POOR FARMERS RETURNING TO COCA

IBUELO ALTO, Bolivia - One morning last April, Hilaria Perez Prado
began her day as always -- hoping soldiers wouldn't burst from the
jungle and tear her farm to pieces.

They did come, though. They trampled her fields. And then one shot her
in the chest as they left.

Perez, 41, is out of the hospital. But her lung is damaged and so is
her hope of eking out a living for her family farming deep in the
Chapare, a remote Bolivian region that is deep in America's war on
drugs.

In the past seven years, Washington has spent $470 million on a
militarized campaign to deter poor farmers from growing coca.

Plan Dignity, as the campaign was dubbed, worked dramatically for the
first five years. Bolivian soldiers, most of them teenage draftees
from poor families, were given hoes and machetes and ordered to uproot
coca plants one by one.

They yanked out more than a billion plants. Bolivia went from
supplying half of the United States' cocaine demand -- the crop
brought an estimated $500 million into this country of 8 million
people each year -- to supplying very little. American diplomats
called Plan Dignity their most successful anti-narcotics mission in
South America.

But oranges, bananas, manioc root and other crops urged on peasant
growers haven't proved profitable because few buyers come to these
isolated regions, and farmers have begun drifting back to growing
coca. Coca production in Bolivia is up 23 percent since 2001, the
White House Drug Policy Office says.

Anti-drug efforts have been intensified, bringing an escalation in
tensions and conflict between soldiers and peasants.

Farmers plant homemade land mines in coca fields and put rat poison in
low-hanging fruit in hopes soldiers will eat them. Troops sometimes
resort to gunfire.

The People's Defense Office, an independent Bolivian human rights
group that tracks the government's interdiction effort, said 30
farmers and 21 soldiers have been killed the past five years. About
600 civilians and soldiers were wounded, it said.

Also, 1,200 farmers have been arrested on charges of growing coca, the
group said.

"It's easy to understand why people are growing violent. They're
hungry," said Godofredo Reinicke, a human rights activist in the
Chapare, a New Jersey-size region in central Bolivia that is one of
the country's poorest areas.

Reinicke says coca offers many farmers their only chance to earn
enough money.

Stanley Schrager, former director of the narcotics section at the U.S.
Embassy in La Paz, isn't sympathetic to the argument.

"There is an idea out there -- I call it the myth of the innocent coca
farmer -- that he is simply trying to put food on the table to feed
his kids," Schrager said. "But in reality he is at the beginning of a
chain of events that ultimately leads to the drug trade and drug
addiction in the United States, and thus bears some responsibility for
the ruined lives which are the result of this addiction."

Perez doesn't see any option to growing coca. She lives with her
husband, seven children and a pack of chickens in a wooden hovel
without electricity.

She says coca is the only crop that can feed her family. So she'll
keep planting it, along with banana trees to hide the coca from
American helicopters flying overhead.

Chapare's farmers dismiss crops such as oranges and bananas. The
highway through the region is lined with women peddling cheap, overripe
fruit. There are few buyers. The only people who consistently trek into
the Chapare are representatives of drug gangs. They pay $1 a pound for
coca leaf.