NEW LATIN AMERICA MOVEMENT -- MASS DISCONTENT

MIAMI - In November last year the president of Bolivia, Gonzalo
Sanchez de Lozada, visited Washington to ask for assistance.

In a meeting with President Bush he pleaded for a pause in the
eradication of Bolivia's coca crops, the plant used to process
cocaine. He also asked for extra financial aid.

His country was in dire straits, he warned. Without urgent help his
government would collapse.

"We are not discussing that," Bush told Sanchez de Lozada, according
to someone who was in the room.

Last Friday, as tens of thousands of angry protesters descended on the
capital screaming for his head, Sanchez de Lozada quit and fled to
Miami with his family.

Bolivia is only the latest South American country to be thrown into
political turmoil. In the last three years, both Venezuela and Ecuador
have experienced major outbreaks of street violence and attempted coup
d'etats. Argentina is still recovering from a political and economic
meltdown in late 2001.

Latin America is in a state of "unmanageability," comparable only to a
period of fiscal implosion in the 1930s as the United States went
through the Great Depression, said Jorge Nef, a professor at the
University of South Florida. Those years led to military
dictatorship.

Today, in one form or another, the countries of the region are victims
of an explosive mix of unpopular economic measures, centuries of
social and ethnic exclusion and political corruption. It has created a
new movement of mass discontent.

"It's a new tune. It's not the communist guerrillas, or Che Guevara of
the past," said Nef, director of the Center for Latin American,
Caribbean and Latino Studies at USF. "It's a popular mass of
unemployed people."

Bolivia's fate is being closely watched by the antiglobalization
movement, which argues that open markets and free trade have had a
negative effect on weak Third World economies.

It's not only labor unions and student and civic groups who make that
case today. A new wave of political leaders, including Hugo Chavez in
Venezuela and the recently elected presidents of Brazil and Argentina,
Luis Ignacio Lula da Silva and Nestor Kirchner, have all expressed
doubts about the benefits of opening their countries to international
trade and investment.

In Bolivia, South America's poorest country, an estimated 60 percent
of its population of 8-million live on less than $2 a day. Almost 70
percent are Aymara and Quechua indigenous peoples, long marginalized
by Bolivia's European-descended elite.

Bolivia has "one of the worst patterns of wealth distribution in the
Western Hemisphere," according to Eduardo Gamarra, a Bolivian-born
director of Latin American studies at Florida International University.

On top of that are the enormous demands of U.S. counterdrug policy.
In Bolivia's case, that has meant the eradication of 90 percent of the
country's once lucrative coca harvest.

"Washington pushed too hard," said Sanho Tree, director of the Drug
Policy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, a Washington-based
watchdog group. "You can't squeeze blood out of a stone."

Sanchez de Lozada, 73, was once a respected reformer. A millionaire
with mining interests, he played an important role in the 1980s in
consolidating Bolivian democracy after decades of military
dictatorship. As president from 1993-97 he oversaw further democratic
and market-based economic reforms.

But Bolivia has little to show for economic "modernization." After its
inefficient, state-run mining industry was shut down in the mid-1980s,
23,000 people were thrown out of work. When no alternative was
provided, many turned to growing coca.

In its nonnarcotic form, the coca leaf has long been chewed by
peasants to stave off hunger, and to make tea. But, when drug
traffickers seized the opportunity in the 1980s, Bolivia became the
world's largest producer of cocaine.

U.S. promises of financial aid led to the coca leaf being all but
wiped out by the late 1990s. Despite U.S. help, Bolivia has struggled
to find economic alternatives to coca growing. The country has many
disadvantages when it comes to competing with its neighbors for
foreign trade and investment, say analysts.

"Real economic alternatives, especially urban jobs in export-oriented
sectors, are a much tougher proposition, given that Bolivia is a
mountainous and landlocked country 12,000 feet above sea level,"
according to Columbia University economics professor Jeffrey Sachs.

"Without major investment in transport, communications and industrial
zones, only a few products such as coca leaf can bear the transport
costs entailed by this rugged geography," he wrote in a recent article.

Since Bolivia began to introduce free-market reforms, its exports
have in fact fallen during the past 25 years.

That was the situation Sanchez de Lozada encountered when he was
elected again in August 2002. That is why he went to Washington last
November. His timing was unfortunate; Bush was preoccupied at the time
with the looming invasion of Iraq.

Rejected by the White House he turned to the only other remaining
place, the International Monetary Fund. In return for its help Sanchez
de Lozada proposed an unpopular tax hike.

That sparked rioting in which more than 30 people died.

Sanchez de Lozada urgently renewed his cry for help from Washington.
The United States responded with $10-million. It wouldn't be enough.

Opponents began to focus their criticism directly on the president, or
"El gringo," as he is widely known. Oddly for a Latin American head of
state, Sanchez de Lozada speaks an imperfect Spanish with a heavy
American accent, a product of years spent in exile and a degree from
the University of Chicago.

Unfairly perhaps, his accent contributed to identifying him as a
lapdog for the United States.

The final crisis was sparked by public outrage over a multibillion-
dollar project to sell natural gas to the United States. Bolivia has
the second-largest natural gas reserves in Latin America, worth an
estimated $21-billion over the next 20 years.

But protesters objected to a gas concession granted to a foreign
consortium, Pacific LNG, led by British and Spanish companies. They
bitterly recalled the recent privatization of the state water company
- - granted to the U.S. corporate giant Bechtel - which led to increased
prices and rioting, dubbed the "water wars."

For many Bolivians the country's gas fields are a national patrimony
and should be kept for cheap domestic use, rather than foreign
exploitation. Historically, they had little reason to believe the
country's new gas riches would reach the poorest.

Bolivia's democratic future remains in doubt. For the time being Vice
President Carlos Mesa, formerly the country's top TV newscaster, has
assumed the presidency. In a powerful speech on taking office he
appealed to the country for unity, promising to hold a binding
referendum on the gas project.

Calm has returned to the streets, but Mesa may have a hard time
keeping the peace.

"This is only a temporary reprieve for a country that has fallen
apart," Gamarra said.