[News] Bolivia - Hatred of the Indian

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2019/11/19/hatred-of-the-indian-by-alvaro-garcia-linera/?fbclid=IwAR11r3hQGof3Jgnf37zQowwha9oSMKG8u3Gk4SqNeZV4M1xAXuswaTup6NQ 



  Hatred of the Indian

November 19, 2019 
<https://peoplesdispatch.org/2019/11/19/hatred-of-the-indian-by-alvaro-garcia-linera/?fbclid=IwAR11r3hQGof3Jgnf37zQowwha9oSMKG8u3Gk4SqNeZV4M1xAXuswaTup6NQ> 
by Álvaro García Linera 
<https://peoplesdispatch.org/author/alvaro-garcia-linera/>

*Vice-president Álvaro García Linera reflects on the role of racial 
hatred in motivating the coup which forced him and President Evo Morales 
out of office and into exile*

Almost as a nighttime fog, hatred rapidly traverses the neighborhoods of 
the traditional urban middle-class of Bolivia. Their eyes fill with 
anger. They do not yell, they spit. They do not raise demands, they 
impose. Their chants are not of hope of brotherhood. They are of disdain 
and discrimination against the Indians. They hop on their motorcycles, 
get into their trucks, gather in their fraternities of private 
universities, and they go out to hunt the rebellious Indians that dared 
to take power from them.

In the case of Santa Cruz, they organize motorized hordes with sticks in 
hand to punish the Indians, those that they call ‘/collas’/, who live in 
peripheral neighborhoods and in the markets. They chant “the 
/collas/must be killed,” and if on the way, they come across a woman 
wearing a /pollera/[traditional skirt worn by Indigenous and mestizo 
women] they hit her, threaten her and demand that she leave their 
territory. In Cochabamba, they organize convoys to impose their racial 
supremacy in the southern zone, where the underprivileged classes live, 
and charge – as if it were a were a cavalry contingent – at thousands of 
defenseless peasant women that march asking for peace. They carry 
baseball bats, chains, gas grenades. Some carry firearms. The woman is 
their preferred victim. They grab a female mayor of a peasant 
population, humiliate her, drag her through the street. They hit her, 
urinate on her when she falls to the ground, cut her hair, threaten to 
lynch her, and when they realize that they are being filmed, they decide 
to throw red paint on her symbolizing what they will do with her blood.

In La Paz, they are suspicious of their employees and do not speak when 
they bring food to the table. Deep down, they fear them, but they also 
look down on them. Later, when they are on the streets shouting, they 
insult Evo and with him, all of these Indians that dared to build 
intercultural democracy with equality. When they are many, they tear 
down the Wiphala, the Indigenous symbol, they spit on it, they step on 
it, they cut it, they burn it. It is a visceral hatred that they unload 
on this symbol of the Indians that they wish they could extinguish from 
the earth along with all those that are represented by it.

Racial hatred is the political language of this traditional middle 
class. Academic titles, trips and faith serve for nothing because in the 
end, what is important is purity of ancestry. Deep down, the imagined 
lineage is stronger and seems to stick to the spontaneous language of 
the skin that hates, of the visceral gestures and of their corrupt morals.

Everything exploded on Sunday [October] 20, when Evo Morales won the 
election with 10% more than the runner-up, but no longer with the 
immense advantage of before nor with 51% of the votes. It was the sign 
that the regressive, huddled forces were waiting for – the timid liberal 
opposition candidate, the ultra-conservative political forces, the OAS 
[Organization of American States], and the indescribable traditional 
middle class. Evo had won again but he no longer had 60% of the 
electorate. He was weaker and they had to go after him.The loser did not 
recognize his defeat. The OAS spoke of “clean elections” but of a weak 
victory and asked for a second round, counseling to go against the 
constitution that states that if a candidate wins more than 40% of the 
votes and has more than 10% over the runner-up, they are elected. And 
then the middle class launched its hunt of the Indians. On the night of 
Monday, October 21, they burned 5 of the 9 electoral offices, including 
the ballots. In Santa Cruz, a civic strike brought together the 
inhabitants of the central zones of the city, following which the strike 
branched out to the residential zones of La Paz and Cochabamba. And this 
unleashed terror.

Paramilitary groups began to besiege institutions, burn trade union 
offices, set fire to the residences of candidates and political leaders 
of the governing party [Movement Towards Socialism]. Even the private 
home of the president was looted. In other places, families, including 
children, were kidnapped and threatened with being whipped and burned if 
their parent, who was a minister or union leader, did not resign. An 
endless night of the long knives had been unleashed, and fascism peeked out.

The people’s forces comprising workers, miners, peasants, Indigenous 
people and urban dwellers resisted the civic coup and began to retake 
territorial control of the cities. But just as the balance of the 
correlation of forces was shifting in their favor, the police mutiny 
occurred.

