Protesters blocked an airport in southern Bolivia on Thursday to prevent a visit from Bolivian President Evo Morales, as the nation remained bitterly divided ahead of a recall referendum.
David Cruz, leader of a teachers’ union in Pando department, said protesters placed four tractors on the runway of the Cobija airport to keep the president from being able to land.
“Morales comes to make promises he won’t keep,” Cruz told Fides radio.
PHOTO: EPA
Anti-government groups also prevented Morales from going to Santa Cruz and Beni the previous day. Earlier this week protests at an airport in Tarija prompted him to scrap a planned meeting with the presidents of Argentina and Venezuela.
Morales canceled a visit to Sucre for Independence Day celebrations after local authorities did not guarantee his security.
“These are factious groups paid by the [opposition] governors,” presidential minister Juan Ramon Quintana told state-run radio Patria Nueva.
Morales presided over a parade of the armed forces and indigenous groups on Thursday in the central city of Cochabamba, where he thanked the military for its support.
“I encourage you defend this process of change,” Morales said.
The president and eight of the country’s nine regional governors are subject to recall in Sunday’s vote. Morales sought the referendum in a bid to strengthen his hand in disputes with governors who are seeking more autonomy from the central government, but polls suggest that both he and his rivals will likely survive the vote.
Two miners were killed in violent protests on Tuesday.
Morales is expected to survive the recall vote this weekend but a political crisis in South America’s poorest country may intensify as right-wing opponents try to block his socialist reforms.
Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous leader and a former coca farmer, hopes a recall win will allow him to relaunch reforms such as nationalizations and land redistribution in the landlocked Andean country.
“I’m going to vote for him because he does good things for peasant farmers,” said Ignacia Cordero, a wheat and potato farmer from El Alto near La Paz, dressed in a woolen hat and traditional multilayered, multicolored skirts.
“He gives money to the aged, and for children too,” the 67-year-old said, her four-year-old grandson slung over her back in a piece of woven cloth. “He won’t lose. There are plenty of farmers like me who will vote for him.”
While Morales remains popular, his reforms have increasingly divided the country.
He has already nationalized energy, mining and telecommunications businesses and is distributing some of the proceeds to Bolivia’s poorest in the form of handouts.
THE ‘MONSTER’: The Philippines on Saturday sent a vessel to confront a 12,000-tonne Chinese ship that had entered its exclusive economic zone The Philippines yesterday said it deployed a coast guard ship to challenge Chinese patrol boats attempting to “alter the existing status quo” of the disputed South China Sea. Philippine Coast Guard spokesman Commodore Jay Tarriela said Chinese patrol ships had this year come as close as 60 nautical miles (111km) west of the main Philippine island of Luzon. “Their goal is to normalize such deployments, and if these actions go unnoticed and unchallenged, it will enable them to alter the existing status quo,” he said in a statement. He later told reporters that Manila had deployed a coast guard ship to the area
HOLLYWOOD IN TURMOIL: Mandy Moore, Paris Hilton and Cary Elwes lost properties to the flames, while awards events planned for this week have been delayed Fires burning in and around Los Angeles have claimed the homes of numerous celebrities, including Billy Crystal, Mandy Moore and Paris Hilton, and led to sweeping disruptions of entertainment events, while at least five people have died. Three awards ceremonies planned for this weekend have been postponed. Next week’s Oscar nominations have been delayed, while tens of thousands of city residents had been displaced and were awaiting word on whether their homes survived the flames — some of them the city’s most famous denizens. More than 1,900 structures had been destroyed and the number was expected to increase. More than 130,000 people
A group of Uyghur men who were detained in Thailand more than one decade ago said that the Thai government is preparing to deport them to China, alarming activists and family members who say the men are at risk of abuse and torture if they are sent back. Forty-three Uyghur men held in Bangkok made a public appeal to halt what they called an imminent threat of deportation. “We could be imprisoned and we might even lose our lives,” the letter said. “We urgently appeal to all international organizations and countries concerned with human rights to intervene immediately to save us from
RISING TENSIONS: The nations’ three leaders discussed China’s ‘dangerous and unlawful behavior in the South China Sea,’ and agreed on the importance of continued coordination Japan, the Philippines and the US vowed to further deepen cooperation under a trilateral arrangement in the face of rising tensions in Asia’s waters, the three nations said following a call among their leaders. Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr and outgoing US President Joe Biden met via videoconference on Monday morning. Marcos’ communications office said the leaders “agreed to enhance and deepen economic, maritime and technology cooperation.” The call followed a first-of-its-kind summit meeting of Marcos, Biden and then-Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida in Washington in April last year that led to a vow to uphold international
RSS