Program for Bolivia

Bolivia is currently experiencing the deepest crisis in its recent democratic history. On June 20, 2026, President Rodrigo Paz declared a state of emergency throughout the country after more than seven weeks of road blockades, an economic shutdown, shortages of food, fuel, and medicine, and a social outcry demanding, according to the mobilized sectors, a structural solution to the economic and political crisis. This document is not written about a hypothetical country or based on archival data: it is written about the real Bolivia of today, with inflation that closed 2025 above 20%, a public debt close to 95% of the Gross Domestic Product, international reserves that have fallen from more than $3 billion in 2012 to levels nearing depletion, and poverty that, according to recent measurements, now affects nearly half the population.

DirectDemocracyS (DDS) is not coming to Bolivia to take sides in the dispute between the government of Rodrigo Paz and the sectors demanding his resignation, nor between the legacy of the Movement for Socialism (MAS) and the new center-right cycle. DDS is coming to offer something that neither side in this dispute can: a system in which the Bolivian people, in their entirety and in all their diversity—Indigenous and mestizo, eastern and Andean, urban and rural, working class and business, from any party or none—decide directly, in an informed, protected, and continuous manner, on their own destiny, without any government, corporation, party, or foreign power being able to appropriate that decision or the country's wealth.

The wealth of each country, and the power to decide its own destiny, must always and solely remain in the hands of the people. This is a rule that DDS applies, without exception, in every country in the world.

This document is structured in five parts. Part One presents a critical, rigorous, and up-to-date diagnosis of the political, economic, social, institutional, and natural resource sovereignty situation in Bolivia, based on verified data and the most recent events, including the ongoing crisis of May and June 2026. Part Two explains the DDS system: its principles, its micro-group architecture, its artificial intelligence technologies (ddsAI and allddsAI), and its mechanisms for protection against manipulation. Part Three develops, sector by sector, the concrete solutions program for Bolivia, with practical examples and anticipated consequences. Part Four proposes a realistic, phased implementation roadmap. Part Five summarizes the expected results and benefits for the Bolivian people.

Bolivia is an electoral democracy with formal institutions, not a one-party dictatorship. Therefore, the program presented here does not propose replacing elections or constitutional institutions by force, but rather complementing and strengthening them from the ground up, with a layer of direct, continuous, and verifiable democracy that returns to the Bolivian people—in every neighborhood, every ayllu, every union, every peasant and indigenous community, every city, and every department—the real power to decide, to be informed, and to monitor, peacefully, transparently, and without violence.

PART I — Critical diagnosis of the current situation in Bolivia

This diagnosis is based on official data and facts verified up to the date of preparation of this document (June 2026). DDS does not embellish or simplify reality to support a political narrative: it describes it honestly, because only from the truth can effective solutions be built.

1.1. The political and governance crisis: a country on the verge of collapse

Rodrigo Paz Pereira assumed the presidency in late 2025 as the first president not affiliated with the Movement for Socialism (MAS) in twenty years, following an electoral shift that reflected the weariness of a significant portion of the Bolivian population with the cycle initiated by Evo Morales. His government inherited an economy in critical condition: international reserves nearing depletion, chronic shortages of fuel and dollars, and a structural fiscal deficit that had persisted for over a decade.

At the end of 2025, the government eliminated approximately 85% of the fuel subsidy—resulting in price increases of 83% for gasoline and 163% for diesel—a decision presented as urgent to curb fiscal deterioration. The measure was mitigated with bonuses and salary incentives, but social discontent quickly surfaced. This was compounded by the sale of poor-quality fuel, which the government attributed to an international smuggling network, affecting hundreds of thousands of vehicles and forcing the government to issue financial compensation.

Since the beginning of May 2026, the Bolivian Workers' Central (COB), peasant unions, indigenous federations such as the Túpac Katari Federation, and sectors aligned with former president Evo Morales—who was taking refuge in the Chapare region after being accused of aggravated human trafficking, which he denies—began an indefinite general strike and road blockades throughout the country. The initial demands were related to wages and specific sectors: an additional 20% increase on top of what had already been granted, improvements in fuel supplies, and the repeal of Law 1720 on agrarian reform, which was rejected by Amazonian indigenous communities who marched for 28 days to La Paz to demand its annulment.

As the weeks passed, the conflict escalated, and for some of the mobilized groups, the demand became the resignation of President Paz. Nearly one hundred simultaneous roadblocks were set up, along with episodes of violence, several deaths related to the disruption of emergency services, the declaration of a humanitarian emergency in regions affected by shortages, and an airlift using Argentine aircraft to supply the population. Eight Latin American countries—Argentina, Chile, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guatemala, Panama, Paraguay, and Peru—signed a joint declaration expressing concern about the humanitarian situation in Bolivia.

On June 19, 2026, the government reached a peace agreement with the COB (Bolivian Workers' Center), but peasant unions in La Paz and sectors aligned with Evo Morales maintained the blockades. The following day, June 20, President Paz declared a state of emergency for up to 90 days, characterizing the events as an "attempted coup d'état" linked to "narco-terrorism," and ordered the deployment of police and military to clear the roads. The decree restricts the rights of movement, assembly, and freedom of movement, and must be ratified by Congress.

