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href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/10/10/history-at-the-barricades-evo-morales-and-the-power-of-the-past-in-bolivian-politics/">https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/10/10/history-at-the-barricades-evo-morales-and-the-power-of-the-past-in-bolivian-politics/</a></font>
<h1 class="reader-title">History at the Barricades: Evo Morales
and the Power of the Past in Bolivian Politics</h1>
<span class="post_author_intro">by</span> <span
class="post_author" itemprop="author"><a
href="https://www.counterpunch.org/author/dehufr/"
rel="nofollow">Benjamin Dangl</a> - October 10, 2019</span></div>
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<p>A caravan of buses, security vehicles, indigenous
leaders, and backpackers with Che Guevara T-shirts wove
their way down a muddy road through farmers’ fields to
the precolonial city of Tiwanaku. Folk music played
throughout the cool day of January 22, 2015, as
indigenous priests conducted complex rituals to prepare
Bolivia’s first indigenous president, Evo Morales, for a
third term in office. His ceremonial inauguration in the
ancient city’s ruins was marked by many layers of
symbolic meaning.</p>
<p>“Today is a special day, a historic day reaffirming our
identity,” Morales said in his speech, given in front of
an elaborately carved stone doorway. “For more than five
hundred years, we have suffered darkness, hatred,
racism, discrimination, and individualism, ever since
the strange [Spanish] men arrived, telling us that we
had to modernize, that we had to civilize ourselves… But
to modernize us, to civilize us, first they had to make
the indigenous peoples of the world disappear.”</p>
<p>Morales had been reelected the previous October with
more than 60 percent of the vote. His popularity
was largely due to his Movement Toward Socialism (MAS)
party’s success in reducing poverty, empowering
marginalized sectors of society, and using funds from
state-run industries for hospitals, schools, and
much-needed public works projects across Bolivia.</p>
<p>“I would like to tell you, sisters and brothers,”
Morales continued, “especially those invited here
internationally, what did they used to say? ‘The
Indians, the indigenous people, are only for voting and
not for governing.’ And now the indigenous people, the
unions, we have all demonstrated that we also know how
to govern better than them.”</p>
<p>For most of those in attendance, the event was a time
to reflect on the economic and social progress enjoyed
under the Morales administration and to recognize how
far the country had come in overcoming five hundred
years of subjugation of its indigenous majority since
the conquest of the Americas.</p>
<p>“This event is very important for us, for the Aymara,
Quechua, and Guaraní people,” Ismael Quispe Ticona, an
indigenous leader from La Paz, told me. “[Evo Morales]
is our brother who is in power now after more than five
hundred years of slavery. Therefore, this ceremony has a
lot of importance for us… We consider this a huge
celebration.”</p>
<p>For critics on the political left, the Tiwanaku event
embodied the contradictions of a president who
championed indigenous rights at the same time that he
silenced and undermined grassroots indigenous
dissidents, and who spoke of respect for Mother Earth
while deepening an extractive economy based on gas and
mining industries. Indeed, the way the MAS used the
ruins of Tiwanaku for political ends, as it had in past
inaugurations, appeared shameful and opportunistic to
some critics.</p>
<p>But such uses of historical symbols by Morales were
part of a long political tradition in Bolivia. From
campesino (rural worker) and indigenous movements in the
1970s to the MAS party today, indigenous activists and
leftist politicians have claimed links with indigenous
histories of oppression and resistance to legitimize
their demands and guide their contested processes of
decolonization.</p>
<p>When Evo Morales walked through the doors of Tiwanaku
amid smoking incense and the prayers of Andean priests,
for many Bolivians it was a profound moment marking the
third term in office for the country’s first indigenous
president. It was also just another day in a country
where the politics of the present are steeped in the
past.</p>
<p>The Morales government typically portrays itself as a
political force that has realized the thwarted dreams of
eighteenth-century indigenous rebel Túpac Katari, who
organized an insurrection against the Spanish in an
attempt to reassert indigenous rule in the Andes. This
was underlined in the recent naming of Bolivia’s first
satellite, Túpac Katari. The launching of the satellite
was broadcast live in the central Plaza Murillo in La
Paz, an event accompanied by Andean spiritual leaders
who conducted rituals to honor Mother Earth. The
government has also named state-owned planes after
Katari. That Katari’s legacy could be put to use in such
a way speaks to the enduring political capital of the
indigenous leader.</p>
<p><strong>Túpac Katari’s Symbolic Return</strong></p>
<p>Over two hundred years before the Morales government
