Che's Second Coming?

The Bolivian Congress is an ornate building in the Spanish Colonial style. It is also a study in cognitive dissonance. Located on the Plaza Murillo, one of the central squares of Bolivia's main city, La Paz, it is flanked by the Presidential Palace, the Cathedral and the mausoleum of Bolivia's second president, Andrés Santa Cruz, who fought alongside Simón Bolívar. Around these decorous buildings, soldiers in red pseudo-19th-century uniforms stand at attention or march ceremoniously from point to point. Were it not for the fact that most of these young recruits have the broad Indian faces of the Andean altiplano, or high plains, and that those gawking at them in the square are also themselves mostly indigenous, it would be easy to become confused and believe you were in some remote corner of Europe, albeit the Europe of a century ago.

Inside the Congress, this effect is, if anything, even stronger: marble floors, waiters wearing white shirts and black bow ties, photos on the walls in the office wing of the building, many now yellowing with age, that show previous generations of congressmen among whom there is barely an Indian face to be seen. The burden of this faux-Europeanness seems overwhelming, until, that is, you walk down one of the main corridors and, at its end, find yourself confronted with an enormous, colorized, Madonna-like image of Ernesto (Che) Guevara, Fidel Castro's comrade in arms, the archrevolutionary who died 38 years ago in the foothills of the Bolivian Andes trying to bring a Marxist revolution to Bolivia, then as now the poorest and most racially polarized country in South America.

"This is a sanctuary to El Che," says Gustavo Torrico, an influential congressman from the radical MAS party, gesturing around his office. (Though mas literally means "more," the Spanish acronym stands for "Movement Toward Socialism.") There are not just a few pictures of Che; there are literally dozens of them, big, small and in between: Che with Castro, Che in the field, Che with his daughter in his arms, smiling, smoking, exhorting. The effect is overwhelming.

And yet, in Bolivia these days, Che's image is hardly restricted to the office of a few leftist politicians. To the contrary, it is everywhere. It stares down at you from offices and murals on city walls of La Paz and of Bolivia's second-largest city, Cochabamba, in working-class districts and slum communities and university precincts. In Bolivia, Che's image is not a fashion statement, as it is in Western Europe. When you see people wearing Che T-shirts, or sporting buttons with the martyred revolutionary's face, they are in deadly earnest. In Bolivia, only images of the Virgin Mary are more ubiquitous, and even then it's a close-run thing.

"Why do I like Che?" Evo Morales, MAS's leader and presidential candidate, said in response to my question, looking as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. Morales is the first full-blooded Aymara, Bolivia's dominant ethnic group, to make a serious run for the presidency, which is in itself testimony to the extraordinary marginalization that Bolivian citizens of pure Indian descent, who make up more than half of the population, have endured since 1825, when an independent Bolivia was established. "I like Che because he fought for equality, for justice," Morales told me. "He did not just care for ordinary people; he made their struggle his own." We were sitting in his office in Cochabamba, a building in a condition somewhere between Spartan and derelict that Morales uses as a headquarters when he is in the city but that normally serves as the headquarters of the cocaleros, the coca-leaf growers from the country's remote, lush Chapare region. Morales started in politics as the leader of these cocaleros, and he has pledged that if he wins the presidential election scheduled for Dec. 18, one of his first acts will be to eliminate all penalties for the cultivation of coca, the raw ingredient in cocaine.

Unlike Che, who was a kind of revolutionary soldier of fortune, Morales does not have to adopt the revolutionary cause of Bolivia. He was born into it 46 years ago, in a tin-mining town in the district of Oruro, high in the Bolivian altiplano. Morales's family history is similar to that of many mining families who lost their jobs in the 1970's and 1980's, when the mines closed, and migrated to the Bolivian lowlands to become farmers, above all of coca leaf. (Limited cultivation of coca in certain indigenous regions is legal in Bolivia, and the cocaleros insist that the coca they grow is used only for "cultural purposes," but the Bolivian government and American drug-enforcement officials say that as much as 90 percent of the coca in Morales's home region, Chapare, makes its way into the international cocaine trade.) As an adolescent and a young man, Morales was a coca farmer, but his political work on behalf of the cocaleros soon propelled him into the leadership of a coalition of radical social movements that constitute the base of the MAS party.