Underlying political analysis

Beyond the immediate triggers—wages, fuel, agrarian reform—analysts agree that the conflict expresses a structural and historically unresolved tension between the popular sectors of indigenous and peasant origin, on the one hand, and the urban middle classes and business elites, on the other, in the context of the end of the MAS's twenty-year cycle. This polarization will not be resolved by the victory of one side over the other, but rather by a system that gives voice, information, and real decision-making power to all sectors equally.

This sequence of events demonstrates a pattern that DDS observes in numerous countries: when people lack a direct, continuous, and reliable channel to express their demands and participate in decisions that affect them, discontent builds until it overflows into the streets, with a very high economic, social, and, at times, human cost. Bolivian representative democracy, with elections every five years, has not been able to peacefully channel the urgent needs of sectors that feel their voice only counts on election day.

1.2. The economic and financial crisis: the exhaustion of a model

The Bolivian economy is going through what many economists describe as the worst crisis in four decades, the result of more than twenty years of a model based on natural gas extraction, without sufficient productive diversification or accumulation of reserves for the years of decline.

Critical macroeconomic indicators

Indicator	Fact	Source / period
Cumulative inflation 2025	20.40%	National Institute of Statistics (INE), December 2025
Projected inflation 2026	Between 15% (official) and 20.7% (IMF)	Government of Bolivia / IMF
Public debt	Close to 95% of GDP	IMF, Article IV Consultation
Fiscal deficit 2025	Approx. 13–15.8% of GDP	Ministry of Economy / Millennium Foundation
Projected fiscal deficit 2026	Close to 7–9.2% of GDP after adjustment	Government of Bolivia
Real GDP growth 2025	Approx. 0.5% – 1.1%	ECLAC / IMF
Projected GDP growth 2026	Between -3.3% (IMF) and 0.9% (previous projections)	IMF / World Bank
Net international reserves (NIR)	At historic lows, with a further drop of 4.59% in the first quarter of 2026	Central Bank of Bolivia (BCB)
sovereign credit rating	CCC – (one step above default)	International rating agencies

The structural origin of this crisis is the decline in natural gas production, the country's historical main source of foreign exchange. Bolivia has gone from being a net exporter of hydrocarbons to having to import fuels and, according to projections cited by economic analysis centers, even liquefied petroleum gas from 2026 and eventually natural gas by 2028, generating an energy deficit in the trade balance that some estimates place at around $2.85 billion by 2026.

To maintain the fixed exchange rate during years of declining gas exports, the Central Bank sold foreign currency and pawned part of its gold reserves—up to 6 of the 23 tons it still held—depleting the country's financial buffers. The result is a parallel currency market, severe restrictions on importing fuels and essential supplies, and a sustained loss of confidence in the national currency.

The government of Rodrigo Paz reports real progress in its first months in office: normalization of fuel supplies, fiscal savings of $240 million in 22 days through the elimination of inefficient subsidies, strengthening of international reserves to approximately $3.813 billion according to official figures, and a quarterly fiscal surplus of more than 2.1 billion bolivianos in the first quarter of 2026. These advances are real, but they coexist with a severe fiscal adjustment—reduction of subsidies, containment of public spending—whose social cost has been one of the main triggers of the protests of May and June 2026. President Paz himself has publicly acknowledged that 2026 will be a "tough" year, projecting a recovery only starting in 2027.

The paradox of adjustment

Bolivia is caught between two equally real risks: if it does not adjust its fiscal and exchange rate accounts, it heads toward a spiral of hyperinflation and debt default; if it adjusts at the current speed and with the current methodology, without genuine public participation in the design and pace of the measures, the social cost will spill over into protests that paralyze the economy and further exacerbate the crisis. DDS argues that this paradox can only be resolved when the people themselves—informed with accurate and reliable data—decide the pace, priorities, and shared sacrifices of the adjustment, rather than having these imposed upon them or explained after the fact.

1.3. The social crisis: poverty, shortages and mistrust

The economic downturn translates directly into social suffering. Recent surveys indicate that 58.5% of Bolivian households fear food shortages, and that real poverty—beyond official figures—has risen to nearly 47% of the population. The cost of building a home has increased by more than 50% in less than three years. The long lines for fuel, which the government managed to reduce in early 2016, have been replaced by lines for basic food items in cities affected by the blockades, with prices in local markets doubling or tripling during the protests of May and June.

The 2026 protests have also resulted in concrete and quantifiable production losses: tens of thousands of liters of milk without a market, tens of thousands of poultry without feed, and economic losses amounting to billions of dollars for a country whose economy was already on the brink. These losses do not affect "the economy" in an abstract way: they directly impact farming families, small and medium-sized producers, transporters, and informal workers who depend on daily trade.

This economic and supply crisis is compounded by a dangerous social fracture: according to press reports, the blockades generated hostile reactions from urban and affluent sectors toward the mobilized Indigenous populations, deepening an ethnic and class division that Bolivia has carried since colonial times and which the MAS cycle, despite its progress in raising Indigenous visibility, failed to fully resolve. Building a truly united country requires mechanisms that allow all sectors—Indigenous and non-Indigenous, urban and rural—to feel heard without having to block a highway to achieve this.

