Monday, November 30, 2009

Coca War

A super brilliant lady from the Andean Information Network recently came in to talk to us about Bolivian-International relations and drug policy. The presentation was based so firmly in common sense and objective data that it was both shocking and fascinating and just... kind of exciting to listen to. It also made me want a job like hers.

The bottom line of her shpeal was basically that drug eradication policies have failed horribly across the board, and while they are being continued in Colombia and Peru, Bolivia is actually making headway in finding new, though imperfect, means of combating the issue. She pointed out that Bolivia is a relatively pure case study, meaning that you don´t have the FARC, the Shining Path, paramilitaries, and kingpins running around confusing the situation. You have coca growers in Las Yungas and in Chapare, where they have been growing some amount of coca since before the Incas came. You have Colombians and other international drug producers coming in to buy leaves or paste. And that´s pretty much it. To say that there is no confusion or chaos would be impossible, but at least the situation is relatively easy to understand.

Past policies were eradication based. Oh, and US demanded and directed, as they still are in most of the region. The US demands results and militarized fumigation and violent practices, withholding trade benefits and aid if you fail to comply. In the 1990s Alternative Development was the big policy- namely the encouragement of the production of other products, like pineapples and mangoes, instead of coca. The major problem with this is that coca is about 1000 times easier to grow and brings in more than 10 times the money. Aid programs refused to offer aid to non-coca growers, indirectly contributing to a rise in coca production as farmers made an effort to gain access to the money. Additionally, growers often eradicated fields and took the aid money, only to set up new ones in other areas. So that didn´t particularly work at all. Even ex militaries have come out against these old policies.


Though Evo is toted as the leader of the coca growers and their best political ally, coca production areas are still heavily militarized. A mini School of the Americas is still functioning right in the heart of the Chapare, despite the eviction of the DEA and USAID alternative development projects. Why? Well, it´s rough to maintain stability in the south if you go around upsetting the military... So the occasional violent attack persists in the jungle, prisons are still full of middle men, and the growing continues. Evo´s policy has been to legalize coca growing to the extent that country chews nationally, and each family is allotted land on that basis. But Bolivia has no idea how much coca its citizens consume traditionally on a yearly basis. Europeans have been in the process of conducting a study for years now that would give a concrete figure of how much coca is consumed traditionally-setting a bar for legal coca production. But the study has never been finished- no one wants to know the answer. The government is much happier with a grey area, and ultimately it doesn´t seem that the figure will ever materialize.

So what´s the current strategy? It´s not, as some hard core conservatives might scream, to encourage coca growth or cocaine production. It is to cap growth, forcing prices up, and allowing farmers to subsist growing less. This program has met with some success in areas where everyone participates. But illegal growth continues, spilling into national parks and steep slopes hidden in the mountains. If this continues, the system will fall apart. Of course the US likes to ignore the fact that studies demonstrate that demand side policies- ie, drug treatment in the United States- are many times more effective and much cheaper. While the demand exists, production will continue. Additionally, almost all the money from coca production ends up in the countries where its sold. Growers make a mere % of the total drug profits, compared to % of their first world counterparts.

The long history of drug policies and policy changes in Bolivia are filled will 100s of circles and ironies and mistakes. For instance, coca wasn´t even grown in Chapare until the government forcefully resettled fired miners there after the large scale mine closings of the 1950s. These miners had a long history of union activism, and rather than be dispersed, they set up an even stronger and more self sufficient union system in the jungle, neglected and rejected by central state authorities. These are the unions that continue to run production in Chapare today, the unions through which Evo Morales came to power. Other great policies? If you want a better idea of what the drug war has looked like in Bolivia, or, uh, just want to learn how to make your own cocaine, you can hop down here and visit the Cocaine Museum in Chapare any time.

The solution? Well... international and equitable partnerships (this is already beginning to happen as the US looses its influence in the region and European countries step in with less demanding funding), demand side policies, accurate information and honest statistics, intelligence sharing, and constantly assessing and improving policies. The US could actually play a beneficial role in Bolivia acting as a partner. Our speaker was quick to point out that Anti-Americanism is actually more often just the recasting of the rejection of failed programs. USAID´s alternative development projects may have been kicked out along with the DEA, but USAID´s more successful and considerate programs are all still running.

Though the talk was thoroughly engrossing as a topic on its own, it also made me realize something important about what I want to do with my own life: though health work has long seemed like the most practical and depoliticized sector of non-profit work, I will never be able to have the kind of on the ground active expertise in health that I could have in any other development area, by dint of my squeamishness and refusal to consider medical school. The idea of having a job where you get to deal with issues as entire complex processes and also act locally seems pretty brilliant to me. Losing that first component seems like a big loss in all ways. So perhaps policy regarding some specific but linked-to-the-whole-world-as-it-is job would be better for me... something to think about. Revolutions in Health might be more Revolutions in Thinking About Development and Change... which I suppose it always has been. Onwards!

