Bolivian poor glimpse victory for their champion

Bolivians went to the polls yesterday to elect a new president, with popular indigenous leader Evo Morales hoping for a historic victory in south America's poorest country.
Opinion polls showed Mr Morales, 46, a former coca farmer, on 34%, a 5% lead over his nearest rival, Jorge "Tuto" Quiroga, a protege of the late, former dictator Hugo Banzer. If there is no clear majority there will be a run-off in January.

Mr Morales has waged a decade-long controversial battle with Washington over Bolivia's leaf fields of coca, the raw material used to make cocaine. Bolivia is the world's third-largest grower of coca.

"If [the US] wants relations, welcome," Mr Morales said after voting yesterday. "But no to a relationship of submission.
"I am the candidate of those despised in Bolivian history, the candidate of the most disdained, discriminated against."

A 24-hour ban on motor vehicles brought calm across the country yesterday as voter turnout was said to be high.

In Senkata,a neighbourhood of El Alto, on the high plateau above La Paz, the capital, hundreds of residents were queueing to vote when the school opened its doors at 7 am. In El Alto, like the rest of Bolivia, the majority of people are indigenous and poor, with three out of every four people in the city are Indian, jobless and survive on less than £1.30 a day.

Senkata is where the chain of events leading to today's vote began. In Black October 2003, Bolivian troops killed dozens of residents at a roadblock. When the violence spread, killing more than 70 in a week, the then Bolivia President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada resigned.

Maria Mammani, 54, a mother of six, sat on a bench outside the Senkata school. An Aymara woman, wearing a black bowler hat, white shawl, and a colourful, multi-layered skirt, she said her son picked up a dead child from the street the day Bolivian soldiers fired on neighbours. "Evo defends the poor. The other politicians are like past presidents, they are corrupt and will sell out this country."

Ariel Herrera, a 19-year-old carpenter and night school student, is voting for "Evo". "For the first time, one of us, an indigenous, someone who is from the poor class, will be president," he said.

If elected, Mr Morales would become the first wholly indigenous president in Latin America since Benito Juarez, a Zapotec Indian elected president of Mexico in the mid-1800s.