In 1826, the Spanish finally left Latin America ending their three centuries of colonial rule.  However, this independence was short lived.  As Escobar states, “by the beginning of the twentieth century, the ascendancy of the U.S. was felt in the entire [Andean] region” (Escobar 1995: 27).  Starting in the 1900s and continuing into today, the west, lead by the United States, assumed the colonial role vacated by the Spanish. From its earliest, pre-WWII stages, the United States used ‘development’ to pursue moral and economic initiatives in Latin America. These multiple colonial pursuits would act to solidify the Andean reliance on coca, constructing it as an inextricable economic requirement of Andean life. 

The simultaneous birth of the communist – capitalist conflict quickly problematized this poverty.  The goal of the United States and the west after WWII was to expand free-market capitalism to increase their economic and political power in the world. Escobar states, that the United States after WWII endeavored to “expand and deepen the markets for U.S. produced products abroad,” find “new sites for the investment of U.S. surplus capital,” and secure “access to cheep raw materials to support the growing capacity of its industries” (Escobar 1995: 32-33). Communism was the sole threat to these aspirations for political and economic hegemony and in the eyes of the west, poverty made Latin America vulnerable to it.  Escobar states that the west “…commonly accepted in the early 1950s that if poor countries were not rescued from poverty, they would succumb to communism” (Escobar 1995: 34). 

This linking between poverty and communism provided a powerful justification for western self-interested development initiatives in the Andes. For example, the first development initiative undertaken after WWII took place under a moralistic anti-communist/poverty banner. In 1949, the World Bank, under the direction of the United States (within the World Bank the U.S. holds 21 percent of the voting power, far more than any other member), entered Colombia in the world’s first development project.  It was the hope of this project to guide Colombia away from poverty and communism, toward a healthy capitalist economy.  The Bank stated that 
“…only through a generalized attack throughout the whole economy on education, health, housing, food, and productivity can the vicious cycle of poverty, ignorance, ill health and low productivity be decisively broken…In making such an effort, Colombia would not only accomplish its own salvation but would at the same time furnish an inspiring example to all other underdeveloped areas of the world” (Escobar 1995: 25).  In this statement, the bank links its mission to what Escobar termed “a quasi-religious fervor in the notion of salvation,” illustrating the west’s attempt to legitimize its involvement in Colombia under the banner of a moral battle against poverty and communism.  However, such development initiatives also contributed to the individual economic interests of western nations.  As Escobar points out, “of the fifty largest customers of U.S. commodity corporations, thirty are developing countries…,” and the majority of these thirty received some sort of U.S-led development aid (Escobar 1995: 166).

Prior to development, Andean people relied heavily on subsistence farming to meet their everyday needs. This sort of economic structure allowed them to exist without relying on a steady income with which to purchase food.  However, this subsistence economy ran counter to the free-market capitalistic goals of development.  As Sanabria states, development initiatives saw indigenous highland and valley agriculture as “…backward and incapable of satisfying the needs of an expanding internal market and of producing a supply of export commodities” (Sanabria 1993: 50). Though the indigenous economy would support individual families, it did not promote the accumulation of wealth and expansion of markets that the west saw as essential in its crusade against poverty and communism. Thus, the west saw as its duty to transform the Andean agriculture into a system that cultivated and exported crops for profit (Sanabria 1993: 51). 

This transformation entailed the agricultural expansion and introduction of cash crops into Bolivia’s Chapare region (Sanabria 1993: 52-53).  Such endeavors meant developing a transportation infrastructure to access the region and the promotion of settlers to colonize and cultivate it.  Sanabria states that as early as 1942, the United States offered Bolivia a twenty-five million dollar grant to develop a highway that would connect the Chapare and Bolivia’s other agricultural areas to the major urban centers of Cochabamba and Santa Cruz (Sanabria 1993: 43).  This highway would ease the resettlement of tens of thousands highland and valley-based peasants to the Chapare and make the distribution of their products possible. 
Unfortunately, after opening and colonizing these areas, agricultural production proved to be, for the most part unprofitable. Sanabria reports that between 1970 and 1982 the cost to produce potatoes out-paced the income generated by a margin of four to one.  This and other such gulfs translated into an overall drop in agriculture’s contribution to Bolivia’s gross national product from 26 to 18 percent between 1960 and 1980 (Sanabria 1993: 53-54). 

It is in this failure to provide a profitable cash crop that the development period contributed to coca’s construction as an inextricable component of Andean life. The destruction of the peasant economy and the implementation of a for-profit system when coupled with development’s failures to produce a viable revenue-producing crop, left peasants no choice but to turn to coca.  As Sanabria states, during the 1970s and 1980s decline in agricultural profitability, the “coca leaf was perhaps the only major peasant commodity that…managed to retain…its real value” (Sanabria 1993: 57).