Despite U.S. Aid, Coca Cultivation On Rise in Andes

"There's no question that Evo Morales has intentionally weakened the effort that existed when he took office, and the increase in cultivation partly reflects that," said John P. Walters, the White House drug policy chief.

Since being elected president in December 2005, Morales has promoted the coca leaf as a symbol of Bolivian nationalism, while stressing the need to fight cocaine production. His government continues to eradicate illegal coca -- plots with known links to the drug trade or grown in national parks, for example. Under Morales, the amount of cocaine seized each year has risen to the nearly 20 tons confiscated so far this year, according to government statistics.

Morales also supports a four-year-old policy that allows coca farmers in Bolivia's Chapare region, where coca cultivation had previously been illegal, to grow the plant on a third of an acre of their land, called a cato. Critics say the policy has led to a spike in coca production because coca farmers, or cocaleros, do not fear punishment if they exceed the limit. The U.N. figures show that coca cultivation last year in Bolivia surpassed the 50,000-acre limit that the government allows by nearly 50 percent.

"What we've had in Bolivia is basically this perception on the part of cocaleros that one cato per family translates into one cato per person," said Eduardo Gamarra, a Bolivian-born expert on the coca industry who teaches Latin American affairs at Miami's Florida International University. "The net effect has been a net growth."

Among the coca growers in the Chapare, Morales is perceived as a folk hero. On the wall of the coca growers union office in the lowland jungle town of Chimore, the words "Evo Yes!" are painted next to a portrait of Che Guevara, the Argentine-born revolutionary figure. In the back of the office, workers stuff coca leaves into 50-pound bags that are then loaded onto waiting buses.

"Before, it was a tremendous fight. We planted coca and the authorities took it away," said Luis Endara, secretary general of the coca growers union in Chimore. "Now there is freedom. The army doesn't bother us anymore. Every community now controls itself."

Between 1997 and 2003, 60 people were killed in the Chapare in fighting between coca growers and Bolivian authorities, and more than 700 others were injured, according to the Andean Information Network, a research group based in Bolivia. Today, most of the far more infrequent confrontations involve rocks or tear gas. No one has been killed in recent months.

"Before, the police persecuted us," said Flora Sanabria, 33, who sat along a road next to her drying coca leaves. She also grows bananas and oranges, but coca, with its three to four harvests a year, provides a steady income for her family. "We are much better off. We have a cato of coca now, and before, we had almost nothing."

The rebound of coca in Bolivia, combined with increased cocaine demand from Latin American countries such as Brazil, has fueled the drug trade.

Bolivia's vice minister of social defense, Felipe Cáceres, said that in the past few years, the number of drug traffickers working the Bolivian-Brazilian border has risen fivefold to between 50 and 60. "Unfortunately," he said, "the demand of the drug in Brazil has increased spectacularly."

Domestic consumption in Bolivia -- mostly as tea or leaves for chewing -- accounts for 2.5 percent of Bolivia's gross domestic product, five times as much as in Peru or Colombia. But the Bolivian government's plans to industrialize coca -- turning coca into toothpaste, crackers, liquor and other products for export -- have failed to materialize.

Meanwhile, the clandestine labs used to produce Bolivian cocaine are proliferating beyond the main coca-growing regions of Chapare and Yungas, according to René Sanabria Oropeza, the head of the Bolivian drug police. His police have been finding coca-processing labs even in the poor urban neighborhoods of La Paz and El Alto, a sprawling satellite city adjacent to the capital.

One young man from La Paz, Miguel Ángel, who asked that his last name not be used, explained that traffickers now pay neighborhood residents to process coca in their homes. His family recently received $500 for allowing a group of men to use their kitchen to process coca leaves for a week.

"They said, 'We're in your house now, but we'll go to another house,' " Miguel Ángel said. "That is how they keep from getting caught."