The Bolivian city of Santa Cruz, Bolivia’s economic engine, experienced a day of violence this Friday, with street clashes between government officials and opponents and the offices of a peasant union burned and looted, according to television images.
Source: AFP
Santa Cruz, controlled by the right-wing opposition, celebrates this Friday 21 days of protests with blockades of streets, avenues and interdepartmental roads to demand that the government advance a year a census of population planned for 2024.
During the morning, retail vendors and public service drivers marched down a city avenue to demand that roadblocks be suspended, clashing with picketers opposed to leftist President Luis Arce, with stones, sticks and firecrackers.
Neighbors organized themselves with the help of young people linked to the Santa Cruz civic committee, a civil-business conglomerate, and pushed back the pro-government protesters.
Riot police intervened firing tear gas to disperse the demonstrations.
The opposition groups burned tires that they used as barricades and claimed to have been repressed by the soldiers.
“Today the people of Santa Cruz [gentilicio de Santa Cruz] has been attacked by the Police and by the [partido de gobierno, Movimiento Al Socialismo] MORE”, the right-wing governor, Luis Fernando Camacho, told the press.
He noted that the police and the MAS “have generated anxiety and have fired tear gas.”
The Minister of the Interior (Interior), Eduardo del Castillo, responded that the demonstration of vendors and drivers “was the peaceful march of the people that was brutally attacked by financed radical sectors seeking confrontation.”
Hours later, young opponents of the government angrily attacked the offices of the Federation of Peasants of Santa Cruz, close to the ruling party, which they burned and looted until the arrival of the fire police, according to images from the private television channel Unitel.
There is no official version on the number of injured and detained on this day.
Santa Cruz, an economic locomotive, recorded four dead in street clashes between civilians, a woman raped and 178 injured in 21 days of protests, according to a government balance.
The opposition region demands a census that it update its legislative representation and the amount of state funds it receives, based on a number of inhabitants that it considers to be greater than that handled by the latest official statistics.
