By DAN KEANE
Associated Press Writer
AP Photo ASAPEVOS101
Doc: 00384413 DB: research_d_2007_2 Date: Mon Jun 25 17:47:12 2007
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NOTE TO APME JUDGES: Although this story is dated June 25, 2007, it appeared only in AP's asap service, which showcased stories on a weekly cycle. It was available to newspapers for use on July 1, 2007.
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SOCCER -- Kicking into thin air
The soccer-mad Bolivian president is fighting a ban on high-altitude games. DAN KEANE challenges him to a game
AP Photo ASAPEVOS101
By DAN KEANE
Associated Press Writer
LA PAZ, Bolivia (AP) _ Evo Morales swears playing soccer at high altitude can't hurt you. Lying flat on my back on the floor of my apartment after another loss to the Bolivian president and his team of retired World Cup ringers, I'm inclined to agree.
Sure, I've got a twitchy, lung-deep cough, a pair of knotted legs and a cleat-smashed big toe. But if a low-country reporter whose only regular exercise is typing really fast can hack his way through a soccer game up here at 11,800 feet above sea level, then what is Pele whining about?
The Brazilian soccer god has joined many of his lowland countrymen in supporting a recent decision by FIFA to ban international matches above 8,200 feet, excluding the capitals of Bolivia, Colombia, and Ecuador as well as the stadiums of top teams in Peru, Chile, and Mexico.
Based on somewhat arbitrarily defined health risks (why not ban games in extreme heat or cold?), the ruling aims to undo the highland teams' considerable home-field advantage over their visiting lowland rivals. While provoking howls of protest across the Andes, the measure has drawn support from fans and officials alike in flatland futbol giants Argentina and Brazil, with one Brazilian soccer official even hailing the altitude ban as "a victory for humankind."
Those are fighting words in Bolivia, whose poor but proud soccer fans are generally accustomed to considering themselves part of humankind. The day after the ban was announced, Morales summoned the foreign press to the presidential palace and fired back: "He who wins at altitude wins with dignity; he who fears altitude has no dignity."
During the press conference I reminded the president he still owed us foreign correspondents a chance to redeem our own dignity after a blurry 11-1 or 12-1 whipping he and his boys gave us last October. Evo grinned at the challenge, and immediately added us to the ticket for a nationwide high-altitude sports rally late last month.
___
THE BEAUTIFUL, IF NOT PRETTY, GAME
The day began with Evo hopping on a trampoline on the street in front of the presidential palace not long after sunup, and the president went on to play three other soccer games before our own.
If all the action wore the man down, it was hard to tell. Evo's only 47 years old, and though sporting an age-appropriate thickness around the middle, he's fit enough to run his administration on a relentless dawn-to-midnight schedule, taking his vacations only in 90 minute breaks on the soccer pitch. He's an able player, strong if not flashy, prowling the top of the box while younger staffers and the aging stars of Bolivia's 1994 World Cup team lead the attack down the wings.
When the crossing pass comes his way, he is quick to leap for a header and happy to mix it up in front of the goal. Last year one defender accidentally broke his nose.
On this particular afternoon, we journalists escaped La Paz's Hernando Siles Stadium with only a 2-0 defeat, a moral victory given our own rudderless defense (everyone wants to guard the president; no one can guard the World Cup guys.)
Evo has since continued his protest against the FIFA ban with games at the foot of a disappearing Andean glacier, on an icy slope 19,700 feet up the slope of a dormant volcano, and against Paraguayan President Nicanor Duarte at near-sea-level Asuncion.
Earlier this month, Evo faced off against a team of Brazilian diplomats in the manicured garden of the Brazilian ambassador's La Paz mansion. As waiters in white gloves and string ties served caipirinhas and fried cheese, the president and his security guards gamely thrashed the diplomats 6-0.
Even the Brazilians' wives and children were unable to resist the occasional "Evo!" cheer.
