September 09, 2008	Tuesday	Ramazan 8, 1429

SUCRE, Bolivia: Renowned as the cradle of Bolivian independence, this colonial town in the south-central highlands has become a front line in a new battle that is threatening to rip this South American nation asunder.

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 have become bitter adversaries. Their differences say much about the schisms of class, region and ethnicity that some observers 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 US-backed, racist “oligarchy” of conspiring to topple his socialist vision of nationalisations, 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 sell-out: a puppet of the right-wing, white and mixed-race aristocracy that long has dominated Bolivia. The Morales government says it is the first to champion the country’s indigenous majority, although others say most Bolivians are in fact of mestizo, or mixed-race, origins.

“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.”

Cuellar, a former domestic servant and mother of seven, had little formal education. Her mother died when she was two, and from an early age she helped care for her younger siblings, while also minding the family’s cows and sheep in her native village of Ichupampa. She demonstrated early leadership skills, however, eventually developing a regional reputation as an advocate for rural women.

A turning point on her path to political activism, Cuellar says, were the killings seven years ago of her father, her husband and her brother-in-law in a robbery. She successfully pressed for authorities to track down the killers and send them to prison.”

From then I fought for justice, for change,” says Cuellar, who became a partisan of Morales’ Movement to Socialism party. Morales swept to the presidency in December 2005.

But Cuellar split with the central government last year during a raucous convention held here to rewrite Bolivia’s Constitution, Morales’ top priority. She had served as a delegate for the ruling party.—Dawn/LA Times-Washington Post News Service