BOLIVIA: Bolivia's government coalition fell apart yesterday after a main ally of embattled President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada withdrew his support, echoing the call of thousands of protesters for the president to step down.
Manfred Reyes Villa, head of the centre-right New Republican Force party, said he had asked Sanchez de Lozada to quit to avoid more bloodshed in a month-long uprising that has claimed dozens of lives and caused food shortages in La Paz.
After the president refused, Mr Reyes Villa dropped out of the coalition and three ministers from his party resigned. The defection strips the president of a workable majority in Congress, which is set to hold an emergency session on Friday.
"There's nothing to do but leave [the government]. This can't go on," Mr Reyes Villa told reporters. "I told the president we can't go against the current and wait for more and more deaths." Without the support of Mr Reyes Villa, Mr Sanchez de Lozada no longer has the two-thirds majority needed to pass most legislation in the Bolivian Congress.
Meanwhile, thousands of farmers and workers streamed into the capital again yesterday, marching past boarded-up banks and shops. An estimated 74 people have died in a month of protests against Mr Sanchez de Lozada's pro-US, free-market economic policies which have failed to improve living standards here.
The capital has been paralysed by roadblocks. In one middle-class neighbourhood, 4,000 people camped overnight in the hope of buying cooking gas that never arrived, while morning bread lines were six blocks long.
A Brazilian air force aircraft evacuated 108 people, flying them from La Paz to Brazil, while Israel was also making arrangements for stranded tourists to be airlifted out.
Even Bolivia's elite has tired of the crisis.
"There is fear of looting here. Everybody knows that this is spilling over, and the only way out is for [the president] to quit," said Guadalupe Lopez, a public relations consultant, as she picked rubbish off the street with rubber gloves in a wealthy district. "We can't take any more of this."
Mr Sanchez de Lozada, a 73-year-old US-educated businessman and one of the wealthiest people in the country, is disliked by millions of Bolivians who see him as a "gringo" out of touch with the needs of South America's poorest country.
A US-led effort to eradicate coca, the raw material for cocaine, and an unpopular plan to export natural gas, sparked the unrest in the landlocked nation of 8 million people.
Bolivian lawmakers chartered flights into La Paz to discuss the crisis yesterday, although no specific agenda has been set.
Most analysts say that it is nearly impossible the president will finish his term in 2007.