La Paz, Bolivia – Bolivian President Evo Morales has promised to eradicate 5,000 hectares (more than 12,000 acres) of coca crops this year provided Washington agrees to extend trade preferences set to expire at the end of 2006, Bolivia’s ambassador-designate to the United States, Gustavo Guzman, said Friday.
In statements to Erbol radio and interviews published in La Razon and La Prensa dailies, Guzman added that Bolivia “can be as friendly with” leftist-populist Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez as with the United States.
For months, the Bolivian government has urged Washington to renew the Andean Trade Promotion and Drug Eradication Act, or ATPDEA, that has allowed several Bolivian products to enter the U.S. market with zero tariffs. The ATPDEA is also very important for Ecuador, which like Bolivia does not have a free-trade agreement with the United States.
Under the law, approved in 1991 but set to expire on Dec. 31 of this year, the United States opened its markets to products from Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru in exchange for those nations’ cooperation in the war on drugs.
Peru and Colombia will not have any problems if the free-trade agreements they negotiated with the United States move ahead because the pacts maintain the benefits currently enjoyed by exporters in the two nations.
The Bush administration said it would not continue negotiating a free trade treaty with Ecuador in response to Quito’s decision to rescind a contract with a U.S. oil company.
Bolivia never started free-trade talks and the decision by its president, Evo Morales, to nationalize energy resources on May 1 moved the Andean nation further away from Washington even though no U.S. companies were directly affected by the move.
Guzman, who has never visited the United States, also said relations with the United States “are complicated and tense,” but he noted that authorities in La Paz “continue to maintain contacts” with their U.S. counterparts.
“We can be as friendly with Chavez as with the United States,” he said when asked what effect the socialist Morales’ friendship and ideological affinity with the leftist leader has on Bolivia’s dealings with the United States.
“If the United States believes that the closer we are to Chavez the further we are from democracy, it is badly mistaken,” said Guzman, who noted that Washington and Caracas “have the best and most outstanding trade relations” despite “a tense relationship politically speaking.”
The president of Venezuela, the fourth-largest supplier of oil to the United States, frequently rails against what he calls U.S. “imperialism.”
Morales began his political career as leader of a coca-growers union in the central region of Chapare and decided to retain that position even after his inauguration as president. He has begun an international campaign to legalize coca leaf, which is the raw material of cocaine but has been used by Andean Indians since time immemorial for medicinal, nutritional and ceremonial purposes.
On June 20, the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime said in its annual report on the Andean region that Bolivia reduced coca production by 8 percent in 2005. A total of 25,400 hectares (more than 62,700 acres) were found to be used for coca leaf cultivation in 2005, compared with 27,700 hectares the previous year.
Bolivian law allows a maximum of 12,000 hectares to be cultivated legally for traditional uses.
Two days after the release of the U.N. report, however, the United States disputed the figures and said that cultivation of coca had in fact risen by 8 percent in 2005.
