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Bolivia leader hails gas referendum victory Bolivia's President, Carlos Mesa, said late on Sunday the country backed his proposals to allow natural gas exports and increase state control over the nation's huge reserves in a referendum aimed at appeasing an impoverished Indian majority.
"The five questions have been answered, each one, with a yes," Mesa told a news conference.
These results -- yet to be confirmed by an official count -- will likely ensure that Mesa stays in power until 2007 and lend the Andean country some political stability after a bloody indigenous revolt ousted the previous government last year.
Voting was mostly peaceful as Bolivians voted over an energy issue that has split the country between its majority Indians and European-descended elites.
The battle over who profits from one of Latin America's biggest gas reserves pits Bolivia's low-income Indian majority, calling for national control, against elites, who say Bolivia needs the foreign investment that more exports would bring.
Fury at a $5 billion plan to export gas via Chile, Bolivia's historical enemy, lay behind a siege of the capital by Indian groups in October in which dozens of protesters were killed by troops. The violence led to the ouster of pro-Washington President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada.
Mesa, his replacement, called the referendum to appease Indians, who made nationalization a rallying cry of October's revolt, and he has turned the election into a vote of confidence.
Bolivia's state TV said an unofficial count of 25 percent of Bolivia's 20,500 voting stations showed Mesa winning each of the referendum's five questions with approval ranging from 45 percent to 66 percent of the votes. The margin of error on the count was 4.5 percentage points.
This roughly coincided with another unofficial count of 41 percent of the votes by PAT television, a leading private news channel.
Defeat in the referendum would have forced him from office and plunged Bolivia, with a history of coups and rebellions, into civil unrest.
There were sporadic reports of violence by radical Indian groups, which threatened to burn ballot boxes and boycott the vote.
"The referendum's strongest message has been that peace has conquered violence," Mesa said.
The referendum was seen as the best of the worst by foreign investors, given that a "No" vote would have plunged Bolivia into chaos. Foreign companies will have to deal with stronger state controls and higher taxes.
The vote may come as a relief to Washington, which feared that more unrest in Bolivia, the world's third biggest source of coca leaf used to make cocaine, could lead to more drug smuggling from an Andean region seeing growing indigenous anger at "gringo imperialism."
The vote could also send a political signal across Latin America, where democratic leaders from Argentina to Peru face voter backlash after a decade of market reforms that many argue have benefited foreign firms and the rich. |
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