The Politics of Conflict Resolution in Bolivia

Mediating Democracy in El Alto:

By Susan Helen Ellison

B.A. Washington University in St. Louis, 2000

M.T.S. Harvard Divinity School, 2007

M.A. Brown University, 2009

A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Anthropology at Brown University

Providence, Rhode Island May 2013

This dissertation by Susan H. Ellison is accepted in its present form by the Department of Anthropology as satisfying the dissertation requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Date______Kay B. Warren, Advisor

Recommended to the Graduate Council

Date______Daniel J. Smith, Reader

Date______Jessaca Leinaweaver, Reader

Date______Keith Brown, Reader

Date______Nancy Postero, External Reader

Approved by the Graduate Council

Date______Peter Weber, Dean of the Graduate Schoo

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Susan Helen Ellison ______

Permanent Address: 2216 Valley Vista Rd. Louisville, Kentucky 40205 [email protected] Date of Birth: December 8, 1977

Education

Brown University Ph.D. in socio-cultural anthropology May 2013 Ph.D. Candidacy Awarded May 2010 Dissertation: Mediating Democracy in El Alto: The Politics of Conflict Resolution in Bolivia Chair: Kay B. Warren. Readers: Daniel J. Smith, Jessaca Leinaweaver, Keith Brown

A.M. in Socio-Cultural Anthropology Awarded May, 2009

Harvard Divinity School Masters in Theological Studies (MTS), June 2007

Washington University, St. Louis Bachelor of Arts (double major in Cultural Anthropology and Spanish), May 2000 Summa Cum Laude Senior Honors Thesis: “Doing Ants’ Work: The Evolution of Chile’s Popular Movement.” Thesis Advisor, Prof. Richard G. Fox Phi Beta Kappa John Bennett Award to the Outstanding Graduating Senior in Anthropology.

Research Interests

Political and legal anthropology including anthropological approaches to democracy, transnational governance, crime/criminalization, conflict and its resolution; The politics of nature, social movements, and political subjectivity; The anthropology of aid, humanitarian intervention, and nonprofit organizations; Urban anthropology. Latin America, especially Bolivia.

Grants and Fellowships

2011 Social Science Research Council SSRC-ACLS International Dissertation Research Fellowship

2010 Wenner-Gren Foundation International Dissertation Research Fellowship

2010 National Science Foundation dissertation research fellowship. Jointly funded by the Cultural Anthropology and Law and Social Sciences Programs.

2010 Fulbright-Hayes (declined).

2009 Tinker Field Research Grant, Brown University Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS). For Pre-dissertation research, summer 2009.

2008-Present Jacob K. Javits Fellow, U.S. Department of Education

2008 Honorable Mention, National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship

2007 Brown University Fellowship, Brown Graduate School

2008 Summer research grant, Graduate Program in Development (GPD), Brown University

2005-2007 Guerrand-Hermés Scholarship, Harvard Divinity School

Publications

Under review. “Replicate, Facilitate, Disseminate: Bricolage, Political Subjectivity, and American Democracy Promotion in Bolivia,” for the Political and Legal Anthropology Review (PoLAR).

Awards

2013 Joukowsky Family Foundation’s Outstanding Dissertation Award, Brown University.

2013 Elsa Cheney Award for unpublished work by a Junior Scholar. Gender and Feminist Studies section of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA)

Research Experience

Dissertation Fieldwork August 2010-November 2011; June-July 2009 Seventeen months of ethnographic fieldwork in El Alto and La Paz, Bolivia toward my doctoral dissertation. Funded by the Wenner-Gren foundation, Social Science Research Council, and National Science Foundation, and the Jacob K. Javits Foundation, and the Tinker Foundation and Brown University’s Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS).

Masters Fieldwork June-August 2008 Nine weeks of fieldwork in El Alto, Bolivia investigating the interplay between U.S. democracy promotion programs and indigenous and sindicalista (labor union) forms of political participation and political subject formation. Supported by the Summer Fieldwork research grant, Graduate Program in Development (GPD), Brown University.

Independent research, U.S. drug policy in the Andes July 2000 Conducted independent research in San Sebastian Women’s Prison in Cochabamba, Bolivia

as part of an investigation into U.S. drug policy in the Andean region. My article following the stories of women imprisioned under U.S.-backed drug policy -- and the lives of their children – was published in The Courier-Journal November 19, 2000. Accompanying award- winning photographs of women prisioners and their children selected for an exhibit by Artswatch in Louisville, Kentucky in July 2001.

Undergraduate Honors Thesis, “Doing Ants’ Work: The Evolution of Chile’s Popular Movement.” Jan-August 1999 Seven months in Santiago, Chile conducting fieldwork for my senior honors thesis at Washington University in St. Louis. Studied the collapse of the popular movement against Pinochet following Chile’s transition to democracy, with a particular focus on the experience of pobladora women who participated in Christian Base Communities during the dictatorship. My fieldwork included participant observation in ongoing Christian Base Communities, in- depth interviews with women religious and former movement participants, the Catholic hierarchy, and former prisoners and survivors of torture, as well as the families of the dissapeared. Graduated Summa Cum Laude and received the John Bennett Award to the Outstanding Graduating Senior in Anthropology for my project.

Languages: Fluent in both written and spoken Spanish and English.

Conference Papers and Invited Lectures

2013 “Words are carried off by the wind: Debt, Conflict, and the Judicialization of Kinship in El Alto.” American Ethnological Society and Association for Political and Legal Anthropology, Spring Conference 2013, “Anthropologies of Conflict in a New Millennium.”

2013 “Studying Aid Workers or Becoming One?: The Perils of Studying Up in Engaged Research.” Delivered at the international workshop, “Knowledge Production, Ethics, Solidarity: Stories from the field,” hosted by Brown University’s Middle East Studies Center.

2011 “El Alto, Problem City: The Politics of Capacitación for Conflict Resolution in Bolivia.” Invited Panel (AAA Committee on the Anthropology of Public Policy): “Legacies of the Past, Promises of the Future: Capacity Building as a Practice of Contemporary Development, Intervention and Governance.” Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association.

2009 “Replicate, Facilitate, Disseminate: ‘Translating’ American Democracy Assistance in El Alto, Bolivia.” Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association.

2009 “‘The Rome of Yesterday Reflected in the Bolivia of Today’: Faith-based Advocacy, Structural Inequality, and Health in the Andes.” Brown University Lecture Series, “Innovative Approaches to Global Health.” Series theme, “Religion and Global Health.” April 9, 2009.

2008 “Debating Democracy: American Foreign Aid and Democracy Promotion in Bolivia.” Panel: “New Directions with Core Heuristics in Political Anthropology.” Annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association.

2008 “Friction in the Aid Chain.” Brown Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS) Graduate Student Conference. November 14, 2008.

2008 “Back from the Field: American Foreign Aid and Democracy Promotion in Bolivia.” Brown Graduate Program in Development student conference October 10, 2008.

2008 “Debating Democracy and American Foreign Aid in Bolivia.” New England Council of Latin American Studies (NECLAS) annual conference. Panel: “Changes in the Andes.” October 4, 2008.

Teaching Experience Teaching Portfolio available at http://susanhellison.wordpress.com/

Spring, 2009 Teaching Assistant, International Health: Anthropological Perspectives with Prof. Daniel J. Smith. Led two weekly sections, graded, and offered student advising.

Fall 2008 Teaching Assistant, The Anthropology of Masculinity with Prof. Matthew Guttmann. Grading and student advising.

Teaching Invitation and Guest Lectures

2013 Guest speaker, grant writing and research design for the interdisciplinary course, Theory and Research in Development II, Brown University. March 7, 2013.

2013 Guest speaker for the course “Theories of Latin American Development,” taught by Kathleen Millar, Simon Fraser University. Discussed my article manuscript (which was assigned reading), “Replicate, Facilitate, Disseminate: Bricolage, Political Subjectivity, and American Democracy Promotion in Bolivia.”

2012 Guest lecturer for the Brown University seminar “Two Billion Cars: Humans, Markets, Cultures, and the Automobile” taught by Prof. Cathy Lutz. Lecture: “Of Citizens and Cebras: Transportation and the Birth of a City.”

2012 Guest speaker, grant writing and research design for the interdisciplinary course, Theory and Research in Development II, Brown University. February 23, 2012.

2011 Guest lecturer, Louisville Presbyterian Seminary class taught by Prof. Cláudio Carvalhaes. “Everyday Violence and Religious Pluralism in Post-Multicultural Bolivia.” Dec. 1st, 2011

2008 Guest lecturer for seminar “Andean Anthropology” (Prof. Jessaca Leineweaver) Brown University. October 15, 2008. On course book The Spectacular City and lynching violence/vigilante justice in Bolivia. Academic Service 2009 Co-Organizer III Annual Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS) Graduate Student Conference, Brown University.

2008 Center for Latin American Studies and Caribbean Studies liaison between the Bolivian Embassy and Brown University Events planning team for visit of Bolivian President Evo Morales to Brown University, where he delivered the Ogden Lecture in International Affairs, April 22nd, 2008. Worked with Brown staff, Bolivian Embassy, Secret Service, and Bolivian community representatives in Providence, among others involved in coordinating President

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Morales’ visit.

2008 Co-organizer, conference “Changes in the Andes: Realities, Challenges and Opportunities for Inter-American Relations.” February 12-13, 2008. Co-sponsored by the Center for Latin American Studies and Caribbean Studies and Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University.

2005-2007 Graduate Student representative on Harvard’s University-wide Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibility (ACSR). Also served on a sub-committee advising the ACSR and Harvard Corporation on investments in – and divestment from – companies doing business in Sudan.

2005-2007 Secretary, Nuestra Voz, Harvard Divinity School’s Latino/a Students Association.

Additional Training

2013 Teaching Certificate III, Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning, Brown University.

2012 Teaching Certificate I, Reflective Teaching Practice. Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning, Brown University.

Research-Relevant Work Experience

August 2001-May 2005 Prior to beginning graduate studies, I worked as the facilitator for a national network of Bolivian grassroots, non-profit, and faith-based organizations that were working to identify and address what they considered to be the structural causes of poverty in the country. That network was part of a larger transnational advocacy network of organizations mobilizing in response to neoliberal economic restructuring policies and historical forms of socio-political and economic exclusion. My work focused heavily on indigenous rights and environmental justice issues related to the mining sector and water privatization. I regularly wrote and spoke at international conferences on the unfolding social, political and economic situation in Bolivia, including two violent episodes in 2003 that precipitated the flight of President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada (the “Gas War”), the ascencion of President Evo Morales, ongoing conflicts over the privatization of water, and efforts to redress the historic and ongoing social, political, and economic exclusion of indigenous Bolivians from political power.

Relevant Non-Academic Publications

“In Bolivia, Rebecca’s Story Is All Too Real,” Sunday Forum section, The Courier-Journal, Louisville, KY, December 22, 2002.

“Bolivia and the Drug War: Are women, children victims of policies to limit imports of cocaine?” Sunday Forum section, The Courier-Journal, Louisville, KY, November 19, 2000.

“Haunting Visions of the ‘Disappeared’: School of the Americas protest is a reminder of Chilean horrors,” Sunday Forum section, The Courier-Journal, Louisville, KY, December 5, 1999.

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References

Kay B. Warren Dissertation Chair Charles C. Tillinghast Jr. ‘32 Professor in International Studies and Professor of Anthropology Director Pembroke Center, Brown University. 1 (401) 863-3251 (x32653) [email protected]

Daniel Jordan Smith Associate Professor and Chair of Anthropology Department, Brown University. 1 (401) 863-3251 (x37065) [email protected]

Jessaca Leinaweaver Vartan Gregorian Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Brown University. 1 (401) 863-3251 (x36429) [email protected]

Keith Brown Professor (Research), Brown University. [email protected] Currently out of the country – available by email.

Mailing address for all four: Department of Anthropology Box 1921 128 Hope Street Brown University Providence, RI 02912 USA Tel: (401) 863-3251 Fax: (401) 863-7588

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This dissertation project was made possible thanks to the many people who sat down to talk with me about their experiences participating in foreign-funded conflict resolution programs, working within the Bolivian justice system, or laboring in non-governmental organizations and grassroots groups operating in El Alto and La Paz, Bolivia. People like Nancy, Charo, Germán, Ceci, Marina, Daniel, Jorge, Silvia, Rita, Leticia, Carmen, Ana Maria, Ofelia, Ronald, Rosita, Maria Luisa, Pedro, Arabel, Carolina, Benedicta, Stefan, Alejandrina, Lourdes, Jeanette, Lucila, Patti, Evelyn, Edith, Michael, Elena, Carlos, Richard, and Daniela – among many others. Many of you understand your lives to be driven by a commitment to improving access to justice and achieving substantive democracy in Bolivia, and you were extremely generous in sharing your experiences wrestling with how best to accomplish those goals. I owe a special debt of gratitude to people connected to El Alto’s Integrated Justice Centers – staff, interns, and volunteers – and the Bolivian Ministry of Justice, for allowing me to work closely with them on a day-to-day basis. Some of you appear here under pseudonyms. Others of you do not appear in the text, but are very much present, nonetheless. You helped me understand the institutions and processes I was studying, and therefore haunt this project and my conscience as I try to get it right, try to show the complexity, struggles, conflicting agendas, frustrations, intense debates, and triumphs of the many people whose proyectos de vida are entangled with the country’s proceso de cambio. Thank you for your openness, your analytic insights, and especially your time and thoughtfulness in the many formal interviews and informal conversations we have shared over the years.

I am deeply grateful to my committee for their guidance and support throughout my time at Brown University: My Chair, Kay B. Warren, my committee members Daniel J. Smith, Jessaca Leinaweaver, and Keith Brown, and my outside reader, Nancy Postero. Each of you has played a critical but distinct role in helping me grow as a scholar and navigate this dissertation process. Thank you to Kay, my advisor, for your ethnographic sensibilities, energetic brainstorming, and professional wisdom and strategizing sessions; to Dan for your grant writing feedback, mentoring on teaching, and enthusiastic support for my dissertation; to Keith for your insights into Aidland and the world of democracy promotion, and for always thinking outside the (black) box; and to Jessa for your discerning feedback, for modeling a calm, measured approach to getting things done and maintaining sanity amid the demands of academia, and for your extraordinary ability to demystify the whole process. Finally, thank you to Nancy Postero for inspiring conversations over coffee and for your close reading and insights into the dissertation draft.

James Doyle, Sohini Kar, Colin Porter, Stacey Vanderhurst, Láura Vares, and Caitlin Walker – I am so thankful that I entered graduate school with such an extraordinary group of people. You are all brilliant, insightful intellectual interlocutors, but more importantly, you are wonderful people and dear friends. From those first awkward “get to know you” meals to Skyping our way through fieldwork dilemmas, I have been so grateful for your support and encouragement. From arguing over films at the GCB to cramming for our qualifying exams, from mapping our grant proposals to celebrating after we’ve reached candidacy, from picking outfits for AAA interviews to helping me format my dissertation for that final submission – you have been there all along the way, and I am a better scholar and person for sharing this experience with you.

I am particularly indebted to the dear friends and colleagues who read various chapters and

iterations of this dissertation, beginning with my first fumblings at ideas to those final, critical stages making sure my metaphors aren’t mixed and my sentences aren’t fragments. Remaining fragments are my own fault. But I will just claim them as a stylistic device. You have made me a better writer and thinker, and I am grateful for your critical eyes and listening ears: Stacey Vanderhurst, Andrea Flores, Katharine Marsh, and Bill and Linda Ellison.

Silvia Rivera, Pamela Calla, Germán Guaygua, Juan Arbona, Helene Risør, and Nancy Postero all offered their insights and critical perspectives as I was formulating and developing my project. I am especially grateful to Pamela and to the Universidad de la Cordillera for the affiliation as I conducted research, as well as to the Bolivian Vice Ministry of Justice and Fundamental Rights, and Vice Minister Nelson Cox Mayorga, for the formal affiliation with the Ministry as I worked in El Alto’s Integrated Justice Centers. I would like to say a special thank you to Bolivia’s former president, Dr. Eduardo Rodríguez Veltzé, for his assessment of judicial reform and foreign aid in Bolivia. Thank you to my wonderful bolivianistas, who debated policy, crowded the MUSEF conference room, shivered in late-night FEJUVE gatherings, trekked to Sucre and further-flung destinations for thoughtful and rowdy conversations about the unfolding Proceso in Bolivia, our research projects, and our own proyectos de vida: Yvonne Goodson, Nancy Egan, Lesli Hoey, Gabriel Hetland, Raul Rodriguez Arancibia, Sara Shahriari, Carmen Soliz, Sarah Hines, Magalí Rabasa, Nate Freiburger, Damaris Mühe, Dario Kenner, Georgina Lewis, Alicia Bunch, Cara Contreras, Santos Tola, and Jorge Derpic, among others.

Many other faculty members in Brown’s Anthropology Department and Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS) have played important mentoring roles throughout my graduate studies, including Cathy Lutz, Paja Faudree, Bianca Dahl, Matt Guttmann, and Sherine Hamdy. I am particularly grateful to Richard Snyder and Jim Green, who provided me with wonderful opportunities to organize conferences and participate in exciting interdisciplinary conversations through CLACS. Kathy Grimaldi, thank you for being the anchor in the Anthropology Department. You keep us grounded with your humanity and superhuman organizing skills, and your capacity to tolerate people at their most stressed and grumpy – and to offer perspective when we lose it. Thank you also to Matilde Andrade and Margie Sugrue -- the keepers of the money and materials that keep us running as a Department. Thank you to Susan Hirsch and José Torrealba, who weathered and laughed through many event planning (mis)adventures at Brown’s CLACS – all the workshops, films, and speakers series, and especially the visit of President Evo Morales. Richard G. Fox and Lisa Baldez have also been key mentors, encouraging me to pursue independent research in Chile while I was an undergraduate student at Washington University in St. Louis. They helped set me on this path to the Ph.D. At Harvard, Michael D. Jackson, Ajantha Subramanian, and Ronald F. Thiemann left their imprints on my thinking and research trajectory.

One of the great draws of Brown’s Anthropology Department was the collegial, collaborative environment among graduate students – an ethos we work very hard to reproduce each year. The first people I encountered at Brown were the elder statespeople of our department, who mentored me through my first years in graduate school, and now continue to be nurturing colleagues and friends: Kathleen Millar, Jennifer Ashley, Harris Solomon, Katie Rhine, Inna Leykin, Christine Reiser, Kendra Fehrer, Rebecca Galemba, Andrea Maldonado and Andrea Mazzarino, and Yağmur Nuhrat, and Kristin Skrabut. Kathleen, Jen, Harris, Christine, Katie, and Rebecca, you have dedicated so many hours to offering concrete advice and wisdom on grant writing, teaching, and fieldwork, as well as your empathy and honest talk about the realities of academia. Inna, Kendra, Yağmur, and Kristin, you made this experience more manageable, injecting wry humor into an often- overwrought grad school life. Over the last six years I have enjoyed the company of many wonderful graduate student colleagues who have supported me as I wrestled with project design, agonized over existential dilemmas, and slogged through the writing process, including Josh MacLeod, Bhawani Buswala, Chelsea Cormier McSwiggin, Katharine Marsh, Alyce de Carteret, Emily Button, Magnus

Pharao Hansen, Yana Stainova, Sarah Newman, and Karen Jorge, among others. Thanks to the first year students who have been an enjoyable part of this, my final year in graduate school, and to Alyce and Katherine, for caring for my family – Harlan and Leona – when I was on the road.

I also have been grateful for my extended interdisciplinary cohort – friends in sociology, political science, religion, history, and literature – who have pushed me to think in new ways and to articulate my project for other audiences, and who have cheered me throughout the process: Angelica Duran Martinez, Amy Benjamin, Sinem Adar, Ana Catarina Teixeira, Sukriti Issar, Coleman Nye, Arturo Marquez-Gomez, Heather Silber Mohamed, Jen Costanza, Marcelo Bohrt Seeghers, Pablo Suarez, Elizabeth Bennett, among many others. Thanks for being my personal interdisciplinary crew, for balancing earnest conversations about our research with hearty laughs.

The origins of this dissertation date back to my first trip to Bolivia in 2000 – through Washington University in St. Louis’ Catholic Student Center. I later returned to the country in 2001 to begin a four-year stint working with a national network of Bolivian organizations pursuing social and economic justice. There were many people who have played an enormously important role in this long journey, including Kate McCoy, Rob Young, and Joe Wright. Three of the first people I met in Bolivia were GeorgeAnn Potter, Amanda Martin, and Melissa Draper. GeorgeAnn and Amanda in particular played an unsuspecting role in setting me off on this path – by introducing me to San Sebastian Women’s Prison, where I conducted independent research on U.S. drug policy and Ley 1008, resulting in an Op-Ed piece that precipitated my return to Bolivia a year later. From 2001- 2005, my thoughtful, deeply-committed colleagues spanned hemispheres: Lionel Derenoncourt, Maria Arroyo, Hunter and Ruth Farrell, Lynn McClintock, Brad Hestir and Jean Norris, Melanie Hardison, Rebbeca Barnes, Peter Davies, and the people and organizations working with the UMAVIDA network and the Joining Hands program world-wide. Over the years, my community in Bolivia has included dear friends and coworkers who have influenced my thinking and deepened my understanding of issues affecting Bolivia and U.S.-Bolivia relations, including Enriqueta Huanto, Rina Yanapa, Luis Perez and Lourdes Huayhua, Samuel Condori, Cleo Loza, Andrea and Andy Baker, Cati Williams, Sara Weinstein, Father Mike Gillgannon, Anitawa Fearday, Joan Muray, Maggie Fogarty, Tim Provencal, Sarah Henken, Chenoa Stock, Joanna and Erwin Ramos-Romero, Jason and Felicia Gehrig, Julieta Paredes, and Dan Moriarty. Mil gracias especialmente a Elizabeth López, quien siempre está dispuesta a ayudarme profundizar mis ideas, y a Zoraida, Braulio, Basílica, Irma, y Samuel, por su apoyo, amistad, y cariño.

My ethnographic research was made possible thanks to the generous support of a number of institutions, including the Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, Social Science Research Council SSRC-ACLS International Dissertation Research Fellowship, Wenner-Gren Foundation International Dissertation Research Fellowship, National Science Foundation dissertation research fellowship (jointly funded by the Cultural Anthropology and Law and Social Sciences Programs), the Tinker Field Research Grant through Brown’s Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS), and Brown University’s Graduate Program in Development (GPD) summer research grant.

Finally, I want to thank parents for the ways they have shaped the way I relate to the world and write about it. My father and stepmother, Bill Ellison and Linda Raymond Ellison, sat down at the dinner table every night, where we would talk through the major controversies of the day – and all of the multiple and conflicting perspectives that accompanied them. Their journalistic ethos has profoundly influenced the ways I approach fieldwork and tell stories – even if my grammar leaves much to be desired. My father, Bill, is my biggest cheerleader and approaches everyone from my college friends to the check-out worker at the grocery store as if they are worlds unto themselves, each one worth knowing and from whom much can be learned – a great model for treating every person I meet. My stepmother, Linda, pushed me to volunteer in places like Louisville’s Sheppard’s Square housing project as a middle schooler – encouraging me to the world as bigger than my own

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experience or troubles. She read to me every night as a child, taking me to Narnia and to a Little House in a Big Woods, and taught me to listen to the rhythm of language. My mother, Helen McCloy, instilled in me a love of poetry and an eye for composition that inflects my writing to this day. She has shown her support by becoming deeply invested in the lives, triumphs, and struggles of my friends in Bolivia, asking after them by name. All three of my parents have encouraged me to take risks, to pursue justice, to find my voice, and to really listen to the voices of others. I am grateful for their love, patience, and support throughout.

All of these people – and many more who I have not been able to name here – have influenced my project for the better. Any omissions, errors, or failings are mine alone.

I dedicate this dissertation to my extended network of fictive kin, my comadres and compadres, and especially to my ahijados/godchildren:

Mauricio, Sofia, Mariana, Jules, Aaron, Michael, and Alison

Les agradezco por incluirme en su familia, en esta red expansiva de amistad, cariño y compromiso.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS...... xv

INTRODUCTION Peeling the ADR Onion ...... 1

CHAPTER ONE: Fix the State or Fix the People? ...... 32

CHAPTER TWO: Cultures of Peace, Cultures of Conflict...... 73

CHAPTER THREE: A Market for Mediators...... 113

CHAPTER FOUR: Between Compadres There is No Interest ...... 155

CHAPTER FIVE: The Conflictual Social Life of an Industrial Sewing Machine...... 200

CHAPTER SIX: Words are Carried Off By the Wind ...... 245

CONCLUSION: Rumor Has It ...... 285

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 306

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1 Study guide,“Towards a Democratic Culture: Authority and Responsibility”...... 55

Figure 2 Blackboard from an ADR training session...... 135

Figure 3 Advertisement for a training workshop on working with NGOs ...... 150

Figure 4 District 8’s Integrated Justice Center alongside microfinance institutions...... 183

Figure 5 A moneylender’s storefront ...... 210

Figure 6 A "micro" bus ...... 215

Figure 7 Case files in one of La Paz’s criminal courts...... 271

INTRODUCTION

Peeling the ADR Onion

“Given a choice between a boiling, violent and a freezing, apathetic society as reaction to massive needs-deprivation, topdogs tend to prefer the latter. They prefer ‘governability’ to ‘trouble, anarchy’. They love ‘stability’. Indeed, a major form of cultural violence indulged in by ruling elites is to blame the victim of structural violence who throws the first stone, not in a glasshouse but to get out of the iron cage, stamping him as ‘aggressor’.” — Johan Galtung

“To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.” - Tacitus, Agricola

Uprising

In October of 2003, residents of the city of El Alto laid siege to Bolivia’s adjacent capital, La

Paz. Although the flashpoint of the uprising was the export of Bolivia’s natural gas supplies, the popular protests expressed a deeper dissatisfaction with neoliberal economic development policies and the state of democratic institutions in the country (c.f. Kohl and Farthing 2006; Lazar 2008).

Protests in El Alto escalated rapidly after the military opened fire on residents in the rural Altiplano town of Warisata, killing several people, including a child. The military had descended on the town in helicopters in order to break up a blockade there, and to “liberate” tourists trapped in the nearby vacation destination Sorata.1 The intervention, however, only succeeded in enflaming people’s anger

1 A massacre in the Altiplano town of Warisata is considered one of the key moments precipitating the 2003 El Alto uprising. The town, located just a few hours outside El Alto, had erected roadblocks to protest government policies. On September 20th, 2003, the Bolivian military attempted to break the blockade so that tourists who had been stranded in their neighboring town of Sorata could pass through. Bolivian Defense Minister Carlos Sanchez Berzain was present and reportedly ordered the military to open fire on the crowd of protesters. Five civilians, including a child, and one soldier were killed.

about the government’s use of violence to suppress protests. It proved to be a crucial turning point in helping to galvanize the disparate protests taking place in El Alto and the surrounding rural hamlets. Those protests now rallied around a common battle cry: Gas for Bolivia and the resignation of Bolivia’s president, Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada (or “Goni” as he was commonly known). As the government’s repression increased, the demand for President Sanchez de Lozada’s resignation intensified.

At the time I was working as the facilitator for a national network of Bolivian grassroots groups, NGOs, and faith-based development organizations that had come together to look at the structural causes of poverty in Bolivia. I was living in a working class neighborhood perched high on

La Paz’s steep ladera (hillsides) facing El Alto. Just a few months earlier, in February, I had watched curling smoke plumes rise from neighborhoods in downtown La Paz, as rioters burned government buildings and political party headquarters. The February violence had been provoked by a new tax system pushed by the World Bank. Angered by the new policies, Bolivia’s police force abandoned their posts and took to the Presidential Plaza to protest, where they were joined by young students from a nearby school. Amid rock-throwing students, the protests turned deadly when the military began firing on the crowd. The police shot back using their own service weapons. Riots broke out across the city. For several days afterward, the wafting traces of burning government buildings and paperwork filled the crater of La Paz.

Now, in October, I watched as tear gas plumes and smoke wafted once again — this time from burning blockades where the two cities connected in the Ceja.2 Street traffic vanished as the stranglehold grew tighter. The airlines stopped running. Food shortages stripped the markets bare.

Friends concerned about me, a young foreign woman living alone, walked several miles to bring me a wilted head of lettuce they had managed to stockpile before foodstuffs grew scarce. A neighbor’s family secretly made bread in their bakery’s large brick oven, dispensing it to their closest relatives.

2 Literally “eyebrow” -- the market /commercial district where La Paz and El Alto meet at the ridge where the high plain city descends into the vast bowl of La Paz.

One brought me a gift of still-warm, crusty marraqueta. I offered her a few eggs in return. For those of us living in La Paz, we could only imagine what was happening in El Alto, listening to radio reports and talking anxiously with friends there.

As news of more deaths and injuries came in, people called radio stations pleading with neighbors to let ambulances through the blockades. One DJ begged, “If any health center is listening to this broadcast, please send help to…” But the Red Cross couldn’t get into El Alto. They had no gasoline. The wounded and dead had to be wheel-barrowed to makeshift hospitals or morgues.

Several stations continued to offer live updates even as they received threats of military intervention.

Neighbors went out to help protect them. Listeners called in sobbing, terrified by what was happening, pleading with the government not to kill more people. Others spoke with hushed voices, expressing their pain and shock. One caller identified himself as a “conscripto,” a young soldier fulfilling his mandatory military service: probably a kid just out of high school. In a defiant yet shaking voice he told listeners, “I am here with others in the ***** Battalion. We are ready to support our people. We are ready to disobey orders. We call on others to join us.” For a moment I couldn’t believe he had just identified himself publicly. Other reports came of the military executing young conscripts for refusing orders, for refusing to fire on the civilian population of El Alto. Those stories circulated as evidence of the brutality of the government, which was asking the nation’s children to fire on their parents, grandparents and siblings.

In the Alto neighborhood of Villa Adela, where I would later live during dissertation fieldwork, a man called the radio station to say that people there were forming a mob to seek out the families of the local police in order to take revenge. The DJ tried to calm him down, pleading with him and others not to confront the military or attack police families. The caller responded, “Mr.

Journalist, you have to understand. Our people are dying. We cannot let it continue. We must take a stand. We are ready to die confronting the military if necessary.” Calls poured in from other Alto residents saying this was the wrong approach. That Alteños had to stop attacking Alteños. The poor couldn’t keep hurting the poor.

That Tuesday, I called a dear friend, Enriqueta, who lived in the Rio Seco, one of the neighborhoods that would be left pockmarked by the 2003 violence. She breathed heavily into the phone as we spoke. She was running. I could hear hollow popping noises in the background and what sounded like the loud whir. ‘Helicopter?’ I thought. “Where are you running?” I shouted into the phone, alarmed. “I’m here in my neighborhood. We’re trying to help the wounded,” she panted. I begged her to be safe, to stay home. “I have to help,” she insisted and kept jogging toward the injured.

Another friend, Rina, who lived on the steep La Paz ladera opposite me, called to check in.

“Imagine the mothers. Imagine the widows!” Rina wailed. “So much suffering. They should feel anguish—killing their brothers and sisters. But they feel nothing. Shooting from the helicopters, the snipers, oh!” Rina’s voice shook with rage and sorrow as she repeated “They don’t see us as human.

They’re just killing us…”

As the deaths continued to mount, people’s tone changed. Neighbors sat around sharing what we could learn from friends and relatives in other neighborhoods, on the radio or TV. An older woman in my building, who had never shown any sympathy for campesino or indigenous movements, held a hand to her mouth and winced as her daughter told us of yet another report of deaths. Yet rather than blame the protesters (as she once did), she now blamed the president and his repressive tactics.

President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada declared that he would not give in to the growing pressure to step down. The American mission issued statements saying that the U.S. would stand behind Goni and his bid to remain in power — to preserve Bolivian democracy. Critics scoffed at the notion that democracy could be preserved through violent repression. Amid increasingly violent reprisals, support for Goni quickly eroded.

As the violence and uncertainty intensified I asked my friend and colleague Rina — an Aymara agronomist who people often assumed was my empleada (maid) because of her ethnicity— what she thought would happen. She responded, “[Goni] will eventually have to resign. He just will. That’s

how it’s always happened. [Indigenous] people didn’t know how to read, how to write. There were so few schools; you had to walk for hours. They had to struggle. The people have always had to struggle. You weren’t allowed to study, but the people fought for their rights. The indigenous were slaves to the masters, that’s all. But now the people are many.3 They’ve studied, and now they are aware.”

“And one day,” Rina concluded, “they will govern. They are preparing themselves.”

Rina was right.

Two years later, Evo Morales Ayma would be elected Bolivia’s first indigenous president.4

***

Political and development analysts characterized the weeks-long (and largely unarmed) 2003 uprising as symptomatic of ailing democratic institutions and unhealthy, “authoritarian” political practices in the city’s trade unions and neighborhood associations. One report, commissioned by

USAID, described the city as “a brewing cauldron for confrontation, frustration, and all kinds of anti-democratic and anti-systemic (illegal) actions.”5 In the wake of the unrest, American and

European aid agencies flooded El Alto with new waves of funding under the banner of emergency democracy assistance. One of their flagship approaches to “deepening democracy” in El Alto was to sponsor “Alternative Dispute Resolution” (ADR) programs throughout the city to promote a

3 Rina’s statement invoked the words of Tupac Katari, an indigenous leader who was reported to proclaim at his execution (drawn and quartered) by the Spanish that although he would die, he would return -- and he would be millions. He is a heroic figure among indigenous movements in the Andes. 4 With his support and credibility gone, Sanchez de Lozada fled La Paz for Miami on October 17th, 2003. He has remained in the U.S. ever since, amid continued demands for his extradition to face charges. In the wake of the 2003 uprising, many Bolivians celebrated the power of El Alto to organized and to bring the country — and the Sanchez de Lozada administration — to its knees. But many others, including political elites and foreign donors, were deeply alarmed. As Goni’s vice president, Carlos Mesa assumed the reins, he acknowledged the demands now known as “the October Agenda,” and pledged his commitment to redress the macro political-economic critiques they expressed. Mesa would not complete the term. Under less violent but nevertheless conflictual circumstances, he resigned — not once, but twice before it really stuck in May of 2005. Those next in line for succession were so politically unpopular that the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court was asked to fill the open presidency. Chief Justice Rodríguez Veltzé would assume the presidency in the interim, stabilizing the country long enough to hold elections. Evo Morales and his Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) party won with an unprecedented 54% of the vote on December 18th, 2005. 5 Indaburu Quintana, Rafael. 2004 “Evaluacion de la ciudad de El Alto” Contract 511-O-00-04-00047-00, USAID.

“culture of peace” against El Alto’s supposed “culture of conflict.” Donors have advanced ADR as both a substitute to the backlogged formal legal system, and as a means to instill Alteños with deliberative democratic temperaments. Yet since 2008, ADR and allied democracy promotion programs have become entangled in a much larger national debate over who sets the terms of democracy and what justice should look like in Plurinational Bolivia. In 2008, the Morales

Administration put the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) under the microscope, accusing the American Mission of funding his right wing opposition. Morales rallied his base of support — the coca growers’ union in the Chapare and Yungas regions — and made public accusations of political meddling, ultimately severing diplomatic relations with the United States.

The accusations sent existing programs into a period of prolonged uncertainty about whether their projects would continue or face immanent closure. The U.S. eventually suspended their democracy promotion programs – some at the natural end of contract periods, others ahead of schedule.

