Tens of thousands of supporters greet Bolivian ex-president during his triumphant return to Chimoré
Tens of thousands of jubilant followers have welcomed Evo Morales back to the coca-growing region from which he fled into exile exactly one year ago after what they branded a racist rightwing coup.
“Evo, Evo, Evo,” chanted the people who had travelled from all over Bolivia to witness their leader’s triumphant return home in the jungle-flanked town of Chimoré.
Continue reading...Bolivia’s former leader Evo Morales made a dramatic homecoming on Monday, greeted by crowds of cheering supporters as he crossed the border from Argentina, where he had been living in exile since late last year
Continue reading...Ex-president greeted with thousands of flag-waving supporters a day after new leftwing president, Luis Arce, sworn in
Thousands of flag-waving supporters have greeted Evo Morales at Bolivia’s southern border, as the country’s exiled former president began a triumphant homecoming that suggests his four-decade political career may be far from over.
“As long as capitalism and imperialism exist, the fight goes on,” Morales, 61, declared as he prepared to cross the international bridge between the Argentinian border town of La Quiaca and Villazón in Bolivia at about 10am local time.
Continue reading...Luis Arce to take power after landslide win for Movement for Socialism, but experts predict bumpy road ahead
Bolivia’s new president, Luis Arce, has vowed to rebuild his country’s battered economy, revive ties with leftwing neighbours and serve one term only, as he prepared to take office after October’s landslide election.
Speaking to the Guardian before his inauguration on Sunday, the UK-educated economist was cautious about characterising his victory as proof that Latin America’s leftwing “pink tide” of the early 2000s was bouncing back after a period of rightwing dominance. Since 2018 the left has returned to power in Mexico and Argentina, while a leftwing economist is well placed to win Ecuador’s presidential election in February.
Continue reading...On Friday authorities confirmed Mas’ candidate, Luis Arce, won the presidential election – overcoming the ‘worst’ moment of their 25-year history
Two agonising weeks had passed since Evo Morales was driven from Bolivia and in his vice-president’s recently vacated chambers one of their party’s rising stars sat, crestfallen and drained.
“It hurts,” confessed Eva Copa, the 32-year-old senate president from Morales’ Movement Towards Socialism (Mas), her voice breaking and tears filling her eyes as she pondered what some thought might prove a fatal blow to their pro-indigenous project. “What has happened will leave scars.”
Continue reading...The landslide vote for Luis Arce is reason for optimism, but Bolivia still requires major resources to contain Covid-19
On 18 October, the progressive candidate, Luis Arce, decisively won Bolivia’s presidential election, beating his nearest rival by about 20 points according to exit polls. His party, Movimiento al Socialismo (Mas), also apparently retained its majorities in both houses of congress.
It’s a remarkable turn of events. In November 2019 the Mas president, Evo Morales, was overthrown in a police-military coup that installed the rightwing evangelical Jeanine Áñez as president.
Continue reading...Exit polls for presidential election project win for Luis Arce as rival concedes defeat
Evo Morales’s leftwing party is celebrating a stunning political comeback after its candidate appeared to trounce rivals in Bolivia’s presidential election.
The official results of Sunday’s twice-postponed election had yet to be announced on Monday afternoon, but exit polls projected that Luis Arce, the candidate for Morales’s Movimiento al Socialismo (Mas), had secured more than 50% of the vote while his closest rival, the centrist former president Carlos Mesa, received about 30%.
Continue reading...A year after the country’s first indigenous president was controversially ousted, his party is well placed to win a rerun presidential election
David Ticona Mamani felt despair and foreboding when Evo Morales was forced from his Andean homeland last November amid civil unrest, electoral meltdown and what supporters of Bolivia’s first indigenous president called a racist, rightwing coup.
“I wept,” remembered the 56-year-old lawyer, a fervent supporter of Morales and his Movimiento al Socialismo (Mas).
Continue reading...Wildfires, mostly caused by land clearing for cattle grazing and soya production, have set four nations ablaze
Primatologist Martin Kowalewski is measuring the scale of the fires raging across Latin America not in satellite images, but in the number of caraya monkeys (black-and-gold howlers) that have succumbed to the flames.
“Of the 20 family groups that we used to trace in the wild, each group consisting of seven or eight monkeys, at least five groups were burned alive,” he tells the Guardian. Other animals have also perished at San Cayetano, a nature reserve in Argentina’s northeastern province of Corrientes. “Carpinchos (giant South American rodents), otters, two species of fox, guazú deer, yacaré caimans, turtles, snakes. Birds are better at escaping the fire, but that was before all the deforestation. Now they have nowhere to go because there is nowhere else. The forest is so fragmented that they have nowhere to nest.”
Continue reading...Human Rights Watch report accuses administration of Jeanine Áñez of overseeing legal offensive against people linked to Morales
Bolivia’s rightwing caretaker government is abusing the justice system to wage a politically motivated witch-hunt against former president Evo Morales and his allies, a new report by Human Rights Watch claims.
The report accuses the US-backed administration of Jeanine Áñez – who became interim leader after Morales was forced into exile last November – of overseeing a legal offensive against more than 100 people linked to Bolivia’s first indigenous president.
