LEFTIST SET TO BE BOLIVIA'S FIRST INDIAN PRESIDENT

Evo Morales, a Former Coca Grower, Leads Polls Going into Sunday's
Vote.

LA PAZ, BOLIVIA - Evo Morales is an unorthodox candidate. He's a
former IIama herder and coca farmer, and an indigenous Indian with an
eighth-grade education. His platform rests on ending Bolivia's 20
years of free-market economic policies, and decriminalizing the
growing of coca, the leaf from which cocaine is made. And polls
indicate he is poised to become the next President of Bolivia.

"This election [on Sunday] will change history," Mr. Morales tells the
crowds gathered for his last campaign rally in the capital. With a
traditional red poncho draped over his signature blue sweatshirt,
Morales revs up his supporters: "If we don't win, neo-liberalism and
colonialism will deepen," he cries. A wreath of potatoes, roses, and
coca leaves hangs around his neck. "The time of dignity for the people
has come."

Morales is populist, socialist, and anti-American. In that sense, he's
cast in the same mold as Venezuela's Hugo Chavez - who Morales
admires. And like Chavez, his country sits on a vast supply of
hydrocarbons - the continent's second biggest reserves of natural gas.

Washington worries that if Morales wins, it will be yet another Latin
American nation swinging to the left - away from free trade - and, in
this case, the drug war. After two decades of moving away from
dictatorships, some see a regional trend back toward the Marxist ideas
popular in the '60s and '70s. "Che Guevara sought to ignite a war
based on igniting a peasant revolution," Roger Pardo-Mauer IV, a
senior adviser to the Bush administration, said in July. "This project
is back."

But here in Bolivia, the poorest country in South America, many people
hope that Morales will bring them the jobs, stability, and dignity
they crave.

"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?"
It's a common gripe heard in a county with some 54 trillion cubic feet
of natural gas - and a per capita income, according to the World Bank,
of $960. "Morales understands inequality and poverty," says Pairo.
"And only he has the guts to make changes."

All polls show Morales, head of the Movement to Socialism (MAS) party,
slightly ahead of his closest challenger, conservative former
President Jorge "Tuto" Quiroga, a Texas A&M alumnus and former IBM
executive who leads the Democratic and Social Power (PODEMOS)
citizen's association. Local paper La Prensa, in a poll published
Wednesday, gave Morales 34.2 percent of the vote, Quiroga 29.2
percent, and cement magnate Samuel Doria Medina 8.9 percent. Five
other minor candidates are running.

But, in the likely event that no candidate wins more than 50 percent
of the votes Sunday, Congress will choose between the top two
vote-getters when it reconvenes in mid-January. Analysts say this
could bode ill for stability in a country which has had 83 presidents
and about 200 coups and countercoups since independence 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. The decision
of congress, he says, or even the expectation of it, will bring people
to the streets, "especially if Morales wins the popular vote but is
snubbed by the likely more conservative legislature."

Meanwhile, while it might be alarmed by Morales' stance on coca, his
anti-American rhetoric, his stated antipathy to a free trade
agreement, and his promise to enforce a new hydrocarbons law which
will force all foreign companies working in the natural gas sector to
renegotiate contracts - the US has tried to keep its opinions about
the front-runner private this time around.

During the last presidential election in 2002, then US Ambassador
Manuel Rocha criticized Morales, only to see his support triple. "My
campaign manager," Morales often refers, jokingly, to the diplomat.

One of seven children born to a poor family in a tin-mining town in
the district of Oruro, high in the Bolivian altiplano, Morales was one
of only three who made it past infancy. He grew up herding the family
IIamas and never finished high school. When the mines closed in the
late 1970s, his parents migrated to the Bolivian lowlands of Chapare
to become coca farmers.

Morales's start in politics came in 1993 when he was elected president
of a local coca farmers federation, and later he helped found MAS and
was elected to congress in 1997. In 2002 he narrowly lost the
presidential race to Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, who was soon forced to
resign amidst massive street protests largely by MAS supporters.

Morales would be the first full-blooded indigenous president here,
even though over half of the population consider themselves indigenous.

As for the lucrative gas sector, Morales has promised to revise
longstanding contracts with foreign investors - a plan that will no
doubt be met with resistance by companies such as Repsol, British Gas,
and Total. The three investors have already threatened to take the
country to court over a hydrocarbons law passed in May that imposed a
new 32 percent tax.

Meanwhile, Morales's plans for the coca sector run completely counter
to the US campaign to stamp out coca production, and as such is likely
to cause great tension with his biggest donor. Two-thirds of the $150
million the US gives in aid to Bolivia every year goes towards
eradicating the raw material to make cocaine and encouraging
alternative agriculture and development. One of Morales's catchy,
though perhaps questionable, campaign slogans is "Causachun coca,
wanuchun Yanquis" ("Long live coca, death to the Yankees").

"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,
D.C. "His supporters may be happy, but Bolivia's economy would not be
viable, and the country's integrity could well be jeopardized."
Morales, says Shifter, would need to find a formula for satisfying his
base, yet keeping the country together. "That," he says, "will be no
mean feat."