BOLIVIA: For a start, Evo Morales wants to remove the coca leaf, the main ingredient in cocaine, from the UN's list of illicit substances, writes Tom Hennigan in São Paulo
An international campaign to remove the coca leaf, the main ingredient in cocaine, from the UN's list of illicit substances is the centrepiece of a new drugs strategy announced by Bolivia's recently elected radical government.
The strategy also named a coca-farmer as the country's new drugs czar and ordered the disbandment of a joint army-police task force responsible for destroying illegal plantations of the crop.
Once a feared presence in coca-growing areas, the task force has retreated to barracks since the election in December of the radical pro-coca leader Evo Morales as president. Last year, it was responsible for the destruction of almost 20,000 acres of coca and 3,800 clandestine cocaine laboratories.
A former coca-grower, Mr Morales has pledged to end the US-backed policy of coca eradication. The US is Bolivia's main foreign aid donor, providing $150 million (€123 million) a year in assistance, most of it devoted to destroying the country's illegal coca crop.
But Mr Morales and his supporters insist that coca is a traditional plant of the Andean Indians and that the US has no right to promote its eradication because of drug problems among its own population.
Bolivian law allows the cultivation of 30,000 acres of the crop for legal traditional uses, such as chewing and coca tea. But the actual area planted is estimated at 60,000 acres, with most coca going to cocaine. Bolivia is the world's third-largest producer of the drug after Colombia and Peru, exporting an estimated 100 tonnes a year.
But in a speech at the weekend before supporters in his political bastion of the tropical Chapare region, the main centre of Bolivia's illegal coca industry, Mr Morales drew back from allowing the unfettered cultivation of the coca plant for the time being.
Instead he said the government would allow each family in the Chapare to grow a cato of coca, 1,600sq m or 0.4 of an acre. The deal will cover an estimated 36,000 coca-growing families. The president said the deal was to allow time for the government to undertake a study of how much more of the plant Bolivia could produce for the legal market.
Mr Morales and his supporters have placed great store by the possibilities of expanding existing legal uses and developing new ones for the coca plant. They argue that coca tea and coca-based soft drinks could be exported around the world and that coca can be more widely exploited by the pharmaceutical industry, to be used in everything from toothpaste to cures for cancer.
By depenalising the international trade in coca, Mr Morales says, Bolivia would be able to export the leaf to countries such as Argentina, where possession of coca is legal but importing it is a crime.
Having stood down the army's main anti-drug unit, the president called on coca-growers to police the cato arrangement themselves. "If you want to support the government of your leader and now president Evo Morales, let us respect the agreement. A cato of coca until the study shows if we need more," said the president at a rally in the Chapare town of Sinahota on Sunday.
But analysts are sceptical that community policing will work in Bolivia, despite the huge support for the president among coca-growers and the influence his coca trade unions wield.
"It is going to be very difficult for the government to control organised crime, which is already in there," said Eduardo Gamarra, Bolivian head of the Latin American and Caribbean Centre at Florida International University.
"There is a whole group of people that have in essence lived off coca, some of whom have been selling to the drug industry. So they are going to have a difficult time convincing peasants to give it up as they get a premium from selling to the drug industry."
The country's military will also be closely watching the changes in drug policy. The armed forces have expanded greatly in recent decades as part of the effort to eradicate coca production, and an end to that policy could lead to a much-reduced military budget for a high command that has grown accustomed to the benefits of the war on coca.