DRUG WAR CASUALTIES

Bolivian Farmers Grow Coca Despite Risks

Ibuelo Alto, Bolivia - One morning in April, Hilaria Perez Prado began
her day as always: hoping soldiers wouldn't burst from the jungle and
tear her farm to pieces.

They did come, though. They trampled her fields. And then one shot her
in the chest as they left.

Perez, 41, is out of the hospital. But her lung is damaged and so is
her hope of eking out a living for her family farming deep in the
Chapare, a remote Bolivian region that is deep in America's war on
drugs.

Over the past seven years, Washington has spent $470 million on a
militarized campaign to deter Perez and other poor farmers from
growing coca.

Plan Dignity, as the campaign was dubbed, worked dramatically for the
first five years. Bolivian soldiers, most of them teenage draftees,
were given hoes and machetes and ordered to uproot coca plants one by
one.

They yanked out more than a billion plants. Bolivia went from
supplying half of the United States' cocaine demand - the crop brought
an estimated $500 million into this country of 8 million people each
year - to supplying very little. American diplomats called Plan
Dignity their most successful anti-narcotics mission ever in South
America.

But bananas, manioc root and other crops urged on peasant growers
haven't proved profitable because few buyers come to these isolated
regions, and farmers have begun drifting back to coca. Coca production
in Bolivia is up 23 percent since 2001, the White House Drug Policy
Office says.

So anti-drug efforts have been intensified, bringing an escalation in
tensions and conflict between soldiers and peasants.

Farmers plant homemade land mines in coca fields and put rat poison in
low-hanging fruit in hopes soldiers will eat them. Troops sometimes
resort to gunfire.

The People's Defense Office, an independent Bolivian human rights
group, said 30 farmers and 21 soldiers had been killed in the past
five years. About 600 people were wounded, it added.

An estimated 1,200 farmers have been arrested on charges of growing
coca, the group said.

"It's easy to understand why people are growing violent. They're
hungry," said Godofredo Reinicke, a rights activist in the Chapare, a
New Jersey-size region in central Bolivia that is one of the country's
poorest areas.

Stanley Schrager, former director of the narcotics section at the U.S.
Embassy in La Paz, isn't sympathetic to the argument that farmers must
grow coca to survive.

"There is an idea out there - I call it the myth of the innocent coca
farmer - that he is simply trying to put food on the table to feed his
kids," Schrager said. "But in reality he is at the beginning of a
chain of events that ultimately leads to the drug trade and drug
addiction in the United States, and thus bears some responsibility for
the ruined lives which are the result."

The Bolivian government, meanwhile, is caught between the U.S.
insistence on eradication and the farmers' forceful and well-organized
demands that coca be legalized.

The farmers, in fact, may be the greatest threat to the political
survival of President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, who has the
distinction of being the least popular leader in South America. His
approval rating was 9 percent in a poll released Aug. 11.

Still, Sanchez de Lozada, 72, has vowed not to leave office unless he
dies first and recommitted himself to the eradication program. He
hopes to pull Bolivia out of its economic crisis by creating new jobs
with public works projects.

But Perez, 41, doesn't see any option to growing coca. A Quechua
Indian who speaks no Spanish, she lives with her husband, seven
children and chickens in a wooden hovel without electricity.

She says coca is the only crop that can feed her family. So she'll
keep planting it, along with banana trees to hide it from
helicopters.

Chapare's farmers dismiss crops like oranges and bananas. The highway
through the region is lined with women peddling cheap, overripe fruit:
100 oranges for 35 cents, 20 ripe bananas for 13 cents. There are few
buyers.

The only people who consistently trek into the Chapare to buy produce
are representatives of drug gangs. They pay $1 a pound for coca leaf,
so farmers grow coca and risk their lives.

One morning in January, Estevan Garcia joined about 100 other coca
farmers who gathered armfuls of rotting fruit from their farms,
planning to blockade the highway as a protest.

When they arrived, soldiers were waiting.

"They tear-gassed us and I ran," Garcia said. "I felt something hot. I
touched my face and pulled out my jaw."

A soldier's bullet had cut through his face and unhinged his lower
jaw.

Now Garcia spends his days asking government officials to help him buy
a $12,000 prosthetic jaw. He has received no reply.

He says it would take him 138 years to accumulate enough money as a
manioc root farmer. "People don't even talk about that quantity of
money around here," said his wife, Epifania Vargas.