___
A BRUSH WITH BREATHLESSNESS
Being that close to a head of state out there yelling and sweating like anyone else can tend to make one a bit giddy, no matter who you're supposed to be rooting for. During our own game, a rare press corps attack left Evo and I idling together at midfield, hands on hips, eyes following the action downfield. Or his were: I was staring at Evo instead, soaking up an exclusive presidential moment and searching my asphyxiated brain for a clever remark.
In our wheezing silence I suddenly saw how plainly human he seemed, free for a rare moment of all the handlers, the guards, the howling media dog pack and the fleet of tinted-window Land Cruisers. The baggage that so clearly divides us on any other day had vanished, freeing us from the roles of president and reporter, Indian and gringo, former llama herder and spoiled college boy. We were just a couple dudes -- "humankind," to say it fancy -- running around a grassy field in the sunshine.
To complain that my lungs were on fire would have only killed the moment.
___
POINT TAKEN
I rotated out a few minutes later. As the referee blew the final whistle, security guards in red and green tracksuits bolted on to the field to surround the president. The television scrum shouldered their cameras and galloped after them, swearing at each others' snaking microphone cables. And next to me on the sidelines a round-bellied school teacher suddenly appeared, exhorting his class of wide-eyed 10-year-old girls to get out there and grab Evo for an autograph.
At his barked command, they broke onto the field at a dead sprint, utterly oblivious to the allegedly treacherous Andean air. "Run!" the teacher bellowed. "Run!"
___
asap contributor Dan Keane is an AP correspondent based in La Paz.
___
Want to comment? Sound off at mailto:soundoffasapap.org.
Bolivia's racial, geographical divide sharpens with shots in air and talk of civil war
By DAN KEANE
Associated Press Writer
AP Photos NY392-394
Doc: 00390100 DB: research_d_2007_3 Date: Sat Sep 29 20:22:08 2007
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Bolivia's racial, geographical divide sharpens with shots in air and talk of civil war
AP Photos NY392-394
By DAN KEANE
Associated Press Writer
SANTA CRUZ, Bolivia (AP) _ Miguel Roda fires four shots into the palm trees and imagines a civil war.
"We will spill our last drop of blood, comrades!" he shouts to a few dozen supporters gathered in a city plaza. "We will defend Santa Cruz inch by inch, street by street and town by town!"
The enemy, to this black-bereted, revolver-toting Bolivian, is his leftist president, Evo Morales. Roda's dream: to revive the Bolivian Socialist Falange, an ultranationalist party that was strong in the 1950s and then dormant for decades.
Civil war may seem unthinkable, but in Santa Cruz, a lowland city and anti-Morales stronghold, the appearance of Roda's fringe group reflects the alarm gripping the white elite. Morales' reforms are popular among his fellow highland Indians, but take dead aim at the frontier capitalism practiced in Santa Cruz state.
Old regional and racial rivalries, many Bolivians believe, are deepening the split.
"The elite feel absolutely violated by the changes taking place in Bolivian society," says Jose Mirtenbaum, a sociologist at Gabriel Rene Moreno University in Santa Cruz. "The situation here is very emotional, and very irrational. But as the saying goes, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you."
Since his election 21 months ago, Morales' program has met fierce though almost exclusively peaceful resistance from the elite of Santa Cruz, a once isolated cow town that remains the richest city in South America's poorest country.
Its U.S.-style consumerism, bootstrap mentality and racial makeup don't easily mix with Morales' vision of a communal state ruled by the traditional values of Bolivia's long-oppressed Indian majority.
Santa Cruz's elite made their millions from soy plantations, cattle ranches and real estate and feel targeted by government plans to seize land judged idle or fraudulently obtained and give it to the needy.
Santa Cruz is also the center of Bolivia's energy industry, and some worry about foreign investment now that Morales has forced international gas companies to increase royalty payments. Its leaders want autonomy and a bigger share of their state's natural gas revenues, but Morales needs the cash for desperately poor highland states.
