MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Bolivia returns “privatized” stake in cement factory to local government

President Evo Morales helps allies, punishes opponents

Bolivian President Evo Morales announced Wednesday the expropriation and transfer to a provincial government of the 33% stake in the regional cement factory Fancesa.

The 33% stake was in the hands of Bolivia’s main cement manufacturer Soboce which is privately owned and closely linked to one of the country’s opposition leaders.

The decree was signed by Morales in the southern city of Sucre, where Fancesa is headquartered. From its founding in 1959 until the mid-1980s, Fancesa was owned in equal parts by the city of Sucre, San Francisco Xavier University and the Bolivian government's development agency, CBF.

The CBF handed its 33% stake to the Chuquisaca provincial government, which eventually transferred its interest to Soboce in 1999, in a ‘privatization’ transaction that Morales now described as “illegal”.

Labour and grassroots groups had been calling for the return of the Fancesa stake to the provincial government, President Morales said Wednesday.

However the full story is that the governor of Chuquisaca, Esteban Urquizo is a close political ally of President Morales and the Soboce (Bolivia’s Cement Society) is split between the Mexican Chihuahua Cement Group (GCC) which arrived in the country in 2005 (47%), and businessman Doria Medina who is also an opposition leader and his National Unity party has several members in Congress.