New Proof that Coca-Cola Buys Andean Coca Leaves

-------- Original Message -----
January 28, 2005
Please Distribute Widely

Dear Colleague,

Acting Publisher Luis A. Gómez weighs in today on a statement just released by Peru's drug control agency, the National Commission for Development and Life Without Drugs (shortened in Spanish to DEVIDA). The document supports, although timidly, the industrialization of the coca leaf in Peru, a long-sought goal by many in that country as a way to both legitimize this ancient, sacred plant, and to boost the Peruvian economy.

snipped

The DEVIDA statement contains another bombshell: confirmation that the Coca Cola Company, despite repeated denials, does in fact buy coca leaves from both Peru and Bolivia. While small farmers, and even local Peruvian companies trying to incorporate coca leaves into drinks and other products, face constant state harassment and repression, one of the biggest corporations in the world is buying tons of coca, using it in their drinks and lying about it to the world – getting ever-richer off the sacred plant of the Andes, while the people who grow and maintain it suffer for their labor.

Gómez writes, of the DEVIDA document:

"The good part comes in that same point #5. The end of the paragraph reads: 'Coca Cola, the globally recognized soft drink manufacturer, buys 115 tonnes of coca leaf from Peru and 105 tonnes from Bolivia per year, with which it produces, without alkaloids, 500 million bottles of soda per day.' You read correctly, kind readers, Coca Cola buys coca leaves. We have said so ourselves in past reports, and the Peruvian government says the same thing now. And so now we are sure that the 'spark of life' ('La Chispa de la Vida' is Coke's Spanish-language slogan) has coca – in at least 500 million bottles a day. And that process that Nils Ericsson has told us about helped the company earn 13.3 billion dollars in net profit last year, according to their own financial reports.

Read the full report:

http://www.narconews.com

From somewhere in a country called América,

Dan Feder
Managing Editor, Narco News
http://www.narconews.com
webmaster@narconews.com
Narco News is supported by:

The Fund for Authentic Journalism
P.O. Box 71051
Madison Heights, MI 48071 USA
http://www.authenticjournalism.org

The Fund receives online donations at this web page:
http://www.authenticjournalism.org