TUG OF WAR OVER COCAINE

A Clear-Cut Victory Over Growth Of The Drug Is Impossible. It Can,
Perhaps, Be Contained.

La Macarena National Park is a dramatic mountain ridge that cuts like
a serrated knife through the tropical grasslands of Colombia. It is a
refuge for dozens of species of wildlife found in few other places on earth.

But recently it has become a new front in the "war" on the cocaine
industry that the United States and its allies have now been waging
for a generation in the Andean states of South America.

Each day, hundreds of peasant labourers march through the park,
spades in hand, to plots planted with coca, whose leaves are used to
make cocaine. They yank out bush after bush under the eye of more
than 1,000 police.

That protection could not save Jose Bermudez, a young labourer, who
was killed on March 10 when he trod on a land mine placed by the
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia -- known as the FARC -- the
leftist guerrillas who control the coca fields of La Macarena. In
all, the FARC have killed 13 police or eradicators in the park this year.

In its first three years, the government of Alvaro Uribe, Colombia's
president, unleashed a massive program of aerial spraying of coca
crops with weed killer -- at a cost of $200 million a year paid by
the United States.

This cut the coca crop by between a third and a half, according to
the U.S. State Department and the United Nations Office on Drugs and
Crime, both of which try to guess the size of the crop.

But spraying is controversial. Critics say it wipes out food crops
and may damage health. And to evade it, coca is no longer grown in
vast plantations but in thousands of tiny plots -- some in national
parks like La Macarena where spraying is forbidden.

A year ago Uribe's officials launched a big manual eradication effort
in parallel with spraying. In 2005 the civilian army of peasant
eradicators uprooted more than 31,000 hectares (77,000 acres) of
coca; this year, the government hopes for 40,000 hectares. Yet this
Herculean effort may be in vain.

In November, the drug warriors in Washington, D.C. claimed a small
victory. After years in which cocaine has been cheap and abundant,
its retail price rose last year by 19 per cent, while its average
purity declined by 15 per cent. They attributed this to the massive
eradication effort in Colombia.

Yet victories in the drug "war" have long proved illusory because of
the protean geography of the cocaine industry. A decade ago, the bulk
of coca-growing shifted to Colombia from Peru and Bolivia. Now coca
cultivation is on the rise again farther south.

The U.S. State Department's latest estimates, released on March 1 in
its annual drug-control report, showed an increase over the past year
of 38 per cent in Peru (to 38,000 hectares) and a smaller, but
steady, rise in Bolivia (to 26,500 hectares).

Though this trend is a "problem," coca is still mainly grown in
Colombia, points out Anne Patterson, the senior anti-drug officer at
the State Department and a former American ambassador in Bogota.

But while Uribe seems set for a second term, eradication faces a new
political challenge in both Bolivia and Peru, countries which until
recently were seen as success stories in the drug "war." Evo Morales,
long the leader of Bolivia's "cocaleros" -- "coca farmers" -- won a
landslide victory in a presidential election in December.

He says he will halt forcible eradication. He also says that he
opposes cocaine and the drug trade, but wants to promote new uses of
coca. These include pharmaceuticals and, improbably, biscuits, bread
and chewing gum.

In Peru, Ollanta Humala, a nationalist former army officer, might win
a presidential election whose first round is next month. He has two
cocalero leaders in his parliamentary lists and says that he would
stop eradication.

Since taking office in January, Morales has given signs that he would
prefer to avoid a fight with the United States. On March 11, at the
inauguration of Chile's new president, he met Condoleezza Rice, the
secretary of state, and presented her with a charango -- a Bolivian
ukulele -- decorated with lacquered coca leaves.

Avoiding a clash may be hard. Morales faces pressure to allow more
coca in the Chapare, a big centre of the drug industry a decade ago.
Under an agreement suspending forced eradication there in 2004, 3,200
hectares of the shrub are tolerated pending a study on how much is
required for traditional uses, such as chewing and tea. Another
12,000 hectares are grown legally in the mountainous Yungas region.

The Chapare accord works out to one "cato" -- a measure equal to
1,600 square metres -- for each of the 23,000 families who signed up
to it. Now the cocaleros want to expand that number. Morales'
predecessors turned a blind eye as 40,000 families took advantage of
the one-cato rule.

Morales is unlikely to take them on. He wants to amend the 1988 law
that limits legal coca to 12,000 hectares. Any new limit is likely to
be negotiated rather than imposed. He has also said he wants to strip
the army of its role in fighting drugs -- seen as "mission essential"
by John Walters, the United States drug "czar."

Both the United States and Bolivia now face stark choices. The
Americans must decide between the drug war and supporting democracy.
Their options include withdrawing aid and vetoing loans to South
America's poorest republic.

Morales, for his part, knows that more coca would boost Bolivia's
drug industry, which in the past had fascist links.

The two countries are in an "uncomfortable detente," according to
Kathryn Ledebur of the Andean Information Network, an NGO. She sees
in the moderate tone toward Bolivia in the State Department's report
signs of a "more strategic approach" to coca. But reaching a deal --
which could involve a harsher crackdown on trafficking and more aid
for alternative crops -- will not be easy.

"We want to work with the government," says Patterson. But if coca
returns on a large scale in Bolivia "it will undermine all the effort
we've undertaken in Colombia," she adds.

Peru may be potentially the weakest link in the Andean anti-drug
chain. Despite 12,000 hectares eradicated last year, the State
Department reckons there is more coca than at any time since 1999.
After cocalero protests, the government of Alejandro Toledo scaled
back eradication.

The remnants of the Shining Path, a Maoist terrorist group, are said
by some analysts to be strengthening their grip over the drug trade,
in a pattern familiar in Colombia.

"Peru is moving toward becoming a drug state," says Jaime Antezana, a
sociologist who has studied the cocaleros.

Even in Colombia, the success of the drug warriors is fragile. Manual
eradication is far more laborious than spraying. An American study
found that the manual teams pulled up an average of 20.5 hectares a
day, while the spray planes covered 734 hectares a day. But unlike
manual eradication, spraying may merely wipe out one harvest, rather
than the plant.

American officials say replanting almost matches eradication. They
admit their figures may be underestimates. The United Nations
reported last year that 60 per cent of the coca fields it detected in
2004 were new, some of them in virgin areas. There is evidence, too,
that yields are steadily increasing.

A "clear-cut victory" over coca is impossible, Patterson concedes.
"It's just a question of containing it where it breaks out."

The problem is that containment carries heavy political costs for
democratic governments in the Andes. The drug trade itself undermines
democracy, but so do the heavy-handed American efforts to contain it.

As long as rich-country governments insist on imposing an
unenforceable prohibition on cocaine consumption, Andean governments
will continue to be faced with the thankless task of trying to
repress market forces.