Although it has no sea, Bolivia suffers a tsunami

By: Hugo Marcelo Balderrama - 19/03/2023

Guest columnist.
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Fitch Ratings has downgraded Bolivia's long-term foreign and local currency issuer default ratings (IDRs) to (B-) from (B) and revised the outlook on the rating to Negative from Stable. Some of the variables that Fitch Ratings took into account are: Increased external pressure, Depleted reserves, Cloudy macroeconomic outlook, Large fiscal imbalance, Low bond payments, Political risks. Simply put, international markets are wary of our ability to pay. Similarly, they are concerned about the country's political, economic and social instability.

However, the economic problem, important as it is, is not the biggest, much less the only one. In fact, the economic crisis is a symptom of the failure of the Plurinational State.

At the end of 2016, in Geneva, the International Association of Police Sciences and the Institute for Economics and Peace presented a report entitled: International Police and Security Index. The objective of the work was to measure the efficiency of the police forces and the result in terms of citizen security.

Bolivia occupied, as in many other international indicators, one of the last positions (114 out of 127), although as a consolation for fools we can say that Venezuela is worse than us (119).

Likewise, the investigation indicated that the nations with fully functioning democratic institutions are the ones with the best security conditions for their citizens. In short, for several years international organizations have questioned the story of the "vibrant" Bolivian democracy.

For its part, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), in its report on Human Development 2021-2022, places Bolivia in 118th place out of 191 countries. Again, at the South American level, the country is only above Venezuela. It would give the impression that both dictatorships compete to see who does things worse.

The Corruption Perception Index (CPI) 2022, published in January 2023 by Transparency International, ranks Bolivia 126 out of 180 countries, with a score of 31 out of 100.

In general, Transparency International warned that there is an evident link between violence and corruption, since the countries that have the lowest scores on the peace index also have very low scores on the corruption index. Ergo, the violence suffered by men, women and children in Bolivia has nothing to do with patriarchy, as feminists wildly shout, but with the lack of institutions, the rule of law and security.

Additionally, the insightcrime group, specialists in drug trafficking and organized crime, in a work titled: The nature of Bolivian organized crime, classified Bolivia as the regional epicenter of drug trafficking. Verbatim, he cites the following:

In Bolivia, using Peruvian base, Colombians can produce a kilo of high-quality cocaine for less than US$2,000. That same kilo in São Paulo or Buenos Aires reaches a value of up to US$8,000. Thus, Colombians can earn more than US$5,000 per kilo, but with minimal risk of interdiction and almost no risk of extradition; simply transporting shipments of drugs across the Bolivian border into Brazil or Argentina.

So, while Luis Arce Catacora and his group of cheerleaders spend state money trying to convince us Bolivians about the "solidity", "stability" and "armoring" of the national economy, risk rating agencies, international markets and common sense they remind them that Bolivia is not an economic oasis, but only a narco-dictatorship.

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