albro-blar-bolindigpol.pdf

The Indigenous in the Plural inBolivian Oppositional Politics

ROBERT ALBRO

Program on Culture in Global Affairs, The George WashingtonUniversity

This article examines how currents of Bolivia’s indigenous movement

are gravitating to the city and to the centre of national political life,

capitalising on popular sentiment against the political status quo, eco-

nomic privatisation and violations of national sovereignty. The

Movement Toward Socialism led by Evo Morales does not promote

a separatist ethno-national project; instead, it uses regional, national

and international coalition building to equate indigenous with non-

indigenous issues through resonant political analogies that frame

Bolivia’s national crisis of political legitimacy in terms of indigenous

rights, while making common cause with diverse urban popular sectors

who, if not indigenous, recognise their indigenous cultural heritage as a

crucial background to their own struggles against disenfranchisement.

Keywords: Bolivia, indigenous movements, sovereignty, coalition build-

ing, pluralism, nationalism.

This fight is not only for the defence of the coca leaf or of the land and

territory . . . but also it carries the demands of all social sectors. (Estado

Mayor del Pueblo [‘People’s High Command’], 2003)

From an indigenist seed – the origin of which was the demand for sover-

eignty, land and territory – the intuition of coca growers has now been

transformed into the spokesperson for the discord of this amorphous social

movement. (Orduna, 2002)

In recent years, successive socially plural but issue-based popular coalitions, largely

driven by an assertive indigenous leadership, have been remarkably successful at

mobilising ordinary Bolivians in very large numbers. These coalitions have effectively

used the strategies of direct action protest to apply public pressure to the downsized,

typically indecisive, multiparty governments of Bolivia’s ‘pacted democracy’ (Gamarra,

1996). ‘Indigenous rights’ have become a fundamental articulatory issue for the protest

efforts that ousted erstwhile President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada in October 2003

and that continued to pressure his successor Carlos Mesa. In a country where the

majority shares an indigenous heritage, indigenous-based politics have lately gained

# 2005 Society for Latin American Studies. Published by Blackwell Publishing,9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. 433

Bulletin of Latin American Research, Vol. 24, No. 4, pp. 433–453, 2005

national ground not through promoting ethno-nationalist separatism but by ceding the

formerly exclusive category of ‘Indian’ to a pluralist and urban-based project of

refounding the Bolivian State. These developments signal an important watershed for

the ‘political culture of social mobilisation’ (Albo, 1996) in neoliberal Bolivia, as

indigenous-inspired claims have led to new articulations of culture with class across

diverse social sectors.

In the most recent census of 2001, 62 per cent of Bolivian adults declared themselves

to be indigenous. But the proportion of people of indigenous descent in Bolivia is

greater than censuses indicate. Urbanites have not been in the habit of declaring their

indigenous heritage. The Bolivian national project underway since the Revolution of

1952 has assumed the disappearance of indigenous identity. This process of so-called

mestizaje meant assimilation into a desired culturally and ethnically mixed middle class

destined to live in cities (Rivera, 1993; Larson, 1998). As a result, citizenship rights

could only be enjoyed by ‘conforming to a homogeneous mestizo ideal’ (Hale, 2004:

16) and were thus incompatible with claims to culturally specific collective rights.

Access to the state for indigenous peoples was channelled through relations of patron-

age and clientage using the idiom of class, as with the ‘proletarian’ miners. ‘Bruto

indio’ remained everywhere a predominantly backward, rural and insulting term of

reference when used in the present tense, even while the arts and letters of indigenismo

celebrated in print the past greatness of the Inca and Tiwanaku civilisations as the

direct ancestors of the modern Bolivian State (Salmon, 1997).

Despite achieving citizenship after the Revolution of 1952, Bolivia’s indigenous

majority – as Indians – has continued to be systematically excluded from direct access

to the nation’s public political life. For the kataristas of the late 1970s,1 an earlier

incarnation of Bolivia’s contemporary indigenous movement, the solution was to

embrace the goal of indigenous self-determination as a distinct ‘indigenous nation’

within the pluri-national Bolivian State. This political effort assumed that self-

identification coincided with communal indigenous practices and experiences, which

were distinct in time and place from Spanish-descended and European-inspired urban

Bolivia. This goal is still alive and well in some quarters. Felipe Quispe – current

congressman, executive secretary of the national agrarian union and the most publicly

militant among indigenous Aymara leaders – regularly refers to the fact of ‘two

Bolivias’ (Albo, 2003: 16), pointedly underscoring the racism and inequalities of its

‘q’aracracia’, a pun that combines ‘q’ara’ (‘plucked’, ‘bare’ or ‘hairless’ in Aymara and

Quechua, meaning ‘white person’) with ‘democracia’. But in the present environment of

economic globalisation and transnational capital, regular calls for self-determination

acquire new and forceful meanings for displaced, urban, indigenous and also indigenous-

descended popular sectors, encouraging indigenous and popular organisations to make

common cause, in ways that neither reproduce the mestizaje of the past nor insist upon

a separate indigenous nation for the future.

The passage of the 1994 Popular Participation Law presented new possibilities for

indigenous inclusion, in the terms and language of Bolivian State reform, through a

1 The kataristas’ name comes from the late eighteenth century neo-Incan rebel TupajKatari (Albo, 1987).

Robert Albro

434 # 2005 Society for Latin American Studies

new constitutional definition of Bolivia as ‘multiethnic and pluri-cultural’. Analysts

have been sceptical about the supposed pluralism of these multicultural states, includ-

ing Bolivia, arguing that they offer political recognition to indigenous peoples as a

means of converting and assimilating them into the nation-state as hierarchically

subordinate ‘intercultural citizens’ or ‘indigenous citizens’ (Postero, 2000; Medeiros,

2001). As such, multicultural reforms work, above all, as instruments of governmen-

tality serving a new project of nation building, articulated from above and failing to

address lingering questions of social justice, inequity and exclusion from below.

Multiculturalism in this sense is understood as a way for governments to use cultural

rights ‘to divide and domesticate Indian movements’ (Hale, 2004: 17).

But such swords can be double-edged. If not a road to ‘two Bolivias’, multicultural

reform does open the door for other indigenous leaders such as Evo Morales to take the

Bolivian nation to task for not living up to its commitments to its citizens, among

which they definitely include themselves. This type of indigenous critique fully exploits

the top-down legal pluralism of Latin American nation-states in the 1990s, but with

very different goals for national participation, beginning with the promise of using

local government as a tool for political change. The Popular Participation Law of 1994

created a total of 311 local municipalities, with new responsibilities as well as budgets.

