Bolivia's eastern lowlands prepared for a mass demonstration yesterday demanding greater autonomy from President Evo Morales' government, in a movement that has taken on fresh urgency during the struggle over a new national constitution.
Fasting protesters who for days sprawled on mattresses in the central square cleared out of the palm tree-filled plaza for a gathering expected to draw legions of demonstrators.
Protests also were planned in the southern city of Tarija and in Bolivia's Amazonian northeast at Cobija and Trinidad.
The demonstrations form a giant half-moon across the map of Bolivia's relatively prosperous eastern half, an area dominated by a largely mestizo and white population that bridles at the new influence of the Aymara and Quechua Indian population of Bolivia's western Andean highlands.
Morales, Bolivia's first Indian president, has pledged to redistribute power and wealth to the Indian majority. But many here in Bolivia's largest and most prosperous city complain they're being shunted aside.
"It's absurd that we must always be reaffirming that we're Bolivian. It hurts the people here, it makes them feel rejected," said German Antelo, president of the Santa Cruz Civic Committee, a non-governmental assembly leading the protest, speaking for fellow Santa Cruz residents in an interview before the protests.
"They want to be part of the country, but keeping their own identity," he said.
Morales controls just over half of the popularly elected constitutional assembly and believes that simple majority is enough to approve the articles of a new charter giving a greater voice to Bolivia's long-oppressed indigenous population.
But his conservative opposition, centered in Santa Cruz, insists the document must be written by a two-thirds majority of the 255-member assembly.
Weeks of talks between the two sides have failed to produce a compromise, and opposition delegates have declared a boycott of the assembly until the government allows the vote.
Now the opposition is taking the fight to the streets. Protest T-shirts for sale in Santa Cruz are silkscreened with "2/3" or "Autonomy" and some of the local graffiti calls for outright independence from "Dictator Evo."
Far outside the city center, in the poor Plan 3,000 neighborhood largely populated by Indian immigrants from the west, a few hundred local residents held their own counter-protest on Thursday. Marchers decried autonomy as a ploy by Bolivia's wealthy elite to steal back power from Morales' government and block his populist reforms.
"They want autonomy so that they can transfer the power they once had in the central government here to the state," said Eulogio Cortes, a local leader in Bolivia's landless movement attending the event.
Morales this week acknowledged the protesters' right to march, but added that any move by the eastern states to declare independence would provoke a military response.
"We've begun to take back Bolivia," Morales said, directing strong words at the business leaders at the head of the autonomy movement. "Now that they can't sell Bolivia, they want to divide Bolivia, that's the basic issue. There will be no division."
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