RAG RADIO / Thorne Dreyer : November Guests Include Spiritual Counselor, Citizens' Advocate, Singer-Songwriter

Rev. Bob Breihan, Methodist minister and longtime social activist, on Rag Radio, November 29, 2013. Photo by Roger Baker / The Rag Blog.

Rag Radio podcasts:
Thorne Dreyer interviews Rev. Bob Breihan,
Sam Daley-Harris, Doyle Niemann & Mariann
Wizard, Susan D. Carle, and Slaid Cleaves

Our November guests were a Methodist minister and longtime social activist, a noted citizens' advocate, two staffers from the original Rag, the author of a book about the 'movement that started the civil rights movement,' and an acclaimed singer-songwriter.

By Rag Radio / The Rag Blog / December 20, 2013

Thorne Dreyer's guests on Rag Radio in November 2013 included Methodist minister and longtime social activist, Rev. Bob Briehan; citizens' activist and author Sam Daley Harris; progressive Maryland legislator Doyle Neiman with poet-activist Mariann G. Wizard, both staffers of the original Rag in the '60s; Susan D. Carle, author of a groundbreaking study of nineteenth century social and legal activism; and noted Austin-based singer-songwriter Slaid Cleaves.

Rag Radio is a weekly syndicated radio program produced and hosted by long-time alternative journalist Dreyer and recorded at the studios of KOOP 91.7-FM, a cooperatively-run all-volunteer community radio station in Austin, Texas.


Rev. Bob Breihan

Listen to or download the podcast of our November 29 Rag Radio interview with longtime social activist and spiritual counselor Bob Breihan here:


Rev. Bob Breihan, a United Methodist minister, was state director of the Texas Methodist Student Movement in the 1950s and directed the Methodist Student Center at the University of Texas at Austin from 1960 to 1980. In 1986 he founded the New Life Institute, a non-profit training organization that provides emotional and spiritual counseling to those in need, regardless of ability to pay. Rev. Breihan is now retired and living in Austin.

Bob Breihan was an active participant in the civil rights and desegregation movement in Austin from the early 1950s, and was a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War. The Methodist Student Center under his tenure was a haven for student radicals and other wayward souls. It was home to the Ichthus Coffee House, where Pete Seeger and Janis Joplin performed, and to Sattva, Austin’s pioneering vegetarian restaurant and commune. Rev. Breihan assisted the Vets for Peace and counseled conscientious objectors during the Vietnam War and, later, young women seeking abortions.


Sam Daley-Harris

Listen to or download the podcast of our November 22 Rag Radio interview with citizens' advocate Sam Daley-Harris, author of Reclaiming Our Democracy here:


Activist and citizens' advocate Sam Daley-Harris, a former music teacher and classical percussionist, "has helped thousands of ordinary citizens transform from hopeless bystanders to powerful advocates." He is the author of Reclaiming our Democracy: Healing the Break Between People and Government, which recently was published in its updated 20th anniversary edition.

In 1980, Sam Daley-Harris founded RESULTS, a grassroots lobbying group that, according to The New York Times, "has had major success building support in Congress for initiatives aimed at basic needs for the poor." In 1995 Daley-Harris and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Muhammed Yanus founded the Microcredit Summit Campaign that provided microloans to more than 100 million of the world's poorest families.

He also mentored the founder of Citizens Climate Lobby prior to its launch in 2007, and in 2012 started the Center for Citizen Empowerment and Transformation, a group that works with the leadership of organizations to empower their members and train them to work for social causes like "ending poverty, cleaning up the environment, building local economies, and bringing peace to the world."

From left, Rag Radio's Tracey Schulz, guest Mariann Wizard, host Thorne Dreyer, and guest Doyle Niemann, at the studios of Austin's KOOP-FM, November 15, 2013. Photo by Alan Pogue / The Rag Blog.

Doyle Niemann and Mariann Wizard

Listen to or download the podcast of our November 15 Rag Radio interview with former Ragstaffers Doyle Niemann and Mariann Wizard here:


Doyle Niemann is now a progressive leader in the Maryland House of Delegates, and Mariann Garner-Wizard is an Austin-based poet and social activist. Niemann and Wizard (then Mariann Vizard) both worked with The Rag, Austin’s now legendary underground newspaper, published from 1966-1977.

Doyle Niemann was an anti-war activist at the University of Nebraska and the University of Texas where he worked with the Young Democrats and the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). He later was on the staff of underground newspapers Space City! in Houston and The Great Speckled Bird in Atlanta, and was founding managing editor of the national progressive newspaper, In These Times. In 2002 Niemann was first elected to the Maryland House of Delegates where he is a legislative leader on environmental and housing issues.

Mariann Wizard has been a progressive activist since the ‘60s and an advocate for drug law reform. She is a widely-published poet, a professional science writer specializing in natural health therapies, and a regular contributor to The Rag Blog. Her recent books include Did You Hear Me the First Time? and End Games, a book of poetry and drawings, and Hempseed Food: The REAL Secret Ingredient for Health & Happiness.


Susan D. Carle

Listen to or download the podcast of our November 8 Rag Radio interview with author Susan D. Carle here:


Susan D. Carle is the author of Defining the Struggle: National Organizing for Racial Justice, 1880-1915, a groundbreaking study of nineteenth century social and legal activism published by Oxford University Press. According to NAACP president Benjamin Todd Jealous, “Susan Carle writes a clear and convincing history of the first generation of civil rights organizers and advocates -- the movement that started the Movement.”

Carle is a professor at American University Washington College of Law where she teaches legal ethics, anti-discrimination law, labor and employment law, and torts. She writes primarily about the history of social change lawyering, legal ethics, and the history and sociology of U.S. lawyers. Carle has been a community organizer, a civil rights lawyer, and a union-side labor lawyer. She graduated from Yale Law School in 1988 and received the 2001 American Association of Law Schools Best Junior Scholar Award and the 2006 Jean and Edgar Kahn National equal Justice Library Award for her writing on the early history of the NAACP.


Slaid Cleaves

Listen to or download the podcast of our November 1 Rag Radio interview with singer-songwriter Slaid Cleaves here:


Go to our earlier post about the show at The Rag Blog -- for information and photos from our interview with Slaid Cleave, who joined us in interview and lively performance.


Rag Radio is hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor Thorne Dreyer, a pioneer of the Sixties underground press movement. Dreyer was a founding editor of the original Rag, published in Austin from 1966-1977. Tracey Schulz is the show's engineer and co-producer.

Rag Radio has aired since September 2009 on KOOP 91.7-FM, an all-volunteer cooperatively-run community radio station in Austin, Texas. Rag Radio is broadcast live every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CST) on KOOP and is rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (EST) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA. Rag Radio is also aired on KPFT-HD3 90.1 -- Pacifica radio in Houston -- on Wednesdays at 1 p.m. (CST).

The show is streamed live on the web and, after broadcast, all Rag Radio shows are posted as podcasts at the Internet Archive.

Rag Radio is produced in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive Internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation.

Rag Radio can be contacted at ragradio@koop.org.

