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The antinarcotics campaign in Bolivia has indeed proved fitful. Last August Siles ordered 1,200 troops to destroy coca crops in the Chapare region, the broad tropical valley where nearly a third of Bolivia's coca is grown. As it turned out, only six ill-equipped 100-man companies took to the field. Some of them gave local growers warning of their imminent raid six days in advance. One general actually resigned, saying that he was not about to kill campesinos just to please North Americans. The 150 men of the U.S.-funded Bolivian antidrug unit known as the Leopards have not fared much better. After two months of special training, complained one U.S. official, "they spent months and months doing nothing. The government's choice was to avoid confrontation, so they stayed in their barracks." Finally, last October, 93 members of the heavily armed paramilitary unit were sent on a sweep of the Beni, a roadless wilderness east of the Andes in which some 200 cocaine barons process and ship coca out of huge estates, some as large as 100,000 acres and many equipped with processing plants and airstrips. The biggest target of all was Suarez, who maintains a feudal rule over a colony of peasants in what amounts to a coca state within a state. Though they raided several ranches, the Leopards failed to find Suarez; they uncovered a paltry 380 kilos of cocaine. Clamping down on coca cultivation has been even harder in Peru. Four years ago, Washington launched what was regarded as a well-planned $26 million program centered on the coca-growing upper Huallaga Valley, a steep-sloped area some 200 miles northeast of Lima, the capital. The first part of the program was an $18 million, five-year project by the Agency for International Development to help the Peruvians build roads, bridges and water systems. The scheme was also designed to reduce coca production and encourage instead the cultivation of coffee, bananas, rice, citrus and other crops. Yet the seemingly apolitical program became the target of repeated assaults led by the Maoist guerrillas known as Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) or a related leftist group called Puka LLacta (Red Fatherland). Last July the terrorists drove into the project's central village of Aucayacu, ordered residents to stay indoors and sprayed the town with bullets, killing five policemen. Three other policemen were ambushed and killed outside of Aucayacu as they went to the rescue. Most of the program's workers were withdrawn from the town.
The second part of the U.S. drive involved the eradication of coca crops, accompanied by a reimbursement of about $120 for each affected acre. For 19 months, brigades of laborers tore out coca plants by hand and sprayed them with herbicide. By last November they had wiped out around one-fifth of the approximately 45,000 acres under cultivation in the upper Huallaga Valley. But after the bloody murder of 19 crop-eradication workers, believed to have been ordered by a local drug czar, the program was suspended for a couple of months.