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No-tie Evo may win in Bolivian poll

Evo Morales, a seasoned protest leader and hero to Bolivia's majority Quechua and Aymara communities, is front-runner to become the impoverished country's first indigenous president.

Morales, 46, is ahead in the polls as Bolivians prepare to vote in today's presidential and congressional elections. But unless he attracts half of the vote it will be up to Congress to select Bolivia's next president.

If elected Morales, better known simply as Evo, has vowed to nationalize the country's oil and gas industry to distribute wealth in South America's poorest country.

He also supports the free cultivation of coca -- the source plant for cocaine -- opposes the "imperialist" policies of the US, and openly admires Cuban president Fidel Castro and leftist Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

Morales, who wears sneakers and is never seen in a coat or tie, says his country needs of drastic change.

"For a handful of people there is money, for the others, repression," he has often said.

The son of both Aymara and Quechua indigenous parents who grew up in poverty and dropped out of high school, Morales was born in Oct. 29, 1959 in the mining region of Orinoca, high in the mountains in the department of Oruro.

His family was so poor that four of his six siblings died before reaching the age of two.

Morales left home in the early 1980s as the region was struck by a drought and a collapse of the mining industry, and migrated like many indigenous highlanders to farm in the Chapare region where many raised coca, the source plant for cocaine.

To survive Morales took on a series of odd jobs, including work as a traveling musician and as a football player.

With that background he became sports secretary of the Chapare coca producers guild. Soon he was the leader of some 30,000 poor families linked to farming coca plants.

Coca has been cultivated in the Andes for thousands of years, used mainly for medicinal and religious purposes. Coca leaf tea is taken to fight altitude sickness.

But cultivation boomed in the 1980s with the growth of the international drug trafficking trade, and especially with the growth of the Colombian drug cartels.

In the 1990s the US government pumped millions of dollars into the region in an effort to eradicate coca production by spraying the plants with herbicide and paying to have them physically uprooted.

Coca farmers and US-funded anti-drug police clashed frequently and often with much violence.

Morales, now a popular and charismatic coca farmer leader, was elected to Congress in 1997 representing the region. In 2002 he made a run for the presidency representing the Movement Towards Socialism, currently the country's main political group. He came just two points behind conservative Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, who became president.

In October 2003 Morales was instrumental in leading mass protests that led to Sanchez de Lozada's resignation in the so-called "gas wars."

In his final campaign rally in La Paz, Morales vowed to a delirious crowd of 10,000 supporters to "re-found Bolivia" and end "the colonial state" that has maintained the social status unchanged since Bolivia's independence from Spain in 1824.

Morales rose in the polls over the past six months from a low of 12 percent to the current 34 percent -- five points ahead of his nearest rival, conservative former president Jorge Quiroga. Businessman Samuel Doria Medina is running third with nine percent support, according to a Wednesday poll published on the Usted Elige Web site.

Morales has his detractors in the protest movement.

Felipe Quispe, an indigenous Aymara leader and one-time classmate of Morales, said that Morales was not up to the job.

And if he does not nationalize the oil and gas industry, "we indigenous will throw him out with even more anger," he said.
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