Morales, Evoin full Juan Evo Morales Ayma  ( born October Oct. 26, 1959 , Isallavi, BoliviaBolivian Bol.Bolivian labour leader who became president of Bolivia (2006– ). A member of the Aymara indigenous group, Morales was Bolivia’s first Indian president.



Morales won a seat in the House of Deputies (the lower house of the Bolivian legislature) in 1997 and was the MAS candidate for president in 2002, only narrowly losing to Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada. During the presidential campaign, Morales called for the expulsion from Bolivia of U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents (his campaign was bolstered by the U.S. ambassador’s comment that aid to Bolivia would be reconsidered if Morales was elected). In the following years, Morales remained active in national affairs, helping force the resignation of Sánchez de Lozada in 2003 and extracting a concession from his successor, Carlos Mesa Gisbert, to consider changes to the highly unpopular U.S.-backed campaign to eradicate illegal coca production. As the MAS presidential candidate again in 2005, Morales was elected easily, winning 54 percent of the vote and becoming the country’s first Indian president and the first Bolivian president since 1982 to win a majority of the national vote. Sworn in as president in January 2006, he pledged to reduce poverty among the country’s Indian population, ease restrictions on coca farmers, renationalize the country’s energy sector, fight corruption, and increase taxes on the wealthy. Morales strongly supported efforts to rewrite the Bolivian constitution to increase the rights of the country’s indigenous population and to , enshrine his policies of nationalization and land redistribution, and allow a president to serve two consecutive terms, though in a referendum in July 2006 the MAS failed to win a majority in the Constitutional Assembly. In November Morales Morales then nationalized Bolivia’s gas fields and oil industry, and in November he signed into law a land-reform bill that called for the seizure of unproductive lands from absentee owners and their redistribution to the poor. His reforms faced opposition from the richer provinces of Bolivia, three of which had overwhelmingly approved regional autonomy statutes in referenda held in 2007. The Morales government dismissed the referenda as illegal. Tensions escalated, and demonstrations, some of which turned violent, increased throughout the country.