The police had for weeks shown great indolence and ineptitude in 
protecting the common people while they were being attacked and 
persecuted by fascist groups. But from Friday [November 8], many of them 
displayed an extraordinary ability to attack, detain, torture and kill 
working-class protesters. When it came to dealing with the children of 
the middle class, they apparently did not have the capacity. But when it 
came to repressing rebellious Indians, the deployment, violence and the 
arrogance was monumental.

The same happened with the armed forces. During all of our time in 
government, we never allowed them to repress civil mobilizations, not 
even during the first civic coup d’état in 2008. And now, in the midst 
of the convulsion and without us having asked them anything, they told 
us that they did not have anti-riot capacities, that they only had 8 
bullets per member and that a presidential decree was necessary for them 
to be on the streets in even a protective capacity. However, they had no 
hesitation in seeking the resignation of president Evo, in violation of 
the constitution. They did whatever was possible to attempt to kidnap 
him while he was traveling to and was in Chapare. And then, when the 
coup was consolidated, they went to the streets to shoot thousands of 
bullets, to militarize the cities and assassinate peasants. And all of 
this without any presidential decree. In order to protect the Indian, 
they needed a decree. To repress and kill Indians, it was enough to obey 
what the racial and classist hatred decreed. And now, in only 5 days, 
there are more than 18 dead and 120 injured with live bullets. Of 
course, nearly all of them are Indigenous.

The question we must respond to is, how did the traditional middle class 
incubate so much hatred and resentment towards the people, leading them 
to embrace racialized fascism centered on the Indian as the enemy? What 
did they do to irradiate their class frustrations to the police and 
armed forces and become the social base of this process of becoming 
fascist, of this state regression and moral degeneration.

The answer is the rejection of equality, which is to say, the rejection 
of the fundamentals of a substantial democracy.

The last 14 years of the government of the social movements were 
characterized by the process of leveling of the social classes, the 
sharp reduction in extreme poverty (from 35% to 15%), the broadening of 
rights for all (universal access to healthcare, to education and to 
social protection), the Indianization of the State (more than 50% of 
functionaries in public administration must be Indigenous, new national 
narrative around the Indigenous sector) and the reduction of economic 
inequality (the difference of income between the richest and the poorest 
fell from 130 to 45). All this meant the systematic democratization of 
wealth, access to public goods, opportunities and state power. The 
economy has grown from 9 billion dollars to 42 billion dollars, widening 
the market and internal savings, which has allowed many people to have 
their own homes and improve their work activity.

Thus, in a decade, the percentage of people of the so-called “middle 
class” in terms of income, went from 35% to 60%. The largest part of 
them came from the working-class and Indigneous sectors. It was 
essentially a process of democratization of the social goods through the 
construction of material equality. But this inevitably has caused a 
rapid devaluation of the economic, educational and political capital 
held by the traditional middle class. In the past, a notable last name, 
the monopoly over ‘legitimate’ knowledge, and their family relationships 
allowed the traditional middle class to access posts in public 
administration, obtain loans and bids for projects or scholarships. 
Today, the number of people that fight for the same post or opportunity 
has not only doubled – reducing the possibilities to access these goods 
by half – but, additionally, the ‘up-and-coming’, the new middle class 
with Indigenous, working class origins, has a combination of new capital 
(Indigenous language, trade union links) of greater value and state 
recognition to fight for the available public goods.

As such, it is about a collapse of what was a characteristic of a 
colonial society: ethnicity as capital, basically, the imagined 
foundation of the historical superiority of the middle class above the 
subaltern classes because in Bolivia, social class is only 
comprehensible and is visualized under the form of racial hierarchies. 
That the sons of this class have been the shock force of the reactionary 
insurgency is the violent cry of a new generation that sees how the 
inheritance of the last name and skin fades in the face of the 
democratization of goods. Although they raise the flag of democracy that 
is understood as a vote, in reality, they have risen up against 
democracy that is understood as the leveling of social classes and 
distribution of wealth. This is why we see the overflowing of hatred, 
the outpouring of violence – because racial supremacy is something that 
is not rationalized. It lives as a primary impulse of the body, as a 
tattoo of the colonial history in the skin. As such, fascism is not only 
the expression of a failed radical transformation of values, but 
paradoxically in post-colonial societies, the success of a material 
democratization.

With this in mind, it is not surprising that while nearly 20 Indigenous 
people have been shot dead, those that murder them and order their 
murder narrate how they are acting to safeguard democracy. But in 
reality, they know what they have done is to protect the privilege of 
caste and last name.

Racial hatred can only destroy. It is not a horizon for the future. It 
is nothing more than a primitive vengeance of a class historically and 
morally declining that shows that a coup-supporter is crouched behind 
every mediocre liberal.

/Published on CELAG 
<https://www.celag.org/el-odio-al-indio/?utm_source=website&utm_medium=home&utm_campaign=articulos>. 
English translation by Zoe PC./

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