Book: Review/Commentary: Coca, Cocaine, and the Bolivian Reality

Abstract

Coca, Cocaine, and the Bolivian Reality, edited by Madeline Barbara Leons and Harry Sanabria (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), xii+310 pp., $19.95 (paper). Everyone agrees that a multidisciplinary approach is needed if we are to understand drug use and its outcomes. However, few have brought together such diverse and complementary perspectives as anthropologists Madeline Leons and Harry Sanabria, who focus-for a change-on a poor nation that produces the raw material. By telling us about what's happening in Bolivia, a country that hardly looms large in the worldview of most outsiders, the several contributors provide grassroots views that are rarely encountered, and show linkages between domestic and international, private and governmental, legal and illegal systems that are involved in transforming a traditional agricultural product into a valuable drug on streets halfway around the world. The authors of Coca, Cocaine, and the Bolivian Reality include specialists in history, economics, applied sociology, education, political science, ecology, and anthropology. All have lengthy experience in Bolivia. Each chapter is brief, well organized, and amply documented. The editors set the stage with a history of coca, with an emphasis on recent changes as other nations (especially the United States) progressively intervened with a war against drugs. Alison L. Spedding (a coca farmer and trader herself) contributes two chapters. In the first, she describes the growing and processing of coca in considerable detail, showing how it is intimately interwoven with the total fabric of values, social relationships, and other activities of the community. In her other chapter she chronicles the stormy struggle over control of the coca trade that has taken place since the 1970s, and describes forms of peasant resistance to recurrent national and international campaigns to eradicate coca. Elayne Zorn shows how seasonal migration from the overpopulated altiplano zone to the sparsely settled subtropical Chapare area, where coca has recently become a major cash crop, has changed traditional weaving and clothing styles in communities far removed from coca and cocaine. Ana Maria Lema traces the major role that large landowners in the Yungas region, where coca has been produced for domestic consumption since Inca times, played in shaping the modern Bolivian state. On the basis of her intimate familiarity with the area before and after the boom of the 1980s, Madeline Barbara Leons uses the Yungas as a case study demonstrating how and why campaigns to substitute other crops for coca have failed and are likely to continue to do so; peasants seem to understand agricultural economics better than bureaucrats do. …