BOLIVIA CRACKS DOWN ON COCA GROWING

Cocaine-Producing Plant Once Thrived,,Now On The Decline

PRIMER0 DE MAYO, Bolivia

Ever since drought drove his family from a rocky cornfield high in the
Andes 15 years ago, Espinosa Leon has been chopping down tropical rain
forest to grow coca bushes, which produce cocaine. Now, at 38, Leon
finds himself at another crossroads.

"The army is coming any day to destroy my last coca," said Leon, who
had already slashed three-quarters of his crop in recent months in
exchange for aid from U.N. technicians forming a forestry project
here. "I don't have to like it, but coca has no future."

For the last decade, Leon's turn-around would have been the rarest
exception in Bolivia, a country that has been a sponge for more than
$500 million in international money to fight the drug trade, mostly
paid by American taxpayers.

But life is changing fast in the Chapare lowlands, where only a few
years ago drug dealers weighed coca paste on scales openly in the
street and drug money flowed so freely that shirtless peasants drank
Chivas Regal.

Now the Chivas days are over. CIA satellite surveys indicate that last
year Bolivia eradicated coca from 25 percent of the land where it was
grown in the Chapare, a region the size of New Jersey that supplies 90
percent of the country's illicit exports.

The President's Pledge

That pace has accelerated so far this year and new plantings are
increasingly scarce, senior U.S. officials say. These officials say
they are beginning to believe President Hugo Banzer might fulfill his
pledge to eradicate all of Bolivia's illegal coca crop by the end of
his term in late 2002.

"Bolivia is making history," said Donna Hrinak, the American
ambassador in La Paz. "Bolivia has the potential of becoming the first
country ever to stop producing illegal drugs. A year ago no one in the
U.S. government would have come out and said that."

But even the most optimistic U.S. officials concede that the gains in
Bolivia, and similar ones in Peru, have made little or no impact on
the availability of cocaine or its price or use in the United States,
in large part because growers in Colombia have filled the gap.

Bolivian officials say they have their own reasons for eliminating the
crop. Drying up a well for government and judicial corruption is
foremost among them, along with improving what even they concede is a
miserable international reputation that discourages foreign investment.

Bolivians still grow about 70,000 acres of coca and earn $300 million
a year from the drug. And there is no assurance that the resistance of
coca growers, the difficulties they face earning a living from other
crops, or a policy shift by whoever succeeds Banzer in 2003 will not
slow or reverse Bolivia's gains.

The Difference Now

Bolivia had tried coca eradication for more than a decade, relying
mostly on incentives that paid growers to switch crops, policies that
by themselves had little effect and met great resistance from growers.
The difference now appears to be that Banzer has mixed some sticks
with the carrots.

His so-called Dignity Plan, the government's counternarcotics program,
made a clean break from past U.S.-financed efforts, which had netted
an unremarkable 3 percent reduction in coca acreage between 1993 and
1997.

In years past, coca growers w o were paid to dig up their bush s and
grow pineapples and bananas typically took the money, eradicated one
coca field and then cultivated another deeper in the jungle.

When he took office a little more than a year ago, Banzer quickly
phased out the "voluntary eradication" approach. He offered to sign
agreements with communities across the Chapare under which they would
receive credits, roads and technical help to grow alternative, legal
crops in exchange for promises that they would never

grow coca again. Any communities refusing to sign, or breaking their
agreements would face "forced eradication," possible arrest and even
forced relocation.

So far, 75 agreements covering About 700O growers have been signed,
officials said, with many more communities poised to follow.