BOLIVIA AS A SYMPTOM

Evo Morales won the Bolivian presidency three weeks ago with a
surprising 54 percent of the vote and within days was on his way to
visit Cuba and Venezuela.

He flew to Havana and worked out a 30-month plan with Fidel Castro to
reduce illiteracy in Bolivia and then went to Caracas to sign an
energy agreement with Hugo Chavez. President Morales promised to
support the two in their "anti-imperialist struggle" against the
United States. Mr. Chavez warned that the Bush administration "would
be sorry" if it tried to support a coup against the new Bolivian
leader. The White House probably would find these developments
unsettling if it still paid attention to South America.

President Bush's idea of foreign policy south of the U.S. border is
building a wall to keep Mexicans out and maintaining a failed embargo
to punish the Cuban people. The policy is the right politics to
satisfy the president's base but does nothing to improve U.S.
relations throughout the hemisphere. It could have been the U.S. that
helped Bolivia grow its economy, market its large reserves of natural
gas and eradicate illiteracy. U.S. efforts to eradicate coca in
Bolivia have put peasants out of work but offered them no
alternative. About 65 percent of the country is Indian, illiterate
and desperately poor.

Mr. Morales, 46, an Aymara Indian and former coca farmer, has
promised to roll back "imperialist-prescribed" economic policies
About 3 percent of Bolivia's population -- mostly white people --
controls about 90 percent of its wealth. Mr. Morales is the first
Indian president in the country's 180-year history. He won the office
with rallies in the streets calling for the redistribution of wealth
and power. Just how much redistribution he intends is a question with
answers in progress. He is likely to oppose a U.S.-proposed free
trade zone that spans the hemisphere. The United States "constantly
accuses me of everything: being a drug trafficker, a coca leaf mafia
man and a terrorist," Mr. Morales says.

The White House is so preoccupied with creating some measure of
democracy in Iraq that it overlooks the growing problems in Latin
America. U.S. leaders need a redistribution of attention.