LETTER FROM BOLIVIA

Taking The Side Of The Coca Farmer

A Maverick Politician Stirs A Continent And Puts Washington's Drug War At Risk

To understand why Evo Morales has come within a llama's hair of being
President of Bolivia - and why his formidable political power is giving
U.S. officials fits - pay attention when he and his top advisers open their
mouths.

That is, see what they're chewing: coca leaves, treasured by Andean Indians
like Morales as a sacred tonic and as their most lucrative cash crop but
better known to Americans as the raw material of cocaine.

Over the past five years, the U.S. has got Bolivia to uproot almost all of
its coca shrubs - only to see Morales, 42, and his left-wing Movement to
Socialism engineer an astonishing protest this year that could force
Bolivia's next government to let the plants flourish again. "The coca
leaf," says Morales, whose party took the second largest bloc of seats in
parliamentary elections in June, "is our new national flag."

To the dismay of the Bush Administration, it's a banner waving over a large
swath of South America. Coca eradication is the linchpin of Washington's
antidrug strategy.

The widening revolt against it is the loudest sign yet of a new resentment
toward the U.S. in Latin America, where free-market reforms pushed by
Washington have left much of the region's 500 million people poorer.

A former parliamentary Deputy from Bolivia's central coca-growing region,
Morales in the past was often dismissed as a radical relic in the land
where Che Guevara died. But today he's strong enough to have made it into
this week's presidential runoff vote in the new parliament, facing front
runner Gonzalo Sanchez, a former President. More than that, Evo-speak--"The
drug war is just a U.S. excuse to control our countries"--resonates beyond
Bolivia's borders.

Next door in Peru, irate coca farmers have successfully pressured the
government to suspend eradication. In Colombia, the coca crop has grown
fivefold in five years, to more than 400,000 acres, despite almost $1
billion in U.S. eradication funds. Authorities now say they will spray only
"industrial-size" coca fields and not those of smaller farmers, who are, of
course, the voters.

If Morales can thwart the U.S. in Bolivia - South America's poorest nation
but Washington's eradication showcase - it means the elimination effort has
been a washout.

The Evo phenomenon is partly a result of what Latin American critics call
Washington's anti-coca "fundamentalism"--a heavy-handedness that seems to
blame the remote cocaleros, or coca farmers, more than the addictive
appetites of Americans. A key sore point was last year's creation of a
special U.S.-funded Bolivian army unit to enforce eradication. "The army
soldiers come to my house and shout, 'You b_______ Indian coca sellers!'"
says Maria Luz Gomez, 32, a cocalera in Morales' home state of Cochabamba.
"But without the coca, we can't have a life here." The special unit has
been accused in numerous killings of cocalero leaders in Cochabamba, most
notoriously Casimiro Huanca, who witnesses say was shot in the back by
soldiers during a protest last December. According to U.S. and Bolivian
officials, the special unit will be dissolved next month.

The cocaleros - who are guilty themselves of killing soldiers in recent
clashes - accuse the U.S. embassy in La Paz of lobbying behind the scenes
with parliamentary leaders to get Morales kicked out of the assembly for
his pro-coca activism, a charge the embassy denies.

The growers were outraged when the U.S. ambassador, Manuel Rocha, warned
that a Morales victory would mean a drastic reduction in U.S. economic aid
to Bolivia, now $156 million a year. Morales impishly thanked Rocha: the
perception of Yanqui meddling helped catapult his presidential candidacy.

The U.S. rightfully insists that it works hard to provide cocaleros with
alternative crops like bananas and coffee.

But the depressed markets for those goods mean farmers earn sometimes as
little as one-tenth of what they would with coca, which produces three to
four harvests a year. Of course, coca farming is not - as Morales and the
growers would have it - an entirely innocuous affair.

Even though the cocaleros don't turn coca leaves into cocaine - that's done
by the drug cartels - they know that the bulk of the crop goes not toward
its traditional uses as an anesthetic and a salubrious chew but into making
the illegal drug. In a recent speech on Morales' home turf, Ambassador
Rocha blasted the "lie that coca cultivation is an innocent endeavor to the
world." The cocaleros' probity is debatable, but while Morales is chewing
up Bolivian politics, their clout is unquestionable.