Andean Group - 8 February 2005

President Carlos Mesa's acceptance of the rebellion in Santa Cruz has embarked Bolivia upon a hasty, and inevitably messy, adoption of departmental autonomy - the terms for which have so far been set only by the Cruceño business élite. The constitution will have to be amended at full speed to meet a tight, improvised electoral calendar, which includes a referendum that assumes a partially predetermined result: approval of a still unknown system to devolve powers upon new regional authorities.

When it became clear that on 28 January the Comité Cí­vico Pro Santa Cruz (CCPSC) would unilaterally set up an autonomous government Mesa rushed to preempt it, issuing a call for departmental gubernatorial elections to be held on 12 June and reinterpreting the Cruceño rebellion as not having breached the constitution.

The CCPSC was careful to tiptoe around the letter of the law. It did not establish a new, autonomous government at the public assembly, attended by tens of thousands. Instead it emerged with a mandate, by acclamation, to set up a “provisional assembly" charged with guiding the department towards the adoption of autonomy. The members of this assembly, moreover, were people already holding elected public office: the 25 Cruceños serving as national legislators, the 23 members of the current departmental council, the leaders of the three indigenous groups of Santa Cruz, and the 56 heads of municipal governments. Carlos Hugo Molina, the incumbent, government-appointed prefecto (governor) and himself a Cruceño, resigned clearing the way for an eventual elected successor.

The CCPSC has not yet unveiled a blueprint for the autonomous administration it wants, but it has made clear in the past that it aims to install an assembly with broader legislative powers than the existing departmental council, including the ability to determine the department's share of the oil and gas revenues. The central government is no clearer about what extra autonomy it is prepared to grant the regions, beyond the move from appointed to elected prefectos. Mesa admitted as much when he issued the call for gubernatorial elections: 'We shall have to study in detail what powers, additional to those already vested in the prefecturas, can be given to the departments.'

An aim with many meanings
Achieving a consensus on this will not be easy. The kind of autonomy Santa Cruz is demanding is not the only model around. Similar demands have been made by the Comité Civico de Tarija (CCT), a mirror-organisation of the CCPSC established in Santa Cruz that holds the bulk of the gas reserves. Chuquisaca, partly sandwiched between the two, is divided: geography and history link a big portion of this department with the highlands. The other two departments usually included in the Media Luna ('Crescent'), northern Beni and Pando, have sprouted different models of regional rearrangement. One that has gained a substantial following is the notion of linking up the Amazonian portion of Bolivia, which stretches into the north of Santa Cruz and provides the fanlike network of river outlets for the coca grown just south of them.

Associations of municipalities, known as mancomunidades, have been established across departmental boundaries, pointing to the existence of common interests not well served by the current administrative map. In the recent municipal elections the dominant new force, dramatically displacing the established political parties, was the array of civic associations closely in touch with local needs and with Bolivia's first big experiment in decentralisation. They have little sympathy for the existing, centrally appointed departmental government, but are not keen to see this replaced by centralism at departmental level.

Also part of the picture is an entirely different demand for autonomy: that of the indigenous communities, most forcibly expressed by Felipe Quispe's proposal to recreate the old Aymara domain which includes portions of both Bolivia and Peru as a new entity called Collasuyo, after one of the 'corners' of the Inca empire. And partially overlapping the ethnic element are the common interests of the coca-growers, whose 'territory' has spread out from the Yungas valleys north of La Paz down across northern Cochabamba and, more recently, into Santa Cruz.

All of this was meant to be thrashed out at the constituent assembly, scheduled to emerge from elections which the mayors of Bolivia's main cities have asked congress to call within 60 days - more than a month earlier than the initial tentative date of 8 May. Even if the electoral authority could manage this, it would not give the constituent assembly much time to agree on a blueprint for regional autonomies, let alone a whole new constitution (including such things as the status of the country's hydrocarbons), before the 12 June elections of departmental governors.

That is not the only problem. Whatever constitutional reforms are approved by the constituent assembly must be ratified by the whole electorate in a referendum. In order to avoid having governors elected before the autonomy provisions are fully enacted, the mayors and a number of politicians have been proposing that the gubernatorial elections and constitutional referendum take place on the same day. 

This does not completely solve the problem, but it preserves a semblance of legal propriety. Unavoidably, the new governors will end up ruling not autonomous departments or regions but areas in the process of becoming autonomous, with hastily concocted rules to guide them. Given Bolivia's social and political volatility, this is not a comforting thought.

Calls for prudence
The president of the chamber of deputies, Mario Cossí­o, has been urging a slower, more deliberate pace. What is needed, he says, “is to discriminate the logical sequencing of a process which must conclude in a profound reform of the Bolivian state." Cossí­o, wary of the problems that haste might bring, says, 'Each issue demands specific treatment: I don't know if putting it all into a single bag is in the country's best interests.'

The main problem, says Cossí­o, is Mesa's call for gubernatorial elections on 12 June, which forces the whole schedule to be reorganised to accommodate them. Personally, he adds, he is not sure that the debate on regional autonomy has 'matured' enough to make June the key deadline. Cossí­o, it should be noted, belongs to the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR), the party which took the heaviest battering in the municipal elections.

He is hardly the only one calling for prudence. Williams Paniagua, president of the constitutional committee (also MNR), is advocating a two-step approach: first a referendum on autonomy, accompanied by the election of governors, and secondly, at a later date, the election of a constituent assembly, which will have a far more comprehensive remit.