DRUG WAR'S BACKFIRE

VILLA TUNARI, Bolivia -- The large wooden press that stands in the square
of this rural village is a symbol of the central role that coca has played
for centuries in the culture and economy of South America's Andean highlands.

But for years, thanks to a U.S.-backed eradication effort, the press has
stood silent, no longer used to bale coca leaves. A cooperative Bolivian
government has outlawed coca in this region, dispatching teams of soldiers
to scour the countryside and hack down the bushy green plants grown on
small plots owned by poor farmers.

"We used to trade the coca for potatoes and other vegetables, but now we
don't have anything," said Jacinta Morales, 73, whose eyes fill with tears
as she surveys the dead coca bushes lying in heaps in her barren fields
near Villa Tunari. "Now there's no work here. My son went to the city to
try to find work but there is none. All of the campesinos (peasants) here
are crying."

Eradicating coca plants has become a central part of the U.S. war on drugs,
with millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars annually poured into the Andean
nations to stop the cocaine pipeline at its source. Last year, the program
escalated dramatically as Washington pledged $1.3 billion to war-torn
Colombia, where farmers raise coca under the watchful eye of leftist
guerrillas who finance their insurgency with drug profits.

Bolivia is much further along in its eradication effort. The nation of 8
million people, about 65 percent of whom live in poverty, provides
troubling parallels that should serve as warning signs for U.S. policy-makers.

With $800 million in U.S. money in the past decade, Bolivia has slashed its
illegal coca crop from more than 100,000 acres to less than 5,000. Bolivian
President Hugo Banzer pledges that the entire illegal crop will be wiped
out by the end of his term next year.

The effort has won Banzer praise from Washington, but it has carried a high
price. Eliminating coca has stung the economy of the impoverished Chapare
region of central Bolivia, where Morales lives. Alternative development
programs aimed at getting farmers to switch to crops such as bananas or
pineapples are scrambling to fill the void, but peasant leaders question
whether other crops can be successful without more infrastructure to get
the crops to markets in Chile and Argentina.

Even more worrisome, as coca acreage has plummeted, social tensions in
Bolivia have increased. Last year, outraged coca farmers -- called
cocaleros -- joined groups upset about other issues in a blitz of protests
that brought Bolivia's economy to its knees and threatened the stability of
Banzer's government. Protesters in the Chapare region blocked one of
Bolivia's main highways, paralyzing the bus and truck traffic that carries
much of the nation's commerce, while bloody clashes with the army left a
dozen people dead.

"The U.S. eradication program is provoking our culture," said Evo Morales,
a fiery cocalero leader who is not related to Jacinta Morales. "Coca is
part of our identity, and to try to wipe it out is repression. They have
criminalized the cocaleros. If the U.S. wants to stop the growing of coca,
it's going to set off a war."

An uneasy truce has prevailed since late October, when thousands of
cocaleros gathered for protests in Cochabamba, the largest city near the
Chapare. No new clashes broke out, but the tensions are still simmering.

"Something has to be done," said Marcelino Mamani, 60, a protester who grew
coca for 30 years before his crop was eliminated. "There is no market for
other products. They have to listen to us. You can't let us all just die of
hunger."

Long before the first Spanish conquistador appeared searching for gold, the
indigenous people of the Andes were growing coca, whose leaves are still
chewed as a mildly narcotic antidote to the ravages of hunger, bitter cold
and altitude sickness. Under the Spanish it took the name "hoja sagrada,"
or sacred leaf.

'It's good for you'

Even today, visitors arriving at posh hotels in La Paz, the world's highest
capital city at 12,000 feet above sea level, are often given a cup of "mate
de coca" -- tea made from coca leaves -- to ease altitude sickness. The
leaf is sold legally on the streets of La Paz and is chewed by peasants
everywhere.

"It's good for you," said Liliana Lopez, an Indian woman who chews the leaf
as she sells tourist trinkets on a La Paz street corner. "Everyone here
uses coca. It is only in the United States where you use it as an illegal
drug."

Indeed, Banzer's eradication plan calls for some 30,000 acres of coca in
the Yungas region near La Paz to remain in production for domestic
consumption. But the campaign to stamp out coca in the Chapare region has
spawned smoldering resentment and economic disruption.

A hilly, densely forested region that is more than 12 hours by bus over
bone-jarring roads from the capital, the Chapare became a large-scale
coca-growing region in the 1980s after thousands of peasants laid off from
work in the nation's mining industry moved here.

With little agricultural background, they turned to coca for the same
reasons Indians throughout the Andes have always raised it: It grows like a
weed, it can produce three crops a year, and there's a ready market.

Cornelius Suarez, 43, grew up tending his father's coca plants on a small
but thriving farm just outside Villa Tunari. Raising three crops a year, he
earned as much as $1,000 annually, but insists he grew coca only for
domestic consumption, not for sale to drug traffickers.

Last fall, soldiers brandishing machetes hacked down Suarez's crop.

"They destroyed it all," he said, shaking his head as he stepped over the
dead, bushy plants. "They talk about other crops, but that's all on paper.
They haven't given us anything. I can grow millions of pineapples here, but
who is going to buy them?"

Seeking recognition

President Banzer recognizes the problem, and recently called on the United
States and other donor nations to repay his country for the economic damage
it has suffered in eliminating the illegal coca crop.

"It's time the world took stock of the work we have done and translates it
into investment to generate employment and replace jobs and revenue that
were eliminated along with the coca," he told Bolivians in his annual New
Year's address.

Officials from Bolivia's alternative development program point to
statistics that show weaning the cocaleros to other crops is working --
although slowly. Since 1986, alternative crop acreage -- bananas,
pineapples, heart of palm and other plants -- has shot up by 186 percent.
Some 17,000 families are now receiving alternative development funds in the
Chapare region, many selling produce to three firms that export bananas and
two that ship heart of palm.

Steady progress is being made on Bolivia's infrastructure problems. The
United States has funded the construction of some 30 bridges and the
improvement of more than 500 miles of unpaved roads, along with the paving
of nearly 50 miles of highways.

But in a country as poor as Bolivia, where the daylong ride from the remote
Chapare to the market in Cochabamba takes a toll on passengers as well as
perishable crops, the challenge is extreme. Poor farmers will likely
continue growing coca as long as they can get away with it.