The Movement Towards Socialism is not a political party, but a criminal group. That is the reality that many do not dare to accept. One, because he has no motivation to manage the country, but only to maintain power at any cost. Two, because his actions always responded to street violence and terrorism.
Do you think I’m exaggerating?
January 14, 2002, Sacaba, a municipality in my native Cochabamba, woke up surrounded by 5,000 coca growers under the command of Evo Morales. The slogan was to reopen the coca market that the government had closed some time ago.
The police guarding the place faced the Molotov cocktails thrown by the coca growers. But they couldn’t prevent 25 vehicles from being burned to the ground. Due to the constant onslaught of the violent hosts, the authorities sent a military contingent to support the police group.
Mauro Bertero, then minister of information, denounced the presence of snipers and the use of firearms by coca growers. The violence intensified with the days. The dead on Morales’ side began to appear, but with one caveat, the caliber of the ammunition did not correspond to those used by the Bolivian Armed Forces. That technique of assassinating his own militants was imported from Colombia, as Fernando Vargas Quemba explains very well in his book: Historical Memory of the Farc, his true origin.
On Thursday, January 17, at sunset, an ambulance was attacked by a group of peasants who kidnapped two law enforcement officers (Lieutenant Marcelo Trujillo and police officer Antonio Gutiérrez) who were wounded inside. The bodies of the uniformed men were found on Friday morning, naked, tortured and hanged, abandoned on the banks of a river near Sacaba.
As a result of these events, on January 22, in a marathon session, with 104 votes in favor and 14 against, the Bolivian Chamber of Deputies separated Evo Morales from its ranks. However, his allies in the press and human rights organizations came out in defense of the coca grower. They used the typical progressive victimizer trick. For these operators of political correctness, Evo was not expelled because of his terrorist acts, but because of racism and discrimination against indigenous people. For his part, Morales used threats and blackmail.
The government, at that time headed by Jorge Quiroga, decided to give in to the progressives’ complaints and the coca growers’ threats. He traded justice for peace, but it would not last long. Well, in September 2003, with Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada already president, Evo Morales, Felipe Quispe and Carlos Mesa staged a coup. The Republic of Bolivia was taken hostage by a dangerous transnational gang called: Socialism of the 21st century.
The defense and industrialization of Bolivian gas were the slogans used by the subversives as a flag of war. However, almost two decades after those events, Bolivia ceased to be a gas power. Carlos Miranda Pacheco, the best energy analyst the country had, in one of his last interviews in life for the portal www.energiabolivia.com stated the following:
We are suffering the effect of having been late in carrying out an exploration campaign to replace what we were exporting. Currently we lack gas to fill the contracts we have, but it does not mean that Bolivia no longer has more gas. The gas that has been produced comes from exploiting ± 12% of the total potential area of the country. No exploration has been done outside the traditional area and having carried out late exploration only in the traditional area, means that to date we lack gas. The income from the sale of hydrocarbons has been fundamentally squandered in the country to finance unfinished projects, companies without productive purposes, and national political displays and international conventions also held in the country.
Miranda was not the only one who warned of the disaster of the energy management of the Movement Towards Socialism. For example, Álvaro Ríos, Minister of Hydrocarbons of Bolivia between 2003 and 2004, in an analysis published in the newspaper Los Tiempos (November 2021) pointed out that:
The Bolivian situation is becoming much more complex because more gasoline and more diesel are being imported progressively. This 2021, about 71 percent of the diesel demand and about 36 percent of the gasoline demand have already been imported. At the rate we are going, probably in 2023 we will start importing liquefied petroleum gas (LPG). And when we do that we will have to import at the international price, at the price at which it is at that moment. Finally, if we do nothing, by 2030 we will be starting to import natural gas. In 2030 we will import gas because Bolivian production is declining. So, from being a gas-producing and gas-exporting country, becoming a net fuel-importing country is going to cost Bolivia a very heavy bill.
Evo Morales squandered the gas rent on inefficient public companies, on weakening democratic institutions, on corrupting the consciences of prosecutors and judges to imprison his opponents, and on positioning his image as the “liberator” of the indigenous and humble people of the world.
Morales was never interested in political management, his only motivation was to sustain his dictatorship at any cost. It is time to stop treating a simple group of thugs as statesmen.
“The opinions published here are the sole responsibility of their author.”
