“All signs indicate that our deputy minister, Rodolfo Illanes, has been cowardly and brutally murdered”, Interior Minister Carlos Romero told a press conference.
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Miners have been striking since early last month and holding protests at strategic points across the country, demanding the right to work for private companies and more union representatives and rights, among other things.
The fatal beating follows the killings of two protesters in clashes with police, deaths that likely escalated tensions in the strike.
More than 100 arrests had been made in relation to the murder.
A senior Bolivian politician has been beaten to death by an angry mob of striking mineworkers, officials say.
Mr Illanes was beaten to death at about 18:00 local time (00:00 GMT), La Razon newspaper quoted Defence Minister Reymi Ferreira as saying.
Smoke wafts over the highway linking the Bolivian capital of La Paz with the Chilean border during an ongoing clash between striking miners, who are blockading the road, and police.
The majority of Bolivian miners, one of the poorest countries in South America, indeed work in cooperatives, for which they extract silver, tin or zinc.
“This mobilization of the Fencomin was a political conspiracy and there were no genuine social demands for the sector”, President Morales told the media on Friday.
“The prices of minerals have gone down and the costs of production have increased”, he said.
A visibly shaken Morales spoke of his “deep pain” at the killing.
He was taken hostage on Thursday morning, although he tweeted later that day: ‘My health is fine, my family can be calm’.
But reports later said the government official was dead, citing a radio station director who said he saw Illanes’s body.
Illanes’ body was later found abandoned on the side of the highway, his vehicle burned.
According to the Minister of the Interior, they seek actually to receive permission to rent their mining concessions to private and foreign companies, which is prohibited by the Constitution. The government argues that if they associate with multinational companies they would cease to be co-operatives.
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The National Federation of Mining Cooperatives began the indefinite protest after negotiations with the government failed on mining legislation.
