Bolivia’s leftist government and rebel rightwing governors were readying yesterday for negotiations aimed at ending a bitter and enduring political conflict that last week blew up into deadly violence.
Bolivian President Evo Morales was expected to engage his foes in the talks after South American presidents holding a crisis summit on Monday gave him their “full and firm” support and rejected any breakup of Bolivia.
His vice president and ministers met over Monday night with one of the five governors demanding autonomy for their eastern states to fix the parameters of the upcoming talks.
The conflict has been bubbling along since Morales, a former coca farmer and union leader, became president in 2006 and set about imposing reforms designed to benefit the indigenous majority he belongs to.
Matters came to a head last month when Morales called a Dec. 7 referendum on a rewritten Constitution that would break up big land holdings and redistribute revenues from natural gas.
Anti-government rallies sprang up in the rebel states, where the governors demanded more control over gas fields and militants set up roadblocks to separate the economically vital eastern lowlands from the poorer Andean western half of Bolivia. Government offices and airports were taken over by stone-throwing mobs, and residents clashed in several areas. In the northern state of Pando, they turned deadly, with at least 18 people dead and 100 wounded.
Defense Minister Walker San Miguel said 11 people suspected of “heading or instigating” gangs alleged to have gunned down people in Pando had been arrested and taken to La Paz.
The government has accused Pando’s governor, Leopoldo Fernandez, of having a hand in the killings. His state has been under martial law since Saturday. One soldier and one civilian were killed over the weekend after the military moved in.
Morales, when he arrived in Santiago, Chile, for Monday’s six-hour summit, charged that the coalition of rebel governors had tried to mount a “civic coup” against him.
The meeting with the presidents of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Uruguay and Venezuela resulted in a unanimous statement warning that all the governments represented “energetically reject and will not recognize any situation that attempts a civil coup and the rupture of institutional order and which could compromise the territorial integrity of the Republic of Bolivia.”
It also condemned the deaths in Pando and called for a commission to investigate allegations of a “massacre.”
The harsh words Morales reserved for his political enemies did not augur well for the planned talks.
Morales was also embroiled in a diplomatic row with the US, after ordering the US ambassador out of the country for allegedly giving support to the opposition.
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, the Bolivian leader’s main ally, followed suit, expelling the US ambassador to Caracas.
The president of Honduras added to the show of solidarity by refusing a new US envoy, while Nicaragua’s leader, Daniel Ortega, snubbed an invitation to meet US President George W. Bush on the sidelines of a UN General Assembly later this month.
A furious Washington expelled the Bolivian and Venezuelan ambassadors in retaliation.
A subsidiary of a Hong Kong-based company that has lost control of two critical ports on the Panama Canal said it is seeking US$2 billion of compensation in damages from Panama over its “illegal” takeover of the ports. Panama Ports Co, a unit of Hong Kong’s CK Hutchison Holdings (長江和記實業), on Friday said in a statement that it is demanding the sum under international arbitration proceedings that it had already started. The Panamanian government last week seized control of the Balboa and Cristobal ports on each end of the Panama Canal, after the country’s Supreme Court declared earlier that a concession allowing
DETERRENCE: With 1,000 indigenous Hsiung Feng II and III missiles and 400 Harpoon missiles, the nation would boast the highest anti-ship missile density in the world With Taiwan wrapping up mass production of Hsiung Feng II and III missiles by December and an influx of Harpoon missiles from the US, Taiwan would have the highest density of anti-ship missiles in the world, a source said yesterday. Taiwan is to wrap up mass production of the indigenous anti-ship missiles by the end of year, as the Chungshan Institute of Science and Technology has been meeting production targets ahead of schedule, a defense official with knowledge of the matter said. Combined with the 400 Harpoon anti-ship missiles Taiwan expects to receive from the US by 2028, the nation would have
POSSIBILITIES EMERGE: With Taiwan’s victory and Japan’s narrow win over Australia, Taiwan now have a chance to advance if South Korea also beat the Aussies Taiwan has high hopes that the national baseball team would advance to the World Baseball Classic (WBC) quarter-finals after clinching a crucial 5-4 victory over South Korea in a nail-biting extra-inning game at the Tokyo Dome yesterday. Boosted by three home runs — two solo shots by Yu Chang (張育成) and Cheng Tsung-che (鄭宗哲) and a two-run homer by Stuart Fairchild — the triumph gave Taiwan a much-needed second victory in the five-team Pool C, where only the top two finishers would advance to the knockout stage in Miami, Florida. Entering extra innings with the game tied at four apiece, Taiwan scored
MISSION OF PEACE: The foreign minister urged Beijing to respect Taiwan’s existence as an independent nation, and work together to ensure peace and stability in the region Minister of Foreign Affairs Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍) yesterday rejected Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi’s (王毅) comments about Taiwan, criticizing China as a “troublemaker” in the international community and a disruptor of cross-strait peace. Speaking at a news conference on the sidelines of the Chinese National People’s Congress, Wang said that Taiwan has always been a territory of China and that it would be impossible for it to become its own country. The “return” of Taiwan to China was the natural outcome of the Chinese people’s resistance against Japan in World War II, and that any pursuit of independence was “doomed
RSS