Que pasa después de la coca

Genero: Documental

2004

director: Roberto Lanza

writer :Roberto Lanza

exec producer: Pentti Kouri

exec producer: Roberto Lanza

producer: Alex Moreno

producer: Donald K. Ranvaud

producer: Robert Bevan

editor: Juan Carlos Gomez Millo

production: Buena Onda

co production: Lapponia

COMENTARIOS:

Today, there are 70.000 families in Bolivia whose lives depend exclusively on the ancestral farming of the coca leaf. This practice has been declared illegal for the past 12 years in Bolivia (Law n. 1008). The USA have monitored the application of the law and have engineered consistent military and economic pressure. The American army, the DEA and other agencies of the US government are present all over the country.

The United States are claiming that total eradication of the coca plantations is the only way to control cocaine smuggling into the USA. Most of the coca farmers emigrated from the altiplano, and they assert the cultivation of coca crops as a right to life, work and the well being of their families.

The government has militarized the Chapare zone and has begun a plan of eradication by force after the failure of the Alternative Development Plan, which tried to replace Coca for other agricultural products. Incentives to diversify crop plantation, though promised, have never been applied systematically and in some cases agent orange has been used to destroy the fertility of the soil and thereby drastically reduce the capacity for alternative cultures. Simultaneously a campaign to evict peasants from the land and build tourist resorts has taken root.

The time limit that the peasants gave the government to come up with a positive answer to their demands was March 2001. Many confrontations between Army and peasants have taken place since claiming hundreds of lives but no resolutions have been achieved.

These confrontations have already claimed hundreds of deaths. March 2002 was the self imposed deadline the US and the Bolivian Government had chosen for the completion of the operation Zero Coca. A year and a half later the activities have intensified and merged with other pressing struggles exasperating the majority of the indian population (35% Aimara 23% Quechua) often prone to take the law into their own hands through demonstrations.

The clear and present danger is the Colombian-ization of the conflict and the fostering of a guerrilla culture to defend the right to grow the coca leaf, in keeping with religious, medical and social traditions that have shaped the culture of Bolivia and adjoining countries.

Are the undeniable social and economic evils of cocaine smuggling the real reason for this conflict? What are the hidden agendas of all the players concerned? How can one dominant culture attempt to eradicate the foundations of a willfully subservient one many miles away, geographically and morally?
This documentary sets out to investigate and seek answers to these questions.