Bolivia's Evo Morales called Monday on the opposition that ousted him to "pacify the country" after his shock resignation following weeks of protests over his disputed re-election left a power vacuum in the country.
Shops and offices in La Paz were shuttered early Monday after looting broke out late Sunday in some parts of the capital and the neighboring city of El Alto.
Thousands of commuters were forced to walk to work in the morning drizzle as the city's cable-car network remained paralyzed and buses were scarce.
The police -- largely confined to barracks since riots broke out on Friday, with many units joining the protests -- were returning to the streets, police chief Vladimir Yuri Calderon said. "The Bolivian police will be acting," Calderon told ATB television.
Tweeting from the central coca-growing region of Chapare, where he fled on Sunday, Morales called on the opposition to "assume its responsibility" after Sunday's riots.
He said the opposition leadership had a "responsibility to pacify the country and guarantee the political stability and peaceful coexistence of our people." Morales, who was Bolivia's first indigenous president, said his opposition rivals, Carlos Mesa and Luis Fernando Camacho, "discriminators and conspirators, will go down in history as racists and coup plotters." Camacho is a key opposition leader in Santa Cruz, Bolivia's biggest city and economic capital. Mesa, a former president, came a close second to Morales in the disputed October 20 election.
Morales, whose Movement for Socialism party retains a majority in the Congress that will elect his temporary successor, said "the world and patriotic Bolivians repudiate the coup."
Cuba's Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez described Morales as "a protagonist and a symbol of the rights of the indigenous peoples of our Americas." And Brazil's Luis Inacio Lula da Silva said the coup that removed Morales was evidence of "an economic elite in Latin America that did not know how to share democracy with poor people."
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