Seventeen killed as Bolivia police strike sparks riots

Striking police officers and civilian protesters clashed with government troops, leaving at least 17 people dead and another 100 injured as protesters set fire to seven government buildings and looted department stores.

Protests began yesterday morning as government troops fired tear gas, rubber bullets and live ammunition at the demonstrators, who stormed the presidential palace in La Paz to protest at government proposals to raise taxes and cut spending on social programmes.

After escaping from the besieged presidential palace in an ambulance, President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada gave a nationally televised speech appealing for calm and announcing he would suspend the tax increases.

“I plead with all Bolivians to put an end to the violence and to begin honest negotiations,” Sanchez de Lozada said. ”I ask one more thing from our father above – God save Bolivia.”

As the president withdrew all troops from the historic centre, protesters set fire to seven government buildings that burned throughout the night as the city’s firefighters abandoned their posts and joined the police in the protests.

Protests then turned to looting. Before thousands of cheering onlookers, protesters tossed computers and books from the windows of the government buildings.

A large cheer came as protesters eased a large oak desk out a fifth-story window, and then turned to screams of panic as it landed squarely on a man walking below.

He was loaded into an ambulance and became another among the growing list of injured or dead in what has become the bloodiest day of protest in recent Bolivian memory.

Not far away, inmates set fire to the city’s largest jail but soldiers arrived on scene and extinguished the flames. There were no immediate reports of injuries.

The director of the capital’s main public hospital, Eduardo Chavez, said at least seven of the dead were police officers who died from gunshot wounds.

There was no breakdown of how many of the injured were civilians, police or government troops – though at least one 27-year-old man who was shot in the eye by soldiers said he was a volunteer firefighter who was only helping an injured police officer into an ambulance.

More injured and dead were expected, Chavez said.

“I’ve been a doctor here for 30 years and I’ve never seen such a bloody day,” he said.

The mutiny began Tuesday night when officers in four precincts refused to begin patrols and demanded a 40% pay increase.

Officers in the capital are paid about €105 a month, a salary that would have been eroded by proposed income tax increases ranging from 7% to 13%.

By morning, nearly all police in La Paz and the surrounding area had left their posts despite talks with government officials to avert the strike.

Street protests began Monday after Sanchez de Lozada, struggling to lift Bolivia out of a five-year recession, approved tax hikes that would reduce the buying power of South America’s poorest nation.

“The citizens here are full of fear,” said Fernando Solis, a businessman who was trapped by the protests inside the Paris Hotel in the city’s historic centre.

Unions, business interests and others came out against the tax increases, but it was the police revolt that appeared to spark the violent street clashes with government troops.

Police officers, dressed in green fatigues, seized the foreign ministry, firing tear gas in support of the demonstrators who laid siege to the presidential palace across the square.

All shops were closed within at least 12 blocks of the historic centre as smoke from tear gas and burning tires, wood and other debris filled the air.

“I’ll continue fighting until the government is deposed,” said Juan de Dios, a 17-year-old high school student who joined a mob attacking the presidential palace.

The government has announced there will be no public or private activity today, as it tries to regain order. Even so, large workers’ unions are planning widespread protests and marches in the afternoon.

“We’re living in total chaos,” said Sonia Rocha, a restaurant owner. “The government should really have thought before announcing these new taxes. We’re just too poor to pay them.”

Wilma Plata, head of La Paz’s teachers union, said some 20,000 public school teachers would join the police in a general protest today.

“The government has created this crisis, and expects the nation’s workers to shoulder the burden,” she said. “The government is destroying us.”