Great one from evo:
EM:
First, an important fact, of which people should be informed. At the moment we nationalised it in 2005, the [annual] income from oil was barely 3 billion bolivianos. After we nationalised, by January 22, 2019, on the anniversary day of the Plurinational State, we were left with 38 billion bolivianos of oil rent. [In 2005] they left us a GDP of 9.5 billion dollars. By January last year, we left it at 42 billion dollars — imagine the importance of this change.
Bolivia was the bottom country in South America for economic growth, but out of the fourteen years that I was president, for six of them Bolivia was first-placed. When I went to international forums, summits, or to some inauguration, these presidents would ask me: “Evo, this year how much economic growth will there be?” I told them 4 or 5 percent, and they asked me what I had done to achieve this. And I answered: “We must nationalise our natural resources, and basic services must be a human right.”
The privatisations are back again now. The Supreme Decree 4272 [imposed by Jeanine Áñez’s regime] of June 24 this year, proposed a return to the past, reducing the state to “dwarf” size, as the International Monetary Fund wants. The state is not going to invest in public companies, and it will contribute less to the expansion of the productive apparatus for the benefit of the Bolivian people. The idea of this supreme decree is to return to the state functioning only as a regulator and not as an investor in national projects.
The IMF’s recipes are all there in this Supreme Decree: privatising electricity, telecommunications, health, and education. The privatisation of education has already begun, because this year they did not set aside a budget for the creation of new schools. On September 14, they began privatising energy in Cochabamba; the attorney appointed by Áñez resigned, because that privatisation decree was unconstitutional. Basic services are a human right and cannot be a private business, health cannot be a commodity, and education is so important for the emancipation of the people. So, the people rise up in rejection of this.
Unfortunately, Bolivia currently has two pandemics: the pandemic that kills us with the virus — and paralyses production through the quarantine — but also a government that paralyses all public works and submits them to capitalist policies.
Our task is to defend the nationalisations and deepen industrialisation. That is the goal we must achieve, so we can continue with economic growth. But first we have to recover democracy and take back our country.
Let’s hope they do.
Wednesday will be crucial.
How are they gonna do that without force?
We’ll see.
Exit polls have MAS winning already but the actual taking of power is what concerns me. Also, there’s nothing stopping another coup attempt.
Yes, I’m aware, but I’m not saying that they’re going to retake power as a certainty; I’m also wondering what will happen.
But the campesinos, indigenous, and rural people are all staunchly against the government, to the point of arming themselves.
I hope MAS will learn from this experience (if they manage to recover full state powers) and strengthen the military. Purge reactionaries from positions of authority, teach soldiers political education, and basically do what Venezuela did. This is a historic moment in Bolivia, where the MAS has to decide whether to break away from imperialism by force. Whatever happens I’m here for it.
Absolutely. Educating and politicizing the military along socialist lines has more than anything proven to be the deciding factor in whether these revolutions have survived.
In ML States like China, Cuba, USSR, the military is / was either just a wing of, or entirely controlled by the communist party, and in VZ the military is educated along socialist lines.
