Morales leads the Movement for Socialism party and has pledged to stop payments on Bolivia’s $6.6-billion national debt and to renationalize industries that had been sold to foreign investors in the 1980s and ‘90s. He has won growing support from the indigenous population of the country with his calls to halt the government’s coca eradication efforts that have driven tens of thousands of poor farmers deeper into poverty. He said he would end the operations of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) within the country, a move that would deal a blow to U.S. military intervention in the region under the guise of fighting the drug trade.

Earlier this year Bolivia’s legislators--under pressure from the U.S. government--removed Morales from his seat in Congress. Since then his popularity has been on the rise. He has expanded his base of support from among coca farmers in Bolivia’s east and south to the cities.

In the weeks prior to the election thousands of peasants have been marching across Bolivia toward La Paz, the capital, to demand Congress convene a popular assembly to rewrite the constitution. This is just the latest in a series of protests by workers and farmers over the past several months.

Morales came in third in the presidential contest with his support rising from 4 percent in earlier pre-election polls to nearly 18 percent of the votes cast. Manfred Reyes Villa, a multimillionaire and former army captain who was mayor of Cochabamba, reportedly received 20.2 percent of the vote, and former president Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada received 21.7 percent. Since no candidate received more than 50 percent, Congress will choose the president August 6 from the top two vote getters. Morales has already stated that members of his party will not form coalitions with either Sánchez de Lozada or Reyes Villa. Voters also elected a new 157-member Congress the same day.

In his remarks U.S. ambassador Rocha stated: "I want to remind the Bolivian electorate that if they elect those who want Bolivia to go back to being a major cocaine exporter, such an outcome might jeopardize future U.S. aid to Bolivia." He added, "The only ones in the whole world who hate the DEA are the drug traffickers, for obvious reasons. We must rule out that unconsciously this gentlemen [Morales] is confessing his ties to this scourge of humanity."

Rocha also rejected comments by Morales that the U.S. embassy had issued death threats against him. The ambassador said that the only one who has received such a warning is Osama bin Laden. Such an accusation might indicate Morales’s solidarity with the leader of the al Qaeda terrorist network, he insinuated.

The U.S. ambassador’s comments evoked an angry response within the country. Even the National Election Board and a gamut of Bolivian politicians, including President Jorge Quiroga, felt under pressure to take their distance from his remarks. Morales, for his part, stepped up his criticism of the U.S. government and as he won more support for this stance he described the U.S. ambassador his "best campaign chief."

Bolivia, with a population of 8 million people, is one of the poorest countries in the world, with 70 percent of the country’s inhabitants living below the government’s official poverty level. The country in its majority is made up of indigenous peoples--30 percent Quechua, 25 percent Aymara, and 30 percent mestizo. Morales is an Aymara, and has gain wide support among the Quechua people.

The capitalist rulers of Bolivia were among South American countries in the 1980s to undertake the privatization of state-owned industries and other such "market reforms," measures that have had a severe impact on millions of the country’s working people and farmers.

"Economically what we have is a total complete crisis," stated Rosendo Mamani, 53, who once mined tin and now sells sodas at a kiosk. "There is no source of jobs. There is too much poverty. People eat just once a day."

This backlash against greater intervention into the economy by imperialist investors has even led Reyes Villa and a fourth candidate, former president Jaime Paz Zamora of the Movement of the Revolutionary Left, to take their distance from the past two decades of "free-market reforms."

In response to the U.S.-sponsored coca leaf eradication campaign about 40,000 poor and largely indigenous families have had farm income destroyed with no alternative crop assistance provided to them. With no source of income, many are facing serious malnutrition.

The Bolivian government, armed with millions of dollars of U.S. military aid, began in 1998 moving into sections of the country like the Chapare region and simply uprooting the coca plants by force. Washington has funded and trained a group of mercenaries known as the Expeditionary Task Force, an armed unit of 1,500 former Bolivian soldiers, who are paid, fed, clothed, and trained by the U.S. embassy in La Paz.

These thugs have conducted a number of assaults against peasants in the area. They’ve carried out at least four killings and more than 50 instances of clubbings, beatings, and theft over the past eight months, according to Bolivia’s human rights ombudsman’s office.
 
 
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