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!

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.

The Politics of Poverty

This article is super interesting and deserves a read

This one too. Time for changes...

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

I had a silly charming story to tell and instead decided to post this boring rant about politics and slums. That´s how it goes.

This week, while sifting through some volunteer abroad sites, I came across this advertising line which probably expresses what I most despise about concepts of development work:

After your first few days sampling the delights of these two cities, you can, if you wish, get down to some serious work with street children, or perhaps volunteer with orphans!

My instant grumblings went something like- howcanthesepeoplebeokmakingmoneyofftheideathatcharitymakesyoua
goodpersonandworkingabroadisasacrificeforthepoordefencelesssuffering
peopleof theworldmerrrrrrrrr.

And then I found myself in Santa Barbara for the first time. Santa Barbara is a slum, a product of neoliberal policies, privatization, modernization, and internal migration. It is a community built on the highest point of a steep, rocky, dusty mountainside to the south of Cochabamba. It may be the first place I have ever been where people told me the folks were poor, and when I looked around, instead of thinking about how calm and idyllic their meager living spaces were (re: Mexico, Nicaragua), I just thought- shit, this looks miserable. But the thing is, I immediately started to think- well, it could be worse. I bet in India and Africa you really see how horrible and disgusting and... and I caught myself and thought- what the hell? Is that what I want? To see people suffering? To be shocked? To be justified in all my years complaining about the state of the world? And if what I want to see is suffering then, on some level, don´t I buy into my most hated- I came here to save the world and do good- bullshit? I know that I don´t, which should be enough, I suppose. But if I´m not just spectating here, what do I think I can do?


Well, for starters, the people who live in Santa Barbara are amazing. That was always a part of the idea, what I wanted. To learn. And I don´t know what it says, that they are so lovely. That we can make inhospitable awful places into homes, I suppose, unlivable lives into... lives. Whether that should be considered a good thing or not is hard to say. And then of course we of Pro Habitat are up there to do development work. So there are our projects. I like them. Sure they are community and empowerment based and all that, but of course, at the bottom line, they aren´t exactly political tools. But still. If the world is one enormous disaster, it´s nice to know that there is in fact some bizarre and intricate patchwork of projects spreading across it. That there is no real answer but there are folks driving pick-up trucks, and community groups talking. And that might be enough, from the development perspective. It´s up to collective action and politics and whatnot to meet it half way, in the transformative sense, i suppose.

And so, speaking of transformative politics, on Saturday I went to see almost every Latin American president come and talk in a stadium filled with indigenous peasants and assorted South American residents. I went with Red Tinku, a social movement I´ve joined up with. Their movement seems to consist primarily of selling leftist books and conducting free popular education classes in the plaza most nights. Within five minutes of meeting the organizer he had sent me to make photocopies. Well, I wouln´t be one to knock the revolutionary fire of the xerox machine. Anyhow. We went and sat in the 100 degree sun. I was forced to wear a Bolivian flag and felt somewhat silly. We waved flags and yelled. Chavez, Morales, Correa, Ortega, Zelaya, and Cuba´s vice president (sadly, no Raul), sat onstage and watched dancers dance, singers sing. They declared the creation of a new Latin American currency. Talked about unity. Sometimes it´s hard to see how politics on that level connect with reality in its everyday forms. It´s nice to hear about the revolution and the possibilities, but life changes so little, and so infrequently. For the first time that I´ve ever heard of, the presidents met with the folks from the social movements here and said- sup? what can we do with you? And that´s kind of amazing, to me. But when do meaning and reality coincide? And can our eco bathrooms be a part of the change? Does it matter so long as the folks building them are making demands?


And of course, in the end, I do believe in all this. That a better world is possible. It´s below, and to the left, as the Zapatistas like to say. That collective action and solidarity and struggle can produce change, even on the daily level where you feel it, and that change is necessary. I don´t know about how it will be led or constructed or planned or if it can be. I don´t take myself too seriously, as I sort of stumble around and look at stuff, but I do mean it. For the record.

The place where other people´s heroes come to die

Wow, or, as they write it here in Latin America, GUAU, this has been quite the week. After a single day of work with Pro-Habitat I found myself hopping onto yet another bus, this time to Santa Cruz, a tropical place off to the East. Most of Pro-Habitat was traveling, along with an assortment of community members, youth leaders, a trio of indigenous ladies, a host of representatives from our myriad partner organizations, and a relatively famous old man on a speaking tour. We are currently engaged in this huge project in favor of the Right to the City (El Derecho a La Ciudad), a project which demands equal access to and enjoyment of the city, from access to land and water to cultural diversity and participation, popular control over public spaces and city politics, and collective construction and ownership of property. It´s a pretty inspiring and complex platform which I am excited to learn and think more about. We presented first at a conference for International Habitat Day, where the esteemed old man (Enrique Ortiz) spoke at length, and then got back on the bus to head to Vallegrande, where we presented as a part of the 5th Alternative Social Meeting, which was a kind of smaller scale regional World Social Forum type event.


