EVO MORALES, PRESIDENT OF THE PEOPLE

It took Bolivia 470 years after the Spanish conquest for an
indigenous person to return to govern its territory.

In that period of nearly five centuries, what has happened in this
country and in this continent?

What is happening now? The answer to the latter question is that
something has awoken, something that resembles the light of a new dawn.

For many people in the continents of the Americas the election of Evo
Morales as president of Bolivia represents further testimony that the
geopolitical development of Latin America is heading in a new direction.

The conditions of oppression and rebellion have existed for centuries
in what has always been the poorest country in Latin America. In the
1960s, Che Guevara chose Bolivia as the next country to carry on his
revolutionary strategy.

Only today is Bolivia beginning to harvest the first tangible
benefits of what it means to assume political, social, and economic
sovereignty.

In South America, the notion of sovereignty has a maltreated,
misunderstood, and frequently banalized history.

It is nonetheless evident that the life and work of Evo Morales,
since his childhood until now as president, rests in great measure
upon this important concept.

"My father is Dionisio Morales Choque, my mother is Maria Mamani
(both have passed away). We are a family of Aymara nationality. There
are seven siblings, of which only three are alive.

My other brothers and sisters lost their lives in their infancy,
which is the life expectancy that families or children have in
campesino communities. More than half die, and we, with luck, saved
three out of the seven.

We lived in Isallavi in a little adobe house with a thatched roof. It
was small: no more than three by four meters. It served as sleeping
quarters, kitchen, dining room, and practically everything else.
Outside we had a corral for our animals.

We lived in poverty like everyone else in the community."

Evo Morales grew up in the countryside, raised llamas and helped his
father cultivate the land. Like many children in the Bolivian
highlands, he learned Spanish in school but not in the house, where
they spoke a dialect of Aymaran. The population of Bolivia is
approximately 60% indigenous, and not until 2005 has this majority
ever been represented by one of its own in the position of the
nation's highest authority.

Grounded in the reality shared by the people of his country, Morales
continues to remind not only his compatriots but also the entire
continent of the elemental principles that a truly egalitarian
government should set out to do: improve economic disparities, help
restore to the people their lost dignity, and protect freedom of expression.

To the discomfort of the United States government, it is for these
basic principles that Morales, in the early 1990s, became Bolivia's
leading voice in defense of the ancestral production of coca leaves.

"I believe my only full-time activity, my true passion in the last 19
years has been, and is, the defense of the coca leaf, the land, and
the territory, but now also the defense of the natural resources, the
rights of the poor and the exploited of the country, the thousands of
workers and unemployed, the rebuilding of our homeland, the defense
of our national sovereignty and of life itself."

The repeated and continuous US-sponsored campaigns to eradicate the
cultivation of the coca plant in Bolivia, many of which have been
violent and accompanied by the Bolivian militia, were predicated on
their failure to distinguish the coca leaf from cocaine.

To offer an analogy, it would be as if the United States began to see
an elevated index of alcoholism from Italian wine and therefore the
government decided to destroy the vineyards in France. The coca leaf
has been used by indigenous communities for centuries.

With this fundamental idea of sovereignty, Morales passed from being
an agricultural syndicate leader to a member of the Bolivian Senate
and now president of the Republic. One of his first acts as president
was to cut his own salary in half, and then recommend similar cuts to
the congress, which in turn followed his lead, sending the clear
message, from the start, that this administration is not merely a
superficial alteration to the same discredited model, but instead an
attempt to break from the long-standing tradition of institutional
corruption and replace it with transparent and accessible democracy.

In December of 2005 Morales won the presidential election in the
first round, and has since enjoyed public approval ratings upwards of
80 percent.

"It is not about conquering. It is about convincing, persuading,
about concrete proposals with transparency and honesty," he says.

His foremost campaign promise was to nationalize Bolivia's natural
gas reserves, the second largest in the continent.

Historically, this wealth has benefited transnational corporations,
who previously reaped 82 percent of the proceeds, while the vast
majority of the Bolivian population lives in conditions considered
among the poorest in the world.

Shifting control of this enormous resource from foreign corporations
to the Bolivian nation was seen as the best way to rectify this gross
historical incongruity, a measure which was supported by 92 percent
of the Bolivian populace, according to The Economist. Morales heeded
the call of his electorate and carried through with his campaign
promise, nationalizing the natural gas reserves on May 1st of this year.

Morales also laid out a plan of repartitioning 200,000 square
kilometers of state-owned lands for cultivation by indigenous
communities and landless campesinos. Much of this state-owned land
was illegally expropriated from indigenous communities by a long line
of previous administrations, stretching back to the country's
colonial beginnings; this measure is an effort to return land to
these communities and at the same time increase agricultural productivity.

Evo Morales' personal and political themes obey the most basic
perception of the problems of the people at large.

His methods, as well as his constructive relationship with Hugo
Chavez and Fidel Castro, are stigmatized by the neoliberal wing of
the continent, but Morales is a leader that wants to be consistent
with his own life. In his public discourse there is no demagoguery
because he has already begun to do exactly what he promised, and what
his people elected him to do. He remains committed to the most poor,
from where he comes, and wants to return to them the dignity that has
long been denied them. Although his period in office is young, and
his dreams to build a true democracy in and restore dignity to
Bolivia are as challenging as they are bold, he is one of the few
leaders in the world today whose actions are consistent with ideals.

Andres Barriga is an artist and documentary filmmaker based in Quito,
Ecuador. His most recent films are 25 Years of Democracy in Ecuador
1979-2004 and Velasco: Portrait of an Andean Monarch. This article
was translated by Maria Isabel Davila and Gerald Toth.