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Comment by spikels | Hacker News Reader

How did expelling the DEA help? I can understand that the DEA would be ineffective but why would they be counter productive?

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The DEA are confrontational, destructive and foreign. They're the colonial police looking out for America's interest, not Bolivia's. This means they're going to be widely hated, even by people who might otherwise support their aims. So hated, in fact, that a political movement started against them and got elected: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movement_for_Socialism_%28Boli...

The coca reduction that's actually happening is based on replacing coca growing with other forms of agriculture in cooperation with the farmers.

Coca leaf is unlikely to be eliminated entirely as it's an effective traditional medication for dealing with altitude sickness (much of Bolivia is at high altitude, including La Paz at 13400ft). So again Bolivians are never going to support its 100% eradication.

The exported product is purified cocaine hydrochloride, not the leaf.

Having spent a fair bit of time in Peru and Bolivia, I am 100% convinced that consumers of cocaine, in the form of an illicit street drug, are missing the majority of the experience of consuming the Coca leaf as it's consumed locally. Unfortunately I simply lack the vocabulary describe what exactly is missing and how the experience of chewing the Coca leaf is superior... but I've personally found the difference to be profound.

My experiences traveling through the region have convinced me that attempts to eradicate the coca plant and practice of chewing coca leaves are fundamentally misguided and unethical.

Cocaine is problem primarily in the advanced capitalist economies and it is solely within these nations where those problems can be solved... though it's obvious to anyone who is being intellectually honest that the strategies of the DEA and the drug war are abysmal failures and so must be either substantially reformed or abandoned altogether.

I don't think one needs to have traveled through the region to consider unethical the attempts to stifle a nation's old tradition that isn't hurting anyone. It's throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

>Cocaine is problem primarily in the advanced capitalist economies and it is solely within these nations where those problems can be solved..

Travel through the poor neighbourhoods Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Argentina, Brazil etc and say cocaine (or by-products of the cocaine process) are not a problem.

>and it is solely within these nations where those problems can be solved

The only solution is legalisation of all drugs. Producter countries such as Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Laos, Burma will have billions added to the government funds to help lift 1000s if not millions of people out of poverty. Transport countries such as El Salavador, Honduras, Mexico will cut of instantly 99% of profits to the drug gangs. Users will stop dying from tainted products, or using "research chemicals" instead of the real thing.

Negatives? from what has been seen in Holland and the decriminalisation of cannabis and Portagal, none

Similar to the difference between drinking a cup of (regular black) tea and consuming a small amount of powdered caffeine?

The article insinuates that the DEA branch was accused of conspiracy and espionage - other articles seem to imply that the President at least believed that the DEA was following him around and spying on his romantic life, as well as implying that the US DEA branch attempted to contract killers to hit Bolivian gov't officials.

I can't imagine that the grounding of the President's plane under suspicions of housing Snowden warmed him up, either.