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Brazil & Southern Cone - August 2015 (ISSN 1741-4431)

Chile’s exasperation with Bolivia

Chile’s foreign minister, Heraldo Muñoz, on 4 August said that “everything has a limit”, and accused the Bolivian government led by President Evo Morales of making “unjustified accusations”.

Muñoz was responding to comments made by Morales in an interview with the Bolivian national daily El Deber. The radical left-wing Bolivian president said that he was considering expelling the Chilean consul to Bolivia, Milenko Skoknic, whom he accused of seeking to promote “instability” by travelling around the country to meet opposition political leaders.

President Morales levelled his accusation just a day after announcing that Bolivia’s foreign ministry would send the Chilean government a formal proposal to re-establish relations (severed in 1978 over Bolivia’s long standing claim to sovereign access to the Pacific Ocean, lost to Chile in the War of the Pacific [1879-1883]), with Pope Francis to act as guarantor. The latest spat over Skoknic would appear to put paid to any hopes of a rapprochement. In a press release, Chile’s foreign ministry described Morales’s accusations as a “media campaign”, and said it had no intention of removing Skoknic, in the post since 2014, noting that the diplomat has the total freedom to “meet whoever he wants.”

Morales’s call to re-establish relations follows the Pope’s visit to Bolivia in July, wheN he urged the two neighbours to work on their relations, “in order to avoid conflicts between brother countries and [to] advance frank and open dialogue about their problems”. The Pope’s remarks were hailed as a victory by the Morales government.

In 2013 Bolivia brought a case against Chile before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) at The Hague over its coastal claim. Bolivia insists that it is not asking the ICJ to review a 1904 peace treaty between the two countries but rather is demanding that the court order Chile to negotiate with Bolivia over the matter, citing the fact that on various occasions in the past Chile has shown a willingness to negotiate Bolivia’s demand for an outlet to the Pacific.

  • In 2015, the Chilean government led by President Michelle Bachelet issued a formal challenge to the ICJ’s jurisdiction, calling on the court to “adjudge and declare that the claim brought by Bolivia against Chile is not within the [its] jurisdiction”, arguing that the court does not have the authority to rule on bilateral treaties signed between two countries, such as the 1904 treaty.

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