Bolivia entered its special period

By: Hugo Marcelo Balderrama - 25/05/2025

Guest columnist.
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During the 1990s, following the fall of the Soviet bloc, Cuba experienced an acute economic crisis known as the Special Period.

The Special Period was initially defined by severe restrictions on hydrocarbons in the form of gasoline, diesel, and other derivative fuels that Cuba had previously obtained through its economic relations with the Soviet Union. This period transformed Cuban society and its economy, leading the dictatorship to implement urgent reforms in agriculture, resulting in a decrease in automobile use, and necessitating overhauls in industry, healthcare, and rationing. Obviously, these were not reforms that benefited the population, but rather improvements to the dictatorial mechanisms of censorship, domination, and control. Even eating meat had become a counterrevolutionary act.

Hugo Chávez took over Venezuela's Central Bank in 2007. After his death in 2013, his successor, Maduro, inherited inflation rates of 40% annually, following a sharp rise in the previous decade. By 2017, the Chavista regime's monetary mismanagement had left inflation at 438% annually.

Additionally, in 2007, the Simón Bolívar National Project was created with the objective of creating a solid ethical architecture of values ​​that would shape the Nation, the Republic, and the moral-socialist State. To this end, it proposed moving toward a socialist productive model where the State would retain full control over productive activities of strategic value to the country's development, with the goal, among other things, of increasing food sovereignty.

The combination of both measures generated high levels of shortages in the markets, which was the perfect excuse for the dictatorship to implement price controls and attack merchants. Ironically, the more it persecuted commerce, the more prices rose. It was during this time that Chávez's phrase, "Expropriate it," became famous.

Could a similar scenario occur in Bolivia?

At the end of 2022, the first fuel lines were already recorded in the country. In February 2023, Bolivian citizens lost access to their dollars in the financial system. Throughout 2024, fuel problems worsened to the point of forcing citizens to sleep near gas stations. So far in 2025, things have worsened. Now the difficulties are not limited to fuel, but also include food and medicine.

The government's response falls somewhere between mockery and malice, as it approved an increase in import taxes on vehicles that are not fully hybrid, a measure intended to curb the entry of vehicles that continue to rely on fossil fuels. In other words, citizens already facing double-digit inflation will be forced to replace their vehicles.

But the most worrying thing is seeing how the population, instead of attacking the real culprit, the MAS economic model, waits, and even celebrates, when the authorities go out to the markets to control prices, punish merchants, and confiscate food. Note this: between municipal gendarmes confiscating oil in Bolivian markets and Hugo Chávez expropriating homes, there is only a difference of degree.

It turns out that every economic crisis, which is always caused by the current rulers, is the best excuse to tighten the screws. Remember, Castro-Chavism reigns over the ashes of nations.

«The opinions published herein are the sole responsibility of its author».