UPRISING IN BOLIVIA BLAMED ON U. S. ANTI-DRUG POLICY

(New York Times) L A PAZ, Bolivia---On a visit to the White House last
year, President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada told President Bush that he
would push ahead with a plan to eradicate coca but that he needed more
money to ease the impact on farmers.

Otherwise, the Bolivian president's advisers recalled him as saying,
"I may be back here in a year, this time seeking political asylum."

Mr. Bush was amused, Bolivian officials recounted, told his visitor
that all heads of state had tough problems and wished him good luck.

Now Mr. Sanchez de Lozada, Washington's most stalwart ally in South
America, is living in exile in the United States after being toppled
last week by a popular uprising, a potentially crippling blow to
Washington's anti-drug policy in the Andean region.

United States officials interviewed here minimized the importance of
the drug issue in Mr. Sanchez de Lozada's downfall, blaming a "pent-up
frustration" over issues ranging from natural gas exports to corruption.

But to many Bolivians and analysts, the coca problem is intimately
tied to the broader issues of impoverishment and disenfranchisement
that have stoked explosive resentments here and fueled a month of
often violent protests.

"The U.S. insistence on coca eradication was at the core of Sanchez de
Lozada's problem," said Eduardo Gamarra, a Bolivian scholar who is
director of the Latin American and Caribbean Center at Florida
International University in Miami.

Dr. Gamarra and others point to events in Bolivia as a warning that
United States drug policy may sow still wider instability in the
region, where anti-American sentiment is building with the failure of
economic reforms that Washington has helped encourage here.

In Bolivia the backlash has strengthened the hand of the political
figure regarded by Washington as its main enemy: Evo Morales, head of
the coca growers' federation, who finished second in presidential
election last year.

"To the extent that the U.S. pushes on eradication targets without any
kind of flexibility, it makes people there much more amenable to
turning to violent protest or insurgent groups," said Michael Shifter,
who follows the Andean region for the Washington-based policy group
Inter-American Dialogue.