Bolivian coca hero runs for president
COCA POWER: Indian coca farmers in Bolivia are pinning their hopes on Evo Morales winning the Dec. 4 elections. As one of them, he promises to safeguard their interests

AP , ASUNTA, BOLIVIA
Tuesday, Oct 25, 2005,Page 7

The coca farmers on these steep mountain slopes have long felt their livelihood and Indian identity threatened by US-backed efforts to uproot the crop that makes cocaine.

Now they are pinning their hopes on one of their own -- an Indian coca farmer who is also the front-runner for the presidency.

Evo Morales promises that if elected on Dec. 4, he will decriminalize all coca farming. That would mean an end to a decade-old crop eradication program that has led to clashes between farmers and soldiers in which dozens have died.

He would also be Bolivia's first Indian president, and his leftist politics -- he's a close friend of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez -- would move yet another Latin American government leftward after Brazil, Argentina, Chile and Uruguay.

A Morales victory may worry Washington, as well as many governments in Europe, Bolivian cocaine's chief market. But the cocaleros, as coca farmers are known, are delighted at the prospect.

"Many Indians are very hopeful that these elections can change history," said Issaes Alvarez, a 23-year-old cocalero and town councilor in Asunta, in a coca-growing region northeast of La Paz, the capital. "If the eradication continues there will be a massacre, there will be death, there will be violations of human rights."

Indians are the majority in this nation of 8.5 million, and for centuries, those in the Andean highlands have chewed the coca leaf to stave off hunger pangs and work up energy, used it in religious ceremonies and boiled it into medicinal tea. It's sold legally in supermarkets throughout Bolivia and Peru, and is served as tea in cafes.

But coca is also the main ingredient of cocaine, and the Bolivian and US governments are convinced that a growing amount of the crop is being turned into drugs. Bolivia, the world's No. 3 coca power after Colombia and Peru, produced up to 106.2 tonnes of cocaine last year, up 35 percent from 2003, according to the latest UN World Drug Report.

Morales' family is one of many who migrated from Bolivia's poor western highlands, where they struggled along by herding llamas and growing potatoes. In the tropical Chapare region, in southeast Bolivia, Morales began growing coca, became a trade union official and finally, in 1993, president of the cocalero organization. He still operates a coca farm.

Chapare is his power base, and it was here that he led the often violent clashes with government forces over coca eradication. He was elected to Congress in 1997 and narrowly lost the presidential race to Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada in 2002. He was a key figure in protests that brought down Sanchez de Lozada in 2003 and his successor, Carlos Mesa, in June.

Opinion polls give him a slight edge over conservative former president Jorge Quiroga.

In the last election, then US Ambassador Manuel Rocha criticized Morales, only to see him shoot up in the polls. Morales jokingly called Rocha his "campaign chief." This time Washington has kept silent about the election, but Morales has said plenty about Washington.

"Thanks to coca, we've made it through the endless suffering caused by the white man's infamous war on drugs," he wrote on his Web site.

But meanwhile, the laborious work of pulling out plants by hand continues. Last year, troops uprooted 8,320 hectares in Chapare -- 83 percent of the total.

Los Yungas, about 480km away, is the only region where growing is legal. The government lets cocaleros farm 11,840 hectares, but the UN Illicit Crop Monitoring Program estimates that an additional 5,200 hectares are planted. The hillsides of Asunta, for example, are an endless patchwork of illegal green coca bushes.

Now the government is eyeing Los Yungas too. Next month it will begin paying some farmers to destroy their plants and encourage them to switch crops voluntarily. But although authorities promise there'll be no uprooting by force, tempers are running high. After the army enlarged a checkpoint to track illegal drugs out of Los Yungas, cocaleros threatened a blockade, fearing eradication was coming.

Farmers say alternative crops such as coffee and bananas are harder to grow and transport, and fetch a lower price. They are staking their hopes on Morales.

"We're not going to let up. We'll keep fighting no matter what the consequences, because there's no other product that sustains us like coca," said Asunta farmer Juan Condori. "It's the only crop that supports the whole family."

