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<div class="header reader-header reader-show-element"> <font
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href="https://peoplesdispatch.org/2019/11/19/hatred-of-the-indian-by-alvaro-garcia-linera/?fbclid=IwAR11r3hQGof3Jgnf37zQowwha9oSMKG8u3Gk4SqNeZV4M1xAXuswaTup6NQ">https://peoplesdispatch.org/2019/11/19/hatred-of-the-indian-by-alvaro-garcia-linera/?fbclid=IwAR11r3hQGof3Jgnf37zQowwha9oSMKG8u3Gk4SqNeZV4M1xAXuswaTup6NQ</a></font>
<h1 class="reader-title">Hatred of the Indian</h1>
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<div class="reader-estimated-time"><a
href="https://peoplesdispatch.org/2019/11/19/hatred-of-the-indian-by-alvaro-garcia-linera/?fbclid=IwAR11r3hQGof3Jgnf37zQowwha9oSMKG8u3Gk4SqNeZV4M1xAXuswaTup6NQ">November
19, 2019</a> by <a
href="https://peoplesdispatch.org/author/alvaro-garcia-linera/">Álvaro
García Linera</a><br>
<br>
<font size="+1"><b>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</b></font></div>
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<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>In the case of Santa Cruz, they organize
motorized hordes with sticks in hand to punish the
Indians, those that they call ‘</span><i><span>collas’</span></i><span>,
who live in peripheral neighborhoods and in the
markets. They chant “the </span><i><span>collas</span></i><span>
must be killed,” and if on the way, they come across a
woman wearing a </span><i><span>pollera</span></i><span>
[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.</span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>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. </span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>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.</span> <span>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. </span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>The answer is the rejection of equality, which is
to say, the rejection of the fundamentals of a
substantial democracy.</span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><span>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.</span> <span>But
in reality, they know what they have done is to
protect the privilege of caste and last name.</span></p>
<p><span>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.</span></p>
<p><em>Published on <a
href="https://www.celag.org/el-odio-al-indio/?utm_source=website&utm_medium=home&utm_campaign=articulos">CELAG</a>.
English translation by Zoe PC.</em></p>
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<div class="moz-signature">-- <br>
Freedom Archives
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