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Indigenous Movements and Building the Plurinational State in Bolivia. Organisation and Identity in the Trajectory of the CSUTCB and CONAMAQ

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Abstract

This book, which is informed by extensive field work, combining interviews and participant observation, provides a comprehensive study of key issues related to crucial differences in the relationship between collective identity and organisation in two of Bolivia's most important social movements and how these differences impacted on the two movements' participation in the process of writing a new Bolivian constitution and, subsequently, implementing the changes it sets out, in particular, regarding the rights of indigenous peoples to self-determination and territory. The book offers an overview of the historical processes, socio-political structures and cultural issues that have influenced recent developments and changes in Bolivia. It offers important insights into key issue regarding the identity and organisation of Latin American social movements generally.
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... Not surprisingly, then, the scholarly literature on Bolivian social movements is quite comprehensive (e.g. Burman 2014Burman , 2015Canessa 2000;García, Chávez, and Costas 2010;Grisaffi 2017;Hurtado 1986;Pape 2009;Portugal and Macusaya 2016;Powęska 2013;Rivera [1984Rivera [ ] 2003Sturtevant 2018;Ticona 2010). Nevertheless, very little has been written on the emergent Bolivian environmental movement (see however Burman 2017;Fabricant 2013;Hindery 2013;Kaijser 2014;Perreault and Valdivia 2010; moreover, a valuable assessment of some of its initial dynamics is found in Zimmerer 2004). ...
... Influenced by theorists of the so-called 'new social movements ' (e.g. Habermas 1981;Slater 1985), scholars working on social movements in Latin America (see, e.g., Ejdesgaard, Balslev, and Velázquez 2015;Escobar 2006;Escobar and Alvarez 1992), not least in Bolivia (Burman 2015;García, Chávez, and Costas 2010;Powęska 2013;Rivera [1984Rivera [ ] 2003, have emphasized the collective identities around which social movements are forged. In Bolivia, these identities have without exception been based on ethnicity, class, or more recently gender and sexuality. ...
... Hence, studies of Bolivian social movements (García, Chávez, and Costas 2010;Powęska 2013) manifest that quite homogeneous identities based on class, ethnicity, and gender have been crucial to the emergence of contentious movements and to their persistence over time. Collective identity, it seems, is the glue that holds movements together and creates internal solidarity. ...
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Since at least the mid-20th century, social movements have been key actors in Bolivian society, causing governments to fall and redrawing the cartographies of power. Recently, a new movement emerged, a middle-class movement that articulated its demands in harsh opposition to the government of former President Evo Morales: an urban environmental movement. In its rhetoric, Morales was un burro (a donkey) and un ignorante (an ignorant man) steering the country towards ecological collapse. Subsequently, the movement played a key role in the social protests that led to Morales’s fall in November 2019. In this paper, I aim to understand why this movement emerged and mobilized during the Morales administration and how colonially conditioned relations of power and contradictory images of the indigenous Other are articulated in this process. I argue that the emergence and mobilization of the movement ought to be understood in relation to: (1) the politically conditioned forms for legitimate political opposition; and (2) the challenge to coloniality implied by the coming to power of subalternized subjects. When the borders of seemingly fixed categories and spaces are blurred, the privileged develop novel ways of making social distinctions. One such way, I argue, is to display a ‘taste for ecology.’
... This ethnic revival was partially and indirectly fostered (or rather provoked) by selective ideological and mainly symbolic use of some elements of indigenous culture and heritage by the National Revolution that sought this way to legitimate Bolivian mestizo nationalism, which has been contested by the indigenous Katarista/Indianista movement´s counter-narrative since the 1970s (Nicolas and Quisbert 2014). But above all, the emergence of an indigenous movement and the general empowerment of the indigenous peasant majority in the long run, were the fruits of the ambiguity and contradictory effects of social and political reforms of the national revolutionary era (agrarian reform, enfranchisement and universal education) and the disillusionment of Aymara activists with the false narrative of national integration and equality and with the whole revolutionary project (Powęska 2013). ...
... These measures in no way changed the power relations between the state and indigenous peoples nor undermined the state's colonialist character. (Powęska 2013). ...
... I found that the use of the discourse of the national-level confederations in othering one another has exaggerated local cultural and political differences. As each of the national confederations of rural groups has performed their collective identity, strategically, emphasising the differences between themselves and the rival federation (Lucero 2006, 39;Powęska 2013), they have effectively created the differences in identity that they perform (see Goffman 1990). Although class and ethnicity are fluid, rather than essential categories in Bolivia (Fontana 2014, 438), the performance of essential identities in relation to rival federations jeopardises the unity of the indigenous originary peasant as a collective subject, and form of collective citizenship in Bolivia. ...