Coming up on Rag Radio:
THIS FRIDAY, December 20, 2013: Historian, author, and publisher of nonfiction comics, Paul Buhle, editor of Radical Jesus: A Graphic History of Faith.

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BOOKS / Nina Herencia : Are We Hearing You Well, Mariann?

Are we hearing you well, Mariann?
New poetry and drawings from the Wizard

By Nina Herencia / The Rag Blog / November 6, 2013

Mariann Wizard has published two books this month; the second one, Hempseed Food: The REAL Secret Ingredient for Health & Happiness, will be reviewed soon in The Rag Blog. Mariann will launch Hempseed officially on Saturday, November 9, 7-9 p.m., at Austin's Brave New Books, 1904 Guadalupe, and promises to read a bit from Didn't You Hear Me the First Time? as well at that event.

Wizard will also be on Rag Radio, Friday, November 15, from 2-3 p.m., on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin and streamed live. She will be joined on that show by fellow former staffer from the original Rag, Doyle Nieman, now a member of the Maryland State Assembly.

[Didn't You Hear Me the First Time? and End Games. Poetry and drawings by Mariann Garner-Wizard. (2013: Dharma Wizard Books. Paperback; 42 pp; $10. Available at. www.Lulu.com, Amazon.com, and local bookstores.]

AREQUIPA, Peru -- From outside the U.S., more in times of premonition than confirmed crude realities (I'm writing this just after September 11, a date which for North and South America has only sobering connotations!), it is unlikely to expect a woman’s poetic voice arising from the center of global power.

Surely, this is due more to the muffling of real people’s voices than their absence, or to the lack of channels to share them all the way here. Or perhaps it is our own outsider expectations, accustomed as we are to simulated voices, or those supplanted by artificial mechanical devices, or trained with ulterior motives. Hardly ever do we hear common people’s spontaneous expressions that resonate with ordinary folks.

Poetry seems no match for a system glowing pompously (from the outside) like an efficient machine, reputedly based on science (not necessarily constructive), unforgiving of imperfection, lack of success, frailty... Not being able to measure up, most of the world can only retreat to a safe distance, and perhaps wonder.

And in the face of insecurities, limitations, shortcomings of the common human condition, poetry comes in handy, as much as family, to shield and nourish. That is why voices from the U.S., walking on foot, unveiling their own suffering, longings, and concerns, reaching out to tune in with feelings, to extend the sense of family all over the world, surprise us!

Because poetry’s natural existence is roaming loose in streets and plazas, in abandoned and forgotten corners, perhaps humming pained lullabies, its harvesters, poets, in heroic persistence, bring forth a product that resonates universally with common people. Mariann Garner-Wizard’s poetry represents creation in times of war and peace, bonanza and crisis, excess accumulation and hovering cataclysm. Her life has surfed the waters of her times, keeping a compass of the heart balanced by a good political sense. (Of course I have my own biases, but she has asked me to read her poems, and react to them. What an honor!)

Her poetry first surprised me in my Austin walk while I was there doing graduate work; a poem about education, I remember. Its magical dimension rose to a level recognizable in any language, in any culture. Anyone from Asia, Europe, or Africa, or we in Latin America, would have gotten her meaning immediately!

Fortunate to have met her personally, and through her quite a few of her peer generation and family, I felt in their company in an oasis of solidarity, sensitivity, and world concern. Wizard’s poetry conveys thoughts and feelings about our times, about people and nature that are recognizable and reconcilable with/by most people in the world.

A short roaming through Mariann’s poetry garden, to view and smell the aroma of her flower creations: poems that go from the personal private (welcome that!) to non-private but personal bonds with neighbors and family. Her inspecting gaze fans from past virtues, now fading away, as in a poem to her beloved former mother-in-law, Zula Vizard, to visions of a future already here, as in "Grand Central Station," where all of the human family knows each other and even speaks each other’s languages.

Introspective personal poems touch the passing of time in one’s own life, a feeling of "Deep Water" running, in realization of the end of life's proximity...; and the existential need to start paddling, left or right! (Don’t we all empathize!)

One of my favorite poems visits the past and makes it forever present. "García Lorca’s Grave" makes Mariann, for me, a natural member of the International Brigade of Poets! I could not hold myself back from sharing it with friends during the recent 70th momentous commemoration of García Lorca’s death. In it, she combines rhymes and associations that we all have -- rain in Spain, for whom the bells toll -- and turns the flowery-innocent and literary into committed political speech.

“As long as there are mass graves, you will find the poets in them.” But their voice, she says, “the people’s voice...will not be silenced in the common grave.”

In "Egypt-Land 1 (18 February 2011)" she conveys her sensitivity to international struggles with allusions to her own social history, the breaking of political bondage and desire for liberation now! Recognizing the eternal true voice of the Sphinx, it is all about people, it closes with a subtle haiku image of the movement of history itself: "Ripples spread in sand as in water; dunes shift slowly, then all at once."

From world and historical awareness, she turns to view the internal crisis in the U.S. with a critical yet good-humored tone. In "Like Wheel of Fortune’s Before & After: Fiscal Cliff Dwellers -- a Meditation on Mesa Verde and the Ongoing Crisis," Mariann reflects on the dilemma of the life style of the U..S as symbolized by Wall Street:

Life on the cliff face keeps men on their toes;
there is nothing certain, that's just how it goes.
You know it's called "Wall Street," so what did you think?
There's a top, and a bottom, and always, the brink!

In another poem she offers recommendations on living in times of fear and how to "Be Safe." In another, perceptive of entanglements that tie people to serve and be served in the system, she still reacts with a woman’s pain: “It’s in these times I still miss you!” Here are intimate reflections about the world, complex and often ambiguous, declared at the kitchen table, with or without company.

Her political awareness, never divorced from the intimate and personal, comes out expressly in "Didn't You Hear Us the First Time?," signed meaningfully on U.S. Independence Day, July 4, 2013. In it, she reiterates her generation’s pronouncements, a still-relevant and vibrant 70s call echoed in the book's title:

We're getting tired of fighting the same battles
over and over again,
winning, and having victory
snatched from our grasp;
tired, but nobody's quitting;
it's too important and besides
what else would we be doing?
Taking some fantasy cruise
on a Carnival death ship?

(Believe It Or Not: it's cheaper to live on cruise ships than in retirement homes!)

Who the hell listens to all those conversations they're recording,
and who reads all our so-called private mail?
Is that the career of the future?
... they didn't hear us the first time.

It is hard to choose a favorite and hard to not copy them fully for readers to savor, relish, and ruminate upon. "In His Eye Is On the White Tail Deer," she returns again to the seemingly ordinary: homelessness, hunger, and a deer hunt ban. In prosperous Austin, often a youth-glorifying city that in rapid development has lost some of its depth, as in her poem, man and nature are prey of the same captors.

Through her we look into hidden corners, under highway bridges, along city-bounded creeks and in nature’s hideaways, to view the lives of the poor and of animals, each prisoners of irrational cruelty.

