Bolivia, Facing a Fatal Hope | Bolivia, ante una esperanza fatal

Oscar Antezana Malpartida, El Dia:

A common practice of socialist systems is to imprison political opponents or individuals inconvenient to the rulers, often without demonstrating their guilt. Other opponents are eliminated.

Socialist rulers build their power on two foundations: fear and greed. In these countries, everyone can be bribed or threatened. In this sense, corruption is not just a secondary activity, but the moral decay at the heart of the socialist state that sustains these governments. The clearest and most recent example of bribery occurred in recent days when 12 turncoats from the Community Citizen party allowed the approval of loans. The confrontation between the two factions of the MAS is about power, not their noble vocation to serve the people. Venezuela and Nicaragua are the most recent and relevant examples.

Some citizens or opponents understand the fear and confront it; others have no choice and are immediately captured. Others face trials and resist, thus challenging an absolute power that cannot find solid evidence or arguments to dictate a sentence. Such is the injustice, incompetence, and cynicism. But for socialists, the end justifies the means, regardless of trampling laws; “just do it.”

As identified by Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition politician who was President Putin’s latest fatal victim, he said that it is not honest people who scare these authorities, but those who are not afraid, or, to be more precise, those who can be afraid but overcome their fear. Hence the repression, intimidation, and blackmail. Lawyers and others associated with these individuals are also in danger.

All this occurs in Russia, Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, and, to a high degree, in Bolivia. It is the socialist recipe to stay in power. Fear and greed financed by corruption. Socialism is not a political system; it is a national-level mafia created by intellectuals of low morals, like Karl Marx, who never worked, squandered his wife’s fortune on drinking, women, and debts, and died in poverty. Socialists manage countries with fear and power, like mafias anywhere in the world, and they are sustained by corruption for the benefit of the mafia bosses who are the rulers. They do not govern countries; there is a permanent “misgovernment”; rather, they manage their wealth and power by corroding the morals of people and the entire state.

There is hope, although it is not green at present. Waiting for the economic catastrophe in Bolivia, I do not say disaster because it already is. We will experience a situation that will dwarf the UDP era. During that time, the fiscal deficit rose to 24% of GDP. Now we have a fiscal deficit ranging from 4-7% for the past ten years and a public debt of over 80% of GDP (27% in 2012). The prices of key goods and services, such as the exchange rate and gasoline, were distorted as they are today. However, at that time, tin was the main source of foreign exchange to import and grow the economy again. Now there is no gas. Mainly, the rulers of that time, although inept, did not have the audacity to gamble “the grandmother’s jewels,” the gold. They had some moral shame that they stepped aside so that another person could govern. Not now; there is not a trace of morality left; they sell even the last thing that remains to the country and indebt it to the maximum in order to enrich themselves and make the population poorer, the socialist formula. And, to conceal and buy time, their desperation and greed reach such a point of lying to themselves and deceiving themselves.

The “hope” is that the economic situation will sink and drag down the government and the ruling party. That the population experiences firsthand what socialism is capable of, what a mafia installed as a government is capable of. That a national trauma remains, as hyperinflation has done to this day, so as not to re-elect uneducated, unscrupulous people, who from the first minute have been judge and jury, have confronted the citizenry with “we have to govern for the next 500 years,” and have handed over the country’s sovereignty to Cuba and Venezuela, and increasingly to China. Inept people who have not defended the country in international diplomacy against Chile over access to the sea and the use of the Silala River, nor against drug trafficking, which is rather devouring us. We have a small and poor legal economy and are at the mercy of other countries and external threats. So much ineptitude and wickedness, sacrificing eleven million Bolivians for the greed of a few scoundrels.

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