In 1997, at least 464 indigenous candidates won municipal office, making up 29 per

cent of the national total (Albo, 2002: 82). The numbers rose in 2002. If critics

assumed the law would weaken the power of local unions, in many cases it has also

allowed indigenous authorities to become elected local officials and enabled indigenous

political efforts to control municipal politics in some regions, most obviously the coca-

growing Chapare region of Evo Morales. This sort of local political control has

translated into greater impact on national elections for indigenous concerns. But at

the same time, and as I develop below, what ‘indigenous’ entails has also been changing

shape rapidly in recent years.

In the early months of 2000, the combined efforts of ‘peasant’ irrigators, urban

middle-class professionals, labour unions, environmentalists, students, coca growers

and the recently in-migrating urban poor living in marginal barrios won Bolivia’s

so-called Water War by forcing the government to renege on its questionable behind-

closed-doors deal with the consortium Aguas de Tunari (in which Bechtel has a

controlling interest) to purchase the city of Cochabamba’s water works. Coalition

leader Oscar Olivera, although not himself indigenous, nevertheless publicly pro-

claimed water to be sacred, because it was ‘tied to traditional beliefs for rural people

since the time of the Incas’. The Cochabamba coalition later participated in the drafting

of an ‘Indigenous Declaration of Water’ in British Columbia. A rallying point for this

cross-sector and largely city-based movement was the defence of the use and distribu-

tion of water as a collective cultural heritage based on indigenous rights, or ‘usos y

costumbres’ [customary law] (Laurie, Andolina and Radcliffe, 2002; Albro, 2005), as

enshrined in Bolivia’s new multicultural constitution.

The Water War re-emerged on new fronts in 2003. During ‘Black February’, and

again during the Gas War of September and October, oppositional coalitions prevailed

in their aims. They first obliged the President to back down on his proposed application

of an International Monetary Fund-prescribed 12.5 per cent income tax increase. They

Indigenous in the Plural

# 2005 Society for Latin American Studies 435

subsequently forced the government to abandon its plan to pipe Bolivian natural gas

through Chile to the US. During this most recent round of protests, direct action led by

the Coalition in Defence of Gas brought together street vendors, farmers, miners,

workers’ unions, students, teachers and neighbourhood committees, primarily in the

immigrant city of El Alto, known as ‘the Aymara capital of the world’ (Gill, 2000: 39)

and the centre of conflict. Following October’s victory and while in Mexico City, Evo

Morales asserted that, ‘What has happened in recent days in Bolivia is a great revolt,

after being humiliated for more than 500 years’ (Morales, 2003a). In subsequent

months, he has driven the point home: ‘After more than 500 years, we, the Quechuas

and Aymaras, are still the rightful owners of this land’ (Morales, 2003c). Felipe Quispe,

in turn, hailed the ouster of the President as one step nearer to the goal of ‘self-

determination’ for Bolivia’s ‘indigenous nation’. Though fought mostly in cities, and

mostly by urban social actors, the Gas War, in short, was definitively celebrated by

popular leaders as a victory for indigenous Bolivia, albeit variously understood. We are

now witness to indigenous issues gravitating to the centre of Bolivian life, if not in the

terms we might imagine. The precedent of the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS)

helps us to recognise that indigenous advocacy in Bolivia now takes the form of

broader – and plural – civil society coalitions rather than pursuing a marginal, if

more exclusively autonomous, identity politics of its own.

In the 2002 presidential elections, Evo Morales was transformed into the national

figure with perhaps the largest public following. His MAS candidacy finished a stun-

ning second, with almost 21 per cent of the vote, a hair’s breadth behind Sanchez de

Lozada’s National Revolutionary Movement (MNR) – the closest to a dominant party

in Bolivia since the Revolution of 1952 – with 22.5 per cent of the vote. The MAS took

four of nine departments, 27 congressional seats and eight of the 27 senatorial seats.

Over 50 of the 157 seats in Bolivia’s legislature now belong to its ‘original inhabitants’

and ‘indigenous peoples’, or self-described Quechua, Aymara and Guaranı Indians.

Morales and his allies stood to control up to 40 per cent of congress, a startling

turnabout in this historically elitist chamber. As one current government minister

noted, ‘There are more indigenous representatives in congress than anywhere else in

Latin America’ (Calla, 2004). Evo Morales has insisted that for his MAS to be the

‘primary political force in Bolivia’, it would not necessarily need to win the presidency

in 2007, but, rather, up to 70 per cent of the local municipalities in the elections of

December 2004 (Los Tiempos, 2003a). In those elections, the MAS indeed emerged as

Bolivia’s most important political party, winning a total of 452 municipal seats nation-

wide and more than twice as many votes as its nearest competitor (Los Tiempos, 2004).

Indigenous rights now inform an inclusive language of cultural citizenship characteris-

ing social protest and indigenous legislative efforts in Bolivia.

The most compelling question, then, becomes: considering their historically mar-

ginal position, why have indigenous issues recently taken their place among the most

pressing concerns of current, largely urban, massive street protests in Bolivia? In the

discussion to follow, I use the case of the MAS to explore the convergence of shared

popular experiences in the neoliberal era, noting the new utility of the discourse of

indigenous rights, the changing role of indigenous heritage, the intersection of national

with indigenous issues and the international popularity of indigenous causes, all of

Robert Albro


which provide a cross-cutting appeal and urgency to protest efforts now no longer

dismissively relegated to the ‘Indian question’.2

Coca-Grower Roots

The origins of the MAS, as an electoral instrument, can only be understood in the

context of the longer term history of cocalero [coca grower] militancy from the

Chapare resettlement zone, at least since the early to mid-1980s (for the history of

coca growing, see Healy, 1988, 1991; Gamarra, 1994; Leons and Sanabria, 1997). The

position of the MAS as both a social movement and a legislative opposition to the

MNR-led coalition government in 2002–2003 was a direct result of prior years of

coca-grower organising. This took the form of networked local agrarian unions,

determined to resist a US-backed and US-funded Bolivian State policy of eradication

of coca leaf production in the Chapare, as most recently orchestrated by the Banzer

administration’s Dignity Plan.

The Chapare’s coca growers have been the objects of a decades-long low-intensity

war, claiming at least 67 coca growers’ lives since 1987, with many more injured.3 As a

strategy of US international drug policy, at least since the US Operation Blast Furnace

in 1986, a panoply of US and Bolivian police, military and special forces have operated

at different times in the Chapare and aggressively pursued the eradication of the zone’s

production of coca leaf, the active ingredient in cocaine. The earliest of these forces was

the US-trained Mobile Rural Patrol Units (UMOPAR), created in 1983 to function

as an elite mobile paramilitary to control Chapare drug trafficking (Williams, 1997:

26–27). Forces introduced more recently like the Joint Task Force have been repeatedly

cited for human rights violations, especially their tactics of beatings, arbitrary or illegal

detentions, indiscriminate use of intimidation and the shooting and killing of unarmed

civilians.

