Mavericks Rise Amid Tumult in S. America

Before he almost won Bolivia’s presidential election, Evo Morales came to town to throw rocks at the police.

Fearlessness has won him the support of this country’s poorest peasants, who love him because he dodges army bullets and dances through clouds of tear gas. But legions of city dwellers have come to admire the stone-throwing congressman too.

Urban Bolivians voted for Morales in surprising numbers in June elections here, in perhaps the most striking example of the increasing anger many South Americans feel toward the forces that he skewers in his speeches: the United States and free-market economics.

Morales, an Aymara Indian elected to Congress in a district of mostly Quechua Indians, sees his rise from coca farmer to national political figure as part of a messianic struggle against evil.

“On one side there is Evo Morales, who represents the poor, the victims of neoliberalism and the Quechua and Aymara, the true owners of this noble land,” he said in an interview. “And then there is the other side--American imperialism, the transnational corporations, the oligarchy and corruption.”

The same enemies on Morales’ list appear in speeches by politicians as diverse as the gadfly congresswoman Elisa Carrio in Argentina, nationalist President Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and, in a significantly more moderate tone, presidential candidate Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in Brazil.

After a decade in which governments across the region embraced open markets, privatization and other reforms prescribed by conservative gurus, there is a growing sense that South America has lost its way. Most of the region’s countries are adrift in a sea of recession, unemployment and foreign debt.

Official unemployment has reached 22% in Argentina and 15% in Venezuela. With Brazil slipping deeper into a fiscal crisis, its currency, the real, lost 20% of its value in two months before the International Monetary Fund stepped in Wednesday with its largest bailout, a $30-billion loan.

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Looking for Leaders

The search for saviors in this battle between the global economy and its malcontents has boosted the fortunes of many politicians who were considered, until recently, unreformed leftists or political mavericks with little hope of ever winning power.

Here in Bolivia, Morales won 21% of the vote in an 11-candidate field and finished just 42,000 votes behind the winner, Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, who took 22%.

“This was the first time in my life I’ve ever voted for an Indian,” said Jorge Barcena, a 50-year-old teacher in La Paz, Bolivia’s capital, explaining his vote for Morales.

Some of Barcena’s relatives, all middle-class La Paz residents like him, thought that he was crazy to vote for Morales. Racial stereotypes remain an ugly fact of everyday life in Bolivia, where the large indigenous majority remains impoverished and marginalized.

“How could you vote for that Indian?” his relatives told him in disparaging tones.

But for Barcena, voting for a rank outsider like Morales was the only way to send a message to the political elite.

“I am so angry, so completely upset,” he said. “All these parties make arrangements with each other to loot the country. They support this neoliberal system that only makes them rich and leaves everyone else poor.”

Stories of cronyism and corruption abound here, as elsewhere across South America. Once, politicians who enriched themselves were tolerated because they controlled bureaucracies that could dispense vast networks of patronage--everything from lucrative business contracts to jobs as trash collectors.

Now, hard times mean that the caudillos, or benevolent strongmen, have fewer gifts to dispense. Traditionally dominant parties such as the Peronists in Argentina and the Nationalist Revolutionary Movement in Bolivia are losing influence.

Violent protest has become widespread, with Peru and Paraguay both declaring a state of emergency in recent weeks in response to unrest.

Of the nine countries in Spanish-speaking South America, only one is free of political and economic instability--Chile.

Assistant Secretary of State Otto J. Reich has acknowledged the growth of the dissident voices in Latin America and has expressed special concern about the situation in Argentina.

“The social upheaval is painful and difficult, and the risk of political and economic contagion, while diminished in recent months, is not fully under control,” Reich said recently.

Already, in Brazil, the two left-leaning front runners in the presidential election have said they would put off negotiations on a treaty to create a “Free Trade Area of the Americas” because they see it as a U.S. attempt to impose unfair trade practices.

And in Bolivia, Peru and elsewhere, demonstrations against government plans to privatize utilities and other services have hit hard at investments by European and American firms.

Indeed, a growing number of South Americans see their governments as servile before “Yankee” domination and the demands of the IMF, which requires free-market reforms as a condition of economic assistance.

In Buenos Aires, IMF officials visiting Argentina last month were greeted by protesters burning American flags. The sense that Argentina’s sovereignty is under threat has boosted Carrio’s profile--she rails against the IMF and revels in her image as a self-described “fat woman” outside the male-dominated establishment.

“The representative of the fund thinks he’s our economy minister and that he can tell Argentines how they should act,” Carrio said in a recent interview. Among other things, the IMF demanded that the Argentine Congress repeal a law used to prosecute bankers who spirited money out of the country, arguing that the law chilled the investment climate there.

“We’ve gotten used to being treated without dignity and mutual respect,” said Carrio, a lawmaker from the impoverished north. “Instead, Argentina allows itself to be persistently abused and violated. This isn’t good for either Argentina or the United States.”

Admirers and detractors alike say she “has ovaries”--a phrase used to describe strong women in Argentina. Carrio leads in polls ahead of a presidential election scheduled for March.

Like Carrio and Morales, Venezuela’s Chavez can claim outsider status: He is a bachaco--a man of mixed race--and a military officer who never held office until he was elected president in 1998. His support among the poor appears to have grown even stronger in the wake of an April attempt to oust Chavez led by dissident generals and business leaders.

