Beverage Creates a Buzz

INZA, Colombia — Call it the "Real Thing."

Indians in this remote mountain village in southern Colombia are marketing a particularly refreshing soft drink that harks back to Coca-Cola's original formula, when "coca" was in the name for a reason.

Advertising posters here describe the carbonated, citrus-flavored Coca-Sek as "more than an energizer" -- a buzz that just might be provided by a key ingredient, a syrup produced by boiling coca leaves.

Since January, the Nasa indigenous community has been offering the soft drink locally and in neighboring Popayan, where it is bottled. By the end of the year, the Nasa hope to sell Coca-Sek nationwide, targeting the same consumers who drink Gatorade or Red Bull, both highly popular with Colombians.

For six years, the Nasa have been quietly selling coca-flavored cookies, aromatic teas, wines and ointments at informal sidewalk stalls and in health food stores. They say they're trying to capitalize on a plentiful resource -- and remove the stigma from a leaf that for them is sacred.

Cocaine, the highly concentrated form of the leaf's alkaloid extracted using solvents and other chemicals, is "foreign to our culture and is an invention of Western man," said Gelmis Chate, president of the Nasa council here.

But consumption of coca leaves by chewing them or by using them in food or tea is an ancient custom. The 4,000 indigenous families in this region typically grow several coca plants on their farms for personal use, a right guaranteed by Colombian law.

For Abraham Cuello, 50, the half-dozen coca plants sprouting among his banana, coffee, mango and papaya trees have as much mystic as alimentary value. "They protect my farm and all that I grow," he said as he pulled the bright green leaves from an 8-foot coca plant.

The Nasa's coca cookies and teas attracted little attention, but the launch of Coca-Sek has ignited controversy in a country where Washington has spent $4 billion since 1999 combating the drug trade and terrorism.

The reasons are myriad: the tribe's market ambitions for the beverage; the inevitable comparisons with the original Coke, which dropped cocaine from its formula in 1905; and the recent election of Bolivian President Evo Morales, an indigenous coca grower who supports the production of legitimate coca products.