The Banzer government’s Dignity Plan, initiated in 1997 and described as an ‘all-

out, no-holds-barred approach’ (Ledebur, 2002: 2) to the prevention, eradication and

interdiction of coca growing, renewed hostilities and greatly increased the pressure-

cooker atmosphere of the Chapare. Thirty-three coca growers have been killed and

over 1000 either injured or detained to date (Ledebur, 2005: 144–145). Building on

Bolivia’s Dignity Plan, in 2001, the US initiated a new Plan Colombia, which ear-

marked a $1.3 billion package of mostly military aid for the Andean region, with the

basic goal of drug control at the source in Colombia, Peru and Bolivia, through

eradication, fumigation and, finally, interdiction (Walker, 2001). The Plan Colombia

2 The ‘Indian question’ is a phrase from an earlier generation of policy thinking inspiredby indigenismo, not only in Bolivia, but also in Mexico, Peru, Ecuador and elsewhere.These policies grappled with how to bring Indians more into national life, even as theyexpressed a paternalistic impulse to manage Indians’ affairs for them.

3 For the period 1987 to 2001, Ledebur (2002: 15) and other observers have documented57 deaths, although some accounts run as high as 300 lives lost (Rocha, 2002). In 2002and 2003, five more deaths were recorded respectively, making a documented total of67 (Ledebur, personal communication 2004).



increases the militarisation of the Andean region, at the same time as it ropes the

ongoing US War on Drugs into the War on Terror in the hemisphere. For two decades,

then, day-to-day existence for the members and leadership of the Six Federations of

Coca Growers of the Tropics has been characterised by an antagonistic relationship to

the State and by constant efforts to cope with government impunity and violent

incursions into their communities.

As part of the State’s project to transform the largely uninhabited lowlands into an

economic asset, peasant unions were first organised in the Chapare with the 1953

Agrarian Reform, in order to facilitate the legalisation of land claims for new settlers

and to address new community needs. From 1976 to 1992, the population of the

Chapare more than tripled to 108,276 (INE, 1992). Population growth was fuelled

by the steady arrival of ex-miners as a result of the 1985 closing of COMIBOL,

Bolivia’s national mining corporation, perhaps the most controversial of the govern-

ment’s austerity measures. In fact, the majority of the Chapare’s coca growers are

originally from elsewhere. During the 1960s and 1970s, local unions formed into

federations, currently represented by the Six Federations of Coca Growers of the

Tropics (around 35,000 strong).

With the early institutional absence of the Bolivian State in the region, agrarian

unions became a collective form of local governance responsible for the distribution of

land grants, the establishment of boundaries, the building of small-scale public works

and the maintenance of the scales of exchange for the market, as well as the manage-

ment of market outlets for coca and other products produced in the Chapare.

Subsequent State efforts to isolate the coca growers helped feed a cocalero militancy,

galvanising the internal unity of local unions already so intrinsic to the daily life of the

Chapare. This militancy was also encouraged by the arrival of ex-miners to the

Chapare in large numbers after 1985, bringing with them their own radical union

tradition and long history of resistance to State oppression. Since 1988, the Six

Federations of the Chapare have been led by Evo Morales, elected in 2003 to his

fifth consecutive term as the general secretary. Leadership of the Chapare’s coca

growers has undeniably been his passport to national politics, with the coca growers

as the social base and radical vanguard of the MAS.

With the collapse of class-based political options during the era of neoliberal multi-

culturalism, strategies of dissent based on cultural identity are now more important for

the struggle of the cocaleros, who have self-consciously framed their conflict with the

State in terms of a tradition of radical Andean cultural alterity. Coca growers have

articulated their goals with those of the hemisphere’s indigenous movments, namely

self-determination, autonomy, recognition of cultural distinctiveness, political restruc-

turing of the state, territorial rights, access to natural resources and greater control over

their own local economic development (Warren and Jackson, 2002: 7). Since approxi-

mately 1985, the Chapare federations have supplanted the highland Aymara kataristas

as the main vanguard of Bolivia’s national agrarian union movement, the CSUTCB,

commanding influence in the national union hierarchy of the Central Obrera Boliviana.

To draw sharp distinctions between ‘peasantries’ and ‘indigenous communities’ in the

Chapare is to ignore the ways that cocaleros promote both peasant agriculturalist and

indigenous cultural agendas as situations warrant.

Robert Albro


However, human rights groups and anthropologists focus upon the coca growers more

in terms of the question of ‘poverty’ (Kohl and Farthing, 2001; Potter and Ibarrola, 2003;

Farthing, 2004). Until such time as an alternative is offered, they point out, coca growers

are justified in making a living as displaced casualties of failed State economic policies.

This is conspicuously apparent with the failures of the state-directed or U.S. Agency for

International Developement-promoted alternative development programs. Coca growers,

according to human rights activists, are not drug traffickers. They are mainly referred to

as poor ‘subsistence farmers’, ‘small-scale peasant farmers’ or ‘landless small holders’.

Despite the widespread use of indigenous Andean languages and symbols of identity by

coca growers in their mass protest rallies, reference to ‘class’ – and treating ‘coca growers’

as ‘poor farmers’ – has been the primary means used to publicise the rights of coca

growers by the international community. If among themselves the Chapare coca growers

often self-identify as ‘campesinos’ [peasant agriculturalists], nationally and internationally

coca growers highlight their indigenous heritage. Meanwhile, cocaleros present them-

selves to the international community, as representatives of Bolivia’s (and the hemi-

sphere’s) indigenous movements, encompassing ‘class’ with ‘culture’. This is at once an

expression of the influence of radical dissenting traditions like that of the miners (and the

role of popular culture in that tradition), the State’s own new multiculturalism and the

‘boomerang effect’ of international indigenous activism (Keck and Sikkink, 1998: 12–13),

giving the cocaleros a public relations tool beyond the State in their protracted conflict

with it.

The MAS: An Indigenous Political Instrument?

Common perceptions of the coca growers as an intransigent, isolated and issue-specific

population are misleading. As Healy (1991: 92) has indicated, one tool of cocalero

political organising has been to participate in other social movement networks and to

forge multiple alliances with the clergy, diverse human rights groups, foreign NGOs,

labour unions, other social movements and sympathetic social scientists. The recent

projection of the MAS’s political influence beyond the local politics of the Chapare

continues a long-term strategy of the coca growers. During the 1980s, leaders of the

coca-grower unions also sought out the support of ‘allied’ political parties from the

Left, such as the Izquierda Unida [United Left or IU]. The IU’s support in Cochabamba

increased from two per cent in 1985 to 33 per cent by 1989. But in the Chapare the IU

enjoyed higher support at 42 per cent among those who voted (cited in Healy, 1991:

106).

