BOLIVIA FINDS COCA IS A TOUGH HABIT TO BREAK

More Than 10 Years Of Battles To Eradicate The Drug Crops Have Failed
To Establish Viable Alternatives

Leon Montano sits on his porch in the still of the evening. Thick
banana tree groves surround his ramshackle farmhouse near Chimore, in
the Chapare region of Bolivia.

"Much of this used to be coca," he says as a black pig saunters into
the yard. "Then the soldiers came and chopped it all down." Mr Montano
has few regrets. He recalls the decades when cocaine ruled the region.

"You would see women by the road crouching next to a bag of cocaine,
with scales on one side and a gun on the other," the 60-year-old
Quechua Indian farmer recalls.

While trafficking was never on the scale of Colombia, this richly
forested tropical basin 200 miles south-east of La Paz became a hub
for the cocaine trade, making Bolivia the world's second biggest raw
cocaine producer after Colombia.

At its peak, cocaine generated an estimated Dollars 500m a year. The
local economy was dependent on it. But in 1989 Bolivia launched a
multimillion-dollar project - sponsored by the US - forcibly to wipe
out the Chapare's coca, the raw material for cocaine. Bananas, palm
hearts or pineapples, among others, were introduced to replace it.

Farmers received Dollars 2,500 for each hectare of coca destroyed. Of
some 76,000 hectares of coca, only 1,000-2,000 have survived the purge.

The militant coca-growers' unions are accusing the government of
destroying farmers' livelihoods without providing them with a viable
alternative. They also blame US "imperialism" for turning impoverished
coca growers into scapegoats in the Andean drugs war.

However, says Mr Montano, looking to his wife for approval, while the
farm makes fewer profits, life is more peaceful. The police bother
them less. Even the threats of violence from the unions who want coca
replanted won't budge him: "When times have been hard, I've never
said: 'That's it, I'm going back to planting coca'."

Not all ex-coca farmers are likely to prove so resolute, however. Just
as President Hugo Banzer has declared "zero coca" in the Chapare and
victory for his anti-coca Dignity Plan, the resolve of farmers is
being tested by the lack of profits offered by alternative crops.
Cynics say that without massive US support, the whole enterprise would
have collapsed long ago.

"Coca still presents itself as an opportunity," said Col Jaime Cruz,
the rural police commander in the Chapare. "There is still some
resistance and we have seen sporadic replanting."

Rising hardship is tempting some to return to coca, despite the risk
of losing their land or being thrown in prison. Local jails are
already packed with locals who tried to process raw cocaine from their
own crop.

"The danger is that if there is no market (for alternative crops),
people will return to coca-growing. Coca buyers paid cash and in
advance," said Angel Zambrana, the head of a local farming
association.

Oscar Coca, adviser to Evo Morales, union leader, agrees: "Farmers
have tried to operate within the law, that's why they went with
alternative development. They wanted it to work. But the truth is it
hasn't."

Last September police clashed with angry cocaleros, who blockaded the
roads in protest at eradication. It forced the government to airlift
supplies to the capital. Ten people died in the rioting. Conflict is
expected again if troops try to uproot the excess coca being grown in
the Yungas region near La Paz.

"There could be more violence this year," Mr Coca said. The key test
of farmers' resolve, he says, will come in July when coca leaf is
traditionally replanted.

The heavy-handed tactics of the soldiers has done little to smooth the
transition from coca, the unions say. And once the coca fields were
razed, farmers discovered the new crops were difficult to produce and
sell.

Banana cultivation, for example, requires expensive steel railing to
move the freshly picked bananas from the plantation to the packing
station. Cleaning and packing is costly and time-consuming. Transport
to the main export market in Argentina also requires Dollars 25,000
refrigerated trucks to conserve the fruit on the journey.

Demand for the bananas however remains strong, Bolivian officials say.
Argentina buys some 22m cases a year, of which Bolivia supplies less
than 1m. But coca leaf was easy to grow, profitable and came with a
ready-made market.

"No single crop is yet as profitable as coca," concedes Carlos
Sarabia, who leads the USAID alternative development project in the
Chapare, but he maintains the new crops will prove lucrative.

The US has earmarked Dollars 80m for Bolivian alternative development
in the next four years. The project will also get a Dollars 55m from
the Dollars 110m that the US gave Bolivia for supporting the
anti-guerrilla campaign in Colombia. But no amount of money, it seems,
can completely heal the scars left by a decade of coca eradication.
The battle for the Chapare may yet be far from over.