November 26, 2005
Advocate for Coca Legalization Leads in Bolivian Race
By JUAN FORERO
CHIPIRIRI, Bolivia - In nearly 50 years of growing coca, Jos=E9 Torrico
has seen army soldiers swarm across his fields to pull up his plants
and heard threats from successive Bolivian governments determined to
destroy his crop.
And like thousands of other coca farmers in this verdant, tropical
region of central Bolivia, Mr. Torrico has refused to stop growing
coca, the main ingredient in cocaine, even in the face of a relentless
United States-financed effort to stamp it out.
Now, after years of persistence, he and his fellow farmers say they are
eagerly anticipating the advent of a new era, one in which growing coca
will finally be made legal. That is, they say, if Evo Morales is
elected president on Dec. 18.
"It will be legalized," Mr. Torrico, 69, said with a broad smile as he
showed off an orange nylon tarp loaded with freshly picked coca leaves.
"This is good for us. Evo can do us favors."
Mr. Morales, a onetime leader of the coca growers federation, has
steadily become revered by the left around Latin America as an
unbending opponent of globalization. That is worrisome enough to the
Bush administration. But more alarming to American officials is that a
man who promotes coca farming - an industry central to cocaine
production - may soon lead this Andean nation.
Rising in part on his pledge to legalize coca, Mr. Morales has become
the top presidential candidate in Bolivia, and he now leads his closest
adversary, Jorge Quiroga, an American-educated former president, by 33
to 27 percent, according to a poll conducted earlier this month.
Mr. Morales's ascent now, at a time when President Bush holds the
lowest standing of any United States leader ever in Latin America, has
intensified a clash of cultures with Washington that shows some of its
deepest strains here.
For 20 years, Washington has sponsored efforts to eliminate coca as
part of its fight against the illegal drug trade, and Bolivian
governments have cooperated, eager for loans and other support from
international lenders.
But today Washington-backed economic prescriptions are being rejected
up and down the continent. And though the presidential race is tight,
political analysts say that Mr. Morales may have the upper hand because
of the potent anti-establishment fervor that has swept Bolivia, forcing
out two presidents since 2003.
The growing appeal of Mr. Morales, who like most Bolivians is of Indian
descent, runs deepest here in the Chapare, a New Jersey-size swath of
rivers and thick jungle where coca cultivation has for years made
Bolivia one of the world's top cocaine producers.
For thousands of years before that, however, Indian highlanders
cultivated and chewed unprocessed coca to mitigate hunger and increase
stamina. Though the Bolivian government has made growing coca largely
illegal, the bright green leaves are taken for granted as part of
Andean culture.
They are still bought and sold legally across Bolivia for chewing or
making tea, with people young and old never giving it a second thought.
Indeed, coca tea is sold in supermarkets and it is consumed across the
Andes, even in elegant hotels and offices.
While acknowledging that cocaine trafficking is a problem, Mr. Morales
and the coca growers contend that most coca in the Chapare goes for
traditional uses. Mr. Morales says that as president he would allow the
"industrial" use of coca, to make everything from toothpaste to
pharmaceuticals to soft drinks to be exported as far away as China and
Europe.
"Coca and coca tea can be industrialized to circulate internationally,"
Mr. Morales said during an interview en route to a meeting with coca
farmers. "How can we not legalize, since we are not hurting anybody?"
Erecting road blockades and battling soldiers, the coca growers have
already won victories against the Bolivian government once thought
impossible, most recently with a pact last fall that allowed each
farmer to plant up to a third of an acre with coca in the Chapare.
Today the blue, black and white flags of Mr. Morales's party, the
Movement Toward Socialism, flutter from houses in the Chapare, and Mr.
Morales is treated like a conquering hero during his frequent visits.
"Evo came up from the bottom, first as a union leader, then as the
leader of the coca growers federation," Ren=E9 Arandia, a coca growers
leader, said as he took a break from a recent meeting between Mr.
Morales and several hundred cocaleros, as the growers are called, in
the town of Lauca =D1. "And now he's on his way to becoming president of
the republic. For us, this is a victory."
For Washington, however, it is little short of a nightmare. American
officials and leading drug policy experts contend that, no matter what
Mr. Morales and the coca growers say, most of the coca grown in the
Chapare winds up as cocaine.
They also say that the recent pact permitting limited coca production
in the Chapare has emboldened not only coca farmers, but cocaine
traffickers.
"The results are pretty clear," said Eduardo Gamarra, the Bolivian-born
director of Latin American studies at Florida International University,
who has closely tracked the drug trade. "Coca production has expanded
considerably in Bolivia, and cocaine production has expanded
considerably in Bolivia."
The United Nations said in a recent report that Bolivia produced up to
107 tons of cocaine last year, up 35 percent from 2003. The sudden
increase has prompted warnings that cocaine traffickers are gaining
ground after several years in which Bolivia's drug crops were
substantially reduced.
"I don't think there's an attractive or viable future by becoming a
narco-state," John Walters, the White House drug czar, said in an
interview.
American officials, though, have watched helplessly as Mr. Morales's
influence has grown. When they have offered opinions - like claims,
with little proof, that Mr. Morales is linked to drug trafficking - it
has only strengthened Mr. Morales's appeal.
"They accuse me of everything," Mr. Morales told a crowd on a recent
campaign swing. "They say Evo is a drug trafficker, that Evo is a
narco-terrorist. They don't know how to defend their position, so they
attack us."
As president of the so-called Six Federations, a confederation of coca
growers, he molded it into a powerful political force that propelled
him to Congress.
Mr. Morales is well aware of the debt he owes his base. "If not for the
Chapare, if not for the Six Federations," he says, "there would not be
an Evo Morales."
Though 20,848 acres of coca was uprooted in eradication efforts in
2004, farmers keep planting it. They say they have no choice but to
grow coca, since other crops fare poorly here and American-financed
efforts to encourage them to switch to legal crops have stumbled.
Mr. Torrico's 20 acres are filled with crops like bananas, fruit,
yucca, coffee and cacao. On a tour of his plot, though, he listed off
the hurdles he faces making ends meet, from high transportation costs
to bottom-basement prices for most of his crops.
Coca, on the other hand, earns him as much as $162 dollars a month. It
is not a windfall, even by Bolivian standards, but it is a living, he
said.
"With coca, I was able to send my children to study," said Mr. Torrico,
who has eight children. "The other stuff, the citrus fruit, the
bananas, give us nothing. Coca is what sustains us here."
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