Photo credit: Daniel Fallshaw
“We chew it and we use it as coffee; it’s a stimulant actually – it’s a very good stimulant, better than coffee because you don’t get a buzz after,” indigenous Latina filmmaker Violeta Ayala told Hollywood on the Potomac while putting a human face on the vicious cycle of life in and outside the notorious San Sebastian Prison in Bolivia. “That’s how people use it traditionally, you chew the coca leaves. I always said there is a world of possibilities that haven’t been explored. Coca Cola is the biggest exporter of coca leaves in the world. They still export tons and tons of coca leaves for the flavor of Coca Cola. Today all the anesthetics are done through synthetic means, but the environmental impact is very big. If they use a coca leaf, it would be a lot less. The coca leaf is just a plant. I always do this analogy that the relationship between the coca leaf and cocaine is the same relationship as grapes and wine.”
COCAINE PRISON begins in Bolivia’s notorious San Sebastian prison, a virtual citadel inside a crumbling old colonial house and follows the interlinked lives of Hernan, a drug mule who dreams of being a drug boss, his younger sister, Daisy, who struggles to escape the lure to traffic cocaine and Hernan’s friend, Mario, a cocaine worker fighting for freedom. In a country where the cocaine trade isn’t ruled by violence, these three small fish dispel the gun toting Narco myth and put into perspective the drug war and the lives of the ‘disposable’ people. From inside one of Bolivia’s notorious prisons, a cocaine worker, a drug mule, and his little sister question the world’s relationship with cocaine. The film’s DC premiere was held at The US Naval Memorial as part of the Double Exposure Investigative Film Festival.
Violeta Ayala
“I wanted to tell the story from what I understood and saw from the side that I was familiar with. I always think that there is this very big glamorization of the word drugs in the sense of Pablo Escobar and Narcos and they always show us as people from south of the border – Mexicans and Latin Americans as people with no feelings, no family, they don’t care, they don’t care about their lives. Even in Narcos the white guy is the hero and I was a little bit sick of it and I wanted to show a different story, a story that is more familiar to me, more real, that’s how it works. Because the price of the coca leaf is a set price, in global terms it’s very cheap but in local terms it’s a lot of money so it’s a very profitable crop. It’s all about the demand. Usually the coca growers don’t make cocaine, they sell it to people who make cocaine. It’s very interesting because it’s not like one guy makes it and then the drugs arrive here. One guy grows a coca leaf, another one picks the coca leaf, another one mixes the coca leaf with some acid, the next one mixes it with another and that’s how it goes. It’s a long chain before it even gets outside of the country,” Violeta explained.
Hernan and Mario
Inside the prison: “They sleep on the floor and they sleep outside. That’s how it works because what happens is that the complexity of the situation has to do with the criminalization of drugs and the illegality of the world drugs. Hernan and Daisy wanted to have a band; he didn’t need money to eat. Hernan is a teenager who simply wanted to have a band with his sister. The father didn’t want to give them money to buy a guitar because they have zero talent. The father bought a house for them in the outskirts of the city, but it’s their house, they own that house, they own that piece of land so they could go to school. Of course, the same father wouldn’t buy a guitar or a drum set because you have to prioritize when you have children. Mario was different. Mario wanted to feed his children.”
Mario gets handcuffed outside the court house
“The prison was crazy, it’s a result of this.,” said Violeta. “The prison was built only for like 70 people, but because there are so many prisoners it now has grown and is overgrown and there’s so many people there and the police cannot control them, there is not enough space. It’s not even called a prison, it’s called a rehabilitation center. They do have all sorts of criminals but they don’t have the hardcore criminals, how can I say, the very dangerous ones. It is still a prison and it is very, very crowded and noisy and in that sense it’s horrible because when people come out, the only thing they want is they wanted peace, they wanted silence. They have no privacy and that’s maybe exactly the opposite of a prison in Australia or here in the U.S.: however, still an oppressive, horrible space where you have no possibilities. Yes, families can go but children living in prison, I don’t think it’s a good idea anywhere. I hear a lot of horrible things that happen to children inside of prison.”
Violeta went on to describe what happens to the prisoners and who represents them. The basic line is that “if they catch you and you say I am guilty, you have a short trial and you can get pardoned eventually like Hernan. But if you don’t like Mario, and you don’t want to accept that you’re guilty, you go through this really long process and you can stay in prison for years and years and years before you even have a trial because the whole system is collapsing, the whole legal system it’s rotting away with corruption and delays.”
En fin: “This is an elephant in the room in Bolivia. I hope the film allows us to have a discussion and allows us to talk and to challenge our own views and to help us to find a different approach to this rather than being violent or punitive about it, looking at a different way out. However, I am not very optimistic because there is a law that’s in parliament that actually wants to punish them more. Before President Morales we had a big issue with the DEA and the American corporation in Bolivia that was killing farmers and they stopped that and I am very thankful and I think that was the best policy that Morales did. Yet, he hasn’t challenged the system, he hasn’t changed laws to protect the people, what he’s done is just put a band-aid on it, but the problem is still there.”
