Bolivia is the latest Latin American nation to embrace a leftist leader -- Evo Morales, a former coca grower who rose to power vowing to use his nation's resources to help the poor.
The landlocked nation, high in the Andes, gets much of its revenue from sales of natural gas. With trillions of cubic feet of gas, Bolivia has the second-largest proven reserves in the region after Venezuela.
In 2003, a government plan to export the gas via a pipeline sparked a popular revolt that hastened the political shift to the left. Then-President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, a U.S. ally and free-market disciple, agreed to ship natural gas out of Bolivia for processing elsewhere.
Protestors said that the plan relegated Bolivia to simply supplying raw materials, leaving the more lucrative job of refining to others. Critics had long derided Lozada's "neo-liberal" policies, which slowly put once-public enterprises into private hands. Many Bolivians saw it as one more case of foreign exploitation.
Demonstrators set up a blockade in the capital of La Paz in hopes of stopping the gas pipeline deal. Troops using tear gas and bullets to break up the protest killed at least 50 people in what became known as the "war in defense of gas." Disgraced, Sanchez de Lozada resigned and fled to safety in the United States.
Jim Shultz, director of the Bolivia-based human rights organization Democracy Center, says Sanchez de Lozada epitomized a generation of Latin American leaders, backed by the U.S. government and the World Bank, who persisted in pushing a misguided economic model on their people.
"What is happening in Bolivia [and] throughout Latin America is not rocket science to understand," he says. "It is about the practical failure at a day-to-day level to deliver the goods, because they just haven't worked."
President Evo Morales was swept into office largely on a promise to regain control of Bolivia's hydrocarbons industry. At his inauguration, he told a delighted public that his government would end centuries of "foreign plunder" of Bolivia's mineral wealth. He nationalized the hydrocarbons industry in May 2006 -- an ongoing process that relies on negotiation, not confiscation of assets.
The leftist transformation that has spread across the region may be less about ideology than economics. At least 60 percent of Bolivia's population lives on $2 or less a day, and the gap between rich and poor is one of the widest in the world.
The indigenous majority have long felt excluded from power by descendants of Spaniards, who traditionally held the keys to wealth and power. Morales, the first indigenous Bolivian head of state since Spanish forces took over five centuries ago, is redistributing millions of acres of land.
At his inauguration in January, Morales proclaimed "from 500 years of resistance ... we pass to another 500 years of power." Indigenous people across the hemisphere saw an end to their exclusion.
Critics say Morales is trying to wrap state capitalism in the flags of Socialism, riding a surge of national pride to upend longstanding agreements. But political scientist Jose Mirtenbaum disagrees, saying Bolivia has given birth to a new kind of politics.
"I think that Evo has opened this door -- he's forcing the world to think in new paradigms," Mirtenbaum says. "Just by the fact that he presented himself in his sweater before the King of Spain!"
And as the leader of Bolivia's cocalero movement -- a loose federation of coca growers -- Morales is also challenging the United States to rethink its coca eradication efforts.
Coca for chewing and tea are ancient traditions in Andean culture, and growing and selling coca leaves is legal -- the derivative cocaine is not. Aides say Morales prefers that growers voluntarily eradicate illegal crops. But experts say that won't work as long as there's no alternative crop as lucrative as coca -- and that means reducing demand for cocaine within the United States.
While Bolivia's drug policy is aggravating relations with the United States, Morales' gas-nationalization plan is antagonizing Bolivia's biggest customer: Brazil.
Morales is also having to fend off rebellious states that are rich in oil and clamoring for more autonomy. Yet his personal popularity remains high. South America's newest leftist leader, for the most part, enjoys rock-star status.
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