The Vice Minister is a busy man. He runs from place to place, with his cell-phone in one hand and a bag of coca in another, busily chewing the leaves as he answers calls and delegates tasks to his team of bureaucrats. As he fills his mouth with the pungent green leaves, his speech becomes less coherent.

The Vice Minister has little respect for his daily schedule. Whatever was on his calendar for a particular day is malleable to his whims and the rush of people and phone calls that he constantly allows himself to be bombarded with. He hands out favors to friends and party-members in the form of government positions.

Despite his fancy title, his cadre of assistants and technical advisors, in reality he has a meager budget and hence little real power. He is averse to making decisions, especially ones that involve investment. He is prone to corruption, and like other vice-ministers in previous governments he has been known, from time to time, to spend just a little bit more on certain budget items then would actually be possible if people had been paying closer attention.

Like most other vice-ministers, mayors, and other government officials, he is obsessed with the concept of receiving funding from foreign sources for development projects. Morales’ rhetoric of autonomy through nationalization seems completely lost on him. He seems incapable of grasping the risks and opportunities presented by the nationalization of gas, nor is he conscious of the dangers that come with the constant temptation of channeling foreign aid dollars, either through loans or grants, into the bottomless pit of “poverty alleviation”.

The Vice Minister is just another petty bureaucrat cloaked within the hype and fervor of a populist, indigenous movement. Like the mayor, he does not represent the new hope of a beleaguered but optimistic nation; instead he is more representative of the same uninspired and egocentric mentality that for decades has rendered Bolivian governments corrupt and ineffective.