Changing Lifestyles : ‘Coca’ Habit Hard to Break : * Rising cocaine prices and technical foul-ups are thwarting U.S. efforts to get South American farmers to switch to non-drug crops.

Florencio Quinteros destroyed his coca bushes and helped persuade other farmers around San Miguel to do the same. They accepted credit to plant substitute crops, such as orange and macadamia trees--all under a program sponsored by the U.S. Agency for International Development.

After a two-year grace period, Quinteros and many of his neighbors now face interest payments on their loans, but they are short of cash because their new trees are not yet producing.

“I’m sorry I pulled out my coca, because I can’t pay the interest,” said Quinteros, 51, a leader in the local farmers’ union. And fellow farmers in the same fix are blaming him.

“They give me that look, like ‘You got us in this mess,’ ” he said.

Quinteros’ troubles are a small sample of the enormous problems U.S. and Latin American authorities face in their efforts to reduce coca production and cocaine trafficking.

Bolivia and Peru are the world’s leading producers of coca leaves, the raw material for cocaine. The governments of both countries contend that the key to reducing coca crops is “alternative development,” helping farmers such as Quinteros to make a living from substitute crops.

By all accounts, alternative development has advanced further in Bolivia than in Peru. A close look at Bolivia’s program, however, shows that its successes so far are tentative ones at best.

Coca leaves, a legal commodity, have been chewed by the native peoples of Bolivia as a mild stimulant since ancient times, but most of Bolivia’s production goes into illegal cocaine. The Chapare region, a New Jersey-sized area where dense rain forest has been carved up by about 35,000 coca farmers, produces more unrefined coca paste than any area except Peru’s Upper Huallaga Valley.

Quinteros, an industrious little man with a crippled foot, had about seven acres of coca on his two small farms near San Miguel, a back-road Chapare village. He destroyed all but about 10% of his coca bushes and received a compensation from the Bolivian government of $6,000, which he used to buy a truck.

Then he took out a U.S.-guaranteed loan of $8,000 to put in substitute crops and start a plant nursery.

The U.S.-sponsored program gave him courses on how to grow black pepper, oranges, macadamia nuts, coffee, pineapple and other products. He was to operate a demonstration farm and sell planting stock to other farmers at reasonable prices.

The price of coca leaves was low in 1990, and most farmers around San Miguel followed Quinteros’ example, eradicating coca to plant other crops. But in 1991, coca prices were higher for much of the year. Farmers who had destroyed coca bushes and taken out loans began to miss the income from the leaves.

Quinteros has $1,080 in interest due next month.

Another problem that has discouraged potential converts to alternative development is a lack of technical assistance, even though a U.S.-financed agricultural station not far away has a staff of extension workers.

“In the area of San Miguel, the technicians haven’t come for a year,” Quinteros said.

A field agent of DIRECO, the government agency that oversees coca eradication, said most coca farmers in the Chapare region are unprepared to raise other crops.

“I know people who have taken out 100% of their coca and now can’t make a living,” said the agent. “They have nothing to eat. So the alternative development program is not working.”

Can coca be eliminated from the Chapare? “I think it is going to be impossible,” he said. “If alternative development doesn’t work, the people would perish.”

The agent asked not to be identified, but Enzo Fernandez, 54, DIRECO’s coordinator in the Chapare, spoke openly. Since 1988, when an estimated 118,000 acres of coca were growing in the Chapare, DIRECO has paid farmers to pull out 49,000 acres, Fernandez said.

So far, about 16,000 farmers have voluntarily destroyed at least part of their coca, but about 20,000 others have chosen not to participate, he said.

The collective experience of those who have eradicated coca has not been encouraging for the others. “Five thousand have pulled out all of their coca, and now they have nothing,” Fernandez said.

During a blitz against traffickers in April of 1990, he recalled, the price of coca leaves fell to less than $7 per 100-pound load. And in that month alone, farmers voluntarily eradicated more than 2,700 acres of coca.

Since 1990, however, the price has risen at times to more than $70 per 100 pounds. In early March, it was around $35, still a profitable price for most producers.

