Bolivian highway construction on hold

RURRENABAQUE, Bolivia – Bolivia’s president late Monday suspended a planned Amazon highway that has sparked clashes between police and Indians who say the road would despoil a nature preserve that is home to thousands of natives.

President Evo Morales also distanced himself from the decision to break up a protest march Sunday. His announcement came hours after police released hundreds of activists when mobs of local people blocked roads and an airport to prevent the detainees from being taken out of the area.

“We repudiate the excesses yesterday at the march,” Morales said, adding that a high-level commission including international representatives should be formed to investigate the crackdown.

Hours earlier, Defense Minister Cecilia Chacon resigned in protest over the police action against opponents of the highway, who include not just local indigenous peoples but also Bolivia’s main highlands Indian federation.

In a brief televised address Monday night, Morales announced that he was suspending the highway project and would let the two affected regions decide whether to proceed with the Brazil-financed road. He offered no specifics, but on Sunday he said that a referendum on the road could be held in the two affected regions, Cochabamba and Beni.

The proposed 190-mile highway would connect Brazil with Pacific ports in Chile and Peru. Plans called for it to cross Bolivia’s 600-square-mile Isiboro-Secure Indigenous Territory National Park, which is home to 15,000 indigenous people who live off hunting, fishing, gathering native fruits and subsistence farming.

The residents fear an influx of settlers would destroy their habitat, felling trees and polluting rivers. Environmentalists say the road would mostly benefit Brazilian commercial interests such as timber exporters while endangering a pristine nature preserve.

Police used tear gas and truncheons to break up a march Sunday by some 1,000 protesters who were marching to La Paz, the national capital in Bolivia’s highlands.

Officers detained the protesters and loaded them onto buses planning to drive them back to the eastern lowlands provincial capital of Trinidad, where the march began in mid-August.

But hundreds of people lit bonfires on the roadway, forcing authorities to detour to the airport in the Amazon town of Rurrenabaque. Residents of the town, however, had blocked the runway with barricades.

Authorities then backed down and let the detainees go.

“Given the attack by hundreds of people, the police pulled back to avoid confrontations,” Interior Minister Sacha Llorenti said at a news conference in La Paz before the president made his comments.

Bolivia’s national ombudsman, Rolando Villena, told Erbol radio “there was excessive use of force” by police. Protest leaders claimed a child was killed and other protesters, including children, were missing. Bolivia’s Roman Catholic Church issued a communiqué saying a child had died but offered no details.