La Paz: Evo Morales was set for his first full day at work as Bolivia's first indigenous president on Monday, after vowing to end what he called 500 years of abuse of the country's majority race.
Noting that Bolivian Indians make up 62 percent of the population, the leftist long-time protest leader, himself an ethnic Aymara, said: "We have been condemned, humiliated and never recognized as human beings."
"Five hundred years of campaigning and popular resistance by indigenous people has not been in vain. We are here, and we say that we have achieved power to end the injustice, the inequality and oppression that we have lived under," Morales, a former union leader and coca leaf grower, said during his inauguration Sunday.
Before 11 presidents and government leaders from Latin America and Europe, Morales focused a nearly two-hour speech on bringing justice to the country's indigenous majority. The new president held a moment of silence for those who had died in social struggles in Bolivia in recent years, calling them "martyrs".
His fiery speech also mentioned Latin American revolutionaries Che Guevara and Simon Bolivar.
And as his speech dragged on he said: "It's not my custom to talk much. Don't think that I've been infected by Fidel and Chavez." He was referring to Cuban President Fidel Castro, who was invited but absent, and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, both known for lengthy, grandiloquent speeches.
Then he made guests laugh by turning to a member of his own party who was nodding off and upbraiding him: "That senator from Cochabamba: don't fall asleep."
Morales rose to prominence as a leader of street protests and roadblocks that helped topple two Bolivian presidents in the past three years. He was elected on December 18, 2005, with almost 54 percent of the vote.
In a second speech on Sunday to supporters crammed into a city plaza, Morales promised "a government without dead people".
"The blood spilled by our brothers has not been in vain," he said of those who had died in mass street protests over the past years.
"We are not vengeful. We are not going to take revenge on anyone," he told the river of people crowding the square and the main avenue leading to it, who were waving the Bolivian national flag and the multi-color flags representing the country's 37 indigenous groups.
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