The title is the same as a famous Italian song from the 70s and takes up in full a recent interview that the interim president of YPFB Armin Dorgathen Tapia (ADT) gave to Brújula Digital, a media that published it in summary form on January 18th.
In truth, in that “bikini” speech (showing a lot and hiding the substance) the current executive does not differ in any way from his predecessors, to whom, without naming them, he addresses poison darts, with the exception of the late Carlos Villegas, more for legal reasons (risk of defamation of a macabre dead man described as a corpse thrown into the sea with the ship’s compass) than for inexplicable technical merits.
The president of YPFB must be such a busy person that he does not have the time to properly prepare for an interview with one of Bolivia’s most prestigious digital media. Nothing else means making mistakes with regulations relevant to YPFB, such as the unproductive Oil Incentive Law No. 767, enacted in 2015 and not in 2017, as the interviewee claims.
In the same way, the pressures inherent in his position are perhaps the cause of his memory failures, since he does not remember the amount of YPFB’s debts, much higher than those that the government of the “Kirchnerist brothers” has accustomed us to owe us. Why doesn’t it disclose the precise amounts of what YPFB owes to companies, not only those that extract the exported gas, but also those that supply the fuels and other services?
In short, the inaccuracies and secrecy of the chairman of the largest state-owned company lead to suspicion that ADT is confusing and lying, as it does with its repeated promises to reveal the certification of oil and gas reserves “in the coming weeks.”
As far as reservations are concerned, the interviewee loses all modesty when he admits that he knows this information but keeps it hidden and does not divulge it because he is analyzing it “exhaustively”. It is a good thing that YPFB analyzes the result of Ryder Scott’s latest certification, however, Law 3740 of August 31, 2007, is peremptory and clear: “YPFB, until March 31 of each year, must publish the level of certified reserves existing in the country as of January 1 of that year.” The obligation is to publish, not to analyse, and every year, not every five or six years. The interviewee’s explanation for refusing to show this data is ridiculous: the population “doesn’t understand” how reserves evolve. In reality, the fear is that the population will be convinced that they have been deceived by the insane energy policy of all the governments of their party, which have privileged to monetize and squander gas reserves instead of exploring.
True to the archist script, the YPFB president blames previous governments for the end of the gas cycle, resorting to errors, half-truths and lies, as in the accusation against former president Carlos Mesa of having disclosed the study of the certifying company De Goyler & Mac Naughton “which was never proven, it was a deception”. Based on his professional career, one would expect ADT to have greater responsibility and awareness that the decline in reserves between 2004 and 2005 was due to changes in the international calculation methodology that affected Bolivia and Argentina.
Among other things, the reality hidden by the interviewee is that Bolivia is not sovereign in energy (it imports fuels), it does not have security of supply (this is why the queues at the pumps, which are increasingly long, frequent and expensive for the country), nor is it sustainable (the problems tend to worsen over time). In short, instead of sustainable solutions, words, words, just words.