LA PAZ, Oct 17: Bolivian President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada on Friday agreed to step down amid spiraling social unrest, clearing the way for Vice President Carlos Mesa to succeed him, a senior ruling coalition source said.

“He will make his resignation official in a letter to Congress, and then we will move on to the succession” later Friday, the source said.

Government spokesmen would not immediately confirm or deny the report. The president was huddled with advisers and scheduled to make an address to the nation later Friday, they said.

Several radio stations broadcast the national anthem, and demonstrators in the streets of South America’s poorest nation began setting bonfires and celebrating. Many sang and chanted “all the way to the damn resignation!”

Earlier, a key political ally of Bolivia’s president dropped his support and said he would hold an emergency meeting Friday with Sanchez de Lozada to weigh a response to calls by thousands of demonstrators for the Bolivian leader to step down.

The crisis is such that “we cannot row against the tide. We have to look for a way out as soon as possible, because we cannot go against democracy,” Manfred Reyes Villa, leader of the New Republican Force that backs the president, told Panamericana radio, as armored cars and troops stood watch outside the San Jorge presidential residence.

Bolivia has been roiled in recent weeks by controversy over a government plan to export natural gas that critics said would not put enough in government coffers and would only favor the well-off.

In four weeks of often violent protests, at least 86 people have been killed, according to human rights groups.

Wednesday, Reyes Villa signed a manifesto with the president and another ruling coalition leader, Jaime Paz Zamora, proposing a referendum on the natural gas issue. But opposition forces rejected it out of hand and continued to press for the president’s resignation.

Some 50,000 protesters flooded downtown La Paz on Thursday, demanding that Sanchez de Lozada step down.

“We have done everything possible to defuse the crisis,” Reyes Villa said. “We must be responsible above all. A time of reckoning has come, because the country cannot remain adrift.”—AFP