VILLA TUNARI, BOLIVIA

I have taken a job in Bolivia working  for a farmer who grows coca – the same plant used to make the illegal drug cocaine.

As far as I can tell, none of the coca we are growing supports the illegal narcotics industry, but I have only been here for four days and the plants are very young. My boss, Marcelo Ramallo, says they have 63 more days before the first harvest.

The almond shaped leaves are used in traditional ceremonies and chewing them is the official habit of the nation.

Coca history in Bolivia

Political debate around growing coca in Bolivia has been much like the gun control debate in the Texas. Coca is in these people’s DNA, and any effort to prohibit it quickly erupts into a political firestorm.

However, cocaine, a product of this green leaf mixed with petroleum, has caused thousands, if not millions, of deaths around the world in the past four decades in the War on Drugs.

In the last decade, hundreds of Bolivians have died fighting to retain their right to grow coca.

According to the New York Times,  from 1998 to 2002 sixty people were killed and more than 700 were wounded in the Chapare, the region where I now reside, in violence related to coca eradication.

The government has instituted a mildly successful regulation of coca production. By licensing growers, rather than making it illegal, Bolivia’s coca production dropped by 13 percent over the past year, according to the United Nations.

Bolivia is the world’s third-largest coca producer, after Peru and Colombia, where growing coca is illegal.

In Bolivia, farmers are allowed to grow 1600 square meters (two-fifths of one acre) of coca per family. For centuries farmers grew coca in the Chapare without regulation.

Theses days cocaleros – or coca farmers – have a large feather in their cap. Evo Morales, current President of Bolivia, is also the president of the national cocalero union. It was from that post that he found his way into Bolivian politics.

Not only do the cocaleros have a decades-long fight against the U.S.-led drug interdiction efforts under their belts, but they have also developed what they believe is their own brand of national socialism. Morales party is called MAS, Moviemiento Al Socialismo (Movement for Socialism).

From one Bolivia to another in 15 hours

How I got here:

In my thick corduroy jacket, prepared for the chilly temperatures of the mountain passes, I hop on a bus in the mountain capital city of Sucre. I must travel over the mountains to Cochabamba, a city nestled on a leafy shelf of the Andes between the altiplano highlands of Potosí and Chuquisaca, and the jungles of the Amazon. The bus stumbles out of port with late arriving passengers begging to be let inside.

I always sit towards the front of the bus now, ever since that time I missed my stop because of the ten meters of men sleeping in the aisle.

The bus stops for dinner at a highway town just as the sun is dipping behind a mountain ridge. Women yell the names of strange juices and snacks into the darkness. After I climb back in with all of the passengers, I cultivate that perfect sleeping position between the window and the soft Quechua grandmother who falls asleep on my shoulder.

It is a new day but still dark as the floata (bus) rolls into the main bus terminal in Cochabamba at a busy 4 a.m., which is good because I have got to hurry to get across town to the so called “parada Chapare,” where I haggle for a shared ride in a taxi to Villa Tunari, the principal tourism center of the region known as El Chapare. I know from experience that I must get on the road before the highway closes, at 9 a.m., at a curve in the road where a crew is still repairing a massive washout caused by heavy rains a month before. The road does not open up again until 3 p.m. and you don’t want to get stuck on the wrong side.

The driver takes me right where I need to go. Having reserved my seat, I wander to relieve myself in a dirt parking lot in sight of the car so I can watch my bag.

I sleep close with strange men like brothers I never knew in the shared-taxi darkness. When I arrive at  9 a.m. crossing the street, I shed my corduroy as I begin to sweat with the jungle heat of Amazon Bolivia for the first time.

This trip is all about business, but I must take a break for a cup of coffee and cheese empanada in the central market among the flies.

Jungle insects have tropical colors, wild wings and funny looking faces that suck the ground with the fervency of something not caring to waste its short little life. And as I drink my coffee black swarms of them swim through my fingers.

Breakfast is quick and it is on to my first meeting with a local journalist.

Radio Sobernania & the Senda Beher of Faith and Happiness

The village of Senda Beher is about 25 km from Villa Tunari, down a series of rutted out, muddy roads connecting this network of small rural settlements. I split the trip into three death-defying motorcycle taxi rides.

One such settlement is called Chipiriri, the headquarters of Radio Sobernania.

A week prior, I had met with Walter Cassia, the voice of Radio Sobernania, for the first time. As a fellow journalist, he saw the story I was after and put me into contact with a man named Marcelo Ramallo, President of the Senda Beher Cocalero Union (syndicato).

Mi casa su casa

A white dove bathes in the same puddle as a pig. This puddle, filled by a recent rain, marks the front door to Ramallo’s home in his cocalero hamlet.

The buildings are barren. Nothing is painted. Cinderblocks, gray concrete, corregated tin, sturdy with no frills. The only colors are the in the spray painted phrases like “Vote for the Coca” and adulation for Evo Morales splashed around town. 

There is no front door and no one is home. After waiting a swelteringly hot hour on his porch, a girl in a red croptop tells me to walk down the road, where I might find Ramallo working on his farm.

It is hot noon when I find Ramallo, full of soup, sleeping on a plastic potato sack in the shade of a tree beside a gentle flowing brook that passes through his land. His wife and two-year-old child are half-sleeping by his side.

No one could work in this heat. This creek is fed by a cold spring in the jungle I dip my head and the family wakes up.

Baking in the sun just south of our siesta is Ramallo’s legal coca plot, separated into about one hundred lines coca plants. Between two rocks, a small battery-powered radio blasts Radio Sobernania’s midday programming, recordings of Evo Morales and Vice President Alvaro Garcia Linera speaking at a university in the Bolivian State of Beni.

“The change in Bolivia will leave no children behind,…” Linera’s says. “The land of Bolivia produced more food before the Spanish arrived than it does now,…”

Ramallo’s wife, awake now, pours water over her child’s face and speaks soft quechua into his ears.

The Vice President drones on:

“The debate was whether the indigenous people had souls or didn’t have souls. That was the question of the Pope during the colonization of Bolivia… They trapped us like animals and now, in 2013, people continue to ask that question of the people of Bolivia, do the people of Bolivia have souls?”