La Paz, Bolivia ? President Evo Morales fired two top mining officials late Friday after a clash between rival bands of miners over access to the country’s richest tin deposit left at least 16 dead and more than 60 injured.

Reports of a halt to the fighting came after the government sent 700 police to control the mountainside where the mine is located.

Officials from the two mining groups also met with government ministers in La Paz. Presidential spokesman Alex Contreras said the meeting yielded a peace agreement, with both sides agreeing to allow humanitarian aid to enter the town.

It wasn’t immediately known if the agreement would turn into a permanent cease-fire. A truce Thursday night lasted long enough for both sides to bury their dead.

Morales, who took office in January as Bolivia’s first indigenous president, responded to the violence by dismissing both the minister of mines, Walker Villaroel, and president of Bolivia’s state-owned mining company Comibol, Juan Carbrera.

Morales said the changes were part of his administration’s learning process.

“In eight months we cannot solve all of our social problems,” he said. “I recognize, self-critically, that we are all new at this – ministers, vice ministers, president, vice president, all learning to serve the people better.”

State-employed miners evacuate an injured co-worker Friday in the city of Huanuni, Bolivia. The Bolivian government sent 700 additional police to quell a clash between rival bands of miners over one of South America's richest tin mines.

In their place, he swore in Guillermo Dalence Salinas as the new minister, and Hugo Miranda as the new head of the mining company.

The violence began Thursday morning, when hundreds of miners belonging to independent cooperatives stormed the state-owned Huanuni mine, demanding more access to its tin deposits. State-employed miners counterattacked to regain control of the mine, and the groups exchanged gunshots and dynamite.

The clash followed a breakdown in negotiations in the nearby city of Oruro in which the miners’ cooperatives rejected a government proposal dividing Huanuni’s veins of tin between the two groups.

The cooperatives strongly backed Morales’ election last year, and the administration has already granted them access to a portion of the Huanuni deposit on the barren slopes of Posokoni Mountain.

Miners from both sides threw dynamite and homemade explosives at each other from ridge to ridge, sometimes separated by no more than 50 feet.

Miners, some only in their teens, carried sticks of dynamite in backpacks and tucked in their belts.

In town, residents held a prayer vigil in the local church for the violence to end.

Blood stains and holes from explosives littered a soccer field in the Dolores neighborhood following fighting there Thursday.