This week President Hugo Banzer of Bolivia launched the Dialogo Nacional 2000, a series of discussions with local authorities and non-governmental organisations aimed at shoring up the nation's crumbling democratic institutions.
Seventy per cent of the population live in poverty, rising to 96 per cent in Chuquisaca, the impoverished region chosen as the site of this week's round of dialogue. The first meeting brought together 112 representatives from the region who discussed ways of spending the $1.3 billion earmarked for the country in debt relief thanks to its status as a Highly Indebted Poor Country, (HIPC), ranking alongside Ethiopia and Haiti.
The Dialogo 2000 originally began life as a prior requirement from donor countries anxious to improve accountability procedures for the distribution of HIPC funds, which will be disbursed over the next 15 years. The windfall is less spectacular than first appears, as the aid package averages out at $10 per person per year. The Dialogo 2000 has since been extended to act as a national forum for debate on social reform.
Invited delegates voted unanimously on Wednesday to have the Catholic Church oversee the distribution of HIPC funds, highlighting the widespread lack of faith in political parties.
President Banzer, then an army general, first came to power through a bloody coup in 1971 eliminating hundreds of opponents and shutting down the nation's democratic institutions, ruling until 1978 when he was ousted by a rival military faction.
Over the past decade Mr Banzer has refashioned himself as a democrat, launching the National Democratic Alliance, (ADN), which has rotated power with two other parties, allowing Mr Banzer to become President in 1997, despite winning just 13 per cent of possible votes.
The ruling centre-right coalition was almost ousted last April, when a series of popular protests escalated into outright rebellion, resulting in the deaths of six unarmed protesters, shot dead by police.
The riots occurred after a British-owned company sought a 35 per cent price rise in privatised water charges.
The government hopes the national dialogue will breathe oxygen into ailing state institutions, winning a breathing space until elections in 2002.
In a parallel initiative, the US embassy in La Paz sponsored a five-day conference this week, inviting Amnesty International to address army and police chiefs to improve the negative image during recent protests.
The depressing economic figures are manifest on the streets of La Paz, where beggars and homeless abound, daily demonstrations block the central area, the elderly queue all day for miserly pensions and in the hills above the city, resentment breeds rebellion. There, perched high above La Paz is the ramshackle El Alto neighbourhood, a legoland of precarious tin shacks. It exploded last month when demonstrators sacked local government offices, destroying public records, a hint of what may lie ahead for Bolivia's beleaguered government.