Despite the mantra of a deep distrust of traditional political parties, coca growers

have worked steadily to develop their own national political instrument. In 1995 and

on the heels of the publicity generated by the 1994 ‘March for Life, Coca and

Sovereignty’, the coca growers used their dominant position in the CSUTCB to adopt

the ‘thesis of the political instrument’, which sought the creation of a political party as

a direct extension of their union movement. This new party was first called the

Assembly for the Sovereignty of the People (ASP). Along with other prominent



indigenous and peasant leaders, the ASP included Evo Morales as the main representa-

tive of the coca growers.

The government’s Popular Participation Law strengthened rural municipalities like

those in the Chapare, and the ASP was one inadvertent beneficiary (Oporto Ordonez,

2002: 24). Albo (2002: 84) has described the ASP as a ‘Quechua peasant party’ with

‘candidates almost exclusively in Cochabamba’. Important for our purposes is a con-

certed commitment by the ASP to disregard the ‘artificial division between the worker

and [Bolivia’s] original inhabitants’ (Opinion, 1995). The ASP’s purposeful strategy of

alliance building included bridging ‘class’ and ‘ethnic’ divides in Bolivia’s opposition

movement. After forging an electoral alliance with the oppositional IU party, the newly

organised ASP participated in Bolivia’s municipal elections of 1995, winning just three

per cent of the national vote. In Cochabamba, however, it achieved twelve per cent of

the vote, garnering a total of 47 seats in local town councils and eleven mayoralties,

with most of these located in the Chapare. In the 1997 national elections, the IU-ASP

won only four per cent of the national vote, but with 17.5 per cent in Cochabamba,

their overall total gave them six national congressmen (McKee, 1999: 5).

One of them, swept into office with a record majority in his own Chapare district of

almost 62 per cent, was Evo Morales. After disputing control over the CSUTCB, Evo

Morales broke with his rivals and capitalised on the ASP precedent with a new

‘instrument’, by borrowing the party name, ‘MAS’, from another obscure party.

Once established, and now dissociated from the union environment of the CSUTCB,

Morales became more vocal about the indigenous basis of the MAS: ‘We, the original

people, have organised ourselves into a political instrument for the people’s sover-

eignty’ (Morales, 2002b). After marginally increasing its number of councillors in the

1999 municipal elections, the MAS and Morales greatly solidified a prominent position

in Bolivia’s national political arena with their highly publicised participation (employ-

ing blockades and marches to great effect) in the Water War of 2000 and in subsequent

national protest efforts leading up to the surprise result of the 2002 national elections

and to the civic revolts of 2003. Evo Morales is now, perhaps, the indigenous leader

with the greatest exposure in Latin America.

Given the deep suspicion in which Bolivia’s political establishment is held by its

disillusioned public, the MAS presents itself as a clear alternative to the vertical

politics, corruption and broken promises of national politicians, contrasting the

‘political mafia’ with the ‘people’s power’. Morales has often reiterated: ‘The MAS

represents the social movements, and is a political instrument of liberation. It is

not the creation of politologos [political scientists], nor of political analysts, academics

or politicians. It is born from a congress of peasants’ (quoted in Sapulveda, 2003). In

fact the MAS’s organic structure is half political party and half social movement. At the

national level, the MAS is often hard to distinguish from the more circumstance-driven

political coalitions in which it exercises a coordinating hand, such as the Estado Mayor

del Pueblo [The People’s High Command], a confederated steering committee of

agrarian and labour unions that led protest activities during February 2003. Leaders

of the MAS insist that, in point of fact, it ‘governs from the streets’.

Morales and other masistas emphasise that the MAS ‘does not have its own separate

structures’. MAS legislators claim not to be politicians or political representatives.

Robert Albro


They are, rather, ‘messengers’ to congress, ‘spokespeople’ for a base-driven consensus

emergent from face-to-face rank-and-file union meetings, at which they are expected to

report. The militant unity of coca-grower unions, so fundamental to daily life in the

conflict-ridden Chapare, has also become the projected basis of a national movement.

The mid-level MAS hierarchy functions as a variable number of ‘cabinets’, created on

an ad hoc basis to define key issues. These cabinets have tried to institutionalise the

‘public assemblies’ used so successfully during the Water War. At the most local level,

the MAS can be hard to distinguish from the local union structure of the Six

Federations of the Chapare, and where it has won elections, from the provincial

municipal bureaucracy. This is what MAS militants mean with their talk of ‘refounding

the country based upon an authentic participatory democracy’ or of ‘recuperating a

democracy kidnapped by neoliberalism’ (Prensa Obrera, 2002). They are referring to

the politics of face-to-face assembly that is so ingrained in both indigenous community

and local union politics.

As with past indigenous movements such as the kataristas, the MAS was originally

erected upon the organisation of the CSUTCB and the agrarian union movement. But

unlike the MAS, katarismo was an electoral failure. The reasons for this included a lack

of financial resources, an overly rural social base, a lack of extra-regional appeal and a

weak organisation at the national level. The kataristas also fell prey to internal

squabbles and an overly intellectual, intransigent indianist position, as well as the

cooptation of key leaders such as Jenaro Flores and Victor Hugo Cardenas into

government office. One important point of contention in the fragmenting katarista

movement of the mid-1980s was sharp division over whether ‘class’ (i.e. the ‘revolu-

tionary’ aspect) or ‘ethnicity’ (i.e. the ‘indio’ aspect) of katarismo should predominate

(Albo, 1987: 401–402). If Evo Morales refers to his indigenous descent, and

champions the cultural beliefs and values of Bolivia’s ‘original inhabitants’, he also

rarely engages in polarising ethnic rhetoric like the kataristas of the past or Felipe

Quispe at present.

If the MAS is distinct from separatist indigenous movements such as katarismo, it

also consciously distinguishes itself from recent populist political parties, such as

CONDEPA (Conscience of the Fatherland). Organised in clientelistic fashion,

CONDEPA ultimately put its trust in proven candidates from the urban sectors, who

were ‘professional politicians’ with well-established political credentials (Albo, 2002:

83). This created friction between the party leadership and its supporters, alienating the

in-migrating, urban and primarily indigenous-descended popular base, who perceived

the party’s behaviour to be no different from that of traditional parties, and left it in

droves. As one MAS leader explained in an interview with me:

We have learned a lot from CONDEPA. But here the organic structure has

not been undone. The organic structure rules and not the bureaucrats in

parliament. CONDEPA had its leaders who entered government, only

to separate themselves from the organic structure of the rank-and-file

[los bases]. We are part of civil society and not a political party. Where

are our meetings? In the streets. We simply carry the rank-and-file’s own

wants to parliament. (Author’s field notes, November 13, 2002)



Current MAS leaders seek to avoid institutionalising such a gulf between their urban

Indian constituency and ‘white’ legislators. The MAS’s challenge is not only to move

beyond the single mindedness of its rural union and cocalero origins, but also to avoid

the temptation of becoming a conventional and entirely urban political party.

