VENTILLA, Bolivia, Oct 9 (Reuters) - Two Bolivians were killed on Thursday in street battles with police around La Paz as a three-week-old wave of demonstrations against unpopular President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada again turned violent. Doctors and police said a miner was killed as dynamite-wielding workers in Ventilla, a town on the outskirts of the capital, protested Sanchez de Lozada's free market economic policies. A student was later shot dead in clashes with police elsewhere in the poor outskirts of La Paz. It was unclear who was responsible for the deaths but it was the worst violence since seven Bolivians were killed in clashes between troops and peasants last month. Protesters attacked journalists in the area, stuffing a dynamite stick into the mouth of a local television team's driver and threatened to light it. Thousands of people, including coca farmers angry at a U.S.-backed drive to eradicate illegal crops of coca, the raw ingredient in cocaine, have marched across Bolivia in protest over the past month. An unpopular project to export natural gas to the United States through Chile -- which has had tense diplomatic relations with Bolivia because of a border dispute -- became a lightning rod for wider protests. Sanchez de Lozada, a key U.S. ally in the anti-drug war who is widely unpopular for failing to alleviate the poverty that engulfs two thirds of the population of South America's poorest country, has played down the protests and defied calls to step down.
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