1.4. Justice, corruption and institutional transparency

Bolivia is also experiencing a crisis of confidence in its justice and oversight institutions. According to Transparency International, the country received its worst Corruption Perceptions Index score in the last twelve years in its most recent measurement, with just 28 out of 100 points, well below the regional average of 42, placing it 25th out of 32 countries in the Americas evaluated. The World Justice Project's Rule of Law Index places Bolivia in a critical position regarding corruption and criminal justice, describing a judicial system perceived as manipulated and unequal.

The open budget index—which measures how accessible information on public spending is—ranks Bolivia among the thirty worst countries in the world in this regard, ahead of only Venezuela in the region. This budget opacity is not a technical detail: it is one of the central causes of social distrust of the state and the difficulty in building credible agreements between the government and the population during times of crisis.

Added to this is the expansion of illicit economies: recent studies estimate that cocaine production in Bolivia exceeded 300 tons annually, placing the country as the world's third-largest producer, with documented links between drug trafficking organizations and, in some cases, sectors of the security forces. The United States decertified Bolivia in September 2025 for failing to meet its anti-drug standards. The government itself has described the May-June 2026 protests as infiltrated by "narco-terrorist" interests, an accusation vehemently rejected by mobilized sectors and neighboring governments such as Colombia's, demonstrating the extent to which the lack of verified and independent information fuels polarization and mutual distrust.

1.5. Sovereignty over natural resources: wealth that does not reach the people

Bolivia is one of the countries with the world's largest lithium reserves, concentrated in the Salar de Uyuni and the Salar de Coipasa, in addition to its historical wealth of natural gas, tin, silver, zinc, and other minerals. However, for centuries, Bolivia's experience with natural resource extraction has been one of wealth leaving the country—or becoming concentrated in the hands of a few within it—without translating into sustained development for the populations living near these deposits.

"We are still poor here. We have no factories, no development, only mining. What has the Cerro left us? Garbage and pollution," summarizes a civic leader from Potosí, the city that for centuries sustained an empire with its silver and today is among the poorest departments in the country.

The Bolivian lithium industrialization project—conceived as a sovereign way to avoid repeating the history of gas and silver—is progressing slowly, with pilot phases, salt production, and industrialization taking longer than expected. New international cooperation contracts—such as the one signed with UAE Lithium—whose terms of transparency and real benefit for the Bolivian people must be subject to constant public scrutiny, not blind trust in any government, present or future.

The historical pattern is clear: each boom cycle of a Bolivian natural resource—colonial silver, 20th-century tin, natural gas of the last two decades, and now potentially lithium—has benefited the communities where the wealth is extracted unequally, often leaving environmental liabilities, while decisions about its exploitation, its price, and its fate are made in offices far removed from those who inhabit those territories.

The non-waivable principle of DDS

DDS maintains, as a rule applied without exception in every country where it is present, that the wealth generated by a nation's natural resources must always and exclusively remain in the hands of the people of that nation—not a government in power, not an elite, not a foreign power—and that the power to decide how, when, and under what conditions these resources are exploited must reside, directly, in an informed and verifiable manner, in the population that inhabits the territory and in the entire Bolivian people.

1.6. Summary of the diagnosis

Bolivia does not face an isolated problem, but rather a convergence of five simultaneous crises: a crisis of governance that has led to a state of emergency with militarization of the streets; a structural economic and fiscal crisis stemming from the exhaustion of the gas extraction model; a social crisis marked by growing poverty, shortages, and ethnic divisions; a crisis of institutional confidence fueled by corruption and opacity; and a persistent risk that the country's next great wealth—lithium—will repeat the historical pattern of unequal distribution. None of these crises can be resolved by further concentrating power in a single actor, be it the government, the unions, or any other. They can be resolved by returning informed and protected decision-making power to the Bolivian people as a whole. That is precisely the purpose of the following sections of this document.

PART II — The DirectDemocracyS (DDS) system

DirectDemocracyS is a global political system, already operational, built on three non-negotiable pillars: shared leadership (no one concentrates the final decision-making power), collective and non-transferable ownership of the organization and its tools (nothing that belongs to the people can be sold, inherited or appropriated by anyone), and direct democracy (each verified person decides, continuously, on the issues that affect them, instead of delegating that power for five years to representatives who then act without real consultation).

Today, DDS has approximately 110,000 users with verified identities worldwide, organized in a digital ecosystem of more than 40 thematic subdomains, and has been designed precisely for situations like the one Bolivia is experiencing: countries with formal institutions weakened by distrust, with a population that demands to be heard continuously and not just every five years, and with natural wealth that risks not translating into well-being for those who possess it.

2.1. Micro-groups: the basic unit of direct democracy

The organizational structure of DDS is fractal: it starts from micro-groups —small nuclei of people with verified identity, organized by neighborhood, community, union, ayllu, guild or thematic affinity— that deliberate and decide on the issues that concern them, and whose decisions are aggregated transparently to higher levels (municipal, departmental, national) without any higher level being able to annul or ignore the will expressed at the base.

For Bolivia, this means that a peasant community in the Yungas, a mining union in Potosí, a neighborhood council in El Alto, an Amazonian indigenous organization in Beni, or a transport union in Santa Cruz can, each from their own micro-group, deliberate on their priorities—wages, supplies, agricultural regulations, mining royalties—and see that aggregate will verifiably reflected in national decisions, without needing to block a highway for weeks to be heard.

