Peasants’ Way of Life : Coca Leaf--Not Just for Getting High

EL ALTO, Bolivia —  Valentin Quispe, an old Indian soothsayer in a blue knit cap and a green corduroy jacket, studied a scattering of coca leaves on the wool cloth at his knees and told a client, a young man, that his marriage was in trouble.

“You and your woman may separate,” Quispe said. “You have problems. Fight too much.”

The young man asked if there was another woman in his future. Quispe scattered some more coca leaves and paused. “Yes,” he answered. “You will have luck with the other woman.”

Sacred Ceremonies

Reading coca leaves for a glimpse of the future is an ancient tradition in these Andean highlands of Bolivia and neighboring Peru. So is chewing the leaves, giving them as a gift, using them as medicine, bartering with them and hallowing them in sacred ceremonies.

To the outside world, the little green leaf is best known as the raw material of a lucrative and illegal drug that worries the United States and Europe. The controversy over cocaine, in turn, is a cause of deep concern for those who see coca as an essential part of traditional Indian culture and rural economy. Hundreds of thousands of Bolivians and Peruvians who are not cocaine traffickers depend on the cultivation and marketing of coca leaves for their livelihoods.

Peasant cooperatives and farmers’ unions in Bolivia have vowed to disobey a new law, passed at U.S. urging, that will make coca an illegal crop in most parts of Bolivia. In both Bolivia and Peru, coca growers have staged angry pro-tests over experimental projects employing herbicides against coca bushes. At least 11 people died when Bolivian peasants clashed with anti-narcotics police in June.

Those who use coca in Bolivia are generally members of a poor majority that has its roots in the rural highlands and the pre-Hispanic past. Aymara and Quechua, the languages of the Incas, are their mother tongues. Their culture remains proudly distinct from that of the country’s Spanish-speaking rulers.

The cultures meet in El Alto, a dusty city of 150,000 people on the edge of a vast highland plateau called the Altiplano. On one side is the Altiplano’s flat plain, where Indian farmers till rustic patches of potatoes and quinoa, the crops of their ancestors. On the other side, spilling down a steep valley, is La Paz, the national seat of government with a population of 1.5 million. The roar of jet planes at El Alto International Airport, which serves La Paz, mingles with the din of bustling marketplaces that serve the outlying rural areas.

Near one native market on a broad, dirt street known as Avenida Panoramica, Indian women come and go in bowler hats, billowing skirts and multicolored shawls. The street opens into a concrete plaza, where a statue of Christ on a tall pedestal overlooks La Paz in the valley below. Flanking the plaza, in two perpendicular rows of sky-blue shacks made of corrugated metal, about 30 soothsayers practice their ancient art.

Called yatiris , they dispense blessings in a mixture of languages and creeds. They make appointments for house calls, to administer sacred baths and ward off evil. And they read coca leaves.

Quispe agreed to let a foreigner watch a leaf-reading. To begin the session, he recited a combined version of the Hail Mary and the Lord’s Prayer, mixing Spanish and Aymara. When his customer expressed agreement with a prediction, the yatiri said in broken Spanish: “Always the truth from coca comes.”

Rites of Birth, Death

Indian peasants live and die with coca. Before giving birth, a woman chews the leaves to hasten labor and ease the pain. After a birth, adult relatives and friends celebrate by chewing leaves together. A young man in love offers coca to the father of the girl he wants to marry. A dying person is encouraged to chew some leaves to ensure passage to a better world. Coca is the most important refreshment at wakes, and offerings of coca leaves often are placed in coffins with the dead before burial.

In day-to-day life, chewing coca leaves is important for breaking the ice in business or social encounters, for relieving hunger or tedium, and for reinforcing physical endurance.

“To work the farm, you chew coca,” said Quispe. “You cannot work without coca. Without coca, work is only sad. If you chew, the heart is nourished.”

There is archeological evidence that coca was cultivated by Andean Indians as early as 2000 BC, long before the great Inca dynasty, which dates from about AD 1000. It is believed that the dynasty’s early monarchs, or Incas, developed a monopoly on coca, largely restricting its use to royalty, priests, medicine men and message runners, who could travel up to 150 miles a day by chewing coca leaves.

Incas’ Loyalty Inducement

Coca also was used in religious sacrifices, initiation rites, as a medicine and an aphrodisiac. As a trading commodity, it was more valuable than gold. In building their empire, the Incas are said to have supplied coca to conquered chieftains as an inducement to loyalty.

Some scholars contend that the Inca monopoly on coca was relaxed and use of the leaves popularized in the 1400s. Even beyond the Inca empire, which stretched from today’s central Chile to northern Ecuador, early European explorers found coca in widespread use.

Describing Caribbean islanders he found in his 1499 voyage, Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci wrote to a friend: “In looks and behavior, they were very repulsive and each had his cheeks bulging with a certain green herb which they chewed like cattle.” Not long after the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro entered the Inca capital of Cuzco in 1533, some of his men were secretly chewing coca themselves.

While the Roman Catholic Church campaigned against coca use, calling it a “delusion of the devil,” Spanish colonizers established a new monopoly on coca, handing it out to Indians conscripted for labor in mines and haciendas.

‘Tool of Repression’

“The Spanish used it, you would have to say, as a tool of repression to ensure a more docile labor force,” said an American anthropologist in La Paz.

Coca received little notice in Europe until the mid-1800s. Angelo Mariani, a Corsican chemist in Paris, began marketing a wine steeped in coca leaves during the early 1860s. Vin Mariani was endorsed by popes and presidents, and its popularity spread through the United States in the 1880s. American soft-drink makers soon were producing coca-laced beverages such as Doctor Don’s Kola, Inca Kola and Coca-Cola.

