Bolivia's Morales Eye Middle Way on Coca

Bolivian President Evo Morales, listens to a question during press conference in Cochabamba, Bolivia on Thursday, Dec. 7, 2006 at the second South American summit. (AP Photo/Martin Mejia) (Martin Mejia - AP)

CARANAVI, Bolivia -- Since taking office in January, Bolivian President Evo Morales has tried to hold onto millions of dollars in U.S. aid contingent on the eradication of coca, without losing the support of its growers. But keeping both sides happy has proved difficult.

Morales' "zero cocaine, not zero coca" policy combines crop eradication and more anti-drug enforcement with the promotion of the coca leaf's "industrialization" into legal products.

In La Paz, the Bolivian capital 60 miles southwest of Caranavi, the government agency charged with destroying illegal coca is just a 10-minute drive from the new agency promoting coca tea, coca flour, coca-flavored liquor and even coca toothpaste.

But on a steep slope in the Andes' eastern foothills, Paolina Quispe choked back tears as soldiers yanked her coca plants one by one from the dry soil.

"Most people here say Evo has tricked us, Evo has sold us out," said Quispe, 28. A year ago she voted for Morales, then head of the coca growers' unions. But she says he has changed since becoming president.

Quispe and many other coca farmers as well as officials in Washington assumed during Morales' campaign that his victory would mean an end to years of coca eradication efforts. But the reality is more subtle, as Morales has taken a middle path _ attacking cocaine while gamely charting a new course for the leaf that Bolivians have chewed for millennia as a mild stimulant.

Morales' strategy makes U.S. officials squirm, but Washington continues to give his government $87 million a year in anti-narcotics aid in hopes of reducing Bolivia's coca crop _ half the size it was a decade ago, but still the world's third largest, after Colombia and Peru.

Meanwhile, Morales doesn't miss a chance to remind Americans that they lead the world in snorting cocaine; he may do so again this weekend when he hosts a meeting of South American leaders in Cochabamba, a city in the heart of coca country.

"While our coca farmers are working toward a concerted, voluntary reduction, if the United States doesn't reduce its market demand, coca will continue to be diverted to illegal use," he said recently.

Creating an international legal market for coca would take the leaves out of drug traffickers' hands, Morales insists, and Bolivia hopes to make its case at a 2008 conference in Vienna to review U.N. narcotics rules.

But the argument has yet to convince Washington or persuade other nations to end a 45-year-old ban on coca-derived products.

"There's really only one good use for the coca leaf in economic terms, and that's cocaine," the U.S. ambassador to Bolivia, Philip Goldberg, told The Associated Press. "The narcotraffickers will always pay more than the toothpaste factory."