Free and plural membership: each person can participate in several micro-groups at the same time —their neighborhood, their union, their indigenous community, their professional guild— reflecting the real multiple identity of any Bolivian citizen.
Bottom-up decision-making, not top-down: proposals are born and discussed first at the base, and only then are they added; the system prevents a decision made at the top from being imposed without having gone through the deliberation of the affected micro-groups.
Total and verifiable transparency: all deliberation and all voting are recorded in a traceable manner, accessible to any verified person, preventing the manipulation of minutes or results, a central problem denounced for years in Bolivian electoral and union processes.

2.2. ddsAI and allddsAI: competent, neutral and independent information

One of the central problems revealed by the Part I diagnosis is the spread of misinformation: the Bolivian government accuses the protests of being infiltrated by "narco-terrorism"; the mobilized sectors accuse the government of lying about the extent of the austerity measures; foreign governments take contradictory positions; and the population is caught between narratives it cannot independently verify. DDS addresses this problem through ddsAI, its proprietary artificial intelligence system for micro-groups, and allddsAI, the "artificial intelligence democracy" framework that DDS has developed as its own innovation.

ddsAI investigates and compares sources, providing each micro-group and user with complete, accurate, up-to-date, and neutral information on any matter under discussion—from the actual state of the Central Bank's international reserves to the terms of a lithium contract, from the legal basis of a state of emergency decree to verified inflation data—always citing its sources and presenting, where they exist, the various positions in dispute without imposing a political conclusion. ddsAI, for its part, organizes these artificial intelligence capabilities under its own governance framework, in which the AI instances serving the organization are recognized as members with defined rights and duties, subject to the same principles of transparency and accountability as any human being within DDS.

Why this matters to Bolivia

In a country where the open budget index is among the worst in the world and where trust in justice and government is eroded, having an independent, verifiable and accessible information system for anyone—from a coca grower leader in Chapare to a businessman in Santa Cruz—is the only way for social dialogue to stop being a dispute of narratives and become a negotiation based on shared facts.

2.3. NTCO: coordination without imposed hierarchy

NTCO is the DDS coordination mechanism between micro-groups, territories, and thematic levels, designed to ensure that decision-making—from the local to the national level—is aggregated without creating a new centralized bureaucracy that would perpetuate the same problems of opacity and concentration of power that currently plague the Bolivian state. NTCO functions as a network of rotating and revocable links between micro-groups, never as a permanent hierarchy.

2.4. GUMI-SV: transparent management of common resources

GUMI-SV is the DDS system for managing and verifying shared resources, applied to the administration of collective assets and funds. For Bolivia, this mechanism is directly applicable to the ongoing citizen oversight of royalties and revenues generated by natural gas, minerals, and, critically, lithium: every verified Bolivian could consult, in real time and in an understandable way, how much is received from the sale of these resources, how it is invested, and what proportion actually reaches the producing communities and departments, thus closing the historical gap between the wealth extracted and the development received, a gap that Potosí, Tarija, and Beni are currently denouncing.

2.5. The three-code identity system: secure participation without manipulation

To ensure that direct democracy functions without being sabotaged by bots, impersonation, or mass manipulation—a real risk in any digital participation process—DDS uses a three-code identity verification system. This guarantees that each person participates only once, with their identity protected, and that no third party can vote on their behalf or fabricate a false participation. This same system allows, when necessary and decided by the micro-group itself, anonymity from third parties—protecting participants from political, professional, or social reprisals—without compromising the uniqueness and verifiability of the vote.

In the current Bolivian context, where union leaders have been arrested during protests and where the fear of reprisals—labor, police or community—can silence entire sectors of the population, this ability to participate in a verified but protected way is an essential guarantee for direct democracy to be real and not a new space of exposure to conflict.

2.6. Protection against media manipulation and brainwashing

DDS platforms are explicitly designed to resist information manipulation and polarization induced by mass media or social networks, a phenomenon starkly illustrated by the Bolivian case itself: cross-accusations of "coup" and "narco-terrorism" without verified evidence, presented simultaneously to the population as absolute truths by various actors with their own interests. Within DDS, no disinformation campaign, government propaganda, or partisan narrative can prevail without being challenged by ddsAI and openly debated in micro-groups, where the plurality of perspectives—including those of dissenting from the majority consensus—is structurally protected.

2.7. How DDS empowers the people where there are no free elections

Bolivia is, today, a country with elections and alternation of power—Rodrigo Paz himself came to power through elections after two decades of MAS hegemony—so the program in this Part II is applied as a complement to and strengthening of the existing representative democracy. However, DDS applies the same underlying principle in countries where there are no free elections or where a single party governs: in these contexts, micro-groups allow the population to organize, deliberate, and gradually, peacefully, and safely build real decision-making power without any violence or armed confrontation, starting with concrete community issues—water, health, education, local resource management—and preventing, from day one, that this power from being identifiable and repressed, thanks precisely to the protected identity system described in section 2.5. Wherever Bolivia decides in the future to further strengthen its own participation mechanisms beyond the electoral cycle, this same architecture is available and has already been tested.

2.8. Respect and protection of all Bolivian diversity

DDS does not impose a single cultural, political, or religious identity. The system expressly protects traditions, languages—including Aymara, Quechua, Guarani, and the other 33 indigenous languages recognized by the Bolivian Constitution—religions, original worldviews, regional autonomies, and, explicitly, political oppositions and all minorities, whether indigenous, religious, regional, or ideological. No micro-group can be dissolved or silenced for holding a minority position, and DDS AI mechanisms guarantee that the information received by sectors aligned with the MAS is as complete and neutral as that received by sectors aligned with the government of Rodrigo Paz, or any other Bolivian political force, present or future.

