Paper Short Abstract:

This paper examines the shifting moral economies of the cocaine trade in Bolivia, with a focus on what happens when deals go wrong. We learn how debt is used to structure the entire supply chain creating both stability and threat.

Paper Abstract:

In Bolivia’s lowland Chapare region, much of the population grows, dries, and sells coca leaf, and some directly work processing refined cocaine for export. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork this paper examines the shifting moral economies of the drug trade, with a focus on what happens when deals go wrong. We follow the story of Charles, a peasant coca farmer who, over the past ten years, has become increasingly involved in the illicit drug trade, first as a manual labourer processing cocaine and later as a confidant and enforcer for a local drug boss and his Colombian paymasters. Through Charles’s story we learn how debt is used to structure the entire supply chain creating both stability and threat. First, we hear how Charles was forced to become indebted as a supplier of the raw material for the refinery and then how he in turn now works for the drug boss to reclaim unpaid debts from others. The paper explores how threats of violence are used to intimidate parties into signing contracts to repay debts incurred in the drug industry which are then reimagined as loans – that are legally enforceable. In telling this story the chapter highlights the deep entanglement between agricultural unions, local politicians, and the police in supporting the mercurial drug trade and sheds new light on debt and extortion practices that exist at the very boundary between legality and illegality.