The dialogue between protesters and the Government on carrying out a census fails

First modification: 10/23/2022 – 05:44

The desire for dialogue did not prosper in Bolivia. The Government and the Committee for the 2023 Census ended the negotiating table. A decision that occurs amid tensions between opponents and government officials that have led to clashes in which at least one person died. At the same time, the most populous region of the country, Santa Cruz, has entered an indefinite strike.

This Saturday the Minister of the Presidency, María Nela Prada, and the spokesperson for the Presidency, Jorge Richter, met to seek solutions to the tensions with the Governor of Santa Cruz, Luis Fernando Camacho, one of the main opponents of the Government, and other members of the Census Promotion Committee.

The disagreements in the meeting occurred before the demand of the Committee to carry out the census next year and that the results be delivered within a maximum period of 180 days. The refusal of the government representatives was immediate, asserting that the reason for the meeting was not the decision of a date for the process.

Despite the fact that Camacho appreciated the willingness of the country’s leadership to dialogue, he considered as “lack of respect” the counterpart’s proposal to “propose a new or complementary supreme decree that does not establish the date of the census ”, so he decided to get up from the table. Following him were the other members of the Committee who, before abandoning the dialogue, also made known their disagreement with what was proposed.

Given this gesture, the Minister of the Presidency stressed that the responsibility for what happens in the indefinite strike will fall on those who turned their backs on the talks. María Nela Prada also argued that they would continue to insist on dialogue.

Unemployment in the Santa Cruz region

The governor of Santa Cruz, the opposition Luis Fernando Camacho called for an indefinite strike starting this Saturday. The strike will include street blockades and mobilizations to ask for the census to be carried out next year.

The clashes between both sides left one deceased as a result. The AFP news agency reported strong street clashes since dawn, in which the victim, identified as Pablo Taborga, was attacked with sticks, for which he was admitted to a local hospital, where he later died.

The wife of the deceased told the local press that the demonstrators promoting the strike “arrived with homemade bombs and sticks and at one point they beat him with sticks among several.” For his part, the president, Luis Arce, condemned the violence on his twitter account.

Santa Cruz, the nation’s economic stronghold, is expected to lose at least $20 million a day due to the shutdown.

The causes of the crisis

The National Census is the common factor in the confrontation between opponents and pro-government supporters. The decision of the Government to postpone the realization of this exacerbated the spirits of the Civic Committee of the department of Santa Cruz, leader of the actions that gave truncated the re-election of Evo Morales and that finally led to his subsequent resignation in 2019, who was joined by other groups.

The process of calculating population and housing is key when it comes to distributing tax revenue and assigning seats in Parliament. The key is that the most populous region of Bolivia, which has already experienced episodes with separatist desires during the Morales mandate, knows that, if the process is carried out in 2023, the results must be taken into account for the 2025 elections with the sum of a small number of deputies.

The justification for its postponement by the Arce administration was the health emergency, the quality of the data, and the need to depoliticize the process.

With EFE and local media