We have to stop him.

A Trade Agreement Everyone Likes

Nearly two decades ago, under President Bush’s father, the U.S. began the Andean Trade Preference Act (ATPDEA). That program offers Bolivia and a handful of other Latin American nations reduced U.S. tarriffs, allowing them to develop new industries and jobs exporting products such as textiles and handmade furniture. For the U.S., the aim is to create opportunities for employment as an to alternative to growing coca for the illegal drug market.

In September, as part of the Bush administration’s diplomatic battles with Bolivian President Evo Morales, President Bush announced that he will use his executive authority to axe Bolivia out of those trade preferences.

The actual victims of President Bush’s move, however, won’t be President Morales, but women and men who eke out modest livings as weavers, jewelry-makers and carpenters, creating products for U.S. markets. The U.S. Congress knows that, and just two weeks ago approved a six-month extension for Bolivia. But yesterday in Washington President Bush repeated his intent to sidestep Congress and use his powers to cut Bolivian workers out of the program.

Listen to the Voices of the People who Will be Affected by Bush’s Plan

We profiled some of these workers for our new book, Dignity and Defiance, and after President Bush’s announcement last month we traveled out across Bolivia to ask them how his threat would affect their lives. Today we have posted a five-minute video of their own words on our website. We hope that you will take a moment to listen to what they have to say, here.

We also demanded and won the right to have their video testimony from Bolivia played next week in Washington when the Bush administation holds the public hearing required by law before he implements his plan. Administration officials told us that this will be the first time that video testimony like this has been played in such a proceeding.

On October 23 in Washington, those officials will hear directly from people like Joaquín Aquino, a carpenter in his 50s who hand-makes furniture for the U.S. market and Natalia Alanoca Condori, a 28-year-old mother who makes clothing sold in American stores. These are the people, along with thousands others like them, who will be the real victims of President Bush’s actions against Bolivia.

What You Can Do to Help

We have an opportunity and an obligation to these workers to take action and help stop President Bush’s plan. Here are three simple ways that you can help:

1. Share this request for action with others

All across the United States there are people and organizations that care about making U.S. policy in Latin America more just. Help us spread the word about the need to act on this now, by forwarding this email to others.

2. Sign the Democracy Center’s online petition

You can directly add your voice to the campaign to stop President Bush’s threat against Bolivian workers. In less than sixty seconds right now you can add your name to an online petition that the Democracy Center will be submitting as part of the formal public record against Bush’s anti-Bolivia policy. Sign that petition here. If your organization wants to join the petition please send us an email telling us so at: gro.rtcycarcomednull@aiviloB.

We need your petition endorsements no later than midnight October 30.

3. Submit Formal Comments to the Bush Administration

If you or your organization want to do more, federal law guarantees the right to submit formal comments to the Bush administration’s Trade Representative. To do that you must submit your comments by e-mail no later than 5pm on October 31. Those comments must be sent in the form of an attachment and must include the subject line, “Review of Bolivia’s Designation as a Beneficiary Country Under the ATPA and ATPDEA.” The address is: vog.poe.rtsunull@2180RF. You must also include in the attachment a cover letter with your name, address, telephone number and e-mail address.

Even if we can’t make President Bush back down on his plan to put Bolivians out of work, taking action now helps build the case for Congress and the new President to reverse it. Those leaders need to see that people in the U.S. care about this issue.

Raising Up Voices from Latin America

President Bush’s move against the Bolivian people is just one more example of how we, as citizens, need to not only change leaders but also change the political winds that drive U.S. policy toward Latin America. To help do that the Democracy Center is launching a new campaign – Voices from Latin America.

Voices from Latin America marries new technology and old-fashioned organizing to build a bridge between citizens in the U.S. and Latin America. It is a platform from which we can work together to help educate one another and take joint action, like the one we are starting today on Bush’s assault on Bolivian workers. On the website you will find:

• Briefing papers (in English and Spanish) on some of the main issues in U.S./Latin America relations, on topics such as trade, the ‘U.S. war on drugs’, and immigration.
• Video testimonies from across the region in which people tell how U.S. policy affects their lives and their nations.
• How to get involved, and real examples from people who have.

As citizens we have to be educated and involved in U.S foreign policy in ways that we never have before. That includes making sure that the people in other countries who are so affected by what the U.S. does have their voices heard in the U.S. Help us do that by visiting the Voices from Latin America web site.

The target of the International Narcotics Control Board is the tea made with coca leaves. Known here as “mate de coca” the tea can be made directly from the leaves or from commercially produced little tea bags (a la Lipton). It is served, among other places, in the U.S. Embassy in La Paz and to all arriving guests at the five-star Radisson Hotel. In fact, the U.S. State Department formally recommends the tea to visitors from the U.S. to help with the effects of high altitude.

So, why does the UN think that people who drink the tea should be prosecuted? Because it is the product of a small green leaf, coca, which through heavy chemical alteration can be morphed into cocaine. This is the story of how bureaucratic blindness results in stupid public policy.

The “Coca” in Coca-Cola

Coca has been a part of Andean culture for more than 4,000 years. It was used by Incan religious leaders as a sacrament. The small green leaf acts as a mild stimulant, and eases the effects of living and working at high altitude. It also diminishes the appetite, making the chewing of the leaves popular with miners, construction workers, farmers and others who toil long hours.

