Coca Yes, Cocaine No: How Bolivia's Coca Growers Reshaped Democracy.

• Author: Sierra, Luis M.

Grisaffi, Thomas. Coca Yes, Cocaine No: How Bolivia's Coca Growers Reshaped Democracy. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019.

Thomas Grisaffi's ethnography Coca Yes, Cocaine No: How Bolivia's Coca Growers Reshaped Democracy explores how Bolivia's Chapare coca growers' unions and their six federations founded the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) political party. Grisaffi explains how once in power, the very mechanisms that made the federations formidable actors, and that made the MAS a powerful political party, also made them incapable of scaling up their form of grassroots democracy. Grisaffi builds a multilayered history of the unions. In addition, he ably illustrates how globalization and US foreign policy constrained the MAS in its goal of decriminalizing coca and distinguishing it from cocaine. These constraints echoed those the party faced within Bolivia.

Coca Yes, Cocaine No examines the tension inherent in how the sindicatos (base-level unions), the MAS, and institutional power operated during a crucial period in Bolivia's recent past. The sindicatos believed leaders would "lead by obeying," which allegedly meant...