Bolivian President Evo Morales lashed out at opponents on Monday after four people were killed in violent protests against his reforms and opposition leaders renewed threats to secede from the central government.
Violence exploded on the streets of the southern city of Sucre over the weekend after Morales' leftist allies pushed a draft of a new constitution through a constitutional assembly under military guard.
The US Department of State and the UN expressed concern over the violence and urged both sides to show restraint and tolerance.
Morales has made rewriting the constitution a pillar of his reform agenda, but the issue has deepened ethnic and regional divisions in South America's poorest country, which has a long history of political upheaval.
A close ally of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, Morales took office as Bolivia's first indigenous president in January last year, vowing to increase state control over the economy and empower the poor, Indian majority.
He nationalized the natural gas industry and seeks to give more autonomy to indigenous groups with the new constitution.
In the opposition stronghold of Santa Cruz, the country's economic powerhouse in the east, residents rallied in the main square on Monday and voted in a public forum to authorize a civic committee to declare autonomy.
Flanked by the Santa Cruz mayor and the regional governor, Branco Marinkovic, a leader of the Santa Cruz secessionist movement, said the afternoon rally gave him "a mandate" to begin the autonomy process.
Morales spoke heatedly against anti-government protesters in Santa Cruz who occupied state offices and said his government was trying to work for change for everybody.
"Occupying state offices isn't democracy, civil disobedience isn't democracy, and we hope the Bolivian people ... identify these traitors, the people who are against the nation and want to damage this process of change," Morales told thousands of followers in La Paz.
Four people were killed in the weekend's unrest in Sucre, in which demonstrators torched police stations and stormed a jail, freeing 100 inmates.
A funeral for two of the dead turned into an anti-government protest in Sucre, 700km south of La Paz, as the government contemplated emergency measures to bring the city of 200,000 people back under control.
Meanwhile, the UN, the Organization of American States (OAS) and the US, called for calm.
In New York, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon urged all sides to refrain from violence.
"In order to strengthen democracy and respect for human rights in Bolivia, the secretary general urges all political and social actors to remain calm, to abstain from using violence and to seek a consensus on the pressing issues affecting the Bolivian people," his press office said in a statement.
OAS Secretary-General Jose Miguel Insulza stressed the need to end the violence and the confrontations and that "the parties, given the democratic legitimacy of the Bolivian government, reinstate talks to reach a constitutional decision that harmonizes the interests of all."
"The confrontations reveal a worrying division of Bolivian society which seriously affects the environment that should reign during the drafting of a constitutional charter," Insulza said in a statement.
In Washington, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said the US government deplored the violence and urged the Morales administration and the opposition "to show restraint and tolerance during this critical period."
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS