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In recent decades, poverty and the promise of a
better life has not only led thousands of
Peruvian peasants down the road of guerrilla
warfare and bloody terror. Many of them,
sometimes the same individuals, have also
transformed the most sacred plant of the Incas
into one of the world's most commercial cash
crops. Seen by many peasants as a road to
fortune and freedom, for others cocaine is a
scourge, bringing violence, the mobsters and
deforestation in its wake.
The only people who make decent money engage in
"cooking" cocaine . Illegal "kitchens",
makeshift coke refineries, have become the main
means of livelihood for many ordinary peasant
families, as the equipment is simple - oil drums,
a few chemicals, paraffin and a fire. Bushels of
coca leaves are dissolved in paraffin and
hydrochloric acid, heated, and stirred,
eventually producing the pasta, which is then
washed in ether or acetone to yield powdery
white cocaine.
Peru's coca industry netted an estimated $3
billion in 1984 - twenty percent of the
country's gross national product. By the end of
the 1980s this figure was much higher and the
problem had become an issue of global dimensions.
However, a combination of market saturation and
political pressure from the USA, backed up by
anti-cocaine money and hardware like police
helicopters, seems to have changed the situation
substantially. In 1996 the Peruvian price of
cocaine had dropped by over fifty percent on the
street, down to almost $4 a gram. Colombian drug
cartels were buying less from Peru, having been
hit hardest by US anti-cocaine policies, and the
protection once afforded by Sendero Luminoso
terrorists had turned into more of a liability
than anything else. By the end of the twentieth
century there was also increasing US
intervention, including aerial patrols over the
northern jungle border between Peru and Colombia
firing on unmarked planes that refuse to
identify themselves. Production of cocaine in
Peru has dropped further while it has started to
rise in Colombia, and these lower levels of
supply have brought Peru's internal price for
cocaine back up to a street level of $10 a gram.
It seems unlikely that cocaine production will
be reduced much further, since there are always
new export opportunities and a steady home
market; but the basic crop - coca plants - no
longer offers quite the relatively stable, safe
and so much more remunerative option to small-time
cash-croppers that it did just a couple of years
ago.
Coca , the plant from which cocaine is derived,
has travelled a long way since the Incas
distributed this "divine plant" across
fourteenth-century Andean Peru. Presented as a
gift from the gods, coca was used to exploit
slave labour under the Spanish rule: without it
the Indians would never have worked in the
gruelling conditions of colonial mines such as
Potosi.
The isolation of the active ingredient in coca,
cocaine , in 1859, began an era of intense
medical experimentation. Its numbing effects
have been appreciated by dental patients around
the world, and even Pope Leo XIII enjoyed a
bottle of the coca wine produced by an Italian
physician, who amassed a great fortune from its
sale in the nineteenth century. The literary
world, too, was soon stimulated by this white
powder: in 1885 Robert Louis Stevenson wrote Dr
Jekyll and Mr Hyde during six speedy days and
nights while taking this "wonder drug" as a
remedy for his tuberculosis, and Sir Arthur
Conan Doyle, writing in the 1890s, used the
character of Sherlock Holmes to defend the use
of cocaine. On a more popular level, coca was
one of the essential ingredients in Coca Cola
until 1906. Today, cocaine is the most
fashionable - and expensive - of drugs.
From its humble origins cocaine has become very
big business. Unofficially, it may well be the
biggest export for countries like Peru and
Bolivia, where coca grows best in the Andes and
along the edge of the jungle. While most
mountain peasants always cultivated a little for
personal use, many have now become dependent on
it for obvious economic reasons: coca is still
the most profitable cash crop and is readily
bought by middlemen operating for extremely
wealthy cocaine barons. A constant flow of semi-refined
coca - pasta, the basic paste - leaves Peru
aboard Amazon river boats or unmarked light
aircraft heading for the big-time laboratories
in Colombia. From here the pure stuff is shipped
or flown out, mostly to the USA via Miami or Los
Angeles. Much of the rest is refined in Peruvian
cocaine "kitchens" in the ceja de selva or Lima,
before finding its way into nostrils of wealthy
Limeños, or going over the border into Brazil
and further afield.
Few people care to look beyond the wall of
illicit intrigue that surrounds this highly
saleable contraband. In the same vein as coffee
or chocolate, the demand for this product has
become another means through which the
privileged world controls the lives of those in
the developing world, at the same time
endangering the delicate environmental balance
of the western edge of Amazonia. As Peruvian
Indians follow world market trends by turning
their hands to the growing and "cooking" of
coca, more staple crops like cereals, tubers and
beans are cultivated less and less.
It's a change brought about partly by
circumstance. Agricultural prices are state
controlled, but manufactured goods and transport
costs rise almost weekly, preventing the
peasants from earning a decent living from their
crops. Moreover, the soil is poor and crops grow
unwillingly. Coca, on the other hand, grows
readily and needs little attention
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