MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Shepherd, union leader, congressman, president

Evo Morales, 46, who January 22 will become Bolivia's first-ever Indian president is a leftist leader of coca-leaf farmers and former llamas shepherd born to a highland couple who saw three of their six children die in infancy.

The stocky 46-year-old Aymara politician was born in a straw and mud dwelling in a small highland community in Oruro province, more than 400 kilometers south of La Paz, to a poor family of farmers. Evo, as he is popularly known, had six brothers and sisters but only him and two other Hugo and Esther, survived.

As a child he looked after llamas and worked the harsh soil of the Andes, more than 3,000 meters above sea level, which yields a bounty of potatoes.

Teachers at the small rural school he attended in his native village recall that he was a good student, but Evo came up just short of finishing high school and moved with his family at 16 to the city of Oruro, where he completed his military service.

In Oruro he learned to play the trumpet in an army band and was a talented soccer player. He moved in the 1980s to the tropical Chapare region, in Cochabamba, looking for opportunities, and was introduced to labor activism by the coca growers.

His defense of coca crops which has been used in Bolivia in rituals and to make food and medicines since ancient times --even when surplus is also sold to cocaine traffickers--, pushed him to the top of the peasant movements.

The labor movement provided Morales, who is not married but has two children with different women, with a springboard into politics.

In 1995, he founded the Political Instrument for the Sovereignty of the People, which competed in elections as the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS). He gained a seat in Congress but he did not give up his union leadership role.

During his 2002 bid or the presidency Evo was expelled from Congress for violating ethics rules. His exit from Congress came at the end of the administration of Jorge Quiroga, the conservative who was Evo's main rival in Sunday's elections but who finished 20 percentage points behind him.

But Morales's ouster from Congress turned out to be a blessing in disguise with the Indian leader taking a close second place in the 2002 general elections, behind Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada. The leftist's good showing was attributed in part to his straightforward way of speaking and down-to-earth rural speech inflections.

Political analysts agree that he was also helped by statements made by then-U.S. Ambassador to Bolivia Manuel Rocha, who criticized Morales just days before the election.

That was the first public clash between Washington and the Aymara socialist who has never hidden his admiration for guerrilla leader Ernesto "Che" Guevara trapped and killed by soldiers in Bolivia in 1967.

As leader of the opposition and an organizer of street protests, Evo played a leading role in the ouster of Sanchez de Lozada in October 2003 and of his successor, Carlos Mesa, in June of this year, an event that resulted in early general elections last Sunday.