Andean Information Network

This AP article was published in the  North County Times and the Washington Post.

CARANAVI, Bolivia (AP) — On a steep slope in the Andes' eastern foothills, Paolina Quispe choked back tears as soldiers yanked her coca plants one by one from the dry soil.

A year ago she voted for Evo Morales, head of the coca growers' unions. But she says he has changed since becoming president.

"Most people here say Evo has tricked us, Evo has sold us out," said Quispe, 28.

Quispe and many other coca farmers as well as officials in Washington assumed during Morales' campaign that his victory would mean an end to years of coca eradication efforts. But the reality is more subtle, as Morales has taken a middle path — attacking cocaine while gamely charting a new course for the leaf that Bolivians have chewed for millennia as a mild stimulant.

Since taking office in January, Morales has tried to hold onto millions of dollars in U.S. aid contingent on eradication without losing the support of "cocaleros," or growers, such as Quispe.

But keeping both sides happy has proved difficult.

Morales' "zero cocaine, not zero coca" policy combines crop eradication and more anti-drug enforcement with the promotion of the coca leaf's "industrialization" into legal products.

In La Paz, the Bolivian capital 60 miles southwest of Caranavi, the government agency tasked with destroying illegal coca is just a 10-minute drive from the new agency promoting coca tea, coca flour, coca-flavored liquor and even coca toothpaste.

Morales' strategy makes U.S. officials squirm, but Washington continues to give his government $87 million a year in anti-narcotics aid in hopes of reducing Bolivia's coca crop — half the size it was a decade ago, but still the world's third largest, after Colombia and Peru.

Meanwhile, Morales doesn't miss a chance to remind Americans that they lead the world in snorting cocaine, and may do so again this weekend when he hosts a meeting of South American leaders in Cochabamba, a city in the heart of coca country.

"While our coca farmers are working toward a concerted, voluntary reduction, if the United States doesn't reduce its market demand, coca will continue to be diverted to illegal use," he said recently.

Creating an international legal market for coca would take the leaves out of drug traffickers' hands, Morales insists, and Bolivia hopes to make its case at a 2008 conference in Vienna to review U.N. narcotics rules.

But the argument has yet to convince Washington or persuade other nations to end a 45-year-old ban on coca-derived products.

"There's really only one good use for the coca leaf in economic terms, and that's cocaine," the U.S. ambassador to Bolivia, Philip Goldberg, told The Associated Press. "The narcotraffickers will always pay more than the toothpaste factory."

Morales has asked coca growers to accept a cooperative eradication program projected to destroy 12,400 acres of coca crops this year, the minimum set by Bolivian law. While that's the smallest area since 1994, Morales' approach of holding lengthy talks with growers has largely avoided the violence of past U.S.-backed forcible eradication campaigns.

These have killed at least 88 farmers, police and soldiers since 1987, according to the Andean Information Network, a nonprofit group that monitors the drug war in Bolivia. Government officials believe the toll is several times higher.

Destruction of cocaine-processing facilities has jumped 56 percent on Morales' watch, though U.S. officials believe that's in part because drug production has risen.

Morales' kinder, gentler eradication hasn't stopped Bolivia's bitterly poor subsistence farmers from chafing at the limits placed on their most profitable crop.

In September, two growers died battling soldiers who were sent to destroy coca planted along the disputed border of Carrasco National Park, a traditional coca-growing region where the plant is now banned inside park limits.

Weeks earlier, farmers in the Yungas region northeast of La Paz briefly detained a government minister — himself a local coca grower — sent to promote a voluntary eradication program.

On paper, Bolivian laws permit coca-growing in about 38,000 acres of designated areas, while limiting growers to one "cato," a third of an acre. But the United Nations estimated coca production to be 65,000 acres last year, and U.S. officials believe the crop has continued to expand in 2006.

Unofficially, the government has let farmers grow up to a cato throughout the country. Though Quispe's fields lie outside the designated zones, the soldiers left her with one cato of her healthiest plants, enough for her to earn only about $500 a year.

In September, the U.S. State Department demanded the repeal of the cato exception. Morales' government refused.

"Nobody will change our coca policy, no matter what happens," Felix Barra, the minister in charge of developing legal coca markets, told the AP. "The cato of coca has cost us many lives, and much blood, and we can't then just submit ourselves to the will of another government."

Bolivian officials won't say whether eradication will continue at the same pace next year, or at all. Morales has said he would like the cato limit to be formalized in law, while others have suggested raising the legal production limit — both sure to raise a howl in Washington.

But Morales already hears the grumbling at home. Farmers blocked highways in October demanding the right to plant two or even three catos apiece, and even Barra has admitted planting more than a cato in his hometown in the Yungas.

Back on Quispe's newly barren terraces, she and her neighbors wondered whether other Bolivians would also be willing to give up their livelihood to support Morales' young government. Modesta Arce, an elderly farmer, sat glumly among piles of plants starting to wilt in the sun.

"We've sacrificed," she said. "But will everyone else sacrifice, too?"