BOLIVIA, SHIFTING ITS FIGHT ON COCAINE, TO URGE FARMERS TO PLANT NEW CROPS

LA PAZ, Bolivia - After nearly a decade of forced eradication of coca,
the plant from which cocaine is made, Bolivia wants instead to try to
persuade poor farmers to abandon illicit crops in favor of coffee and
cocoa.

The strategy shift, outlined in a government report, is tacit
acknowledgment that unpopular forced eradication has come with too
high a social and political cost for Bolivia, which once was hailed as
the Andean leader in the U.S.-backed drug war.

The United States and Europe, which will be asked to pay for most of
President Carlos Mesa's new $969 million, five-year antidrug plan, are
grudgingly sympathetic. Successful past eradication efforts, in which
troops uprooted coca plants, have taken an estimated $400 million out
of Bolivia's small economy in recent years, causing scattered
violence, disruptive roadblocks, and political and social unrest.

Eradication also helped turn Evo Morales, an Aymara Indian whose power
base is among Bolivia's cocaleros, or coca growers, into one of the
country's most influential politicians. His Movement to Socialism
party could win up to half the votes in Bolivia's December municipal
elections, increasing the chances the country could have a
pro-cocalero president.

U.S. officials involved in Bolivia's drug war are not uncomfortable
with the size of the government's funding request for alternative crop
development. They privately concede that the weakness of the current
government and the difficult terrain in Bolivia's remaining coca
fields make it unrealistic to expect a repeat of past eradication successes.

In the 1970s and '80s, Bolivia ranked either first or second in the
world as a supplier of coca. With Peru and Colombia, it forms the
Andean triangle, which provides most of the world's cocaine.

Since the fall of pro-U.S. President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada last
October, U.S. antidrug experts have worried that political instability
could undo Bolivia's gains and allow a haven for drug rings fleeing
stepped-up eradication efforts in Colombia, now the world's biggest
coca producer.

Cocaleros led the opposition that toppled Sanchez de Lozada's
government last year, and they could easily turn against Mesa, a
historian by trade and an inexperienced politician without a political
party or legislative base.

Mindful of Bolivia's political minefield, Mesa proposes to spend $557
million on alternative crop development, $355 million on interdiction,
$17 million on rehabilitation and treatment, and just $40 million on
eradication.

"We want greater equilibrium," Jorge Azad Ayala, Bolivia's vice
minister for alternative development in the Ministry of Agriculture,
said in an interview. "What has happened in previous governments is
the four elements were not balanced."

If donor countries disagree, they can use their power of the purse to
realign Bolivia's drug-war tactics.

Critics question Bolivia's plan to make coffee and cocoa the focus of
alternative development efforts. Similar efforts failed in Peru
because surplus production globally drove down coffee prices to record
lows, from which they have not recovered.

"It does beg a lot of questions that they would be promoting coffee,
given the price crisis," said John Walsh, a senior associate for the
Andes and drug policy at the Washington Office on Latin America, a
left-leaning policy think tank.

The Mesa plan seeks substantially less for eradication than Bolivia
sought when it launched its anti-coca Plan Dignity in 1998.
Then-President Hugo Banzer sought $237 million for eradication and
interdiction and $700 million for alternative development.

What Banzer got was $205 million for eradication and law enforcement
but just $128 million for alternative development. The subsidies
helped eliminate more than 90,000 acres of coca under cultivation,
but only about half of the 40,000 poor farmers in the key
coca-growing Chapare region got help producing alternative crops.