Washington wasted no time in making known its opposition to Morales becoming president of the country.

After 10 days of vote counting, the National Election Council announced the official results of the June 30 election. Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, a millionaire, and the country’s former president from 1993 to 1997, came in first with 624,126 votes or 22.46 percent of the vote; Morales received 581,884 votes or 20.94 percent; and Manfred Reyes Villa, also a millionaire and a former army captain, had 721 votes less than Morales, or 20.91 percent.

Support for Morales surged as the U.S. ambassador to Bolivia, Manuel Rocha, intervened in the election to warn voters not to elect the peasant leader to the presidency, otherwise U.S. aid to the country would be cut off. Morales, who leads the Movement for Socialism party, has pledged to stop payments on Bolivia’s $6.6 billion national debt; renationalize industries sold to foreign investors in the 1980s and ‘90s; halt the government’s coca eradication efforts, which have driven tens of thousands of poor farmers deeper into poverty; and end the operations of the U.S. Drug Enforcement agency in the country, through which Washington has deepened its military intervention in Bolivia.

In the elections held for Congress the same day as the presidential vote, the Movement for Socialism party won enough seats to become the second largest party in the legislature.

"This is a bad sign," stated Gary Rodríguez, president of the Institute of Foreign Trade, speaking on behalf of the class of millionaire employers who run the country.

Continuing U.S. imperialism’s drive to influence the outcome of the election, the U.S. ambassador held meetings with leading legislators in an effort to convince them to block Morales’s presidential bid. In a televised interview July 9, Reyes said he had recently met with the ambassador. "I did not receive any pressures," he said, but "what the ambassador did make clear is that there should not be any kind of an alliance with Evo Morales."

Otto Reich, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, reiterated this point in an appearance in Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina, July 11. He said that the inclusion of Morales in a government coalition could lead to the cutoff of millions of dollars in U.S. funds for Bolivia. "We do not believe we could have normal relations with someone who espouses these kinds of policies," Reich said, referring to Morales’s political positions.

State Department spokesman Philip Reeker also spoke up in defense of Rocha’s intervention in Bolivia’s election, claiming that all the ambassador was doing was correcting "incendiary and wrong statements" made by Morales.  
 
 
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