Pubdate: Fri, 31 Mar 2006
Source: Daily Journal, The (Venezuela)
Copyright: 2006 The Daily Journal
Contact: http://thedailyjournalonline.com/Contacts.asp
Website: http://www.thedailyjournalonline.com
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/4017
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/decrim.htm (Decrim/Legalization)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/coke.htm (Cocaine)

A DOWNTURN IN COCA ERADICATION IN BOLIVIA

The smell permeating the grimy whitewashed rooms of the market in the
Villa Fatima district overlooking this Andean capital evokes the
sweetness of cut grass -- only it's more pungent, nearly
intoxicating.

Sacks of freshly harvested coca leaves are stacked all around,
awaiting buyers. It's all legal -- this trade in the leaves that
produce cocaine.

There's lots more coca leaf around than there has been in years, no
surprise given that fledgling President Evo Morales was recently
re-elected head of Bolivia's coca growers' federation.

Eradication of Bolivian coca leaf, an enterprise underwritten almost
exclusively with U.S. tax dollars, is down more than 60 percent since
Morales took office.

Coca eradication is no longer obligatory and forced, but rather
depends on the cooperation of coca growers, said Felipe Caceres, the
official in charge of the effort and himself a coca grower. Morales
himself has declared zero tolerance for cocaine but says he won't
discourage coca growing for traditional consumption.

To see one such traditional use, look no farther than the bulging
cheek of Daniel Sonco, a 37-year-old coca trader.

He chews on a ball of coca leaves as he and a colleague repack a
half-dozen sacks of "hoja de coca" in airtight plastic for a trip
down from Bolivia's high plains to the steamy eastern lowlands where
he says he sells them in one-pound lots to agricultural workers.

"If you don't chew down there you get sleepy," says Sonco, his breath
emitting a bitter, alkaloid odor. "The people in the east need to
chew to work because it's so hot there."

There is a traditional and religious mystique to coca-leaf chewing; it
was once a restricted privilege of Inca royalty before becoming common
practice among indigenous peoples in the Andes, where the stimulant
doesn't just suppress the appetite but also helps ward off altitude
sickness.

The first thing you're offered at La Paz hotels as you arrive in the
world's highest capital (3,600 meters) is a cup of "mate de coca," or
coca tea. You'll get the same treatment, incidentally, in the former
Inca capital of Cuzco, Peru.

Another means of coca consumption -- as an all-purpose food supplement
- -- has in recent weeks been suggested by politicians in the region
whose pronouncements tend to make U.S. diplomats cringe.

Bolivia's new foreign minister, David Choquehuanca, said the "sacred
leaf" is so nutritious it should be on school menus, although
scientific studies have shown that humans don't easily assimilate its
nutrients.

A spokesman for Peruvian presidential candidate Ollanta Humala said
ground coca leaf could be baked into schoolchildren's bread. In
Venezuela, President Hugo Chavez embraced the idea of coca bread to
support legal uses.

"Coca isn't the same as cocaine," Chavez said. "Coca is tremendously
nutritional."

Coca recipes notwithstanding, Bolivians have no illusions that a good
portion of their coca crop is being converted into cocaine.

The question is, how much?

Back in October 2004, then-President Carlos Mesa ended a tense
confrontation with coca growers in the Chapare region by agreeing to
let them cultivate 3,200 hectares of the crop while the government
commissioned a study of Bolivia's legal coca market.

Once that number was determined, the government would eradicate the
surplus.

The study has yet to be started and Bolivia's coca crop, meanwhile,
grew to an estimated 26,500 hectares last year, according to the U.S.
State Department. That was an 8 percent increase over 2004 and more
than twice the 12,000 hectares that's permitted under Bolivian law.
The crop has grown for four years in a row.

This worries U.S. officials, though they've been loath to discuss the
issue on the record. U.S. Ambassador David Greenlee has publicly
expressed concern, nevertheless, that excess coca leaf cultivation
fuels the cocaine trade.

Of the $150 million in annual U.S. aid to Bolivia, about two-thirds
was tied to narcotics and those funds were divided among eradication
and interdiction and alternative development. The money goes to
everything from boots to health care and pay supplements for the 1,500
Bolivian conscripts in the eradication force.

Unlike in Colombia, where the chief method of coca crop destruction is
aerial spraying with the herbicide glyphosate, here conscripts do it
by hand. Last year, they ripped an average of 500 hectares of coca
bushes out the ground every month.

In the nine weeks since Morales' Jan. 22 inauguration, however,
they've destroyed 412 hectares -- nearly one third of that eradicated
in the past week, according to the Vice Ministry of Social Defense,
which oversees the force.

It's anyone's guess at this point how much more coca is being
planted.

Bolivia is the world's third-largest coca producer behind Colombia and
Peru, and what gets processed into cocaine is smuggled mostly as
partially refined coca base into Brazil across a porous border,
destined mostly for Europe and the Brazilian market, now the world's
second-largest after the United States.

Alarmed by growing drug-related violence and rising crack cocaine
addiction, Brazil last week said it would build nine new surveillance
posts along its 3,400-kilometer border with Bolivia to combat drug
trafficking and illegal immigration.

Pressure from neighbors may be tempering the Morales government's
initial stridency in seeking to decriminalize coca leaf on a global
scale.

While Bolivia's "Coca Control" agency has been renamed "Coca
Development," its chief returned somewhat chastened last week from a
meeting in Vienna of the International Narcotics Control Board.

Caceres announced that Morales would be delaying his campaign to get
coca leaf decriminalized and said coca growers needed to understand
that some eradication would continue.

"We will eradicate but in a voluntary manner," he said. "We will
meet our international obligations in a voluntary form." 
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MAP posted-by: SHeath(DPF Florida)