Bolivia Held Hostage by Cocaine

CHIMORE, Bolivia — The column of police commandos trudges down the muddy trail into the green maze of the jungle carrying rifles, shotguns, tear-gas canisters, machetes and riot shields.

The baby-faced commandos, known as the Leopards, joke and grumble good-naturedly as they hurdle logs and streams. But they are ready for combat. Peasants here once ambushed police patrols with bows and arrows and crude bombs. Now the peasants defend their livelihood with ancient but durable Mauser rifles that saw action in the war against Paraguay in the 1930s.

“The Mauser is very good; it has better range than our weapons,” Col. German Saavedra says, watching the hillsides that wall the trail. “They fire on us from above, from several positions simultaneously. The peasants have an impressive communications network. They move through the terrain very well.”

The mission of the patrol: to find and destroy coca. This is a key battlefield in the global war on drugs. Known as the Chapare, this New Jersey-sized jungle valley with a population of 220,000 is the source of about 25% of the world’s cocaine. The “enemy” here is not cartel gunslingers but peasants whose crops make Bolivia the world’s No. 2 producer of the coca leaf and cocaine.

Although Bolivia has avoided the savage violence and international attention that have afflicted Latin America’s other major coca producers, Colombia and Peru, the Bolivian front has become increasingly treacherous. Three police officers and six peasants have died this year, in the Chapare’s worst bloodshed in a decade.

“The elements of an explosive mix are there,” said Victor Canales, who recently stepped down as Bolivia’s anti-drug czar. “This is the kind of thing that happened in Peru and Colombia. . . . There is surely going to be conflict. And the more progress we make, the more violence there is going to be.”

The conflict seems as murky as the muddy labyrinth of the Chapare; the politics and rhetoric on all sides are stubborn and contradictory. Whether seen through the eyes of the police who patrol the jungle, the peasants whose livelihood is based on coca or the politicians who fight the war of words, the Chapare is a jungle of clashing perceptions and elusive realities.

Bolivia, one of the poorest nations in Latin America, has come under pressure as the U.S. revives a strategy that targets nations that are the chief source of cocaine. Funding for international drug control more than doubled this year. State Department anti-drug assistance to Latin America rose by 40%, an increase that does not include the expanding budgets of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and the Pentagon.

“The best way to fight cocaine is to go to the plant,” said Robert Charles, counsel for a House subcommittee on national security. “The source countries need very special attention. We are going to try to win this war there.”

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The struggle is driven from afar by demand for cocaine and the political importance of the drug issue in the United States. Washington has spent at least $750 million since 1988 on a three-pronged Bolivian offensive: interdiction of drug traffic, eradication of coca and development of alternative crops. Spurred by impatience in Washington, Bolivian authorities are scrambling to meet year-end eradication targets required for U.S. certification of their anti-drug efforts.

“U.S.-Bolivian relations revolve around the drug issue--and the certification issue in particular,” the Washington Office on Latin America, a policy research and advocacy group, asserted this year. “One has to ask whether [the] meager results are worth the cost.”

Drug seizures are up about 40%. Cocaine’s dominance in Bolivia has declined since the 1970s and 1980s, when military rulers were brazen partners of traffickers.

After taking office last month, President Hugo Banzer negotiated a preliminary accord with coca growers that could reduce tensions in the Chapare.

But eradication efforts have barely dented coca acreage. And the U.S.-backed crackdowns are blamed for alleged human rights violations.

“We have run a great deal to find ourselves in the same spot,” said Bolivian Congressman Juan del Granado, head of a legislative human rights commission. “The problem is not the Chapare. The problem is wealth and opulence on one hand and poverty and misery on the other.”

Bolivia’s leaders have promised to wipe out coca despite years of failure and their often-dubious anti-drug records. Some politicians still defend the coca leaf--which remains legal when planted under government regulations, and is chewed by millions--as a symbol of sovereignty. The bosses of coca growers unions have gained unprecedented clout; they denounce cocaine while supplying the drug trade.