Around the same period, USAID transferred control of its ADR programs to the Bolivian Ministry of Justice, while other foreign-funded ADR programs continued to operate through the work of

Bolivian NGOs. Regardless of who was executing them, however, ADR and democracy assistance programs continue to spark debate over the aims and interests behind foreign funding.

This project examines how foreign aid ideologies about legitimate democratic personhood, participation, and how justice should be enacted, frequently chafe against local meanings of conflict, coercion, and political engagement in the city of El Alto. In particular, I follow donor efforts to promote Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) through workshops, public forums, and especially through the creation of a national program of Integrated Justice Centers meant to pull Bolivians out of the formal legal system. Throughout this dissertation, I show how the unfolding (geo)politics of foreign funded conflict resolution programs have become entangled with Andean kinship practices, local political tactics, and postcolonial governance projects alike, precipitating the hyperpoliticization of these ostensibly apolitical aid programs. In contrast to conciliation’s small-scale, technocratic, and therapeutic intervention, I show how Alteños clamor for a broader conceptualization of justice – and

a democratic system capable of redressing structural forms of violence – even as they utilize these

“depoliticizing” stopgap measures to endure in the meantime.

The 2003 uprising has deeply shaped the ways Bolivians and foreign researchers like myself think about struggles over the future of Bolivian democracy. And yet, this focus on the “event” — on that moment in 2003 when El Alto laid siege to La Paz — may erase the longer history of indigenous mobilizations over precisely these issues. Those movements have been building since the

1970s and grew more powerful in the 1990s, but they frequently invoke their precursors: indigenous uprisings during the Colonial era. Moreover, it narrows our focus to overt expressions of political dissatisfaction: mass street protests, strikes, blockades, and revolutionary discourses in public forums.

The political conflagration that has erupted over USAID’s post-2003 funding also obscures a longer history of aid interventions and liberal reforms. Those include earlier efforts to remake Bolivia’s political institutions and economic policies — advocated by a variety of financial institutions and bilateral donors. This dissertation is structured to start with those big debates and the ways foreign aid platforms — particularly democracy promotion programs and judicial reform projects — have intersected with them. Ultimately, however, I am more interested in the kinds of everyday crises and struggles that never grab headlines or that, as Elizabeth Povinelli has said, fail to reach “the level of an event” (2011: 4).

Media and scholarly coverage of the 2003 uprising — or the many subsequent political

“events” and dramatic moments of social and political violence in Bolivia — tend to focus on the spectacle: spectacle in protest and violent repression, spectacle in charismatic leadership and symbolic political actions, spectacle in public lynchings of suspected criminals and effigies hung in warning, spectacle in dance parades that overrun capital streets and neighborhood plazas and that enact forms of sociality that bind people together and enable collective action.6 Indeed there is a lot of spectacle in Bolivia, and those studies offer enormous insights into those eventful forms of protest, sociality,

6 See, for example, Bolivianist work on spectacular expressions of protest, violence, belonging, and politics: Guss 2006; Goldstein 2004; Gustafson 2006; Fabricant 2009, among others.

and violence that shape life and politics in Bolivia. Amid a series of dramatic accusations of foreign political meddling, the total collapse of Bolivia-U.S. relations has also proven to be rather theatrical.

But while working on a topic that initially seemed so spectacular and so politically fraught, I found that, along with Povinelli,7 what interested me was, “the ordinary, the chronic, and cruddy rather than catastrophic, crisis-laden, and sublime” (Povinelli 2011: 3). As Povinelli describes, “In the oscillation between [a] state of neither great crisis nor final redemption, there is nothing spectacular to report” (4). Rather, working in El Alto’s Integrated Justice Center in District 6, I encountered a kind of “dispersed suffering” (ibid) and mundane forms of foreign aid interventions that never rose to the level of smoking gun, or rather, the match that lit the unfolding geopolitical firestorm. Yet both that diffuse suffering and those ordinary interventions are deeply reflective of the “late liberal” logics that have restructured much of living and dying in places like El Alto.

This dissertation is in many ways an attempt to connect the geopolitical to the intimate, the political Event to the cruddiness and everyday experiences of people targeted by aid programs, as well as those responsible for implementing them. In some ways here, form reflects content: as I found, American democracy assistance programs were increasingly concerned with rehabilitating the ways residents of El Alto managed conflict, both political and interpersonal. They operated with their own theories of how the Event was tied to the intimate. One of the signatures of ADR is its emphasis on rehabilitating the individual and the interpersonal at the expense of examining the political, reframing the political as a methodological challenge rather than a policy one. By contrast, this dissertation seeks to show how the two are, in fact, deeply intertwined.

Among people who work in the world of Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR), the

“Conflict Onion” is a popular image as they explain the techniques of their well-honed conflict resolution expertise. Workshop leaders in Bolivia and the United States invoke the “Onion” as a metaphor for the multi-layered and multi-dimensional quality of a conflict, its many actors and unarticulated desires, the ways prior conflicts may compound and confuse a particular dispute.

7 And Povinelli, in turn, was inspired by the science fiction work of Ursula Le Guin.

Those invoking the Onion explain that ADR method is meant to help clients peel away those layers to get to the heart of a conflict and to make its resolution possible, despite the tears it may provoke along the way. In this dissertation I take as an inspiration — somewhat ironically — the ADR Onion.

Each chapter aims to peel back layers on the history, politics, meanings, ironic moments, and unexpected outcomes that these aid interventions provoke.

AID and Accusation

The 2003 uprising was the Big “E” Event that worried political analysts, catalyzed a series of donor interventions, and re-arranged national political platforms. In many ways this project dates back to the initial grief, uncertainty, and recovery that followed what became known as “Black

October.” Within a year, the American Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI) would arrive in Bolivia, targeting El Alto with a massive dosage of democracy assistance funding normally reserved for war- torn, post-conflict zones like the Balkans (Brown 2009). At the time neither my colleagues nor I knew much about OTI. What we did know was that a funding surge had hit El Alto, and many

NGOs were scrambling to apply for those resources. The members of our network hotly debated what to do with that funding — and whose interests it ultimately served. As I have shown elsewhere

(Ellison 2009/Forthcoming), American aid officials regularly defended their investments as merely technocratic, apolitical interventions — efforts to bolster the “empty form” of democratic institutions and deliberative democratic practice. The expressed aim of the U.S. democracy assistance programs was to restore Alteños’ confidence in formal democratic institutions – particularly political parties – by meeting their immediate needs, and to encourage Alteños to communicate their frustration, dissent, and desires through deliberative democratic practices and institutional democratic channels. In other words, U.S. democracy assistance in El Alto sought to produce classical liberal and governable subjects, to respond to immediate demands for infrastructure and political accountability, and thus to stabilize El Alto and the country as a whole.

When I left Bolivia in 2005, heading back to the US to pursue graduate studies, several organizations I knew were bustling to gain access to American democracy assistance funding in El

Alto. When I returned three years later, many people I spoke with were trying to keep their work with USAID and their receipt of American funding a secret — including people who were, by then, working in the Morales Administration. Not because they believed they had done anything wrong with those funds, but because they wanted to avoid guilt by association. USAID was in the middle of a geopolitical firestorm and its beneficiaries were suspect. What I had thought was merely an intense internal debate among NGOs and activists over the stated and strategic aims of American funding — and whether an organization could accept such funding and remain relatively independent of those donor objectives and interests — was now a hot button political issue on a national stage.

“Evo celebrates the expulsion of [the U.S. Agency for International Development] from the

Chapare, and the Yungas threatens [the same],” declared one of the headlines that welcomed me back to Bolivia in 2008 when I returned to conduct MA research. The article went on to report that

Morales had told a crowd of peasant farmers that, “There is no reason we should kneel before the empire.8“ On his audience’s mind was likely the twin American presence of the DEA and USAID, which operated in the Yungas and Chapare regions with parallel drug interdiction and alternative development projects meant to supplant coca production with tropical fruits. But over the course of the next few months, the programs Evo pointed to again and again were American democracy assistance projects targeting democratic institutions, political parties, and civil society groups.

Precisely the programs I had returned to study. A subset of “technocratic,” “apolitical” American aid programs that had seemed so welcome only three years earlier was suddenly at the center of a heated struggle over how to decolonize Bolivian democracy and a catalyst for crumbling US-Bolivia relations.

European aid representatives and NGO workers shook their heads and dithered over what it would mean for their own work, which was often not that different (at least on the surface).

8 Front page, La Prensa, Friday, June 27th 2008.

American officials expressed their exasperation, telling me that Evo supporters denounced them publicly, and then begged for continued funding privately. They dismissed the attacks as merely populist discourse — political posturing — meant to agitate and rally supporters. Many Left-leaning groups continued to receive American funds without ever realizing their politically fraught origin — even as they denounced American injerencia or political meddling. They carried embossed folders or canvass event bags bearing the logos of their funders — funders like the National Endowment for

Democracy, whose translated names they did not recognize as American in origin or funded by

Congress. Some decried the ways American interests dictated Bolivian policy and politics. Others took more moderate positions, criticizing the unequal power relations created by foreign aid in

Bolivia more generally, while arguing that the aid was nevertheless critical to ongoing efforts to redress inequality and improve democratic institutions in the country. Rather than emphasizing political meddling, they pointed to the inflated salaries paid to foreign consultants, the resources that went into overhead rather than programming, the paternalistic relationships it reproduced.

Many Bolivians understood Morales’ election to represent a moment of rupture with the past, an event that radically upended the historical social, political, and economic exclusion of Bolivia’s indigenous majority. Evo made the “October Agenda,” as it came to be known, a central part of his political platform. As the Morales Administration and indigenous movements push for the decolonization of the state, they insist on plural and alternative visions for the good life (vivir bien) that reflect indigenous cosmovisión and enact indigenous autonomy. The Assembly charged with re- formulating Bolivia’s Constitution (adopted in 2009) under Morales incorporated the term

Plurinational into the country’s official name, replacing the term “Republic,” to underscore the

Morales Administration’s intention of elevating status and power of indigenous peoples as coeval to mestizo and European-descendent Bolivians. The phrase el proceso de cambio or “the process of change” has become shorthand for that transformative agenda, and Alteños regularly invoke it as a litmus test for policies and political allegiances. Supporters of Morales decry political leaders and grassroots dirigentes (union leaders) who show signs of being “against el proceso de cambio,” while both Morales

supporters and his further-left critics frequently ask whether the Administration is living up to its own platform and political mandate. Morales has honed in on foreign aid projects (primarily

American aid) and foreign-funded NGOs under the mantle of decolonizing foreign relations. Yet these projects have not gone uncontested, and have instead sparked enormous debate and struggle over the meanings of justice and how to achieve it.

I initially set out to discover how ostensibly apolitical, technocratic aid programs had become so deeply hyperpoliticized. And indeed, part of this dissertation continues to tackle that puzzle. But while the political conflagration tended to focus on whether American aid had supported Morales’ opposition — particularly right wing leaders and parties in the eastern lowland region — this obscured the more complex dimensions of the role foreign aid has played in Bolivian social, political, and economic life. All the focus on funding to the Right was missing a far more interesting set of questions. What was USAID doing in the city of El Alto? El Alto offers Morales’ Movement Toward

Socialism (MAS) party a staunch base of support,9 and is home to Leftist trade unions, neighborhood associations, and pro-Indian movements; The funding flowing into the city therefore begged the question: What kind of work were American and European donors doing there? The daily work of

Bolivia’s Integrated Justice Centers, as well as other mundane, everyday efforts to promote

Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) as a mechanism to enact justice outside of the formal legal system, reveals just how entangled geopolitical debates and ordinary experiences of conflict and violence really are in places like El Alto. In particular, I show how foreign aid agendas have become ensnared with Alteños’ everyday efforts to manage economic insecurity and interpersonal violence, especially as these two issues intersect in the lives of urban-dwelling indigenous women. What these entanglements reveal is something more complex than simply “funding the Opposition.”

9 Even though Alteños resent those who suggest that Evo played a role in the uprising. In fact, he was mostly missing during that period, and initially took rather conservative positions.

A note on methods

This project is akin to what Janine Wedel has called “studying through,” or “tracking policy discourses, prescriptions and programs and then linking them to those affected by the policies”

(2005: 37). I spent 17 months working in foreign-funded legal aid centers, conflict resolution programs, and the criminal courts El Alto and La Paz. My primary research site was one of El Alto’s

Integrated Justice Centers, originally sponsored by the U.S. Agency for International Development

(USAID), but now run by the Bolivian Ministry of Justice. I arrived at my field site in the fall of

2011, during yet another period of heightened debate over the influence of foreign funding in

Bolivian politics and public policy. This charged political atmosphere greatly enriched my research project while also posing new challenges. I found that on a personal level, people who had worked with American-funded democracy assistance and judicial reform programs were anxious about identifying with those projects, and claimed that they had trouble finding employment due to the

USAID “stain” on their CVs. This sense of being politically marked contrasted with the ways association with such programs has historically provided a source of cultural capital, a stepping-stone to higher class status. Accordingly, I had to navigate the increasingly complex representational politics of foreign aid in my conversations with former staff and government officials. Yet none of these categories were stable.

As the control of El Alto’s Integrated Justice Centers shifted from USAID to the Ministry of

Justice, many of the people I interviewed moved from being USAID contract workers to government bureaucrats and public servants under the Morales Administration. Moreover, parallel to

USAID’s efforts was a broader spectrum of conflict resolution programming promoted by the

United Nations, European Commission, and other bi-lateral donors and nonprofit organizations which did not receive the same degree of political dissection. These institutions and projects swapped workshop leaders and training materials, attended conferences together and shared theoretical frameworks, met with government officials and trained other government bureaucrats in ADR methodologies. These were not discrete categories, but rather forms of expertise and real live expert

practitioners who circulated between aid agencies, government ministries, NGOs, and community organizations. With them traveled ideas, techniques, and funding. And as these people and resources, methods and expertise circulated, the distinction between foreign and government program seemed harder to maintain. The Vice Minister of Justice and Fundamental Rights, Dr. Nelson Cox

Mayorga10, suggested to me that the most important difference was that now the state itself had assumed responsibility for ensuring that poor Bolivians have access to court alternatives. Cox

Mayorga had been working in the Ministry since the foundation of the Centers, and criticized

USAID for its anti-institutional, anti-state approach. But the transfer of control from USAID to the

Ministry of Justice didn’t mean the end of foreign funding. Instead, Cox Mayorga was now working more closely with the Danes and Germans.

To get at these entanglements, this project examines two broadly-defined categories of aid interventions targeting social and interpersonal conflict in Bolivia: 1) ADR programs intended to help the general public develop conflict resolution skills, and 2) the Integrated Justice Centers, which encourage ordinary citizens (particularly the poor and indigenous residents of El Alto) to utilize ADR as an alternative to the formal legal system. The first includes a broader constellation of European and American funding that has gone to both NGOs and government agencies to promote a “culture of peace.” These programs promote conflict resolution methods through training workshops, public forums, model debates (conversatorios), radio programs, and national ad campaigns. I attended many such events, including book launches and the National Congresses on Alternative and Indigenous

Dispute Resolution. I interviewed jurists and policy makers, donor representatives and aid recipients,

NGO staff and workshop participants, and Bolivian officials at the Ministry of Justice. I also enrolled in a two-month-long diploma course in ADR that was sponsored by La Paz’s Catholic University, brought professors from California Western Law School, and staffed sessions with conflict

10 Throughout this dissertation, most aid workers, NGO representatives, staff, volunteers and interns appear under pseudonyms, as do clients of the Integrated Justice Centers. I reserve original names for people like Dr. Cox Mayorga and others speaking in their capacity as high ranking public officials or institutional representatives, or for people speaking in public forums where they can be widely identified, are covered by the media, or are otherwise on the record.

resolution experts (conflictologos) from the well-known Bolivian NGO, UNIR.11 The course drew government bureaucrats, Bolivian and German NGO workers, human rights activists and rural development technicians, lawyers and law enforcement officials from both Bolivia and Venezuela.

During that two-month course (meeting 5 nights a week), I witnessed passionate debates about the usefulness or inappropriateness of ADR models that have traveled from Harvard

University’s Negotiation Program, foreign law schools, and bi/multilateral donors. Those conversations further revealed the ways local donor-policy “translators” or “brokers” are putting

ADR programs and resources in conversation with Bolivian debates about judicial pluralism and indigenous modes of conflict resolution, among other topics. I also spent four months working at one of the criminal courts in La Paz — with the aim of better understanding the challenges facing the formal legal system, and the reasons motivating donors to advocate informalism as a solution to those problems. There, I met with judges and court staff, interns and lawyers, and observed the daily workings of the courts, including the many, many cases that seem never to go to trial due to missing parties, jurors, or both.

The bulk of my time, however, was spent working in one of El Alto’s six Integrated Justice

Centers. For fifteen months, I served in an official capacity as an intern with formal affiliation with the Vice Ministry of Justice and Fundamental Rights. In District 6 (Alto Lima), I worked alongside the staff, legal aid interns fulfilling requirements for their law degrees, as well as the few volunteers who continued to return to the Center even after the volunteer program had been officially phased- out. On a daily basis I did intake with Center clients, registering detailed histories of domestic violence, interpersonal conflicts, and various other problems that brought residents to the legal aid center — from formalizing land titles to fights over inheritance. These day-to-day tasks included orienting clients about their legal and non-legal options, setting-up conciliation appointments, and drafting transfer letters to other agencies (e.g. the forensic medical examiner, psychological services, child protective services, among others).

11 UNIR is the Spanish verb “To Unite.”

I regularly observed the work of Center staff as they provided orientation, explained conciliation services, and initiated court cases. We discussed our work, the formal justice system, conciliation/ADR, and issues confronting Center clients. I also observed mediation sessions, and with the permission of all parties, conducted in-depth follow-up interviews with clients about domestic violence, debt conflicts, and corruption in the justice system, among other recurring themes. Attending conciliation sessions allowed me to observe the ways staff utilized ADR, as well as the ways clients responded to those methods, and to catch the turns of phrase and complaints that were written out of the succinct, bullet-pointed final accords. In my follow-up interviews I was able to further situate conciliation sessions within a broader constellation of conflict management strategies people in El Alto employ outside of the Centers and state agencies, including the use of fictive kin, neighborhood associations, and rural indigenous community leaders (Mallkus) to resolve disputes.

Because I was working as an intern at the Center, the position posed unique ethical challenges for how to best approach people whose stories and experiences I wanted to follow more closely through follow-up interviews. When many people first approached the intern desk where I worked, they were dealing with sensitive issues and personal struggles – and I never wanted anyone to feel that they had to assent to participating in my study before getting access to Center resources or other help. As I consequence, I would always approach people later, after their intake sessions were over, after they had their conciliation invitations and other necessary documents arranged – and sometimes weeks after we had first met and they had initiated cases with the Center – to ask if I might interview them further about their experiences. Nearly everyone I approached said yes, as long as I could work around their busy lives rearing children, selling produce in the market, or travelling long distances hauling products for other vendors. I interviewed women butchers outside their corner shops and prestamistias (moneylenders) as they labored at their other jobs, and spent many hours sharing tea and flaky empandadas as women mapped their vast webs of debts and detailed their histories of violence, as Mary Kay vendors tabulated their cosmetic sales and recounted their struggles to obtain child

support from estranged husbands, as brothers and sisters debated how best to care for a disabled sibling when elderly parents died. It is my hope that chapters 4, 5, and 6 help put flesh, sweat, and tears in an otherwise abstract debate about ADR, foreign aid (and political meddling), and crumbling

US-Bolivia relations.

Fieldsite: The Integrated Justice Center, District-6 (Alto Lima)

District 6’s residential neighborhoods blanket the foothills of the Andes, blooming like little rows of adobe and brick flowers. District 6 is home to the massive 16 de Julio street market, which I describe in greater detail in Chapter 4. District 6’s broad commercial avenue gives way to bumpy pavement, then cobbled streets, then dirt roads that turn in to mucky sludge during the rainy season.

These neighborhoods are home to university students and young bureaucrats, women who work as empleadas (household maids) in La Paz, and men who drive the taxis, lumbering Micro, speedy minis, interdepartmental buses, and heavy trucks. And many, many of the people who came to the Center self-identified as comerciantes. They were itinerant street vendors, seamstresses, and small shop owners.

Nearly all of them worked in Bolivia’s vast informal sector. The International Labor Organization

(ILO) estimates that 75% of Bolivians labor informally12.

District 6’s Integrated Justice Center was the first one built in El Alto, forged in collaboration between USAID, the Ministry of Justice, and the local neighborhood association and its Vigilance

Committee.13 District 6, in turn, served as the pilot project for what would become a national program, a history I describe in greater detail in later chapters. The neighborhood association donated a plot of land to the project, and the Center now sits just across for the Depute Mayor’s office in Alto Lima.

12 ILO 2006 statistics, published online June 10, 2011. The ILO estimates 75% of Bolivians are “Persons in informal employment” outside of agriculture, while 52% are classified as working in the informal sector. 13 A citizen oversight committee meant to monitor the production of obras or public works, among other efforts to control corruption in the dispersing of funds.

As I describe in Chapter 1, the team responsible for designing the Centers envisioned a place apart from the formal legal system. Staffed by volunteers from the surrounding community, the program designers believed that the resources they offered would help resolve people’s everyday conflicts with neighbors, relatives, and friends, and would introduce and disseminate information on human rights — including a child’s right to an “identity” (e.g. recognition through a birth certificate) and a woman’s right to live a life free from domestic violence. But as I learned during the course of my fieldwork there, District 6 was also a place where staff and volunteers often came to challenge that original vision, and pushed the work of the Centers back toward the formal legal system.

The building is itself a testament to this tension between the formal and the informal; indeed, the two operate in one space. As I describe in Ch. 1, reformers have raised serious questions about how best to improve access to justice for Bolivians. They point to prior waves of institutional reforms aimed at the formal legal system that have failed to live up to expectations, and instead advocate informalism as a more satisfying mechanism for business interests and ordinary citizens alike. This perceived institutional failure is not particular to Bolivia, but rather reflects a global pattern of promoting informalism. Nevertheless, it plays out in particular places, like El Alto’s

Integrated Justice Centers, where it becomes entangled with local meanings, practices, and politics.

Entering the building to the right, in a dark and hidden corner, are the judges chambers. Those chambers are part of an ongoing effort to further decentralize Bolivia’s justice system by creating satellite courts, but the corner location reflects their peripheral relationship to core mandate of the

Integrated Justice Centers: to get people out of the formal legal system. Crammed into two small offices, the judge and his staff handle a variety of cases ranging from divorce and child support to inheritance claims and domestic violence cases. Yet as I show in Chapter 6, however little space they hold in the overall building, the formal courts occupy enormous space in people’s imagination.

Interns regularly grumbled about how people could not understand the separation between the two entities (a separation anthropologists themselves argue is tenuous at best). As one intern, Olivia, once

barked at a client who was mystified by the distinction: “We are not the juzgado [courts] — that is a completely unrelated entity!”

The Integrated Justice Center occupies the vast open space to the left of the entrance. The

Center consists of a large waiting room lined with plastic chairs. At three wooden desks in the middle of the room, interns register new clients into the computer system, print invitations to conciliation, draft letters of referral to other institutions, and redirect lost parties back toward the hidden court.

Alongside the back wall are glass-enclosed offices housing the Director and the occasional pro-bono lawyer. The Conciliator, whose work is the heart of the Centers, has a sturdy wooden door and blinds to add a degree of privacy. Staffed initially by community volunteers, the Center is now run by a small crew of public servants (the Director and Conciliator) and two or three legal aid interns from local universities. Occasionally the Center enjoys an on-site psychologist — usually another college- age student getting credit for an internship.

Many people who come to District 6’s Integrated Justice Center pass through an orientation process with the interns, who explain their legal and non-legal options, and generally encourage them to pursue conciliation as a first resort for their problems. Eventually many of these individuals and families will also get a turn before the judge (who may do his own form of conciliation) — although that eventuality was never fully anticipated or desired by the original design team.

Potential clients – predominantly women – may be there for a consultation on how to obtain child support from a husband who has gone to work in Argentina, Brazil, or Spain, as many Alteños do. They may be there to lodge a complaint against a bricklayer who never completed a retaining wall. They may be inquiring about options for leaving a husband after years of chronic violence. They may be seeking information about how to obtain a birth certificate for a child or how to file an inheritance claim. But many residents of District 6 come to the Integrated Justice Center because they are buckling under the weight of multiple debts owed to friends and banking institutions.

Indeed, conciliators in several of El Alto’s Integrated Justice Centers reported that conflicts over

interpersonal debt were overtaking their usual caseload of “intrafamilial conflict” and child support.14

Those debts were so inescapable during my time at the Center that they became the focus of the final three chapters of this dissertation.

Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) in an Era of Plurinationalism

El Alto’s Integrated Justice Centers emerged alongside a broader constellation of programs whose stated aim was to improve access to the formal legal system for poor and indigenous people, particularly women. That phrase “poor and indigenous people, especially women” has served as the rallying cry for a broad range of judicial reform platforms and aid interventions. As I describe in the first three chapters of this dissertation, these slogans carry their own histories, assumptions, and logics, even as they have appealed to people across the political spectrum. But these programs also emerged alongside efforts to promote legal pluralism and the substantive recognition of indigenous or “traditional” justice.

The effort to meaningfully implement legal pluralism in Bolivia is an ongoing and politically fraught endeavor.15 The push for judicial pluralism began in the 1990s16 as a nod to indigenous communities and an effort to decentralize democratic governance and budgeting in the country

(usually glossed simply as “decentralization”). Some critics decried these efforts as a mere extension of superficial “multiculturalism” — a “permissible,” folkloric indigeneity that masked continued social, political, and economic inequality.17 Others celebrated the move as a deeper form of recognition, however incomplete. The Morales Administration has since made legal pluralism central

1414 With no centralized system identifying what is meant by “intrafamilial” conflict, I was left trying to count by hand how many cases included problems with debt, though interns usually relied on a few stock phrases to register clients, and those underlying economic issues would emerge during sessions themselves or in people’s self reporting -- even if the detail didn’t make it into the registry. Conciliators suggested to me that a third to nearly half of their cases were explicitly over debt, even as debt came up in other kinds of conciliation sessions. This chapter and the following two deal with precisely this preponderance of debt-related cases. 15 During my fieldwork, the debate was over the “Ley del Deslinde Jurisdiccional,” a law that would help regulate jurisdictional authority. 16 Debates about judicial pluralism sometimes seem to have forgotten that it pre-dates the Morales Administration’s inclusion of indigenous justice in the 2009 Constitution.

to a larger national project of decolonizing the state. But the debate over achieving “true” legal pluralism — and resolving some of jurisdictional complexities it has spawned — is often eclipsed by broader national debates over lynching/vigilantism in cities like El Alto and Cochabamba and in rural hamlets. Critics have warned that “traditional justice” threatened human rights and liberal democracy by utilizing physical punishment, or that it is too easily invoked as a cultural smokescreen to justify the use of violence or inhumane punishment — such as the killing of Benjamín Altamirano, the

Mayor of Ayo Ayo in 2004. These arguments have tended to conflate community justice and lynching, spawning counter-editorials and conferences aimed at disabusing the public of this

“barbaric” image. These are the more spectacular forms of violence that arrest public attention and debate, and re-inscribe the urban/rural divide, themes I return to in Chapters 2 and 4.

When I first began researching foreign-funded ADR and “access to justice” programs, many people suggested I should be studying indigenous conflict resolution mechanisms out in the campo

(countryside) if I wanted to see “authentic” forms of popular justice. After all, isn’t that what anthropologists do?, they would ask me. And indeed, as I attended ADR conferences and book launches, many of the speakers, researchers, and activists were focusing their attention on cataloguing

“traditional” or “community” justice practices in the Andes — a project that often paralleled their efforts to promote “Western-style” ADR in cities like El Alto and La Paz. In workshops and public forums, scholars and activists insisted on the non-fixibility of community justice — the oral, dynamic, and non-rigid practices that, they argued, resist definition or institutionalization.

Advocates have dubbed these twin efforts MORCS and MARCS: “Metodos Originarios” or aboriginal/indigenous methods, and “Metodos Alternativos,” or alternative dispute resolution methods.

NGOs and government agencies created public forums to discuss what, exactly, judicial pluralism would look like in practice, and how it should be institutionalized if community justice defied institutionalization. Nevertheless, advocates of judicial pluralism also have criticized the Morales

17 Anthropologists in Bolivia and elsewhere in Latin America have labeled the 1990s as a period of “neoliberal multiculturalism,” drawing on Silvia Rivera’s concept of the indio permetido, a concept that was popularized by Charlie Hale (2006).

Administration, suggesting that the incorporation of community justice has remained discursive, superficial.18 Others have suggested that previous waves of socio-political reforms (such as the 1952

Revolution) had already warped or corrupted “authentic” community justice practices. These were and continue to be hotly contested issues, and assumptions about authenticity and culture that many anthropologists would critique. As I show in chapter four, the notion of legal pluralism enacted through “autonomous” regions may reproduce a billiard-ball image of legal pluralism, where

“Western” and “indigenous” practices are seen as separate systems allowed to co-exist rather than deeply interpenetrated. Moreover, the MORCS/MARCS distinction conceals the fact that many

“Western” style ADR programs initially took their inspiration from so-called indigenous and popular justice practices in African societies, rural Mexican villages, and other “traditional” communities — and from the writings of anthropologists working there.

ADR and its Critics

Anthropologists have long studied dispute resolution mechanisms in the communities where they work (Nader et al. 1963; Collier 1979; Greenhouse 1985). Legal scholars frequently characterized the kinds of third-party mediation anthropologists studied in “traditional” communities as

“primitive” and pre-modern forms of law (Nader 2005). However, those practices have since been recast as thoroughly modern and even more “civilized” than formal courts; indeed, professional mediation is widely used at the level of international relations and between private corporations

(ibid.; Dezalay & Garth 1998). Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) first gained widespread recognition during the 1970s and 1980s during the American community mediation movement, with its most famous program being the San Francisco Community Boards (SFCB) model (Abel 1982;

Harrington & Merry 1988; Merry & Milnar 1993). Much of the practitioner literature describes ADR techniques and theorizes “best practices” (Wall et al. 2001; Bercovitch et al. 1991; Bush et al. 1994).

18 As the former Chief Justice of Bolivia’s Supreme Court (and interim President of the Republic) Dr. Eduardo Rodríguez Veltzé, insisted to me in an interview.

The critical literature on ADR, however, has argued that it merely serves to control and channel other possible (and perhaps more radical) expressions of community organization and political dissent while producing a hegemonic “ideology of mediator neutrality” or “harmony ideology”

(Nader 2005, 1990; Pavlich 1996; Cobb et al. 1991; Cohen 1988; Hofrichter 1982). These critiques also point to the multivalence of these key terms in conflict analysis and resolution. How something is defined — as a means of resistance or a mechanism of control — is deeply political and historically contingent, even if the global proliferation of ADR often acts to obscure those contingencies by presenting its work as a natural outgrowth of native traditions and more humanistic approaches to achieving justice. Nader and Mattei (2008) have pushed the critique further, arguing that the entire

“rule of law” paradigm and its accompanying emphasis on commercial arbitration enables elite actors to plunder poor nations through privatization schemes, legal harmonization agreements, and harmony ideologies that pre-empt more antagonistic forms of seeking justice (like street protest).

Similarly, early critics of informalism argued that neighborhood justice centers like those operating in El Alto or San Francisco were not innocent of political aims. Hofrichter (1982), for example, argued that private dispute resolution served to “dampen class conflict” by redirecting people away from class-based organizing and collective action. Rather than seeing themselves as aggrieved groups demanding redress as a collective, people come to see themselves as private consumers pursuing the satisfaction of their individual complaints (ibid: 240). “Consumers may ‘win’ cases as individuals by getting their money back or obtaining the repair of a product,” Hofrichter argued, “but they lose as members of a wider social class interested in preventing a recurrence of the incident or effecting a change of policy” (Hofrichter 1982: 240). What ADR advocates celebrated as a decentralized, participatory approach to resolving conflict, critics saw as a managerial scheme that obscured broader patterns — erasing politics entirely. As Harrington (1982) concurred, “the origins of these problems are depoliticized or ignored, and the resolutions are internalized by the individualized form of participation. Conflict in this setting is absorbed into a rehabilitative model of minor dispute resolution” (62).

Legal scholar Amy Cohen (2006) has criticized the debate over Alternative Dispute

Resolution in the United States for its emphasis on abstract aims — focusing on what ADR is meant to do, whether ADR is a tool of liberation and empowerment or purely one of social control. By contrast, Cohen argues for focusing primarily on ADR in practice around the world. In many ways this project responds to Cohen’s call. I would argue, however, that separating the two questions — abstract aims versus local applications — fails to account for the full picture of how these concepts and practices travel, as well as how those abstract donor aims come to circumscribe the terms of the debate, especially as they determine what kinds of work gets financed. Failing to attend to the intentionality behind these programs and the ways local practice sometimes converge with those donor agendas — despite the appropriations and translations of local actors — can err on the side of celebrating complexity at the expense of recognizing hegemony and the way it circumscribes both the terms of the debate and other possible solutions. How has private dispute resolution become, to borrow a concept from Warren and Leheny (2010), an “inescapable solution”?

ADR and Governmental Rationality

Foucault (1991) famously traced how “the problem of population” gave rise to the art of government, a concern for managing people like “data” for their own good, not through law, but by disposing “things” toward a convenient (read: governable) end (211-221). Political anthropologists have reconsidered Foucault’s concept of governmentality in a world in which non-state or supranational actors and agencies have assumed regulatory functions and are challenging that “precarious achievement” of the state (Ferguson and Gupta 2002: 989). This body of work argues that we must reconceptualize the techniques of disposing people toward self-care, self-discipline, and self- regulation to fit the context of neoliberal globalization; so-called “local” “grassroots” groups and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) “may be better conceptualized not as ‘below’ the state, but as integral parts of a transnational apparatus of governmentality” (ibid: 994). One of the recurring themes I address in this dissertation is how neoliberal governmental rationality is enacted through

ADR programs and parallel efforts to encourage women to pursue microfinance to lift themselves out of poverty. As Wendy Brown explains, neoliberalism “imposes a market rationale for decision making on all spheres” and seeks to produce “entrepreneurial actors in every sphere of life” (W.

Brown 2005: 40; 42; cf Peck and Tickle 2002; cf Chalfin 2006 on supranational “actuarial governance”; Rose 2006).

Elizabeth Povinelli has advanced the term “late liberalism” to describe the champions of neoliberalism have grappled with the legitimacy crises it now faces. Povinelli characterizes late liberalism as a form of cultural recognition that has “incorporated and disciplined the challenge that anticolonial and new social movements posed to liberal forms of government by shifting the locale of the crisis and creating a definitive, though undefined, limit on the formative legal and social power of cultural difference” (2011: 26). Though seemingly parallel to what Charlie Hale (2002, 2005) and other Latin Americanists have dubbed neoliberal multiculturalism, Povinelli argues that late liberalism is more heavily “inflected by a civilizational rhetoric” compounded by a language of security and risk that serves as the ethical basis for routing out “all social projects that do not produce market forms of life” (29). Informed by the likes of Samuel Huntington’s theories of cultural clashes and Robert

Kaplan’s juju journalism,19 late liberalism mounts “a robust defense of western liberal principles”

(28). This dimension of “late liberalism” is perhaps best evident in arguments over how to talk about the future of Bolivian democracy, accusations about who is engaging in illiberal politics and tactics, and efforts to re-conduct and manage that debate — themes I address in Chapter 2, Cultures of Peace,

Cultures of Conflict.

