MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Center-right boycotts Bolivian's speech to EU parliament

President Evo Morales of Bolivia told the European Parliament in Strasbourg Monday that nationalization of the country's natural resources was not a matter of expropriation or expulsion.

Speaking without notes and apologizing for his "nervousness," the Bolivian socialist stressed that assuming control of the Andean nation's massive reserves of natural gas is crucial to his government's anti-poverty policies.

"To distribute the wealth, we have the obligation to nationalize it," Morales said, though stressing that "no one is being expelled, nor is anyone being expropriated." "Any company that invests in my country has every right to recover its investment and to profits, but not to control. They will be partners, not owners of our natural resources," he said.

Morales expressed admiration for the EU and noted that the 25-member union provides development aid to poor nations without the kind of conditions often attached by the United States.

The Bolivian spoke to a nearly half-empty chamber, as most of the parliament's center-right bloc stayed away from the session. At a subsequent discussion with the legislature's foreign affairs committee, one of the few conservative lawmakers who was present for Morales' speech, Spaniard Jose Ignacio Salafranca, queried the president about La Paz's announcement earlier Monday that two European financial giants would have 72 hours to surrender their shares in the energy companies whose concessions were nationalized.

Directed at BBVA and Zurich Financial Services, the ultimatum threatens a government takeover of those firms' facilities in Bolivia if they do not transfer the oil and gas shares to the government "free of charge." Since 1997, BBVA and Zurich Financial have managed Bolivia's two pension fund administrators, Prevision and Futuro, respectively. Morales told Salafranca that because the holdings of those funds "are of the state and the Bolivian people," the pension funds will henceforth be run by the government. He said the move did not constitute expropriation.

In another exchange, when Salafranca asked that Bolivia engage in a dialogue on the fossil-fuels issue, Morales complained about the conservatives' boycott of his speech to the parliament. "Some legislators left, that's not dialogue; it is disdain, it is humiliation," the Bolivian said.

Asked at a press conference about the boycott, parliament speaker Josep Borrell, a Spanish Socialist, said that he did not want to "get into a polemic" with any faction, but also stressed Morales' status as a democratically elected president.

Borrell attributed the center-right walkout to parliament's rejected last week of the conservatives' motion to cancel Morales' appearance and condemn Bolivia's nationalization as a violation of human rights.

While the biggest player in Bolivia's natural gas sector is Brazilian state-owned oil giant Petrobras, Spain's Repsol YPF and French oil major Total also have substantial stakes in the Andean nation.

During the discussion on the foreign affairs panel, the leader of the Eurosocialists, former Danish Prime Minister Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, said that Bolivia "has the fundamental right to renegotiate contracts. Spain's Manuel Medina, also a Socialist, noted that recent European governments, notably Francois Mitterrand's 1981-1995 administration in France, had carried out nationalizations.