Thursday, November 26, 2009

Two months in and....

I have learned a few Bolivian tricks. I have learned to talk like them, which is one of my favorite parts about staying put for more than a month in any given country. I can throw out Pues and Que Macana and Colla/Camba as much as I´d like. I´ve learned to hold tiny plastic cups in my teeth while I engage in multiple activities. I´ve learned to smile a lot at folks, and wait very, very patiently all the time.

My job has been really wonderful. It´s strange to work in such a general capacity for such a small non-profit. I feel like I´m doing absolutely everything at once, all the time, which is a little overwhelming. Back in NYC we had division of labor and such, and I only had to have a peripheral grip on other people´s projects. I like it this way though, it´s enlivening. Currently we are working on a Right to the City campaign in Cochabamba, holding forums and workshops and festivals to get people to rally around the idea that access to, use, and enjoyment of the city are rights. That includes the right to housing, to water, to transportation, and also to citizen control over key features of city governance and structure. Pretty awesome. In the Southern Zone we are finishing up a bathroom construction project in three communities: Santa Barbara, Barrios Unidos, and Maria Auxiliadora. In Santa Barbara we are also working on getting a youth led recycling center up and running (lots of time hanging out with 12 year old boys), working out the glitches in a women´s cooperative running a local market, and restarting a community garden-seed center. Maria Auxiliadora is petitioning for a kitchen building program. I have been working on a grant proposal for a project that will make Santa Barbara´s ecological bathroom project an ecological and sustainable resource for community members by running an educational campaign in the community and the local primary school, and starting a small scale women´s cooperative to recycle waste products. My boss is in DC right now promoting a World Bank grant proposal, which I will probably end up rewriting and submitting to a host of other agents.

Besides all that... I´ve been lucky enough to make something like a community for myself out here. My host family is lovely as ever, and I have been spending a lot of time with folks from Red Tinku, the local social activist group which gives public classes and sells leftist lit in the plaza, attends local political events (it´s presidential election season here, so there are loads of them), and hosts wild traditional parties on the first Friday of every month, where I get to dance around fires, drink chicha, chew coca, and burn tiny effigies of money, visas, and other important documents. For luck. The FSD staff and my fellow volunteers have also been lovely, and we´ve been making time to cook and to go out and visit the campo now and then. I´ve met Chilean anarchist artisans, and Brazilian journalists, and I find I like to speak in as many languages at once as possible. My Quechua is a struggling mess, but it´s pretty fabulous on the tongue.

I have also contracted amoebas in my stomach and watched a possibly disease ridden tick hang out on my leg until it was removed by a talented 3 year old. I keep telling myself that someday I´ll work a job where strange diseases aren´t so common, but it´s hard for me to really believe that. The folks living in the Southern Zone are super sweet and have invited me to stay with them for a weekend, which should be a much more in my face development experience than watching our projects stall, sputter, and reinvent themselves on the ground. Looking forward to that, I think.

Two months seems somehow like ages and like nothing. I suppose that´s the general nature of time. I´m excited to to travel, excited to stay around, excited to come home, and can´t seem to stop coming up with 1000 different plans for the rest of these next few years. But hey, living the fight has never been about being at peace in the present, so I think I´m ok.

Living here proves everything I´ve ever learned about Latin America wrong, incomplete, or so spot on it´s almost alarming. My dad tells me that science says it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert on something. So I suppose I´m on my way. Though what, exactly, this makes me an expert on remains unclear.



Oh right- and Happy Thanksgiving! Eat well.

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Friday, November 6, 2009

November Fifth

7:30 - wake up

8:30- walkin to work

9:30 - my office

10:30 - translating

11:30 - writing a grant. sometimes.

12:30 - headed home for lunch in the front seat of the trufi

1:30 - lunchtime

2:30 - headed to Santa Barbara

3:30

4:30 - women´s cooperative meeting

5:30 - we are way out of town

6:30 - back to the office

7:30 - headed to a Red Tinku meeting. ¨Work enslaves you, asshole!¨

8:30 - dinnertime

9:30 dirty feet and yoga

10:30 - in my friend´s car

11:30 - guitarists perform, folks dance

12:30

1:30


2:30 - lights out!


You can see what November 5th looked like all across the world for folks I know here. It might take a few days for everyone to get their photos up and posted, so make sure you check back later.

Also, my photos from this last month should be visible here, and you shouldn´t have to create an account to see them. But it is free to do, if it´s easier that way. Some folks have had trouble with the link in the email, so let me know if you want to see them and can´t, but don´t ever respond directly to those email invitations, as that email address is invalid.

I´ve been working a lot lately translating for a World Bank competition and starting a grant proposal, and spent the last two weekends traveling, first in the rain forests of Chapare, and then in the little mountain towns of Sucre and Potosi. All is well, and I´ll try to have something more to say soon. Cheers,
m