Morales’ supporters have come to the same conclusion - and shown no reluctance in attacking indigenous politicians who would challenge their champion in elections expected in December.

When Victor Hugo Cardenas, a native Aymara like Morales and a former vice president, hinted he would run, the response was brutal: A mob of Aymaras violently evicted Cardenas’ family from their house here on Lake Titicaca’s shore, beating his wife and 24-year-old son with whips and sticks so badly they were hospitalized for two days.

Then, on Friday, the community ceremoniously banished the Cardenas family. A man and a woman in red ponchos bullwhipped the politician’s effigy, then symbolically buried it.

"We don’t pardon those who betray our brother Morales," a leader of the 400-strong mob, Alfredo Huaynapaco, told The Associated Press. Reporters found the house garbage-strewn, nearly all the furniture gone. "Taken over by the people," someone painted on a wall of the two-story brick home.

Neither police nor prosecutors have acted against the aggressors. While Morales condemned the violence, he also said: "The Bolivian people have no tolerance for traitors, nor do they forgive them."

Cardenas, who wasn’t with his family at the time, brought his injured wife and children to the relative safety of their apartment in La Paz, the capital. He told the AP in an interview Monday that his sons still wake up jumpy at night, but a flood of telephoned insults has diminished.

The 58-year-old university professor and linguist has had a long career of representing Bolivia’s oppressed Indian majority. Like Morales, he grew up poor on Bolivia’s barren high plains. He made his name as a social agitator during military rule that ended in 1982.

Rising to vice president under President Gonzalo Sanchez de Losada from 1993-97, he did much to enshrine in Bolivia’s legal code greater equality for its natives - particularly in bilingual education - in a society where Indians only won the right to vote in 1952 and still face discrimination.

"The political fight is part of my personal history. They jailed and tortured me during the dictatorships but never did anyone take action against my wife and children. And if (former dictator Hugo) Banzer couldn’t shut me up, neither can Morales," Cardenas told the AP.