Bolivia deploys army to clear protest roadblocks after weeks of unrest amid its worst economic crisis in decades.
LA PAZ: Bolivian police driving bulldozers cleared highways Sunday and fuel trucks rolled into La Paz after the president declared a state of emergency to remove anti-government roadblocks that had paralyzed the Andean nation.
For more than six weeks, unions, Indigenous groups and coca farmers have marched through cities and blocked roads across the country with rubble, logs and debris in protest against the conservative government as people endure Bolivia’s worst economic crisis in 40 years.
Major cities have suffered acute shortages of fuel, food and medicine, the economy has lost billions of dollars, and the protests have threatened to topple Bolivia’s first non-socialist government in two decades.
As of Sunday, the number of roads blocked fell from 50 to 12, the highway department said.
The dozen remaining roadblocks are in the department of Cochabamba, where clashes broke out Sunday as police fired tear gas on protesters, who hurled stones and incendiaries, aligned with former president Evo Morales.
The clashes marked the first such conflict since President Rodrigo Paz appeared in a pre-dawn televised address on Saturday to declare a state of emergency and warned protesters they would face “the full force of the law” as he moved to end the crisis.
Defense minister Ernesto Justiniano told reporters Sunday that the roads from La Paz and El Alto to Chile and Peru were “all clear,” after police and soldiers used tractors and excavators to unblock them.
“This is a victory for the people, we met with truckers who said their trucks had been stopped, with them, for about 50 days,” he said.
‘Free the country’
After roads were cleared in a high-altitude plateau called the Altiplano, trucks carrying gasoline or diesel fuel started rumbling towards and into La Paz and nearby El Alto, both of which had been suffering fuel shortages.
Security forces on Sunday also worked for a second day to free up a road between La Paz and the city of Oruro, recovering a conduit key for bringing in fuel from neighboring Chile.
Hydrocarbons Minister Marcelo Blanco said fuel trucks were arriving in major cities. “The goal of the decree was to free the country from this blockage.”
Paz’s 90-day state of emergency curbs the right to protest and allows the military to be deployed.
The protesters want Paz to abandon neo-liberal economic reforms and step down, less than a year after he was elected.
The 58-year-old had signaled he was ready to negotiate and, earlier last week, agreed to a deal with one of the country’s major unions to end the crisis.
In exchange for a promise not to privatize state companies and to hold further talks, the Bolivian Workers’ Central union agreed to end their protests.
But some Indigenous groups have vowed to fight on, and some major roadblocks remain.
