Bolivian city highlights bitter rivalries

By Ignacio Badal

SANTA CRUZ, Bolivia, Nov 30 (Reuters) - In the downtown boutiques and cafes of Santa Cruz, Bolivian President Evo Morales is widely reviled, but many in its poor outskirts are fiercely loyal to the leftist leader.

This tropical, eastern city is Bolivia's economic hub and a focus of increasingly fierce opposition to the leftist former coca farmer who has angered opponents with a drive to rewrite the constitution to give more power to indigenous groups.

Tensions over the reforms have escalated this week, exposing centuries-old rivalries and suspicions between the indigenous Andean highlands and a European-descended business elite concentrated in the eastern lowlands.

"This government does whatever it wants. It wants to impose things upon us. The indigenous peasant farmers have all the rights and we have none," said Marcos, a company executive, in the city's leafy main square.

"Here in Santa Cruz, we've got cows, but in (the highlands) they've got nothing but rocks. They don't want to turn their lives around, they just want to take our resources," he said, asking not to give his surname.

Santa Cruz, an agricultural center where foreign energy companies have offices, came to a virtual standstill on Wednesday as workers in Bolivia's opposition-controlled regions protested Morales' constitutional reform plans.

Morales became Bolivia's first leader of indigenous descent in January 2006, ending the political dominance of a mainly white economic elite and raising fears in Santa Cruz that the region, which accounts for one third of the country's economic output, could lose its affluence and stability.

In Santa Cruz, the green and white regional flag is more common than the national flag and walls are daubed with graffiti calling for autonomy from the central government.