In this column we have been insisting on the need for the Government to need a public force to be configured as a true and authentic departmental government. In the governments of the MAS (Evo Morales and Luis Arce) not only that he has not had the political will to advance and deepen the autonomous process, but have practiced pure and hard centralism. Most departmental authorities seem comfortable with the simple election of authorities and delegation of competences, but without economic resources or their own public force in the case of the Interior.
The Constitution recognizes the Unitary Plurinational State with autonomies, and a territorial division of power, where the executive and legislative bodies of the autonomous governments are part of the distribution and exercise of public power because they are recognized government quality (arts. 269-276). And he defines that “autonomy implies the direct election of its authorities by citizens, the administration of their economic resources, and the exercise of the legislative, regulatory, inspective and executive powers, by their autonomous government bodies in the scope of their jurisdiction and powers and powers.”
Autonomy in general implies the existence of different government levels in the territory: a national government and several autonomous governments, with executive, legislative, regulatory and inspection faculties. The Constitutional Court maintains that autonomy in Bolivia is designed as the governmental quality that a territorial entity – municipal, regional, indigenous, indigenous peasant -, each of them with constitutional rank and hierarchical equality (SCP No. 2055/2012 of October 16). The governmental quality implies the return of state powers – legal, administrative and judicial – to the autonomous entity.
The autonomous powers are based on an act of delegation of public functions of the State. The autonomies regime aims to distribute the political-administrative functions of the State in a balanced and sustainable way in the territory for the effective participation of citizens in decision-making, the deepening of democracy and the satisfaction of collective needs and the integral socioeconomic development of the country. In general, “autonomy” and “self -government”, have been treated as synonyms, and hence the head of the right to autonomy can exercise a certain level of self -government.
The State (the Government is a part) is commissioned to guarantee fundamental rights throughout the national territory. As the State is the guarantor of fundamental rights and citizen security an essential purpose and function contemplated in the Constitution, this competence must be regulated by a special law, according to numeral 13, paragraph II of article 299 of the Constitution. The creation of the Departmental Public Force is even more urgent and necessary given that Santa Cruz has become the Criminal Organizations Barracks in Brazil and other countries.
In this line, each governance must establish its own public force given its status as departmental government, which is essential to enforce its legitimate decisions and resolutions. Thus, for example, in the problem of the Earth in the Bolivian East it has been seen that the governorate, although the Departmental Agrarian Commission presides, is prevented from guaranteeing the proprietary law, executing some eviction, unemployment, etc.
The Constitutional Court has indicated that art. 98 of the LMAD, derives to a special law the regulation of competence on citizen security, an issue that has no disagreement or violates the Political Constitution of the State. And clarifies that the special law, which regulates the concurrent competence of citizen security, will not be confused with the private competence of the central level of the State referring to the Bolivian Police, and that on the contrary the exercise of this competence also falls on other mechanisms that allow to guarantee the regulatory and executive power of the autonomous territorial entities.
