In the face of continuing political upheaval and pervasive corruption in Peru, the Bush Administration began focusing their hopes on Bolivia where they had better odds of success.  Bolivia had all the same problems, but the country’s grinding poverty gave the U.S. tremendous leverage with its $100 million foreign aid package. The Bolivians, feet to the fire, were forced to get serious about the drug war, and it was here that the U.S. finally succeeded in getting a significant number of peasants to substitute other crops for coca.  Offering farmers one-time cash payments of $800 an acre to pull up their coca fields, Bolivian and U.S. experts arrived in the Chapare Valley to provide seed, plants, and advice for growing everything from macadamia nuts to passion fruit.  Thousands of acres of coca plants were wiped out and there was a significant and immediate drop in coca production.  Unfortunately, nobody seems to have thought beyond the planting season. One typical group of farmers had been talked into planting ginger, and very shortly found themselves up to their asses in ginger. After accumulating forty tons of the stuff, the Bolivian official in charge said, “Now I am trying to stop ginger production because I don’t know where I will sell it.”^[16] The farmers who switched to bananas, grapefruit, and pineapples fared no better.  Some of them managed to get crops to market but at a price too low to make a living. Soon, there was smoke rising from the jungle again. “I think coca is here for good,” said a local trader, “It’s the only product you can grow that you know you can sell the same day and earn enough to stay alive.”^[17]

In the months before Bush took office, a cabinet-level document had been circulated that called for the elimination of half the Latin American coca production by 1993.^[18]  Four years and $2 billion later, the crop was out of contol. Constant heat on growers in the Upper Huallaga had sent them into the adjacent jungle and now coca was being grown in the valley of the