The New York
Times
Bolivian Leader's Ouster Seen
as Warning on U.S. Drug Policy
By LARRY ROHTER
Published:
October 23, 2003
L A PAZ, Bolivia, Oct. 22 -- On a visit to the White
House last year,
President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada told President Bush
that he would
push ahead with a plan to eradicate coca but that he needed
more money
to ease the impact on farmers.
Otherwise, the Bolivian
president's advisers recalled him as saying, "I
may be back here in a year,
this time seeking political asylum."
Mr. Bush was amused, Bolivian
officials recounted, told his visitor that
all heads of state had tough
problems and wished him good luck.
Now Mr. Sánchez de Lozada,
Washington's most stalwart ally in South
America, is living in exile in the
United States after being toppled
last week by a popular uprising, a
potentially crippling blow to
Washington's anti-drug policy in the Andean
region.
United States officials interviewed here minimized the importance
of the
drug issue in Mr. Sánchez de Lozada's downfall, blaming a "pent-up
frustration" over issues ranging from natural gas exports to corruption.
But to many Bolivians and analysts, the coca problem is intimately tied
to the broader issues of impoverishment and disenfranchisement that have
stoked explosive resentments here and fueled a month of often violent
protests.
"The U.S. insistence on coca eradication was at the core of
Sánchez de
Lozada's problem," said Eduardo Gamarra, a Bolivian scholar who
is
director of the Latin American and Caribbean Center at Florida
International University in Miami.
Dr. Gamarra and others point to
events in Bolivia as a warning that
United States drug policy may sow still
wider instability in the region,
where anti-American sentiment is building
with the failure of economic
reforms that Washington has helped encourage
here.
In Bolivia the backlash has strengthened the hand of the political
figure regarded by Washington as its main enemy: Evo Morales, head of
the coca growers' federation, who finished second in presidential
election last year.
American officials have considered Bolivia such a
success in the
anti-drug campaign that they were looking to replicate their
strategy in
Peru. But there, too, signs of discontent are appearing,
beginning with
the re-emergence of the Shining Path, the guerrilla group
that
terrorized the country throughout the 1980's. "Right now Shining Path
is
strongest in coca growing areas," said Michael Shifter, who follows the
Andean region for the Washington-based policy group Inter-American
Dialogue. "To the extent that the U.S. pushes on eradication targets
without any kind of flexibility, it makes people there much more
amenable to turning to violent protest or insurgent groups like Shining
Path."
In Colombia the eradication push has succeeded in
substantially reducing
coca acreage and is helping the government in its
fight against leftist
rebels. But such successes have often pushed
cultivation farther south
to Bolivia and Peru.
The eradication
campaign is supposed to be coupled with an "alternative
development" program
to encourage farmers to grow crops like pineapples,
bananas, coffee, black
pepper, oregano and passion fruit on land once
devoted to
coca.
Though the United States has earmarked $211 million for such
projects
here in the last decade and helped raise the incomes of a growing
number
of peasant families, critics say the money is not nearly enough to
compensate all of those whose livelihoods have been destroyed by
eradication campaigns.
During his Washington visit last year, Mr.
Sánchez de Lozada asked for
$150 million in added emergency aid, meant among
other things to help
reduce a yawning government budget deficit that had
severely limited
spending on social programs.
He got $10 million, and
that only after he was nearly toppled in a round
of protests in
February.
"These are derisory sums that are incommensurate with what is
needed,"
said Jeffrey Sachs, an economist who is director of the Earth
Institute
at Columbia University and a long-time adviser to Bolivian
governments.
"The United States has constantly made demands on an
impoverished
country without any sense of reality or an economic framework
and
strategy to help them in development."
David N. Greenlee, the
American ambassador here, in an interview on
Monday, disagreed with the
notion that added assistance from Washington
would make much
difference.
"It's too early to say whether we can provide additional
resources," he
said. "I think we currently provide substantial resources,
and it is
possible this new government can be more efficient."
He
added, "A few million more from the U.S. isn't going to solve the
problems
of Bolivia."
At a news conference on Saturday night, less than 24 hours
after he was
sworn in, Bolivia's new president, Carlos Mesa, said coca
eradication
had created "a complicated scenario" and hinted that some
changes might
be in the works.
For Mr. Mesa, who heads a weak interim
government, some moderation of
the effort may be inevitable if he is to
avoid his predecessor's fate
and hold off the challenges of opposition
figures like Mr. Morales, the
leader of the coca growers.
Mr.
Morales's position has been enhanced by recent events, despite the
United
States Embassy's efforts to isolate and discredit him.
In recent years
American officials pushed to have Mr. Morales expelled
from Congress and
indicted for the murder of four policemen in the
Chaparé region, his
political base and a center of coca cultivation.
During last year's
presidential campaign, the embassy suggested that Mr.
Morales's election
would be viewed by the United States as a hostile act
and would provoke an
end to aid to Bolivia.
"That has merely inflated Evo Morales even more
and catapulted him into
the position he is in now," Dr. Gamarra said, that
of a power broker
with the capacity to bring down the government. "He has
used the coca
issue to construct a national movement, with the coca growers
as his
praetorian guard."
The new government, political analysts and
diplomats here said, is in a
bind. It may be difficult to keep Mr. Morales
at bay if Mr. Mesa does
not declare a pause in the eradication effort, but
such a move could
jeopardize Bolivia's international assistance.
In
an interview here on Monday, Dionisio Núñez, a coca grower, member of
Congressional and key ally of Mr. Morales, said that their party, the
Movement Toward Socialism, intended to demand that the new government
modify the laws against coca cultivation, whether the United States
likes it or not.
For starters, he said, the opposition wants a
recalculation of the areas
in which growing coca is legal, as well as an
expansion of the places
where it is legal to sell coca leaves.
"A new
president can't return to a policy of repression and
militarization" to
combat drugs, Mr. Núñez warned. "There has to be a
change, to a policy that
is truly Bolivian, not one that is imposed by
foreigners with the pretext
that eradication will put an end to
narcotics trafficking."
Despite
Mr. Sánchez de Lozada's fall, the Bush administration seems
committed to
continuing the policy, with a modest budget in Bolivia.
"We think on
balance that our policies and our emphasis on alternative
development,
together with Bolivian participation and their own policies
regarding drugs,
have been positive things for Bolivia," Ambassador
Greenlee said. "We don't
think it is a
problem."
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