From Alternative Development to Decolonisation: Transforming Drug Crop Policies in Bolivia

Abstract

Bolivia’s ‘coca yes, cocaine no’ policy towards drug crops offers a useful lens to examine Evo Morales government’s decolonisation efforts, as unlike other government attempts, it had both local and international aspects. Using ethnographic data from the Chapare, one of Bolivia’s two principal coca growing regions, this article traces how the Morales government’s development policy between 2006-2019 broke with U.S.-led militarised eradication and crop substitution. Partially assisted by a European Union municipal strengthening program, coca policy was ‘nationalised’, permitting registered growers to cultivate a limited amount of the leaf. Unlike U.S.- financed ‘alternative development’, the new approach fostered self-determination, revalued coca’s traditional role and front-loaded development assistance. These reflect both decolonisation goals and international development best practices. And yet, despite significant achievements, particularly in reducing violent confrontation with the state, the overarching international prohibitionist paradigm, domestic dynamics, and a steady demand for cocaine put the brakes on just how far domestic innovation in development-oriented drug control strategies can go.

Keywords:

• coca
• cocaine
• Bolivia
• alternative development
• decolonization

1. Introduction

Bolivia endured more than twenty years of the U.S.-financed War on Drugs, particularly in the Chapare region east of Cochabamba, but after 2004, it rose to prominence as a frontrunner in devising a participatory and non-violent model, which the government later termed the ‘nationalisation’ of its coca policy (Stippel & Serrano, 2018, pp. 282-292). The ‘coca yes cocaine no,’ strategy distinguished between the traditional uses of coca, such as for chewing, tea, and medicine, and the illicit production of cocaine. It permitted coca cultivation in designated areas and set limits on the quantity of coca leaf that can be grown.

This policy diverged sharply with U.S.-funded alternative development, which from the mid-1980s until 2006, drew on ingrained colonial biases about the lawless nature of so-called ‘narco-frontiers’ to shape policy decisions (Goodhand, 2021). Alternative development was designed in response to U.S. government’s domestic needs to show progress against illegal drugs and attempted to justify U.S.-funded military and police actions by putting a friendly face on a repressive policy. Concerns about crime and security consistently trumped development issues and led the UN General Assembly to succumb to continuous U.S. pressure by defining alternative development in 1998 as drug crop eradication with rural development as the facilitating mechanism, relegating drug crop farmers’ economic and social wellbeing (Alimi, 2019, p. 39). This neo-colonial drug crop control amounted to a war against the peasantry that destabilised local economies, turned poor farmers into outlaws, and triggered human rights violations across the Andes (Acero & Thomson, 2022; AIN, 1994). These high costs did not lead to a reduction in cocaine production, which has consistently trended upwards (UNODC, 2023b).

While Evo Morales’ government’s ‘coca yes, cocaine no’ policy was never formally recognised as part of its overarching commitment to decolonisation, this framework proves useful in examining Bolivia’s drug crop program, particularly because it was the only policy to address decolonisation in the international context. Building on indigenous intellectuals who have long argued for recapturing subaltern knowledges and cultural practices to inform decolonial state building (Ari, 2014), the Bolivian government prioritised local knowledge and traditions, as well as contesting imperial hegemony by expelling U.S. officials and agencies and facing down international drug regulatory bodies. These efforts sought to empower indigenous peasant communities, foster self-determination, and address excess coca cultivation while respecting the rights of local populations. And yet, although our study reveals significant achievements, it also underscores the challenges Bolivia faced in attaining independence from the U.S. and international regulatory agencies dominated by northern countries.

The article draws on long-term qualitative research with coca growers carried out in the Chapare between 2000 to 2023. It also includes interviews with US, EU, and Bolivian government officials as well as secondary research.¹ All translations are by the authors.

2. Decolonisation and alternative development

Given the drug war’s myriad and well-documented failures, scholars have looked for explanations for the maintenance of this costly, unsuccessful, and destructive policy (see Farfán-Méndez, Le Cour Grandmaison, & Morris, 2022). Some view the U.S-backed ‘drug war’ as a manifestation of ongoing neo-colonial relations, subordinating regions, peoples, and economies world-wide (Ciocchini, 2024; Daniels et al., 2021). Researchers describe the drug war as opening ‘frontier spaces’ to capitalist development and in the process rendering local populations into ‘expendable life’ (Bourgois, 2018; Goodhand, Ballvé, & Meehan, 2023; Sauls, Dest, & McSweeney, 2022). The negative impacts have fallen disproportionately on indigenous peoples (Labate & Rodrigues, 2023; Paredes & Pastor, 2023), afro-descendent communities (Koram, 2019), and women (Muehlmann, 2018).

Decolonisation refers to more than liberation from a foreign power, here it also marks an ongoing move away from an unjust, and discriminatory order that persisted beyond early 19^th century independence from Spain (Howard, 2010, p. 177). Though a common definition of ‘decolonisation’ has proven elusive, most stress sovereignty, self-determination and (re)valuing indigenous culture, organisation and ‘ancestral knowledge’. Former rector of Bolivia’s Guarani indigenous university, Marcia Mandepora describes this as meaning: ‘to stop valuing what is foreign and focus on what is ours. In practical terms, we must confront racialised class inequalities, dismantle the patriarchal logic of colonial rule, and rethink the state itself, as it was designed to control Indigenous peoples and lands for resource extraction and labour.’²

For Apolonia Sanchez,³ former coca union leader and director of the Decolonisation and anti-Racism Unit for Cochabamba’s Departmental government (2016-2019), a colonial mentality is deeply embedded in Bolivian culture. ‘Imagine, since 1492 we have internalised foreign influences so that it has become normal, as if it is part of our culture’. She claims this has led to values that promote racism, patriarchy, and other forms of discrimination. ‘I am not saying we must forget Spanish and return to the past, of course not, there have been many good things too’ she said, holding up her mobile phone as one example of the benefits of modernity. ‘…But we do have to value what comes from our ancestors’. Decolonisation is not a dismissal of modernity then, rather it is thinking about what it means to be modern from a radically different perspective (de la Cadena, 2010; Walsh, 2010).

