HUATAJATA, Bolivia — In this town on the edge of Lake Titicaca, presidential candidate Felipe Quispe, an Aymara Indian, talks openly of starting a war against the government. Fifty miles away, on the outskirts of La Paz, the capital, thousands of peasants are marching to demand that Bolivia's Constitution be thrown out and rewritten.
The presidential candidates of the major parties are dancing around an unspoken truth: Bolivia is broke, and there is little money to pay for all the new jobs, hospitals and schools that the contenders in today's elections are promising to bring to this desperately poor country.
"The political system has reached a point of exhaustion," said Sacha Llorentti of the Permanent Assembly of Human Rights in Bolivia, a nongovernmental organization here. "And at the same time we are seeing new groups trying to force their way into the system."
Racked by Divisions
Bolivian voters will elect a new president and 157-member Congress today. Like no other election in this nation's convulsive history, it has brought to the fore Bolivia's gaping ethnic, regional and social chasms.
Already one of Latin America's poorest nations, Bolivia is in its second year of recession. Its growing budget deficit is proportionally larger than that of Argentina, the region's better-known crisis economy.
"We Bolivians have a tremendous capacity for putting up with hunger," said Antonio Peredo, vice presidential candidate of the Movement Toward Socialism, which is running third in some surveys here. "But now things are so bad that more than half the people don't know what it [means] to have bread and sugar."
Cry for 'Positive Change'
The man widely expected to finish first in the presidential race, Manfred Reyes Villa, is the 47-year-old mayor of Cochabamba and founder of the New Republican Force. A former military man, Reyes Villa has portrayed himself as an outsider because he is not a member of one of the four parties that have dominated Bolivian politics for decades.
Bolivia needs "positive change," Reyes Villa says, repeating his campaign's catch phrase. Among other things, he promises to double the nation's education budget.
But even if Reyes Villa finishes first, he might not become Bolivia's next president. If no candidate wins a majority, the top two vote-getters proceed to a runoff in Congress on Aug. 6. Traditionally, Congress has picked a president only after weeks of back-room deal-making.
