Evo Morales Could Be a 'Nightmare' for U.S.

Bolivian Could Be a 'Nightmare' for U.S.

By FIONA SMITH
The Associated Press
Monday, December 12, 2005; 3:03 PM

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/12/AR2005121200656_pf.html
or
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051212/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/bolivia_america_s_foe
or
http://www.ocnus.net/artman/publish/article_21918.shtml
or
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/1102AP_Bolivia_Americas_Foe.html

CARACOLLO, Bolivia -- As a little boy in Bolivia's bleak highlands,
Evo Morales used to run behind buses to pick up the orange skins and
banana peels passengers threw out the windows. Sometimes, he says, it
was all he had to eat. Now, holding the lead ahead of Sunday's
presidential election, he's threatening to be "a nightmare for the
government of the United States."

It's not hard to see why. The 46-year-old candidate is a staunch
leftist who counts Cuba's Fidel Castro and Venezuela's Hugo Chavez
among his close friends. Moreover, he's a coca farmer, promising to
reverse the U.S.-backed campaign to stamp out production of the leaf
that is used to make cocaine.

With his Aymara Indian blood and a hatred for the free-market
doctrines known to Latin Americans as neo-liberalism, Morales in
power would not only shake up Bolivia's political elite, but
strengthen the leftward tide rippling across South America.

"Something historic is happening in Bolivia," Morales told The
Associated Press in an interview. "The most scorned, hated,
humiliated sector now has the capacity to organize."

At a recent campaign stop in the western highland town of Caracollo,
Morales and members of his Movement Toward Socialism party were
mobbed by crowds who kissed them, showered them with confetti and
draped necklaces of flowers and fruit around their necks.

The Movement Toward Socialism "represents not only hope for the
Bolivian people, but also a nightmare for the government of the
United States," Morales told the supporters.

"I have no fear in saying _ and saying loudly _ that we're not just
anti-neo-liberal, we're anti-imperialist in our blood."

Morales, whose leather key chain sports a portrait of communist
revolutionary Che Guevara, has already been involved in toppling two
presidents, has come close to winning the presidency once before, and
is now running strong against conservative former President Jorge
Quiroga and several other candidates. If no one wins an outright
majority on Sunday, Congress will choose between the top two
vote-getters in mid-January.

The latest poll by Ipsos-Captura shows Morales with 32.8 percent,
five percentage points above Quiroga, and gives a margin of error of
two percentage points.

"Symbolically, he would represent a fundamental change," said Jimena
Costa, a political science professor at Bolivia's Universidad Mayor
de San Andres. "It's not just the first time an Indian would win the
presidential elections, but he would be doing it with the support of
a sector of the white and mestizo community and urban populations."

Morales has been a problem for Washington since he rose to prominence
in the 1990s as the leader of the cocaleros, or coca farmers, in
Bolivia's tropical Chapare region, leading their often violent
resistance to U.S.-backed coca eradication efforts.

While the U.S. government insists that much of the Chapare's coca
becomes cocaine, farmers say they supply a legal market. Coca leaves
are sold in supermarkets and can be chewed, brewed for tea, and used
in religious ceremonies.

During the last presidential election, then U.S. Ambassador Manuel
Rocha criticized Morales, only to see him shoot up in the polls. This
time Washington has kept silent, though a statement two weeks ago by
the present ambassador, David Greenlee, urging Bolivia not to change
course on coca, was widely interpreted as a jab at Morales.

"I hope there aren't changes, because if there are changes for the
worse, the country that's going to suffer is Bolivia," Greenlee told
anti-drug rally in El Alto, a slum city next to La Paz.

Morales, more comfortable in black Wrangler jeans and sneakers than
suit and tie, still maintains coca fields and pledges an
international campaign to legalize the leaf and industrialize its
production. He insists he will fight drug trafficking, but maintains
that the plant has been wrongly maligned in the world's mind.

As a boy, Morales' family struggled to survive. Of seven children,
Evo was among only three who made it past infancy. He helped herd the
family's llamas and harvest their potatoes, played trumpet in a
traveling band and dropped out of high school. When he was 19 the
family joined the highland migration to low-lying Chapare in the
southeast. There he became a cocalero and in 1993 was elected
president of the local coca farmers' federation.

Meanwhile, the nation of 8.5 million was emerging from decades of
coups and dictatorships and joining the spread of democracy across
the continent. Morales founded the Movement Toward Socialism in 1995,
was later elected to congress, and in 2002 narrowly lost the
presidential race to Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada.

The free market policies that have failed to pull Bolivians out of
poverty, coupled with the conflict over how best to exploit the
continent's second largest natural gas reserves, has empowered the
country's poor Indians to demand change. Morales became an important
figure in waves of protest that brought down Sanchez de Lozada in
2003 and his successor, Carlos Mesa, in June.
© 2005 The Associated Press