As I show in the chapters that follow, ADR has touched down in Bolivia amid parallel efforts to produce entrepreneurial and counterinsurgent citizens. What I mean by “counterinsurgent” citizens is an effort to promote a model of citizenry that turns inward for the resolution of its problems rather that toward confrontation, where political protests are derided as anti-democratic and destabilizing,

19 Shaw 2003

authoritarian, and illiberal.20 An entrepreneurial and counterinsurgent citizen demonstrates her enterprising spirit as she pursues newly-available credit and achieves economic independence. She also demonstrates her maturity as a citizen and person in the way she manages her interpersonal conflicts

— she doesn’t wait on the state to intervene, and when she does need to air her grievance on political matters, she channels her frustrations through designated institutional channels and not street protests. In this context, ADR could be understood as a technology intended to produce such entrepreneurial and counterinsurgent citizens. In the second half of the dissertation, I examine some of the reasons Alteños come to the Integrated Justice Centers — in particular, as they seek to manage the enormous material and interpersonal burdens spawned by debt. As such, ADR is both a tool of a neoliberal rationality and a mechanism to cope with its effects.

Bolivian proponents of ADR explicitly understand their work to be aimed at remaking

Bolivians from the inside out, transforming first their interiors (that is, their dispositions), then their interpersonal relationships, and finally in doing so, broader patterns of social conflict. ADR is exemplary of governmental rationality, whether enacted by government bureaucrats, foreign donors, or NGOs (cf W. Brown 2005; Peck and Tickle 2002; Chalfin 2006). Yet ethnographic approaches to political subject formation challenge the notion that neo/liberalism (or late liberalism, for that matter) flattens or homogenizes all other forms of subjectivity in its path (Paley 2001; Postero 2007;

Biehl 2007). Nancy Postero (2006), for example, argues that one of the great ironies of Bolivia’s state-sponsored neoliberal multiculturalism was that indigenous citizens seized on those policies and the political apertures they produced to mobilize for a more radical agenda. While the Bolivian government intended the Law of Popular Participation (LPP) as a “palliative” to accompany

20 Despite his ascendency on the shoulders of protest movements, Morales has himself turned to criticizing protests in many of the same terms as his predecessors who criticized protesters for creating an “ungovernable” country -- although Morales’ arguments tend to focus on whether social movements have been infiltrated by right wing sympathizers who are working against the proceso de cambio. In that sense, Morales would not see himself as trying to squash social movements in the service of a neoliberal agenda – and indeed, during recent political missteps, Morales has tried to claim the moral high ground of backing down from unpopular policies amid protests – rather than shooting protesters. Nevertheless, critics often accuse Morales of steamrolling social movements and especially indigenous groups (like the lowland TIPNIS communities) to further his own agenda and power while deriding protests as “destabilizing” against el proceso.

stringent structural adjustment policies while furthering an elite agenda of democratic decentralization, indigenous citizens did not transform into good little Indios Permetidos (Permissible

Indians). Instead, they have mobilized to demand substantive political power and to voice profound critiques of global capitalism. As Nugent (2009) argues, the targets of such projects regularly mobilize competing ideologies of democracy and vitality, and “seize upon discourses of popular sovereignty that circulate throughout the global arena, [to] generate vernacularized versions of these global discourses, and use them to mount local political struggles” (Nugent 2009; cf Warren 2001, 1998).

So, too, Alteños utilize ADR in unexpected and ironic ways, while expressing their critiques of liberal democracy and entrepreneurial development schemes — in both heated public debates and quiet moments over tea.

ADR in an Era of Expertise

One of the appeals of studying the Integrated Justice Centers was the fact that amid a vitriolic debate over USAID’s work in Bolivia, they resisted simplistic demonization: there was a sense among both their creators and ordinary Alteños that the Centers addressed a real need among the population. While the Morales Administration pointed to American aid and its funding of right-wing

NGOs and elite political actors, ADR advocates argued that the programs they had created were simply offering tangible solutions for the country’s poor and working classes — particularly women, particularly indigenous people. My own friends, kin, and former colleagues — many of whom were deeply skeptical of American interests — believed that the work of the Integrated Justice Centers represented an exception, precisely because they responded to pressing, concrete problems and offered measurable benefits. After several moths working at the Center, I found myself often advising taxi cab drivers and shopkeepers about the services the Centers offered. When my comadre plunked down a huge amount of cash for a lawyer to help her obtain a correction to her birth certificate, I threw my hands up in exasperation because he was clearly abusing her ignorance of new

regulations that made it easier and cheaper to correct such paperwork through an “administrative” process rather than the old long-form court procedure. I urged her to go to the nearby Integrated

Justice Center where the staff would help her for free.

Annelise Riles (2002) has argued that ADR, with its emphasis on informality and expertise, poses a challenge to critical scholars, for “these techniques go beyond the benevolent technocratic paternalism Foucault once identified as governmentality. They appeal, rather, to a new market- inspired rationale of providing a service, filling a need, or solving a problem people surely want solved” (613). What makes this appealing quality of ADR dangerous, according to Riles, is how slippery it is; it produces the “hegemonic institutionalization of a heady fantasy of liberal communication, a hope that political conflict can be resolved through new and ever more technological solutions” (618). It is now a maxim among anthropologists that Alternative Dispute

Resolution’s (ADR) toolkit erases politics and power while gesturing toward them, acknowledging their absence and therefore pre-empting critique. And indeed, as I show in later chapters, late liberal notions of expertise and informality have come to shape – and perhaps delimit – the terms of the debate over how to achieve justice in “Plurinational” Bolivia by prioritizing ever more technical methods for resolving conflict in the country.

But not all scholars think that informalism is the overriding rationality operating these days.

Comaroff & Comaroff (2006) have argued that the current moment is characterized by the juridicalization of politics — yet with similar consequences for collective action. The courts rather than the streets have become the grounds upon which groups increasingly stake their claims; indeed,

“Class struggles seem to have metamorphosed into class actions” as marginalized and oppressed groups with “common plaints” become “plaintiffs with communal identities” (ibid: 27). These are not the individual, isolated consumers identified by Hofrichter above, but once again, collective action is not based on social class. Class-action lawsuits unify complainants not by their labor, but rather their consumption.

As I show in the following chapters, the “displacement of the political into the legal” realm on issues of debt exemplifies this important question about how both conciliation and litigation may undercut the possibility of tackling these broader patterns of social conflict, even as it provides individual disputants with a resource to manage insecurity in the meantime. Both tactics allow individual parties to feel satisfied — at least temporarily —even as their own interpersonal tensions continue to mount because the root causes of those conflicts continue unabated. Indeed, early

Marxist critics of ADR would suggest that this paradox is not an unintended consequence of ADR but in fact its purpose: undermining the possibility of collective action while offering individual parties a sense that their private disputes had in some way been satisfied through informal mechanisms. In an era when legal expertise is also at a premium, the same might be said of the courts.

Peeling the Onion

The chapters that follow are effectively divided into two parts. In the first part, I focus on the history, politics, and practices of foreign aid programs, and follow the experiences of the people tasked with implementing them: the aid brokers and translators21 responsible for the spread of ADR in Bolivia. I begin the dissertation by examining that broader constellation of foreign-funded conflict resolution programs (both American and European) seeking to transform Bolivian political culture and the justice system.

In Chapter 1, I argue that the promotion of ADR reflects a broader shift from a donor concern for “capacity building” aimed at bolstering state institutions to capacitación or skill-set training that aims to transform Alteños themselves to be more amenable to (neo)liberal democratic governance. In particular, these programs have reacted against the more combative, confrontational organizing tactics of El Alto’s “militant” labor/trade unions and neighborhood associations, and the

21 For anthropological approaches to “brokerage,” or “transactors” or “translators” see: K. Brown et al 2006; K. Brown 2009; Greenhalgh 2008: 16; Lewis and Mosse 2005; Rossi 2005; Merry 2006; Sampson 2005; Warren 2010; Gustafson 2009; Coles 2009, among many, many others.

influence of “conflictual” indigenous rights movements and rural peasant unions. I ask what these shifts in foreign-funded judicial reform paradigms reveal about changing transnational governance strategies and the kinds of citizen-person they seek to produce, and show how these transnational political and economic agendas intersect with local reform efforts.

In Chapter 2, “Cultures of Peace, Cultures of Conflict,” I show how the “Culture of Peace” concept has become ubiquitous in Bolivia, informing foreign aid programs and domestic policy agendas alike. I argue that the conversatorio (model dialogue) is one paradigmatic expression of the ways the culture of peace concept is mobilized in Bolivia by people and institutions that are seeking to reconfigure how democratic politics is done in the country. This globally-circulating aid paradigm has become entangled with the widespread “culturalization” of conflict in Bolivia — local idioms attributing “conflictiveness” to Andean Indians. Yet as I show, that transformative agenda has encountered profound skepticism along the way, as target populations challenge its assumptions, reject its methods, and question whose interests are ultimately served by these transformative projects.

In Chapter 3, “A Market for Mediators,” I turn my attention to the growing cadre of conflict analysts and culture of peace promoters (conflictologos) who are taking advantage of new professional opportunities afforded by ADR, as expertise in conflict management can be marketed at a high premium to non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and government agencies alike. As I show, the structure of foreign aid and the subsequent market for expertise in conflict management has come to re-map — and perhaps circumscribe — the terrain of struggle over democratic personhood, legitimate political action, and conflict itself in “plurinational” Bolivia.

The second half of the dissertation focuses on the work of El Alto’s District 6 Integrated

Justice Center, the efforts of its volunteers, professional staff, and interns, and the experiences of its clientele. In Chapters 4, 5, and 6, I examine the complex ways that residents of El Alto relate to foreign-funded conflict resolution programs and the push for informalism in the justice sector. All

three of these chapters deal with several recurring themes, namely debt, domestic violence, and conciliation documents.

Chapter 4, “Between Compadres22 There Is No Interest” argues that ADR privatizes justice by treating conflicts as isolated problems to be resolved in an informal, therapeutic setting between two parties: reducing conflicts to neat dyads. Yet as I show, this conceptualization of conflict and its resolution does not reflect the sociological reality of El Alto residents, many of whom are Aymara

Indian immigrants from surrounding rural hamlets. I argue that this tension is exemplified in conciliation sessions addressing kinship relationships (compadrazgo) that are knit and frayed by debt.

In Chapter 5, “The Conflictual Social Life of an Industrial Sewing Machine,” I build on

Adelman’s (2004) call to examine the political economy of domestic violence or the “battering state.”

This chapter tells the story of Doña Justa and a network of friends and kin who are interconnected through a broken-down industrial sewing machine — a machine that circulated first as a commodity and then as collateral on interpersonal debts and microfinance loans, and that has been tied to domestic violence and a possible murder. The critical literature on Alternative Dispute Resolution

(ADR) has pointed to the ways mediation “disappears” violence as it promotes harmony and

(re)conciliation. In Bolivia, however, ADR practitioners regularly insisted to me and to their clients that “you cannot conciliate violence, you must adjudicate.” Despite this assertion, I found that

Bolivian ADR practitioners regularly mediate “around” domestic violence as they draw-up agreements on issues ranging from child support to debt payments to a husband’s alcohol consumption patterns. Yet conciliators often did so at the behest of their clients — who were anxious to obtain conciliation documents that would help them cope with vast webs of debt and other sources of economic insecurity.

Chapter 6, “Words are Carried off by the Wind,” concludes this three-part examination of how ADR has become entangled with widespread economic insecurity and complicated webs of interpersonal debt fueled by microfinance institutions that target women’s social networks. I argue

22 Co-parents/godparents.

that residents of El Alto are using ADR in ways foreign donors never intended. As Alteños pursue conciliation, they frequently do so in an effort to mimic and reinsert themselves into the formal legal system by obtaining conciliation accords – documents many people imagine to hold coercive properties. In doing so, I argue that Alteños are seeking to transform informal social obligations into binding legal contracts, to effectively “judicialize” their relationships with neighbors and kin.

As I show in Chapters 4, 5, and 6, many women pursue conciliation documents as a form of leverage with violent domestic partners, and eschew domestic violence litigation in order to first grapple with those crushing debts, which cannot wait. In doing so, I argue that conciliation services not only obscure violence, but they also depoliticize forms of violence that are rooted in and exacerbated by an entrepreneurial model of capitalist development promoted by foreign aid organizations, the Bolivian government, and nongovernmental organizations alike. Yet even as conciliation programs treat these as isolated problems to be resolved by signing interpersonal conciliation documents, many women clients quietly reassert the macro political-economic dimension of their woes.

These stories illuminate a serious tension between the causal relationship that ADR advocates ascribe to interpersonal and social conflict in El Alto and the ways Alteños themselves experience that causal relationship. As I show in these final three chapters, many ADR advocates I spoke with saw conflict as “scaling up” from the interpersonal to the social – that is, social conflict was generated by people’s failure to find redress for everyday experiences of interpersonal conflict. In this conceptualization of conflict, the arrow points from interpersonal to social: if we fix the micro dimensions of conflict (e.g. by teaching people interpersonal conflict resolution skills), we can fix the macro (widespread protests, blockades, and other combative approaches to demanding redress). But as many Alteños, particularly women, related their experiences of intimate violence and economic insecurity, the arrow seems to point in the opposite direction: macro political and economic systems that shape, instigate, and aggravate interpersonal conflict, including conflict in their homes and social networks.

CHAPTER ONE

Fix the State or Fix the People?

Asusena’s Dilemma

Asusena is growing restless. The shared printer is down. With the Integrated Justice Center’s coordinator away for a meeting at the Ministry of Justice, the interns are at a loss about how to do our work — which relies heavily on printing letters of referral to the forensic medical examiner, invitations to conciliation sessions, and memoriales (court documents) for those clients starting child support or domestic violence cases in the formal legal system. Luckily it’s a slow day and we are approaching lunch time, when clients generally rush home to prepare meals and claim their children from school. Asusena wanders around the emptying room as if lost, anxiously declaring herself useless and grimacing, pulling at her sweater. The rainy season is just beginning, but the air is cold, damp, the tile floor of the Center muddy despite everyone’s best efforts to keep it clean.

On this chilly September morning I want to take advantage the Center’s emptiness to get her opinion. I have been spending several days a week visiting one of the criminal tribunals in La Paz, trying to understand the kinds of problems that prompted foreign aid programs to focus their funding so heavily on judicial reform during the 1990s. Asusena — who spent 6 years working as an

“unpaid”23 intern in Bolivia’s court system — knew I was seeing her old stomping grounds first hand.

“You worked in one of the tribunals before,” I say. “What do you think should be done to improve the administration of justice?”

23 As I describe further below, Asusena admitted that she charged small fees -- unofficial fees -- while working in the court.

Asusena folds her legs and grey scarf at the same time, tilting her head pensively. She rattles off a list of problems, ascribing blame: Lawyers who don’t orient their clients well because they care more about making money than poor people’s needs. Lazy, insensitive interns who are constantly forcing people to correct their documents and come back later — so they can delay cases and thus lighten their workloads.

“I also hear a lot of complaints about notificaciones (process serving),” I offer. Asusena nods, consternation spreading across her face.

“Well that I have seen with my own eyes,” she groans. “Once, when I was working in the

[main El Alto court house in the Ceja], one of the interns was attending to the accused in a contraband case. The [accused] said, ‘Look, you aren’t going to serve me. You aren’t going to serve me the notification.’ This is the way people delay justice.” She told me, going on to explain a variety of “payment” options for securing the delay through bribes. “And afterward I said [to the intern],

‘Why are you doing that?’ And he responded, ‘Everyone does this. It’s normal.’ These guys [who were paying-off the intern] were functionaries of the deputy mayor of [a highland town]. They do everything they can to delay justice.”

It was a familiar refrain for me: accusations of people slipping money to interns24 and state functionaries to avoid being served and thus delaying their court cases indefinitely. I had witnessed many such cases be “suspended” due to failed notifications. “Yes,” I nodded, “I hear complaints there is a lot of corruption in the Central de Notificaciones” [process server headquarters].

“The Central is a different issue,” Asusena clarifies. “The Central has to notify jurors.25 Let’s say you have to do a lottery of 25 people. And you have three cases. So that’s 75 people a day you have

24Paying off court staff to delay or help advance a court case should be distinguished from the kinds of daily charges interns and others often charge for basic bureaucratic transactions. On a daily basis at one of the criminal tribunals I watched interns furtively cobrando [charging fees] for daily tasks, and participated in fiery debates among judges, staff, and interns about the legitimacy of such charges for the unpaid interns. Indeed, the tribunals could not function without the labor of a cadre of young interns, and many in the justice system defended their right to charge fees to cover bus fares and their need to eat. Asusena acknowledged that she regularly charged small fees to people using the courts under pressure from her colleagues to “cobrar.” 25 Bolivia only recently introduced jurors into their legal system — the very people receiving the notifications that Asusena so rarely delivered. I sometimes asked tribunal interns, lawyers, and judges if they thought it ironic that juries were meant to democratize the courts, but only seemed to create new nodes for corruption and

to notify. And then you maybe have other notifications. You just don’t have enough time. I remember coming home at night when I was working for the Central in El Alto and I would just be pissed-off [renegando]. I would sit down at the kitchen table and invent things.”

Asusena explains that she would sit in her home and fabricate information for the forms she had to fill-out daily as a process server. Physically unable to meet her case allotment, she concocted the details: “I’d write ‘The house had a green garage,’ because they all have green garages, right? --

‘and was located in front of a yellow house.’ I would make things up. I felt bad about it, but I just didn’t have enough time! Some days I also would have to go to the FELC-C [Special Unit in the

Fight Against Crime], San Pedro [men’s prison], Obrajes [women’s prison] too. The first time I went to San Pedro — and you won’t believe it — I showed up and the officer asked for my credential and just sent me in. And it’s a zoo.26 And I got robbed! Someone stole my cell phone. As I was leaving another officer said, ‘But why did you go in? You don’t have to go in to [serve court summons], you have to leave the notification at the desk.’ But I didn’t know any better! So each day I would maybe manage to notify 5 people. FIVE PEOPLE!” She moans, eyes wide.

“Five people out of 75?” I gasp.

“Yes, five. Maybe it was supposed to be more than 75. Let’s see. How many jurors are there?

Twelve, right? And maybe I would have 5 cases. So you do the math.

The math is closer to 60 people a day. But Asusena’s point was not about exact numbers. It was about larger patterns in the administration of justice in Bolivia, and what it was like to be one person reproducing those patterns as she raced between the snare of the Ceja and the warmer, wealthier Southern Zone of adjacent La Paz, as she wandered El Alto’s almost universally-unmarked

additional delays when none of the summoned jurors would show — making it impossible to begin proceedings. Several judges celebrated the transition to the adversarial model of justice, saying that the inquisitorial model was notoriously corrupt and opaque. Nevertheless, court workers did acknowledge the enormous difficulty of even beginning proceedings when many case were suspended due to juror shortages. 26 The San Pedro men’s prison, like many in Bolivia, is an over-crowded, open air penitentiary where families and prisoners gather on the open patio, cook meals. Children often live with their parents in Bolivia’s prisons. I spent one month researching at a similarly-arranged women’s prison in Cochabamba, San Sebastian, where a tangle of wires and plastic tarps covered the main patio area, which sometimes felt like a dense labyrinth. Some women enjoyed tightly-packed rooms where they slept with their children. Others slept in the stairwells and in the open courtyard, exposed to the elements.

streets looking for juror residences, and waded through the bureaucracy of the Special Unit in the

Fight Against Crime (FELCC ).

Asusena often expressed remorse about her own participation in the very practices many

Bolivians cite when they complain about the corruption and mishandling of the justice system. We talked about cobrando (charging fees for paperwork, a kind of “corruption” that is essentially institutionalized and normalized in most courts), about the pressures she received from both interns and even judges when she failed to do so. During her work at the Center, I watched Asusena dutifully strive to embody the ideals of the Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) programs: refusing to accept money when it was offered, treating clients with enormous respect and patience — even though she would shake her fists and vent frustration once certain “aggressive” clients were out of earshot.27 She was now a law student and often pondered what role she would play as a professional in the Bolivian justice system. Could she be different? Would she cave into pressure — as she felt she had as an intern cobrando for her services? After so much time encouraging Center clients to pursue conciliation, por la via buena, hablando (taking the good path, talking), first out of obligation and then out of a sense that it might, in fact, be a better option, she wondered if she should train to be a conciliator herself.

But there is another story concealed in Asusena’s professional history. It’s a story about foreign aid. It’s a story about how institutions like the World Bank, Inter-American Development

27 Unlike the legal aid workers described by Harri Englund (2006), Asusena and the other Integrated Justice Center interns I observed seemed to care sincerely about cases they were working on. I watched Angelica, for example, grow increasingly agitated when she discovered a mistake in a memorial she had written for a Center client pursuing a case against her common-law husband for intrafamiliar violence. Angelica’s anxiety reflected a desire to please the Center Director, upon whom her internship marks depended, but also a sense that she had failed her client and might botch her ability to “get justice.” I also witnessed interns like Angelica waver between trust and distrust of the clients she was serving, wondering when clients were manipulating her emotional response to their stories as she conducted intake, when she was being “played” by clients who might actually be the “victimizer” in child support cases or family fights over inheritance. It was a suspicion I experienced myself when one of my first clients, and elderly man accompanied by several of his children, accused the man’s grown sons of elder abuse over land titles, only to have the other half of the family, including his elderly wife, accuse him of decades of abuse, and the other adult children of being interesados (selfish and self-interested) in assuring their own inheritance. Such ambiguities are familiar for social workers, legal aid staff and therapists, and were oft-discussed themes among interns trying to make sense of how much to care about clients or remain emotionally detached.

Bank (IDB), and U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) came to promote conciliation as the solution to failed institutional reforms — for foreign companies and ordinary Bolivians alike.

It’s a story about how Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) travelled from corporate boardrooms,

World Bank policy conferences, and the Harvard Negotiation Program to the dusty neighborhoods of El Alto.

Much like El Alto’s Integrated Justice Centers, the introduction of juries, Bolivia’s human rights ombudsman, reforms to Bolivia’s criminal code, its counter narcotics laws, and training programs aimed at attorneys and judges — among many other efforts to improve the Bolivian justice system — have all been profoundly shaped by foreign donors and international legal expertise.

Asusena’s experience of trying — and failing — to deliver her daily notification quota speaks to some of the unintended consequences28 of introducing legal reforms like juries. Those donor-backed reforms to the legal system may have inadvertently introduced further delays and new opportunities for corruption — even as those changes are also celebrated for helping “democratize” and make more transparent the older inquisitorial model, where judges ruled with little need to publicly defend their verdicts.

Asusena’s professional trajectory has been profoundly marked by Bolivia’s entanglement with a broad range of international judicial reform agendas leading up to the promotion of Alternative

Dispute Resolution (ADR) mechanisms in Bolivia. But how did ADR get here? That is, How did

ADR travel to Bolivia, to El Alto, into the professional trajectory of Asusena and the everyday encounters she had with Center clientele? What was the analysis that drove such interventions, and what roles did particular policy makers and donor institutions play in promoting a shift from aid centered around criminal justice reform — institutional reforms to the formal legal system — to the

28 As I witnessed during my time observing one of Bolivia’s criminal courts, people summoned to be jurors rarely showed up for duty. The reasons for that are many, but they include a break down in the notification process, and sometimes the active interference by one or both parties, as well as the challenges of delivering notifications described by Asusena above. Often prosecutors and public defenders failed to show, and audiences were suspended. Again and again. And again. People cycled through the courts, waiting to finally have enough pieces of the puzzle — the defense, the plaintiff, the prosecutor, the lawyers, witnesses, jurors and judges — to finally go to trial.

promotion of informal mechanisms for resolving disputes? More critically, what was and is at stake in promoting ADR over other possible interventions into Bolivia’s justice system and other democratic institutions?

***

This chapter offers a birds-eye-view of larger shifts in donor-backed governance strategies concerned with democratization, judicial reform, and governability. I am particularly interested in the ways these contingent, historical processes contributed to the creation of Bolivia’s Integrated Justice

Centers. I argue that the Integrated Justice Centers and allied programs targeting Bolivian civil society are emblematic of a larger shift in donor governance strategies and democratization priorities; it is a shift from a primary focus on institutional capacity building to capacitación or skill-set training focused on individual citizens and the ways they are embedded in “conflictual” interpersonal, social, and political spaces.

How and why did donor institutions like the World Bank and USAID shift their attention from institutional reform that sought to create a stable, predictable investment environment for capital, to an aid platform that sought to transform the ways individual citizens manage conflict in their everyday lives? What do these shifts in foreign-funded judicial reform paradigms reveal about changing transnational governance strategies, and the kinds of citizen-person they seek to produce?

What stated and strategic interests underlie that donor agenda? How do these transnational political and economic agendas intersect with local reform efforts? This chapter examines contingencies and policy shifts that went into declaring Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) a promising solution for

Latin America’s — and especially Bolivia’s — legal woes. The narrative of linear progress inherent in democratization and judicial reform programs often obscures the historical contingency of these concepts and the work that went into producing the policy consensus that now drives them (cf Coles

2004; Greenhalgh 2008). The residue of those efforts sits in conference documents and project evaluations, and the memories of people who participated in their design (cf Warren 2010). By contrast to the labor that went into producing such a policy consensus, democratization and good

governance programs frequently naturalize the relationship between the liberal economic model and democratization (Salas 2001: 23).

As Postero (2007) has pointed out, Bolivia’s process of neoliberal restructuring included a surprising emphasis on remaking, expanding, and strengthening democratic institutions — not simply the contraction of the state, as critics often define neoliberalism. In Bolivia’s Law of Popular

Participation (LPP), elite interests in promoting decentralization dovetailed with the increasingly vocal demands by grassroots indigenous movements for equality and greater inclusion in Bolivia’s political life (Postero 2007). Bolivia’s judicial reform platforms paralleled those decentralization efforts, and shared the goal of making state institutions more responsive to citizen demands. And indeed, in the wake of the 2003 uprising, donors continued to emphasize this concern for restoring people’s trust in democratic institutions. American donors (through OTI) would do so by infusing funds to do what the state had not been able to do: build schools, build sewage systems, offer potable water. My argument here is that the emphasis on capacitación targeting Alteños’ political subjectivities represents a sharper turn in (neo)liberal rationalities, away from the forms of participatory democracy and development advocated earlier in the 1990s with the Law of Popular

Participation (LPP) and concomitant efforts to steer Bolivians out of syndicate (union) organizing tactics (which I describe in the next chapter), toward more disciplined channels. Advocates thus envisioned ADR as a mechanism for de-escalating conflict by actually responding to people’s pressing needs (giving them a more satisfying experience with a state-like entity) while also transforming the way they relate to such state-like institutions: If you can’t fix a broken system, keep people out of it. Take away their desire for it in the first place, replace it with a sense of being empowered to care for themselves.

I begin by situating judicial reform against a longer history of foreign aid platforms targeting

Bolivia, particularly American Cold War efforts to stave off the rise of the Left. I then turn to the waves of economic restructuring measures that helped to produce the city of El Alto itself — as thousands of people were displaced from the newly “capitalized” mining sector were “relocated” to

the periphery of the capital, La Paz. Many of these stringent economic restructuring measures were accompanied by public sector reforms, including efforts to remake Bolivia’s justice system. Thus judicial reform, economic restructuring, and the history of El Alto are deeply intertwined. These development and decentralization paradigms touch down in the lives of people like Asusena and her colleagues, whose personal and professional trajectories have been deeply marked by foreign aid.

Future chapters will explore how these globally circulating legal aid models, reform agendas, and theoretical frames were appropriated and adapted to the Bolivian context under the banner of promoting a “culture of peace,” the experiences of ADR “translators” or policy “brokers,” and the ways these programs intersect with the lives of their target populations. To quote Tania Li, as a whole this dissertation will examine “what happens when those interventions become entangled with the processes they would regulate and improve” (2007: 27). For now, let me begin with a little history of American-Bolivian Cold War entanglements.

From the Alliance for Progress to The Washington Consensus

Since the turn of the 20th century the United States has shown a great deal of interest in and a willingness to try to shape — and even strong-arm — the political and economic life of its southern neighbors. Early American diplomatic efforts toward Bolivia were driven by an interest in the country’s mineral wealth and a concern with stemming the tide of economic nationalism, which threatened those interests (Siekemeier 2011). Starting in the 1940s, foreign aid interventions in

Bolivia frequently involved technical assistance and technology transfer — infused with a healthy dose of anti-indigenous bias that blamed Bolivia’s indigenous culture for impeding modernization

(Healy 2001: 22). By the 1950s, anti-communist agendas were the primary force behind American aid programs in Bolivia, as the U.S. sought to defuse and restrict the revolutionary fervor taking-root in Latin America (Siekmeier 2011; Healy 2001).

In 1952, Bolivia’s Revolutionary Nationalist Movement (MNR) initiated its own population- improvement project. The revolution sought to enfranchise Bolivia’s impoverished and politically excluded indigenous people while simultaneously suppressing their indigenous roots, pulling rural

Indians along the socio-political spectrum toward modernity as mestizo citizens (Healy 2001: 14).

Accompanying land reform in 1953 had profound consequences for rural indigenous organizing patterns and the way rural communities related to highland cities and towns. As Healy explains,

Rapid rural unionization to implement the agrarian reform opened a niche for peasant sindicatos (self-governing community-based organizations dominated by male membership to serve among other things as a political constituency for the MNR) to participate in building a new political order (2001: 12).

The Revolution also nationalized several of the largest mines, while Leftists within the party insisted on the co-government of labor unions in remaking the state.

That new political order made Washington extremely anxious. Bolivia’s revolution revived

American concerns over economic nationalism and Leftist influence in the region. Yet rather than rely on overt military intervention it had elsewhere in Latin America, the U.S. went with an economic development strategy. Historian James Siekmeier has argued that the U.S. chose to support the more conservative-centrist elements within the MNR party in an effort to prevent the rise of a potentially more Leftist, less US-friendly regime in its place (2011: 5-6). Bolivian political elites, for their part, largely embraced this developmentalist orientation; officials welcomed Western aid even as they tried to court both sides of the Cold War scramble to win allegiance among Third World countries.

Centrist MNR officials “discovered that they could increase the flow of assistance either by claiming outright that more assistance would prevent the nation from falling to communism or by quietly reaching out the East bloc” (Siekmeier 2011: 5).

But donor pressure to implement economic liberalization contributed to further divisions within the country — and within the MNR party itself. Those divisions — fueled and funded by

American Cold War agenda and IMF economic austerity measures — would set the stage for a military coup in 1964 (Siekmeier 2011: 9). Bolivia would be wracked by frequent coups and counter-

coups over the next decade, and each military regime sought to suppress dissent and to crush labor movements with the help of American economic and military aid.

Throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, American financial aid continued to be driven largely by concerns over Leftist movements in the Americas, as the Kennedy and later Johnson and Reagan

Administrations funded counterinsurgency efforts in the region (Siekmeier 2011: 10). The Kennedy

Administration’s Alliance for Progress aimed to foster U.S.-friendly, stable democracies in Latin

America through economic development. The U.S. intended for economic development and infrastructure projects to help undercut the appeal of labor unions and other movements for more radical/Leftist political regimes, winning hearts and minds to the U.S. cause. When those efforts failed, American administrations financed the counter-insurgency efforts of military regimes throughout Latin America and the Third World, including in Bolivia. Bolivia’s military leadership proved just as adept as its MNR predecessors at playing-off of American Cold War fears to obtain economic and military assistance (ibid).

Thus American development aid in Bolivia emerged as part of a broader Cold War platform related to staving-off Leftist movements, and that utilized economic resources to steer policy in the country. Economic development would continue to serve as a tool of American diplomacy following

Bolivia’s transition to democracy. When Hernán Siles Zuazo was elected President in 1982, he took helm of a country on the verge of economic collapse — re-establishing formal (if fragile) democracy in Bolivia. Unable to steer the economy out of the crisis, he left a legacy of hyperinflation to his successor, Víctor Paz Estenssoro. And Paz Estenssoro, for his part, turned to foreign advisors and donors for aid in coping with the spiraling crisis.

The Bank and Bolivia: Judicial Reform as a Tool of Market Liberalization

On August 29th, 1985, Paz Estenssoro issued Supreme Decree No. 21060, abruptly liberalizing

Bolivia’s economy. Ds.21060 served as the blueprint for stringent economic restructuring measures dubbed “shock therapy.” The liberalization plan was designed by Harvard wunderkind Jeffrey Sachs,

and sought to rein in the rampant hyperinflation that had gripped the country since Hernán Siles left office. The austerity measures accomplished that goal — quickly reducing inflation. But the measures also triggered wide-ranging negative consequences that continue to haunt the country — and galvanize social movements — to this day. During this period, often called “Latin America’s lost decade,” Paz Estenssoro’s Administration relied heavily on the World Bank (WB) and International

Monetary Fund (IMF) to cope with the debt crisis.

Thus when Bolivians invoke el neoliberalismo —as dirigentes (union leaders), political elites, and ordinary citizens often do — they are not merely throwing around an empty category. Neoliberalism has a very specific, historical meaning in the country, even if Leftist political leaders may invoke it quite liberally to denounce their opposition. Bolivia was the testing ground for many of the first waves of structural adjustment that the IMF and World Bank would later advocate world-wide. The country served as a guinea pig for policy platforms that later constituted the foundation of the

“Washington Consensus.” These economic policies often accompanied other institutional reform agendas, including decentralization and education reform. Among them was judicial reform, which rose to prominence during the 1990s under the leadership of the World Bank, Inter-American

Development Bank, and the American Bar Association, among other influential institutions.

In 1995, the World Bank organized a conference29 that brought together a growing transnational network of aid institutions, scholars, and Bank employees that were promoting judicial reform and the rule of law as necessary preconditions to effective market expansion (Rowat, Malik and Dakolis, et al. 1995; Domingo and Sieder et al. 2001). That conference, though not unique, was emblematic of a growing donor policy consensus about the importance of judicial reform and good democratic governance in the service of private sector interests (Dezalay & Garth 2002). As Sri-Ram

Aiyer, Director of the Bank’s Technical Department of the Latin America region argued, judicial reform “must foster an enabling legal and judicial environment that is conducive to trade, financing, and investment” (1995: vii). Just a few years earlier, Aiyer’s assertion would have fallen on deaf ears

— if it had been uttered at all. But economists like those working with the Bank —and shaping economic policies throughout the Americas —were increasingly being “converted” to the view that the law and “good governance” were critical to their economic reform agenda. It was a shift that would reshape policy coalitions and donor platforms in countries like Bolivia for years to come

(Dezalay & Garth 2002: 170).

This was not the first time aid institutions debated the role of the judiciary in fostering economic growth; in the 1960s, the law and development movement also sought to link the two issues (Carothers 2001; Dezalay & Garth 2002; Salas 2001: 18)). What signaled the newness of the

1990s wave of judicial reform was the ways donor institutions now braided together concerns over market expansion, democracy, and the modernization of the state and its administrative institutions

(cf Domingo and Sieder 2001; Salas 2001; McAulsen 1997). Within this logic, state reform was a matter of both state contraction and business-friendly intervention, unleashing the potential of private enterprise30 (cf. Burki 1995, Shihata 1995, Weder 1995; Malik 1995; Garth 1995, Dezalay &

Garth 2002). Reformers argued that Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) mechanisms like commercial arbitration would provide foreign investors and national entrepreneurs with more trustworthy institutional mechanisms for resolving their disputes outside of the state legal apparatus.