The city’s trajectory, combining the natural with the metaphoric, is also seen in other poems. Having lived there, I understand Mariann's agony over Texas' near-record drought and unusually abrasive heat. She transforms that into a parable of climate change harshness, with the connotation that it is literally "man"-caused, opposed to the resistant feminine.

The extreme drought, the exacting heat and lack of surface water, cannot bend the stubbornly fertile (an intellectual fertility, in Mariann's case!) woman who remains underground. Obviously, she does not just talk about nature’s trials but woman’s resonance with nature, and the feminine fortitude residing within the earth’s bosom. Her message: no matter how much longing, yearning, suffering, grieving, languishing, and moping take place in the drought, life will be salvaged.

Another poem also talks about extreme heat in Texas, drought plus huge wildfires in areas bigger than some cooler, non-wild states (i.e., Massachusetts). It likens the fires to deer ticks jumping out of control, or "a coyote looking for lunch in Prairiedog Town," resolving when the state’s contending rigid ideological-religious bands agree, in mea culpa unison with a phrase of local culinary fame (meat), that they must have done something "real bad" for Texas to be this "well done." ("Bien cocido.")

The personal religious, with its conservative dissonances, also emerges coupled with Mariann's political side in "I’m Not Down with Jesus Anymore," as a lapsed Methodist-Jew-Buddhist looks at Jesus and his Father as portrayed by the conservative establishment. In response to this established Jesus Christ who seems to no longer love his brother, she movingly posits the feminine in a simple question: "Can you imagine how that hurts His Mother?"

In "People are Praying," the constructive advocacy of a stubborn activist, a woman at that, insists:

We can only change the future.
We change it by changing ourselves.
We are the change we seek, all of us, all together,
none unvalued, none forgotten, none unseen.

As a teacher of introductory sociology in a community college, I cherish another poem particularly, "Hiatus." This one embraces the new generation rising, rolling massively in the face of no political alternatives (tellingly, this does not just happen in the U.S., but across the world), with love from the generation that cried before: Didn’t you hear us the first time?

Clearly Mariann’s poem speaks for those who welcome this promising new movement, featuring within it values of solidarity and communion with nature. The stage is ready for them, lit by the clear yearning, seemingly most specifically of mothers, blessing the new actors. Swept and clean, the stage awaits their gifts!

Lightly as snowflakes, deeper than earthquakes,
firmly they step to the fore;
unafraid of each other, knowing Earth as their mother,
occupying tomorrow's far shore.

Another poem I shared with a friend whose backyard faces a greenbelt reserve in Austin, amazed that the poet could decipher so well our enthralled witnessing of co-travelers in life some late afternoons. "The Deer Sleep Here":

What ancient instinct leads them here,
relict, remnant, ruminant mass?
Water whispering underground,
"This too shall pass. This too shall pass."

Her closing poem, "After Armageddon," signals for me a hopeful new beginning. It is an impatient but not unkind push of the fundamentalist Christians populating the Texas cultural landscape to complete their transition upwards, after the prophesied destruction that they seem to so anticipate. Prediction or prophecy of another monumental cycle presided over by Mother Earth, the cataclysm signals getting back to basics, once more:

Tribes will meet again by the rivers,
at solstice or equinox,
to trade, to laugh, to court, to mourn,
to dance the Long Dance.
Herds and flocks and packs of beasts, birds, and butterflies
will move freely again on the land, tracing ancient migrations,
patterning the earth with a web of wonder and
finding no fences…

...another cycle monumental in our eyes,
yet barely touching Mother-Goddess' crust.
After Armageddon,
things can get back to normal around here.

Even if I missed a few of Mariann's subtle meanings, in part due to specific cultural contents that escape me and in part because I would need to live through her experiences myself, I cried in my first reading, amazed and delighted at her play of words, of images, her humor, intelligence, and compassion. She is a voice of her generation in Austin and more; a woman’s voice expressing in poetry the passion for life that is indeed political.

Engaged always in the extraordinary and the transcendental -- her friendships with and support of writers and political activists for years attests it -- she remains faithful to principle in the very center of a system overextending its dominion. That her tribe remains loving, seeing, and speaking is something that we all, in the wider world, want to sense in the United States!

[Cristina Herencia is a Peruvian social psychologist and activist who works in interdisciplinary social sciences, specializing in issues of gender and identity among Andean indigenous peoples and the effect of globalization on native peoples and cultures.]

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REPORT / Mariann G. Wizard : 'La Vida Coca' in Bolivia and Peru / 3

Coroico is the administrative capital of Bolivia's Nor Yungas province. The town hall façade features the coca leaf and coffee bean of local agriculture in addition to the exotic bird of tourism, the area's main economic activities. All photos by Mariann G. Wizard / The Rag Blog, unless otherwise credited.

La Vida Coca /3: 
Currents in traditional coca 
use in Bolivia and Peru

Regular tours of the area include coca 'plantations.' Almost all of the other travelers we met in Coroico and Copacabana were interested in trying and discussing coca.

By Mariann G. Wizard / The Rag Blog / May 22, 2013

Part three of three.

(Rag Blog Contributing Editor Wizard recently visited Peru and Bolivia with former fellow Ragstaffer Richard Lee. Wizard says the whole thing was Lee's idea, although she did the heavy lifting of writing this report of their experiences, while lifting copiously from conversations they shared and short reports Richard wrote on the spot.)

After being in Coroico about a week, we asked a woman we'd met on our first day there if she knew any cocaleros who might be willing to talk with us about the crop. A hard-working, intelligent person who was extremely patient with our often halting Spanish, she laughed, ducked her head, and said, "Soy una cocalera." ("I am a coca grower.")[1]

She isn't a commercial grower. She and her family tend a few plants, along with abundant fruit trees and vegetables. Over coffee and cake, she described carefully sprouting the small red seeds, transplanting them into pots, then into the field. She showed us the growth pattern of the plants and told us that the growth tips are never touched. We heard about cutting plants off near the base, then regrowing them; regeneration can occur several times, giving plants a life span of 20 years or more.

Most of what we learned I've since confirmed online, but there's nothing like hearing it from a passionate gardener! Her cupped hands as she demonstrated transplanting seedlings, her expertise in how to tell by touch when the hojas are dry enough for storage, reminded me of every other master gardener I know: pride, respect, and love make things grow. Richard, green thumb tingling, was also in his element!

Still, we wanted to see large coca fields. A couple we'd met recommended a local taxista who knew the area well, and we took an agricultural tour of greater Coroico. Tramping up and down steep, muddy jungle slopes before breakfast, swarmed by aroused mosquitoes, we weren't so much in our element as over cake and coffee! But we kept on chewing hojas and drinking water, and keeping on, until we saw what we came to see: well-tended, mature cocal, up close and personal.

Like many Bolivian towns, Coroico is surrounded by a network of rural villages (villas). I liked this "bewitching" signpost.

Here, several distinct cocal fields are seen on the hillside. We were told that each plot is owned by an individual or family; adjoining plots may be owned by close relatives or grown children. Photo by Richard Lee / The Rag Blog.

