Resumen

SOARES GUIMARAES, Alice. La capitalización de los hidrocarburosy la modernidad: un análisis de las ideassubyacentes al modelo de gestión y de sus críticas. Rev. Umbr. Cs. Soc. [online]. 2010, n.20, pp. 71-104. ISSN 1994-4543.

This article analyzes the symbolic elements that lay behind the Capitalization of Bolivia’s hydrocarbons sector, assuming that public policies should be understood not only as the outcome of the contest/interaction of rational interests, but also as a result of the production of meaning, values and identities on a symbolic level. We identify the ideas, perceptions, meanings and values that underlay and informed the Capitalization and its critics, as well as their relation to broader projects associated with the “search for modernity” and with state, economy and society patterns that distinct actors proposed for the country. By means of a hemerographic research, we indicate the connections made between Capitalization and the “path to modernity”, present in the speech of its defenders, and the confrontation between the measure and “national sovereignty defense”, in the voice of its critics.