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Green Gold, Green Hell: Coca, Caste, and Class in the Chaco War, 1932–1935

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 April 2020

Andrew Ehrinpreis
Andrew Ehrinpreis*
Affiliation:
Queens College, City University of New York, Flushing, New Yorkae2377@columbia.edu
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Abstract

This article investigates the use of coca by the Bolivian Army during the Chaco War of 1932–35. I present research that reveals the surprising extent to which the Bolivian Army provisioned coca to its soldiers as a substitute for adequate nutrition; as a morale booster; as a stimulant; and as a medicine. The article explores the social and cultural implications of mass coca consumption by Bolivian soldiers, many of whom were mestizos who had never before chewed the leaf. Ultimately, I argue that the pervasiveness of coca within the traumatic popular experience of the Chaco War sowed the seeds of a historic transformation of the politics of coca in Bolivia. The Chaco War initiated a process by which coca in Bolivia was transformed from a neo-colonial marker of the Indian caste to a material and symbolic element of an emergent interethnic working class. Through a comparative analysis of the Bolivian army's use of coca in the Chaco War with the German army's use of methamphetamine during World War II, this article concludes with a consideration of the ways in which the present case study expands our understanding of the crucial but under-studied historical relationship between drugs and warfare.

Keywords

CocaChaco WarBoliviaDrugs and WarMilitary Social History
Type
Article
Information
The Americas , Volume 77 , Issue 2 , April 2020 , pp. 217 - 245
Copyright
Copyright © Academy of American Franciscan History 2020

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Footnotes

I thank Brooke Larson, Paul Gootenberg, Sinclair Thompson, Eric Zolov, and the anonymous readers at The Americas for their comments on this article. I am also grateful to Luis Oporto Ordóñez, director of the Biblioteca y Archivo Histórico de la Asamblea Legislativa Plurinacional de Bolivia, and Elizabeth Shesko for their research suggestions on this topic. I also thank Mark Rice and other participants in the New York City Latin American History workshop for their comments on an earlier version of this article. Special thanks to the staffs of the Consejo Supremo de Defensa del Estado Plurinacional (COSDEP); the Archivo de La Paz; the Archivo y Biblioteca Nacionales de Bolivia; and the US National Archives for providing me access to their archives. I also thank the Instituto de Estudios Bolivianos in La Paz for providing me with a base of logistical support as I conducted the research for this article. This research was made possible by funding from the International Dissertation Research Fellowship and Drugs, Security, and Democracy programs of the Social Science Research Council; and Stony Brook University.

References

1. Testimonio of Eusebio Condoi, in Pano Condori, Germán Carlos, La coca no es blanca (La Paz: Ministerio de Culturas y Turismo, 2013), 66Google Scholar.

2. So as not to lose sight of the indigenous Andean origins of coca chewing, I refer to the practice as pijchu.

3. The classic ethnographic portrait of Andean coca culture as essential to indigenous identity remains Catherine Allen's monograph. Allen, Catherine J., The Hold Life Has: Coca and Cultural Identity in an Andean Community (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988)Google Scholar. See also Spedding, Alison L., “The Coca Field As a Total Social Fact,” in Coca, Cocaine, and the Bolivian Reality, Léons, M. B. and Sanabria, H., eds. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

4. Evo Morales, Bolivia's first indigenous president, has noted that Bolivian coca culture “encompasses the mestizo population.” Evo Morales Ayma, “Let Me Chew My Coca Leaves,” New York Times, March 13, 2009, A21. Anthropologist Thomas Grisaffi has explored ethnic hybridity and class identities within the culture of coca growers in the Chapare. Grisaffi, Thomas, “We Are Originarios . . . ‘We Just Aren't From Here’: Coca Leaf and Identity Politics in the Chapare, Bolivia,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 29:4 (2010): 425–439CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5. For classic accounts of the national political impact in Bolivia of the Chaco War, see Klein, Herbert S., Parties and Political Change in Bolivia, 1880–1952 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 189–198Google Scholar; and Malloy, James M., Bolivia: The Uncompleted Revolution (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1970), 74–77Google Scholar.

6. Aguirre, René Danilo Arze, Guerra y conflictos sociales: el caso rural boliviano durante la campaña del Chaco (La Paz: Ceres, 1987), 1Google Scholar.

7. Arze Aguirre, Guerra y conflictos sociales.

8. See Klein, Parties and Political Change, 189 ff., and Malloy, Bolivia: The Uncompleted Revolution, 79–81.

9. See for example Arze Aguirre, Guerra y conflictos sociales; and Elizabeth Shesko, “Conscript Nation: Negotiating Authority and Belonging in the Bolivian Barracks, 1900–1950” (PhD diss., Duke University, 2012).

