CALL it the Poncho Revolution. Indigenous dynamite-wielding tin miners and peasant women in traditional dress placed Bolivia’s white political elite under siege this week, forcing the Government to call an election amid signs the country was descending into civil war.

It is the third time in less than two years that Bolivia’s growing and ever more powerful indigenous movement has forced its will on the country’s traditional governing class. It marks the latest advance of the radical Indian movements that are turning politics in the Andean region on its head.

This week’s ousting of Carlos Mesa as President in Bolivia follows that of Lucio Gutiérrez in Ecuador in April. Both fell out with the radical left-wing indigenous groups that were instrumental in bringing them to power.

Neither of these two presidents was toppled at the polls. While most of the new Indian groups embrace democracy, their impatience with the corrupt and incompetent political systems that rule the Andean states has led them to take up more direct forms of action. In recent years the use of mass street protests and road blockades by poor Indians have spread across the region.

In January neighbouring Peru witnessed an armed uprising by a group with a quasi- Fascist ideology promoting the racial supremacy of the country’s “copper-coloured race”. The uprising failed but opinion polls taken afterwards showed its leaders were more popular than the elected president, Alejandro Toledo, himself an Indian but who leads a discredited white political class.

In each of these countries the new radical movements are driven by a burning sense of injustice at centuries of exclusion of indigenous peoples by mainly white elites. In the Andean nations South America’s unequal income distribution has a racial dimension. European- descended whites have benefited from the vast natural wealth of their countries while indigenous peoples have been excluded from politics, economically exploited and culturally ignored in what amounts to a system of virtual apartheid.

Mixing Indian revivalism with mainly left-wing economic ideology, the new indigenous groups are now demanding political power for the first time since the Spanish Conquest in the 16th century.

Many Indian movements and their leaders got their start in politics in 1992 when radicals organised to protest against the celebrations of the 500th anniversary of the discovery of the Americas by Columbus, which they said marked the beginning of genocide and slavery for native peoples.

They draw their support from the desperately poor Andean highlands and the slums surrounding the main cities that are home to peasants fleeing poverty in the countryside.

What the slums and countryside have in common is an almost total absence of any state presence. Healthcare and education services are either rudimentary or non-existent. In southern Bolivia infant mortality rates are among the worst in the world outside sub-Saharan Africa. Illiteracy rates are far higher for indigenous people than other racial groups.

Now the new elections in Bolivia raise the possibility of one of the leaders of this new generation of indigenous radicals becoming a president. This standard bearer is Evo Morales, leader of the Movement towards Socialism (MAS), the biggest of Bolivia’s radical groups.

An Aymaran Indian, former musician and lorry driver, he wants to nationalise the country’s huge gas reserves, allow the free cultivation of the coca plant and, most crucially, draw up a new constitution that will reflect the influence of the country’s indigenous majority.

The prospect of a Morales presidency makes neighbouring leaders and the US nervous. Argentina and Brazil fear disruption to the supply of Bolivian gas needed by their expanding coastal economies.

The MAS has links with similar opposition parties in the Peruvian highlands and with Hugo Chávez, the populist Venezuelan President. Considered by Washington a destabilising influence in the region, Señor Chávez has provided forums for the radical movements to meet each other in Venezuela and is rumoured to bankroll them using his oil income.

There have also been rumours of links between the MAS and leaders of the FARC, the cocaine-financed Marxist guerrillas fighting the Colombian Government for 40 years.

Enemies of Señor Morales say Bolivia will become a narco-state under his rule. When he stood as a candidate for the presidency in 2002, eventually coming a close second, the US gave warning that he would be unacceptable to them given his promise to eject the US’s Drug Enforcement Agency from Bolivia, the world’s third- largest producer of cocaine.

Like the recent Peruvian rebels, the MAS advocates the free cultivation of the coca leaf, which is the most lucrative cash crop for indigenous peasants and one, they point out, which always has eager buyers.

THE STATE THEY'RE IN

Languages: Spanish, Quechua, Aymara

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