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---------------------------- By REUTERS Filed at 10:43 p.m. ET
LA PAZ, Bolivia (Reuters) - Striking teachers and protesting peasants manning roadblocks paralyzed Bolivia for a 15th day on Monday, but military food flights relieved some of the pressure on the main cities as negotiations inched toward resolving the crisis.
About 50,000 rural teachers agreed to end their strike and return to the classroom in exchange for a $40 raise this year and a $200 pay hike next year. Teachers earn between $150 and $200 a month in this poor Andean nation of 8 million people.
Some 80,000 urban teachers rejected the pay deal and remained on strike in conjunction with angry peasants, who have used stones, bricks and barrels to blockade the main cities in protest over the government plans to eradicate coca, the raw material used to make cocaine but also grown by Andean Indians for religious and medicinal purposes.
Coca growers welcomed a government offer not to build three army barracks in the key coca-growing Chapare region but union leader Luis Cutipa asked that the region's 40,000 families be allowed to grow 2.5 acres (1 hectare) of coca for traditional use.
Talks resume in Chapare on Tuesday but the government, eager to secure vital U.S. aid, has refused to discuss any exceptions to its eradication campaign.
Negotiations with peasants in La Paz ended in a stalemate but both sides agreed to meet again on Tuesday morning.
``I'm sorry you're running out of bread and potatoes but this isn't my fault,'' Tupac Katari peasant leader Felipe Quispe told national television. ``The bottleneck to these negotiations is the capitalist system the government's trying to impose on us.''
SITUATION BECOMES TENSE
The situation in Bolivia has become increasingly tense. The blockage of all roads leading in and out of the capital, La Paz, and the agricultural hubs of Santa Cruz and Cochabamba has caused food prices to skyrocket, with meat prices doubling and the cost of some vegetables rising fourfold.
``It's incredible how expensive everything is. The government really has to do something about this,'' said Carlos Horacio at an open-air market in La Paz.
The Bolivian air force said it had flown more than 1.18 million pounds of food to La Paz, Cochabamba, Santa Cruz, San Borja and Cobija to restock supermarket shelves.
``Time counts for the people, time counts for the country because the longer we wait, the more it costs all of us,'' said Walter Guiteras, the government's chief negotiator.
Ten people have died during the past week in clashes with security forces over the government's reluctance to raise teachers' pay as well as the peasants' complaint against plans to eradicate coca growing and tax the water they draw from canals in use for generations.
At the height of coca production about five years ago, one in every eight Bolivians earned lucrative pay in what is one of the Western Hemisphere's poorest nations, with an average annual income of $1,000.
Bolivia is the world's third-largest producer of coca after Peru and Colombia, but has reduced significant amounts of production acreage in the past five years in exchange for U.S. aid.
``Bolivia's been the victim of its own success in the fight against drugs because it has cut into revenues into the underground economy of between $350 to $500 million,'' the International Monetary Fund's representative Eliahu Kreis said.
The impact of the roadblocks likely will trim 1 percent off economic growth in the impoverished Andean nation this year, Kreis said.
The government of President Hugo Banzer, a military dictator of the 1970s who was elected president in 1997, has vowed to rid the nation of illegal, nontraditional coca fields and replace the lucrative crop with a more diversified economy.
But coca growers are skeptical of government suggestions they grow pineapples and bananas instead of the bitter leaf, which they use to ease the pangs of hunger and thirst and cope with altitude sickness.