Bolivia: Unprecedented gender parity in cabinet

Evo Morales began his second term as president of Bolivia by swearing in a cabinet made up of an equal number of women and men - unprecedented in this South American nation with a strong patriarchal tradition. "My great dream has come true: half of the members of my cabinet are women, and half are men," said a visibly moved Morales when he presented his new team of ministers Saturday, the day after he was sworn in to a second term. "This was an impressive surprise," Jimena Leonardo, one of the heads of the Bartolina Sisa federation of peasant women of La Paz, told IPS. Three of the 10 female members of the cabinet are indigenous social activists. The 50-year-old Morales, the first indigenous president in this country where Amerindians make up over 60 percent of the population, said that since his days as a rural trade union leader, he had stressed the need for women's participation in top posts to be "chacha-warmi", which means roughly fifty-fifty in Aymara, his mother tongue.