By IPS Correspondents
LA PAZ, Oct 17 2003 (IPS)

Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada resigned from the Bolivian presidency Friday after allies in his coalition government abandoned him and as many as 70 people died this week in police crackdowns on continued massive protests. Vice-President Carlos Mesa is his likely successor.

Mesa withdrew his support for Sánchez de Lozada on Monday, citing differences in how the president was dealing with the unrest, which began a month ago as a protest against a natural gas pipeline project.

The first protesters’ initial roadblocks later spread to the rest of the country, and were joined by dozens of social organisations calling for the president’s resignation. Since Oct. 11, the demonstrations have brought nearly all activity to a halt in La Paz, the seat of government, and the nearby city of El Alto.

Around 5:00 pm local time (21:00 GMT), Sánchez de Lozada left the presidential residence, boarding a helicopter for an unknown destination, though speculation is that he will head to Argentina or Peru.

Parliamentary deputy Evo Morales, the leader of the coca farmers and of the opposition Movement Towards Socialism, and figurehead of the protest movement, said he is willing to support the designation of Mesa as the new president.

But he added that his backing would last only as long as Mesa complies with the expectations of the people, referring to demands for constitutional reform and modification of the government’s free-market economic policies.

Morales said that now, after the president’s resignation, it is time to initiate legal action against Sánchez de Lozada for his responsibility in “the deaths at the hands of the military-police crackdown.”

It is not yet known whether Sánchez de Lozada’s successor will serve out the rest of his five-year term, to end Aug. 6, 2007, or if it will be a transition government until early elections are organised.

Meanwhile, neither Morales nor Aymara indigenous leader and lawmaker Felipe Quispe – another head of the protest movement – have issued statements about the participation of their respective parties in the new government.

Sánchez de Lozada, 73, had stated on two occasions this week that he was not considering the possibility of stepping down, which he said would amount to giving way to a process of ”destabilisation of democracy,” which in his view is headed Morales.

The outgoing president said several times this week that his government was facing ”a subversive conspiracy supported from outside the country,” which was taking advantage of the social protests triggered by the issue of a pipeline that would export Bolivia’s natural gas to the United States and Mexico, possibly through a port in Chile.

The organisations involved in the protest, and Morales himself, argue that the Bolivia sees very few benefits from the natural gas industry, which is in the hands of big transnational corporations.

In an attempt to calm things down, Sánchez de Lozada said Wednesday that he accepted many of the initial demands set forth by the civil society groups and political opposition.

He said a referendum would be held on the pipeline project, and offered to renegotiate the contracts with the oil companies, in order to increase the share of revenues and royalties that would go to the Bolivian state.

In addition, he agreed to the creation of a constituent assembly to rewrite the constitution.

But it was already too late for such a compromise offer, according to the leaders of the protests, who insisted that the president must step down – which he finally did.

The city of El Alto, the poorest in Bolivia, has been at the centre of the unrest for the past month, with daily marches and roadblocks that steadily grew stronger and involved more and more people.

Last Saturday the protests intensified, and the heavy-handed police and military crackdown since then left around 70 dead according to a number of sources, although only 40 deaths are officially admitted, in La Paz and El Alto. Hundreds have been wounded.

There have also been reports of intelligence agents trying to silence the media, particularly radio and TV journalists, and of attempts to confiscate newspaper editions.

Although the authorities denied any attempt at censorship, the heads of several media outlets that have been particularly outspoken in their criticism of Sánchez de Lozada confirmed that there had been attempts to limit freedom of speech.

The indigenous peasants, human rights activists, trade unionists and other social groups initially protested the natural gas contract with foreign oil companies and the fact that the pipeline might go through a port in Chile.

Relations between the two countries have been touchy ever since Bolivia became a landlocked country when it lost its Pacific shoreline to Chile in the 1879-1884 War of the Pacific.

But the mobilisation extended, reflecting discontent with the free-market policies that have failed to curb the poverty in South America’s poorest country, and with deep-rooted corruption and clientelist political practices.

More than 70 percent of the population of 8.2 million lives below the poverty line, and three out of 10 Bolivians live in extreme poverty, according to official statistics.

According to the Permanent Human Rights Assembly of Bolivia, more than one million people work in the informal sector of the economy, miners earn less than 14 dollars a month working 14-hour days, and 50 percent of the country’s families survive on a dollar a day, said the human rights group.

Coca farmers also joined the protests, angry at the U.S.-backed strategy to eradicate illegal coca crops.

On Wednesday, a group of local academics, artists and personalities from the world of culture, headed by a former people’s defender (ombudsman), journalist Ana María Campero, declared a hunger strike in La Paz to demand that Sánchez de Lozada be replaced by Mesa.

Sánchez de Lozada, one of Bolivia’s most powerful businesspeople, whose fortune is based on mining, became president on Aug. 6, 2002, after winning the elections that year thanks to a political alliance with former president Jaime Paz Zamora (1989-1993).

In his first term in office (1993-1997), he carried out a process of partial privatisation, which put state enterprises and the country’s oilfields under the control of transnational corporations.

Goni – Sánchez de Lozada’s nickname – is also sometimes referred to as ”the gringo” because of his U.S. accent, a result of living for years in the United States.

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