Cochabamba social unrest of 2007

Social unrest in Cochabamba involved violent clashes between supporters and opponents of Cochabamba Prefect Manfred Reyes Villa in the departmental capital city of Cochabamba, Bolivia, reaching their peak on January 11 and 12, 2007. The policies of the President Evo Morales and the agenda of his Movement towards Socialism (MAS) party in the Constituent Assembly were opposed by politicians in other political parties, notably Reyes Villa. The prefect's opposition to Morales' policies angered the President's supporters, and early in 2007 demonstrations in Cochabamba escalated into violent clashes between Reyes Villa's civic movement and urban and rural social movements who called for his ouster. During the violence, coca farmer Juan Tica Colque (age 38) and the young student Christian Urresti (17) were killed. Coca farmer Luciano Colque (48) was mortally wounded by blows from civic movement protesters and died of cranial trauma on February 27. Some 200 people were wounded in the clashes.

The pro-autonomy Prefect Manfred Reyes Villa of Cochabamba Department (which is "a geographic and cultural bridge between the pro-autonomy lowlands and Morales' Andean base") was a major opponent of Evo Morales' policies. A previous presidential candidate with the New Republican Force, Reyes Villa was "widely considered to harbor national political ambitions," and did in fact run for the presidency in 2009. While Reyes Villa was one of Morales' most outspoken political opponents, Morales also is very popular with many in the region, where he led the protests of coca leaf growers as the head of Cochabamba's coca growers confederation.

In December 2006, Reyes Villa joined the national right-wing parties and the prefects of the media luna in opposition to the MAS' proposed rules for voting in the Constituent Assembly then rewriting the Constitution of Bolivia. Reyes Villa maintained that each of the new charter’s articles should be written by two-thirds of the assembly’s delegates, while Morales (whose MAS party holds just over half of the seats) held that the document should be written by a simple majority of the delegates with only the final draft being held to a two-thirds nationwide vote.

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