Bolivian President Evo Morales said on Wednesday that he would expel the US ambassador for allegedly inciting violent opposition protests.
Morales’ announcement came hours after his government said a pipeline blast triggered by saboteurs forced the country to cut natural gas exports to Brazil by 10 percent.
“Without fear of the empire, I declare the US ambassador persona non grata,” Morales said in a speech at the presidential palace.
PHOTO: AP
He said he asked his foreign minister to send a diplomatic note to US Ambassador Philip Goldberg telling him to go home.
“We don’t want separatists, divisionists,” Morales said.
In Washington, US State Department spokesman Gordon Duguid called the accusation “baseless” and said the US government had not yet received a note about the ambassador.
The US embassy in Bolivia said on its Web site that Goldberg learned of Morales’ action during a meeting with Bolivia’s foreign minister. The statement said he was surprised at Morales’ “sudden decision” and was waiting for official diplomatic notification.
Morales’ close ally, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who also calls the US “the empire,” cheered the move, calling a two-week wave of increasingly violent anti-Morales protests the harvest of an alliance between Bolivia’s “extreme right” and the US government.
The Bolivian leader did not offer specific evidence against Goldberg, but he has long accused the diplomat of conspiring with Bolivia’s conservative opposition. A share of US aid to Bolivia goes to eastern provincial governments that are the nexus of opposition to Morales, which has angered the Bolivian president and his supporters.
Morales, meanwhile, praised protesters who marched on the US embassy in May and has accused Washington of plotting to overthrow him.
In June, Bolivia terminated USAID programs in the coca-growing Chapare region aimed at weaning farmers off the crop from which cocaine is produced. Farmers there had faulted the programs as heavy-handed and ineffectual.
Goldberg met last week with Ruben Costas, one of Morales’ most virulent opponents. Costas is governor of Santa Cruz, Bolivia’s richest province and the seat of a pro-autonomy revolt against the nation’s first indigenous president.
Anti-Morales protests reached a crescendo on Tuesday with the sacking and burning of government offices in Santa Cruz, in which at least 10 people were reported injured.
Anti-government activists also seized several natural gas installations in the east.
At one, in the eastern province of Tarija, demonstrators triggered Wednesday’s pipeline blast by closing a valve, creating pressure that ruptured the line near the border with Paraguay and set off a fire, the government said.
No injuries were reported in what state energy company president Santos Ramirez called “a terrorist attack.”
The government immediately ordered additional troops to secure gas and oil installations.
Ramirez said both gas plants remained occupied by protesters on Wednesday afternoon.
The pipeline blast reduced by 3 million cubic meters the 30 million cubic meters of gas Bolivia sends to Brazil each day, he said. But in Brazil, officials said the gas flow remained normal.
Brazilian Ambassador Frederico Araujo was quoted by the government’s official news service as saying Brazil would not be affected for 48 hours.
“They damaged only one valve, they didn’t explode the pipeline like it’s been said in the news,” Agencia Brasil quoted him as saying.
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