COCHABAMBA, Bolivia -- Slapping the leather cover of a Bible, a man in this city's central square attracted a pressing crowd one recent morning with the promise that a passage he had found in Deuteronomy spoke directly to his country.
" 'One from among your brethren you shall set as king over you,' " he said, " 'and you may not put a foreigner over you who is not your brother.' "
The biblical foreigner, he explained, was the U.S. government and the multinational corporations that exploit Bolivia's natural resources. The potential king was Evo Morales, a former union leader whose message of the need for freedom from U.S. economic interests has put him at the top of the list of presidential hopefuls.
"Evo is the only one who can defend us," said Jose Meneces Gomez, a bystander who had crowded close to hear. "We need someone who will be a president for Bolivians, not for anyone else."
On Friday, Bolivia's electoral court indefinitely postponed elections, which were to take place in December. While the government dispute involved wrangling about how congressional seats should be distributed, Morales described the decision to suspend elections as a personal attack on his success. He said the squabble over congressional seats was calculated to derail his campaign and stop a wave of anti-globalization spreading through South America.
"If they don't want us to win democratically," he said last week during a rally in central Bolivia, "the people will rise up and take power by force."
Street protests have toppled two presidents in two years, and the December elections were seen by Morales's supporters -- many of whom had participated in the protests -- as a chance for the country to reverse centuries of exploitation by foreign governments and multinational corporations.
Morales has cast the prospect of a popular uprising as a last resort, saying he hopes the elections can be salvaged. He has continued to campaign on a platform of self-determination, which plays very well among the 60 percent of Bolivians who, like Morales, are of indigenous descent. But he has won few allies among international investors.
Morales is also clearly not the favorite of U.S. officials, who have been quiet about this campaign. When Morales ran for president in 2002, the U.S. ambassador to Bolivia warned that the United States might cut economic ties if he won. Few statements could have helped Morales more; a late upsurge drove him to second place, just 1.5 percentage points behind the winner.
"We are not interested in protecting U.S. interests," Morales said in an interview two weeks ago. "We don't want to protect policies that fail to resolve the problems of the majority in our country."
Morales, 46, got his start in national politics as the head of the Federation of Coca Farmers, an experience that shaped his opposition to the United States. Coca is a traditional crop among Andean Indians, used as a stimulant to ward off mountain sickness long before it was processed to make cocaine. He describes the U.S. government's efforts throughout South America to eradicate coca as a strategy to keep Bolivia subservient to outside control. The real target of the anti-drug programs, he says, is his country's natural gas reserves, the second-largest in South America. The oil reserves historically have been extracted by foreign corporations under government contracts that Morales deems exploitive.
"The pretext is going after the narco-traffickers, the narco-terrorists," Morales said. "But they really just want to take control of our resources."
Jefferson Morley blogs his survey of world events covered in the foreign online media. Multiple updates are filed daily, Monday - Friday.
Sign Up for RSS Feed