Less than meets the eye in Bolivia’s oil drama

Nationalization worries are mostly overstated

LA PAZ, Bolivia

This is simply the way democracy sometimes works. Oil and gas nationalization has been the main political issue in Bolivia for the last several years. Morales, an Aymara Indian farmer, won a landslide victory in December on a promise to nationalize the gas industry. Now he’s delivering on that promise he made to the country’s 9 million citizens.

And when viewed from a Bolivian perspective, this is less of a nationalization than a return to constitutionality. Morales has a strong legal argument that the privatization that took place in the mid-1990s was unconstitutional. Under the Bolivian Constitution, the contracts that gave control to private companies were supposed to be approved by Congress, and they were not.

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