Under a blue tarpaulin at her creaky street stall, Rosita, an indigenous Aymara butcher, is complaining. "There's not enough beef now," she says. "These conservative racists from the east want us, the Indians, to starve so [that] we yield and get back under their thumb. But no, we won't let them. We will fight for Evo and this process of change."

That process seems to have arrived at a violent standstill over the past week. Though Bolivia's first indigenous president Evo Morales emerged as the clear winner of a national vote earlier this month in which he faced removal from office, the eastern, whiter and wealthier half of the country is not willing to concede defeat. Neither is it happy with a rule that many in the east describe as totalitarian.