MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Bolivian natural gas will have to wait .

Bolivia has lost the opportunity, at least for a decade, of selling natural gas to United States and Mexico, following a similar 20 year agreement reached by Indonesian suppliers with North American buyers.

"This is very bad news for Bolivia; we'll have to queue and wait for many years, at least until 2007", said Bolivian Development Minister Javier Nogales.

Apparently this last week US distributor Sempra Energy and British BP affiliate BPMiGas from Indonesia signed the twenty years supply contract with Indonesian authorities.

Bolivia that has the largest natural gas reserves in South America after Venezuela, was expecting to sign a similar agreement involving the Consorcio Pacifico LNG, which is a consortium of Repsol-YPF, British Gas and Panamerican Energy that exploit most of the Bolivian oil and natural gas new fields.

However the government of landlocked Bolivia still has to decide the port from which the natural gas was to be exported, delaying an investment involving 6,5 billion US dollars. The project included two pipelines from the fields to the port, a liquefying plant and port installations, ships to transport liquid gas and a re-gasifying plant in Mexico.

Actually the (non) decision of the Bolivian government, pending for three years, involved a highly politically sensitive issue and triggered an institutional crisis that concluded with the resignation of the elected president and the naming by Congress of a caretaker, Carlos Mesa.

Bolivia is the poorest country in South America with 85% of Indian population and a great majority of public opinion openly resent American companies extracting hydrocarbons besides the fact that the most likely location for the pipeline and the liquefying plant was to be Chile. The other option, but far more expensive, was Peru.

Bolivia and Peru in 1879 waged war against Chile and were defeated, with Bolivian loosing their sea outlet and since condemned to be landlocked.

The recovery of that territory has become a Bolivian obsession, and the pipeline and plant were planned in that specific area.

This together with the permanent US policy of conditioning financial aid to the elimination of coca plantations, rejected by the Indian population since it's the most profitable crop and part of ingrained Indian culture, created an explosive cocktail with social upheaval that only ended when elected president Sanchez de Lozada resigned and left the country.

So, Indonesians quickly moved in and replaced the Bolivian option.