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Evo Morales, Bolivia’s president, has claimed a reinvigorated mandate for constitutional reform after a partial count of Sunday’s recall referendum showed he had won more than 60 per cent of a national vote of confidence in his government. The president is expected to move swiftly to seek approval for a draft constitution that would redistribute wealth from the hydrocarbons industry, intro­duce land reform and open his way to run for a second term. Addressing supporters from the balcony of the presidential palace on Sunday, Mr Morales said the vote had “deepened democracy”. “We are convinced that it is important to...

LA PAZ, Dec 6 (Reuters) - In a violent show of anti-Venezuela sentiment, a crowd of about 200 Bolivians hurled stones at a Venezuelan military plane and prevented it from refueling after it landed on Thursday, local radio reported. After hearing the incoming plane, the mob seized control of the airport in the Amazonian city of Riberalta and attacked the aircraft. Regional leaders had said they suspected it was carrying arms and not humanitarian supplies, according to the radio reports. "We won't put up with these Venezuelans who come to the country and do whatever they want. We won't let...

The Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) decided at a meeting on Friday to set up a South American Parliament in Bolivia to promote the bloc's integration. Chilean President Michele Bachelet, also the UNASUR's temporary president, and Bolivian President Evo Morales opened the meeting in Bolivia's Cochabamba province which drew representatives from 12 countries in the region. "There are many tasks that the UNASUR is urged to accomplish, as part of the Latin American and Caribbean efforts," Bachelet said. Bolivian Vice President Alvaro Garcia said that UNASUR members consider it necessary to promote the construction of the institutionalism and the...

A poor, agrarian, landlocked country in South America with a nearly 100 percent Christian population is hardly the place one would expect to become a hotbed of Islamic extremism in the Western Hemisphere. But a recent report by the Open Source Center (OSC) of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence says it's so. .... One Muslim leader named in the OSC report is Mahmud Amer Abusharar, founder of the Centro Islamico Boliviano (CIB) in Santa Cruz. Abusharar emigrated from the Palestinian territories in 1974 and claims to have built Bolivia’s first mosque in 1994 so that he would...

Bolivia blames capitalism Mexico: Bolivian President Evo Morales said capitalism was responsible for climate change in his speech at the Climate Change Summit Thursday and he insisted on the need for the developed countries to make new commitments to reduce their greenhouse effect gas emissions. “We are sometimes debating only the effects of global warming, and not the causes, and we should be responsible and debate those causes,” said the Bolivian President in the high level segment of the 16th Climatic Change Summit in Cancun. Morales recalled the responsibility of the Governments so that key decisions are adopted to face...

LA PAZ, Bolivia Bucking a global trend, leftist-led Bolivia is lowering its retirement age and nationalizing its pension funds. Bolivia's Congress approved legislation early Friday to make Bolivians eligible for full pensions at age 58. The country's 70,000 miners will get to retire two years earlier. The previous retirement age was 65 for men and 60 for women. Bolivia's decision to lower its retirement age runs counter to a global trend to raise retirement ages as life expectancies rise, birth rates drop and national treasuries come under strain from pension obligations. France raised its minimum retirement age to 62 last...

A rather unexpected voice just joined the chorus of the liberal media outcry over sex scandals among some Catholic clergymen: none other than Evo Morales, Bolivia’s socialist and neopagan president. A Neopagan Socialist... Indeed, Mr. Morales, leader of the Movement to Socialism, figured he should teach the Pope how things in the Church ought to be run. For those who may not know, he was inaugurated President of Bolivia in 2006 using indigenous pagan rituals.1 The Bolivian newspaper Los Tiempos, of Cochabamba (6/20/2006), described the ceremony: “Evo Morales assumed political power with a spectacular display of religious rituals alluding to...

Bolivian President Evo Morales announced a workers' day takeover of four power companies on Saturday, expanding the state's dominion over key industries. Morales signed the nationalization decree at offices of one of the companies in the central city of Cochabamba hours after police and soldiers moved in to secure them. The companies include Bolivia's largest power producer, Empresa Electrica Guaracachi SA, which is controlled by Rurelec PLC of Britain, as well as Empresa Corani SA, a hydroelectric company operated by GDF Suez, which itself is partly owned by the French government. Also nationalized were the Valle Hermoso company, operated by...

