Juan Carlos Urenda, leader of Bolivia's right-opposition Todos por Santa Cruz party, spoke before members of the US Congress at the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington DC on April 22, complaining about what he called the deteriorating democratic system in Bolivia under leftist President Evo Morales, in a special session on Latin America organized by the Center for Security Policy. Presided over by Reps. Brian Bilbray (R-CA) and Connie Mack (R-FL), the event also included testimony by ex-assistant secretary of state Otto Reich and journalist Douglas Farah.

Strikes and protests against the Bolivian government's wage hike offers this week marked a break by organized labor with the leftist government of President Evo Morales. An indefinite strike was called May 5 by the Bolivian Workers Central (COB), the country's largest union federation, to press the government on its offer of a 5% wage increase. As the strike kicked off, police arrested 17 in La Paz, where protesting workers attacked the main entrance to the Labor Ministry with dynamite. Three were reported injured in the clash. The strike was honored across the country, with factory workers, rural teachers, public health workers, miners and other sectors walking off the job, and marching peacefully in many towns and cities.

The Obama administration sought to boost security ties with hemispheric allies last month as Defense Secretary Robert Gates traveled to Peru, Colombia, and Barbados. Before kicking off his tour in Lima, Gates and met with Brazil's Defense Minister Nelson Jobim at the Pentagon April 12, to sign the two countries' first bilateral defense pact since 1977. In Bogotá, Gates voiced support for the stalled US-Colombia FTA. "I would hope we would be in a position to make a renewed effort to get ratification of the free trade agreement," Gates said. "It is a good deal for Colombia; it is also a good deal for the United States."

Ecuadoran police on May 6 fired tear gas at indigenous protesters gathered outside the National Assembly building in Quito to oppose a water resources bill that they say would favor mining companies and agribusiness over peasant communities. Protesters blocked highways at three points around the country as well as blocking the entrances to the National Assembly building. Police said two protesters and 11 police officers were injured in the clash. At least 1,000 protesters are now camped out in a park near the congress building, where they expect to be joined by delegations from several provinces that are still marching on the capital. Near Guayllabamba, Pichincha province, police detained a convoy of 15 buses carrying some 1,000 indigenous comuneros from the village of Cayambi towards Quito. (IPS, Reuters, El Comercio, Quito, May 6)

Thousands of unionized public employees marked International Workers Day on May 1 with marches in Quito and Guayaquil, Ecuador, joined by members of socialist president Rafael Correa's PAIS Alliance (AP) party. ("PAIS" is the acronym of "Proud and Sovereign Homeland" in Spanish, and also spells the word for "country.") Unemployment in Ecuador reached 9.1% in the first quarter of 2010, up from 7.9% at the end of 2009, while underemployment among the country's 4.6 million economically active workers is officially at 51.3%.

Several thousand marched in the Bolivian capital La Paz on May Day, in a militant display that incessantly shattered the air with hurled firecrackers—and some much louder explosives that might have been dynamite. While the main Workers Central of Bolivia (COB) led at the front of the march, contingents ranged from indigenists to Trotskyists to anarchists, with varying degrees of support for (or dissent from) the left-nationalist Evo Morales government. (World War 4 Report on the scene in La Paz)

After scoring points with global environmentalists with his World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth (CMPCC) in Cochabamba this week, Bolivian President Evo Morales has got himself in hot water with gay activists across the planet. On April 21, he commented to reporters at the CMPCC on the dangers of factory-farm chicken—but in half-baked (pardon the pun) and homophobic terms. "The chicken we eat is full of feminine hormones," the populist president said. "And therefore when men eat these chickens, they experience deviances in being men."

As the World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth (CMPCC) convened for a third day April 21 at Tiquipaya, outside the central Bolivian city of Cochabamba, Aymara indigenous leaders and their supporters continued to meet just outside the official summit at the dissident "Table 18," on social conflicts related to climate change. Greivances centered on ecological impacts of mineral projects, including the Japanese-owned San Cristobal mine in southern Potosi department and the state-owned Corocoro mine in La Paz department.