Notes from a Watson Journ If Only My Words Could Do Justice to My Experiences: Testimonials of former coca growers By Ana Maria Rey Martinez ’08 Ana Maria Rey Martinez is currently on a year-long journey through South America and Southeast Asia, courtesy of a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship. Born and raised in Colombia, having seen the impact of drugs on her own nation, she is seeking to understand the role and culture of coca in the countries that produce it by listening to the stories of former coca growers. This edited excerpt comes from a report sent to the Watson committee, which she prefaced with this caveat: “The following are immediate thoughts, emotions, sentiments, feelings, idealism ... put into somewhat inadequate words.” ~ DG
Peru
Last November, I was on the bluest lake I have seen—Lake Titicaca. At an altitude of two and a half miles above sea level, male Taquileños (from Taquile one of Titicaca’s islands) still carry on their waist a traditional handmade purse. Detached from both the Bolivian and Peruvian mainland, disconnected from typical technology (no TVs, radios, cell phones) and getting just enough energy from solar panels—given by the dearly remembered President Fujimori—Taquileños are probably unaware of the stigma attached to what they carry in their purses: their daily intake of coca leaves.
suffering by providing vigor. “Because God put it in this land more than in other lands, it might have been necessary for the locals. God did not create things without a reason and without a particular purpose,” says Juan de Matienzo, a historian of the sixteenth century.
Their relationship with coca is special. It is kept wrapped around their waist, close to their very bodies, inside finely made chuspas or purses. Coca is their source of corporal energy, an intermediary for the communication with the gods of the pre-Inca civilizations of twenty thousand years ago and of the Incas themselves. Chewing coca may not be a conscious political act, but it is a constant reification of Taquileño identity, heritage, needs and beliefs. It is also a power source to climb up the very steep hill—820 feet high—from the pier to their houses.
Many self-styled Peruvian cocaleros (former or current coca growers) whom I met before my visit to Lake Titicaca loved sharing passages from chronicles of the conquest and colonial times. Francisco Pizarro, Pedro Cieza de Leon and Huaman Poma de Ayala—the most revered chroniclers—write that during colonial times Spaniards decided to prohibit the chewing of coca by indigenous people. As coca consumption declined, productivity decreased. The Spaniards withdrew the law. This interest in gathering early accounts proves the need by cocaleros and their supporters to defend coca through cultural and historical arguments. The Taquileños may not be as actively political as some cocaleros I met in the Peruvian Andean and Amazonian regions, yet they too celebrate and defend the very nature of coca every time they create a purse and wear it around their bodies; every time they chew coca.
The Taquileño use of coca led me to imagine the way Incas interacted with the plant. Today’s evil leaf used to be a considered the daughter of the deity Pachamama. It was so pure that it was given as an offering to the Inca pantheon: Sun, Mother Earth and the Huacas, or sacred sites. Coca was also offered to the Inca themselves. During the empire, the chasquis, or messengers, chewed coca so as to walk for miles through the rough and high Andean mountains to deliver important messages. Coca was believed to improve memory and relieve human
This coca—the pure, the sacred—has been turned into an evil. Coca is like any other capitalist commodity but illegal, making it more desirable and more profitable. It is produced in Bolivia, Peru and Colombia by laborers who do not—and never will—enjoy the high prices their product brings in the international market. Like coffee, bananas, asparagus and cacao, coca is produced for export in the most fertile areas, satisfying the cravings of the Western capitalist world who want it all, at any social, cultural and economic cost.
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