16 Jul 2004 20:12:06 GMT

By Alistair Scrutton

LA PAZ, Bolivia, July 16 (Reuters) - Indians who used street protests to oust Bolivia's last president could now take up arms against a new one who refuses to heed demands to nationalize the country's energy riches, a senior leader said.

"If (the government) doesn't understand us, we could even be obliged to take up arms," Felipe Quispe, a former guerrilla who is one of Bolivia's most well-known Indian leaders, said on Friday, just days before a natural gas referendum on Sunday that the government must win to survive.

"The strikes, the marches, are getting worn out. We may have to opt for another form of battle," said the 62-year-old Quispe, an mobile-phone carrying Amyara Indian wearing a cowboy-style hat, denim shirt and leather jacket.



President Carlos Mesa will hold a referendum on how to develop one of Latin America's largest gas reserves in a vote he hopes will appease Indians who demand more state control to ensure affordable fuel.

The Indian's ire at government plans to export gas lay behind a siege of the capital last October, when dozens of people died and Mesa's predecessor, President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, was ousted.

Polls show a majority of Bolivians will say 'Yes' to Sunday's five-question referendum that asks if voters want more state control over gas production and exports. It assumes foreign firms will stay on.

But Indians led by Quispe say they will burn ballot boxes. They want total state control through nationalization and foreign firms thrown out.

NATIONWIDE REBELLION

Quispe's power is centered in remote villages near the top tourist destination of Lake Titicaca, a sacred Inca site. Many Bolivians oppose his radicalism, but his road blockades last year helped spur poor Indians, a majority of the population, to carry out a nationwide rebellion against Sanchez de Lozada.

"We want one question, whether to nationalize or not. The government is deceiving us," he said in a downtrodden office adorned with an Inca flag. "We live in a gas-rich nation but we have to cook with wood or animal fat."

Growing calls to nationalize the gas industry show how many Bolivians feel that decades of market reforms have only helped foreign firms and European-descended elites.

Quispe spent five years in prison in the 1990s for leading a group of guerrillas that tried to blow up power pylons.

He named the rebels after Tupac Katari, an Indian who laid siege to Spanish colonists in La Paz and forced settlers to survive by eating rats. Around his office lie paintings of Inca leaders killed in battles against the Spanish empire.

"We have sacrificed so much, the dead and wounded. These were all Indigenous people, not mixed bloods or whites," said the man known as "Mallku", the Aymara Indian word for chief.

Quispe wants Bolivia to revert back to "Ayllu", a basic form of Indian community self-rule since Inca times. He calls Mea a "bearded conquistador."

"In many villages, inhabitants have expelled the police. There is now a parallel power," he said.

Quispe's power may be waning. He is hostile to another Indian leader, Evo Morales, a more moderate politician who won about a quarter of votes in the last presidential election.

A firm 'Yes' vote on Sunday could also weaken Quispe amid signs Bolivians are tired of social conflict.

But political analyst Jorge Lazarte said Quispe "will always be waiting in the aisles," to try and take up Indian leadership amid any government crisis.