Now La Paz can claim its own cabildo (the link takes you to 21 stories from La Razón). Santa Cruz has had several, including a recent one three weeks ago, to demand regional autonomy. Recently, the media luna (Santa Cruz, Beni, Pando, Tarija, and now perhaps Chuquisaca) opposition have also called for moving the capital back from La Paz to Sucre. So the La Paz cabildo was meant to demand that the Constituent Assembly respect “national unity” & remove moving the capital from the agenda.
By all accounts, the cabildo was incredibly successful (in the sense of getting tens of thousands of people to participate). La Razón has so far refused to give an estimate on attendance, since organizers have given estimates as high as 2.5 million (which would be more than a quarter of the country’s population). But it’s probably as large (if not larger) than the estimated 300,000 who attended the cabildo in Santa Cruz last year. The problem, of course, is that once again we see politics being a game of mass mobilization (and political performance), rather than political bargaining.
For the record, I think moving the capital is a great idea in theory, but a completely unpractical project. In theory, there’s no reason why La Paz has to be the capital (it’s only the capital due to a historical “accident” of sorts);1 and one could make arguments for moving the capital to a more central location (perhaps Cochabamba?). But moving the capital would cost large sums of money the government doesn’t have, not to mention the economic displacement of thousands of government bureaucrats who live in La Paz (a recent report suggested that government was the largest share of La Paz’s GDP). Plus, I doubt Sucre wants to become the new marchodromo (I suspect its experience w/ protesters & the Constituent Assembly may have soured many sucrenses from their desire to reclaim the capital).
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1 La Paz only became the capital after the 1898 Federal War, in which La Paz led the fight against a centralized state, under the banner of federalism. The “federal” forces won (w/ the help of indigenous militias), then promptly moved the capital to La Paz, and set up a centralized state (after exterminating most of their indigenous allies).
PS. More on the cabildo from MABB.