launched a satellite bearing his name, the Aymara
indigenous rebel Katari led a 109-day siege of La Paz
that rattled Spanish colonial rule. Katari’s revolt was
part of an indigenous insurrection across the Andes
launched in 1780 from Cuzco and Potosí, and spread by
Katari to La Paz in March 1781. A central demand of the
revolts was that governance of the region be placed back
into indigenous hands.</p>
<p>The Spanish eventually crushed the rebellion and
captured Katari. It is widely understood that moments
before his execution, Katari promised, “I will return as
millions.” Indeed, though his dream of overthrowing the
Spanish and gaining indigenous self-rule was crushed,
during the hundreds of years that have passed since his
execution, this martyr and his struggle have been taken
up as symbols of indigenous resistance by countless
movement participants, activist-scholars, and union
leaders in Bolivia.</p>
<p>Activists have erected Katari statues, his name and
portrait have graced placards and the titles of
campesino unions, and his legacy has fueled dozens of
indigenous ideologies, manifestos, and political
parties. Katari’s street barricade strategies have been
taken up again by twenty-first-century rebels, and the
satellite named after him circles the globe.</p>
<p>Katari’s symbolism travels well. In April 2000, the
specter of Katari returned in the form of a series of
Aymara-led protests against water privatization and
neoliberal policies. The protests involved road
blockades that cut off La Paz from the rest of the
country. Marxa Chávez, an Aymara sociologist with rural
roots, became involved in the uprising. She told me that
activists took turns maintaining the barricades and
established vigils along the highways to signal when
locals, visitors, and the military were arriving.</p>
<p>The very act of blockading roads to strangle La Paz
recalled Katari’s struggle. “The blockade is a form of
remembering the siege,” Chávez explained. The movement’s
organization of road blockades utilized practical
knowledge that had been “transmitted basically by oral
memory.” For example, “there was a form of convening
people in the Túpac Katari uprising which was to light
bonfires in the hills so that other communities would
see them, and it was a symbol of alert.” In the
blockades of 2000, activists used the same style of
fires to summon people. “That’s why hundreds of people
later arrived in [the highland town of] Achacachi to
face off with the military, because they had seen the
smoke.” She placed the origins of the technique in the
“unwritten memory in the communities.”</p>
<p>Three years later, another siege would rock La Paz,
this time led by the same highland communities and
spreading to El Alto. For weeks on end, Aymara activists
maintained barricades surrounding La Paz to protest
government repression and a plan to privatize and export
Bolivian gas. The protests ousted the neoliberal
president Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada and ushered in a new
phase of grassroots organizing and leftist politics that
paved the way for Morales’s election in 2005.</p>
<p><a
href="https://www.akpress.org/the-five-hundred-year-rebellion.html"><em>The
Five Hundred Year Rebellion</em></a> demonstrates
how the grassroots production and mobilization of
indigenous people’s history by activists in Bolivia was
a crucial element for empowering, orienting, and
legitimizing indigenous movements from 1970s
post-revolutionary Bolivia to the uprisings of the 2000s
and into today. For these activists, the past was an
important tool used to motivate citizens to take action
for social change, to develop new political projects and
proposals, and to provide alternative models of
governance, agricultural production, and social
relationships. Their revival of historical events,
personalities, and symbols in protests, manifestos,
banners, oral histories, pamphlets, and street
barricades helped set in motion a wave of indigenous
movements and politics that is still rocking the
country.</p>
<p>As contemporary Bolivian politics and movements
demonstrate, the struggle to wield people’s histories as
tools for indigenous liberation is far from over.</p>
<p><strong>Coca Fields and Street Rebellions</strong></p>
<p>The road to Evo Morales’s election was a long and
tumultuous one, forged in coca fields and street
rebellions. Morales is a former coca grower and union
leader who rose up from the grassroots as an activist
fighting against the US militarization of the tropical
coca-growing region of the Chapare in the central part
of the country. (Although it is a key ingredient in
cocaine, the coca leaf is used legally for medicinal and
cultural purposes in Bolivia.) Morales and other coca
farmers saw the US-led drug war in the country as an
attempt to undermine radical political movements, such
as the coca unions Morales led. He became an early
figurehead and dissident congressman in the MAS
political party, which grew in part out of the coca
unions and ran a nearly successful presidential bid by
Morales against neoliberal president Sánchez de Lozada
in 2002.</p>
<p>The MAS has always defined itself as a political
