LA PAZ, Bolivia (Reuters) - Evo Morales, who challenges U.S. anti-drug policies, was set to become Bolivia's first Indian president and join Latin America's shift to leftist leadership after winning an unexpectedly large majority in Sunday's elections.
Morales' rivals conceded defeat when results tabulated by local media showed him taking slightly more than 50 percent of the vote, much higher than predicted.
With 8 percent of the official ballot tallied, Morales led with 47 percent to 37 percent for Jorge Quiroga, a conservative former president. The official tabulation will take several days but based on exit polls the final result is expected to remain close to 50 percent.
Should Morales capture more than half of the votes he would avoid facing a congressional vote between the two top vote-getters as requried by Bolivian law.
"Beginning tomorrow Bolivia's new history really begins, a history where we will seek equality, justice, equity, peace and social justice," Morales told hundreds of supporters amid chants of "Evo President! Evo President!" at his campaign headquarters in the central city of Cochabamba on Sunday night.
Landlocked Bolivia, South America's poorest and most unstable country, has seen two presidents in three years toppled by large-scale demonstrations led by out-of-work miners, disenfranchised Indians and coca-leaf growers.
The new government will face conflicting demands from Indian groups who want the constitution rewritten to enshrine Indian rights and the country's wealthy eastern provinces where a wealthy elite wants greater power for regional governments.
Morales has pledged to nationalize the natural gas industry -- Bolivia has South America's second-largest reserves of the fuel -- tuning into popular disillusionment with free-market economic policies that many say did little to help the poor.
Morales, a lawmaker who admires Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's drive for regional cooperation to counter U.S. influence, also tapped into frustrations of the Quechua, Aymara and other Indian groups that are a majority in this Andean country.
His most fervent support comes from Indians who see one of their own reversing what most see as more than 500 years of discrimination under leaders of European heritage, beginning with slavery in Spanish colonial silver mines.
A high-school dropout who herded llamas as a boy, Morales has vowed to roll back a U.S.-backed eradication program of coca, the main ingredient in cocaine but also prized by Indians for traditional medicinal uses.
Washington considers Morales, who first rose to power as the leader of the country's coca farmers, an enemy in its anti-drug fight in Bolivia, the third biggest cocaine producer after Colombia and Peru.
A Morales presidency will add Bolivia to a regionwide drift to the left that has seen leftist presidents come to power in Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Venezuela.
yahoo
hasta la victoria siempre!
freedomfighter
Post je objavljen 19.12.2005. u 20:28 sati.