6-15-05,11:00am
LA PAZ, June 13 (PL) – Today, Bolivian President Eduardo Rodríguez is to install his Cabinet, whose composition should serve the immediate goal of consolidating a social truce and the task of convening elections in six months.
The jurist, until last Thursday president of the Supreme Court, is keeping the names of his Cabinet members under wraps, but the media is saying that they include journalist Iván Avilés and veteran politician Germán Gutiérrez.
Avilés, a former leader of the journalists’ union and Rodríguez’ secretary at the Supreme Court, is installed in the offices of the ministry of the president, which is why he is already being named as such in the press.
Gutiérrez is being indicated as a definite minister of government (interior). He has been a socialist deputy, mayor of the southern city of Sucre, and in that same city, he was delegate for former President Carlos Mesa on the issue of judicial reform.
The new president postponed the task of forming the government team in order to prioritize the social truce reached yesterday with the grassroots organizations of El Alto, a bastion of the social protest that laid siege to Mesa and resisted lifting it with the argument that they were not calling for another president.
Rodríguez met with El Alto leaders at a radio station in this municipality, acceding to a condition laid down for dialogue when his invitation to meet at the government palaocial leaders ratified as government palce on Saturday.
pality, acceding to a condition laid down for dialogue on declining hice on Saturday was declined.
The social leaders ratified the nationalization of the country’s hydrocarbons, the convening of a constituent assembly, and the trial of ex-president Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada as demands that will not be rescinded.
The new president replied that he could not make political decisions or appeal to demagogy and that his mission was limited to maintaining democratic stability and calling general elections; in other words presidential and legislative elections, a dimension supported by the leaders.
In terms of popular demands, Rodríguez stated that the parliament that emerges from the upcoming elections would have to take care of those.
Both sides agreed to form bilateral commissions to discuss the El Alto demands and set in motion formulas for solving them to put before the new Congress, and the leaders ratified their open truce with the stepping down of the president.
