Instead of forming a new cabinet, he chose to maintain his predecessor’s cabinet. Article 70 of the Constitution dictated that if, in the middle of a presidential term, the President resigned or was dismissed, disabled, absent or dead, the President of the Council of State would be called to carry out the executive power until the end of the constitutional term. Frías refused to finish the remainder of Morales' term, calling for elections. Accepting the President's compromise, the National Assembly proposed that Article 70 be changed. As per the proposal, the President of the Council of State would still be called to carry out the executive power, however, within thirty days would have to set a date for elections, convening the Assembly for three months after this decree had been promulgated. One of the first administrative acts of the new administration was to conclude a diplomatic agreement that was signed on December 5 between the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Casimiro Corral, and the Minister Plenipotentiary of Chile, Santiago Lindsay. The purpose of the agreement was to settle any issues which had arisen during the negotiations of the earlier boundary treaty of August 10, 1866. Corral had already announced, in his memorandum to the Assembly of 1872, that negotiations were under way to smooth out these difficulties. However, two stipulations were contested vehemently by the Assembly. The first was the division of the guano deposits and profits between the two nations; the second regarded the export rights of the metals extracted from the territory between the parallels 23º and 25º. These issues would not cease to be a hotbed of tension for the two nations in the future. Corral reported he had reached an agreement with Chile and was ordered to submit a transcript of the negotiations, to be presented for discussion for the next extraordinary Assembly, to be convened on 23 April, 1873. A major controversy during his first term was the López Gama affair. The affair started when the entrepreneur Pedro López Gama sued the government for the loss of 200,000 tons of guano, amounting to 2,000,000 pesos. López won the lawsuit against the Bolivian government, the court ruling that a 1,000,000 peso compensation was in order. In order to pay such a figure, the State was forced to auction off the estaca-mines of Aullagas to the highest bidder. López, who purchased the majority of said mines, would end