Bolivia was facing worsening strife yesterday after Bolivian President Evo Morales and his political foes exchanged ultimatums and blame over unrest that has already claimed at least 17 lives.
The crisis has taken on international proportions, with the US ambassador to Bolivia expected to return to Washington after being booted out by Morales, and Brazil and Argentina concerned over natural gas supplies from their beleaguered neighbor.
The unrest was the biggest challenge Morales has faced since becoming Bolivia’s first indigenous president in 2006.
The president’s attempts to railroad through socialist reforms to redistribute land and natural gas revenues to the country’s 6 million-strong indigenous majority have been met with fierce resistance from conservative governors in five of Bolivia’s nine states — Santa Cruz, Pando, Beni, Tarija and Chuquisaca.
They are opposed to his call for a December referendum to decide a new constitution enshrining his changes and want more control over revenues from lucrative gas fields. They are pushing for autonomy.
Chief opposition figure Ruben Costas, the governor of the eastern state of Santa Cruz, told reporters overnight that prospects of a negotiated solution to the unrest were dim.
“We warn that if there is just one more death or person wounded, any possibility of dialogue will be broken,” he said.
Morales, for his part, told union leaders in central Bolivia that he would not deviate from his push for controversial socialist reforms that sparked the rebellion.
“We have always cried ‘fatherland or death.’ If we don’t emerge victorious, we have to die for the country and the Bolivian people,” said the leftwing leader, who took power as Bolivia’s first indigenous president in 2006.
The Morales government has accused the opposition governor of the northern state of Pando of being responsible for most of the deaths that occurred there since Tuesday.
Interior Minister Alfredo Rada said governor Leopoldo Fernandez was suspected of being behind a “massacre” of 16 rural workers by anti-government militants, some of whom were said to be armed state government employees.
A local farmers’ leader, Shirley Segovia, told Erbol radio the victims “were killed like pigs, with machine guns, with rifles, with shotguns, with revolvers.”
Unconfirmed reports said that Fernandez had fled to Brazil.
Morales decreed martial law for the state and sent 100 troops by airplane to the principal city of Cobija to retake the airport which had been seized by protesters. One of the soldiers was killed in the operation, the defense ministry said.
Information coming out of Cobija, Pando’s principal city, was difficult to verify because there were no flights there and roadblocks in much of eastern Bolivia hindered ground traffic.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un sent Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) greetings with what appeared to be restrained rhetoric that comes as Pyongyang moves closer to Russia and depends less on its long-time Asian ally. Kim wished “the Chinese people greater success in building a modern socialist country,” in a reply message to Xi for his congratulations on North Korea’s birthday, the state-run Korean Central News Agency reported yesterday. The 190-word dispatch had little of the florid language that had been a staple of their correspondence, which has declined significantly this year, an analysis by Seoul-based specialist service NK Pro showed. It said
On an island of windswept tundra in the Bering Sea, hundreds of miles from mainland Alaska, a resident sitting outside their home saw — well, did they see it? They were pretty sure they saw it — a rat. The purported sighting would not have gotten attention in many places around the world, but it caused a stir on Saint Paul Island, which is part of the Pribilof Islands, a birding haven sometimes called the “Galapagos of the north” for its diversity of life. That is because rats that stow away on vessels can quickly populate and overrun remote islands, devastating bird
‘CLOSER TO THE END’: The Ukrainian leader said in an interview that only from a ‘strong position’ can Ukraine push Russian President Vladimir Putin ‘to stop the war’ Decisive actions by the US now could hasten the end of the Russian war against Ukraine next year, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Monday after telling ABC News that his nation was “closer to the end of the war.” “Now, at the end of the year, we have a real opportunity to strengthen cooperation between Ukraine and the United States,” Zelenskiy said in a post on Telegram after meeting with a bipartisan delegation from the US Congress. “Decisive action now could hasten the just end of Russian aggression against Ukraine next year,” he wrote. Zelenskiy is in the US for the UN
A 64-year-old US woman took her own life inside a controversial suicide capsule at a Swiss woodland retreat, with Swiss police on Tuesday saying several people had been arrested. The space-age looking Sarco capsule, which fills with nitrogen and causes death by hypoxia, was used on Monday outside a village near the German border. The portable human-sized pod, self-operated by a button inside, has raised a host of legal and ethical questions in Switzerland. Active euthanasia is banned in the country, but assisted dying has been legal for decades. On the same day it was used, Swiss Department of Home