o seemingly unrelated articles appeared in The Guardian and the New York Times this March; linking them was the infamous ‘champagne drug’ known as cocaine. The resulting story is that of a commodity chain that intertwines four continents; a network that connects ostensibly disparate lives, where one thread could originate from a tribe in Colombia and end with a fisherman in Guinea Bissau. The cocaine trade is a well-known phenomenon that for a Western audience sparks almost romanticised visions of Johnny Depp in ‘Blow’ or Kate Moss as the comeback cover girl. The legend that is Pablo Escobar and his Medellín cartel similarly detaches us from the realities of this diffuse network. The notion that political instability in West Africa could be associated with rebel groups in South America would appear to be farfetched if not ludicrous and yet recent events make the links that bind these two areas of the globe very much apparent.
On March 2nd 2009, the president of Guinea-Bissau, João Bernando Vieira, was assassinated in an event that focussed attention on the precarious political stability of the West African region. Very soon references to the recent UNODC (UN Office on Drugs and Crime) report on drug trafficking as a major security threat for West Africa were making their way into the media and a story that once centred around an Andean producer and US or European consumer became that much more complex. Anecdotal stories of bags of cocaine awash on beaches and Porsches parked outside nightclubs in the capital city of a country sitting at 171 in the human development index, illustrate the impact of a commodity trade whose total European wholesale value is greater than the GDP of four countries through which it transits.
Alongside the economic implications of cocaine’s West African doorway into Europe, marked by suspiciously high levels of foreign direct investment over the last couple of years, the political ramifications are similarly dire. Unlike the hierarchical structure of drug cartels in Colombia, West African trafficking seems to be more of an entrepreneurial venture spanning a network of thousands in the region linked to counterparts working from European. As cocaine trafficking is the most lucrative economic alternative next to oil extraction, the UNODC argues that it is the most rational choice as an income generating strategy particularly for demobilised forces and guerrilla armies, relicts of the many conflicts that the region has suffered. Given that much regional political stability rests on a knife-edge, the sudden injection of vast sums of cash and its concomitant power into this melting pot could have disastrous security repercussions. Moreover, the new black economy is so large and unstructured that it would enable multiple groups to develop into threats, creating pressure points between as well as within national borders. Bolstered by high levels of corruption, little or no rule of law and poor institutional capacity and resources to deal with such an eventuality, West African countries, many of which are already referred to as prime examples of ‘failed states,’ cannot even begin to deal with such a burden.
On the other side of the Atlantic, however, many Latin American countries seem to be faring little better despite decades of interventionist policies, particularly from the US. Coca eradication initiatives such as those under Plan Colombia that provide aid, mainly in the form of military assistance, have largely failed in their objective, and unintentionally shifted coca plantations into national reserves. As chemical aspersions cannot be carried out there, the government resorts to manual eradication, which involves facing landmines buried in the fields precisely to discourage this practice. On top of this are the allegations of drug cartel links to guerrilla groups. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) have long been rumoured to finance themselves through this lucrative trade and now this hydra has reared another ugly head in Peru. On March 17th 2009, the New York Times published an article entitled ‘Fueled by Coca: Peru’s Rebel War Reignites’ which described army attacks on coca farmers and other civilians in remote Andean villages under the guise of combating a resurgent guerrilla group allegedly financed by cocaine. Although some dismiss this scaremongering as a tactic to divert attention away from issues like the financial crisis to the terrorist ghost that is always lurking just below the surface of Peruvian society, the stark reality is that the ensuing violence is not fabricated. Civilians, and in particular coca farmers, have been caught in the brutal crossfire between the military and the new ‘Shining Path’ rebels who are alleged to have reinvented themselves after their apparent demise in 2000 along similar lines to Colombia’s FARC- as a cocaine enterprise. Where does this leave the coca farmers seeking out an existence by cultivating a traditional crop that is one of the few plants which can grow on the slopes of the Andes without exorbitant inputs?
Back in Europe, from the 11th - 13th March 2009, the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs met at UNODC headquarters in Vienna to review the effectiveness of drug control. Here, Bolivian president and former coca farmer Evo Morales campaigned for the removal of the coca leaf from the same list as cocaine in the UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs. Coca is a sacred plant amongst Andean people with a multitude of uses other than the narcotic effect of its one alkaloid, cocaine. In July 2008 on the reserve of Cerro Tijeras in Colombia, a coca festival was held to showcase the gastronomic delights derived from this insignificant looking leaf. All of the products, from wine to cakes, consisted of the coca leaf as a whole entity without first having the cocaine alkaloid extracted through a variety of dubious methods involving substances like gasoline and potassium permanganate. If such licit uses for this plant do exist, then cocaine’s power as a commodity is immense if it can create connections between theUS military, South American guerrilla groups, African warlords, British rock stars and European crack addicts.
The flurry of concerns that arise with the politicisation of the cocaine commodity chain cannot be ignored, but the insistence on centring hitherto unsuccessful response efforts on coca production is failing those for whom this is fast becoming a life-or-death issue. The deadly cocaine web is ever-expanding and trapping more and more with the attractive gains that it has to afford those in its commodity chain whether they are Peruvian coca farmers or entrepreneurial fishermen from Guinea Bissau. Certain realities must be faced and with them a re-examination of perceptions and priorities must be undertaken before this web engulfs more victims.
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