Bolivia Races to Destroy Cash That Fell From Sky in Plane Crash
(Bloomberg) — Bolivian authorities are scrambling to destroy millions of dollars worth of local currency that suddenly fell from the sky in a deadly plane crash in the country’s second-largest city.
A military cargo plane filled with new invoices sent to Bolivia’s central bank crashed near El Alto International Airport on Friday afternoon, killing at least 22 people and injuring at least 37. Most of the victims were in vehicles near the airport and died when the plane crashed.
The fatal accident also caused a flurry of bills to the highly populated city of El Alto. While people rushed to the scene of the crash to collect as many banknotes as possible, authorities also rushed to search for survivors and burn the banknotes as quickly as possible. The area is now heavily guarded by police and military, and people were still searching for bills early on Saturday.
“Our estimates indicate that at the height of the conflict around 20,000 people tried to collect the banknotes,” Hernan Paredes, Deputy Minister of the Bolivian Ministry of Internal Affairs, told local media. “There were vandal groups, so we detained 49 people.”
Bolivia is one of the poorest countries in Latin America. Currently facing one of the continent’s highest inflation crises, inflation rose to almost 25 percent last year but has fallen steadily below 20 percent in recent months as new centrist President Rodrigo Paz tries to fix the country’s strained public finances.
The banknotes were each worth between 10 and 50 bolivianos; this was equivalent to about $1 to $5, respectively, in Bolivia’s most widely used black currency market. The country’s minimum wage is currently set at 3,300 Bolivians.
Authorities did not say exactly how much the bills were worth in total, but images broadcast on local television showed the plane full of paper money.
The central bank said in a statement that it had revoked the validity of banknotes, all of which could be identified by a specific series printed on the banknotes. Bolivia’s financial system regulator ASFI also warned citizens not to attempt to use the banknotes.
Still, while banks can verify whether an invoice is valid by looking at the serial, ordinary merchants are unlikely to be able to verify the serial printed on every invoice they receive, especially since the money is legitimate and goes through a routine fraud check. Bolivia remains a mostly cash-based economy for most daily transactions.
Officials also said some banknotes of this series were already in circulation, making it difficult to distinguish those obtained legally from those stolen from the plane crash. The government said legal owners should go to banks and replace them with bills from a different series.
“The invoices for the accident have been fully identified,” ASFI said in a statement. “Financial institutions will continue to hold any of these and will report owners to the relevant authorities if they attempt to introduce them into the system.”
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