How seriously to take Morales's tough talk about drug "depenalization" and nationalization of natural resources - oil, gas and the mines - is the great question in Bolivian politics today. Many Bolivian observers say they believe that MAS is nowhere near as radical as its rhetoric makes it appear. They note that conservative opponents of Brazil's current leftist president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, also predicted disaster were he to be elected, but that in office Lula has proved to be a moderate social democrat. And MAS's program is certainly much more moderate than many of its supporters would like. Washington, however, is not reassured. Administration officials are reluctant to speak on the record about Morales (the State Department and Pentagon press offices did not reply to repeated requests for an interview), but in private they link him both to narco-trafficking and to the two most militant Latin American leaders: Hugo Chávez, Venezuela's leftist populist military strongman, and Fidel Castro.

Rogelio (Roger) Pardo-Maurer IV, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for Western Hemisphere affairs and a senior adviser to Donald Rumsfeld on Latin America, said in a talk last summer at the Hudson Institute in Washington, "You have a revolution going on in Bolivia, a revolution that potentially could have consequences as far-reaching as the Cuban revolution of 1959." What is going on in Bolivia today, he told his audience, "could have repercussions in Latin America and elsewhere that you could be dealing with for the rest of your lives." And, he added, in Bolivia, "Che Guevara sought to ignite a war based on igniting a peasant revolution.. . .This project is back." This time, Pardo-Maurer concluded, "urban rage and ethnic resentments have combined into a force that is seeking to change Bolivia."

Morales has become almost as much of a bugbear to the Bush administration and many members of Congress on both sides of the aisle as Chávez or Castro. And for his part, Morales seems to revel in the role. At the summit meeting of the Organization of American States held in Mar del Plata, Argentina, earlier this month, he appeared with Chávez at a huge anti-American and anti-globalization rally just before the meetings began. The two men spoke in front of a huge image of Che Guevara. This is symbolic politics, but it is more than that too. The left is undergoing an extraordinary rebirth throughout the continent; Castro's survival, Chávez's rise, the prospect that the next president of Mexico will be Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the leftist mayor of Mexico City, and the stunning trajectory of Morales himself all testify to that fact. Pardo-Maurer is right that Morales's success reflects both Bolivia's current dire economic conditions and the perception of the indigenous majority that it is finally their time to come to power. But it is also a product of the wider popular mood in Bolivia and, for that matter, in much of contemporary Latin America.

For most Bolivians, globalization, or what they commonly refer to as neoliberalism, has failed so utterly to deliver the promised prosperity that some Bolivian commentators I met insisted that what is astonishing is not the radicalization of the population but rather the fact that this radicalization took as long as it did. Bolivia often seems now like a country on the brink of a nervous breakdown. Every day, peasants or housewives or the unemployed erect hundreds of makeshift roadblocks to protest shortages of fuel (a particularly galling affront in a country with vast hydrocarbon resources) or to demand increased subsidies for education or to air any of the dozens of issues that have aroused popular anger. The language of these protests is insistently, defiantly leftist, with ritual denunciations of multinational corporations, of the United States and of the old Bolivian elite, who are white, mostly descendants of Spanish and German settlers. Two presidents were chased out of office in the last two years by popular protests made up largely of MAS supporters: first Gonazalo Sánchez de Losada, then Carlos Mesa. (Since Mesa's government fell in June, the country has been run by a caretaker government overseen by a former chief justice of the supreme court.)

What distinguishes the situation in Bolivia from that of some of its neighbors is the way that ethnic politics and leftist politics have fused. It is this hybrid movement that Morales has led with such popular success. The hopes of many indigenous Bolivians are now incarnated in Morales's candidacy, and even many members of the old elite, including former President Sánchez de Losada, seem to believe that if he wins, Morales must be given the opportunity to rule.

When you meet him in person or read transcripts of his speeches, Morales seems like an unlikely vessel for these hopes. Whatever his gifts as an activist, and despite his obvious commitment to his cause, to an outsider, at least, he seems too young, too naïve, too provincial to serve as president of Bolivia. And when he talks of depenalizing coca production, as he often does, and insists that there will be nonnarcotic markets for coca leaf in China and Europe, it is hard to know whether he is simply being loyal to the cocalero constituency that first propelled him to prominence or whether he sincerely believes what he is saying. Certainly, such statements have played into the hands of his political enemies within Bolivia and abroad, who routinely accuse him of being in the pay of narco-traffickers - a charge Morales angrily denies and for which no concrete proof has ever been offered.

One of Morales's supporters told me, "Evo is a desconfiado, a man who tends to mistrust people until they show him a reason to think otherwise." That, along with the naiveté, is certainly the impression he gives. And yet surrounded by his supporters, visibly basking in their affection - an affection that often seems to border on devotion - Morales, or Evo, as almost everyone in Bolivia calls him, is a man transformed, a natural orator with extraordinary charisma. It is worrisome to think what the reaction in poor urban neighborhoods and in the altiplano will be if Morales does not become Bolivia's president.

