Yesterday afternoon, a mass meeting of the inter-institutional committee of Yapacaní (cabildo) seeking the resignation of Yapacaní mayor David Carvajal was broken up violently by police who appear to have killed at least three people and wounded many more. After the violence Carvajal has resigned. Hundreds of protestors with rocks, sticks and fireworks faced off [...]

Today 56 new magistrates will be sworn into office during a ceremony in Sucre. The government is calling this a triumph of democracy because the new magistrates were elected by popular vote on October 16, and the opposition deplores the new judges as politically biased members of the judiciary who did not have a popular [...]

Yesterday, the legal director of the Bolivian Interior Ministry, Fernando Rivera, said that the Hungarian Elöd Tóásó was legally detained in the terrorism case that resulted in the deaths of three of his alleged conspirators in April 2009. Rivera’s statement is in contrast with the contents of a letter from the UN, which recommended Tóásó’s [...]

The last major opposition leader in Bolivia, Ruben Costas, the governor of Santa Cruz may soon be declared “a rebel” for not appearing in court in La Paz to address charges of defamation where he is accused of “verbal aggression” against judge Marcelo Soza. All of President Morales’ strong opponents have either fled the country [...]

In the lowlands of the Santa Cruz department in Bolivia, up to 50,000 Mennonites live in reclusion, farming soybeans in the clearcut jungle and wetlands. Mennonite men are occasionally seen in the large towns and metropolitan Santa Cruz in their trademark blue overalls and button-up shirts; Mennonite women, though, are much less visible, usually having been [...]

Bolivian President Evo Morales yesterday defended his government’s decision to send a document on July 8 to the International Court of Justice in The Hague. The document asked the court to evaluate Bolivia’s position regarding a maritime border dispute between Chile and Peru over the sovereignty of the two nations’ Pacific costal area. While Chile [...]

Yesterday, at approximately 7:45pm, the public ministry ordered the arrest of Paulina Callaú Jarpa, one of the co-owners of the Málaga building in the city of Santa Cruz de la Sierra, which collapsed on January 24, killing 15 people, including masons and construction executives. Callaú will have an arraignment either today or tomorrow, in order [...]

On Tuesday, June 28, a trilateral commission will meet in Villamontes, Tarija—a Bolivian town on the Bolivia-Argentina border—to discuss strategies to ameliorate problems that are currently affecting the Pilcomayo River. The river, which has suffered from extremely low water levels and contamination lately, runs through Bolivia, Argentina, and Paraguay before joining the Paraguay River en [...]

Boris Villegas, the director general of internal affairs, said on Thursday that he has been receiving threats that demand that he drop the Ròsza terrorism case. (In April of last year, Eduardo Ròsza-Flores, an alleged Bolivian-Hungarian mercenary, was killed with two other foreign nationals in Santa Cruz by Bolivian police. Government officials say they were [...]

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