“It’s a poor country, but that’s not an excuse,” a U.S. anti-drug official said. “Should we allow you to violate the law just because you are going to make more money? I say no. And there are a lot of so-called innocent little peasants increasingly involved in the processing of cocaine.”

Bolivian drug traffickers, no longer junior partners supplying the big Colombian cartels, increasingly produce cocaine bound for the United States and Europe. They take refuge behind desperate and politicized peasants.

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The U.S. has committed itself to helping professionalize Bolivia’s anti-drug fight and developing legal crops to substitute for coca. But the debate over the strategy divides even U.S. law enforcement. Retired DEA agent Gene Castillo, the former No. 2 chief in Bolivia, is a critic.

“Eradication is never going to work,” Castillo said. “For all the money the U.S. spends, they could just buy up the coca leaf. The U.S. State Department does not have a handle on the culture. They are asking too much of the Bolivians.”

Chapter One: The Soldiers

Col. Saavedra’s 289-officer eradication patrol rolls out of the police base here in the town of Chimore at dawn.

The convoy of 13 trucks drives down a narrow road past tethered cows, women washing laundry in a stream, peasants who murmur cautious greetings. The commandos are guided by an informant who claims that there is coca growing in the hills beyond the end of the road.

The trek begins down a trail that a night of jungle rain has turned into yellow-brown slop.

Urging on the troops, Saavedra booms: “Mud? What mud? Why bother to clean your boots? Keep moving!”

Looking very much the jungle warrior in his crisp camouflage uniform, M-16 at the ready, Saavedra has a dimpled smile and a tough reputation he cultivated as chief of the La Paz riot squad. Now he is a commander of the paramilitary Rural Mobil Patrol Units, or UMOPAR, an elite force trained and paid bonuses by the Narcotics Assistance Service of the State Department.

In 1988, Bolivia passed one of South America’s toughest drug laws. The mandate to eradicate coca planted after that year proved a Sisyphean task. Farmers plant fields as fast as police uproot them.

In 1995, the U.S. gave Bolivia an ultimatum: Eradicate in earnest or be judged uncooperative in the battle against narcotics and face losses in U.S. aid. Crop destruction went into high gear.

Peasant militias retaliated. Riots left seven peasants dead, including a 13-year-old girl, and scores injured on both sides. The fighting surged again early this year.

President Banzer, who ruled as a dictator in the 1970s, has promised to eradicate all coca in the Chapare in five years. Critics predict more violence, which human rights advocates blame on heavy-handed police operations.

“They take over the whole village in a violent fashion, kicking down doors, hitting men, mistreating women,” lawmaker Del Granado said. “There is no control.”

The alleged abuse does not rise to the vicious levels reported in other nations, and the peasant militias are not the “narco-guerrillas” of Colombia and Peru. But a concerted drive to wipe out coca would be risky, according to former DEA agent Castillo.

“It’s not going to be pretty. You would end up having to kill a lot of innocent people,” he said. “It would be a winnable war if you used the military. But what would be the price?”

Saavedra’s morning patrol knows one potential price.

The commandos do not expect an attack, but they know they are shadowed by lookouts in the brush. The column slogs down the trail for about two miles. The colonel calls: “A path! Find a path!”

The patrol scouts a trail that twists up a steep hillside through thorns, vines and insects with a fever-inducing bite. Their sweat mixing with a drizzle, the soldiers emerge into a clearing. Kelly-green coca crops stretch before them.

They march through the first field without touching a plant. Under the complex rules of this game, the authorities do not destroy coca of indeterminate age, even if it was probably planted after 1988 and is therefore illegal in this region. The plant remains productive for about 20 years.

Only a few peasants have ever been arrested for planting new coca.

The commandos stand guard as officers unsheathe machetes and go to work on a patch of clearly new coca. They yank and slash the plants by hand. If the roots are not slashed properly, the plants can be stuck back into the ground. Coca is a plant that needs little care.

The officers record the tally: about 1,500 square yards. A small victory on a big battlefield.

