Evo Morales: The cuddly crusader

It's because of one South American revolutionary, Che Guevara, that the humble beret owes its status as a sartorial signifier of romantic rebellion. Now, thanks to another South America revolutionary, President Evo Morales of Bolivia, stripy alpaca jumpers could soon acquire a similar insurrectionary cachet.

After triumphing in Bolivia's presidential election in December 2005, the 46-year-old Aymara tribesman passed the time until inauguration day by taking his colourful pullover on a whistle-stop diplomatic tour, posing for photo-ops with his more soberly dressed counterparts in Venezuela, Cuba, France, China, Spain and South Africa. Given the worldwide publicity, you could be forgiven for suspecting he had a stake in a knitting factory - but only if one knew very little of his politics.

Morales once described capitalism as "the worst enemy of humanity". If that wasn't enough to provoke nervous mutterings in Washington and elsewhere, Morales - leader of Bolivia's Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) - has backed his words with spectacular action. Last Monday - 1 May, the international workers' holiday and the hundredth day since his swearing-in - Morales announced he was renationalising Bolivia's energy industry, and dispatched troops to take charge of 56 sites belonging to foreign-owned gas and oil companies. While this provoked international umbrage, Morales's move was domestically popular, prompting street celebrations in the capital, La Paz.

Bolivia has the second largest natural gas reserves in South America, but remains the poorest country on the continent, which is why arguments over the ownership of its resources have dominated Bolivian politics in recent years.

In October 2003, strikes, riots and outright fighting over the question left more than 70 dead, forced the then president Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada into exile, and passed into Bolivian history as the Gas War. Lozada, now living in the US, is wanted on genocide charges in Bolivia. More pro-nationalisation protests, many violent, occurred over the next two years.

Under Morales's May Day decree, all foreign energy firms operating in Bolivia have 180 days to negotiate new contracts, under which their sales must be channelled through Bolivia's state energy company, YPFB, or quit the country. Brazil's state-owned firm Petrobras, through which Brazil imports 55 per cent of its gas, is among those with Bolivian tanks parked on their lawns, and has suspended future investment in Bolivia. Spanish-Argentinian company Repsol - along with Petrobras, the biggest foreign investor in Bolivia - has lobbied the Spanish government to send a delegation to La Paz. British Gas and BP, also at large in Bolivia, have expressed concern. And Morales has been summoned to meet the presidents of Brazil, Argentina and Venezuela - not all of whom are wholly unsympathetic to Morales's robust approach.

A wave of leftist nationalist populism is sloshing across South America - the so-called "pink tide" - and Morales is only the most flamboyant of its surfers.

The man in the jumper was born on 26 October 1959, to desperately poor, illiterate parents in a mountain village. Of the family's seven children, only Evo and two others survived their first year. Morales worked as a llama-herder, then a coca farmer, then an activist in the coca farmers' union in Bolivia's Chapare region (he is still head of the national union).

In 1997 he was elected to congress. In January 2002, his rivals contrived to remove him, however, over allegations that he had been responsible for the deaths of soldiers and police officers in riots thrown by coca farmers protesting US-backed coca eradication plans. Morales ran for president five months later and came second. His strong showing was widely attributed to the US's then ambassador, Manuel Rocha, who suggested that the US might cut off aid if Bolivia elected a man like Morales.

He is a populist of genius. His every utterance, every decision, seems to emphasise his humble roots, rugged honesty, and passion for his country. Morales is, as he ceaselessly reminds people, the first of Bolivia's majority indigenous population to lead the country since Spanish conquest in 1538. He is perceived as incorruptible (a novelty in Bolivian politics) and committed (he has been jailed three times).

Upon taking office, Morales halved the presidential salary, declaring that he had use the balance to hire schoolteachers. Unmarried, he made his elder sister Esther, a shopkeeper, first lady. He also plays the trumpet.

Morales continues, also, to champion the cause of the coca-growers. Coca - the plant from which cocaine is refined - plays a key role in many traditional practices. Previous governments, anxious to keep getting US aid, abetted America's quixotic coca eradication programmes, effectively deploying Bolivia's army to suppress its poorest people at the behest of a foreign power. Under a 1988 law, only 12,000 hectares were set aside for the legal production of coca. In 2004, Morales's agitation won another 3,200 hectares, but as president his ambitions go further.

Morales wants the United Nations to rescind a 1961 convention that declares coca an illegal narcotic, so that Bolivia might export coca-based soap, wine, shampoo and biscuits, among other products. In March 2006, in a gesture that demonstrated both coca's versatility and Morales's innate cheekiness, he presented the visiting US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice with a ukulele decorated with lacquered coca leaves.

There was a time when a left-leaning South American president could look forward to a CIA-backed coup d'état, a violent death and rosy martyrdom. However, times have changed. Morales's popularity represents possible stability - something which can only benefit Bolivia, which has averaged better than one change of government a year since independence. More importantly, Morales will feel a certain safety in left-wing numbers. These include Venezuela's Hugo Chavez (soon to visit the UK), who has used his country's oil wealth to promote a somewhat authoritarian socialist agenda, Argentina's Nestor Kirchner, who fulminates against the IMF, Chile's Michelle Bachelet, who was jailed and tortured under General Pinochet, Uruguay's Tabare Vazquez, the first identifiably left-wing leader elected there and Brazil's Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who despite the current contretemps with Morales, is a kindred spirit, with a similar union background.

Morales has taken a big gamble. The foreign energy corporations have an estimated £3bn invested in his country, which they maytake elsewhere - and circuses have to be accompanied by bread at some stage. Morales has said, "Tomorrow it will be the mines, the forest resources and the land." Bolivia, and those with an interest in it, must watch, whether excited, nervous or bemused by this cheerful, cuddly crusader, to see whether Morales proves more Mandela or Mugabe.