Over the past twenty years, international drug control strategies have steadily shifted towards a more development-oriented approach that reflects aims foregrounded in decolonisation theory. A growing recognition that crop substitution programs failed because they ignored underlying social and economic conditions led to a re-framing of drug crop cultivation as primarily a development issue (Brombacher & David, 2020). Currently alternative development more closely mirrors worldwide standards, which emphasise sustainable rural development, poverty reduction and local control over policy and programs. By 2016, for the first time, the UN actively incorporated development-oriented measures to tackle drugs, explicitly linking alternative development to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (see UNDP, 2019).

Driven in part by having the world’s largest domestic drugs problem, and its self-designated role as the planet’s policeman, which some argue is driven by imperial ambition (Grandin, 2006), the U.S. has always differed significantly from Europe in its alternative development policy. This divergence speaks to distinct domestic approaches, with the U.S. criminalising drug use and users while the EU countries, although they vary considerably, are generally more oriented to public health and harm reduction⁴ (Fukumi, 2016). In practical terms, much of the difference reflects issues of conditionality and sequenced aid: the U.S. has conditioned economic development assistance on farmers first eradicating their drug crop while the EU frontloads assistance to ensure alternative sources of income are in place before any eradication measures begin, a strategy known as ‘sequencing’ (Brombacher & David, 2020).

Pushback from the Global South against U.S. imposition of its drug policy agenda took a leap forward in 2011, when several South American ex-Presidents, who felt their countries had paid too heavy a price in the War on Drugs, formed the Global Commission on Drug Policy. The Commission identifies the drivers of drug production and trafficking as poverty, inequality, weak state and justice systems and demands local involvement in shaping policy, a stance consistent with efforts to decolonise north-south relations (GCDP, 2020).

In Bolivia, when Evo Morales, a coca farmer and union leader, became president in 2006, his government’s actions to decolonise state and society, exemplified by the establishment of a Vice-Ministry of Decolonisation,⁵ remained for the most part, more discursive than applied (Ramírez, 2015). They foregrounded indigenous symbols, particularly the coca leaf, rather than increasing self-determination and autonomy as many indigenous groups demanded. The government’s approach was criticised for its absence of substantive measures (Cusicanqui, 2012), and for its preservation of a liberal centralised state that perpetuated historic colonialism (Doyle, 2023). Others argued that Bolivia’s ongoing reliance on extractive industries and the influx of foreign direct investments this entails, has created a neo-colonial system that generates new dependencies, exacerbating processes of dispossession and displacement (McNelly, 2023; Petras & Veltmeyer, 2014; Postero, 2017).

The one notable exception, although it was never heralded as a decolonialisation initiative, was the effort to diminish farmers’ dependence on coca, decoupling it from the U.S. War on Drugs. The ‘coca yes, cocaine no’ policy largely reflects the vision of decolonisation incorporated into Bolivia’s 2007 National Development Plan as well as in the 2009 Constitution (Hesselroth, 2016). It achieved decolonisation goals by strengthening indigenous values and asserting greater local control over policy.

However, unlike other efforts, decolonising the War on Drugs also involved confronting external colonialism from the U.S. as well as international drug regulatory bodies. And yet, while it was able to expel U.S. officials and agencies, the Morales government had little choice but to mould its policy within existing international prohibition-oriented parameters to keep international aid flowing. The international drugs regime, led by the US, constrained the extent of Bolivia’s control over its own territory and policy.

3. Coca crops in Bolivia

Bolivia’s long history of cultivation of the coca bush (Erythroxylum coca) in the semi-tropical foothills of the Andes predates the arrival of Europeans by at least 3000 years.⁶ But, beginning with Spanish colonisation, the country’s non-indigenous elites stigmatised the leaf (Gootenberg, 2008). For indigenous societies, coca performs a pivotal role in initiations, marriages, and funeral rites, as well as ensuring the fertility of the earth. Sharing coca builds trust and community, and it serves as a ritual component in every exchange. While providing myriad social and health benefits,⁷ since the discovery of cocaine in the mid-nineteenth century, it has also served as the drug’s principal raw material. Much of the Bolivian crop is destined for this purpose and no clear boundaries separate sales for traditional uses and the illicit cocaine market.

Bolivia’s two main growing regions, the Yungas and the Chapare, have historically suffered low living standards, although because of coca, income has always been higher than in the rural highlands and valleys (CEDIB, ND). In all, the coca zones number about 650,000 people (Ministerio de Desarrollo Rural y Tierras, 2021), with almost a quarter of a million of them in the Chapare’s five main coca growing municipalities (INE, 2024), where 49,000 heads of family are registered union members.⁸ Coca is a versatile crop, thriving on steep slopes, in acidic soil, and at high altitudes. It grows rapidly, typically maturing within a year, and can be harvested every three to four months. The necessary tools for its cultivation – like a digging stick, machete and back-pack mounted crop sprayer – are affordable and widely available. Importantly, despite price fluctuations, steady demand for cocaine over the past 50 years guarantees farmers a reliable source of income, with coca yielding higher returns than any other crop (Gutierrez, 2023). In the Chapare, both men and women cultivate, fertilise, harvest, and transport coca leaves, but men do most of the preparation of fields and women dominate the commercialisation of coca leaf (Alvarado Choque, 2020).

