LA PAZ, Bolivia (Reuters) - Seven Bolivians died, including a policeman and soldier tortured and murdered by "narcoguerillas," as poor farmers protested an army crackdown on the illegal sale of coca leaves, police said on Friday.
The two officers' bodies where found at dawn on Friday in Bolivia's tropical Chapare region, 435 miles southeast of La Paz, after another five Bolivians were killed in riots this week.
The deaths were the latest in a long drawn-out U.S.-backed government campaign to eradicate coca, the raw material used to make cocaine but also a major source of income for many peasants and chewed by some as medicine in this Andean nation.
Witnesses said the two victims were abducted on Thursday from an ambulance which was then set on fire in an attack a government source blamed on "narcoguerillas," a term used for left-wing rebels who work as drug traffickers.
Since Tuesday, farmers have set several trucks on fire near a coca market that had been shut down by authorities in the village of Sacaba, prompting bloody clashes with police which killed another five farmers and officers.
Bolivia gets valuable aid from the U.S. government in return for its successful eradication program in recent years.
Farmers in the Chapare region, one of the largest coca-growing areas in Bolivia prior to the crackdown on its cultivation, have protested a law making it illegal to sell coca produced in the region.
Officials from the government of President Jorge Quiroga, which allows only limited growth of the leaf in other regions, traveled to the city of Cochabamba for negotiations with the farmers to be mediated by human rights organizations.
Farmers want to be allowed to legally grow small plots of coca in Chapare, where Quiroga has mobilized about 5,000 troops since November to complete the eradication of illegal coca fields it says are used for drug trafficking.
A member of Bolivia's Congress from the region has called in recent months for the coca farmers to form their own "army" to combat the government's actions.
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