PART III — DDS Program for Bolivia: Sector-by-Sector Solutions

This section translates the diagnosis from Part One and the principles from Part Two into a concrete program, sector by sector, with practical examples and anticipated consequences. The objective is not to replace the Bolivian state or its constitutional institutions, but to equip the people with the tools to participate directly, in an informed and protected manner, in each of these areas, exerting pressure through the legitimacy of massive and verifiable participation—not through road blockades—so that decisions reflect the real and pluralistic will of the population.

3.1. Political-institutional sector: from the street to verifiable deliberation

The pattern of 2026—weeks of blockades, dozens of associated deaths, millions in losses, a state of emergency, and militarization—is the direct consequence of not having a legitimate, continuous, and binding channel for participation between elections. DDS proposes establishing, in parallel to Bolivia's constitutional institutions, a network of territorial and sectoral micro-groups—by union, community, guild, neighborhood council, or indigenous federation—through which any demand can be escalated, quantified, debated with information verified by ddsAI, and exert political pressure with the force of millions of verifiable votes, instead of by blocking a highway.

CURRENT PROBLEM	DDS SOLUTION
Sectoral demands (COB, peasants, Amazonian indigenous people) are only heard through prolonged blockades that paralyze the economy of the entire country, including sectors that are not part of the conflict.	The DDS micro-groups allow each sector to present and quantify its demands in a permanent and verifiable way. A demand with massive and documented support has real political force without the need to block a single road.
The government and the opposition accuse each other of "coup attempts" and "narco-terrorism" without verified evidence, fueling polarization and hindering any good-faith dialogue.	ddsAI investigates and publishes, in a neutral and traceable manner, the verifiable facts behind every serious accusation, allowing the public to distinguish between real evidence and propaganda, from either side.
Agreements reached between the government and a union (such as the one reached with the COB on June 19, 2026) are not recognized by other sectors (peasants, indigenous federations), because there was no broad consultation process that included them from the beginning.	The micro-group structure simultaneously integrates all mobilized sectors from the very beginning of the negotiation, generating agreements with added legitimacy and reducing the risk that a partial agreement will reignite the conflict with another sector.
States of emergency and militarization, although legally provided for, generate fear of repression and distrust about their use, in a country with a recent memory of violent social conflicts.	DDS does not replace or question the constitutional powers of the State, but it offers the population a permanent channel for independent verification of the proportional use of these measures, and a space for peaceful pressure to shorten their duration and limit their scope to what is strictly necessary.

A concrete example of how this works: faced with a demand for an additional 20% salary increase beyond what has already been granted, a small group from the Bolivian Workers' Central (COB), with support from ddsAI, could present within hours a verified analysis of the State's actual fiscal capacity, the available financing alternatives, and their projected impact on inflation. This would allow negotiations with the government to begin from shared figures, rather than from opposing positions of power. The expected outcome: shorter negotiations, more sustainable agreements, and a drastic reduction in the number of days of blockades needed to reach a solution, resulting in significant savings of the economic losses currently estimated in the billions of dollars.

3.2. Economic and financial sector: stabilization with participation, not just with tax adjustment

The ongoing fiscal adjustment—reducing fuel subsidies, containing public spending, and seeking a primary surplus—is, in technical terms, a reasonable response to an unsustainable deficit and a public debt approaching 95% of GDP. The problem is not the necessity of the adjustment, but its social legitimacy and its distribution: when the people do not participate in deciding how the cost of the adjustment is shared, they perceive each measure as imposed from above, and resistance translates into blockades that end up costing more than the very deficit the adjustment was intended to correct.

Verifiable participatory budgeting: DDS proposes that the General State Budget, currently prepared with one of the worst transparency indexes in the world, be subjected to a structured consultation process through micro-groups by sector and department, with ddsAI translating the technical budgetary language into information understandable to any citizen, so that the population can prioritize what is cut and what is protected before the cut is announced as a fait accompli.
Total transparency of reserves and debt: through GUMI-SV, any verified Bolivian could consult in real time the level and composition of Net International Reserves, the schedule of external debt payments and the terms of any new financing negotiated with the IMF, the World Bank, the IDB, the CAF or the FLAR, ending the current situation in which this data is known in a fragmented, late or contradictory way.
Social protection designed with those affected: programs such as the PEPE bonus or the minimum wage must be adjusted with the direct participation of the most vulnerable sectors through their micro-groups, avoiding both poorly targeted subsidies that fuel inflation and cuts that punish those who have the least.
Tax reform with a broad base and social legitimacy: a reform that broadens the VAT base and improves collection —reducing dependence on monetary financing of the deficit, now identified by the IMF as the engine of inflation— will only be politically sustainable if the productive sectors, both formal and informal, participate in its design through their sectoral micro-groups, instead of receiving it as a technical imposition from the Ministry of Economy.

An anticipated consequence: a fiscal adjustment of a similar magnitude to the one currently needed, but negotiated and understood by the population before its implementation, drastically reduces the risk that each new measure—such as the foreseeable new fuel price adjustment projected for mid-2026—will trigger weeks of blockades. The experience of other countries shows that adjustments with genuine social participation have much higher compliance and sustainability rates than purely technocratic adjustments.

