BOLIVIA HUNGRY FOR CHANGES

Vote To Elect A President And Congress Comes Amid Protests And Stark Poverty

HUATAJATA, Bolivia -- In this town on the edge of Lake Titicaca,
presidential candidate Felipe Quispe, an Aymara Indian, talks openly of
starting a war against the government. Fifty miles away, on the outskirts
of La Paz, the capital, thousands of peasants are marching to demand that
Bolivia's Constitution be thrown out and rewritten.

The presidential candidates of the major parties are dancing around an
unspoken truth: Bolivia is broke, and there is little money to pay for all
the new jobs, hospitals and schools that the contenders in today's
elections are promising to bring to this desperately poor country.

"The political system has reached a point of exhaustion," said Sacha
Llorentti of the Permanent Assembly of Human Rights in Bolivia, a
nongovernmental organization here. "And at the same time we are seeing new
groups trying to force their way into the system."

Racked by Divisions

Bolivian voters will elect a new president and 157-member Congress today.
Like no other election in this nation's convulsive history, it has brought
to the fore Bolivia's gaping ethnic, regional and social chasms.

Already one of Latin America's poorest nations, Bolivia is in its second
year of recession. Its growing budget deficit is proportionally larger than
that of Argentina, the region's better-known crisis economy.

"We Bolivians have a tremendous capacity for putting up with hunger," said
Antonio Peredo, vice presidential candidate of the Movement Toward
Socialism, which is running third in some surveys here. "But now things are
so bad that more than half the people don't know what it [means] to have
bread and sugar."

Cry for 'Positive Change'

The man widely expected to finish first in the presidential race, Manfred
Reyes Villa, is the 47-year-old mayor of Cochabamba and founder of the New
Republican Force. A former military man, Reyes Villa has portrayed himself
as an outsider because he is not a member of one of the four parties that
have dominated Bolivian politics for decades.

Bolivia needs "positive change," Reyes Villa says, repeating his campaign's
catch phrase. Among other things, he promises to double the nation's
education budget.

But even if Reyes Villa finishes first, he might not become Bolivia's next
president. If no candidate wins a majority, the top two vote-getters
proceed to a runoff in Congress on Aug. 6. Traditionally, Congress has
picked a president only after weeks of back-room deal-making.

No matter who is elected, political observers doubt that any of the major
parties can govern Bolivia, which has been shaken for months by a series of
protest movements, most in its vast and impoverished interior.

Some of the most violent demonstrations have been against the current
government's moves to eradicate coca farming, in which the leaves are used
to make both cocaine and traditional remedies. The most prominent opponent
of the crackdown has been Evo Morales, a former coca farmer and founder of
the Movement Toward Socialism. Morales has become a cult hero to many here
since legislators voted this year--under intense pressure from the U.S.
government--to remove him from his seat in Congress.

"It was a big mistake on the part of the political elite to kick him out of
Congress," said Carlos Toranzo, project coordinator for ILDIS, a La Paz
think tank. The U.S. Embassy was seen here as being behind the removal.
"Now Evo Morales has become a symbol of Bolivian dignity and sovereignty,"
Toranzo said.

In the last year, Morales has moved beyond his base of support among coca
farmers in Bolivia's tropical east and south to build alliances with the
urban left, a coalition symbolized by his choice of candidate for vice
president, Peredo. The candidate is a member of a prominent La Paz leftist
family, and his brothers joined Che Guevara's failed Bolivian guerrilla
movement in 1967.

"The coca farmers aren't the only marginalized people in this country,"
said Peredo, who was exiled from Bolivia during the dictatorship that gave
way to democracy in 1985.

The Movement Toward Socialism has become the first truly national party
here with Indian leadership. And Morales, an Aymara with mostly Quecha
supporters, could win a Senate seat in the election.

Rallying Indian Voters

Several members of Quispe's Pachakuti Indigenous Movement are expected to
be elected to Congress. Despite its low single-digit showing in national
surveys, Quispe's party has a strong following in the Altiplano plateau
around La Paz, home to the Aymara people.

His one-truck campaign caravan recently spent a day in the impoverished
Aymara towns around Lake Titicaca, passing out posters that urged villagers
to "vote for your blood."

"The Mallku is here," people called out as Quispe neared, using the Aymara
word for condor, a term of respect for community leaders.

"I am going to win, I will govern, and for the first time an Indian will be
president of this country," Quispe said in an interview in Huatajata. "And
we are going to return this land to its rightful owners."

If he becomes the next president, Bolivia as such will cease to exist,
Quispe said. It will return to the Aymaras, Quechuas and other native
peoples, who will raise their seven-color flag in place of Bolivia's green,
yellow and red one, which Quispe sees as the imposition of Europeans.

And if the needs of Bolivia's Indians--who form the overwhelming majority
of the nation's population--are not met, Quispe says there will be war.

"Things will get serious very quickly," said Quispe, who rose to prominence
as president of Bolivia's largest peasants union. "It will be like
Chiapas," he said, referring to the 1990s insurrection of indigenous people
in Mexico.

In the weeks before the election, thousands of peasants have been marching
across Bolivia toward La Paz, threatening to disrupt the vote with their
demand that Congress immediately convene a popular assembly to rewrite the
constitution.

Given the general clamor for reform, even the centrist and right-wing
candidates in today's election are taking a populist tack.

Front-runner Reyes Villa has flooded the airwaves with ads promising new
government programs to pull Bolivia out of its recession by spending
millions of dollars on everything from job programs to salary increases for
teachers and school buses for rural children.

"It's an excellent campaign strategy," said Toranzo of ILDIS. "But it's not
a good strategy to govern. A populist administration simply isn't possible
at the moment. If he gives the people everything he's promising, the
government will collapse in less than a year."