BOLIVIA WINNING DRUG FIGHT, BUT AT A PRICE

Leonardo Marca is down to his last acre of coca, and he has no intention of
giving it up without a fight.

When soldiers took machetes to his fields in Chipiriri, Bolivia, two years
ago, he begged them to leave him something to support his family. Perhaps
it was the big military tattoo on one arm, left over from his army days,
that persuaded them to spare him a single patch covered by a thick jungle
canopy.

"I know they are coming back," said Marca, 43, a man of sheepish manner but
fiery words. "The government says it will take our land and send us to jail
if we persist in growing coca. We will have no alternative but to defend
ourselves, like in Colombia."

The coca farmers of the Chapare region of central Bolivia are down to what
amounts to their last few acres after an aggressive campaign, financed
mostly by the United States, to eradicate what was once the world's largest
coca-growing area. In the last three years, thousands of families who once
grew coca have fled the Chapare and thousands of others have grudgingly
given up coca to cultivate legal crops.

President Hugo Banzer is equally determined. "We are not going to retreat
one centimeter," he said in a speech last week. "Our firm commitment is to
leave Bolivia without drugs by 2002, totally outside the drug circuit."

U.S. and Bolivian officials say Banzer is nearer than ever to making
Bolivia the first country in the history of the modern drug wars to
effectively eliminate itself as a producer. But that victory has been won
at a steep cost in Bolivia.

Banzer's government has been rattled by explosive protests and simmering
small-scale insurrections, and the effect on the overall supply of cocaine
reaching street corners in the United States, the main consumer of the
drug, has been virtually nil.

The resistance of a hard core of about 2,000 families has grown more
fierce. Coca farmer union leaders have stepped up threats to farmers who
have chosen to switch to other crops. Coca growers have set booby traps in
the remaining coca fields and even ambushes.

One anti-narcotics policeman was found buried with acid poured on his face,
and four members of the security forces and the wife of an anti-narcotics
policeman have been missing for two weeks and are presumed dead. About 25
coca growers have been arrested in recent weeks.

Hoarding Seeds

A blockade by the coca growers that ended last week did serious harm to
U.S. and Bolivian efforts to encourage alternative agricultural
development. Losses to alternative development projects came to $1.25
million, according to the U.S. Embassy in La Paz, the capital.

Meanwhile, Chapare coca growers have been hoarding coca seeds, which can
sprout into flowering bushes in just 2 1/2 years, with an eye toward
returning to cultivation at the earliest opportunity.

What the coca growers are waiting for, they say, is a change of government
in 2002. One leading candidate, former President Jaime Paz Zamora, used to
wear a pin on his lapel showing a coca leaf as a sign of resistance to
Washington.

Several major leaders of the coca growers are threatening armed conflict if
they are not permitted to grow at least small amounts of coca.

Most military experts do not believe the coca growers can put up serious
resistance, and they point to a small rebellion in 1998 that was easily put
down. But with other Aymara-speaking Indian peasant groups becoming
increasingly militant over a variety of land issues, Bolivian officials
express concerns about a string of pocket-size rebellions.

Only three years ago, coca fields were as plentiful in the sweltering
mountain valleys of the Chapare as cornfields in Kansas. Those days are
over.

But many of the coca farmers show no interest in giving up coca for good
and cultivating alternatives such as black pepper, pineapple and heart of
palm.

The coca growers are primarily former miners who lost their jobs 25 years
ago when the government privatized the mines. They have little farming
experience. The other coca farmers are peasants who fled the highlands
because of drought and soil erosion. There, they raised corn and potatoes
- -- far easier crops to grow than the tropical fruits that have been
promoted as alternatives.

Lucrative Crop

The transition from cultivating coca, which needs almost no tending, to
learning how to deal with fertilizers and pesticides is daunting for many.
Coca is also far more lucrative than fruits and vegetables, and waiting for
traffickers to come by and transport their coca harvest is a lot easier
than finding credits and ways to get legitimate crops to markets.

The downside is that coca strips the soil of nutrients. The land of the
Chapare, never that fertile to begin with, is so poor from years of coca
growing that the farmers have a tough time competing with farmers from
other areas.

"After coca comes what?" asked Carlos Toranzo Roca, a Bolivian economist at
the Latin American Institute of Social Investigations in La Paz. "To
sustain zero coca, you need an economic plan. And we still haven't seen
that plan."

Nevertheless, of the 78,400 acres in the region under coca cultivation at
the beginning of 1998, the aggressive eradication campaign has left only
about 4,000 today, according to the U.S. Embassy. Even those are due to be
eliminated soon.

Despite the costs to the Chapare region and even Bolivia as a whole, the
shift has had little or no effect on the overall supply of cocaine being
brought to markets, as traffickers have nimbly shifted growing and
production to Colombia in the last five years.