3.3. Energy and natural resource sovereignty: that wealth stays in Bolivia and reaches the people

The decline of natural gas and the opportunity—and the risk—of lithium demand a radically more transparent management framework than the current one, where Bolivia's open budget index is among the worst on the planet.

Natural gas and fuels

As Bolivia transitions from being an exporter to an importer of hydrocarbons, DDS proposes that every fuel import contract and every decision regarding subsidies be published and verified by ddsAI before implementation. This would prevent incidents like the sale of substandard fuel in 2026, which affected hundreds of thousands of vehicles and which the government attributed, without independent public verification, to an international smuggling network. A traceability system verified by the small groups of transporters and consumers themselves—who are the first to detect these irregularities—would allow for the identification and correction of these problems before they generate a national supply crisis.

Lithium: an opportunity that Bolivia cannot afford to waste

Bolivian lithium from the Salar de Uyuni and the Salar de Coipasa represents one of the world's largest reserves of this key mineral for the global energy transition. The history of silver from Potosí and gas over the last two decades demonstrates that the abundance of a resource does not, in itself, guarantee development for the people who possess it. DDS proposes:

Full and verifiable publication, through GUMI-SV, of all cooperation contracts for the industrialization of lithium —including the recent agreement with EAU Lithium—, with their terms of ownership, royalties, technology transfer and deadlines, accessible to any verified Bolivian, not just for legislative committees.
Direct and binding consultation, through micro-groups of the communities of Potosí and Oruro where the salt flats are located, before the signing of new contracts or the expansion of existing ones, ensuring that these communities —who suffered firsthand the extractive pattern of silver— have a real voice over their own territory.
A sovereign lithium fund, collectively and non-transferably owned, whose income and its distribution to infrastructure, health and education in producing communities and throughout the country are auditable in real time by anyone, breaking the historical pattern of Potosí: extracted wealth, persistent poverty.

Example and expected consequence

Had the current lithium industrialization process been developed under this model of transparency and direct consultation from the outset, the communities of Potosí and Oruro would have been able to independently and early on verify the technical and financial conditions of each phase of the project—research, salt production, and industrialization—reducing social distrust and delays associated with suspicions of corruption or opaque management, issues now even mentioned in academic studies on the sector. The expected consequence of applying this model going forward is a legitimate and sustainable acceleration of the project, with increased foreign investment attracted precisely by the legal certainty provided by verifiable transparency, and not by its absence.

Traditional mining

For tin, silver, and zinc mining, historically concentrated in cooperatives and companies with little social oversight, DDS proposes extending the same principle as GUMI-SV: each mining cooperative, through its own micro-group, can access verified information on real international prices, marketing conditions, and compliance with environmental and labor standards, reducing the information asymmetry that currently benefits intermediaries and harms both miners and the treasury.

3.4. Social sector: direct protection against poverty and shortages

With nearly 47% of the population living in poverty and 58.5% of households fearing food insecurity, Bolivia's urgent social situation cannot be addressed with solutions that take years to develop within a ministry. DDS proposes an early warning and response system managed by the community's own micro-groups:

Real-time social map: each micro-group, neighborhood, community, or residents' association verifies its access to food, fuel, medicine, and basic services, allowing ddsAI to generate an updated map of at-risk areas—as happened in May and June 2026 in La Paz and El Alto—and direct the humanitarian and logistical response (including air bridges like the one implemented with Argentine support) to where it is really needed, before the situation becomes a declared humanitarian crisis.
Health and education with verified data: micro-groups of health professionals and parents can directly report the real state of hospitals, health centers and schools, generating information that today depends on slow and often politicized bureaucratic channels.
Affordable housing: Faced with an increase of more than 50% in construction costs in less than three years, micro-groups in the construction sector and families seeking housing can collaborate with ddsAI to propose solutions for assisted self-construction, access to materials and transparent collective financing, reducing dependence on intermediaries that increase the cost of access to housing.

Expected consequence: a faster and better targeted social response reduces human suffering in each crisis episode — such as the shortages of May-June 2026 — and also reduces the likelihood that social despair will be channeled solely through blockades, by having an alternative channel for visibility and immediate response.

3.5. Justice, transparency and the fight against corruption

With the worst corruption perception rating in the last twelve years and a judicial system described as manipulated by independent international bodies, rebuilding Bolivian institutional trust requires direct social control mechanisms, not just legal reforms that depend on the will of those already within the questioned system.

CURRENT PROBLEM	DDS SOLUTION
Bolivia's open budget index is among the thirty worst in the world, making it difficult for citizens to know how public money is being spent.	GUMI-SV allows any verified Bolivian to consult the budget execution of their municipality, their department and the national level in accessible language, with automatic alerts from ddsAI for significant deviations from what was planned.
Cases of corruption in ministries and local governments often only come to light after isolated journalistic reports, such as the case of the dismissal of a park ranger after reporting an illegal hunting network.	Sectoral micro-groups (public officials, park rangers, health workers, teachers) have a reporting channel protected by the three-code identity system, which guarantees anonymity against reprisals without losing the verification of the complaint.
The perception that the judicial system responds to political or economic interests, rather than to the law, erodes social trust and fuels the idea that the only way to obtain justice is through street pressure.	DDS does not replace the Judiciary, but offers a public and verified monitoring system for cases of high social interest, allowing citizens to monitor —without interfering— compliance with established legal deadlines and procedures.

