Pubdate: Sat, 29 Jun 2002
Source: San Jose Mercury News (CA)
Copyright: 2002 San Jose Mercury News
Contact:  http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/390
Author: Kevin G. Hall, Mercury News Rio de Janeiro Bureau

COCA IN BOLIVIA

CHIMORE, Bolivia -- Bolivia's remarkable victories in the drug war may be 
at risk in presidential elections Sunday.

Bolivia, which once led the world in cultivating the plant from which 
cocaine is made, has eradicated 85 to 95 percent of its coca production 
during the past four years. But political turmoil threatens to undermine 
the anti-coca efforts.

Polls suggest that no candidate is likely to win a majority of Sunday's 
vote. If that happens, Congress would have to pick a president, and a weak 
coalition government probably would result.

That would be a severe blow to Washington's war on drugs. Political turmoil 
in Peru has allowed the cocaine trade there to rebound, and despite 
millions in U.S. military aid, coca king Colombia has failed to defeat the 
Marxist rebels who control drug zones there.

Bolivia has uprooted almost 90,000 acres of coca in the southern Chapare 
region, and since 1998, has taken 230 to 300 tons of cocaine out of the 
world drug trade. But the hardy coca bush, which is harvested four times a 
year, could bounce back faster than crabgrass if Bolivia's new government 
lacks the will and the muscle to continue the unpopular campaign against it.

The government tried in November to discourage coca farmers from replanting 
by decreeing that possessing or transporting coca is a crime. But violent 
protests nullified the decree, and U.S. eradication experts in the Chapare 
said 95 percent of the bushes now being eradicated were newly planted.

"We need a legal measure to penalize the person who goes back to this. 
After it is uprooted, they just go back to planting it," Lt. Col. Jaime 
Cruz Vera, the head of rural interdiction forces, complained in an 
interview at an army base in muggy Chimore, once home to much of Bolivia's 
coca trade.

Hours after soldiers uprooted her remaining coca bushes along a back road 
near the Chimore River, Emedia Castro stripped and dried them, hoping to 
earn what little she could in one of the region's 15 illegal coca markets.

During a trip through the Chapare this month, a Mercury News reporter found 
coca bushes hidden among banana trees and behind passion-fruit vines. 
Peasant women dried coca leaves in front of wooden shacks, and at one 
clandestine coca market, Indian women said coca would continue to be grown 
in the Chapare because it was the only cash crop.

The Chapare is the size of New Jersey, and Bolivian forces and their U.S. 
partners must revisit a third of the region every year in an effort to wipe 
out new coca plantings. Bolivia's next government may not be willing or 
able to continue the battle. Eradicating the coca trade in the Chapare cost 
farmers in South America's poorest country $400 million in illicit 
earnings, and the leading presidential candidates are trying to avoid 
alienating the country's Indian and mixed-race majority.

In an interview, Manfred Reyes Villa, the presidential front-runner, drew a 
careful distinction between growing coca, which Indians use for medicinal 
purposes, and producing cocaine.

"In my government we will have a frontal attack on cocaine, not coca. Coca 
is a traditional, cultural theme, but we will fight against drug 
trafficking," Reyes Villa said.

The campaign against coca has helped make an obscure agitator named Evo 
Morales Ayma a political force. Polls show Morales running third or fourth, 
and his Indian-based Movement to Socialism Party may win three of 27 Senate 
seats. That would enable him to gum up anti-drug legislation and demand 
that Chapare farmers legally be allowed to cultivate small plots of coca.

U.S. drug experts said any backsliding would lead to uncontrolled new 
plantings, but President Jorge Quiroga said he expected his successor to 
maintain Bolivia's anti-coca course.

"I have seen nothing that leads me to believe that the next government will 
backtrack, because really the hard part has been done," he said in an 
interview at the presidential palace in La Paz, Bolivia's capital.

"The controls must stay in place, but it is easier to control replanting as 
opposed to start from zero and having to do all the eradication and 
alternative development that we've done."
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