BOLIVIA: Nine people have been killed in Bolivia in a fight between two rival mine groups over access to one of South America's richest tin mines.
At least 40 were injured in Thursday's battle at the state-owned Huanuni mine between independent miners allied with President Evo Morales against those employed by the state mining company.
Hundreds of miners belonging to independent co-operatives stormed the mine, demanding more access to its tin deposits. State-employed miners counterattacked to regain control of the mine and the groups exchanged gunshots and threw mining explosives.
Vice-president Alvaro Garcia Linera said in a national address: "What should have been a blessing for the country, to possess such natural riches, today has become a curse."
Among the dead were men and one woman from both groups, as well as a bus driver.
A team of Bolivia's top ministers arrived yesterday in the mining town of Huanuni, 290km south of the capital of La Paz to negotiate an end to the conflict.
The Bolivian government has so far declined to mobilise the military in response to the conflict.
President Morales's chief of staff, Juan Ramon Quintana, said: "We are still not deploying public forces, and will do so only when it becomes necessary."
But some angry miners accused Mr Morales, an Aymara elected as Bolivia's first indigenous president, of withholding troops to avoid a confrontation with the mining co-operatives that played a key role in the populist movement that helped him win election last December.
Mr Morales was elected in December with a mandate to help Bolivia's poor indigenous majority see a larger share of the revenues from the land-locked nations' extensive mineral and natural gas deposits.
The battle for Huanuni has roots going back at least 20 years. In 1985, state mining company Comibol shuttered mines throughout Bolivia after a collapse in the world metal market, laying off some 30,000 workers.
While many of Huanuni's unemployed miners sought work in other fields and other parts of the country, some remained, and as prices recovered they formed independent mining co-operatives to continue mining tin on their own.
Bolivia eventually granted the Huanuni mine concession to then-British-based Allied Deals. When the company, now based in the US, declared its Bolivian operations bankrupt in 2005, the mine returned to Comibol, despite demands from the miners' co-operatives for some control over the valuable deposits. - (AP)