To understand what’s happening right now in Bolivia, it’s key to also understand the process of increased division and degradation that the social movements suffered during the tenure of Evo Morales. The movements who were initially the president’s support base were divided and degraded by a left that would allow only one possibility and wouldn’t allow autonomy.
It’s a story that began around 2009–2010 when another form of government was assembled, another form of State, different from what was being proposed by the bases: an increasingly authoritarian state that would monopolize power and wouldn’t allow organizations any degree of autonomy.
This process led to the deterioration of the government’s relationship with the social movements. In 2010 this discontent came to the fore within indigenous organizations who adopted an autonomous position and requested a panel at the summit in Tiquipaya, a summit through which the ruling party intended to show that Evo Morales’s attitude was one of respect for Mother Earth and for the protection of indigenous rights. The panel was to address the South American Regional Integration Initiative (IIRSA) and mining pollution, yet the government refused to address those issues. The pollution of the fields and their irrigation waters was to be discussed as it was already causing serious problems, above all in Potosí, Oruro, and Huanuni, adding to the grim destruction and disappearance of Lake Poopó, the second largest in the country.
Obviously, these are processes whose origins date back a long time but were being aggravated through the intensification of extractivism. This process led to the destruction of the notion of Communal Lands of Origin (TCO), which were the foundation of indigenous autonomy at the time. At the end of 2010, a decree was issued establishing that these indigenous lands, in addition to being “native” were also “peasant.” This allowed coca-leaf growers to invade the national parks, as was the case of the Isiboro Sécure National Park and Indigenous Territory (TIPNIS), where a financial protocol, tainted with corruption, was signed with the Brazilian construction company OAS to build a highway. There are many details regarding that particular episode, but what’s worth remembering is that the government chose to repress the indigenous people of the Park and favor the invasion of coca-leaf growers and the construction of that highway.
This moment was a breaking point. Thereafter and in 2013, the government gave the order to invade the National Council of Ayllus and Markas of Qullasuyu (CONAMAQ) headquarters, and mining entrepreneur Hilarion Mamani was installed as its leader, an assault on the indigenous procedures that existed there to rotate authorities.
It’s a long process, many years in the making, that has among its latest manifestations the burning of the Chiquitanía (see “La otra frontera,” Brecha, 30‑VIII‑19), triggered by a government decree that encouraged settlers from the western part of the country to invade that unique ecosystem. In the previous year, there had been a great rapprochement between the government and ranchers over a plan to export meat to China. Obviously, it’s much cheaper to burn the forest, as that decree enabled, than to bring in tractors or backhoes. With the Chiquitanía being a very dry area, the fire raged out of control. It was a tragedy without a name and the greatest trigger of the Evo Morales debacle.
Luis Fernando Camacho and the right that he now leads are enjoying a momentary stardom, thanks to having managed to articulate different angers towards the Movement toward Socialism (MAS). But the biggest dispute is still in land grabbing and in the expansion of the agricultural frontier, which has been agreed on between the right and Evo Morales. The right will not undo this pact; it will not give the indigenous peoples the land that Evo Morales took from them. Rather, with the momentary euphoria of these hours, it’s preparing to consolidate the economy of soybeans and agribusiness, a process that Evo had already begun.
What lies ahead is a process of great uncertainty, of institutional fragility, of sabotage, of economic liquidation. The MASistas will try to leave a country in ruins in order to return triumphant. It has been a very serious mistake of the political class to dispense with MAS and to paint of its government a picture of illegality. The transitional government that has now taken office is born weak and defective. It’s not legitimate; 40 percent of the electorate can’t be erased in a single stroke. It’s one thing to recognize the failures of the Evo Morales government and another to ignore that MAS actually has an electorate and that it has played a very important symbolic role for the dignification of what is indigenous.
Here the whole political class fell, not just Evo Morales. And there’s a power vacuum because people haven’t yet recognized their own energy, their own organizational strength. Unfortunately, we have lost many years in the dispute over the corporate control of movements and social organizations, which has left us out of combat at a time when the right is raising its head and the army remains intact with all its dealings and all its fraudulent and corrupt businesses. We are in a very critical situation.
Nevertheless, in recent years there has been recognition and self-recognition of the indigenous as a moral force. Although it has been, to some extent, degraded by the government of MAS, in everyday life it’s recognized that what’s indigenous is valuable in terms of language, food, culture, and forms of community and solidarity. A whole series of groups is waving the whipala to make it clear that we’re not going back 17 years. Camacho has gone to the old government palace, as if to say that this process of recognition and self-recognition didn’t exist, ignoring the forest for the trees. But there’s no going back.
What exists is an urgent need to rechannel popular mobilizations, shedding those very strong aspects of misogyny and authoritarianism fostered by the government of MAS. We are now paying the bill for the denial of the organizations’ horizontal democracy as well as their degradation—a bill called paralysis and stupor.
In the midst of that, in the fight against that, women are on the front lines in terms of thought and action. And as for the pain that this whole situation produces, we women are everywhere, articulating more local forms of democracy and fighting so that the idea of indignation, the idea of the council, the idea of the Women’s Parliament can break off into thousands of parliaments, thousands of councils so that we can discuss what kind of country we want, what democracy is, and what it means to be indigenous. Is wearing a native poncho and organizing a drunken stupor what it means to be indigenous? We, in our position as women, don’t believe so. In several groups we have created a kind of platform to make each corner a space for deliberation.
We’re going to rely on the Constitution, a Constitution that has been mistreated by the government of MAS itself. We are right now in the defense of the Constitution, in the defense of the whipala, in the defense of the communal democracy of the ayllus*, and in the defense of women.
* Traditional communities of the original peoples of the Andean region.
Originally published in Spanish in Brecha on November 15, 2019. English translation by Linda Quiquivix with permission from the author.