Something pretty earth-shaking took place in Callanca on September 26. A letter arrived from the Provincial Government announcing that it was ordering elections to be held in Callanca for a mayor and city council. That means that Callanca will be metamorphizing from a Centro Poblado into a Municipalidad.
It’s hard to explain to an American what that actually means since there are no Municipalidades in America. Or it would better to say that everyplace is a Municipalidad in the U.S. Even the tiniest towns have a mayor and some form of town government. It’s not that way in Perú. Most towns are very small caseríos with little or nothing in the way of what we would call a government., sometimes not even a school. They depend entirely on the Distrito, which is sort of like what we’d call a very small county in the U.S. I’m not sure what the official definition of a caserío is, but judging from the ones I’ve seen I’d say it’s a community of fewer than 1,000. Communites slightly larger qualify as Centro Poblados. Most Centro Poblados are also dependent on the government and budget of their Distrito and don’t have a mayor (alcalde), city council (regidores) or courthouse (municipio), police station (comisaría), park (plaza) or much of anything else of their own. They’re sort of like a neighborhood within a city: an identifiable entity, often with its own name, but with no autonomy of any kind.
The caseríos and centro poblados are sort of like satellites of a larger city that’s a Municipalidad Distrital or Distrito or, in English, obviously, “district.”
In Perú they divide up geography and to some extent government in this way: Departamento (think “state”), Province (a concept that doesn’t exist in the U.S. but imagine Northern California and Southern California with their own independent governments), Distrito (something like “county”), Centro Poblado (maybe “township” would be close) and Caserío (Podunk or Wide Place in the Road). In terms of government as opposed to geography those last three are often lumped together as a Distrito (“district”), a largish city of maybe 30,000, one or two Centro Poblados of 1–5,000 people and several tiny caseríos. But if a Centro Poblado has enough population and independence it can solicit from its Provincial Government and District Government permission to become its own Municipalidad and elect its own officials and begin to take charge of its own institutions—schools, police, sanitation, etc. “Municipalidad” is a term that exists solely at the level of government, not as a geographical term. That is, Monsefú (our Distrito) is both a Distrito and a Municipalidad; Callanca will be both a Centro Poblado and a Municipalidad. “Municipalidad” indicates the presence of a government, a mayor and a council. So Callanca will be what’s called a Municipalidad de Centro Poblado. One day, if it acquires the requisite institutions and services, it can become its own Distrito. But first things first.
In order to hold elections we have to register everyone over 18 to vote. This is no simple task. Here one’s vote is a much more important right and duty than in the U.S., where we offer people the opportunity to register to vote and if you don’t register, tough luck, you don’t vote and that’s your loss. But in Perú you get fined if you don’t vote and the goal is to achieve 100% participation the process. There’s even a line about voting in the national anthem, “y antes niegue sus luces el sol, que faltemos el voto solemne.” The sun will give up its right to shine before we give up our right to vote. This makes the job of registering voters a lot more difficult. We have to go door to door and write down the names of everyone in the house eighteen or older and their DNI, national identification-card number. This is exactly as difficult as it sounds and as difficult as it would be in your town were you required to go door to door and write down everyone’s name and social security number. What are the odds that they’ll all be home at the same time or that the ones at home will know the SS#s of those who aren’t at home? So we leave a blank form and ask people to write down names and DNIs and we come back a day or two later and pick up the forms. When we finish with a house we put a sticker on the door, “casa empadronada.”
This would be slow and tedious but not impossible in a town of 5,000 in the U.S. We’d divide up streets and neighborhoods among the available election workers, hand out the forms, pick up the forms and cross the addresses off our list. But this is Perú. In Callanca there are no street names, much less house numbers. The election workers forget to take tape or stickers with them and so don’t mark the houses that have been empadronado, they fill in the names of the people in the houses but don’t write down their DNI, they skip houses, they don’t empadronar houses in order, they forget in which houses they left blank forms and so never go back to pick them up, they write down names and DNIs of people under 18 years of age, and they generally advance a process that’s a textbook example of entropy if not outright chaos.
Since other Centro Poblados in Perú have achieved Municipalidad status, I’m assuming we’ll somehow get through this registration ordeal. Here things frequently work out in unexpected ways. A few weeks or months from now someone might say, “Oh yeah, I forgot, we can ask the government for a list of the DNIs of everybody in Callanca.” Things have to work out in unexpected ways because expectations as we know them are few and far between. Planning just does not happen here. Other volunteers have told me that it’s a product of our educations that we’re able to imagine outcomes abstractly and to have faith in those abstractions. “This is a design for a business card. It will cost you 50 soles to print 500 of these. If you print the business card and hand it out to potential customers, some of them will call you back and order artesanía because they will remember meeting you and seeing the quality of your artesanía and the picture on the card will remind them of you and your products and the list of services printed on the card will remind them of the kinds of artesanía you produce. If you get even one order thanks to the cards, the income from that order will pay for printing the cards. So print the cards!” That argument makes sense to us. We can imagine the steps involved and we see the business cards as a wise investment. We’ve also seen business cards and other forms of promotion work for other people. But often people in Callanca, because they only may have finished second or third grade, don’t have much confidence in predictions. They would rather spend the 50 soles on materials and buy enough materials to produce 200 soles worth of artesanía that they can sell right now instead of spending the 50 soles on business cards and generating potentially thousands of soles worth of income in the long term. When we were petitioning for the Municipalidad, a woman in Chiclayo who runs a major tour company and who was helping us with the campaign for a Municipalidad actually put forth the proposition that we should be able to collect 4,000 signatures in a week. Clearly she was not envisioning the steps in the process. After a month of work we managed to collect fewer than 500 signatures. And then it turned out that we didn’t need the signatures anyway, the Municipalidad was approved without the submission of any petitions.
A recently formed Municpalidad de Centro Poblado near Callanca, Pampa Grande, also a community of 5,000 people, took three months to complete its voter registration and about 1,300 of the 2,500 or so eligible voters managed to register and vote in their elections. So I’m expecting a similar result here in Callanca.
In spite of the headaches, I’m proud to have been a part of the process of forming the Municipalidad. It’s something that nearly everyone in Callanca wants and has wanted for years. My counterparts in the community understand the legal ins and outs of the formation of the Municipalidad much better than I do and so they did the great majority of the work in petitioning for the Municipalidad. At the same time I made significant contributions to the project, including carrying the paperwork to the Municipalidad Distrital and presenting it to the Alcaldesa and participating in the meeting with the Alcaldesa that led to her eventually approving the formation of the Municipalidad de Callanca. I’d been in many such meetings where unlimited promises were made and zero results ensued (and we gringos are good at imagining disappointing outcomes as well as profitable ones) so it was I who thought to ask for a document at the end of the meeting, a document expressly stating that the District was recommending that the process of forming a Municipalidad de Callanca move forward. This, according to the Peace Corps Handbook, is how Peace Corps is supposed to work. The needs arise from the community and the community—with the volunteer working alongside them and pestering them and complaining and warning them about the terrible things that are going to happen if they fail to plan well—satisfies its own needs. That way when the volunteer leaves the needs of the community can continue to be met and the voice of Carlitos—complaining and pestering and warning and saying if you don’t plan well terrible things are going to happen to you—stays with them forever. For better or for worse.
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