“All the indications are that our deputy minister Rodolfo Illanes has been brutally and cowardly assassinated”, Carlos Romero, the Minister of Government, said late on Thursday in comments quoted by the Reuters news agency.
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Evo Morales government has called for dialogue, urging miners on Thursday to send a “positive sign” that strikers are willing to lift the highway blockades launched earlier this week and sit down at the negotiating table.
A minister has been killed by striking miners in Bolivia.
A representative of the Federation of Mining Cooperative in Bolivia, known as Fedecomin, also confirmed that the organization was holding Illanes, but rejected the government’s characterization of the move as a “kidnapping”.
Mr Romero said the authorities had tried to persuade the miners to release Mr Illanes and were now trying to retrieve his body.
Breaking down during a television interview, Ferreira said it looked as if Illanes had been tortured. He said officials were investigating and that a government minister would speak to the press shortly.
“It was really a criminal act”, Mr. Ferreira was reported as saying.
Bolivia’s attorney general announced that five prosecutors had been sent to Panduro.
Illanes’s bodyguard escaped the scene after being stripped of his gun, and had been admitted to a clinic in La Paz.
Police shot two miners dead on Wednesday.
“We are very shocked, we’re running a risk because the miners are furious”, Flores told Erbol Radio by telephone from Panduro, some 180 kilometers from La Paz, where clashes have erupted between miners and police.
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The country’s approximately 100,000 informal miners are demanding the right to work for private companies, which is now forbidden.
