About Agencia Boliviana de Información

Agencia Boliviana de Información

The Agencia Boliviana de Información, universally known by its initials ABI, is the official news agency of the Bolivian state. Based in La Paz and publishing in Spanish, it was created to supply the country's newspapers, radio stations and television channels with a continuous flow of news about the government and about Bolivia as a whole, drawing on correspondents throughout the country. For almost three decades after its launch in February 1996, ABI operated as the wire service at the centre of the state's communications apparatus, alongside the state television network and the Patria Nueva radio network. Its recent history, however, has been one of abrupt interruption and institutional redesign. On 24 November 2025 the incoming government of President Rodrigo Paz announced the temporary suspension of ABI's operations for an undefined period while its future course was rethought, and in March 2026 a supreme decree placed the agency among the state media to be administered by a new Strategic Communication Unit of the Plurinational State. Any honest account of ABI must therefore describe both the agency that functioned until late 2025 and the uncertainty that has surrounded it since.

Origins and launch in 1996

ABI began transmissions on 6 February 1996, during the government of President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, whose first administration ran from 1993 to 1997. It did not begin with a large infrastructure of its own. Its first dispatches travelled through the telematic network system of Jatha, a private agency, and reached newsrooms as emails and faxes sent to newspapers, radio stations and television channels. That modest technical arrangement is significant: ABI was conceived from the start as a distribution service for other media, not primarily as a publication for the general public. Other outlets were its first audience, and the agency's copy was written to be republished. In 1998, two years after its launch, ABI moved onto the open internet with its own website, abi.bo, which remains its official site. The move placed the state wire alongside the first generation of Bolivian online news sources and gradually changed its reach, because material that had once gone only to subscribing or recipient newsrooms could now be read directly by anyone with an internet connection, in Bolivia and abroad.

Place within the state media system

ABI has never been a stand-alone institution. Reporting by Freedom House and the Inter American Press Association described it as one of the state media financed from the national treasury, grouped with the state television network and the Patria Nueva radio network. The same reporting described a free news service delivered via the internet to both public and private media nationwide, a model that made ABI copy a routine ingredient in the output of outlets that had no correspondent of their own in La Paz or in the departmental capitals. The State Media Monitor, which classifies state media worldwide, lists ABI as a State-Controlled state news agency within the state's communications apparatus, a typology it records as unchanged across its monitoring cycles. That classification captures the central tension in ABI's identity. Supporters of a state wire argue that a government is entitled to communicate its acts directly and that a public agency can serve smaller media that cannot afford a commercial wire. Critics argue that an agency financed by the treasury and directed within the government's communication structure will inevitably favour the government of the day — the very charge the Paz administration levelled at ABI when it suspended it in 2025.

How the agency worked

In its normal years of operation, ABI maintained its headquarters in La Paz, the seat of Bolivia's government, and a network of correspondents across the country, allowing it to file from all nine departments. Its dispatches followed the conventions of wire journalism: a dateline naming the city, the date and the parenthetical initials (ABI), followed by a concise report built around official announcements, statements by ministers and authorities, and coverage of public events. Because the service was free and immediate, its stories were widely reproduced, sometimes verbatim, by regional newspapers, radio stations, television channels and news websites, which made ABI one of the most pervasive single sources in Bolivian news even where readers never visited its website directly. The Spanish Wikipedia infobox for the agency listed Antonio Erick Ortega Pérez as its director; as with all leadership information about an institution in transition, that listing should be read as a snapshot rather than a guarantee of who holds the post after the 2025–2026 restructuring. ABI also represented Bolivia internationally among public agencies: it was among the founding members of the Unión Latinoamericana de Agencias de Noticias (ULAN), constituted in Caracas in June 2011 by Latin American state and public news agencies to promote regional news exchange.

Coverage and editorial character

The substance of ABI's output was the daily record of the Bolivian state: presidential activity, cabinet decisions, legislation, public investment, infrastructure works, social programmes, official statistics and the positions of Bolivia in international affairs. Around that core it carried general news — society, economy, culture, sport and incidents — reported by its correspondents, so that a provincial newspaper could fill both its politics pages and its general pages from the same wire. Defenders of the agency within Bolivia pointed over the years to the professionalism of its journalists and to its role in making information from remote departments available nationally. During the long governments of the Movimiento al Socialismo, however, opposition media and press-freedom organisations repeatedly accused the state media, ABI included, of functioning as a publicity apparatus for the ruling party. That dispute was never merely academic. It shaped how ABI copy was treated by independent outlets, which often republished its factual announcements while discounting its framing, and it formed the explicit background to the decision taken after the change of government in 2025.

