BOLIVIANS RATIFY NEW CONSTITUTION

EL ALTO, Bolivia -- President Evo Morales seemed assured of an easy
victory in a referendum on Sunday over a sweeping new Constitution
aimed at empowering Bolivia's Indians. The vote capped three years of
conflict-ridden efforts by Mr. Morales to overhaul a political system
he had associated with centuries of indigenous subjugation.

Citing preliminary vote counts, reports on national television said
about 60 percent of voters had approved the new Constitution. If that
margin holds or goes higher, it would strengthen Mr. Morales's
mandate, political analysts here said.

Still, regional conflict over the results may loom in the months
ahead. Citing the same counts, both state and private news media said
at least four departments, or provinces, in Bolivia's rebellious
eastern lowlands had rejected the charter by wide margins.

Vaguely worded items among the new Constitution's 411 articles would
broaden definitions of property to include communal ownership; allow
Indians to mete out corporal punishment under their own legal
systems; extend limited autonomy to regional prefects; and reaffirm
state control over Bolivia's ample natural gas reserves.

It is up to Congress to draft regulations for many of these articles,
but the legislature also is an institution in flux, with Indians
guaranteed new representation in its chambers.

"With my humble vote, I am creating a little bit of hope for my
children," said Ismael Pocoaca, 42, a construction worker who voted
Sunday morning at the Chuquiago Marka School here in this city of
slums on the windswept plain overlooking the capital, La Paz.

After the vote, Mr. Pocoaca and other Aymara Indians gathered in
front of the school, where vendors sold fried-pork sandwiches and
posters of Mr. Morales, a former llama herder. "We are finally
recapturing our dignity," said Maria Laure, 38, a soap saleswoman who
voted for the new Constitution.

But while Indians across the country celebrated the vote, the
Constitution opens a new stage of uncertainty in fractious Bolivia.

Few people claim to know precisely how the laws will function under
the new Constitution, in what way they will undergo substantial
revision in Congress or how they will affect a nation facing a sharp
economic slowdown this year.

Officials in the lowlands, where most of Bolivia's food and petroleum
are produced, ridiculed the new charter. "No constitution can be
implemented if it has not been approved in all of the departments,"
said Carlos Dabdoub, a political leader in Santa Cruz, an eastern
department that rejected the Constitution.

Given the festering resistance in Santa Cruz and elsewhere, it was
notable that the Constitution came to a vote. Violence over the
proposed charter reached a head in September when more than a dozen
peasants, mostly supporters of Mr. Morales, were killed in a clash in
the Amazonian department of Pando.

Talks between Mr. Morales's supporters in Congress and the splintered
opposition produced a compromise from earlier versions of the
charter. One of the most polemical articles in the final draft
reversed a plan to allow Mr. Morales to indefinitely run for
re-election, limiting him to one five-year term if he wins a new
election later this year.

But other articles reflect the influence wielded by Mr. Morales, 49,
an Indian who lacks fluency in Aymara and Quechua, Bolivia's main
indigenous languages. Communicating with audiences in the colonialist
language, Spanish, he has nevertheless forged a political movement
imbued with nationalism and has heightened ethnic awareness.

"After 500 years, we have retaken the Plaza Murillo!" Mr. Morales
told followers last week in a speech at the end of the campaign in La
Paz's central square, which until the 1950s Indians were prohibited
from entering.

The new Constitution would allow Mr. Morales, whose government is
supported financially by Venezuela, to assert even greater state
control of the economy, with articles that could forbid foreign
companies from repatriating profits or resorting to international
arbitration to resolve nationalization disputes.

Indeed, Mr. Morales seems undaunted by a dearth of investment and a
slowing economy as prices decline for Bolivia's natural gas and
neighboring Brazil lowers imports of the fuel.

On the eve of the vote, he announced the nationalization of a
Bolivian unit of the British oil giant BP, and created a new daily
newspaper, Cambio, controlled by his government. And after his recent
expulsion of the American ambassador and Drug Enforcement
Administration agents, whom he accuses of espionage, he repeated his
criticism of the United States.

"Bolivia, little by little, is shutting itself off from the world,"
said Gonzalo Chavez, a Harvard-educated economist at the Catholic
University of La Paz, who sees economic growth falling to 2 percent
this year from about 6 percent in 2008.

But others say the new Constitution addresses underrepresentation of
Indians, pointing to articles that would reserve seats for them in
Congress and in other areas of the fast-growing bureaucracy. Even Mr.
Morales's cabinet has just two Indian ministers; his top aides, the
vice president (a former guerrilla) and the chief of staff (a former
military officer), are light-skinned intellectuals.

In symbolic importance, said Xavier Albo, a Jesuit scholar and
linguist, the new Constitution may be the equivalent of Spain's
Reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula from the Moors in 1492. But
instead of the blood spilled in that process, Mr. Albo said, Bolivia
is "advancing in a democratic process that does not exclude or
subjugate anyone."

Some Bolivians who read the entire Constitution came away with other
impressions.

Edmundo Paz Soldan, a writer who teaches at Cornell University, said
it reminded him of an essay by Jorge Luis Borges that describes a
Chinese encyclopedia's attempt to divide fauna into myriad
nonsensical categories. For instance, Mr. Paz Soldan said that the
Constitution recognized 36 different indigenous groups in Bolivia,
some with fewer than 100 people, but that it was unclear how
precisely each group would be enfranchised in a country where three
main indigenous groups -- the Quechua, Aymara and Guarani -- wield
much larger influence.

"The mind-boggling text may have the ratification of the majority,"
Mr. Paz Soldan said, "but it might not be the recipe for a viable country."