As consumption of cocaine skyrocketed in the United States in the early 1980s, coca production expanded in the Chapare. The region, roughly the size of Connecticut or Yorkshire has only been settled since the 1950s, when impoverished highland peasants, with government encouragement, made the most of a new U.S. financed road that opened access to the lowlands.⁹ The so called ‘colonos’ cleared small plots, used mostly manual production, and a family-based labour force. They grew rice, bananas, and citrus fruits alongside coca, which supplied the mines but also the drug trade that was still in its infancy (Millington, 2018).

Against a 1980s backdrop of political and economic crises, drought in the highlands and IMF imposed neoliberal economic reforms that put tens of thousands out of work, migrating to the Chapare became a lifeline that served to effectively absorb displaced labour (Laserna, 1995). Most residents self-identify as Quechua, and it is common for individuals to be bilingual, using a blend of Quechua and Spanish.

For many years, government presence was minimal, but it would be inaccurate to say there was no law. Since the very beginnings of settlement, farmers organised into what are now 937 tightly knit local unions, joined into 105 Centrals, which in turn are grouped into six federations with an overarching coordinating body (formed in 1991), and later joined by parallel women’s organisations.¹⁰ Part of the campesino¹¹ confederation, the Confederación Sindical Única de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia (CSUTCB) and the highland migrant confederation, the Confederación Sindical de Comunidades Interculturales Originarias de Bolivia (CSCIOB), these unions are highly participatory. They usually employ indigenous decision-making practices mixed with union traditions inherited from ex-miners who migrated to the Chapare after tin mines were shuttered in the mid-1980s. They control land tenure, arbitrate disagreements, organise communal work parties (e.g. to maintain communal resources such as a plaza or to clear road verges), and punish anti-social conduct (Grisaffi, 2019, pp. 89-96). Although women exercise growing influence, leadership remains concentrated in male hands (Farthing & Grisaffi, 2024).

4. A neo-colonial policy: alternative development in Bolivia from mid-1980s to 2005

In the mid-1980s, the United States, long the world’s largest cocaine consumer, launched a militarised interdiction and eradication policy directed at the Chapare. Consistent with its drug crop control elsewhere, coca eradication was always the principal goal, with secondary importance attached to developing economic alternatives (see GAO, 2002; Jackson, Bathrick, Martin, & Rodriguez-Schneider, 2003).

The Chapare alternative development program was for many years one of USAID’s largest in Latin America (Farthing, 2004). Over a twenty-year period, most coca farmers participated in at least one USAID program, all conditioned-on eradication, some with compensation and others that eradicated forcibly. Inevitably, compelling farmers to relinquish their most reliable income source in the absence of viable alternatives significantly hindered any prospects of rural development (Lupu, 2004).

USAID had begun limited projects in the Chapare in the 1960s, but in the face of mushrooming coca production, the already existing Chapare Regional Development Project (CRDP) which prioritised increasing (licit) agricultural production, was revised in 1987 to focus on conditioned coca substitution (Jackson et al., 2003). When no other crop could directly compete with coca, a new program, the Cochabamba Regional Development Project (CORDEP), was launched in 1991 to combat migration to the region but achieved minimal success (Painter, 1994, p. 107).

Three successive Bolivian governments (from 1985 to 1997) insisted that Chapare farmers be compensated for voluntary eradication, as they were all aware of the pivotal role coca played in absorbing labour and they sought to minimise showdowns with the increasingly powerful coca unions while maintaining some semblance of national sovereignty (Brewer-Osorio, 2021). Most farmers eradicated their coca, accepted the compensation, and cultivated the program’s recommended crops. However, faced with limited USAID investment in generating sales, many eventually replanted coca (Farthing, 2004). The Chapare experience reflects alternative development projects worldwide that generally failed to integrate peasant producers into global (licit) markets (Grillo, Kendra, Pastor, & Manrique, 2021; Meehan, 2021). These repeatedly unsuccessful programs undermined peasant trust in not only the implementing agencies, but also in the community leaders who acted as intermediaries, local political representatives and ultimately, the national state (Busnel, 2022).

When Hugo Banzer came into office in 1997, he succumbed to U.S. pressure and adopted forced eradication and militarised interdiction for the first time. Operations by U.S.-trained and funded police and military units led to repeated arrests, killings, harassment, and sexual assault of women (Ledebur, 2005). Between 1997 and 2001, approximately 45,000 hectares of Chapare coca were forcibly eradicated but the underfunded alternative development program was unable to keep pace (GAO, 2002). This created severe economic hardship for growers whose catastrophic drops in income did not lead as many of them to out-migrate as anticipated.¹² Many farmers steadily replanted to keep their heads above water (Lishfer, 2003).

By the early 2000s, USAID had shifted its focus yet again, emphasising the capitalist expansion that some researchers say is at the heart of drug policy (Avilés, 2018): it began emphasising commercial scale private investment, mostly by Cochabamba city-based elites, providing regional benefits with little direct impact on coca growers. These companies were accused of misappropriation of USAID funds, inadequate accounting practices and conflicts of interest (Pinto Cascán, 2003). Lavish agricultural stations, Bolivian professional administrators who earned in a month what campesinos earned in a year accompanied by U.S. advisors paid four times more again, racing back and forth from the Chapare in new jeeps to offices in one of Cochabambás most luxurious office buildings, only reinforced coca growers’ frustration and distrust (Farthing, 2004). In 2006 the director of the coca growers’ radio station, Egberto Chipana, explained: ‘On my show I used to say, ‘Alternative development has the highest wages in Bolivia! …we would be better off administering the money ourselves!’¹³

Nonetheless, in 2003 interviews, USAID representatives insisted that the program had seen steady success – each year, more legal crops exported, licit income increased, and more families incorporated into the program (Farthing, 2004, p. 1). Coca growers almost universally disagreed. Oscar Coca, administrator of the Chapare’s Consortium of Municipalities, identified three principal problems with the U.S. approach: an uncoordinated strategy that operated outside existing community organisations and local governments; an inflexible conditioning of assistance on eradication; and a large, expensive bureaucracy.¹⁴