To those (including, evidently, a good number of global policy makers) who think that drinking coca tea or chewing coca leaves will offer up something akin to an excursion on LSD or magic mushrooms, think again. It’s “kick” is almost unnoticeable, nothing in comparison to a “Grande” (Spanish for “big”, Starbucks for “small”, go figure) cappuccino. In this regard, as both a drinker of coca tea and an addict to afternoon caffeine, I speak with authority.

In 1860, a German chemist figured out that the coca leaf also contained a very small trace of an alkaloid that could be leached out of the plant with chemicals such as kerosene and bleach, and concentrated into a white powder, cocaine. Soon after the powder became considered a medical marvel, embraced by everyone from the Pope to Sigmund Freud to President Ulysses Grant. Coca-Cola followed, in the 1880s, as an elixir of cocaine and caffeine.

By the early 1900s policy makers in the U.S. decided that maybe mass use of cocaine wasn’t such a good idea, and approved a law banning it. Coca-Cola followed suit in 1929, keeping the coca leaf in for flavor, but taking out the cocaine.

But in the effort to sweep cocaine under the carpet, global policy makers went overboard and tossed the unaltered coca leaf in with it. In 1961, the UN developed a formal list of “narcotics” banned from international export, such as heroin and cocaine. Based on a 1950 report, long on old school racism and short on actual science, the UN added the coca leaf to the list as well.

That is roughly akin to banning corn because it might be used to make moonshine. Nevertheless, a study penned in the day when modernity was still defined by the weight of chrome car bumpers is the basis for global drug policy in 2008. Alcohol and nicotine, both far more damaging than coca tea, to be sure, are not on the list.

The “ban coca tea” recommendation from the UN last week is not, by the panel’s own admittance, based on any science or finding that drinking coca tea or chewing coca leaves is harmful. In fact, studies by the World Health Organization have found that the use of coca leaves is neither harmful or addictive. Nope, the UN panel’s action was an act of simple bureaucratic consistency. If the coca leaf is on the international narcotics list, the panel argued, then governments ought to prosecute any use of it in any form. Dumb follows stupid.

Coca in Bolivia

Don Pio was a friend of mine, a small and aging house builder who I never saw without his felt hat on his head and a wad of green coca leaves in his mouth. Boasting coca’s ability to suppress his appetite, Don Pio once told me, “Ayyy, if it weren’t for coca I’d be running to the refrigerator every half an hour and I’d never get any work done. And I’d be fat too.”

When he died of old age two years ago I looked into the grave where he had just been lowered and realized that no one had remembered to toss in a bag of green coca leaves to accompany him on his trip to the next world. We held up the filling of the grave until someone among the bereaved could come up with coca to toss in after him.

You will not find a construction site in Cochabamba where the workers do not have a wad of green leaves in their mouths. You will be hard pressed to find a farmer working in his or her field without chewing those same leaves. Coca is, in these parts of Bolivian culture, exactly what a morning cup of coffee is in the U.S., though again, with a far less narcotic kick than well-prepared caffeine.

To be sure, not all of the coca grown in Bolivia is benignly brewed into herbal tea or stashed between the cheek and gum. In the 1980s, a good deal of Bolivian coca was destined for the cocaine market, making the country a key target in the U.S. War on Drugs. Through a combination of forced eradication (including a massive trampling on Bolivian civil rights) and the move of the cocaine industry to Colombia, Bolivia’s participation in the cocaine trade was reduced to a trickle. But the war on the coca leaf continued.

So Much for Alternatives

Today, with a former coca grower, Evo Morales, in the Presidency, it is unclear how much of the green leaf grown here ends up headed for processing into narcotics, but it may still be as much as half. Morales has mandated a new approach, “coca si, cocaina no” based on two basic ideas. First, commit coca growing communities to voluntary limits on how much they grow, instead of sending in troops and U.S. advisors to burn their crops. Second, build up markets for non-narcotic coca products, from tea to toothpaste, to give the subsistence farmers who grow coca a chance to make a living in an honest way.

And that is where a UN list set in stone 47 years ago puts up a ridiculous and damaging roadblock. As long as the coca leaf, separate from cocaine, remains on the list, Bolivia can’t export coca tea to any of its potentially lucrative foreign buyers — from health food stores in California to mass markets in China. Selling Bolivian coca to foreign markets would help an economy that badly needs a boost and would create a far happier end use of those leaves than having them turned into crack a hemisphere away.

But again, bureaucratic silliness, allied by a lack of general public understanding, stands in the way. Coca is to cocaine what grapes are to wine. So, now if they come for me you’ll know why. Bottoms up.

Note: This article borrows from the chapter, “Coca: The Leaf at the Center of the War on Drugs,” of the forthcoming book Dignity and Defiance: Stories from Bolivia’s Challenge to Globalization (University of California Press), written by Caroline Conzelman, Coletta Youngers, Linda Farthing, Caitlin Esch, Leny Olivera, and myself. For more information on coca visit the web site of the Coca Museum in La Paz, Bolivia.