Vallegrande is the tiny Andean city where Che´s body was brought after he was shot in La Higuera. The town is super old and lovely. We went to see the various places where his body lay in the local hospital, in front of which we took slightly absurd and solemn group photos. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid are among the other famous souls who were killed in these mountains, which lead my project director to describe Bolivia as ¨the place where other people´s heroes come to die¨. This may be the single most depressing description of a country I have ever heard.


The Social Alternative was pretty awesome, and mostly what I expected: a bunch of young punk and hippie kids from Argentina, Uruguay, and Bolivia, plus a random bunch from Switzerland and a few unidentifiable gringos. Our delegation was by far the oldest bunch, though I suppose there were a fair assortment of adult types about. Because Mercedes Sosa died just a few days beforehand, we got to have a really lovely ceremony for her wherein they played a gorgeous song and we all stood silently with our hands on our hearts. It was nice to be somewhere where they really felt her death as a social thing, and also to be able to celebrate the legacy of radical music in such a space. There was also a speaker from Honduras, which was really amazing, since she had basically come as a refugee to ask for our solidarity, and everyone in the room screamed and clapped and declared their trans-national Latin American support. It´s amazing that a military coup can still be happening here at all. The echoes of the 80s in Latin America are terrifying even as echoes. So nice to see the United States working so hard to protect democracy now... (Work to shut down the School of the Americas, the US program to turn Latin American armies into assassins and murderers, which coincidentally trained the current Honduran coup leaders, here.)


For reasons I don´t understand but am grateful for, these indigenous and Quechua speaking ladies have taken a particular liking to me. They giggle and pat me on the shoulder a lot. I tried to impress them with my two words of Quechua. Everyone at the social forum wanted to take their picture and they kept dragging me in. I bet my gringa presence really threw off their indigenous photographic charms. My other coworkers took me out for a night and lived up to their Bolivian reputation for drinking hard- I actually had to surreptitiously pour my drinks into potted plants, off of balconies, and hide my glasses behind napkin holders and empty bottles just to maintain a basic sense of consciousness. Guess we´re all friends now though! I also fell for an adorable four year old from the slums, whose father has vowed to take me to see some radical indigenous hip hop artists, which Bolivia is rather famous for, in small, obscure circles, anyhow.


It´s weird to suddenly be busy. I´ve had to cut down on the sulking. When I got back from Vallegrande I felt like I was coming home. That is really something, I think. Hasta la victoria, entonces.

Away

This is how I'm feeling, mostly.

When I landed in La Paz at 5:30 in the morning it was still dark out, and the temperature was a stunning 34 degrees Fahrenheit. I had been dreading the altitude and its possible nose bleed inducing effects for weeks but had somehow managed to eclipse any concept of cold from my mind. I fled the plane with two covertly stolen airline blankets and hit the tarmac breathing ice. At the bus station in Al Alto, hovering 13,000 feet up on a steep incline above La Paz, I could see the snowy caps of the nearest peaks of the Andes as dozens of marvelous looking indigenous women trudged between the buses. Everyone looks so damn cool here. I know nothing of the socio-economic geographies of this country yet, so if El Alto´s bus station is the most hard core I get to see, I will have to go back. Old men in woolen button ups and caps giggled at my state, helped me get my shit together.

On my double decker bus I sat next to an Andean woman; black and grey braids down to her waste, tied together at the tip with bright blue wool strings from which hug woolen bell shaped pieces, a long bright satin skirt, sweater, rainbow cloth tied intricately into a bag, fabulous bowler hat with tassel perched improbably on her head. Apparently I will soon be able to tell the exact region of origin of these ladies by the length of their skirt and shape of their hat. The folks behind us brought on a couple of chickens which clucked quietly and intermittently throughout the ride, like my cat might on a long ride to the vet. At a certain point, as the sun got up over us in the afternoon and we found ourselves gliding neatly along the bends of the Andes, through miles and miles of desert, that same couple pulled out a small boom box and serenaded the bus with classic pop hits from Bolivia and the States alike. Bolivia may be the most bizarre and fascinating place I have ever been.

When I woke up on my first morning in Cochabamba, after a blissful 18 hours if sleep at my hostel, I held my eyes shut and tried to stay floating in that nebulous place where you don´t remember where your body could possibly be in space or time or intent... but when I finally did get the balls to get up and get out the door I had one glorious moment when I couldn´t help but think- fuck yeah. I got here. I moved my little feet along, into one thing that moves, into another, and here I am, in a valley in the middle of South America, in the sun, completely and totally alone. Which is a feeling that fast becomes disquieting. But still. When some well dressed young lady at the French-Brazilian dinner party our neighbors in Brooklyn were holding in their loft upstairs asked me for one piece of profound advice on traveling, all I could think to tell her was: it´s easier than you think. I stand by that. For all my anxious whining, I´m standing here disposed to create a life from scratch, for a while, because I can.

I went into the city center and got myself a phone for cheap. As I worked out its inner workings, I came across the pre-made texting quicknotes. I´ll be there in 5. I´ll be late. I´ll see you soon. Take care. And lastly: Te amare por siempre. I will love you forever. Can´t wait till I settle down enough to start sending that one out to folks.

I´m still figuring absolutely everything else out.