BOLIVIA: Bolivians look ready to deal the US a major setback in its two-decade-long war on drugs when they elect a new president on December 18th.
Washington is looking on with mounting apprehension as opinion polls point to victory for Evo Morales, a radical Indian leader who has vowed to expel the US's Drug Enforcement Agency from Bolivia and allow the free cultivation of the coca plant - the raw material for cocaine.
Bolivia is the world's third-largest producer of the drug after Colombia and Peru.
A former coca grower himself, Mr Morales got his start in politics in the 1990s as a union boss for the country's coca growers during their campaign against a US-sponsored coca eradication effort. This hugely cut Bolivian cocaine production but impoverished peasants.
Today Mr Morales is president of the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS), a party which grew out of that struggle and which is anti-American and anti-capitalist as well as pro-coca. He is also a close friend of Hugo Chávez, the Venezuelan president, who is determined to combat what he sees as US interference in the region.
"Morales is somebody who really for the first time has taken such a strong public stand that defies US policy on the drug question," said Michael Shifter, senior analyst at the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington think-tank. "His radical position on coca and his alliance with Chávez makes people very nervous here in Washington about what he will do."
MAS draws most of its support from Bolivia's downtrodden Indian majority and if elected Mr Morales would be the country's first indigenous president. Indians have been excluded from power for centuries by a small white elite which MAS accuses of ransacking the country's natural wealth for personal gain. The struggle for power between the two groups has paralysed the country since 2000 and at times turned violent.
But while a Morales presidency would be a blow to the US's War on Drugs, it is not a war going particularly well anyway, according to John Walsh, a drugs policy expert at the Washington Office on Latin America and a critic of US drugs policy.
"As long as there is prohibition of and demand for cocaine there will be coca grown in the Andes so Morales being elected is not an 'either/or' situation with regard to coca production," said Mr Walsh.
But legalisation will be a test for MAS claims that Bolivia can allow the free cultivation of coca without turning the country into a paradise for the continent's drug cartels.
"Morales's position is 'coca yes, cocaine no', yet the political debate in Bolivia has not addressed the nuts and bolts of how to do that and there has to be an acknowledgement based on the evidence that most of Bolivia's current coca production goes to cocaine production," Mr Walsh adds.
The US has committed huge resources to the War on Drugs and prohibition remains its stated goal. But the possible arrival of Mr Morales in power could bring the US towards a moment of truth in its handling of the issue. The risk for the US is that if it pressures a Morales presidency over its coca policy it could push the country into further turmoil or instead into the arms of Hugo Chávez. "The question for the US is 'is it a goal you want to sacrifice everything for?'" said Mr Walsh.
The US is the biggest bilateral donor to Bolivia, giving it $150 million (€126.786 million) a year in aid. Flush with petro-dollars, Mr Chávez would have little problem making up any shortfall were the US to punish Mr Morales by cutting aid.
Nor is the US likely to find much support to pressure Mr Morales over drugs among Bolivia's neighbours. Both Brazilian president Lula da Silva and his Argentine counterpart Nestor Kirchner recently expressed their support for Mr Morales's candidacy and Brazilian diplomats do not share the US's concern over coca.
Instead, Bolivia's neighbours are far more interested in what a President Morales will do with Bolivia's other lucrative export - natural gas.
Bolivia has the second-biggest gas reserves in South America and they are ideally placed to feed the energy-hungry economies of Brazil, Argentina and Chile. But exporting gas is an emotive issue in Bolivia. The country's Indian majority has a strong folk memory of how they were forced to dig up the country's silver and tin for the conquistadors and their descendants without sharing in any of the wealth and are suspicious of plans to export gas.
Protesters forced Bolivia's last elected president from power in October 2003 after he announced plans to export gas to the US and Mexico via Chile. The political turmoil over how to exploit the gas reserves has held up their commercial development.
Mr Morales pledges he will renegotiate the contracts Bolivia signed with international energy companies, keeping a bigger take of the profits for the Bolivian state. This makes him a relative moderate on the gas issue among Bolivia's radicals, many of whom advocate outright expropriation.
Brasília and Buenos Aires are betting that Bolivia's first indigenous leader will be in the best position to guarantee supply, even if he sets a higher price.
"A Bolivian president today without indigenous blood will find it difficult to gather the necessary support to rule," says ambassador José Botafogo Gonçalves, formerly Brazil's chief negotiator for Mercosur and currently president of Brazil's Centre for International Relations. "So perhaps Bolivia now has to try a period of indigenous rule." Even if he grows coca.