That makes his revolution much more of an uphill battle than that of his closest ally, President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, who has billions in petrodollars to spend.
All these are hot-button issues. But civil war?
"The Bolivian is a very impatient person. He always hopes for change, but he always sees the solution in catastrophe," says Victor Jemio, a retired Bolivian army general and military analyst. The country is notoriously unstable, he notes, having had 84 presidents and dictators in 182 years.
Morales, 47, was in New York last week for the U.N. General Assembly and showed up on Comedy Central's "Daily Show," denouncing capitalism as "the worst enemy of humanity" while jokingly pleading not to be considered part of "the axis of evil."
But in Santa Cruz, few are joking. Many believe uncorroborated whispers that Morales is flying in arms from Venezuela on unregistered midnight flights. A cryptic video recently posted on YouTube by a right-wing Santa Cruz group purports to show Indian "paramilitaries" crawling around in the underbrush on the shores of Lake Titicaca.
This year's scariest yarn was given credence by O Globo, one of neighboring Brazil's largest newspapers. It quoted an anonymous Santa Cruz state official as bragging that a 12,000-strong anti-Morales militia was hidden in the jungle, awaiting the proper moment.
The newspaper's reporter never saw any militia, and no evidence has emerged to support any of the gossip.
Roda explains his gunshots as a tribute to the memory of a handful _ the exact number is in dispute _ of Falange members killed in 1958 by Indian troops sent to quell their rebellion.
The "massacre" has become a legend in Santa Cruz cafes and online chat rooms, where the bitter memory sometimes carries a racist shadow.
"The number of dead is less important than the humiliation (Santa Cruz) suffered at the hands of a pack of hounds blinded by alcohol and irrationality," Santa Cruz historian Alcides Parejas said in an e-mail interview.
It still echoes a half-century later as Indian immigrants _ largely Morales supporters _ arrive in search of work, driving Santa Cruz state's population from 2 million in 2001 to an estimated 2.5 million today.
Morales stoked the whites' fears last month when he hosted a parade of Indians alongside Bolivian soldiers at a Santa Cruz air base.
The tension sometimes spills into the streets.
The Cruceno Youth Union, an ally of Roda's group, was accused of organizing a pre-dawn raid in August on a largely Indian market. In footage shown on national television, drunken young men smashed car windows and threatened vendors with racial taunts. A car carrying fleeing thugs ran down and injured a vendor.
Union members deny any involvement. But the boys hanging around their ramshackle clubhouse twirl big sticks and baseball bats, and don't hide their distaste for pro-Morales newcomers.
"Either they adapt to Santa Cruz, or they return to their own territory," Union member Victor Hugo Vhistrox told The Associated Press.
Some fear the pistol-wavers' dreams will come true if common ground isn't found.
"We've arrived at a moment that we don't know exactly how to face," says Carlos Valverde, a Santa Cruz TV commentator and fierce Morales critic. Valverde belonged to the Falange as a teenager in the 1950s when his father was one of its leaders, but doesn't endorse violence.
"The fear I have is that one day we'll arrive at the cliff," he says, "and we'll arrive with such force that some will fall over the edge. And then it'll all go to hell."
AP Interview: Bolivian president recounts beatings at hands of anti-narcotics police
AP Photo DGX104, DGX103, DGX105, DGX101
Doc: 00158230 DB: research_d_2007_4 Date: Sat Nov 3 00:58:35 2007
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AP Interview: Bolivian president recounts beatings at hands of anti-narcotics police
Eds: RECASTS with Morales recollections of police beatings.
AP Photos DGX104, DGX103, DGX105, DGX101
By DAN KEANE
and
FRANK BAJAK
Associated Press Writers
LA PAZ, Bolivia (AP) _ In a new feature film about his journey from dirt-poor sheep herder to Bolivia's president, Evo Morales is portrayed being beaten unconscious by anti-narcotics police and found the next day by fellow coca union leaders.
