Bolivia’s leader solidifies region’s leftward tilt

While mostly vague on details, and recently moderating his tone, Morales promises to transform Bolivia and "end the colonial and neoliberal model," as he put it on Saturday in an elaborate ceremony at the sacred ruins of this pre-Incan civilisation.

He has said he would "depenalise" cultivation of coca, the prime ingredient for cocaine, which Washington has spent hundreds of millions of dollars and more than two decades trying to eradicate.

He pledges to inject the state in Bolivia’s oil and natural gas industry, troubling the multinational energy companies that first flocked here in the late 1990s, even though Morales recently said he would not expropriate foreign holdings.

He has disparaged American-backed free trade policies, and seems certain to stand as the southernmost outpost of a new anti-American nexus with Cuba and Venezuela, whose president, Hugo Ch?vez, has become among the Bush administration’s most ardent critics.

Any and all of those steps in a country where coca tracts and rich energy holdings give it a strategic importance far outweighing its tiny population could unsettle Washington and the region.

Bolivia’s gas reserves, the continent’s second-largest, help power South America’s largest economies. Brazil has plowed US$1.5 billion into energy investments in Bolivia and worries about rising drug and crime problems in its urban slums if Bolivia’s coca crop is not controlled.

Morales is at least the seventh Latin American leader to take power since 2000 from the left, a varied crop that ranges from Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Ecuador to Venezuela, with strong leftist contenders surging in Peru and Mexico, both of which will also hold elections this year.

His success is also the most prominent example of Latin America’s recent democratic revolutions. Throughout the region, the indigenous and the poor, increasingly mobilised by frustration with Washington-backed economic prescriptions, have used the ballot box to put in place a group of leaders more representative of their interests for the first time in nearly five centuries. With the exception of Ch?vez, who is bankrolled by Venezuela’s oil wealth, most of the continent’s other left-leaning leaders, like Luiz In?cio Lula da Silva of Brazil, have pursued pragmatic policies once faced with the real task of governing.

In recent weeks, Morales has toned down some of his more strident language and struck a more accommodating note with American officials. But in Bolivia’s case, political analysts here say, it is far harder to know exactly how Morales might rule.

Morales, a former congressman, is untested as an executive and known less as a pragmatist than as a fiery orator and protest leader. Several of his associates, including Vice President-elect ?lvaro Garc?a and Carlos Villegas, who will oversee economic planning, are leftist academics with no experience in government.

"There could be realism and pragmatism in their policies, or they could allow ideology to guide them," said Roberto Laserna, a political analyst with San Sim?n University in Cochabamba, the city where Morales makes his home. "But we do not have a way to gauge their management experience."

What is clear is that Morales’ compelling storybook rise to power has brought this isolated country of nine million people the kind of international attention it has rarely received. A former llama herder who saw four siblings die in childhood, Morales won Bolivia’s December 18 election in a landslide not seen since the country’s return to democracy in 1982.

The first Indian elected president in a country where most people are indigenous, Morales, dressed notably casually in an open-collar shirt and sweater, embarked on a ten-day world victory tour. He met this month with the President Jacques Chirac of France, President Hu Jintao of China and Prime Minister Jos? Luis Rodr?guez of Spain.

On Saturday, in a ceremony attended by tens of thousands of Aymara and Quechua Indians at this archaeological site some 14,000 feet above sea level, Morales donned the replica of a 1,000-year-old tunic similar to those once used by Tiwanaku’s wise men, was purified in an ancient ritual and accepted the symbolic leadership of the myriad indigenous groups of the Andes.

"We are not alone," Morales told the crowd. "The world is with us. We are in a time of triumph, a time of change."

Yesterday, for his official state inauguration, he expected about a dozen foreign leaders, far more than have ever attended a Bolivian inauguration.

Part of that solidarity stems from his role as representative of a new Latin American pole in global politics, as the region coalesces as a counterpoint to unpopular United States policies. More and more Latin American countries are taking exception to Washington’s economic prescriptions and those of the International Monetary Fund. Some are strengthening ties with China, which is investing heavily in the region.

Many have refused to go along with Bush administration demands to exempt Americans from criminal prosecutions at the International Criminal Court at The Hague. No South American countries have sent soldiers to support the war in Iraq. And anti-American criticism has become political sport, as opinion surveys give President Bush the lowest standing in Latin America of any American president in the region’s history.

As varied as the region is, no other part of the world has seen as uniform a shift in its political landscape.

Morales, however, has already had to find middle ground between the explosive populist talk that helped propel him to power and a pragmatic path that will help Bolivia’s tiny US$9.5 billion economy grow, said Nancy Birdsall, president of the Washington-based Centre for Global Development, which studies economic issues affecting developing countries.

In a 2002 interview, Morales told The New York Times that the solution to Bolivia’s economic troubles was "communal socialism," having peasant communes run mineral and metals mines and agriculture. Morales, while railing at globalisation, now says that trade agreements can work, if fair to both sides, and that foreign investment is needed.