Bolivia’s election

[For the latest news and analysis on Bolivia's presidential election, where the leftist MAS (Movement Towards Socialism), led by indigenous coca farmer Evo Morales, leads in the polls, check out the Democracy Centre's Blog from Bolivia.]

Bolivia’s hero vows to break US shackles

On the eve of polls that could give South America its first indigenous head of state, Evo Morales talks about his gas nationalisation plans

Alfonso Daniels
Sunday December 18, 2005
The Observer

On a barren landing strip in Bolivia’s mining heartland of Oruro, hundreds of people, including miners carrying dynamite charges, stir at the sight of an approaching small plane. It’s a stampede by the time it lands, as the crowds rush down the slope to greet an emerging heavy-built man. He is Evo Morales, a 46-year-old Aymara Indian, leading candidate in today’s presidential elections and leader of a left-wing revolution that may soon engulf most of South America.

Morales is on the verge of becoming the first wholly Indian leader in Latin America. According to most polls, Morales’s advantage over his closest rival, the former conservative President Jorge Quiroga, is at least five points. Despite having little chance of an absolute majority, forcing the newly elected rightist congress to choose the new President in January, congress is expected to nominate Morales if he wins the popular vote, due to fears of civil unrest, which has toppled two centre-right Presidents in two years.

Morales is riding a wave of anger from Bolivia’s impoverished Indian majority who have not seen any benefits from years of free-market policies and the sale of the country’s natural resources by a mostly white elite to huge multinationals.

In few places is the country’s ingrained injustice as visible as in the arid region of Oruro, birthplace of the Bolivian trade union movement, whose tin mines have maintained the state for decades, while its inhabitants live in miserable mud huts. Morales was born there, before being forced by drought to move to the region of Chapare, where he later emerged as the leader of the coca farmers, launching his political career.

Morales’s first stop in Oruro is Unc