Angélica Mérida and Natalia Aparicio talking Economics with Pablo Mendieta

August 28, 2025

Pablo Mendieta is an economist at the Cámara de Industria, Comercio, Servicios y Turismo in Santa Cruz. He studied under and then worked for Felipe Larraín Bascuñán in Chile. Larraín in turn worked with Jeffrey Sachs in Bolivia in the 80s.

It's quite amusing how often he uses surgical metaphors. I think that's a big part of the problem of letting business determine economic policy: you can't reasonably expect a surgeon to do his own open heart surgery effectively.

See Level1 Links With Richard Wolff and Politolik - Natalia Aparicio talking with Amilcar Zenteno: Juana Azurduy, the Republiquetas, and the Colony. Independence of Bolivia.

Following that there is some coverage of reactions to the release of Camacho and Añez from prison.

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Jeffrey Sachs gave this talk earlier this year. It's mainly about education. The problem is how do you decide what you teach those children? One of the big problems with Evo Morales administration was that the public education system seemed to me to have been co-opted as a vehicle for promulgation of the MAS party propaganda. Maybe it was just that they were in the earliest stages of trying to get children properly fed so they could get into school every day.

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Jeffrey Sachs' visit to Bolivia in 1985

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Here's a brief history of Bolivian economics from Sergio Alberto Fernández a legal expert international trade. His description of the 2003 "Guerra del Gas" at 8:30 is quite different from anything you would hear from the other side of the fence. The way he presents the Guerra del Agua makes it sound like it was after the Guerra del Gas, but it was three years earlier, in 2000. His focus in this interview is on the legal aspects of the nationalization process of the MAS administration after 2005.