AN OUSTED PRESIDENT FEARS FOR BOLIVIA'S FUTURE

"Are There Questions We Ought To Be Thinking About? Are There Things
We Ought To Do Differently?"

That invitation to think outside the box came from Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld this week in connection with the U.S. war on
terrorism. Horrified Senate Democrats, seeming to prefer reliance on
bureaucratic inertia to set policy, denounced the suggestion. Yet in
the week following the violent overthrow of Bolivian President Gonzalo
Sanchez de Lozada, the insightful question could well be addressed to
U.S. policy makers responsible for Latin America.

Indeed, three issues in the Bolivian case bear U.S. scrutiny. The
first is whether fighting U.S. drug abuse by seeking to stomp out the
humble coca plant -- tenacious as a New York City cockroach and,
thanks to prohibition, more valuable than Colombian emeralds -- makes
sense or nonsense. Bolivia is just the latest example of how the drug
war transforms thugs into rich Pied Pipers, turns locals anti-American
and inflames political violence. Security forces assigned to combat
this orchestrated chaos are at a great disadvantage, as are frail
institutions.

The second phenomenon worth looking at in Bolivia is the presence of
foreign leftists claiming non-governmental organization (NGO) status,
while surreptitiously sowing the seeds of violence and pumping out
international propaganda to delegitimize the state. This has served
the interests of guerrillas in Colombia for the past decade, although
Colombian leadership has recently outed the NGOs' dirty little secret.
Let's hope it doesn't take that long in Bolivia to unmask front groups
and trace the sources of terrorist funding.

A third major source of instability is the International Monetary
Fund's incompetence.

Mr. Sanchez de Lozada, who fled his country last Friday, didn't
exactly enumerate these items when I phoned him in Washington this
week. But connect the dots in his story and the picture is the same.
Policies and politics from the outside heaped burdens on this fragile
democracy that were simply too heavy to bear.

The immediate events which triggered the president's resignation began
with road blockades protesting the government's plan to export natural
gas through Chile. When the military tried to open the roads and
protect the rights of innocent civilians, protestors used dynamite and
stones to fight them. Estimates of the dead range from 45-65.

Yet this was hardly a spontaneous popular uprising. Indeed, an
important fact about the street clashes was the forced enlistment of
participants. Mr. Sanchez de Lozada says that protest organizers told
residents in low-income barrios that every household had to send at
least one family member to the street or be fined 100 pesos or suffer
the consequences. The Shining Path used just such coercion against
peasants in its Maoist jihad.

In fact, the unrest, says Mr. Sanchez de Lozada "was a very well
organized, well financed effort on the part of coca growers and on the
part of Evo Morales and Felipe Quispe."

As the leader of the cocaleros in Bolivia's Chapare region, Mr.
Morales has organized resistance to the U.S. eradication agenda and
become a hero. He frequently visits Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez
and has ties to Libya's Moammar Ghadafi, who gave him the Libyan Peace
Prize.

Mr. Quispe, the leader of the Pachakuti Indigenous Movement, dreams of
becoming the Chairman Mao of a resurrected Pachakuti Empire. Mr.
Sanchez de Lozada says that Mr. Quispe studied under Peruvian
terrorists who used the Bolivian border areas as a safe haven during
the 1980s. "Quispe was in jail for blowing up power lines," he told
me, "and his case is still being processed" even though he is no
longer being held.

Despite the socialist rhetoric, Bolivia's "indigenous" movements
ironically draw much of their power from cocaleros clamoring for free
markets and property rights. By denying farmers the opportunity to
sell the crop that yields the best return, the government effectively
confiscates their property. One can argue about the merits and costs
of prohibition but it would be grossly misleading to conclude from
these events that the Indians oppose market economics.

Nevertheless, every washed up leftist on the planet who has spent the
past decade weeping over the death of Che Guevara seems to now believe
that the angry coca growers are the second Bolshevik coming of their
beloved utopian dream. Reports from on the ground suggest that the
revolt leadership is flush with tall, blond Northern Europeans. There
is also a homegrown variety. Trotskyites, the president told me, are
"an endangered species in the world but we've got them in Bolivia."

Mr. Sanchez de Lozada says that he can only assume that the NGOs have
"good intentions." But he also says that in providing "money, training
and organization" they can "end up supporting radicals that do not
foster policies that help the indigenous people." Anti-globalization
actors can be legitimate, he says, "but they cannot mobilize for the
use of violence and displacing an elected president."

Had the economy been more robust, the president may have survived the
extremist assault. But in a five-year recession with the IMF breathing
down his back, those odds dropped precipitously. He gave his enemies
ammunition when he proposed tax hikes in February as way to meet IMF
fiscal targets. Equally as damaging was the misery inflicted from the
IMF-induced Argentine devaluation, which destabilized import and
export markets. Indeed, one way to finish off coca growers would be to
sick the IMF on them.

The president says he is "very worried" about the potential for the
loss of democracy in Bolivia. He's seen the extremism of the coca
movement. "Around indigenous leaders you get Trotskyites that cannot
get used to the idea that the Berlin Wall came down. They love being
in congress but when that doesn't work, they take to the streets with
violence. I'm very worried because the man-eating tiger has had a
taste and he thinks he can do it again." The U.S. ought to consider
why the tiger is so feisty in the first place.