Morales was born into the Aymara indigenous ethnic group in the Andean highlands, a group of people who tend to back roads, industry and economic development, said Tegel. But indigenous populations in the tropical part of the country, generally speaking, don’t want that, he said. “They want to a certain degree to be left alone. That doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t want economic development, but they want a different model and they want it done much more at a community level.” Economics is a huge issue in Bolivia — one of the poorest countries in Latin America — and a major driver in policy decisions, Tegel said. “That tension between his indigenous and environmental discourse and some of the projects he actually wants to do, including increasing mining in the country, is at the very least a paradox and something his critics are calling hypocritical.”

Long a part of indigenous culture in which the leaf had been chewed or brewed in teas, coca cultivation is legal — though controlled — in Bolivia. President Evo Morales, himself once a leader of coca growers, has championed its cause, leading the United Nations to acknowledge his country’s right to allow its traditional use.

Mr. Morales is also the first indigenous president of Bolivia, where 48 percent of the population declared themselves indigenous in the last census, and his government has proven itself adept at reconciling ancestral knowledge with economic modernization.

EV: Decolonization means a lot to me, it means recuperating… our own path, something which we’ve been forced to lose, this [indigenous] path, this wisdom, this knowledge has been devalued, minimized as though it weren’t knowledge at all. And so now we are recuperated this, and we’re doing so in our own way. This for us is decolonization, a process which is done via the state but also via the social organizations, because this is an issue of how to organize, how to speak of our ancestral technologies. Yes, many things have been modernized, but in many cases we have a necessity to recuperate our own principles and values as indigenous peoples.