Pubdate: Wed, 08 May 2002
Source: Time Magazine (US)
Copyright: 2002 Time Inc
Contact:  http://www.time.com/time/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/451

TAKING THE SIDE OF THE COCA FARMER

A Maverick Politician Stirs a Continent and Puts Washington's Drug War At Risk

To understand why Evo Morales has come within a llama's hair of being 
President of Bolivia - and why his formidable political power is giving 
U.S. officials fits - pay attention when he and his top advisers open their 
mouths. That is, see what they're chewing: coca leaves, treasured by Andean 
Indians like Morales as a sacred tonic and as their most lucrative cash 
crop but better known to Americans as the raw material of cocaine. Over the 
past five years, the U.S. has got Bolivia to uproot almost all of its coca 
shrubs - only to see Morales, 42, and his left-wing Movement to Socialism 
engineer an astonishing protest this year that could force Bolivia's next 
government to let the plants flourish again. "The coca leaf," says Morales, 
whose party took the second largest bloc of seats in parliamentary 
elections in June, "is our new national flag."

To the dismay of the Bush Administration, it's a banner waving over a large 
swath of South America. Coca eradication is the linchpin of Washington's 
antidrug strategy. The widening revolt against it is the loudest sign yet 
of a new resentment toward the U.S. in Latin America, where free-market 
reforms pushed by Washington have left much of the region's 500 million 
people poorer. A former parliamentary Deputy from Bolivia's central 
coca-growing region, Morales in the past was often dismissed as a radical 
relic in the land where Che Guevara died. But today he's strong enough to 
have made it into this week's presidential runoff vote in the new 
parliament, facing front runner Gonzalo Sanchez, a former President. More 
than that, Evo-speak--"The drug war is just a U.S. excuse to control our 
countries"--resonates beyond Bolivia's borders. Next door in Peru, irate 
coca farmers have successfully pressured the government to suspend 
eradication. In Colombia, the coca crop has grown fivefold in five years, 
to more than 400,000 acres, despite almost $1 billion in U.S. eradication 
funds. Authorities now say they will spray only "industrial-size" coca 
fields and not those of smaller farmers, who are, of course, the voters. If 
Morales can thwart the U.S. in Bolivia - South America's poorest nation but 
Washington's eradication showcase - it means the elimination effort has 
been a washout.

The Evo phenomenon is partly a result of what Latin American critics call 
Washington's anti-coca "fundamentalism"--a heavy-handedness that seems to 
blame the remote cocaleros, or coca farmers, more than the addictive 
appetites of Americans. A key sore point was last year's creation of a 
special U.S.-funded Bolivian army unit to enforce eradication. "The army 
soldiers come to my house and shout, 'You b_______ Indian coca sellers!'" 
says Maria Luz Gomez, 32, a cocalera in Morales' home state of Cochabamba. 
"But without the coca, we can't have a life here." The special unit has 
been accused in numerous killings of cocalero leaders in Cochabamba, most 
notoriously Casimiro Huanca, who witnesses say was shot in the back by 
soldiers during a protest last December. According to U.S. and Bolivian 
officials, the special unit will be dissolved next month. The cocaleros - 
who are guilty themselves of killing soldiers in recent clashes - accuse 
the U.S. embassy in La Paz of lobbying behi! nd! the scenes with 
parliamentary leaders to get Morales kicked out of the assembly for his 
pro-coca activism, a charge the embassy denies. The growers were outraged 
when the U.S. ambassador, Manuel Rocha, warned that a Morales victory would 
mean a drastic reduction in U.S. economic aid to Bolivia, now $156 million 
a year. Morales impishly thanked Rocha: the perception of Yanqui meddling 
helped catapult his presidential candidacy.

The U.S. rightfully insists that it works hard to provide cocaleros with 
alternative crops like bananas and coffee. But the depressed markets for 
those goods mean farmers earn sometimes as little as one-tenth of what they 
would with coca, which produces three to four harvests a year. Of course, 
coca farming is not - as Morales and the growers would have it - an 
entirely innocuous affair. Even though the cocaleros don't turn coca leaves 
into cocaine - that's done by the drug cartels - they know that the bulk of 
the crop goes not toward its traditional uses as an anesthetic and a 
salubrious chew but into making the illegal drug. In a recent speech on 
Morales' home turf, Ambassador Rocha blasted the "lie that coca cultivation 
is an innocent endeavor to the world." The cocaleros' probity is debatable, 
but while Morales is chewing up Bolivian politics, their clout is 
unquestionable.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Alex