Bolivia's new interim president Eduardo Rodriguez Sunday met with protest leaders in the opposition stronghold of El Alto in efforts to stave off further protests, according to reports from La Paz.

Labor leaders in El Alto, a city outside Bolivia's administrative capital La Paz, threatened more protests like those that had toppled his predecessor if he did not pledge to nationalize the country's oil and gas industry and hold early elections.

Rodriguez spent nearly two hours with neighborhood, union, mining and farm leaders in a church auditorium, trying to bring calm to the city, which has become the center of the country's most intense civil disturbances.

"We must re-establish peace," Rodriguez told the strike leaders, as they repeated calls for immediate action to nationalize the natural gas industry and a national assembly to rework the constitution to guarantee more representation for Bolivia's Indian majority.
 
The protest leaders demanded the December elections that Rodriguez has already promised be for new lawmakers, not only for a new president.

Three weeks of fierce protests in Bolivia have forced out its former president Carlos Mesa. The embattled president decided to resign last week, caught between interior demand for energy nationalization and foreign gas firms threatening to sue if the government broke existing contracts.
 
Amid pressures of resurgence of the turmoil, Mesa on Sunday urged companies like Spain's Repsol YPF and Brazil's Petrobras not to pressure a new Bolivian government too hard because the country was in danger of civil war, Mesa told Spanish newspaper ABC.

(Xinhua News Agency June 13, 2005)