As the American Bar Association’s Bryant Garth explained to conference attendees, private justice was appealing to multinational corporations that preferred to avoid the “home court” advantage of resolving disputes in host countries or getting ensnared in corrupt and backlogged courts (1995).

In documents like those produced at the 1995 conference, Bank officials drew connections between their economic agenda and the emerging good governance programs like those financed by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) (cf. Carothers 2001). Yet Bank representatives were at pains to reiterate that their institutional mandate was a circumscribed one,

29 Organized by The Public Sector Modernization Unit (LATPS) of the Technical Department of the Latin America and Caribbean Region of the World Bank. 30 Aiyer and other conference participants repeatedly referred to this paradigm shift in aid and development policy, one that reflected a broader trend in promoting stringent economic restructuring known as “structural adjustment” throughout the Latin America region.

focused exclusively on “facilitating investment for productive purposes, promoting private foreign investment, promoting equilibrium in the balance of payments, and fostering international trade”

(Shihata 1995: 14). Nevertheless, many reformers took it as a given that the relationship between democratic governance and market expansion were mutually beneficial and mutually reinforcing (cf

Domingo & Sieder 2001; Oxhorn and Starr 1999). Ultimately judicial reform is necessary, officials argued, to ensure the “certainty and predictability” that investors crave, and good democratic governance was critical to that project (Shihata 1995: 13; cf Salas 2001; Malik 1995).

Much like democratization and good governance projects before them, judicial reform advocates constructed the rule of law paradigm as a technocratic endeavor that could shed its political trappings — indeed, depoliticization was seen as a positive outcome. As Bryant Garth of the

American Bar Association told conference participants in 1995, “Legal reform is no longer seen as the key to social change, with the result that there is now the possibility of ‘depoliticizing’ legal aid.

Instead of seeing legal aid as the cutting edge of a political movement, it can now be considered a fundamental right of citizenship under the rule of law” (Garth 1995: 90). This effort to strip judicial reform of political meaning is foregrounded throughout the World Bank report. The shared and recurring language, and references to each other’s work illuminates the ways donor institutions were exchanging analysis, debating theories, and comparing “best practices” in these region-wide meeting spaces.

Through conferences like this one, an emerging assemblage of judicial reform advocates was taking shape in Latin America. Anthropologists have drawn on the work of Bruno Latour to argue that an “assemblage” approach to policy forces ethnographers to expand their object of study beyond state institutions or the human objects of intervention (Greenhalgh 2008: 11; cf Li 2005;

Kosak 2006; Lewis & Mosse 2005). Latour’s concept of the “assemblage” reflects the “real-world heterogeneity of the things that actually go into the making of public policy” (Greenhalgh 2008: 12;

Latour 2007, 1999; Ong & Collier et al. 2004). Tania Li (2005) speaks of the “multiple authorities devising improvements,” a vast “assemblage” that becomes, if only briefly, “stabilized as a discursive

formation” that “supplies a complex of knowledge, and practice in terms of which certain kinds of problems and solutions become thinkable whereas others are submerged, at least for a time” (Li

2005: 386; Lewis & Mosse 2005). As anthropologist Susan Greenhalgh insists, the ways these problems are identified and assessed “do not simply reflect a reality that exists in nature; instead they may actively constitute a new reality by shaping what is thinkable in the domain of population” or other sites of intervention (2008: 10; cf Leheny and Warren 2010; Paley 2009; Li 2005).

Once “embedded in public policy and bureaucratically enacted,” Greengalgh argues, “a powerful problematization can remake the world in which we live”; such problematizations become

“sticky” and can be difficult to dislodge (2008: 10). Similarly, my aim here is to trace the emergence of a donor policy consensus that promoted Alternative Dispute Resolution in Bolivia, to historicize the ways foreign donors mobilized certain forms of social scientific knowledge to support their case for ADR, how they made claims to rationality, objectivity, and authority, and how those rationalities and reform agendas were bureaucratically enacted. Attending to how donors identified what was

“wrong” with Bolivia forces into the light processes that are often “black boxed,” obscured from view and naturalized (Latour 1999: 70). World Bank-sponsored judicial reform in Bolivia would put this emerging policy consensus and its accompanying intervention strategies to the test.

Reforming Bolivia’s Courts, Building Democratic Institutional Capabilities

By the time Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) arrived in Bolivia, it reflected a larger transnational narrative about how Latin American state institutions hindered private enterprise and thus stunted development. The same year it hosted the Latin American conference, the World Bank began financing an overhaul of Bolivia’s justice system.31 The project was intended to accompany

Bolivia’s second wave of structural adjustment and a broader donor preoccupation with modernizing and decentralizing Bolivian state institutions (Evaluacion del Proyecto de Reforma Judicial 2003: 3). Soon afterward (1998), the Spanish development agency (AECI) joined the effort, focusing its attention on

31 Convenio de Credito N. IDA-27.050; PPFI - P 8.251, for approximately US$11 million.

training judges and attorneys. As the World Bank conference heralded, this shared reform agenda understood market expansion to be the crucial mechanism for reducing Bolivia’s poverty levels, which were the highest in South America. As the Bolivian project stated, its primary objective was to

“create a judicial system that contributes to economic growth, facilitating the activities of the private sector and social well being, guaranteeing basic rights to citizens”32 (2003: 3). In one brief statement of purpose, Bolivia’s Judicial Reform I project conjoined — perhaps conflated — the commercial and social aims of donor interventions.

The project would be the first of its kind financed by the World Bank in Latin America. It reflected a donor policy that placed the judicial system at the heart of an economic reform agenda seeking to smooth the way for market expansion. The program incorporated Alternative Dispute

Resolution (ADR) as a mechanism to address the concerns of investors who, the project asserted, feared their assets could become ensnared in Bolivia’s backlogged, corrupt, and unreliable justice system. In doing so, the Bolivian project reiterated an analysis articulated at the region-wide World

Bank conference. But the World Bank was not the only donor institution supporting Alternative

Dispute Resolution in Bolivia. Around the same time, the Inter-American Development Bank

(IDB)33 began working with the Bolivian Chambers of Commerce34 in Santa Cruz and Cochabamba and the La Paz Bar Association to institutionalize commercial arbitration and spread information about its use to lawyers, judges, and businesses. And in 1997, Bolivia adopted Law 1770, institutionalizing commercial arbitration as a substitute to the Bolivian courts.

Coinciding with the efforts by the Bank and IADB, in 1990 USAID began subcontracting work to the Inter-American Bar Association to promote commercial arbitration (Wanis-St. John

32 All translations my own 33 Inter-American Development Bank project #TC9908045 under “Modernization of the State.” US$ 501,400. Oct. 20, 2000-Dec. 14, 2005. 34 Dr. Gloria Salazar, a lawyer involved in the early phases of introducing commercial arbitration to Bolivia, described to me the ways Bolivian Chamber of Commerce representatives learned of ADR experiences in Colombia (where aid institutions had also helped finance the introduction of commercial arbitration), and began to agitate for the adoption of similar legislation despite some initial resistance from Bolivian congressional representatives who, Salazar claimed, were uncomfortable with the unfamiliar model of dispute resolution.

2000). American aid expanded those efforts in 1992 with its Administration of Justice project.

Following the adoption of Law 1770 in 1997, USAID also began to support several small pilot projects with law schools and NGOs that sought to extend conciliation services to the broader public in a limited capacity (ibid). USAID framed all of these interventions as elements necessary to promote the Rule of Law, ensure democratic stability, and enable economic development. But

USAID reports also framed the project in terms of a more narrow concern for redressing the backlog of cases that had been produced through counter narcotics legislation (Law 1008), as

Bolivian prisons filled up with people suspected of drug trafficking, which further slowed an already over-burdened system. According to those reports, American technical assistance was heavily invested in equipping Bolivian courts to help fight the drug war — on the judicial battlefield. This strategic priority meant providing both the legal and physical infrastructure necessary to prosecute offenders for drug-related crimes, but also to increase the presence of state institutions in coca- producing “brown” regions like the Chapare and Yungas35 (O’Donnell 1993).

During this period, USAID also began to lay the foundation for reconfiguring the country’s criminal procedures code. The project was contracted to Management Sciences for Development

(MSD) — a for-profit development firm specializing in justice sector intervention — but USAID’s technical assistance team worked closely with their counterparts in the German aid agency (GTZ) toward implementing the reform agenda.36 The new Criminal Procedures Code dismantled the inquisitorial system37 and replaced it with an accusatorial/adversarial model — introducing citizen judges (juries), and making trials oral and public, among other modernization reforms. USAID and

GTZ’s technical assistance teams labored to create the necessary legal/legislative framework for the reform; trained judges, lawyers, and judicial bureaucrats in the new code and its implications; and

35 http://www.usaid.gov/policy/budget/cbj2006/lac/pdf/bo511-007.pdf. 2006 Data sheet for USAID Pillar “Democracy, Conflict and Humanitarian Assistance,” Strategic Objective No. 511-007. cf Wanis-St John, 2000 36 Based on personal interviews with MSD staff. 37 By contrast to an adversarial system, in which legal teams gather evidence and present their arguments before a judge and/or jury, in an inquisitorial system the judge is more actively involved in the case proceedings, including investigation/evidence gathering and questioning of the suspect, while lawyers play a far more reduced role in the proceedings.

targeted the broader public, especially NGOs to raise awareness about the significance of the new system.

While the World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, and Spanish Agency for

International Development Cooperation (AECID) were busy financing early phases of Bolivian judicial reform, the USAID was also embarking on a broader platform of democracy assistance and decentralization.38 And unlike the World Bank — which was constrained by the need to regularly reassert the purely economic priorities of their work — USAID could more freely acknowledge the political dimensions of its aid platform.39 In many of USAID’s project reports, the donor framed its efforts to reform the criminal procedures code — to speed trial time, and to train judges, prosecutors, and public defenders — as part of a larger strategy aimed at improving the accountability of the Bolivian state.

All of these efforts, USAID reports stated, were in service of improving the credibility of democracy and its institutions among Bolivian citizens. Institutional failings were to blame for the backlog in cases in the justice system (and not U.S.-drafted drug policies that filled the courts), as well as for the frustrations many citizens felt toward their elected officials. Redressing these grievances demanded institutional reform, decentralization, and the general modernization of the state apparatus to be more amenable to good governance and economic growth. As the title of the project’s closing report indicated, the five-year (1998-2003) project aimed to increase “Citizen Support for the

Bolivian Democratic System.”40 It described U.S.-financed transparency and constituent relations campaigns as seeking to close the gap between legislators and the Bolivian electorate through public hearings and other outreach efforts.

USAID’s criminal procedures code/judicial reform project was slated to close in 2003 despite complaints from both Bolivian counterparts and donor representatives that many of the institutional

38 Alongside Bolivia’s Law of Popular Participation or LPP. 39 Although, as I have shown elsewhere (2009), USAID representatives in Bolivia frequently asserted to me that their own interventions -- including those aimed at the justice sector and broader democracy assistance programs -- were technical and non-political in nature.

reforms had not achieved their goals. As I show below, in the wake of those disappointments Aid contractors would soon shift the focus of their intervention strategies — from the decade-long effort to reform the formal legal apparatus to a renewed emphasis on Alternative Dispute Resolution. No longer a tool of institutional reform, these efforts would reframe conciliation as a mechanism for transforming Bolivian citizens.

The Politics of Diagnostics: (Re)making of Sites of Intervention

A decade after the first stirrings of the Judicial Reform I project,41 the Bolivian Ministry of

Foreign Relations published a project evaluation (2003). It was scathing. The evaluation states bluntly that the aims outlined in the program’s design were not achieved, that the reform interventions were largely “irrelevant” and “impertinent,” and that the program’s limited achievements wholly failed to justify the total financial investment of the donor institution.42

Consultants working to implement the World Bank-financed project reportedly confronted obstacles created by the very modernization agenda and institutional changes they were seeking to implement through constitutional reforms. While the report delivered a more favorable verdict of training programs run by the Spanish aid agency, it described the World Bank-sponsored project as essentially a flop.

The evaluation blamed a lack of will and even antagonism on the part of its Bolivian counterparts (22). But why the animosity? Critics, the evaluation reported, argued that the reforms

“had their origin in the political realm and did not emerge from the needs of the Judicial Branch...As a consequence, the Judicial Branch saw the reforms as an imposition from political sectors and not a need of their own, causing [the Judiciary], during the first phase, to become an opponent to the

40 USAID/BOLIVIA STRATEGIC OBJECTIVE CLOSE OUT REPORT, for “Increased Citizen Support for the Bolivian Democratic System,” 41 The program was formally implemented in 1995, but planning began in 1993. 42 The report also evaluated separately a related program financed by the Spanish aid agency AECI, and declared that program more successful in achieving its goals. Unlike the Bank-backed project, the AECI- funded training programs targeting the judicial branch reflected an “adequate relationship between the results and applied resources” (2003: 28).

transformations” (22). The targets of this particular judicial improvement scheme rejected the proposed modernization plans, arguing that they were irrelevant to the real needs of the justice sector.

This was a sentiment shared by Bolivia’s former Chief Justice, Dr. Eduardo Rodríguez Veltzé, who told me that he felt donors had not taken seriously internal evaluations identifying the reform priorities of judges and other Bolivian jurists. As Country Director for the UN’s Latin American

Institute for the Prevention of Crime and the Treatment of Offenders (ILANUD) prior to his election to the Supreme Court, Rodríguez had observed USAID’s earlier efforts to reform Bolivia’s criminal procedures code. While serving as interim President of the Republic, Rodríguez would sign into law the creation of the National Access to Justice Program (Programa Nacional de Acceso a la

Justicia) under Decreto Supremo Nº 28586. The Decree was the bricolage of earlier reform efforts that, Rodríguez believed, reflected strategic donor interests rather than a sincere concern for redressing the needs of ordinary Bolivians. As a result, he argued, foreign aid interventions in Bolivia were “disorganized” and donors pressured their Bolivian recipients to implement ill-fitting programs, showing “an unacceptable doctrinal influence” rather than a willingness to listen to the problems

Bolivian jurists had identified as priorities.

The report relates that donor contractors and reformers had made counter arguments, accusing members of the Supreme Court of being resistant to changes that would erode their power and threaten their “conservative legal culture,” as several people would later described the conflict to me in interviews.43 The report cites turf battles and over-reaching by the new institutions created to help modernize the courts; internal disagreements over institutional roles; and profound uncertainty about what the new laws permitted. It offers a bleak account of near-total reform impasse and wasted investment (ibid., 23). The Bank’s effort to promote Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) occupies only a brief and wholly unfavorable paragraph: the ADR initiative had a “negligible impact”

(9).

The Judicial Reform I evaluation concluded by placing blame on the Bank’s “incorrect evaluation of the weaknesses of the counterpart” institutions (the Ministry of Justice and the Judicial

Power/Branch) among other lethal miscalculations. It re-asserts the professionalism and expertise of the donor institution, while raising questions about the “professional competence” of the local

“counterparts” tasked with implementing reforms, instructing future donor efforts to be more exacting on their recipients (35). Evaluators call for more careful project designs, creating a horizon of ever-more technical and sophisticated operations, even as the evaluation acknowledges that recipients viewed the reforms as mismatched to their real needs — as cookie-cutter donor models unfit for Bolivian reality.

The evaluation’s overarching message is that the Bank’s attempts at institutional reform have proven profoundly disappointing, if not a downright fiasco.44 In conveying this message, the report continues to build on an existing narrative of inept state institutions that are resistant to change, while only superficially mentioning the failures of private efforts like the promotion of commercial arbitration — which also accompanied those broader state reform efforts. In doing so, the report reinforces the notion that meddling with obstinate state bureaucracies will likely end in frustration.

The driving development paradigm asserts that state institutions are a stumbling block to private enterprise and economic growth, and the evaluation reasserts that efforts at institutional reform are paralyzed by those same inefficiencies.

The repercussions of that perceived failure echoed well into 2011 as I was conducting fieldwork.

Donor representatives, government officials, and Bolivian contractors affiliated with the project bitterly described to me the weariness it had produced. Donors, they told me, were wary of funding new efforts even as Bolivia was facing a critical historical juncture. The Morales Administration had ushered in yet another era of profound institutional transformation — exemplified by the country’s

43 The report’s conclusions reflected criticisms I heard in my own interviews with people involved in the programs. 44 Cf Dezalay & Garth 2002, Carothers 1999, and Hammergren 1998 on the widespread perception among donor institutions that these reform efforts failed due to “the lack of political will within target countries, the power of entrenched interests, and pervasive corruption” (Dezalay & Garth 2002: 221).

new Political Constitution of the State (adopted in 2009). Donors told me that under the banner of decolonizing the Republic and re-launching Bolivia as a plurinational state, the new Constitution essentially obliterated earlier reform efforts. David Schjerlund of the Danish Embassy surveyed the shrinking landscape of judicial reform aid and tried to interpret for me what he believed were the sentiments of his counterparts.

“With one stroke,” he told me, “you completely erase the work that they [Spain] did for fifteen years on the judicial career.” With the adoption of the new Constitution, everything was changing, everything was uncertain. Schjerlund suggested that donor agencies now faced a conundrum: support

Bolivia as it embarked on this challenging new effort to “decolonize” public administration, or sit it out and wait to see what happens before investing more money in a politically fraught environment.

Either choice, he suggested, was an understandable response to chronic political and legal uncertainty in the country. Schjerlund believed that the new Constitution and its accompanying political- institutional uncertainty had made most donors unwilling to invest until the dust settled. But the doubts about institutional reform were not specific to this latest round of state restructuring; those doubts had already been cast in project evaluations prior to the election of Evo Morales or the adoption of the new Constitution.

The Judicial Reform I project evaluation (2003) did work beyond merely reporting breakdowns in communication or misallocated funds back to the project’s funders. Even as it acknowledged that the reform agenda may have reflected donors’ own interests rather than recipient priorities — and therefore doomed the project to failure — the report ultimately reproduced many of the assumptions about state institutions that framed the aid intervention in the first place. For example, concerns about bureaucratic “resistance to change” appears in planning documents45 for the Integrated Justice Centers; these planning documents preemptively anticipate opposition to the

Centers and render such opposition as a “normal” response by any existing “system.” In so doing, planning documents effectively anticipate and delegitimize potential critiques as the predictable

response of bureaucrats or institutions that find their personal, political, and economic interests threatened by change. Bolivian bureaucrats and state institutions had proven themselves to be the impediment to modernization and economic growth donors expected them to be all along. This perceived failure of judicial reform and donor theory of the state set the stage for the renewed emphasis on Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) with an expanded mandate: to transform not the state, but Bolivians themselves. Yet while these debates and proposed solutions were unfolding in

Bolivia around specific intervention strategies, they reflected a global pattern of diagnosing state institutions and bureaucrats as impediments to reform (cf Domingo and Sieder eds. 2001).

Donor anxieties about Bolivia’s chronic political uncertainty and the failure of institutional reform have become part of a larger narrative I heard repeated in interviews, read in project evaluations, and then encountered again in proposals for a renewed emphasis on Alternative Dispute

Resolution following El Alto’s uprising in 2003. But those justifications also fit neatly within existing donor platforms of promoting “popular” or informal justice models throughout Latin America — models influenced by the American Community Mediation movement and donor theories of the state as an impediment to free enterprise. The year the Ministry of Foreign Affairs published the unfavorable evaluation of the World Bank’s program — 2003 — Bolivia was engulfed in a series of uprisings that ultimately brought down President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada. Goni’s first term

(1993-1997) had ushered in many of the economic reforms and decentralization measures that defined the 1990s and accompanied judicial reform.46 That uprisings — and the generalized sense that prior institutional reforms had failed — helped build momentum for a renewed emphasis on informal institutions, civil society, and Bolivian political culture.

45 “Programa de Administracion de Justicia de Bolivia. Centros Integrados de Justicia para Bolivia (CIJs)” “Etorno de los CIJs: Platneamiento General.” No date. Pgs 1-2. 46 Indeed, by the end of the 1990s, many judicial reform program had begun to declare their efforts unsuccessful even as “the process of transplanting continues apace” (Dezalay & Garth 2002: 247). What accounts for this paradox? Dezalay and Garth have argued that foreign-funded judicial reform programs have tapped into local elite interests in recipient countries, where judicial reformers are able to position themselves as the brokers of “nobility speaking on behalf of the new and sophisticated remedies for the state and the economy” (ibid, 250).

From Institutional Capabilities to Capacitación

As USAID closed out a Strategic Objective grant titled “Increased Citizen Support for the

Bolivian Democratic System” (1998-2003), it surveyed the state of “democratic values” and attitudes in Bolivia and expressed some alarm.

The aim of the programs under this

Strategic Objective, the report explained, had been to improve government responsiveness — and thus de-escalate potential unrest. In doing so, it had hoped that constituency-outreach might help

“overcome the distrust many citizens harbor toward governing institutions,” and “act to reduce the threat that anti- system misinformation campaigns can lead to further political instability.”47

Yet just as this credibility-building programming came to a close, the city Figure 1 A study guide published in Bolivia by the International Republican Institute (IRI) reads “Towards a of El Alto erupted in protest. As the Democratic Culture: Authority and Responsibility” and features students listening to a teacher and citizens in line military responded to the blockades to pay impuestos or taxes (2004). with increased brutality, the government quickly lost its moral authority. On October 17, 2003, Bolivian president Gonzalo

Sanchez de Lozada fled the country for exile in the United States. As Sanchez de Lozada’s vice president, Carlos Mesa, assumed the presidency, he swore an oath to respond to the “October

47 USAID/BOLIVIA STRATEGIC OBJECTIVE CLOSE OUT REPORT, for “Increased Citizen Support for the Bolivian Democratic System,” FY 1998 - FY2003. Total Cost: $41,533,000,

Agenda,” to take seriously the demands it expressed. As an indication of his commitment, Mesa promised to usher in a special assembly to refashion Bolivia’s Constitution and to confront endemic racism against Bolivian Indians.

USAID analysts watched these unfolding events and expressed enormous misgivings about the future of Bolivian democracy and efforts to redress Alteños’ demands. As they reported back on their work, they worried that the Constituent Assembly would provoke greater political instability, fretting it might “create expectations that it cannot fulfill, or it may embark on debates that unleash deep-seated social, regional, political, economic and ethnic conflicts” (6). As I have described elsewhere (Ellison 2009), the U.S. Mission contracted its Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI) to begin a short-term, intensive intervention with the stated aim of de-escalating social conflict. At the invitation of then-President Carlos Mesa, OTI quickly targeted El Alto for an intensive dosage of

“democracy assistance” funding normally reserved for war-torn, post-conflict zones like the Balkans.

OTI focused its funding on addressing some of the city’s infrastructural problems that contributed to Alteños’ frustrations, but its centerpiece was promoting “dialogue on issues of national importance.” That is, OTI set out to train a cadre of democracy promotion replicators who would help promote reformed and rehabilitated democratic practices among the residents of El Alto, and encourage them to channel their dissent not through street protests, but rather by engaging in thoughtful and respectful debate. At the same time, existing aid programs — including American contractors working on judicial reform — quickly reconfigured their work to tackle issues related to the October unrest. One way American aid made this shift was by funding a series of Integrated

Justice Centers that would provide Alternative Dispute Resolution services to the broader public.

Stated versus Strategic Goals

All of the people affiliated with the creation of the Integrated Justice Centers identified a single root of the program: the 2003 uprising. Yet some highlighted the local demand, while others emphasized the donor’s strategic interests. “It grew out of 2003,” Program Director, Esteban Piñera,

told me. “A petition from the Mesa Administration asking for help to lower the conflictivity in El

Alto.” Piñera argued that the demand for gas was a symbolic expression of dissatisfaction by people who had no sense of a real or satisfying future for themselves or their children. But that prolonged dissatisfaction threatened to destroy Bolivian democracy. As Piñera explained, “A society in conflict is continually reproduced, causing these conflicts to magnify to the extent that they produce conflicts on the scale of what we [saw in 2003]. As a consequence, [Bolivian] democracy was at risk.”

At the time, Management Sciences for Development (MSD) was wrapping up the criminal procedures code project. Piñera said that his American colleagues urged the judicial reform team to respond to the recent events. He explained,

All of the investigation contracts [related to the criminal procedures code] were coming to a close, and this [opportunity] comes to me like an anecdote [at the end of the project]. And then Mesa’s new government enters [the presidency]. What can we do? And [USAID] said there were Justice Centers in Central America, I think — in Colombia or Ecuador. So we could reproduce one of those centers to help, shall we say, put the lid on [tapar] the spaces of conflictivity that existed in El Alto.

In Piñera’s framing the Integrated Justice Centers — inspired by donor and contractor models in other countries — were proposed as a mechanism for “putting a lid” on conflict in El Alto, as a means to de-escalate social unrest. In response to a request for support from the Mesa

Administration, the team offered a programmatic platform that had been tested elsewhere. Their aim was to help Mesa re-establish governability in the country — especially in El Alto. That new line of programming fit neatly within MSD’s existing rule of law portfolio, which included legal aid and

ADR programs, among others. And in this, our first conversation, Piñera emphasized the donor- proposed side of the project.

During our subsequent conversation one year later, Piñera was no longer working for the project. It had closed, along with a number of other USAID-financed democracy assistance programs as the Morales Administration ratcheted-up its accusations of American political meddling.

During this interview, Piñera would now describe the final result of their efforts — the creation of the Integrated Justice Centers — as uniquely “Made in Bolivia.” I would hear some of his former colleagues make similar claims about how the project emerged from local demands – that is, El

Alto’s Integrated Justice Centers were borne of El Alto’s particularities. That shift in emphasis – from a donor reform agenda to a locally-driven process – is a puzzle I explore further below and again in Chapter 3. By contrast, Piñera’s colleague, Cecilia Ibáñez, distinguished between what she saw as the donor’s agenda and the contracting team’s priorities. Ibáñez, an Argentine lawyer, worked for both American contracting agencies that ran the Centers over the course of their funding by

USAID (MSD and Checchi). Looking back at the origins of the project, she told me that the donor representatives were deeply alarmed by the 2003 uprising. “Well, El Alto, the epicenter of the conflict, was marked as the ‘most conflictive city on the planet’,” she told me, chuckling a little at the idea that El Alto could epitomize the worst expression of global conflict. Yet that perception, she told me, drove the intervention strategy.

According to Ibáñez, the team working with MSD was asked to find a way to help USAID get a toehold in El Alto. Their job was to design a project that would allow USAID to work in “the most conflictive city on the planet.” As Ibáñez explained,

You’ll remember that moment was like an enormous shock, [Goni] leaves and Mesa is left in his place. What was going to happen? The social organizations had been growing stronger in Bolivia, but with that event, well, here’s an indicator [of how the donor reacted]: the message we received was that we needed to find a way to work in El Alto. That was the message we received….So after the gas war, the crisis, and Sanchez de Lozada’s resignation, well, we were with MSD at the time — in the final year of the project. And what happens is they say that they are thinking of shifting the focus toward that objective: We have to find some way to work in El Alto.

Specifically, the team was encouraged to target particular neighborhoods that had been marked as contributing to the conflict. As Ibáñez explained, the project initially targeted District 5 because of its key role in the uprising. “I mean, it wasn’t like, ‘well, the next step is conciliation.’ [Rather] there was a fear about what could happen, and we were asked specifically to work in District 5. District 5 was the epicenter of the gas war.” Ironically, the team was never able to get the land necessary to build the Center there, or to secure buy-in from the local neighborhood association. With the District 5

project floundering, delegates from other neighborhood associations seized on the opportunity to bring the legal aid obra48 (project) to their zone.

The uprising in El Alto was clearly a galvanizing factor in the American infusion of democracy assistance aid. But El Alto wasn’t the only place USAID targeted in the wake of the uprising. The project also targeted other “conflictual” regions of the country — namely areas enflamed by ongoing drug interdiction as well as other significant waves of highland immigration. Ibáñez added,

“Afterward Plan 3000 came up — and that isn’t innocent either, that it was Plan 3000 in Santa Cruz, and it was the Chapare in Cochabamba, the Yungas. I mean, they were strategic areas as well to enter and to have a presence — to do something.” Plan 3000 is a poor neighborhood located on one of

Santa Cruz’s outer anillos or rings. The city is designed like a bulls-eye radiating outward from a core of wealth to working class, poorer, and more heavily indigenous neighborhoods located on the outermost concentric circles. Plan 3000 is heavily populated by highland immigrants — that is,

Aymara and Quechua Indians whose presence is a notable source of tension with lowland mestizo elites who occupy more neighborhoods in the city’s more central rings (cf Gustafson 2006; Fabricant

2009). Like El Alto’s mix of displaced miners and indigenous highland migrants encircles La Paz, so too Plan 3000 is a concentration of highland kolla migrants occupies the periphery of this Santa Cruz

-- a city known for the wealth of its camba, mestizo elites. But the decision to target the Yungas and

Chapare was most explicitly linked to conflict generated by the drug war. It was a strategic interest that deeply frustrated Bolivia’s former Chief Justice (and President), Dr. Eduardo Rodríguez Veltzé.

“Have you come to resolve your problems or ours?”

When we met in his temporary office in the library of La Paz’s Catholic University’, Dr.

Rodríguez was still battling treason charges. In 2006, Morales Administration initiated an

48 Anthropologists working in El Alto have highlighted the critical importance of obras in helping to bolster the legitimacy of neighborhood association dirigentes. One proves one’s leadership by securing obras or public works projects -- like new parks, cobbled roads, or other services -- in your neighborhoods. It seems that some neighborhood association leaders recognized the usefulness of the USAID project for demonstrating their

investigation of Rodríguez for his role in decommissioning aging Chinese missiles with the help of the U.S. government while he was serving as interim49 President of the Bolivian Republic between

June of 2005 and January of 2006.50 But Rodríguez’s entanglement with the stated and strategic interests of American foreign policy pre-dated his fateful entry into Bolivian politics. As a lawyer and then Chief Justice of the Bolivian Supreme Court, Rodríguez had witnessed donor efforts to intervene into the Bolivia justice system, regarding many of those attempts with deep skepticism, as I described earlier.51 Reflecting on the turn to ADR, Rodríguez insisted that USAID “didn’t want to hear anything about” the findings of the Court’s self-diagnostic on weaknesses in the justice system.

When I asked why he thought the Americans were uninterested in considering their findings, he pointed to a number of intersecting issues ranging from patterns in foreign aid intervention that pre- determine intervention models to a political agenda that drove particular aid strategies in the country.

Above all, however, he saw the overriding influence of the American-backed drug war. He explained,

Soon, I understood that USAID’s interest was to renovate the criminal justice system, as they were doing throughout the region, and with a special interest in the socio-political phenomenon of narcotics trafficking. They only wanted to hear about resourcefulness and ability to secure projects for their zone (cf Lazar 2008; Postero 2007 on how the LPP has shaped people’s expectations of local leaders in securing obras). 49 As Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Rodríguez was pulled into a national political drama when then- President Carlos Mesa stepped down, proclaiming Bolivia ungovernable and himself fed-up with trying. Dr. Eduardo Rodríguez Veltzé, 4th in line for the presidency, was awakened on June 10th, 2005 and told that the men in line before him — both presidents of the Bolivian Senate and Congress — were unable to assume the presidency as protests intensified. Rodríguez stepped into the office vowing to hold elections within a year, setting the scene for Morales’ election in December of 2005. 50 Morales accused Rodríguez of placing the sovereignty of the Republic in jeopardy, and suggested that the action was part of a larger American strategy aimed at undermining the Leftist Morales Administration (though the destruction of the Chinese missiles occured prior to Morales’ election). As Morales’ chief of Staff, Juan Ramon Quintana, insisted, “There’s an interest behind this to diminish the capacity of Bolivian self-defense that was generated in a climate of mistrust of the armed forces by the U.S. government and by uncertainty over the upcoming elections.” Rodríguez insisted he did not know of the decommissioning beforehand. Weeks after we met, those charges would be dropped, as prosecutors turned their investigation toward military leaders who authorized the disposal and coordinated with the American Mission while Rodríguez was out of the country. 51 When we met, Bolivia had just held judicial elections under the banner of “democratizing” the justice system; Rodríguez’s name was splashed throughout the press as journalists sought the insights of a respected legal scholar and former Chief Justice. But he was also getting attention as a symbol of what Morales’ critics called the Administration’s efforts to persecute its opposition via the law. The election of high ranking judges, critics argued, was part of a larger effort by Morales to consolidate his power and control the judicial branch, ensuring that corruption charges and other cases against opposition candidates would proceed — and thus deal a mortal blow to his political competitors. Critics also charged Morales with manipulating the judiciary to ensure that his interest in running for another term in office would be cleared by the Constitutional Court.

criminal justice, so we had some really big differences [of opinion] because there was a total imbalance of funding that was dedicated to serving their interest in criminal justice. But what we knew from the diagnostic was that we needed [support for] other areas as well.

While USAID was “polishing” its criminal justice reform program, Rodríguez suggested that many donor institutions were reconsidering their intervention strategies. But USAID, he argued, was still single-minded in its pursuit of the judicial needs of the drug war.

Rodríguez situated the US-financed Integrated Justice Centers within a larger aid platform concerned with coca eradication and interdiction in the Andean region. “It was tied to the drug war,” he insisted. “Where did they want to put the Centers? El Alto, the Chapare, the Yungas. That’s when

I realized exactly what was happening. And I said, ‘Have you come here to resolve your problems, or ours?’” Rodríguez insisted that while the Yungas and Chapare had more obvious connections to coca production, donors and government officials fretted that El Alto was playing an increasingly prominent role in drug trafficking. The geography of USAID funding mapped directly onto the geography of counter-narcotic policies. While Rodríguez voice his suspicions and critiques of the strategic aims motivating the creation of the Integrated Justice Centers, reading USAID project summaries one gets the sense that the decongestion of Bolivian courts, while rhetorically in the service of improving access to justice for ordinary citizens, was in fact intended to free up the courts to prosecute drug offenses and in effect allow the U.S. to pursue its drug interdiction strategies.

The connection between the American-backed drug war and the later shift to Alternative

Dispute Resolution is also acknowledged in USAID’s own summary of its efforts to promote ADR in Bolivia:

One of the most serious challenges facing the Government of Bolivia is a lack of public access to the formal justice system. This poses serious threats to the legitimacy of the Bolivian government. USAID supports the use of ADR, especially commercial arbitration and conciliation, as a way to increase public access to justice and reduce the backlog of cases in the Bolivian court system. This alleviates the burden placed on courts and allows them to focus on anti-narcotics and broader judicial reform objectives52 (emphasis added).

52http://gsearch.info.usaid.gov/search?q=cache:Mq9IHYeSUJIJ:www.usaid.gov/locations/latin_america_carib bean/democracy/adr/dg_conflict2b.html+Bolivia+%22ADR%22&client=default_frontend&output=xml_no

Program abstracts connect efforts to reduce the cost and length of criminal trials, to reduce backlogs in the courts, and improve citizen confidence in state institutions to drug interdiction/coca eradication. Specifically, the summary of Alternative Dispute Resolution efforts characterizes conciliation as a mechanism to reduce cases in the formal justice system while also improving legitimacy in service of the drug war. The connection, however, is a puzzling one given that the cases addressed by conciliation are primarily civil cases, like child support, domestic conflicts, and contract disputes not typically backlogging the criminal courts. This is a somewhat odd leap — between a criminal justice system lumbering under the weight of drug-related offenses and ADR mechanisms that largely are reserved for civil courts and commercial disputes.

