Bolivia approved a new constitution on Sunday, the result of a long struggle by President Evo Morales to advance the standing of indigenous Bolivians. Unofficial results show that about 60 percent of voters approved the document, which expands rights for indigenous groups, strengthens the government’s role in the economy, allows Morales to run for another term in office, and maintains relative autonomy for the resource-rich eastern lowlands.

Many Bolivians see the vote as a watershed moment for a country that remains deeply divided by resource distribution and demographics. In the words of Vice President Alvaro García, ”There will still be conflict and tension…but from here on out, this country will be governed by three principles: equality, autonomy and a strong state presence in the economy.”

But a strong and vocal minority, based in the eastern lowlands and largely descended from Europeans, opposes both Morales and the new constitution. Violent clashes broke out this past September, when seven peasant farmers were shot and killed by members of the opposition. The U.S. Ambassador to Bolivia was expelled for allegedly inciting the opposition to violence; the U.S. government responded by expelling the Bolivian ambassador. Since then, relations between Bolivia and the U.S. have been tense. Last week, the chargé d’affaires at the American Embassy, Krishna Urs, walked out of a speech by Morales when the President repeated his accusations that the Ambassador and DEA officials were inappropriately meddling in domestic Bolivian affairs.

Mark Weisbrot, an economist who studies Bolivian economics and politics closely, sees the U.S. relationship with Bolivia as critical to healing some of Bolivia’s domestic divisions.

“The bigger question is political–how the Obama Administration responds to the new constitution,” he said. While Morales has successfully negotiated with opposition members of the Bolivian Congress, the vocal minority in the eastern lowlands doesn’t even think that the Morales government is legitimate. They may be looking to the U.S. for tacit support of their opposition to the new constitution.

“If President Obama issues a clear statement indicating support for the constitutional process – as governments in the region undoubtedly will – this will send a message that Washington no longer supports extra-legal or anti-democratic actions against the Bolivian government,” said Weisbrot.

“If not, opposition governors and groups who have vowed to defy the new constitution will likely read Washington’s silence as continued support for their cause,” he said.

President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have indicated at least one shift in direction for Latin America policy: a focus on energy to counter the “free-trade and anti-drug fatigue” in the region. But it remains to be seen where Bolivia’s cranky politics (and deposits of natural gas) will fit into those priorities.

Before Evo Morales was elected President of Bolivia, WIDE ANGLE reported on his activities as an organizer of coca growers in Coca and the Congressman.

Juan Evo Morales Ayma, President of Bolivia, spoke in New York on Tuesday as part of the Columbia University World Leaders Forum. Morales, the first indigenous president in Bolivian history, was elected in 2005. In September of this year, he kicked out the U.S. Ambassador to Bolivia, accusing him of conspiring against the Bolivian government, and America followed suit by expelling the Bolivian ambassador. Diplomatic relations deteriorated further this month when Morales suspended the Bolivian operations of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA).

Morales has accused both the U.S. Ambassador and DEA agents of involvement with his political opponents as justification for their expulsion. In his address at Columbia, Morales recounted recent stories of U.S. intervention in Bolivian affairs. Earlier this year, U.S. Embassy officials asked members of the Peace Corps and a Fulbright scholar to keep tabs on Cubans and Venezuelans in Bolivia. In 2002, then-U.S. Ambassador Manuel Rocha warned that a Morales win in the 2002 Bolivian presidential election could threaten U.S. aid to the country. Considering this history, Morales said he felt justified in his accusations of the Ambassador and DEA agents. However, he emphasized that he wants to improve the relationship between Bolivia and the U.S., and invited the audience to help him. He said that Bolivia is a poor country that needs help and investment, and he wants to encourage cooperation, as long as the cooperation is transparent.