10. Statement of M. Pinto-Escalier, “Preliminary Discussion on the Basis of Series of Measures Adopted by the Advisory Committee on the Traffic in Opium and Other Dangerous Drugs.” Opium Advisory Committee (OAC), League of Nations documents C.760.M.260.1924.XI, 63. It should be kept in mind that in early twentieth-century Bolivia the ethnic categories of “Indian,” “half-caste” (Pinto-Escalier's English translation of mestizo), and even “white” were contested, unstable, and at times a function of the observer's social position. The mestizo category, encompassing a wide swath of Bolivia's population, was particularly ambiguous. As a political and cultural concept, mestizaje was frequently disparaged in the early twentieth century by Bolivian Liberals, such as luminaries Alcides Arguedas, Bautista Saavedra, and Manuel Rigoberto Paredes, who viewed mestizos as a corrupting influence on the indigenous laboring caste. See Brooke Larson, “Redeemed Indians, Barbarized Cholos: Crafting Neolcolonial Modernity in Liberal Bolivia,” in Political Cultures in the Andes, 1750–1950, Nils Jacobsen and Cristóbal Aljovín de Losada, eds. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005). Yet, there was nuance to elite views on the question of mestizaje. Javier Sanjines has argued compellingly that pre-Chaco War liberals conceived of ethnic mixture as divided into two distinct subcategories: mestizos and cholos, the former referring to Hispanicized mixed-race people and the latter to “Indianized” urban mixed-race people “who follow indigenous cultural norms.” C., Javier Sanjines, Mestizaje Upside-Down: Aesthetic Politics in Modern Bolivia (Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004), 194–195Google Scholar n5. The general acceptance of the former—and denigration of the latter—by politically and economically dominant criollos has led some scholars of Bolivian culture to view creoles and Hispanicized mestizos as a unified group: the mestizo-criollo. Sanjines, Mestizaje Upside-Down, 24. While the practice of pijchu was not limited to rural indigenous communities, it would have marked the chewer as either an Indian or a cholo, as opposed to a criollo or criolloized (Westernized) mestizo.

11. See Larson, “Redeemed Indians, Barbarized Cholos.”

12. For deeply researched treatments of the role of coca commerce in early twentieth-century Bolivia's elite-dominated export economy, see Maria Luisa Soux, La coca liberal : producción y circulación a principios del siglo XX (La Paz: Misión de Cooperación Técnica Holandesa : Centro de Información para el Desarrollo, 1993); and Solange Leonor Zalles Cuestas, Los caminos del poder local en Yungas: coca, vialidad y fiscalidad (1932–1952), (Sucre: Archivo y Biblioteca Nacionales de Bolivia, 2011).

13. I place the term “national” in quotation marks to reflect the very limited conception of nation espoused by Liberal elites, in which the vast majority of Bolivia's population were excluded from citizenship.

14. In the eyes of a number of Bolivia's Liberal intellectual and political luminaries, such as Manuel Rigoberto Paredes and Alcides Arguedas, coca culture was fundamental to fortifying the Indian “race” as a laboring caste. See Arguedas, Alcides, Pueblo enfermo (La Paz: Anthropos, 1910), 38Google Scholar; and Arguedas, Alcides, Raza de bronce (Barcelona: Red Ediciones S. L., 2016)Google Scholar [Kindle DX version], 139. For Paredes, Indian coca consumption fortified the desirable elements of Aymara culture and racial characteristics that were worthy of preservation. Among these were stamina and dietary frugality. Paredes, Manuel Rigoberto, “Supersticiones, mitos y costumbres supersticiosas,” Boletin de la Sociedad Geográfica de La Paz 17:48 (1919): 6Google Scholar.

15. Bolivia's 1932 ratification of the International Opium Convention of 1925, United Nations, Multilateral Treaties Deposited with the Secretary-General, vol. 1, part 1, chapts. 1–11 (New York: United Nations Publications, 2002), 372.

16. Carlos Rodríguez Cortez in discussion with the author, May 2016. These and other oral histories of Chaco War veterans are analyzed in more detail later in this article.