In an interview with The Associated Press, Morales said there were in fact multiple beatings during his years fighting forced coca eradication _ and that he wants the armed U.S. agents who still direct his country's anti-narcotics police to leave Bolivia.
"It wasn't just once or twice," Morales said Friday, becoming animated as he recounted harrowing memories from the comfort a sofa in his presidential residence. "I could tell you many of these stories."
Bolivia's first indigenous president also told the AP that the world's richest nations must be made to pay for the damage their profligate use of natural resources has caused developing countries.
He said he and other Latin American leaders are exploring possible legal means for demanding compensation for the developed world's "ecological debt."
"It's not possible that some in the industrialized world live very well economically while affecting, even destroying others," said the 48-year-old Aymara Indian. Scientists count this Andean nation's rapidly melting glaciers among the most profound signs of global warming.
In a wide-ranging 70-minute interview, Morales also said:
_ His version of socialism requires state control of all basic services, including telecommunications.
_ Armed separatists are looking to provoke fatal confrontations in the country's pro-autonomy eastern lowlands. He said he ordered troops to quit the region's main airport last month during a standoff over landing revenues after getting intelligence that the crowd that had stormed the facility included rabble-rousers with guns.
_ This majority indigenous country will next week become the first to ratify the Sept. 13 U.N. declaration endorsing the rights of the world's native peoples. The United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand were the only countries to vote against the declaration.
After winning the presidency in December 2005, Morales has increased Bolivia's annual natural gas revenues from US$300 million to US$2 billion (from euro200 million to euro1.4 billion) a year by exerting greater state control over the industry.
Water utilties have reverted to state control and authorities are negotiating the re-nationalization of the country's main telecommunications company, Entel, which is owned by Telecom Italia SpA. Officials have indicated electrical power could be next.
Morales has allied himself closely with Hugo Chavez, Venezuela's leftist president, and Fidel Castro, Cuba's aging leader.
But his vision of socialism is guided, Morales said, by the communal decision-making of Bolivia's indigenous societies and their "way of living in harmony with Mother Earth."
Those politics have not endeared him to the United States, his nemesis in the late 1980s and 1990s when he led coca growers, or "cocaleros", in protests against Washington-directed forced eradication campaigns. The plant's small green leaf has been chewed as a mild stimulant here for millenia, but is best known outside the country as the base ingredient of cocaine.
The struggle between protesters and eradication forces often became a deadly game of cat and mouse.
One night in 1989, police nabbed Morales at a coca farmers' dinner, dragging him away to a van where he was kicked repeatedly. A crowd of his fellow cocaleros gave chase, prompting worried police "to start kicking me even harder," Morales remembered.
"But then suddenly they lifted me high up, and I'm up there with my face towards the floor of the van, and they threw me down like a piece of meat," he said. "I passed out."
Cocaleros rushed van and the police fled into the jungle, where they dumped their unconcious prisoner.
Friends of Morales found him prone and bleeding the next day, a scene recreated in the Bolivian-made film "Evo Pueblo."
While last month he expressed his desire that all U.S. military personnel leave Bolivia, Morales on Friday said he wants any and all armed foreign troops out.
Despite his close ties with Chavez, the only Venezuelan soldiers now in Bolivia are unarmed pilots who fly him around in loaned helicopters, Morales said.
"The only armed soldiers I've seen are those from the United States."
The U.S. Embassy will not say how many troops or military contractors it has in the country, but they are believed to not exceed a few dozen.
Many of them work out of the base at Chimore, in the coca-growing foothills of central Bolivia. Morales once spent many a long night in the base's jail cells.
"In those days, when I was at Chimore, I was detained, I was handcuffed, I was locked up," he remembered. The president smiled and shook his head.
"Now they have to salute us every time we arrive."
