The results of the population census that Bolivia carried out on March 23 have caused a reaction from the regions and parties opposed to the government of Luis Arce. The Bolivian population is considerably less than the National Institute of Statistics (INE) expected in a projection for 2022. The figure is 11,312,620 inhabitants and not 12 million, as was believed the country should have. This difference, which has economic and political consequences, has disconcerted and angered several of the Bolivian local elites, normally in opposition. On September 2, with a march, protests began in Santa Cruz, the department (region) that is considered most “affected” by the demographic measurement.
In Bolivia, the distribution of tax revenue and the number of deputies depend on the number of inhabitants in each territory. Therefore, these territories want to be as populous as possible, in order to receive more resources and have more representatives in Parliament. For this reason, censuses often cause bitter disputes between the country’s departments, as well as between these and the governments that organize them.
The main political leader of Santa Cruz has spoken of a “census fraud” carried out by the Government of Luis Arce. “There is evidence of a gross manipulation of the census figures, which clearly harms Santa Cruz,” posted the former governor of the department Luis Fernando Camacho, who is in prison on charges of terrorism and conspiracy to overthrow President Evo Morales in 2019.
According to the census, Santa Cruz has 3.1 million people, below the projection of 3.6 million and far from the 4 million established by a “regional census” organized by Santa Cruz institutions last year. At that time, the government stated that this was not a census, but a survey, an inadequate method to quantify a population. It anticipated that it would be used to discredit the national census. The director of the INE, Humberto Arandia, has now insisted that “the estimated” cannot be compared with “the observed.” Santa Cruz is the most populated region in the country, but very close to La Paz.
Representatives from Santa Cruz are raising all kinds of complaints and calling for protests in the streets. They have described what happened as the “theft of a million people from Santa Cruz” and have asked for different types of external audits of the work of the INE. Six months ago, when the census was about to take place, leaders and the media predicted that it would confirm “the power of Santa Cruz” and that the region would obtain four deputies and income of 80 million additional dollars. None of this has come to pass. For example, it is estimated that the Santa Cruz parliamentary group will only increase, from the 28 deputies it has today, to 29, out of a total of 130 legislators. This additional seat will have to be given up by the Chuquisaca region, the territorial nucleus in which Bolivia was founded, today depopulated by the emigration of its people to the agro-industrial east.
The same protest is taking place at the municipal level. The mayors of the capital of Santa Cruz, which with 1.6 million people is the most populous city in the country, and of the city of El Alto, which is the second with 885,045 inhabitants, have complained about how “incomprehensibly little” the population of their cities has grown in the last 12 years, since the previous census in 2012.
Government officials believe that the projected population decline is due to a decline in the fertility rate, which fell from the previously estimated 2.62 children per woman to 2.1 children per woman. This is a Latin American trend caused by cultural and health changes. They also spoke of an increase in the mortality rate due to the recent pandemic. Another reason for the gaps is the habit of urban migrants to travel to their communities of origin on census day. Even so, 55% of the population lives in the capitals and 77% in the so-called “central axis” made up of La Paz, Cochabamba and Santa Cruz. Many rural municipalities have lost population, confirming the existence of an “empty Bolivia” in the poorest area of the country, south of the Andean plateau.
The origin of the census disputes dates back to 1994, when a reform of the State organization defined that the country’s tax pool would be distributed to decentralized governments according to the population of each territory, an indicator that was believed to be more objective and easier to determine than that of unmet needs or poverty.
Due to its growth expectations, Santa Cruz stopped for 36 days in 2022 to ensure that the census was carried out in 2023, something that it ultimately failed to achieve. This region disputes economic leadership with La Paz, the administrative capital of the country, and is a jealous defender of its autonomy from the central government based there. This historical antagonism is also expressed politically: the governors of Santa Cruz have been opposed to the governments of the Movement Towards Socialism of the last two decades, accusing them, among many other things, of favoring La Paz, which is the bastion of the Bolivian left.
Follow all the information from El PAÍS América on Facebook and Xor in our weekly newsletter.
#Protests #Santa #Cruz #census #counted #Bolivians #region
