Republic or Plurinational State? | ¿República o Estado Plurinacional?

By Fernando Untoja, Eju.tv:

An Aymara Look at the False Dilemma

State failure does not begin with the Republic, but it becomes consolidated with the Plurinational State. The Republic, despite its structural limits, sought to build a nation-state, a common citizenship, and a shared political identity. Its horizon was imperfect, but modern: legal equality, sovereignty, and national belonging.

The Plurinational State deliberately breaks with that project and replaces it with a recent ideological construction. The plurinational is not an ancestral legacy nor an organic historical demand, but a contemporary political formulation designed from power to reconfigure the State on identity-based foundations. Within this framework, a homogeneous political subject —the “indigenous”— is invented, endowed with abstract virtues and stripped of its real diversity. This operation, typical of a decadent Marxist tradition, turns identity into an instrument of control and fragmentation into public policy.

Beyond its symbolic weight, the plurinational model is institutionally unviable. A State cannot sustain itself on multiple differentiated legal subjects without eroding its own coherence. The coexistence of “nations” with distinct political rights breaks the principle of equality before the law, weakens sovereignty, and fragments state authority. Instead of an integrated institutional system, a mosaic of overlapping autonomies, contradictory norms, and dispersed political loyalties emerges, incompatible with modern governability.

The fiction of the 36 “nations” does not describe social or cultural reality; it instrumentalizes it. Far from correcting historical exclusions, the Plurinational State replaces the State–citizen relationship with a corporate and ethnic logic that dissolves citizenship as a universal category.

The pending historical task is not to deepen this identity engineering, but to promote a change of mentality and articulate a political project that restores —or refounds— the Republic on modern bases: full citizenship, the rule of law, and a social order grounded in universal rights, not in identities fabricated from power.

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