Before the election could take place, Flores’ ADEPCOCA announced that they were going to hold their own election as her two year period in office would end on July 31st 2021. Lluta agreed to resign and give way to a ‘unity’ leadership, without restrictions as to the candidates, understood as accepting candidates who had previously been associated with the parallel organizations fomented by MAS, side by side with those who had participated in the anti-government protests. This situation was inconvenient for all involved, and a growing current of opinion in Yungas, with the slogan ‘Neither Armin (Lluta, then president of the majority ADEPCOCA) nor Elena (Flores, president of the minority ADEPCOCA with government support)’, arguing that a new ‘unity election’ should be held to form a sole leadership.Īlthough the government did not admit to public negotiation with the organization headed by Lluta, they gave the impression that they would recognize the committee named in such an election. The Legal Coca Market was occupied only by those few producers who retailed coca by the pound to private consumers. The syndicate’s offices were completely inadequate for the quantities of coca that arrived daily in the city, and local residents had a bonanza renting out garages, shops, the ground floors of their houses and even buildings under construction even so, most of the sales had to be carried out on half-constructed pavements, in the midst of rain, mud, and occasionally snow. The government also provided a permanent contingent of police to prevent the majority ADEPCOCA from any further attempts to disrupt operations. In 2020, they resumed operations in a building of a transport syndicate, heading out of the city to Yungas, Qalajawira.Īs before, the government obliged wholesalers to purchase coca at this site by setting up an office there to authorize transport of coca for sale in the rest of the country, and refusing to stamp documents if the coca in question had been purchased in Villa Fatima. They then moved from one improvised location to another, ending up in another building belonging to ADEPCOCA, constructed to serve as a hospital for members of the organization but which has never functioned as such, in Calle 10, Villa el Carmen, a suburb neighbouring Villa Fatima, also quickly abandoned. Initially, the government maintained its central tactic, which was to support a rival ADEPCOCA with a parallel wholesale coca market, that took over the Legal Coca Market in March 2018, owned by ADEPCOCA in the suburb of Villa Fatima in La Paz, but was soon driven out by massive protests of grass roots coca growers. It made little difference that Morales and García Linera were replaced by the technocrat Luís Arce Catacora and the Indianist mystic David Choquehuanca the attack on Yungas resumed almost immediately. New national elections were held in October 2020, resulting in another majority win for the MAS (due to the disorganization and feeble campaigns of the opposition coalitions). However, most buried the hatchet and let everyone send one or two bundles, relieving the worst economic hardship. A pitched battle ensued when one faction tried to disrupt a shipment of their rivals’ quota. One community split into two opposing factions due to earlier political problems. Two local community representatives escorted the lorries, took charge of sales and distributed the proceeds to the individual producers who remained in the countryside. Each community could send a lorryload of coca (generally sixty five pound takis – or ‘bundles’– of leaves, this being the standard unit for wholesaling) to the market in the city of La Paz every two weeks. Although the rural communities never observed lockdown and went on working their coca fields as usual – indeed, they had to, they were not going to let the crops just shrivel and rot – monetary circulation came to a standstill for three months.įrom July 2020, some relief came with a system of quotas. Coca leaves did not count as an essential consumer good (although many Bolivians feel it’s as essential as tea or coffee in other parts of the world) and all transport in and out of the Yungas was paralysed, except for those carrying basic food supplies.
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