MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Colombia’s Uribe Warns Nationalizations Lead to “Major Social Defeats”

Uribe is a strong promoter of the private sector and has also opened the Colombian economy which has not ceased to grow under his two administrations

Colombian president Alvaro Uribe questioned Latin American countries that are moving along the path of nationalization of corporations and warned that erasing private sector investments only anticipates “major social defeats”.

“When private sector is annulled, private initiative, inventiveness and creativity is annulled” and peoples turn to become “complacent” and less motivated to risk and creativity, said an official release from government house in Bogotá, Palacio Nariño.

“I’m afraid that those Latin American economies that are shedding private sector investments can only expect major social defeats. The world has repeatedly shown that when private initiative is annulled, creativity becomes a victim, peoples tend to become complacent, management is destroyed, inventiveness and work contraction lost,” insisted President Álvaro Uribe. All of this only finally leads to an overall “collapse of living standards and quality of life.” Uribe said his administration has made it a priority objective to promote “investment with social responsibility.”

When historians analyze in depth how the Soviet Union and China’s Mao Tse Tung economies collapsed or how the Berlin Wall fell, they will come to the same conclusion: a drop in living standards and quality of life, said Uribe. And that “was speared by a political system that systematically annulled private initiative and creativity thus making people complacent, prisoners of bureaucratic aspirations leading finally to popular uprisings which brought down these systems.”

In neighbouring Venezuela, President Hugo Chavez, in an interview with Brazil’s Folha de São Paulo justified nationalizations and that the “nationalization process will not surpass 30% of the economy and is concentrated in strategic sectors.” Chavez said that “telecommunications, power generation and distribution—strategic areas for Venezuela—were in private hands, but now with nationalization the State has the hegemony and that is how it should be.”

Over the weekend also Bolivian President Evo Morales announced the nationalization of the country’s four main power generating companies, three of them partly owned by foreign investors. On Sunday Morales also announced the government was taking over a small antimony melting plant belonging to Sinchi Wayra, an affiliate of Switzerland’s Glencore.