FACTBOX: Key facts about Bolivia's Evo Morales

(Reuters) - As many as 30 people have died in the last week amid political violence in Bolivia, in a deepening conflict between President Evo Morales and opposition governors who fiercely resist his socialist reforms.

Groups of pro- and anti-Morales activists have clashed off-and-on since Tuesday in the eastern part of the impoverished South American country, and Morales imposed martial law in sparsely populated northern Pando province.

Here are some key facts about Morales:

* Morales is very popular in Bolivia. He won an August recall election with 67 percent of the vote. But his push for deep socialist reforms has angered rightist opponents, especially large landholders in the country's east.

* Morales, 48, comes from a poor Aymara Indian family. He herded llamas on the Andean plateau as a boy and never finished high school. He has said four of his six siblings died young.

* When a severe drought hit in the early 1980s, Morales and his family moved to Bolivia's coca-growing region, where a decade later he emerged as the leader of the coca farmers' union, launching his political career.

* Morales' rise to power goes hand in hand with the political awakening of Quechua and Aymara Indians, who make up a majority of the population. He became the country's first president of indigenous descent after winning an election landslide in late 2005.

* He is a fierce critic of U.S. foreign policy and has forged a strong ideological alliance with Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and Cuba's Fidel Castro, to whom he often refers in reverential terms.

* Morales wants to rewrite Bolivia's constitution to give more power to Indian groups, who he says have been oppressed for centuries by the largely white, European-descended elite.

(Editing by Fiona Ortiz and Todd Eastham)