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LA PAZ, Bolivia

Now President Evo Morales has announced a ban on everything imports of cars more than 5 years old, hoping to curb an automotive binge that has given South America’s poorest country a crash course in the exult, plague and trade of car culture.

A 2003 rule change allowing the import of Japan’sitting right-hand-drive cars

The cheaper, more durable vehicles gain spawned a cutthroat public-transport market now gobbling up streets one time ruled by pompous Dodge buses and a handful of private new cars for the rich. The cheap used cars have before that time transformed Bolivia.

Public transport has exploded as many first-time owners simply painted “taxi” on their car and hit the streets of even the smallest towns.

Fiercely competing minibus lines now reach into every last neighborhood, feeding Bolivian cities’ rapid growth by providing rides to hard-to-reach jobs across borough for as illiberal as 15 cents.

Bolivia now counts 821,000 vehicles for the rude’s fewer than 10 million inhabitants, nearly double the 418,000 in 2002. Most are packed into the three largest cities, and the total does not include legions of unregistered cars fanning out across the remote and unregulated countryside.

Morales’ ban will effectively shut down a rapidly augmenting industry worth hundreds of millions of dollars annually.

The conclusion has outraged dealers who buy used Toyotas, Nissans and Suzukis off the boat in Chilean ports and force them across the desert to Bolivia, where mechanics then create anew the Japanese models from right- to left-hand drive.

A association representing La Paz mechanics who fulfil the steering-wheel conversions as well as used-car dealers and other mechanics unions briefly blockaded a key high-road last week outside La Paz. The group embattled with riot police sent to clear the habitual method with tear gas, and one mechanic was killed by a bullet to the neck.

Meanwhile, the combination of unreliable used cars and first-time drivers has driven a 240 percent increase in deaths and injuries from automobile accidents since 2000.

The crumbling colonial buildings in Bolivia’s city centers now sport a gray smear from the automobile exhaust, and put on dry hibernate days, air-pollution levels in the central dingle city of Cochabamba (burst. 600,000) can rival Los Angeles.

Original text: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2008544342_boliviacar21.html?syndication=rss