La Paz  - Eleven people died in southwestern Bolivia while they slept at a rural lodge that was also being used as a pesticide deposit, police said Tuesday in the Bolivian province of Chuquisaca.

The dead - including one boy and three women - were peasants from the Japo K'asa, some 720 kilometres southwest of La Paz, who had opted to sleep there en route to Sucre. They were carrying agricultural produce from the Nor Cinti valley to market.

The lodge held bottles of chemicals that are used as pesticides.

"Apparently a child took the lid off one of the bottles and the pesticide spread little by little around the place, killing the 11 people in their sleep, including the boy," San Lucas local official Jorge Penaranda told the La Paz daily La Razon. (dpa)