A military cargo plane filled with new bills for Bolivia’s central bank crashed near El Alto International Airport on Friday afternoon, killing at least 22 and injuring at least 37
By Marcelo Rochabrun and Sergio Mendoza
Bolivian authorities are scrambling to destroy the equivalent of $62 million worth of local currency bank notes that fell from the sky in a deadly plane crash in the country’s second largest city.
A military cargo plane filled with new bills for Bolivia’s central bank crashed near El Alto International Airport on Friday afternoon, killing at least 22 and injuring at least 37. Most of the victims were in vehicles near the airport and were struck by the plane.
The deadly crash also unleashed some 17 million bank notes into the highly populated city of El Alto, according to figures released by central bank president David Espinoza, totaling 423 million bolivianos ($62 million). People raced to the area of the crash to try to collect as many bills as possible, while authorities rushed to look for survivors and also burn the bank notes as fast as they could. The central bank estimates about 30 per cent of the bills have been stolen from the crash site.
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The area is now heavily guarded by police and military and people were still scouring for bills in the early hours of Saturday.
“Our estimates suggest that at the peak of the conflict there were about 20,000 people” trying to collect the bank notes, Bolivia’s Vice Minister of Interior Order Hernan Paredes told local media. “There were vandal groups embedded, that’s why we detained 49 people.”
Bolivia is one of Latin America’s poorest countries. It is currently facing one of the continent’s highest bouts of inflation, which peaked at almost 25 per cent last year, but has steadily cooled to just under 20 per cent in recent months as new centrist President Rodrigo Paz tries to turn around the country’s strained public finances.
The notes were each worth between 10 and 50 bolivianos, equivalent to between $1.5 and $7 according to Bolivia’s official exchange rate, although they are worth roughly 30 per cent less in the black foreign currency market, which is the one most commonly used by Bolivians. The country’s minimum wage is currently set at 3,300 bolivianos.
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The central bank said in a statement that it was canceling the validity of the notes, which can all be identified by a specific series printed on the bills. Bolivia’s financial system regulator ASFI also warned citizens not to attempt to use the notes.
Still, while banks may be able to verify if a bill is valid by looking at the series, it is unlikely that ordinary vendors would verify the series printed on each bill that they take, especially because the money is legitimate and would pass a routine forgery check. Bolivia remains a mainly cash-based economy for most day-to-day transactions.
Authorities also said that some of the bills belonging to that series are already in circulation, which complicates the task of separating those legally obtained from those stolen from the plane crash. The government said legitimate holders should go to banks to exchange them for bills from a different series.
“The bills from the accident have been totally identified,” ASFI said in a statement. “Financial entities will proceed to retain any of them and report any holder to the relevant authorities if they try to introduce them into the system.”