Meanwhile, others were experimenting with cocaine, the alkaloid first extracted from coca leaves in 1860. In the 1880s, Dr. Sigmund Freud in Vienna found the drug to be “a magical substance” of many powers. But around the turn of the century, cocaine abuse and addiction became widespread, and public concern grew.

During the early 1900s, new U.S. state and federal laws put increasingly strict controls on both cocaine and coca leaves. Many scientists who have studied coca leaves and their use contend that it was a mistake to also classify the leaves as a dangerous drug.

Form Quid in Cheek

Andean users generally form a moist, compact quid of leaves in the space between their gums and their cheek, carefully adding a bit of alkaline substance such as ash or lime. As they gently masticate, much as a tobacco chewer does, saliva and alkali mix with the essences of the leaves. But unlike tobacco chewers, coca chewers swallow the juice. According to studies in the 1960s and 1970s, the alkali and saliva, then digestive juices, break the cocaine down into another alkaloid, ecgonine, which is many times less toxic than cocaine. Only trace amounts of cocaine ever reach the bloodstream of chewers, according to the studies.

Coca leaf contains more than a dozen alkaloids in addition to cocaine, and little is known scientifically about their combined action when ingested by chewing leaves. But most scientists who study the custom have concluded that chewing coca is not harmful. The combined effect of chewing coca may produce a sense of well-being and cheerfulness, but no one has documented anything like the common euphoric reaction to cocaine. And no one has proven the leaves to be addictive.

Dr. Peitro Ingrosso, an Italian physician who has been coordinating a community development program in Bolivia for the past year, said the only known negative result of chewing coca leaves is an erosion of tooth calcium after many years of use.

Finds Coca Innocent

“It is very difficult to demonstrate anything against coca,” Ingrosso said in an interview. “The leaf is innocent, completely innocent.”

In addition to chewing coca, Bolivians use the leaves as a poultice for wounds and sores, and brew them in a soothing tea that is said to be good for an upset stomach or altitude sickness. The Coca-Cola Co. still uses coca, without cocaine alkaloids, in its secret beverage formula.

The commerce in coca is regulated by law in Peru and Bolivia, but most of today’s production is diverted into cocaine traffic. While most legal coca continues to come from Andean valleys, called yungas in Bolivia, the bulk of the illicit leaf is grown in tropical lowlands.

The pointed, thumb-sized leaves are harvested three or four times a year, and a bush will produce for several decades. There are dozens of varieties of the coca plant, adaptable to a wide range of climates. A variety called epadu has long been cultivated by Indians in Brazil’s Amazon jungle, and in recent years, police have found increasing amounts being grown for cocaine. Coca growing for cocaine has become even more widespread in Colombia’s lowlands.

U.S. Lobbied for Law

The United States lobbied long and hard for a Bolivian drug law that was passed by the Congress in July. It includes a strict new legal framework for prosecuting drug trafficking, and it imposes broad controls on the production and marketing of coca leaf.

The law prohibits coca cultivation in all regions except specified Andean valley areas where it has been grown traditionally and “transitional” areas where it is to be eradicated over the next few years. The main transitional area is the Chapare River lowlands, northeast of Cochabamba in the center of the country.

The U.S. Embassy in La Paz estimates that Bolivia has a total of about 100,000 acres in coca production, and about 70,000 of that is in the Chapare. The new law says that virtually all Chapare coca must be eradicated, leaving no more than about 30,000 acres of legal production.

The eradication is to take place gradually as rural development programs, with substitute crops and aid to farmers, are implemented. The 1989 goal is to reduce coca farming by 12,000 acres.

U.S. to Provide Aid

To finance the reduction program, Bolivia is seeking $383 million in foreign funds for the next three years. The U.S. Agency for International Development says it will contribute about $125 million.

Farmers cooperatives and unions affiliated with the Bolivian Workers Confederation, the country’s main labor organization, say the new law is unconstitutional because it limits the freedom of coca growers. They also contend that the law is aimed at eliminating the traditional use of coca.

“They want to make us forget coca, and in making us forget that, they want us to forget our culture,” said Juan de la Cruz Villca, an Indian who heads Bolivia’s main federation of campesinos, or peasant farmers.

Speaking in an interview, Villca added: “The campesinos are aware that the law is bad. It is impossible to enforce. They can only enforce that law by killing the people. The campesinos will not pull out a single plant.”

Farmers Protested

In an indication of the issue’s volatility, thousands of farmers in the Chapare marched on a government office there June 27 to protest the use of herbicides against coca plants. The new law bans herbicides, but word had gotten around that a Bolivian government agency was experimenting with them.

When the protesting farmers found no one at the agency’s Chapare office in the village of Villa Tunari, they gathered at the compound of Bolivian anti-narcotics police next door. Police opened fire when some of the demonstrators tried to get through the compound fence, and later there was more shooting as police chased demonstrators into the village. According to a Catholic Church report, 11 or 12 persons died, at least two by gunfire and the others by drowning as they tried to escape police by swimming the Chapare River.

Filemon Escobar, a leftist leader of the Bolivian Workers Confederation, said the labor movement can accept the reduction of coca farming only if the United States agrees to provide aid worth $1.5 billion a year in return.

“The campesinos say the enemy of the coca plant is Mr. Reagan,” Escobar said, warning that U.S. efforts to eradicate coca could lead to violent upheaval in Bolivia.

“The confrontation in this country is the confrontation between the Andean culture, with the coca leaf as its flag, against the government of the United States,” he declared. “If the Yankees don’t stop bothering us with the eradication of coca, we are going to resist them militarily.”

A U.S. Embassy official denied that the American anti-cocaine drive is aimed at also eliminating traditional uses of coca.

“We are not trying to destroy 2,500 years of Andean culture,” the official said.