A Native Speaker; The campaign of Bolivian indigenous leader Evo Morales is lending hope to the region's poor but increasingly assertive underclass.

Byline: Jimmy Langman

On the ballot, he is listed as Sixto Jumpiri, one more candidate in the Bolivian national elections later this month. But to the Aymara and Quechua Indians of the Bolivian highlands, he is better known as Apu Mallku, or Supreme Leader. Not long ago, that millennial honorific might have sounded quaint. Today, traditional leaders like Jumpiri command a new brand of respect--and clout. The Apu Mallku's mandate is to oversee the vast network of ayllus, an ancient Andean system of governing councils that predates even the Inca empire. In the impoverished and neglected Bolivian countryside, the ayllus have made a comeback, their principles of communal cooperation and self-governance filling a void left by a fumbling state.

But Jumpiri, who dons a white-feathered cowboy hat and a traditional rainbow-colored poncho when he visits his constituents, wants more than respect in the highlands. He is demanding a stake in national power. That's why he is running for Congress on the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS in Spanish) ticket, a broad coalition of leftist unions and indigenous groups led by Evo Morales, a charismatic congressman and coca-farming leader who may be on the verge of becoming Bolivia's first-ever indigenous president. "This country has always been run by the white European minority," Jumpiri says. "With Evo, we have a chance to make a change."

The change is already underway. Across Latin America, indigenous movements are surging in tandem with the more widespread rejection of neoliberal economic policies. Already among the region's poorest citizens, plagued by continuing discrimination and attacks on their land rights, indigenous communities have led the region in the backlash against globalization. This is not just a cultural revival but a vibrant, sometimes explosive, outpouring of civic and political activism that is wielding greater influence over the region's affairs, challenging centuries-old political arrangements, and helping to reshape the way Latin Americans see themselves. Since 2000, indigenous uprisings have been instrumental in toppling four presidents in Ecuador and Bolivia, two of them in the past year alone. A quieter upheaval is taking hold in places like Colombia, Venezuela and Guatemala, where burnished faces are gaining visibility in federal and local governments that were once as white as the Andean slopes.

Until now, the most celebrated symbol of Latin American indigenous assertion has been Sub-Commandante Marcos, the shadowy, balaclava-clad Zapatista guerrilla who sparked a revolt in rural Mexico in 1994. But no one represents the new activism better than Morales, an Aymara Indian and longtime farmer of coca, the waxy-leafed plant from which cocaine is made. Morales parlayed his cachet as a "cocalero" leader into national headlines in 2002, narrowly losing the Bolivian presidency. He's since broadened his agenda to include changing Bolivia's neoliberal economic model and boosting indigenous participation in politics.

If Morales wins the Dec. 18 election (he holds a slim lead, favored by a third of the electorate), he will become the first full-blooded Indian president of a Latin American nation since Mexico's Benito Juarez, who served two four-year terms in the mid-1800s. Already the stocky, jet-haired man whom Bolivians know as "Evo" is becoming an international icon. "Morales will inspire indigenous people everywhere," says Alvaro Bello, a social anthropologist and --indigenous expert with the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America. If elected, says Bello, "he will have broken 500 years of indigenous exclusion."

His victory remains in question, but the exclusion is not. A World Bank study released last month on indigenous peoples in Bolivia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico and Peru found that poverty rates remain dismally unchanged. Overall, indigenous people are 13 to 30 percent more likely to be poorer than non-Indians. In Mexico, they earned barely a quarter the wages of their fair-skinned compatriots in 2002--down from a third in 1989. The study shows that even educated Indians earn "considerably less" than their nonindigenous counterparts. "We can't come out and say it with economic models," says Gillette Hall, a coauthor of the bank's study, "but most people would say that's probably due to discrimination."