Bolivian President Evo Morales has abandoned a public event in the face of an angry protests over food shortages and price rises. Mr Morales was due to address a parade to commemorate a colonial-era uprising in the mining city of Oruro. But he and his team left the city to avoid a violent demonstration by miners throwing dynamite.There have also been protests in other Bolivian cities over the shortage of sugar and other basic foodstuffs.Mr Morales cut short his visit and returned to La Paz after protesters set off explosions close to where he was preparing to give a speech...

Note: The following text is a quote: Heads of Canadian alien smuggling organization sentenced BURLINGTON, Vt. - On May 3, Jose Manuel Galdamez-Serrano, 56, Norvin Gonzalez-Morales, 29, Ruben Damas-Hernandez, 31, and Emmanuel Antonio Galdamez, 27, of Montreal, Quebec, were sentenced in U.S. District Court in Burlington following their guilty pleas to alien smuggling offenses. The defendants were extradited to the United States from Canada to face the charges contained in the indictment. Chief U.S. District Judge William K. Sessions III sentenced Jose Manual Galdamez-Serrano to 60 months imprisonment and three years of probation following his guilty plea to one count...

<p>Atomic energy was one of many areas of cooperation discussed as Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin made his first visit to the South American country.</p>

Firebrand leaders Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales and Robert Mugabe turned up the heat at the UN climate talks, dumping the blame for global warming squarely at the feet of capitalism. Mr Chavez, the President of Venezuela, was one of the first world leaders to take the podium at the venue of the Copenhagen talks. He seized the occasion to characterise newly-minted Nobel Peace laureate US President Barack Obama as a warmonger. "I don't think Obama is here yet," said Mr Chavez. "He got the Nobel Peace Prize almost the same day as he sent 30,000 soldiers to kill innocent people...

SNIPPET: "Lula and Chavez have established a "strategic relationship," and recently agreed upon a joint Brazilian-Venezuelan oil venture worth billions of dollars. Lula and Chavez have joined with Daniel Ortega, the returned Nicaraguan Marxist dictator, to form an anti-U.S. Latin American military alliance - all with Russian assistance - funded by the region's abundant oil reserves. Brazil is engaged in its own arms build-up and Lula is determined that Brazil will become at least a first-rate regional power. Unfortunately, Lula is establishing Brazil as an anti-American military power by aligning with nations hostile or potentially hostile to the U.S. Lula...

It's good, occasionally, to take a trip down memory lane. It helps to put things into perspective. Hugo Chavez ought never to have been elected president. By rights, he ought to be growing old in a jail cell somewhere. Well, it's been seventeen years, maybe he’d be in a half-way house by now. As an army officer in 1992, he led a military revolt against the legal, constitutional government of Venezuela, and attempted to overthrow the democratically elected president of the time, Carlos Andres Perez. He gambled that once the shooting started, the minister of defense and the rest of...

Mystery deepened on Friday surrounding the breakup of a suspected assassination plot against Bolivian president Evo Morales that left three dead, as opposition leaders cast doubt on the government's story and said it was using the plot to influence coming elections. The hazy details of what happened on Thursday, in accounts by Bolivian authorities, seem lifted from the pages of a Hollywood script. An alleged plot against the president and other top officials was broken up by an elite police squad. Three men were killed in their underwear after a half-hour shootout at a hotel. Allegedly among the dead were...

Mystery deepened on Friday surrounding the breakup of a suspected assassination plot against Bolivian president Evo Morales that left three dead, as opposition leaders cast doubt on the government's story and said it was using the plot to influence coming elections... An alleged plot against the president and other top officials was broken up by an elite police squad. Three men were killed in their underwear after a half-hour shootout at a hotel... The dead are believed to be 49-year-old Eduardo Rózsa Flores, Santa Cruz-born son of a Hungarian father and Bolivian mother; Árpád Magyarosi, a Romanian-born Hungarian; and Michael...

