Bolivia's Evo Morales to Nationalize Railroads, El Diario Says

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Bloomberg

Bolivia's Evo Morales to Nationalize Railroads, El Diario Says

By Matthew Craze

July 16 (Bloomberg) -- Bolivian President Evo Morales said the country will nationalize its railroads, which were privatized by former president Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, El Diario newspaper reported.

Morales said in a speech at Tiwanaku, Bolivia, that the sale of the state-owned railroads hadn't benefited the Bolivian people, the newspaper said.


Read more: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601086&sid=aUDK7yJqYAOk&refer=latin_america

---

Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, Mr. Privatisation

The government renationalises a big tin smelter
Bolivia's industry
Feb 19th 2007
From the Economist Intelligence Unit ViewsWire

~snip~
In what has now become a hallmark of his presidency, Evo Morales stood before crowds of supporters on February 9th to announce the renationalisation of another former state asset, the world’s fourth-largest tin smelter, Empresa Metalúrgica Vinto. The current owners, Glencore, a Swiss metals and minerals broker, will not be compensated, Mr Morales said. While the case certainly raises concerns about the government’s intentions towards other mining companies, the expropriation of Vinto is probably more about political vendetta than a policy of nationalisation.

The announcement came after a difficult week for the government. The president was forced to drop a plan to increase mining taxes after thousands of individual miners marched on La Paz to protest against the proposal. In the face of an open revolt by a sector normally supportive of the government, Mr Morales was forced into a humiliating about-turn and agreed to freeze taxes at current levels.

Obvious target
Vinto always was seen as a likely target for the Morales administration. Glencore bought Vinto in 2005 as part of an estimated US$90m purchase of mining assets owned by a former Bolivian president, Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, who was forced from office in 2003 and fled to the US.

Mr Sánchez de Lozada was both the architect of privatisation reforms in the 1990s and the former owner of the country’s largest mining company, Compañía Minera del Sur (Comsur). He is also the man held responsible by the current administration for the deaths of 67 people during anti-government protests in 2003. Those protests were spurred on by Mr Morales, then leader of the coca growers association. On the basis of the charge against him, the government is mounting a strong effort for the extradition of Mr Sánchez de Lozada to face prosecution in Bolivia.
(snip)

The government has quietly given assurances that whatever it may say in public it will not act against companies operating legally and in good faith. Foreign mining investors believe that mining code revisions to be announced by the government will be neither draconian nor confiscatory in terms of a higher tax burden and are therefore pressing ahead with their projects.

More:
http://www.economist.com/agenda/displaystory.cfm?story_id=8727212

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Last Updated: Wednesday, 27 June 2007, 16:08 GMT 17:08 UK

Timeline: Bolivia
A chronology of key events:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/country_profiles/1218814.stm





Small Banzer, taller Pinochet



Banzer on Paraguay's stamp

President Hugo Banzer, who privatised Bolivia's water:

COLONEL HUGO BANZER
President of Bolivia
In 1970, in Bolivia, when then-President Juan Jose Torres nationalized Gulf Oil properties and tin mines owned by US interests, and tried to establish friendly relations with Cuba and the Soviet Union, he was playing with fire. The coup to overthrow Torres, led by US-trained officer and Gulf Oil beneficiary Hugo Banzer, had direct support from Washington. When Banzer's forces had a breakdown in radio communications, US Air Force radio was placed at their disposal. Once in power, Banzer began a reign of terror. Schools were shut down as hotbeds of political subversive activity. Within two years, 2,000 people were arrested and tortured without trial. As in Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil, the native Indians were ordered off their land and deprived of tribal identity. Tens-of-thousands of white South Africans were enticed to immigrate with promises of the land stolen from the Indians, with a goal of creating a white Bolivia. When Catholic clergy tried to aid the Indians, the regime, with CIA help, launched terrorist attacks against them, and this "Banzer Plan" became a model for similar anti-Catholic actions throughout Latin America.

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/US_ThirdWorld/dictators.html

[Warren Stupidity]

1. The people of south america are following their own path.

Viva Evo!

[Peace Patriot]

2. Yup! They have the right idea--UNprivatize everything that should rightfully be

in the PUBLIC venue--our public airwaves, our utilities, our infrastructure, medical care, education, our natural resources, the writing our laws (now done, in this country, by corporate lobbyists), prisons, the military, national security, the postal system, emergency services, park lands and preserves, forests (so vital to clean air and water), port facilities, downtowns (the "public square"), and everything that used to be, and should be, part of "the commons."

It's time. And South America is showing the way.

Oh, and one more thing--pertinent to the U.S.A. (and quite obvious to the rest of the world)--THE COUNTING OF OUR VOTES!

You thought that was public, didn't you? Our most fundamental civil function. Think again.

How they are doing this in South America--creating democracy and restoring "the commons"--can be boiled down to three fundamental lessons:

1. Transparent elections (--ban on electronic voting machines run on 'trade secret, proprietary programming code, owned and controlled by rightwing Bushite corporations--the current Stalinist vote counting system in the U.S.) (--no brainer; demand it of your local registrar; recommend it to Howard Dean.)

2. Grass roots organization.

3. Think big.

[EFerrari]

5. 4) Benefiting from US obsession with the Middle East, i.e., neglect.

