SOLDIERS, POLICE MOBILIZE TO COUNTER BOLIVIAN FARMER PROTESTS

LA PAZ, Bolivia (AP) -- Protesting coca-leaf farmers set up new roadblocks
thursday to interrupt traffic on the country's main highway while soldiers
and police used tear gas in response to rock and stone throwing protesters.

Only minor injuries were reported in the clash between police and
protesting coca leaf farmers in the central Chapare region, 480 miles (772
kilometers) from La Paz, angered by the government's destruction of coca
leaf crop.

Only 2,000 hectares (4,940 acres) of coca leaf remain in the Chapare, 5
percent of what existed four years ago. President Hugo Banzer says Bolivia
will no longer be producing cocaine by the end of the year.

Farmers are also demanding greater investment in new agricultural
industries to compensate for the losses related to the destruction of coca
fields.

Losses related to the roadblocks are estimated at $20 million, the
government says.

The government mobilized hundreds of soldiers and police Wednesday to break
up the roadblocks which have paralyzed the country's main highway.

Soldiers entered the tropical Chapare coca-leaf producing region and began
moving trucks and rocks that have interrupted traffic between the cities of
Cochabamba and Santa Cruz.

At least 2,000 trucks and buses were stranded by the roadblocks. Many of
the trucks and buses were able to get through, but new road blocks set up
Thursday brought traffic to a new standstill.

The road that links Cochabamba and Santa Cruz, crossing the Chapare region,
was blocked Monday by farmers opposed to the government's destruction of
nearly all the coca leaf that fed the cocaine industry.

In an unrelated protest in the Bolivian highlands, soldiers were
temporarily able to lift roadblocks on the roads connecting La Paz with
Lake Titicaca, Peru and Chile, but farmers set new ones up minutes after
the soldiers left, leaving hundreds of buses and trucks stranded on the
frigid Bolivian highlands.

Farmers there are demanding that the government reconsider a new water law
that congress was debating and changes in agrarian reform laws.

Farmers blocking the road to Arica, Chile, are also demanding that the
Enron-owned Transredes pipeline company compensate farmers for an oil spill
on the Desaguadero River that flows out of Lake Titicaca. Transredes has
spent millions of dollars cleaning the oil spill and provided farmers with
food for their animals.