Evo Morales is an unorthodox candidate. He's a former IIama herder and coca farmer, and an indigenous Indian with an eighth-grade education. His platform rests on ending Bolivia's 20 years of free-market economic policies, and decriminalizing the growing of coca, the leaf from which cocaine is made. And polls indicate he is poised to become the next President of Bolivia.

"This election [on Sunday] will change history," Mr. Morales tells the crowds gathered for his last campaign rally in the capital. With a traditional red poncho draped over his signature blue sweatshirt, Morales revs up his supporters: "If we don't win, neo-liberalism and colonialism will deepen," he cries. A wreath of potatoes, roses, and coca leaves hangs around his neck. "The time of dignity for the people has come."

Morales is populist, socialist, and anti-American. In that sense, he's cast in the same mold as Venezuela's Hugo Chávez - who Morales admires. And like Chávez, his country sits on a vast supply of hydrocarbons - the continent's second biggest reserves of natural gas.

Washington worries that if Morales wins, it will be yet another Latin American nation swinging to the left - away from free trade - and, in this case, the drug war. After two decades of moving away from dictatorships, some see a regional trend back toward the Marxist ideas popular in the '60s and '70s. "Che Guevara sought to ignite a war based on igniting a peasant revolution," Roger Pardo-Mauer IV, a senior adviser to the Bush administration, said in July. "This project is back."

But here in Bolivia, the poorest country in South America, many people hope that Morales will bring them the jobs, stability, and dignity they crave.

"How is it," asks Juan Carlos Pairo, a bus driver and Morales supporter, "that we have so many natural riches, and we are so poor?" It's a common gripe heard in a county with some 54 trillion cubic feet of natural gas - and a per capita income, according to the World Bank, of $960. "Morales understands inequality and poverty," says Pairo. "And only he has the guts to make changes."

All polls show Morales, head of the Movement to Socialism (MAS) party, slightly ahead of his closest challenger, conservative former President Jorge "Tuto" Quiroga, a Texas A&M alumnus and former IBM executive who leads the Democratic and Social Power (PODEMOS) citizen's association. Local paper La Prensa, in a poll published Wednesday, gave Morales 34.2 percent of the vote, Quiroga 29.2 percent, and cement magnate Samuel Doria Medina 8.9 percent. Five other minor candidates are running.

But, in the likely event that no candidate wins more than 50 percent of the votes Sunday, Congress will choose between the top two vote-getters when it reconvenes in mid-January. Analysts say this could bode ill for stability in a country which has had 83 presidents and about 200 coups and countercoups since independence in 1825. Massive street protests forced the last two presidents to resign.

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