8 May 2006. A World to Win News Service. On 1 May, amid much pageantry, Bolivia’s newly elected president Evo Morales announced that his government was taking control of the country’s oil and natural gas. As nationalizations go, this one was mild and one that foreign-owned companies could live with, even if they didn’t like it: they will have to sell 51 percent of the stock of their local holdings to the Bolivian government, and make royalty payments of 60-82 percent on the value of the gas produced. Brazilian, Spanish, French and British companies were the hardest hit.

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• 1 May in Bolivia: The Evo Morales government and the future of Bolivia

8 May 2006. A World to Win News Service. On 1 May, amid much pageantry, Bolivia’s newly elected president Evo Morales announced that his government was taking control of the country’s oil and natural gas. As nationalizations go, this one was mild and one that foreign-owned companies could live with, even if they didn’t like it: they will have to sell 51 percent of the stock of their local holdings to the Bolivian government, and make royalty payments of 60-82 percent on the value of the gas produced. Brazilian, Spanish, French and British companies were the hardest hit.

The mass upsurge in Bolivia has driven out two previous presidents over the past three years. When he took office in January, Morales promised great changes for this largely Indian and peasant country. Although Bolivia’s nine million people are among the poorest in South America, it is one of the richest in mineral resources, especially natural gas. As much or more than any other South American country, Bolivia has seen repeated political upheavals and toppled governments. Its resources have been nationalized and then privatised several times since 1937, when Bolivia took over the local holdings of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company from which Exxon is descended. Each time, the people’s aspirations to run their own politically and economically independent country and construct a liberating new society have been disappointed. Without a thorough agrarian revolution and complete reorganization of the economy so that it is no longer dependent on the export of its natural resources, Bolivia will always remain a dominated country. While making demagogic nationalistic promises, Morales has not even put forward these two basic steps.

This is a much abridged and edited version of the extensive article “The Evo Morales presidency is part of the restructuring of the old state and the revival of bureaucrat capitalism