Evo presidente!

The election of a radical indigenous leader in Bolivia signals a major political shift – for now

By John Ross

news@sfbg.com

MEXICO CITY – Latin America's estimated 60 million indigenous peoples are on the move, from Tijuana to Tierra del Fuego – but in dramatically distinct directions.

While Mexico's profoundly Mayan Zapatista Army of National Liberation launches a vehement anti-electoral campaign, disusing the political class, eschewing power, and seeking to build autonomous alliances down below, Eva Morales, a 46-year-old acculturated Quechua Indian farm leader, will take power from the top when he is sworn in as the first Indian president of majority-Indian Bolivia.

Morales, recently snapped wearing his ratty old alpaca sweater during an audience with the king of Spain (to the enormous disdain of fashion-conscious diplomats everywhere), has also been photographed whispering in Fidel Castro's ear, conducting an entourage of women leaders of his cocalero (coca-growers) federation wearing polleras (Indian skirts) through the streets of old Havana, and nuzzling Venezuela's Hugo Chávez before a portrait of Simón Bolívar in Caracas.

More important, Chávez, Morales, and Castro have announced the formation of an anti-imperialist alliance that has Washington plotting counterinsurgency strategies.

In the spring of 2004 this reporter got a weeklong look at Bolivia's unlikely new president in interviews with Morales and his top advisors. The thumbnail portrait that emerged was one of a pragmatic and even opportunist politico with a wandering eye and a quick tongue. He energetically bashed the gringos to a gringo reporter, charging the United States with "poisoning" Bolivia with transgenic crops and vowing to shut down Washington's embassy for meddling in Bolivian affairs when he came to power.

In a majority Indian country like Bolivia, being an Indian is no big thing. Bolivians are more apt to identify themselves by their class or occupation – farmer, miner – than as Aymara, Quechua, or Amazonas.

Morales concedes his own ties to "Indian-ness" are tenuous – when I was in Cochabamba, he was relearning Quechua in preparation for the presidential run. The lingua franca of the cocalero movement is Spanish.

A bright kid from the dirt-poor altiplano, where the tin mines had all tapped out, Morales moved with his family down to the tropical Chapare in the mid-1970s. Growing coca leaf was the preferred mode of eking out a living for the new arrivals, or colonos. By the early '90s Morales had risen from sports director of the cocalero federations to a tough energetic leader not afraid to defy the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration's militarized coca-eradication programs to uproot the sacred Inca plant.

But the cocaleros' epic struggle has less to do with the Incas than with defending the colonos' hard-won land. Morales's interests have always been more agricultural than cultural.

Morales's installation as Bolivia's first Indian president may well prove to be a classic case of not wishing for what you want lest you get it. He and his bookish VP, Álvaro García Linera, will soon find themselves enmeshed in a baffling tangle of "arrangements" with the usual suspects – the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, and the White House.

As leader of the cocaleros, Morales could not even obtain a US visa because the US embassy in La Paz had him pegged as a "narco-terrorist." Now he is holding cordial meetings at the embassy he once vowed to close with his old adversary, US ambassador David Greenlee, once in charge of DEA enforcement and eradication programs in the Andean republic. Although Greenlee insists that Morales comply with the DEA's "Zero coca" mandates, Morales can ill-afford to disaffect the cocalero federations that brought him to power.

Morales is similarly sandbagged by Bolivia's other great resource: natural gas, the second most important reserves in the Americas. To his left, the Bolivian Workers' Confederation, historically the most militant such aggregation on the continent, and the municipal councils of El Alto, the ragged city of 700,000 Aymaras overlooking La Paz from whence the overthrow of two out of the three last Bolivian presidents was hatched, have given Morales three months to nationalize the nation's natural gas resources. He, instead, opts for a 50-50 split with transnational energy titans like Spain's Repsol and France's Total and recently toured Europe to assure the CEOs that expropriation was not on his agenda.

Morales is pushing a constitution that would enshrine autonomy as a central principal of governance. But autonomy in Bolivia is a two-edged sword. The wealthy, white province of Santa Cruz in the east has long been a seedbed of secessionist sentiments. With major oil and gas holdings in Santa Cruz and neighboring Tarija, Morales cannot allow the local oligarchs a free hand.

Strategically accessible from Paraguay, where the United States has an airbase and ready strike-force capability, Santa Cruz could also provide an open door to CIA sabotage, military incursion, and the capture of Morales on drug-trafficking charges (à la Panama's Manuel Noriega) should Bolivia's new president prove too troublesome for the Bush White House.

All over Latin America, where the pendulum has swung from neoliberalism to social democracy, the people are finding the changes to be disappointingly cosmetic. What with a dozen presidential and parliamentary elections on tap in Latin America in 2006, the debate between Morales's taking power from the top down and the Zapatistas' efforts to build it from the ground up will have hefty resonance from Tijuana to Tierra del Fuego this year.

John Ross is the author of three prize-winning volumes on the Zapatista rebellion and is working on a fourth, Making Another World Possible – Zapatista Chronicles 2000-2005. JOHN ROSS SPEAKS ON THE EVO-MARCOS DIVIDE Feb. 10 7 p.m. New College 786 Valencia, SF www.newcollege.edu.