Chapter Two: The Politician

Congressman Evo Morales, the de facto ruler of the Chapare, is Bolivia’s most divisive political figure.

Morales, 37, an Aymara Indian with a helmet of black hair and a slightly hooked nose, is wearing a black jacket, jeans, sandals. He heads a confederation of about 31,800 coca growers, one of Latin America’s most effective peasant movements. This summer, Morales became the first cocalero leader elected to Congress. Allies captured three other congressional seats and numerous village councils.

As he takes the stage of a crowded union hall in the jungle town of Sinahota, Morales looks unperturbed by the knowledge that the Bolivian and U.S. governments consider him Public Enemy No. 1.

A speaker winds up her diatribe in mixed Quechua and Spanish with cries of “Long live coca! Death to the Yankees!” And Morales flashes the practiced smile of a born politician, a smile intended to soften incendiary rhetoric.

The audience is Morales’ people: seated peasant women resplendent in their red, purple and orange skirts, straw hats decorated with ribbons, hair intricately braided.

Because this is a meeting of the women’s brigade, the men crouch along the walls. These self-proclaimed Yankee-haters with resilient faces wear jackets and jeans with logos such as “Texas City” and “Traditional American Way of Life.” They chew cheek-swelling wads of coca leaf.

Morales lauds the women’s spirit. He hails a recent melee in which a police officer died. He reminds his listeners that they are Quechua and Aymara Indians, who make up about 65% of Bolivia’s population--”the absolute lords of the land!”

The farmers express their adulation quietly. Afterward, they stand outside the barred windows of an office behind the hall, listening to Morales hold court beneath a poster of his idol: Argentine revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara. Morales also admires Fidel Castro and Mexico’s Zapatista rebels.

The vanguard of the Bolivian left was once the mighty miners unions. In the 1970s and ‘80s, as economic changes emptied mines, legions of families migrated from the desolate highlands to the rain forest to harvest the magic coca leaf. It was the Bolivian Gold Rush.

The Morales family moved from the hills to the Chapare in 1979. After his father died, Morales scrounged work as a trumpeter in dance bands and as a semiprofessional soccer player. Then he drifted into union activism.

Today, beneath his attacks on the World Bank and the North American Free Trade Agreement, his creed is simple: The union is the crux of life in the Chapare. The union is our father and the land is our mother. The union represents solidarity. Neoliberal economics represent “hell for humanity.”

Foreign organizations champion Morales. He flies frequently to forums in Europe. Someone even nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize. When he failed to win, a Dutch group gave him a consolation award of about $15,000 that he used to buy a Toyota Land Cruiser.

The hero worship appalls anti-drug officials, who say cocaine money finances Morales’ travel and politics and the thuggish shock troops of the peasant militias.

“If coca is eliminated, Evo is no longer a leader and he will have to work for a living, so he has a community of interests with traffickers,” former anti-drug czar Canales said. “There has been a penetration of the coca union leadership by traffickers. We have arrested more than 20 peasant leaders involved in trafficking, production, sale of drugs.”

Clashes with police have left scars on Morales’ back. But he has not been convicted of a serious crime. He remains under investigation on suspicion of drug ties and inciting violence, according to Col. German Aliaga of UMOPAR, who said drug laws supersede Morales’ new parliamentary immunity.

Asked about proof, a U.S. official said: “Morales is widely considered to be a tool of the drug traffickers. It is unclear whether he is in their pay or his defense of coca-growing simply serves their interests.”

Morales denied receiving drug money. He said the union does not pay him a salary, and he claimed to live off donations from members.

The United States has replaced communism with drugs in a worldwide crusade for power, Morales said. His rhetoric gets convoluted when he defends coca and condemns cocaine.

“We must end this problem of drug trafficking. . . . But coca has become a product of survival against neoliberalism. And if these macroeconomic policies are not revised, the next century will be the century of drugs.”

Despite his calls to arms, he insisted that the militias are a spontaneous movement: “We have been attacked with bullets. Can we not defend ourselves with bullets?”

