BOLIVIAN SCARE: FORCED RESIGNATION OF PRESIDENT IS A BAD OMEN

Bolivia is beginning to look as if it could become another Venezuela. The
United States should worry. The Western Hemisphere doesn't need another
country whose head of government regards capitalism and globalization as
enemies, energy as a weapon and democratic institutions as mere devices.

It is consoling that Bolivia's constitutional order is undisturbed, even
with the resignation last week of President Gonzala Sanchez de Lozada and
the deadly street protests that preceded it. Vice President Carlos Mesa
immediately took power, as the constitution stipulated, and is free to serve
the remaining four years of Mr. Sanchez's mandate. But Mr. Mesa says he will
call an early election, which raises the prospect of a victory by Evo
Morales, the second-place finisher in 2002.

A Morales presidency would be a gigantic step backward for Bolivia and for
U.S. policy in Latin America. He is a congressman and leader of the union
that represents Bolivia's growers of coca, the base material for the illegal
drug cocaine. He opposes the U.S.-backed coca-eradication policies of Mr.
Sanchez.

The immediate cause of the demonstrations that brought down Mr. Sanchez was
his plan to export natural gas to the United States and Mexico through a
port in Chile. Bolivia lost the port, and much else of what is today
northern Chile, during a war from 1879 to 1884. Bolivians have never
completely reconciled themselves to being landlocked, and the gas pipeline
scheme rekindled the old resentment.

But there were underlying causes. Mr. Sanchez is rich and white; most
Bolivians are poor and brown. Mr. Sanchez speaks Spanish with an American
accent, having been raised in Chicago; many Bolivians speak only indigenous
tongues. The anti-coca campaign nearly wiped out the illicit crop, but the
corresponding campaign to help Bolivians grow and sell legal crops did not
fare nearly so well. Finally, Mr. Sanchez was too identified with
globalization, which many Bolivians wrongly see as a threat instead of an
opportunity.

One shrinks to imagine a Bolivian president who would use the country's
copious natural gas and coca as Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez has used
his country's petroleum - as weapons in an ideological war against the
United States. However, Mr. Morales could become Bolivia's next president,
and sooner than anyone had imagined. The United States should brace itself.