DRUG WAR TAKES DIFFERENT TACK

Under New President, Coca Eradication In Bolivia Is Cut Back

LA PAZ, Bolivia - The smell filling the grimy whitewashed rooms of the
market in the Villa Fatima district overlooking this Andean capital
evokes the sweetness of cut grass, only it's more pungent, nearly
intoxicating.

Sacks of freshly harvested coca leaves are stacked all around,
awaiting buyers. It's all legal, this trade in the leaves that produce
cocaine.

There's lots more coca leaf around than there has been in years, no
surprise given that new President Evo Morales was recently re-elected
head of Bolivia's coca growers' federation.

Eradication of Bolivian coca leaf, an enterprise underwritten almost
exclusively with U.S. tax dollars, is down more than 60 percent since
Morales took office.

The destruction of coca fields is no longer forced but depends on the
cooperation of coca growers, said Felipe Caceres, the official in
charge of the effort and a coca grower.

'Zero Tolerance' For Some

Morales has declared zero tolerance for cocaine but said he won't
discourage coca growing for traditional consumption.

To see one such traditional use, look no farther than the bulging
cheek of Daniel Sonco, a 37-year-old coca trader.

He chews on a ball of coca leaves as he and a colleague repack a
half-dozen 50-pound sacks of hoja de coca in airtight plastic for a
trip down from Bolivia's high plains to the steamy eastern lowlands,
where he says he sells them in 1-pound lots to agricultural workers.

"If you don't chew down there, you get sleepy," Sonco said, his breath
emitting a bitter, alkaloid odor. "The people in the east need to chew
to work because it's so hot there."

There is a traditional mystique to coca-leaf chewing. It was once a
restricted privilege of Inca royalty before becoming common practice
among indigenous peoples in the Andes, where the stimulant doesn't
just suppress the appetite but also helps ward off altitude sickness.

The first thing you're offered at La Paz hotels as you arrive in the
world's highest capital, 11,800 feet above sea level, is a cup of mate
de coca, or coca tea. You'll get the same treatment in the former Inca
capital of Cuzco, Peru.

Another means of coca consumption, as an all-purpose food supplement,
has in recent weeks been suggested by politicians in the region.

Bolivia's new foreign minister, David Choquehuanca, said the "sacred
leaf" is so nutritious it should be on school menus, although
scientific studies show that humans don't easily absorb its nutrients.

A spokesman for Peruvian presidential candidate Ollanta Humala said
ground coca leaf could be baked into schoolchildren's bread. In
Venezuela, President Hugo Chavez also embraced the idea of coca bread.

Coca Called 'Nutritional'

"Coca isn't the same as cocaine," Chavez said. "Coca is tremendously
nutritional."

Coca recipes notwithstanding, Bolivians have no illusions that a good
portion of their coca crop is being converted into cocaine.

The question is, how much?

In October 2004, then-President Carlos Mesa ended a tense
confrontation with coca growers in the Chapare region by agreeing to
let them cultivate 7,900 acres of the crop while the government
commissioned a study of Bolivia's legal coca market.

Once that amount was determined, the government would eradicate the
surplus.

The study has yet to be started and Bolivia's coca crop, meanwhile,
grew to an estimated 65,500 acres last year, according to the U.S.
State Department. That was an 8 percent increase over 2004 and more
than twice the 29,652 acres permitted under Bolivian law. The crop has
grown for four years in a row.

This worries U.S. officials, though they have been loath to discuss
the issue on the record. U.S. Ambassador David Greenlee has expressed
concern, nevertheless, that excess coca leaf cultivation fuels the
cocaine trade.

Of the $150 million in annual U.S. aid to Bolivia, about two-thirds is
tied to narcotics. The money goes to everything from boots to health
care and pay supplements for the 1,500 Bolivian conscripts in the
eradication force.

Unlike in Colombia, where the chief method of coca crop destruction is
aerial spraying with a herbicide, conscripts in Bolivia do it by hand.
Last year, they ripped out an average of 1,235 acres of coca bushes a
month.

In the nine weeks since Morales' Jan. 22 inauguration, however, they
have destroyed just 1,017 acres, though nearly one-third of that was
eradicated in the past week, according to the Vice Ministry of Social
Defense, which oversees the force.

It's anyone's guess how much more coca is being planted.

3rd-Largest Producer

Bolivia is the world's third-largest coca producer, behind Colombia
and Peru, and what gets processed into cocaine is smuggled across the
porous border into Brazil, destined mostly for Europe and the
Brazilian market, the world's second-largest after the United States.

Alarmed by growing drug-related violence and rising crack cocaine
addiction, Brazil last week said that it would build nine new
surveillance posts along its 2,100-mile border with Bolivia to combat
drug trafficking and illegal immigration.

Pressure from neighbors may be tempering the Morales government's
attitude toward coca.

While Bolivia's "Coca Control" agency has been renamed "Coca
Development," its chief returned somewhat chastened last week from a
meeting in Vienna of the International Narcotics Control Board.

Caceres announced that Morales would delay his campaign to get coca
leaf decriminalized and said growers needed to understand that some
coca destruction would continue.

"We will eradicate, but in a voluntary manner," he said. "We will meet
our international obligations in a voluntary form."