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Bolivia's new president will have to hit the ground running


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By Claudio Campuzano
SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM

August 1, 2002

No candidate achieved the required 51 per cent of the popular vote in the first round of Bolivia's presidential election last month so, voting on the presidential election run-off on Sunday, Aug. 3, Congress is expected to choose U.S.-educated millionaire businessman Gonzalo S‡nchez de Lozada, who got 22 percent of the vote, over Evo Morales the spearhead of Bolivia's indigenous rebellion against coca leaf eradication, who was two points behind.

S‡nchez de Lozada, who was Bolivia's president between 1993 and 1997, should be inaugurated three days later, on Aug. 6. And within the following 48 hours he will be facing a critical decision on a highly controversial issue that could make or break his four-year presidency.

Bolivia stands at the threshold of a multibillion-dollar deal to sell natural gas to California through an export terminal on land lost to Chile in the 19th century. However, the idea of cooperating with its historic enemy is anathema to Bolivian nationalists. As they see it, Chile's gain is-once again-Bolivia's loss.

Pacific LNG, an international consortium made up of Britain's BG Group PLC and BP PLC and Spain's Repsol YPF, is ready to invest $6 billion to drill for the gas in southern Bolivia and pump it though a pipeline to a port in northern Chile. The gas would be converted to liquid and shipped on futuristic tankers to a "regasification" plant in northern Mexico to be built by Sempra Energy of San Diego and its partner, CMS Energy Corp. of Dearborn, Mich.

Sempra says that, beginning in 2008, it expects to market 800 million cubic feet of the gas daily to power plants and residential and industrial users throughout southern California and the U.S. Southwest. The company also hopes for major sales to the booming factories in the Mexican state of Baja California.

Many Bolivians who are loath to deal with Chile, which defeated them and their ally Peru in the 1879 War of the Pacific that left Bolivia landlocked, are fighting for a plan to run a gas pipeline through Peru, which has offered to provide Bolivia with a coastal strip on the Pacific near Ilo, a Peruvian port. But running the duct through Peru would cost an additional $760 million plus an annual $102 million in operating expenses, not covered by the foreign consortium, because the facilities offered by the Peruvian port of Ilo are inferior to those provided by the Patillos cove at the southern Chilean city of Iquique. Furthermore, Peru's domestic economic and political situation is uncertain, with president Alejandro Toledo's approval rate running below 15 percent, while Chile is economically and politically stable.

Successive deadlines for closing the deal have come and gone, and president Jorge Quiroga will be leaving office with the issue still unresolved.

The latest, and final, deadline set by the foreign consortium before it starts looking at other similar opportunities in Russia and Australia, is Aug. 8, two days after S‡nchez de Lozada takes office (the consortium has suggested it might help the new president by stretching the deadline to the end of August).

President Quiroga tried to make the Chilean proposal more palatable to the opposition by presenting it as a means of winning back a beachhead on the Pacific. Gaining ocean frontage for export to the North American market is crucial, he observed, because Bolivia's gas reserves grew tenfold over the past few years and sales to neighboring Brazil have been less than expected.

Still, just drilling for gas and shipping it north isn't enough to lift Bolivia out of its chronic poverty, the president argued. Economic control of a coastal zone, he added, would allow Bolivia to use its gas to create "value-added" industries like petrochemicals and synthetic fuels.

New president S‡nchez de Losada not only inherits this thorny issue, but will be facing the opposition headead by indigenous leader Evo Morales, a 42-year-old Aymar‡ Indian who has pledged to fight to reverse two decades of free-market economics which, he says, have done nothing for the poor in Bolivia. "Capitalism is the enemy of humanity," he has said. "People are rising up against the system."

Morales has assumed the representation of the underclass of Indian peasants who have never had a strong voice in Congress in nearly 200 years of Bolivia's history, with his party controlling 35 of the 157 seats in the lower chamber and closely allied with another substantial group led also by an Indian leader, Felipe Quispe-while S‡nchez de Lozada's support comes from a less-than-convincing coalition. In a matter of weeks, Morales turned his gripes about the U.S.-backed campaign to eradicate coca leaf growing, rural poverty and general U.S. interference in domestic affairs into important election issues.

In Bolivia, Aymar‡ and Quechua Indians outnumber those of mixed or European blood by three to one in a total of 8.3 million people, and Morales's faction will become the second political force in the country.

One note of powerful symbolism: Evo Morales's speaks Spanish, but his first tongue is the Aymar‡ language; Gonzalo S‡nchez de Losada's Spanish is tinged with an English accent, because, although from an old Bolivian family, he was brought up and educated in the United States.

Claudio Campuzano (claudio-campuzano@hotmail.com) is U.S, correspondent for the Latin American newsweekly Tiempos del Mundo and editorial page editor of the New York daily Noticias del Mundo. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com

August 1, 2002



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