Disclaimer: This article has not been translated by a professional translator, therefore the quality may differ from the Spanish original version found here.
It was not by accident that it should have been the Mexican government which rescued Evo Morales after his intemperate renunciation of the presidency of the Plurinational State of Bolivia in November 2019, since the PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional, Institutional Revolutionary Party) of Mexico was during 60 years what the MAS (Movimiento al Socialismo, Movement towards Socialism) aspired – and still aspires – to be: the one party in the state, of which all social organizations form part. A model closer to home is the MNR (Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario, Nationalist Revolutionary Movement) in its first governments after 1952, although both indianists and leftists are accustomed to despise that period.
In its first period in office (2006-2009) and during most of its second (2010-2014), it was not necessary to juggle in order to procure that the leadership of social organizations lined up behind the MAS, and people willingly came out for mass meetings, openings of new public works and other events where Evo was present (at least until we got bored with seeing him so many times and all over the place). It was in the course of his third administration, from 2015 onwards, when his reelection was proposed on the basis of the dubious technicality that, although the new Constitution reformed by the MAS in 2009 only allows two consecutive presidential periods, that is only one consecutive reelection, his first period was under the Republic of Bolivia, supposedly a different country whose rules were irrelevant.1 At that time, and even in the referendum of the 21st of February 2016, when the proposal to allow indefinite re-election of the President and Vicepresident lost by a narrow margin, the yungueños continued to support the MAS. The schism began with the conflicts around the Law 906, the Coca Law, which was eventually promulgated on the 8th of March 2017.
In fact, since 2002 successive governments debated the division of the Law 1008, Law on Coca and Controlled Substances (1988), into two parts, separating the Coca Regime to give it the status of an independent law, Evo Morales, at the time leader of the Six Federations of the Tropic of Cochabamba (the Chapare) and member of parliament, held meetings with Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada (MNR) before the latter was forced to resign in 2003. In 2004 Carlos Mesa, in a typical expression of the erratic and improvised policies of his interim presidency, approved the long time demand of the Chapare coca growers for the legalization of a cato (40 by 40 metres) of coca per member of the peasants’ unions, up to a maximum of 3000 Ha. This limit was to have been revised after a year from the emission of the decree, but was not reconsidered until, early in 2017, the law finally entered into debate in the Plurinational Assembly (the new name for the parliament), after years during which it was more useful as a political football with which to distract the coca growers’ organizations into passing time preparing diverse drafts of a law on coca, in which the yungueños also took part presenting their own proposal in their region.
The version which resulted for the Yungas was ostentatiously presented to the national assembly by Franclin Gutiérrez, then president of ADEPCOCA (Asociación Departamental de Productores de Coca, Departmental Association of Coca Growers) in December 2016. The yungas’ lawyers who took part in preparing the draft law, and the yungas’ leadership in general, lacked information or contacts concerning general legislative procedures in order to have presented it in that month, since at the end of every year the legislative period closes and any proposal which has not entered into consideration is discarded. It has to be presented anew in the following year if there is will to carry on with it. And in addition, in order to figure in the agenda, a draft law or bill must be presented by a member of one of the two chambers, with the same value if this sponsor is a senator or a member of the lower house. But ADEPCOCA presented its proposal in the form of correspondence. They probably thought that the parliament proceeds in the same was as the agrarian unions, where every meeting always begins with roll call followed by reading the minutes of the previous meeting and correspondence. Thus they would have imagined that their project would have been read before that of the government which could be expected to feature in the body of the agenda (perhaps a sign of a vague idea of the proceeding, because it is certain that the projects to be debated are treated in order of arrival, whether or not they have been presented by the ruling party). But in the Plurinational Assembly, correspondence is not read as part of the agenda. The only draft law which entered into debate was that of the MAS.
