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In the end, Washington's most effective weapon is still its most direct one: cutting off drugs at the source. "The closer you are to where it comes from," explains Ambassador Corr in Bolivia, "the more bang you get for your buck. By the time it gets to East St. Louis or Champaign, Ill., it's all over the place." U.S.-backed programs of coca eradication have enjoyed some measure of success: last fall in "Operation Federico" in Brazil, 9 million epadu plants were burned while workers in Peru slashed down more than 5,000 acres, three times more than in all 1983. But eradication does not work unless it is accompanied by adequate compensation to campesinos for the loss of a crop that requires less work and promises ten times more profit than such alternatives as coffee or bananas. Often, however, other crops cannot flourish on the soil where coca grows. At the same time, the U.S. is not about to send huge infusions of dollars to recompense coca growers stripped of their income. "We just can't afford it," says a Washington official. "If we gave money to Peru or Bolivia, other countries would start growing coca in order to get U.S. funds."
Even harder to uproot than the coca leaf may be the widespread conviction among South Americans that cocaine is a U.S. problem. "We are putting our lives in danger to prevent drugs from entering the U.S.," complains Bolivian Under Secretary of the Interior Gustavo Sanchez. While U.S. officials claim that it is illicit production that begets consumption, many South Americans contend that the process works the other way round. "The U.S. is to blame for most of this mess," says one Panamanian official. "If there weren't the frightening demand in the States, we wouldn't even have to worry about trying to eliminate the supply." As reports of cocaine use in the developing world circulate, says Enrique Elias Laroza, Peru's former Justice Minister, South American governments lose heart and people "ask how a poor country can win the fight against narcotics trafficking when much more powerful, rich countries have failed."
In recent months, local governments may have come to appreciate better the problems afflicting their North American neighbor: coca abuse has begun to spread across South America. The greatest culprit is a brown, pennies-cheap cigarette made of an addictive low-grade coca paste. Often known as brutos, the cigarettes contain impurities that have not been processed out, including caustic soda, sulfuric acid and kerosene. The cheap high, once favored only by teenage street kids, has now hooked a significant cross-section of society.