instrument of the social movements from which it
emerged. During the early 2000s, Bolivia saw numerous
uprisings. In the 2000 Cochabamba Water War, the people
of that city rose up against the privatization of their
water by Bechtel, a multinational corporation. After
weeks of protests, the company was kicked out of the
city, and the water went back into public hands. In
February 2003, police, students, public workers, and
regular citizens across the country led an insurrection
against an IMF-backed plan to cut wages and increase
income taxes on a poverty-stricken population. The
revolt forced the government and IMF to surrender to
movement demands and to rescind the public wage and tax
policies, ushering in a new period of unity and
solidarity between movements as civil dissatisfaction
gathered heat, reaching a boiling point during what came
to be called the Gas War.</p>
<p>The Gas War, which took place in September and October
2003, was a national uprising that emerged among diverse
sectors of society against a plan to sell Bolivian
natural gas via Chile to the United States for eighteen
cents per thousand cubic feet, only to be resold in the
United States for approximately four dollars per
thousand cubic feet. In a move that was all too familiar
to citizens in a country famous for its cheap raw
materials, the right-wing Sánchez de Lozada government
worked with private companies to design a plan in which
Chilean and US businesses would benefit more from
Bolivia’s natural wealth than Bolivian citizens
themselves would. Bolivians from across class and ethnic
lines united in nationwide protests, strikes, and road
blockades against the exportation plan. They demanded
that the gas be nationalized and industrialized in
Bolivia so that the profits from the industry could go
to government development projects and social programs.</p>
<p>Neighborhood councils in the city of El Alto, many with
ex- miners as members, banded together to block roads in
their city. The height of the Gas War recalled Katari’s
siege as it involved thousands of El Alto residents,
organized largely through neighborhood councils,
blocking off La Paz from the rest of the country and
finally facing down the military. The government’s
crackdown intensified as state forces in helicopters
above shot the civilians below, leaving over sixty
people dead. The repression pushed movements in the city
into a fury that emboldened their resistance. By
mid-October, the people successfully ousted Sánchez de
Lozada and rejected the gas exportation plan, pointing
the way toward nationalization.</p>
<p><strong>The Evo Morales Government</strong></p>
<p>Such protests and others promoting land reform and
demanding a new, progressive constitution opened up new
spaces for radical alternatives to the neocolonial
state, putting Bolivian sovereignty and a full rejection
of the neoliberal model at the center of the country’s
politics. The MAS and Morales emerged from this period
of discontent as the most adept at channeling the energy
and demands of the grassroots while navigating the
country’s national political landscape—one dominated at
the time by right-wing political parties.</p>
<p>In 2005, Morales won the presidential election, largely
thanks to the political space and popular hope inspired
by social movement victories in the previous five years.
Because he was the first indigenous president of
Bolivia, his election was seen as a watershed moment in
a nation where the majority was poor and indigenous.
That Morales could be elected on a socialist,
anti-imperialist platform after roughly twenty years
of neoliberalism was historic. Perhaps even more
significant was that, in a nation rife with racism and
neocolonialism, an indigenous man from a humble
background could take up residence in the presidential
palace.</p>
<p>Shortly after assuming office, Morales moved quickly to
institutionalize many of the social movement victories
that had been won in the streets. He nationalized
sectors of Bolivia’s rich gas industry, convened an
assembly to rewrite the country’s constitution, and
followed through on many of his campaign pledges to
alleviate poverty and empower the poor and indigenous
people living on the margins of society. His election
notably took place at a time in Latin America when other
progressive presidents were in power; from Argentina to
Venezuela, Morales was not alone in asserting national
sovereignty and rejecting imperialism.</p>
<p>The economic changes in the country point to some of
the reasons Morales was so popular throughout much of
his time in office. Bolivia’s GDP rose steadily from
2009 to 2013, contributing to what the UN called the
highest rate of poverty reduction in the region, with a
32.2 percent drop between 2000 and 2012. The rates of
employment and pay went up, buoyed by a 20 percent
minimum wage increase. Much of this economic success can
be tied to the government placing many industries and
businesses—from mines to telephone companies—under state
control, thus generating funds for the MAS government’s
popular social programs, including projects seeking to
lift mothers, children, and the elderly out of poverty.
