According to President Luis Arce, the disaster of the MAS’s energy policy is due to the fact that “nationalization has been neglected.” In fact, the president criticized the governments that preceded him (omitting that he was the “super minister” of the economic area) who devoted themselves to monetizing the gas reserves inherited from liberal governments, neglecting exploration and the energy transition.
Unfortunately, energy was not the only area that MAS governments did not address. What else “didn’t take care”?
The currency reserves that exceeded 15 billion dollars and have now vanished causing the current chronic lack of foreign currency have been disregarded.
Not even the spoiled creatures of the regime, the public enterprises, created for no reason, administered without professionalism, conditioned by political interference and left in a comatose state from birth, have been cured. Today they are a chasm of money that no one wants or can stop.
Nor has foreign policy been dealt with, turning Bolivia into a vassal of “other” imperialisms, not to mention submission to the ineffable Puebla Group. Amateurism, gross errors and improvisation continue to be the brand of our diplomacy.
And what can be said about how democratic values have been neglected, preferring violence, extortion, imposition, violation of the law (“lawyers then fix”) and interim fuses.
Undoubtedly, the most visible and painful “oversight” is justice, which has never been respectable, but thanks to the MAS it has hit rock bottom with para-prosecutors and para-judges at the shameless service of power. That justice, which tortured and executed honest people like José Bákovic and Marco Antonio Aramayo, continues to imprison political actors who bear the same responsibility as the regime’s acolytes who remain free and unpunished.
Above all, the MAS neglected education, the most powerful weapon for change, reducing it to improved infrastructure and monetary incentives to motivate children to go to school. Unfortunately, the educational delay will have an impact on the reconstruction of Bolivia, after the populist hurricane has passed. If education is neglected – education in universal values, not in abused “ancestral” values – the fight against the cancer of corruption and activities related to international crime is neglected. Nor was the dignity of the indigenous people respected, whom they wanted to include in political and social life, but who ended up extorted by a handful of venal and unscrupulous leaders.
The truth has been neglected, in favor of propaganda and full freedom of expression, replacing it with pseudo-journalists, who know no shame. Nor has the harassment of independent newspapers been neglected to the point of closing them. The obstruction of the truth in episodes of violence has left open wounds in the national memory and in the international courts of justice.
Painfully, forests have been neglected and uncontrolled fires have been encouraged to satiate the greed of the party’s land dealers.
Fundamentally, ethics have been neglected: good has been called evil and evil has been called good, and the most abject vices have been defended by silencing consciences. The bottom was reached when innocent adolescents, raped in the “Feast of the Satyr”, were not protected.
In his “Moralia“, Plutarch narrates that Bias of Priene, one of the Seven Sages of ancient Greece, when asked about the most harmful animal, replied: “If you speak of wild beasts, the tyrant; if you talk about pets, the flatterer.” The biggest oversight, Mr. President, has been to fill Bolivia with vulgar tyrants and flatterers.