Bolivias Morales backs Guatemala candidate Menchu

President Morales is sending aides to Rigoberta Menchu in her bid to become the first indigenous woman head of state in Latin America.

Menchu, a defender of Mayan victims of Guatemala's bloody 1960-1996 civil war, will run in Guatemala's Sept. 9 presidential election backed by a left-leaning party and a coalition of indigenous leaders.

Santos Ramirez, an influential senator from Morales' Movement Toward Socialism party, said this week that the party will send delegates to Guatemala on Saturday to advise Menchu.

"We have decided to send an envoy to that brother country (Guatemala) to accompany and support comrade Menchu in her bid (to become president)," Ramirez told reporters in statements published late on Tuesday.

Morales' spokesman Alex Contreras said on Wednesday that Morales may visit Guatemala on March 30 to attend an international summit of indigenous peoples.

Morales in 2006 became the first Indian president in Bolivia, where most of the population is of indigenous descent, on campaign vows to stamp out discrimination against Indians and tighten the state's grip over natural resources.

Both Menchu and Morales have been champions of the poor and indigenous in their countries, where they suffer discrimination despite being a majority.

One of Menchu's main rivals will be retired Gen. Otto Perez Molina, who has been accused of war crimes by human rights organizations but also was key to the 1996 peace deal that ended the war.

In a recent poll, about 20 percent of those surveyed said they would vote for Menchu, putting her in second place behind another leftist, Alvaro Colom. Perez Molina was in third place in the poll.

Menchu, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992 for her human rights work, was born in the Quiche area, one of the hardest hit by army and paramilitary massacres during the war, when an estimated 200,000 people were killed, most of them Maya Indians.