Beyond the coca growers, the MAS has experienced success among displaced

migrants (such as the Chapare’s ex-miners), particularly among the ranks of the

Landless Movement in lowland Santa Cruz. It is also attractive to the growing mem-

bers of the informal economy (again, such as coca growers themselves), many of whom

live and work in expanding urban peripheries such as El Alto in La Paz and Quillacollo

in Cochabamba (Los Tiempos, 2003b). Given that the MAS represents a cross-cutting

pluralist politics, it would be a grave error to interpret the MAS as either a demagogic

populism or a renewed ‘old Left’ (Brennan, 2003; Crespo, 2003; Crandall, 2004;

Waugh, 2004), or even more simplistically, as a part of Latin America’s new ‘axis of

evil’, in the words of US congressman Henry Hyde. The MAS is more than simply a

one-issue, rural and one-sector event. Perhaps most importantly, the new political

centrality of the MAS suggests a growing rural-urban articulation of indigenous politics

with broad-based questions of popular social enfranchisement that has taken an

anti-neoliberal turn.

Neither just a party nor just a movement, the MAS has built upon the Bolivian

government’s own top-down multicultural legislation, while at the same time serving as

the instrument of the coca growers (and an increasing number of other social sectors)

from the bottom up. Nationally, the MAS is at once a legislative instrument of

governance and a potent expression of Bolivian civil society, with international links,

responding to the exhaustion of neoliberal democracy. Locally, the MAS is intimately

aligned with both the institutional culture of agrarian unions and that of municipal

government. But the MAS maintains a fluid and flexible structure, which is primarily

issue-driven, and based on plebiscist principles of public assembly (institutionalised as

floating cabinets). The organisational capacity of the MAS is expressed in its ability to

coordinate regional and national strikes and blockades. This degree of coordination

has led to more enduring political coalitions that cut across diverse popular sectors in

Bolivia.

Indigenous Heritage and Coalition Building

From the onset of trouble in the Chapare, cocaleros used direct action tactics of

roadblocks, hunger strikes, mass marches, public protest rallies, sit-ins, along with

occupations of local government and NGO offices (Healy, 1991; Ledebur, 2005). One

important precedent was the ‘March for Life, Coca and Sovereignty’ in 1994 (Ticona,

Rojas and Albo, 1995: 69), when thousands of cocaleros (both men and women)

braved the tear gas and rubber bullets of riot police in a march to La Paz. Along

with the threat of blockades, such marches and rallies, principally in the cities of La Paz

and Cochabamba, are the method of choice for coca growers to generate widespread

publicity, to influence public opinion and to overcome their political marginalisation in

the Chapare. These marches have become regular occurrences in Bolivia. Another

Robert Albro


large-scale march to La Paz, the ‘March for the Life and Sovereignty of our People’,

took place in April 2001 (on the first anniversary of the Water War of 2000). This was

followed in 2002 with a ‘March for Popular Sovereignty, Territory and Natural

Resources’, also to La Paz. And there are many smaller marches and rallies, such as

the ‘March for Unity and Dignity’ I attended in July of 2001, which wended its way

from the outskirts of the city of Cochabamba to its central plaza. All of these efforts

have raised the national and international profile of coca growers. The goal of raising

public awareness of the coca growers, subsequent anti-economic globalisation protests

and now the MAS, is entangled in the logic of the spectacle.

Protest marches function as potent expressive vehicles, where the ‘indigenous’

heritage of coca growers, MAS loyalists and Bolivia’s diverse popular sectors is on

full display. An array of ‘Andean’ symbols marks all such public events. These symbols

are not exclusive (as in the past) but promote an inclusive coalition. These include the

whipala: if initially used by the kataristas as the banner of Aymara nationalism, the

flag’s checkerboard matrix now illustrates a popular ‘Andean pluralism’ (Stephenson,

2003). Important, too, is the visibility of native languages. Protesters carry placards

sporting exhortations in Quechua and Aymara, ‘Kawsachun coca!’ [Long live coca!]

and ‘Wanuchun yanquis!’ [Death to the Yankees!]. In rallies I have attended, speeches

are given in Quechua. Evo Morales, not a fluent Aymara or Quechua speaker, is careful

to employ indigenous terms. Explaining their effort to ‘refound the country’, Morales

has put it this way: ‘Let us walk together to create a new country – a pachakuti!’

(Morales, 2002a). The Andean cosmological idea of a ‘pachakuti’ refers to the over-

turning of the earth and to cyclical time, when what once was will be again. A key

symbolic burden is also carried by the participation of women de pollera [wearing the

traditional gathered skirt of the Andes], or cholas, many of whom are active leaders

among coca growers and in the MAS movement. Associated with urban ‘market

women’, the pollera is a sign of ‘Andean Bolivia’ while suggesting, in pluralist fashion,

the interrelation of ‘country’ with ‘city’ (Albro, 2000). Ethnicity, language and gender

are mobilised in this way to frame current struggles such as the Water War and Gas

War. In these performative spectacles ‘symbols’ of Andean Bolivia serve to publicise an

indigenous ‘heritage’ – as an agentive and current Bolivian reality – and to differentiate

the diverse causes of popular dissatisfaction from government policy.

Reinforcing this has been the active presence of Evo Morales on the international

circuit. He is without doubt the most well-travelled Bolivian politician, having made

trips to Europe, Japan and North America to meet with foreign NGO staff, to

participate in activist congresses, to undertake speaking and informational tours, to

raise money, and to raise awareness of the impact of the Drug War. In the early 1990s,

Morales was a vocal critic of the NAFTA accords, played an active role in the 1992

anti-quincentenary campaign and was also elected Bolivia’s media ‘Man of the Year’ in

1992 for his defence of coca leaf as a national patrimony. Moreover, he made it onto

the ballot for the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize. Since his first trip abroad to Belgium

in 1989, as of mid-2003, Morales had made over 90 international trips (Los

Tiempos, 2003c). He is repeatedly the subject of interviews (doing hundreds in the

course of a given month) and political rallies, as well as celebrity tours abroad. He

regularly meets with foreign dignitaries and national leaders. This exposure makes him



uniquely positioned to represent Bolivia’s popular movements to international

audiences.

Perhaps his most important role is the representation of Latin America’s ‘original

people’ at various international forums, such as the World Social Forum in Buenos

Aires and the United Nations’ Committee on Human Rights in Geneva. Morales has

taken steps to insert himself into the prominent currents of the hemisphere’s pan-

indigenous movement, including Rigoberta Menchu (who wrote an open letter sup-

porting the ouster of Bolivia’s President in October of 2003) and Ecuador’s powerful

CONAIE (comparable with Bolivia’s CSUTCB) as well as Aucan Huilcaman, perhaps

the most prominent leader in the struggle of Mapuche Indians in Chile. In his public

statements against the pending Free Trade Area of the Americas, Morales is also in the

habit of using the phrase, ‘Ya basta!’ [Enough!], made famous by the EZLN’s

Subcomandante Marcos, alongside reference to Bolivia’s Quechua, Aymara and

Guaranı peoples.

