The Unending Cycle of Government Control

I walked down two flights of stairs, took a couple of steps into the kitchen and there – the TV blasts, streaming live protests taking place outside the public textile industry Enatex. This was my first day in Bolivia. I was very confused and not exactly sure what was going on, but nonetheless intrigued. I began paying more and more attention to the news when my family would turn on the TV hoping to learn more about an event that changed the lives of thousands.

This week we went to the Congressional Archives in the center of La Paz. Here, we had the opportunity to take a step back in history as we looked through archives of newspapers. For no particular reason, I decided to pull the newspapers from June during the year 1980. A few pages in the newspaper El Diario, a half page ad caught my eye. The title read, “National Association of Textile Industry.” As so much is going on with the national textile industry today, I was eager to learn more about its role in the past.

In the last thirty-six years, it is clear that not much has changed regarding the struggles of the textile industry. The history of the textile industry is quite complex as it shifted from being state owned, to privatized, and then to a public industry being shut down completely to be replaced by a government project known as Senatex. It is interesting because within the article from the thirteenth of June 1980, the national, state owned textile industry was unable to pay an extraneous bond as a result of what they believed to be a largely oversized workforce- all paralleling the issues of the textile industry today.

A little over thirty-six years later, on the second of July 2016, La Razon released another article addressing the present concerns of what to do with the former industrial workers of the public textile industry, Enatex, who are now jobless. Now under national governmental control, it is as if we jump back to June of 1980. Not exactly the same, but we are still presented with the issue of determining what to do with the textile workers. History proves that the textile industry operating under national government control wasn’t successful, so why are we back in the same situation now? It has become greatly apparent that the government in Bolivia doesn’t necessarily learn from its mistakes: all at the cost of its people.