In The Footsteps Of Che Guevara: Democracy In South America

At the end of one of its corridors, just visible through office doors, hangs the more modern image of Che Guevara. Inside the room, he is everywhere. Among the myriad images is a black and white poster showing his patchy, iconic beard and piercing eyes above the slogan, "I'd rather be an illiterate Indian than a North American millionaire". Thirty-eight years after his death in the foothills of the Bolivian Andes, trying to spark a Marxist revolution, the socialist soldier of fortune's boast reverberates in the dilemma now facing the country. Bolivia is at a crossroads and goes to the polls on Sunday to choose between a Harvard-educated, American-married, member of the business elite and an indigenous Aymara Indian and radical former coca farmer. The two leading presidential candidates, Jorge "Tuto" Quiroga and Evo Morales, personify the bitter divide between the European-descended haves and the majority indigenous have-nots, in Bolivia and beyond. Despite its poverty, Bolivia contains a wealth of natural resources, from minerals to significant oil reserves, and the second largest proven gas reserves on the continent. But an estimated 63 per cent of the people remain rooted in poverty, and its indigenous people - mainly Aymara and Quechua Indians - who make up more than half of the population, are suffering disproportionately. Bolivia was in the vanguard of nations that experimented with the neoliberal "shock tactics" of privatisation and austerity measures that swept Latin America during the 1980s and 1990s, known as the Washington consensus. These policies helped to control hyperinflation but failed utterly to deliver the promised prosperity to all but a few of the business elite. Popular anger and disbelief that hydrocarbon wealth had failed to lift them out of poverty has brought the country to the edge of disintegration, with two presidents forced out of office inside two years by mass social protests. http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article333457.ece © 2005 Independent News and Media Limited

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