Pubdate: Tue, 19 Sep 2006
Source: Adbusters Magazine (Canada)
Copyright: 2006 Adbusters Media foundation
Contact:  http://www.adbusters.org
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1444
Author: Andres Barriga
Note: The author is an artist and documentary
filmmaker based in Quito, Ecuador.

EVO MORALES, PRESIDENT OF THE PEOPLE

It took Bolivia 470 years after the Spanish conquest for an 
indigenous person to return to govern its territory.

In that period of nearly five centuries, what has happened in this 
country and in this continent?

What is happening now? The answer to the latter question is that 
something has awoken, something that resembles the light of a new dawn.

For many people in the continents of the Americas the election of Evo 
Morales as president of Bolivia represents further testimony that the 
geopolitical development of Latin America is heading in a new direction.

The conditions of oppression and rebellion have existed for centuries 
in what has always been the poorest country in Latin America. In the 
1960s, Che Guevara chose Bolivia as the next country to carry on his 
revolutionary strategy.

Only today is Bolivia beginning to harvest the first tangible 
benefits of what it means to assume political, social, and economic 
sovereignty.

In South America, the notion of sovereignty has a maltreated, 
misunderstood, and frequently banalized history.

It is nonetheless evident that the life and work of Evo Morales, 
since his childhood until now as president, rests in great measure 
upon this important concept.

"My father is Dionisio Morales Choque, my mother is Maria Mamani 
(both have passed away). We are a family of Aymara nationality. There 
are seven siblings, of which only three are alive.

My other brothers and sisters lost their lives in their infancy, 
which is the life expectancy that families or children have in 
campesino communities. More than half die, and we, with luck, saved 
three out of the seven.

We lived in Isallavi in a little adobe house with a thatched roof. It 
was small: no more than three by four meters. It served as sleeping 
quarters, kitchen, dining room, and practically everything else. 
Outside we had a corral for our animals.

We lived in poverty like everyone else in the community."

Evo Morales grew up in the countryside, raised llamas and helped his 
father cultivate the land. Like many children in the Bolivian 
highlands, he learned Spanish in school but not in the house, where 
they spoke a dialect of Aymaran. The population of Bolivia is 
approximately 60% indigenous, and not until 2005 has this majority 
ever been represented by one of its own in the position of the 
nation's highest authority.

Grounded in the reality shared by the people of his country, Morales 
continues to remind not only his compatriots but also the entire 
continent of the elemental principles that a truly egalitarian 
government should set out to do: improve economic disparities, help 
restore to the people their lost dignity, and protect freedom of expression.

To the discomfort of the United States government, it is for these 
basic principles that Morales, in the early 1990s, became Bolivia's 
leading voice in defense of the ancestral production of coca leaves.

"I believe my only full-time activity, my true passion in the last 19 
years has been, and is, the defense of the coca leaf, the land, and 
the territory, but now also the defense of the natural resources, the 
rights of the poor and the exploited of the country, the thousands of 
workers and unemployed, the rebuilding of our homeland, the defense 
of our national sovereignty and of life itself."

The repeated and continuous US-sponsored campaigns to eradicate the 
cultivation of the coca plant in Bolivia, many of which have been 
violent and accompanied by the Bolivian militia, were predicated on 
their failure to distinguish the coca leaf from cocaine.

To offer an analogy, it would be as if the United States began to see 
an elevated index of alcoholism from Italian wine and therefore the 
government decided to destroy the vineyards in France. The coca leaf 
has been used by indigenous communities for centuries.

With this fundamental idea of sovereignty, Morales passed from being 
an agricultural syndicate leader to a member of the Bolivian Senate 
and now president of the Republic. One of his first acts as president 
was to cut his own salary in half, and then recommend similar cuts to 
the congress, which in turn followed his lead, sending the clear 
message, from the start, that this administration is not merely a 
superficial alteration to the same discredited model, but instead an 
attempt to break from the long-standing tradition of institutional 
corruption and replace it with transparent and accessible democracy.

In December of 2005 Morales won the presidential election in the 
first round, and has since enjoyed public approval ratings upwards of 
80 percent.

"It is not about conquering. It is about convincing, persuading, 
about concrete proposals with transparency and honesty," he says.

His foremost campaign promise was to nationalize Bolivia's natural 
gas reserves, the second largest in the continent.

Historically, this wealth has benefited transnational corporations, 
who previously reaped 82 percent of the proceeds, while the vast 
majority of the Bolivian population lives in conditions considered 
among the poorest in the world.

Shifting control of this enormous resource from foreign corporations 
to the Bolivian nation was seen as the best way to rectify this gross 
historical incongruity, a measure which was supported by 92 percent 
of the Bolivian populace, according to The Economist. Morales heeded 
the call of his electorate and carried through with his campaign 
promise, nationalizing the natural gas reserves on May 1st of this year.

Morales also laid out a plan of repartitioning 200,000 square 
kilometers of state-owned lands for cultivation by indigenous 
communities and landless campesinos. Much of this state-owned land 
was illegally expropriated from indigenous communities by a long line 
of previous administrations, stretching back to the country's 
colonial beginnings; this measure is an effort to return land to 
these communities and at the same time increase agricultural productivity.

Evo Morales' personal and political themes obey the most basic 
perception of the problems of the people at large.

His methods, as well as his constructive relationship with Hugo 
Chavez and Fidel Castro, are stigmatized by the neoliberal wing of 
the continent, but Morales is a leader that wants to be consistent 
with his own life. In his public discourse there is no demagoguery 
because he has already begun to do exactly what he promised, and what 
his people elected him to do. He remains committed to the most poor, 
from where he comes, and wants to return to them the dignity that has 
long been denied them. Although his period in office is young, and 
his dreams to build a true democracy in and restore dignity to 
Bolivia are as challenging as they are bold, he is one of the few 
leaders in the world today whose actions are consistent with ideals.

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Andres Barriga is an artist and documentary filmmaker based in Quito, 
Ecuador. His most recent films are 25 Years of Democracy in Ecuador 
1979-2004 and Velasco: Portrait of an Andean Monarch. This article 
was translated by Maria Isabel Davila and Gerald Toth.
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