The appeal to the ways ADR furthers the aims of the drug war may not be so transparent, however. It may reflect an explicit geopolitical interest driving American-financed judicial reform programs. Alternatively, the authors of USAID project reports and summaries may strategically be framing their interventions as critical to the U.S.-backed drug war in an effort to justify continued funding to the report’s primary audience: a U.S. Congress that is often more concerned with proving itself tough on crime and drugs to its own constituents (cf Tendler 1975 on how American politics shapes USAID’s work). Although it is difficult to discern strategic interests, based on the first hand experience of people who were called into design the Centers, it appears that one of the primary objectives was to install institutions that would increase state presence in so-called “brown areas” like the Chapare and Yungas (O’Donnell 1993). As one project summary reported, the “Citizens will have a much greater confidence in their political system and institutions of government. State presence will have increased, especially in the Chapare and Yungas regions where illicit coca is grown53 (emphasis added).”

Similarly the installation of Centers in Plan 3000 would support such an interpretation of these goals.

_dtd&proxystylesheet=default_frontend&ie=UTF-8&num=10&lr=&site=lpa_collection&access=p&oe=ISO- 8859-1 53http://gsearch.info.usaid.gov/search?q=cache:2YLD72_- E28J:www.usaid.gov/policy/budget/cbj2006/lac/pdf/bo511- 007.pdf+Bolivia+%22criminal+justice%22&client=default_frontend&output=xml_no_dtd&proxystylesheet= default_frontend&ie=UTF-8&num=10&lr=&site=lpa_collection&access=p&oe=UTF-8

Project summaries tend to emphasize the Centers as a mechanism of improving citizen confidence in the State’s capacity to deliver services as a mechanism of lowering levels of conflict in the region.

For donor institutions, El Alto, the Chapare, Yungas, and Plan 3000 all raised serious questions about democratic “governability” in Bolivia, as well as what several USAID reports characterize as “anti-systemic” and authoritarian predispositions that threaten to undermine democratic values and incite political instability. These tendencies, analysts argued, manifest in recurring bouts of social conflict, including the 2003 uprising. Writing shortly after that event, one

USAID report observed, “A significant challenge facing Bolivia is its inability to manage political conflict productively and efficiently. Rather than resolving conflict, Bolivia passes inconclusively through regular crises that weaken respect for the state….Although Bolivia has made enormous strides in judicial reform, considerable work is needed to convince the public that the rule of law is a reality.54“

And yet, it is interesting that the solution offered in response to the perceived failure of state institutions was to promote Alternative Dispute Resolution for the broader population — that is, informal mechanisms for resolving conflicts and redressing these problems. ADR is intended to pull people out of the legal system. As I argue in the following section, this push for informalism reflects a shift in focus from institutional capabilities to civil society, democratic habits, and interpersonal conflict management. Program designers intended the Centers to complement — but also to operate apart from— the formal legal system. The locations where USAID chose to initiate the pilot project for Bolivia’s Integrated Justice Centers thus point to two major intervention concerns: 1) state illegitimacy provoking unrest and instability and 2) the drug war. American-financed studies and project reports describe El Alto as hyper-prone to being “conflictual,” while the Yungas and Chapare are defined by their role in coca cultivation and the manufacture of cocaine. In both cases, the lack of state presence is seen as permitting narcotics production as well as fomenting discord among a frustrated populace, both issues meriting geopolitically-motivated aid interventions.

Intersecting agendas for making new citizens

As I spoke with members of the design team and the staff of the Integrated Justice Centers,

Bolivian aid brokers tried to distinguish between the strategic aims motivating the U.S. Mission and their own social and political commitments to improving the lives of poor residents of El Alto. Many staff members were resentful of the ways that they had become embroiled in the Morales

Administration’s accusations against USAID — as well as the consequences for their own livelihoods. What I want to highlight in this last section are the ways that the donor concern with

“putting a lid” on conflict in El Alto (a concern shared by the Mesa Administration) intersected with the design team’s ideas about resolving people’s frustrations while promoting citizenship rights and obligations. These two agendas coincided as the project shifted its intervention strategy from one preoccupied with institutional reform to an approach that emphasized self-reliance and the acquisition citizenship skills, among them, conflict resolution toolkits.

In my interviews with design team members, contractors frequently told me that the uprising reflected legitimate frustrations with state institutions. Alteños, they argued, were profoundly fed-up with corruption and backlogs in the courts, everyday injustices, and the failure of the state to satisfy their demands for basic social services. Planning documents suggested that Bolivia was facing a profound crisis of the state, and prior institutional reforms had failed to redress these problems. Yet rather than continue to focus primarily on improving state legal services and institutional capabilities,

American aid programs now turned their attention to El Alto’s “conflictual” civil society. Their stated aim was to design programs that responded to Alteños’ demands for “justice” while also capacitando or training people in skill-sets they deemed necessary to generate deliberative democratic habits and assume personal responsibility for resolving disputes.

54 USAID/BOLIVIA STRATEGIC OBJECTIVE CLOSE OUT REPORT, for “Increased Citizen Support for the Bolivian Democratic System,” FY 1998 - FY2003. Pg. 8

The project’s emphasis on citizenship rights, Cecilia Ibáñez explained, grew out of the initial needs survey their team conducted in El Alto following the uprising.55 I go into that study in greater depth in the chapter on Bolivia’s expanding market for mediators and ADR expertise (chapter 4).

Here, however, I want to highlight the ways that survey process led members of the team to make an explicit link between frustration with the failures of state institutions and the events of October. In the process of conducting surveys and constructing the program, contractors and staff developed theories of the relationship between individual, interpersonal, and large-scale social conflict. For example, Ibáñez explained,

What we saw was that many of the problems that people had were not about ‘I have a problem in the dividing wall with my neighbor.’ It was ‘I don’t have water, or the mayor’s office isn’t being responsive’ on administrative issues. So what did we say? What was our hypothesis? The thing that is a small conflict today, can become an uprising [revuelta] tomorrow.”

For Ibáñez, everyday frustrations with state institutions on an individual level scaled up to broader social conflict.

Project Coordinator Esteban Piñera and educator Pamela Chacón also saw conflict moving between scales, though in slightly different terms. Both made connections between interpersonal disputes — domestic violence, child support claims, fights with neighbors and mothers-in-laws — and broader social conflict. As Piñera explained, “Family conflict produces more conflicts, stronger conflicts.” Broader social conflicts, Piñera explained, are exacerbated by unresolved interpersonal conflict. In Piñera’s analysis, high levels of irritability combined with backlogged courts made for a lot of unhappy people in their private relationships. The combination of unhappy citizens and unresponsive state institutions was responsible for the conflagration. In this case, widespread social unrest could be understood as a kind of “scaling-up” of interpersonal disputes, as those frustrations escalated into unquenched rage. In these narratives, de-escalating interpersonal conflict and violence was the key to de-escalating public expressions of El Alto’s “conflictivity.”

55 I explore this process in greater depth in the next chapter.

In their analysis, the public and private were intimately linked. The contracting team argued that conciliation would help improve people’s perception of state bureaucracies and democracy more generally by helping them avoid the formal courts all together. But ADR would also serve as a mechanism for helping to “form” — helping to transform — Bolivian citizens. The Centers were to provide formación (formation) or capacitación (training or person-oriented capacity building) in mediation and conflict resolution on two levels: First, by training a cadre of neighborhood volunteers in conflict resolution, and second, by providing ADR services to ordinary Alteños, who would seek out mediation for specific complaints -- and go home with a new toolkit to manage conflict in other realms of their lives.

Neighborhood volunteers would serve as a critical node for helping residents of El Alto begin to understand their rights and obligations as Bolivian citizens — citizens who were empowered to resolve their problems for themselves rather than relying on an ineffectual, unresponsive state. As

Ibáñez explained,

For me the Centers are an opportunity to begin to form citizens [formar ciudadanos], right? That it not just be about these twenty who come to work as volunteers at the Center, but rather that permanently you are seeing a change, permanently you are seeing people being formed [formandose] so that they don’t depend on formal authorities, because formal authorities don’t give them any answers.

The design team’s early “formation” efforts included training neighborhood volunteers in human rights issues and conciliation skills as building blocks of democratic personhood. Volunteers would then be empowered to both embody those skills in their daily work at the Centers and in other dimensions of their lives — at home, in the local parent-teacher association, in their mothers’ clubs and labor union.

The notion that Alternative Dispute Resolution can transform society is not unique to Bolivia nor new to popular justice campaigns (cf Shook and Milner 1993). During the 1995 World Bank conference on judicial reform that helped launch the World Bank’s foray into commercial arbitration,

Argentine jurist Gladys Stella Alvarez spoke about the transformative properties of Alternative

Dispute Resolution (ADR). Alvarez, who played a critical role in bringing conciliation to Argentina

before helping to export its lessons and “best practices” to countries like Bolivia, argued that ADR could bring its “essentially democratic nature” to help enable a deeper kind of change — beyond institutional reform. The practice of ADR held within it, she insisted, “the possibility of it inducing a paradigmatic social change from a culture of encouraging litigation to one of pacification and cooperation” (Alvarez 1995: 79). But ADR’s transformative agenda has deeper roots.

As Harrington (1982) has documented, the antecedents of ADR back to the American

Progressive Era (the late 19th and early 20th century) and the movement to “socialize the law” among poor and working class immigrant populations to the U.S. Advocates promoted an entire therapeutic-judicial apparatus rooted in dealing with delinquent children through the newly formed juvenile courts. As Harrington explains, “The state, represented by probation and patrol officers, was cast in the role of ‘friend,’ helping poor and working class immigrant children to become socialized or ‘Americanized.’ Both developments rendered the courts more interventionist” (1982: 51). Later reformers justified the informal dispute resolution as a “decentralized management model” in which

“minor disputes are channeled into appended tribunals that emphasize therapeutic intervention by trained lay citizens. Individuals, assisted by mediators, seek to reach an agreement on how to restructure their future behavior to avoid or prevent conflict” (Harrington 1982: 62).

Merry and Milner (1993) have traced the many contexts in which popular justice and community mediation programs have aspired to “reshape society and to give greater power over the handling of their conflicts to relatively powerless people” (9). In particular, American community justice models have placed “an emphasis on helping individuals achieve full personhood and a stress on the expression of feelings as a way of resolving conflicts” (9; cf Carr 2011 on the history of

American talk therapy). The San Francisco Community Boards (SFCB) model heavily influenced the ideological underpinnings of the broader ADR movement in the U.S., as well as later efforts by

USAID and the American Bar Association to export popular justice models worldwide. The SFCBs in particular emphasized notions of empowerment, self-reliance and volunteerism as foundational to the construction of civic-mindedness and democratic practice. As Merry and Milner (1993) explain,

in this model, “empowerment suggests an enhanced self-reliance and a greater control over one’s life.

Through training and the participation of disputants, community mediation claims to empower both mediators and disputants by enhancing their capacity to manage their own conflicts” (Merry and

Milner 1993: 16).

The therapeutic residue of American community mediation programs in the Bolivian programs is evident in training manuals and workshops that draw on the theoretical frameworks and training techniques espoused by the American community mediation movement (in “the onion,” ‘I’ statements). At the Centers and in other affiliated ADR programs, trainers work to equip Bolivian volunteers and ADR practitioners with the tools they will need to help facilitate forms of communication and self expression that will be amenable to personal, interpersonal, and broader social transformation. The team designing Bolivia’s Integrated Justice Centers understood their work to be operating on two levels: empowering mediators and disputants via new skill sets in ADR.

Understood this way, Alternative Dispute Resolution in Bolivia becomes a kind of school for

(neo)liberal citizenship. The Integrated Justice Centers would offer a space for El Alto residents to exercise their “rights and obligations,” acquire the tools to do so. As one document explained, bypassing the bureaucratic tangle to rectify birth certificates would “help citizens obtain documents related to their exercise of citizenship.”56 (pg. 11). As such, program designers understood that self- reliance to be an empowering opportunity to exercise substantive citizenship rights.

Yet I want to suggest that efforts to expand ADR beyond the commercial realm have occurred in Bolivia alongside a broader trend in the governmentalization of political subjectivity wherein citizens are encouraged to take an entrepreneurial and self-actualizing approach to their own welfare with the effect of reducing demands on the state for redressing their grievances. As Ibáñez articulated it: “so that they don’t depend on formal authorities, because formal authorities don’t give them any answers.” That phrasing in many ways encapsulates that neoliberal theory of the state and the ways it seeks to remake the interiority of its subjects as a consequence. As Nikolas Rose argues,

56 *Document “Proyecto: Centros de Justicia El Alto.” Pg. 11

neoliberal or “late liberal” governmental rationality is distinct because it seeks to govern people at a distance, reconfiguring their subjectivities to actively seek “self-actualization and self-fulfillment”

(147). This trend toward the governmentalization of political subjectivity through ADR operates out of a rationality that emphasizes the value of self-reliance in the absence of a responsive or effective state — values Ibáñez herself articulated in explaining the aims of the Centers.

The programmatic emphasis on volunteers also reflects the ways these multiple interests and logics intersect. Globally, ADR advocates frequently celebrate the capacity of volunteers to embody citizenship practices and to serve as a node for helping others to cultivate those capabilities. But volunteerism can also be understood as yet another level of outsourcing the labor of development work itself. Volunteerism may extend the neoliberal processes of “off shoring, deskilling, and flexibilization” which “has impacted both aid practitioners and the character of aid work” (Hindman and Fechter 2011). That is, where anthropologists have highlighted the ways that NGOs have filled the void left by a shrinking state (Gill 1997; Paley 2001; Hale 2002), we might say that volunteers are now taking over the labor of NGOs. They are state agents twice removed. As such, volunteerism is exemplary of this shift in intervention strategies (from institutional capacity building to capacitación)— one that dovetails with a donor ideology of shrinking the state and promoting entrepreneurial and private-sector solutions to the problems poor people face. This intervention model was reflective of a broader donor policy of promoting conciliation throughout the Americas. But as I explore in the next chapter, it was also specific to concerns about Bolivians themselves — especially the illiberal tendencies of Alteños.

Conclusion

When I first met Asusena, she was a recently appointed intern at the Integrated Justice Center and was highly suspicious of the conciliation component of our legal aid work. She came from a background of working as an unpaid intern in the courts, and scoffed at the notion that Alternative

Dispute Resolution (ADR) could really be useful for resolving people’s problems. “After so many

years working in the courts, you just can’t convince me in a couple of months that conciliation is better,” she initially shrugged. But she would encourage clients to try it, she said, because it was her job. During her time at the Center, however, I witnessed a significant transformation as Asusena herself began to promote conciliation rather enthusiastically as a more satisfying alternative to the formal legal system. I would catch her eye after listening to her council a new Center client on the benefits of ADR: “It’s free, faster than the courts, it’s about both parties being satisfied with the outcome. Isn’t it better to work things out by talking?” Asusena would notice my amused look, laugh, and roll her eyes. “I know, I know! I’ve been indoctrinated,” she once hooted in mock-exasperation.

During the course of her work at the Center, Asusena had shifted from being court-centric to someone who was seriously considering the value of ADR for the clients she served. When I asked, she said she wasn’t sure if it was because she really believed it, or she had just repeated it enough times that she had been “indoctrinated.” Either way, her own professional and personal trajectory mirrored — and was shaped by — shifts in foreign funding reform programs.

In this chapter, I’ve argued that the creation of the Integrated Justice Centers reflects a broader shift in the strategies of foreign aid programs that have sought to promote judicial reform, from that of strengthening democratic and legal institutions – that is, institutional capacity building – to equipping ordinary Bolivians with skills sets and values that are more amenable to liberal democracy and governance. Although conceptually different, negotiation, mediation, conciliation, and commercial arbitration are components of a broader package of Alternative Dispute Resolution

(ADR) programming introduced into Bolivia by foreign donors and Bolivian advocates as a more satisfying alternative to the formal legal system. Bolivia was well on its way to further consolidating and normalizing mechanisms for Alternative Dispute Resolution via commercial arbitration when the

2003 uprising in El Alto created a sense of urgency among many aid programs. That urgency crystallized in the widespread call for the broader dissemination of Alternative Dispute Resolution

(ADR).

For democracy promotion contractors, the 2003 uprising became emblematic of the failures of prior waves of institutional reform to redress grievances. It also justified a programmatic shift that advocated bypassing state institutions in order to promote more “democratic” attitudes among the general populace. This shift reflects a broad concern among foreign aid institutions and Bolivian technocrats with the “ungovernability” of many of Bolivia’s more contentious populations, namely the residents of the city of El Alto and regions facing tumult over counter-narcotics policies. Yet while the sites of intervention have shifted, the overarching goals of furthering a particular model of deliberative and institutional democratic governance combined with ongoing market reform have not.

Bolivia’s Integrated Justice Centers emerged in response to events unfolding in Bolivia, but also transcends the Bolivian context. They sit at the intersection of ongoing modernization and justice sector reforms throughout Latin America, the American-financed drug war, the 2003 uprising in El Alto, and a growing preoccupation with Bolivia’s “ungovernability.” The USAID-backed push to get Bolivians out of the justice system reflects existing donor ideologies about the state, as friend or foe, of private enterprise, as well as the influence of social scientific theories about the importance civil society in consolidating democracy. American donor strategies — like those of the World Bank

— operated out of a shared assumption: what is good for business is good for people. And government is bad for business. And yet, while ADR has flagged in the commercial realm, it has flourished among NGOs and donor-backed projects promoting conciliation, mediation, and other

ADR skills for the broader public, especially the poor, women, and indigenous people.

USAID was not be alone in making this shift. As I show in the next chapter, The European

Commission, the United Nations, and German aid agencies (among others) all flooded Bolivia with funding seeking to promote nonviolent conflict resolution and a culture of peace.57 As Ibáñez told

57 There are, of course, differences, and the political ideologies of each donor state or multilateral institution is reflected in their appeal to the multivocal “culture of peace” concept, and their particular preoccupations with/emphasis on civil society versus capacity building for state institutions, among other things. I will be exploring some of these differences in the dissertation.

me, “I could see that many of the [agencies of the] Cooperación saw what was coming and for that reason decided to change the course of their work toward issues that let them work closer with the community.” This shift was driven in part by donor anxieties about these “ungovernable” groups and protracted conflict in the country. But it also reflected, Ibáñez insisted, a genuine concern for helping redress Alteños’ grievances because, “The truth is, there was a lot of conflict.”

CHAPTER TWO

Cultures of Peace, Cultures of Conflict

In July 2008, the program Barrios de Verdad (colloquial: “Neighborhoods for Sure!”)1 celebrated its first graduating class in the city of La Paz, Bolivia. Some 100 people, including graduates of the leadership development course, their family and friends gathered for the awarding of certificates of participation on the fifth floor of La Paz’s Casa de la Cultura [House of Culture]. Aymara women dressed in thick, multi-tiered skirts and bowler hats bounced children on their laps or hushed babies swaddled tightly in bright aguayo. Late-arriving relatives crowded into the room, enthusiastically taking photographs and carrying roses for the graduates.

The Master of Ceremonies reminded the crowd that Barrios de Verdad aimed to “Transform neighborhoods, not just through cement, not just through [public] works…but also by changing habits.” The Executive Director of the Bolivian Association of Culture and Fundamental Rights

(ABC-DF),2 Juan José Diez de Medina, explained that over the course of the evening, invited graduation speakers would be modeling a conversatorio or the kind of peaceful dialogue they hoped the program would help promote in the neighborhoods of La Paz and El Alto, and, by extension, throughout the country.

A representative of the young adult graduates, Sammy Condori, told the crowd “We have been given a chance to show that our city of La Paz can initiate activities of pacification and no

11 While a literal translation might read “Neighborhoods of Truth” or “True Neighborhoods,” and play on the ambiguity of what, exactly, represents a “true” neighborhood, a colloquial translation would read more accurately as “Neighborhoods for Sure!” Or “Real Neighborhoods.” 2 ABC-DF is the project implementer of Barrios de Verdad, which is co-sponsored by USAID’s Strengthening Democratic Institutions (FIDEM) program and the municipal government. FIDEM is run by the American private development contractor Chemonics, and was a successor program to the programs run by the Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI), described below.

longer ones of confrontation.” Picking up on Sammy’s theme, Lic. Gabriela Ugarte of Fundación

UNIR told the graduating class that one of the major challenges facing Bolivia was to “make citizens out of the youth.” Finally, Ramiro Burgos, the coordinator of the Neighborhood Improvement

Program for the municipal government of La Paz3 contrasted his views on leadership with what he sees as the dominant leadership practices in Bolivia. He told the assembled, “Our leaders hide behind a curtain of protection that is called ‘UNION,’ ‘COOPERATIVE’ and ‘I need to ask the grassroots.’” Burgos continued, “A leader is not someone who repeats what the grassroots say. A leader is not someone who hides, who camouflages himself in a trade union and is not capable of redirecting, orienting or training his people.”

Burgos’ critique indicts Bolivia’s indigenous ayllu model of leadership rotation and rural sindicatos (peasant unions) created during the 1952 Revolution, as well as urban trade union and neighborhood association dirigents, among other forms of collective organizing. His assessment, however, is emblematic of many of the theoretical assumptions guiding democracy promotion and conflict resolution programs in Bolivia over the past ten years. Guided by liberal conceptualizations of social action and the subject, their goals have been to mold new citizens,4 to change habits and practices. And to change “conflictual” social and political culture. In the words of Burgos, democracy assistance and conflict resolution programs have aimed to “transform the mentality of the inhabitants of a city.”

***

What is wrong with the mentality of Alteños and Paceños, and why have they been targeted for transformation? Programs like Barrios de Verdad have a long genealogy in debates among democracy promotion advocates and development practitioners about what conditions are necessary and sufficient for democracy to thrive. In Bolivia, they also have a specific history rooted in anxieties about unruly, ungovernable populations, especially indigenous people and militant social

3 Under La Paz Mayor Juan de Granado of the Movimiento Sin Miedo party.

organizations. In recent years, those anxieties have been concentrated around the city of El Alto.

Foreign and Bolivian political analysts — and residents themselves — frequently characterize El Alto as a city beleaguered by poverty, social exclusion, disorder, and institutional disrepair. Some political analysts have also blasted what they describe as the “pre-modern” aspirations of Bolivian indigenista movements, and the “radical,” “self-defeating,” and sector-specific demands of Bolivia’s labor unions, which frequently utilize more confrontational political tactics — such as street protests, blockades, and strikes — to make their demands known (cf Gustafson 2006; Sanjinés 2002). More moderated critiques focus on the routinization of protest at the expense of other possible tactics, and criticize the ways patronage (pega) shapes political engagement. If Bolivian political practices are routinely antagonistic, critics warn, El Alto magnifies those tendencies.

This chapter examines how discourses and practices of Alternative Dispute Resolution

(ADR) have traveled to Bolivia under the banner of promoting a “Culture of Peace” against Bolivia’s

— and especially El Alto’s — supposed “culture of conflict” and confrontation. The “culture of peace” concept has become ubiquitous, informing foreign aid programs and domestic policy agendas alike. The appeal to construct a “culture of peace” has not been limited to foreign donors and

Bolivian NGOs. Enshrined in Bolivia’s new Political Constitution of the State — under the leadership Evo Morales — is the omnipresent phrase. Article 108 (4) includes among the responsibilities of Bolivian citizens the obligation to “Defend, promote, and contribute to the right to peace and to foment a culture of peace.”

But “Culture of Peace,” like democracy itself, is a multivalent concept. Many NGOs advocating culture of peace in Bolivia are quick to caution that they don’t mean the absence of conflict. Rather, they seek the eradication of violence as a means for resolving conflicts — which they describe as a normal part of all human life and social institutions. Their aim, they insist, is conflict transformation, emphasizing the productive nature of conflict for enabling social change and

4 Of course, the concept of the “new” man or citizen is not particular to USAID programming, but rather has long been invoked by organizations, movements, ideologies, and governments on both sides of the political spectrum.

achieving social justice. Conflict, they explain, becomes unproductive when it veers into violence, when it is not thoughtfully and systematically channeled toward finding solutions that are reasonably acceptable to all parties.

Many Bolivian proponents of the culture of peace concept invoke the practices of

Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) as a means to achieve their goals and vice versa. ADR is a broad category that encapsulates techniques, methods, concepts, and approaches to conflict and its resolution, while “culture of peace” is a widely-circulating idiomatic framework invoked by people across the political spectrum. For advocates, “culture of peace” is an ethos that can be cultivated — and the toolkits of ADR (active listening, “I” statements, etc.) can be used to help people nourish those sensibilities. Thus Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) is distinct from but related to the appeal to constructing a “culture of peace.” Nevertheless, the two are often invoked interchangeably as mutually reinforcing practices and dispositions that include effective communication and negotiation skills.

The “neutral, third-party mediator” personifies the stated intentions of ADR: to offer technical and apolitical intercession into conflicts, from the interpersonal to the transnational. In this chapter I want to suggest that conversatorios — or model dialogues, which appear in several vignettes throughout — exemplify the related project of promoting a culture of peace. Conversatorio is a term commonly used in Bolivia to describe public events meant to inform, analyze, and discuss issues, usually with the help of a guest specialist on the topic or a panel. Conversatorios as they are used in culture of peace campaigns have a more instructive aim: they are intended to model peaceful negotiation and deliberation in contradistinction to more confrontational forms of politics. They are intended as instructive spaces for practicing deliberative encounter. Yet Bolivian critics raise serious questions about all the talk of peacemaking — equating it with demobilization and pacification — and even the conversatorio itself. Those reactions sometimes surprise and unnerve workshop leaders by challenging them in ways that might better be described as contestatorios, or Talk Backs. As one

participant quips later, when questioning a conversatorio leader, “When the Indian is bad, it’s because he talks back [porque es contestón]5.”

I do not mean to suggest that culture of peace programs are naively complicit in the strategic aims of foreign donors or merely seeking to demobilize Alteños, although some may see that as an explicit — and justifiable — end goal for a country beset by recurring conflict. Culture of peace promoters are a socially and ideologically heterogeneous group — from a wide variety of backgrounds and situated along the spectrum of political commitments.6 Just what people and organizations mean by promoting a “culture of peace” was and is always up for debate, and it is precisely that polyvalence that enables its spread. Yet although many Bolivian Culture of Peace proponents recognize alternative ways of thinking about what it means to be a person embedded in a community (such as the notion of collective subjectivities often attributed to indigenous groups), in the vignette above we see how liberal assumptions about the primacy of the individual continue to undergird the paradigm.

Constructing a culture of peace — as it is articulated by Burgos to the Barrios de Verdad graduating class — requires sloughing off political practices that are authoritarian or confrontational, to reveal the unencumbered person free from the tethers of social or political obligation. Advocates insist that this is not a partisan concern, although it has clear roots in Liberalism. Similarly,

Alternative Dispute Resolution as a concept appeals to people across the political spectrum for that very reason: advocates insist that it is all method, no content. Instead, these are personal (moral) qualities that make one more capable of authentic yet respectful encounter. Yet target audiences frequently dispute these claims and assumptions.

5 Similar to racist American idioms of “uppity” black women and men who step out of place (subordination). 6 Some came to their work through happenstance, following appealing opportunity to work for an NGO project, or at the invitation of a friend to participate in a conflict resolution course. Some had training in other dimensions of development work or as lawyers, and followed new opportunities to work in the arena of conflict resolution as donors began funding ADR projects. Others came from a background as political and labor militantes, experienced organizers who found ADR to be a compelling means to advance their own social commitments, a new toolkit for activism. Still others continued to participate in ADR programs while remaining skeptical about their efficacy or the agendas they ultimately serve.

Accordingly, this chapter aims to accomplish two interrelated goals. The first is to extend the argument I began in the previous chapter on the shift in governmental rationalities expressed in the turn from institutional capacity building to capacitación by looking at how it occurs in practice. The second is to further examine the content of the culture of peace concept itself, and to show how it circulates — and provokes dissent — in Bolivia. In doing so, I hope to further illuminate some of the politics of appealing to peace in a country that is often defined by conflict.

I begin by exploring some of the ways conflict has been “culturalized” in Bolivia. In doing so, I am drawing on the work of Wendy Brown (2008) and Mahmood Mamdani (2005), who have examined the processes by which illiberalism and certain modes of doing (illiberal) politics are essentialized and attributed to particular cultures, religions, or ethnic groups. As Mamdani has suggested, this culturalization of politics asserts “that every culture has a tangible essence that deﬁnes it and then explains politics as a consequence of that essence” (Mamdani 2004: 17). This critique of culturalization puts anthropologists in the position of writing against static theories of culture — concepts that anthropologists have long since abandoned — while still trying to suggest that there are different ways of interpreting and being in the world that deserve our understanding7 (cf Merry

2003a on the “demonization of culture” and “culturalization of problems” in human rights debates).

Talking in cultural terms in Bolivia can veer from blatantly pathologizing to uncritically celebrating

— and both are ahistorical. Explaining the origins of conflict in El Alto as an essentially unconscious cultural product fails to show how people are thoughtfully analyzing power and making tactical choices. The evidence of those considerations and tactical choices is evident in the consternation and “prickly”8 responses culture of peace promoters sometimes encounter when they set out to transform Bolivian citizens, which I explore in the second half of the chapter.

7 We often find ourselves at odds with scholars in other fields, people like Samuel Huntington, who declared “culture matters” in ways anthropologists find quite troubling, especially as those static definitions of culture are picked up by the general public, the press, and decision makers, and worked into national policies 8 Li 2007

A Culture of Conflict

Who embodies the ethic or culture of peace? Who is tolerant? Who practices deliberation?

By contrast, whose cultural practices are marked as particularly conflictual, and why? Which rationalities or political actions are categorized as illiberal, authoritarian, barbaric, anti-modern, or anti-democratic — and who decides the litmus test for these qualities? This is the stuff of theoretical debates in the social sciences, particularly political science and political philosophy.9 But in Bolivia, these debates are also reflected in popular discourses about recurring conflicts in the country. In the following section, I examine how concerns about anti-democratic, authoritarian impulses of El Alto have informed intervention strategies aimed at promoting a culture of peace. I argue that, in the

Bolivian context, the heavy emphasis on the cultural dimensions of conflict reinforces the idea that certain groups are predisposed to authoritarian, anti-democratic, and illiberal forms of political engagement.

This preoccupation with Bolivia’s political stability and its contentious populations is not a new phenomenon. While advocates have appealed to the need to promote a culture of peace throughout Bolivia, and have recently targeted groups in the lowland region, I want to suggest that the impetus to promote a culture of peace has its origins in long-standing social and political anxieties rooted in the specific populations of El Alto. And El Alto, in turn, is populated by groups of people who have long-worried foreign donors. Thus although ADR programs in Bolivia pre-date the 2003 uprising, efforts to promote culture of peace greatly intensified following that event.

What was it about El Alto that has so rattled foreign donors and Bolivian political analysts alike? Many of the analyses that followed the 2003 uprising expressed the persistent anxieties held by

Bolivian elites, who have long regarded El Alto’s predominantly indigenous and working class population as unruly and even menacing. Critical analysts have been particularly disparaging of El

9 See Habermas (1981; 1996) and his critics: Frasier (1992) Mouffe (1999); Cohen and Arato (1995), Povinelli (2011); among many others discussing his work. Two key themes emerge in Habermas’ writing on communicative action/argumentation that has significance for examining ADR and the circulation of the “culture of peace concept”: his views on the modern capacity for reflexivity and the centrality of process over content.

Alto’s supposed “collective mentality.” That allusion to a “collective mentality” invokes the city’s unique history: El Alto’s population is comprised primarily of displaced miners and rural immigrants from indigenous Andean communities whose organizing tactics have been deeply shaped by collectivist unions or sindicatos created during the 1952 Revolution (cf Arbona 2008).

Located 4000 meters above sea level, the city of El Alto envelops Bolivia’s capital, La Paz – which is built into a deep basin in the Andean high plain. Because of La Paz’s geographical features,

El Alto essentially acts as a gateway between the city and the rest of the country, a quality that has proven enormously consequential when residents of El Alto mobilize and block entry into the capital, as they did in 2003. Although administratively independent since 1988, the social, political, and economic lives of La Paz and El Alto are deeply intertwined. Rural peasants first began gathering around the “marginal/segregated” outskirts of La Paz following Bolivia’s 1952 Revolution, which constitutionally freed indigenous peoples from bonded labor and re-categorized them from Indios to campesinos or peasants (Arbona and Kohl 2004: 256; Siekmeier 2011; Postero 2007).

Despite their progressive aims, the ‘52 revolution was not unlike 16th century efforts to move indigenous people along the spectrum of humanity through their incorporation into township reducciones (Ellison, n.d.; cf de Acosta, José 2002; Lupher 2003; Pagden 1982). Bolivia’s Nationalist

Revolutionary Movement (MNR) sought to pull rural Andeans along the spectrum from Indios to campesinos via their incorporation into sindicatos campesinos or peasant unions (cf Healy 2001). As

Postero explains, “Here we see a legacy of the liberal period: the continued need for political technologies that would include Indians in ‘modern’ Bolivia but would also ensure their control and continued subordination” (2007: 39). MNR’s solution to the “Indian problem” was a managed and transformed inclusion.

But those revolutionary rural unionization schemes did not remain rural. During the 1980s,

El Alto experienced a population explosion when a severe drought struck the already-arid region

(1982-1983). Subsistence-based indigenous farmers moved to El Alto in the tens of thousands. They were quickly joined by droves of tin and silver miners who were displaced when Bolivia adopted

stringent structural adjustment policies and closed state-owned mines in 1985 (as described in the previous chapter). Thus the 1952 Revolution’s sindicatos campesinos and their organizational tactics would later play a profound role in shaping the political life of El Alto — and other communities throughout the country. To this day, many residents of El Alto maintain ties to their rural hamlets, traveling home to fulfill social obligations and leadership roles, harvest crops and host cargo fiestas.

Similarly, the Revolution’s nationalization project, which targeted the country’s largest mines, would deeply shape labor organizing practices in the country.

During the 1980s and 1990s, displaced miners and campesinos would bring those practices to

El Alto as the mining sector was “capitalized” and Bolivia adopted stringent structural adjustment policies described in the previous chapter. The confluence of populations – and the rapidity of their migration to El Alto – had a striking effect upon the social and political organization of the city. As

Arbona and Kohl explain, “This intense migration has created a political culture that combines aspects of trade unionism with traditional forms of land-based organization within a context of marked economic insecurity and social frustration” (2004: 258). Many of those frustrations have been concentrated around the lack of basic social services, including water and sanitation systems.

Political organizing in El Alto was also profoundly shaped by the very neoliberal reforms that accompanied the good governance and judicial reform agendas of the 1990s. Bolivia’s Law of

Popular Participation (LPP) was adopted during Goni’s first term in 1994. It created a new system for channeling citizen participation through Territorial Grassroots Organizations (OTBs) intended to direct people away from sindicatos (trade, labor and peasant unions), and equipping them with “the idioms of modern bureaucratic democracy” and participatory budgeting (Postero 2007: 153; Lazar

2008). As Postero argues, the LPP’s authors intended it, in part, to help sooth the pain of neoliberal restructuring, but they also introduced the reforms in response indigenous demands for substantive inclusion and power (2007: 129). The LPP drew indigenous Bolivians into a new democratic structure for channeling their participation, while simultaneously seeking to undermine the

“collectivist” or corporatist politics of sindicalismo — to diminish the power of organized labor

(Postero 2007; Lazar 2009).