The suspension of November 2025

On Monday 24 November 2025, presidential spokesperson Carla Faval announced that ABI's operations were temporarily suspended while its course was, in her word, replanteada — rethought or redesigned — in line with the objectives of the new administration. La Razón, reporting the announcement the same day, noted that the suspension was for an undefined period and that Faval promised the government would announce in the following days the final guidelines on ABI's continuity and the role it would play in the new structure. Faval said the authorities considered that the agency had performed a propagandistic role in favour of the government of the day, and she framed the measure within a broader pledge: "We reaffirm our commitment to sober, transparent communication, free of political lineaments." The suspension did not arrive alone. At the same time, the print edition of the state daily Ahora el Pueblo was stopped and the paper moved to digital-only publication, a step Faval justified as ending an unnecessary expense. The previous week, the Minister of the Presidency, José Luis Lupo, had already announced that the Paz administration intended to transform the state's whole communication area, eliminating the Vice-Ministry of Communication. La Razón noted that ABI had continued operating normally during the first two weeks after the change of government, up to its last published news shortly before the announcement.

Restructuring under the 2026 decrees

The institutional answer to the suspension came in early March 2026. By Supreme Decree 5566 of 2 March 2026, the government constituted the Unidad de Comunicación Estratégica del Estado Plurinacional de Bolivia — the Strategic Communication Unit of the Plurinational State of Bolivia — as a decentralised public institution, with its own legal personality and administrative, financial, legal and technical autonomy, under the tutelage of the Ministry of the Presidency. The decree provided that the unit would have no board of directors and would be headed by a Director General Executive appointed by the President through a Supreme Resolution, with its internal structure to be set by internal regulation. Its financing was to come from the General Treasury of the Nation, donations and credits, specific resources and other sources. Reporting on the combined effect of Decrees 5550 and 5566 explained that the new unit would administer the principal state media, expressly including the Agencia Boliviana de Información, the Red Patria Nueva, the newspaper Ahora el Pueblo and the Sistema Nacional de Radios de los Pueblos Originarios. Its functions were described as extending well beyond news production, to the coordination of public-sector advertising, relations with private media and the development of social-listening analysis of government management on social networks.

What the restructuring means for ABI

For ABI itself, the decrees settled one question and left another open. They settled the question of institutional survival: the agency was not abolished, but folded into a centralised communication structure answerable to the Presidency, in a system in which the former Ministry, and later Vice-Ministry, of Communication disappeared as a separate cabinet-level home. They left open the practical question of the agency's daily newsgathering — when, and in what form, regular ABI wire publication would resume after the November 2025 suspension, and under what editorial rules. The sources documenting the March 2026 reorganisation describe ABI as one of the media the new unit will administer; they do not, by themselves, demonstrate a return to the pre-suspension rhythm of daily dispatches. Readers encountering this profile should therefore treat ABI's status as transitional: a state agency founded in 1996, suspended in November 2025, and placed in 2026 under a new strategic communication authority whose stated aim was to replace what the government called propaganda with sober and transparent official communication. Whether the redesigned agency achieves that aim is a judgement that can only be made from its future output.

Significance in Bolivian media history

Whatever its future form, ABI occupies a defined place in the history of Bolivian journalism. It was the instrument through which, from 1996 onwards, the Bolivian state spoke to the country's media in wire form every day, and through which much of Bolivia learned what its government had said and done. Its free internet service lowered the cost of national news for hundreds of small outlets, and its founding membership of ULAN connected Bolivia to the project of a Latin American public-news bloc. At the same time, its trajectory illustrates the structural dilemma of state media in a polarised democracy: each change of government in Bolivia has brought a redefinition of the state communication apparatus, and ABI's suspension and restructuring under the Paz government is the most recent example. Its archive of dispatches from 1996 to 2025 remains a primary record of three decades of Bolivian public life, and the terms on which the agency operates within the Strategic Communication Unit will be a practical test of the new administration's communication promises.

Basic facts

Agencia Boliviana de Información (ABI) is a Spanish-language state news agency headquartered in La Paz, Bolivia, with correspondents throughout the country. It began transmissions on 6 February 1996 through the telematic network of the private agency Jatha and launched its own website, abi.bo, in 1998. It is financed as part of the state media system and classified by the State Media Monitor as a State-Controlled agency. Its operations were announced as temporarily suspended on 24 November 2025 by presidential spokesperson Carla Faval, and Supreme Decree 5566 of 2 March 2026 placed it among the state media administered by the Unidad de Comunicación Estratégica del Estado Plurinacional de Bolivia, a decentralised public institution under the Ministry of the Presidency. Its official website is abi.bo.