La Paz – Brazil’s foreign minister is seeking here to prevail on Bolivian authorities not to implement a drastic hike in the price it charges Brazil for natural gas in the wake of the nationalization early this month that sparked tension between the neighbors.
The details of the debate between Bolivia and Brazil about the effect of the nationalization are being withheld, both countries’ foreign ministers said Monday.
Bolivian Foreign Minister David Choquehuanca received his Brazilian counterpart, Celso Amorim, on Monday, and afterward the latter met with President Evo Morales within the framework of a one-day visit to La Paz.
At a joint press conference, Choquehuanca and Amorim avoided giving details about the situation of Brazil’s state-run oil company, Petrobras, or about Bolivian plans to raise the price of gas it sells to Brasilia.
Those issues are being analyzed by officials from the energy and hydrocarbons ministries of both countries and by technical committees set up by Petrobras and Bolivia’s state-run energy firm Yacimientos Petroliferos Fiscales Bolivianos, or YPFB, which was refounded to take control the sector.
Instead, Amorim and Choquehuanca said that they had discussed a wide spectrum of matters within the scope of friendly relations and bilateral cooperation.
On May 1, the Bolivian government nationalized the country’s energy resources, including two refineries that Petrobras acquired a decade ago in the cities of Santa Cruz and Cochabamba from YPFB when that firm was partially privatized in the 1990s.
The head of Bolivia’s diplomatic corps said that “the matter has to be dealt with on a government to government basis,” as had been agreed over the past few weeks between Morales and Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva at the meetings the pair held in Puerto Iguazu, Argentina, and in Vienna.
Choquehuanca said that the in-depth talks depend upon the result of the audits the Bolivian government has decided to perform in the petroleum and natural gas fields developed in the past decade so that it can have specific information regarding the investments made by the multinationals affected by the nationalization.
“The matter must be handled but we’re not starting the negotiation process. We’re waiting for the audit. We still don’t know the result. We still can’t move forward at all,” said Choquehuanca.
For his part, Amorim agreed that that was where the matter stood at present, adding that he had heard the Bolivian leader say “with all clarity that the technical groups … must speed up their work.”
He said that he did not come to La Paz to negotiate the price of natural gas that Brazil imports from Bolivia.
“I’m not a technician. I don’t have the cost-benefit tables and I don’t want to have them. That’s not my function,” he remarked.
Amorim, on the other hand, said he was put more at ease by the report from the Bolivian authorities about the situation and the treatment to be accorded to the Brazilians who are working in the Bolivian agricultural sector.
“With regard specifically to the soybean producers, everything I heard is very reassuring,” he said in reference to the complaint from Morales’ government that there are Brazilian citizens, as well as people of other nationalities, who have appropriated public lands illegally in eastern Bolivia.
On that subject, Choquehuanca said that those who had committed that infraction would be removed from those lands whether they are Brazilians, Bolivians or citizens of other countries because “the laws must be respected.”
For Amorim’s visit, the parties established a mixed commission so that the Bolivian government’s activities might be transparent, just like in the areas of the free movement of people and the regularization of residence papers, the timetable for which has been postponed by mutual agreement.
“The two technical groups will observe the mutual commitment to apply national legislation, taking into account the humanitarian needs of the Bolivian and Brazilian communities in the two countries’ territories,” according to a communique issued by the Bolivian Foreign Ministry.
The Brazilian minister did not try to hide the “sensitivity” existing in his country about the presence of Bolivian army soldiers at the two Petrobras refineries ever since Morales issued his nationalization decree.
Despite saying this, however, Amorim responded to a journalist’s question by adding that he was not going to discuss that subject further at present and that he would wait to see how matters evolved.