17. Malloy, Bolivia: The Uncompleted Revolution, 69.

18. Malloy, Bolivia: The Uncompleted Revolution, 70.

19. Malloy, Bolivia: The Uncompleted Revolution, 71.

20. Klein, Parties and Political Change, 111.

21. Malloy, Bolivia: The Uncompleted Revolution, 71–72.

22. Fernández, Nicanor, La coca boliviana: maravillosa propiedades y cualidades de la coca, opiniones de prestigiosos médicos y naturalistas acerca de la planta sagrada de los Incas del Perú (La Paz: Editorial “America,” 1932)Google Scholar.

23. Fernández, La coca boliviana, 11–12.

24. R. F. Fernald, US Consul, Coca Leaf in Bolivia, April 8, 1933, National Archives [NA], Record Group [RG] 170, Box 54, 5.

25. Fernández, La coca boliviana, 12–13.

26. Fernández, La coca boliviana, 13.

27. Fernald, Coca Leaf in Bolivia.

28. Fernández, La coca boliviana, 12.

29. Délégation de Bolivie to the Société des Nations, No. 39/932, October 29, 1932, Archivo del Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores (AMRE), Delegación de Bolivia ante la Liga de Las Naciones, Delegación Permanente, 1932–1934.

30. Délégation de Bolivie to the Société des Nations, VII.

31. Fernández, La coca boliviana, 14.

32. Fernández, La coca boliviana, 14.

33. In a provocative study, Silvia Rivera has documented the rise of a coca culture among middle-class and elite Argentines in the 1920s, a phenomenon she links to “the urban elite's romantic discovery of the gaucho.” Silvia, Rivera C., “Here, Even Legislators Chew Them,” in Illicit Flows and Criminal Things: States, Borders, and the Other Side of Globalization, William van Schendel and Itty Abraham, eds. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 130–131Google Scholar. Rivera also notes that, as a result of the adoption of the habit by northern Argentine elites, the chewing of coca did not function as an ethnic or racial marker but rather had evolved into “a symbol of regional belonging.” Rivera C., “Here, Even Legislators Chew Them,” 131.

34. Fernández, La coca boliviana, 13.

35. See for example Klein, Herbert, Bolivia: The Evolution of a Multiethnic Society (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 181–185Google Scholar; and Zulawski, Unequal Cures, 56.

36. Arze Aguirre, Guerra y conflictos sociales, 44–45.

37. For a thoughtful treatment of the feudal aspect of Bolivia's conscription for the Chaco War, see Luis Oporto Ordóñez, Uncía y Llallagua: empresa minera capitalista y estrategias de apropiación real del espacio (1900–1935), (La Paz: IFEA, Plural Editores, 2007), 117–135.

38. Arze Aguirre, Guerra y conflictos sociales, 2.

39. Khan, Zoya, “Oscar Cerruto's Aluvión de Fuego: An Incomplete Narrative of the Fragmented Bolivian Nation,” Chasqui: Revista de Literatura Latinoamericana 38:1 (2009): 88Google Scholar.

40. Mercado, René Zavaleta, Lo nacional-popular en Bolivia (Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno, 1986), 261Google Scholar. Arze Aguirre has similarly referred to a “surge of national consciousness” among Chaco war combatants. Arze Aguirre, Guerra y conflictos sociales, 80. Klein asserted, “The war shattered the traditional belief systems and led to a fundamental rethinking of the nature of Bolivian society.” Klein, Herbert, Bolivia: The Evolution of a Multi-Ethnic Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 187Google Scholar.

41. Shesko, “Conscript Nation,” 88.

42. Ann Zulawski, Unequal Cures: Public Health and Political Change in Bolivia, 1900–1950 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 53–54.

43. Mendoza, Jaime, “El macizo de Yungas,” Revista de Agricultura 1:3 (1942): 14Google Scholar.

44. Shesko, Elizabeth, “Mobilizing Manpower for War: Toward a New History of Bolivia's Chaco Conflict, 1932–1935,” Hispanic American Historical Review 95:2 (2015): 318–319CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

45. Fernández, La coca boliviana, 22.

46. Fernández, La coca boliviana, 21(emphasis mine).

47. “Donativos para el ejercito en campana,” El Diario, August 3, 1932, reproduced in Nicanor Fernández, La coca boliviana, 23.

48. “Donativos para el Ejercito en campana,” El Diario, August 3, 1932. Not growers themselves, coca merchants or “brokers” purchased coca leaves wholesale from both large haciendas and Yungueño Indian communities for retail sale, primarily in urban and mining centers.