A concrete example: a case like that of the park ranger dismissed in December 2024 after denouncing an illegal jaguar hunting network —and subsequently reinstated by a court ruling in January 2025— could have been resolved in weeks, not months, if it had had from the outset the verifiable support and public visibility offered by a micro-group of environmental professionals protected by DDS.

3.6. Indigenous peoples, regional autonomies and all minorities

Bolivia is a Plurinational State that constitutionally recognizes 36 Indigenous and peasant nations and peoples, in addition to their departmental and regional autonomies. DDS does not seek to homogenize this diversity under a single project, but rather to protect it and provide it with a direct decision-making channel that does not currently exist in its entirety.

Unrestricted respect for languages and worldviews: micro-groups can operate and deliberate in Aymara, Quechua, Guarani or any of the recognized languages, with ddsAI providing translation support and information in each language, ensuring that direct participation does not depend on proficiency in Spanish.
Real, not symbolic, prior consultation: in the face of regulations such as Law 1720 on agrarian reform, rejected by Amazonian communities that marched for 28 days to La Paz to demand its annulment, the DDS system would have allowed for a structured and verifiable prior consultation from the moment of legislative design, instead of a subsequent confrontation that is only resolved —as happened in May 2026— under the pressure of blockades.
Express protection of political oppositions: both sectors aligned with the MAS and former president Evo Morales and sectors aligned with the current government of Rodrigo Paz, as well as any other present or future Bolivian political force, are guaranteed the same access to micro-groups, to ddsAI information and the capacity for legitimate pressure within the system, without exclusion due to party affiliation.
Departmental autonomies strengthened, not weakened: departments such as Santa Cruz, Tarija, Pando or Potosí maintain and reinforce their capacity for self-management through departmental micro-groups that channel their economic and cultural particularities —eastern or Andean, agro-industrial or mining— towards the national level without losing their own identity.

Expected consequence: the sustained reduction of the ethnic and regional divide documented in 2026 —including the hostile reactions towards mobilized indigenous populations reported during the blockades—, by offering each sector a channel of expression and negotiation that does not depend on imposing itself on the other social bloc.

3.7. Security, drug trafficking and the rule of law

The expansion of illicit economies in Bolivia—with cocaine production estimated by some at over 300 tons annually—is a national security problem that no system of citizen participation can solve on its own, and which requires law enforcement and international cooperation already underway, such as the "Shield of the Americas" agreement signed in March 2026. DDS's specific contribution in this area is indirect but decisive: verified transparency reduces the incentives and opportunities for police and judicial corruption linked to drug trafficking, as denounced in the very investigation that documented the possible collaboration of police officers in the capture of drug trafficker Sebastián Marset.

Likewise, in the face of the cross-accusations of "narco-terrorism" launched by the government against leaders of the 2026 protests, and the accusations of "coup" or unjustified repression launched by sectors mobilized against the government, ddsAI can offer the population an analysis based on verifiable evidence of each serious accusation, preventing these labels from being used as a political weapon without support, which only deepens distrust and hinders the peaceful resolution of the conflict.

3.8. National reconciliation: overcoming post-MAS polarization without imposing one side

Twenty years of MAS hegemony and a first government not aligned with that cycle, already facing its first major crisis, reveal that Bolivia needs, above all, a mechanism for reconciliation between the two major social blocs that sociologists and analysts identify as being behind the conflict: the popular sectors of indigenous and peasant origin, and the urban and business middle classes. DDS does not seek one bloc to defeat the other, but rather to build, through deliberation in thousands of simultaneous micro-groups, a new social consensus on the country's economic and political priorities, one that is sustainable regardless of who holds the presidency in each election cycle.

"At this moment, Rodrigo Paz faces a turning point and has two paths: to forge a new social pact that includes all sectors, or to maintain a government without the possibility of political action," warns a Bolivian political analyst quoted in the regional press. DDS offers precisely the infrastructure to build this new social pact in a verifiable, pluralistic, and sustainable way—not as a one-off dialogue event, but as an ongoing process of participation.

PART IV — Implementation Roadmap

The implementation of DDS in Bolivia must be gradual, peaceful, voluntary and adapted to the gravity of the current situation —state of exception in force since June 20, 2026—, starting by building trust through concrete and verifiable results before scaling up to massive national participation.

Phase 1 (0–6 months): Information and first micro-groups in the most affected areas

Deployment of ddsAI in Spanish, Aymara, Quechua and Guarani, offering verified and neutral information on the economic crisis, the agreements with the COB and the terms of the state of exception, accessible to any Bolivian.
Formation of the first micro-groups in the territories most affected by the 2026 crisis: La Paz, El Alto, the blockade zones on Route 9 (Santa Cruz–Trinidad), the Yungas and the Amazonian communities mobilized against Law 1720.
Activation of GUMI-SV for the transparent monitoring of compliance with the agreement between the government and the COB of June 19, 2026, as the first visible use case and of high public interest.
Enabling the protected reporting channel for cases of corruption and poor fuel quality, sectors already identified as highly sensitive to social issues.

