Facing the unrelenting use of their sacred leaf by the Andean peoples, the con-quistadors then used it to better exploit them as beasts of burden in mines and fields.
In the 20th century, the United States - invoking the United Nations concern with drug abuse, and based on discriminatory scientific fabrications alleging it was coca that had turned the Andean man into a beast - had all the nation-states in the world sign the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs. The document, amongst other things, made coca use a crime and demanded that the Andean peoples abandon it within 25 years from the date its provisions went into effect. As the Andeans continued to chew coca after that period elapsed, the U.S. used a coca smoking epidemic, in the form of crack, as an excuse to start a War on Drugs, sending police and military forces to eradicate coca fields, terrorizing the Andean peoples to this day.
This continued colonizing stand is not surprising from those who build their happiness over the capitalization of their fellowmen. What is truly a scandal is that the same United Nations that issued the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights – to guarantee, among others, the right to religious freedom, including a person’s freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance - should be the one to authorize, shortly after, a shameful convention that systematically violates the right to religious freedom of the Andean peoples. That, in spite of the principles stated in article 28 of the 1948 document, which literally expounds: Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized. In other words, that every Aymara, Quechua and every individual, independently of ethnic origin, has the right to the free use of the coca leaf, if that is his or her wish, wherever that person may be.
Ever since that fateful day in 1532, the Andean people have seen white men come by with books proclaiming the superiority of their creeds in one hand while, with the other, they clutched a stick to thrash the Indian who would not bow to that reality. Now that Mama Coca has led her people to sovereign power, placing the stick in their hands, the time has come for Europeans and their American breed to take out the leaf from their sacrilegious list, respect their own word in the UN Carta Magna, respect the sacred leaf, and respect the Andean peoples and their freedom of religion.
“¡Causachun coca!” “Long live coca!”
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