While bloated and pricey bureaucracies are a hallmark of bilateral and multilateral aid worldwide (Easterly, 2002), an overarching stumbling block in the Chapare was USAID’s refusal to work with community representatives (the coca growers unions), a position that runs against all conventional wisdom about rural development. USAID created parallel local ‘associations,’ with a paid leadership; a policy that fed into negative campesino memories of 1950s efforts to similarly control rural populations through government-run unions (Albó, Libermann, Pizarro, & Godínez, 1990). And in a national context where USAID democracy promotion programs had a history of actively working to undo collective organising (Ellison, 2018), coca growers reasonably feared that this was a plan to destroy their organisations. USAID consistently described coca grower unions as ‘drug traffickers’ or at a minimum, that their leaders were in the pay of drug dealers (Ledebur, 2005). While growers had varying involvement with the drug trade, they were primarily peasant farmers whose sense of ownership and loyalty to their union runs very deep (Grisaffi, 2019).

The refusal to recognise growers’ representatives meant that union-government agreements, many tied to demands concerning alternative development and often forged during periods of intense conflict, repeatedly went unfulfilled because the U.S. embassy withheld its stamp of approval. This reinforced coca growing families’ belief that U.S.-backed military and law enforcement operations and U.S.-sponsored development initiatives were one and the same. These dynamics contributed to political instability, increased violent conflict, and fuelled the decisions of individual growers to replant coca (Farthing, 2004).

The U.S.-sponsored approach to alternative development prioritised ‘expert’ knowledge,¹⁵ and side-lined grassroots voices and know-how. It embodied what Escobar (1995) and others characterise as an imperialistic endeavour to subordinate peripheral regions of the globe (see also Echeverría, 2011; Zibechi, 2008). Unsurprisingly, working class Bolivians viewed the drug war as a colonial imposition, owing to the demonisation of coca leaf that stands in stark contrast to their own customs. Consistent with accusations that the drug war’s purpose is furthering capitalist development, coca growers told us that they understood that the aim of U.S.-led policies was to push them off the land so that agri-business could move in, and they would be contracted as cheap labour. They spoke of the U.S. and its agencies in Bolivia as an ‘imperial force’ that undermined national sovereignty.¹⁶

5. Emerging municipalities, the EU’s PRAEDAC and the cato accord

In 1994, Boliviás neoliberal era Law of Popular Participation (LPP) devolved administrative responsibility and funding to municipalities, many of which were newly formed, turning local government into an important site for social and economic development (Kohl, 2002). The LPP provided a mechanism for political engagement with the state hitherto inexistent in rural Bolivia. USAID refused to engage with the new municipal governments in the Chapare as all of them, with virtually no opposition, were immediately controlled by the coca growers’ unions and have operated as an appendage to the union ever since.¹⁷ This was despite the fact USAID provided training to 86 other municipalities across Bolivia (including those in the coca-growing Yungas) (Farthing, 2004, p. 3).

In a stark break from U.S. strategy, the European Union initiated a Chapare program in 1998 with no coca-related conditions. The EU emphasised building partnerships with the coca unions, respect for human rights and social inclusion. It was committed to sequencing of development funding: the ‘Assistance to the Chapare Alternative Development Strategy Plan’, known by its Spanish acronym PRAEDAC, supported land titling, strengthened municipal administrative capacity, natural resource management and access to credit. PRAEDAC was similar in style and staff composition to other bi- and multi-lateral development institutions, but as Carlos Hoffman, the EU’s Director of Municipal Programming, explained: ‘Our attitude is that we will help campesinos improve their lives and then they will abandon drugs. Our philosophy is to support the municipalities… USAID carries out projects that the municipality doesn’t know anything about, which makes a real planning process impossible’ (Farthing & Kohl, 2005, p. 9). Felipe Cáceres, the former mayor of the Chapare’s most populated municipality, agreed, saying that ‘in eight years, with one quarter of the money, the municipalities have achieved ten times what USAID accomplished in 20 years’.¹⁸ The municipalities subsequently developed detailed mappings of their resources, potentials, and limitations, and of their spending priorities.¹⁹

The next step in the shift away from the conditioning and towards improved sequencing happened in late 2004 when President Carlos Mesa, weary of constant protest and violent police repression, acquiesced to a long-standing grower demand, and authorised a subsistence plot of coca leaf, known as a cato. Conflict abated almost immediately. ‘It’s very simple,’ said coca grower Celestina Ticona. ‘The cato lets us feed our families.’²⁰ ‘We bought our plot and built our little house thanks to the cato,’ confirmed Alieta Ortiz, who worked at a Chapare community radio station for eight years.²¹

While the EU’s approach was distinct from the United States, and undoubtedly provided the groundwork for what came next, it shared the common goal with the U.S. of reducing coca cultivation. Their different strategies to reach the same result were both determined by the international community, not Bolivia. As such, the EU model represents an external and top-down approach that seeks to find the solutions to its domestic problems through intervening in another country. This has become particularly apparent in the EU’s more recent efforts as its domestic drug problems have grown; cooperation funds are increasingly focused on security rather than farmer well-being (Provost, Daniels, Gurung, & Cook, 2023).

