UPDATE (10 March '05): The title of this post is changed because Pres. Mesa's resignation has been rejected by the Bolivian parliament, which wants a governance pact. All of Bolivia's parties have

...signed onto the pact except Evo Morales' "Movemiento ál Socialismo" (MAS), which is leading the demands for Mesa to resign (IPS, Reuters). Morales is insisting that the energy contracts be dissolved.

Commentator Calmo wants to know which MNC's are involved: according to the Financial Times, BP, British Gas and Repsol are the main exploration firms. Repsol is Spanish. As always, here's a link to the EIA page for Bolivia.

My understanding is that Evo Morales (BBC profile; leader of the MAS demos against the Mesa government) is mainly interested in ending Bolivian collaboration in the War on Drugs. He has traditionally led the association of coca growers; Bolivia is the traditional center of coca cultivation, although Peru and Colombia have also become big growers also. Coca growers typically become organized, of course—they've formed associations in the past with either neo-liberal extremists like Luis Garcia Meza (Consortium) or far-left movements like Sendero Luminoso and FARC. Not surprisingly, these associations have tended to fall apart—FARC, for example, became a tax collector prone to death-squad tactics, while the anarcho-capitalist drug barons turned out to be exactly what you'd expect a baron to be: feudalist, not anarchist at all.

Morales led demonstrations against Pres Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada in October '03 that culminated in large numbers of dead protestors and Sanchez de Lozada's resignation. Then, as now, the issue was the plan to export Bolivia's NG—possibly via pipeline to Antofagasta, Chile, which captured the port from Bolivia in 1879. However, I suspect Morales has sought to extract some concession from the leadership of the country in exchange for permission to exploit this bonanza; one is, to terminate cooperation with the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), or at least, drastically reduce it; and possibly postpone development until such time as MAS and its allies have much more control over the revenues.

There's been some mention of a "shouting match" between Venezuela's President Hugo Chávez and Pres. Carlos Mesa of Bolivia; basically, the President of Venezuela has a television program called "Hello Mr. President" in which he said "the Bolivian oligarchy, encouraged by Washington, is trying to break up Bolivia into pieces. They are trying to avoid convening the Constituent Assembly" (El Universal). The term "Constituent Assembly" is rather startling; Bolivia doesn't have one, but the Bolivar-ian (as opposed to "Bolivian") revolution of Venezuela that Chávez launched was mainly executed through a revision of the constitution and a constituent assembly like the one described here (Narco News Bulletin). Chávez later clarified his remarks, declaring that he hoped his Bolivian colleague would complete his term.

Readers may have noticed I've defended Chávez consistently and I think he deserves it now also. When Washington sought to isolate Castro, our diplomats accused the Havana government of fomenting revolution in countries as far afield as Uruguay, Bolivia, and Peru. According to Phillip Agee, several of the incidents in which arms caches were "discovered" by police in places like Venezuela or Ecuador were in fact plants by the CIA. This was a successful strategy, but I'd imagine it's probably harder now and the basis for accusing Chávez of fomenting revolution in his neighbors' countries is flimsier. It's not terribly diplomatic for him to refer to countries having "an oligarchy," or to argue that opponents of one of his ideas are, in effect, members of that oligarchy. However, the desperate effort of journalists to construe this as "interfering in the affairs of neighboring countries" suggests that the State Department is not through plotting a coup against Chávez.

Incidentally, I must point out that Bolivia has the second largest reserves of NG in South America—after Venezeula. If Bolivia does have its constituent assembly, it will doubtless consider the matter of NG and receipts from possible exports, which would lead—ineluctably—to the decision to export NG and use the royalties to supply services to the peasants and Indians. This would probably cause the price of NG to go down somewhat, impacting Venezuela's revenues somewhat. Conversely, consumption of NG is likely to increase globally. So draw your own conclusions. I think Chávez was thinking like a web logger; he felt he needed to offer a straightforward discussion of the politics in Bolivia and their implications, and—like most leaders doing the same thing—suggested that Bolivia needs to do what he did for Venezuela.