Pubdate: Sat,  6 Jul 2002
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2002 The New York Times Company
Contact:  http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: Juan Forero

FROM LLAMA TRAILS TO THE CORRIDORS OF POWER

ORURO, Bolivia - After finishing third in the presidential election on 
Sunday, Evo Morales was cornered by supporters at a simple meeting hall in 
this gritty city perched 12,000 feet in the Andes. Miners with gnarled 
hands and weathered faces, tough truck drivers and poor indigenous women 
wearing traditional bowler hats - they would not let him go. Instead, they 
hugged and kissed him, all the while beseeching him never to back down.

It is the kind of attention any politician would crave. But Mr. Morales is 
not just any politician: he is a coca-chewing Aymara Indian who would 
nationalize Bolivia's industries, stop payment on its foreign debt and halt 
American-backed efforts to end coca growing that he says have deepened the 
poverty of his supporters. Short of reaching those goals, he hints at the 
possibility of violent revolt.

"Now since we have won, we intend to change the laws peacefully in the 
Parliament," he said in an interview this week after his party's powerful 
showing. "But if they do not want it, then comes a people's uprising, then 
comes the social fight."

Such bold words - unnerving to American officials and enthralling to his 
backers - spill easily from a man secure in his roots deep among Bolivia's 
Indian majority, who have catapulted him to a leading place in the politics 
of this country of 8.3 million and into a budding clash with the United States.

Mr. Morales captured a startling 21 percent of the presidential vote on 
Sunday in a field of 11 candidates. At the same time, he won a seat in 
Congress, which will now choose a winner between the two presidential 
front-runners. There, his party, Movement Toward Socialism, is now the 
second largest.

Mr. Morales is poised to be Bolivia's kingmaker. It is his strongest 
position yet from which to disrupt Bolivia's free-market policies and years 
of gains Washington has made in trying to stop the coca cultivation that 
not long ago made Bolivia the world's second leading source of the prime 
ingredient for cocaine.

It would be a remarkable rise for any politician. But for Mr. Morales, 42, 
of the Aymara, a deeply traditional people long excluded by this nation's 
European-descended elite, it is nothing short of a revolution.

"For more than 500 years, they have not been tolerant with us," he said, 
dismissing the notion of compromise - "perverse" negotiations, he called it 
- - with other parties. "Now that we have gotten ahead, they want us to be 
tolerant with them."

Evo Morales was born to a poor farmer and shepherd and grew up in a 
Orinoca, a small community on a cold, windswept plain in southern Bolivia. 
His family lacked plumbing, or heat, and his parents, Dionisio Morales and 
Mari Aima Mamani, struggled to feed him and six other children.

He stands 5 feet 10, taller than many of his supporters and has a Roman 
nose and a helmet of black hair, often covered with the ticker tape that 
his followers shower on him. But for his supporters, it is Mr. Morales's 
close ties to them - the copper color of his skin, the hard life he has 
lived - that so captivate them and to them make him an authentic leader.

"He was born poor, his father was a peasant, he has walked the highlands 
with the llamas," said Rene Santos, 24, a youth leader for Mr. Morales's 
party who is also Aymara. "Evo knows our reality."

What guides him, Mr. Morales says, is the goddess Pachamama, the mother of 
the earth for the Aymara, who live at once close to the earth and sky and 
whose culture is based on sharing. "The Aymara and Quechua culture are one 
of respect, humility," he explained, "and there is also equality and 
reciprocity."

It is also a culture in which the use of coca - to chew as a stimulant and 
to quell hunger - has been central. Coca, he says, symbolizes Bolivian 
pride and history. He considers its eradication a violation of sovereignty 
and claims that American-financed programs to wipe out the crop are a 
smokescreen to take over the nation.

Only a minority of the coca grown in the Chapare region, a main base of his 
support, winds up as cocaine, he says, arguing that most is used for 
traditional purposes. He says he is opposed to drug trafficking, but that 
the problem is one of demand. "The coca is not cocaine," he said.

Mr. Morales said he would like to put into practice in Bolivia what he 
calls "communal socialism," which he described as a simple concept learned 
in his childhood.

He recalled how his father, at the height of a drought in 1971, when Evo 
was 11, took 50 head of sheep to another town and traded them for corn. He 
then returned to Orinoca and divided the corn to help feed the other families.

"My father told me to respect and show solidarity," Mr. Morales said. "He 
would say, `If you have food, you do not eat alone.' "

Mr. Morales is unmarried - "There are too many beautiful women out there," 
he said. He played trumpet professionally in local bands and never finished 
high school. Eventually, he entered politics through his activism as a 
leader of the cocaleros, Chapare farmers whose livelihood was threatened by 
government efforts to stop coca growing.

As their leader, Mr. Morales rose in 1997 to win a congressional seat. He 
also continued to lead road blockades and protests against ending coca 
growing, some of which turned deadly. That prompted the Congress to expel 
him in January, and when he emerged weeks later to campaign for the 
presidency, his approval rating stood at just 3 percent.

All that changed in a matter of weeks. His blistering words, filled with 
sometimes wild, Yankee-bashing invective - like a recent claim that the 
American Embassy was trying to assassinate him - captivated a broadening 
base of supporters among Bolivians frustrated by a deepening three-year 
recession.

Railing against "imperialists" and "Mafia parties" in Congress, Mr. Morales 
now promises a no-holds-barred battle to push a populist agenda. That would 
include nationalizing industries - the mines, the railroads, the electrical 
companies - and allow them to be run by peasant communes.

Bolivian markets, Mr. Morales says, should be closed to outside goods, 
noting that the imported Dutch potatoes he has eaten "taste like nothing." 
He opposes foreign companies that want to extract resources, saying 
Bolivia's minerals should remain here.

"As indigenous people, we see ourselves as absolute owners of this noble 
land and the territory," he said. "And when we talk of territory, we talk 
about gas, petroleum, mineral resources. All those should be in Bolivian 
hands."

To achieve his goals, Mr. Morales refuses to rule out a revolution similar 
to the one in 1952 that shook this country, which has one of the region's 
most unstable histories. "There could be a use of arms, momentarily," he said.

Those close to Mr. Morales note that he lacks specifics, either for his 
policies or his plans for protest, as well as the highly trained advisers 
that might smooth his message.

To some, the language is worrisome.

The American ambassador here, Manuel Rocha, regards Mr. Morales as a 
demagogue who mines anti-American sentiment for political aims.

"Evo is a cocalero leader whose cocaleros sell coca paste to 
narco-traffickers," Mr. Rocha said. "There's not any innocent activity 
going on in the Chapare."

Indeed, five days before last Sunday's election, Mr. Rocha warned Bolivians 
that electing "those who want Bolivia to become a major cocaine exporter 
again" could jeopardize American assistance to the country.

Analysts said the condemnation only boosted the standing of Mr. Morales, 
who delighted in the controversy and thanked the ambassador for being his 
"best campaign chief."

"Instead of burying me," he said, "they made me much stronger."
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MAP posted-by: Larry Stevens