President Rodrigo Paz has dismissed his economy minister, Jose Gabriel Espinoza, after Congress censured him for failing to appear and answer questions about the economy. Oscar Mario Justiniano Pinto takes over on an interim basis, with no date given for a permanent appointment.
Paz had resisted the removal before accepting it. Roland Pacheco, an opposition legislator, said the president was "showing a measure of humility and complying with the Constitution".
The problem the minister could not answer for
Bolivia has run out of dollars. That single fact sits underneath the fuel queues, the protests and the censure vote.
The mechanism is worth setting out, because a country that subsidises fuel running short of foreign currency sounds paradoxical and is not. For two decades Bolivia paid for cheap fuel with natural gas exports, which brought in the dollars the state then spent importing refined fuel and selling it below cost. Gas production has declined through a mix of mismanagement, depleted fields and too little exploration. The export income fell. The subsidy bill did not.
A government in that position has three options and dislikes all of them: spend down reserves until they are gone, borrow, or raise fuel prices and face the street. Bolivia has now tried the first and is being forced toward the third.
Nine months of unrest
The sequence has been steady. Fuel subsidy cuts in December 2025 triggered protests. A land reform policy in April 2026 brought further demonstrations. Roadblocks and marches ran through May and June, some calling for Paz to resign. In June the president declared a state of emergency and Congress approved the use of the military to clear blockades.
Roadblocks are the characteristic instrument of Bolivian protest and they are effective precisely because the country's geography makes it easy to sever cities from supply. Deploying soldiers to clear them is a serious escalation for any government, and particularly for one that has been in office since November.
A new government inheriting an old problem
Paz was elected in October and inaugurated in November 2025, ending nearly two decades of government by the MAS party. He campaigned on what he called capitalism for all, a departure from the state-led model that preceded him.
The difficulty is one every incoming government facing a subsidy crisis meets. The previous administration's spending created the shortfall; the new administration's corrections create the pain, and voters experience the corrections rather than the cause. More than 37 percent of Bolivians were below the national poverty line as of 2024, which is the constituency that a fuel price rise reaches first.
Espinoza's dismissal resolves a political confrontation with Congress. It does not produce dollars, restart gas fields or make imported diesel cheaper, and his successor inherits the same arithmetic on Monday.