This small, well-tended cocal field near the road was easy for us to access.

Here you can see that the plant in front center has been cut off just above the ground and regenerated to its present height.

Small red seeds (see inset for enlargement) from tiny white flowers. Seeds are planted soon after falling off the parent plant. PVC pipes bring water for irrigation and for workers to drink. At high altitudes under a strong sun, hydration is vital.

Coca isn't the only traditional herbal medicine in common use in Peru and Bolivia. Chamomile (manzanillo; Matricaria recutita syn. Chamomilla recutita) or anise teas, mint (yerba buena; Mentha viridis), lemon verbena (yerba luisa, cedrón; Aloysia citriodora), and West Indian lemongrass (Cymbopogon citratus) were recommended and served to us by gardeners, restaurateurs, and/or friends.

Specific comments regarding manzanillo as a sleep aid, yerba buena to "balance" heavy foods, and yerba luisa as an overall tonic were noted. As in other indigenous cultures, many foods' and condiments' health effects are common knowledge, especially in traditional Quechua- and Áymara-speaking households.

After I had an allergic reaction to Coroico's notorious mosquitoes, bringing up lovely big red welts on my arms, everyone we met told me about one or another traditional repellent. Rubbing whole limes (Citrus limonum) on the skin in the evening was the one most mentioned. To be fair, DEET also worked quite well; if only I'd thought to use it that first rainy day!

Dried spices, hojas de coca, peppers (Capsicum spp.), and other condiments at Coroico's weekly market. Peppers, garlic (Allium sativum), and other spices are used in unique sauces, ajillos, by restaurants and at home; everyone seems to have a recipe for ají.

Both countries boast a wealth of fruits and vegetables -- Bolivia has over 30 varieties of potatoes (papas; Solanum spp.)! -- many not seen in the U.S., or seen infrequently, or in a processed state. While restaurants do not avail themselves much of this produce bounty (many serve French fries and rice at every meal!), a trip to the mercado brings delicious rewards. We recruited friends to cook papas lisas for us and enjoyed a fabulous traditional stew of the tiny potatoes, onion (Allium cepa), and alpaca rib meat – ¡que sabrosa!

Besides cattle, pigs, poultry, and sheep, two domestic camelid species, llamas and alpacas, are raised for meat, fiber, and as beasts of burden. (Wild vicuñas are protected.) Alpaca meat isn't much different from grass-fed beef in flavor. Guinea pigs (cuy) are also a traditional Andean food. Richard ate cuy years ago in Ecuador; I'll pass! However, some dishes I did have were equally odd, like this "chicken foot soup":

Peru, with its extensive coastline -- Bolivia is landlocked -- offers a wide array of fresh seafood. Lake Titicaca, between the two nations, is home to delicious lake trout.

By the way, again from Wikipedia, "Raw coca leaves, chewed or consumed as tea or mate de coca, are rich in nutrition... Specifically, the coca plant contains essential minerals (calcium, potassium, phosphorus), vitamins (B1, B2, C, and E) [, and]... protein and fiber."[2]

Abundant fruits and veggies in Coroico's weekly market. Papas lisas are the small red and yellow potatoes at right center. I also ate papas negras, the purple ones at bottom right and center, cooked whole in oil -- ¡muy rico!

Not all traditional medicine in the region is herbal or food-based. Good luck rituals and tokens abound, like the brightly-colored fetishes below, in La Paz' Mercado de Hechicería (Witches' Market). Arriving during Carnavál, we also saw cars, taxis, and buses decorated and prayed over as a blessing; and good luck icons by the score, such as miniatures of items the buyer hopes to obtain: money, cars, televisions, etc.[3] All of the shops in the Hechicería had coca. Some Andean shamans use hojas to divine the future.

In the Mercado de Hechicería, dried llama fetuses (hanging) of various sizes are sold. These are buried for good luck in new enterprises, especially those involving construction. Well-to-do traditional people are expected to sacrifice a live animal.

While our inquiries had been fruitful, we had questions our local informants couldn't readily answer. For example, other than for rapid drainage, and where the terrain consists of steep slopes, is it necessary to plant at such challenging angles? Also, can cocal be grown at lower altitudes than Coroico's 5000 feet above sea level, and if so, would this affect its strength or efficacy?

Lest you think we must have stood out for our unusual interest in coca, rest assured, we did not. Regular tours of the area include coca "plantations." Almost all of the other travelers we met in Coroico and Copacabana -- people of all ages from Switzerland, Belgium, New Zealand, Chile, Brazil, Germany, France, Australia, and Japan -- were interested in trying and discussing coca. Bolivians from other parts of the country were interested in comparing the local product with coca from their area.

Our "where's Waldo?" moment: a day after our field trip, strolling across Coroico's plaza for perhaps the 50th time that week, we finally recognized the healthy if somewhat untended stand of cocal growing there among the palms and hibiscus (Hibiscus sabdariffa). Since this is about the only flat spot in Nor Yungas, it seemed to settle whether cocal must be grown on a slope! (The question of altitude remains open.)

The public cocal patch in Coroico's main plaza.. Photo by Richard Lee / The Rag Blog.

Andean music on the plaza draws a crowd. Traditional women from the Afro-Bolivian community (seated, right front) are said to be prolific coca users.

The Sanjuanitos wowed us with John Lennon's "Imagine." Richard later wrote, "Lennon could have imagined this..."

It is in the plaza that matters of interest are discussed before and after cocalero meetings at the roofed "polyfunctional" sports court down the hill. Bolivia's future is being shaped by astute agriculturalists who value tradition but want the benefits of modernity. Change, like the new cell phone technology that has reportedly made rural life safer, is weighed and measured before adoption.

In this small plaza and others all over Bolivia and Peru, citizens talk and relax at the end of the day or the week, after school or at lunch time. Taxis come and go; buses disgorge weary travelers. Children and dogs run free and everyone sees that the soccer ball doesn't bowl over any old folks. Young couples promenade hand in hand in the evening, while the ice cream man, and the chicken sandwich lady, and the elders sitting on stone or wooden benches smile in approval. Here, coca is at home.

[Rag Blog Contributing Editor Mariann G. Wizard, a Sixties radical activist and contributor to The Rag, Austin's underground newspaper from the 60s and 70s, is a poet, a professional science writer specializing in natural health therapies, and a regular contributor to The Rag Blog. Read more poetry and articles by Mariann G. Wizard on The Rag Blog.]


Footnotes:
[1]I'm not naming any Bolivian acquaintances, in order to protect their privacy. None of them live electronically.
[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca
[3]The fake lucky dinero, by the way, is from "El Banco de Buena Fortuna," and Richard got taken for 50 Bolivianos (about $7.50 US) by making change in the dark. It's a wonder what a photocopier can do, isn't it?

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REPORT / Mariann G. Wizard : 'La Vida Coca' in Bolivia and Peru / 2

Coca leaves, a standard small bag sold for personal use in Bolivia. From 10-40 hojas are used at once while working, walking, or otherwise exerting oneself at high altitudes. Habitual users enjoy coca three or four times a day. All photos by Mariann G. Wizard / The Rag Blog, unless otherwise credited.

