To many observers, the election of Evo Morales may seem like a victory orchestrated only by Bolivia’s rural and lower class voters. Bolivians will be the first to tell you that this is not the case.

In La Paz before the elections, some of the finest automobiles in the country were decked out with pro-Evo and MAS propaganda. A small group of urban elites, and even a few Europeans, have been instrumental in helping the MAS party gain the level of organization and popular support necessary to win a national election.

Part of that strategy involved controlling the rural voter base through traditional political channels. The MAS party skillfully used sindicato and indigenous organizations as top-down hierarchies where those in charge used their influence to pressure rural communities into voting for Evo. In some cases, the social pressures were so great that rural residents voted for Evo even if he wasn’t their candidate of choice.

For many Bolivians, a vote for Evo was a vote against centuries of imperial exploitation and foreign intervention. Middle-class voters will admit that Evo Morales may not be the best leader, and they may not agree with many of his policies, but they voted for him because of their disaffection with a political elite that has dominated the trajectory of Bolivian politics for at least the past 50 years.

The protest votes were an expression of distaste with so many policies formulated and implemented by people like Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, Hugo Banzer Suarez, and Jorge Quiroga, leaders who were as much instruments of US foreign policy as they were self-interested, Westernized technocrats that had little in common with the average urbanite, much less the indigenous campesino.

So Evo Morales, more so than most heads of state, is as much a symbol of national sovereignty and ethnic identity as he is a formulator of domestic and foreign policy.

Bolivians are well aware that Evo’s stance against neo-imperialism has put him at great personal risk. The magnitude of that risk remains to be seen, and will be directly proportional to his nascent policies on a host of issues: foreign gas contracts, coca production, free trade agreements, and the role of foreign aid agencies and the US military in Bolivia’s future.

What is certain, however, is that no other Bolivian leader, even within the MAS party, has the popular support and the symbolic charisma of Evo Morales. Should something happen to Evo, Bolivia‘s fragile socio-political calm would devolve into a state of total chaos.