To understand what happened at Villa Tunari, you have to understand what coca means in Bolivia. The coca leaf is not cocaine. For indigenous Andean communities, it is a staple -- chewed for energy at high altitude, brewed as tea, central to religious ceremonies practiced for centuries. But in the 1980s, international pressure, driven primarily by the United States, made no such distinction. The US Drug Enforcement Administration maintained an operational base in the Chapare, and US Army Special Forces trained Bolivian UMOPAR troops at a camp in Chimore, east of Villa Tunari, beginning in 1987. The joint Operation Blast Furnace in 1986 had already targeted the region. By 1988, the DEA and UMOPAR had launched Operation Snowcap, while US Border Patrol agents staffed Bolivian police checkpoints on Chapare roads. For the cocalero families, whose livelihoods depended on the leaf their ancestors had cultivated for generations, the eradication campaigns were an existential threat imposed from outside.

The coca growers had been mobilizing since late May 1988, protesting the pending passage of Law 1008, which would criminalize coca production in the Chapare. DIRECO staff had already used herbicides to destroy crops in violation of agreements between the government and farmers. On 27 June, following a night of meetings, peasant leaders decided to approach the DIRECO facility directly. Between 4,000 and 5,000 farmers gathered. When the DIRECO compound proved empty, peasant leader Rocha and three others walked to the UMOPAR guard post, where Colonel Jose Luis Miranda authorized their entry. Then coca grower Eusebio Torrez Condori was shot and killed near the DIRECO entrance. Dozens of farmers surged into the UMOPAR camp to report the shooting to their leaders, who were still meeting with the colonel. When reinforcements under Major Primo Pena arrived, a joint church-labor investigative commission later found, the gathered farmers had shown neither violence nor aggression. The reinforcements opened fire regardless.

The killing did not end at the UMOPAR compound. In the hours and days that followed, security forces unleashed a campaign of violence across the Chapare. In Villa Tunari, helicopters circled overhead as soldiers raided houses. Residents were arrested, union and civic leaders were taken. Along the roads between Villa Tunari, Sinahota, and Chimore, UMOPAR troops beat farmers and fired tear gas from helicopters at people on the ground. Three-year-old Grover Quiroz was among those transported to Cochabamba with gunshot wounds. The Multisectoral Commission later described the atmosphere as one of "fear, anxiety and intimidation." The government's Information Minister claimed the protesters had been armed and that police had fired only into the air. Video evidence contradicted both claims. Over a hundred people were injured. The Bolivian government said five DEA agents were present at the base but did not participate; eyewitnesses, including future president Evo Morales, disputed that account.

Evo Morales was among the coca farmers present that day. A year later, on the anniversary of the massacre, he spoke at the commemoration. The following day, UMOPAR agents beat him and left him in the mountains to die; other union members rescued him. The massacre catalyzed the consolidation of Chapare coca growers' unions into the Coordinadora of the Six Federations of the Tropic of Cochabamba -- the political base that would eventually carry Morales to the Bolivian presidency in 2006. Law 1008 passed on 19 July 1988, less than a month after the killings. It outlawed coca production in the Chapare but, in a partial concession to the cocalero movement, prohibited the use of defoliants, herbicides, and aerial spraying in eradication. The farmers who died at Villa Tunari did not stop the law, but their deaths ensured that the resistance to it would never be extinguished. Today, the massacre is commemorated annually, a reminder that the people who grew the leaf refused to be treated as the criminals the law made them.