Llama fetus witch doctor ritual to help president!

LA PAZ, Bolivia - August 11, 2008 - Muttering incantations at a witches' market above La Paz, Faustino Tinta sets fire to a dried llama fetus and wax trinkets, an offering his client hopes will help Bolivian President Evo Morales survive a recall vote.

Tinta, 53, is one of dozens of witch doctors who tend a warren of stalls in the Morales' stronghold of El Alto, making offerings that promise luck at work or in love, or to call up spirits and banish curses.

Inside his stall herbs hang on the wall next to a carving of Jesus and a picture of Morales. Outside, at around 13,120 feet above sea level, snow falls on the ground.

"Snow. It is a happy omen," he said, sprinkling alcohol on the palms of 23-year-old miner Javier Ramos. "Many people have come to make offerings to Pachamama for Evo."

August is the month of Pachamama, or Mother Earth, central to Andean culture.

Ramos wants spirits to protect him while he works underground at a gold mine in the town of Consata, 85 miles north of La Paz, and to ensure that Morales wins Sunday's vote and pushes on with his nationalization and pro-poor reforms.

"I'm making this offering so things go well at work, so that nothing happens to me inside the mine, so I make money, and so that Evo wins," he said, his smile revealing tiny gold stars set into his teeth as the smell of caramel wafted from the burning pyre. "I will vote for him. Let's hope he wins."

Morales is expected to survive a recall vote this weekend but South America's poorest country is gripped by a political crisis that could deepen as right-wing opponents seek to derail his socialist reforms.

Morales and eight of Bolivia's nine provincial governors face Sunday's recall votes. Confident of victory, he approved the votes in an apparent bid to undermine his opponents and sap momentum from autonomy movements in natural gas-rich eastern provinces.

The president is very popular in and around La Paz, but his reforms, from energy and mining nationalization to the centralization of energy revenues, have polarized Bolivians.

"Evo is going to have the support of more people. He is going to win the referendum," said soothsayer Maria Samo, tossing coca leaves onto a crucifix placed on a piece of woven material in her own stall nearby.

"But his enemies will try to make trouble. There, look: that is his luck," added Samo, pointing to two stray leaves, their dark green upper side facing upwards. She has told fortunes for 25 years and followed in her grandmother's footsteps.

The dark side of the leaves denotes luck while the silvery underside is cause for worry, she said.

And another question on many Bolivians' lips - will 48-year-old Morales, Bolivia's first indigenous leader and a former coca farmer, get married?

"No, I see no partner," she said. "He won't get married in the coming years."