The presidents of the two national legislative chambers at that point abdicated their constitutional powers in favor of Eduardo Rodríguez, the chief justice of the Supreme Court and new president of Bolivia. This time, congress unanimously accepted his offer.
Aware of his growing inability to control or influence events without resorting to violence, Mesa tendered his resignation to congress. Weeks of escalating street demonstrations and widening disorder reached a peak in June 2005 as tens of thousands of protesters marched into La Paz. Still, domestic tensions between the poor and rural eastern highlands and the wealthier cities and oil-rich south continued to rise.
Chile has traditionally refused to negotiate on the issue, but Mesa nonetheless made this policy a central point of his administration seeking the popular support he lacked.įollowing protests, he tendered his resignation to congress on Mahowever, the legislators voted almost unanimously the next day to reject his offer. In addition, in January 2004, he announced that his government would hold a series of rallies around the country and at its embassies abroad, demanding that Chile return to Bolivia a stretch of seacoast that the country lost in 1879 after the end of the War of the Pacific. He did not resign, but he did withdraw his support for Sánchez de Lozada five days before the latter's resignation, saying: 'I cannot continue to support the situation we are living through.' It also placed him at the center of extreme political pressures from both internal Bolivian and external foreign interests regarding the use of Bolivia's rates and the property of the gas reserves for the Bolivian state. As the gas conflict escalated, Mesa ended discontent with the government's heavy-handed repression of the protests, which would leave over 60 people dead during September and October 2003.
0 kommentar(er)
