Bolivia info.....
Oct 01, 2004 (South Florida Sun-Sentinel - Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News via COMTEX) -- One year after Bolivia exploded in street protests that left 60 dead and forced the president to resign, the now stabilized Andean nation stands poised to sign an accord to double exports of the natural resource that prompted its upheaval: natural gas.
Bolivia has the second largest reserves of natural gas in Latin America after Venezuela, and the economic future of the nation of 8.5 million people depends in large measure on how the land-locked country uses those new found resources, analysts say.
President Carlos Mesa, the former TV journalist and political independent who assumed Bolivia's top job last October, said Thursday in Miami that his country's future now looks promising, thanks to a July 18 referendum in which voters approved new guidelines for managing the gas reserves and gave the go-ahead to boost exports.
Based on those results, Bolivia plans to sign an agreement with Argentina within days that would roughly double the volume of its natural gas exports. The country in the heart of South America now earns about $300 million a year in sales of gas to neighboring Brazil, said presidential chief of staff Jose Galindo.
Bolivia's success story, from chaos to stability and faster economic growth, highlighted a day of top-level talks on Latin America and the Caribbean at the seventh annual Americas Conference held at the Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables.