The slogans of the Bicentennial: incorporate young people, open up to tourism and export or die

60% of the Bolivian population is under 30 years of age. After the pandemic and keeping this reality in mind, we have recovered physical contact with those who are outside the departmental capitals; In meetings in the territory I am finding two constants that are repeated: the media headlines do not express their main concerns, while they specify that the attention is on the work and production with which they sustain themselves.

It is not a deliberate ignorance, it seems to be simply that people focus their attention on what is their priority. The long list of unresolved and conflicting issues that sometimes anguish those of us who live in cities have another way of analyzing when the rain does not come, the roads do not allow products to be removed, or it is necessary to go to the capital to carry out a process of uncertain and unscrupulous results.

Accepting this reality, what do we do with the issues that are running over us in the cities? Let’s agree that they are not few or simple because they go through, among others, the scarcity of the dollar, the ignominy of justice, the conflict of bills, the lack of decent public services, the public fights for the presidential candidacy between Evo Morales and Luis Arce Catacora, at the same time that street violence is added and the repressive apparatus of the State continues its task against the opposition, with suspicious enthusiasm and haste. Do we know how young people are involved in that mess?

In periods of structural economic crisis, the inhabitants who work and produce should have the attention and priority of the authorities. This categorically basic statement is not, however, the one that drives public action, engrossed in an inexplicable agenda. At this moment, the collective slogan should be “export or die”, while we press for the initiation of a crusade that achieves the declaration of tourism as a public policy of national priority, and accompanies the government’s commitment to find international markets for our products that can compete on price and quality. Non-traditional products such as singani, wine, coffee, chocolate, oregano, honey, blueberries, certified wood crafts, high-quality fabrics, goldsmithing, almonds, manufactures… added to traditional products, in a massive and concerted campaign, should adorn the daily news.

Faced with the Bicentennial, this should be the moment of production. Amalaya the departmental Legislative Assemblies begin the crusade and embarrass the Plurinational Legislative Assembly with initiatives, demands and departmental laws that allow people to work with dignity and young people to strengthen their hopes.

Dreaming costs nothing, and demanding rationality and decorum from public servants is a constitutional right that we must ask for, and that young people must demand rowdy. Whatever is not done at this time, they will be the ones who will suffer the consequences the hardest.