Why Is the Drug Trade Not Violent? Cocaine Production and the Embedded Economy in the Chapare, Bolivia

Abstract

Bolivia is a centre for drug production and trafficking and yet it experiences far less drug‐related violence than other countries in Latin America that form part of cocaine's commodity chain. Drawing upon more than three years of ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2005 and 2019, this article presents evidence from the Chapare, a coca‐growing and drug processing region in central Bolivia, to consider why this is the case. Building from the literature on embedded economies and the subsistence ethic of peasant communities, the article demonstrates that the drug trade is part of a local moral order that prioritizes kinship, reciprocal relations and community well‐being, facilitated by the cultural significance of the coca leaf. This has served to limit possibilities for the violence that is often associated with drug production and trafficking. In addition, coca grower agricultural unions act as a parallel form of governance, providing a framework for the peaceful resolution of disputes and working actively to exclude the state and criminal actors.

On Their Own Terms: How Cocalera Organizing Expanded Indigenous Women’s Rights in Bolivia

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Anthropology of Policy: Tensions, Temporalities, Possibilities

“…In addition to the general drug policy reform recommendations presented in the concluding chapter of Righteous Dopefiend (Bourgois & Schonberg 2009), an ethnography of homeless drug users, medical anthropologist Philippe Bourgois has published extensively in public health journals, including an article (Bourgois 2002) arguing that ethnographic methods can produce critical insights into public health questions addressing specific policy concerns. Grisaffi (2014Grisaffi ( , 2019 has published his findings as an academic ethnography examining the political culture of coca farmers in Bolivia as well as in a policy brief published in coordination with an advocacy nongovernmental organization based in Cochabamba directed toward debates over cocaine paste production. Some funders and disciplinary associations are now encouraging or even requiring that research have a public impact such as influencing policy making.…”