Certainly, the candidate is starting to behave as if the office will soon be his. A telltale sign of this is the way Morales and MAS, while not repudiating previous statements about the changes they want to make in the Bolivian economy, seem to be leaving the door open to a more moderate approach. Increasingly in speeches and interviews, Morales has taken to emphasizing that when, for example, he speaks of nationalization, he is mainly speaking of Bolivia's reassertion of sovereignty over its natural resources and of partnership with multinational corporations, not, à la Fidel Castro, of the systematic expropriation of the multinationals' interests in Bolivia. Morales commented to me that "Brazil is an interesting model" for cooperation between the state and the private sector, and, he added, "so is China."

Only on the depenalization of coca production does he remain absolutely adamant and defiant, and in this, it must be said, he enjoys considerable popular support among not just the coca growers but also many Bolivians who believe that the cocaine problem should be addressed principally on the demand side, in the United States and Europe. A popular T-shirt in the markets of La Paz reads, "Coca leaf is not a drug."

Assuming there is no attempt to cancel the elections outright, Morales's most difficult political problem may be that MAS's platform is actually quite a bit more moderate than many of its rank-and-file supporters would like - or, indeed, than they understand it to be. As Roberto Fernandez Terán, a development economist at the University of San Simón in Cochabamba and an expert on Bolivia's external debt, told me, "I have no great hope that MAS will make profound changes." Senior MAS officials insist, however, that their nationalization program alone would engender profound improvements in the Bolivian economy. By proposing that the Bolivian government renegotiate its contracts with the multinational oil companies, "we are literally proposing changing the rules of the game," said Carlos Villegas, a researcher at the University of San Andrés in La Paz and MAS's principal economic spokesman. "The current contracts say that the multinationals own the resources when they're in the ground and are free to set prices of natural gas and oil once it has been extracted." In March, the Bolivian Congress, under pressure from demonstrators, passed a law reasserting national ownership of resources, but, Villegas said, "it is not being enforced." MAS would not only enforce the law; it would also extend its powers.

Bolivia has considerable oil reserves and, far more crucially, has the second-largest proved reserves of natural gas in South America after Venezuela - some 54 trillion cubic feet. Talk to ordinary Bolivians, and it often seems as if their profound rage and despair over what is taking place in their country is at least partly due to the gap between Bolivia's natural riches and the poverty of its people. "We shouldn't be poor" is the way Morales put it to me. This perception is hardly limited to die-hard MAS supporters. In the campaign ads being run by Morales's two main rivals for the presidency - Samuel Doria Medina, a wealthy businessman, and Jorge Quiroga, a former president - each candidate makes populist appeals. Doria Medina, in his ads, says he will "stand up" for Bolivia. And lest there be any doubt about what he is referring to, at the end of his ad he looks straight into the camera and says that if elected he will tell the multinationals, "Gentlemen, the party is over!"

If Petrobras, the oil company that is partly owned by the Brazilian state, can prosper, MAS supporters argue, why can't Bolivia adopt a similar strategy and flourish as a result? In any case, they point out, a large part of the population derives what little hope it has from Bolivia's hydrocarbon reserves. "The population," Carlos Villegas told me, "is demanding to know why these resources haven't lifted the country out of poverty. And they blame the privatization imposed by international lenders." At least according to Villegas's argument, taking back control over oil and natural gas would allow Bolivia to get a fair price and to pay for its industrialization, in the process creating employment and thus alleviating poverty, and escaping the problems that afflict so many resource-rich countries from Gabon to Indonesia. "Look, this is not a fantasy," he said at the end of our interview. "It's a perfectly feasible, practical program."

At least some well-informed outsiders agree. Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel laureate who was formerly the chief economist of the World Bank and is now a professor of economics at Columbia University and a stern critic of many international lending institutions, put it to me this way: "They could do it." If Bolivia abrogated its existing contracts, he said, some of the non-Western oil giants would gladly negotiate new deals on better terms. "Petronas" - the Malaysian state oil company - "would come in, China would come in, India would come in." If Morales did nationalize the country's oil and gas, the multinational oil companies that currently hold the Bolivian concessions, including Repsol, a Spanish company, and British Gas, would probably sue Bolivia in an international court and try to organize an international boycott. But Stiglitz dismisses that threat: "If you had three, four, five first-rate companies around the world willing to compete for Bolivia's resources, no boycott would work."

