Pro-government supporters and security forces on Sunday confronted protesters loyal to former Bolivian president Evo Morales in a street melee, the second such violent escalation in a week as fears grew of further unrest in the Andean nation.
The protesters and counterprotesters hurled firecrackers, homemade explosives and stones at each other across a dusty sprawl in the city of El Alto, while riot police unleashed tear gas into the crowds. At least eight people were injured, the Bolivian Ministry of Health said.
The standoff — which erupted while thousands of Bolivians supporting Morales continued a week-long 190km march to the capital, La Paz — spoke to the depth of the schism in Bolivian politics ahead of next year’s presidential election.
Photo: AP
Morales and his former economy minister-turned-bitter-rival, Bolivian President Luis Arce, are vying to lead Bolivia’s long-dominant socialist party, MAS, into next year’s vote. Their power struggle has paralyzed the government, exacerbated the depletion of Bolivia’s foreign exchange reserves and fueled street protests.
The rolling political crisis began in 2019, when Morales — who came to power in 2006 — was forced to resign after being re-elected to a third term in a vote marred by accusations of fraud and mass protests. He left the nation, but made a dramatic political comeback a year later, returning to find he had retained widespread support among poor and indigenous Bolivians.
Mobilized by Morales, bound together by misery over Bolivia’s economic meltdown and outraged by Arce’s efforts to block the candidacy of their polarizing former leader, the marchers on Sunday stopped on their sixth day of walking to sleep at an encampment 11km from El Alto, a sprawling city on a plateau above Bolivia’s capital.
Seeking to portray the march as a reflection of Bolivia’s indigenous highland culture as much as a political exercise, Morales — surrounded by supporters waving the multicolored flag dear to indigenous Andeans that the leftist leader turned into a patriotic symbol when he served as the nation’s first indigenous president — praised his supporters’ “peace and enthusiasm.”
Other Morales supporters broke off from the march and pressed into the scrappy outskirts of El Alto, where security forces and supporters of Arce had massed in anticipation of their arrival. The protesters and counterprotesters clashed in the neighborhood of Ventilla as acrid smoke from burning tires and thick clouds of tear gas coursed through the streets.
Each side blamed the other for the violence.
Morales accused Arce’s government of deploying “paramilitary groups to incite violence,” busing officers into El Alto to stir up trouble — a claim echoed by Bolivia’s ombudsman.
“It’s very sad that this government doesn’t pay attention to its conscience,” said Benita Cruz, a Morales supporter at the scene of the clashes. “They are repressing the poor and most humble people.”
In increasingly dramatic terms, Arce — who earlier this year faced what he described as a military coup attempt — has accused Morales of seeking to sabotage his government.
The unrest offered a possible preview for the coming days, as Morales and his thousands of supporters have promised to continue their so-called “March to Save Bolivia” into La Paz, despite vows by Arce’s supporters to prevent them.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
BLIND COST CUTTING: A DOGE push to lay off 2,000 energy department workers resulted in hundreds of staff at a nuclear security agency being fired — then ‘unfired’ US President Donald Trump’s administration has halted the firings of hundreds of federal employees who were tasked with working on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, in an about-face that has left workers confused and experts cautioning that the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE’s) blind cost cutting would put communities at risk. Three US officials who spoke to The Associated Press said up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were abruptly laid off late on Thursday, with some losing access to e-mail before they’d learned they were fired, only to try to enter their offices on Friday morning
RSS