Bolivia – Jorge “Tuto” Quiroga, a conservative former president, is fighting an uphill election battle as he promises to keep Bolivia’s markets free and pursue its war on cocaine.
The latest poll, with a margin of error of two percentage points, puts him five points behind front-runner Evo Morales, who says he’ll end Bolivia’s 20-year open-door economics and decriminalize the growing of coca, the leaf from which cocaine is made.
“We’re in a contest with an adversary that has slogans but no proposals,” Quiroga said at a rally of about a hundred people on the shore of Lake Titicaca in Bolivia’s poor highlands, where both he and Morales were born.
Their battle also has racial overtones.
Morales is Aymara Indian while Quiroga is mestizo, or mixed-race, and represents the elite that Morales wants to shake up.
“It has to do with an aristocratic ideology that we inherited in colonial times, which includes the fear of Indians, and so a vote for Quiroga probably would be more for fear of Evo Morales than because they like Tuto Quiroga,” said Jimena Costa, a political science professor at the Universidad Mayor de San Andres.
Both candidates promise to pull Latin America’s poorest nation out of poverty by exploiting its vast natural gas reserves, but they would do it very differently: Morales by buying back foreign-owned refineries, and Quiroga by raising its export price.
Quiroga studied industrial engineering at Texas A&M. He returned to Bolivia with his American wife, Virginia Gillum, in the late 1980s, and worked his way up the ranks of the conservative Nationalist Democratic Action party. They have four children.
In 1997, aged only 37, he was elected vice president under Hugo Banzer, a dictator who had gone democratic. Banzer fell ill with cancer in 2001 and Quiroga served out the last year of his presidency.
He went on to consult for the World Bank overseas and while he was away from Bolivia, Indians mounted often violent protests against free-market reforms that had failed to alleviate poverty.
The unrest toppled two presidents and broke up Bolivia’s traditional political parties, including Quiroga’s.
In an attempt to distance himself from the old guard, Quiroga formed a new party, Democratic Social Power.
“There’s never been (an) election so critical, so transcendental as this one,” Quiroga told The Associated Press.
“There are two clear options on the table: moving forward with progress, peace, employment and well-being that (we) represent, and moving backward into unsuccessful foreign relations and divisions within the country.”