... This ethnic revival was partially and indirectly fostered (or rather provoked) by selective ideological and mainly symbolic use of some elements of indigenous culture and heritage by the National Revolution that sought this way to legitimate Bolivian mestizo nationalism, which has been contested by the indigenous Katarista/Indianista movement´s counter-narrative since the 1970s (Nicolas and Quisbert 2014). But above all, the emergence of an indigenous movement and the general empowerment of the indigenous peasant majority in the long run, were the fruits of the ambiguity and contradictory effects of social and political reforms of the national revolutionary era (agrarian reform, enfranchisement and universal education) and the disillusionment of Aymara activists with the false narrative of national integration and equality and with the whole revolutionary project (Powęska 2013). ...
... These measures in no way changed the power relations between the state and indigenous peoples nor undermined the state's colonialist character. (Powęska 2013). ...
... I found that the use of the discourse of the national-level confederations in othering one another has exaggerated local cultural and political differences. As each of the national confederations of rural groups has performed their collective identity, strategically, emphasising the differences between themselves and the rival federation (Lucero 2006, 39;Powęska 2013), they have effectively created the differences in identity that they perform (see Goffman 1990). Although class and ethnicity are fluid, rather than essential categories in Bolivia (Fontana 2014, 438), the performance of essential identities in relation to rival federations jeopardises the unity of the indigenous originary peasant as a collective subject, and form of collective citizenship in Bolivia. ...
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If the 1952 National Revolution sought the wide incorporation of indigenous majority through their cultural assimilation and the process of building inclusive mestizo nation, the new project is based on the concept of the Plurinational State, incorporating numerous indigenous nationalities on the equal terms and granting them the right to self-determination. However, the concrete implementation of the indigenous rights is partial and ambivalent, provoking the question about the real change of power relations between the state and indigenous peoples. Moreover, since the indigenous discourse became inherent part of state narratives and symbolic machinery, the state has gained monopoly about indigeneity and uses it to construct a new political-cultural community, based on plural ethnic identities merged into a broad, inclusive indianised state nation. This paper seeks to respond if the new Bolivian (pluri)national project is truly new or is it rather a renewed version of an old nation-state project?
... Since the election of the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) -Movement Towards Socialism -in Bolivia in 2005, many scholars have critically examined the integration of social movements into the MAS as the administration attempts to construct a 'government of social movements' (for example Albó, 2015;Crabtree and Chaplin, 2013;Escárzaga, 2012;Farthing and Kohl, 2014;Fontana, 2013aFontana, , 2013bPoweska, 2013;Regalsky, 2010;Salazar, 2015). Others have focused on the increasing tensions emerging around territory and extractivism in Bolivia, the debate over the Territorio Indígena y Parque Nacional Isiboro Secure (Tipnis) -Isiboro Sécure National Park and Indigenous Territory -being firmly at the centre of this literature (for example Cusicanqui, 2015;Tapia, 2011;Webber, n.d.). ...
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Evo Morales has labelled his government the ‘government of social movements’, and much has been written on relations between social movements and the state in Bolivia since the turn of the century. The Central Obrera Boliviana (COB) — Bolivian Workers’ Central — has, however, remained largely absent from discussions in much of the literature. This article seeks to analyse the position of the COB under Morales, and to explore the nature and consequences of its relationship with the government over the past 12 years. The article differentiates between the concepts of labour bureaucracy and labour officialdom and examines how they can be used as analytical lenses that shed light on the position of the COB today. The author argues that during Bolivia's neoliberal period (1985–2005) the need to look after the COB bureaucratized union structures, as personal needs of the leadership were placed above those of the Bolivian working classes. This then allowed Morales's government to easily co‐opt sections of the labour movements’ leadership to form a labour officialdom, leaving the COB unable to challenge the continuation of the neoliberal structure of the economy and represent the majority of the country's working classes.
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Indigenous peoples in Latin America are historically underrepresented in elected bodies. In 2009, Bolivia introduced a new mechanism for direct representation to counteract this systematic representation gap, securing 7 of 130 seats (5.4%) in the national parliament for indigenous peoples of the lowlands. The reform was part of a series of implementation conflicts related to a new vision of plurinational state-building, included in the new 2009 Constitution. Although most indigenous organizations were seeking a ‘power-sharing’ agreement with direct representation for all indigenous nations, the new government, led by President Evo Morales, successfully intervened in favor of a minority protection scheme. Furthermore, for the direct representatives, the room to maneuver left was severely limited, leaving little space to act on behalf of their minority constituencies. Curiously, this reduced version of direct representation is nonetheless the most advanced in Latin America. The Bolivian case provides important lessons on the ‘de-monopolization’ of political parties as a key factor in the effective representation of indigenous peoples in parliament, as well as on the importance of a goal-oriented design for electoral mechanisms focusing on substantive representation.
