La Paz – Bolivia’s powerful bus drivers’ union on Tuesday threatened President Evo Morales, a supposedly worker-friendly Socialist, with a two-day national strike while the main labor federation said it would “try” him for the death of 16 miners last week in clashes at a tin mine.
The threats coincided with the second day of a local transit strike in La Paz, which also had to cope with protests that led to clashes between demonstrators and police and confrontations pitting Morales partisans against the head of state’s critics.
The executive secretary of the bus drivers union, Jose Luis Cardozo, said his group is prepared to mount a 48-hour nationwide strike beginning Thursday if the government does not act to repeal a law permitting the legal registration of 60,000 vehicles that were smuggled into Bolivia.
Previous Bolivian governments have also offered amnesties under which owners of contraband vehicles can “legalize” them by paying fines.
The drivers union claims such measures always result in a surge of additional vehicles onto the nation’s streets and highways, making traffic worse and the drivers’ lot more difficult.
Cardozo, 400 of whose union colleagues began a hunger strike Monday to protest the vehicle amnesty, said he will meet soon with government officials to demand that the law be scrapped.
Yet the deputy minister for liaison with grassroots movements, Alfredo Rada, said the law will stand and that the government is only prepared to discuss the details of how the measure is to be implemented.
Meanwhile, the guild representing bus drivers in the capital kept up for a second day its strike in opposition to municipal authorities’ plan to reroute traffic for construction projects.
Around 3,000 drivers and their supporters marched to downtown La Paz, causing some property damage after police prevented them from reaching city hall.
Capital bus drivers are demanding the resignation of Mayor Juan del Granado, whom they accuse of hurting their interests for the sake of public works projects the strikers deride as more ornamental than functional.
Army troops aided police in preventing the drivers from blocking the streets with their vehicles, as they had done Monday, effectively paralyzing traffic on the main thoroughfares of La Paz.
Separately, more than 1,500 people descended on the capital from the neighboring industrial city of El Alto in a march organized by the COB labor federation on behalf of the union representing employees of state-owned mining company Comibol.
The aim of that protest was to demand an immediate solution to the dispute between Comibol workers and members of independent mining cooperatives for control of Bolivia’s largest tin deposit, located in the south-central town of Huanuni.
The conflict turned violent last Thursday, with the rival groups exchanging shots and hurling dynamite charges at each other in a confrontation that left 16 dead and 61 wounded.
Wearing his miner’s helmet, COB chief Pedro Montes said the labor federation cannot allow the Morales government to abandon the widows and orphans of those killed at Huanuni.
He said the COB “will put the government on trial” because Morales allowed the dispute between the contending groups of miners to fester instead of providing a settlement that could have averted the bloodshed.
Montes repeated an earlier accusation that before Thursday’s eruption, Vice President Alvaro Garcia Linera had opposed the idea of sending police and soldiers to Huanuni as a precautionary measure.
The government, for its part, says sole blame for the tragedy rests with the independent miners, noting that the mayhem began when the members of the cooperatives tried to occupy the Huanuni mine by force.
Presidential spokesman Alex Contreras said Tuesday that Morales “doesn’t need allies” like the independent miners, who, the spokesman said, are trying to break the accord they signed with officials last week after the president fired both Mining Minister Walter Villarroel – former leader of the cooperatives – and Comibol chief executive Antonio Rebollo.
Morales and his Movement Toward Socialism have traditionally had warm relations with the independent miners and those employed by Comibol.
Tuesday’s COB procession into La Paz was met by hundreds of irate Morales supporters who rejected the labor federation’s accusations against the president.
Witnesses said that a U.S. photojournalist was among a number of reporters threatened and even assaulted as the COB and Morales partisans confronted each other in the capital.
