FROM LLAMA TRAILS TO THE CORRIDORS OF POWER

ORURO, Bolivia - After finishing third in the presidential election on
Sunday, Evo Morales was cornered by supporters at a simple meeting hall in
this gritty city perched 12,000 feet in the Andes. Miners with gnarled
hands and weathered faces, tough truck drivers and poor indigenous women
wearing traditional bowler hats - they would not let him go. Instead, they
hugged and kissed him, all the while beseeching him never to back down.

It is the kind of attention any politician would crave. But Mr. Morales is
not just any politician: he is a coca-chewing Aymara Indian who would
nationalize Bolivia's industries, stop payment on its foreign debt and halt
American-backed efforts to end coca growing that he says have deepened the
poverty of his supporters. Short of reaching those goals, he hints at the
possibility of violent revolt.

"Now since we have won, we intend to change the laws peacefully in the
Parliament," he said in an interview this week after his party's powerful
showing. "But if they do not want it, then comes a people's uprising, then
comes the social fight."

Such bold words - unnerving to American officials and enthralling to his
backers - spill easily from a man secure in his roots deep among Bolivia's
Indian majority, who have catapulted him to a leading place in the politics
of this country of 8.3 million and into a budding clash with the United States.

Mr. Morales captured a startling 21 percent of the presidential vote on
Sunday in a field of 11 candidates. At the same time, he won a seat in
Congress, which will now choose a winner between the two presidential
front-runners. There, his party, Movement Toward Socialism, is now the
second largest.

Mr. Morales is poised to be Bolivia's kingmaker. It is his strongest
position yet from which to disrupt Bolivia's free-market policies and years
of gains Washington has made in trying to stop the coca cultivation that
not long ago made Bolivia the world's second leading source of the prime
ingredient for cocaine.

It would be a remarkable rise for any politician. But for Mr. Morales, 42,
of the Aymara, a deeply traditional people long excluded by this nation's
European-descended elite, it is nothing short of a revolution.

"For more than 500 years, they have not been tolerant with us," he said,
dismissing the notion of compromise - "perverse" negotiations, he called it
- - with other parties. "Now that we have gotten ahead, they want us to be
tolerant with them."

Evo Morales was born to a poor farmer and shepherd and grew up in a
Orinoca, a small community on a cold, windswept plain in southern Bolivia.
His family lacked plumbing, or heat, and his parents, Dionisio Morales and
Mari Aima Mamani, struggled to feed him and six other children.

He stands 5 feet 10, taller than many of his supporters and has a Roman
nose and a helmet of black hair, often covered with the ticker tape that
his followers shower on him. But for his supporters, it is Mr. Morales's
close ties to them - the copper color of his skin, the hard life he has
lived - that so captivate them and to them make him an authentic leader.

"He was born poor, his father was a peasant, he has walked the highlands
with the llamas," said Rene Santos, 24, a youth leader for Mr. Morales's
party who is also Aymara. "Evo knows our reality."

What guides him, Mr. Morales says, is the goddess Pachamama, the mother of
the earth for the Aymara, who live at once close to the earth and sky and
whose culture is based on sharing. "The Aymara and Quechua culture are one
of respect, humility," he explained, "and there is also equality and
reciprocity."

It is also a culture in which the use of coca - to chew as a stimulant and
to quell hunger - has been central. Coca, he says, symbolizes Bolivian
pride and history. He considers its eradication a violation of sovereignty
and claims that American-financed programs to wipe out the crop are a
smokescreen to take over the nation.

Only a minority of the coca grown in the Chapare region, a main base of his
support, winds up as cocaine, he says, arguing that most is used for
traditional purposes. He says he is opposed to drug trafficking, but that
the problem is one of demand. "The coca is not cocaine," he said.

Mr. Morales said he would like to put into practice in Bolivia what he
calls "communal socialism," which he described as a simple concept learned
in his childhood.

He recalled how his father, at the height of a drought in 1971, when Evo
was 11, took 50 head of sheep to another town and traded them for corn. He
then returned to Orinoca and divided the corn to help feed the other families.

"My father told me to respect and show solidarity," Mr. Morales said. "He
would say, `If you have food, you do not eat alone.' "

Mr. Morales is unmarried - "There are too many beautiful women out there,"
he said. He played trumpet professionally in local bands and never finished
high school. Eventually, he entered politics through his activism as a
leader of the cocaleros, Chapare farmers whose livelihood was threatened by
government efforts to stop coca growing.

As their leader, Mr. Morales rose in 1997 to win a congressional seat. He
also continued to lead road blockades and protests against ending coca
growing, some of which turned deadly. That prompted the Congress to expel
him in January, and when he emerged weeks later to campaign for the
presidency, his approval rating stood at just 3 percent.

All that changed in a matter of weeks. His blistering words, filled with
sometimes wild, Yankee-bashing invective - like a recent claim that the
American Embassy was trying to assassinate him - captivated a broadening
base of supporters among Bolivians frustrated by a deepening three-year
recession.

Railing against "imperialists" and "Mafia parties" in Congress, Mr. Morales
now promises a no-holds-barred battle to push a populist agenda. That would
include nationalizing industries - the mines, the railroads, the electrical
companies - and allow them to be run by peasant communes.

Bolivian markets, Mr. Morales says, should be closed to outside goods,
noting that the imported Dutch potatoes he has eaten "taste like nothing."
He opposes foreign companies that want to extract resources, saying
Bolivia's minerals should remain here.

"As indigenous people, we see ourselves as absolute owners of this noble
land and the territory," he said. "And when we talk of territory, we talk
about gas, petroleum, mineral resources. All those should be in Bolivian
hands."

To achieve his goals, Mr. Morales refuses to rule out a revolution similar
to the one in 1952 that shook this country, which has one of the region's
most unstable histories. "There could be a use of arms, momentarily," he said.

Those close to Mr. Morales note that he lacks specifics, either for his
policies or his plans for protest, as well as the highly trained advisers
that might smooth his message.

To some, the language is worrisome.

The American ambassador here, Manuel Rocha, regards Mr. Morales as a
demagogue who mines anti-American sentiment for political aims.

"Evo is a cocalero leader whose cocaleros sell coca paste to
narco-traffickers," Mr. Rocha said. "There's not any innocent activity
going on in the Chapare."

Indeed, five days before last Sunday's election, Mr. Rocha warned Bolivians
that electing "those who want Bolivia to become a major cocaine exporter
again" could jeopardize American assistance to the country.

Analysts said the condemnation only boosted the standing of Mr. Morales,
who delighted in the controversy and thanked the ambassador for being his
"best campaign chief."

"Instead of burying me," he said, "they made me much stronger."