Corruption allegations stung many candidates during the recent elections, including the new president, a former general whose ‘70s dictatorship Morales described as the seedbed of the cocaine boom.

“The rise of drug trafficking was during those years, the era of Banzer,” Morales said.

Allegations linger from Banzer’s reign: His relatives and allies were accused of corruption. And the military has played a dominant role in the drug trade.

U.S. diplomats express confidence in Banzer. But a key Banzer ally, former President Jaime Paz Zamora, had his U.S. visa revoked because of suspected drug ties. A Paz Zamora lieutenant is doing prison time for corruption. Some fear that Morales and Paz Zamora will team up to block anti-drug efforts.

Whoever his allies, Morales sounds ready to fight the politicians, the DEA, the military. “They are not going to wipe out coca,” he said.

Chapter Three: The ‘Ants’

They don’t call drug runners “mules” in the Chapare. They call them Chaka, the Quechua name for leaf-carrier ants.

The term applies to the small-time smugglers, producers of cocaine base paste and coca growers whose misery roils the one-story jail in the police base at Chimore.

The smell inside hits with physical force: too many bodies crammed into a humid, fetid box meant to be a temporary holding pen. The cells swirl with tales of purported injustice and evident hardship.

A face materializes out of the swarm: dazed, wizened, a pulverized nose, gray stubble.

His name is Anastasio Garcia. He is 70 years old.

Garcia mumbles in Quechua. Inmates translate: He was arrested during a raid on a maceration pit, a makeshift outdoor lab where coca leaf becomes base paste, the next step toward the street drug. Garcia was a pisacoca--a hired hand who trampled together the chemical mixture like a European peasant stomping grapes into wine.

“They paid me 30 Bolivianos,” about $5, he says. “I wanted the money to buy an identification card so I could collect a pension. I have been here a month. I do not know what is going on with my case. When I was arrested, they threw me on the floor. I am sick: dizziness, diarrhea.”

Garcia is no kingpin.

“The biggest traffickers stay out of the Chapare,” Col. Aliaga says.

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Unlike in Colombia and Peru, there are few sophisticated labs guarded by private armies here, few secret airstrips. Aggressive enforcement has forced Bolivian drug mafias into more diffuse, incremental methods.

At the bottom of the pyramid are coca growers, who usually own two to five acres that produce four harvests and about $3,000 in profit a year. The yield from 2 1/2 acres is about 15 1/2 pounds of leaf a year.

Middlemen buy the leaf, rolling into hamlets to cut deals in open-air restaurants, with their clouds of slow-motion flies and jug-sized bottles of Coca-Cola arrayed on the tables. Leaf is transferred to an estimated 9,000 clandestine labs that produce base paste selling for about $700 a kilo, or 2.2 pounds.

Unrefined paste flows out of the valley in truckloads or hidden in bicycle tires, children’s clothing, crates of pineapples, hollow dashboards, the backpacks of hikers.

In nearby Santa Cruz and the Beni lowlands, hydrochloric acid is used to refine the paste into cocaine. Traffickers--Colombians, Bolivians, Brazilians--smuggle the drug to the U.S. and Europe. The hottest routes are through Brazil and Paraguay.

Legal commerce masks illegal commerce in the Chapare, whose main highway is a busy transnational route connecting the prosperous cities of Cochabamba and Santa Cruz. Smuggler “ants” fill the Chimore jail because the 1988 drug law gave authorities broad powers to make arrests and hold suspects on limited evidence.

Trifonia Vargas claims that she did not know there were drugs in a friend’s car when police stopped them. She and her husband have spent five months in a cell with two of their children. The other three are with relatives.

“We need help,” Vargas says. “My children are out there abandoned without me. There are other cases when people get caught red-handed and the police let them go.”

Corruption speeds the exit of drugs and the entry of chemicals used in production. But it is less lucrative and lethal than in nations such as Mexico, where drug lords hire police forces as foot soldiers and mow down honest prosecutors at will.

