BOLIVA'S MAIN UNION CALLS STRIKE AGAINST EMERGENCY

Bolivia's largest union has called for a national strike on Wednesday
to protest a state of emergency clamped on the landlocked Andean
nation after a rash of violent protests over the weekend against a
possible hike in water prices.

Announcing the one-day strike in a communique Tuesday, the Bolivian
Workers' Centre (COB) said: "During the strike all workers will
participate actively in supporting the peasants in the countryside, in
the cities and in every workplace."

President Hugo Banzer decreed a 90-day state of emergency after five
people were killed and more than 40 injured in clashes between
protesters and police over the weekend. The measure gives Banzer
extraordinary powers to deploy police and the military.

The COB said the one-day stoppage Wednesday was "against the state of
siege and for the cessation of violence and the massacre of peasants."

Banzer told businessmen on Monday the state of siege would remain in
place "until order has been fully restored.

Banzer, who formerly ran the country as a dictator in the 1970s, is
the fourth consecutive Bolivian leader to be forced to implement a
state of emergency.

On Monday the government said drug traffickers in the cocaine trade
were financing the uprisings to destabilise the government. Bolivia is
the world's third-largest cultivator of coca leaf, the raw material
used to produce cocaine.

Police have cleared nearly all highways blocked during the weekend
violence sparked by proposed legislation that threatened to hike water
rates in Latin America's poorest nation.

But protesters in Cochabamba, the third-largest city in this country
of 8 million people, said Tuesday they controlled the trunk route from
the capital La Paz to the country's largest city Santa Cruz and would
continue to hold on to it until Congress sanctioned a new water law.

Roadblocks also persisted on the high plateau route from La Paz to
Lake Titicaca, where in the town of Achacachi on Sunday two civilians
were shot and a soldier was beaten to death.

Local newspapers reported that La Paz, the highest capital in the
world at 11,520 feet (3,600 meters), was suffering from food shortages
because of the blockages.