Of course, there are strong countervailing views not only to MAS's nationalization program but also to any sweeping criticism of the policies of the principal international lending institutions: the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Inter-American Development Bank. "People criticize our recommendations," said Peter Bate, a spokesman for the IADB. "But before the international financial institutions intervened, Bolivia's inflation was running at 25,000 percent per year. What should we have done, let that continue?"

For Jeffrey Sachs, Joseph Stiglitz's colleague at Columbia and a former economic adviser to the Bolivian government, the problem was less the international lending institutions' recommendations than the lack of follow-up on the part of Washington. Gonzalo Sánchez de Losada, the first of the two presidents ousted in Bolivia's recent wave of protests, has said that when he went to see President Bush at the White House in 2002, the president talked of little except Afghanistan. As Sachs put it later in an op-ed piece in The Financial Times, the Bush administration "proved to be incapable of even the simplest responses to a profound crisis engulfing the region." In an e-mail message to me, he said he had "never seen such incompetence" as the Bush administration's approach to Latin America, which he characterized as comprising "neglect, insensitivity, disregard, tone-deafness." Sachs cited one damning example in Bolivia: as his government teetered on the verge of collapse in 2003, Sánchez de Losada asked the U.S. government for $50 million in emergency aid. Washington made $10 million available. As Sachs put it bitterly, the decision in effect invited MAS and the social activist movements - peasants, coca growers, laborers and the unemployed - "to finish off the job of bringing down the government."

In this, Joseph Stiglitz agrees. "One of the main stories" from Latin America's period of austerity measures imposed at the urging of international institutions, he told me, "is the gap between what was sold and what was delivered." In countries like Bolivia, he added, "people went through a lot of pain, and 20 years later now they don't see any of the benefits. Leaders in the anti-inflation fight gave the countries that followed their recommendations A-pluses. But few of the results in terms of incomes of the average person and poverty reduction had been yielded."

Many Bolivians, and certainly almost all MAS supporters, are more than prepared to blame the Americans for much of what went wrong during what Roberto Fernandez Téran, the economist from the University of San Símon, described to me as "the lost decade of the 1980's and the disappointments of the 1990's." A joke you hear often in Bolivia these days sarcastically describes the country's political system as a coalition between the government, the international financial institutions, multinational corporations and la embajada - the U.S. Embassy. But while it would be unwise to underestimate the force of knee-jerk anti-Americanism in Latin America, the ubiquitousness of leftist sentiments in Bolivia today has more to do, as Joseph Stiglitz points out, with the complete failure of neoliberalism to improve people's lives in any practical sense. It is almost a syllogism: many Bolivians believe (and the economic statistics bear them out) that the demands by international lending institutions that governments cut budgets to the bone and privatize state-owned assets made people's lives worse, not better; the Bolivians believe, also not wrongly, that the U.S. wields extraordinary influence on international financial institutions; and from these conclusions, the appeal of an anti-American, anti-globalization politics becomes almost irresistible to large numbers of people.

If Bolivians who support Morales and MAS seem drawn to thinking in conspiratorial terms about U.S. actions in the region, the mirror image of this attitude is to be found in Washington. There is a powerful consensus in U.S. government circles that holds that Morales is being bankrolled by Chávez - a charge that the Bolivian leader flatly denies. Roger Noriega, the former assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, repeatedly made the point during his tenure, echoing background briefings by Pentagon officials. "It's no secret that Morales reports to Caracas and Havana," Noriega said last July, just before leaving office. "That's where his best allies are."

Publicly, Thomas A. Shannon, Noriega's successor, has taken a more low-key approach. But the Bush administration's view of Morales does not appear to have changed significantly. Michael Shifter, a senior fellow at the Inter-American Dialogue, a policy group in Washington, and one of the shrewdest and most experienced American observers of Latin America, told me that he has been struck by the depth of conviction in Washington that Morales is dangerous. "People talk about him as if he were the Osama bin Laden of Latin America," Shifter told me, adding that, after a recent lecture Shifter gave at a military institution, two American officers came up to him and said that Morales "was a terrorist, a murderer, the worst thing ever." Shifter replied that he had seen no evidence of this. "They told me: 'You should. We have classified information: this guy is the worst thing to happen in Latin America in a long time."' In Shifter's view, there is now a tremendous sense of hysteria about Morales within the administration and especially at the Pentagon.

