Triumphant Bolivian president elect Don Evo Morales touched down in Africa last week as part of a whirlwind global tour ahead of his official inauguration on January 22. Morales, who visited South Africa where he met with politicians and civil society leaders, has pledged to adopt socialist policies and resist US influence on the domestic policies of his country. Okello Oculi tells us who Morales is, what pressures he is likely to face and what his election means for Africa.

Bolivia is a country two-thirds of whose population are indigenous "Indians". The Asian connection in their Euro-centric ethnic label is a gross historical error by European travelers who after 1492 assumed that any landmass west of the Atlantic Ocean's European coast must be the fabled India. On December 18, 2005, its voters made history by electing "the first wholly indigenous president in Latin America in modern times". His name is Don Evo Morales, a bold campaigner against American opposition to growing cocoa plants for the economic benefit of his native peoples.

Morales, an Aymara Indian, won 51.1 per cent of the vote, making it the first time that a Bolivian president is not elected by the country's parliament (or Congress), and thereby denying the big white European land owners in the eastern provinces the decisive voice in an election. Morales has openly declared himself as a "brother" to leftist presidents Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, Lula da Silva in Brazil, and Fidel Castro in Cuba.

Bolivia has a unique geopolitical status, sharing borders with Brazil to the north and east, Peru in the northwest, Chile in the southwest, and Argentina and Paraguay in the south. In the mid-1960s, after being disillusioned with the revolutionary potential of Laurent Kabila and his colleagues in today's Democratic Republic of Congo, Che Guevara (the famous Cuban-Argentinean medical doctor turned revolutionary armed fighter), went and started a guerrilla war in Bolivia under the theory of establishing a "focal point" for exporting liberation to the whole of South America. In 1968 the American government's Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) triumphantly flashed around the world pictures of a dead Che Guevara. He had been murdered by a military unit funded by the agency.

Morales came to power leading a coalition of "trade unions and social movements" led by his own union which has pledged to legalise the growing of cocoa out of whose leaf cocaine is extracted. At his election victory rally he declared: "Long live cocoa, no to the Yankees". He pledged to re-negotiate contracts which, under the privatization programme of the previous government, gave ownership of oil and gas reserves to foreign multinational companies. Che Guevara must have smiled in his grave in Cuba, his adopted country.

Morales, like Fidel Castro, Salvadore Allende in Chile, and Hugo Chavez before him, will face stiff opposition from the United States. His pledge to "change the history of Bolivia with peace and social justice" must taste like salted human excrement to President Bush and his born-again Christian crusaders for a post-Cold War American domination code-named "pro-democracy".

The rich white minority who voted for his opponent, Jorge Quirago, will oppose his grabbing land from them for redistribution to the dispossessed "Indians"; as well as the central government's control of royalties for gas and oil. For him to succeed he must deepen the combative skills and steadfastness of his followers.

He must also implement creative policies for taking economic growth to the poor through loans to cooperative groups and small firms; supporting local mass-based technological inventiveness, while supporting patriotic big businesses and vigorously undertaking land redistribution. Such concrete economic empowerment initiatives will be the much needed anchor for sustaining the popular mandate of the election victory.

Yet Morales must not underestimate the blood-soaked record of American foreign policy in the region. The naked brutality with which the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile was crushed in 1972 and the subsequent reign of terror which President Eduardo Pinochet unleashed on his supporters, as well as the massacre of thousands of "communists" in Brazil and Argentina in the mid-1960s, must always be kept in view by Morales. Only by such vigilance will the "Movement for Socialism", which he leads, ensure the practical realisation of his assertion that "the people have defeated the neoliberals".

Morales' anti-privatization election victory is coming at a time when African leaders have been selling away national economic institutions to foreign multinationals; and doing so behind the backs of their pauperized peoples. Moreover, those leaders who took loans without putting them to development of their nation's economies are now being hunted down like thieves by Euro-American debt collectors. Morales's boldness, rooted in the mobilization of his country's trade unions and other mass associations, is therefore a vital lesson to Africa.

* Okello Oculi, Ph.D, is Executive Director of Africa Vision

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