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LA PAZ - Violent protests against President Evo Morales have shaken Bolivia and cut the Andean nation in half, with rebel provinces blocking Government attempts to regain control and tensions running dangerously high between the country's indigenous majority and inhabitants of the richer and whiter eastern provinces.
Militia groups armed with clubs and shields took to the streets last week to impose a strike which paralysed much of the eastern lowlands and deepened a political crisis. Youths opposed to Morales, Bolivia's first indigenous leader, beat up senior police commanders in front of television cameras, underlining the brazen challenge to central government authority.
Five eastern provinces, where the people are paler and richer than in the indigenous western highlands, have vowed to resist the President's attempt to "refound" Bolivia as a socialist state which champions the long-neglected indigenous majority. Protesters have halted beef supplies to the west, blockaded highways and made moves to create a new police force to assert their push for autonomy from the capital, La Paz.
Morales, flush with victory in a recall vote which renewed his mandate, has ordered the police to be on alert and hinted he would soon call a referendum on a new constitution to entrench his reforms, a red rag to the opposition. Some of his supporters threatened violent retaliation against what they termed oligarchs and fascists. Peasants blocked roads leading to the city of Sucre to isolate the opposition stronghold.
Analysts said that South America's poorest and most turbulent country was edging closer to being a failed state. Security concerns have rendered almost half the country a no-go zone for the President. No one knows whether Bolivia will retreat from the abyss, as it has managed in previous crises.
"This division is not new, but it is more radical than before. As well as the east-west division, we have an increasing city-countryside division," said Carlos Toranzo, a political analyst at the Latin American Institute of Social Research.
Radicals on both sides had seized the agenda in the hope of crushing the other, he said. "This constant violence will not cease. We are hearing confrontational language from the President and the [opposition]. It seems they are all pushing for more violence."
The landlocked nation has been turned upside down since Morales, a former coca farmer and llama herder, swept to office in 2006.
A member of the so-called "pink tide" of left-wing leaders spearheaded by Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez, Morales has extended state control over the economy, including lucrative natural gas reserves, and thumbed his nose at the United States.
Carlos Pablo Klinsky, an outspoken opposition leader in Santa Cruz, said events could turn bloody if Morales pushed for a referendum on the constitution. "People here are very angry and it would not surprise me if soon they started seizing state institutions. If the President keeps pushing his reforms, violence will get harsh, very harsh."
LAND OF EXTREMES
* Bolivia is South America's poorest country, with 60 per cent of the 9 million population living below the poverty line and 38 per cent in extreme poverty.
* A survey by the Catholic Church found that 50,000 families own almost 90 per cent of the country's productive land.
* Indigenous Bolivians earn less than half the money of non-indigenous Bolivians and get 40 per cent less schooling.
* The four eastern lowland provinces produce 82 per cent of Bolivia's natural gas. Their population is the least indigenous ranging from 16 per cent in Pando to 38 per cent in Santa Cruz, compared with 66 per cent to 84 per cent in the other states.
* The eastern states have a per capita income about 40 per cent higher than the other five states.
* The reassertion of state control over natural gas resources has brought in an extra $1.5 billion of revenue to the treasury.
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