In Latin America, some leaders reject U.S. drug war

By Alonso Soto

QUITO (Reuters) - From Argentina to Nicaragua, Latin Americans have elected leftist leaders over the last decade who are challenging Washington's aggressive war on drugs in the world's top cocaine-producing region.

These governments are shaking off U.S. influence in the region and building defense and trade alliances that exclude the United States. Some now say they can better fight drugs without U.S. help and are rejecting policies they do not like.

The strongest resistance to U.S. drug policies is in Ecuador and Bolivia, two coca-growing countries of the Andes, and in Venezuela.

Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa, the son of a drug smuggler, has ordered parliament to pardon about 2,000 small-time couriers, one of a number of measures seen at odds with U.S. policy.

"I lived through this and these people are not criminals," the president said when an opposition lawmaker raised questions about his father's past. "They are single mothers or unemployed people who are desperate to feed their families."

Among those likely to walk free in a mass pardon expected later this year is Nury Vivas, 33, who was caught with 150 grams of cocaine in her stomach as she stood in line to catch a flight to the United States.

She is now serving six years in a run-down prison in Quito that is packed with couriers picked up for smuggling cocaine to the United States and Europe.

Vivas, who was earning $10 a day making candy in a gritty border town near Colombia, said she did it get out of debt. "We didn't know what to do with so much debt," she said. "We needed the money."

'PROBLEM WILL ALWAYS EXIST'

For Correa and other leaders, the plight of people like Vivas, coupled with stubbornly high smuggling rates, is proof of the failure of a drugs war focused on prison sentences and eradication of the coca crop, the raw material for making cocaine.

They resent prescriptions handed down from Washington that they say cram courts and prisons with the poor without slowing demand for cocaine in U.S. cities.

Washington seems to accept that Correa takes the fight against drugs seriously, noting recent billion-dollar drug hauls in Ecuador. But U.S. officials say Venezuela gives drug traffickers safe haven and they also have questions about Bolivian plans to increase legal production of coca.

Bolivian President Evo Morales, a former coca grower, has said crop eradication policies harm indigenous Andean people, who have legitimate reason to chew coca leaves for the mild stimulant effect that helps ward off hunger.

"We are not a cocaine culture. Coca leaf is one thing, cocaine is another," Morales told Venezuelan television. "As long as they don't stop the drug addicts and the market for cocaine, this problem will always exist."

Latin America pays a heavy cost for the drugs war. Cartels and cocaine-funded guerrillas kill thousands of people each year in battles with security forces to keep coveted trafficking routes or profitable coca plantations.