Bolivia faces a census that threatens to inflame political polarization

Counting the population of a country should be a technical activity, but in Bolivia it is deeply political.

The reason is as simple as it is forceful: the distribution of public resources depends on the number of people who inhabit each municipality and department (region) of the country.

That is why the population and housing census that will be carried out this March 23 has provoked rhetorical battles, social conflicts and, these days, the return of many families of peasant origin from the cities to their communities of origin.

In the midst of the conflict, President Luis Arce assured that it will be “the best census in the history of Bolivia.”

The measurement will determine how far the loss of native languages ​​has progressed, such as Aymara, Quechua and Guaraní, which according to the last census, in 2012, were spoken by 2.8 million of the 10 million Bolivians registered at that time.

At that time, 3.2 million people self-identified as indigenous.

Now it will be known whether this percentage has increased or decreased, which has political implications because there is a movement to reject the declaration of the country as a Plurinational State, which has been based on the strongly indigenous character of the population.

At the same time, historical discrimination discourages people from presenting themselves as indigenous.

In the days before the census, instructions were circulated to answer “no” to the questions about whether the interviewee is part of an indigenous people and speaks native languages.

Simultaneously, a group has asked that the Aymaras not be afraid to show themselves as such.

For the opposition, the questionnaire is biased because it does not include the “mestizo” identity.

The National Institute of Statistics (INE) has responded that this identity is not useful for guiding public policies, which is what the census seeks.

Several rural municipalities in Chuquisaca, a region in the center of the country, have rented buses and organized sports championships and artistic evenings with monetary prizes to stimulate the return, during the census, of their former residents who migrated to urban areas, especially to the dynamic Santa Cruz de la Sierra.

The impoverished fields of Chuquisaca are part of the “empty Bolivia”, where the levels of emigration are alarming.

The cities have fought back.

For example, Enrique Leaño, the mayor of Sucre, the historic capital of the country, set up a “neighborhood control” to detect and sanction with fewer works the neighborhoods in which “desertion” of inhabitants is observed.

That is, in neighborhoods where, at the time of the census, the usual residents have gone to other places.

The interplay of emotional pressures and threats of sanctions from both sides has put many families of indigenous origin in trouble.

Some have chosen to split up to comply with their neighborhood councils, which require them to remain in urban centers, and simultaneously not have problems with the authorities of their communities of origin, who ask them to return to register there.

The origin of this problem dates back to 1994, when a reform of the organization of the State defined that the country's tax pool be distributed to the decentralized governments according to the population of each territory, an indicator that was believed to be more objective and easier. to determine that of unmet needs or poverty.

The distribution of deputies, whose number is fixed, also depends on the same population criterion.

For both reasons, it is expected that there will be conflicts when the census results are known towards the end of this year.

It is anticipated that the growth of the agroindustrial region of Santa Cruz will cause the loss of resources and councils to several mountainous departments of the country, which are poorer and are considered chronic expellers of population.

A Santa Cruz newspaper headlined “The census is expected to confirm the power of Santa Cruz” and predicted that this region will have four more deputies and will receive an additional 80 million dollars.

Santa Cruz stopped for 36 days in 2022 to ensure that the census was carried out in 2023, something that in the end was not achieved.

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 opponents of the leftist governments of the last two decades.

Civic leaders in the region have shown distrust about the transparency of the census.

They fear that this could be manipulated to reduce the population weight of Santa Cruz.

That is why they organized their own “regional census” last year, after which they claimed to have reached the figure of four million inhabitants.

The Government has rejected this result and denounced that Santa Cruz did not carry out a census, but rather a survey, an inadequate method to quantify a population.

Some analysts think that the sure contrast that there will be between the figure obtained by the census, which will probably be 3.7 million, and the figure of four million Santa Cruz residents defended by the civic movement of this region will serve to make it and the political opposition accuse Arce of “setting up a fraud,” with the aim of generating conflicts for his management.

The president recovered his health by declaring that he should not expect “major surprises regarding the population.”

Arce said that he did not believe that Bolivians were many more than those projected by the INE: 12.3 million.

“What is going to be interesting is to see the composition of that population and above all to see the quality of housing and the needs they have,” he explained.

To carry out the census, 845,000 volunteers will be mobilized who will apply a ballot with 59 questions, 10 more than in the 2012 census. According to the Government, the cartography that has been prepared especially for this process has been the best the country has had to date. now, which guarantees that the results will be more accurate.

In addition to demographic issues, the number of people who died from Covid will be quantified and the housing conditions of all Bolivians will be surveyed.

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