AP News, June 23rd, 2007
National maps give them both a star, but for more than a century, the seat of Bolivia's government has been in high-altitude La Paz. Now Sucre, a provincial lowland city where the highest courts are based, wants the executive and legislative branches as well.
The unlikely proposal plays into a regional rivalry between supporters and opponents of President Evo Morales, with each side accusing the other of trying to carve up the country.
"Listen, the capital is not a piece a bread," Vice President Alvaro Garcia Linera scoffed this week. "It's not a roll or a potato to haggle over or sell."
Garcia dismisses the opposition proposal to move the capital as political rhetoric designed to buy favor for the eastern states' autonomy movement. But it has become one of the most hotly contested issues in the constitutional assembly, now largely divided between representatives from Bolivia's poor western highlands and the more prosperous lowland east.
Four opposition-controlled eastern states want greater autonomy from Bolivia's heavily centralized government. Several petroleum-rich states also want a larger share of the gas revenues they now pass on to La Paz.
Morales has vigorously fought state autonomy, and instead has proposed autonomous regions for 36 different Bolivian indigenous groups.
Sucre, a sleepy colonial gem tucked between dusty hills 255 miles southeast of La Paz, was the site of Bolivia's founding in 1825 and its full-fledged capital until losing a brief civil war to La Paz in 1899. But it hardly has the infrastructure to house the whole government _ the tiny airport, for example, shuts its unlighted runway at dusk.
Eastern states argue that Sucre's central location can better represent the entire country than La Paz, which is on Bolivia's far western edge. Even some Morales sympathizers in the remote and bitterly poor southwestern deserts back the move, hoping to draw more government spending their way.
La Paz residents say switching the capital from Bolivia's largest city, with a metropolitan population of 1.7 million, to Sucre, population 250,000, would cause an expensive logistical train wreck and dig up painful memories of the civil war.
Morales has told his party's constitutional delegates not to touch the topic, and though their slim majority in the assembly will likely kill the proposal, Sucre's quixotic campaign has La Paz backers on the defensive.
