Contexts - The Rough Guide to Bolivia - page 475

on the direction of the country's development, new political forces were increasingly making
themselves heard.
THE COCAINE ECONOMY
Starting inthe1970sinresponse torisingdemand for cocaine intheUS,highland migrants
in the Yungas and in the Chapare had begun growing coca , which was then processed in
secret laboratories in the Beni and flown to Colombia and on to the US. By the 1980s, coca
was a boom industry, generating good incomes for the peasant growers (whose numbers
were swelled by thousands of laid-off miners after 1985) and huge fortunes for the traffick-
ers. Much of the money made was reinvested in legitimate businesses in Santa Cruz , fuel-
ling economic growth in the Eastern Lowlands - at the peak of the boom, cocaine exports
were estimated to exceed all Bolivia's legal exports combined, and at one stage the leading
Bolivian cocaine baron, Roberto Suárez , even offered to pay off the entire national debt
in return for immunity from prosecution.
A New Revolution
Under pressure from the US, Banzer made the eradication of coca production a key policy
- a particular irony given the known links of most of his government to drug traffickers.
However, sending the army in to destroy coca crops in the Chapare provoked massive resist-
ance from well-organized campesino syndicates, led by the radical indigenous activist Evo
Morales . Meanwhile, on the Altiplano, a new generation of radical leaders was using the
powerful national peasants union, the CSUTCB , to press for the complete transformation of
Bolivian society to meet the needs of the indigenous majority. And in Cochabamba in 2000,
the sale of the city water company into foreign ownership provoked a spontaneous non-viol-
ent popular uprising that became known as the Guerra del Agua - “the Water War”.
Banzer responded to this rising tide of popular discontent by sending in the troops to clear
the roads and crush the protests. Unrest continued to escalate when Goni returned as pres-
ident in 2002, after a narrow election victory over Evo Morales. Peasants, miners and civic
groups united around the demand for the re-nationalization of Bolivia's massive natural gas
reserves, by now the mainstay of the economy. The widespread belief was that, as with sil-
ver and tin, Bolivia's richest natural resource was being exported unrefined with little benefit
to the majority population. Tumultuous protests paralyzed the country, with the people of El
Alto playing a key role in cutting off La Paz. After armed forces failed to quell the unrest,
Goni fled into exile in 2003, leaving his vice-president, Carlos Mesa , to manage the crisis.
Mesa held a referendum on the gas issue but refused to implement full nationalization and
was himself forced to resign after mass demonstrations in 2005.