A BOLIVIAN LEGISLATOR WHO JUST SAYS `YES' TO COCA

LAUCA ENE, Bolivia -- Like congressmen all over the world, Evo Morales hugs
babies and makes fist-thumping speeches. But that's where the similarities
end. For starters, this congressman chews coca leaves in public.

In fact, as Morales returned to his district recently, he was not at all
embarrassed to be photographed caressing the coca bushes that grow on his
property. During his election campaign last year, he ran on the slogan
"Vote for coca!" He won 70 percent of the vote in a field of 10, which is
perhaps not particularly surprising since his district, the tropical region
of Chapare, produces 85 percent of the refined cocaine produced in Bolivia
every year.

At age 38, Morales is the spokesman for six of the seven coca grower unions
in Bolivia, and he is the single most powerful politician standing in the
way of efforts by the United Nations and the U.S. and Bolivian governments
to fight the Bolivian cocaine trade.

Since President Hugo Banzer Suarez announced in January his intention to
eradicate the coca industry in Chapare by the year 2002, Morales has been
leading road blockades and accusing the president and his family of being
international traffickers themselves -- charges that he has failed to
substantiate but that have won him screaming newspaper headlines and
considerable national television exposure.

"We'll see who wins in 2002," Morales said, while discussing future protest
strategy with the deputy mayor of the town of Villa Catorce over an ample
helping of stewed chicken and rice. "If in 2002 there is no coca in
Chapare, Banzer wins. If our people are still growing coca, I win."

Cocky is a good word to describe the Bolivian legislator. He applauded and
laughed when his colleagues made speeches against him in the halls of
Congress recently, and he exchanged hearty greetings with policemen who man
road blocks in his district. When he plays soccer, he likes to wear the
number 10, the number worn by Diego Armando Maradona, the great Argentine
star. Still single, he was quoted in a 1995 Bolivian newspaper interview
that one day he wanted to be married in a church made of coca leaves.

"He's an egotist, but when he enters the room he demands attention," said
Oscar Torrico Alvarado, a center-left congressman from neighboring
Cochabamba.

Morales is controversial, to say the least, although a Dutch human rights
group nominated him for a Nobel Peace Prize in 1995 for protecting the
rights of peasants who say they are doing nothing more than growing a crop
that has been grown in the Andean region for hundreds of years.

After Morales openly called on coca growers to defend their lands against
army and police units, the government blamed him personally for the killing
of three police officers and the wounding of 15 others in a string of
ambushes staged since April. He has also been blamed for a rash of threats
members of his organization have made to coca growers who have signed
agreements with the government to stop growing their illegal crops, a
charge that he only partly disputes.

"Any threats have been spontaneous," he said.

The government party is trying to strip him of the legal immunity from
prosecution that he is granted automatically by being a federal legislator.
But a majority in the Chamber of Deputies opposed the move to sanction him
in large part because it would set a precedent that could someday backfire
on a sizable number of congressmen with questionable ethics.

Meanwhile, Bolivian law enforcement agencies are trying to find out if he
has any ties with international drug traffickers, but U.S. and Bolivian
officials concede that they have come up nothing solid so far.

"He's a very capable union leader and he knows how to inspire and prepare
young people," said Brig. Gen. Walter Cespedes Ramallo, the top Bolivian
army commander in Chapare. "But he has to know that to support coca
cultivation in Chapare he is defending the interests of the
narcotraffickers."

Traveling with Morales through his district is an object lesson on how coca
permeates the politics and economics of the area that votes for him so
resoundingly. Touring his district in sandals and blue jeans, he got out of
his van to talk to a woman drying coca leaves on her front yard in the town
of Villa Catorce as she complained about the increasing number of peasant
associations in the region who were abandoning the crop for fear of
government reprisals.

"These are our problems," he said, nodding his head glumly. But then,
shaking off his own concerns that the unity of the coca growers may be
cracking under government pressure, he added, "These are not really unions
- -- they have no members."

The main event of the day was a coca growers union meeting in this
sweltering town of wooden shacks set on stilts. As he arrived, the growers
were listening to radio reports of an ambush of a government eradication
team that left one policeman dead and three wounded.

"Did we lose any people?" he asked.

During the meeting a young woman flanked by her children began crying
uncontrollably about the loss of income her family would suffer if the
government campaign was effective.

Sitting behind a pile of coca leaves, Morales responded, "It's time to stop
crying and start organizing!"

Then he went into a blistering attack on the government. "They speak of
sedition and treat us like guerrillas," he said. "Banzer is using Chapare
to distract the rest of the country from all the other problems the nation
faces."

Discussing the attempts by his opponents in Congress to strip him of his
immunity, he steamed, "Congress is the first mafia of the state. All they
know how to do is lie and steal."

The 300 union members cheered, and many took copious notes to take back to
their locals.

Like many of the people of Chapare, Morales originally came from the
highlands to find a more prosperous life. He came from a poor subsistence
farm family, worked in bakery and took up the trumpet as an adolescent, and
even became a professional for awhile. His band specialized in playing the
tinku and diabladas, traditional Indian fight and protest music.

He never finished high school, and then entered the army. His life-defining
epiphany, he said, came in 1978, when he took part in a military action
against a march by coca growers protesting a military coup.

"When ordered to shoot, I shot over the heads of the protesters," he
recalled. "I saw that the biggest defenders of democracy were the
cocaleros."

Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company