LA PAZ (Reuters) – Emboldened by a new leftist constitution, Bolivia President Evo Morales on Saturday handed over ownership of farmland seized by the state from wealthy estate holders to poor indigenous people. Morales handed out around 94,000 acres of lands recently confiscated from five big ranches in Bolivia's wealthy eastern lowlands, a stronghold of his conservative political opponents. The ranchers have been accused of employing workers in conditions of semi-slavery. [...] "It is not that these lands were not in production, but that they were the site of human rights violations against the Guarani, who will now be their...

Bolivian President Evo Morales has ordered the expulsion of a US diplomat he accused last week of colluding with opposition groups in recent unrest. He said Francisco Martinez, a political officer at the US embassy in La Paz, had links to groups involved in violent opposition protests. President Morales ordered the US ambassador to leave the country six months ago over similar allegations. The US government has denied the latest allegations as baseless. Since his election in 2006, Bolivia's first indigenous president, a leftist who came to national prominence as a leader of the country's coca farmers, has frequently accused...

President Evo Morales has announced he is suspending "indefinitely" the operations of the US Drug Enforcement Administration in Bolivia.Mr Morales accused the agency of having encouraged anti-government protests in the country in September. He did not say whether its staff would be asked to leave the country, as coca- growers have been pressing him to do. Bolivia's first indigenous president once served as the leader of the country's union of coca-growers.

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CARACAS, Venezuela — They don't call him President Bush in Venezuela anymore. Now he's known as "Comrade." With the Bush administration's Treasury Department resorting to government bailout after government bailout to keep the U.S. economy afloat, leftist governments and their political allies in Latin America are having a field day, gloating one day and taunting Bush the next for adopting the types of interventionist government policies that he's long condemned.

<p>A founding member of the campaign of Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois met in New York City tonight with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.</p> <p>Jodie Evans, who co-hosted Obama's first major fundraiser in Hollywood in February 2007 just after Obama announced his candidacy and is a top fundraiser and donor to Obama's campaign, led a delegation of leftist anti-American groups that held a private meeting near the United Nations. The stated purpose of the meeting was to "serve as an opening for diplomatic resolution" to prevent war between Iran and the United States.</p>

We are all now very familiar with the aptly-named triple threat posed by Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. But there's another gathering storm closer to home and the media only feigns interest. Cuba's old news. And Venezuela's rants against colonialism and America have reached the level of parody. But recently Bolivia has stepped up and is trying to play with the big boys.

Marxist President Evo Morales, a Chavez lackey and supporter of the Iranian regime, blamed opposition activists for killing government supporters this weekend. --Opposition leaders said the Marxist fighters were armed and intended to start fighting in the region. Here is AMAZING Footage of fighting at the airport in the city of Cobija this weekend: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rF9e32_rqcU . . Former Bolivian Congressman and political dissident Jose Brechner sent this report on the crisis earlier today: The socialist government of president Evo Morales centralized all the financial resources of the state and doesn´t want to give back the taxes from oil revenues to...

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad flashes the V for 'victory' sign as he waits for the arrival of his Bolivian counterpart Evo Morales in Tehran. Ahmadinejad told Bolivia's visiting Morales on Monday their two nations are natural allies and would boost energy ties, state media reported. (AFP/Atta Kenare) TEHRAN (AFP) - Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told Bolivia's visiting left-wing President Evo Morales on Monday their two nations are natural allies and would boost energy ties, state media reported. "The two revolutionary nations and the governments of Iran and Bolivia are natural allies and will boost their relations in the fields of...

CARACAS, Venezuela — A mysterious Venezuelan air force flight came under attack from vigilantes when it touched down last week at an airfield in northern Bolivia amid fears that the transport plane was delivering weapons. Suspicions were only deepened when officials confirmed that a Venezuelan banking official on board the flight had been carrying a briefcase stuffed with $160,000 in cash. The airfield, at Riberalta, is located near a Bolivian uranium-mining area, adding to long-standing suspicions that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is trying to purchase uranium from his Latin American neighbor for transshipment to Iran.