It has happened before. During the 2002 Bolivian elections, when Morales was a first-time candidate little known outside of the country, the U.S. ambassador at the time, Manuel Rocha, stated publicly that if Morales was elected, the U.S. would have to reconsider all future aid. Most observers, and Morales, too, who speaks of the episode with a combination of amusement and satisfaction, say that it got him and MAS at least 20 percent more votes. The current U.S. ambassador, David Greenlee, has been far more circumspect. But if anything, Washington's view of Morales has only hardened. And the reason for that, unsurprisingly, is Hugo Chávez's increasing role. As Michael Shifter puts it, "There is this tremendous fear that Chávez is living out the Fidel Castro dream of exporting revolution throughout Latin America and destabilizing the region - something that wasn't done during the cold war and is now being financed by Venezuelan oil."

For his part, Morales is unapologetic and, when pressed, grows more rather than less defiant. At his rallies, Cuban flags are ubiquitous, as are Che Guevara T-shirts and lapel pins. But he is at some pains to make the point that neither Venezuela nor Cuba is a model for the kind of society he wants Bolivia to become. Castro and Chávez, he told me, are his friends, but so are Secretary General Kofi Annan of the United Nations, President Jacques Chirac of France and Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero of Spain. Morales also makes a point of emphasizing that the era of "state socialism" is past. Even when he is talking about the nationalization of Bolivia's natural resources, which with the depenalization of coca cultivation is the central plank of his campaign, Morales is at pains to point out that the model he has in mind is closer to Brazil's state-owned oil giant, Petrobras, than to anything Castro would endorse.

When you spend time with Morales, it is hard not to conclude that he wants to have it both ways where his links with Chávez and Castro are concerned. For while he denies any particular affinity with either regime, there is no doubt that these two "radical" leaders are the ones to whom he has turned time and again for advice. Certainly, Hugo Chávez has made no secret of the sympathy he feels for Morales's campaign, while the state-run Cuban press has lavished a great deal of attention on Morales. MAS seems unsure of how to present these links. In Morales's campaign biography, there are angry sentences denying a connection to Chávez. But on the same page where these lines appear, there is a photograph in which Morales and the Venezuelan strongman are posed together.

On the campaign trail, "populist" doesn't even begin to describe the Morales style. He seems genuinely indifferent to creature comforts. He also seems committed to a kind of political campaigning that more closely resembles the labor activism that catapulted him to fame than to political campaigning in the classic sense. Morales has drawn a number of important Bolivian economists like Carlos Villegas to his side, but he seems most at ease among his rank-and-file supporters. The overwhelming majority of MAS activists appear to be volunteers, and while they seem to view Morales's candidacy almost as a sacred cause, it quickly becomes obvious that most have little experience in electoral politics. Morales's two bodyguards didn't seem to have the first clue about how to protect their charge. He travels without any serious security, almost always moving from place to place in a single S.U.V., accompanied by only a driver, an aide and whomever he is meeting with at that particular moment. MAS campaign offices are almost all utterly unadorned except for the usual campaign paraphernalia and posters and images of the candidate, his running mate and, inevitably, Che.

Even without apparent resources, MAS is surging, and the most recent polls put Morales ahead of his two principal rivals. Yet many Bolivians, including some who are sympathetic to MAS, say privately that Morales remains something of an unknown quantity. Shifter suggested to me that Morales is "still a work in progress," and a number of well-informed Bolivians I met agreed. The problem, of course, is that given the severity of the Bolivian crisis, the militancy of so much of the population and the impossibly high level of expectations that a MAS government would engender among Bolivia's poor and its long-marginalized indigenous populations, there is very little time. It is quite accurate to speak of the rebirth of the left in Latin America, but the sad truth is that the movement's return is more a sign of despair than of hope. Almost 40 years ago, one self-proclaimed revolutionary, Che Guevara, died alone and abandoned in the Bolivian foothills. Today, another self-proclaimed revolutionary, Evo Morales, could become the country's first indigenous and first authentically leftist president. But as was true of Che himself, it is by no means clear that Morales has any hope of fulfilling the expectations of his followers.

On a stage in a soccer stadium in Mar del Plata, before a rapturous crowd and with Hugo Chávez beside him, or on the campaign trail back home, surrounded by people who look as if they would give their lives for him, Morales exudes confidence. And the more Washington makes plain its opposition to him, the greater the fervor he inspires in his supporters. But if the history of the left in Latin America teaches anything, it is that charisma is never enough. The fate of Che Guevara, who failed to foment a Latin American revolution and left no coherent societal model behind for his followers, should have taught us that already.

David Rieff, a contributing writer, is the author, most recently, of "At the Point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention."

Noah Friedman-Rudovsky for The New York Times