Cruceño Model and MAS Model | Modelo cruceño y modelo del MAS

By Fernando Prado, El Deber:

Much has been said about the Cruceño model, and we all agree that today this is a primarily productive model, linked to a liberal business logic, having lost some of its cultural and management characteristics during the neoliberal period, but that is another topic. What we want to scrutinize now is why the MAS model is falling apart, considering that it has governed the entire country for almost 20 years.

The “social community productive economic model with import substitution” of the MAS is actually a centralized and totalitarian statist model in the Stalinist style, in which the Central State, managed by a “nomenclature,” gradually assumes total control of the economy, society, and territory.

The most serious issue is that this centralized state, managed by a corrupt, inept, and racist clique (characteristics widely demonstrated in its history), aims to be the main investor in productive activity, as declared by its spokespeople, having already created more than a hundred companies and promised another hundred for the current year.

It could be just another model to try out, but the problem is that for a series of well-known reasons, we are faced with evidence that they neither have nor will have the capacity or ethics to function as state entrepreneurs.

They have discovered that creating state-owned companies is the best way to get rich quickly, as the industrialization system in their hands allows them to divert state resources first to their personal wealth, then to their criminal group, and lastly, to the party, in that order. They steal during project allocation, they steal in acquisitions, they steal through job distribution to friends, relatives, and party members, and they steal from the funds assigned or better yet, given annually by the State.

The figures are clear: the debts of public companies with the State Bank have already exceeded $6 billion. To give just one detail, Finpro, which lends resources from international reserves, has granted state-owned companies $1.2 billion: $600 million in donations, and another $600 million as a 30-year loan, interest-free, with a five-year grace period. That’s why these companies claim to be fine, as they neither pay nor account for the capital or the investment interest, and ultimately, they can’t even pay their staff, like the lithium company, which requires more than $30 million a year to cover its operating costs while generating only a symbolic few dollars a year.

But we retirees are also financing these bankrupt companies: the State has taken more than $3 billion from the Gestora, resources that have been allocated to deficit-ridden state companies, resources that obviously will never return. It will only take a decree to free them through a “forgiveness.”

In summary, the crux of the model is that of an entrepreneurial and productive State, and as this ruling class does not have the business capabilities required, simply due to this ideological scruple, it is leading the country to imminent bankruptcy.

And it’s not that governments are inherently unviable for management and investment. It is this government, in particular, that does not have the minimum conditions to embark on an “industrialization” process which, we reiterate, is leading us to bankruptcy and is the main factor explaining the disappearance of reserves, the emptying of the Central Bank, the monstrous external and internal debt, and the cherry on top: the disappearance of dollars.

Leave a comment