The Cocalero was born into a Quechua speaking family in the arid, rural valleys of Cochabamba, Bolivia. At the age of 15, his father left his mother, with 10 children, for another woman. Out of sheer necessity, his mother forced him to drop out of school to work full time in family agriculture. Besides, his small community didn’t have a high school, and the cost of sending him to a town nearby was too heavy a burden to bear.

So the cocalero, heartbroken, abandoned his dreams, dropped out of school, and became a full-time farmer, cultivating maize, onions, tomatoes, legumes, and a host of other temperate crops. His temperament and sense of humor made him somewhat of a black sheep in the family, and his brothers and sisters teased him incessantly.

Four generations after the Agrarian Reform, land and water rights had been divided into increasingly smaller fractions. The cocalero observed his older brother’s and sister’s, now with their own families, struggling to make a living with only half a hectare of arable land and 20 minutes of irrigation per week. After centuries of deforestation and hillside cultivation, a desert landscape was slowly replacing the fertile agricultural valley.

It didn’t take long for a friend to convince him to migrate. One day, in the middle of the night, he packed his bags and left home, without telling his mother or his family. He went to the Chapare, the tropical area of Cochabamba notorious for illicit coca production.

In those early days, he was in wonder of the lush vegetation, the abundant, year-round rainfall, and the seemingly limitless supply of arable land. His work ethic allowed him to adapt quickly, and he planted citrus, yucca, banana, and, of course, coca. The cocalero prospered.

After a year, he returned home, begging his mother to come with him, asking if he could bring his younger brothers and sisters to his newfound paradise. His mother, aging and stubborn, refused. The cocalero returned to the Chapare, and continued to work hard.

Politically, he became radicalized by the sindicalist movement to rid the Chapare of the US led initiative to eradicate coca from the region. He began to chew the sacred leaf voraciously, swearing that it was impossible to rid Bolivia of coca, and observing his neighbors as they went ever deeper into the mountains to hide their coca plantations from the state-sponsored goons that, every so often, would come into their community to dig up and burn the illicit coca plants.

As the years passed, the temptation became ever greater. Yes, growing coca was lucrative, but processing it was the equivalent of Bolivian alchemy: it turned lead into gold. He didn’t have to travel far to learn the tricks of the trade. His friends and neighbors taught him the process: take a whole bunch of green coca leaves, mash them up into a soupy mixture, mix it with a whole bunch of chemicals, and wallah!: white gold.

Now the cocalero is, by rural Bolivian standards, wealthy. He has three cars, nice clothes, many hectares of land, and a pretty wife, and he isn’t even 21 years old. He knows, and all of his neighbors know, that all of the USAID funded alternative development projects in the world would never have given him such a handsome return on his investment.

The cocalero has reached the point of no-return: from a 15 year old boy, impressionable and desirous of knowledge, to the tragic victim of circumstance forced to abandon his dreams and his family, he has now become the cocalero, addicted to easy money and trapped in the high-stakes game of illicit coca production.