La Vida Coca /2: 
Currents in traditional coca 
use in Bolivia and Peru

The overall effect of chewing leaves, drinking coca tea, or eating coca-containing foods can be described as both energizing and calming. Stress and anxiety are decreased, gastric disturbances eased, and the next hill isn't quite so daunting.

By Mariann G. Wizard / The Rag Blog / May 15, 2013

Part two of three.

[Rag Blog Contributing Editor Mariann Wizard recently visited Peru and Bolivia with former fellow Ragstaffer Richard Lee. Wizard says the whole thing was Lee's idea, although she did the heavy lifting of writing this report of their experiences, while lifting copiously from conversations they shared and short reports Richard wrote on the spot.]

It is estimated that 50% of Bolivia's gross national product is related directly or indirectly to coca. The illegality of much of this crop, and its ineligibility for international trade, has significantly handicapped Bolivia's economy and given it, along with Colombia, something of an "outlaw" reputation.

Rather than succumb as Colombia has at least temporarily done to U.S. demands for crop eradication, Bolivia now charts an independent path to international legitimacy and respect. Commodities production has given Bolivia a positive trade balance since 2004. Natural gas, silver, zinc, and soybeans account for 72% of total exports.

Main imports are machinery and transport equipment, chemicals and related products, and mineral fuels and lubricants. Main trading partners are Brazil (33% of total exports, 18% of imports), Argentina (12% of exports, 13% of imports), and United States (10% of exports and 11% of imports).[1]

A new Bolivian Vice Ministry of Coca and Internal Development was established in February 2009, in a reorganization of the executive branch. It is charged with developing employment opportunities, diversifying the economy, respecting traditional cultural values, and in general furthering Bolivian President Evo Morales' overarching vision of "Living Well."

It is expected to rationalize the processing of coca, maintain a climate of social peace, and mitigate and prevent conflicts under the new national policy of peacefully combating drug trafficking.[2]

One of the possible side effects of this policy is a striking lack of domestic militarization in Bolivia compared with most other Latin American nations we've visited in recent years. It's like the dog that didn't bark in the night, not obvious at first but increasingly pleasant over time.

It's worth noting that women spearhead Morales' administration. Strides in women's liberation are seen everywhere. Ending domestic violence and the rule of "machismo" are serious concerns in Bolivia's social revolution. Billboards and televised public service announcements proclaim, "Don't Kill The One You Love." Civilian gun ownership is banned.

While we were still in Bolivia, the campaign to have traditional coca use removed from the list of narcotics finally succeeded,[3] following a powerful appeal by Morales to UN delegates in Vienna.[4] Among the folks we talked with or saw responding in newscasts, this was met with firm approval. If Evo is leading a revolution, his constituents, at least in the altiplano, are keeping pace every step of the way.

Today, there is an emphasis on developing new products to "soak up" the excess coca that feeds illicit drug production, rumored to be concentrated in Brazil. Across the Amazon River, in one of the most difficult environments on the planet, one can envision secret jungle drug labs. But in the highlands, coca is part of a healthy, active lifestyle: "Living Well."

Coca candies, cookies, "teas" (actually infusions; true tea is Camellia sinensis), energy bars, and more are available or in the works. Coca Colla™, an energy drink made with coca extract, was reportedly launched in April 2010, but we didn't see it anywhere; we would surely have tried it. At least 35 coca product brands are operating.[5] A new publication, Il Jornada Nacional del Acullico, launched in 2012 to "reclaim" traditional coca mastication.[6]

Stevia (Stevia rebaudiana), an herb that produces the sweetest natural substances known to date, calorie-free steviosides, grows in Bolivia and is included in many products, in line with the government's overall health-promotion and economic development programs. It's commonly available in restaurants as an herb.

While coca "tea" is often made with whole leaves, there are also many chopped, bagged products from large and small manufacturers. When made of pure hojas, such teas may still be chewed as well as brewed for a stronger effect.

Coca teas, Larco Museum gift shop, Lima. Note the different flavors, including a coca-green tea combination. Some sources state that the term "maté" was adopted for coca teas to capitalize on the popularity of yerba maté (Ilex paraguariensis), but it is used in northwestern Bolivia for any mixed infusion. Matés commonly include tea, anise (Pimpinella anisum), cloves (Syzygium aromaticum), cinnamon (Cinnamonum verum), or other herbs or spices.

Energizing coca- and maca (Lepidum meyenii)-based candies, left, from airport gift shop, Lima. Coca-and-quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa) cookies, right, from Arcoiris Pasteleria on the plaza in Coroico, Nor Yungas, Bolivia.

Many medicinal and personal care products are made with coca, like these at Coroico's Blue Pine Tienda, as entrepreneurs combine traditional lore and modern marketing to legitimize coca in world markets.

Ingacoca's™ banner lists coca syrups for coughs, asthma, prostate support, rheumatism, acidic urine, liver support, stomach ulcers, gastritis, anemia, weight loss, mental acuity, poor appetite, diabetes, nerves, insomnia, kidneys, intestinal parasites, and high blood pressure; salves for rheumatism, varicose veins, bone support (coca is high in calcium), arthritis, gout, fungi, and hemorrhoids; and shampoo and skin creams.

What scientific support is there for the claimed benefits of coca leaf? Herbal medicine expert Andrew Weil says,

Coca appears to be a useful treatment for various gastrointestinal ailments, motion sickness, and laryngeal fatigue. It can be an adjunct in programs of weight reduction and physical fitness and may be a fast-acting antidepressant. It is of value in treating dependence on stronger stimulants.

Coca regulates carbohydrate metabolism in a unique way and may provide a new therapeutic approach to hypoglycemia and diabetes mellitus. With low-dose, chronic administration it appears to normalize body functions. In leaf form coca does not produce toxicity or dependence. Coca can be administered as a chewing gum or lozenge containing a whole extract of the leaf, including alkaloids, natural flavors, and nutrients.[7]

However, as with cannabis, coca's illegality makes it difficult for research on these benefits, all with at least some evidence, to proceed. A search of the PubMed database for Erythroxylon brought up just 109 reports, many on plant pharmacology. Interestingly, several studies used little-known species, not those most cultivated, but having local traditional uses. Most found a chemical basis for the tradition. Some reports are historical; others are policy, cultural, or environmental studies.

There are epidemiological and clinical studies of coca's effects in altitude sickness. (Results: it works and people use it without ill effects.) A study of effects of hojas on biochemical and physiological parameters found metabolic benefits with prolonged physical activity; that is, more fat is burned by users during exercise.[8]

We started seeing coca tea and/or hojas at the hotel breakfast (desayuno) buffet in Nazca, Peru, and at most hotels and hostels after that. Coca tea was on almost every restaurant menu. We learned later that coca is also readily available in Lima, where we had spent a week in ignorance. After all, at sea level, why would anyone have altitude sickness?

