Leftist set to be Bolivia's first Indian president

"Whatever the outcome, it is likely to be greeted by ... protests, even violence," says Markus Schultze-Kraft, Andes Project Director at the International Crisis Group, a Washington think tank. The decision of congress, he says, or even the expectation of it, will bring people to the streets, "especially if Morales wins the popular vote but is snubbed by the likely more conservative legislature."

Meanwhile, while it might be alarmed by Morales' stance on coca, his anti-American rhetoric, his stated antipathy to a free trade agreement, and his promise to enforce a new hydrocarbons law which will force all foreign companies working in the natural gas sector to renegotiate contracts - the US has tried to keep its opinions about the front-runner private this time around.

During the last presidential election in 2002, then US Ambassador Manuel Rocha criticized Morales, only to see his support triple. "My campaign manager," Morales often refers, jokingly, to the diplomat.

One of seven children born to a poor family in a tin-mining town in the district of Oruro, high in the Bolivian altiplano, Morales was one of only three who made it past infancy. He grew up herding the family IIamas and never finished high school. When the mines closed in the late 1970s, his parents migrated to the Bolivian lowlands of Chapare to become coca farmers.

Morales's start in politics came in 1993 when he was elected president of a local coca farmers federation, and later he helped found MAS and was elected to congress in 1997. In 2002 he narrowly lost the presidential race to Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, who was soon forced to resign amidst massive street protests largely by MAS supporters.

Morales would be the first full-blooded indigenous president here, even though over half of the population consider themselves indigenous.

As for the lucrative gas sector, Morales has promised to revise longstanding contracts with foreign investors - a plan that will no doubt be met with resistance by companies such as Repsol, British Gas, and Total. The three investors have already threatened to take the country to court over a hydrocarbons law passed in May that imposed a new 32 percent tax.

Meanwhile, Morales's plans for the coca sector run completely counter to the US campaign to stamp out coca production ,and as such is likely to cause great tension with his biggest donor. Two-thirds of the $150 million the US gives in aid to Bolivia every year goes towards eradicating the raw material to make cocaine and encouraging alternative agriculture and development. One of Morales's catchy, though perhaps questionable, campaign slogans is "Causachun coca, wanuchun Yanquis" ("Long live coca, death to the Yankees").

"If Morales fully carries out his proposed agenda, the consequences would be likely to be quite problematic," says Michael Shifter, vice president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a think tank in Washington, D.C. "His supporters may be happy, but Bolivia's economy would not be viable, and the country's integrity could well be jeopardized." Morales, says Shifter, would need to find a formula for satisfying his base, yet keeping the country together. "That," he says, "will be no mean feat."

• Ms. Harman is Latin America correspondent for the Monitor and USA Today.

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