LA PAZ (AFP) -- President Evo Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous president, will likely face an indigenous rival in December, as his former ally Alejo Veliz announced Monday he will run for president in the early general elections.

A leftist former farm union leader, Veliz is highly critical of Morales and the new constitution he helped push through in January that, among other things, allows him to run for reelection to another five-year term.
“I see in President Morales many weaknesses, primarily judicial weaknesses. He’s a man who doesn’t respect ... the rule of law,” Veliz said on local television.
He said he was forming a new political party, Pulso (People for Liberty and Sovereignty), to participate in the electoral process, adding that “the ship Morales and his team are steering is about to crash.”
Veliz was an ally of Morales, 49, when he muscled his way to the presidency in 2005 elections as the charismatic leader of a coca growers union.
But in announcing his own run for the presidency Monday, Veliz slammed Morales for lacking “professional training” and for splitting the country between rich and poor.
“When have you seen a country with two flags, two systems of justice and so many nations, I think we’ve got to create a great country, with only one flag, one justice system, a country with a lot of education, but with opportunities for all,” Veliz said.
The sweeping constitutional changes gives the country’s 36 indigenous communities and groups rights to territory, language and their own “community” systems of justice. It also limits the size of landholdings.
Morales says the new constitutions lays the foundation for “communitarian socialism,” but it has met fierce opposition from big landholders of European descent in the country’s east.
Invoking the new charter, indigenous groups seized a farm owned by a former vice-president earlier this month and tried to take over a mine.