In addition to addressing the current diplomatic conflict, Morales spoke more broadly about democracy in the Americas, the history of the Bolivian coca grower’s movement and his political party (MAS, the Movement Toward Socialism), and the major events of his presidency. Among those events is the controversial 2006 nationalization of the country’s hydrocarbon industries (mostly natural gas, but also including oil). Morales said that his nationalization plan brought much-needed revenue to the country and took Bolivia from a financial deficit to a financial surplus in only one year. Before nationalization, Morales said, Bolivia earned about $300 million from hydrocarbons per year; in 2007, the country received about $2 billion.

No doubt that 2008 has been tense for Bolivia and President Morales. While opposition has been vocal and even violent in recent months, this year Morales did overwhelmingly win a national referendum on his government’s performance. Unfortunately, the next few months probably won’t get easier. Morales’ plans for re-writing the Bolivian Constitution come up for a national vote on January 25, 2009. If he wants to ease the tension, maybe another appearance on The Daily Show would help.

Before Evo Morales was elected President of Bolivia, WIDE ANGLE reported on his activities as an organizer of coca growers in Coca and the Congressman.

The rise of new leftist leaders in South America has been swift and surprising. From Venezuela’s Chavez to Brazil’s Lula, from Argentina’s Kirchner to Peru’s Toledo, the swelling ranks of left-leaning governments have provoked fears among some conservatives. If the proverbial dominos are on the table — will Bolivia be the next to tip over? In recent years the country has been roiled by competing political forces, with the indigenous coca grower’s union (the “cocaleros”) becoming an unexpected powerhouse. Their hero is ex-Congressman Evo Morales, a former coca farmer from indigenous peasant roots, who rose up last year to defend the coca growers against the Bolivian military’s crop eradication program. Today Latin America’s highest-profile indigenous leader, Morales fell just 45,000 votes shy of the presidency in the country’s June 2002 election. This summer, as the standoff between the cocaleros and the government escalates, Wide Angle travels with Morales to the stunning highlands of Bolivia as he fights to expand the amount of coca that can be legally grown by farmers. The pitfalls of a drug-based economy — and the difficulty of finding suitable replacement crops to support peasant families — are all part of the story. We will profile powerful indigenous politicians working with Morales, a poor cocalero family whose survival is dependent on coca growing, a wealthy entrepreneur who is starting a chain of supermarkets, and a coca-eradication commander on a slash and burn mission. Cocaleros illuminates the shifting balance of power that’s underway in Bolivia — and spreading across Latin America.

A Bolivian baby chews on a coca leaf. Coca can be harvested for legal purposes such as chewing and pharmaceutical use as well as for cocaine production.

BBC News: Country Profile: Bolivia
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/country_profiles/1210487.stm
The news organization’s broad overview of Bolivia, featuring a timeline of the nation’s history; data on Bolivia’s population, languages, and economy; and a profile of the country’s current president, Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada.

Library of Congress: Country Study: Bolivia
http://memory.loc.gov/frd/cs/botoc.html
From a series of books prepared by the Federal Research Division of the Library of Congress. Features articles and information on Bolivia’s history, economy, government, transportation, national security issues, foreign relations, natural resources, manufacturing, justice system, and more.

BBC News: Bleak Future for Bolivia’s Economy
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/1400337.stm
Traces a crash in the Bolivian economy that began sometime in the late 1990s, and the government’s response to the crisis. Suggests the situation was exacerbated by the government’s unwillingness to recognize the problem early on.

Bolivia Web
http://www.boliviaweb.com/
“The Largest Bolivian Community on the Web” includes features on Bolivian history, cooking, photographers, poets, maps, travel information, and more. Links are provided to sites with information on Bolivia’s government, education system, economy, and the latest Bolivian news.

Guardian Unlimited: Let Latin America Find its own Path
http://www.guardian.co.uk/argentina/story/0,11439,769413,00.html
An article addressing recent economic troubles in Latin American countries, including the crisis in Argentina, riots in Uruguay, Peru, and Paraguay, and the history of free market economies in region.

