Morales Backers Fail to Win Control

by Fiona Smith
President Evo Morales' supporters failed to win control of an assembly that will rewrite Bolivia's constitution, leaving him no choice but to compromise over his ambitious plans to empower the indigenous majority and boost state control over the economy.

Morales allies won 132 seats in the 255-person body Sunday, far short of the two-thirds majority they needed to push through their leftist agenda, according to unofficial results.

In a separate ballot question with potentially explosive results, voters in four of Bolivia's nine states overwhelmingly chose greater political and economic autonomy for their states. Each state voted independently on autonomy and was not affected by the outcome in other states.

The first official results were not expected until Monday.

Sunday's vote was a crucial test for Morales, an Indian elected in December on promises to wrest political control of South America's poorest nation from a corrupt political class and more evenly distribute the nation's wealth. He began by nationalizing the natural gas industry on May 1.

The assembly, which begins work Aug. 6, has up to a year to rewrite the constitution, which must then be endorsed in a nationwide referendum.

Compromise could be difficult for Morales, whose government has so far used decrees to advance some of its goals, such as nationalizing the natural gas industry.

He had hoped to use the constituent assembly to enshrine in law the accelerated seizure of unproductive lands from absentee owners, and to strengthen traditional Indian justice systems in a country with a notoriously corrupt legal system.

A subdued Morales attempted to put the best face on the vote Sunday.

"This support gives us more force to keep changing Bolivia," he told reporters at his home.

Morales had said he was voting against the autonomy ballot question, claiming it would only benefit "oligarchs." Now he will be forced into accommodation on the issue with political foes led by the Podemos party of former president Jorge Quiroga who backed it solidly.

Voters in the eastern state of Santa Cruz, Bolivia's largest and wealthiest and the center of opposition to Morales, approved autonomy by an overwhelming margin, unofficial results showed. State leaders have complained that too much of their revenues are siphoned off by the central government to subsidize the poorer Andean highlands that are Morales' base.

Quiroga made Morales' close relationship with President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela the central issue ahead of Sunday's vote. He accused Morales of selling Bolivia out to Chavez's plans to consolidate power regionally.

Podemos won 64 seats in the constituent assembly, with a collection of smaller opposition parties splitting the rest.

Morales won the presidency by a wide margin in December and is hugely popular, though his relations with the United States have chilled as he has forged closer ties with Venezuela and Cuba.

Morales remains president of Bolivia's coca-grower's union, and his Movement Toward Socialism party, or MAS, is a broad cauldron of social and union activists, landless peasants, coca growers and middle-class intellectuals more accustomed to organizing social movements than governing.

Critics claimed Morales would seek to use the assembly to increase his power as did Chavez, who held a constituent assembly in 1999 that concentrated executive power and hastened his re-election.

Many in MAS also support changes that would allow Morales to run for another five-year term. The law now bans him from running for re-election in 2010.