Jesuit In Peru

President Evo Morales seemed assured of an easy victory in a referendum on Sunday over a sweeping new Constitution aimed at empowering Bolivia’s Indians. The vote capped three years of conflict-ridden efforts by Mr. Morales to overhaul a political system he had associated with centuries of indigenous subjugation. Citing preliminary vote counts, reports on national television said about 60 percent of voters had approved the new Constitution. If that margin holds or goes higher, it would strengthen Mr. Morales’s mandate, political analysts here said.

In symbolic importance, said Xavier Albó, a Jesuit scholar and linguist, the new Constitution may be the equivalent of Spain’s Reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula from the Moors in 1492.

But instead of the blood spilled in that process, Mr. Albó said, Bolivia is “advancing in a democratic process that does not exclude or subjugate anyone.” Some Bolivians who read the entire Constitution came away with other impressions. Edmundo Paz Soldán, a writer who teaches at Cornell University, said it reminded him of an essay by Jorge Luis Borges that describes a Chinese encyclopedia’s attempt to divide fauna into myriad nonsensical categories. For instance, Mr. Paz Soldán said that the Constitution recognized 36 different indigenous groups in Bolivia, some with fewer than 100 people, but that it was unclear how precisely each group would be enfranchised in a country where three main indigenous groups — the Quechua, Aymara and Guaraní — wield much larger influence. “The mind-boggling text may have the ratification of the majority,” Mr. Paz Soldán said, “but it might not be the recipe for a viable country.”

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Photo is of Fr. Albo