Bolivia's Morales faces a challenge from fellow Indian

The pugnacious prefect, or governor, Savina Cuellar, a former livestock herder who proudly dons the broad-brimmed hat and billowing skirt that mark her indigenous origins, has become a symbol of the country's deep divisions.

Her peasant background inevitably evokes comparisons to the humble history of leftist President Evo Morales, the coca-leaf cultivator who in 2005 was elected Bolivia's first indigenous president.

But the two allies have become bitter adversaries. Their differences say much about the schisms of class, region and ethnicity that some fear have left Bolivia on the verge of civil war. Five of Bolivia's nine governors, including Cuellar, are lined up against Morales and his controversial plans for a new constitution.

"Evo says there is a democracy, but what I see is a dictatorship," says Cuellar, seated inside the ornate government palace on the scenic plaza, her sentences interspersed with phrases from her native Quechua. "For me, Evo doesn't represent the indigenous people, because they're dying of hunger."

She defiantly rejects the class-warfare rhetoric of Morales, who accuses a U.S.-backed, racist "oligarchy" of conspiring to topple his socialist vision of nationalizations, land reform and Indian empowerment.

"Evo is the racist: He is dividing Bolivia," asserts the diminutive, ever-combative Cuellar. "I don't have anything against the rich. Thank God there are rich! They give us work, so we have something to eat."

The government and its allies deride Cuellar as a sellout: a puppet of the right-wing, white and mixed-race aristocracy that has long dominated Bolivia. The Morales government says it is the first to champion the country's indigenous majority, though others say most Bolivians are in fact of mestizo or mixed-race origins, and not pure Indian.

"Savina has become a tool of the powerful," says Esteban Urquizu, head of a pro-government federation, as he and others chew coca leaves in the group headquarters here. "She is being used, manipulated."

An account in a Mexican newspaper labeled Cuellar the "Bolivian Malinche," after the widely reviled Indian woman who aided the Spaniard Hernan Cortez in his 16th century war of conquest.