Bolivia: a sea of lies and a dystopia

By: Hugo Marcelo Balderrama - 22/01/2023

Guest columnist.
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While the common Bolivian continued in the New Year"s party, the dictatorship put Supreme Decree 4850 into force. In this regard, the economist Gabriel Espinoza, in an interview with the newspaper Página Siete, expressed the following:

In this decree, the Government is considering the sale of a property as a commercial activity; If someone for some reason leaves the country, he decides to reduce his house to an apartment or vice versa and sell some personal property, now that is considered a commercial activity. Therefore, a group of income tax will be applied to the value of the sale, as if this sale were for financial purposes.

The main objective of the measure is to increase the State"s tax collection. In other words, another way to continue taking private resources to sustain the worn-out economic model of the Movement Towards Socialism.

However, fiscal voracity is just one more example of Bolivia"s complicated macroeconomic picture. For example, the international risk rating agency Standard & Poor"s (S&P), at the beginning of December, lowered the country"s note, mainly due to permanent social conflicts.

But the thing continues, because the same month, Marcelo Montenegro, Minister of Economy, affirmed that the "sea of ​​gas" that Evo Morales boasted during his last term was, like many of the things that the cocalero affirmed, a lie. He also added that we were paying the consequences of several years of lack of exploration. Nobility forces us to recognize that, on this point, Montenegro is right.

Given this scenario, the key question is, how long can the fixed exchange rate and the hydrocarbon subsidy be sustained?

But Bolivia"s problems are not confined to the economic field, but rather encompass the entirety of society.

Just two weeks before the start of the 2023 school administration, many parents, educators, and political scientists realized that the Bolivian school educational curriculum aims at indoctrination rather than teaching.

It was the national teachers themselves who denounced that, to cite one case, the high school textbooks show the events of 2019 as a "coup d"état."

In the case of Social Sciences, which had 16 hours, four are taken away so that these are assigned to the teaching of the subject of depatriarchalization, basically, gender ideology, feminism, abortion and other elements of the UN 2030 agenda.

Mathematics was assigned 20 hours, but, starting this year, eight will be cut so that they can be dedicated to teaching a new subject, Financial Education.

It is evident that Bolivia is trying to apply George Orwell"s maxim: "He who controls your past will also control your future." We are not an economic oasis, but just a sea of ​​lies.

poor country!

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