An striking Editorial from El Diario:
After the succession of setbacks that it suffered during this year, the country faces a panorama that is accentuated before the presence of other difficult and harsh problems to be solved. Among the latter is the one referred to the production of hydrocarbons that has entered in a moment of irreversible inflection.
In the first place, it was the opposition social movements of the beginning of the year that culminated in the repeal of the Criminal System Law, the resurgence of corruption in state media, the Quiborax cases, the Unión Bank, etc., the crisis in the public health, to name the most scandalous. Added to these issues was the popular resistance to the repostulation to the presidency of Evo Morales, a decision that brought with it the social unrest originated in the ignorance of the result of the referendum of February 21, 2016 and the ruling of the Constitutional Court endorsing the annulment of the popular sovereignty.
To make matters worse, the current government, responsible for maritime management before the court in The Hague, suffered an unparalleled failure in the history of that issue, to know the ruling of that international organization in the sense that the government of Chile was not obliged to dialogue with Bolivia on the point demanded.
That chain of stumbling blocks was not closed with those issues, but others of international level were added, such as, on the one hand, the gradual extinction of the Forum of San Pablo, the collapse of populism in Argentina, Brazil and Ecuador and the collapse of Venezuela and Nicaragua, which would apparently have the days numbered and, on the other, the triumph of a progressive candidate in Brazil, the prosecution of Cristina Kirchner in Argentina, etc.
To this set of difficulties are added others no less alarming, such as the one of the net international reserves (RIN) that fell to $8,907 million dollars, almost half in relation to the year 2014 and what is even more serious, the fall of gas production and export, on which the national economy depends. In this regard, it is announced the failure of the drilling of the Buyui well, reaching 7,400 meters deep, and another worrying detail that indicates that the gas reserves are not 10.7 TCF but only 3.65 and will only last for five years, according to Eng. Guillermo Torres Orías, negative data that are not offset by the rise in the price of oil, which in Texas rose to 76 dollars per barrel and in Europe to 88, but with a tendency to go down due to greater supply from Saudi Arabia.
Bolivian Thoughts 