The Cato Accord: Bolivia’s Humane and Effective Approach to Controlling Coca Cultivation

In 2006 President Morales made a radical break with the US-backed antidrug strategy, which focused on the forced eradication of coca leaf and the criminalization of coca growers. The new policy, often referred to as ‘coca yes cocaine no,’ draws on the coca growers’ own distinction between coca leaf (which has been consumed by Indigenous Andeans for millennia) and cocaine, the illicit drug. The strategy legalized the cultivation of a small amount of coca leaf in specific zones, encouraged the coca unions to self-police to ensure growers do not exceed this limit, and envisions the industrialization and export of coca based products. The overriding aim of the policy is to reduce harms to coca grower communities. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the Chapare, one of Bolivia’s two main coca growing regions, this chapter explains how this new policy has been operationalized and demonstrates how coca farmers have made significant sacrifices to implement the new viable, less damaging alterative to the forced eradication of coca crops.