 He was Vice President of Bolivia from 1993 to 1997 during the first presidency of Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada.Cárdenas was born in 1951 in the Aymara village of Achica Bajo on the shores of Lake Titicaca, the son of a rural school teacher.When he was still a child, his father changed his name from Choquehuanca to Cárdenas, in order to mask his indigenous origin and remove what at the time was an obstacle to his educational and professional advancement.