By AFP | 2024-07-19

LA PAZ -- Bolivian long-haul driver Gerardo Salluco prepares to spend his second night in a snaking queue of buses, waiting for fuel at a service station under military guard.

Such lines for diesel and gasoline have become a common sight in the South American country, battling a severe economic crisis and political instability that led to an alleged coup attempt on June 26.

Bolivia is unable to purchase and import sufficient fuel for its needs because of a shortage of US dollars, in turn, caused by a dramatic drop in exports of natural gas -- once a mainstay of the economy.

Much of its dwindling foreign reserves are spent on fuel subsidies, which ironically have stoked theft of the ever-scarcer, but cheap, resource for bootleg sale in neighboring countries.

The cumulative result has been crushing shortages of gasoline and diesel at home, cost-of-living increases, growing discontent and mass fuel protests.

Amid the turmoil, President Luis Arce announced at the end of June that he had thwarted a military coup attempt against him.

In an unusual twist, coup leader Juan Jose Zuniga claimed he was following Arce's orders, and that the president had hoped for the coup to trigger a crackdown that would boost his popularity.

"It seems that they want to distract us," said 49-year-old Salluco, who has been ferrying passengers between Bolivia and Chile for the past 12 years.

"I am not very involved in politics, but we realize it. They want to distract, there are no dollars, there is no diesel."

Amid the political upheaval, however, Salluco is keeping his focus on the gas station.

"I have to stay vigilant," the driver told AFP as night started to fall, still in line. "They could start selling at any moment."

'Overdemand'

Bolivia is one of the poorest countries in the region despite sitting on vast mineral resources such as natural gas and lithium -- a key component of batteries used in electric cars.

The country, home to 12 million people and an Indigenous majority, saw a short-lived "economic miracle" under the 2006-2019 presidency of leftist Evo Morales, with Arce as economy minister.

Morales, Bolivia's first Indigenous president, nationalized hydrocarbons and other resources such as lithium.

The country experienced more than 4.0% annual growth while poverty rates tumbled from 60% to 37%, according to official figures.

Morales' failure to implement structural economic reforms meant the growth was unsustainable, say critics.

Last August, the president of state oil company YPFB, Armin Dorgathen, said Bolivia was running out of natural gas -- which it also sold to Argentina and Brazil -- because of a lack of investment in new exploration.

Production had fallen from 59 million cubic meters per day in 2014 to 37 million, he said.

Foreign currency reserves, meanwhile, fell from $15 billion a decade ago to about $1.8 billion last month.

There are now restrictions on withdrawals of greenbacks -- officially 6.96 BOB to the dollar. However, the dollar commands rates up to 30% higher on the black market.

"Before we did not have a limit for sending (dollars) abroad; nowadays we do... in some banks it is no longer possible," student Minerva Ruelas, 27, told AFP.

As frustration at shortages rises, the YPFB has put part of the blame for the lack of fuel on alarmist social media posts sparking "overdemand."

Last month, Arce's government deployed soldiers to service stations to thwart fuel theft.

For truck driver Claudio Laura Flores, 33, the situation means waiting hours, sometimes days, in long fuel queues "far from your family, cold, hungry."

Fellow long-haul driver Severo Bustencio, 40, said that the fuel shortage "is affecting us a lot because we cannot travel."

"And if we cannot travel, we do not earn."