49. R. F. Fernald, US Consul, “Coca Leaf in Bolivia,” April 8, 1933, US National Archive, RG 170, Box 54.

50. Juan Manuel Balcazar, Historia de la medicina en Bolivia (La Paz: Ediciones “Juventud,” 1956), 530.

51. Shesko, “Conscript Nation,” 240.

52. Shesko, “Conscript Nation,” 3.

53. See for example the bill of sale made out to El Jefe del Reclutamiento Beni, Gral. Federico Román for “7 pounds of coca for 0.80” for a total of “Bs. 5.60,” January 29, 1934, Archivo de La Paz (ALP), Contraloría General de la República, Box 73, file 280, Another bill of sale, Recibos-Planillas de Socorro, November.18, 1932, records the purchase by the army of 12 pounds of coca from vendor Francisco Tito. ALP, Contraloría General de la República, Box 17, file 76.

54. Informe by Tcnl. Rogelio Ayala Moreira, March 30, 1934, ALP, Julio César Valdez Collection, Box 4.

55. See for example the oral history of Chaco War veteran Luis Michel: “P: Did you chew coca during the war?” “L. M.: Yes, the government provided it to the soldiers,” in Arze Aguirre, Guerra y conflictos sociales, 180.

56. Diario de Campana del ExCombatiente Sub-Oficial Dn. Demetrio Oyola Justiniano, Guerra del Chaco, 1932–1935, Santa Cruz, January 1978, courtesy of COSDEP.

57. Emilio Fernández Miranda, “La cocamania en Bolivia,” Primer Congreso Neuropsiquiátrico Latino Americano, Buenos Aires, 1944, 74.

58. Testimonio of Eusebio Condoi, in Germán Carlos Pano Condori, La coca no es blanca (La Paz: Ministerio de Culturas y Turismo, 2013), 66.

59. This undated document is printed on the letterhead of the Estado Plurinacional de Bolivia, which marks it as having been produced in 2009 or later. The document is a fascinating example of continuity between the elite nationalistic pro-cocaism of the early 1930s (which underlay the army's provision of coca to its troops during the Chaco War) and the “popular coca nationalism” of the early twenty-first century that underlies reports such as Cnl. Guido Cuentas Vargas Daen, “La hoja de coca en la Guerra del Chaco”(“The Coca Leaf in the Chaco War”), a government report commissioned by COSDEP, Secretaria General Permanente.

60. Brigadier General Bejarano, Ramón César, Síntesis de la Guerra del Chaco: homenaje al cincuentenario de la Defensa del Chaco Paraguyao (Asunción: Editorial Toledo, 1982), 12Google Scholar.

61. César Bejarano, Síntesis de la Guerra del Chaco.

62. Letter from Isidro Ramírez, no. 56, December 28, 1932 Archivo del Museo Militar del Ministerio de Defensa Nacional, Asunción, Paraguay, courtesy of Elizabeth Shesko.

63. Zulawski, Unequal Cures, 73–74.

64. Zulawski, Unequal Cures, 73–74.

65. “The single most common disease treated in the Villa Montes hospital in 1933 was avitaminosis (1,999 cases), which was technically the lack of certain vitamins, most commonly vitamin C, but actually caused by general, extreme malnutrition. . . . . Avitaminosis was a result of the inability of the army to provision its troops in the field and was exacerbated by Argentina's (unofficial) support for Paraguay, which meant food could not reach the Bolivian Army through Puerto Yrigoyen, an Argentine port on the Pilcomayo River.” Zulawski, Unequal Cures, 62.

66. José Gamarra Z., president of the Coca Producers Corporation and the SPY, to Dr. Tomás Manuel Elio, Minister of State in the Office of Foreign Relations, La Paz, January 14, 1948, US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), NA, RG 170.

67. Miranda, Emilio Fernández, “Vitaminas y Avitaminosis,” in La sanidad boliviana en la campana del Chaco, Melean, Aurelio, Mendoza, Jaime, and Saavedra, Alberto, eds. (Cochabamba: Universidad de Cochabamba, 1938), 315Google Scholar.

68. Andrade, Victor, “El problema de los Seguros Sociales de Bolivia,” Protección Social: Publicación Mensual de la Caja de Seguro y Ahorro Obrero 5:56–57 (1942): 13Google Scholar.

69. Andrade, “El problema de los Seguros Sociales de Bolivia,” 13.

70. Martín Cárdenas, “Psychological Aspects of Coca Chewing,” UNODC, January 1, 1952, retrieved online at https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/data-and-analysis/bulletin/bulletin_1952-01-01_2_page004.html, accessed December 13, 2019.

