The assassination of an important leader of the coca growers union in Bolivia last week has brought nationwide attention upon a conference that began today on alternative crops to coca, the leaf from which cocaine is produced, but which also constitutes an important medicine and food in the region.

Tensions have run high in Bolivia's Chapare region for weeks, as 4,000 soldiers have clashed with 36,000 coca-growing families who have organized themselves into a powerful labor union. As the conference convened in downtown Cochabamba, hundreds of coca growers took to the streets in protest of the US-imposed "zero coca" policy of forced eradication of the crops.

Experts from Bolivia, Peru and Colombia are meeting at the conference to study the efforts by governments to replace coca crops with products like pineapples, bananas and palm hearts. The programs are commonly referred to as "alternative development." Normally, a policy conference would not attract as much media attention as the gathering that begins today in Cochabamba has drawn, but in the wake of the assassination of coca growers union leader Casimiro Huanca, conference organizer Georgean Potter has been besieged by national television and radio shows with requests for her appearance, as well as a constant ring of calls from newspaper reporters. That's because the circumstances in which the labor leader was shot were directly related to the failure of current "alternative development" programs.

On Thursday, December 6th, many farmers who had accepted the government's offer to give up coca farming in exchange for growing fruits and other legal products gathered alongside the highway in the Amazon town of Chimore. They brought truckloads of rotting pineapples and bananas that they had labored months, sometimes years, to cultivate but upon harvest found no market to which to sell them. Military soldiers arrived and tear-gassed the protesting farmers. Then they apprehended union leader Casimiro Huanca, 55, president of one of the six large federations of coca growers. While in custody, in front of scores of witnesses, he was shot by soldiers. He died a half-hour later.

That the shooting took place at 3 p.m. Thursday just as Bolivian President Jorge Quiroga was meeting with George W. Bush at the White House in Washington has added fuel to the fire. Among the Bush-Quiroga agenda items was the "war on drugs" and Bolivia's stated goal of "zero coca," supported by the US Embassy here. The Catholic Church, the Public Defender and Human Rights organizations have all termed the death of the unarmed farmer as an "assassination, in cold blood."

The conference features presentations by experts on the theme: Ricardo Vargas from Colombia, publisher of the Accion Andina magazine; Francisco Barrantes from Peru, leader of the National Association of Agricultural Producers and representing 250,000 families in 16 valleys throughout Peru; and Georgean Potter, author and human rights expert from Bolivia. Various Andean non-governmental and human rights organizations are participating, as well as representatives of the farmers. The conference is co-sponsored by The Lindesmith Center/Drug Policy Foundation and the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, based in the United States.

During the December 6th protest another farmer, Fructuoso Herbas, 35, was also shot by a soldier, and today is being treated at the Viedma public hospital in Cochabamba. This reporter interviewed him in his hospital room on Friday.

"We work in alternative crops," Fructuoso began, struggling to hold his head up off the bed. "When we stopped growing coca we worked planting pineapple, palm, other fruits. But there is nowhere to sell these fruits. There is nowhere to take them and they are wasted. Nobody buys them. There is no market. Later we told ourselves, it's not working, this growing of bananas. We needed to bring the produce out on the highway to make a noise, to demonstrate to the press, for the international press too, we put out the fruits that were rotting, fruits of various qualities, for all to see..."

"And then," explained Fructuoso of Thursday in the Chapare, "came the military soldiers..."

"Then the security forces attacked. They choked us with clubs, with their rifles on our necks, they started to beat us up, and we started to escape. Others insulted the soldiers, saying, 'Why do you come after us with guns and clubs?' The soldiers said, 'Because you are blockading.' Next we learned that our leader was dead..."

"Right now," said Fructuoso Herbas, the peasant farmer of legal crops, the US-claimed success story in the war on drugs, straining to see his own injured leg, "the pain is something I can't stand. Why is the government concerned with bringing us bullets and gases? Our neighbors don't have anything. There is no economic source. With what is there to survive? We don't have roads to get our products to market. And the market doesn't want to come here because the roads don't even have bridges. We don't know what is going to happen. And the government just shoots bullets..."

"They told me to plant palm to sell palm hearts," he cries out, unheard in the capitals of Washington and La Paz, who imposed this tragedy upon him. "But it was all for nothing. They tricked us. But the palms don't sell. And I'm so worried they are going to shoot us more. Who is going to help me? We have no economy. We have no money..."

The full interview appears at: www.narconews.com/warlog.html

Arriving last night in Cochabamba from Peru, agricultural leader Francisco Barrantes explained that it is the market that determines how much coca is produced in his country, not governmental efforts to eradicate or substitute the crops. In 1995, he explained, when the price of an 11.5 kilo bundle of coca leaves fell to $1.50 U.S. dollars, "many farmers stopped growing coca." But now, with the prohibition market paying from $45 to $55 US dollars, his organization counts almost 60,000 hectares of coca growing in Peru.

Barrantes said that "legalization is the only possible solution" to the destabilization and explosion of coca crops caused by the prohibition economy. "We don't defend the narco," he explained. "We know drugs are dangerous." But the coca leaf, he added, has a large legal market by indigenous farmers who chew it as a food and a medicine, making governmental efforts to eradicate the crop impossible.

The conference opened Monday morning with a presentation by the Colombian investigator Ricardo Vargas, who explained the history of coca eradication and "alternative development" efforts in his country. He noted that the former President, Ernesto Samper, in 1996 had established a program that gave farmers certain benefits in exchange for "the total eradication by the farmer of his crop." But by 1997, more than 200,000 coca farmers mobilized, rejecting the government program, which they noted was "filled with traps" and failed to comply with the benefits promised to farmers.

"When the people found themselves without coca," said Vargas in the conference's opening session, "many small farmers had no other possibility except to ally themselves with the armed rebels of the FARC."

"The international economy of drugs is what facilitated the connection between the farmer and the narco-traffickers," said Vargas. "The current policy of aerial fumigation has caused a state of confrontation and makes cooperation between the government and farmers in alternative development programs impossible. Only five percent of the funds for Plan Colombia go to alternative development; most of the funds go to militarization. If the fumigation continues, it will impede the peace."

As the conference continues, the participants will engage in a painstaking review of the "alternative development" policies in each of the three countries: Bolivia, Colombia and Peru. The plan is to analyze which programs have worked, which have not, and to make proposals for effective alternative development.

But hanging over this effort by representatives of Civil Society from the Andean region is the US-imposed drug war. As Emperatriz Cahuach, an indigenous delegate to the conference from the Colombian state of Amazona said during the opening session of the conference: "Drug trafficking is not the real problem in our territories. The drug war is just a pretext used by others to take natural resources from our lands."

Still, as governments continue to fail to solve the problems caused in coca growing country by an out-of-control drug war that has been militarized, Civil Society is making an effort to cross international boundaries and propose workable solutions. "Civil Society," Vargas told the conferees, "must assume its proper role."

-- Former Boston Phoenix political reporter Al Giordano reports on the drug war from Latin America. He is publisher of The Narco News Bulletin -- the Internet news service that won a free-speech battle this week in the New York State Supreme Court in the "Drug War on Trial" case. He receives email at narconews@hotmail.com