BBC (Monday): New Bolivian leader names team

Transparency and someone for the indigenous people, etc. Let's just hope the US doesn't have him killed or perform a coup!

I'm hoping that all of South American does this and leads the way towards sustainability and a new form of government...

Maybe they will take some of us Americans if things don't change here in 2004.. :(

I, for one, like to practice my English speaking skills.

Earlier, the leader of the main indigenous workers' confederation (CSUTCB), Felipe Quispe, warned that Mr Mesa's new government would face further demonstrations within 90 days if it failed to abandon some of the plans which brought down the previous president, Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada.

These include the gas export project at the centre of violent protests by tens of thousands of people in La Paz, staged in opposition to the government's free market policies.

The ex-prez--ally of the US in their latest scheme to rob the indigenous of Latin America and pillage yet another country--was flown by the US with his family to Miami (where else) to live happily ever after.

---

From Pacific News Service last Friday

<clips>

Behind Bolivia's Gas War

LA PAZ, Bolivia--Bolivians don't know what's good for them, declared the editors of the New York Post. Citing widespread opposition and protest to a proposed deal to export Bolivian natural gas to California, the paper observed: "And right now in Bolivia -- the poorest country in all of Latin America -- there are people fighting to remain poor."

The broad opposition to the proposed gas deal is not fueled by stupidity. Ordinary Bolivians have not stood before armed soldiers because they just don't understand the subtleties of global economics. At work is a conflict between the country's two very different populations, one glowingly rich and the other abjectly poor. The real issue in the "gas war" is how Bolivia should integrate itself into the global economy -- who will win and who will lose.

Two hundred miles away from the eye of the conflict in the capital city of La Paz lies the small city of Potosi and behind it the small mountain "Cerro Rico" (Rich Hill). For 300 years, from the mid-1500s to the mid-1800s, this single hill of silver bankrolled the Spanish empire. Millions of Bolivian Indians and slaves died extracting the silver for the Spanish. Here is a history written into the Bolivian soul -- a country that sat atop one of the greatest sources of mineral wealth in the history of the planet ended up being the poorest in South America.

Today the nation's newest and probably last "Cerro Rico" is a mammoth underground reserve of natural gas that the government is planning to harvest, in association with a British-backed consortium, Pacific LNG. To Bolivia's wealthy elite and their allies at the International Monetary Fund, the deal looks like a financial boon for a country that could very much use one. Average Bolivians see an unfolding repeat of the theft of the nation's silver.

<http://news.pacificnews.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=8e7890e37f836788252aaac364cf501d>

---

<>
Bolivian miners are cheered on in El Alto as they return home to Oruro from La Paz, Bolivia on Saturday Oct. 18, 2003. People continued to celebrate a day after Bolivian President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada was forced to resign after weeks of bloody street protests set off by a plan to export natural gas to the United States. (AP Photo/Dario Lopez-Mills)