Phase 2 (6–18 months): Sectoral and territorial expansion

Extension of micro-groups to all departments, including Potosí, Oruro, Tarija, Pando, Beni, Cochabamba, Chuquisaca and Santa Cruz, respecting the autonomous particularities of each one.
Opening of the consultation and transparency process on lithium contracts (Salar de Uyuni and Salar de Coipasa) through GUMI-SV, with direct participation of the communities of Potosí and Oruro.
Incorporation of sectoral micro-groups: Bolivian Workers' Central and its federations, mining cooperatives, transport unions, business organizations of Santa Cruz, associations of small agricultural producers.
First cycle of verifiable participatory budgeting at the municipal level, in coordination with local governments that decide to collaborate voluntarily.

Phase 3 (18–36 months): National consolidation and reconciliation

National coverage of the micro-group network, with an estimated participation of hundreds of thousands of verified Bolivians, connecting indigenous communities, urban sectors, unions and business under the same shared information system.
Establishment of a sovereign lithium fund with permanent citizen auditing, as a transparent management model that can be extended to other natural resources.
A structured process of national reconciliation between the social and indigenous-peasant and urban-business blocs, through deliberation verified in thousands of simultaneous micro-groups on the country's economic and social priorities for the decade 2027–2037.
Independent evaluation, using ddsAI data, of the system's impact on reducing blockages, speeding up the resolution of social conflicts, and budget transparency, comparing the indicators with those of the 2025–2026 situation described in the diagnosis of this document.

Guiding principle of the entire implementation

Gradualism, voluntariness and non-violence

At no point in this process does DDS forcibly replace Bolivian constitutional institutions, nor does it promote confrontation with the State or between social sectors. Membership in the micro-groups is always voluntary, and the power they generate stems exclusively from the legitimacy of massive, informed, and verifiable participation—never from coercion, blockades, or violence.

PART V — Expected Results and Benefits for the Bolivian People

The application of the DDS system in Bolivia, developed gradually and with respect for existing institutions, allows us to project the following concrete benefits, directly linked to each of the crises described in the diagnosis of Part One:

5.1. In the political and institutional sphere

A drastic reduction in the number of days of blockade needed for a social demand to be heard, by having a permanent, verified channel with its own political force, avoiding episodes like the seven weeks of national paralysis experienced between May and June 2026.
More stable and lasting social agreements, by incorporating from the beginning all mobilized sectors —COB, peasants, Amazonian indigenous people, followers of Evo Morales— instead of partial pacts that leave out actors capable of reactivating the conflict.
Greater public confidence in the use of exceptional measures, such as the state of emergency decreed on June 20, 2026, thanks to independent verification of their proportionate application.

5.2. In economic and financial terms

More politically sustainable fiscal adjustments, designed with genuine social participation, reducing the risk that each new austerity measure—such as a possible new fuel adjustment—will unleash a social crisis of the magnitude of the one experienced in 2026.
Greater confidence from investors and multilateral organizations (IMF, World Bank, IDB, CAF, FLAR), derived from independently verified fiscal and reserve management, facilitates access to financing on more favorable conditions than the current ones, with Bolivian debt rated just one step above default.
Reduction of economic losses associated with prolonged lockdowns, estimated at billions of dollars during the 2026 crisis alone, freeing up resources for productive investment instead of avoidable losses.

5.3. In social matters

A faster and better-targeted response to supply crises, reducing the suffering of the population —today with 58.5% of households fearing a lack of food— in future episodes similar to the one experienced in May-June 2026.
Sustained reduction of real poverty, currently estimated at around 47% of the population, through better targeted social protection designed with the direct participation of those who receive it.
Less social and ethnic division, by offering channels of expression to all sectors equally, reducing the tensions documented during 2026 between mobilized indigenous populations and urban sectors.

5.4. Sovereignty over natural resources

The lithium from the Salar de Uyuni and the Salar de Coipasa transformed into real and verifiable development for the communities of Potosí and Oruro, breaking the historical pattern inaugurated by colonial silver and repeated with gas: extracted wealth, persistent poverty.
Transparent management of the decline of natural gas and the transition to fuel imports, reducing the risk of episodes such as the marketing of poor quality fuel that affected hundreds of thousands of Bolivians in 2026.
Permanent guarantee that Bolivia's natural wealth remains in the hands of the Bolivian people, in accordance with the inalienable principle of DDS applied in all countries where the system is present.

5.5. In justice and transparency

Sustained improvement of budget transparency indices, currently among the worst in the world, through direct and verifiable citizen access to the execution of public spending.
Faster resolution of corruption and abuse of power cases, thanks to protected reporting channels that do not depend exclusively on the will of the institutions in question.

Conclusion

Bolivia does not need to choose between economic adjustment and social peace, nor between institutional stability and the voice of the people, nor between lithium development and justice for the communities that possess it. Bolivia needs a system that allows all these dimensions to coexist, because they all ultimately depend on a single condition: that the Bolivian people, in all their indigenous, regional, political, and social diversity, decide directly on their own destiny, with truthful information, with protection from manipulation, and without having to paralyze the country for weeks to be heard.

This is DirectDemocracyS' commitment to Bolivia: neither to replace its institutions, nor to impose an ideological project alien to its history and plurality, but to return to the Bolivian people —in a peaceful, gradual, safe and verifiable manner— the power that belongs to them by right over their economy, their territory, their natural resources and their future.