Even so, the government, in an attitude which was soon to change, was disposed to negotiate the content of the law with the yungueños. The main bone of contention was the question of how many hectares of coca fields were to be permitted and their geographical location, in addition to the symbolic topic of the denomination of the zones thus identified. The Law 1008 established 12,000 Ha as the limit for legal cultivation of coca, on the basis of the study carried out by William Carter and Mauricio Mamani at the end of the 1970s. The national level study carried out by CONALTID, the national entity in charge of coca and drug trafficking issues, published in 2013, on the demand for coca leaf for legal consumption (basically chewing, plus minor quantities included in ritual offerings, medical uses or ‘industrialized’ for teas, pomades, etc.) had established a total of about 14,000 Ha as sufficient for all this, but the MAS government had declared for some time that legal cultivation should reach 20,000 Ha, 13,000 Ha for the department of La Paz (distributed among the provinces of Nor and Sud Yungas, Inquisivi, Caranavi and Apolo en in the province of Franz Tamayo) and 7,000 Ha for the department of Cochabamba. While the Law 1008 divided the zones of cultivation between ‘traditional’, ‘excess in transition’ and ‘illegal’ (anywhere else in the country outside the specified zones), the Law 906 replaces this with ‘authorized zones’, where cultivation is legal although with certain limits, and the rest of the national territory where coca growing is illegal and fields can be directly eradicated. Within those authorized, there is an ‘original and ancestral’ zone, a zone which is ‘original and ancestral with registration’, and a ‘registered’ zone.
The yungueños objected that the denomination of authorized zones treated them in exactly the same way as the ‘excess’ zones, as they insisted in continuing to refer to the Chapare, which under the Law 1008 figured as ‘excess in transition’, that is, where coca should gradually be eliminated and replaced by products of ‘alternative development’. The justification for this classification is that Yungas coca is generally considered ideal for traditional use, principally chewing, while Chapare coca is considered inferior for this use and in practice is almost entirely used for processing cocaine, which was the reason why it should be replaced by other agricultural products. They argued that no extension should be legalized in Cochabamba, except perhaps a minimal area in the ‘traditional’ Yungas of Vandiola (where in previous centuries coca was grown but which is today isolated and depopulated and whose geographical limits are uncertain). The MAS considered that the Law 906 benefits the traditional, that is the ‘original and ancestral’ zone, in the Yungas, because this is the only area where there is no registration nor limits to cultivation, that is, they can plant as much coca as they like and cultivate it ‘for the rest of their lives’, as the yungueños repeat in their demands, but this means little because these densely populated zones long ago reached the limits of the agrarian frontier and there are no possibilities for expanding cultivation.
The yungueños mobilized on the 17th of February 2017, with the aim of besieging the Plaza Murillo, historic centre of the city of La Paz where the parliament building and the old Presidential Palace are located, a tactic which was successful when applied a few months earlier by the Red Ponchos.2 But this time the government did not give way to the protest and instead expelled them from the streets around the plaza in a late night police assault with the help of the Neptune car.3 They regrouped in the Coca Market in Villa Fatima and from there went out to march in the city, being repressed by the police with intense tear gas attacks and many arrests. People said that for decades they had not been repressed with such force and decision, although this was not yet perceived as a signal of a fundamental change of direction on the part of the government. With threats such as sending all the arrested to prison and eliminating ADEPCOCA from the law, the government got the coca growers to accept an increase in extensions to 14,300 Ha for La Paz – and to 7,700 Ha for the Chapare, who thus obtained a benefit without having moved a finger – in exchange for accepting the rest of the law without any modification. The grass roots criticised their leadership for having accepted this agreement and dispersed embittered and deceived.
The Minister for Rural Development and Land, at the time Cesar Cocarico, on whose office depends the Viceministry of Coca and Alternative Development, understood to the ‘power share’ exclusively assigned to Yungas in the administration, initiated a ‘socialization’ of the new law in the Yungas, although belatedly since ‘socializing’ a legislative topic usually refers to presenting a draft proposal and receiving opinions or comments which may then be included in the final version of the law, not a propaganda tour to briefly mention the benefits of the law before going on to a session on the grand achievements of the present administration, which is what he or the team from the Viceministry effectively did. Some parts of the Yungas simply refused to attend these mass meetings; others mounted road blocks to prevent their arrival, and in Arapata clashed with those in favour of the visit to the point that Cocarico had to be rescued by helicopter.
In parallel, the government went ahead with its strategy of absorbing social organizations converting them into branches of the party: in so far as the organizations began to distance themselves, if not assuming a direct opposition, it sought among the factions which always exist those which were disposed to break with the existing leadership and set up a parallel organization with the same name, which would then be recognized by the government and use to channel public works, investments and the access to salaried posts in public administration and/or candidatures (for the MAS) in local and national elections, where these candidates continue to the those with the best chances of winning, even in regions where the public in general no longer sympathizes with the MAS.