BOSTON (AP) - A Somerville man who was allegedly fleeing police when he crashed his car into a taxi -- killing a passenger in the cab -- is due in court today on a number of charges. Prosecutors say Javier Morales being chased by state police early Sunday morning when the SUV collided with the taxi. Killed was 23-year-old Paul Farris of Medford. The Tufts University grad was the lead singer in a Boston-based rock band and was planning to attend law school. Farris' girlfriend and the cab driver suffered serious injuries in the crash. The charges against the 29-year-old...

LIMA, Peru (CNS) -- When Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez told Archbishop Roberto Luckert Leon recently that he would "see him in hell," he was fanning the coals of an ongoing war of words with Catholic leaders. And when Bolivian President Evo Morales' government picked a fight with that country's bishops shortly after his inauguration, he seemed to be biting the hand that had helped the country's grass-roots movement put a president in power. But while some of the region's political leaders appear to be trying to distance themselves from the institution that has been a political as well as a...

LA PAZ, Bolivia - Opposition lawmakers marched out of Congress in protest Monday during a four-and-a-half-hour speech by Evo Morales marking his first year in office as South America's first indigenous president. In Monday's address, Morales recalled being expelled from Congress in 2002 on charges he'd incited violence as leader of Bolivia's coca growers' union, a post he still holds. He slyly called Sen. Luis Vasquez, who was president of the House when it voted to expel him, "my best campaign manager." Deputies of Vasquez's party, the main opposition group Podemos, then got up and filed out in silence. Their...

Chavez warns of US-backed coup plot in Bolivia Press Trust of India Caracas (Venezuela), October 10, 2006 Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez warned of a US-backed plot to topple his close ally, Bolivian leader Evo Morales. The US government "is not going to give Evo a honeymoon. A destabilising plan is already under way to impede Evo from governing," Chavez said in a televised speech on Monday. "First to impede him from governing so that the Bolivian people will become disenchanted," Chavez said. "And later, to topple him." The Venezuelan leader has suggested previously that Washington was linked to moves to...

La Paz, Oct 5 (EFE).- President Evo Morales said Thursday that Bolivia's Supreme Court has no jurisdiction over the extent of the mandate of the Constituent Assembly and denounced the tribunal as a "nasty aftertaste of the colonial state." He commented in Bolivia's official capital, the southern city of Sucre, after meeting there with assembly delegates from his Movement Toward Socialism, or MAS.

LA PAZ, Bolivia A vaguely worded military pact between President Evo Morales' government and Venezuela ran into resistance Thursday in the opposition-controlled Senate. The accord, presented May 26 during a visit by President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, would bring armed forces under the two leftist administrations closer together and have Venezuela help Bolivia construct a military base in the northern city of Riberalta and a river port on its border with Brazil. "Disarm who? Control of what forces? It could mean anything — whatever you want is in there," Carlos Borth, senator from the conservative opposition party Podemos, told the...

Geopolitics: Radical chic is thriving in the whirl of parties at the United Nations these days, and no one is being courted more solicitously as one of the downtrodden than Evo Morales of Bolivia. You remember "radical chic," don't you? The 1960s and 1970s phenomenon, described by Tom Wolfe in his "Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak-Catchers" tells how New York's glitterati threw black-tie parties to court supposedly "real" revolutionaries — like Black Panthers, Puerto Rican separatists or Indian liberationists — in a bid to feel "authentic." It's been a long time, but radical chic isn't dead. Which explains why...

Evo Morales takes the coca leaf to the UN and defends it After unexpectedly wielding a green coca leaf in his right hand, Bolivian President Evo Morales demonstrated Tuesday before world leaders one of the many injustices which he came to raise before the United Nations. Before the initial surprise and reserved applause immediately afterwards, Morales said that to criminalize the coca leaf was an "historic injustice." "This leaf represents the Andean culture, the environment and the hope of the people," said Morales, who before being President was the leader of the Bolivian coca growers. "It is not possible...

