This book is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the current conjuncture in Bolivian politics. It examines the political context in which Evo Morales became president of Bolivia and how his (and his party's) relationship with his grassroots support base changed during his time in government, and thus unknowingly puts forward some of the factors behind Morales’ removal from office in 2019 after nearly 14 years as president. Published in the last year of Morales’ presidency, the book is unique, as Thomas Grisaffi himself declares in the introduction, as ‘the first full-length monograph about the Chapare coca growers’ unions and their relationship to the MAS [Morales’ Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement toward Socialism) party ]’ (p. 3). The main focus of the book is on understandings of democracy within the coca unions through which Morales rose politically. It is based on around 30 months of fieldwork throughout over a decade with coca growers in the Chapare region of Bolivia. The book is mainly ethnographic, while contextualising the politics and relationship with coca locally using comparative literature. The coca grown in Chapare is widely acknowledged to be overwhelmingly destined for the international cocaine trade, rather than traditional uses. Grisaffi also covers the local uses of coca leaves as mild stimulants that have both medicinal and religious significance in the Andes and have been chewed as part of everyday life in rural communities for centuries. However, he acknowledges that as he came to write this book he could not ignore the relationship between coca growing and the international drug trade, something which he admits international commentators on Bolivia (including, previously, himself) have been guilty of.

Morales came to power in Bolivia declaring that he would ‘lead by obeying’, but Grisaffi shows us how government during his time as president came to be understood as authoritarian, with the change in tone at the micro level set by Morales’ own grassroots supporters, the coca growers themselves. Within the coca unions, because of the rotation of leadership among members and the way that decisions are reached through consensus (involving hours or even days of discussion), there is little distinction between the leadership and ordinary members. All decisions are understood as taken communally, and the actions of the leadership reflect the will of the union membership from the bottom up. The MAS was set up in the 1990s as the coca growers’ political vehicle, with membership of the union and the party overlapping at the local level in Chapare. This is why Grisaffi quotes his informants as telling him shortly after Morales’ election that now ‘all of us are presidents’ (p. 8), believing that in government the coca growers would be able to run the country on the basis of the same bottom-up decision-making characteristic of union governance in Chapare.

On the one hand Grisaffi shows leaders of the coca growers’ unions acting as if they were the state (for example, ordering the army around locally), but for the most part he shows ordinary union members becoming increasingly disaffected with an authoritarianism they saw in the governance by their party, and a disconnect between themselves and the leaders of their own union. Grisaffi argues that the conditions for realising bottom-up government were never possible within the constraints imposed on Morales by the international legal system. Ordinary members felt let down because Morales’ government continued the policy initiated by his predecessor of allowing coca cultivation but restricting the amount that could be grown legally. The coca unions, and Morales himself as president, had fought for acceptance of coca-leaf cultivation, nationally and internally, by highlighting its traditional uses but rejecting its use as an ingredient in cocaine, thus (at least in public discourse) accepting the international moral and legal consensus that cocaine production was wrong. Once in government it was therefore impossible for the MAS to legalise unlimited coca cultivation as the coca growers would have liked, and union members came to feel that decisions were now taken from above and that they attended meetings simply to agree to decisions that had already been made. As Grisaffi points out, this case study highlights the problems that all social movements might face in terms of scaling up grassroots democratic processes to governance on a national level. Yet this study is unique in dealing with the dilemmas faced by a government whose grassroots supporters depend on illegal activity for their livelihood.

In terms of theory, the book makes a valuable contribution to political anthropology in arguing that liberalism does not have a monopoly on democracy but that we should take vernacular forms of politics seriously as equally – but different – democratic practices in their own right. Through rich ethnographic description, the coca growers are shown to value democratic participation based less on voting through a ballot box and more on achieving consensus, prioritising social relationships, holding leaders to account and affirming one's identity as part of a group. Urban, middle-class Bolivians portrayed this form of collective decision-making – in which individuals were obliged to follow the will of the majority – as union dictatorship; however, many individual coca growers themselves appeared to reach similar conclusions, but for different reasons, towards the end of Morales’ presidency, as they felt the will of the grassroots came to be ignored and decisions were imposed upon them from above. One is left to ponder whether it is possible, or even desirable, to scale up participatory democracy based on face-to-face interactions to the governance of a state. Coca Yes, Cocaine No: How Bolivia's Coca Growers Reshaped Democracy is a valuable resource for anyone interested in the relations between local and national forms of governance and democracy, and particularly for anyone who wishes to understand democracy in Bolivia during Morales’ presidency.