Bolivia’s national hydrocarbons regulator, the Agencia Nacional de Hidrocarburos (ANH), had blocked 10,781 vehicle plates for repeat fuel loading by 18 October 2026, according to figures presented by Hydrocarbons and Energy Minister Marcelo Blanco Quintanilla on 21 October 2026. Blocking a plate suspends the vehicle’s record in the national fuel sales control system, which stops its RFID windscreen sticker working at the pump.
The crackdown is being run while the regulator itself sits under a government takeover. Supreme Decree 5699, issued under President Rodrigo Paz, placed ANH under an intervention commission drawn from five ministries and led by Blanco, with Jorge Luis Gumucio appointed interim executive director (ANH, 3 September 2026).
The sticker is ten years old, the enforcement is not
B-SISA is Bolivia’s fuel sales control system. Every vehicle in the country must carry a windscreen sticker containing an RFID chip, and antennas installed at fuel stations detect each registered vehicle as it arrives (ANH, 2016). Since 2016 the sticker has also carried a security hologram and a barcode, and only ANH staff are permitted to fit and activate one.
The reader estate goes well beyond the forecourt. ANH has described roadside towers fitted with high-gain antennas that read stickers from 25 metres and log a photograph alongside the plate, the vehicle colour and the B-SISA code, plus Android handheld readers used at checkpoints and border crossings (ANH, 2015).
What changed in 2026 is not the hardware but the willingness to switch vehicles off. In Oruro, ANH blocked 40 motorcycles and referred seven forged B-SISA stickers to the authorities (eju.tv, citing ANH, 24 July 2026).
Two sets of figures, three weeks apart
The 21 October 2026 ANH release reports, for that month: 14,097 litres of petrol and 659 cylinders of liquefied petroleum gas seized, nine people apprehended and three vehicles impounded. The largest single actions were roughly 13,000 litres of petrol stockpiled illegally at a house in Sucre, and an operation at the El Alto interdepartmental terminal that recovered 223 gas cylinders.
An earlier report on 2 October 2026 carried different and in some cases larger numbers: about 6,700 plates blocked, 31 arrests, 24 vehicles seized and eight vehicles fitted with extra tanks taken off the road. The plate count has since risen, but the arrest and seizure figures quoted in October 2026 cover different periods and should not be read as a running total.
The volumes need more care still, because three separate measures have been quoted in the space of three weeks. Blanco gave 14 million litres as fuel “protected” by blocking plates, which is an estimate of diversion prevented rather than fuel recovered. Coverage of the same 2 October briefing described 17 million litres seized, made up of 10 million litres of petrol and 7 million of diesel handed over to state oil company YPFB. The regulator’s own 21 October release reports 14,097 litres of petrol seized. Litres protected and litres seized are not the same quantity and cannot be added together.
Blanco also said the plate blocking has improved availability of liquid fuels at service stations, and that queues to fill up have gone.
Detection still depends on someone reading the data
The weak point is analysis, not identification. ANH’s departmental director for Chuquisaca, Ricardo Castellanos, said spotting repeat refuelling is “not an automatic process at the moment” but a specialist review of the database (Correo del Sur, 30 June 2026). The patterns staff hunt for are the obvious ones: a full tank filled twice inside 30 minutes, or the same plate fuelling in Sucre and La Paz 15 minutes apart, which points to a cloned plate or a cloned sticker rather than an unusually thirsty car.
That gap is familiar from other state vehicle identification schemes. The tag answers “which vehicle is this” quickly and at a distance, but deciding that a sequence of individually legitimate reads adds up to fraud is a separate job, and one that needs either rules in software or a person with time. In Bolivia it is still a person. The same pattern has held back enforcement elsewhere, including the RFID tagging of mineral transport vehicles in Madhya Pradesh.
Not everyone in the Bolivian state has been impressed by B-SISA. YPFB president Armin Dorgathen called it “un saludo a la bandera”, roughly window dressing, and said some plates had loaded between 4,000 and 6,000 litres (Correo del Sur, 25 July 2025). Blanco, for his part, has said that once the diesel subsidy was removed “el negociado se paso a la gasolina”: the racket moved to petrol.
What is still not public
ANH has not published the tag or reader suppliers behind B-SISA, how many stickers have been issued in total, or how many of the country’s service stations have working antennas. Without the last of those, there is no way to judge whether 10,781 blocked plates reflects thorough national coverage or only the parts of the country where the readers are reliable.
Bolivia is not the only Latin American government leaning on RFID for a national vehicle register this year. Honduras is due to begin issuing RFID vehicle plates from 4 November 2026, and Mexico’s REPUVE sticker and Brazil’s SINIAV scheme have been in place for years.
The intervention is also doing work that has nothing to do with tags. ANH issued 21 new fuel import authorisations in October 2026, five for own consumption and 16 for resale, taking the total since the approvals process was speeded up to 57. Twenty-two new operators brought in 2.65 million litres for their own use during the month, and 45 authorised firms imported 15.33 million litres for sale. In a separate operation at Senkata, ANH found an import tanker carrying diesel with water content above the permitted level, sealed the vehicle and ordered a full quality analysis of the stored product; a confirmed breach carries a fine of up to Bs 250,000 under Supreme Decree 5619.
Read more at https://www.anh.gob.bo/w2026/contenido.php?s=5&O=2953
