Protesting Bolivian miners clash with police
Source: Reuters
(Updates with injuries, details) LA PAZ, Bolivia, Nov 11 (Reuters) - Bolivian miners clashed with police on Saturday during a protest in western Bolivia, with about 12 people wounded, according to local media that quoted the country's police chief and a miners' leader. The violence involved miners from the town of Huanuni, where 16 people were killed last month when rival groups of mine workers fighting for control of the country's largest tin mine attacked each other with dynamite and stones. National police commander Isaac Pimentel was quoted by state news agency ABI as saying miners set off dynamite when officers arrived to dismantle blockades on a road linking the cities of La Paz, Cochabamba and Santa Cruz. He added one officer was seriously wounded by an explosion. The agency said seven other officers were wounded and 25 arrests were made. Hilarion Villca, a mining union leader, said four miners had been wounded by pellets fired by police. "One of them was shot with a firearm," he told radio station Erbol. The miners from Huanuni mining cooperatives set up roadblocks in the town of Caihuasi and nearby Caracollo, about 125 miles (200 km) south of La Paz early on Saturday. Villca said the miners were protesting because they wanted the leftist government of President Evo Morales to "respect concessions and contracts in the working areas (at the Huanuni tin mine)." October's violence in Huanuni erupted between employees of state mining company COMIBOL and members of the independent mining cooperatives, both of whom work parts of the mine. Under a deal aimed at resolving the long-running dispute, some of the cooperatives have accepted a government offer for their members to become COMIBOL employees but others want to carry on working independently. That deal was part of a wider plan announced by Morales after last month's bloodshed to reform and modernize the dilapidated mining industry in Bolivia, which has significant deposits of tin, zinc, wolfram, lead, silver and gold. Tens of thousands of miners belong to the powerful cooperatives that formed in the 1990s when unemployed miners started exploiting idle mines.
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