Power of Indian majority to shape Bolivia election

December 05, 2009|Frank Bajak, Associated Press

CHARAGUA, Bolivia - In Bolivia’s biggest municipality, a scrub-brush expanse of cattle ranches and farms, tomorrow’s national elections aren’t all about Evo Morales.

With Bolivia’s first indigenous president expected to easily win reelection to a five-year term, the focus in Charagua is on the drive for greater political power by the Indian majority of this poor South American nation.

The municipality is one of 12 that vote tomorrow on whether to abandon modern political structures in favor of traditional native governance, with major decisions taken by public assemblies.

The prospect has galvanized the Guarani, the third-largest of the 36 ethnic groups with rights to self-determination enshrined in a new constitution backed by Morales that Bolivians ratified in January.

With Morales’s help, the Guarani have been dismantling the last vestiges of oppression that United Nations investigators in May described as “forced labor and servitude.’’ Indian families in the Chaco region provided live-in labor for large landholders, typically receiving nothing more than food and clothing in exchange.

“That’s what the Guarani people have achieved: breaking feudal power,’’ says Miguel Valdez, a researcher at the nonprofit Center for Research and Promotion of the Peasantry, or CIPCA. “It’s a revolution.’’

The Guarani, who number about 85,000 in Bolivia and also live in Paraguay, Brazil, and Argentina, also hope to gain their first seat ever in Bolivia’s Congress tomorrow as voters elect a new 36-member Senate and 130-member lower house.

Their candidate is Wilson Changaray, president of the Guarani’s People’s Assembly, the group’s governing body in Bolivia.