Bolivia President Declares US Ambassador 'Persona Non Grata'

Via Yahoo News! (AP) -

LA PAZ, Bolivia - President Evo Morales said Wednesday that he is expelling the U.S. ambassador in Bolivia for allegedly inciting violent opposition protests.

Morales' announcement came hours after his government said a pipeline blast triggered by saboteurs forced the country to cut natural gas exports to Brazil by 10 percent.

"Without fear of the empire, I declare the U.S. ambassador 'persona non grata,'" Morales said in a speech at the presidential palace. He said he asked his foreign minister to send a diplomatic note to Ambassador Philip Goldberg telling the American to go home.

"We don't want separatists, divisionists," Bolivia's leftist president added.

In Washington, U.S. State Department spokesman Gordon Duguid called the accusation "baseless" and said the U.S. government had not yet received a note about the ambassador.

The U.S. Embassy in Bolivia said on its Web site that Goldberg learned of Morales' action during a meeting with Bolivia's foreign minister. The statement said he was surprised at Morales' "sudden decision" and was waiting for official diplomatic notification.

Morales' close ally President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, who also calls the United States "the empire," cheered the move, calling a two-week wave of increasingly violent anti-Morales protests the harvest of an alliance between Bolivia's "extreme right" and the U.S. government.

The Bolivian leader did not offer specific evidence against Goldberg, but he has long accused the diplomat of conspiring with Bolivia's conservative opposition. A share of U.S. aid to Bolivia goes to eastern provincial governments that are the nexus of opposition to Morales, which has angered the Bolivian president and his supporters.

Morales, meanwhile, praised protesters who marched on the U.S. embassy in May and has accused Washington of plotting to overthrow him.

In June, his government terminated USAID programs in the coca-growing Chapare region aimed at weaning farmers off the crop from which cocaine is produced. Farmers there had faulted the programs as heavy-handed and ineffectual.