71. Fernández Miranda, “La cocamania en Bolivia,” 74.

72. Fernández Miranda, “La cocamania en Bolivia.”

73. Fernández Miranda, “La cocamania en Bolivia,” 72.

74. Fernández Miranda, “La cocamania en Bolivia,” 73.

75. Klein notes that the Chaco War had “a profound effect on the civilian white and mestizo intellectuals who were drawn to the front . . . there was born among these men a new sensitivity and a new pattern of expectations. Revealing all the nation's glaring faults, the Chaco War produced the generacion del Chaco.” Klein, Parties and Political Change in Bolivia, 189.

76. Indeed, the depth of Chaco experience was such that, in the view of some contemporary observers, it produced some of the finest and most consequential Latin American literature of the era. Klein, Parties and Political Change in Bolivia, 189–190.

77. Augusto Céspedes, Sangre de mestizos (La Paz: Juventud, 1969), 153–154.

78. Fernández Miranda, “La cocamania en Bolivia,” 61.

79. Fernández Miranda, “La cocamania en Bolivia,” 74.

80. Gosalvez, Raúl Botelho, Coca: motivos del Yunga paceno, novela (Santiago de Chile: Zig-Zag, 1941), 73–74Google Scholar.

81. Desiderio Poquechoque, a campesino from Tarabuco (Chuquisaca), quoted in Arze Aguirre, Guerras y conflictos sociales, 236–238.

82. Carlos Rodríguez in discussion with the author, May 2016.

83. Luis Michel, of Chuquisaca, quoted in Arze Aguirre, Guerras y conflictos sociales, 175–176.

84. Arze Aguirre, Guerras y conflictos sociales, 180. Michel was not asked, nor did he indicate, whether he had ever chewed coca before the Chaco War. However, the fact that he highlights having chewed coca during the war because it was provided by the government strongly suggests that this was his initiation into coca culture.

85. Lara, Jesús, Repete: diario de un hombre que fue a la guerra del Chaco (La Paz: Librería Editorial “G.U.M.”, 1985)Google Scholar.

86. See Klein, Parties and Political Change, 196.

87. Dunkerley, James, Rebellion in the Veins: Political Struggle in Bolivia, 1952–82 (London: Verson, 1984), 51Google Scholar.

88. Lara, Repete, 9.

89. Lara, Repete, 8. Young men from the elite classes were commonly designated as “unfit” for combat, thus immunizing them from service on the front lines.

90. Lara, Repete, 7–8.

91. Lara, Repete, 7–10.

92. Lara, Repete, 134, 19.

93. Lara, Repete, 218–219, 134.

94. Lara, Repete, 134 (emphasis supplied).

95. Lara, Repete, 134.

96. Lara, Repete, 180–181. While Lara makes no mention here of indigenous coca traditions, it bears noting that the sharing of coca leaves has for centuries played an important role in “the small reciprocities of everyday sociality” in highland Andean indigenous communities. Abercrombie, Thomas A., Pathways of Memory and Power (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), 56Google Scholar.

97. Courtwright, David T., Forces of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 16Google Scholar.

98. Important contributions to this literature include Peter Andreas, “Drugs and War: What is the Relationship?” in Annual Review of Political Science, vol. 22, forthcoming, cited with permission of the author; and Killer High: A History of War in Six Drugs, New York: Oxford University Press 2020; Ohler, Norman, Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015)Google Scholar; and Wald, Erica, Vice in the Barracks: Medicine, the Military and the Making of Colonial India, 1780–1868 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

99. Andreas, “Drugs and War: What is the Relationship?”

100. Andreas, “Drugs and War: What is the Relationship?” 7.

101. Ohler, Blitzed, 82.

102. Ohler, Blitzed, 69.

103. Ohler, Blitzed, 71.

104. Ohler documents the Nazi regime's virulent anti-drug campaign, which was integrated into its plan for “racial hygiene”: “Anyone who consumed drugs suffered from a ‘foreign plague.’ Drug dealers were presented as unscrupulous, greedy, or alien; drug use as ‘racially inferior’; and so-called drug crimes as one of the greatest threats to society.” Ohler, Blitzed, 19. The Nazis regarded cocaine, which had been wildly popular in Weimar Berlin as “degenerate poison.” Ohler, Blitzed, 12.

105. Ohler, Blitzed, 8.

106. Ohler, Blitzed, 32.

107. For an extended treatment of resource nationalism in Bolivia, see monograph, Kevin Young'sBlood of the Earth: Resource Nationalism, Revolution, and Empire in Bolivia (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017)Google Scholar.