BOLIVIAN SCORES WITH ANTI-U.S., PRO-COCA STANCE

Presidential Candidate Decries 'Colonialism' In South America's
Latest Leftist Campaign

LA PAZ, Bolivia -- The leading candidate in Bolivia's presidential
election Sunday is a former llama herder and coca farmer and a
confirmed bachelor. He's unorthodox in other ways, too.

Evo Morales, 45, vows to end Bolivia's 20-year-old open-door economic
policies and decriminalize the growing of coca, the leaf from which
cocaine is made. And perhaps most alarming to Washington, he is
addressing his country's social and economic disparities with a big
dose of anti-American rhetoric.

"This election will change history," Morales, 46, said Tuesday at his
last campaign rally in La Paz, the capital. An indigenous Indian,
Morales addressed the crowd holding a gold-flecked staff and wearing
a traditional red poncho draped over his signature blue, terrycloth
zip-up sweatshirt. A wreath of potatoes, roses and coca leaves was
draped around his neck. "If we don't win, neo-liberalism and
colonialism will deepen," he said, referring to policies of previous
administrations that have worked closely with the United States and
other countries. "The time of dignity for the people has come."

Morales' populist, socialist and anti-American stance resembles the
politics of Venezuelan President Hugo Chvez. Like oil-rich Venezuela,
Morales' country sits on a vast supply of energy: the continent's
second-largest reserves of natural gas.

The United States is concerned that if Morales wins, another Latin
American nation will swing to the left -- away from free trade and,
in this case, the war on drugs.

Half a dozen Latin American nations, including Argentina and Brazil,
have leaders whose views clash, in varying degrees, with U.S.
economic remedies for the region. In 2006, at least a dozen
presidential contests are scheduled; contenders in many, including
Peru, Nicaragua and Mexico, are campaigning on leftist platforms.
It's a regional trend that harks back to Marxist campaigns of the
1960s and '70s.

"Che Guevara sought to ignite a war based on igniting a peasant
revolution," Roger Pardo-Mauer, a senior adviser to the Bush
administration, said in July, referring to the socialist
revolutionary who helped Fidel Castro gain power in Cuba and who was
killed in Bolivia in 1967. "This project is back," he said.

In Bolivia, the poorest country in South America, many people are
less concerned with foreign relations than with jobs, stability and
national dignity.

"How is it," asks Juan Carlos Pairo, a bus driver and Morales
supporter, "that we have so many natural riches and we are so poor?"
That's a common complaint in a country that has 54 trillion cubic
feet of natural gas reserves -- second only to Venezuela in South
America -- and, according to the World Bank, a per capita annual
income of $960. "Morales understands inequality and poverty," Pairo
says. "Only he has the guts to make changes."

The daily newspaper La Prensa published a poll Wednesday that showed
34% of voters supporting Morales, 29% backing conservative former
president Jorge "Tuto" Quiroga and 9% behind cement magnate Samuel
Doria Medina. Five other candidates also are running.

In the likely event that no candidate wins more than 50% of Sunday's
vote, Congress will choose between the top two vote-getters when it
reconvenes in mid-January. Any uncertainty could bode ill for
stability in a country that has had 83 presidents and about 200 coups
and countercoups since independence from Spain in 1825. Massive
street protests forced the last two presidents to resign.

"Whatever the outcome, it is likely to be greeted by ... protests,
even violence," says Markus Schultze-Kraft, Andes Project Director at
the International Crisis Group, a Washington think tank.

Born to a poor family in a tin-mining town in the Oruro district,
high in the Bolivian altiplano, Morales grew up herding the family
llamas and never finished high school. When the mines closed in the
late 1970s, his parents migrated to the Bolivian lowlands of Chapare
and became coca farmers.

Morales entered politics in 1993 when he was elected president of a
local coca farmers' federation. Later, he helped found the MAS
political party and was elected to Congress in 1997. In 2002, he
narrowly lost the presidential race to Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, who
was forced to resign after MAS supporters launched protests over a
gas-export plan they said would not benefit Bolivians. Morales led
new protests by Indian and labor groups that helped oust President
Carlos Mesa in June.

If elected, Morales would be Bolivia's first full-blooded indigenous
president, even though more than half the country's residents
consider themselves indigenous.

His plans for coca run counter to the U.S. campaign to stamp out
production in the world's third-largest producer of the leaf, after
Colombia and Peru. One of Morales' slogans has been "Causachun coca,
wanuchun Yanquis" -- "Long live coca, death to the Yankees." Bolivia
produces about 150,000 pounds of cocaine a year, says Col. Luis
Caballero Tirado, head of Bolivia's special counternarcotics forces,
and at least half of it travels to the USA. Bolivia gets $95 million
in annual U.S. aid to eradicate coca, according to the U.S. Agency
for International Development.

"If Morales fully carries out his proposed agenda, the consequences
would be likely to be quite problematic," says Michael Shifter, vice
president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a think tank in Washington.
"His supporters may be happy, but Bolivia's economy would not be viable."