La Paz, Bolivia – As former coca grower Evo Morales prepares to take the oath of office as Bolivia’s new president on Sunday, a battle over the U.S.-funded anti-drug efforts in this impoverished, cocaine-producing country is taking shape.
Morales has promised to fight production of the drug, but protect the cultivation of its main ingredient, coca leaf, which traditionally is chewed to increase stamina and suppress hunger in the high-altitude Andean country.
Coca is widely grown in Bolivia, even though it’s illegal in most of the country. Morales, 46, promised during the campaign that he’d decriminalize coca growing.
“We say no to zero coca, but we are promoting zero cocaine,” Morales said Thursday. “We are going to try to interdict the narco-traffickers.” One of Morales’ top coca advisers, Dionicio Nunez, goes further, saying the new government will likely end cooperation with U.S. anti-narcotics forces, which have been in the country since the late 1980s.
Such a move could endanger an average of $150 million in annual U.S. foreign and anti-drug aid to Bolivia, much of it contingent on U.S. officials certifying that the country is doing its part to stop cocaine production.
Also at stake is Bolivia’s application for $598 million in aid from the U.S. Millennium Challenge Account, which is intended to help needy countries that the U.S. government thinks are on the right developmental path.
“We are going to ask the United States to leave,” said Nunez, a former congressman with Morales’ Movement Toward Socialism party and a leader of the country’s coca growers. “We are no longer going to accept the requirements that the United States has placed on us.” The new government also will likely end the forced eradication of coca leaf, Nunez said. The program has been carried out largely in the tropical Chapare lowlands.
Although coca is a pressing U.S. concern in Bolivia, American officials have said that they’ll wait until after Morales acts. The Aymara Indian, who will be Bolivia’s first indigenous president, also has confronted the United States on trade and management of its natural gas resources.
The cause of coca, which growers call “the sacred leaf,” is one of survival, despite U.S. efforts to promote other crops such as bananas and palm hearts in the Chapare, said farmer Eulalio Camacho Zuares.
“Many will starve without coca,” Camacho Zuares said. “There will be no peace without coca.” The country is the world’s third biggest producer of coca, behind Colombia and Peru, with about 65,500 acres under cultivation, according to 2005 U.S. estimates. Coca production grew by nearly 8 percent from 2004 to 2005.
(EDITORS: STORY CAN END HERE) Some U.S. experts are skeptical that Morales will fight drug production. He has longtime ties to coca growers, who prize the crop for its high market prices.
“Let’s give (Morales) the benefit of the doubt and say coca growers are coca growers and have no ties to narco-trafficking. That still doesn’t account for the free flow of drugs that’s crossing northern Bolivia and a whole series of organized crimes taking place in the region,” said Eduardo Gamarra, the director of the Latin American and Caribbean Center at Florida International University in Miami.
Bolivian government officials long have charged that growers know how coca leaf is used to produce cocaine in regions such as the Chapare, even if they aren’t producing the drug themselves.
Last year, Bolivian anti-drug police discovered more than 4,000 maceration pits, where coca leaf is mixed with sulphuric acid and other chemicals and stomped into paste, the first step in cocaine production. Most of the pits were found in remote spots of the Chapare.
Bolivian police also seized more than 12 tons of cocaine last year, mostly in the Chapare, a 36 percent increase from the year before.
“There are a lot of factories in the jungle and lots of small groups involved in producing cocaine,” said Gen. Luis Caballero, the head of Bolivia’s special anti-drug forces.
Nunez rejected such criticisms, saying coca growers were producing only enough of the crop to chew and brew as tea.
“The government has always accused us of being narco-traffickers, but it has never been proved,” he said. “We are not traffickers. We are peasants.” Activist Kathryn Ledebur of the Bolivia-based Andean Information Network said U.S. anti-coca efforts, which include advising Bolivian troops and supplying helicopters and aircraft, have failed and should be revised.
“They have not reduced coca cultivation and only created tons of social conflict,” she said.
For Morales, the coca issue is a deeply personal one and the engine behind his decade-long rise to power.
A coca farmer in the Chapare and then a leader of grower unions, Morales directed often violent resistance to U.S.-backed efforts to eradicate coca leaf.
Minutes after voting in the coca-farming town of Villa 14 de Septiembre last month, Morales gave thanks to coca grower leaders, who surrounded him during a press conference and sprinkled the sharply aromatic leaf over his head and shoulders.
“MAS (Morales’ party) began with the defense of this coca leaf and with the defense of our land,” he said.
The forced eradication of coca has largely stopped in the Chapare since October 2004, when then-President Carlos Mesa and coca grower unions, led by Morales, reached a temporary agreement that allowed the cultivation of nearly 8,000 acres of coca in the Chapare but stopped short of legalizing the crop.
Eradication efforts have barely touched huge amounts of coca in the inaccessible, mountainous Yungas region north of the capital of La Paz, where an estimated 43,000 acres are under cultivation, about a third of it illegal.
Farmers in the Yungas have long warded off government eradicators.
Despite the tough talk, Nunez said the new government would maintain the coca status quo until a long-delayed European Union-funded study on traditional coca use is completed. A European Union official said the study would be finished by September at the earliest.
Past Bolivian governments said they’d use the study to determine how much coca Bolivia needs to grow to satisfy traditional uses, then eradicate any excess acreage.
Whether Morales’ government will accept the study’s results and its possible consequences is an open question, especially with coca growers who make up his political base expecting free rein under the new administration.
Nunez said the government wasn’t obligated to accept the study’s results.
“We will decide how the study is done and what we do with it,” he said. “No one can tell us what steps to take.”