But the energizing qualities of coca can benefit tourists at any altitude: see more, do more, enjoy your trip more. While I was sick in Arequipa (everyone there blamed Nazca's water!), hotel staff, doctor, and "Ricardo" all recommended coca. Poco a poco, it helped.

Desayuno buffet at Hotel Berlina, La Paz, with hojas de coca and coca tea. This hotel also had leaves and tea, and hot water, in the lobby at all times.

So, everybody asks, "What is it like to chew coca?" What many really want to know is, "What is it like compared to cocaine?"

It's different. It's not nearly as strong as blow, no matter how much lejia (see below) you use or how many leaves you cram into your cheeks. Yes, there is an astringent flavor; yes, you can get a numbing effect in mouth and throat; yes, there are alkaloids in the leaves and you can test positive for cocaine if that's a concern.

The overall effect of chewing leaves, drinking coca tea, or eating coca-containing foods can be described as both energizing and calming. Stress and anxiety are decreased, gastric disturbances eased, and the next hill (everything in Bolivia is uphill or downhill from where you are!) isn't quite so daunting.

But, unlike the single alkaloid cocaine, use of whole leaf products doesn't end in a sudden emotional or energy crash or turn nice people into a--holes. After a time, the effect gently fades away. Neither of us ever experienced sleeplessness, anxiety, or remorse while using hojas.

And of course there is no issue of addiction or compulsion. You can take it or leave it (unless, of course, you're one of those people who can't take or leave anything; in that case, well, hojas are a lot cheaper than refined "salt").

The mild, balanced effects parallel those of other whole herbs versus single compounds. A classic example is cannabis flowers versus tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), their main psychoactive ingredient. Pharmaceutical medicines of THC alone can cause anxiety. Using whole cannabis for pain control, appetite stimulation, and other medical purposes causes fewer problems and gives patients more control.

And as it turns out, many "minor" ingredients of cannabis -- cannabinoids and other compounds -- also have benefits. The latest pharmaceutical versions of what Mother Nature provides are standardized cannabinoid blends.

A small piece of lejia ("lye") made from stevia (above) or quinoa ash, burned limestone, or baking soda ("bico"), is often chewed with coca to free more alkaloids. This produces a stronger effect, including numbing the inside of the mouth, than hojas alone.

Our serious quest for knowledge began in La Paz, the capital of Bolivia, 13,323 feet above sea level. We visited the coca market, ADEPCOCA, just four blocks from the Villa Fatima terminal, where minibuses from coca-growing Nor Yungas province leave and arrive hourly.

Four stories (each about 100 x 80 m) of coca fill La Paz' bustling ADEPCOCA market. This photo, made early on a Sunday, shows little of the traffic that normally congests this intersection, so that more of the building can be seen. The structure covers a full block. The sign on the front says "COCA ES VIDA"; coca is life.

Bags of prime hojas with the ADEPCOCA logo ready for delivery to hotels, markets, and other outlets. Taxis often carry several bags at a time along with passengers, piling bags in cargo compartments and atop vehicles.

While most traditional women and older men in the market didn't wish to be photographed, this young man with iPod had no qualms and happily posed. Many hundreds of bags like his are bought and sold daily at ADEPCOCA.

Between La Paz and Coroico, along what was once "the most dangerous road in the world," cocal, as coca is called in the field, begins to be seen. The closer we came to one of Bolivia's prime coca centers[9] (like our driver and some fellow passengers, chewing hojas all the way!), the more we saw the well-tended crop on steep hills framed by snowy peaks, rushing waterfalls, and infinite shades of green.

A cocal field near the road. Maintaining agricultural terraces or gradas under frequently torrential rains is an ongoing task of Andean coca growers. Photo by Richard Lee / The Rag Blog.

NEXT: Cocal up close and personal; everything else; our "Where's Waldo?" moment.

[Rag Blog Contributing Editor Mariann G. Wizard, a Sixties radical activist and contributor to The Rag, Austin's underground newspaper from the 60s and 70s, is a poet, a professional science writer specializing in natural health therapies, and a regular contributor to The Rag Blog. Read more poetry and articles by Mariann G. Wizard on The Rag Blog.]


Footnotes:
[1]Trading Economics.com. ]http://www.tradingeconomics.com/bolivia/balance-of-trade
[2]http://www.vcdi.gob.bo/index.php/institucion/institucional 
[3]Neuman W. Bolivia: Morales wins victory as U.N. agrees to define some coca use as legal. New York Times. Jan. 11, 2013. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/12/world/americas/bolivia-morales-wins-victory-as-un-agrees-to-define-some-coca-use-as-legal.html?_r=1& 
[4]Cusicanqui JJ. Morales buscar a retirar la coca de la lista de estupefacientes. La Razón. Mar. 12, 2013, p. A4. 
[5]Medrano E. Temen desvío de la industria de la hoja. La Razón. Mar. 12, 2013, p. A4. 
[6]Cusicanqui JJ. Morales buscar a retirar la coca de la lista de estupefacientes. Sidebar: Il Jornada del Acullico. La Razón. Mar. 12, 2013, p. A4. 
[7]Weil AT. The therapeutic value of coca in contemporary medicine. J Ethnopharmacol. 1981 Mar-May;3(2-3):367-76. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6113306 
[8]Casikar V, Mujica E, Mongelli M, et. al. Does chewing coca leaves influence physiology at high altitude? Indian J Clin Biochem. July, 2010;25(3):311-4. doi: 10.1007/s12291-010-0059-1. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21731204 
[9]The other is Chaparé.

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REPORT / Mariann G. Wizard : 'La Vida Coca' in Bolivia and Peru

Pre-Incan metal vessels in the Larco Museum, Lima, for storing coca leaves. Human-faced pots from some early Andean cultures (not shown) have distended cheek pouches, where coca leaves are held during use. The central figure above is using coca in the Amazonian/Caribbean way. There the Kogi, Arhuaco, and Wiwa people use a hollow gourd (poporo) associated with virility to consume coca. Women of these tribes are prohibited from coca use. All photos by Mariann G. Wizard / The Rag Blog, unless otherwise credited.

La Vida Coca /1: 
Currents in traditional coca 
use in Bolivia and Peru

Although its use continued, coca production had been 'stripped of its original cultural and social meaning' by the subjugation of indigenous practice to the whims of European and North American commodity culture.

By Mariann G. Wizard / The Rag Blog / May 9, 2013

Part one of three.

I recently visited Peru and Bolivia for the first time, in the company of intrepid adventurer and fellow former Ragstaffer Richard Lee. It was all his idea, a journey we talked about for a couple of years. Both South American nations are huge, with enormous wild and rugged areas; are rich in geographical, botanical, and cultural wonders; and are repositories of a wealth of ancient and modern histories unfamiliar to many outsiders.

We both like straying off the beaten path. A guide book or "canned" tour is merely a point of reference. While ruins and relics may be spectacular, inspiring, and mysterious, we prefer checking out current life and culture, moving slow, meeting people, and making new friends. Although my trip lasted two months, and Richard's even longer, it would take years to see all of the "must see" places the tour books extol.

