In Bolivia's biggest municipality, a scrub-brush expanse of cattle ranches and hardscrabble farms, Sunday's national elections aren't all about Evo Morales.

With Bolivia's first indigenous president expected to easily win re-election to a five-year term, the focus in Charagua is on the drive for greater political power by the Indian majority of this poor South American nation.

The Ireland-sized municipality is one of 12 that vote Sunday on whether to abandon modern political structures in favor of traditional native governance, with major decisions taken by public assemblies.

The prospect has galvanized the Guarani, the third-largest of the 36 ethnic groups with rights to self-determination enshrined in a new constitution backed by Morales that Bolivians ratified in January.

With Morales' help, the Guarani have been dismantling the last vestiges of oppression that U.N. investigators in May described as "forced labor and servitude." Indian families here in the Chaco region provided live-in labor for large landholders, typically receiving nothing more than food and clothing in exchange.

"That's what the Guarani people have achieved: breaking (the landowners') feudal power," says Miguel Valdez, a researcher at the nonprofit Center for Research and Promotion of the Peasantry, or CIPCA. "It's a revolution."

The Guarani, who number about 85,000 in Bolivia and also live in neighboring Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina, also hope to gain their first seat ever in Bolivia's Congress on Sunday as voters elect a new 36-member Senate and 130-member lower house.

Their candidate is Wilson Changaray, president of the Guarani's People's Assembly, the group's governing body in Bolivia. It was revived in 1987 following the restoration of democracy to Bolivia, a full century after government troops crushed a Guarani uprising in the Chaco region.

"Charagua was the nest, the bastion of the big landholders, the great dictators," says Changaray, a 42-year-old farmer's son with a boxer's build. Typical of many Guarani leaders, he never finished elementary school. It was a three-mile (five-kilometer) walk each way,

But Changaray says white minority domination is coming undone in Charagua _ where 70 percent of the 28,000 people are Guarani _ by the time Morales' took office in 2005. The new government soon ordered tens of thousands of hectares (acres) of fallow land seized from large landholders here in Bolivia's eastern lowlands and turned it over to indigenous communities.

Although there have been flare-ups of violence _ one in September 2008 in the opposition-led eastern state of Pando cost 19 lives _ the transition has been mostly peaceful.