By contrast, Bolivian police are accused of stealing bicycles. A major bust of 1,200 pounds occurred at a checkpoint after the truck driver tried to bribe officers with candy.

“It’s more mom-and-pop stuff,” an official says.

The State Department’s counter-narcotics report on Bolivia this year called drug corruption “a problem in the courts, the military and in civilian anti-narcotics agencies.”

The “narco-plane” scandal of 1995 displayed the highflying potential of drug money. Police in Lima, Peru, found 4.1 tons of cocaine aboard a cargo plane that arrived from the La Paz airport. The failure to intercept the load resulted in allegations against Bolivian airport officials, police, the interior minister and politicians.

The flight plan revealed the network between source countries and Southern California. Investigators suspect that the shipment resulted from a deal between Luis Amado Pacheco, an accused Bolivian gangster, and recently deceased drug lord Amado Carrillo Fuentes of Mexico. The final destination was Mexicali, where Mexican traffickers intended to smuggle the cocaine across the U.S.-Mexico border.

If the border is the last line of defense, the first line is the checkpoint at a Chapare crossroads commanded by Javier Loraraida, 27, a police lieutenant.

His drug-sniffing dogs go to work as passengers file off wheezing buses and bedraggled trucks that charge families a few coins to ride atop heaps of produce.

The checkpoint is a forlorn parade, he says. “It affects you. Just because you are especially trained for the jungle, an elite unit and all that, it does not take away your humanity.”

Recently, police arrested a family at the checkpoint. The father had concealed sticks of dynamite strapped to his body. He was a former miner; dynamite is a favored weapon of the militias because many peasants learned to use explosives in the mines. The two children, who spoke only the Aymara language, were sent to a women’s prison with their mother.

For the “ants,” smuggling has become another harsh journey, Loraraida says. “They were part of a rural exodus, from the highlands to the Chapare. They were desperate there. And they are desperate here.”

Chapter Four: The Alternative

Beneath the Huey helicopter piloted by a U.S.-trained crew known as the Red Devils, the jungle unfolds in a tapestry of hallucinatory beauty.

The helicopter threads among storm clouds, fog banks, mountains. Gazing out the side door past the machine gun, a U.S. anti-drug official says most coca growers are hard-working people who do not see themselves as criminals.

“The concept of someone on the street in New York or Los Angeles drugging themselves with this stuff is totally alien to them,” said the official, the U.S. Embassy’s liaison with Bolivian anti-drug forces in the Chapare.

The Bolivian government pays peasants $2,500 per 2.4 acres to let their coca be eradicated and grow other crops instead. The United States bankrolls the program, providing equivalent funds for Bolivia to repay international debts.

Peasants pocket the subsidy and plant the alternative crops. But many also keep planting coca secretly, shifting the crops from roadsides to hillsides.

This victory of market forces and human nature over government explains why critics call alternative development a failure. But the U.S. and Bolivian aid workers who preach this secular gospel take the long-term view. All they can offer is a legal, decent way of making a hard living.

There are now three times as many non-coca crops as there is coca in the Chapare. Infrastructure--roads, hospitals--has blossomed. True believers cling to outposts of hope such as Angel Zambrano’s palm heart farm.

Zambrano grew coca in the lawless late 1980s, when narcotics were sold on the highway and gangsters cruised in convoys. He disliked breaking the law.

“I was tense because of the drug situation,” he said. “It was like the Wild West.”

Coaxed by U.S. advisors, he tried other crops. His 60-acre farm now sells palm hearts to a thriving Japanese-Bolivian cannery. He will soon supply a new Spanish-funded cannery.

Zambrano heads an association of 350 palm heart farmers, a bulwark in a struggle that is cultural as well as economic. He trots out his story regularly for official visitors.

“It’s harder work than coca,” he said. “But after the first harvest, it became easier. We have been threatened by the coca growers, but we don’t pay attention. The families from the coca zones come to me and say their leaders won’t let them switch. I brainwash them a little bit. I tell them they have to look at the future.”