In effect, the LPP represented the convergence of indigenous demands for access to political power and an unfolding neoliberal agenda that favored decentralization and structural adjustment, yet sought to blunt the impact of those harsh economic reforms so as to pre-empt/diminish the backlash. Nevertheless, the LPP proved incapable of delivering on its promises while restructuring organizational practices, furthering poor — and especially indigenous — Bolivian’s frustrations with their continued political, economic, and social exclusion. As Postero argues, the very mobilizations that took root in El Alto in 2003 were enabled by the LPP itself — the political tools and subjectivities it helped to produce. Anthropologist Sian Lazar (2009) has called the confluence of the

LPP and sindicato organizing forms in El Alto the “organizational bases for revolt.”

In the wake of El Alto’s October 2003 uprising, the United States Agency for International

Development (USAID) commissioned a report, headed by Bolivian Rafael Indaburu Quintana (not to be confused with the report described in Ch. 1, which evaluated the closing judicial reform program).10 Between December 2003 and January of 2004, Indaburu and his team developed a “rapid assessment” of the conditions facing El Alto’s 650,000 residents.11 The report expressed a great deal concern about El Alto’s “irrational” and “chaotic” organization: anarchic and illicit land sales, disarray in the city’s sprawling open-air markets, and an expanding population whose growth outpaced the city government’s ability to provide basic services including sanitation, electricity, and potable water. In addition to these broad concerns about El Alto’s disorder, Indaburu’s team expressed particular alarm about El Alto’s youth. The report estimated that some 46% of Alto population is under 20 years of age and faces limited access to education and bleak job prospects

(Indaburu iii). As a consequence, it argued, this atmosphere “generates population pressure and a

10 The Indaburu report was published in Spanish. All translations are my own. 11 Population counts in El Alto are difficult because much of the population moves between urban neighborhoods and rural communities where they maintain roots and frequently continue to serve in rotating leadership roles.

series of tensions and generational conflicts, and a brewing cauldron for confrontation, frustration, and all kinds of anti-democratic and anti-systemic (illegal) actions” (ibid).

According to the report, by 2003 the social, economic, and infrastructure problems facing El

Alto had created a noxious environment for democracy: El Alto’s many trade unions and neighborhood associations provided “radical” channels for mounting popular unrest -- provoking discontent, and facilitating popular mobilizations. In a post-2003 context, the report argues, El Alto’s

“home-grown” social institutions posed a serious threat to the country’s political stability, further jeopardizing foreign investment. The evaluation critically targets grassroots-level “power structures,” led by “professional union bosses,” or what some critics (including Alteños) described to me in interviews as dirigentes mafiosos or Mafioso leaders. It further characterizes El Alto’s neighborhood associations as “predisposed to conflict” from their inception (21). In the view of the analysts writing the USAID-contracted analysis, non-state institutions like El Alto’s Federation of Neighborhood

Associations (FEJUVE) had warped healthy expressions of civil society. Instead, they created a

“collective mentality” that misdirected Alteños away from healthier, formal democratic institutions such as voting and citizen oversight committees formed under Bolivia’s Law of Popular Participation

(LPP).12

Aid documents and contractors themselves suggested that in addition to this “credibility crisis” affecting state institutions, social tensions in Bolivia also reflected the “conflictual” tendencies of broader society — especially El Alto — and a patterns of strategically escalating social conflict in the service of dirigentes interesados (the personal interests of trade, labor, and neighborhood leaders).

That is, analysis documents produced by USAID implementing institutions, as well as planning documents, and aid contractors themselves frequently describe Bolivia as a country plagued by

12 The LPP was accompanied by an attractive discourse of liberal democratic values such as equality before the law and offered new mechanisms for channeling political concerns and collective participation in municipal politics. Postero has found in her work with lowland Guarani communities that “indigenous citizens in Bolivia have taken advantage of political openings that the LPP offered, in many cases by assuming many of the rationalities of neoliberalism” (17; cf Hale 2002; Gustafson 2009). Nevertheless, Postero argues that the neoliberal reforms enacted in Bolivia during the 1980s and 1990s, and the accompanying LPP posed a “radical challenge” to the real power of collective organizations -- such as trade unions -- that Bolivians previously had relied upon to channel their demands, such as those criticized by the Indaburu report.

authoritarian practices and anti-democratic sentiments; In this political cosmology, El Alto intensifies these tendencies due to the historical confluence of its rural Andean and syndicate labor practices that, analysts argue, are used toward authoritarian and anti-democratic ends via street protests, blockades, and most recently, the siege on La Paz.

The writers of the Indaburu report expressed concerns about these “collectivist” modes of political organization and the ways they threatened to undermine the mechanisms of modernization intended by the LPP. Moreover, in a context of widespread poverty and disaffection, they accused unscrupulous dirigentes (labor or community leaders) of fomenting discord for personal gain and power. As the evaluation stated:

In this war of El Alto, the official institutionalism of the State and the systems of government are losing battle after battle against a discourse of separation, exclusion and violence, a discourse promoted by a frustrated population that has been put-off and ignored, egged on by the dictatorship of certain neighborhood and labor leaders, which has meant that official institutionalism has become clandestine, or has been subordinated to those leaders (Indaburu 41, emphasis mine).

Rather than supporting a true, “participatory democracy” (49), the report argued that El Alto’s labor unions and neighborhood associations merely instigated regular blockades, strikes, and marches. It was against these harmful expressions of “collective mentality” that Ramiro Burgos enjoined the freshly minted citizen-leaders in the opening vignette.

Such studies point rightly to residents’ discontent with state policies and the failure to deliver basic services like sewage, potable water, health care, and education— as well as other everyday sources of frustration in the city. Yet these characterizations portray El Alto as an almost nightmarish carnival of disorder and barely-contained rage, a city crippled by its own political culture and the sectarian organizing tactics of trade unions, neighborhood associations, and other social organizations. In doing so, they define the terms of intervention as a need to counteract a pathological political culture. The critical emphasis is on the strategies social organizations use for demanding justice rather than the frustrations driving those demands.

This image of El Alto as a city besieged by conflict is not limited to debates about the legitimacy or abuse of leaders — of dirigentes and their political tactics. Bolivian analysts, donor

representatives, and ordinary citizens alike often fret over the “conflictual” tendencies of their Alteño neighbors. I heard comments about “conflictual Alteños” so frequently that I started to keep a file dedicated solely to the ways people had warned me “asi son los Alteños” or “that’s just how Alteños are.” And these characterizations tended to heavily culturalize conflict in racial terms. That is, characterizations of the political culture of El Alto frequently downplay the historical context in which those tactics emerged, focusing instead on the ways tactics such as blockades, strikes, and laying siege to the capital13 were a natural expression of “conflictual” groups like Aymara immigrants, whose culture is inherently predisposed to violent confrontation. Let me give some examples.

One afternoon I sat with a government bureaucrat, “Daniela,” chatting about her work with the Ministry of Justice. Daniela made the trek every morning to El Alto from her home in La Paz.

She found her work rather unsatisfying and the commute back and forth between El Alto and La Paz made her even less enthusiastic. That morning we were catching up on current events. Sugar shortages were causing long lines and angry debate about the rise in food prices following the

Morales’ Administration’s botched effort to end gasoline subsidies over the Christmas holiday. The move sparked immediate and angry protests, as bus fares and food prices shot up over night. As the blockades and marches escalated, Morales was forced to withdraw the decree and declare himself

“listening to the people” and their demands — positioning himself as the people’s president who responds to protest not with gunfire, as Sanchez de Lozada did, but with understanding and reason.

Morales nevertheless bitterly decried the protesters as infiltrated by right wing neoliberals bent on his destruction rather than angry Alteña market vendors, housewives, and day laborers who could not cover the sudden and dramatic increase in prices.

A month had nearly passed since the so-called gasolinazo, but food prices were still elevated, sugar supplies were down, and citizens were hotly debating where to place blame for the situation.

13 A practice that itself often invoked several indigenous uprisings against colonial authorities -- which many residents of El Alto and nearby rural hamlets viewed as their historical predecessor -- seeing themselves as their descendants or inheritors of a long lineage of resistance to colonial rule. In this narrative, the relationship between cultural and historical origins is a positive one.

Confusion abounded over the prices. Daniela had been told by her superiors that as a government employee (and MAS militante) she could go pick up some of the sugar being handed out at supply stations throughout El Alto — where residents of the city were lining up at dawn in order to receive their family’s quota. Daniela recounted how she had arrived at one such storeroom, government ID in hand, and had pushed her way to the front, past the long line of Aymara women waiting their turn.

Much to her dismay, Daniela found that the storeroom had run out of the promised sugar. “People had picked things up earlier in the day, and then it seems like they had sold off the rest [illicitly].”

Daniela grew indignant with what happened next: “And the people [waiting in line] turned on us!

They were so enraged. But that’s how Alteños are — good and conflictual [“Pero asi son los Alteños.

Bienconflictivos”]. They want everything by force. They want everything right now. You know how they are.”

“Is that really how they are?,” I asked Daniela. “Maybe it was just circumstantial. The price of sugar up,” I continued, “People are poor and angry with food prices are on the rise. Could that be the issue?”

Daniela paused for a moment and considered my argument. “Well, maybe it’s their educational level,” she offered. “They don’t have education like we do in La Paz. La Paz is so different. Here [in

El Alto] they just want to lynch you.”

Much like euphemisms in the U.S. where urban stands in for “black,” Daniela’s comments about education indexed something else: race, a rural-urban divide, and the widespread sentiment that El Alto residents were somehow inherently conflictive owing to their indigenous roots. In addition to concerns over Alteño political practices, the city has received a great deal of negative press over “lynchings,” as vecinos (neighbors) apprehend suspected criminals and physically attack them, sometimes to the point of killing them. By invoking education and lynching, Daniela is attributing the anger she witnessed by the women standing in line for sugar to the innate characteristics of a group of people: highland indian migrants to the city of El Alto who bring with them uneducated, barbaric, uncivil practices like lynching. They also bring a rural ignorance of proper

city behavior. And the invocation of “rural ignorance,” in Bolivia, immediately signals to the listener that the people being discussed are Indian.

Political commentators have focused a lot of attention on lynchings in El Alto and elsewhere in Bolivia, frequently conflating them with indigenous “community justice.” El Alto is riddled with dummies hung in effigy, and explicit graffiti that declares, “Thief that is caught will be burned alive,” among other warnings. Sometimes those symbolic threats give way to real lynchings. Anthropologist

Daniel Goldstein (2004, 2012) has suggested that lynchings in Bolivia need to be understood within a much longer history that includes the roll-back on state services under structural adjustment and people’s demand for state responsiveness.

Helene Risør (2010) has shown how hanging dummies, ominous graffiti – and lynchings themselves – reflect some of the more fearsome ways vecinos (neighbors) try to identify threats and secure themselves against potential dangers in the absence of the state. Yet at the same time, vecinos are often themselves deeply critical – and fearful – of state agents. As one resident put it to me, “You cannot trust the police. Police and thieves share the same bed.” Scholars and community leaders have tried to distinguish the killing of suspected thieves in El Alto and elsewhere in Bolivia from “traditional” or “community justice” as indigenous groups practice it. Yet despite efforts to have a more nuanced conversation about lynchings, they continue to haunt debates about

“community justice,” especially as Bolivian lawmakers and local leaders are working-out how to meaningfully incorporate indigenous autonomy within the Plurinational State. In these accounts,

Highland Indians bring their barbarous and unhygienic practices, ignorance and illiberalism to the city where they reproduce it — along with unwashed babies and drunken brawls.

Yet even Alteños themselves sometimes speak in these terms. Asusena, who is herself of

Aymara decent and lives in El Alto, once quipped that I had been taken hold of by the conflictual tendencies of lo indio — Indianness. I had been infected by association. We had been discussing language differences, and I had mentioned that for some reason in Spanish I felt emboldened to stand up for myself in ways I often didn’t in English. I said that in Spanish I was a little more brave,

but also more defiant. I suggested it was because speaking Spanish was like putting on a mask or being an actor playing a role. Asusena laughed and corrected me. “No, no, it’s not the Spanish,” she said. “You spend your time hanging out with Alteños. Te ha agarrado lo indio.” You have been taken over by Indianess. And Indianness, she went on to explain, meant being more aggressive. It was, she implied an inherent characteristic of Indians — but it was also contagious. I had caught the Indian bug. Without intending to, Asusena reproduced the widespread racialization and culturalization of

Alteños’ disposition to being conflictual.

I want to caution that I am not suggesting that all people who are advocating the culture of peace paradigm or Alternative Dispute Resolution would make such a statement about El Alto or

Alteños — or that they consciously try to attribute conflict to people’s ethnic background.

Nevertheless, my point is that the donor-driven push for promoting a culture of peace and ADR has unwittingly intersected with widespread notions about the relationship between culture and conflict in Bolivia. Culture of Peace as an idiom simultaneously creates an opposing category: a culture of conflict. And in Bolivian debates about conflict, particular groups are often singled-out as being predisposed to confrontational forms of doing politics. These characterizations tend to dismiss blockades and street protest as the self-interested maneuvering of dirigentes or as an outgrowth of an essentialized cultural tendency toward violence and conflict. By attributing protest to abusive or mafioso dirigentes, critics are able to undermine claims for political redress: these aren’t valid demands, they are manipulated ones.

El Alto is often portrayed in the press, in policy papers, and in people’s everyday characterizations as a kind of nightmarish wasteland. And thus one of the dangers in highlighting these characterizations of El Alto as a “conflictual” place is that I may reproduce those pathologizing narratives, many of which have their root in anxieties about unruly, insurgent indigenous populations dating back to the colonial era, and fears about Leftist unions that gripped American policy makers during the cold war era. Those characterizations also fail to do justice to the lives of Alteños themselves, which cannot be reduced to pure suffering and violence.

And yet, not to acknowledge the forms of everyday violence, stress, and frustrations that

Alteños experience in their home city is to deny some of the very real challenges facing El Alto.

Throughout this dissertation I return to those very real experiences of frustration, fear, violence, and anger. Here, however, I want to highlight how popular discourses have tended to culturalize the ways that El Alto residents express their frustrations and make demands for redress — by attributing those practices to an essence, to the pre-existing tendencies, or cultural norms of particular groups, namely

Andean Indians. That cultural lens may displace attention from the larger macro economic and political dimensions of the demands themselves. And as I argued in the previous chapter, in the wake of the 2003 uprising, many donors shifted their attention to this conflictive culture, advocating deliberative democratic skills, habits, sensibilities, and values under the banner of promoting a culture of peace. But what, exactly, is a culture of peace?

A Culture of Peace

Norwegian Sociologist Johan Galtung was one of the principal conceptual and theoretical architects of conflict resolution studies. Galtung famously coined the term “structural violence,” now frequently utilized by anthropologists concerned with social, political and economic inequality.

Galtung has been instrumental in both disseminating those concepts through channels like the Journal of Peace Research (which he founded), his work with the United Nations, and his appointments at numerous universities worldwide. When I began researching conflict resolution aid programs in

Bolivia in 2008, Bolivians working with conflict resolution programs invoked Galtung as they spoke about the theoretical frameworks they utilized for understanding how conflict emerges and operates, or as they spoke about the root causes of violence in the country. It seemed like Galtung, along with

American sociologist John Paul Lederach, was on everybody’s lips.

The kinds of conflict analysis, conflict typologies, and conflict resolution theories elaborated by people like Galtung and Lederach are complex and have spawned entire fields of study, training programs, and research institutes. The “cultural” dimensions of conflict get invoked in a number of

different ways among ADR practitioners, conflict studies researchers, and multilateral agencies like the UN. One of the ways “culture” is invoked through what Johan Galtung termed “cultural violence.”

What Galtung means by “cultural violence” is something rather akin to Bourdieu’s notion of symbolic violence: the “cultural” dimensions of human social life used to justify and normalize structural violence — or social, political, and economic inequality. These are the signs, symbols, institutions, and ideologies that buttress disparities in wealth and power. As the epigraph at the beginning of this dissertation indicates, Galtung is well aware of the ways attributions of violence and unruliness can be utilized to denigrate the people who are actually the victims of political-economic inequality, racism, and social exclusion. In contradistinction to cultural violence, United Nations defines a “culture of peace” as,

an integral approach to preventing violence and violent conflicts, and an alternative to the culture of war and violence based on education for peace, the promotion of sustainable economic and social development, respect for human rights, equality between women and men, democratic participation, tolerance, the free flow of information and disarmament.14

That is, cultures of peace can be contrasted against the culture of war, violence, confrontation, exclusion, and intolerance — and these definitions frequently invoke both the need for education as a tool of cultural transformation and socio-economic and political equality as a critical dimension of ensuring peace. Such definitions insists that peace cannot be achieved without substantive equality.

But Galtung’s — or the United Nations’ — original use of “culture” and its various meanings15 is not my focus here; my aim in this chapter is neither to confirm nor to challenge these conceptual

14 1998 UN resolution on a culture of peace. 15 Yet while Galtung, Lederach, and their interlocutors — including Bolivian advocates — stress the structural dimensions of inequality, the role of socio-economic exclusion in generating social conflict, and the productivity of conflict itself, in practice those complex understandings are often reduced to short-term NGO projects and role-playing games for children rather than redistributive policies or institutional reform. This reductionism is due in part to the pressures of funding agencies to quantify impact (e.g. the American F- process of accounting to Congress, or other international donor standards for reporting the number of people reached through workshops, training sessions, media outreach, etc.). Galtung, who has famously celebrated the American Republic while excoriating the American Empire, might also blanch to see how the call for constructing a culture of peace has been taken up by the very institutions that serve as the diplomatic arm of American foreign policy and interest.

frameworks. Rather, my intent is to illuminate the ways the globally circulating notion of constructing a culture of peace has touched down in Bolivia, the skeptical audiences or “prickly subjects”16 it has encountered, and what this circulation reveals about the unfolding politics of aid interventions aimed at de-escalating social and interpersonal conflict in the country through the invocation of cultural transformation.

In her effort to denaturalize the concept of tolerance,17 political philosopher Wendy Brown argues that such an approach requires that we abandon our taken for granted notions of “tolerance as a transcendent or universal concept, principle, doctrine, or virtue so that it can be considered instead as a political discourse and practice of governmentality that is historically and geographically variable in purpose, content, agents, and objects” (2006: 4). Similarly I want to suggest that the notion of promoting a culture of peace reflects a governmental rationality that strives to transform

Bolivian political subjectivities. That is, these programs seek to transform the ways people think about and behave as political actors18 by appealing to notions of tolerance, dialogue, and other sensibilities, orientations, and practices that its advocates argue are central to liberal democratic practice and governance. For advocates, Alternative Dispute Resolution is part of that transformative but non-partisan toolkit: offering active listening and communication skills, conflict analysis frameworks and the opportunities to rehearse deliberation and negotiation. Yet as I show further below, in practice, many target groups (e.g. Bolivia’s “at-risk” youth and political militants) seriously question the concept of peace invoked by these programs. Concepts such as “cultural violence” articulate with local and national discourses about culture and violence, causing target audiences to hear and interpret these terms quite differently.

16 Tania Li, 2007 17 Compare with anthropology’s own complex relationship to the concept of tolerance and the concept of cultural relativism — and how others view anthropology vis a vis this debate (Merry 2003a). 18 And the conduct of political conduct (Foucault 1991).

Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) as a tool for constructing a Culture of Peace

Bolivian NGOs have been some of the principal channels of foreign funding aimed at de- escalating social conflict and promoting negotiation and deliberation as mechanisms to achieve a

“culture of peace” in Bolivia. Prior to 2003, a number of foreign donors and NGOs were already involved in promoting negotiation and conciliation, among other techniques of conflict resolution in

Bolivia. For example, the German aid agencies DED and GTZ had been operating in and around northern Potosí with a program called Ayllus en paz (Ayllus in peace). Following violent clashes in

2000, the program sought to de-escalate conflicts between rural communities contesting land limits by reorienting inter-ayllu clashes into participatory budgeting models created under Bolivia’s Law of

Popular Participation (LPP).19 Similarly, Canadian donors had targeted Bolivian mining communities to train them in negotiation skills that, they argued, would help them better understand the logics driving transnational mining companies. Thus equipped, these Canadian ADR projects argued that mining communities would more effective at negotiating their interests with transnational corporations.20

Following the October 2003 uprising, however, a variety of donors flooded Bolivia with funding seeking to promote nonviolent conflict resolution and a culture of peace, and many continue to fund conflict resolution and educational programs toward that end. For example, on the heels of the unrest, the European Commission (EC) quickly mobilized funds to support “laboratories of peace” with a rapid-aid program titled “Negotiation, Deliberation, and Dialogue” (NEDD). The EC channeled those funds through Bolivia’s nascent Fundación UNIR, an organization that makes appearances throughout this chapter. As is evident in the title of the EC-funded project, these programs have tended to emphasize the role of the liberal democratic toolkit — including deliberation, negotiation, dialogue, and tolerance — in the creation of a “culture of peace.”

19 Report and Work manual, “PROYECTO: IMPACTO DE LA LEY 1551 EN LOS AYLLUS EN LAPAZ DURANTE LOS ANOS 2000•-2004” Unión de Consejos para el Desarrollo de Los Ayllus en Paz” (UCDAP) with funding from the Fondo de Pequeñas Medidas deApoyo al Control Social (FACS-GTZ).

Over the course of the next few years, the culture of peace concept gained traction among

Bolivian NGOs and an emergent network of ADR promoters, whose work I explore in the next chapter. The culture of peace concept was not only gaining ground as a recognizable slogan, it also was being institutionalized. Fundación UNIR’s staff worked to define the organization’s objectives, and to reach a shared understanding of the terms they were now helping to spread. As an institution,

UNIR sat at the intersection of foreign aid projects dedicated to the de-escalation of social conflict and an emerging group of Bolivian conflict resolution experts. UNIR was both a product of, and a force for the expansion of culture of peace programming in Bolivia.

Bolivia’s conflictologos (conflict resolution specialists) now moved between sister organizations and shared conference spaces, ADR training workshops, and project planning sessions. And with them, concepts like culture of peace gained traction, if not a singular meaning. Those multiple and sometimes conflicting meanings were evident as I spoke with culture of peace advocates. Take for example how UNIR’s Santiago Mujica tried to distinguish his understanding of “culture of peace” from that of other institutions. Santiago explained,

There are people who have come from the Defensor del Pueblo. I respect them, they are good professionals, all of them. But their vision is more in the line of human rights — the need to defend the citizen against the state. Not of seeking a relation of equal to equal. For me a culture of peace means [resolving conflicts] between equals. But the Defensor defends the weak before the state. It’s a different mentality. I understood culture of peace as ‘You and I are equals, we will respect each other. Not just tolerance. Respect.’ I don’t know if I am defining it correctly…. Of course we held internal seminars [within UNIR] on interculturality, on culture of peace. But despite those efforts, two days in a seminar is never enough to homogenize the ideas.

The concept may not have been homogenous within UNIR, but it certainly was becoming ubiquitous among donor-backed conflict resolution programs.

For example, under the idiom of promoting a “Culture of Peace” in El Alto, USAID’s

Integrated Justice Centers sought to reorient Alteños out of the formal legal system while providing them with transferable skill-sets for addressing conflicts in their homes, neighborhoods, and

20 For a critique of the use of ADR in disputes over natural resources and between local communities and multinational corporations, see Nader and Mattei’s Plunder: When the Rule of Law is Illegal (2008).

workplaces. ADR programs would help people envision a new way of being a citizen-person.21 As

José Pérez, the Director for El Alto’s District One Integrated Justice Center told me:

Conciliation should be a real opportunity to envision something different, and for changing people’s behavior. It’s a chance for people to realize that the path they have chosen is not satisfying…. and that there is another way, which is that of peace and tranquility. Conciliation, like all other forms of conflict resolution, seeks peace. Which is why our first slogan for the Centers was “A Culture of Peace,” though many people misunderstand its meaning.

For Pérez, conciliation is a tool for self reflection, for changing interpersonal behavior, and for promoting a larger orientation toward peacefulness and tranquility.

A variety of organizations along the political spectrum — both national and international — utilize the concept of promoting a culture of peace in their campaigns. As I noted in the opening, it is now even enshrined in the new Constitution. Writing on the concept of tolerance, political philosopher Wendy Brown acknowledges that given the “proliferation of and variation in agents, objects, and political cadences of tolerance, it may be tempting to conclude that it is too polymorphous and unstable to analyze as a political or moral discourse” (2006: 3). The same could be said of peace. Yet with Brown, I contend that these “semiotically polyvalent, politically promiscuous, and sometimes incoherent” appeals to building a culture of peace — across transnational networks of donor institutions, state agents, and activists — offers transferable insight into emergent modes of governmentality that transcend the Left and Right in a deeply divided country. Nevertheless, as Dr.

Pérez acknowledges above, some people found the appeal to peacemaking deeply suspicious. One of the ways these suspicions emerged was precisely in the workshops and training sessions meant to help foster a “culture of peace” by allowing people to observe and then rehearse those skills: conversatorios.

21 cf Wedel et al (2005) on the ways “…modern power largely functions not by brute imposition of a state’s agenda but by using policy to limit the range of reasonable choices that one can make and to ‘normalize’ particular kinds of action or behavior” (pg 38).

Conversational Politics

The Bolivian non-profit organization Fundación UNIR (UNITE in Spanish) is holding a public “conversatorio” or model public debate during the annual La Paz book fair. School children race around the stands, laughing and lunging at each other while staff members from UNIR instruct others on a puzzle meant to teach cooperation skills and group problem solving. The event is part of

Fundación UNIR’s ongoing “Culture of Peace” campaign, which is financed by a variety of

European aid agencies. The campaign advocates — as many foreign-funded programs now do – instilling participants with skill sets, values, and capabilities that encourage tolerance and peaceful conflict resolution. It’s a kind of deliberative democratic toolkit.

Invited speakers sit in an inner circle on an elevated platform, while spectators form an outer ring. Over the din of the book fair, organizers play an opening song about the value of cultural pluralism and open-mindedness meant to inspire the debate. The Master of Ceremonies then invites us to observe how participants will be modeling a dialogue on diversity, demonstrating the importance of listening and learning to speak one’s opinion respectfully while reflecting on the themes from that song.

The MC explains to the crowd that, “These skills are useful for addressing both fights in your home, and fights in your neighborhood as well.”

In that brief comment, the Master of Ceremonies summarizes a notion that has guided many recent foreign aid interventions into conflicts in Bolivia: that training individuals in conflict resolution skill-sets will be transferable to larger-scale social conflict. The underlying —and frequently unstated

— assumption is that this transfer will help promote greater economic and political stability.

Over the next hour, participants take turns around the circle, sharing their thoughts about diversity. Most fall back on vague platitudes about the richness of diversity and unity amid difference.

They are, almost universally, positive expressions — diversity is good, is beautiful, makes us stronger.

That is, all are positive until we reach Julieta Paredes. Paredes is a well-known Aymara feminist activist, and the only person to explicitly criticize the exercise itself when she is given her turn to

speak. Julieta sits forward and tells the crowd “Look it’s a nice desire, it’s well intentioned. But reality isn’t like that. We aren’t the same, however much we want to be.” She goes on to comment on the hidden economic inequalities that surrounded everyone observing the model dialogue. “Some

[Aymara Indian women] came here with 10 pesitos in their pockets to spend on a book,” Julieta continues, “while others can buy as many as they like. We are not the same,” Julieta proclaims. “If we can’t deepen the discussion on these issues, we just end up singing about pretty, superficial things.”

As the session comes to a close, I approach Julieta, who smiles at me wryly. “How boring was that?” she laughs. “A lot of pretty talk?” I offer. Julieta shakes her head, “It’s like throwing water on something when really we should just burn it all down.”

***

Conversatorios are one of the principal idiomatic expressions and tools of the culture of peace paradigm in Bolivia. The practice of hosting conversatorios could be translated as discussion group, conversation, forum, public debate, or model dialogue. Yet while the notion of holding a public debate places an emphasis on the contentiousness of disagreement and argumentation, the idea of modeling dialogue places the accent on harmony-seeking. Some conversatorio organizers see their work as engaged in a radical critique of Bolivian society where political issues are explicitly discussed and confrontational forms of activism are encouraged. But in my experience observing culture of peace campaigns, organizers frequently intend the audiences of the conversatorio to both witness to and begin to interiorize the dispositions that make dialogue and deliberation possible, and to re-orient themselves toward the negotiation table.

These are, they insist, skill sets that know no political party, no political allegiance per se.

These are qualities that people may learn to cultivate across the political spectrum. Some advocates I spoke with argued that these forums could provide grist for critical awareness about political and economic issues, arguing that the goal was not depoliticization but rather consciousness-raising. Even so, in all of these framings negotiation skills are non-ideological in and of themselves. Instead, they become methodological vehicles for tolerant encounter, deliberation, and mutual understanding. In these

conversatorios, the political and normative dimensions of liberalism are often submerged. As such, the notion that negotiation acts as a building block toward a “culture of peace” is depoliticized, as advocates insist that these interior sensibilities provide the necessary conditions for democracy to thrive.

Conversatorios are thus emblematic of the shift in governance strategies that I described in the previous chapter, from capacity building aimed at the institutions responsible for managing populations to capacitando (training) ordinary citizens into a culture of peace. Ethnographic studies of democratization programs have illuminated how subjectification processes intersect with population- level governance efforts led by state governments and supra-national agencies alike. These works examine how an array of institutions promoting democratization, transparency, and good governance travel, and may be understood to constitute a transnational apparatus of governmentality (cf Paley

2009; Brown 2006, 2009). Kimberly Coles’ (2009) work on transnational election monitoring is illustrative. Coles shows how transnational election monitoring serves a “governance strategy aimed at controlling and transforming the conduct of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Bosnians, as well as Bosnian democracy” (129). Election supervisors enact forms of governance at multiple registers, operating through their “sheer,” “mere,” and “peer” presence. Though apparently “passive,” foreign election monitors embody transnational governance interventions, as well as model the ways Bosnians should perform democracy in their own state. Election watchdogs are symbolic, pedagogic, and they supply a normalizing gaze (cf Foucault 1995, 1991). Similarly, at conversatorios like the one described above, participants are meant to embody deliberation and dialogue for an audience, while also shoring up in themselves these orientations. Just as volunteers in the Integrated Justice Centers would be transformed through their participation, so too would they model these qualities for their neighbors.

The idiom of promoting a “culture of peace” has saturated Bolivian NGOs, state agencies, and donor organizations alike. In many of these interventions, civil society was and is both a target audience and embodiment of hope in the face of disappointing institutional reforms. Although program designers continue to emphasize the failures of institutional channels for redressing

grievances, these programs now place hope for generating democratic governability and political and economic stability on providing ordinary citizens with values and skill sets that enable conflict de- escalation and management.

Yet these broadly-circulating concepts do not reflect ideological consensus, but rather a vast terrain of struggle over the aims and means of governance in the country. Julieta’s critique is emblematic of these tensions. As I show in the final section, culture of peace advocates often encountered audiences that were deeply suspicious of all the talk of peacemaking. It is precisely in those spaces of encounter —the conversatorios meant to help transform political subjectivities — that target audiences often express doubt about the means and ends of peace, and try to reassert other possible interpretations of conflict and coercion.

A Conversatorio or a Contestatorio? A Dialogue, or a Talk-back?

It’s a Friday evening and the director of Bolivia’s Taller Historia Oral Andina (THOA) has invited me to a conversatorio with Carlos Hugo Laruta. I’ve just heard Laruta, a sociologist who worked for the

UN’s peace taskforce in Central America, give a talk at a book launch sponsored by Fundación

UNIR several days earlier. With UNIR, Laruta has recently published a collection looking at los Modos

Originarios de Resolución de Conflictos (MORCs), or indigenous conflict resolution methods, part of their ongoing efforts to promote the twin projects of Alternative Dispute Resolution (los MARCs) and

Indigenous practices (los MORCs). That glossy book launch was held in the hip, artsy, tree-lined

Sopocachi neighborhood. But this is a very different venue, a working class neighborhood and an institution known for its critical voice and political activism — and I’m particularly keen to hear the exchange at tonight’s event. Unlike the kinds of conversatorios I was used to seeing run by UNIR and other NGOs, I suspected this one might be a little different.

THOA, a collective of indigenous activist-intellectuals based in La Paz, was founded on the premise of critiquing Western epistemologies and historiography, and re-constituting the Ayllu (cf

Stephenson 200222). Tonight’s conversatorio is intended to discuss the hotly debated anti-racism law that the Morales Administration is backing. The new law has sparked strong criticism for its criminalization of any person who expresses — or institution that publishes or promotes — hate speech. I’m hoping the conversation will go a little deeper than the limited discussion at the press- oriented book launch. But as I wait for the conversation to start, I don’t anticipate the degree of outrage the affable Laruta will provoke among THOA’s audience over the next two hours. In this conversatorio, Laruta makes an appeal for harmony much as I had seen his UNIR colleagues do at the book fair. But the reaction he receives is anything but harmonious. I quickly realize that I am witnessing something better described as a contestatario rather than a conversatorio (a heated speak-back rather than easy-going dialogue).

We begin by watching a grainy video filmed at a 2001 national conference on racism.

Laruta’s fellow guest speaker, Rodolfo Quispe, opens the conversation by sharing an informal study he has been conducting, collecting racist terms for “Indio” — a derogatory term used for indigenous people in Bolivia, a term that is often spat out, dripping with disgust and condescension. Racist discourse is becoming more euphemistic, Quispe tells us. “People no longer say ‘Indio’ — now it’s camouflaged. The other day I was on a bus and a woman said ‘I live in the South Zone of El Alto.”

We all chuckle, recognizing the allusion and what it indexes: the woman on the bus has compared the middle class El Alto neighborhood of Ciudad Satelite with the exclusive residential areas of La Paz’s

Zona Sur. It’s a discursive move that implies both her class status and her mestizo heritage. It’s like saying she’s from the Beverly Hills…of the Bronx.

As Quispe concludes his remarks, a breathless Laruta — who has arrived moments earlier — quickly launches into an opening story. It’s his story. Speaking with a pedagogical tone that borders on political stump speech,23 Laruta recounts how his own parents’ marriage crossed regional and racial divides. “I am telling this story to show you why I made the life decision several years ago to

22 I also worked with THOA for four years (2001-2005) while facilitating the UMAVIDA network, an association of Bolivian NGOs and grassroots groups. 23 And indeed, Laruta has run for office.

work so that Bolivia might live in peace. I do not bet on confrontation because I have decided to opt for life. I prefer to focus on that which unifies us [rather than that which divides us], and to work in a way that is as harmonious and peaceful as possible.” As the child of a highland Aymara father and mother from Bolivia’s lowlands, Laruta describes himself as a child of two worlds, “the world of chuño24 and the world of citrus and yucca.” As a result, Laruta explains, he has chosen to work for reconciliation between the two, “to work for pacific and harmonious mechanisms to deal with the problems of our country.”

Laruta then shares two stories meant to illustrate his point. The first involves watching a confrontation in the rural province of Ballivian, where Laruta describes witnessing a clash between two musical bands during an entrada or dance parade. One group, Laruta tells us, played musica autoctona, or indigenous music on wind instruments. Their group was suddenly interrupted when the group of comerciantes or merchants —a term meant to index more mestizo, middle class Bolivians — came around the street corner with a full brass band, their music overpowering the other groups.

