Bolivian President Evo Morales speaks at Brown University yesterday. Among his first acts as president was to increase Bolivia’s share of profits that oil and natural gas companies earned from that nation’s deposits.

The Providence Journal Steve Szydlowski

PROVIDENCE — Thirty-six years ago, a 13-year-old named Evo Morales used to walk three weeks from his family’s home in the Bolivian highlands to the major city of his province, leading a herd of llamas that he would sell on the way so he could buy corn to bring home.

It was a journey that brought him to bigger places than the town of Oruro.

Now, the peasant boy is an adult and in his second year as the first native Indian president of Bolivia.

“Now, every day I go in an airplane over where I used to go on foot,” he told a packed audience at Brown University’s Sayles Hall yesterday. “I reflect sometimes on how life can change.”

The farm worker — who never went to college — was speaking in a hall lined with oil paintings of various presidents and benefactors of the university, as part of the Stephen A. Ogden R. Lecture Series.

Morales began his political evolution on a soccer field. In 1983, his talent at the sport earned him the position of sports secretary for his union of coca growers. He used that position to organize the younger members of the group, and in two years rose to secretary general of the union. By 1988, he was executive secretary of the regional confederation. In 1996, he was chosen president of the coordinating committee of a six-federation regional committee.

Indigenous Bolivians, who mostly live in the mountainous western part of the country, have felt neglected and sometimes harassed by the central government, Morales said. Until his election in 2005, the presidents and business leaders of Bolivia were drawn from the white and mixed-blood populations.

The revenues from the valuable ores, petroleum and natural gas extracted from Bolivia’s land all seemed to go anywhere but to the Bolivians who needed it most, Morales said. And when the government did come into the lives of those in the western part of the country, it was to send in soldiers and agents of the United States Drug Enforcement Administration to destroy their coca plants as part of drug eradication programs.

Morales said coca is an important part of the rural Bolivian economy, and not for cocaine manufacturing. The plant is used for medicinal purposes and is considered sacred in the native Indian culture.

One of his first acts as president was to demand — and get — a greater share of the profits that oil and natural gas companies earned from Bolivia’s deposits. The nation’s cut of that industry went from $300 million the year before he took office to $1.9 billion last year.

“I would like to know where the money used to go,” Morales said.

“Bolivians were poor,” he said. “But Bolivia was never poor.”

He has used that revenue to set up a social security system for his country, providing pensions to those over 60 years old. Morales said only around 20 percent of workers in his country have a pension plan, and virtually none of them in the part of the country where he grew up. He also set up grants to help poor families keep their children in school.

“For the first time, the state is reaching into the home,” he said.

Morales’ supporters have proposed a new constitution that would allow him to run for another term. However, dissatisfied elements in the nation’s eastern provinces have proposed changes of their own, ones that would give them greater autonomy from the federal government.

Morales complained that the U.S. government has been aiding his political opponents through the USAID programs. He also has a close relationship with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a bitter critic of U.S. policies toward Central and South America.

One questioner from the audience asked Morales how he would prevent his government from avoiding some of the excesses of socialist regimes of the past, such as Stalin in the Soviet Union. He said he didn’t see socialism as a threat to freedom but as a way to ensure social justice.

“What do I understand socialism to be: Equality among all human beings,” he said.

Morales spoke of going to Cuba to listen to a speech by Fidel Castro — it lasted seven hours — and how the Cuban leader told the group “don’t do what I did, do what Chavez is doing.” Morales said he took that to mean that if they wanted to change their societies, they shouldn’t resort to armed insurrection, but rather get inside the government structure to accomplish their social and economic goals from within.

Morales’ easy speaking style and gentle manner belied the strength of his opinions. He said he did not have a formal political science education, but knew what he saw as morally right and wrong. He said the upper classes and business interests of Bolivia had been profiting at the expense of a majority of its people, and it was time for them to share the wealth.

“It’s not confiscation,” he said. “It’s redistribution.”

jhill@projo.com