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June 27, 1998
Bolivians Show New Resolve in War Against 'Cocaleros'
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By CLIFFORD KRAUSS
ILLA ROSARIO, Bolivia -- Coca growers ambushed a drug eradication team near this rebellious hamlet one day early this month, leaving one policeman dead and three wounded. The next day 600 soldiers and policemen barreled through the jungle in a show of force.
With two armed helicopters hovering overhead, the security forces slashed 10 acres of coca bushes with machetes. The hamlet was virtually empty but the police arrested a single straggler who they said was carrying a dynamite fuse.
"We've returned to show the cocaleros we will not be stopped," army Lt. Col. Jorge Antello, 44, the commander of the operation, told a reporter, as soldiers trained their rifles at the surrounding foliage.
Such expressions of determination in the battle against cocaine represent a break from the past -- even though many of the soldiers did take dried coca leaves from town to chew, then or later.
Still, the official determination to do away with coca is a change. Only six years ago, a Bolivian president wore a pin shaped like a coca leaf on his lapel, symbolizing years of half-hearted efforts against drugs that drove U.S. ials to distraction. Last year, Washington came close to decertifying Bolivia as a country committed to fighting drugs and close to cutting off tens of millions of dollars in aid, but at the last moment, La Paz fulfilled a U.S.-set eradication quota.
Then suddenly in January, the new Bolivian president, the retired general Hugo Banzer Suarez, pledged to wipe out every illegal coca plant by the end of his term, in 2002. In Bolivia, illegal plants are defined as those planted since 1988, in areas where international traffickers operate. After six months, his stepped-up efforts have won praise from the Clinton administration and U.N. officials.
But the efforts have set off increasing violence by coca growers, including blockades of crucial roads and ambushes against the security forces here in Chapare, a region the size of New Jersey where one-quarter of the total world cocaine supply originates.
Under Banzer's program, 90,000 acres of coca fields will be destroyed in the next four years at a cost of $108 million, with another $700 million going to providing basic improvements like roads and granting credits and training of farmers to grow alternative crops. Government officials said they expect that much of the funding will come from the United States, along with sizable contributions from the European Community and the United Nations.
In a reversal of past government policy, Banzer has pledged to phase out payments to coca growers for voluntarily eradicating their illegal crops. During the last several years, coca farmers have been paid $2,500 for every 2.5 acres they eradicate, in a program that has cost American taxpayers nearly $100 million over the last decade.
But U.S. and Bolivian officials said many of the farmers took the money and then cultivated just as much coca acreage deeper in the jungle. Bolivia had 113,200 acres of coca under cultivation in 1997, according to the CIA, just 3 percent less than it had in 1993. State Department officials, tired of subsidizing coca growers, pushed hard for the policy change.
Under the new strategy, farmers will be paid nothing and smaller payments will go to the communities for resettlement and social programs until there is a complete cutoff in 2002. Government officials said the savings will go into law enforcement and economic development, but they concede that the policy is unpopular among coca farmers.
"By the year 2002, cocaine will be worthless in Bolivia," the Interior minister, Guido Nayar Parada, asserted in an interview. "The armed resistance by the cocaleros only shows that we are having an impact and we will not be deterred from applying the law."
While U.S. officials here love to hear such unqualified commitment, they caution that it will take much to overcome years of disappointments. A State Department official said that despite improvements in eradication, only 1 percent of the cocaine base now being produced in Chapare is being intercepted. The figure is so low, he said, because police patrol traffickers' routes during the day but not at night, and because corrupt police are allowing illegal cargoes through road blocks.
U.S. officials note that although cultivating new coca fields has been illegal since 1988, only a handful of the 40,000 coca growers in the country have been arrested.
And while U.S. officials compliment the government for pressing projects to replace coca crops with legal crops like pineapples and bananas, they warn that it will be difficult to wean peasants off a coca crop that is resistant to tropical funguses and floods, offers a predictable market, and can be harvested four times a year with little effort.
Meanwhile the Americans say that ambushes of police -- there have been nine since April 2, killing three policemen and wounding 15 more -- have slowed eradication efforts. The Bolivian government is now forced to mobilize far larger forces in eradication sweeps, which are slower and more costly. Leaders of six coca grower unions say 12 growers have been killed during confrontations with the security forces in recent months, while the government admits to only two.
But U.S. officials also see reasons for optimism. They note that a growing number of peasant groups are signing agreements with the government to eradicate their coca crops. And a Bolivian anti-terrorism unit, trained and financed by the CIA, began operating in the Chapare recently and is making an impact.
The unit has captured a list of terrorist leaders and a code book for terrorist operations belonging to one of the six coca unions that are planting illegal crops in a local national park, according to Bolivian army and State Department officials.
Banzer's ambitious plan comes at a time when Bolivia's role in the drug world is going through a rapid transformation. Only three years ago, traffickers from Colombia's Cali Cartel bought coca base and paste from Bolivian middlemen, moved it to Colombia for processing, and the drugs then moved through Mexico and the Caribbean to the U.S. market.
But with the arrests of the top Cali leaders and Peru's decision to shoot down cocaine flights, smaller Colombian organizations that have replaced the cartel have stepped up coca cultivation at home. That has made Bolivian coca far less important to international traffickers. The trend should help Banzer's efforts, even if it is unlikely to make a dent in the drug trade on the streets of American cities.
"If we can't achieve our objectives in Bolivia with the help we are getting from this government," a senior U.S. Embassy official said, "we can't succeed anywhere in South America."
Still, the wealth that coca sales bring is evident everywhere in the Chapare, making peasants all the more resistant to change. Imported Chilean wines and bottles of Johnnie Walker scotch are available in neighborhood stores that only stocked cheap beer a decade ago.
"The challenge is to convert growers accustomed to getting out of their hammocks four times a year to pick coca off trees," a U.S. official said, "into real farmers able to do backbreaking work and fight off the funguses and pests that plague tropical crops. That won't be easy."
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