COCALEROS REWRITE US DRUGS WAR 'SUCCESS STORY'

PEASANT farmers in Bolivia have brought the country to its knees by
mounting a ferocious campaign to be allowed to grow coca leaves.

Two years ago, the US State Department praised Bolivia as "the model for
coca eradication" in South America, but the Bolivian government now appears
to be losing the war on drugs after tens of thousands of defiant,
sandal-wearing farmers, known as cocaleros, have taken up arms.

There is talk of allowing the cocaleros to grow coca - traditionally used
for chewing, in tea and as a medicine - for a limited period, a move which
would anger the US. In the Chapare jungle, they have doggedly replanted
fields destroyed by anti-narcotics troops, resulting in an increase of coca
production from 600 to 5,400 hectares in two years, according to US
government statistics.

The government has been brought to the brink of collapse by a blockade of
the nation's most important highway with logs, rocks and curved,
tire-shredding nails.

Last January, 11 people were killed in violent confrontations between
cocaleros armed with dynamite booby traps and pre-World War II Mauser
rifles, and police and soldiers, armed with tear-gas and M-16s.

Fiercely anti-American, the cocaleros might represent the single greatest
threat to President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, who is clinging to power
after the recent violence in Chapare and a clash between police and
soldiers in La Paz last month, which resulted in 33 more casualties.

"The war on drugs is failing," said Aymara cocalero leader Evo Morales, 42,
who narrowly lost Bolivia's presidential election last July. "The United
States thinks it can spend billions of dollars to reach zero coca, but this
isn't a solution. All this social and political revolt is thanks to the
coca leaf."

For the vast majority of families in Chapare, growing coca is a means of
survival. Often, it is their only non-subsistence crop, and the earnings go
toward food, clothing and other necessities.

While they concede that some of the coca they produce is bought by drug
traffickers, they show little remorse.

"The Americans are the ones who brought this dirty business here in the
first place," said cocalero Gregorio Caceres, 59, his cheek bulging with
coca leaves. All we do is plant and harvest."

According to drug tsar Ernesto Justiniano, the Bolivian government may
consider allowing some cocaleros in Chapare to continue growing a limited
amount of coca for six months while a study is conducted to measure
domestic demand for the leaf, a mild stimulant that has been consumed by
indigenous peoples in Bolivia for hundreds of years.

But the United States continues to make clear it flatly opposes any "pause"
in coca eradication.

Looming behind any decision the Bolivian government makes are nearly 125m
dollars in US aid and the sway the United States holds over international
lending organisations.