This NYT story looks at the left turn promised by Evo Morales, Bolivia's first aboriginal president, and how that may reverberate throughout the Americas.

An excerpt:

When Evo Morales, an Aymara Indian and former head of the Bolivian coca growers union, is sworn in as president on Sunday, it may be the hardest turn yet in South America's persistent left-leaning tilt, with the potential for big reverberations far beyond the borders of this landlocked Andean nation.
 
Bolivia's Shift to the Left While mostly vague on details, and recently moderating his tone, Mr. Morales promises to transform Bolivia and "end the colonial and neoliberal model," as he put it on Saturday in an elaborate ceremony at the sacred ruins of this pre-Incan civilization.

He has said he would "depenalize" cultivation of coca, the prime ingredient for cocaine, which Washington has spent hundreds of millions of dollars and more than two decades trying to eradicate.

He pledges to inject the state in Bolivia's oil and natural gas industry, troubling the multinational energy companies that first flocked here in the late 1990's, even though Mr. Morales recently said he would not expropriate foreign holdings.

He has disparaged American-backed free trade policies, and seems certain to stand as the southernmost outpost of a new anti-American nexus with Cuba and Venezuela, whose president, Hugo Chávez, has become among the Bush administration's most ardent critics.

Any and all of those steps in a country where coca tracts and rich energy holdings give it a strategic importance far outweighing its tiny population could unsettle Washington and the region.

Bolivia's gas reserves, the continent's second-largest, help power South America's largest economies. Brazil has plowed $1.5 billion into energy investments in Bolivia and worries about rising drug and crime problems in its urban slums if Bolivia's coca crop is not controlled.

Mr. Morales is at least the seventh Latin American leader to take power since 2000 from the left, a varied crop that ranges from Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Ecuador to Venezuela, with strong leftist contenders surging in Peru and Mexico, both of which will also hold elections this year.

His success is also the most prominent example of Latin America's recent democratic revolutions. Throughout the region, the indigenous and the poor, increasingly mobilized by frustration with Washington-backed economic prescriptions, have used the ballot box to put in place a group of leaders more representative of their interests for the first time in nearly five centuries. With the exception of Mr. Chávez, who is bankrolled by Venezuela's oil wealth, most of the continent's other left-leaning leaders, like Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, have pursued pragmatic policies once faced with the real task of governing.

In recent weeks, Mr. Morales has toned down some of his more strident language and struck a more accommodating note with American officials. But in Bolivia's case, political analysts here say, it is far harder to know exactly how Mr. Morales might rule.