MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Morales highlights Bolivian independence from the IMF and World Bank

Bolivia is now in the process of becoming a member of Mercosur and Morales attended the group’s summit in Argentina last week.

President Evo Morales has highlighted the total Bolivian independence from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB), which have carried out “devastating economic policies for many years” in this South American nation.

 “A day like today in 1944 ended Bretton Woods Economic Conference (USA), in which the IMF and WB were established,” Morales wrote on his official twitter account, adding that “These organizations dictated the economic fate of Bolivia and the world. Today we can say that we have total independence of them.”

In recent speeches when opening social works in this Andean-Amazonian nation, Evo Morales revealed that the economic dependence was so great that the IMF had an office in government headquarters and even participated in their meetings.

Bolivia is now in the process of becoming a member of Mercosur and Morales attended the group’s summit in Argentina last week.

Following his speech at Mercosur Summit held in Mendoza, Morales live-twittered that “in view of the global financial crisis of capitalism, we are in a moment of integration for the liberation of the people.”

“First the Great Homeland,” Morales said and warned that “Our Mercosur cannot repeat the bitter history of the Organization of American States (OAS): for political or ideological reasons expel or exclude some nations.”

“Interventions in Libya, Iraq and other countries are conducted to appropriate natural resources. The main purpose in Venezuela is oil,” Morales said in the forum where several leaders have supported some interventionist stances.

He also stressed that “neither as Mercosur member nations nor as America’s organizations, we can be accomplices of a U.S. intervention in Venezuela.”

Since 2006, a year after Morales came to power, social spending on health, education, and poverty programs has increased by over 45%.

Bolivia’s popular uprising known as the The Cochabamba Water War in 2000 against United States-based Bechtel Corporation over water privatization and the associated World Bank policies shed light on some of the debt issues facing the region.

At the time, the World Bank had stated, “Poor governments are often too plagued by local corruption and too ill equipped” and “no subsidies should be given to ameliorate the increase in water tariffs in Cochabamba.”

Some of Bolivia’s largest resistance struggles in the last 60 years have targeted the economic policies carried out by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

Most of the protests focused on opposing privatization policies and austerity measures, including cuts to public services, privatization decrees, wage reductions, as well the weakening of labor rights.