The Return of the Indigenous Struggle in Bolivia

[Judi Lynn]

Post on: December 12, 2019 Javo Ferreira


The resistance to the right-wing coup in Bolivia has developed under the banners of the indigenous peoples. The working class needs to take up these demands as its own. We publish here the prologue to the third edition of Javo Ferreira’s book Comunidad, indigenismo y marxismo (Community, Indigenism, and Marxism).

ince the Bolivian elections of October 20, the subsequent coup d’état has been consolidated, reopening deep wounds and contradictions in society that Bolivian and Latin American “progressivism” thought had been overcome. The civilian, police, and military coup, consummated with the resignation of President Evo Morales on November 10, attempted to consolidate itself through savage repression that claimed the lives of more than 30 people and left hundreds injured and almost a thousand detained by the police and military forces. It is in this context, while the ashes of the roadblocks still smolder, that I write this prologue for the third edition of this book. Great events in the history of peoples are those that, like a judge’s decision that cannot be appealed, determine whether texts, analyses, and documents drawn up previously can pass the test of facts or are simply to be tucked away in the trunk of historical curiosities. I believe not only that this text, written mainly in 2009 after 14 years of government by the MAS, has comfortably passed the test of events, but also that much of what happened after 2009 was anticipated in its pages. I hope that, with the revival of the struggle of the exploited and oppressed of Bolivia—a large part of the country’s nations and native peoples—this text will contribute to that struggle and to organizing against the state, against its ruling classes, and against the racial structure of society that makes it easy to gain advantage from the social capital that comes with being white and Spanish-speaking.

It remains to be seen how far the coup plotters can go in dismantling the “Plurinational State of Bolivia”—as former Vice President Álvaro García Linera called the outcome of his administration’s efforts to overcome the racial structuring of Bolivian society. Constitutional and institutional reforms were undertaken by the government in an attempt to break through the state’s “gelatinous” nature and advance toward a unitary construction of civil and political society.

On November 10, after the resignation of Morales and García Linera, a group of coup plotters undertook an enormously symbolic act—lowering the wiphala1 at the Palacio Quemado (Bolivia’s presidential palace) and setting it on fire. This revealed the racist character of the coup and the white elite’s absolute hatred of indigenous peoples. It also left for dead any attempt to use reforms to satisfy the indigenous peoples’ structural democratic demands in a new constitution, without modifying the bourgeois character of the Bolivian state. Ultimately, the “apparent state”2 was never displaced, thus permitting the Right—which never accepted the Constitution or the state’s plurinational character—to trample on it once the balance of power allowed. Doing so, however, does not appear to be a simple task, as was demonstrated by the massive mobilizations that arose in resistance to the coup and that in their early days used slogans that centered fighting racism and defending cultures. The passivity of the MAS, the Central Obrera Boliviana (COB, the trade union confederation), and several of the leaderships that have validated the coup is an enormous help in this effort to dismantle, at least partially, many of the demands that had been embodied as provisions in the Constitution—and which are now under attack and could even be eliminated as the racist elite reoccupies the state.

The MAS was elected as a government based on the great uprisings and insurrections that shook Bolivia in the 2000s. This government had to express—albeit in a distorted way—the relationship of forces established by those great independent actions of the mass movement. This was expressed in various constitutional and legal reforms presented as a “democratic and cultural revolution.” The approval of the new constitution was the result of a pact with the Right that in 2008 had its strongholds in Sucre and in the so-called Media Luna.3 That constitutional pact brought a certain social peace to the country, lubricated by a boom in the price of raw materials that helped cushion the deep social, economic, and political cracks of the last decade. It was translated into important reforms that sought to resolve, through institutional means, the historical social exclusion of the great national majorities of Aymara, Quechua, and Tupi Guaraní origin. But that pact lasted only until October 20, 2019, when the crisis was reopened and the trend from 2008 toward civil war reemerged.

More:
https://www.leftvoice.org/the-return-of-the-indigenous-struggle-in-bolivia