[NYTr] The Real Reason People Fear Evo Morales
 
Date: Wed, 3 Oct 2007 19:59:56 -0500 (CDT)

Via NY Transfer News Collective  *  All the News that Doesn't Fit
 
Alternet - Oct 3, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/64220/

The Real Reason People Fear Evo Morales

By Roberto Lovato

"Why are you going to go listen to that idiot? That racist indio
(Indian) can't even talk during interviews," snarled my blonde-haired,
green eyed Cuban friend when I told him I'd be covering the visit of
Bolivian President Evo Morales. He was clearly unhappy with the
friendship between Morales and Fidel Castro. My friend was not alone.

Here in the North, the Bush administration regularly denies visas to
indigenous, mestizo (mixed Spanish and Indian), and even white members
of Morales' cabinet. In the South, meanwhile, right-wing Peruvian
novelist Mario Vargas Llosa recently published an article about Morales
titled, "A New Racism Approaches the Region: Indians Against Whites."

"To put the Latin American problem in racial terms as do some
demagogues is senseless and irresponsible," said Vargas Llosa.

Indian power ruffles feathers in the modern world.

The first time I saw Morales during his visit to New York for the
United Nations General Assembly meeting this week, he was suited up as
a midfielder in a soccer match on the Lower East Side. Though impressed
by some of what I'd heard about the very smart reform agenda of the
first indigenous head of state in Bolivia -- a majority indigenous
country -- in 500 years, the journalist in me in was skeptical about
political theater, even if it took the form of soccer, the only sport I
really like.

Yet, even from a distance, he looked very much at ease, undistracted
from his game despite the blaring cacharpaya (traditional Andean music)
or the throngs of Bolivianos screaming "Evo!" at his slightest pass or
shot. I asked Mathilde Lazcano, a Bolivian psychologist and social
worker who has met Morales and who worked among indigenous populations
for more than 20 years, why people were so effusive about Evo. "For
most of our lives, the indigenas, the poor of our country could not
express ourselves. I'm here because he (and) his movement brought to
life my work," she said, adding, "He's the real thing."

After the match, which his team won despite the presidente's missing a
penalty kick, he was whisked by his soccer-uniformed security crew
through the crowd. He stopped for a moment and stood right near me. I
studied his lanky frame, his straight hair and aquiline nose. Most
striking were his intense, but warm brown eyes. He looked like a more
genial version of the Geronimo pictures I grew up with. He looked
"integro" or "integral" as some of my most respected Salvadoran
revolutionary friends called those personifying the highest political
-- and personal -- ideals. But my biggest surprise was when I saw how
tall he was. Most Bolivianos I grew up with were short mestizos like
the Chavez brothers who played on a soccer team my not-so-PC brothers
in San Francisco's Mission district named the "Conquistadores" or
(Spanish) "Conquerors." Like them, it was easier for me to identify
with the Spanish and nationalist side of the mestizo equation than with
the indigenous side.

The 5-foot-10-inch Evo came, it seems, to turn over the tortilla of our
consciousness about Indians, race and power -- and about ourselves.

When I saw him on stage during a speech he gave the next day at the
historic Great Hall of the Cooper Union, he started looking even
taller. He nervously began by telling us that he was honored to stand
at a podium where the likes of honest Abe Lincoln (another lanky
president) have stood. But unlike Lincoln, he located himself in
relation to not just the "intellectual and professional" and "western"
tradition of power but also to the 2,000-year-old collective political
tradition of the Aymara people he descended from. "For 500 years," said
Morales, "we have had patience."

"It's amazing how he's able to weave and connect so many issues while
connecting them back to his base," said my friend, a highly respected
former Latin American diplomat in the audience.

Evo Morales also said things Lincoln or any other U.S. president could
or would never say, things like, "Capitalism is the worst enemy of
humanity" or "We need to decolonize internally and externally." I've
never heard a head of state, certainly not inside the United States,
interrogate and point out the cultural similarities between both
rightists and leftists of the "West."

Morales strikes a 180 degree difference from other indigenous South
American heads of state. Peru's Alejandro Toledo, the Stanford-trained
Ph.D. and former president, championed U.S. free trade agreements and
drug enforcement policies rejected by Morales. Strongly supported by
the U.S. State Department and Vargas Llosa, Toledo ranked among the
least popular presidents in Latin America, with 23 percent approval in
polls taken by the respected Mitofsky International last year. The same
polls ranked Morales among the most popular by margins of 81 percent.

It's not just that he's indigenous, but that he communicates honesty
and centeredness, even on TV as he did during his smash-hit (raucous
audience applause sounded like the fans at the soccer field in the
Lower East Side) appearance on Jon Stewart's The Daily Show.

By the time I met and spoke with him on the third and final day of my
time tracking him, I, like the growing number of those nominating him
for the Nobel Peace Prize, believed him when he looked at you and said
things like, "We do not have a vengeful mentality" or "We must build a
culture of life"; and I also understood why my white Cuban friend, the
U.S. State Department, Vargas Llosa and a slew of others criticize
Morales with such intensity: fear.

They fear him not only because he is indigenous, not only because he is
a leftist in the presidential palace with a massive base of support
across the entire insurgent continent; they fear him because his public
and private persona, his gentle charisma and ethical approach forces
them -- and us -- to look at the long history of violence and hate
buried in our individual and collective subconscious, our top-down
notions of political -- and personal -- modernity. He forces us all to
look at the inner Conquistador -- and the inner Indio.

We are ill-prepared to deal with someone who can say without blinking,
"I think that indigenous people are the moral reserve of humanity."

Though he uses state bureaucracy and other instruments of modernity, he
also wields them with an unprecedented difference. He has, for example,
established in Bolivia something like a Department of "Decolonization"
designed to help those wanting to deal with the ravages of modernity.

As he crisscrosses, like a skilled soccer player, New York City between
TV studios, skyscrapers, freeways, the 9-11 memorial and other symbols
of New York life, I hope he leaves the blueprint for such a department
for us to study and apply here.

[Roberto Lovato, a frequent Nation contributor, is a New York-based
writer with New America Media.]

B) 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

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