These days, Fernandez said, the only farmers who volunteer to destroy their coca are ones who urgently need the compensation money of $2,000 per hectare (2.47 acres).

“You need a sustained drop in prices, six or seven months, so that farmers will start to think that this is not worth it and will start reducing their coca,” he said.

That will require more consistent action by Bolivia’s U.S.-trained anti-drug police force, known as UMOPAR, or “the Leopards.” When the Leopards are cracking down on traffickers, coca prices usually drop because farmers have fewer buyers competing for their product.

But in the past, crackdowns have soon eased and coca prices have gone back up. The Leopards are as infamous for their corruptibility as the traffickers are for their resilience.

In late 1990, the Leopards invaded a northern area of the Chapare, known as the Red Zone, where traffickers clustered plastic-lined mashing pits for making coca paste from coca leaves. The traffickers’ response was to teach farmers to make paste in their own small pits, Fernandez said.

“Now coca is being mashed everywhere,” he said. “The process has multiplied, and it is harder to control.”

The government is reluctant to move against the farmers because their unions wield considerable power in the national confederation of farmers unions, and confrontational police tactics are especially controversial in Bolivia.

Last year, at Washington’s urging, DIRECO began forced eradication of unregistered, illegal coca fields in the Chapare. But angry farmers resisted, damaging nine of the agency’s vehicles and wounding five drivers. A farmer was shot and killed.

DIRECO quickly halted the forced eradication.

“Why should we go asking for more dead?” said Oswaldo Antezana, the country’s interior minister. Antezana, who at one time was the ministry’s undersecretary for alternative development and coca crop substitution, said U.S. officials have pressured Bolivia to carry out forced eradication. “They don’t want to understand” that such tactics can be dangerously counterproductive, he said.

After last year’s attempt, Chapare farmers formed self-defense committees. If forced eradication resumes, Antezana said, “they will react for sure, and there will be confrontation.”

He accused the State Department of exaggerating its estimate of more than 12,000 acres of new coca planted illegally in Bolivia during 1990 and 1991.

But a U.S. anti-narcotics official said: “The key to eradicating coca and keeping it eradicated is the political will on the part of the Bolivian government to force eradication of illegal coca. Until they are willing to do that, it won’t happen.”

Antezana said government agents are holding “seminars” with farmers to persuade them to cooperate in eradication efforts. But they are not easily persuaded because the alternative development program is lagging behind eradication.

“This is a very big gap that in some way we must begin to close with emergency action,” Antezana said.

He said Bolivia received about $50 million in foreign aid for alternative development last year, mainly from the United States and the United Nations. About $37 million of that went to the Chapare, less than one-third of the amount he said was needed.

Garber A. Davidson Jr., assistant director of the U.S. Agency for International Development in Bolivia, said AID and Bolivian institutions lack the structural capacity to absorb much more development money than is being applied in the Chapare. “I think we’ve got all we can handle,” Davidson said.

He said official American aid for the region is being increased from $14.2 million last year to an estimated $21.8 million this year and about the same amount in 1993. He added that what Bolivia needs more of is private investment.

“Unless they can get that, not only in the Chapare but other key development poles in Bolivia, I don’t think we can succeed,” he said.

AID is trying to help create a climate for private investment in the Chapare by helping farmers grow marketable products, financing road construction, building packing plants for produce and developing export markets.

“Right now we’re really pouring it on,” said Marion (Tex) Ford, the AID regional manager for the Chapare. He summarized efforts to help Chapare farmers grow and sell bananas, citrus fruit, pineapples, hearts of palm and coffee.

Coca farmers have put in at least 24,000 acres of those and other alternative crops since 1986, Ford said, mostly in the past two years. This year, he predicted, more than 8,000 additional acres will be planted.

Still, judging by Bolivian statistics, alternative production remains discouragingly low. Gustavo Navia, marketing director for the program, said 675 Chapare families earned a paltry $74,000 from substitute crops in 1991.

Cocaine Regions

Bolivia and Peru are world’s leading producers of coca leaves, the raw material for cocaine.

Chapare region in Bolivia: Second-largest producer of cocaine paste.

Upper Huallaga Valley, Peru: Top producer of unrefined cocaine paste.