Such language reflects Morales’ debt to the many ‘transnational advocacy networks’

focusing on the issue-specific question of pan-indigenist organising in this hemisphere

(Brysk, 2000). Such basic transandean strategic essentialisms like the ayllu movement –

developed by groups such as the Andean Oral History Workshop, ‘Abya Yala Net’ or

the ‘Pachamama Alliance’ – minimise distinctions within and across indigenous groups

as irrelevant to the political ‘unity’ of the hemisphere’s ‘first peoples’, a unity transect-

ing the boundaries of historical nation-states and significantly produced through the

perception of shared experiences of colonial disenfranchisement (Andolina, 2001). The

international circulation of MAS leaders is certainly effective in projecting their issues

into a broader public arena. At the same time, such circulation meaningfully dissociates

indigenous claims from particular locations.

Evo Morales often notes the clear strategy of Bolivia’s traditional ‘political class’ to

divide the country’s social movement into distinct sectors. ‘They say to us’, he says, that

‘the politics of Quechua and Aymara peasants on the Altiplano is the shovel and the

pick [la pala y picota]’ (Morales, 2003b). Such a strategy of playing rival sectors off

against each other – ‘miners’ versus ‘peasants’ – to ensure a fragmented opposition has

indeed historically characterised Bolivia’s elite political tactics. Morales counters this

with his own indigenous heritage as an appeal to unity among protesting groups. Public

pronouncements by Morales about his humble upbringing stress the collective social

facts of indigenous life:

In my community they lived in solidarity. In my community of origin there

was no private property. In my community of origin there was no individ-

ualism. In my community one lived in a fashion together with the

family . . . In my community we did not know about money, but we

lived well. (Morales, 2003b)

Similar assertions fill out Menchu’s (1984) evocations of Mayan community life in her

widely referenced testimonial account, as the register of transnational pan-indigenism. In

the case of Bolivia’s MAS, however, such expressions of indigenous solidarity acquire

their potency as an invitation to the recognition of an indigenous heritage shared by all of

Robert Albro


Bolivia’s popular sectors that is in explicit contrast to the perceived ‘individualism’ of the

neoliberal market. This is not a rhetorical strategy to set off an indigenous identity from a

wider participation in the nation, as with Menchu’s celebrated ‘secrets’ (Sommer, 1991).

As Morales reminded a crowd of coca growers, workers, students and others, at a rally,

‘We have to practice solidarity and reciprocity, which is part of our culture!’ (Morales,

2001). If Bolivia’s coca growers ‘identify themselves as brothers and sisters of a wider

indigenous struggle’ (Gustafson, 2003: 49), despite critics who decry their indigenous

credentials, they continue to use national and transnational indigenous politics as a bridge

to cross-sector solidarity efforts and coalition building. The essentialist presentation of

these expressive politics in Bolivia is significantly shaped by the extra-local agenda of

transnational pan-indigenism, and it aligns with the MAS’s public spectacles of indigenous

identity, which are used to promote an expansive, plural and indigenous ‘outside’ at the

expense of one or another definition of an exclusive, authentic and indigenous ‘inside’

(Gow and Rappaport, 2002).

But Morales also refers to a non-indigenous roster of figures, both old and new,

including Che Guevara and Fidel Castro. He has cited Adolfo Perez Esquivel, the

Argentine human rights activist, and shared panels with US activist Noam Chomsky.

He has cultivated close relationships with Venezuela’s embattled President Hugo

Chavez, and Brazil’s President ‘Lula’ da Silva, in such contexts as the World

Gathering in Solidarity with the Bolivarian Revolution in Caracas. Morales’s MAS

shares a great deal with Venezuela’s Chavez and chavismo, including a call for a

plebiscist democracy through referendums, as well as an anti-imperialist, anti-

oligarchic and anti-FTAA discourse. He also shares their commitment to regional

self-determination, which Chavez expresses in his return to Bolıvar, and which da

Silva expresses in his call to overhaul and strengthen the South American trading

block MERCOSUR. Chilean writer Harnecker (2003) might have had the MAS in

mind when she argued that Latin America’s progressive political currents need to take

fuller account of the region’s indigenous movements and ethnic minorities, if they are to

construct a ‘social Left’ to challenge neoliberalism. For the MAS, ‘self-determination’

encompasses a great deal more than simply ‘indigenous self-determination’.

Sovereignty: One Articulation

Throughout this discussion of Evo Morales and the MAS, as representative of new

directions in Bolivia’s indigenous movements, I have highlighted the commitment to

local, national and transnational networking. I have further emphasised a relocation of

indigenous politics from its historically marginal, if identity-based, position to a more

central, but socially plural, role in Bolivian national politics. A key term in the

discourse of the MAS has been ‘sovereignty’, explicitly linked to a global rights debate

and evolving concepts of self-determination. The doctrine of ‘self-determination’ has

been a central tenet of indigenous rights movements in Latin America (Carlsen, 2003).

The MAS, however, does not use this term in ways commensurate with the established

international standard. Instead, the idea of sovereignty has become one means for the

MAS to join a non-exclusive ‘inside’ (of an indigenous heritage, shared deprivations of



neoliberalism and popular coalition building) to an expansive ‘outside’ (of Andean

spectacle, cultural rights and transnational pan-indigenism). ‘Sovereignty’ mixes both

class and cultural discourses, self-identifications and experiences, while moving indi-

genous politics into an urban arena. In this section, I consider the multiple conceptions

of sovereignty now converging in approaches like that of Bolivia’s MAS. Focusing on

one key word – sovereignty – we can better appreciate how the MAS is redefining

national debates around a plural indigenous consensus. In the successive protest coali-

tions of recent years, how have protestors understood these conflicts as attacks upon

‘sovereignty’?

In many public interventions, Evo Morales has insisted that ‘savage capitalism’ –

specifically transnational corporations seeking to acquire newly privatised public

resources – amounts to nothing but the imposed ‘policies of hunger and of misery for

indigenous peoples’ (Morales, 2003b), a conclusion with which an increasing number

of disillusioned Bolivians from all walks of life, both rural and urban, are inclined to

agree. Bolivia’s indigenous population largely overlaps with the two-thirds of Bolivians

now living in poverty. Many are the direct casualties of neoliberal austerity measures

first put into effect in 1985, in agreement with IMF-imposed conditions. Subject to

shared neoliberal deprivations, increasing poverty, widespread social displacement, a

growing informal sector and a shrinking public commons (Kruse, 2003), the history of

indigenous marginalisation has been extended to the present alienation and disillusion

of urban popular sectors suffering the brunt of neoliberal deprivations.