The first target, in 2015, was CONAMAQ,4 when a group of MAS supporters, alleging that the actual leadership had completed the period that corresponded to them but refused to permit a new election, managed to overtake the national offices of the organization in La Paz. After that, division progressed in the federations of urban residents, such as FEJUVE- El Alto and FEJUVE- La Paz, and in the CSUTCB,5 this last less surprising since it had already been through periods with two national executives, due to regional and personal rivalries. The way was prepared forgetting the political independence of these organizations. Up to the first decade of 2000, a requirement for postulating for superior leadership posts was to not be a member of any political party, this slid over to ‘not being a member of any traditional/ neoliberal political party’, that is, it was allowed to be a sympathizer or even a card carrying member of the MAS.
In the case of ADEPCOCA, the attack began forming, not a parallel organization, but a new organization among its affiliates, CONALPRODC (Confederación Nacional de Productores al Detalle con Carpeta, National Confederation of Retail Producers with File). I am not aware of other studies ‘from the inside’ of organizations where the MAS fomented divisions – I occupied a leadership post in my Agrarian Centre during the two years when the conflict was at its height – which, apart from external interference combined with personal interests of leaders in search of rewards, allow one to identify the structural fractures (between classes, regions or others) which provide the foundations. The ‘carpeteros’ or ‘file holders’, that is, those coca growers who have obtained the retail permit known as ‘carpeta al detalle’ (retail file), to retail coca to the consuming public in a certain site in the interior of the country, represent the climax and fracture of a long term structural class project, where peasant coca growers have taken over, firstly (with the Agrarian Reform of 1953) the totality of coca production (displacing the landlord class), then with the ADEPCOCA Market controlling the middleman positions wholesaling coca between the production zones and the city, and then, with these files, entering in coca distribution in the rest of the country. While bulking coca in the Yungas during the week, taking it to the city of La Paz on Sunday, selling it to wholesalers from the rest of the country on Monday and returning to the country on Tuesday or Wednesday is compatible with maintaining coca production, retailing in another department no longer permits one to continue simultaneously with working the coca field. Furthermore, these files were mainly taken up by return migrants from the cities and other departments, who were approved for them because their families were coca growers, members of their local peasant syndicate and associates of ADEPCOCA, although their children who applied for the file no longer were. This was the group which the MAS used as a wedge to impulse the division of ADEPCOCA, at the head of a small group with political ambitions which, first of all, named themselves as an Electoral Committee and then launched an election where they appeared as its new leaders.
The motives cited for forming CONALPRODC, in which the majority of grass roots members appeared in the lists without having participated when their local representatives handed over their names to this small group, were that ADEPCOCA limited its actions to the department of La Paz and did not help them when they were the object of confiscation of coca or other problems in the other 8 departments of Bolivia, and that in their communities, the file holders were obliged to go to all the assemblies, marches and other events because their file was ‘thanks to the community’. There were no reports on how CONALPRODC might have assisted those with difficulties in the interior, but barely 6 months after its formation in June 2017, it began its attack denouncing the charges without rendition of accounts levied for taking coca out of the ADEPCOCA Market, and each time ADEPCOCA called an assembly of its associates. CONALPRODC immediately convoked a meeting on the same day but in a different place with the sanction of a fine for those who did not attend and handing out a ticket to those who did turn up. This was easy to impose because they had an agreement with DIGCOIN, the government office which stamps the permits for wholesale transport of coca, to refuse to emit these if the applicant did not present the CONALPRODC ticket.
In March 2018, a disputative assembly of ADEPCOCA in Coripata ratified Franclin Gutiérrez and his directory for another period of two years, but as soon as he left the site, the podium was taken over by an Ad Hoc Committee which was sworn in by an improvised group of the executives of the provincial peasant federations, at that time still lined up with the MAS. Two days later this Committee went to the Coca Market. According to them, they only wanted to ask Franclin to provide them with an office where they could carry out an audit of how the institution was managing the money it charged for using the Market, which was what they questioned, and he, in a cowardly fashion, escaped leaving them in possession of the Market. For others, this action was an intentional planned takeover by force. They remained in possession of the Market for a week, until the producers entered the city in a massive march which ended in clashes which left the interveners effectively besieged in the Market for another week, when they had to give in and return the building to Franclin, his directory and the majority of coca growers who supported them. Nevertheless, the divisions multiplied in Yungas. The executives who had supported the intervention were expelled from their posts, but some refused to accept this. In other cases a nominal federation in favour of the government was formed by a minority of grass roots members and communities. All the mayors in the provinces were part of the MAS, and they supported these parallel organizations with public works or projects, even at the base level of local communities as long as they did not participate in actions of protest, while those who continued to support ADEPCOCA could not even get the municipal tractors to come and work on their roads.