BOLIVIA: A native Indian is favourite to win Bolivia's presidential election but he faces an uphill task in gaining power, writes Tom Hennigan in La Paz
After almost 500 years of white rule, Bolivia votes for a new president next Sunday with a member of the Indian majority the clear favourite to top the poll.
This break with history has unleashed a huge wave of hope for a better future among the country's indigenous communities, some of South America's poorest citizens, after suffering centuries of social and political exclusion.
The man of the moment is Evo Morales, the 46-year-old leader of the anti-capitalist Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) party. An Aymara Indian from a mining family, he worked as a lorry driver and travelling musician before turning to politics during the struggle between indigenous peasants growing coca and a government implementing a US-inspired eradication plan.
Now he pledges to give Bolivia's indigenous peoples a voice in running the country and to end what Indians see as centuries of systematic looting of the country's resources by the Spanish conquistadors and their descendants.
This is especially true when it comes to the country's gas. Morales' rise is in large part due to Indian anger at what they claim is the elite's willingness to sell the country's huge gas reserves on the cheap to foreign energy firms. Morales vows to extract the best price possible for the gas and then invest the money in job creation.
Despite his speeches being laced with references to the wrongs done by Europeans to Indians since the time of Columbus, Morales is always at pains to point out that the country's non-Indian minority have nothing to fear from an Indian-dominated government. "We are not for excluding anyone but including everyone," he says.
"Our enemies accuse us of racism when the problem is racism directed at us."
The symbolism of a first Indian president is not lost on Morales' supporters.
"When he receives the presidential sash it will be a great moment - a huge party, crazy," says Margarita Chejo, an Aymara Indian from the Indian slum city of El Alto, which overlooks the capital La Paz.
"A Morales presidency would mean so much to us because Evo has suffered like we have. He knows what it means to have to struggle each day for bread." But despite leading in the polls Morales still faces huge obstacles before he can occupy the presidential palace.
Only MAS is confident that it will win an outright majority on Sunday. Bolivia's notoriously unreliable opinion polls give Morales 36 per cent of the vote, six points ahead of his nearest rival, right-wing candidate Jorge Quiroga, in a crowded field.
Few political analysts believe Morales will pass the 50 per cent plus one vote he needs to be declared outright winner.
Unlike most of South America, Bolivia does not have a run-off round between the two leading candidates if no one candidate passes 50 per cent of the vote. Instead, the decision passes to a vote in congress.
The combined might of the establishment parties could place Quiroga in the presidential palace ahead of a poll-topping Morales. The fear is that such an outcome could provoke demonstrations in a country that has seen power increasingly slip from the formal institutions of state to protesters in the street.
MAS has already signalled that it will not accept a Quiroga presidency.
Leading MAS senator Román Loayza caused a storm of controversy earlier this month by declaring that his party had been in talks with the security services to ensure that Morales came to power "one way or the other" and warned: "If they do not let us govern democratically then it will have to be by force."
Morales distanced himself from Loayza's remarks but opponents have seized on them to call into question MAS's democratic credentials.
Some have even suggested that the party's supporters will surround the congress building if it has to vote on a president in an effort to intimidate legislators into voting in Morales, much as they did in June to prevent a right-winger taking office as interim president.
Others fear MAS will instead look to undermine a Quiroga presidency by returning to its tactic of road blockades. Blockades have been used by the radical movement in helping to bring down two presidents since the last elections in 2002.
Alternatively, if Morales is elected president it is likely he will head a minority administration facing an uphill task in implementing his radical agenda.
"The elections themselves are not the solution," says Elva Terceros of CEJIS, a leading left-wing Bolivian think-tank. "No one will have a majority in congress to vote through their programme." Instead, Terceros and most Bolivians are looking beyond Sunday's vote to a constitutional assembly, due to be held some time next year.
Set to bring together all sectors in society to hammer out a new constitution which will mark the refounding of Bolivia, jockeying for influence at the assembly has already started.
Morales and his supporters admit the assembly is an even greater prize than being the first Indian leader in Bolivia's history.