AMERICA'S WAR ON DRUGS LEAVES POOR BOLIVIAN FARMERS HUNGRY AND DESPERATE

IBUELO ALTO, Bolivia -- One morning last 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 from poor
families, 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 oranges, 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 growing 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
that tracks the government's interdiction effort, said 30 farmers and 21
soldiers have been killed the past five years. Some 600 civilians and
soldiers were wounded, it added.

Also, 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 human rights activist in the Chapare, a New
Jersey-size region in central Bolivia that is one of the country's poorest
areas.

Reinicke says coca offers many farmers their only chance to earn enough money.

Stanley Schrager, former director of the narcotics section at the U.S.
Embassy in La Paz, isn't sympathetic to the argument.

"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 of this addiction."

Perez, 41, doesn't see any option to growing coca. A Quechua Indian who
moved to the Chapare from the Andean highlands, she speaks no Spanish. She
lives with her husband, seven children and a pack of 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 the coca from American
helicopters flying overhead.

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 to protest development programs that push alternative
crops.

When they arrived, soldiers were waiting with orders to prevent any
disruption of traffic.

"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.

Doctors grafted a cheek muscle under his mouth to serve as a lower jaw. He
can speak again, but cannot smile. The tip of his tongue was torn away and
he no longer can taste anything sweet. He also can't chew, and must suck
liquefied food through a straw.

"I have no desire to feed myself because there is no pleasure in it," he said.

Garcia spends most of his days in Cochabamba, the largest nearby city,
asking government officials to help him buy a $12,000 prosthetic jaw from
Germany. He has received no reply.

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.