Loco Bolivian president Evo Morales is union chief of coca growers, urges ambassadors to chew coca-AP

12/18/10, "Bolivia: Morales advised Ambassadors to chew coca," AP report, Bolivia, Hoy

"President Evo Morales on Saturday recommended chewing coca to combat diabetes and stressed the medicinal uses of this plant prohibited by a UN convention to be raw material for cocaine.

"I want to tell ambassadors that if they have problems with diabetes, consume, eat coca and go to heal," said Morales and gave as examples to their Ministers of Education and Public Works, who said "are sanándose" thanks to this evil sheet.

• He spoke in this jungle region in central Bolivia in the closing of management of counternarcotics operations in the presence of officials and diplomats.

"We're in a tough campaign (to decriminalize coca) and my order, ambassadors, with all due respect, is to accompany the traditional use of coca.

• It is food and medicine, "he said.

He said that Paraguay's foreign minister, Hector Lacognata, he said it also consumes coca against diabetes during the Mercosur summit that ended Friday in the Brazilian city of Foz de Iguazu.

At that event sought support from the Bolivian president to block the government's campaign to get the UN to remove coca from the list of banned substances.

In Bolivia, coca in its natural state has broad medicinal and food from the time of the Incas. Preferably the dried leaves are

• chewed to combat tiredness,
  

• high-altitude illnesses and neutralize hunger.
  

In Colombia, indigenous muiscas healing properties attributed to cancer, heart and nervous.

However, the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs of 1961 against preventing any marketing and use of coca. Even calls to eradicate customary to

• chewing the leaves that millions of Indians engaged in the Andean region.

For these reasons, Morales struggles to exclude the coca leaf from the international standard. . In Bolivia, between 12,000 and 20,000 hectares are intended to cultivate the bush, but surplus production is diverted to drug trafficking.

Morales himself, who is the leader of coca growers' union chief, acknowledged that

• much of the coca growers diverted by the same drug trafficking,
  

• but blamed the United States and developed countries by the spread of cocaine use.

The president is promoting a plan to reduce excess coca. On Saturday this year reported that 8,200 hectares of coca eradicated while narcotics force seized 28 tons of cocaine, of which 50% were admitted from Peru.

Bolivia is the third largest producer of coca and cocaine after Colombia and Peru and

• often replant coca bush despite eradication plans."...

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