LA PAZ, Bolivia (AP) - Evo Morales, Bolivia's first Indian president, took office yesterday with a promise to lift his nation's struggling indigenous majority out of centuries of poverty and discrimination.

Morales, a former leader of Bolivia's coca growers and a fierce critic of U.S. policies, raised a fist in a leftist salute as he swore to uphold the constitution.

"I wish to tell you, my Indian brothers, that the 500-year indigenous and popular campaign of resistance has not been in vain," Morales said.

The 46-year-old son of a peasant farmer, Morales vowed that his socialist governmen t would reshape Bolivia. He criticized free-market economic prescriptions supported by the U.S. and international donors, saying they had failed to end chronic poverty.

"The neoliberal economic model has run out," said Morales, an Aymara Indian.

Thousands of Aymara and Quechua and other Indians attended, many wearing the varied styles of hats imposed on them when
Bolivia was a Spanish colony hundreds of years ago. They stood alongside miners, students and leftist sympathizers waving Cuban and Venezuelan flags on the cobblestone plaza outside the colonial-era Congress building.

"Power is in the hands of the Bolivian people for the first time," said Walter Villarro, among 2,000 miners who turned out dressed in their trademark helmets and black leather jackets.
Morales compared decades of discrimination against Indians to apartheid, saying "Bolivia seems like South Africa" as he recounted how, decades ago, Indians were barred from entering the plaza.

He said he planned to bring Bolivia's vast natural gas reserves under more state control, and call a constitutional assembly to answer Indian demands for a greater share of power at all levels of society, he said.