Death Road: Road to gold & Cocoa?
A drive down Bolivia's infamous "Road of Death" will transport you to another world. That world was filled with passion, misunderstanding and controversy over coca (the plant used to make cocaine) and gold for centuries.
After crossing the 4,800m Cumbre Pass, my vehicle was engulfed in a swirling fog cloud. Inside the vehicle we felt an eerie silence, as if trapped in a bubble. This was the best experience we had on the Death Road trip.
64 km from the high Andes mountain town of La Paz to the tropical regions beyond the Yungas valleys and Amazonian lowlands. The Yungas Road has a steep descent of 3,500m. The highway, which was only 3 meters wide, had sharp turns and dangerous bends. Small waterfalls splashed against the nearby rock. Roadside temples were widely seen there.
The highway, built by Paraguay's POWs following the devastating Chaco war of 1932 to 1935, lost many lives in road accidents in the 1990s. The Inter-American Development bank lists this road as "the world's most dangerous road". The vehicle we were traveling in was moving slowly. Looking out the window I could see a steep 1,000m valley. A two-wheeler sped past us in the opposite direction.
Before that, the trio on a bicycle cautiously crossed a ditch. Although the bypass is built around a very dangerous area, the road's brutal reputation has made it a tourist attraction, drawing a lot of curious travelers.
This trail is also a gateway to an overlooked area. The Yungas region is a rich and biodiverse region between the Andes and the Amazon. The Yungas is also an area closely associated with gold and coca, two resources that have caused passion, misunderstanding and controversy.
After a two-hour drive down Death Road, we entered the town of Coroigo, once a gold-mining center. Now it is a faded tourist town.
It was hard to leave the place, with pleasant weather, rolling hills and pleasant places to eat and sleep. After a day of rest due to trip cancellations, I ventured into the surrounding countryside to learn about how the region helped shape modern Bolivia. The fertile soil and abundant rainfall made the Yunga, which runs along the eastern slopes of the Andes, an agricultural center. The region was also a grain production center for earlier empires such as the Inca and Tiwanaku.
As I hiked along the centuries-old trail towards the Rio Coroico, I saw plantations of coffee, bananas, cassava, guava, papaya, and citrus. Coca, a shrub with slender branches, ovate leaves and red fruits, was also cultivated. For thousands of years, coca has been an important part of South American cultures. With hundreds of square kilometers of coca cultivation, bolivia is the largest producer of coca on the South American continent. Two-thirds of them are produced in the Yungas.
The Spanish initially viewed coca as an evil substance. But after realizing the benefits it would bring to the indigenous people working in the mines and plantations, the colonial authorities changed their minds and commercialized the coca crop. Since then, interest in coca has spread beyond the South American continent.
As demand for cocaine rebounded in the 1980s, the US-led 'War on Drugs' devastated the Chapare region, Bolivia's major cocoa-producing region. These operations culminated in large-scale human rights violations, killings, torture, arbitrary arrests and detentions, assaults and robberies.
This helped fuel the rise of Evo Morales, president of the six confederations of Cochabamba Tropics, the union representing coca farmers.
Sociologist and historian Silvia Rivera Gucicanqui says that coca farmers played a key role in the 1999-2000 protests against the privatization of the municipal water supply company in the city of Cochabamba.
The struggle also led to Morales' political rise. Morales became president of bolivia after winning the 2005 election. Morales, an Aymara, was the first indigenous president of the Americas.
Today, coca is considered a sacred plant by many Bolivians. A third of its population continues to use coca. Thomas Grisaffi, author of the book 'Coca No Cocaine', says that coca has been adopted by most sectors, regions and ethnicities, and that taking coca is considered a national custom, much like the british drinking tea.
Eventually, I reached the Coroigo River, symbol of Yungas' gold wealth. Its waterways, known as the Golden Route, extend to the neighboring amazon, totaling 350 km. Although these river, stream, and creek beds proved rich in gold deposits, they never produced enough to satisfy the demand of the invaders.
Beyond all these stories, a gold rush has been going on in the Yungas and the Bolivian amazon since the 2007-2008 global financial crisis sent gold prices skyrocketing. Many of the mines there are illegal, according to a 2018 report by the amazon Socio-Environmental Geo-Information Project, a coalition of civil society organizations. Also, the areas are associated with deforestation, siltation of waterways and organized crime. But there was little sign of this in Koroiko.
