Municipalities and Terrorism. Impact of Subversive Violence on Local Governments

Evaluating the impact of terrorist violence on local governments raised some prior questions for us: What are local governments? What are their competencies? Where are local governments situated within the State? What type of state do they correspond to? Seeking an answer led us to review the constitutional conception of local governments and their insertion into a system of government. We noted that the decentralist model of state that the 1979 Political Constitution sought to formulate has yet to be developed. In the absence of proposals for a new political legal order, we outline some minimal considerations on the decentralist state, local governments and their democratic mechanisms. Setting aside all juridical-doctrinal considerations that might support it, from 1980 onward local governments have been established in the provincial and district jurisdictions of the country and renewed on two successive occasions. The development of local democracy therefore faces the difficulties inherent to its recent creation — its competencies have not been fully defined, nor are its possibilities recognized. (Excerpt from the preface).