SEVEN DIE AS BOLIVIAN COCA FARMERS CLASH WITH ARMY

LA PAZ, Bolivia (Reuters) - Seven Bolivians died, including a policeman and
soldier tortured and murdered by "narcoguerillas," as poor farmers
protested an army crackdown on the illegal sale of coca leaves, police said
on Friday.

The two officers' bodies where found at dawn on Friday in Bolivia's
tropical Chapare region, 435 miles southeast of La Paz, after another five
Bolivians were killed in riots this week.

The deaths were the latest in a long drawn-out U.S.-backed government
campaign to eradicate coca, the raw material used to make cocaine but also
a major source of income for many peasants and chewed by some as medicine
in this Andean nation.

Witnesses said the two victims were abducted on Thursday from an ambulance
which was then set on fire in an attack a government source blamed on
"narcoguerillas," a term used for left-wing rebels who work as drug
traffickers.

Since Tuesday, farmers have set several trucks on fire near a coca market
that had been shut down by authorities in the village of Sacaba, prompting
bloody clashes with police which killed another five farmers and officers.

Bolivia gets valuable aid from the U.S. government in return for its
successful eradication program in recent years.

Farmers in the Chapare region, one of the largest coca-growing areas in
Bolivia prior to the crackdown on its cultivation, have protested a law
making it illegal to sell coca produced in the region.

Officials from the government of President Jorge Quiroga, which allows only
limited growth of the leaf in other regions, traveled to the city of
Cochabamba for negotiations with the farmers to be mediated by human rights
organizations.

Farmers want to be allowed to legally grow small plots of coca in Chapare,
where Quiroga has mobilized about 5,000 troops since November to complete
the eradication of illegal coca fields it says are used for drug trafficking.

A member of Bolivia's Congress from the region has called in recent months
for the coca farmers to form their own "army" to combat the government's
actions.