DOES COKE MAKE IT REAL?
Peru's Drug Czar claims Coca-Cola buys
tons of coca leaf every year, while the nation's cocaleros gain ground in their
ongoing battle to grow their sacred crop.
Story & photos by Peter Gorman
After more than two decades of steady opposition to US-backed coca eradication
in Peru, the traditional coca growers in the Peruvian highlands (known as
cocaleros) may finally see their efforts rewarded with an opportunity to
industrialize their sacred leaf for nondrug purposes—the central goal of a
struggle that has transformed these impoverished native farmers into a potent
political force. Along the way, the cocaleros report that
coca-eradication projects attempting to destroy their one sustainable crop
condemn them to poverty, while crop-substitution programs—generally pineapples,
coffee or bananas—have mostly failed because the mountainous soil is not right
for those crops, or because the infrastructure doesn’t exist to get them to
market in a timely fashion, or because there simply was no demand. A matter of
life and death for the indigenous farmers involved, the conflict has often
turned violent. As recently as June, at least 20 policemen and cocaleros
died in a bloody confrontation over coca eradication in southern Peru.
Over the years, the dead have numbered in the thousands.
And while an official government okay to manufacture industrial products made
from the coca leaf remains just out of reach, a recent written comment by the
Peruvian drug czar has led three of the country’s coca-cultivating regions to
legalize such production, while also apparently answering once and for all the
oft-asked question of whether or not Coca-Cola uses coca leaves to make its soft
drinks. In January 2005, Nils Ericsson, president of the National Commission for
Life and Development Without Drugs (DEVIDA), issued a 10-point statement
intended to clarify the country’s position on the commercialization and
industrialization of the coca leaf—a contentious issue in a country where more
than a million farmers make their living off the plant. In point No. 5, Ericsson
wrote: “Coca-Cola, the globally recognized soft drink manufacturer, buys 115
tonnes of coca leaf from Peru and 105 tonnes from Bolivia per year, with which
it produces, without alkaloids, 500 million bottles of soda per day.”
The comment—first picked up outside Peru by the Narco News Bulletin — has
been roundly ignored by the American press, even after it prompted a string of
significant victories for the cocaleros. Shortly after the tragic event
in June, and in direct response to it, the governor of the state of Cuzco
(Peru’s leading tourist destination, with both the city of Cuzco and the fabled
lost Incan city of Machu Picchu within its boundaries) lifted the ban on new
coca planting in the state, hinting that if the leaves were good enough for
Coca-Cola, they should be good enough for other uses as well. The action
immediately brought threats of federal intervention from the Peruvian capital of
Lima, but the governor, not to be bluffed, responded that he would simply call
for Cuzco’s independence from Peru if the intervention materialized.