As Bolivian President Evo Morales tries to implement a controversial "agrarian revolution", the BBC's Damian Kahya visits the east of the country to talk to both settlers and landowners. Settler building a house (Photo: Amy de Wit) The settlers say they will not give up and are still building houses Land is a cause of conflict now in Bolivia. A recent survey by the Catholic Church here found that just 50,000 families own almost 90% of Bolivia's productive land. Evo Morales, the country's first indigenous president, was elected earlier this year on a platform promising to redistribute land. Few...

Bolivia is on fire. The fiery democratic revolutionary babes of Santa Cruz are no more. Now, it’s angry citizens of The Media Luna - four provinces, led by Santa Cruz, fighting to the last man against the brutal expansionary communism of Evo Morales’ Bolivia. This is going well beyond peaceful demonstrations to the first stages of insurgency and maybe war. Revolutionary war. They are fighting tyranny. They’re fighting with axes, fists, and cudgels, in an action that began with a general strike Friday in four provinces against Morales’ effort to rewrite the constitution to maximize his own power. Attendence was...

Excerpt - LA PAZ, Bolivia (AP)--Bolivia's former president says Washington is refusing to clarify that he had nothing to do with the secret removal of anti-aircraft missiles to U.S. soil - an incident that has him facing treason charges under Bolivia's new leftist government. "They ought not to be leaving us hanging," said Eduardo Rodriguez, a former Supreme Court chief who stepped in as caretaker president last year after two Bolivian leaders were ousted by street protests. He organized December elections won by the radical leftist Evo Morales, a remarkably strife-free process for such a polarized nation. Twenty-eight Chinese-made shoulder-fired...

COCHABAMBA, Bolivia — The sun sets golden on the small town of Anzaldo, deep in the Bolivian countryside. On a recent evening, Lolita Antezana took a 90-minute taxi ride from Cochabamba to Anzaldo, her freshly purchased table and 10 chairs lashed atop the roof. With its dusty streets, quiet tenor and predictable routines, the town has always been her home. At 79, Antezana said she's "too old to get involved in politics." But even she finds herself excited about Bolivia's new president, Evo Morales. She saw him on television, playing soccer with some kids in La Paz, a decidedly unpresidential...

LA PAZ, Bolivia (AP) - President Evo Morales said yesterday that members of the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy are behaving as if they were in "the times of the Inquisition" as he defended his government's plan to remove Catholicism as the sole religion taught in schools. His comments came a day after Education Minister Felix Patzi referred to Catholic "monsignors" as "liars" and said they have been serving the oligarchy for the 514 years since Spain colonised the country. "I want to ask the (church) hierarchies that they understand freedom of religion and beliefs in our country," Morales told reporters....

LA PAZ, Bolivia - Bolivia's education minister called for an end to religious education in the country's schools, drawing criticism from the Roman Catholic Church which could see its schools affected by the proposed change. Education Minister Feliz Patzi said at an assembly on education reform that the government aims to make education secular in Bolivia, where Catholicism has been the official religion since the country's founding in 1825. "Secular means that there is no monopoly on religious teaching," Patzi said. "Secular means that there is no indoctrination." Reforms drafted by the education assembly in Sucre, about 335 miles south...

CURAHUARA DE CARANGAS, Bolivia (AP) - ... Being Aymara Indians like Evo Morales, South America's first truly indigenous leader, they might be expected to line up squarely behind him. Yet they, like many Bolivians, have their doubts, fearing they are being led into a dangerous alliance with Cuba and Venezuela. They worry about Morales' effort to make his ``people's revolution'' permanent, beginning with elections Sunday for a national assembly to rewrite Bolivia's constitution. Jaime Perez, a powerful Aymara leader, takes issue with Morales' alignment with ``the socialist politics of Cuba'' and with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who strengthened his own...

LA PAZ, Bolivia - Students attending a conflict resolution course in this politically tumultuous Andean nation got some unexpected extracurricular experience when Bolivia's leftist government accused the program's sponsor of being a front for U.S. spies.