[Vidar]

3. Bravo Evo!

[MrPrax]

4. Lozada looks like John Gotti

Viva! Evo! Viva! Revolución

[Vogon_Glory]

6. Re-Nationalization NOT Necessarily for the Best

We can hope that the re-nationalized Bolivian railroads are as well-run as the recently privatized ones. However, considering what happened to a couple of government-owned railroads elsewhere in Latin America, we can hardly predict a guaranteed success.

In Ecuador, the former state-owned railroad network has mostly stopped operating, with the exception of a tourist operation near Quito. Aside from formidable foreign-exchange problems and the fact that the Ecuadorian railroads had lost money for years, the Ecuadorian property has been literally run into the ground. Taking care of track was neglected, the locomotives were badly-maintained, and the engineering needed to keep even a second-rate railroad was sorely ignored.

In Argentina, the meter-gauge railroad linking Bolivia to the Atlantic has gone well down the road to ruin. Again, the same problems: lack of maintenance of track, locomotives, and rolling stock. The result: what traffic the eastern Bolivian railroad sends to the Atlantic goes through Brazil, not Argentina.

In both cases of nationalized Latin American railroads, maintenance and more importantly marketing were sorely neglected. If you are going to run trains, you have to have and keep customers. This is as true in Latin America as it is in El Norte.

The problem with Latin-American government-owned enterprises is that they are seen as primarily as employment agencies first and foremost with the idea of actually OPERATING the railroads and MAINTAINING them as secondary or tertiary concerns--if that. Unlike kill-joy Anglos, many Latin American government-owned railroads (Not all of them, of course) are more interested in keeping guys on the payroll than in either seeing that they actually do any work or even that the trains actually run or that the track and equipment is actually maintained.

I want to be wrong about my bleak view about the future of Bolivia's railroad network. I want Morales' re-nationalized Bolivian railroads to be run efficiently and at least come close to break-even. But the historical record is no great cause for optimism.

:argh:

[saigon68]

7. Graduates from the "School of the America's"

[roody]

8. More about School of the Americas

www.soaw.org

[conspirator]

9. Not just railroads. All the land should be nationalized and rented by an affordable price to

poor farmers.

[Judi Lynn]

11. As you may have noticed in the last snip of the O.P., Pres. Hugo Banzer

drove the Native Bolivians off their land in the 1970's, and offered it to a tide of white South Africans he brought to Bolivia, in the expectation of literally installing his own larger white ruling class.

That land belonged to them as late as the 1970's. Creepy, isn't it?

[BornagainDUer]

10. That's what should have happened in the US 150 years ago.

From 1850--1900 public lands went from 90% of the total to 10%; most of it tied up in railroads.

[Judi Lynn]

12. And it appears pResident Bush is doing his best to hand off the last public land here to his friends

in the energy bidness.

Anyone acquainted with any part of the facts would have to feel sick about this.

[Vogon_Glory]

14. Overland Freight Rate versus Today's Repuds

At least the Republicans of a century or so ago at least knew how to get a better deal for the government than today's Repuds do. In exchange for federal land-grant largesse, the benefiting railroads were required to charge the government one third LESS in freight rates than they did their other customers whenever government freight went by rail. This was called the Overland Freight Rate and stayed in effect until AFTER World War II.

I'd say that American citizen-taxpayers got a fair, if not outstanding, return for raw land that was more often than not either very remote or even inaccessible by 1860's standards.

Could you imagine CONTEMPORARY Repuds doing something like that? I can't. When the US government acquired Conrail after six major Northeastern US railroads went broke and the federal government poured over SIX billion dollars of subsidies into it, Republicans, led by Ronald Reagan and former Texas US Senator Phil Gramm, couldn't wait to sell it off to the private sector for a bit over TWO billion US dollars.

Who got screwed over? US TAXPAYERS, that's who! It was like the Repuds were ideologically opposed to allowing the government (That means us taxpayers) to get a good return for its money.

Today's Republicans CAN'T be trusted to get American taxpayers a good deal.

:mad:

[conspirator]

15. Of course not. These republicans own the private companies where the money is being poured to.

It's called corruption

[Judi Lynn]

13. Bolivia to Investigate Dictator Crimes

Bolivia to Investigate Dictator Crimes

La Paz, Jul 18 (Prensa Latina) The senator of the governing Movement to Socialism (MAS), Antonio Peredo, recalled the need to create a Commission of Truth and Justice in Bolivia, to clear up crimes of the military dictatorships.

Guillermo Vilela, president of the Permanent Assembly of Human Rights, presented this initiative to Parliament.

Peredo explained that in the previous democratic governments, such as that of president Hernan Siles Zuazo in 1982, similar plans were made but without results.

It was difficult to choose a personality to head the investigation without risking his life, he added.

These are other times, he emphasized and, even after so many years, it is necessary to get to the truth.

Peredo said forced disappearances became the norm of dictatorships in Bolivia as part of genocidal crimes.
(snip/...)

~~~~ link ~~~~

[rabidchickens]

16. .

somethings that evo have ton i havent been thrilled about but he has the right idea -- viva evo, viva chavez