Bolivian President Exits Amid Uprising

President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada resigned Friday following a six-day siege of this capital city by workers and peasants who accused him of selling out their country to foreign interests.

A 73-year-old, U.S.-educated businessman and one of the wealthiest people in the country, Sanchez de Lozada was driven from office by an uprising of its poorest citizens, the Aymara and Quechua Indians who are the majority in the ethnically divided nation.

Arriving from La Paz’s impoverished suburbs as well as dozens of surrounding towns and villages, the protesters cut nearly all the city’s highway and air links, causing widespread food and fuel shortages and stranding hundreds of foreign tourists in this city of 1.4 million people.

“We are very happy today, but this is only the beginning,” said Serafin Paco, a miner who marched to La Paz from the provincial town of Huanuni. “Now we have to fight for our salaries, so that we can all live in better conditions.”

Having marched hundreds of miles in their hard hats to join the antigovernment protests in La Paz, Paco and other miners celebrated in its central plaza by setting off dynamite blasts.

In a resignation letter, accepted by a special session of Congress late Friday, Sanchez de Lozada said “seditious elements” employing violence had forced him to step down. He said he did not believe his resignation would bring a quick solution to the “profound causes of this crisis.”

Bolivian television reported that Sanchez de Lozada left La Paz by helicopter Friday afternoon shortly after writing his letter of resignation. The same reports suggested that he was planning to board a flight to the United States.

Vice President Carlos Mesa, a 50-year-old journalist and historian, took the oath of office as president late Friday. Under the law, he may serve out Sanchez de Lozada’s term, due to end in 2007, but Mesa said he favored a “clear and transparent” vote sooner than that.

Wearing the red, yellow and green presidential sash, Mesa addressed Congress after being sworn in and appealed for national unity, even as he acknowledged Bolivia’s social woes. “Bolivia is still not a country of equals,” he said. “We must understand our peoples, our Quechuas and Aymaras.”

Earlier this week, Mesa broke with the Sanchez de Lozada government over its violent repression of the protest movement. More than 70 people have died in a month of clashes sparked by a plan to export this landlocked nation’s natural gas -- now controlled by a multinational consortium -- by building a pipeline to a port in neighboring Chile. Sanchez de Lozada agreed Monday to scrap the plan, but that did not satisfy his critics.

“The resignation of Sanchez de Lozada is a triumph for the people of Bolivia,” said Sacha Llorenti, one of the nation’s leading human rights activists. “Thousands of people have achieved this feat for their country, for its natural resources and for its democracy.”

For Bolivia’s poor, the export of one of the country’s few lucrative natural resources became a symbol of all that was wrong with their society.

“Keep our gas Bolivian!” went a slogan repeated in countless protest signs and graffiti.

Most Bolivians don’t have natural gas connections and must buy propane or firewood for cooking and heating. Many believed the export plan would have benefited only a handful of politicians and foreign companies.

“First they sold off all the tin we had, and now they want to give away the gas,” said Javier Santos, a street vendor who joined the protests. “The Bolivian people are tired of being cheated.”

Last month, worker and peasant groups began to barricade roads across the country to protest the pipeline plan. Police and army troops, who tried to keep the roads open -- and in one case attempted to rescue stranded tourists in the Lake Titicaca region -- opened fire on some demonstrators.

After two bloody days of protests last weekend, the movement swelled in size and expanded its demands, calling for the president’s resignation. The protests were centered in El Alto, a La Paz suburb of 750,000 that is home to many peasants displaced by Bolivia’s harsh poverty.

El Alto is also the location of La Paz’s international airport, and nearly all highways that connect the city to the rest of the country go through there. Beginning Sunday, El Alto residents tore up streets and built countless barricades, isolating the capital.

The nation’s largest labor federation called for a general strike. Only emergency and media vehicles have circulated in La Paz since Sunday.

As the week progressed, the protests quickly spread to other cities. Middle-class residents of La Paz joined the movement, with some going on hunger strikes to demand that the president step down.

On Friday, a key member of the ruling coalition dropped out of the government. “We can’t row against this current anymore, against a people who have demanded his resignation,” said Manfred Reyes Villa, leader of the National Republican Force, a centrist party. “There is no option but for him to resign.”

Sanchez de Lozada was first elected president in 1993 and served a four-year term. He followed the free-market economic policies adopted by many developing countries in the last decade, selling off government businesses, including its railroads and energy companies

In August 2002, Congress appointed him to serve a five-year presidential term after an election in which he won just 22% of the vote. He formed a coalition government composed of four centrist and center-right parties.

The second-place finisher in the presidential election, Evo Morales, is an Aymara Indian whose base of support is among the Quechua. The election left Morales’ Movement Toward Socialism as the largest opposition party in Congress.

Morales, a former coca farmer, became a symbol of the growing restiveness of the Indian majority. He urged his followers to demonstrate against the government’s austerity programs. Bolivia, like most other South American countries, is burdened by a large public debt.

In February, protests over the austerity plan led to two days of riots that left 31 people dead in downtown La Paz.

On Friday, Morales remained defiant, saying the president’s resignation was a “great victory for the Bolivian people over the political mafia.” He called on his followers to march on the airport at Santa Cruz, in eastern Bolivia, where Sanchez de Lozada was reportedly preparing to board a flight to the United States.

“Sanchez de Lozada cannot be allowed to leave the country,” Morales said. “He needs to be put on trial for economic genocide.”

Another Indian leader, Felipe Quispe, is president of the largest peasants union and has called for armed struggle against the government, which is dominated by descendants of Europeans, and the creation of an “Aymara republic” in western Bolivia.

This week, many of the marchers who entered La Paz carried the rainbow-colored flag of the Aymara nation.

A day before he resigned, Sanchez de Lozada bowed to a key opposition demand, saying he would no longer oppose the calling of a constituent assembly to rewrite the constitution.

Bolivia’s indigenous groups have long called for such an assembly, saying the current constitution discriminates against them. But the concession came too late for the president.

“This government’s problems began with the election and its very small vote,” said Fernando Mayorga, a Bolivian political scientist. “And the series of errors it committed only isolated it more. In the past weeks, its repression of the protests were the drops that caused the glass to spill over.”

With nearly all businesses closed in La Paz and the city isolated, the governments of Brazil, Peru and Israel began airlifting their citizens out of Bolivia on Friday.

A Brazilian air force plane evacuated 105 people to the central-western Brazilian city of Campo Grande. The group included Brazilian tourists, Brazilians living in Bolivia, Chileans and Argentines.

U.S. Air Force Capt. Tom Crosson, a spokesman for the U.S. Southern Command in Miami, said a group of fewer than half a dozen military personnel was being sent to La Paz to assess the situation and help American diplomats.

Crosson declined to say what kind of questions the group was seeking to answer. But he ruled out any evacuation of noncombatants or deployment of a larger military force to intervene in the conflict.

Times staff writer Paul Richter in Washington and special correspondent Oscar Ordonez contributed to this report.