Bolivia recognizes cocaine production in the country, points to “megalaboratories”

The government of bolivian recognized for the first time in 17 years that the country is becoming a production center for cocaine instead of just being a place of transit and cultivation of coca leaves.

The South American country is, along with Colombia and Peru, widely recognized as one of the world’s largest producers of coca, the raw material for cocaine. However, the Government has long maintained that the production of cocaine ready for consumption was limited.

In a change of tone, the government said this week that it had destroyed a significant number of laboratories in the tropical region of the Chapare, one of the main cultivation areas of Coca leaf and a political stronghold of the leftist ex-president Evo Morales.

“Of the 37 mega laboratories that we have destroyed in 2023 (until August), 27 are located in the municipality of Villa Tunari, Chapare province, that is the area where the cocaine hydrochloride”, said the Minister of Government (Interior), Edward Castilloto journalists in reference to the saline or powdered form of the drug.

“They are trying to make our country no longer a transit country for drugsbut in a drug-producing country,” he added, presenting a map of drug trafficking with raids on 1,804 drug factories since 2020, with the “vast majority” in the Chapare.

The acknowledgment underscores the growing pressure for the government to take action on the drug trade in the country, after being criticized for not addressing the issue. It also reflects tensions between socialist President Luis Arce and the ruling MAS party of Morales, a former cocalero union leader from the Chapare.

“In these 17 years, the MAS governments have insisted that in Bolivia there was only the phenomenon of transit of Peruvian coca to other places (…), but at the same time bolivian it has managed to transition from basic pasta to hydrochloride,” Bolivian economist and expert on drug trafficking issues Carlos Toranzo told Reuters.

Behind the change in rhetoric, he added, there are growing tensions in the MAS party over who will lead the elections to be held in two years: Arce or Morales.

“What’s in between? The (presidential) candidacy for 2025, each one wants to get the other out of the game,” Toranzo said. “In Bolivia we are experiencing a dispute between two factions of the MAS, one that points to the other (saying) that they are protectors of drug trafficking,” he concluded.

(With information from Reuters)