On August 1, 1990, Carlos Mesa, Mario Espinoza,[1] Amalia Pando[2] and Ximena Valdivia[3] created the PAT company, initially as a news producer.
The idea originated when at Telesistema Boliviano, Pando, Mesa and Espinoza, agreed to establish their own news production company (the first of its kind in Bolivia); Valdivia provided the loans.
[6] The network was also able to send its newscasts and sports programs to Sistema Unido de Retransmisión in the United States and other parts of the world.
[9] Once Carlos Mesa left the direction of PAT, Abdallah Edmond Daher Bulus, a shareholder of Aerosur, bought his shares and the identity of the channel changed and the Santa Cruz branch became more important.
The time was turbulent and just a few months later Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada resigned the presidency and Carlos Mesa assumed office.
In 2003 Mario Espinoza created a program called El Pentagono where the future vice president Álvaro García Linera regularly attended as a panelist and also Verónica Larrieu,[10] a model from Santa Cruz.
Finally, in 2012, after years of economic and legal problems, Aerosur closed and Abdallah Daher had to sell his shares in PAT, making it a condescending media outlet for the ruling party.
[13] On November 10, 2019, derived from the Bolivian political crisis that led to the renunciation of Evo Morales, and the succession by Jeanine Áñez, the Ministry of Government inisiated a series of penal lawsuits against the network's administrators, as well as ATB's executives, and the national newspaper La Razón, accusating them of illicit economic acts with the government party and Evo Morales.
[1][2] In this case, Marcelo Hurtado was implicated in the irregular purchase of PAT, which led to his arrest and being charged on January 3, 2020, by the Bolivian Prosecutor's Office.
The former executives, with former minister Hector Arce Zaconeta as lawyer, begin a legal battle against Daher to regain financial and editorial control of the outlet.
[17] On June 18, 2009, PAT's news service ran a report showing supposed footage of the Air France crash that happened nineteen days earlier.