BOLIVIA: Bolivia's parliament had the air of a street carnival this weekend as indigenous legislators, wearing traditional bowler hats and coloured ponchos passed out coca leaves and swapped banter in their native languages.
The man waiting to be elected president, Mr Gonzalo Sanchez de Losada, who speaks Spanish with a US accent, was denounced several times as a "vendepatria", a term of abuse which can be loosely translated as a "yankee bootlicker".
Mr Sanchez de Losada's rival for office, Mr Evo Morales, has been denounced by the US government as the nation's leading subversive.
Mr Morales (42), leader of the coca grower's union, is an Aymara Indian and a former miner who was run out of parliament last year for backing street protests against US-led coca eradication efforts.
Mr Sanchez de Losada (72) is a millionaire tin-mine owner and former president (1993-97), who steered Bolivia through a privatisation programme which failed to lift the nation out of its economic gloom.
In parliamentary elections last June, indigenous legislators won 50 out of 157 seats while Mr Morales finished second in the presidential elections, earning him the right to a run-off in parliament last weekend.
"It's a sort of peaceful, democratic Zapatista revolution", said one analyst, comparing events of the past month with the 1994 indigenous uprising in Mexico.
Mr Sanchez de Losada secured a narrow congressional majority of 84 votes by allying his Revolutionary Nationalist Movement (MNR) with the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR), led by a bitter rival of long standing, Mr Jaime Paz Zamora.
The names are all that remain of these parties' idealistic origins as chronic corruption has long buried any prospect of social reform.
Bolivia is a country whose history mirrors the story of lucrative silver deposits, wealth which was systematically looted by US companies over the past century.
The former king of tin, Simon Patino, was worth $500 million in the 1920s and was the seventh richest person in the world, while his workers were the poorest in the western hemisphere, with a life expectancy of 30.
Little has changed for the rural peasantry, who face poverty levels exceeding 80 per cent.
The ruling MNR, lambasted as a puppet of American imperialism, engineered Bolivia's landmark 1952 revolution when President Victor Paz Estenssoro challenged the tin barons and agrarian feudalists, instituting universal suffrage and land reform.
Curiously, it was these reforms, subsequently rolled back, which defeated Che Guevara's revolutionary cell in 1967, as little support could be found among the peasantry, for whom the whiff of social reform was still fresh in the air.