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Thomas Grisaffi’s chapter focuses on coca cultivation and cocaine paste production in the Chapare region of Bolivia. Grisaffi explains that the coca leaf has myriad traditional uses in indigenous Andean culture but the bulk of the local crop ends up in the maceration pit to be transformed into cocaine. The chapter illustrates how cocaine paste production is an accepted and normal aspect of daily life in the region. It generates a market for coca leaf, high levels of employment in production and smuggling, and the cocaine dollars trickle down to support a large informal sector. Drug production and trafficking is organized through extended kinship networks, making it a closed business. Grisaffi argues that as a result of the presence of the strong agricultural unions that protect coca grower interests, the Chapare has not experienced the kind of chaos, violence and disorder witnessed at others sites along cocaine’s commodity chain.

Between 2006 and 2019, Bolivia emerged as a world leader in formulating a participatory, non-violent model to gradually limit coca production in a safe and sustainable manner while simultaneously offering farmers realistic economic alternatives to coca. Our study finds that not only has this model reduced violence, but it has effectively expanded social and civil rights in hitherto marginal regions. In contrast, Peru has continued to conceptualize ‘drugs’ as a crime and security issue. This has led to U.S.-financed forced crop eradication, putting the burden onto impoverished farmers, generating violence and instability. At the request of farmers, the Peruvian government has made a tentative move towards implementing one aspect of Bolivia’s community control in Peru. Could it work? We address this question by focusing on participatory development with a special emphasis on the role of local organizations and the relationship between growers and the state. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, focus group discussions and secondary research, we find that for community control to have any chance of success in Peru, grassroots organizations must be strengthened and grower trust in the state created. The study also demonstrates that successful participatory development in drug crop regions is contingent on land titling and robust state investment, which strengthens farmer resolve to participate so as to avoid a return to the repression of the past.

The innovative “coca yes, cocaine no” policy of the Plurinational State of Bolivia, in place since 2006, provides valuable insight into the benefits of a sustainable livelihood approach to supply-side drug crop control without prior forced eradication. While the policy has inevitable limitations, its focus on the social welfare, human rights and economic stability of coca-farming families has proven effective and sustainable in diversifying the economy and fostering political and economic stability. The direct participation of communities and grass-roots organizations, such as the coca grower unions, in finding more effective and sustainable approaches to drug control have been crucial elements in its success. The elements of the policy’s key programme also correspond with the Sustainable Development Goals, adopted by the United Nations in 2015.

“All of us are presidents” examines the promise and disappointments of direct democracy that followed Evo Morales’ election as president of Bolivia. Working with the literature on politics, the state, and social movements in Latin America, the author contrasts ideas of normative democracy with radical democracy. The article pursues two ideas. First, in the wake of Morales’ election his core political base in the Chapare region perceived and engaged in politics as if they exercised direct, structural authority over the president’s policies. Second, while Morales initially embraced direct democracy he quickly distanced himself from this practice. As the coca growers observe, Morales abandon their political practices they have ceased to refer to themselves as presidents. Therefore, the author suggest that the model of direct democracy that Morales and his aides have promoted is in fact nothing more than a stark utopian claim designed to ensure the legitimacy of the MAS party.

This chapter provides an overview of coca control policy in Bolivia. Two decades of forced coca eradication was a demonstrable failure, generating poverty and gross human right violations, without meeting its objective—reducing Bolivia’s coca crop. In 2004, the Bolivian government granted each registered coca growing family in the Chapare (one of Bolivia’s two main coca growing regions) the right to grow a cato (1600 m2) of coca. Policymakers and coca growers jointly agreed upon the size of the coca plot in an effort to provide each family with the equivalent of a monthly minimum wage as income from coca, and to reduce violence. The Morales administration has continued this policy, and over the past eight years the coca producer’s unions, government officials and members of the international community have built a complex sustainable coca monitoring, licensing, and reduction system. Drawing on 30 months of ethnographic research, the chapter outlines Bolivia’s new approach to coca control. It weights the program’s effectiveness as well as the significant challenges to implementation. It is argued that by focusing on the social welfare, human rights and economic stability of coca farming families, Bolivia’s collaborative approach might be more effective at reducing coca acreage in the long term than the previous strategy of forced eradication.

This article first examines the ways in which coca leaf acquired an important symbolic value in forging a counter-hegemonic discourse that wove together various strands of class and cultural identity struggles in the Chapare province, Bolivia. The second line of enquiry that runs through this article deals with the conflicts that arose when the coca union mutated into a governing political party. Now that the coca growers' leader, Evo Morales, is President of the Republic he is obliged by the international community to reduce the amount of land under coca cultivation. To do this President Morales has had to rhetorically pull coca leaf apart from Andean tradition. This presents a challenge to the integrity of indigenous-peasant based movements in the Chapare because it brings attention to their constructed nature and thus questions the authenticity of the originario identity.

Bolivia is a drug production and trafficking centre and yet it exhibits far less drug related violence than other countries across Latin America that form part of cocaine’s commodity chain. Drawing upon long-term ethnographic fieldwork carried out since 2005, this article presents evidence from the Chapare, a coca-growing and drug processing zone in central Bolivia, to consider why this is the case. Building from the literature on embedded economies and the ‘subsistence ethic’ of peasant communities, it shows how the drug trade is part of a local moral order that prioritizes kinship, reciprocal relations, and community well-being, facilitated by the cultural significance of the coca leaf. This has served to restrict the possibilities for violence. In addition, coca grower agricultural unions act as a parallel form of governance, providing a framework for the peaceful resolution of disputes, and work actively to exclude the state and criminal actors.