Creating coca frontiers and cocaleros in Chapare

This chapter traces the development of the Chapare coca and cocaine frontier from 1940 to 1990. It reanalyzes previously published material, information from archives and libraries, and introduces a new source for historical geography of colonization frontiers—Cold War-era Corona space photography. The historical sequence of colonization is revealed. First, the emergence of an embryonic colonization frontier in the late 19^th and early 20^th Centuries with foci in Alto Chipiriri, and the lowlands of the Espiritu Santo and San Mateo rivers. An establishment phase from the late 1930s to the late 1950s when early poles of agrarian colonization in Chapare, mainly populated by internal migrants discontent with working conditions in the mining sector, and peasants who had left their former haciendas after the 1952 Agrarian Revolution. It was at this time Cochabamba became a major source of coca-cocaine influenced strongly by the east coast mafia of the United States. Finally, a phase of persistence before and after the 1970s “cocaine boom” during which time coca cultivation expanded throughout Chapare as an essential agent of growth in agricultural settlements.