The MAS’s program for government calls for the ‘recuperation of national patri-

mony’, as an extension of their call for new constitutional guarantees promising respect

for ‘the political, economic and cultural autonomy of [Bolivia’s] original peoples

(pueblos originarios)’ (MAS, 2004). This platform suggests how the readily available

language of indigenous rights has become a source for persuasive cultural analogies

that frame the shared deprivations of indigenous and urban non-indigenous popular

sectors alike, each of whom has suffered together in Bolivia’s current ‘free market

democracy’. To supersede the identity-based factionalism that has fragmented opposi-

tional politics in the past, their shared struggle has shifted away from class-specific

issues to the recognition of culture as a shared condition of class.

The Gas War of October 2003 in Bolivia was a response to the perceived violation

of Bolivian ‘national sovereignty’ by both transnational corporations and a so-called

political elite, or ‘mafia’, accused of failing to protect Bolivia’s national interests in the

face of a rapacious economic globalisation. One commentator has put it this way:

‘Politicians, under the stewardship and dictates of the IMF, have proven they are

absolutely untrustworthy in managing the economic affairs of the country’ (Kruse,

2003). In a broad sense of the sweep of national history, the newly discovered natural

gas has been understood as one more non-renewable source of natural wealth, which,

along with silver or tin, promises a short-lived export boom, the squandering of the

nation’s wealth for the profit of foreign investors, and little or no actual improvement

in the lives of ordinary Bolivians.

This explains protest slogans such as ‘The Gas is not for Sale!’. It also explains a key

MAS demand: that Bolivians ‘recuperate control of this resource’ (Gutierrez Aguilar,

2003: 2). As one poor Aymara resident of the city of El Alto – a centre of protest – said,

Robert Albro


‘The gas is ours, and we want it for our children and grandchildren . . .’ (quoted

in Hylton, 2003). The MAS and its allies have taken the position that the government

is trying to disinherit them of their lawful patrimony, as Bolivian citizens, without

prior consultation. The most direct precedent for this position to be found in the

indigenous politics of land and a call for recognition of the preexistent ‘territorial

sovereignty’ of communal landholdings of both ‘originarios’ [highland Indians] and

‘indıgenas’ [lowland Indians], which has been characteristic of the CSUTCB since the

late 1970s. Such analogies enact a bottom-up conception of sovereignty through

‘indigenous citizenship’.

Evo Morales and the MAS have repeatedly located the issues of national autonomy

and economic independence in the resurgence of Bolivia’s indigenous movement. As he

has explained:

The MAS is born and draws its strength from the struggles of the indigen-

ous peoples [pueblos indıgenas], for the defence of our identity, which is

the coca leaf, for the defence of our land, who is our mother, for the

defence of our natural resources, which are our hope and our patrimony.

(Morales, 2004)

Here, coca leaf is at once the livelihood of Chapare agriculturalists and also a culturally

important national natural resource and symbol of social struggle. These ‘struggles of

the indigenous peoples’ have become the basis for broader social and national claims

by current coalition movements.

This position – so successful in mobilising diverse popular sectors in acts of civic

revolt during the Water War and Gas War – had already been firmly established

among the cocaleros themselves, given their experience in the US-led War on Drugs.

Coca-grower unions have long protested that the War on Drugs, with the US Embassy

dictating terms to Bolivia’s government, US personnel on Bolivian soil and the US

certification process to guarantee compliance with US policy demands, amounts to a

clear violation of Bolivian national sovereignty by a foreign power. Coca growers are

the ‘sovereign guardians’ of the coca leaf, as a ‘millenarian leaf and national banner in

the defence of our dignity and of our sovereignty’ (quoted in Prensa Obrera, 2002).

Morales, the MAS and allied movements equate a ‘defence of coca’ with a ‘defence of

all natural resources’, including natural gas. The effort to eradicate coca leaf is here

portrayed as an attack on Bolivia’s national cultural heritage. In this formulation,

cultural heritage is constitutive of indigenous citizenship.

Taking back the country through a more representative ‘popular sovereignty’ has

been behind repeated calls for a more ‘participatory’, plebiscist or assembly style

democracy. This call is set against a more ‘procedural’ type of constitutional rule

making, understood as an elite project in collusion with the closed-door deal making

of transnational corporations. The precepts of participatory democracy are epitomised

by face-to-face coca-grower union assemblies, as well as the so-called the ‘ayllu

democracy’ of indigenous communities (Rivera, 1990). A face-to-face politics links

up with sovereignty in an entirely different way as well. If ordinary Bolivians do not

trust the deal makers, most particularly the nation’s own ‘political class’, and demand



transparency in decision making about the future of national resources, they also blame

a newly decentralised state and its downsized public sector for a loss of jobs, a

diminution of social services and a growing lack of ‘citizen security’. Social justice

can be added to the list of territory, patrimony and dignity, as representing an

indigenous-inspired view of national sovereignty that resonates in transnational con-

texts and helps to articulate ‘inside’ with ‘outside’.

‘Sovereignty’ is a well-established global norm, providing international recognition

of a given state’s right to be a sovereign ruler over a given piece of territory. Most of the

time, social scientists have understood Latin American indigenous movements as direct

attacks upon the so-called ‘sovereign nation-state model’ (Warren and Jackson, 2002:

13). Bolivia’s MAS complicates this picture. Moreover, as repeated large-scale protests

make clear, State-based sovereignty in Bolivia does not neatly ‘enclose’ alternative

local, indigenous and popular sovereignties. In fact, the Bolivian State has, itself,

recognised the ‘multiethnic and pluri-cultural’ complexity of the issue of self-

determination through such precedents as the Popular Participation Law. This law

lends sovereign authority to the MAS as a representative of local ‘customary law’ and

of local (municipal) governance. But this has also given momentum to a culturally

grounded expansion of the applicability of the legal principle of sovereignty to pre-

dicaments of popular disenfranchisement. The MAS’s culturally plural interpretations

of sovereignty – as at once territory, patrimony, dignity, heritage as well as social

justice – are points of articulation in its commitment to popular coalition building.

If the MAS speaks for Bolivia’s ‘indigenous peoples’, it has also expanded indigenous

heritage to protest on behalf of a plural ‘Bolivian people’.

The Indigenous in the Plural

Commentators on recent Bolivian protests from across the political spectrum have

made note of their apparent lack of any clear-cut ‘identity’ (Cardozo, 2003; Garcıa

Linera, 2003; Laserna, 2003; Zegada, 2003). Scepticism is particularly notable among

critics who begin with the assumption of either ethnic or class distinctions (paired with

a sector-specific grievance) as the only intelligible basis for protest. Raising the spectre

of Ortega y Gasset’s ‘revolt of the masses’, critics depict protesters as unruly crowds,

unpredictable, dangerous, ungovernable, pathological subjects, anti-modern and con-

trary to the democratic process. With no identity, protesters are accused of lacking a

coherent plan, ideology or future vision for the county – a view expressed in many

outraged newspaper editorials. Observers with a more approving tone nevertheless

still consign protesters to a liminal-like space of almost utopian social justice exacted

by an outraged mass public, a view still leaving the realities of the many cross-sector

social relationships of current coalition-based protests unacknowledged and

unexamined.

