Bolivia Denies Siege of Police by Coca Farmers

Bolivia’s interior minister Saturday denied and labeled “absurd” a report that angry coca farmers had surrounded more than 200 narcotics police and kept them under siege for at least three days.

A top police official joined Interior Minister Fernando Barthelemy in denying a news report that the siege occurred in the semitropical Chapare district, where nearly a third of the world’s coca leaf is cultivated. Coca is the primary ingredient in cocaine.

The head of Bolivia’s narcotics police, Col. Guido Lopez, said a throng of peasants in the town of Ivargazama had confronted police earlier in the week, but less in anger over a U.S.-financed coca reduction program than over alleged police rapists.

Barthelemy scoffed at a news report that the area’s coca farmers had attacked and laid siege to the contingent of 245 U.S.-financed narcotics police, known as “the Leopards,” for three days, beginning Tuesday.

Siege Report ‘Absurd’

“It’s absurd. It’s not true,” Barthelemy said.

“The news is baseless, because to begin with there are hardly 3,000 coca farmers in the Ivargazama area,” he said.

“It would be naive to think that a police battalion trained to fight drugs traffickers . . . could be under siege, without taking into account their high firepower,” he said.

Barthelemy said the reports spread after left-wingers and drugs traffickers this week tried to exploit the sacking of two policemen for the alleged rape of a prostitute in the area.

The police outpost in Ivargazama is heavily armed, he maintained, and had the post been under attack, police from the nearby town of Villa Tunari would have been dispatched. They were not, he said.

Mario Barrientos, leader of the region’s farmers union, also denied that peasants were holding police under siege.

Blames Drug Traffickers

He said the government faced a political campaign engineered by drug traffickers fighting an official drive to have coca leaf farmers switch to other crops.

Some farmers in Ivargazama are angry over coca reduction, Lopez acknowledged, and a group of 40 of them blocked a bridge to the town Friday. He said police declined to remove them by force to avoid further tensions.

Until August, 1984, the densely vegetated Chapare area of Bolivia was a “no man’s land” run by outlaw cocaine smugglers. Authorities did not dare enter.

The U.S.-financed narcotics police retook control of the zone 17 months ago under prodding from the United States.