Washington Post: Bolivia Articles
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/world/americas/southamerica/bolivia/
A collection of articles dating back to 2000 featuring the POST’s coverage of Bolivia, as well as related regional news stories. Includes additional resources on Bolivia.

Washington Post: Colombia’s Civil War
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/world/issues/colombiareport/
A collection of articles featuring the POST’s coverage of Colombia, with particular attention paid to the nation’s role as a key battleground in the U.S.-sponsored war on drugs.

An indigenous Bolivian woman and her child are shown above. Indigenous peoples are disproportionately poor and uneducated in Bolivia and throughout South America.

What are the key issues facing Bolivia and other South American nations as they seek to trigger equal economic opportunity for all their citizens?

By Juan O. Tamayo
August 7, 2003

One year after Evo Morales, a leftist Aymara Indian and coca growers’ advocate, came in a close second in Bolivia’s presidential election, it’s interesting to speculate on just where he would stand today on Latin America’s political spectrum if he had won.

Would the charismatic Morales still rail against the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and American “imperialism”? Or would he be following the footsteps of other Latin American “leftists” who, after winning the presidency, chose the pragmatic path of continuing free-market policies and cultivating friends in Washington?

In other words, would he have followed the way of President Hugo Chávez, whose fiery populism has polarized and paralyzed Venezuela, or the path of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (known as “Lula”) and Lucio Gutierrez, whose early days of rule in Brazil and Ecuador, respectively, have been marked by surprising moderation.

Galvanized by the failures of market reforms in the 1980s and ’90s; stagnant economies; frustration with corrupt, elitist governments; and the Bush Administration’s foreign policies, Latin America is swinging leftward. Six countries elected at least nominally left leaning presidents in the past three years — Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Perú, and Venezuela — and polls show El Salvador and Panama could follow next year.

Yet the region’s new left (in Spanish, “izquierda”), with the glaring exception of Venezuela, has been marked not by the utopian revolutionary socialism of the 1960s and today’s Cuba, but by policies that are socially responsible yet pragmatic — an “Izquierda Lite.”

Bolivia, in some ways, faces challenges almost unique in Latin America. It has the region’s largest indigenous population, perhaps 70 percent of its 8.3 million people, with 69 percent living in poverty. And under U.S. pressure, it has pledged to eradicate most of its legal coca farms that provide a livelihood to tens of thousands of families and the leaves that are sacred to the indigenous people. In contrast, coca farming in Colombia has always been illegal except for the small Arhuaco tribe in the Sierra Nevada.

Morales, 43, and his Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) made their political mark by leading sometimes violent cocalero protests against the eradication efforts, and his stunning success in the 2002 elections helped Indian candidates increase their representation in Congress from 10 to 30 percent.

Yet Bolivia also faces many of the same problems as the rest of Latin America: motionless economies, onerous foreign debts, rising poverty and unemployment, forsaken public education and health systems, shortages of electricity, drinking water and sanitation services, stultifying bureaucracies, enfeebling corruption, violent land disputes, and disenfranchised minorities.

There’s chronic civil warfare in Colombia, mayhem and bloodshed in Venezuela, a renascent Shinning Path guerrilla movement in Perú, the aftermath of economic breakdowns in Argentina and Brazil, inertia in Mexico, and the whiff of trouble in Chile, long the region’s best economic performer.

Congressman Evo Morales is a leading activist for the rights of indigenous people, including the country’s many coca growers, in Bolivia.

Little wonder, then, that neoliberalism is now almost an epithet, that demands are growing for the renationalization of state companies privatized in suspiciously murky deals during the 1980s, and that opposition to the U.S. war in Iraq has energized youths throughout the region. It’s no surprise that Mexican President Vicente Fox’s business-oriented National Action Party took a beating in midterm elections July 6, while two left-of-center factions scored big, the Institutional Revolutionary Party and the Revolutionary Democratic Party.

