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Book launch: 'Coca Yes, Cocaine No: How Bolivia's Coca Growers Reshaped Democracy'
13 March 2019, 5:00 pm–8:00 pm
This event is free.
Event Information
Open to
- All
Availability
- Yes
Cost
- Free
Organiser
-
Daisy Voake
Location
-
103Institute of the Americas51 Gordon SquareLondonWC1H 0PNUnited Kingdom
In Coca Yes, Cocaine No Thomas Grisaffi traces the political ascent and transformation of the Movement toward Socialism (MAS) from an agricultural union of coca growers into Bolivia's ruling party. When Evo Morales—leader of the MAS—became Bolivia's president in 2006, coca growers celebrated his election and the possibility of scaling up their form of grassroots democracy to the national level. Drawing on a decade of ethnographic fieldwork with coca union leaders, peasant farmers, drug traffickers, and politicians, Grisaffi outlines the tension that Morales faced between the realities of international politics and his constituents, who, even if their coca is grown for ritual or medicinal purposes, are implicated in the cocaine trade and criminalized under the U.S.-led drug war. Grisaffi shows how Morales's failure to meet his constituents' demands demonstrates that the full realization of alternative democratic models at the local or national level is constrained or enabled by global political and economic circumstances.
About the Speakers
Thomas Grisaffi
Lecturer in the department of Geography and Environmental Science at University of Reading
Sian Lazar
Reader in Social Anthropology at University of Cambridge
She is the author of El Alto, Rebel City: Self and Citizenship in Andean Bolivia (2008) and The Social Life of Politics: Ethics, Kinship, and Union Activism in Argentina (2017).
Andrew Canessa
Professor of Anthropology at University of Essex
He is the author of Intimate Indigeneities: Race, Sex, and History in the Small Spaces of Andean Life (2012)