COCA CULTURE

OCHABAMBA, Bolivia - There has been rioting in Bolivia for nearly four weeks
now. News reports say that the riots have been over the construction of a
pipeline to ship natural gas to the United States. That's true, but there's
a deeper anger at work: anger toward the United States and its war against a
traditional Bolivian crop, coca.

You see, because of the American drug problem, we can no longer grow coca,
which was part of our life and our culture long before the United States was
a country. This is why many of the people protesting in La Paz and other
cities are peasants whose families have cultivated coca for generations.

My tribe, the Quechua, comes from the lowland jungles of the Chapare in
central Bolivia. We are used to chewing coca leaves every day, much as
Americans drink coffee. We sustained ourselves by growing coca for chewing
and for products like shampoo, medicinal teas and toothpaste. We did not
turn coca into cocaine; the chemicals needed for that are made in countries
like the United States. Bolivia now allows us to grow a very small amount of
coca, but it is not enough.

I am a cocalera. I owe my life to coca. My father died when I was 2 and my
mother raised six children by growing coca. I was a farmer myself, growing
coca for traditional purposes. But the United States says it is better for
us to just forget about coca. In the early 1990's, Bolivian officials
distributed American money - $300 to $2,500 per farm - and told us to try
yucca and pineapples. But 60 pineapples earn us only about eight bolivianos
(about $1). And unlike coca, yucca and pineapples are difficult to carry to
the cities to sell, and they spoil. So many farmers returned to growing
coca.

Then in 1998, the Bolivian government announced it would eradicate coca
farms through a military program financed by the Americans. Soldiers came to
the Chapare and destroyed our coca crops with machetes. School teachers were
beaten, and some houses were burned down.

When I saw that, I couldn't be quiet. I helped to organize people village by
village, and I became leader of a national association of peasant women.
Eventually we were joined in our protests by other social movements and
unions. We have continued to grow. Evo Morales, the head of the national
coca growers' union, even came in second in the 2002 presidential election.
He got 21 percent of the vote, while the current president, Gonzalo Sanchez
de Lozada, got 22 percent.

I think Mr. Morales would win today. Bolivians have grown tired of Mr.
Sanchez de Lozada's free-market, pro-United States policies, which have not
lowered our high rate of unemployment. The president's willingness to build
a pipeline through Chile to export our natural gas to the United States has
made many more people join the anti-government protests the cocaleros
started.

To me, real success in the war on drugs would be to capture and prosecute
the big drug traffickers, and for the United States to stop its own citizens
from using drugs. The war on the cocaleros has brought Bolivia nothing but
poverty and death.

Now tanks surround the presidential palace in La Paz. Fourteen people died
in riots there on Monday alone. Unless the United States and its allies like
Mr. Sanchez de Lozada stop their war against us, Bolivia will have neither
peace nor a future.

Leonida Zurita-Vargas is secretary general of Bartolina Sisa, an association
of peasant women. This article was written with Maria Cristina Caballero, a
Colombian journalist and fellow at Harvard's Center for Public Leadership.