6. Decolonising coca policy

When Evo Morales took office in early 2006, he vowed to reassert sovereignty, decolonise the state and society, and revalue indigenous culture, starting with the coca leaf. His administration quickly formalised the cato program through its Integrated Development with Coca Plan (2006-2010) and in 2008, introduced a novel approach funded in part by the EU until 2013, called ‘social control of coca’. This program emphasises community participation and respect for human rights, making it the world’s first ‘supply-side harm reduction’ initiative (Farthing & Kohl, 2012). Felipe Cáceres, who assumed the role of Vice Minister of Social Defence in 2006 explained, ‘We decided to leave the machine guns and the bullets behind. We opted to include coca growing communities in the debate and analysis that created our policies’.²²

A new constitution adopted in 2009 legitimised traditional uses of coca leaf for the first time. In 2013, Bolivia pushed back against the 1961 UN Single convention on narcotic drugs, the most important international drug control framework, that lists coca as a restricted substance and was adopted at U.S. insistence (Hudak, 2016). Reflecting how drug policy is tied to capitalist efforts at market domination, Reiss (2014) argues that the categorisation of coca under the convention was designed to further the economic agendas of the expanding global U.S. pharmaceutical industry. The convention, which Bolivia signed in 1976, calls for the destruction of all coca bushes and abolishing traditional consumption of the leaf. Bolivia successfully petitioned in 2013 for a reservation that legally permits coca-growing and its licit uses within its own borders – despite strong U.S.-led opposition. Four years later, Bolivia implemented a new coca law to replace the one designed by the U.S. in 1988. This ‘nationalisation’ of drug policy recognises the cultural, historical, and economic significance of coca and allows for legal cultivation within certain limits, while committing to prevent coca from reaching the illicit drug trade. Then in early 2023, at Bolivia’s request (later joined by Colombia), the World Health Organisation initiated a yearlong ‘critical review’ of the coca leaf which could lead to recommendations for changes in its classification under UN drug control treaties (NPR, 2023).²³

Throughout, Morales accused the U.S. of imperialism in speeches and tweets, including at international assemblies. In 2008 the government expelled the U.S. ambassador and the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) for meddling in internal affairs, followed by the expulsion of USAID in 2013. In response, the U.S. has repeatedly ‘decertified’ Bolivia in its annual ritual of judging countries ‘progress’ on eradicating illicit drugs (Langer, 2020, p. 92).

The Chapare, along with the rest of Bolivia, was transformed during the uptick in government investment and a commodity boom driven by Chinese demand (Addicks, HüBner-Schmid, & Cabieses, 2010, p. 39). In 2015, Felipe Cáceres explained, ‘Before, the children of growers didn’t think beyond coca. But now, three hundred students have just graduated from the local high school. Ten years ago, there were only seven or eight.’²⁴ Development assistance sequencing meant that a state housing program replaced many wooden shacks with brick-and-mortar houses, and low-income households, except for the most remote, now have access to basic services including potable water, sanitation, electricity, and cooking gas (Grisaffi, Farthing, & Ledebur, 2017, pp. 146-148). Up to 2019, many young people in the Chapare, some of whom had job possibilities abroad, decided to stay rather than migrate.²⁵

Government-sponsored scholarships, technical institutions, and the presence of a local indigenous university make post-secondary education accessible within the Chapare. Moreover, affordable government loans, managed by the Banco de Desarrollo Productivo (BDP), have eased the establishment of small businesses, such as shops and transport and helped farmers to make the gradual shift towards non-coca crops (Opinión, 2017).

The backdrop to decolonising alternative development was the Social Control of Coca program that was part of the Integrated Development with Coca policy from 2008-2013. This consciousness-raising campaign through grower unions prioritised collective over individual rights and worked to convince growers to cooperatively limit coca production, using arguments that less production meant higher prices (Ramos, Benavides, Vélez, Jauregui, & Restrepo, 2023, pp. 31-34).²⁶ ‘It certainly wasn’t easy,’ explained Marcela Lopez who worked in the program. ‘Some local union leaders put in time and effort to make it happen. Others didn’t.’²⁷

Nonetheless, the program estimates that it effectively reached 30-40 percent of Chapare unions, and that 88 percent of coca eradicated during the program was removed through cooperative efforts with unions (Farthing & Ledebur, 2015, p. 25). During the program’s five years, coca cultivation in Bolivia dropped from 30,500 hectares to 23,000, a fall of 32% (UNODC, 2018, p. 18). While it declined again in 2014 and very slightly again in 2015, it has risen steadily ever since (UNODC, 2023a, p. 23). Nonetheless, the fact that variations in leaf quantities over time in the Chapare has mirrored the Yungas, where social control has had much less impact, refutes any idea that the social control program alone had a determining effect on production levels.

A critical role in giving growers the confidence to try different economic strategies came from land titling (just under 1.2 million acres or 480,000 hectares), strengthened by the 2013 Agrarian Census, according to former EU Cooperation Attaché Nicolaus Hansmann.²⁸ However, at the same time that land titling increased farmers’ security and their ability to use land as loan collateral, it also led to local conflicts as there were competing claims from current and former owners, some of whom had abandoned their plots during the period of forced eradication. They returned following the 2005 MAS victory only to find that the local union had assigned their land to someone else. More significantly, official land titling stripped unions of a critical basis of their authority, weakening them, and making them more susceptible to state control (Grisaffi, 2019, p. 147).

Coca farmers, whether as agricultural extension agents or inspectors, Vice-Ministers, or the President, were largely the social control program’s implementers, greatly enhancing the sense of ownership. Men held almost all these positions, which led PACS to fund female social control delegates, although often these were assigned mostly cooking and cleaning duties.

‘We allow coca cultivation – but the idea is to gradually reduce reliance on coca crops,’ explained John Cornejo, Technical Director of the partially EU-funded National Fund for Rural Development (FONADIN).²⁹ Assistance is sequenced through the guaranteed income from the cato, on average slightly above the minimum wage, reducing the risk of experimenting with alternatives. Funding has supported increased mechanisation, such as rice husking machines, tractors, temperature-controlled supply chains for dairy, as well as for fruit, honey, and fish processing plants, veterinary services, and as supplies such as seedlings, fertiliser, and tools. Rather than agencies working in isolation, as was the case with USAID, government branches collaborated on health, education, and physical infrastructure. These projects were in the most part driven by demands emanating from the grassroots (FONADIN, 2018, p. iii).

