Hugo Banzer

Forty years ago, fresh from his triumphant takeover of Havana after a guerrilla campaign launched from Cuba's Sierra Maestra mountain region, Fidel Castro warned that the Andes would soon become the "Sierra Maestra of South America." But, despite Castro's efforts to back leftist groups in the Andean countries, no successful revolutionary movement emerged there during the 1960s and 1970s.

President Victor Paz Estenssoro of Bolivia said Thursday that the joint U.S.-Bolivian operation against clandestine cocaine laboratories here should demonstrate to the world "that we want to wipe out the cocaine traffic as much as the United States does." But Paz, in an interview, expressed dissatisfaction over what he said was the lack of a "global approach" to the drug problem by the Reagan Administration.

Like many other Latin Americans, Peruvian Raul Linares conceded the need for drastic action to tame an out-of-control economy when inflation in his homeland hit 7,000% a year in the early 1990s. Then a mid-level bureaucrat in the Agriculture Ministry, he grudgingly accepted the loss of his job as part of an economic "shock" program that included widespread layoffs. Four years later, he runs a bare-bones photocopy shop, and his income is less than a quarter of what it was.

Historically, this has been South America's poorest, most unstable nation, a disheartening example of economic and political underdevelopment. But now, despite its longstanding handicaps, Bolivia has cause for encouragement. After at least 150 coups in the first 150 years of Bolivian national history, there haven't been any since 1981. Old political enemies are working together in democracy. For instance, retired Gen.

President-elect George W. Bush announced Friday that he will nominate John Ashcroft, a stalwart of the Senate's conservative wing and a passionate opponent of abortion rights, to be attorney general. Bush chose the Missouri senator, who was defeated in his bid for reelection, from a field of more moderate prospects. "He will be faithful to the law, pursuing justice without favor," Bush said. "He will enforce the law and he will follow the truth." Bush also named New Jersey Gov.

The home of Lino Oviedo, the presidential candidate and former cavalry general who has this nation in an uproar, resembles a fort on the eve of battle. A sentry stares down at visitors over the high front wall. The wooden gates open onto a patio where half a dozen former soldiers stand watch.

They call him the Indiana Jones of the Chapare. Godofredo Reinicke has intervened in confrontations between anti-drug commandos and coca farmers, sped to a hospital trying to revive a baby fatally overcome by tear gas and performed an impromptu autopsy on a casualty of police bullets in front of an angry crowd. Reinicke, an anesthesiologist turned human rights investigator, helps bring justice to the jungle. The Chapare jungle is the center of Bolivia's U.S.-sponsored war on cocaine.

At times when dictatorships prevailed elsewhere in Latin America, elected governments in the Andean nations withstood adversity. Yet for tens of millions of people here in Ecuador and neighboring nations, democracy seems to have delivered little more than elections. Brutal inequality, economic breakdown and lawlessness are spawning political instability and a rise of militaristic strongmen.

Alfonsin of Argentina. Pinochet of Chile. Sarney of Brazil. Garcia of Peru. Ortega of Nicaragua. Once in the hub of power, now on the rim, a motley roster of former presidents are keeping an active hand in the politics of Latin America. Raul Alfonsin is one of Argentina's most influential opposition leaders. Jose Sarney is a senator who commands a voting bloc in Brazil's Congress. Alan Garcia is said to be jockeying for another presidential race in Peru. Gen.