Mini Cooper, ruined in Katrina flood, part of Bolivia's bizarre car market
By DAN KEANE
Associated Press Writer
AP Photos NY485-487
Doc: 00228408 DB: research_d_2007_4 Date: Sat Nov 17 20:41:33 2007
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Mini Cooper, ruined in Katrina flood, part of Bolivia's bizarre car market
AP Photos NY485-487
By DAN KEANE
Associated Press Writer
COCHABAMBA, Bolivia (AP) _ The bathtub ring of mold on the ceiling of Colleen McGaw's Mini Cooper marks how high Hurricane Katrina's floodwaters rose inside the sporty red coupe.
"There was this mold, this grossness all over it," McGaw says, recalling how she found the car, her college graduation present, three months after the storm submerged her New Orleans neighborhood. "I cried. It may sound lame, but I cried. I had wanted a car like that since I was a child."
Two years later, McGaw was shocked to learn from The Associated Press that her beloved Mini turned up 3,600 miles (5,800 kilometers) south in Bolivia. Its new owner _ stuck with a complete overhaul at US$23,000 (euro15,700) and counting _ is feeling her pain.
Tens of thousands of cars were damaged or destroyed by Katrina, which submerged much of New Orleans in a corrosive broth of saltwater and mud. U.S. officials warned Americans to beware of buying the drowned cars.
But many "Autos Katrina" were shipped overseas, often sold through Internet salvage auctions now globalizing the auto recycling industry.
Totaled cars used to be sold mostly at local auctions to scrap metal dealers and serious gearheads, who well understood the risks of the trade. But in the past five years, an explosion in online sales has lured shoppers around the world. It's a "Wild West marketplace" of tainted dream cars at rockbottom prices, says U.S. auto insurance industry analyst Brian Sullivan.
"Information is in short supply, and you have to be smart and know what you're doing," he says.
Suspected Katrina cars _ with their jittery wiring, sand in the cracks and the telltale mildewed stink _ have cropped up in a number of countries, but Bolivia has become a particular target. One local environmental agency believes 10,000 or more flooded U.S. cars may have ended up in the landlocked nation, drawn by loose import rules, a thriving smugglers' economy and an insatiable hunger for cheap wheels.
The hurricane relics are part of a deluge of used imports rapidly transforming South America's poorest country. Fueled by money sent home by migrants abroad, the number of vehicles on Bolivia's few paved highways is expected to double in the next five years.
McGaw's Mini is still a long way from joining the traffic jam.
Hauled south on a container ship, imported through the Chilean port of Iquique and trucked over the mountains to this Andean valley city, the coupe is now perched on a hydraulic lift, stripped to its chassis and surrounded by its rusty innards.
The new owner _ worried that publicity will reduce the car's resale value and perhaps smarting from automotive heartbreak _ declined, through his mechanic Ramiro Sanchez, to be identified or interviewed.
"He's totally demoralized, but he doesn't just want to give up on it, either," Sanchez says.
The Mini's odyssey began as the McGaw family fled New Orleans on Aug. 28, 2005, the day before Katrina made landfall.
"I just started packing random things _ a cocktail dress, shorts from the 7th grade," says McGaw, who has since finished a law degree and clerks for the Orleans Parish District Court. "I didn't think it was going to flood."
McGaw left her 2004 "chili red" Mini in a backyard carport and rode out of town with her parents.
The next morning, Lake Pontchartrain's storm surge burst through the 17th Street Canal levee, flooding their Lakeview neighborhood in eight feet (2.4 meters) of water and completely submerging the Mini.
When McGaw finally saw her car again three months later, it was dry but coated in salt and slime. A beer can had floated in through the broken windows.
McGaw's insurer, Geico, left a check for US$18,500 (euro12,640) and towed the car away. A vehicle history report listing the Mini as a total loss names the insurer as the car's final owner.
