Bolivia's president sets date for recall vote

(CNN) -- Bolivia's president Monday set August 10 as the date for a vote of confidence he predicts will give him a new mandate and strengthen his hand against movements for autonomy in several states.

"Personally, I have no fear of the people," President Evo Morales told reporters in a signing ceremony at the presidential palace in La Paz.

"The people should say the truth about their authorities. This is another way for the people to judge their elected officials."

The former labor activist announced on national television the referendum that could determine the fate of his administration and that of the governors of the nation's nine departments or states.

Morales is Bolivia's first indigenous president and an ally of Venezuela's leftist president, Hugo Chavez. In 2005, after campaigning on promises to reform the country's constitution to help its indigenous majority, he was elected to a six-year term.

But his proposed reforms have been hamstrung by opposition from officials in the nation's mostly non-indigenous eastern lowland states. Those states are rich in oil and natural gas -- vital resources for the poorest country in Latin America.

May 4, Santa Cruz, the largest and richest of the departments, voted overwhelmingly in support of autonomy in a referendum that Morales has rejected as illegal and intended primarily to help the families of a few large landowners. The leaders of the pro-autonomy movement said the issue was about the rights of individual departments to control their own affairs.

To win, and force another election, the opposition would need to attract as many votes as Morales himself garnered in the 2005 election, when he won with 53.7 percent of the vote.

The confidence vote is not that risky for the president, said Eduardo A. Gamarra, a professor of political science at Florida International University in Miami.

"Morales knows he's not going to lose," he said. "His favorability ratings are high. Morales basically sees this as a way in which he is going to endorse himself, go back to the masses and get a renewed endorsement for his government and for himself."

But the vote is a calculated risk for the nine governors, six of whom are members of the opposition, he added.

Morales also favors a national referendum on changes to the constitution, under which the central government would be further emphasized at the expense of the current system, which gives relative autonomy to the country's departments. But since the nation's law limits to one the number of national referendums that can be held in any given year, that vote will be put off until next year, Gamarra said.

Morales' new constitution would identify Bolivia as an indigenous country, would increase the number of official languages from three to 36 and would limit land ownership to 10,000 hectares (24,700 acres).

"It would change the economic system and attempt to construct a 21st century socialism a la Chavez," Gamarra said.

Whatever happens in the vote of confidence, the autonomy issue is not going away. Three other departments -- Beni, Pando and Tarija -- have planned votes on autonomy before June 22.

The governors of those departments and Santa Cruz were no-shows Monday at a planned meeting with Morales at the National Palace.

"They don't want to talk," Defense Minister Walker San Miguel told reporters. "They don't want to tell the country what cards they are holding up their sleeves."

But Michael Shifter, vice president for policy at the Inter-American Dialogue, a think-tank policy forum on Western hemisphere affairs in Washington, said the issue is "just a power struggle."

"All of this is a jockeying for a better position over essentially economic issues which are at stake: natural gas and the eastern provinces don't want to give up very much and the government wants to take too much," he said.

Shifter was not as confident as Gamarra that Morales' position is secure, however.

"I think the chance probably is that he is going to win, but I think he's taking a risk, no question about it," Shifter said.

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