COCA PROTEST BRINGS BOLIVIA TO A HALT

La Paz: Bolivian government officials hope talks today with coca growers,
teachers and peasants will bring an end to road blocks that have choked
food deliveries and led to 10 deaths.

"I think we'll reach an agreement but I think we could have avoided this
conflict had the government listened to the peasants' demands," the Roman
Catholic archbishop of La Paz, Jesus Juarez, told Reuters.

Bolivia, one of the western hemisphere's poorest nations, has been
paralysed for the last 12 days since tens of thousands of coca growers,
peasants and teachers laid stones and boulders on highways to force the
government to address their demands.

Peasants are against a campaign to eradicate most cultivation of coca leaf,
the raw material of cocaine. In addition, teachers want a 50% pay rise and
other protesters accuse the government of reneging on promised pay rises to
police.

Ten people have been killed in clashes in the past week.

Three were shot at a protest on Thursday at Huarina on the shores of Lake
Titicaca.

Witnesses said a Bolivian Air Force plane opened fire on the group.
Government officials claimed the plane "only shot in the air" but they were
awaiting autopsy results to see if the fatal wounds matched the .50-calibre
bullets of the aircraft.

President Hugo Banzer agreed to negotiate with the three groups separately
over the weekend, meeting with the coca growers in the lowland city of
Santa Cruz, teachers in La Paz and peasants in Pucarani, 30km northwest of
La Paz, near Lake Titicaca.

Talks with coca growers are likely to prove to be the toughest of the three
because of the government's reluctance to jeopardise $US157 million in US
aid over the next two years that is contingent on wiping out coca in the
Chapare by 2002.

"The road blocks will continue; we'll change tactics. We'll block roads
north of La Paz that lead to other departments," said Tupac Katari peasant
leader Felipe Quispe, who held a press briefing in La Paz after hiding for
11 days.

Bolivia has proportionately by far the largest Amerindian population of any
nation in the Americas, with more than 55% of its eight million people of
native extraction.

Average annual income in Bolivia is $US1000 ($NZ2449) and it has one of the
hemisphere's worst infant mortality rates, at 69 per thousand live births.

While all three groups have separate specific demands, they all want the
coalition government led by Mr Banzer - a military dictator in the 1970s
but who was democratically elected in 1997 - to address the root causes of
Bolivia's chronic poverty.

"The church wanted to negotiate everything in one package; that would be
fatal. As the president said, we're not going to stop eradicating coca in
the Chapare region and we will build military barracks there for
surveillance," Information Minister Manfredo Kempff told Reuters.

Mr Kempff estimated coca sales yielded $US250 million to $US500 million to
the underground economy in a nation with a gross domestic product of $US8
billion.

"We've proposed that they grow pineapples or bananas instead but those
crops just do not pay as well as coca, so that's the challenge we face in
Bolivia," Mr Kempff said.

Coca growers say coca pays well, can be harvested three times a year and is
easy to transport, compared with pineapples - which spoil easily - and
bananas, which fetch only low prices.