Bolivian President Evo Morales offered on Friday to include eastern provinces’ autonomy demands in his proposed new Constitution, raising hopes for a solution to Bolivia’s bloody political crisis.
But the leftist leader and his adversaries in the conservative lowlands have been battling over greater local self-rule since Morales took office in 2006, and it is far from clear whether the president’s offer will lead to an agreement.
On Friday, the two sides discussed the autonomy question — a hot-button issue in Bolivia, whose feeble but heavily centralized government struggles to contain the country’s deep racial, cultural and geographical divides.
Morales — riding high after winning 67 percent support in last month’s recall election, including surprising gains in the traditionally hostile lowland east — is now pushing for a national vote to approve a new Constitution granting greater power to Bolivia’s long-oppressed indigenous majority.
Opposition leaders, meanwhile, note that Morales lost in three of four lowland provinces and say voters there back demands for regional autonomy left out of the draft Constitution.
The lowlands have long sought greater control over their region’s natural gas revenues and hope to shield their large agricultural holdings from redistribution under Morales’ land reform.
Deadly protests swept the east last week as anti-Morales groups blockaded highways, sacked government offices and seized gas pipelines. The worst of the violence took place in the eastern province of Pando, where Governor Leopoldo Fernandez was arrested and accused of organizing an armed ambush of Morales supporters.
But many in Bolivia hope that Morales, a famously hard-line negotiator, will resist the urge to run roughshod over a weakened opposition at the negotiating table.
“We’re close to breaking the deadlock,” said Fernando Molina, editor of Pulso magazine. “If Morales wins through dialogue — giving in on some things — the opposition will be cornered, but not eliminated, and he can govern easily for years. But if he just crushes them, the conflict will be back.”
Morales’ landslide 2005 election victory ended a series of weak coalition governments stitched together by wealthy elites in the three decades.
The historic win welcomed Indians into the halls of power, but the old guard has pushed back hard against Morales’ mandate for change.
“This country is ungovernable, no joke,” political analyst Mario Espinoza said this week. “Except maybe if it occurred to someone to show up with an overwhelming military force and kill three or four thousand people, as [the late dictator Augusto] Pinochet did in Chile. Then it would be a piece of cake. But, my God, who wants that?”
‘THEY KILLED HOPE’: Four presidential candidates were killed in the 1980s and 1990s, and Miguel Uribe’s mother died during a police raid to free her from Pablo Escobar Colombian presidential candidate Miguel Uribe has died two months after being shot at a campaign rally, his family said on Monday, as the attack rekindled fears of a return to the nation’s violent past. The 39-year-old conservative senator, a grandson of former Colombian president Julio Cesar Turbay (1978-1982), was shot in the head and leg on June 7 at a rally in the capital, Bogota, by a suspected 15-year-old hitman. Despite signs of progress in the past few weeks, his doctors on Saturday announced he had a new brain hemorrhage. “To break up a family is the most horrific act of violence that
HISTORIC: After the arrest of Kim Keon-hee on financial and political funding charges, the country has for the first time a former president and former first lady behind bars South Korean prosecutors yesterday raided the headquarters of the former party of jailed former South Korean president Yoon Suk-yeol to gather evidence in an election meddling case against his wife, a day after she was arrested on corruption and other charges. Former first lady Kim Keon-hee was arrested late on Tuesday on a range of charges including stock manipulation and corruption, prosecutors said. Her arrest came hours after the Seoul Central District Court reviewed prosecutors’ request for an arrest warrant against the 52-year-old. The court granted the warrant, citing the risk of tampering with evidence, after prosecutors submitted an 848-page opinion laying out
North Korean troops have started removing propaganda loudspeakers used to blare unsettling noises along the border, South Korea’s military said on Saturday, days after Seoul’s new administration dismantled ones on its side of the frontier. The two countries had already halted propaganda broadcasts along the demilitarized zone, Seoul’s military said in June after the election of South Korean President Lee Jae-myung, who is seeking to ease tensions with Pyongyang. The South Korean Ministry of National Defense on Monday last week said it had begun removing loudspeakers from its side of the border as “a practical measure aimed at helping ease
CONFLICT: The move is the latest escalation of the White House’s pitched battle with Harvard University as more than US$2 billion is suspended US President Donald Trump’s administration threatened to assume ownership of hundreds of millions of dollars worth of patents from Harvard University, accusing the Ivy League college of failing to comply with the law on federal research grants. In a letter to Harvard president Alan Garber on Friday, US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick said the university is failing its obligations to US taxpayers, paving the way for a process that could result in the government seizing its patents under the Bayh-Dole Act. Harvard has until Sept. 5 to prove it is complying with the requirements, including whether it showed a
RSS