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Washington PostEvo Pays a Socialist Call
Bolivia's Morales Makes Most of First D.C. Visit
By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 22, 2008; Page C01
The students buzzed excitedly as they stood in the freezing dark at American University while Secret Service agents searched their backpacks. They filled one auditorium and overflowed into another, waiting to see a Latin American leader who has become a folk hero to his poor countrymen in Bolivia -- even as he has alienated its elite, alarmed U.S. officials and polarized the area's Bolivian immigrant community.
There were grizzled professors and nonprofit types in the reserved seats, chatting of bygone wars and revolutions, mentioning Salvador Allende and Che Guevara and Fidel Castro. A hush fell as Bolivian President Evo Morales strode in, flanked by security men, and the entire room rose in a standing ovation.
Morales, a handsome man of 48 with a shock of thick black hair, looked every bit the part of an indigenous peasant leader turned politician. He wore a simple collarless jacket and a rough white cotton shirt with no tie. When he spoke, in Spanish, it was not to tackle the host of thorny U.S.-Bolivian issues but to present his version of Bolivia's tortured racial history and of his own quest for power.
"I come from a majority that was always the most excluded, the most hated, the most marginalized, the most humiliated," he said. At one time, Bolivia was so racially stratified that Aymara Indians, such as his grandparents, "were not even allowed to enter the cities." Even a decade ago, when indigenous leaders tried to engage in politics, he said, "we were told our only political rights were the pick and the shovel."
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