Bolivia's indigenous people form party

Indigenous leaders in Bolivia have announced the creation of a political party intended to serve the interests of the country's vast indigenous population.

One of them, Felipe Quispe, told a crowd of some ten-thousand Aymara indians gathered in Penas late Tuesday -- a small village some sixty kilometres from La Paz, that the Pachakuti Indigenous Movement would take part in the general elections scheduled for 2002.

Speaking in an Indian dialect rather than Spanish, Mr Quispe condemned what he described as the endemic government corruption and said the time had come to reclaim the Aymara nation, which he said had been oppressed by the white people for five-hundred years. Indigenous people make up some sixty percent of Bolivia's population.

From the newsroom of the BBC World Service