IN BOLIVIA'S DRUG WAR, SUCCESS HAS PRICE

CHIMORE, Bolivia -- Coca was king for years here in Bolivia's steaming
Chapare jungle.

From the 1970s on, the leaf used to make cocaine brought thousands of
peasants to this tropical basin 200 miles southeast of La Paz in the shadow
of the Andes. Their crops vaulted Bolivia to the rank of the world's
second-largest producer of raw and partially processed coca, making the
country a hub of the regional drug trade.

But U.S.-supported Bolivian soldiers and military police last month
completed an extraordinarily aggressive -- and successful -- three-year
campaign to eradicate coca in the Chapare. As a result, Bolivia has fallen
off the list of major drug-producing countries for the first time in almost
a half-century. U.S. and Bolivian officials are calling what happened here
the largest victory in the drug war so far, a model for other countries.

"Bolivia has done in the past two to three years what no other country has
done in the drug war in Latin America," said Manuel Rocha, the U.S.
ambassador to Bolivia. "In Latin America, this is the success story."

After years of failure -- including hundreds of thousands of U.S. tax
dollars spent on disastrous attempts to pay farmers to stop growing coca in
the 1990s -- victory was achieved mainly by toughening a program used to
persuade poor farmers to switch to alternative crops.

Under the banner of President Hugo Banzer's "Dignity Plan," Bolivian
soldiers fanned out over a region larger than Connecticut, tearing out coca
plants from the tiny farms of an estimated 40,000 families. Unlike parallel
programs in Peru and Colombia, where U.S. and government officials have
tried to woo farmers to switch to legal crops voluntarily, farmers here got
no choice. The U.S.-financed Bolivian troops simply stormed farms and
uprooted coca leaf by force.

Their no-holds-barred strategy brought dramatic reductions, from 74,360
acres of illegal coca before the Dignity Plan rolled out in 1998 to roughly
6,600 acres today. Most of that is being grown in the distant Yungas
lowlands, where an additional 24,000 acres are still planted legally for
traditional indigenous uses such as chewing to fend off hunger pains and
for herbal tea.

While counter-drug officials herald the success in Bolivia, critics point
out that the gains have been moderated by the growth of coca cultivation in
other countries, such as Colombia. This has led some analysts to suggest
that overall coca cultivation has shifted, not fallen.

The program here has also generated a profound economic shock for thousands
of poor families in the Chapare who, according to local Roman Catholic
Church and human rights officials, face malnutrition from the sudden loss
of their livelihoods and limited attempts to help them switch to legal
crops. Their plight has led some farmers to begin replanting coca,
endangering Bolivia's gains.

"Coca was taken away and the farmers were abandoned -- this is not a battle
won. It is a human tragedy for thousands of poor families with no way to
support themselves now," said the Rev. Sperandio Ravasio Martinelly, pastor
of Villa Tunari parish, one of the Chapare's largest.

Resentment among Chapare farmers has exploded into violence. A dozen
peasants and soldiers have been killed in the past year in clashes that
culminated in a blockade of the region by coca farmers in September. Now,
with the government mounting a final offensive to close the last of the
small coca markets in the Chapare and strengthen its grip through
U.S.-funded training and upgrades at military installations, farmers and
their leaders are organizing into small armed bands.

"We are not going to stop growing coca," said Congressman Evo Moraeles,
leader of the Federation of Coca Growers. "And we will defend ourselves
from this government, which has decided to blindly obey the orders of
Washington with no thought given to its own citizens."

In a town called Paradise, 35 miles from the Chimore military base that has
been the primary staging ground for Bolivia's Dignity Plan, a muddy path
lined with sodden wood planks leads to the Mamani family.

Near the wooden hut that Silverio Mamani, 35, built 10 years ago on money
made from coca, his wife, Mercedes Rios, has just slaughtered one of the
family's last chickens, hanging the freshly cut flesh on a clothesline for
drying into jerky. Their two last bony chickens move around, pecking at
lustrous green Amazon grasshoppers too fast to be food.

"We have tried to spare the chickens for the eggs," she said, cradling one
of their three children, "but we can't wait anymore. We need the food."

Like so many coca farmers, the couple moved here from the old Potosi mining
region a decade ago, destitute after floods ruined their small farm in the
Bolivian highlands. They had heard of a better life growing coca here.

