It gives a slight energy boost and prevents altitude sickness. Without coca, living in much of the country would be impossible.

I hope they cancel coca eradication, it's a stupid idea forced on them by a DEA out of control.

And yes, it would cause a huge backlash against the government, whereas standing up to the DEA will increase support for the government.

because some people in other countries misuse it. Same for San Pedro cactus. Andean civilization is based upon those two plants.

Got a lot of quick reading ahead to get the missing info.

Why SHOULD the people of the Andes surrender something which has had a totally useful part in their lives, helping them to overcome real problems, just as some of the drugs US citizens use daily are necessary for specific reasons.

Their use is thousands of years old. It has been proven by time for a sea of people. Our own political ambitions for power over people should have absolutely no impact there whatsoever.

There are faded election posters with coca leaves and "Coca, vota asi!" on them.

Thousands of families grow coca there and scratch out a living. I've seen their tumbledown houses. They would laugh and say, "Look at my narco mansion!"

It's on the far side of the Andes. I had to take a bus from Ayacucho for about eight hours, went past burned out villages from the Sendero Luminoso era.

Two cops had just been killed there when I arrived. The government in Lima was blaming Sendero Luminoso, but the coca growers said they got killed because they were ripping people off.

But Sendero is still out there, killing a few soldiers in the VRAE every year, although not, I don't think, in the name of Gonzalo Thought anymore. More like just to make some money.

Some of the coca union leaders have the same family names as some Senderistas. Hmmm...

A massacre I heard about which happened there has never been out of my mind. Inconceivable!

For others who may be unaware of it:

Unburying the Evidence of Peru's Biggest "Dirty War" Massacre
Written by Ángel Páez
Sunday, 15 June 2008 10:54

(IPS)-It was not hard to find the remains of the victims, some of whose bones were actually exposed to the elements. But it took 24 years for the people of the highlands village of Putis in southern Peru to get a response to their insistent requests for exhumation and identification of the remains.

In 1984, 125 men, women and children were shot to death by army troops after being tricked into digging their own mass grave.

The biggest single massacre of civilians in Peru's 1980-2000 civil war is just now coming to light, thanks to the unflagging efforts of the victims' families. Since May 17, 60 bodies have been found, including those of 10 children between the ages of six and 10.

On a visit to the area in November 2006, this reporter found that the relatives were going from one public agency to another, asking them to exhume the victims of the massacre of Putis, located in the district of Santillana in the southern province of Ayacucho.

The death toll for Peru's two decade armed conflict was put at 70,000 by the independent Truth and Reconciliation Commission (CVR). But in order to qualify for the reparations provided for by law, victims' families must prove that their loved ones were murdered by the guerrillas, the army or paramilitary groups.

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"Tired of living in the hills and being caught in the crossfire, harassed by the subversives on one hand and by the security forces on the other, the villagers accepted the proposal and moved to Putis, bringing with them all of their belongings.

"The security forces received the villagers and gathered them together in the school, along with local residents that the soldiers had called out of their homes. The military told them that as of that moment they would give them protection and help them in different projects to improve their quality of life," the report continues.

"Under that pretext, the military ordered all of the men, at gunpoint, to dig a large ditch; some were told it was for building a fish farm, to raise trout, while others were told that houses would be built there."

"When the supposed fishpond was ready, the troops brought together the roughly 100 villagers around the pit, including men, women and children, and without further explanation, shot them to death," it adds.

The troops then seized and sold the victims' farm animals. To cover up the murders, they leaked to the press an account of a supposed armed confrontation in which 15 "guerrillas" were killed.

Gonzalo and the boys and girls did a remarkable, patient, job of building an old-school Maoist mass movement and guerrilla army. They controlled a teachers' college in Ayacucho and churned out about 15 years worth of Sendero cadre/rural teachers to spread the movement.

They were a pretty bloody-minded bunch, though.

Peruvian journalist Gustavo Gorriti has wrote the definite work on them 25 years ago. It's three volumes in Spanish, but I think the University of Wisconsin Press may have recently come up with an English edition.

His wikipedia entry is an interesting window on journalism in Peru:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustavo_Gorriti

he was publishing, and planned the right response at that time, for that kind of threat. It is a wonder he's alive, still.

Wonderful getting information on how journalism in Peru has been working. There has been a heavy muffling of all information like this within our own corporate journalists' efforts in the Western Hemisphere. It's always like a miracle finding any information at all.

Goritti's time in Panama is also amazing, along with the news the Foreign Minister, Ricardo Alberto Arias, suddenly slithered into place as La Prensa's president after Goritti got after the Panamanian government.

Someone should decide to write this man's biography. There's far more than enough there for a book, and the information needs to be heard. A lot of people need and want to know what's been going on.

...(through a mouth full of food while comfortably lying back in their warm-ass homes) that strategy would only help drug-funded Shining Path rebels based in the region turn its coca growers against authorities....''

- Tell the critics to go to hell.

K&R

He must be an "elitist, effete snob," or "one of them cheese-eating, wine-sipping surrender muhnkeys", as OUR "critics" would say, through their bacon-stuffed pie-holes.

It's good learning that at least somewhere in the world, serious, intelligent, mature people are making decisions which BENEFIT the people in their country who are NOT wealthy! Seems impossible!

Every time they have let the US bully them on economic or social policy they have gotten screwed and every time they thumb their nose at the US they get ahead.

If the DEA convinces these people to burn enough of their traditional crops then perhaps the US will be able to lobby more effectively to get Peru to let GMO foods and Monsanto replant the land with some round up ready corn.