Weekly Report - 16 December 2003

As we had anticipated, Samuel Doria Medina, who recently defected from the Movimiento de la Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR), has founded a new political party, in response to the `pulverisation' of Bolivia's political system by the crisis of last October - and even which, he said, `has dragged with it the old parties and the old leaders [and] exposed the economic model in all its nakedness [posing] new challenges to the economy and to national politics.'