Thanks to a successful literacy program, UNESCO has
declared the country free of illiteracy. Much of the
funding created by nationalization also pays for
infrastructure and highway development, as only 10
percent of the country’s roads are paved.</p>
<p>The MAS political project has <a
href="https://www.alainet.org/es/articulo/175633">not
been without its pitfalls and structural problems</a>.
Some of the same indigenous and rural communities that
the Morales government seeks to support with its social
programs and politics have been displaced by extractive
industries. Fields of GMO soy, accompanied by toxic
pesticides, are expanding across rural areas in the
eastern part of the country with the government’s
support. Abortion is still largely illegal in Bolivia,
and rates of domestic abuse against women and femicide
have been on the rise. Major corruption scandals have
beset the MAS and its movement allies, including the
CSUTCB and the Bartolina Sisa movement. Morales is
pushing forward with a controversial nuclear power plant
to be built near earthquake-prone La Paz, and the MAS
plans to build a highway through the Isiboro-Sécure
Indigenous Territory and National Park (TIPNIS), a move
which has sparked protests. (More recently, Morales <a
href="https://towardfreedom.org/archives/americas/as-bolivia-burns-state-policy-fuels-the-fire/">has
come under attack</a> for policies that led to the
wide-spread fires in the country.)</p>
<p>The contradictions inherent in the Morales
administration’s decision to deepen extractivist
projects in mining, gas, and mega-dams while
simultaneously cheerleading Mother Earth will impact the
nation and its indigenous movements for decades to come.</p>
<p><strong>“The Open Veins of Latin America are Still
Bleeding” </strong></p>
<p>When I sat down in Cochabamba, Bolivia, in 2003 for an
early morning interview with Evo Morales, then a coca
farmer leader and congressman, he was drinking
fresh-squeezed orange juice and ignoring the constant
ringing of the landline phone at his union’s office.
Just a few weeks before our meeting, a nationwide social
movement demanded that Bolivia’s natural gas reserves be
put under state control. How the wealth underground
could benefit the poor majority aboveground was on
everybody’s mind. As far as his political ambitions were
concerned, Morales wanted natural resources to
“construct a political instrument of liberation and
unity for Latin America.” He was widely considered a
popular contender for the presidency and was clear that
the indigenous politics he sought to mobilize as a
leader were tied to a vision of Bolivia recovering its
natural wealth for national development. “We, the
indigenous people, after five hundred years of
resistance, are retaking power,” he said. “This retaking
of power is oriented towards the recovery of our own
riches, our own natural resources.” Two years later he
was elected president.</p>
<p>Fast-forward to March 2014. It was a sunny Saturday
morning in downtown La Paz, and street vendors were
putting up their stalls for the day alongside a rock
band that was organizing a small concert in a pedestrian
walkway. I was meeting with Mama Nilda Rojas, a leader
of the National Council of Ayllus and Markas of
Qullasuyu, an indigenous organization then facing
repression from the MAS for its critiques of government
policy. Rojas, along with her colleagues and family, had
been persecuted by the Morales government in part for
her activism against mining and other extractive
industries.</p>
<p>“The indigenous territories are in resistance,” she
said, “because the open veins of Latin America are still
bleeding, still covering the earth with blood. This
blood is being taken away by all the extractive
industries.” While Morales saw the wealth underground as
a tool for liberation, Rojas saw the president as
someone who was pressing forward with extractive
industries without concern for the environmental
destruction and displacement of rural indigenous
communities they left in their wake. “This government
has given a false discourse on an international level,
defending Pachamama, defending Mother Earth,” Rojas
explained, while the reality in Bolivia is quite a
different story: “Mother Earth is tired.”</p>
<p>Critiques of the MAS and Morales are rampant among
Bolivia’s dissident indigenous movements and thinkers.</p>
<p>“I had so much hope at the moment when Evo Morales came
into the government,” <a
href="http://upsidedownworld.org/archives/bolivia/indigenous-anarchist-critique-of-bolivias-indigenous-state-interview-with-silvia-rivera-cusicanqui/">Bolivian
sociologist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui explained</a>.
“But he has come to crave centralized power, which has
become a part of Bolivia’s dominant culture since the
1952 revolution. The idea that Bolivia is a weak state
and needs to be a strong state—this is such a recurrent
idea, and it is becoming the self-suicide of revolution.