Their drunken revelry, Laruta tells us, took over the whole street. The tension almost led to blows.

But what would have happened, Laruta asks us, if each group had tried to be more accommodating to the ‘culture’ of the other? How else might they had dealt with the conflict?

Laruta’s second story proves to be even more provocative. Laruta asks the group to think back to the horrifying events of May 2008 in the city of Sucre. On that day, a group of rural campesinos marching in support of Evo Morales were rounded up into the main plaza, beaten, forced to strip, and made to renounce their indigenous heritage while onlookers jeered them with racial slurs. Their bloodied faces and stripped bodies had shocked many Bolivians, provoking outrage at the brutal expression of unabashed racism. Others suggested that Morales’ supporters had strategically provoked the confrontation, knowing that the march would produce conflict that the Morales

Administration could use it politically. Critics suggested that members of Morales’ inner circle were

24 A blackened freeze-driend potato consumed in the Andes. Here it symbolically stands in for Highland Indians.

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the intellectual authors of the confrontation and that the campesinos were the victims of political stratagems.

The common version of those events, Laruta tells us, was that the event was a racist attack against defenseless campesinos -- emblematic of the latent and more overt racism troubling the country. The event, he tells us, as served to justify the new law against “racism and all forms of discrimination,” the hotly-debated law that is the topic of our conversation. But Laruta insists that he does not think the 2008 event was driven by racism. Sure, racism was a factor, he acknowledges, but it was a secondary factor. The real root of the conflict, Laruta tells us, was what he terms “political intolerance.” In Sucre, he tells us, “We saw that the faces doing the beating looked almost identical to the faces being beaten. What happened in Sucre cannot be understood without contextualizing it: a pugnacious circumstance [circunstancia pugna] that dated back months to a conflict between [Sucre’s] urban population and the surrounding rural population. It was a politicized context characterized by an ideology of confrontation that already existed.” This wasn’t a racist act, Laruta insists, but a political one -- complimented by racist ideas. It occurred because “We haven’t constructed a form of citizenship sufficient to address these issues [no hemos construido una ciudadania sufficiente]. Sure, he told us, there are people who are directly responsible for the attacks, but if we think about it differently, we are all “co-responsible/complicit in creating circumstances that promote political intolerance as a shared feeling” [somos corresponsables de crear circunstancias de intolerencia politica como un sentido comun].

Laruta’s comments provoke sharp disagreement. One young woman quips that interracial couples (like Laruta’s parents) were nothing new in Bolivia’s history and challenges Laruta to consider the structural dimensions of racism in such encounters. Laruta responds by arguing against confusing racism and prejudice -- and against making the mistake of idealizing ayllus and indigenous communities. “The Incas and the Aymaras,” he tells us, “and all human groups have their prejudice and forms of exclusion.” People in the room shake their heads. In response, another young man I’ll call Marco, interjects:

What we have here is the conflict between the Noble Indian and the Savage Indian. When the Indian is bad, it’s because he talks back [porque es contestón]. He was a

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submissive Indian, but when he got into politics, that really hurt [Era un indio servil, pero cuando se mete en la politica, esto duele]. They say Evo is surrounded by white people who control him, but whether you want it or not he’s the face [of the government]. So the way I see it is the only way to avoid confrontation is to have the Indian go back to lowering his head. Cambas25 — sorry for the offensive term — will never accept us at their level. It will only be a tranquil country if Indians lower their head once again.

Of course, Marco is not advocating that Indians should adopt such an approach — that they lower their heads to bring peace to the country. Rather, he is critiquing Laruta’s insistence that there might be a peaceful way to achieve social transformation in Bolivia. Peace, Marco argues, is only possible if one group was willing to be submissive. Peace means asking Indians to go back to lowering their heads so as to put Cambas26 at ease. If peace is what you want, it’s submissive Noble Indians you need. Inverting the racist American idiom of “uppity” black women and men who step out of their

(subordinate) place, Marco claims being a contestón as an unwillingness to bow before oppression, but argues that it will be perceived as aggression.

Laruta balks at the suggestion that submissiveness was the only way to avoid confrontation.

He holds out one hand and then places the other above it. The problem, he insists, is that “we were here -- with a lot of discrimination against [indigenous] communities, but instead of leveling things out” he says, flipping the order of his hands and then slapping one down upon the other, “We are here. We have just reversed the discrimination.” Indigenas are now on top, he explains, “when really, where we should be is here,” Laruta says as he intertwines his fingers: “Integrated.” Laruta repeats these gestures a second time, asserting his point. Bolivia is simply living an inversion of unequal power rather than true integration. I watched the young woman sitting across from me turn crimson as Laruta speaks. She shakes her head vigorously in disgust.

This heated exchange drove several points home to me as I moved back and forth between institutions and activists promoting Alternative Dispute Resolution, and as I watched the responses of their target audiences. The exchange highlights just how much dubiousness Culture of Peace

25 Term used for lowland Bolivians in the Santa Cruz region. Generally used to index whiteness and upper- middle class status. 26 Meant to gloss upper/middle class mestizos.

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advocates encounter among the people they are trying to convince of the value of ADR and its accompanying sensibilities and practices. The context was a debate over a specific law — just the kind of topic deliberative democrats might identify as an ideal subject of dialogue and negotiation.

But the response by Laruta’s audience was one of profound skepticism about what was being asked of them. Marco explicitly interpreted Laruta’s call for peaceful dialogue as necessitating submission.

Anything short of “bowing his head,” he argued, will be interpreted by upper-middle class mestizos as a form of aggression. Laruta attempted to re-frame his point as a call for mutually-respectful integration, tolerance, and equality — rather than a simple reversal of power relations between historically subjugated Bolivian Indians and powerful, European-descendant Bolivian elites. But his audience was not convinced.

Inoculating Against Violence

Despite their efforts to nuance the concept of peacemaking — for example, insisting on the need to get at the root causes of strife — culture of peace advocates have not been able to shake people’s suspicions about the ulterior motives of their programs. At the public events I attended, in my conversations with UN representatives, NGO workers, and target audiences, proponents of ADR regularly had to contend with those objections. This distrust is partly because so many of these programs are associated with foreign funders, raising skepticism about the strategic interests behind such campaigns. But it is also because of the ways target audiences interpret the call to peacemaking.

Take, for example, a conversation I had with Robert Brockmann, who was in charge of coordinating the UNDP’s Convivir-Sembrar Paz [Live Together-Sew Peace] campaign in Bolivia.

Although it was a relatively small program within the larger institution, the office had produced a series of beautifully-shot, emotionally-charged TV spots. Brockmann recounted the origin of

UNDP’s culture of peace program as stemming from violent confrontations in 2008 in the Media

Luna Department of Pando — a stronghold of Morales’ opposition. Those clashes left 13 people dead and escalated already-intense regional divisions. After several failed attempts at producing

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television spots that resulted in “typical publicity and marketing campaigns,” noted Bolivian filmmaker Marcos Loayza approached the office with a different vision. Loayza proposed a more interactive campaign based on storytelling. Brockmann proudly showed me the resulting videos, and

I remember finding them moving as I hunched over his computer screen.

The first video was meant to evoke the discord surrounding one of Bolivia’s many recent referendum votes. In it, a group of youth wearing jerseys that say “Si” (“Yes,” a reference to voting in the referendum) runs into another group wearing t-shirts declaring “No.” After some initial, antagonistic exchanges, things begin to escalate. The youth grab sticks, rocks, and begin to menace each other. A woman scoops up her child and flees. Suddenly, two little boys wearing jerseys for

Bolivia’s national soccer team appear on screen, playing with a soccer ball. One loses control of the ball and it goes bounding between the two groups that are facing off at the other end of the field.

The ball interrupts their scowling. Surprised, one of the young men catches it on his knee, while another heads it back to the children — who say thanks. The groups suddenly look back at each other with a kind of mutual recognition, and begin to throw down their weapons. The TV Spot then invites viewers to listen to others and to opt for peace. A second video featured an elderly veteran of the Chaco war dressed in his full military regalia. The frail man stands facing the camera, quietly weeping and calling for peace in his beloved homeland.

Short on resources, Brockmann told me, the Convivir-Sembrar Paz program had been forced to focus on smaller activities. In one, an “inoculation” campaign against violence, organizers handed out

“vaccines” — M & M candies — and had participants sign a commitment to nonviolence in their homes, schools, in other areas of their lives. Ironically, he told me, the vitriolic government minister

Juan Ramón Quintana had participated in the campaign and even took his own dose of the candy vaccine. I smirked a bit at the image of Quintana, one of the most vocal critics of foreign meddling and himself a military man — taking the UN-sponsored vaccine against violence.

But not all the groups that Sembrar Paz approached wanted to participate. Brockmann explained that early in the campaign his office had reached out to the television station RTP —the

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channel associated with the famous Bolivian television personality Carlos Palenque — asking them to be partners in the campaign. RTP, he told me, weren’t interested in joining. “They told us there was a lot of suceptismo (susceptibility, implying that they would be viewed suspiciously if they joined),”

Brockmann explained. “There’s a whole generation of youth who have learned that the only way you can reach political goals is through violence. Peace has become a position of the conservative right.

You go proposing peace and they accuse you of being with the Right.” Frustrated with this perception, Brockmann argued that not everyone equated peace with pacification. “Many people from social movements have signed on to the campaign — and even been filmed doing so! Some don’t pay attention to what they’re signing. But others do think peace is the way. The mayor of

Oruro has signed twice!”

Acknowledging and incorporating the critique of pacification into his account of their activities, Brockmann insisted that “We make it clear that when we say ‘peace’ we don’t mean peace to maintain things the same as they are, but rather, peace for change. If the shooting begins, the possibility of maneuvering are zero. And then, healing the wounds takes generations.” Brockmann explained that in addition to those people who refused to participate because the theme might raise suspicions about their allegiances, they also had trouble populating their videos with representatives of all regions and accents of the country. It was, he told me, extremely difficult to find “indigenas who had not made public pronunciations supporting violence.”

Similarly, the staff at the Integrated Justice Centers reported that target audiences were sometimes suspicious of the culture of peace slogan. As one Center director explained to me,

“People confuse peace with putting people to sleep. Some think that peace means…not having the ability to react, or protest, or confront other ideas. But […] you can respond reasonably, with other ideas, without the need to turn to violence. Culture of Peace means having the capability to resolve conflicts maturely and responsibly.”

Brockmann’s comment points to the suspicion target audiences expressed about the concept, but it also highlights the ways culture of peace advocates often invoked peacemaking as a

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characterological process. It’s not about being passive, the director insists. It’s about maturity, about responsibility. It’s about behaving like a responsible adult. Resorting to violence, to confrontation, is a sign of personal, political, and moral immaturity. Without intending to, this ADR advocate reinscribes some of the troubling ways that people involved in more confrontational forms of political engagement — particularly the indigenous neighbors of El Alto — are infantalized. Notions of democratic (im)maturity are rampant in public discourse about the failures of governance in the country. Frequently those critiques highlight the illiberal and “backward-looking” agendas of indigenous movements and other expressions of sindicalismo as an indication that Bolivia — or at least particular populations within the country — have not yet reached democratic adulthood.

Peace lite

Many politically active young people I spoke with, or saw at events like the conversatorio sponsored by THOA, were wary of all these invocations for peacemaking. In June of 2004 Carmen got a call from her cousin saying there was a workshop sponsored by the U.S. Embassy with free food and that they should go. Carmen recounted that at first she wasn’t interested, that she distrusted all things sponsored by the U.S. Government. But after some cajoling from her cousin, Carmen decided to tag along and see what it was about. The event, she told me, was organized around an homage to Martin Luther King Jr., and the Embassy had invited a lot of youth organizations, including, Carmen told me, “very political and radical youth organizations” like the Leftist NGO where she worked. The organizers, Carmen told me, “talked about how King was this great anti- racist leader, like a union leader who fought for justice.” “It was a workshop on conflict resolution and the culture of peace,” she told me:

There was a sociologist who was supposed to be an expert on the topic, but he seemed more lost than everyone else. They used very simple language, like “you must not fight. You must negotiate. We in Bolivia transmit a bad image [to the rest of the world], that’s why we can’t develop [as a nation]. Something like that — I can’t remember the exact words. So we talked about that for a half hour or something and then we watched a video about Martin Luther King who fought against racism. And they divided us into groups. They told us we had to choose a phrase, a slogan for world peace. For example ‘All of us have rights,” and that they

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were going to record whoever had the prettiest voice to disseminate the recording. I’m sure they got a lot of mileage out of what we did that day. It seemed really ‘lite’ to me, like they checked off a lot of boxes by doing this workshop. It seemed like just another workshop for them to do, nothing more.

Carmen concluded by adding, “So that workshop was all about Culture of Peace. And Culture of

Peace meant that you don’t fight, you don’t question, you don’t criticize — or at least that’s how I understood the message.” In her recollection, the workshop speaker had argued that Bolivia’s underdevelopment was a product of the negative image it projected world wild as an unruly, unstable country. It is a common refrain: the responsibility for underdevelopment in the country lays at the feet of those who provoked constant unrest.

“Did people speak up and criticize, or listen politely?” I asked her.

“They just listened politely.” Carmen paused for a moment, gathering her thoughts. She continued, “Look, I’m not against a culture of peace. There was another project in the Leftist NGO where I was working — about culture of peace. We were working on the issue of voluntary military service [military service in Bolivia is mandatory for young adults]. After what happened in February and October of 2003 — you know, [the state] used youth to do all kinds of things, for violence

[using youth conscripts to carry out the repression against protesters]. We said we cannot turn our arms on our own people. That was [the military’s] way of doing culture of peace — by pacifying the people with arms, a way for the military to control social movements.”

I asked Carmen to clarify what she meant. “This was during that period when the US wanted to set up military bases in Bolivia. We agreed with the idea of a culture of peace, but not the vision of

USAID — to control [Bolivia] in order to export. We meant it as anti-militarism. But how did

USAID use culture of peace? [They said] ‘It’s anti-democratic to do blockades. It’s anti-democratic to fight. Marching is anti-democratic.’ But democracy is when we all have rights and obligations — and it is your right to protest.”

I ask Carmen about one of the major criticisms I had heard voiced by foreign donors — but also many Bolivians — who accuse dirigentes (union leaders) of being “mafiosos.”

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“Look, dirigentes are not saints.” She told me “Mobilizations come from the people. It is we, the people, who demand democracy. But in the end, who suffers? Dirigentes are never lacking in bread. Only the poor are affected [when protests provoke repression or are accompanied by scarcity, as they were in 2003].”

Carmen wanted to reclaim the notion of “culture of peace” from what she perceived as a

‘lite” version articulated by USAID, one that decried confrontational forms of political engagement as destabilizing, anti-democratic, and anti-development. By contrast, she invoked, “culture of peace” to criticize mandatory military service and the American military presence in Bolivia (and demands to legal exceptionalism).

The contentious interactions at the conversatorio held by THOA and Carmen’s criticism of the

U.S. Embassy workshop on Martin Luther King Jr. reveal the often conflicting interpretations of what it means to build a culture of peace. But they also reveal the ways dialogue, tolerance, deliberation, and other concepts associated with the “culture of peace” concept (as it is often deployed in Bolivia) ultimately serve as a framework for advocates and critics alike. Under the rubric of building a culture of peace, schools, NGOs, legal aid centers, faith-based organizations, book fairs, and a variety of other institutions and spaces become the arena in which people learn to act in accordance with liberal principals of tolerance, dialogue, and deliberation. Clashing ideas are natural, but their expression must be disciplined, managed, and transformed.

ADR advocates might argue that the only way to substantially change those unequal conditions is to help people become more effective vehicles for their demands — by equipping them with skills, tools, concepts, and dispositions that enable constructive dialogue and negotiation — whether with the state, a multinational corporation, or an aggrieved spouse, friend, or neighbor. The critics of the assumptions guiding Habermasian ideals point out that in practice, however,

In the moments when these two impulses collide, liberal cultural recognition shifts the burden and responsibility for maintaining liberalism’s exceptionalism from dominant to subaltern and minority members of a society. The subjects of recognition are called to present difference in a form that feels like difference but does not permit any real difference to confront a normative world” (Povinelli 2011: 31).

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The onus of conflict transformation falls on the individual or group’s expression of their dissatisfaction, rather than on the source of conflict itself.

Culture of Peace thus becomes a project where the accent is place on changing conduct rather than changing conditions. Foucault challenged scholars to see the logic and work of government as having escaped the control of the state: power is capillary, enacted by social workers and criminologists, through psychiatric consultations and development project evaluations. Li, however, reminds us that “powers that are multiple cannot be totalizing and seamless” (Li 2007: 25). Li argues that a Marxist/Gramcian analytic framework helps us to understand the processes through which people like Marco, Julieta, Carmen and others come to question the projects targeting them for methodological renovations (Li 2007: 19; Gustafson 2009).

This is not a meta-narrative of resistance, she argues, but rather a means by which to think through the ways capitalism and its contradictions may produce countermovements and “prickly subjects” who mobilize against improvement schemes (Li 2007: 22). Thus Li argues, we must understand both the governmental rationalities propelling improvement schemes and the

“positionings that enable people to practice a critical politics” (Li 2007: 24). As Postero has shown

(2006), indigenous Bolivians have shown an extraordinary capacity to take projects like state- sponsored neoliberal multiculturalism and to poach it for resources to mount a critical politics that is rooted in but pushes beyond neoliberal agendas and rationalities.

Bret Gustafson’s (2009) study of bilingual education reform in Bolivia is illustrative of this tension between governmental rationalities and critical audiences. Gustafson calls Western education the “quintessential apparatuses of governmentality”; nevertheless he argues against reducing bilingual education reform to “an extension of neoliberalism” or a “privatizing and Westernizing conspiracy to rule teachers, Indians or both” (2009: 20). Nor should we celebrate reform a-critically by emphasizing the ways indigenous movements have appropriated and mobilized around its agenda or by “focusing on successful strategies for implementing reforms or measures of evaluation” (ibid: 3). Both approaches remove these “multilayered reform politics from the heterogenous social fields in which

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it comes to ground” (ibid: 4). By contrast, Gustafson wants to approach education reform as his

Guarani informants did: as “an emergent field of encounter and conflict” (ibid: 4). Culture of Peace, like democracy promotion more generally in Bolivia, has become one such field of encounter and conflict. Those tensions were evident as ADR practitioners and promoters encountered doubtful, bristling audiences among the people whose (political) behavior they have sought to conduct toward more peaceful, tolerant, and non-confrontational channels.

Conclusion: Burn it all down

As I described in the previous sections, widespread discourses about violence and unrest in

El Alto contribute to the culturalization of conflict in Bolivia, locating the causes of conflict in the inherent characteristics of El Alto’s population — which is seen as emblematic and an intensification of broader tendencies in the country. El Alto holds within its ever-expanding city limits a destabilizing combination of rural Aymara immigrants and displaced miners — who brought with them the confrontational tactics of their campesino and mining unions. In these narratives, El Alto is a city overrun by dirigentes mafiosos willing to put sectarian and personal interests ahead of the bien comun or common good. It was against this “culture of conflict” that many culture of peace programs sought to promote tolerance and deliberative democratic skill sets that placed a premium on de- escalating broader social conflict through interpersonal, therapeutic interventions, through new practices of communication.

Yet for many activists like Julieta, the discourse of promoting a “culture of peace” remains suspect; it is an attractive patina on a policy program that they believe aims to demobilize powerful social movements -- at the expense of asking tough questions about economic and social inequality.

To use her imagery, Culture of Peace is akin to pouring water on the flames of justice. Similarly,

Carmen derides the “lite” version of peacefulness and democracy articulated by donors as merely seeking to domesticate El Alto’s more contentious forms of “doing politics,” and in doing so, cheapening the role of civil rights protests in securing democracy in the United States. Yet although

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it is questioned by many Alteños who distrust the language of peacemaking, the culture of peace concept itself has nevertheless become pervasive in guiding state, nonprofit, and donor interventions alike, reflecting a concern for managing disorderly populations by reshaping their interiors. As I have shown, globally circulating discourses about peacemaking have become entangled with an ongoing effort to inculcate governmental rationalities into a population that is often pathologized as unruly, inherently predisposed to violence and confrontation. The conversatorio is one paradigmatic expression of the ways the culture of peace concept is mobilized in Bolivia by people and institutions that are seeking to transform how politics is done in the country.

This approach to de-escalating social conflict often recognizes and acknowledges people’s frustrations with state failures and inequality. Nevertheless, by locating the solution in individual skill sets and sensibilities, may place the onus on personal transformation at the expense of considering other framings of conflict and its causes. For example, rather than seeing confrontational tactics as a product of structural violence and efforts to challenge it, intervention strategies often identify Alteño political culture as the target for transformation. In doing so, Culture of Peace campaigns and their preoccupation with capacitando civil society may circumscribe other possible interpretations of conflict in El Alto, including critiques raised by people like Julieta, Carmen, Marco, and many others anonymously invoked by donors and advocates who have encountered these cautious, critical audiences.

But just as the notion of culture of peace is multivalent, so too the notion that El Alto is conflictual. In the wake of the 2003 uprising, many people celebrated what the residents of El Alto had achieved as a political victory for socially, politically, and economically excluded Bolivians. It was a victory made possible by those same “conflictual” tendencies. Take, for example, the way Raúl — a volunteer at one of El Alto’s Integrated Justice Centers who went on to become a lawyer — explained the situation:

You’ve seen those drinks that say ‘shake before use’ on the bottom, right? We Bolivians are like that. ‘Shake before use’ [agitar antes de usar, literally, agitate before use]. If we don’t insist, insist, insist, agitate, then we never get anything. So we [in the Integrated Justice Centers] had to insist [on our demands for change] too. [Before we insisted on having pro-bono lawyers

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at the Centers] people would leave unsatisfied, unhappy. So we said we had to change the Integrated Justice Centers, and we were able to achieve a lot of really important changes. Now the Centers are full and enjoy the trust of the people, they come back, they feel well attended, happy.

For Raúl, the positive changes made to the structure of El Alto’s Integrated Justice Centers was possible only because some people were willing to agitate for change — to see a situation as unjust and to insist on something different. In Raúl’s account, this quality describes Bolivians generally, not just Alteños — and it’s ultimately a positive characteristic. Against accounts of El Alto as pathologically pre-disposed to conflict — a predisposition that frequently relies on a cultural explanatory framework — residents often argued that agitation was a disposition that favors justice, a willingness to be a contestón. In these accounts, a willingness to mobilize, and to engage in forms of confrontational politics that donors described to me as outmoded or antidemocratic, is a necessary mechanism to achieve social transformation.

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CHAPTER THREE

A Market for Mediators

ADR has become an influential paradigm for channeling foreign aid internationally. As I described in the previous chapters, ADR first arrived in Bolivia as part of a larger donor agenda of providing a safe investment environment for capital by providing businesses with the option of circumventing the formal legal system via commercial arbitration. As Garth and Dezalay (1998) have argued, the “moral entrepreneurs” of commercial arbitration in Latin America have promoted the value of ADR in their home countries and then helped to develop the legal and institutional frameworks necessary to support its operation. They have done so while also positioning themselves within this new field of expertise.

A small army of “rule of law” specialists now aid in the export of judicial reform expertise worldwide. They target countries that have yet to fully adopt or harmonize their legal structures in accordance with Western standards, and promote their skill sets for dispute resolution, commercial arbitration, and judicial reform programs (Mattei & Nader 2008: 19; Sampson 2005; Shore & Haller

2005; Dezalay & Garth 1998, 2002; Hornberger 2004). As with many other democracy assistance and development projects, rule of law proponents typically represent these reforms as positive technical tools that can be transferred cross-culturally to aid in democratic consolidation and the adoption of modern juridico-legal frameworks, even as they often face criticism for those same claims (Mattei &

Nader 2008: 31; cf anthropological work on democracy assistance: K. Brown 2009; Coles 2004, 2009;

Paley 2009).

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Bolivia’s nascent market for expertise in Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) experienced an enormous boost following the 2003 uprising in El Alto, when Bolivian political analysts, government bureaucrats, and foreign donors began to fret over the “predisposition” of certain social sectors to engage in more confrontational forms of politics. Against the backdrop of the widespread NGO- ization of both classic development aid and democracy promotion in Bolivia, how have local aid brokers appropriated those terms and positioned themselves as conflict resolution experts, taking up the mantle of promoting ADR and building a culture of peace against Bolivia’s “culture of conflict”?

Along with recent works in critical policy studies, I want to suggest that rather than seeing ADR’s discourses, norms, or practices as the simple transfer of best practices or model policies, or as the blanket imposition of governmental rationalities, it is more useful to trace the ways particular institutions and people help to circulate incomplete, inchoate, and hybrid ideas as they bring particular aid platforms to places like El Alto. As Peck and Theodore explain, “policy peddlers and gurus ply their trade on the international conference circuit, as expertise is insourced from think tanks and consultancies” (2010: 170). Policy transfer is not a neat, rational process of replicating best practices chosen on the open market of ideas; rather, critical policy scholars highlight the fields of power in which new forms of expertise emerge, and “transnational forms of statecraft and regulatory restructuring” occur (Peck & Theodore 2010: 169).

Anthropological approaches to policy making often draw our attention to the enormous struggle that takes place within institutional settings, including the “boundary work” that goes on between scientific disciplines, government agencies, or other rival groups that are vying for credibility, power, and political influence: the heated internal debates raging within organizations, the political maneuvering, “ally recruitment,” and the eventual adoption of particular policies1

(Greenhalgh 2008: 16; cf. Dezalay and Garth 1996; Sampson 2005; K. Brown 2006; Gagnon 2006;

11 Greenhalgh 2008: 16; cf. Dezalay and Garth 1996 on international commercial arbitration’s “moral entrepreneurs”; Sampson 2005 on anti-corruption’s “integrity warriors” and the “projectization” of transparency; as well as K. Brown 2006, Gagnon 2006, and Merritt 2006 on American democracy assistance transactors; Warren and Leheny on the “inescapable solutions” and tensions that emerge in the transnational circulation of supranational policies

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Merritt 2006; Warren and Leheny 2010). But understanding the micropolitics of policymaking also demands that, as Julia Paley notes, we attend to the “intersection of meaning and practice – what is done with meaning, how politics operate” (2009: 8; cf Lewis & Mosse 2005; Riles 2004). Attending to the intersection between meaning and practice requires that we not only examine the micropolitics involved in the making of specific policies, but also the experiences and meaning-making processes of the people who act as intermediaries or brokers between government offices, donor agencies, and the targets of governmental intervention (Greenhalgh 2008: 16; Lewis and Mosse 2006; Rossi 2006;

Goodale 2008; Merry 2006).

In this chapter I examine the emergence of an inter/national market for expertise in conflict resolution in Bolivia. Bolivia’s conflict resolution specialists — or conflictologos as they are sometimes known — have seized upon the professional opportunities afforded by the expansion of funding available for work on the intersecting issues of conflict analysis, management, resolution, and prevention. Yet, I argue that the proliferation of Alternative Dispute Resolution and the promotion of a “culture of peace” cannot be reduced to the instrumental maneuverings of Bolivia’s so-called

NGO class. Rather, ADR and the notion of capacitación into a culture of peace has become a powerful framework through which many advocates identify their own aims and pursue social justice strategically. Nevertheless, I argue that the structure of foreign aid and the subsequent market for conflict management expertise has in many ways narrowed the terms of the debate over how to redress conflict in the country.

William Roseberry’s (1994) application of hegemony is instructive for thinking about the ways that the promotion of Alternative Dispute Resolution and its accompanying discourse of promoting a “culture of peace” have come to shape — and perhaps delimit— the terrain of struggle over democratic personhood, legitimate political action, and conflict itself in “plurinational Bolivia.” This is especially true as concerns about the methods of conflict management frequently eclipse conversations about the central demands of those conflicts — and the patterns in recurring demands.

Roseberry has argued for using Gramsci’s concept of hegemony “not to understand consent but to

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understand struggle” (1994: 361). As Roseberry insists, “what hegemony constructs, then, is not a shared ideology but a common material and meaningful framework for living through, talking about, and acting upon social orders characterized by domination” (ibid, emphasis added). Antonio

Gramsci (1971) never presented hegemony as necessarily the proprietary achievement of any one social class. Rather, it is broadly a practice of exercising power and establishing a particular order through both consent building and force. Gramsci argues that in the interest of establishing hegemony, those who seek to exercise domination through consent building and not just blunt force must take into account “the interests and the tendencies of the groups over which hegemony is to be exercised” (1971: 161). Gramsci’s multilayered theory of hegemony allows for far more complexity in understanding how certain ideas become hegemonic.

This is not a monocausal explanation for the rise of ADR, nor why it has become so persuasive for so many of Bolivia’s conflictologos – a growing sector of middle class conflict resolution experts whose livelihoods, long-term professional goals, and political commitments are frequently intertwined. Rather, this chapter seeks to understand the interplay between markets and meaning- making, as Bolivian conflict resolution experts work to expand their professional opportunities and make a living “while doing some good.” As I show, ADR in many ways has become a part of how these conflictologos imagine themselves and their life’s work (their proyectos de vida). Yet they often cannot shake others’ perceptions – and their own self-doubt – over whether they are merely working in the service of powerful foreign interests. As a consequence, Bolivia’s conflictologos periodically push back against the appealing -- yet abstract -- claims made by global ADR advocates, while nevertheless invoking ADR as a meaningful framework for tracking their personal and professional trajectories, and their aspirations for justice.

Throughout the chapter, I tack back and forth between the experiences of two general sets of conflictologos, or conflict resolution experts and aid brokers.2 The first is the team involved in helping

2 I have not tracked down each and every person who helped facilitate the arrival of ADR to Bolivia, who lobbied for its relevance, who hammered out the laws and regulations, who agitated for a more expansive understanding of its usefulness — or those who argued against it, who denounced it as a privatization of

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to design and implement the USAID-financed Integrated Justice Centers. The second is a group of

ADR advocates and practitioners involved in a broader array of conflict resolution projects — primarily financed by European donors and implemented by Bolivian NGOs. Both of these groups are responsible for helping to expand the market for expertise in conflict resolution, capitalizing on that donor-driven market for their own professional development, and their own proyectos de vida or

“life projects.”

But these are not disconnected groups of people. Bolivia’s nascent army of peacemakers often circulates between state agencies and NGOs, donor implementing agencies and university settings like law schools and diploma courses, international conferences and training workshops. They buy each others’ books and cite shared theoretical frameworks, from scholars like Johan Galtung and

John Paul Lederach to the Harvard Negotiation model and the Do No Harm approach to international aid. As they do so, their narrate their own life trajectories, as they have moved — physically and ideologically — across the deep regional-political divides of the country, between antagonistic forms of politics and negotiated settlements. From the bitter cold of Bolivia’s mining camps to the cushy conference rooms in Canada’s finest hotels. From a comfortable middle-class upbringing in the lowland Santa Cruz to the arid border between Oruro y Potosí, where violent confrontations between neighboring communities have broken out over boundary claims and access to natural resources. As someone who gobbled up feminist peaces studies classes college, trained in

ADR for a year as a freshman, studied Gandhi and King, Paulo Freire and Liberation Theology, went off to Bolivia for the first time at age 22 hoping to do some good (while making a living), I am also, it seems, describing myself.

justice, or who simply found it irrelevant to the Bolivian context. I interviewed a wide variety of people associated with ADR in Bolivia, advocates and critics alike, including key members of the team that designed the Integrated Justice Centers, donor representatives, ADR trainees and volunteers, and people who utilize those services. There are many more people — with, I have no doubt, many more opinions — that I could have interviewed; I left each interview with (generous) lists of more people I should contact, more institutions I should approach. Thus this is not an exhaustive account of ADR in Bolivia, but rather an attempt to trace a broader pattern in donor agendas and implementing agency platforms, “broker” views about what they hoped to accomplish and government officials’ and jurists’ interpretations of how those reforms intersected with — or diverged from — the needs of the Bolivian justice system.

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***

As I have shown in the previous chapters, Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) and other popular justice intervention models were circulating internationally long before they touched down in

El Alto, first as part of a process of judicial reform and later in response to the October 2003 uprising. Nevertheless, members of the team responsible for creating and helping to implement the

Integrated Justice Centers were often at pains to assert that their efforts were not mere copies of foreign programs or in the service of foreign agendas, but rather were uniquely “Made in Bolivia.”

What is at stake in the ways ADR brokers narrate questions of ownership? What are the politics of claiming that a program is locally-driven (bottom-up) rather than imposed from above? In the following section I explore the meaning of this assertion and what it reveals about the labor of ADR brokers in the country. That is, I ask, what kind of work goes into imagining and recapitulating an international donor platform with established modes of intervention into a project that is inspired by the particular needs of El Alto residents? I do so by examining two intersecting issues.

The first issue is the enormous discursive work and the peculiar developmentalist technologies (e.g. surveys, focus groups) that go into reframing a global donor platform as a uniquely local project. The second is how these efforts illuminate the experience of local aid brokers/translators and their own meaning-making processes. One of my aims here is to further complicate the first chapter’s sweeping account of how ADR arrived in Bolivia, where I focused heavily on broader trends in foreign judicial reform and democratization aid. In the following section,

I describe some of the ways that those donor intermediaries — the local Bolivian team employed by

AID contractors to implement the project — characterize their work and insert their own personal histories into those efforts. In doing so, I hope to offer a more textured account of how proponents of ADR have helped to expand the market for expertise in conflict resolution, and make sense of their own roles therein.

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ADR: Made in Bolivia?

The October 2003 uprising occurred just as USAID was concluding its judicial reform program focused on the criminal procedures code. That November, educator Pamela Chacón was approached by an acquaintance, Cecilia Ibáñez, an Argentine lawyer and legal scholar who was working with the USAID judicial reform program. Cecilia asked Pamela if she would be interested in helping Management Sciences for Development, Inc. (MSD) — the for-profit development firm contracted by USAID — conduct an assessment of Alteño demands. Pamela passionately recounted to me the process of developing the Integrated Justice Centers: from an initial curiosity over what El

Alto residents meant when they cried-out for “justice” during the October uprising, to a program that would offer alternatives to the formal legal system. “My sense is that [MSD] thought that the people of El Alto were really litigious. That they always wanted to litigate, and that they wanted to learn about the criminal procedures code,” Pamela told me, “But then October happened.”

The MSD team was struck by the images of El Alto residents chanting their demands for justice. “You were here then, right?” she asked me. “Do you remember? When all those people died, you could see the women on television chanting.” Pamela tensed her shoulders and balled her hands into fists on her desk, shifting her voice to mimic the anger and sorrow people expressed at the time:

“They cried out, ‘Queremos Justicia! Queremos Justicia!’ [We want justice!]. They wept. Remember?

[Residents of El Alto] would cry out on television demanding justice, but we didn’t know what they meant. We thought that to want justice was to demand that judges act correctly.”

MSD contracted Pamela to investigate. Pamela positioned herself and the judicial reform team as trying to solve a puzzle: people in El Alto were demanding justice, but what did that mean?

While the conflagration originated around a series of new taxes, protests eventually coalesced around the rallying cry of nationalizing and commercializing Bolivia’s natural gas supplies — and giving

Bolivians priority access to those resources. And yet, Pamela argued, when she conducted surveys with El Alto residents, the kinds of frustrations they articulated were about everyday forms of corruption and a lack of basic social services.

