SANTA CRUZ, Bolivia, July 19 (UPI) -- A vast majority of Bolivians have voted in a referendum for measures that could lead to nationalizing the country's gas and energy resources.
President Carlos Mesa has interpreted the results from Sunday's vote as a victory for his beleaguered government. "The state has recovered its property," he said at press conference on Sunday night as polls closed, "Bolivia has won."
Despite a higher-than-expected rate of absenteeism and threats of violence, more than half of the electorate voted "yes" to five questions on the ballot that had drawn criticism from throughout the political spectrum for their vague, technical language.
Mesa admitted that he now faces a tough task in getting a new national energy policy approved in Congress where he must reconcile seemingly unbreachable differences between powerful business interests and the main leftist Movement to Socialism, which gave crucial backing to the referendum.
MAS leaders are interpreting the results as a mandate to nationalize.
"We have won the recuperation of our hydrocarbons," said the party chief, Evo Morales. "We will go towards total nationalization," he declared.
An almost unanimous 92 percent of Bolivian voters approved repealing a privatization law passed by the previous government of Gonzalo Sanzhez de Lozada. Some 87 percent voted to transfer privately owned shares in the national energy company, YPBF, to the government and recover gas production "at the well head," a key clause that private sector leaders fear will bolster nationalization demands.
Carlos Alberto Lopez of the U.S. Bolivian Chamber of Commerce told UPI that he expects the debate over the future of the country's gas reserves, worth an estimated $70 billion, to become "more polarized" in the next few months.
MAS strongly urged a "yes" vote on the first three questions concerning state control over hydrocarbons. But the party which is the single largest and best organized political force in Bolivia instructed followers to vote against exporting gas. "We cannot export gas which isn't ours," Morales said. He insists that the resource has to be nationalized before an export policy can be decided.
Fully a third of voters said "no" to the last two questions of the referendum concerning the sale of gas abroad and its use as leverage in Bolivia's dispute with Chile over access to the sea. These clauses were only approved by a little over half the vote.
Some leftist groups and union organizations that urged a boycott of the referendum only managed to prevent voting in some isolated rural communities. Just a few violent incidents were reported in the area of El Alto, an indigenous Aymara community outside La Paz, where rock throwers tried to block access to polling stations and pelted vehicles carrying observers of the Organization of American States.
A local union activist who called for a 72-hour strike, Roberto de la Cruz, was booed when he joined voters. "I never urged people not to vote," he said. "I just told them to write nationalize on the ballot." De la Cruz and others had objected to the wording of the questions.
Absenteeism appeared to be a problem during the early hours of Sunday's voting in which low turnout was reported in many locations throughout the country, including La Paz. But polls filled in the afternoon with estimates indicating 60 percent participation. Mesa called the voter turnout a success, pointing out that it stands well above the average for Latin American referendums.
Voter apathy was apparent, however, in the eastern city of Santa Cruz, Bolivia's second-largest urban center which serves as the national headquarters for many oil firms. Less than half the electorate voted according to local officials consulted by UPI. Juries failed to turn up at many polling stations.
"I've only voted in order to be able to make bank transactions," one woman told UPI as she exited a polling station. The government had made voting obligatory, requiring Bolivians to present their cancelled ballot in order to conduct any official business during the next three months.
The president of the powerful Santa Cruz Chamber of Commerce, Zvonko Matkovic, at one point said the referendum was a "failure." Mesa flew to the city in the afternoon to personally intervene with election authorities to keep the polls open beyond the 4 p.m. deadline. He was heckled at one polling station.
Santa Cruz is the center of a growing autonomous movement in eastern Bolivia, where leaders have threatened to break away from the rest of the country if gas reserves are nationalized. But paradoxically, the question on exports appears to have energized voters in the eastern province of Tarija which contains about three-quarters of Bolivia's gas fields.
Tarija's civic leaders mobilized a "yes" vote in hopes that the referendum's success would unblock gas exports despite opposition from the left.
Mesa used his Sunday evening press conference to urge Bolivians to forge a consensus. He called on the business community and unions to "enter into a constructive dialogue."
"Listen not to the president but the Bolivian people," he said.
The president also announced plans to industrialize gas production, saying "the state will sell gas not only as a natural resource but as an industrialized product."
Two weeks ago, Mesa met with the presidents of Venezuela, Brazil and Argentina to discuss plans to form a South American "energy pole." The project is a brainchild of Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez who envisions merging state-directed oil and gas enterprises into a regional conglomerate called PETROSUR.
Chavez is facing a referendum on his presidency next month.
"He is going to win," Evo Morales assured UPI when asked what the chances were of Chavez surviving strong opposition to his rule in Venezuela.
