Bolivia MCCer shares experience on Witness for Peace delegation

By Lindsey Frye

With its rainforest lowlands, fertile valleys and striking mountain peaks, Bolivia is a country of much historical and geographical diversity. This past October I was able to travel beyond the lowland city of Santa Cruz where I’ve worked for the past year with MCC to experience first hand some of this diversity. I participated in a learning tour with Witness for Peace and along with 10 other women from the United States, I met with politicians, religious leaders, social movement leaders and “campesinos” in four different places in the country. Each person we met with shared their story, their hopes and most of them had a pretty strong opinion to share about President Evo Morales.

In 2005, Morales won the presidency with an overwhelming 54% majority vote and became Bolivia’s first Indigenous President. However, the story doesn’t begin there. It begins when hundreds of families who were moved from Potosi to the Chapare region in the 1980s when the world tin prices fell and there was nothing left to mine. The government relocated the families in the hopes that they would become farmers (and also to break up the mining unions). The families began growing coca and the union structure was reorganized with 900 sub-unions with 140 families in each one. One of those included the family of Evo Morales, who rose to become the president of all of the sub-unions.

We visited a coca farm and a union member, Vitalia, who told us about U.S. funded initiatives in the 1990s to eradicate coca. “In those times, there was no day, no night or sleeping, there was just fear and hiding,” she said, with pain in her voice. Her house was raided several times in the middle of the night, with soldiers threatening to kill her children. She lost friends and relatives during this time at the hands of an army funded almost entirely by the U.S. government. As we spoke with the human rights ombudsman, Godofrede Reinike, we learned that not only was the U.S. funding the army, it was also lining the pockets of Hugo Banzer, the president/dictator at the time with $120 million for 5-8 million hectares of coca eradicated. “Banzer did more than that,” Reinike explained, “he eradicated 30 million hectares, which turned into 78 deaths, thousands detained, hundreds permanently wounded. But it made the movement stronger and it made Morales stronger.”

Since 2005, there has been no forced eradication of coca in Bolivia (although the union will eradicate if any of the members are found to be growing more than their quota). We visited a construction sight where Venezuela has optimistically funded a tea factory. Although coca is used for stomach aches as well as an appetite suppressant, and only 2 of the 18 alkaloids in coca are used to make cocaine, exporting the tea is technically illegal because it appears on a list of international illegal substances created by the U.N. in 1961.

There is much more to be said about the trip, but this is a small window. One thing organizations like Witness For Peace have to teach us is that we must look deep down into the roots of the problems that we attempt to address in countries like Bolivia. Many times at the roots are manipulated governments, coerced by money from the North. It is impossible for me as a North American to do development work in Bolivia without looking first to my own country to know how we, along with others, have kept such a beautiful country in complex cycles of poverty for so long. Although Bolivia is 2nd in Latin America in reserves of natural gas, 5th in the world for fresh water and 8th for biodiversity, 60% of the population suffers from malnutrition and 25% of 5 year olds are in the dying stages of hunger. MCC has a lot of important work to be doing in Bolivia. But just as urgently as community development workers or dry latrine projects are grassroots movements in the United States and Canada to work for change in their local and national governments.