Gradually, with experience, a sharper focus and questions may emerge. While Bolivia and Peru are each unique in hundreds of ways, they have something in common that is quite exotic to North Americans: traditional cultivation and use of coca (Erythroxylon spp). Coca, native to South America, has been used for thousands of years medicinally, ritually, and socially, and grown on several continents. Today Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia produce more than 98% of the world's coca.

Inca and pre-Incan cultures such as the Moche thought coca was a divine plant and sometimes reserved it for royalty. When the Inca fell to the Conquistadores, the Spanish at first tried to stamp out coca as a pagan practice. But they quickly learned to exploit its energizing qualities. Workers with a ready supply of coca didn't have to stop for lunch. So coca, monopolized by the conquerors, was "tolerated" for increased productivity, although Catholic missionaries continued to try to stop or limit its spiritual use.

Coca plants were grown by pre-Incan cultures 5000 years ago. These are at Huaca Pucllana, an active archaeological site in the heart of modern Miraflores, Lima, Peru.

According to Wikipedia, coca was traditionally used

as a stimulant to overcome fatigue, hunger, and thirst... particularly effective against altitude sickness. It also is used as an anesthetic and analgesic [for] pain of headache, rheumatism, wounds and sores, etc. Before stronger anesthetics were available, it also was used for broken bones, childbirth, and during trephining [sic] operations on the skull.

The high calcium content in coca explains why people used it for bone fractures. Because coca constricts blood vessels, it also serves to oppose bleeding, and coca seeds were used for nosebleeds. Indigenous use of coca has also been reported... for malaria, ulcers, asthma, to improve digestion, to guard against bowel laxity, as an aphrodisiac, and [was] credited with improving longevity.[1]

In some coca-using cultures, the herb was specifically linked to sexuality, procreation, and virility.

Richard, an avid horticulturalist, wanted to learn about coca growing. I write professionally about herbal medicines and welcome opportunities to encounter them "in the field." As we traveled south, and up, to the dizzying Andean altiplano, we started to feed our interests with knowledge.

Coca leaves (hojas) and seeds contain alkaloids and other compounds that exert physical and mental effects when consumed. Coca is intensively cultivated and harvested by hand, usually on well-drained, sunny mountainsides. It prefers somewhat alkaline soil. There are said to be over 250 Erythroxylon species; four are widely grown. Many, if not all, contain cocaine, an alkaloid that is coca's best-known ingredient.[2] The reported usual cocaine alkaloid content of coca leaf is between 0.1 and 0.8%.

Wikipedia says,

[P]lants thrive best in hot, damp and humid locations, such as the clearings of forests; but the leaves most preferred are obtained in drier areas, on the hillsides. The leaves are gathered from plants varying in age from one and a half to upwards of forty years, but only the new fresh growth is harvested. [Leaves] are... ready for plucking when they break on being bent. The first and most abundant harvest is in March after the rainy season, the second is at the end of June, and the third in October or November."[3]

Coca is a low-growing deciduous shrub. These plants are thriving in a traditional steeply terraced field.

Despite its South American origin, coca and its alkaloids have profoundly affected North American and European culture. Again from Wikipedia:

Coca was first introduced to Europe in the 16th century, but did not become popular until the mid-19th century, with the publication of an influential paper... praising its stimulating effects on cognition. This led to [the] invention of coca wine and the first production of pure cocaine."[4]

In the U.S., cocaine was associated with the Jazz Age and known as a "rich man's drug."

But another item originally derived from coca became the one symbol of North America, and specifically the U.S., known around the world: the Coca-Cola® soft drink, brand, and logos. Coke® and other kola (aka cola; Cola vera) drinks originally used coca as a flavoring and energizing ingredient; today's Coke still uses denatured coca leaves. The Stepan Company (Maywood, NJ), the top legal buyer of Bolivian coca, imports and denatures it. Coke owns Inka Cola®, formerly its main competitor in Peru, and Coke products are ubiquitous in both countries.

Coca Colla energy drink. Photo from Prensa Libre.com.

"Denaturing" means removing the cocaine. That is sold to Mallinckrodt (St. Louis, MO), the only pharmaceutical manufacturer in the U.S. licensed to purify "coke" for medical use. The only naturally occurring local anesthetic in use today, it was first isolated and purified in 1859. Approved uses include as anesthesia in eye surgery and as a precursor to synthetic prescription and over-the-counter painkillers: novocaine, lidocaine; essentially anything ending with "caine."

In addition to its medical value, cocaine is an attractive drug of abuse, providing an all-too-fleeting feeling of focused energy and power. Cheap South American coke and its derivative, even cheaper smokeable free-base or "crack" cocaine, flooded U.S. and European markets in the late 1960s, a ruinous flood that, with disco music, peaked in the 80s.

Coke and crack are still used, but methamphetamine is so much cheaper now (as well as heroin, other opiates, and prescription painkillers) that "Bolivian marching powder" has lost market share. The epidemic and resulting intensification of the so-called "war on drugs" left deep scars in many urban communities, put an end to the idyllic dreams of 60s social reformers and much of the U.S. Bill of Rights, bent law enforcement priorities, fed corruption both public and private, and helped fund repressive warfare in more than one foreign nation.

Efforts to control and eradicate coca had begun much earlier. The Convention for Limiting the Manufacture and Regulating the Distribution of Narcotic Drugs, an international drug control treaty, took effect in July 1933. It established two groups of forbidden drugs.

Group I included morphine and its salts, including morphine diacetate (heroin) and preparations made directly from raw or medicinal opium poppy (Papaver somniferum) containing more than 20% morphine; cocaine and its salts, including preparations made from coca leaf containing more than 0.1% cocaine[5], all esters of ecgonine and their salts; dihydrohydrooxycodeinone, dihydrocodeinone, dihydromorphinone, acetyldihydrocodeinone or acetyldemethylodihydrothebaine, dihydromorphine, their esters, and the salts of any of these substances and their esters; morphine-N-oxide, also morphine-N-oxide derivatives and other pentavalent nitrogen morphine derivatives; ecgonine[6] and thebaine and their salts; benzylmorphine and other ethers and salts of morphine, except methylmorphine (codeine); and ethylmorphine and its salts [Italics added].

Group II, more loosely regulated, included methylmorphine (codeine) and ethylmorphine, and their salts.[7]

These rudimentary groups foreshadowed the drug scheduling system still used today. The 1931 Convention was broadened considerably by later treaties and eventually superseded by the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, adding cannabis (Cannabis sativa) to the prohibited "narcotics." International law has been further expanded and amended since. Of course the U.S. has enacted its own drug legislation and has pushed prohibition hard in other nations, especially those it "aids."

Coca and coca products, used in the Andes for thousands of years and today by farmers, market women, hard-driving taxistas, tourists suffering from altitude sickness, and those with gastric distress, anxiety, high blood pressure, and other medical conditions, was thus prohibited by international law. Although its use continued, coca production had been "stripped of its original cultural and social meaning"[8] by the subjugation of indigenous practice to the whims of European and North American commodity culture.