But nothing's final in the global used car business. The Mini began a second life when it was sold to Copart Inc., one of the U.S.'s largest auto salvage companies. Copart listed the Mini in an online auction in early 2006, saying it had suffered from "waterflow" but not mentioning the hurricane, Sanchez says.
Geico declined to comment on this case, and a Copart spokesman did not return repeated calls seeking comment.
The Bolivian buyer paid US$7,000 (euro4,780) for the Mini, but it took another $5,000 (euro3,420) in shipping costs and import duties before he could kick the tires. He immediately towed the car to his friend's shop. About 50 other Katrina car owners have come to Sanchez for help since then, he says, but he's turned nearly all of their vehicles away as beyond repair.
The Mini's history was easy to spot, Sanchez says: mud caked to the engine block, pedals rusted in place, and a New Orleans safety inspection sticker on the windshield.
Undeterred, the owner shelled out an additional US$7,000 (euro4,780) _ plus US$4,000 (euro2,730) in tax and shipping this time _ on the parts from a second Mini from Copart, this one condemned after a front-end collision. Parts from a third are now on their way to complete the job, Sanchez says.
How much will all the labor cost? He's a friend, Sanchez says with a shrug. He'll cut him a deal.
And despite the new owner's pain, getting a brand-new Mini shipped to Bolivia would probably hurt even more _ about US$35,000 (euro23,910) with taxes and shipping costs included, Sanchez estimates.
Bolivia is taking in the first world's castoff cars at a pace unmatched in South America, where its neighbors now strictly regulate car imports.
The total number of registered cars in Bolivia leapt 11 percent in 2006, from 537,000 to 602,000, says Freddy Koch, who monitors used car imports for nationwide air quality program sponsored by the Swiss development agency Swisscontact. All but 5,000 of the additional vehicles were used.
Factor in unregistered used imports that slip into Bolivia, and the annual growth rate is a staggering 20 percent, Koch says.
Bolivians pay a steep price for their new mobility: on dry winter afternoons, air pollution in Cochabomba (pop. 600,000) now rivals that of downtown Los Angeles.
Back in New Orleans, the McGaws tore down their mold-blackened home and rebuilt on the same lot. They used the car insurance settlement to buy Colleen a new 2006 red Mini _ this time with cruise control.
In garages a hemisphere away, recovery from Katrina drags on.
"The tragedy continues," Sanchez says. "These cars just keep causing problems."
___
On the Net:
www.copart.com
___
Associated Press Writer Stacey Plaisance in New Orleans contributed to this report.
Autonomy vote bares Bolivia's centuries-old identity crisis
By DAN KEANE
Associated Press Writer
AP Photo DG301, DG302, DG303, DG304, DG305, DG306, DG307
Doc: 00151157 DB: research_d_2008_2 Date: Fri May 2 15:17:40 2008
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Autonomy vote bares Bolivia's centuries-old identity crisis
AP Photos DG301, DG302, DG303, DG304, DG305, DG306, DG307
By DAN KEANE
Associated Press Writer
SANTA CRUZ, Bolivia (AP) _ The wealthy white governor stood beneath a giant statue of Jesus and promised freedom to the tens of thousands cheering him on _ freedom from a llama herder-turned-president who reveres the Indian earth goddess Pachamama.
"Autonomy! Autonomy!" the crowd screamed, waving flags bearing the cross of Santa Cruz state.
Proponents of autonomy speak of economic independence: Santa Cruz churns out almost 30 percent of Bolivia's gross domestic product and its soy and cattle barons are loathe to share with western highlands where poor Indians scratch out a living on tiny potato patches.
But the reasons why a referendum Sunday asking voters to approve a broad declaration of autonomy is expected to pass in a landslide have more to do with divisions of culture and race that have tormented Bolivia for centuries.
Many white and mixed-race middle-class Bolivians here feel that President Evo Morales, the nation's first Indian president, doesn't represent them.