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The seemingly farfetched idea that coca will be eliminated one day colors official rhetoric; the Banzer government has even considered a proposal to offer peasants housing vouchers to resettle near urban areas. Unlike their defiant leaders, growers are pessimistic, according to Carlos Sarabia, director of Bolivia’s alternative development agency. “They say, ‘When there is no more coca, what are we going to do?’ ”

Development workers plan to get tougher by phasing out the $2,500 eradication subsidy, punishing those who grow new coca and avoiding “hard-core” growers, who are often involved in trafficking.

But switching crops brings risks: agricultural diseases, uncertain markets. Experts have parachuted in and hawked impractical products as the way of the future. Farmers got burned.

“These development workers drive around with their luxurious jeeps and their luxurious salaries, but there is no development around here,” said Avelino Espinosa, a peasant leader.

The gap-toothed Espinosa, 54, wears a jaunty straw hat. Long legs crossed at the ankles, he hangs out in the officially regulated coca market in Villa 14 de Septiembre, a militant union town where pigs root in rocky streets.

Espinosa embodies the tenacious culture that two governments have failed to uproot. Coca enabled him to build two solid wooden houses and send his children to college. He leads a tour of his farm, showing off oranges and other fruit crops. He is down to just 2 acres of coca (which he says was planted before 1988 and is therefore legal).

Like Zambrano, Espinosa expounds for outsiders delving into the mysteries of the Chapare: Swiss agronomists, Japanese journalists. Although cocaine spills blood and steals lives across the world, no one can convince him that the plant is evil.

“We are never going to defend drug trafficking,” Espinosa said. He held out a stalk of coca, his sinewy hand stained red by the seeds. “But in its natural state, this doesn’t hurt anyone.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Bolivia’s Cash Crop

Bolivian farmers grow coca that drug traffickers refine into cocaine and smuggle through routes such as Colombia, Mexico and Brazil to the United States and other international markets.

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IMPACT ON ECONOMY

The economic significance of cocaine to Bolivia has dropped significantly since 1988. The value the elicit economy related to coca and cocaine as a percentage to the nation’s output of goods:

‘96: 2%

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COCAINE PRODUCTION

The potential cocaine production of the coca crop in Bolivia declined 10% in 1996.

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Potential cocaine Percent (Tons) change ’88 248 NA ’89 242 -2.4% ’90 242 NC ’91 242 NC ’92 248 +2.5% ’93 264 +6.4% ’94 281 +6.4% ’95 264 -6.0% ’96 237 -10%

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A CAT-AND-MOUSE CROP

Peasants plant coca in the Chapare valley--the nation’s coca hotbed--as fast or faster than the police eradicate it.

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Acres of coca eradicated New coca planted ’88 3,218 16,898 ’89 3,727 12,127 ’90 19,005 14,205 ’91 12,506 8,666 ’92 11,844 7,044 ’93 5,378 8,498 ’94 2,236 4,636 ’95 13,183 12,703 ’96 18,028 17,280

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WORLD’S COCA PRODUCERS

These are the three major coca-producing nations:

Tons of harvestable coca leaf

Peru: 192,570

Bolivia: 82,780

Colombia: 44,970

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CULTIVATION OF COCA

The breakdown in acres in 1996:

The Chapare: 79,200

Yungas: 34,560

Apolo: 1,680

Highland Yungas region near La Paz and a region known as Apolo: also grow coca, but a substantial percentage of coca grown in these areas is used for legal purposes: chewing coca leaf and making coca tea and other traditional products.

The Chapare valley: accounts for about two-thirds of the coca grown in Bolivia and the great majority of the Bolivian coca that is processed into cocaine.

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BOLIVIA FACT SHEET

Population: 7.1 million

Government: republic

Literacy rate: 83%

Natural resources: tin, natural gas, petroleum, zinc, timber

Sources of imports

U.S.: 24%

Argentina: 13%

Brazil: 11%

Japan: 11%

Others: 41%