Bolivia: Morales wins landslide re-election

However, the results exposed the continuing division of the country between the impoverished, predominantly indigenous highlands and the lowland regions, the center of the country’s business elite and its agricultural and energy wealth.

The scale of Morales’s election victory was roughly on a par with other recent votes, including the overwhelming defeat of a “re-call” referendum aimed at ousting him in August of last year and a constitutional referendum last January in which he secured the right to seek a second term.

Morales was first elected president in 2005, when he won just over 53 percent of the vote. He had come to political prominence as the leader of Bolivia’s cocalero movement, which defended the interests of small coca growers against efforts of the Bolivian and US governments to eradicate the crop. Coca production became an increasingly important economic activity under conditions in which jobs in the country’s mining sector were decimated and the economic viability of other crops declined.

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