"The private companies took over the industry. They were eager to take in five billion dollars to export natural gas as raw material (to the United States and Mexico), but they were incapable of investing 40 million dollars in a gas pipeline to provide the western part of the country with energy supplies."
LA PAZ, (IPS) - "If you agree, sign the decree!" Bolivian President Evo Morales told his ministers on the morning of May 1, as he got ready to announce the renationalisation of an industry that will move 200 billion dollars over the next two decades in South America's poorest country.
One of the architects of the measure to reassert state control over the country's natural gas reserves -- the second-largest in South America -- described the process to IPS in an interview. That day, Morales handed the decree to his cabinet, sitting around a huge carved wooden table in the meeting room in the government palace, as the first rays of sunlight filtered through the chilly morning of La Paz.
Signatures, applause and the national anthem. After the last verse ("Morir antes que esclavos vivir" - "Better to die than to live as slaves"), Morales smiled and said "The plane is waiting for us."
Only a few of his closest associates knew that the army would be called out to occupy Bolivia's oil fields, refineries and petrol stations, or that the president and his stunned ministers would ride that morning in a Hercules transport plane to the region of Caraparí, 1,200 km to the south.
When Morales reached the doors of the San Alberto gas plant, controlled until that day by Brazil's state-owned oil giant Petrobras, the smiling employees asked which part of the gas field or facilities he wanted to visit.
But the president had not come for a visit. He had come to seize control of the installations and the gas fields.
A day earlier another army, but this time of oil engineers, had moved quietly through the gas fields and plants on the pretext of carrying out inspections and controls, although in larger numbers than usual. "New technicians are accompanying the old ones to gain experience on the ground," the engineers told the guards and watchmen at the foreign oil companies, to allay any suspicions.
The aim of the secret mission by the oil industry technicians was to take emergency action in case the companies decided to respond to the nationalisation by cutting off energy supplies.
The little-known story behind the events of May 1 was related to IPS by one of the six strategists responsible for the secret plan, Manuel Morales Olivera, general adviser to Bolivia's state-owned oil company Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales Bolivianos (YPFB).
Full story: http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=33229
Leave a comment