La Paz.- The entry into Bolivia of a dozen military flights from Venezuela and the presumed presence of soldiers from that country unleashed a virtual "media war'' between the government and the main opposition group. In a paid announcement, the Ministry of Defense characterized as "irresponsible'' and "absurd'' the public accusation by Democratic Social Power (Podemos), the main opposition group, that the previous evening had published another paid announcement entitled: "Chavez’ troops over-run Bolivia''. In its ad, Podemos accused that "a large number of military flights from Venezuela are landing at night and early morning '' at the main airports...

Americans are suffering a new psychological disorder: news-induced political numbness. It's not the return of Jimmy Carter's "malaise." Despite the steady stream of Congressional absurdities and conservatives' growing impatience with the president, we're doing pretty well for a nation at war. But the incessant 24/7 television-newspaper-Internet barrage has caused people to tune the world out instead of reserving energy to think about the events that must be the focus of our attention. All of us, especially the White House, desperately want a break to rest and recuperate. But that's not an option. Times are tough, and we just have to...

Morales and Chávez rebuked at EU summit Friday May 12, 2006The Guardian (UK) EU leaders today rounded on Bolivia and Venezuela for challenging free market policies at a summit of European and Latin American leaders in Vienna. Wolfgang Schuessel, the Austrian chancellor and the event's host, told the two countries open markets were key to promoting economic growth and prosperity. "There are always two possibilities in life. Either you want to open your markets or you don't want to open your markets - it's your choice," he said. "But the reality is ... open market societies are better in their...

Bolivian, Venezuelan presidents grab summit headlines May 12, 2006, 14:54 GMT Vienna - Leaders from the European Union, Latin America and the Caribbean summit were meeting in Vienna Friday with the gathering threatening to be hijacked by the leftist populist presidents of Bolivia and Venezuela. Speaking to reporters as leaders attending the two-day summit entered a round of key talks, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan joined government chiefs attending the meeting in sharply criticizing Bolivian President Evo Morales and his Venezuelan ally, Hugo Chavez. 'Populism is one the obstacles to development (of Latin America and the Caribbean),' Mexican President Vicente...

LONDON (Reuters) - Bolivia's decision to nationalize its gas fields weighed on shares in companies active in the country on Tuesday, but analysts said the long-term impact on foreign firms would be small. President Evo Morales said on Monday he had ordered the military to occupy Bolivia's natural gas fields and threatened to expel foreign firms that do not recognize state control. Spain's Repsol YPF (REP.MC: Quote, Profile, Research), the most exposed of the Western oil majors to Bolivia, opened down 3 percent, while British gas firm BG Group Plc (BG.L: Quote, Profile, Research), which has large reserves in Bolivia,...

President Evo Morales nationalized Bolivia's natural gas industry and oil Monday, ordering foreign energy companies to send their supplies to a state company for sales and industrialization. Speaking at the San Alberto gas and oil field in the south of the country, Morales warned that companies that reject the decree will have to leave Bolivia within six months. The main oil companies operating in Bolivia are Brazil's Petrobras, the Spanish-Argentine company Repsol YPF, British companies British Gas and British Petroleum and Total of France. "The time has come, the awaited day, a historic day in which Bolivia retakes absolute control...

The election of Evo Morales as president of Bolivia in December prompted a rash of headlines declaring that Latin America has tilted to the left. Latin Americans are fed up, some say, with the "Washington Consensus" of free markets and fiscal discipline, which has failed to erase all their poverty and inequality, and as a result their governments are reverting to protectionism, state ownership of industries and unlimited social spending. But judging from the victory of my social-democratic National Liberation Party in Costa Rica's Feb. 5 elections, our country didn't get the message that all of Latin America is veering...

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who plans to attend the inauguration of a socialist in Chile this weekend, says the United States has no quarrel with leftist leaders in Latin America as long as they govern well. "This is a wonderful moment, the inauguration of the Chilean president, a woman president," Rice told a group of Latin American, Asian and Australian reporters Thursday, a day before she began a trip to those places. She was far less enthusiastic about Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who frequently calls President Bush a terrorist. But she said the United States wants good relations with...