we are at El Alto a satellite city of laaz 13,000 ft above sea level and what you see behind me is a line about a kilometer long of trucks waiting to fill their tanks with diesel for decades Bolivia has imported Diesel and sold it in the country at subsidized prices to help the economy what’s the problem now Bolivia doesn’t have enough dollars to import all the fuel that its econom needs and why is this happening there is now a decline in the production of another commodity natural gas Bolivia has a lot of natural gas in the ground but production is going down after Decades of insufficient investments in its natural gas Fields it is exporting less to Argentina and Brazil its two markets and that means the government doesn’t have enough Revenue to bring in enough Diesel and gasoline to sell its subsidized prices that its economy needs it’s gotten to the point where the current Administration is organizing a national referendum in an attempt to remove these subsidies