So, as many of you have probably heard, Evo Morales has won the election for the presidency of Bolivia. Upsetting all predictions, he won by a simple majority — more than 50% of the vote. This is an amazing feat in a Bolivian presidential election. There were EIGHT candidates for president, and his nearest rival trailed him by twenty percentage points. This kind of slam-dunk never happens.

It means that a very controversial candidate has a real mandate for governance; that, in fact, he has the strongest mandate that any newly elected president has had in Bolivia since its “return to democracy” in the early 80s (following the dictatorships of the 70s).

So what is controversial about “Evo”? He’s indigenous, a socialist, and emerged as a political leader in coca-growing unions. He’s promised to fully legalize the cultivation of coca in Bolivia. Traditionally, coca leaves are chewed or made into tea; a limited level of cultivation for these purposes is already legal in Bolivia. All cultivation over this level is presumably destined to be elaborated into cocaine (in fact, some of the “excess” coca also goes to traditional domestic use — but, ahem, not most of it). Evo has promised to develop profitable alternative (ie, non-cocaine) uses for this “excess” coca. It’s not as totally implausible as it might sound — at the coca-growing peasant end of things, cultivation isn’t that profitable — it’s just more profitable than any of the currently-available alternatives. So it wouldn’t (hypothetically) be impossible to divert “excess” coca to another kind of weakly profitable (at the peasant end) market if one existed. However, it must be said that although it is hypothetically possible there is no realisitic precedent for the plan.

But that’s not really the most important part of Evo’s agenda, though it will receive a huge amount of hyperventilated attention in the U.S. press. Earlier this week, on Fox “News”, a reporter gamely explained that while a one pound of coca leaves costs about $2 on the street in Bolivia, one pound of cocaine is worth about $15,000 on the street in the United States — so “you can see the mark-up”. It was shamelessly misleading, as a pound of coca leaves would in fact yield an amount of cocaine invisible to the naked eye, but whatever.

The coca part of Evo’s campaign really is small potatoes (as is cocaine’s part in the contemporary — as opposed to the 1970s/80s — Bolivian economy). What is a huge deal in Bolivia today is the nationalization of its natural gas resources. This is what is going to receive real (as opposed to scandal-baiting) international governmental and private-sector attention. It is also what is going to be Evo’s central administrative challenge. Evo came in first in the provinces of the more populous Andean west. Support for nationalization of natural gas resources is high is in the Andean west. Evo did not come in first in any of the provinces of the lowland east. The natural gas reserves are in the lowland east, and these lowland eastern provinces have long been rumbling about regional “autonomy” which can for some purposes can be translated as “keeping the profits of natural gas production in the lowland east and not sharing them with the Andean west”.

Surprisingly, Evo did come in second in Santa Cruz — the province that leads the lowland autonomy movement. This was unexpected, and is encouraging because it indicates there may be a basis for rapprochement between the two regions. Evo is witty, charismatic, and courted the east throughout his campaign, evidently with real success. If he can reconcile eastern and western interests over the nationalization and exploitation of Bolivia’s gas reserves, he will succeed where his 3 predecessors have failed in rapid succession.

If he fails, Bolivia is in real trouble, but in that case don’t expect to hear much about him in the U.S. press. But if he does succeed: whoo-eee. Expect to hear that he personally encourages red-blooded American schoolchildren to freebase cocaine daily and twice on Sundays.