Bolivia Leader Asks ‘Global Approach’ on Drugs

President Victor Paz Estenssoro of Bolivia said Thursday that the joint U.S.-Bolivian operation against clandestine cocaine laboratories here should demonstrate to the world “that we want to wipe out the cocaine traffic as much as the United States does.”

But Paz, in an interview, expressed dissatisfaction over what he said was the lack of a “global approach” to the drug problem by the Reagan Administration.

“What we need is a sustained policy, not just a few raids or even a two-month operation,” he said.

Eliminating the cocaine supplies that enter the illicit world market from this key producing country alone would require a four-year effort costing $100 million a year, Paz estimated, noting that the United States provides to Bolivia less than 5% of the aid it needs for anti-drug efforts.

His views were echoed by Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada Bustamante, Bolivia’s minister of planning and Paz’s closest aide. “An international scourge that moves $20 billion a year can’t be fixed by an anti-narcotics policy that has provided Bolivia with $4 million a year and a lot of criticism for a small and poor country that can’t even pay for the gasoline to fly anti-drug raids,” Sanchez said.

Operation Blast Furnace, as the joint anti-drug effort is code-named, has found and destroyed two large cocaine laboratories since U.S. Army helicopters last week began ferrying Bolivian anti-drug police to sites of suspected jungle laboratory and storage facilities identified as targets by a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration field team based here.

First Such Strike

The operation, which has brought about 160 U.S. personnel, including pilots, mechanics and support troops, is the first such U.S.-backed strike against major drug traffickers in Bolivia. The Bolivian press printed stories about the operation three days before it began, removing the element of surprise and apparently allowing some cocaine manufacturers to close their labs and flee.

This landlocked Andean country annually produces an estimated 100 tons of cocaine, extracting it from coca leaves grown by 300,000 peasants, mainly in the Chapare region between Cochabamba and Santa Cruz departments.

The coca leaves are reduced to paste by peasants in cottage industries and then flown to laboratories that drug traffickers have set up, mainly in the northeastern Beni department, where access by land is difficult and labs can be hidden in heavy forest locations.

A lab with a weekly capacity of 2,200 pounds of cocaine was found last Friday near the Brazilian border, and another was discovered and occupied Wednesday, 130 miles west of Trinidad, the Beni capital. No cocaine was found at either abandoned lab. The facility seized Wednesday had a production potential of more than 4,000 pounds a week, Bolivia’s national police said.

Paz said the operation is “a good experience because it will reduce the cocaine outflow . . . . The interdiction of these production sites will force down the value of coca leaves and paste. This will lead peasants to think about substitute crops, and that will make eradication of coca plantations possible.”

“But we cannot impose eradication at the point of a gun,” interjected Sanchez, the planning minister. “This would be genocide.”

Bolivia is losing $3 million a day in Central Bank reserves since the operation began, presumably because cocaine dollars have stopped being exchanged here, said Sanchez.

Loan Request

“We are asking the U.S. Federal Reserve System to provide us with $200 million in a three-year loan so that this loss of reserves doesn’t undermine the stability of our currency,” he said.

Sanchez also expressed irritation over the U.S. government’s opposition to a Bolivian application for a $60-million loan from the Inter-American Development Bank to complete a highway through the Chapare region.

“If we are going to tell the peasants not to grow coca, we have to have alternatives,” Paz said. “Without an all-weather highway, they can’t market rice, coffee, oranges, and other legal crops they could substitute for coca.”

Paz, 78, said the interdiction of cocaine processing and export, by breaking up the laboratories, is necessary before crop substitution and eradication can succeed. Bolivia signed what he called “an ill-advised” agreement in 1983 to eradicate 10,000 acres in the Chapare coca area. This was not fulfilled by a previous government, and coca planting increased.

“We will need $100 million a year for interdiction, crop substitution, eradication and infrastructure projects in the coca regions over a four-year period,” Paz said. “Without that money from international sources, we can’t do anything because output can’t be controlled by going after little operators.

“In a comprehensive policy, it will also be necessary for the United States to take measures to reduce demand,” Paz added.

In his assessment of the joint operation under way here, Paz said the “lack of surprise reduced the impact, but this year’s production is being disorganized (by the raids) and that is very useful.”

Paz, now holding the office of president for the fourth time since he led a successful revolutionary here in 1952, dismissed criticism by opposition parties to his decision to allow U.S. military forces into the country without advising Congress, which is in recess. When Congress resumes Aug. 6, some left-wing members will try to get a vote of censure to compel Paz to send the U.S. forces away.

“I don’t feel threatened,” said Paz, who has confronted several major crises since he took office last August and launched a bold anti-inflation program against the opposition of Bolivia’s labor movement.

When the labor leaders called a general strike, Paz jailed 1,200 union officials. In a week, the strike was over.

In Congress, Paz has solid support from his Nationalist Revolutionary Movement party and from the center-right Nationalist Democratic Action party, led by a former military president, Gen. Hugo Banzer, who governed Bolivia from 1970 to 1977. With the backing of this congressional majority and a military leadership that supports the constitutional system, Paz said he could handle threats from the disorganized left to provoke a general strike against his government.

“The country is going through a hard crisis, but we are going to come out of it all right,” Paz said.

He said that inflation, which reached an annual rate of 12,000% at the end of the previous administration was down to 3% over the last five months.

Tin, Petroleum Fall

The Paz government’s hopes for economic recovery have been dashed by a violent drop in the prices of tin and petroleum, the two main legal Bolivian exports. “But after three years of negative growth, this year will be stable, with no further decline, and we should begin to grow again next year,” Paz said.

Cocaine exports, illegal and outside official financial channels, have been supplying Bolivia with an estimated $600 million a year, more than the $400 million in legal exports expected this year. The reduction of cocaine dollar inflows is bound to affect the economy.

“But we had to attack the drug traffickers to dispel the international image of Bolivia as a country that didn’t want to do anything about the problem. We have a responsibility to other countries to do our part,” Paz said.

On the size and high visibility of the U.S. military presence here, the object of much current internal criticism, Paz said he was fully informed of the numbers of U.S. forces that would be needed, the arrival of numerous U.S. aircraft and the duration of the operation for up to two months.

“The only regrettable thing is that the operation lost the factor of surprise and that it took longer than expected to get the raids under way,” Sanchez said. “We would have liked to have seen more efficiency and speed, like an Israeli operation.”