At first, the rumors proved true. The family made about $800 a year during
peak harvests in the mid-1990s, when Mamani cultivated 1 1/2 acres of coca.
That income is 2 1/2 times what the government says the average Bolivian
farmer makes. The family went from destitute to just poor, from potatoes
and rice to chicken and the occasional omelet.

Then the soldiers came.

It was a blisteringly hot morning in June 1998. A convoy of military trucks
surrounded Paradise. Armed soldiers piled out, forming a human chain to
block wailing peasants who watched as their coca was yanked from the ground.

"I was crying, my children were crying -- coca was all we had," Rios said.

Six months later, the family received 6,000 pineapple plants from a
government alternative development project. But Mamani, like many other
farmers in a region where officials say there is roughly one technician per
300 families, said he received virtually no assistance on how to cultivate
the plants.

Only half the pineapples bloomed. The rest, now rotting on his 13-acre
farm, were attacked by a jungle fungus. Of the plants that yielded fruit,
most were small and ill-formed. He was forced to sell them for a few
pennies each. "We are eating rice and potatoes again, splitting food meant
for two into six portions," he said.

Prices for many crops involved in the alternative development programs have
fallen because of overproduction, poor quality, changing market conditions
and limited access to buyers at home and abroad.

Bolivian government and other officials concede that alternative
development has not kept pace with eradication. The U.N. Office for Drug
Control and Crime Prevention says that only one-quarter to one-half of
families here have received alternative crop assistance.

Bolivia's new agriculture minister, Hugo Carvajal, blamed the limited
success on a lack of funds and a lack of skill by the Chapare's coca
farmers to cultivate other, more demanding crops. But he also said that
when he inherited the ministry late last year, it was overwhelmed.

The government's greater priority, officials say, is the poverty-stricken
nation at large, which has suffered from an image as a drug haven, limiting
access to international loans and steering away desperately needed foreign
investment.

"Look, Bolivia is a poor country, and for years, the coca growers in the
Chapare had a lifestyle much better than the average farmer in the
highlands because they were growing an illegal crop," Vice President Jorge
Quiroga Ramirez said in an interview. "Now, if I go to the United States
and tell a bank robber that he has to stop robbing banks and get a legal
job, should he expect to make the same amount he was making when he was
robbing banks? I don't think so, and the coca growers must begin to
understand that."

Quiroga also points to some coca farmers who have succeeded in alternative
development as examples of what Bolivia hopes to achieve in the long term.

Rosemary Pozo, 36, is part of a community that promised to abandon coca,
making it eligible for significant assistance from the U.S. Agency for
International Development and the Bolivian government. Women in the
community were brought together and taught to make tropical fruit jams out
of new citrus crops. The jars now sell for about 75 cents each, earning
Pozo's family roughly half the $1,700 a year it made growing coca.

"But it is enough for us to eat, and, more importantly, it has given us
peace of mind," she said.

The government and the coca growers have traded accusations of torture and
human rights violations during the eradication campaign.

Godofredo Reinicke, Bolivia's human rights ombudsman for the Chapare
region, said the government has largely ignored allegations that
U.S.-funded Bolivian soldiers have burned down homes, stolen food and
possessions and tortured coca growers in search of intelligence for Plan
Dignity. He said he was shot at by the military two weeks ago while
investigating a torture allegation.

"They have turned a deaf ear to the cruelty -- they just don't want to hear
it," he said. "They have one thing on their minds, getting rid of coca. At
any cost."

Lt. Col. Hernan Caprirolo, commander of Bolivia's eradication efforts at
the Chimore base, bristles at the suggestion, saying his troops have been
the target of snipers, booby traps and kidnappings by coca growers and drug
traffickers. "We are the ones who are being killed in the line of duty," he
said.

U.S. and Bolivian officials contend that a strong military hand in the
eradication campaign was the key to -- not the cost of -- success.

"We tried other ways. We were handing over up to $2,500 to coca growers in
the 1990s to have them switch to other crops, but what did they do? They
turned around, spent the money, and then started growing coca again,"
Quiroga said. "The only thing we succeeded in doing was making coca the
only subsidized crop in Bolivia. . . . So we made a political decision that
the time had come to take serious action for the good of our country, not
just for the good of a few thousand families."