Earning His Stripes

It is an unlikely revolutionary icon, but Evo Morales’ striped jersey may eventually join those other symbols of Latin American radicalism - Fidel Castro’s beard, Che Guevara’s beret and the paratrooper’s uniform of the Venezuelan populist Hugo Chavez.

Morales is - with or without the casual shirts and jerseys he has worn daily during a current tour of world capitals - already something of an icon for a worldwide fan club of leftwingers, anti-globalization campaigners and social activists.

When he is sworn in as the president of Bolivia at a ceremony in La Paz on January 22, he will become a unique figure - an indigenous Indian, pro-coca leaf-farming president of a Latin American nation.

His arrival in power also looks set, at the start of a crucial season of elections across his continent, to broaden the anti-Washington coalition based around Cuba’s Castro and Venezuela’s Chavez.

Castro and Chavez were, in fact, the first two people Morales went to see on his world tour.

Venezuela has provided not just his private aircraft but also some of his traveling companions. These include a group of armed bodyguards who caused a minor diplomatic incident when they tried to get off the plane, guns and all, at Madrid airport.

Starting the European leg of his tour in Madrid last week, Morales was quietly confident but admitted he had much to learn.

"I never in my life thought I would be moving in these circles," he said before taking his striped jersey to dinner with King Juan Carlos of Spain. "I still cannot believe that Evo Morales will be president."

Morales’ smooth skin and dark, indigenous features will make him a rare beast at the next annual meeting of South American heads of state - a recognizable descendant of the peoples who inhabited the continent before Spanish and Portuguese conquistadores arrived five centuries ago.

He was voted into power, with a clear absolute majority, last month after weeks of social unrest amongst the indigenous people who are a majority in Bolivia but have never held power in one of the region’s poorest countries.

"We want to end social injustice," he explained after meeting the Spanish socialist prime minister, Jose Luis Rodre­guez Zapatero, who had just written off a large chunk of Bolivia’s debt. "If we do not solve the indigenous problem, then we will solve nothing."

That would mean protecting small indigenous farmers against competition from big companies, he added.

Morales, more commonly known as Evo, is the great hope for those who decry the huge gaps in wealth in Latin America and the historic mistreatment of its native peoples.

One of seven children born to a family of poor farmers in the Oruro region, he has been a union activist for the past quarter of a century and is a former president of the Federation of Coca Leaf Growers.

His defense of traditional small farmers who cultivate the coca leaf - not for turning into cocaine, but for local use in other, less harmful forms - makes him unpopular in some places, especially Washington.

"I cultivate coca leaf, which is a natural product," he once told journalists. "I do not refine cocaine. Neither cocaine nor drugs have ever been part of the Andean culture."

Amongst his heroes is Che Guevara, who died while trying to bring an armed Marxist revolution to Bolivia in 1967.

"I share Che Guevara’s ideas," he told reporters who mobbed him in Madrid - although he was quick to say that his policies would be backed by votes, not guns.

"I consider it [China] to be a political, ideological and programmatic ally," Morales went on to tell the Chinese president, Hu Jintao, in Beijing this week.

True radicals, however, may be disappointed. Morales has also spent much of his world tour quashing fears that he would expropriate from the foreign companies working in what is the continent’s second biggest reserve of gas.

He was happy to meet business leaders and tell them Bolivia still needed private foreign investment. What he wanted was for Bolivia to own its natural resources while having foreign partners to help it extract them, he said.

"My government will exercise its property right over its natural resources," he added. "We will nationalize, but that does not mean confiscate, expropriate or expel."

He has warned foreign firms that they may have to renegotiate contracts, something analysts say has already led to an investment slowdown.

The question now is will Morales spark what might be called an "Evo effect"? His desire, he has said, is "not just a change in the history of Bolivia, but of Latin America".

Candidates lining up for presidential elections to be held this year in Mexico, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Brazil, Chile, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Venezuela will all be watching to see whether Morales’s popularity spills over his borders.

Washington is treading delicately around a man it has previously attacked for defending coca leaf farming.

It will want to see whether Morales turns out to be a populist like Chavez or a leftwing pragmatist such as Brazil’s Luiz Inecio Lula da Silva.

"Any effort by the US to make it difficult for Morales to govern at the outset would make him into a martyr in most of Latin America," Peter Hakim, the president of Washington’s Interamerican Dialogue thinktank, told Reuters this week.

A first sign that the "Evo effect" was being felt elsewhere could be a sudden show of jersey-wearing by the continent’s politicians. "That is something Evo will never give up," said the football coach Ovidio Messa, one of his entourage in Madrid.