Caranavi, Bolivia (EFE).- Bolivian President Evo Morales authorized Saturday the operation of a third market for coca leaves in the country, but called on coca growers to eradicate voluntarily illegal crops and rationalize their production to combat drug trafficking.
The authorization was announced by Rural Development Minister Hugo Salvatierra at an event held in the town of Caranavi, some 160 kilometers (99 miles) east of La Paz, where Morales asked growers to limit their crops.
The new market will permit some 3,000 coca growers from Caranavi and the surrounding area to sell their crops in La Paz, without having to use the other market operating in the same city that is controlled by farmworkers from the neighboring provinces of Yungas Norte and Sur.
There is yet another legal market in the central area of Chapare in Cochabamba province.
According to the government, the new sales facilities will be temporary while studies are concluded about legal demand for coca, used in Bolivia for cultural and medicinal purposes but which is also the raw material for making cocaine.
“There will never be an absence of coca, nor can coca be freely grown,” Morales told an audience of around 10,000 people who crowded the stands at the little stadium in Caranavi where he had arrived by helicopter (the journey takes six hours by road from La Paz).
The chief executive said that the carrot-and-stick approach of previous governments for eradicating the excess of coca leaf – offering farmworkers monetary compensation while maintaining the threat of military force – was a failure.
On the contrary, Morales, who still leads the association of Chapare coca growers, advocated the rationalization of family coca crops under the control of the unions.
According to official reports, in the area of the Yungas and Caranavi there are less than 5,000 hectares (12,000 acres) of excess coca plantations that should be eradicated, and another 12,000 hectares (30,000 acres) that are legal and supply the leaf for consumption and traditional uses.
In the Chapare area another 5,000 hectares (12,000 acres) of illegal coca plantations are presumed to exist, and a similar amount that is permitted by anti-drug legislation.
Everyone affiliated to a union may sow a maximum area of one “cato” (40×40 meters, or 131×131 feet), which annually, with three crops per year, provides an income of around 9,000 bolivianos ($1,119), farmworker Cruz Santiago Condori, 64, of the Mundial community near Caranavi, told EFE Saturday.
U.S. ambassador David Greenlee said recently that the creation of a new market is breaking the nation’s anti-drug law, which allows for only two legal markets, one for Yungas and the other for Chapare.
Washington views Bolivia’s decision to allow any coca growing as inconsistent with a bilateral accord on anti-drug cooperation, but Morales campaigned for the presidency on a promise to lift all restrictions on coca growing while intensifying the struggle against drug trafficking.
