Pucate vits wala "al lado de la montaña"

Abstract

Coca leaf, divine leaf, sacred plant, tree of the American paradise. It was stolen from the indigenous cultures to be transmuted and used by crime and drug trafficking. No tree or plant, when chemically transformed, has affected society as much as the derivatives of “coca”; hence it is known as the “leaf that kills” and is so repudiated by society, which has never detailed the wonderful virtues it gives to the indigenous, the peasant, the sick and the hungry. This report highlights the traditional, ethnobotanical, industrial, nutritional, cultural and artistic uses of the coca leaf, Erythroxylum novogranatense (Morris) Hieron novogranatense, both in indigenous cultures and in Colombian society, exposes the Colombian people, naive victim of the drug vortex, the millenary history, the mythology, the ethnobotany, the phytochemistry and the chemistry of mambeo, which together with multiple applications stigmatizes the leaf of the Andes and turns it back into “The prodigious repairer of the vital forces”.