Susana Seleme writes in El Deber:

The ‘boli-bourgeois’ and the middle class

‘Boli-bourgeois’ are called the hundreds of businessmen, officials and bankers who became the more rich and opulent caste of Venezuela, under the shadow of the ‘socialist-bolivarian’ [from Bolivar] structure of Hugo Chávez (+) and its successor, Nicolás Maduro, via corruption. Bolivia is not a country as rich as Venezuela, which produces millionaires who spend their money shamelessly in Miami or other cities. There is no boli-bourgeois of this stature, but new rich whose fortunes emerge underthe shadow of the ‘pluri-corrupted’ regime, the extortion and blackmail from the highest to the lowest, and become partners, shareholders or ‘rentier’ of productive legal businesses and services.

From the extinct Venezuelan ‘boss’ and the current, Evo Morales emulates them in their autocratic authoritarianism with absolute powers, without accountability and zero transparency. Well, thanks to the bonanza of the prices of raw materials, he purchased a plane in $7 million dollars for the use of the MAS nomenclature in election times, apart from his that cost more than $40MM; for hundreds of little-courts of synthetic grass; he wants a new satellite for the exploration of natural resources, apart from the Tupac Katari’s communications, and announces the incursion in Atomic Energy for medicinal uses, instead of allocating resources to reduce malnutrition and infant mortality.

A majority holds the title of ‘middle, middle rich, middle educated class’, and among what he believes to be and what is “takes a distance half large”, as says sarcastically poetically the Argentine Daniel Cézare, for a concept that has more than one definition. One million ‘new middle class’ that regime applauds, are not the average illustrated class that gave light to the philosophy, literature and the sciences, among other branches of knowledge. It is not either what Margueritte Yourcenar qualified as support of the State, which “only is maintained thanks to them” because they pay taxes. In Bolivia the only ones that pay are workers and professionals, they are the ones who have taxes deducted from their paycheck and are just 30% of the economically active population (EAP).

The new middle class avoids that payment, because most comes from informality, slipping easily to illegality, since the only industrialized in the Bolivia ‘of change’ is the political economy of cocaine as social relations of production. Hence the wide chain of coca farmers who grow coca leaf, the raw material; carriers, smugglers of precursors and other inputs; processors of paste or hydrochloride of cocaine, drug traffickers and money launderers of all kinds. I.e., impunity and corruption of boli-bourgeois and the new ‘middle-class’.

Master in political science

http://www.eldeber.com.bo/vernotacolumnistas.php?id=131207164813