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).
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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
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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
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436 # 2005 Society for Latin American Studies
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).
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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.
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438 # 2005 Society for Latin American Studies
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
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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.
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440 # 2005 Society for Latin American Studies
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)
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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
442 # 2005 Society for Latin American Studies
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
Indigenous in the Plural
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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
444 # 2005 Society for Latin American Studies
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
Indigenous in the Plural
# 2005 Society for Latin American Studies 445
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,
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446 # 2005 Society for Latin American Studies
‘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
Indigenous in the Plural
# 2005 Society for Latin American Studies 447
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
448 # 2005 Society for Latin American Studies
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.
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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
450 # 2005 Society for Latin American Studies
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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