Because the revolution is what the people do—and what
the people do is decentralized.” She continued, “I would
say that the strength of Bolivia is not the state but
the people.”</p>
<p><strong>The Power of the Past </strong></p>
<p>While Bolivia’s diverse social and indigenous movements
wield power from the streets, the MAS and Morales have
successfully maintained and deepened their influence in
part by mobilizing indigenous and working-class identity
as an extension of party politics. The coca leaf is
often used by the MAS in political campaigning as a
symbol both of indigenous history and of the fight
against US imperialism. Similarly, the government’s
championing of indigenous culture more broadly, and its
connecting that culture to a nationalist project of
liberation and development, resonates with many voters
who felt they had been manipulated by previous political
leaders who, rather than seeking to decolonize and
refound the nation on the basis of its indigenous roots,
instead wanted to turn Bolivia into a mirror image of
the West.</p>
<p>Many of the same histories, discourses of indigenous
resistance, and symbols of revolt produced and promoted
from below by indigenous movements over the period
examined here are now celebrated as part of official
state policy and rhetoric under Morales. The
administration has made the wiphala part of the official
national flag, granted new rights and power to
indigenous communities, named a satellite after Katari,
and published new editions of the works of indigenous
philosopher Fausto Reinaga and other formerly dissident
thinkers and historians.</p>
<p>Some of these government approaches have popularized
images of Katari more as a distinguished head of
state—to suit Morales’s position—than as a rebel leader.
Katari has been portrayed in a number of ways throughout
Bolivian history: during the MNR revolutionary period he
was sometimes depicted in paintings holding a gun, and
the Kataristas saw him as a defiant, chain-breaking
symbol of their struggle.</p>
<p>During its first months in office, the MAS government
chose another version that represented Katari as a
stately leader, not a revolutionary. This version of
Katari was requested in 2005 by former president Carlos
Mesa, not Morales. In the portrait, <a
href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/330345586_Pachakuti_El_retorno_de_la_nacion_Estudio_comparativo_del_imaginario_de_nacion_de_la_Revolucion_Nacional_y_del_Estado_Plurinacional">scholars
Vincent Nicolas and Pablo Quisbert explain</a>,
“Katari is no longer represented as a rebel, but as a
dignitary of the State, dressed in a kind of jacket and
a modern shirt, covered in an elegant poncho adorned
with textile figures, and grasping a special staff of
authority, a symbol of his power.” Though produced
before Morales’s election, this image was taken up by
his administration and widely distributed to tie Morales
to Katari. “The Evo-Katari affiliation,” Nicolas and
Quisbert write, “has been supported very much in this
iconography, and is placed as a kind of backdrop to
Morales himself.”</p>
<p>Such political uses of the past and historical symbols
can be traced in part to the government’s Vice Ministry
of Decolonization, which was created in 2009 and works
with other sectors of government to promote, for
example, indigenous language education, gender parity in
government, indigenous forms of justice, antiracism
initiatives, indigenous autonomy, and the strengthening
of indigenous traditions, symbols, and histories.</p>
<p>One of the people involved in such decolonization
efforts in the vice ministry was Elisa Vega Sillo, a
former leader in the Bartolina Sisa movement and a
member of the Kallawaya indigenous nation. She told me
of the process of decolonizing indigenous history in
Bolivia.</p>
<p>“We try and recover an anticolonial vision above all,”
she said, focusing on how indigenous people, over
centuries of resistance, “rebelled to get rid of
oppression, the slavery in the haciendas, the taking
over of land, of our wealth in Cerro Rico in Potosí, our
trees, our knowledge—they rebelled against all of this.
But in the official history, the colonial history, they
tell us that the bad ones were the indigenous people,
and that they deserved what they got.” She explained,
“We recuperate our own history, a history of how we were
in constant rebellion and how they were never able to
subdue us.”</p>
<p>As a part of these efforts, government-led rituals now
take place every November 14 to mark the death of Túpac
Katari. Yet, sociologist Pablo Mamani asks, why remember
Katari only every November 14, as though he is dead? “We
must put this kind of ritual behind us to enter a more
everyday rituality,” he explains. Mamani sees no need to
remember Katari just one day a year, because “Túpac
Katari has returned and is among us, and we, ourselves,
are the thousands of men and women that we have in these
territories, and we are on our feet, walking.”</p>
<p><em>This essay is excerpted from the Dangl’s book, <a
href="https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1849353468/counterpunchmaga">The
Five Hundred Year Rebellion: Indigenous Movements
and the Decolonization of History in Bolivia</a></em></p>
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