CAUGHT IN THE EYE OF THE LEAF STORM

For the people of Bolivia coca is a sacred plant, a traditional medicine
and source of income. For the U.S. government it is evil, to be eradicated
at any cost. Nick Thorpe reports on the conflict between the two.

Zenon Cruz bites another coca leaf from its stem, tongues it into the wad
already bulging in his cheek and scowls up at the army helicopter hovering
above the jungle canopy. "My father sowed coca and his father sowed it
before him," mutters the peasant farmer, his teeth stained green. "What the
Americans do not understand is that this leaf is a gift from mother earth
to our people, an ancient tradition. They do not understand its sacredness.
They think it is all about drugs."

Like most of the campesinos gathered at this roadside protest in the
tropical Chapare region of Bolivia, the 29-year-old Cruz has watched a
United States-backed eradication squad hack away his entire crop and his
main source of income.

Last year alone, the soldiers destroyed a record 17,000 hectares in the
region, and by the end of this year aim to finish off the remaining 3,000
hectares, in a drive to strangle the US drugs problem at source.

The Bolivian government, with huge funding incentives from Washington (it
must be seen to be meeting drug eradication targets to qualify for
development aid), calls the strategy Operation Dignity. Cruz and his
struggling fellow farmers call it cultural genocide.

Andean peoples were using this hardy plant for a variety of ritual and
health purposes for thousands of years before white men first learned to
extract cocaine from it. Rich in vitamins and minerals, the leaves have
traditionally been used to treat ailments ranging from dysentery to
altitude sickness. The vast majority of Bolivians still chew them daily,
mixing them with ash to create an anaesthetic effect on the stomach to ward
off hunger. Death, marriage and any other social or religious ritual here
will include an offering of coca.

"Guard its leaves with love," warns Legend Of Coca, the 800-year-old oral
poem. "And when you feel pain in your heart, hunger in your flesh and
darkness in your mind, lift it to your mouth. You will find love for your
pain, nourishment for your body and light for your mind."

But the seers also foretold that the white man would find a way to subvert
their "small but strong" plant: "If your oppressor arrives from the north,
the white conqueror, the gold seeker, when he touches it he will find only
poison for his body and madness for the mind."

What the seers did not predict was the scale of the backlash. The white man
duly succeeded in extracting the 6.5% alkaloid cocaine from the coca leaf
at the end of the 19th century Dr Sigmund Freud become the first to
contract nasal cancer from snorting it - and all hell broke loose.

Eradication attempts began in 1949 after a study by a North American
banker, Howard Fonda, claimed that the chewing of the plant was responsible
for mental deficiency and poverty in Andean countries." In 1961 the United
Nations placed coca on schedule one, branding it one of the most dangerous
and restricted drugs. Of course this had no effect on US cocaine use, as
executives snorted lines while the ghettos opted for its cheaper and more
dangerous relative, crack. By the 80s more than half the world's cocaine
was being consumed by the US, which has 5% of the global population.
Bolivia, one of the world's poorest nations, saw an opening in the market
and filled it. It was to become the world's second-largest producer of coca
and cocaine paste.

Now, under the concerted eradication initiated by Ronald Reagan in his war
on drugs, it is payback time. Bolivia is being punished for its recent
complicity with the destruction of its ancient culture.

Not without a fight, however. "Go home, Yankees!" shouts a furious Quechua
woman in a bright shawl and bowler hat, marching with hundreds of others
under banners calling for farmers' human rights to be respected. The
helicopter keeps its distance, and the US Drug Enforcement Administration
officials rarely show their faces outside the confines of the nearby army base.

Zenon Cruz denies supplying the drug barons with his coca, but admits there
were plenty who did. At the height, of the trade light aircraft landed
regularly on these roads to pick up consignments. "But they are punishing
us all - legal and illegal together --and everyone is struggling," he says.

Coca, a hardy plant ideally suited to tired or eroded soil, could produce
three or-four harvests a year. Now forced to grow beans and oranges
instead, as part of a US-funded "alternative development" plan, Cruz must
feed his family on a fraction of his former income. "You can fill a lorry
with oranges and not sell any of them at market but coca always sells like
hot bread," he says. "I was making 150 bolivianos [about $35] a week before
they cut down the coca. Now we sometimes struggle to make 20. How can you
feed a family on that?"

Anti-drugs police estimate that the little more than three tonnes of
cocaine pasta base will leave Chapare this year, but this alone will
generate $4m, thanks to a 300% price increase over the past three years.

Critics of the eradication policy argue that it will simply drive producers
further into the Bolivian Amazon region, or elsewhere in South America
where an estimated 6.5m square kilometres lie ripe for production.

"It's simply the law of supply and demand" says Kathryn Ledebur,
coordinator of the Andean Information Network, a human rights watchdog
publicising problems with the eradication effort. "It's pointless trying to
stop production in the producer countries - the place to fight it is where
the market is." The bigger picture is indeed discouraging. While Bolivia
has fallen from second-to third-largest cocaine exporter behind Colombia
and Peru, there has been almost no reduction in the amount of cocaine
exported to the US and Europe, according to the annual report of the
International Narcotics Control Board. The explanation is that production
has increased in Brazil and Colombia, where the governments have little
control over their tropical territories.

"It's an obvious case of the balloon theory in operation," says Ledebur,
who is an American. "You squeeze it in one place and it'll just expand in
another unless you tackle root demand. Instead we've got a war focused on
the poor people, and it is not working."

"The child in the US learns that he must buy things in order to be happy,
whether it's Nike trainers or a gram of cocaine," says Javier Castro,
curator of the Bolivia Coca Museum in La Paz. "That's the root of the
problem, and everyone knows if they can't get their drugs here, they will
just go somewhere else. In the meantime they want to wipe out coca
completely - it's a kind of cultural genocide. It's going to be as if we
have no soul, no spirit:'

Castro is one of many who have fought to have the coca leaf recognised as a
health product rather than a schedule one drug. Western backpackers here
drink coca tea constantly to ward off altitude sickness, and a Harvard
University study found that 100g of Bolivian coca more than satisfied the
recommended daily allowances of calcium, iron, phosphorus, vitamin A and
riboflavin.

Contrary to popular belief, the burst of energy it gives comes not from the
0.5% cocaine content - this is in fact destroyed by saliva in the digestive
tract, which is why cocaine users must snort or inject - but from its
conversion of carbohydrates into glucose, and its stimulation of the
respiratory system,

With at least 30 coca products already available in Bolivia, ranging from
toothpaste to pick-me-up pastilles, campaigners argue that there is
considerable potential for salvaging the livelihoods of many thousands of
poor farmers by marketing the plant in the West.

But the only company that has managed to get round the ban is the Stepan
company of the US. In one of the howling ironies of the coca war, it
legally imports 175,000kg of Chapare coca each year to make, among other
things, a de-cocainised flavouring for Coca-Cola.