In Brazil, most people know the most important details in the life story of the man they affectionately call Lula, the Workers’ Party candidate who has a lead in all polls and may finally be elected president of Brazil this fall on his fourth try.

While trying to position himself in this campaign as a leader who has grown more moderate with age, Lula has remained true to the central idea of his long career in politics: that free-market policies hurt most Brazilians, especially the poor.

“I am against the free trade treaty with the U.S., because it’s a proposal that would mean the annexation of South America’s economy to the United States,” Lula said recently.

But nowhere has the leap from renegade to power broker been as stunning as in Bolivia. Morales, dismissed as a fringe player on the Bolivian political scene just a year ago, leads the largest opposition party in both houses of Congress after a new legislature was sworn in last week. Morales’ ascendance is in many ways an emblematic tale of the global economy. The path that would lead him to become this country’s best-known rabble-rouser begins in a corner of Bolivia that traditionally has had the strongest link to the world marketplace: the mining regions around Oruro and Potosi in the southwest.

For centuries, Bolivia’s tin mines had provided a steady trickle of income for the area’s mostly Aymara Indian families. But by the late 1970s, with tin prices down and the government preparing to lay off thousands as part of a restructuring program, many families were forced to migrate.

Morales was an adolescent when his family joined the exodus to the tropical Chapare region in central Bolivia where even the poorest farmer could make money planting a booming export crop--the coca leaf, used to make cocaine.

“Evo Morales, the leader, was created by coca and he has won political power thanks to the coca,” said Alcides Flores, an editor at the Cochabamba newspaper Los Tiempos.

Like many observers in Bolivia, Flores doesn’t believe that Morales has the link to the drug trade some have alleged but says his assertions that coca is produced only for traditional, medicinal purposes are disingenuous.

Coca farming remains legal in Bolivia, where farmers have cultivated the crop for thousands of years: Before cocaine existed, it was used for brewing tea and other benign uses.

But the last half a decade has seen a U.S.-backed effort to limit coca farming as part of a global assault on the drug trade. In Chapare, that campaign has included sweeps by army soldiers who burn crops and rough up farmers.

As an activist with Bolivia’s peasant union, Morales organized “committees for peasant self-defense” that often fought pitched battles with soldiers and police. He rose quickly through the ranks.

The demands of the coca growers have become part of a complex quilt of grievances that have spread to nearly every corner of Bolivian society. Morales has linked himself to many of these struggles simply by showing up at demonstrations when the rocks start flying.

In the central town of Sacaba, about two hours’ drive from Villa Tunari, people remember Morales from two years ago, when he brought thousands of cocaleros to join in a protest against government plans to sell the local water company to the San Francisco-based Bechtel Corp.

What came to be known as “the Water War” only added to Morales’ status as a folk hero. Eventually, the government canceled the sale, a major setback to its privatization efforts.

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A Corner of Conflict

Like many other corners of South America, Sacaba seems to be in a perpetual state of conflict. One recent Tuesday found the town square blocked off by barricades of upturned cobblestones, the doors to the municipal government building blocked off with sandbags as part of a protest against local government corruption.

“We’re veterans of the water war, the coca war and now the war against these corrupt politicians,” said Ramiro Villalobos, a 22-year-old law student who, like most of the protesters, proclaimed himself a Morales supporter.

Sacaba voted overwhelmingly for Morales in June. In the surrounding province of Cochabamba, Morales and his Movement Toward Socialism won 38% of the vote--finishing first--and took the largest number of seats allocated to the province in the national Senate and Chamber of Deputies.

For all his fame, as late as March, support for Morales in nationwide polls was still in the single digits.

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Ouster Aids Campaign

According to Bolivian analysts, Morales’ campaign gathered momentum after he was kicked out of Congress in January, charged with fomenting violent unrest against the government. (Morales won back the same seat in the June election.) The expulsion was widely seen here as being masterminded by U.S. Ambassador Manuel Rocha.

“When Evo was kicked out of Congress, he became a victim,” said Sacha Llorentti of the Permanent Assembly of Human Rights in Bolivia, a nongovernmental organization. “And in this country, victims are held in high regard. They prosper.”

Just a week before the election, Rocha once again attacked Morales, suggesting that if the cocalero were elected president, it could mean the end of U.S. aid to Bolivia.

The statement was seen by Bolivians of all political stripes as an unwelcome intervention in the electoral process. From the highest to the poorest levels of society, people are more likely than ever to blame American politicians and diplomats for what ails Bolivia.

In Villa Tunari and neighboring towns such as Shinahota, the cowboy-and-Indian-style games of young children are punctuated with cries of “Death to the United States!” and “Evo, presidente!”

The children mimic what they hear and see in the street battles between residents and army troops sent to rein in the coca trade, said Placida Barrientos, a woman selling bags of coca leaves in the Shinahota market. “The soldiers tell us, ‘We don’t want to be here, but [the Americans] sent us and we have to obey.’ ”

Like other women at the market, Barrientos believes that one man can help save the place where they sell 45-pound bags of raw coca leaves for $35. (Those same leaves can be used to make cocaine worth about $4,000 on U.S. streets.)

“Evo is the one we voted for,” she said. “He knows how we suffer.”