By mid-2019, 3,000 commercial fish farms were operating in the Chapare.³⁰ ‘We are building a fish processing and packing plant and starting a project to breed the fry,’ explained Vincente Cruz, a FONADIN community outreach worker. Through these investments markets for local crops have expanded. Former union leader Apolonia Sanchez told us, ‘A lot has changed thanks to Evo. There are now oranges, palm heart, pineapples, cacao. I grow copoazú fruit. Everything that we produce we sell. I remember back then, during past governments we produced a lot, but a lot went to waste, we could not sell it.’ ³¹ Sanchez continued, ‘Many people are dedicated to non-coca crops. Fish farming, now everyone has it, has been a great success. Imagine – we sell fish at 24 Bolivianos ($3.50) per kilo! When people say that in the Chapare we only have coca, it’s just not true!’

Despite the successes, the challenges were enormous. Coca growers’ unions, like any other organisation, are not immune to noncompliance or corruption. Many farmers in the Chapare initially sought another cato by registering part of their land to a family member or buying additional plots and holding them under different names. In some places, union leadership has abused their positions of power to manipulate social control norms for their personal benefit.’³²

The MAS policy also upset the tacit understanding among growers and their unions that recognises that almost all coca farmers have direct or indirect ties to the cocaine trade. When union leaders, looking to advance within the MAS government, set up anti-drug controls, growers felt betrayed, because their leaders were disregarding their principal obligations: to ‘rule by obeying’ and protect their members’ livelihoods (Grisaffi, 2019). Managing this tension led to arrangements described by a long-term, mid-ranking employee of the cultivation control agency (Unidad de Desarrollo Económico y Social del Trópico de Cochabamba – UDESTRO), as involving payoffs to allow people extra catos, under-reporting, as well as unions often turning a blind eye.³³

Nonetheless, the program was recognised as a ‘best practice’ by the Organisation of American States (OAS, 2013), while the United Nations Development Programme stated in 2019 that ‘the [Bolivian] government has helped stabilise household incomes and placed farmers in a better position to assume the risk of substituting illicit crops’ (UNDP, 2019, p. 9). In contrast, the United States was consistently critical of the initiative, repeatedly labelling Bolivia one of the world’s least-compliant countries in controlling drug exports (ONDCP, 2020; White House, 2012).

Generating alternative uses for the coca leaf, which has high levels of protein and nutrients, was unsuccessful because of the international prohibition on coca exports. In 2019, union leader Edie Godoy told us. ‘If we can industrialise coca, then that will help counter drugs trafficking.’ Grower unions have encouraged the cultivation of organic coca for 30 different products including teas, flour, shampoo, skin creams, drinks, and diet pills (Ministerio de Desarrollo Rural y Tierras, 2021, p. 33). In 2008, the Venezuelan government funded construction of a Chapare coca processing plant EBOCOCA, but continued international prohibition meant the plant ran well below capacity, and during a 2023 visit, the plant was shut and the entrance road overgrown.

Efforts to expand international markets have not seen much success either. Despite a 2018 agreement with Ecuador, coca exports stalled after Morales’ ally, Rafael Correa, left office. Expanding exports to northern Argentina, where coca has traditionally been consumed, have been stymied by efforts by local governments there to increase production (Chulver Benítez, 2020). Ultimately, the UN’s continued listing of coca as a controlled substance – which reflects colonial and racist attitudes (Pearson, 2020) – puts the breaks on a significant expansion of legal markets for the leaf (Busnel & Manrique, 2023).

7. Evo Morales’ ouster

After Jeanine Áñez took over in November 2019, her government closed legal coca markets, usurped control over producer licenses and used military force to subdue cocalero protests (Brewer-Osorio, 2021). After ten Chapare coca farmers were killed on November 15, 2019, and a right-wing mob burned down their union headquarters in Cochabamba, growers immediately expelled the police from the region (Farthing & Becker, 2021, p. 149). Banks refused to operate in the Chapare after the police left, which meant that when COVID-19 exploded, residents were unable to collect emergency subsidies and loans. For two weeks in April 2020, no gasoline was available because the government insisted that it was being diverted into cocaine paste production. The cut-off killed thousands of fish in ponds that relied on gasoline-fuelled aeration pumps (AIN, 2020). The subsequent economic downturn led some coca growers to migrate to Chile where they worked as agricultural laborers, others attempted to get to Europe.³⁴

With U.S. approval, the Áñez government quickly drafted its own drug strategy, which presented a hard-line stance on use, interdiction, and supply control, with text copied directly from U.S. international narcotics control strategy reports. The ‘coca yes, cocaine no’ strategy was dismissed as ‘permissive and impractical’ and ‘merely a political discourse’ (Ledebur, Farthing, & Grisaffi, 2020).

Almost overnight, the Chapare coca farmers’ relationship with the state switched back from partnership to enemy. It spelled the end for any community control over coca production and the promotion of economic alternatives. One grower told us, ‘Why should we respect the cato - when the government does not respect us?’³⁵ In the main towns in December 2019, coca plants were on sale, something not seen since Morales took office and outlawed by the ‘integrated development with coca’ program. This rapid turn of events reinforces both how critical a positive relationship with the state is for effective coca control and how easily it can be disrupted in areas with deep histories of mistrust towards the state.

Although the Áñez government suspended existing development projects, the election of Morales’s Finance Minister Luis Arce to the presidency in October 2020, reinstated economic and community development programs through a four-year plan (Estrategia de Desarrollo Integral Sustentable con Coca 2021/202 -5 - EDISC) that established local economic development agencies (Chulver Benítez, 2020). While the strategy resuscitates social control under the name ‘community social control’, funding for this component is only 3.1% of EDISC’s total budget (Ministerio de Desarrollo Rural y Tierras, 2021, pp. 70-71).

