BOLIVIAN FARMERS USE BOMBS, TRAPS TO THWART ANTI-DRUG TROOPS

VILLA TUNARI, Bolivia - U.S.-trained Bolivian anti-drug troops are
sustaining heavy casualties from bombs, booby traps and ambushes as they
attempt to uproot coca, the plant from which cocaine is made.

The battleground is the Chapare, a New Jersey-sized swath of steamy
tropical lowlands in south central Bolivia where most illicit coca is
grown. Since 1997, soldiers have uprooted 85 percent of the Chapare's coca,
about 90,000 acres. But coca growers, called cocaleros, are fighting back
now. Their success threatens U.S. anti-drug programs in the Andes, credited
with cutting cocaine's availability on American streets.

According to U.S. and Bolivian officials, seven Bolivian anti-drug soldiers
were killed and at least 91 wounded in the Chapare in 2003, most of them by
explosive booby traps planted shoulder-high in the dense undergrowth.
Casualties were negligible in the two previous years.

Some devices used a simple trigger, like a tin can that pulls a trip wire
when stepped on. Others are detonated by remote control. In one instance, a
truck carrying troops rolled over a roadbed trigger that launched a small
rocket at troops sitting in the back.

"We need to do this. The soldiers are taking our children's food right off
our table," said one cocalero in Villa Tunari, the largest town in the
region of the attacks. The coca grower agreed to speak only if his name
were not used.

Most violence has been in the Chapare's so-called Red Zone. It's an area
where former miners migrated when the government closed state tin mines in
the 1980s, a time when Bolivia was the world's second-largest supplier of
cocaine. The most resistant cocaleros farm there, and many have a knowledge
of explosives from their work in the mines.

When government eradication troops moved against Red Zone cocaleros last
fall, "We fully anticipated an increase in violence, and sure as hell it
came. We were really having a hell of a time of it. It was almost every
day, it seemed," recalled a U.S. official whose agency doesn't allow him to
be quoted.

The official added: "When you are telling them, 'We took your livelihood
once (when the mines closed),' and now we are going to do it again,' sure
there is resistance."

The Chapare's coca-growers - and the troops - got a reprieve in December
when a bridge washed out along the country's main highway, disrupting the
delivery of eradication forces to the Red Zone. The bridge is due to reopen
later this year.

In an interview last week, Bolivian President Carlos Mesa said "isolated
terrorist acts" in the Chapare were being investigated.

Mesa declined comment on Bolivian and Colombian media reports that
Colombia's Marxist National Liberation Army (ELN), which is allied with
Colombia's cocaine producers, may have provided Bolivia's cocaleros with
explosives or training. Those claims were based on the arrest in Bolivia
last June of a Colombian national, Francisco Cortes, who allegedly had in
his possession training materials and documents linking him to the ELN.

Colombian cartels and the Marxist rebel groups that charge "protection
taxes" to the drug trade previously had been reported in neighboring Peru
but not in Bolivia.

While Bolivia's investigation of attacks on coca eradicators is under way,
Mesa said, "I don't want to reach any (prejudicial) conclusions about
whether there are more organized structures of a terrorism connection."

Adding to tension in the Chapare are conflicting and unconfirmed reports
that right-wing paramilitary organizations are training there, or,
conversely, that cocaleros are forming their own armed forces to repel
troops advancing on their fields. Fueling the speculation is the reported
unsolved theft of at least 60 assault rifles and 9 mm pistols from a
Bolivian army base in the Chapare in December.

At the U.S. Embassy in La Paz, concern is growing about violence not just
against soldiers, but also against aid workers, American and Bolivian, who
try to persuade farmers to grow other crops.

"Historically the Chapare has been a region susceptible to social conflict,
but indications that the level of violence may be growing and reports of
increasingly sophisticated booby traps are frankly worrisome," said Gerry
Fuller, spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in La Paz.

"Also of concern," he added, "are the allegations that recent violence is
supported by foreign financing and terrorism."

Bolivia in recent years has been the only real success story in the
U.S.-funded Andean war on drugs. The State Department estimates that
Bolivia's efforts have removed 298 tons of cocaine from the global market
since 1997. In the same period, the United States gave Bolivia more than $1
billion in aid to support and reward eradication efforts, including $355
million in direct anti-narcotics assistance.

Bolivian soldiers, some of whom appear to be only 14 or 15 years old, carry
out the current U.S.-funded eradication effort, and Bolivian officers
oversee it. The U.S. Embassy's Narcotics Affairs Section conducts follow-up
inspections and estimates how much coca remains to be eradicated

The eradication efforts cost Bolivia an estimated $400 million in illicit
drug money from its tiny $8 billion economy, however. For the Chapare's
40,000 farmers, coca often is the only cash crop, far more profitable and
easier to get to market than alternative crops such as bananas and pineapples.

A Chapare coca farmer earns the equivalent of $80 per 50-pound bag of
leaves sold to middlemen, who sell to trafficking rings. There are four
harvests a year, and if a farmer who grows only coca sells six bags at
each, that brings in $480 per harvest, or $1,920 per year. That's twice
Bolivia's annual per-capita income of $953.

The coca issue will be back before Bolivians next month, when Mesa, who
took office in October through constitutional succession after his
predecessor resigned, plans to initiate a study of the country's legal coca
market. Native Bolivians chew the leaf legally to give themselves stamina
and ward off hunger.

Cocalero groups want a pause in eradication during any study or a legal
limit to be set for farmers while the study takes place.

Finding the real demand for coca is an increasingly vital matter in
Bolivia, because production is moving out of the Chapare into the Yungas
region, east of La Paz. Previous governments had agreed that some 30,000
acres of coca could be grown there for traditional and medicinal uses. But
the State Department estimates that 58,000 acres of coca grew in the Yungas
last year.

"This is the challenge that faces Bolivia, as coca in excess of what is
needed for the legal, traditional market ends up feeding the illegal
cocaine market," State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said in a Nov.
13 news conference on coca in the Andes.

Miguel Cispedes, the chief of Bolivia's coca regulatory agency in Sacaba,
outside Cochabamba, agreed with Boucher. "This coca issue is a time bomb,"
he said last week.