A President Gets the Boot.(Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada of Bolivia resigns from office)

Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada was an inviting target. The wealthy owner of Bolivia's largest private mining company grew up in the United States and embraced globalization with unmitigated gusto. When the 73-year-old tycoon was first elected president of Bolivia in 1993, he sold off state-owned companies, slashed the government payroll and cut import tariffs. One of the public enterprises he sold to foreign investors was the government's gas and oil company, YPFB--and upon his return to power in last year's presidential election, "Goni," as he is known, antagonized political opponents with plans to build a $6 billion pipeline to export natural gas through a port in neighboring Chile. "Bolivians saw Goni as defending foreign interests more than their own," former senator Andres Soliz Rada says. That perception proved his undoing. Last week, after days of mounting protests that left more than 70 people dead, the embattled president was forced to resign from office.

How did things fall apart so quickly? One problem was the government's ham-fisted response to antipipeline protests: soldiers replaced police on the streets of the capital, La Paz, after the demonstrations began in mid-September--and a series of bloody confrontations ensued. Beyond that, Goni's free-market ideas were greeted with public scorn. In February the government tried to raise income taxes at the urging of the International Monetary Fund, but after a mutiny by disgruntled policemen and others, the idea was ...