One evening in a steady drizzle, I was driving us back from another visit to the army base. The Land Cruiser's weak headlights barely registered on the fog-shrouded highway. Eighteen-wheelers and battered buses bound for Santa Cruz and Brazil rumbled by in the opposite direction with their brights on, blinding me.

"I can't see a goddamn thing," I said.

"Slow down to 15 miles an hour, man, if you have to," said Villalon. "Just get us back to Villa Tunari in one fucking piece."

Abramson was on the phone with Salazar, who'd spent the whole day back in La Paz pleading with the vice minister of coca, an old friend, to help obtain permissions from the cops and the army. But he'd been told, "These authorizations take time."

I slammed my hand against the steering wheel. What the fuck?

"I'm just the messenger," Abramson said with a shrug, stuffing another wad of leaf in his mouth.

Suddenly Villalon grabbed my arm. "Jesus Christ!" he screamed. The Toyota's headlights illuminated a pair of bicyclists on the shoulder of the highway. I swerved sharply to avoid them, missing by inches. I was shaken. I pulled over to the shoulder, breathing hard.

"I could have killed them," I said.

"I know, man," Villalon said. "Go easy on the leaf."

The next morning, still waiting for permits, we decided to pay a visit to the Chapare backwater where Morales and his parents settled in the early eighties and began cultivating coca leaf after moving there from the Altiplano. The Morales family had herded llamas on the bleak, windswept plateau but, like thousands of their fellow Aymaras, found life untenable there after years of crippling drought. Anti-American feeling is especially strong in Morales's rural stronghold, and Villa Tunari's mayor arranged for us to bring along an escort for protection. We picked him up, a cocalero union leader named Jorge, at Villa Tunari's town hall, a crumbling colonial-era villa on the main square. Jorge sat silently in the passenger seat as we drove deep into the jungle, working his way through a box of banana-cream wafers I'd bought for the entire group.

"Why did the gringos invade Iraq?" he asked me sharply.

"For a lot of reasons," I said, annoyed.

"It was all about the oil, right?"

"Maybe that was part of it." I began to rattle off a list of motivations—WMDs, Israel, Bush's personal vendetta, Cheney's paranoid obsessions.

"No," said Jorge. "It was oil."

"If you say so," I said.

After an hour we arrived in the village, bouncing down a cobblestone street past an unkempt soccer field lined with palms and banana plants. We parked in front of the coca market, a small cement-block building with a corrugated-metal roof—one of 16 collection points in the Chapare where cocaleros are obligated to bring their crop for transport to the state market in Cochabamba. One U.S. official I'd talked to earlier told me that these markets function as "one-stop shopping" for the cocaine traffickers—much of what's delivered here, he said, never ends up in the state market. The jungle heat was stultifying.

"Take off your sunglasses," Salazar warned me.

"Why?" I asked.

"You look like a DEA agent."

Inside the market stood the largest pile of coca leaves I'd yet seen, ten feet high and 15 feet long—a Mount Illimani of coca leaf. A shirtless cocalero stood thigh deep in the massive mound, running his hands through the leaves, many of which had stuck together in the humidity. The walls were covered with lurid murals that conjure up the brutal war between the cocaleros and antidrug forces: One showed an Aymara woman with a face straight out of Edvard Munch's The Scream, hands plaintively outstretched, standing in front of burning coca fields and a line of black helicopters. UNITED WE CAN NEVER BE DEFEATED, proclaimed the slogan above the hellish scene. The cocalero stopped his toil when he saw us walk in.

"Who are the gringos?" the man asked Jorge, suspiciously.

"Periodistas," he explained. The cocalero relaxed. He wandered over and stuffed a fistful of coca in his mouth. It was time for his pijcho, or coca break, a high point of the day for many cocaleros. He sat on a sack and offered me a wad. I wrapped it around a chunk of lagia and placed it between my gum and cheek. After a few minutes of mastication I felt the warm tingle as the alkaloid-rich juices entered my bloodstream.

"Te gusta?" he asked me.

"Mucho," I said, and he and Jorge laughed heartily.

The cocalero turned serious. "During Coca Zero, the people suffered a lot here," he told us. "The Yanquis tried to convince us to plant alternative crops, but it was all a lie. The soil was bad, and most of the crops died. Many people had to move away. For a while the cocaleros were divided over the issue. But now we've all turned back to coca." He grinned.

Just the other day, he told us, Morales had come back to visit. He'd stayed for an hour or so, eating a plate of river fish and kicking a soccer ball around on the muddy field. "We used to call him 'El Pelotero' when he was younger," the cocalero said. A fine athlete, Morales had parlayed his skill into a job as sports director of the local coca growers' syndicate—the position that helped speed his political rise.

The cocalero's face lit up in amazement. "Nobody expected that we'd be so happy," he said. "Nobody expected that Evo would become the president. It is like a dream."