The history of the U.S. drug war, specifically against coca cultivation in Colombia and Bolivia, is far beyond the reach of this report. It is well summed-up, however, in this assessment:

Attempts to reduce the supply of coca/cocaine oscillate between efforts to eradicate crops on the one hand, and crop substitution on the other... Experts have been unanimous in their condemnation of crop eradication as a viable strategy in isolation for the simple fact that the aggregated coca acreage has not been decreasing because crops have been displaced rather than eradicated.

And not only have such policies failed, but they have been accompanied by substantial ecological damage; virgin areas have been deforested and the environment has been polluted with long-lasting herbicides. But, above all, attempts at eradication have deprived poor peasants and their families of their main source of income.[9]

Crop substitution has had some limited successes. In mountainous Bolivia, coffee (Coffea robusta) was chosen for improvement and propagation. Long scorned as an inferior product, new cultivars, techniques, and training have made Bolivian coffee a star among aficionados.[10] However, unstable prices prevent it from persuading most coca growers to make the switch. Neither eradication nor substitution have ever had the full support of indigenous farmers where they have been tried.

Nor Yungas is home to wild, shade-grown, hand-harvested coffee, among the best in the world. These beans have another month or two to go before they're ready -- harvest generally coincides with la Semana Santa, Holy Week.

Peru and Bolivia did not accept coca's narcotic designation, repeatedly protesting in international forums. In 1994, the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB), the independent, quasi-judicial organ that implements UN drug conventions, said in its Annual Report, "mate de coca... considered harmless and legal in several countries in South America, is an illegal activity under the provisions of both the 1961 Convention and the 1988 Convention, though that was not the intention of the plenipotentiary conferences that adopted those conventions (Italics added)."[11]

But nothing changed legally.

Bolivian coca growers, or cocaleros, began in the mid-1980s to be a political and cultural force. Not coincidentally, in 1985 an energetic young man named Evo Morales was elected general secretary of a local cocalero union; by 1988 he was executive secretary of the Six Federations of the Tropics of Cochabamba.

Around then the Bolivian government, aided by the U.S., began an aerial spraying program to wipe out coca. Morales quickly became a leader among opponents of the program. As a result, he was frequently jailed and, in 1989, beaten nearly to death, dumped unconscious in some bushes and luckily found by colleagues. By 1996, he was president of the Tropics Federation (he retains this office today).[12]

Morales later led a 600 km march from Cochabamba to La Paz. Supporters gave the marchers drink, food, clothes, and shoes. They were greeted with cheers in the capital and the government agreed to negotiate with them. After they went home, the government sent forces to harass them.

According to Morales, in 1997 a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) helicopter strafed farmers with automatic rifle fire, killing five of his supporters. He also recounted being grazed by assassins' bullets in 2000. But Morales found a growing international audience for his positions, traveling abroad to gain support and to educate people on the differences between coca leaves and cocaine.

He says, "I am not a drug trafficker. I am a coca grower. I cultivate coca leaf, a natural product. I do not refine cocaine, and neither cocaine nor drugs have ever been part of Andean culture."[13]

After going through several political formations and fighting official suppression, Morales and his compatriots made a deal with a defunct yet still registered party, the Movement for Socialism (MAS). They could take over the party if they would keep its acronym, name, and colors. The former right wing MAS became the left coca activist party, the Movement for Socialism -- Political Instrument for the Sovereignty of the Peoples. The new MAS is "an indigenous-based political party that calls for nationalization of industry, legalization of the coca leaf... and fairer distribution of... resources."[14]

At a gathering of farmers in 2005 celebrating MAS' 10th anniversary, Morales declared the party ready to take power.[15] He was proven correct, winning over 53% of the vote in that year's Presidential election. Fending off attempts to remove him from office, he was re-elected in a 2009 landslide. Everywhere we went in northwestern Bolivia, graffiti on walls proclaimed, "¡VIVA MAS! ¡VIVA EVO!"[16]

Bolivian President Juan Evo Morales Ayma discussing coca use. Photo from www.parahoreca.com.

In his first term, in 2008, Morales evicted the DEA from Bolivia. When the U.S. ambassador protested, Evo accused him of conspiring against democracy and encouraging civil unrest, and ordered him out, too. The Bolivian ambassador to the U.S. was expelled in retaliation. Diplomatic relations between the two nations were restored in November, 2011, but have not warmed.

Morales still refuses to allow agents of the DEA into the country.[17] On May 1, 2013, he announced the long-threatened expulsion of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), accusing it of funding his opposition. He also took exception to newly-confirmed U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry's recent characterization of the Western Hemisphere as the "backyard" of the U.S., a characterization most Central and South Americans and Canadians, and many U.S. citizens, must find paternalistic, arrogant, ignorant, and typical of the "Ugly Yanqui" we have come to know and despise.[18]

NEXT: Coca's changing future; the facts as we found them; our quest begins.

[Rag Blog Contributing Editor Mariann G. Wizard, a Sixties radical activist and contributor to The Rag, Austin's underground newspaper from the 60s and 70s, is a poet, a professional science writer specializing in natural health therapies, and a regular contributor to The Rag Blog. Read more poetry and articles by Mariann G. Wizard on The Rag Blog.]


Footnotes:
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca
[2] Bieri S, Brachet A, Veuthey JL, Christen P. Cocaine distribution in wild Erythroxylum species. J Ethnopharmacol. Feb. 20, 2006;103(3):439-47.
[3] Wikipedia/Coca, op. cit. Harvest times refer to commercial crops. Fresh hojas are picked and used as needed. Leaves are carefully sun dried for storage and shipment. Coca drops its leaves, like other deciduous plants, but every two-three years; new leaves soon emerge.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Remember, coca leaf material generally has a cocaine level of 0.1-0.8%; so, all products made from coca leaves were covered.
[6] Coca's alkaloids are all derivatives of ecgonine.
[7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wikiConvention_for_Limiting_the_Manufacture_and_Regulating_the_Distribution_of_Narcotic_Drugs
[8] Bastos FI, Caiaffa W, Rossi D, Vila M, Malta M. The children of Mama Coca: coca, cocaine and the fate of harm reduction in South America. Int J Drug Policy. Mar. 2007;18(2):99-106. doi:10.1016/j/drugpo.2006.11.017 – local_links.php
[9] Ibid.
[10] Friedman-Rudovsky J. Bolivian buzz: coca farmers switch to coffee beans. Time. Feb. 29, 2012. http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2107750,00.html
[11] Wikipedia/Coca, op. cit.
[12] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evo_Morales#Early_cocalero_activism:_1978.E2.80.931983
[13] Ibid.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Ibid.
[16] It must be noted that this area is Morales' political stronghold. Opposition is centered in the eastern lowland province, Santa Cruz, and its capital of the same name, Bolivia's most populous city. 
[17] Wikipedia/Evo_Morales, op. cit.
[18] Valdez C, Bajak F. Bolivia's Morales expels USAID for allegedly seeking to undermine government. Associated Press. May 1, 2013. Accessed at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/01/bolivia-morales-expels-usaid_n_3193115.html.

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