By 2023, the plan has only had limited success in stemming expanding coca cultivation. In 2021, coca acreage was at the highest levels recorded since 2008, although it dropped slightly in 2022 (UNODC, 2018, p. 18; 2023a, p. 23). In July 2023 a current UDESTRO employee said his agency estimates illegal Chapare coca acreage to be equivalent to, if not above, that dedicated to registered legal catos.³⁶ An official at the Vice-ministry of Social Defence and Controlled Substances (VDSSC),³⁷ which oversees the coca control program, confirmed the emerging phenomenon of the ‘double cato’. ‘If the next generation doesn’t have education or other production choices, they are going to grow coca. And that is what is happening.’ He explained that adult children are increasingly planting additional catos on their parent’s land (see also Ramos et al., 2023, p. 41).

The official attributed the expansion to farmer disengagement, driven by a profound erosion of trust in the state but also less confidence in current President Luis Arce, who has no history in Bolivia’s social movements.³⁸ In spite of the government’s continued support through the EDISC, local union leader Juana Cervantes believes that the Arce administration views the Chapare as a hotbed of narco-trafficking and will no longer support productive projects, and could even invite the DEA back into the country.³⁹ General secretary of the largest Chapare growers’ union, Eulogio Franco, stressed that Arce does not understand the daily struggles that peasants face.⁴⁰

Cocaleros also lost the privileged access to government that they enjoyed under the Morales administration. Wilma Choque,⁴¹ the vice president of the cocalera women’s organisation, explained: ‘Today, when we travel to meet with Lucho (President Luis Arce), he will not receive us…Government functionaries no longer come to the Chapare; they avoid us.’ Eulogio Franco echoed this sentiment ‘With our brother Evo there was permanent coordination … Today it is different. You must request a hearing (to speak with Arce); you must send letters, and, in the end, there are times that they don’t even listen to us.’ Prominent union leaders were replaced with Arce loyalists, including Alieta Ortiz,⁴² former reporter for the coca growers’ radio station. This culling of Chapare leaders led her to worry that cocaleros will no longer shape coca policy as they had under Morales.

A former UDESTRO employee⁴³ recounted that during Evo’s administration, growers often played the system, planting above the one cato limit. But if Evo told growers they must control coca, the unions swung into action to reduce acreage, with considerable effect. But now, members simply ignore Arce’s requests. The VDSSC official said: ‘we must strengthen social control, so we can get back to the path we had. But to do this we need to have better representation in government and coca growers need to be involved in decision-making’.

8. Conclusions: the upside of decolonising alternative development policy

Decolonial thinkers have long argued that development policy towards low-income countries has been a tool of colonialism and imperialism, that imposes Western models of economic and political development, through force if necessary (Escobar, 1995; Mignolo, 2012; Quijano, 2000). This is unmistakable in the alternative development policies dictated by the U.S. in Bolivia, which have often exacerbated the marginalisation and exclusion that fuels drug crop production in the first place. Twenty years of U.S.-funding was a poorly designed attempt to separate impoverished campesinos from their livelihoods, demonise an ancient and valued part of Andean culture, and in the late 1990s, facilitate regional capitalist penetration.

The Morales administration took an important step towards decolonisation by rejecting decades of governing elites relinquishing national sovereignty to an external power. Bolivia’s shift to integrated development programs with coca offered a different path after 2006, one that removed conditioning and used a sequencing strategy to focus on reducing poverty. However, the end of EU funding in 2013, combined with the relentless expansion of drug trafficking and the Áñez government from 2019 to 2020, unravelled some of what it achieved.

Even so, Bolivia’s efforts have been largely successful in the cato policy’s original goal: reducing violent conflict. Integrated development WITH coca, successfully challenged the alternative development narrative of development WITHOUT coca imposed by the U.S. and frequently, by the UN. For former Decolonisation Director Apolonia Sanchez⁴⁴ the policy has liberated Bolivia from the yoke of U.S. policy, has revalued coca as an ancestral crop, and as such represents an important step towards decolonisation.

Bolivia’s experience reinforces that any development program must come from the grassroots and be embedded in trust in state actors and the extension of citizenship rights. Effective coordination between government agencies, that is sustainable across changes in government, is essential. Its initial priority should be the strengthening of local organisations and governments, especially in regions lacking robust grassroots representation. This is not just a theoretical exercise– but a concrete example that flies in the face of U.S. drug war orthodoxy, illustrating decolonial thinking in action.

While the sequencing introduced by the EU is imperative, Bolivia ventured even further by authorising limited cultivation as a foundational element in crop diversification. Where an agricultural commodity is primarily used for illicit purposes, affording farmers the opportunity to cultivate a restricted amount, providing it is coupled with participatory monitoring, enhanced state services, economic development, and a reduction of punitive measures, positions them more favourably to reduce their dependence on that crop. Notwithstanding its limitations, through its emphasis on human rights, socio-economic development, the regularization of land tenure, and the expansion of state presence in remote regions, the Bolivian model confirms what has been observed elsewhere: keeping a lid on coca acreage will only be successful when wider structural issues are addressed (see also Thomson, Parada-Hernández, & Acero, 2022).

When examined through the lens of decolonisation, campesinos are crafting their own development model based on their vision of a good life, even if the reality is that local economic development has to a considerable extent been funded by the cocaine trade. The illicit trade injects cash into marginalised communities and enables people to remain in rural settings. The fact this model operates outside the bounds of legality is, to some extent, inconsequential to local campesinos, given that for the most part they have not yet experienced much of the harm associated with the cocaine trade. However, the expansion of drug refineries into the Chapare over the past ten years, will likely change this equation as the violence linked to the mercurial trade spirals upward (Grisaffi, 2022, pp. 591-593).

