Trafficking and corruption have been two of the most prominent negative side-effects of the illicit narcotics trade in Bolivia and the country's government has engaged in negotiations with the United States (US) as result of the industry's ramifications.
[2] In addition, farmers turned to coca for its quick economic return, its light weight, its yield of four crops a year, and the abundance of United States dollars available in the trade, a valuable resource in a hyperinflated economy.
[2] The cocaine trade greatly accelerated the predominance of the United States dollar in the economy and the large black market for currency, thereby helping to fuel inflation in the 1980s.
[2] Manufacturers in the Cochabamba area during the 1980s found it impossible to match the wages workers could gain in coca, making their supply of labor unreliable and thus hurting the formal economy.
[4] In the late 1980s, Colombia's Medellín Cartel reportedly wielded considerable power in Bolivia, setting prices for coca paste and cocaine and terrorizing the drug underworld with hired assassins.
[4] Furthermore, drug barons, organized into families, had established their own fiefdoms in Cochabamba, Beni, and Santa Cruz departments, using bribes and assassinations to destroy local authority.
[4] In September 1986, three members of a Bolivian scientific team were slain in the Huanchaca National Park in Santa Cruz Department shortly after their aircraft landed beside a clandestine coca-paste factory.
[4] The murders led to the discovery of the country's largest cocaine-processing installation, as well as evidence of an extensive international drug-trafficking organization consisting mostly of Colombians and Brazilians.
[4] In a related action, suspected traffickers in Santa Cruz murdered an opposition deputy who was a member of the congressional commission that investigated the Huanchaca case.
[4] Bolivians were also concerned about the increasing brazenness of Bolivia's drug traffickers, as demonstrated in August 1988 by a low-power dynamite attack on Secretary of State George P. Shultz's car caravan as it headed to La Paz's Kennedy International Airport.
His main collaborator, Colonel Luis Arce Gómez, was extradited to the United States, where he served a jail sentence for drug trafficking.
[4] After García Meza escaped from custody (he had been living under house arrest in Sucre) and reportedly fled the country in early 1989, the Supreme Court of Justice vowed to try him and two accomplices in absentia.
[4] Bolivians were outraged, for example, by secretly taped "narcovideos" made in 1985 by Roberto Suárez Gómez (known as the "King of Cocaine" in Bolivia until the mid-1980s) and aired on national television in May 1988.
[4] The tapes, provided by a former naval captain cashiered for alleged corruption, showed two prominent politicians from Banzer's Nationalist Democratic Action (Acción Democrática Nacionalista—ADN) and military figures fraternizing with Suárez.
[4] In 1987, according to Department of State and congressional staff, drug traffickers were offering UMOPAR officers and town officials in the Chapare region amounts ranging from US$15,000 to US$25,000 for seventy two hours of "protection" in order to allow aircraft to load and take off from clandestine airstrips.
[4] In February 1988, the deputy minister of national defense announced that about 90 percent of UMOPAR members, including twelve middle- and high-ranking officers, had been dismissed for alleged links to drug trafficking.
[4] The La Paz newspaper Presencia reported in March 1988 that UMOPAR chiefs, including the prosecutors, were working with narcotics traffickers by returning to them the large drug finds and turning only the small ones in to the authorities.
[4] In October 1988, the undersecretary of the Social Defense Secretariat reiterated that drug traffickers had obtained the protection of important sectors of influence in Bolivia, including some military members and ordinary judges.
[4] He cited the example of Cochabamba's Seventh Division commander and four of his top officers, who were discharged dishonorably after they were found to be protecting a clandestine Chapare airstrip used by drug smugglers.
[6] Narcotics traffickers routinely tried to bribe judicial and other officials in exchange for releasing suspected smugglers, returning captured drugs, and purging incriminating files.
[6] A lack of judicial investigatory power hampered the investigation of the bank accounts and the origin of wealth of people suspected of trafficking in drugs.
[6] A total of thirteen Special Narcotics-Control Courts were supposed to be operating by mid-1989, with two in each of the districts of La Paz, Cochabamba, Santa Cruz, and Beni, and only one responsible for the five remaining departments.
[7] According to the Department of State's Bureau of International Narcotics Matters, Bolivia exceeded the voluntary coca reduction target for the September 1987 to August 1988 period, destroying 2,000 hectares, or 200 more than required.
The National Council Against the Unlawful Use and Illicit Trafficking of Drugs (Consejo Nacional Contra el Uso Indebido y Tráfico Ilícito de Drogas—Conalid), presided over by the foreign minister, was charged with drawing up rules and regulations and creating new antidrug-trafficking measures.
[7] Shortly before the new law went into effect, a United States General Accounting Office report criticized Bolivia's methods of fighting drug trafficking.
[7] In October 1988, the Special Antinarcotics Forces captured an alleged drug "godfather," Mario Araoz Morales ("El Chichin"), by chance during a training exercise in a jungle area.
[7] A new National Executive Directorate (Directorio Ejecutivo Nacional—DEN) was to support Copceo's plans and program dealing with alternative development, drug prevention, and coca-crop eradication.
For instance, farmers in Chapare are allowed to grow one cato (1,600 square meters)[13] of coca per year, as part of policy formally introduced in Bolivia in 2004.
Analysts such as Kathryn Ledebur and Colletta Youngers indicate that these successes had emerged from effective coca monitoring, increased economic development, and "social control".
[15] Such improvements in Bolivia's narcotics situation had reportedly drawn attention and led to a slight diplomatic thaw with the United States; the two countries are expected to swap ambassadors.