Article
Anthropologists have criticized “civil society” as a Eurocentric, bourgeois, and individualist concept that brands the Global South and Eastern Europe as inherently inferior. In this article, I introduce an understudied meaning of civil society as collective action inspired by indigenous cultural institutions, which has been operative in Bolivia during the 1990s and early 2000s, and, I suggest, more widely in the Global South. This variant of civil society, however, served as a framework for development professionals to blame failures of development upon local people. But I also argue that civil society's meaning is historically contingent. The concept diminished in Bolivia following Evo Morales's government's return to central state patronage after a decade of austerity and liberal state decentralization. Massive new funding for development in central Bolivia allayed development workers’ concerns that locals weren't doing their part to achieve development. If the reemergence of the civil society concept in Bolivia marked the rise of citizen participation as a substitute for state‐funded development, the decline of “civil society” marked the return to state‐led development. [ civil society, neoliberalism, decentralization, development, indigeneity, Bolivia ]
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With the ratification of its new constitution in 2009, Bolivia was transformed into a “plurinational state” associated with ecologically oriented values, yet resource extraction has expanded ever since. Fieldwork conducted in communities in highland Bolivia shows how resource extraction sustains and is sustained by “revolutionary narratives” in which the state—led by President Evo Morales—is configured as the protagonist of the plurinational era. Examination of the challenges presented by Bolivia’s indigenous communities and mining cooperatives to this revolutionary narrative during the 2014 adoption of new mining legislation suggests that shifting critical focus away from revolutionary change toward what David Scott calls the “politics of the present” might be a more fruitful way to think about the relationship between resource extraction and Bolivia’s plurinationalism. Al ratificar su nueva constitución en 2009, Bolivia se transformó en un “estado plurinacional” asociado con valores ecológicos; sin embargo, la extracción de recursos se ha expandido desde entonces. Investigaciones llevado a cabo en comunidades de las tierras altas de Bolivia muestran cómo la extracción de recursos sostiene y se sustenta en las “narrativas revolucionarias” en las que el estado, encabezado por el presidente Evo Morales, se configura como el protagonista de la era plurinacional. Examinar como las comunidades indígenas y las cooperativas mineras de Bolivia cuestionaron esta narrativa revolucionaria durante la adopción de la nueva legislación minera en 2014 sugiere que virar el enfoque crítico desde el cambio revolucionario hacia lo que David Scott llama la “política del presente” podría ser una forma más fructífera pensar en la relación entre la extracción de recursos y el plurinacionalismo boliviano.
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The article assumes wide interpretation of political culture that includes values and political attitudes of a society, as well as the very concepts of power, political system and mechanisms of participation. As a social constructs, political systems are not culturally neutral. Moreover, the dominating beliefs and values on which the system of power is built, are elements of hegemony supported by symbolic violence. Notwithstanding, culture can be also a source of alternative discourses and political practices, becoming a democratizing factor. In the post-colonial Bolivian society the hegemonic project of a homogenous nation-state has capitulated before strong ethno-cultural diversity and factual political, economic and legal pluralism of the country. The traditional Andean community ayllu with its culturally original legal-political institutions and own model of democracy has become to indigenous activists a basis of an alternative state project. The integration of previously ignored indigenous practices and concepts, democratizing monocultural and exclusive model once imposed by the creole elites, is conceived as an internal decolonization of the state. El artículo asume una interpretación amplia de la cultura política, que abarca valores y actitudes políticos de una sociedad, así como los mismos conceptos del poder, sistema político y mecanismos de participación. Como constructos sociales, sistemas políticos no son culturalmente neutrales. Además, las creencias y valores dominantes sobre cuales un sistema está basado, son elementos de una hegemonía apoyada por la violencia simbólica. No obstante, una cultura puede ser tambien una fuente de los discursos y prácticas políticos alternativos, convirtiendose en un factor democratizador. En la sociedad boliviana pos-colonial el proyecto hegemónico de un estado-nación homogenizante ha capitulado ante la fuerte diversidad política y economica y el pluralismo legal de hecho. La comunidad tradicional andina de ayllu con sus propias instituciones legales y políticas y su propio modelo de democracia se ha hecho una base de un proyecto estatal alternativo. La integración de las practicas y conceptos indigenas antes ignorados, que democratizan el modelo monocultural y exclusivo impuesto en el pasado por las elites criollas, es concebida como una descolonizacion interna del estado.
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