MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

The manager of orthodox economics dedicates landslide victory to Chavez and Fidel Castro

The first indigenous president of Bolivia managed over 60% of valid votes cast and victory in eight of nine regions

Evo Morales easily won an unprecedented third term as Bolivia’s president Sunday on the strength of the economic and political stability brought by his government, according to unofficial results.

Morales, a native Aymara and the country's first indigenous president received over 60% of the vote against 25% for cement magnate Samuel Doria Medina, the top vote-getter among four challengers, according to a quick count of 84% of the voting stations by the Ipsos firm for ATB television.

Doria Medina conceded defeat late Sunday and promised to “keep working to make a better country.”

Morales’s supporters ran into the streets to celebrate the win. In a victory speech from the balcony of the presidential palace in La Paz, Morales dedicated his victory to Cuba’s Fidel Castro and the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez.

He won eight of Bolivia’s nine states, including the former opposition stronghold of Santa Cruz, an agribusiness center in the eastern lowlands where he polled 57%, according to Ipsos.

While known internationally for his anti-imperialist and socialist rhetoric, the 55-year-old coca growers’ union leader is widely popular at home for a pragmatic economic stewardship that spread Bolivia’s natural gas and mineral wealth among the masses.

A boom in commodities prices increased export revenue nine-fold and the country has accumulated 15.5 billion dollars in international reserves. Economic growth has averaged 5% annually, well above the regional average, and is scheduled to reach 5.5% this year.

These achievements have been rewarded by acknowledgment from risk agencies, floating sovereign bonds for the first time in decades and praise from multilateral organizations such as the IMF and the World Bank.

Half a million people have put poverty behind them since Morales first took office in 2006, with per capita gross national income up from 1,000 that year to 2,550 dollars in 2013, according to the World Bank.

Public works projects abound, including a satellite designed to deliver Internet to rural schools, a fertilizer plant and La Paz’s gleaming new cable-car system. Morales’s latest promise: to light up La Paz with nuclear power.

Morales had sought Sunday to improve on his previous best showing — 64% in 2009 — and to maintain a two-thirds control of Bolivia’s Senate and assembly. That would let him change the constitution, which restricts presidents to two five-year terms, so he can run again.

He has not said whether he would seek a fourth term, only that he would “respect the constitution.” He did say in a recent TV interview, however, that he didn’t think people older than 60 should be president.

A court ruled last year that Morales could run for a third term because his first preceded a constitutional rewrite. All seats were up for grabs in the 36-member Senate and 130-member lower house. Results are expected to be officially announced on Monday.