Deputy Minister Felipe Cáceres, the administration's anti-drug chief, insists that during the administration of Morales, Bolivia's first indigenous president, the destruction of illegal coca crops will be carried out with respect for human rights and without violence. Both Cáceres and Morales are themselves "cocaleros" or coca farmers.

The policy of negotiated eradication has been adopted by the commanders of the mobile rural patrol unit (UMOPAR). The assistant to UMOPAR chief Lieutenant-Colonel Julio Cruz Vera is a doctor. This forms part of the strategy of forging a relationship of trust with the residents of the subtropical valleys in the Andean highlands near La Paz, where coca is grown and where coca processing facilities (coca base and cocaine hydrochloride laboratories) are occasionally found.

In his camouflage fatigues, Cruz Vera patrols the thickly forested mountains of the Yungas region not far from the city of La Paz, explaining to the local residents -- most of whom are small farmers -- that the trafficking of precursor chemicals and their use in the production of coca paste and cocaine could land them in prison.

"People were mistakenly informed that we were going to eradicate coca crops and seize people's harvests," Major Alfredo Villca, UMOPAR commander in Yungas, told IPS. "But now we are conducting outreach efforts to work with community leaders and explain how our fight against drug trafficking will work."

The image that Villca describes is radically different from the climate in the area before Morales took office in January 2006, when violent clashes between cocaleros and anti-drug police were frequent and often led to the death of protesters.

Villca oversees the anti-drug police force's operations from his office on a hill in Coroico, 90 km from La Paz. His area of action extends from the police post in La Rinconada, at the foot of the snowcapped mountains surrounding the subtropical valleys, to much warmer areas in the neighbouring provinces of Larecaja and Caranavi.

In late 2005, the installation of a military barracks in La Rinconada, 30 km from La Paz, with the backing of the United States embassy, was opposed by local cocaleros who feared a police crackdown on the transportation of coca and precursor chemicals.

Nearly a year into the administration of Morales, the La Rinconada base has an abandoned look about it. And passing vehicles, which previously had to stop and undergo close inspection by the UMOPAR police, popularly known as "the leopards", are no longer pulled over.

Anti-drug law 1008, which was enacted in 1988, allows for 12,000 hectares of coca to be legally grown for traditional uses -- coca leaf chewing, herbal teas and Aymara rituals -- only in the Yungas region.

But U.S. government and United Nations statistics show that 25,000 hectares of coca are grown in Bolivia. That means some 13,000 hectares of coca are illegally cultivated in Yungas as well as the central Chapare region.

Morales has announced that he plans to amend law 1008 in order to increase the area of legally grown coca from 12,000 to 20,000 hectares, in line with his policy of support for the six cocalero federations in Chapare, of which he is the leader.

The government of Carlos Mesa (2003-2005) had already made the law more flexible, allowing 40,000 cocalero families in Chapare to plant one "cato" (1,600 square metres) of coca each. But Morales' proposal would extend that authorisation to an as-yet undetermined number of farmers who are currently growing coca illegally.

However, in the Yungas regional branch of the Departmental Association of Coca Producers (Adepcoca), farmers argue that an expansion of crops would drive the price of coca down from the current 100 dollars per 50-pound "taque" in the market at La Paz.

The Adepcoca community committees in the coca-producing villages surrounding the town of Coroico issue permits to the registered members of Adepcoca to harvest and sell up to ten 30-pound baskets of coca leaves.

If the members sell coca over the limit set by the committees, they are subject to a fine ranging from 62 to 125 dollars, and to a one to three-year cancellation of their permit for selling coca, explains Santiago Gutiérrez, an adviser to the Coroico municipal government and leader of the local branch of the governing Movement Towards Socialism (MAS).

In late November, Cáceres said that the design of the Morales administration's coca and anti-drug strategy was not yet complete.

However, the basic elements have been defined: "rationalisation" (the negotiated, voluntary reduction of coca crops); an international campaign for the depenalisation of coca leaf production; improvements in agriculture; the creation of conditions for exporting coca-based products like tea bags, coca flour, soap, shampoo, toothpaste, biscuits, liquor, or diet pills; and the establishment of new annual reduction targets.

In mid-December, the government announced that it had reached its annual goal: the elimination of 5,000 hectares of illegal coca, three months before the deadline set by Washington, which had threatened to give Bolivia a bad grade in its annual drug certification process. Decertification would endanger some 150 million dollars in aid received by Bolivia.

Nevertheless, U.S. Ambassador to Bolivia Philip Goldberg expressed concern over the plan to increase the area authorised for legal coca production and to modify eradication strategies.

The intense crackdown on illegal coca and coca paste production in Chapare over the last few years prompted a number of cocaleros to move to Yungas.

"Some Chapareños wanted to produce paste, and they were stripped of their land," says Gutiérrez.

The community committees, which were created in 1994, have gained strength under the Morales administration's "social control" strategy, which gives them a key role in overseeing and monitoring coca crops and in helping to generate alternative economic activities.

But social control has not in and of itself been enough to prevent production of coca paste. Between January and October 2006, the anti-drug police seized 51 kgs of paste and arrested six people in three processing facilities hidden away in the jungles of Yungas, according to the special anti-narcotics force (FELCN).

Pacífico Olivares, regional head of Adepcoca for Coroico, Arapata and Coripata, maintains that the community committees do a better job in combating drug production "than the FELCN and the United States, because we do not allow coca maceration pits," in which leaves are soaked and turned into coca paste.

But Major Villca tells us that this very same afternoon, UMOPAR has discovered a cocaine lab in Nor Yungas and arrested several people.

Olivares is indignant when asked about the presence of drugs. "We aren't drug addicts," he says emphatically.

Villca says that in 2006, several drug labs were found and destroyed near the road connecting Coroico and Caranavi. But he adds that the heaviest flow of drug trafficking in the area is carried out by organised groups that transport cocaine processed in Peru to be sold in Brazil.

UMOPAR seized a total of 12 tons of cocaine in Bolivia in 2006, compared to just three tons confiscated in the previous year. And the amount of marijuana seized rose to 100 tons in the first 10 months of the year, from 43 tons in the same period in 2005, according to commander Cruz Vera.

The big druglords active in Bolivia from the 1960s to the 1980s shifted their activities to Colombia as a result of the tough offensive of the 1990s, says Cruz Vera.

Today Bolivia is the third largest producer of cocaine in Latin America, after Colombia and Peru. Small family groups in rural highland areas and in some cities now control the trade in this country.

The police chief, who was trained in U.S. military doctrine, as were those under his command, says Morales' anti-drug policy is based on "the rationalisation of coca," in which local residents and coca farmers support the efforts carried out by the joint task force made up of the police and the armed forces.

"Social control works," argues Cruz Vera. Local farmers "report the existence of marijuana plantations or cocaine labs, which are destroyed with the support of a prosecutor."

Over the past year, UMOPAR has been cultivating close ties with the cocaleros. In Yungas alone, 11,000 children were vaccinated and received doses of vitamin A, while adults were treated for diseases like yellow fever, leishmaniasis and tuberculosis, explains Dr. Carlos Feraudy.

Even the area of La Asunta, in Sud Yungas, where local residents did not allow the police to enter in the past, is now accessible to police officers delivering medical assistance and carrying out a campaign to inform people about the risks they face if they purchase the chemical precursors used to produce coca paste, says Villca.

The use of force against cocaleros no longer forms part of the repertoire of methods used by the anti-drug police. But local cocalero leader Olivares warns that "If they try to send the soldiers in one day, we will defend ourselves tooth and nail, or else they better give us other sources of jobs.