Continue reading...Trump described NZ’s ‘terrible’ surge, despite 90 active cases in country; Ibiza to ban pool parties, as Spain infections surge. Follow the latest
These look like scenes of yesteryear but thousands of people packed out a water park in Wuhan, China, over the weekend as much of the rest of the world remained under lockdown restrictions.
VIDEO: Crowds packed out a water park over the weekend in the central Chinese city of #Wuhan, where the #coronavirus first emerged late last year, keen to party as the city edges back to normal life pic.twitter.com/SJFBmx5sU8
The Philippines’ health ministry confirmed 4,836 novel coronavirus infections, the seventh consecutive day of reporting more than 3,000 daily cases, Reuters reports.
In a bulletin, the ministry said total confirmed cases had increased to 169,213, while there were seven additional deaths – bringing the total toll to 2,687.
Continue reading...Bolivia considers a pragmatic, if not macabre, option as it struggles to keep pace with Covid-19 deaths
As surging Covid-19 cases across Latin America leave cemeteries and funeral homes struggling to keep pace, engineers in Bolivia have come up with a solution as pragmatic as it is macabre: a mobile crematorium.
The five-metre by two-and-half-metre oven is small enough to fit on to a trailer, and is powered by locally produced liquefied petroleum gas – making it a cheap option for families who cannot afford a funeral service.
Continue reading...Demonstrators allied to Evo Morales say authorities are using Covid-19 to delay vote
Demonstrators in Bolivia have dynamited Andean passes, scattered boulders across highways and dug trenches along rural roads to protest against repeated delays to a rerun of last October’s deeply contentious election, which led to the downfall of the long-serving leftwing president Evo Morales.
As the country’s death toll from the coronavirus pandemic mounts, more than 100 roadblocks and marches nationwide – convened on Monday by Bolivia’s main workers’ union and indigenous and campesino movements allied to Morales’s Movement Towards Socialism (Mas) – have brought the country to a standstill for six days.
Continue reading...Grover Ponce, 42, died after being shuttled between six different health facilities as his family watched in rising desperation
In the two weeks before he died from suspected Covid-19, Grover Ponce was shuttled between six hospitals, as his wife Paola Medina battled the labyrinthine bureaucracy of Bolivia’s health system.
Just days after he was finally admitted to La Portada hospital in La Paz, he had to be rushed to intensive care in another hospital in El Alto. But by then it was too late. He suffered two cardiorespiratory arrests and died on Sunday.
Continue reading...Unit recovers 420 bodies across La Paz and Santa Cruz, with most believed to have had virus
Bolivia’s plan to hold elections in September is increasingly in doubt amid rising coronavirus deaths, and reports that police have recovered the bodies of hundreds of suspected Covid-19 victims.
In the past five days, a special police unit had found 420 bodies in streets, vehicles and homes in the capital, La Paz, and in Bolivia’s biggest city, Santa Cruz, authorities said on Tuesday. Between 80% and 90% of them are believed to have had the virus.
Continue reading...Long lines form every morning in one of the Bolivian cities hardest hit by the coronavirus pandemic as desperate people wait to buy small bottles of chlorine dioxide, a toxic bleaching agent that has been falsely touted as a cure for Covid-19 and myriad other diseases.
The rush in the city of Cochabamba to buy a disinfectant known to cause harm to those who ingest it comes even after the Bolivian health ministry warned of its dangers and said at least five people had been poisoned after taking chlorine dioxide in La Paz, the capital.
Continue reading...Japan reels from resurgence of virus while Australia restricts admissions to 4,000 a week
Tokyo hit another record daily high number of new cases, Australia is to halve the number of citizens it allows to return each week and Hong Kong’s schools have closed early for the summer as countries around the world struggled to contain fresh coronavirus outbreaks.
Amid growing signs of a resurgence of the virus in Japan, the capital reported 243 new infections on Friday, more than the previous day’s 224 and the first time that more than 200 cases have been confirmed for two consecutive days.
Continue reading...Bolivia's President Jeanine Añez said on Thursday she has tested positive for the novel coronavirus. Añez said in a tweet she was "well" and continuing to work while in isolation. "Together, we will come out of this," she said.
The Bolivian government confirmed that at least seven ministers, including its health minister, had tested positive and were either undergoing treatment or recuperating at home
Continue reading...Announcements come after Brazil’s president tested positive; South Africa records highest one-day case increase; Australia to limit incoming travellers
Two more leading Latin American politicians – from Bolivia and Venezuela – have said they have tested positive for Covid-19 in the same week Brazil’s president announced he had contracted coronavirus.
Diosdado Cabello, Venezuela’s number two official and the leader of the Socialist party, announced his diagnosis on social media on Thursday evening and said he was in self-isolation. “We will prevail!!” tweeted the influential Chavista.
Continue reading...Despite imposing an early lockdown, containment may be unravelling amid poverty, an underprepared health system and a bitter political standoff
When Pedro Flores and a group of fellow doctors arrived in the Beni, Bolivia’s tropical northern province, at the end of May, they knew the crisis caused by coronavirus would be severe. But what they found still left them shaken.
“The health system, public and private, collapsed,” said Flores. Many doctors in the regional capital of Trinidad fell ill. Other medical staff, terrified, locked themselves in at home or fled to remote farmhouses. As critically ill patients multiplied, the death toll began to climb.
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