President Carlos Mesa announced that he would resign as road blocks and demonstrations targeting multinational firms wracked Bolivia.
This match may have been lit in 2000 when Bechtel privatized the water company in Cochabamba and water prices quadrupled. This set off huge protests which, after pitched battles, resulted in the people taking over the water company and Bechtel being forced to leave.
And it’s a class/racial struggle too.
Mesa has struggled to govern a country whose Indian majority, frustrated with its traditionally subservient status, increasingly supports activists who blame Bolivia’s woes on a capitalist system dominated by people of European descent.