La Paz – As part of a turf battle, leaders of the coca producers who legally sell their wares in the capital area went on hunger strike Monday against a move by the government of President Evo Morales, who along with being the head of state continues to lead the country’s biggest guild of coca leaf growers.
The vice president of the Adepcoca group representing 14,000 coca producers in La Paz province, Juan Mamani, told EFE that 30 people began the hunger strike at the organization’s headquarters.
Adepcoca, which markets the leaf grown in the La Paz districts of Yungas and Inquisivi, is opposed to a scheme that would allow farmers in neighboring Caranavi to cultivate coca and sell it at a new market in the capital.
Mamani called the plan illegal, noting that Bolivia’s anti-drug legislation contemplates only two legal markets for coca: the existing one in La Paz and another in the central city of Cochabamba.
Like neighboring Peru, Bolivia permits the cultivation and sale of limited quantities of coca, used by Andean Indians in religious rites, for medicinal purposes and as a mild stimulant to ward off hunger.
Authorities say, however, that some coca sold in La Paz ends up being turned into cocaine at clandestine laboratories in the neighboring industrial city of El Alto.
Mamani says Adepcoca’s product goes exclusively for legal traditional uses and that not a single cocaine-processing facility has ever been found in Yungas.
“We have elected President Morales, who is a coca grower, but now he has a proposal to hurt us economically. We will not accept it and we will fight it until the end,” Mamani said.
Morales remains the leader of the coca growers guild in the central region of Chapare, the post in which he launched the public career that led to his election last December as the first indigenous president of this mainly Indian country.
The former Chapare growers guild official who now heads the government agency in charge of regulating the coca trade, Luis Cutipa, says the new market in La Paz is necessary because the one operated by Adepcoca lacks sufficient oversight.
“Seventy-seven percent of the coca seized (by police) is paceña (from La Paz province) because there’s no control, because that coca is being diverted to drug trafficking,” he said.
U.S. Ambassador David Greenlee said over the weekend that Washington does not want to see any additional coca markets opened, viewing such a measure as violating Bolivian law and likely to stimulate excess production that will be used to make cocaine. EFE