In the typically urban context of mobilisation of these coalitions, they are in fact

divested of any ‘primordial’ or ‘collective’ identity, as a specific ‘class’, as an ‘indigen-

ous’ group or even as Bolivian ‘citizens’. This reticence to recognise the socially plural

Robert Albro


constituency of such coalitions reflects a broader scepticism about popular identity in

general (e.g. Hall, 1981). The typical assumption of identity-driven politics is moved to

ignore the undeniably organised and systematic impact such civil society coalitions

have had, in recent years, in determining the shape of national Bolivian politics. It also

leaves unstated the direct political connections such coalitions have, both inside and

outside of formal government, or within local union movements, within the national

legislature and within transnational civil society. Finally, an identity-based approach

does not appreciate the evident successes of popular consensus building. But one way

to begin to make sense of these protest efforts is to explain why they now have

‘indigenous leaders’, and why they are now organised around questions that were

once distinctly ‘indigenous issues’. What, ultimately, has ‘indigenous’ come to signify

at the present moment?

Part of the gravitation of indigenous politics to the centre of Bolivian political life

from their historical marginality has been a calculated dampening of the traditional

politics of difference, an article of faith for indigenous movements in Bolivia since at

least the 1970s and the writings of Reinaga (1971). This development, epitomised by

Evo Morales and the MAS, has worked by folding local, issue-specific, collective and

culture-based strategies of distinct ‘indigenous groups’ (such as the coca growers) or

particular regional versions of ‘indigenous identity’ (such as ‘ayllu democracy’) into a

more urban-based, plural recognition of indigenous heritage. If classic indigenismo was

an organic intellectual project that sought to make a glorious Inca past serve the

modern, ‘mestizo’ nation (Salmon, 1997), the MAS’s political tack reverses fields,

promoting the contemporary social fact of an indigenous heritage among Bolivia’s

popular sectors as a rallying point in response to the exhaustion of the modern

neoliberal state.

Ricardo Calla, while Minister of Ethnic and Indigenous Affairs for Bolivia, recently

identified three distinct ideological currents within its indigenous movements. He

labelled the first ‘ethnocentric, fundamentalist and indianist’, following from the

katarista line, currently represented by Felipe Quispe, and working towards an auto-

nomous Indian political party. He labelled the second current ‘multicultural neoliber-

alism’, primarily indigenous elites championing indigenous rights compatible with the

politics of privatisation. The last current he called ‘intercultural communitarian’,

working within a broader process of democratisation to promote coalitions with

non-indigenous groups (Calla, 2004). As I have developed here, the repositioning of

heritage illustrates a notable transformation of the role of indigenous politics and

identity, one which appears to bridge Calla’s last two currents. Heritage in Bolivia is

no longer exclusively aligned with a communal Indian project. While occupying new

local political spaces made available through Bolivia’s multicultural neoliberalism, the

MAS has also had success galvanising popular support by positioning heritage as a

plural indigenous ancestry not exclusively indicative of any particular collective indi-

genous experience. This has also given indigenous politics a new articulatory power, as

an effective tool for broad-based popular coalition building. This is one way to pursue

Hale’s (2004: 20) recent call for more attention to the political ‘strategies of

rearticulation’ that bridge gaps between different ways of being ‘Indian’ in Latin

America, both authorised and condemned.



Crucial to this process of recognition and articulation is a popular discourse that

simultaneously enables participation in the State and sharp criticism of it. Exploring

the use of the term ‘sovereignty’ in recent protests such as the Water War and Gas War,

we see how the language of sovereignty carries a multivocal burden of dignity, patri-

mony, territory and heritage. Such a multivocality is the result of the MAS’s appro-

priation of multiple sources of sovereign understanding in the development of

international standards for indigenous rights, in the new language of national reform

and in the established discourse of indigenous autonomy (in both its international and

national variants). Rather than a consensus over a shared definition of ‘sovereignty’,

indigenous identity has become part of an articulatory language of popular solidarity.

And yet, traditional Bolivan elites have mischaracterised the MAS’s effort as that of

radical ‘populist caudillos’, and the international press sees an uprising of Bolivia’s

‘poor Indian majority’. Neither has come to terms with the extent and diversity of

popular participation.

If Evo Morales is an Aymara Indian – as he often notes – and if the coca growers of

the Chapare represent Bolivia’s ‘poor Indian majority’ – as they often claim – the

equation of their politics with ‘la indiada’ (Gutierrez Aguilar, 2003) misses the mark. It

ignores the experiential commonalities of displacement and life in the ‘informal econ-

omy’ shared by both rural and urban poor, ‘Indian’ and ‘mestizo’ under the neoliberal

regime. As ‘Indian’ increasingly becomes a part of what it means to be economically

engaged in non-agricultural work, to be ‘urban’ and to be a ‘mestizo’, the ‘Indian

problem’ of the past becomes an ‘ancestral heritage’ for the present and a multisector

popular rallying cry. The MAS points to a further tranformation of what it means to be

indigenous in Bolivia. The MAS has capitalised upon a loss of indigenous political

distinctiveness as an authentic ‘inside’ (replaced by a personal ancestry combined with

shared neoliberal experiences). But the MAS also illustrates the strategic expansion of

an indigenous ‘outside’, significantly produced from without, through the critical mass

of international rights discourses and the language of pan-indigenism, pluralist

messages of sovereignty and a politics of the spectacle with symbols of Andean dissent.

‘Indigenous politics’ in Bolivia is now an effective and extensive cultural means of

constituting plural popular coalitions, rather than a distinctive and restrictive marginal

category for a stigmatised, dangerous, internal cultural ‘other’.

Acknowledgements

This article is based on data collected in Bolivia in 2001 and 2002. A shorter version

was presented as part of a panel on ‘Indigenous People and the State in Latin America’

at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in 2003. I thank

James Herron and Juliet Erazo for organising this session. Many people have gener-

ously offered valuable commentary on earlier versions of this manuscript, greatly

enhancing the result. These include our panel commentators, Bruce Mannheim and

Laura Graham. I also thank Kevin Healy, Eduardo Gamarra, Andrew Canessa, Sian

Lazar, Joanne Rappaport, Kathryn Ledebur, Juan Arbona, GeorgeAnn Potter, Brian

Robert Albro


Johnson, Vladimir Gil and the BLAR editorial team for their detailed commentary.

Research was supported by a Wheaton College Faculty Research Grant, 2001–2002.

Writing-up was supported by an American Council of Learned Societies and Mellon

Fellowship in International Studies, 2003–2004. This manuscript was written while in

residence as a fellow at the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress.

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