The Chosen and the Forgotten

The Chosen and the Forgotten
By Pablo Calvi
Guernica Magazine

AD: Marisa Nakasone

"Before 1988, growing coca was legal throughout Bolivia. But Law 1008—allegedly crafted by American experts, and heavily pushed by Ronald Reagan—banned the activity almost completely, not because of the way it was used locally, but because of how its byproduct, cocaine, was consumed in the United States. After the law passed, Bolivian prisons began to overflow with coca farmers and poor peasants, and by 1992, the penal population in the country had risen from a few hundred to 8,500."

...

"So, for the farmers and the cocaleros in the jungles of Chapare, who were forced to abandon their livelihoods by a law passed in the city, pushed off their land by the military, and severed from a sacred crop, the most valuable they could produce, the war on drugs in Bolivia was rapidly becoming synonymous with class and religious warfare."