TIWANAKU, Bolivia – The ceremony in these pre-Incan, wind-swept ruins looked more like an indigenous Woodstock than an inauguration rite for Bolivia’s new president, a leftist coca-union leader who boasts that he’s the United States’ “worst nightmare.”
Clad in a crimson robe reserved in pre-Hispanic times for the highest priests and bearing a gold-and-silver staff adorned with condor heads, a symbol of supreme power among Andean Indians, a barefoot Evo Morales thanked Father Sun and Mother Earth for his election as this country’s first indigenous leader.
Tens of thousands of indigenous Bolivians – men in ponchos and animal-skin caps, women with braided hair wearing flounced petticoats and bowler hats – performed dances banned by the Spanish conquerors, blew ram horns, waved banners shaped like coca leaves and ecstatically shouted “Long live Evo! Our time has come!”
Saturday’s powerful, incense-filled ritual – a kickoff to a formal inauguration today, was an unprecedented presidential tribute to Bolivia’s Indian majority, which Morales has promised to lift out of centuries of poverty and oppression. But Morales’ politics are equally unconventional, prompting fears in Washington and the business world that Bolivia has elected the next Fidel Castro or Hugo Chavez.
A disciple of both leftist firebrands, Morales, 46, intends to nationalize Bolivia’s gas reserves, the second largest in Latin America. He also has pledged to stop U.S.-funded eradication of coca crops, an indigenous staple that also is the chief ingredient in cocaine. And he has vowed to redistribute idle privately owned land to the poor.
“The time has come to change the evil history of plunder of our natural resources, of discrimination, of humiliation, of hatred … toward indigenous people in Bolivia and all of Latin America,” an emotional Morales, whose vice president is a leftist guerrilla-turned-intellectual, declared during the ceremony. “With the force of the people, we will put an end to the colonial state and the neo-liberal model.”
But even as Morales calls Cuba’s Castro “a father figure” and rails against “imperialism,” the charismatic, racquetball-playing bachelor has tempered his rhetoric since capturing a dramatic 54 percent of the vote in December’s eight-way presidential race.
In recent news conferences, Morales insists he welcomes foreign investment and denies gas nationalization means expropriation. Still, he says, the state will control all gas reserves and slap a hefty 50 percent tax on profits.
Morales also says he’ll crack down on cocaine traffickers and only support traditional use of coca, which indigenous Bolivians chew for medicinal and religious purposes.
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