On Saturday in Bolivia, traffic on all the country’s roads will be prohibited, the borders with neighboring nations will be closed, travel by trains, buses and domestic planes will be suspended: the approximately 12 million Bolivians have been invited by the government to stay at home till midnight. This is because Saturday in Bolivia is the day on which the national census is scheduled: it will be the first in over ten years, after it was postponed to 2022, and it is a particularly important event because some aspects of the country’s politics depend on the population count and the distribution of important public funds.
Since 1994 in Bolivia – as in many other countries in the world – part of the state funds has been allocated to municipalities based on the number of inhabitants: depending on the results of the census, cities and municipalities will therefore have more or less money to spend. But the distribution of the 130 seats in the Chamber of Deputies is also linked to the number of inhabitants of each “electoral department”. The new data could change the political balance of the country.
In recent years in Bolivia there has been a strong internal immigration towards the area of Santa Cruz de la Sierra, in the center of the country, a city where economic growth is also greater. Compared to 2012 data, thelast year in which the census was carried out, Santa Cruz is larger and more populous: it will gain funds and electoral weight (that is, it will elect more deputies).
Santa Cruz is also the area of the country where the opposition to the Movimiento al Socialismo party, in power since 2006 and with which the current president Luis Arce and the previous one Evo Morales were elected, is strongest. Morales could run again in the 2025 presidential elections and has criticized the decision to finally organize the census, after strong popular pressure: the albeit limited changes in the distribution of seats could prove quite decisive in the next elections. MAS and its candidate Arce had won the 2020 elections with 55 percent of the votes, but are currently experiencing a strong popularity crisis, also caused by the rivalry between Arce and Morales.
The census should have been held in November 2022, but had been postponed by the National Institute of Statistics (INE) officially due to “technical issues”: it was said that more time was needed to organize it and to “free it from political tensions”. The decision to postpone caused strong protests in the province of Santa Cruz: they lasted 36 days, with road blocks, arrests and even a few dozen injuries. They only ended when the government agreed to organize the census in March, promising to publish the results by September 2024, in time for the Supreme Electoral Tribunal to change the distribution of seats ahead of presidential and parliamentary elections in 2025.
The November 2022 protests in Santa Cruz (AP Photo/Ipa Ibanez)
But the census is also important for economic reasons: 20 percent of state revenue obtained from taxes is redistributed to local authorities based on the number of inhabitants. This measure has allowed many rural centers to receive funds that were almost totally absent in the past, but the rebalancing after the census could put the poorest municipalities in difficulty, which have lost population due to internal immigration.
The operations will last throughout the day on Saturday. Around 820 thousand volunteers will visit more than 5.8 million homes door to door: they will have a QR code, the two-dimensional bar code, through which it will be possible to verify that they are actually appointed by the government, and they will not be able to enter homes but will have to remain at the door . The questionnaire contains 59 questions per family and the estimated time to complete it is approximately 40 minutes.
A view of the Bolivian capital La Paz (AP Photo/Juan Karita)
After carrying out the census, the operators will place a sticker on the door of the house, but the Bolivians already registered will still not be able to leave the house until midnight. Schools remained closed on Friday ahead of the census and will remain closed on Monday in rural areas. The members of the police were registered a day before, in order to monitor the operations on Saturday.
For the census, the celebrations for the “Day of the Sea” were also brought forward, which is celebrated every year on March 23: Bolivia does not have access to the sea, but remembers on this date when it lost it, in a war with Chile in 1879 .