It is a farmers’ market like any other, but there is only one crop on sale: every week enough coca passes through this row of sheds to make half a tonne of cocaine.
The Villa Fatima market has nothing to do with the narcotics trade, however: it is Bolivia’s only legal coca market. The country’s anti-drugs laws allow for a 12 000ha area of legal coca plantations north of La Paz to satisfy demand for its traditional uses.
Peasants in the bleak Andean uplands constantly chew the leaf to offset cold and hunger, and visitors to La Paz are offered coca tea to treat altitude sickness.
‘Coca is not a drug, it’s a medicine. It helps you work and it stops you getting tired or sad,” says Teresa, a farmer who has travelled overnight to sell a 45kg shipment of the pale green leaves.
After a wave of social unrest that left scores dead and nearly toppled the administration of President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, the Bolivian government is considering a plan to allow thousands more farmers to grow coca within the law.
According to Ernesto Justiniano, the Deputy Minister of Social Defence,
the government plans to launch a six-month study to determine the scale of the nation’s legal coca consumption, and will subsequently allow farmers outside the traditional area to grow small crops of the plant.
‘We’ve begun serious dialogues with coca growers with the aim of combating drug trafficking and maintaining social tranquillity,” he said.
United States officials say the plan could cause an explosion in cocaine production, and have hinted that Bolivia — the poorest country in South America — could lose part of its $50-million aid.
‘Our policy is very clear and it remains clear. Any proposal that would legitimise or legalise any coca [that] is illegal would be a violation of Bolivian law and a violation of international treaties to which Bolivia is a signatory,” a US embassy official was quoted as saying.
Once the world’s largest supplier of coca, Bolivia pledged in 1998 to wipe out all illegal coca crops by 2002. Aggressive eradication campaigns have reduced illicit plantations, but the policy has been enormously unpopular, and violent confrontations with coca growers have become a regular feature of the country’s political life.
Now the government hopes to calm a burgeoning social crisis and weaken the drug trade by taking control over the many clandestine coca markets where farmers sell their crops to the drug mafia.
At Villa Fatima, sales are carefully regulated to ensure that only registered retailers can buy coca for resale in local shops and markets. In the bustling warehouses, bowler-hatted indigenous women haggle, while a scratchy loudspeaker system broadcasts a steady stream of classical music.
Sitting by a set of brass scales, the warehouse manager, Juan Celso Quijhua, chews philosophically on a quid of coca as he checks the weight of a load, and notes the deal in an exercise book. Good quality leaves can earn up to $80 for a 23kg load, a sizeable amount in a country where the average annual income is about $1 000.
‘People have always chewed coca. Farmers only sell it to the cocaine dealers because government doesn’t want to legalise it all,” says Quijhua.
Increasing the legal coca market will win political breathing space for the Sanchez de Lozada government, which was further shaken this month when violent street protests against budget cuts inspired by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) left 32 dead and caused the Cabinet to resign.
But the plan is bound to cause problems abroad. US officials have said that Bolivia risks losing aid money from the US and the IMF, and may even be excluded from the planned Free Trade Area of the Americas if the scheme goes ahead.
Further increasing the pressure on the government, the credit rating agency Standard & Poor’s lowered the Bolivia’s credit rating at the end of February, saying the unrest had put the government’s economic plans in doubt.
‘Sanchez de Losada is in a very difficult situation. The social crisis could bring him down at any moment, and he has very little room for manoeuvre,” said Coletta Youngers from the Washington Office on Latin America, a US think-tank. Between the US and the coca growers, he is stuck between a rock and a hard place.
At the Villa Fatima market, Abel Vargas, a farmer, says he is not interested in politics. As he waits for a buyer, he gestures at his load of coca leaf.
‘They say that this can be made into cocaine, but I don’t know about that. Coca has grown here for centuries, and it will always grow here. Without coca there can be no Bolivia,” he says. —Â