Bolivia's anti-US president sworn in for new term

Morales, 50, was taking up the new mandate with almost unlimited power after last year changing Bolivia's constitution.

LA PAZ, January 22, 2010 (AFP) - Bolivian President Evo Morales was to be sworn in for a second, five-year term on Friday in a ceremony attended by fellow Latin American leftist leaders including his role model, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

Morales, 50, was taking up the new mandate with almost unlimited power after last year changing Bolivia's constitution to get rid of a one-term presidential limit.

On December 6, he easily won re-election against a conservative former governor, Manfred Reyes Villa, who has since fled to the United States, fearing Morales's threats to jail him for alleged tax evasion.

Since coming to power in January 2006 as Bolivia's first indigenous head of state, Morales, a former coca farmer and union leader, has steadily increased his control over his country.

Following in Chavez's footsteps, and backed by Bolivia's indigenous majority, he has nationalized key industries and rolled out what he calls a socialist "revolution."

Along the way, he has sidelined a fractured conservative opposition in Bolivia's lowland east which had unsuccessfully sought to block his control of natural gas reserves there and stall land reforms giving greater autonomy to indigenous communities.

Like Chavez, he has also wielded fierce anti-US rhetoric, and has kicked out the US ambassador and US anti-narcotics officials.

His investiture Friday in Bolvia's legislative assembly was also to be attended by presidents Rafael Correa of Ecuador, Fernando Lugo of Paraguay and Michele Bachelet of Chile.

Chavez, who flew into foggy La Paz early Friday, said Morales's re-election "is an example of Latin America's people waking up from what President Rafael Correa called the long neo-liberal night."

Morales was officially to assume his new term at midnight (0400 GMT Saturday). On Thursday, he underwent a mystical indigenous ceremony to also become the spiritual leader of Bolivia's Amerindians.