Por Edmundo Paz Soldán, a professor of Hispanic languages and literature at Cornell, is the author of the forthcoming Turing's Delirium (THE NEW YORK TIMES, 20/01/06):
THE day after Bolivians elected the populist Evo Morales as their first-ever indigenous president, a colleague of mine back in New York called to ask about the fate of my relatives still in the country. "I mean," he said, "now that the machete-wielding, coca-chewing campesinos have taken over, shouldn't they leave before it's too late?" He also asked me to describe what was happening in the streets of La Paz, which I was then visiting. Were white middle-class owners boarding up their shops? Had they stopped wearing Western clothing and, as a cartoonist suggested, flocked to buy ponchos?
I normally would have complained about his stereotypical view of Bolivians - a people with such a penchant for coups and civil unrest that governing them has become an impossible feat - but this time I could not. I was too shocked by the maturity of Bolivians' reaction to Mr. Morales's election. Only seven months ago, the country was on the brink of civil war and regional disintegration, and Mr. Morales was seen by the urban, non-indigenous middle class as a rabble-rouser who, by ordering former miners, trade unionists and community activists to blockade roads and airports, had paralyzed the economy, isolated Bolivia from the rest of the world and toppled two elected presidents. People in the wealthy, eastern, lowland state of Santa Cruz, complaining of the "unruly Indians back in the West," were already demanding more autonomy from the central government; some were even calling for secession.
But when Evo Morales is inaugurated on Sunday, it will be thanks to the support of the educated middle class who used to be scared of him. Even in Santa Cruz, where middle-class white youngsters frequently pelted Mr. Morales with eggs upon his arrival at the airport, his Movement Toward Socialism party garnered enough votes on Election Day last month to acquire a seat in the national Senate. In truth, I had underestimated the ability of Bolivians to adjust to a new situation - indeed, to any situation.
I should have known better. When I was growing up in a fairly affluent neighborhood of Cochabamba, Bolivia's third largest city, I blithely rearranged my soccer games and dating adventures around each new ordinance or curfew imposed by the revolving military juntas. "There never are solutions in Bolivia," says my father, a retired doctor. "But there are always exits."
And this time Mr. Morales offered an artful exit from what had come to seem like an endless economic and political crisis. The politicians of the traditional parties did not realize how weary Bolivians had grown of the corruption of the white-collar establishment, and of a 20-year-old neoliberal model that had been able to stabilize the economy but could not make it grow.
As my uncle reminded me shortly before the election, Mr. Morales was likely to win in some measure because one of the indigenous people's three main commandments was "do not steal" - a rather surprising comment from my uncle, a retired general who, in 1993, had urged me to pray for the sitting president's health after an Aymara Indian had been elected vice president. All Mr. Morales had to do was to say time and again that while he was going to change the political and economic model, he would respect private property. He said that in plazas full of campesinos in the countryside, and in five-star hotel restaurants brimming with anxious businessmen.
Perhaps this is why some of my friends and relatives in Bolivia, even those who sometimes worried out loud about the coming Indian revenge against their former criollo rulers, willed themselves to pay attention only to the part of Mr. Morales's message that they wanted to hear. And Mr. Morales made it easy for them by quickly learning the main rule for a politician aspiring to the presidency: to adapt his message so that he can be whoever his listeners want him to be.
Thus, in his first trip abroad as president-elect, he was the old-school radical leader when in the company of Venezuela's Hugo Chávez and Cuba's Fidel Castro, but a reassuring voice in Spain and France, countries with interests in the Bolivian gas and oil industry who fear a nationalist confiscation of their holdings. At home, Mr. Morales has tempered his promise to abandon the neoliberal model with warnings that "we cannot undo in five years something that has been in place for decades."
Now, Bolivians have been fixating on what Mr. Morales will wear when he is invested as president Sunday. Will he choose traditional Indian dress, or, as a cousin of mine who voted for him wants, a "more appropriate" Western-style suit? Judging by what he has done and said lately, Mr. Morales seems likely to find a sartorial compromise aimed at pleasing as many voters as possible.