Yet beneath all that lies evidence that this left is very different — not violent or radical but pragmatic, seeking social progress and indigenous rights but using Che Guevara’s image more as a fashion statement than a sign of a true belief in revolution. The prime example of this tectonic shift is Lula, a former metalworkers’ union leader who lost three previous runs for the presidency with fiery promises of vast social welfare programs, threats to renounce Brazil’s foreign debt, and attacks on freemarket reforms as inhumane.

He gave Cuban President Fidel Castro a place of honor at his inauguration on January 1, but is today fighting to trim budget deficits, boost the autonomy of the Central Bank, and reform a costly pension system that allows some government employees to retire with full pay at age 50. His cabinet picks won praise from Wall Street, and he has visited Washington twice in seven months to establish what he calls a “respectful” relationship. While his pragmatism angered some of his radical supporters, he seems undeterred. “I’m fed up with Latin American presidents who blame the disgraces of the Third World on imperialism. That’s stupid,” Lula said recently.

Just as surprising was the turnaround of Ecuador’s Gutierrez, a populist former army colonel who led a military coup in early 2001 and won election in November 2002 with the support of the Pachakutik-New Country Movement, a radical group rooted in the 25 percent of Ecuador’s 13.4 million people who are indigenous. Another 65 percent is of mixed indigenous-European descent.

Gutierrez has reached a $200 million deal with the IMF that requires him to balance the budget by cutting government spending, increasing gasoline and utility prices, and turning over the management of electricity and telephone services to the private sector — all no-nos for any populist. Ecuador’s economy is expected to grow 3.5 percent this year, which would be the region’s highest expansion.

In Argentina, President Nestor Kirchner went after the military, police, supreme court, and tax evaders after he was sworn into office in late May, but made no move so far to roll back the disastrous free-market policies of his predecessor, Carlos Menem. And in Chile, President Ricardo Lagos has changed his country’s economic policies little since he took office in 2000 as the first leftist elected since General Augusto Pinochet surrendered power.

Their promising performances are in sharp contrast with that of Perú’s Alejandro Toledo, his nation’s first Indian president, a Stanford-educated former shoeshine boy elected in 2001 on a promise to eradicate the corruption and mismanagement that characterized former President Alberto Fujimori’s 10 years in power. Toledo’s popularity ratings are down to 12 percent amid charges that he has done nothing to improve the economy, named cronies to senior jobs, and engaged in some of the same sleazy politicking as Fujimori.

Only Chávez has embraced the kind of leftist rhetoric popular in the 1960s, promising a “Bolivarian Revolution,” holding up Cuba as his ideal, and causing a massive flight of people and capital. The resulting economic slump added 2 million people to the rolls of Venezuela’s poor and drove unemployment from 13 percent to 21 percent. His popularity, once in the high 70s, now stands at about 30 percent.

The increase in political representation of and by Bolivia’s indigenous population reflects a growing trend throughout South America.

Chávez’s crisis, even if not totally of his own making, appears to have served as an example to other leftist leaders that pragmatic politics may carry the day. Which returns us to the question of where Evo Morales would stand on this wave of talk-left, walk-center presidents.

An an example, Morales has staunchly opposed construction of a pipeline that would flow Bolivia’s vast natural gas deposits from the landlocked nation to a Chilean port where it would be liquefied for export to California. He argues that the gas should be sold at home to help domestic industries, and that the government should establish new processing plants that would create more jobs and turn the gas into value-added products such as liquid fuels, fertilizers, and plastics.

But Bolivia has more than enough gas for both domestic use and export, and has long sold to Argentina and Brazil, facts that have raised complaints that Morales’s objections are more political: Chile has been Bolivia’s nemesis since it seized Bolivia’s coastal region in the 19th century, and California is an iconic part of the United States.

As a president, then, one has to wonder if Morales would really pass up the pipeline’s projected $21 billion in sales over 20 years, a bonanza to his impoverished nation. Should Evo Morales ascend to the presidency, he will confront this and many other complex issues that pit populism against pragmatism.

Juan O. Tamayo is Senior Correspondent for the MIAMI HERALD.