While Bolivia has advanced in decolonising drug policies by recognising coca as a culturally significant crop and legalising its limited cultivation, its efforts are inevitably limited not only because of the international prohibitionist paradigm but also because the government’s international standing is reliant on compliance, which in turn dictates the amount of international cooperation funding it receives. Bolivia remains entangled in international drug control treaties and global economic structures that prioritise the interests of more powerful nations (Colson, 2020). In the realm of drug policy, even where there is a commitment to assert autonomy and self-determination, genuine change cannot be realised solely at the sub-national or national levels; instead, comprehensive decolonisation requires a broad based and global movement challenging the prevailing prohibitionist framework, which the 2023 coca policy review requested by Bolivia and Colombia attempts to jumpstart.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the coca grower organisations and municipal governments in the Chapare for their collaboration. They thank the editor and the anonymous referees for their helpful comments on earlier drafts. They would also like to thank Kathryn Ledebur, Caroline Conzelman, Maritza Paredes, Alvaro Pastor, Oscar Zambrana and Alieta Ortiz.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The authors will make non-sensitive data available to bona fide researchers on request.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Global Challenges Research Fund under the University Allocation system for substantial research projects 2019-2021 (University of Reading), and the European Research Council under grant ERC-2019-ADG 884839/EXTORT.

Notes

1 This research received ethical approval from the ethics committee at the University of St Gallen (HSG-EC-20220304). Oral and/or written consent was given for interviews, where consent could not be recorded only anonymised data has been used. The authors report there are no competing interests to declare.

2 Author interview, Camiri, 2 March 2017.

3 Author interview, Villa Tunari, 20 July 2023.

4 Harm reduction aims at reducing the negative impacts that result from illicit drug use and production.

5 After the 2009 Constituent Assembly, Despatriarchialization was added to the name.

6 Coca went from being a garden plant with medicinal qualities to mass production grown in plantations with slave labour during the Inca empire (Gootenberg, 2008).

7 Coca’s mild stimulant qualities dull hunger and fatigue, aid digestion, reduce altitude sickness, and provide protein, vitamins, and minerals.

8 Phone interview, UDESTRO employee (name withheld), 25 July 2023.

9 Before the 1950’s, most of the Chapare’s population were nomadic indigenous peoples, the Yuracarés and the Yuquis, but government-supported colonization in the 1960’s led to the first significant wave of campesino migration, which pushed these local indigenous peoples north (Orellana, 1999).

10 Phone interview, UDESTRO employee (name withheld), 25 July 2023.

11 While campesinos are literally people who live in the countryside, and the word is commonly translated as peasants. However, in Bolivia campesino also implies indigenous. The majority are from Quechua and Aymara ethnic or linguistic groups see (Albó et al., 1990).

12 Outlets for migration substantially reduced in the late 1990s, particularly in Argentina which historically absorbed the largest number of Bolivian migrants, and which was facing a profound economic crisis (Ledebur, 2005).

13 Author interview, Chipiriri, Chapare, January 2006.

14 Author interview, Villa Tunari, 15 July 2003.

15 Here, expert refers to those trained at universities in the global north with a focus on international development.

16 Author interviews with current and former leaders Juana Cervantes (San Gabriel), Fidel Tarque Chambi (San Gabriel), and Faustina Casillas (Villa Tunari), 19-20 July 2023.

17 The only exception to USAID conditionality was funding for improved roads in two of the five Chapare’s municipalities beginning in 2002.

18 Author interview, Villa Tunari, 15 July 2003.

19 Author interviews: Diego Ayo, USAID consultant on municipalities, La Paz, 4 August 2003; Alfredo Antezana Lafuente, Lafuente, Director of Servicio de Desarrollo Integral (SEDEI) Cochabamba, 28 July 2003; Carlos Hoffman, Coordinador PRAEDAC. Villa Tunari, 30 July 2003; Godofredo Reinicke, Defensor del Pueblo, Cochabamba, 20 July 2003.

20 Interview, Caranavi, 26 January 2014, courtesy Andean Information Network.

21 Author interview, Villa Tunari, 31 January 2014.

22 Author interview, La Paz, 3 February 2014.

23 A previous WHO review in 1995 found ‘use of coca leaf did not lead to noticeable damage to mental and physical health.’ It was successfully suppressed by the U.S. see (WHO, 1995, p. 223) If the current effort is successful, it could open legal markets for coca leaf products while vindicating indigenous rights.

24 Author interview, La Paz, 27 January 2015.

25 Author interviews with coca growers, Chapare July 2019.

26 Author interview, 23 July 2023, Cochabamba.

27 Interview, 15 January 2021, courtesy of the Andean Information Network.

28 Author interview, La Paz, 30 January 2014.

29 Author interview, La Paz, July 2019.

30 Author interview, Chimoré, July 2019.

31 Author interview, Villa Tunari, 20 July 2023.

32 Author interview, Godofredo Reinicke, director of Puente Investigación y Enlace, Cochabamba, 20 April 2012.

33 Author interview, 25 July 2023, Cochabamba.

34 Telephone interviews, coca growers. December 2019.

35 Author interview, Chapare, 22 December 2019.

36 Telephone interview, 25 July 2023, Cochabamba.

37 Telephone interview, La Paz, 13 September 2022.

38 Telephone interview, La Paz, 13 September 2022.

39 Author interview, San Gabriel, 19 July 2023.

40 Author interview, Eulogio Franco, Villa Tunari, 21 September 2023.

41 Author interview, Villa Tunari, 21 July 2023.

42 Author interview, Villa Tunari, 20 July 2023.

43 Author interview, Cochabamba, 25 July 2023.

44 Author interview, Villa Tunari, 20 July 2023.