Congratulations Evo Morales

Bolivian president, Evo Morales, and vice-president, Alvaro Garcia Linera, celebrate the election victory in La Paz. Photograph: Jorge Bernal/AFP/Getty Images

Exit polls are confirming predictions that Evo Morales has won a convincing victory over his conservative rival, Manfred Reyes, in Bolivia. Whilst facing staunch opposition amongst wealthier Bolivians living in the gas-rich East, Morales – an Aymara coca farmer and the country’s first indigenous president – has always enjoyed strong support from the poorer Quechua and Aymara people in the highland West. Bolivia, Latin America’s poorest country, has suffered from decades of neo-liberalism and the coca eradication programmes carried out by previous governments on behalf of the US. However, with the continent’s second largest reserves of natural gas, the country has the tools to lift itself from destitution. Morales’s wildly popular decision to ‘nationalise’ the gas (in reality Bolivia’s gas reserves have always belonged to the state, foreign corporations were just paying a marginal amount to extract it) has helped GDP leap from $9bn to $19bn since he came to power in 2005, whilst his social programmes have helped raise the quality of life for the poorest sections of society.

For all those in the West who say socialism is dead, that it was tried and failed and no longer matters to anyone in a society where everyone is middle class – look at Latin America. This is where socialism matters. This where it is genuinely making a difference to people’s lives. This – and in all the deeply impoverished countries of the world, held back as the centuries of colonialism that have raped their resources have turned to newer, more insidious forms of neo-liberal exploitation – is where socialism is needed.