Dying to get to the promised land

By Chris Morris
BBC News, Melilla

Despite their fortifications, Spain's enclaves remain a tempting target for migrants desperate to reach Europe. The last two weeks have seen mass assaults on the border and many have been injured or even killed while attempting to scale the razor wire fences, as Chris Morris reports from the enclave of Melilla.

You can see them lurking in the shade of the trees - through the foliage, and through the razor wire which marks Europe's border with Africa. They are waiting for their time, for the chance to reach their promised land.

Even among all the other places where rich and poor collide, this one stands out.

Melilla is an oddity - a tiny European enclave on the African continent. Part of Spain since the 16th Century, its faded colonial grandeur is protected by high fences and armed forces.

Every night a helicopter hovers overhead, another vain attempt to man the barricades of fortress Europe.

The migrants - young men from the war zones and poverty traps of sub-Saharan Africa - have one thing in their favour: strength in numbers.

'Good odds'

Every so often, hundreds of them storm the fences, equipped only with makeshift ladders hewn from the branches of trees, and with cloths tied around their hands - to ease the pain of razor wire slicing through flesh.

Six young men were killed at the fence this week, some of them shot by Moroccan security forces on the other side of the border.

But many more than six made it across the frontier - and that makes the odds pretty good, they say, when you have risked your life over and again just to get this far.

Hasan is 25 years old, from Ghana. He's been travelling across Africa for three years to reach Europe's doorstep. Three years! These are strong people, with the determination to succeed.

Many of them leave their homes in West Africa as teenagers, with no clearer plan in their minds than to head north.

Everyone knows roughly where Europe is. They travel well worn routes up through the deserts of Algeria and Morocco - dangerous roads populated by smugglers, thieves and less-than-welcoming official receptions.

They all seem to know someone who hasn't made it - road accidents, fights, beatings have all taken their toll. But for the toughest, and perhaps the luckiest (although they don't always look that way once they get here) the instinct for survival and improvement is the driving force.

Saturation point

"I'm happy now I'm here," Hasan says, as he stands in a small crowd outside a holding centre run by the Red Cross on the Spanish side of the fence.

"I want to work, and I won't let them take me back."

He's been in Europe for 10 days, and he's dreaming of the job he'll find to help fund his family back home.

But Spain may have other ideas. Hasan is another statistic, another illegal alien, and the authorities here have just sent migrants from third countries back to Morocco for the first time, under the terms of an agreement signed in 1992, but never before implemented by anyone.

Melilla, they say, has reached saturation point. It's the same story along the coast in Ceuta - Spain's other toe-hold on a continent it wants to keep at arms length.

A flood tide of illegal migrants has upset the cosy calculation that inequality can be sustained without cost.

It's happening all along Europe's southern frontiers. Here by land and elsewhere by sea they come - in rickety boats, barely fit to float and packed to the brim. To Malta, the Canaries and the Italian island of Lampedusa. In Malta even the army is outnumbered by illegal immigrants. And patience is wearing thin.

But, let's face it, this is the latter-day invasion we've brought upon ourselves. In a world of instant communications and global images we can't hide our affluence from anyone. The news has reached the smallest African village... and who can blame them if they start heading in our direction?

The response here? Well, the fence is being improved, going up in height from 10 to 20 feet. I can't imagine it will make much difference, the ladders will simply get longer.

But it does mark a toughening of official policy. It's a sticking plaster solution though, not a cure - and everybody knows it.

Medieval siege

Nothing much will change until development brings more prosperity and more jobs to Africa - one of the great challenges of our times. This tiny land border feels a long way from Bob Geldof and Making Poverty History. But this I suppose is what that is all about.

For now we are left with the grainy pictures of the ladders being thrown against the fence, our modern version of the medieval siege. The bravest climb first, and take their leap into the unknown.

As darkness falls at Melilla's holding centre, small groups of migrants begin to queue for food.

Two plastic bags swirl in a sudden breeze and dance on the wind, as if in mock combat.

So many Europeans take what they have for granted. So many Africans are dying to get their share.