Protesters blocked an airport in southern Bolivia on Thursday to prevent a visit from Bolivian President Evo Morales, as the nation remained bitterly divided ahead of a recall referendum.
David Cruz, leader of a teachers’ union in Pando department, said protesters placed four tractors on the runway of the Cobija airport to keep the president from being able to land.
“Morales comes to make promises he won’t keep,” Cruz told Fides radio.
PHOTO: EPA
Anti-government groups also prevented Morales from going to Santa Cruz and Beni the previous day. Earlier this week protests at an airport in Tarija prompted him to scrap a planned meeting with the presidents of Argentina and Venezuela.
Morales canceled a visit to Sucre for Independence Day celebrations after local authorities did not guarantee his security.
“These are factious groups paid by the [opposition] governors,” presidential minister Juan Ramon Quintana told state-run radio Patria Nueva.
Morales presided over a parade of the armed forces and indigenous groups on Thursday in the central city of Cochabamba, where he thanked the military for its support.
“I encourage you defend this process of change,” Morales said.
The president and eight of the country’s nine regional governors are subject to recall in Sunday’s vote. Morales sought the referendum in a bid to strengthen his hand in disputes with governors who are seeking more autonomy from the central government, but polls suggest that both he and his rivals will likely survive the vote.
Two miners were killed in violent protests on Tuesday.
Morales is expected to survive the recall vote this weekend but a political crisis in South America’s poorest country may intensify as right-wing opponents try to block his socialist reforms.
Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous leader and a former coca farmer, hopes a recall win will allow him to relaunch reforms such as nationalizations and land redistribution in the landlocked Andean country.
“I’m going to vote for him because he does good things for peasant farmers,” said Ignacia Cordero, a wheat and potato farmer from El Alto near La Paz, dressed in a woolen hat and traditional multilayered, multicolored skirts.
“He gives money to the aged, and for children too,” the 67-year-old said, her four-year-old grandson slung over her back in a piece of woven cloth. “He won’t lose. There are plenty of farmers like me who will vote for him.”
While Morales remains popular, his reforms have increasingly divided the country.
He has already nationalized energy, mining and telecommunications businesses and is distributing some of the proceeds to Bolivia’s poorest in the form of handouts.
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