COCA IN BOLIVIA

CHIMORE, Bolivia -- Bolivia's remarkable victories in the drug war may be
at risk in presidential elections Sunday.

Bolivia, which once led the world in cultivating the plant from which
cocaine is made, has eradicated 85 to 95 percent of its coca production
during the past four years. But political turmoil threatens to undermine
the anti-coca efforts.

Polls suggest that no candidate is likely to win a majority of Sunday's
vote. If that happens, Congress would have to pick a president, and a weak
coalition government probably would result.

That would be a severe blow to Washington's war on drugs. Political turmoil
in Peru has allowed the cocaine trade there to rebound, and despite
millions in U.S. military aid, coca king Colombia has failed to defeat the
Marxist rebels who control drug zones there.

Bolivia has uprooted almost 90,000 acres of coca in the southern Chapare
region, and since 1998, has taken 230 to 300 tons of cocaine out of the
world drug trade. But the hardy coca bush, which is harvested four times a
year, could bounce back faster than crabgrass if Bolivia's new government
lacks the will and the muscle to continue the unpopular campaign against it.

The government tried in November to discourage coca farmers from replanting
by decreeing that possessing or transporting coca is a crime. But violent
protests nullified the decree, and U.S. eradication experts in the Chapare
said 95 percent of the bushes now being eradicated were newly planted.

"We need a legal measure to penalize the person who goes back to this.
After it is uprooted, they just go back to planting it," Lt. Col. Jaime
Cruz Vera, the head of rural interdiction forces, complained in an
interview at an army base in muggy Chimore, once home to much of Bolivia's
coca trade.

Hours after soldiers uprooted her remaining coca bushes along a back road
near the Chimore River, Emedia Castro stripped and dried them, hoping to
earn what little she could in one of the region's 15 illegal coca markets.

During a trip through the Chapare this month, a Mercury News reporter found
coca bushes hidden among banana trees and behind passion-fruit vines.
Peasant women dried coca leaves in front of wooden shacks, and at one
clandestine coca market, Indian women said coca would continue to be grown
in the Chapare because it was the only cash crop.

The Chapare is the size of New Jersey, and Bolivian forces and their U.S.
partners must revisit a third of the region every year in an effort to wipe
out new coca plantings. Bolivia's next government may not be willing or
able to continue the battle. Eradicating the coca trade in the Chapare cost
farmers in South America's poorest country $400 million in illicit
earnings, and the leading presidential candidates are trying to avoid
alienating the country's Indian and mixed-race majority.

In an interview, Manfred Reyes Villa, the presidential front-runner, drew a
careful distinction between growing coca, which Indians use for medicinal
purposes, and producing cocaine.

"In my government we will have a frontal attack on cocaine, not coca. Coca
is a traditional, cultural theme, but we will fight against drug
trafficking," Reyes Villa said.

The campaign against coca has helped make an obscure agitator named Evo
Morales Ayma a political force. Polls show Morales running third or fourth,
and his Indian-based Movement to Socialism Party may win three of 27 Senate
seats. That would enable him to gum up anti-drug legislation and demand
that Chapare farmers legally be allowed to cultivate small plots of coca.

U.S. drug experts said any backsliding would lead to uncontrolled new
plantings, but President Jorge Quiroga said he expected his successor to
maintain Bolivia's anti-coca course.

"I have seen nothing that leads me to believe that the next government will
backtrack, because really the hard part has been done," he said in an
interview at the presidential palace in La Paz, Bolivia's capital.

"The controls must stay in place, but it is easier to control replanting as
opposed to start from zero and having to do all the eradication and
alternative development that we've done."