It is a crisp, sunny, late-June day in La Paz. At 3,600 meters, the Andean sky is an implausible Soviet-postcard blue. In the Plaza de San Francisco, supporters of coca growers' leader Evo Morales are setting up for this evening's end-of-campaign rally and a few hundred supporters are congregating near the stage. As the sun begins to set, an impromptu parade winds past the Plaza, stopping rush-hour traffic on the Prado, the city's main drag. It is led by Esther Balboa, a Quechua intellectual who is the Aymara leader Felipe Quispe's vice presidential running mate in Sunday's presidential election (the scene is depicted on the jacket of this book). Less than one week before the election, Morales and Quispe, leaders of parties representing the country's indigenous majority, are expected to finish behind the pack. No one predicts the transformation that is about to occur. Quispe will merely win twice the vote of any previous indigenous presidential candidate. Morales will finish second, less than two percentage points behind the winner.

Almost exactly five years earlier, after the 1997 elections, I wrapped up doctoral dissertation research in La Paz. I had a hunch that the new indigenous peoples' parties that had formed in the 1990s might be the basis of a study of how small parties representing the marginalized indigenous population are having an impact on the quality of democracy in Latin America.