Soldiers clashed with students protesting Bolivia's constitutional assembly on Saturday, leaving one student dead in a second day of unrest against the pending legal overhaul.
University student Gonzalo Duran was shot dead in Sucre, said Marcelo Carvajal, head of emergency medicine at the city's Santa Barbara hospital. Another student was hospitalized with serious gunshot wounds, he said.
Sucre City Council head Fidel Herrera said that two students had been killed.
PHOTO: AP
Interior Minister Alfredo Rada said it was unclear who had fired the shots.
He said police and soldiers did not use "deadly weapons."
Thousands of students and residents took to the streets of Sucre on Friday and Saturday, marching to a local military academy where government officials and allies are meeting to draft revisions to the Constitution.
Protesters want the assembly to relocate Bolivia's capital from La Paz to Sucre, a proposal the government has rejected for months.
Sucre is the site of Bolivia's 1825 founding and its first capital. Home to the nation's highest courts, the picturesque colonial city now wants the executive and legislative branches that it lost to La Paz in a brief 1899 civil war to return -- and bring with them much-needed economic development.
Revising the Constitution, which Bolivian President Evo Morales promises will grant the nation's indigenous majority greater say in government, is one of his main political projects.
But the assembly has haggled for more than a year over Bolivia's future without agreeing on a single article of the new constitution, despite a Dec. 14 deadline for a draft.
Violent anti-government protests suspended the assembly in September as students clashed with police, burning tires and trying to seize the historic theater where the assembly then met.
Government allies this month resumed meeting at a military academy outside Sucre.
But clashes forced the assembly to suspend meetings again on Saturday night, after approving a preliminary version of the new constitution. Assembly President Silvia Lazarte said no date has been set for sessions to resume.
"There's a grave danger from the protests and that requires we call a recess," she said.
Four people jailed in the landmark Hong Kong national security trial of "47 democrats" accused of conspiracy to commit subversion were freed today after more than four years behind bars, the second group to be released in a month. Among those freed was long-time political and LGBTQ activist Jimmy Sham (岑子杰), who also led one of Hong Kong’s largest pro-democracy groups, the Civil Human Rights Front, which disbanded in 2021. "Let me spend some time with my family," Sham said after arriving at his home in the Kowloon district of Jordan. "I don’t know how to plan ahead because, to me, it feels
Polish presidential candidates offered different visions of Poland and its relations with Ukraine in a televised debate ahead of next week’s run-off, which remains on a knife-edge. During a head-to-head debate lasting two hours, centrist Warsaw Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski, from Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s governing pro-European coalition, faced the Eurosceptic historian Karol Nawrocki, backed by the right-wing populist Law and Justice party (PiS). The two candidates, who qualified for the second round after coming in the top two places in the first vote on Sunday last week, clashed over Poland’s relations with Ukraine, EU policy and the track records of their
‘A THREAT’: Guyanese President Irfan Ali called on Venezuela to follow international court rulings over the region, whose border Guyana says was ratified back in 1899 Misael Zapara said he would vote in Venezuela’s first elections yesterday for the territory of Essequibo, despite living more than 100km away from the oil-rich Guyana-administered region. Both countries lay claim to Essequibo, which makes up two-thirds of Guyana’s territory and is home to 125,000 of its 800,000 citizens. Guyana has administered the region for decades. The centuries-old dispute has intensified since ExxonMobil discovered massive offshore oil deposits a decade ago, giving Guyana the largest crude oil reserves per capita in the world. Venezuela would elect a governor, eight National Assembly deputies and regional councilors in a newly created constituency for the 160,000
North Korea has detained another official over last week’s failed launch of a warship, which damaged the naval destroyer, state media reported yesterday. Pyongyang announced “a serious accident” at Wednesday last week’s launch ceremony, which crushed sections of the bottom of the new destroyer. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un called the mishap a “criminal act caused by absolute carelessness.” Ri Hyong-son, vice department director of the Munitions Industry Department of the Party Central Committee, was summoned and detained on Sunday, the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported. He was “greatly responsible for the occurrence of the serious accident,” it said. Ri is the fourth person