"They accuse us of not wanting to be Bolivian," Gov. Ruben Costas growled during a rally this week in front of the state capital's Christ statue. "The power belongs to the people, to the forgotten, to the provinces and to the states, where this new Bolivia is born."
Morales says he won't recognize the results of Santa Cruz's "illegal survey" after a court ordered it postponed. But five more states _ most in Bolivia's relatively prosperous lowlands _ may soon follow the example of Bolivia's largest state and hold their own autonomy votes.
It's unclear how Santa Cruz's improvised federalism would work.
Bolivia is still so centralized that hotels in La Paz advertise special rates for citizens traveling to the capital to fill out forms unavailable in the provinces. Santa Cruz leaders want an autonomy so ambitious it would permit them to sign their own international treaties.
They also want to keep more of the state's natural gas revenues and shelter their vast plantations and ranches from land redistribution. Morales counters that he needs a strong central government to spread the Santa Cruz's wealth to the rest of South America's poorest country.
Only by reversing the effects of centuries of racism, he argues, can Bolivia resolve a national identity crisis dating back to the Spanish conquest.
"We were, and continue to be, a profoundly colonial society, where our differences, our jobs, our opportunities are all a function of skin color," Vice President Alvaro Garcia Linera told The Associated Press. "Undoing this requires making the problem visible. And sometimes we don't like to look at ourselves in the mirror."
For centuries, Bolivia enforced boundaries between indigenous, mestizo and white through strict laws and customs. Until a 1952 revolution, Indians couldn't even set foot in the plaza in front of the presidential palace Morales now occupies, let alone vote.
His landslide election in 2005 turned the old order on its head.
But Morales' civil rights crusade came bundled with visions of class struggle and socialist reform _ a hard sell for his whiter and wealthier opposition.
"You want to eradicate racism, but racism has shown itself in your government, which uses racism as an excuse for everything it does," La Paz state governor Jose Luis Paredes told Morales. "You always say, 'They called me Indian.' But you and I are both mestizos _ as is most of our country's population."
A 2001 census found 62 percent of Bolivians over 15 identify themselves as indigenous _ but mestizo wasn't included as an option. Other polls have found most Bolivians acknowledge a mix of Indian and European heritage.
As Indians abandon the countryside for cities, they build new lives amid the same cheap Chinese electronics, fried chicken stands and pirated U.S. movies as their mixed-blood neighbors. Some wear traditional bowler hats, others hoodie sweatshirts. Some switch back and forth.
Morales has tried to unite Bolivia under a new constitution creating a "plurinational state" that would give indigenous groups greater power. But Santa Cruz delegates walked out on the constitutional assembly and declared autonomy.
Garcia, the vice president, says both sides of the debate raise important questions.
"What's interesting is how important the struggle for identity has become _ the importance of asking 'Who are we?' to place ourselves in the world," he said.
To answer that question, Bolivians look back to the 1500s.
The highland capital of La Paz was settled by Spanish conquistadors who crushed strong resistance and enslaved hundreds of thousands of Aymara and Quechua Indians to work the huge silver mine at Potosi.
In the lowland east, the Europeans' culture clash with the local Guarani, Guarayo and Chiquitano Indians was softened somewhat by Jesuit missionaries and a lack of precious metals to exploit.
So while Morales rails against "500 years of oppression," his eastern opposition takes a more benevolent view of their European heritage.
A painting in the office of the Santa Cruz Civic Committee, the center of the state's autonomy movement, shows a crowd of European and mestizo men in powdered wigs and buckled shoes celebrating the state's 1810 declaration of independence from Spain. Barefoot Indians watch from the sidelines.
"We in this region are positive about the conquest," said Luis Nunez, the group's vice president. "We do not in any way resent what that history meant for us. It reflects who we are now."
Somehow, Garcia said, the two sides must figure out together what it means to be Bolivian.
"The crisis unites us," he said. "Today the elite have to think, 'What do I have in common with my maid?'"