Regionalist mobilization and new regional powers: the administrative fragmentation of Viejo Caldas and the creation of Risaralda

Abstract

This paper looks to an approach to the process of creation of Risaralda’s department in 1966 and to the establishment of a new regional power rooted in the formation and performance of a regionalist mobilization. The paper arises the movement’s efficiency as an instance of the existence of a diferenciated social space, in which a new elite with particular features of solidarity, identity and cohesion obtained to  dominate the power’s balances and to establish a political and social power legitimated by an identity discourse.