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Pamela was responsible for holding a series of meetings with neighborhood association vigilance groups to identify what residents thought were the most important issues facing their communities. What she found, she explained, surprised her. Women, Pamela recalled, would pull her aside after meeting with focus groups to say things they did not (dare) articulate during the formal meetings. They described their struggles with domestic violence and their need for child support from negligent fathers. These, Pamela concluded, were the real concerns troubling El Alto residents, particularly women — not the kinds of abstract macro economic policy demands made by the Alto’s

Federation of Neighborhood Associations (FEJUVE), an organization that played a key role in mobilizing the 2003 protests. El Alto’s neighborhood association dirigentes now simply refer to “the

October Agenda” to invoke the list of macroeconomic policy changes that coalesced around the gas issue. By contrast to these systemic critiques, Pamela argued that people’s demands for justice were far more concrete: everyday corruption — like legal bureaucrats who took advantage of people’s ignorance to charge additional “fees.”

Thus, in Pamela’s account, the Integrated Justice Centers grew out of a concern for providing residents with more satisfying alternatives to the formal legal system where they could redress these every-day sources of frustration and insecurity. She repeatedly stated that she and her colleagues were struck by how few people made reference to the macro political-economic demands frequently cited as the driving force behind the uprising. The Integrated Justice Centers would try to create a new institution that allowed people to resolve their concerns while avoiding the state agents and institutions associated with corruption, sluggishness, and discrimination.3

Pamela was emphatic that the design of the Centers had grown out MSD’s curiosity to understand what, exactly, Alteños meant when they clamored for “justice” during the uprising. In

Pamela’s account, the Integrated Justice Centers were forged in response to the particularities of El

3 This analysis and the resulting intervention strategy in many ways mirrors that of the Indaburu report (described in the previous chapter) and the resulting intervention by the Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI). This approach determined that if state institutions and agents were perennially failing the population and provoking discord, that civil society would be the target -- along with infrastructure projects to help de-escalate anger and related demands on the state.

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Alto, even if they were designed by an international team that included a member from one of

ADR’s primary “sending states” in Latin America: Argentina. Cecilia, the Argentine team member, would later tell me about her experience visiting MSD’s projects in Colombia, discussing similar programs in Guatemala, and being encouraged to replicate those models in Bolivia. She would also emphasize the donor’s interest in establishing a presence in El Alto. Yet in Pamela’s account, the impetus for the creation of the Centers — donor concerns — is downplayed; instead, she focuses on the physical labor she performed: conducting surveys and focus groups, traveling to El Alto to interview residents about their demands.

The surveys and focus groups Pamela helped to conduct can be understood as a “need technology” utilized by the MSD team to produce knowledge about the population of El Alto in the service of their larger governance project (Hanson 2007). Anthropologists concerned with the techniques and technologies of development work frequently analyze the maps, surveys, project reports, and other tools used by state and non-state (NGO and supranational) agents alike to make populations knowable — to produce new categories of intervention (Ferguson 1994; Ferguson and

Gupta 2002; Mitchell 2002; Li 2007, 2005).

My concern here, however, is how people like Pamela and her colleagues use these artifacts of the development trade to recapitulate a global aid platform as uniquely inspired by the Bolivian context. Surveys, focus groups, and similar methodologies are now ubiquitous in Bolivia, as are workshops to train people in NGO-speak: in performance indicators, Mission and Vision statements, in POAs (plan operative anual or annual operating budgets), and in grant writing. But their usage here offers insights not only into techniques of governance, but also into the ways the agents of governance imagine and try to make sense of their work — as NGO workers, aid contractors, and conflictologos try to position their efforts as grassroots.

One of the ways these issues intersect is in the planning team’s emphasis on the key role volunteers would play in the Centers. At the heart of their popular justice efforts would be El Alto residents themselves, organized around the powerful local trope of vecinos (neighbors) — now

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blended with notions of volunteerism that pervade popular justice programs world-wide (cf Merry and Milner 1993; Harrington 1993. See Risør 2010 and Lazar 2008 on the powerful appeal to vecinos in El Alto). The Centers would have some limited staff, but volunteers trained from the neighborhood to solve neighborhood problems would carry out its most important work. Planners hoped that those volunteers would embody the skills, concepts, and values of Alternative Dispute

Resolution. Volunteers would demonstrate, through their actions and their solidarity with neighbors in crisis, how to live out the values of tolerance and participatory democracy. A related goal included shaping future legal professionals by exposing them to the plight of poor clients. As Pamela explained, “This was an idea that came from Cecilia Ibáñez of Argentina. A new generation of lawyers, who are committed [to the people] and aren’t trying to trick them. Here they would go to the school of life. Here they are going to cry with the poor and learn to work in solidarity. So that was the hidden objective, the hidden curriculum. To form a new kind of human resource.”

Switching into English to drive home her point, Pamela concluded, “It was [an idea] that was

Made in Bolivia.” I was struck by her phrasing: “Made in Bolivia.” I had heard her colleague, Esteban

Piñera, use the same expression a year earlier while I was conducting preliminary fieldwork and interviews in La Paz. But while Pamela emphasized the Alto-ness of this strategy, Volunteerism has long been a key component of ADR models in the U.S. and elsewhere (Merry and Milner et al. 1993).

The use of volunteers in the San Francisco Community Boards (SFCB) was profoundly influential in

American popular justice movements and the later the export of the model worldwide.4 By blending the notion of volunteerism with the local idiom of vecinidad, Pamela vernacularizes an existing component within ADR aid platforms — which heavily emphasize volunteerism as both a mechanism of implementing informal justice and an end-goal of these popular justice models.

4 Until his death in 2012, SFCB founder Raymond Shonholtz also worked as a consultant for USAID’s though his organization Partners for Democratic Change (cf The Cassals and Associates prepared report, “Anti- Corruption and Transparency Coalitions: Lessons from Peru, Paraguay, El Salvador and Bolivia.” August 2005. Prepared by Gerardo Berthin, Deputy Director, and Joseph Balcer, Senior Advisor, the USAID Americas’ Accountability/Anti-Corruption (AAA) Project, and Partners for Democratic Change (PDC), Colleen Zaner and Megan Ryan along with Julián Portilla from Fundación Cambio Democrático (PDC’s partner in Argentina).

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What is at stake in the politics of claiming uniqueness and what does it reveal about the intersection of foreign aid platforms and local processes of brokerage? Pamela re-casts volunteerism as a Bolivian-inspired approach to popular justice by focusing on the process of conducting surveys and focus groups. The Centers and their emphasis on volunteers, Pamela argued, grew out of attending to local realities that had been detailed in surveys and articulated in focus groups — even if it was the

“dream” of the Argentine contractor who had been exposed to and studied the use of volunteers in

USAID-funded projects in Colombia and Guatemala, projects which in turn had been inspired by popular justice models in the United States5; even if both implementing agencies (MSD and Checchi) had long histories of promoting ADR as part of their institutional platform. The very technologies of the development trade, the focus groups, surveys, and town hall meetings, make it possible for people like Pamela and her colleagues to reframe an international donor platform as a project that was uniquely Made in Bolivia.

Of Best Practices and Donor Salaries

By contrast to Pamela’s account, where donor models were largely absent, Cecilia Ibáñez fondly remembered her trips to Colombia to see first hand the work of MSD’s successor, Checchi.

“Checchi has a project in Colombia, the houses of justice, which work well — it’s fantastic, and I had a chance to visit them — and they have in Guatemala what they also call Justice Centers — although it is more tied to the formal justice system, it has also worked well.” Her experience with Checchi’s work in Bolivia — which replaced MSD as the implementing agency — was less positive. She told me, “Checchi arrived in Bolivia and, well, they had the idea that they wanted to import the

Colombian model or the Guatemalan model or a mix of the two… I finally just had to leave. I mean, it was unbearable working with them, really, because they never took the time to learn about what

5 cf Merry & Milner et al, 1993 for an in-depth study of the San Franscisco Community Boards, its conceptualization of volunteers, its citizenship objectives, and its influence in shaping popular justice movements in the US and worldwide

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happened in Bolivia.” For Cecilia, the difference between implementing agencies was stark, even if the team working on the Centers remained largely unchanged. She attributed this shift to an institutional “culture” of technology transfer:

Checchi works on the issue of conciliation and on the [judicial] reform issue, and in the two issues they had the same logic. [Their logic is] ‘I have this toolbox I’ve tested in Colombia, or that I tested in Guatemala, I’ll implement it here too and it will be the same!’ ….I don’t think they really felt the differences at the level of the Centers, which were already opening, but for us [in the implementing team] it was really weird. We had gotten used to a certain freedom in our work [with MSD], and again one sees this imposition from the Cooperación. Many times it’s not so much them — it’s not an imposition from the head of the Cooperación, but rather its an internal [imposition] from the [implementing] organizations.

For Cecilia, the implementing agency — not USAID itself — made all the difference in determining to what extent the local staff was able to design programs that responded to the Bolivian context.

While Pamela emphasized the local origins of the Centers, Cecilia saw her work as simultaneously local and global. She had herself traveled to visit the USAID-backed programs in

Colombia, and to learn more about the work of MSD and Checchi in global judicial reform and ADR projects throughout the region. The mandate came from a foreign donor. But the team, she told me, was determined to design a project that was reflective of local needs in El Alto. When Checchi took over MSD’s work, Cecilia argued, the implementing agency sought to reassert — to impose — its own interests and expertise at the expense of local knowledge. The tension was a recurring one, she said, one that ultimately led her to resign from the project.

But Cecilia also had plenty of criticisms for her Bolivian counterparts, particularly people she encountered during her work on the criminal procedures code. Cecilia said she was disgusted by how easily donors were able to push through their objectives — a dynamic she attributed to the scramble for foreign funding and its distribution along patronage networks. By contrast, Cecilia argued that the Morales Administration had a healthy dose of skepticism about donor agendas. She told me,

I always thought it was more interesting to work with [Evo’s] functionaries, because one can be with or against [his policies], you can have prejudice, but the [MAS] people would sit down with you and they knew the Constitution, they knew how to debate, and they didn’t debate the kinds of things you are used to debating with people in a suit and tie, but rather they stated things with a lot more logic, and with

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more resistance. None of this ‘Come, impose on me whatever you like,’ that I had seen during the five previous years I had worked in Bolivia.

Cecilia gave voice to critiques I heard from other donor representatives, including a project coordinator with a German aid program that was promoting ADR. Both women argued that their

Bolivian counterparts were willing to simply accept -- wholesale -- donor impositions because they wanted to take advantage of foreign funds and quickly distribute them among their patronage networks. Cecilia argued that both the patronage networks and instability of Bolivian politics drove people to try to move as quickly as possible to assure that they could redistribute funds among their people before they were no longer in a position to do so. In doing so, Cecilia also gave voice to widespread sentiments among Bolivians and foreign donors about the uses and abuses of NGO and foreign aid funding at the national and local levels.

In El Alto, those sentiments are often expressed in accusations about misspent funds intended for obras or public works projects (cf Lazar 2008). Cecilia continued, “It’s kind of an empresarial/entreprenuerial vision of the public, no? Here I am in this place [Congress], and I will get as much out of it as I can, I’ll take advantage. And in exchange for it, well, what ever [the

Cooperación] wants is fine. It’s a very individualist vision.” The idioms of obras and individualism or egoismo are common tropes in El Alto and Bolivia more generally where everyone from local dirigentes to national leaders are suspect in the mis-spending of NGO/donor project funds — or being bought-off by them (cf Lazar 2008; Postero 2007; and the conclusion of this dissertation). As I described in the previous chapter, the World Bank and USAID judicial reform evaluations voiced overlapping concerns, and portrayed Bolivian counterparts in the government as hopelessly corrupt

— thus paving the way for interventions that targeted civil society and capacitación rather than continued institutional reform. I will return to some of these critiques in my concluding chapter, as I examine accusations about foreign political meddling and co-optation through aid money. Here, however, I mention Cecilia’s criticisms in order to highlight the complex political-economy of donor- recipient relationships.

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Rather than focus on issues of corruption, Cecilia took her critique further to point to the ways foreign funding has restructured the Bolivian economy and created a class of citizens whose livelihoods are heavily dependent on foreign donations, loans, and platforms. I regularly heard former AID contractors bemoan the fact that they could no longer find work because their association with USAID tainted them. One woman associated with the early phases of the Integrated

Justice Centers described it as a kind of stain on her CV, one she could not scrub off. But Cecilia rejected this explanation, saying that in all her time working post-USAID with the Office of the Vice

President (Alvaro Garcia Linera) it was never a problem.6 Instead, she suggested that the issue was that people accustomed to NGO and aid salaries were unwilling to accept a significant dip in income.

And when Morales rattled his sword against the undue influence of foreign donors (la Cooperación), those people got resentful about the threat to their livelihoods. She continued,

From my perspective the paradigmatic cases in Latin America are Bolivia and Guatemala, where the Cooperación raised the quality of life for a number of people. And when the Cooperación began to pull out, or when problems emerged between Cooperación and the government -- or when [the government said] we don’t have to just open our doors for you to come in here and impose your agenda -- many of the functionaries, many of the technicians who worked with the Cooperación, began to resist the Proceso [Proceso de Cambio, Evo’s political platform]. For example, someone might say “I’m not going to go work in the Ministry of Justice for six thousand Bolivianos. A few months ago my salary was sixty thousand.” So, it seems to me that [there are] a lot of progressive people with good intentions – with moral values – but in when theings are put in black and white, they miss the old salaries they had with the Cooperación.

For Cecilia, the resistance to Morales’ explicit criticisms of the Cooperación and its agendas was not due to a sincere political critique of his vision of international relations, but rather resentment over the loss — or potential loss — of their (relatively) inflated salaries working with foreign donors.

The financial dimensions of that donor-recipient relationship have profoundly shaped the landscape of Bolivian politics and development. It has created a class of citizens who depend heavily on salaries procured from foreign aid money to stay afloat. But this class is multi-tiered. It includes people like Pamela, who works in project development and execution, but it also short-term contract

6 Of course, her Bolivian colleagues may have been more entangled in the national politics of the mancha (stain) of AID-affiliation.

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workers, secretaries, drivers, and security guards, whose livelihoods also benefit from project funds.

But in the era of Evo Morales, it has also created a great deal of suspicion about who is receiving funding and for what (political) purpose. It is against this complex political backdrop that people like

Cecilia and Pamela emphasize the local dimensions of the Integrated Justice Centers while acknowledging the undeniable power of foreign donors to impose their own reform agendas.

Another member of this group is Esteban Piñera, who Directed the project for Checchi and then MSD. In an interview, he framed his concerns less in terms of employment or the economic interests of Bolivia’s “NGO class” and more as a historical tendency that had plagued the country since its independence. On a blindingly-bright day, I sat with Piñera on a park bench not far from

USAID’s headquarters in La Paz. As we talked about his experience as Coordinator of the judicial reform projects — first with MSD and later with Checchi — Piñera frequently referred to the books he was reading that inspired him to further reflection on his professional trajectory and his own ideas about the challenges facing Bolivia in the plurinational era. Piñera lamented what he called Bolivia’s

“culture of the copy,” and insisted that he personally pushed back against his American superiors when they advocated that the MSD travel to visit other ADR-implementing countries in order to observe their legal aid models. Piñera explained, “[USAID] told us that there were Justice Centers in

Central America, I think. Or in Colombia or Ecuador. And that we could replicate one of those

Centers to help put a lid on [tapar] the spaces of conflictivity that existed in the city of El Alto, basically.” Piñera downplayed the connections to those other sites, despite the fact that members of his staff did make trips to visit them (and the fact that during our first interview he mentioned them as part of the original proposal).

But while USAID was urging reproducing legal aid models from other contexts, Piñera positioned himself as trying to break with this pattern, and critical of the donor invitation to reproduce “best practices.” He explained,

But of course we are not naive — because the policy of Bolivians, I mean, since we were liberated [from colonialism], it was a lot of ‘I like to copy.’ That is, our entire legal system is copied. President Santa Cruz in 1835 or ‘36 brought copies of the French codes, but he never understood our reality. It’s as if you take the French

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codes to your society, and your society is qualitatively different. So I think that this storyline [trama], and these codes, this institutionality that was never ours, I call foreign.

As Piñera put it, that would be akin to, “putting on an arm that is not your own. It will never work. It isn’t coherent. The first thing you have to do is understand your own body.” In framing things this way, Piñera broadened the critique beyond contemporary debates about the imposition of foreign aid agendas and the role of USAID in the country. Piñera, spent much of our second interview deriding aid efforts that sought to impose externally-developed “best practices.” But he also described what he believed is an historical Bolivian propensity to “merely copy” foreign legal systems and models.

This was not, he insisted, a new phenomenon tied to USAID.

By contrast to this mimicry, Piñera argued, he and his MSD team hoped to do something different. Piñera recalled, “We had a really outstanding group of people and we started to discuss [the issues]…And we said, no, we are not going to go for the technical solution, ‘There is conflict here, let’s put in a court.’ Not at all. Instead, we asked citizens [their views]. First we asked what kinds of conflicts they have and if anyone resolves those conflicts for them — and the answer was ‘No.’” For

Piñera, the decision to focus on alternative conflict resolution mechanisms was a rejection of the

“culture of the copy” and a Bolivian disposition toward litigiousness. He highlighted, as Pamela did, the techniques of survey and focus groups as emblematic of the ways the Integrated Justice Centers reflected a bottom-up enterprise. As such, Piñera insisted that the Centers reflected Bolivian reality,

Bolivian demands, and Bolivian solutions.

***

As I have shown in earlier chapters, the Integrated Justice Centers must be understood within a longer history in which ADR travelled to Bolivia as part of several overlapping, though sometimes conflicting donor agendas. The appeal to the “Made in Bolivia” quality of the Centers belies an existing American donor agenda that included similar efforts to promote informal dispute resolution mechanisms in Central and South America prior to the 2003 uprising. There are a number of possible explanations for why Pamela and Esteban caste their work in terms of newness. Some

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might see it as an insincere or disingenuous statement. Another explanation is that they are strategically repositioning their work in the midst of widespread critique of American aid, downplaying the foreign quality of the programs and instead emphasizing the ways they responded to local demands. Another is that they are so heavily invested in giving meaning to their work or positioning themselves as innovators that they ignore or suppress these longer histories.

I think such characterizations may flatten the complex ways people like Pamela, Esteban,

Cecilia, professional NGO workers, applied social scientists, and researchers like myself are often entangled in the politics and conflicting aims of programs like the Integrated Justice Centers and broader ADR and culture of peace programming. As anthropologist Brett Gustafson has noted regarding his own role in conducting focus groups and interviews that were utilized to justify new legislation on bilingual intercultural education, those efforts may be reduced to “polysemic tokens” despite our own intentions (2009: 141). Setting out to revolutionize the Bolivian education system,

Gustafson and his colleagues were later forced to ask themselves “Had we spoken truth to power, or had development made us speak?” (2009: 141). Gustafson’s ambivalence resonates deeply with the insistent yet sometimes disquieted ways Bolivian aid brokers characterized their work as uniquely

“Made in Bolivia.”

Insisting that the Integrated Justice Centers were Made in Bolivia, they invoked the postcolonial discourse that pits Bolivian plurinationalism against the imposition of foreign agendas, and reflected people’s self-consciousness about the widespread critique that NGOs and foreign donors were furthering neoliberal interests.7 Indeed, many governmental websites promoting Evo

Morales’ postcolonial platform include the logo Hecho en Bolivia: consume lo nuestro, emplea a los nuestros

(Made in Bolivia: consume our products, employ our people). The ragged font meant to mimic an ink stamp is cast against the red, yellow, and green of the Bolivian flag. Pamela and Esteban invoked

7 As I have discussed elsewhere (MA, 2009), many people working as intermediaries for foreign funding were at pains to distinguish themselves from aid brokers who uncritically accept funding. Others argued that it is a legitimate strategic practice to captar (capture) foreign funds regardless the aid ideologies at work — to utilize them toward other ends.

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the logo — and stamped the Integrated Justice Centers with this ubiquitous post-colonial slogan.

Esteban even took it a step further, telling me that like Bolivian quinoa or alpaca wool, the Centers might now be ready for export to other places that could learn from the Bolivian model (despite his own refusal to copy model programs from elsewhere).

But I was struck by the ways both Esteban and Pamela code switched into English to tell me that the Integrated Justice Centers were uniquely Made in Bolivia. Not the Spanish Hecho en Bolivia.

That sudden use of English seemed to betray a nagging contradiction: for all their efforts — the focus groups, surveys, and late-night meetings with neighborhood associations — the resulting program nevertheless fit neatly within an existing, contractor-specific intervention strategy, and ultimately served the much simpler purpose of helping USAID get a toe-hold in El Alto, as it had always desired.8

Had Pamela, Esteban, Cecilia, and others working on the project spoken back to AID by refusing to simply adopt existing model programs and best practices from Guatemala and Colombia, or had AID made them speak in the language of ADR? Rather than reduce their efforts to co- optation or misrecognition, I want to suggest that this emphasis on the “local” origins of these transnational campaigns in part reflects the ways ADR has captured people’s imaginations. ADR, like the broader idiom of building a “culture of peace,” has become a meaningful framework for the people tasked with its spread. That meaningfulness is evident in the ways they speak about their own experiences of struggling to make sense of — and then respond to — Alteño demands, and I return to this question of meaning-making in my final section on proyectos de vida (life projects).

But the appeal of ADR and the broader culture of peace concept has also been enabled — and perhaps invented — by an expanding market for expertise in the field of peace building. It is to that expanding market for expertise in conflict and its resolution that I now turn.

8 See previous chapter.

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Consulting on Conflict

Over the course of two months, five nights a week, a group of NGO workers, public servants, police officers, human rights lawyers, and others interested in conflict resolution have been gathering late into the evening for a diploma course on Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR). The course is being offered by the Catholic University of La Paz, in conjunction with the Bolivian nonprofit

Fundación UNIR, and in collaboration with the California Western School of Law. With each module, a new set of international experts in ADR — from both Bolivia and the United States — lead us through concepts such as “culture of peace,” intercultural conflict resolution, negotiation, the

BATNA (Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement), and a variety of exercises and worksheets meant to help us learn the tools of the trade. We spend our evenings working in small groups, practicing negotiation skills and mapping the actors, interests, and possible outcomes of various conflicts, tracing their escalation and denouement. Guest lecturers highlight the conceptual differences between negotiation, conciliation, mediation, and commercial arbitration. Course participants debate the usefulness of methods coming from the Harvard Negotiation Program and

American law schools.

It’s a lively group of people who, in their professional lives, are often thrust into helping manage these same social conflicts we are now using as case studies: a lawyer working for the human rights ombudsman, Derechos Humanos; a public servant who, over the course of the diplomado, misses class dates because he has been called off to help mediate fraught territorial limits between two rural

Andean communities9; and, the staff of several Bolivian NGOs that are actively trying to weigh in on a cross-country march of lowland indigenous Bolivians who are demanding the right to the consulta previa (consultation) on a massive road project that plans to cut through the indigenous territory known as TIPNIS.

Many of the people in the room have been doing some form of conflict analysis and intervention for years. In class discussions, they draw on their experience as union organizers or

9 The recurring tensions between Coroma and Quillacas in Northern Potosi.

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agronomists employed by non-profits, as former congressmen, or as professional conciliators specializing in divorce and child support law. But the 2003 uprising ushered in a new level of interest in conflict resolution among foreign donors and Bolivian aid brokers alike. With the increase in funding available to promote dialogue, negotiation, and conflict resolution more broadly, local activists, lawyers and NGO workers have sought to further institutionalize conflict resolution as a profession. And so participants have joined the diploma course to bolster their CVs, to get the credentials and the conceptual tools they need as experts in conflict resolution.

Like development professionals and NGO workers more generally, Bolivia is now home to a cadre of dispute resolution professionals. While historically the Catholic Church — and more recently the Human Rights Ombudsman, Derechos Humanos10 — played a role in helping to mediate social conflicts between the state and social movements, participants and instructors in the course regularly argue that these institutions have lost their credibility. As these “traditional” mediators of social conflict have lost credibility, they argue, Bolivia’s recurring social conflicts demand professionals equipped with the tools necessary to analyze and to offer neutral intermediation.

Take for example one of the course lecturers, Julian Aguilar. Aguilar is a lawyer specializing in commercial arbitration. Before beginning his lecture, Aguilar rattles off his qualifications: a long CV of international travel (Upsalla, London, Japan, the U.S.), foreign certificates, and formal education in business law. Aguilar periodically inserts anecdotes about conversations with Japanese businessmen about the challenges facing Bolivia’s development, or lessons learned in cross-cultural negotiation with his counterparts in Asia. These are subtle reminders of the cosmopolitan flavor of ADR, and

Aguilar positions himself as both a transnational ADR professional and a broker of ADR in Bolivia.11

Aguilar circulates a textbook he has written, “Hello, I am your mediator.” And as I attend conflict resolution conferences and book fairs, Aguilar’s book is ubiquitous; many of the ADR practitioners and would-be experts in the diploma course this evening consider him an esteemed — if a bit eccentric — colleague.

10 A position that was also originally funded by foreign donors.

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Aguilar is supposed to lead our module on commercial arbitration, but on this night he proposes that we expand the conversation to the broader topic of negotiation. It is a skill set required for commercial arbitration, he tells us, but broad enough for an audience that is not specializing in the business sector. After all, he tells us, the Morales Administration is on the warpath against commercial arbitration as the government continues to lose cases against business interests. The future of commercial arbitration in the country is shaky. But the broader skill set of negotiation can be used for dispute resolution in many other settings — and he’s going to introduce us to that toolkit.

“The Harvard system of negotiation,” he insists, “is the only acceptable approach in the entire world. Others exist, but their doctrinal underpinnings are nonexistent [when compared to Harvard].”

Like many who have led conflict resolution modules in the diploma course, Aguilar reminds his audience that “conflict is natural, it forms part of life in all communities, all countries, all societies, all companies, and government entities, every family, couple or person. It’s good that there is conflict

— but that it be moderated and well managed.” He lists off the many reasons negotiation — the foundational component of Alternative Dispute Resolution — is so widely celebrated: “It’s an opportunity for both sides to grow, an opportunity to discover novel options, to better know the

Other, to analyze, define the rules of interaction, to let out hidden feelings, and analyze our actions in an objective manner, to reach compromise involving all [stakeholders], to improve communication.”

The list is expansive. And Aguilar has several role-playing games to help us practice at those negotiation skills in small groups.

The final weeks of the diploma course are dedicated to applying those concepts, analytic tools, and ADR methods to ongoing social conflicts in Bolivia. Jaime Martínez is an ADR professional who has worked with Fundación UNIR and a variety of other organizations promoting conflict analysis and resolution. Like Aguilar, he has traveled abroad for specialized study in international relations and conflict, joining the ranks of the cosmopolitan conflict specialists working in Bolivia.

11 Aguilar implies that the Morales Administration may itself be to blame for having consistently weak cases.

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He’s worked with the Germans, with the Dutch, with the Office of the Vice President, among other organizations. But Martínez also brings a healthy dose of critique to the “utopia” of Harvard’s approach to negotiation. Influenced by the “Do No Harm” development practitioner literature, he is wary of good intentions. Martínez leads the class in a series of reflections on the unintended consequences of foreign aid and NGO interventions in the wake of natural disasters. Like criticisms of development more generally, Martínez’s ADR training has already anticipated and incorporated critique: He addresses concerns of power, acknowledges that he and Fundación UNIR take a Human

Rights universalist approach to culture, but insists that there are many legitimate criticisms of that position.

Martínez has, by virtue of anticipating ADR’s skeptics, defanged critique. Following a marathon, 3-hour session on intercultural dialogue that covers everything from critical theory, scapegoating, and the difference between peacemaking and peace-building, Martínez gets down to the concrete social conflicts making Bolivia’s nightly news. He distributes a thick set of photocopies

— a kind of conflict analysis workbook known among specialists as a “metodo para la creacion de escenarios” [method for the creation of scenarios]. It’s a systematic methodology for defining the conflict at hand, identifying actors that are both central and peripheral to any given conflict, and mapping possible outcomes — both worst case and best case scenarios. It will be the basis for our final project: each group project will systematically apply the categories and techniques from that packet to map out an ongoing conflict.

Martínez holds up the packet and waves it jokingly at the group. “I have given you something really important here. This methodology can earn you a lot of money as a consultant,” Martínez says with a laugh. He is teasing — but only a little. Many people in the room chuckle at the explicitly- economistic statement. But Martínez’s teasing tone does not alter the reality that many of them were drawn to the diploma course because of the credentials – and by extension the better economic prospects -- it offered. Indeed, Martínez is offering them tools to build a career. Marcado’s winking aside lays-bare the economic underpinnings of ADR’s appeal.

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Martínez goes on to explain that while the methodology is time consuming, complex, and requires a lot of practice, it is now invaluable among people who want to work with NGOs and foreign donors funding projects under the banner conflict resolution. He has given us a tool not only for sorting through the many layers of a given conflict (for peeling the conflict onion), but also for marketing ourselves as conflict resolution professionals, as expertos en la transformación de conflicto

(experts in the transformation of conflict) or conflictologos. Along with the diploma course and its introduction to the various facets, concepts, and methods of ADR, we now hold in our hands a technology of conflict analysis, that, along with our certificates of participation in the course, enable us to insert ourselves into the inter/national market for conflict expertise.

Conflict resolution — or

conflict transformation, as it is

increasingly glossed — is now a

ubiquitous platform for foreign aid

intervention and for smaller-scale

NGO work far beyond institutions

like the Integrated Justice Centers.

Development professionals now

re-specialize in all facets of Figure 2 Blackboard from ADR training session on mapping stakeholders in a given conflict. Photo S. Ellison. conflict: analyzing conflict, training

people in how to manage or resolve that conflict in their everyday, interpersonal lives, as well as efforts to directly intercede into ongoing social conflicts throughout the country. Indeed, along with well-digging, infrastructure development, health promotion, gender empowerment workshops, microcredit assistance, and indigenous rights, conflict is an organizing theme for donors and the organizations hoping to captar

(capture) their funds.

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Among ADR practitioners, the distinction between conflict management, resolution, and transformation indexes significant conceptual shifts in how conflictologos think about and try to intervene upon particular disputes. There are sometimes fierce discussions about these subtle differences, and for many the shift to conflict transformation (rather than “management” or

“resolution”) is a critical one. In part, the shift to “transformation” anticipates the critique about managerial, depoliticizing approaches to dispute resolution. But this turn toward “conflict transformation” further reinforces the critical role of the conflictologo. In this framing, conflict is not only an inherent part of all social formations — whether families, states, or social organizations — but it is also a constructive source of social change.

Drawing on the work of famed sociologist Johan Galtung, organizations like Fundación

UNIR, insist on the positive dimensions of conflict. It is when conflict is not productively managed

(or “transformed”) that it threatens to escalate, to plunge into violence, and to become deeply harmful to individuals and society more broadly. Thus UNIR has sought to both produce agents of conflict transformation — through workshops and other training sessions — and to position itself as an institution that is uniquely prepared to map, analyze, and intercede into recurring social conflicts as a credible third party mediator. As Antonio Aramayo Tejada explains in a piece written for

UNIR12,

Social conflicts are events that put to the test the capacity of political systems to respond to social needs and demands; a response from the position of constructive management is oriented to strengthen and better the relations among actors of a given conflict, avoiding the perception that their objectives are incompatible, leading to a breakdown [in negotiation] and the escalation of violence. It is also necessary to conduct a systematic analysis of conflicts in Bolivia, which offers the necessary elements to better understand the social and political situation and to make decisions with regard to conflicts, orienting actions toward their transformation with the goal of contributing to the development of a democratic society in which the different needs, interests, and visions are recognized, valued, thus contributing to the construction of a culture of peace (direct, structural, and cultural), understood its different forms as an essentially active process (Aramayo Tejada / UNIR, 2012).

12 “Factores clave de la conflictividad en Bolivia” by Antonio Aramayo Tejada, Director Ejecutivo de la Fundación UNIR Bolivia. May 8, 2012. http://www.unirbolivia.org/nueva3/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=660&Itemid=24

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Many social scientists would agree with Aramayo’s emphasis on the productive dimension of conflict and would appreciate efforts to nuance the conversation about the causes and consequences of that conflict — as well as to distinguish between conflict and violence. Nevertheless, political theorist

Wendy Brown has cautioned that when conflict is naturalized in the kinds of “tolerance talk” that accompanies culture of peace campaigns and broader efforts to instill liberal democratic sensibilities, it may contribute to the further depoliticization of conflict. To re-visit Annelise Riles’ critique, the expertise of informal methods and expert techniques in resolving conflicts reinscribes the

“hegemonic institutionalization of a heady fantasy of liberal communication, a hope that political conflict can be resolved through new and ever more technological solutions” (618).

One of the effects of this insistence on conflict’s productivity is that it bolsters the market for expertise. Aguilar, Martínez, and Aramayo argue that conflict is natural, but that it requires care. In order to avoid escalation into violence and to instead transform conflict into something socially productive — a social good — demands careful management. Luckily, they remind their audiences, there are people trained to do the kind of thoughtful, systematic analysis that is required: to map a conflict’s actors and interests, and to intercede as third party mediators or to train local leaders in the skills they need to productively transform their own conflicts. These are the skills and toolkits that enable the creation of a culture of peace — and they can be learned and marketed in an era when conflict resolution expertise is at a premium, especially in places like Bolivia. This insistence on conflict’s naturalness and social productivity has helped to justify, create, and consolidate an international market for expertise in dispute resolution. But that consolidation is also due to a concerted effort on the part of Bolivia’s conflictologos, who have advocated for ADR’s usefulness for broader society — beyond business interests served by commercial arbitration. Conciliation, they insisted, was for everyone.

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Conciliation for all!

In their study of international business dispute resolution, Bryant Garth and Yves Dezalay

(1996) dub an elite coterie of jurists who helped to create the global field of commercial arbitration as

“moral entrepreneurs.” Garth and Dezalay are heavily influenced by Bourdieu’s analysis of fields — in this case professional legal fields — and social capital, and they trace the way this new class of arbitration advocates and specialists transformed the legal apparatuses of their home countries and then positioned themselves within those new legal fields as the virtuous arbiters of private justice.

A number of jurists were instrumental in helping to expand the field of conciliation in Bolivia, first through the promotion of commercial arbitration, and later as a resource for ordinary Bolivians.

Dr. Gloria Salazar, for example, wrote a study concluding that ADR services should be expanded to the broader public beyond private commercial interests, and then played a role in helping to craft the statutes further institutionalizing and legitimizing both kinds of ADR programs. As Salazar told me in an interview, she and an emerging group of Bolivian ADR advocates saw expansive uses for conciliation: “We left aside arbitration essentially for the National Chamber of Commerce and private businesses. But the question was ‘How are we going to conceive of conciliation for all?’ First we said so that it is within reach of all citizens so that it is democratized, so it spreads [para que se socialicen], and so that all citizens have access to justice that is free of charge whenever possible…”

Salazar described herself as having an epiphany. She had worked on earlier efforts to introduce commercial arbitration in Bolivia, but came to see those efforts as devoid of social usefulness. For

Salazar, the task was obvious, as was the end goal: to create a network of conciliators who could spread the gospel of ADR and in doing so, transform their own orientation toward the justice system, as well as that of others. As Salazar explained,

What did we need? We needed to train [capacitar] people to multiply, to replicate others. That was the work of all of 2005…So what do you want? I want to achieve a culture of peace. I don’t need a conciliator. I need legions of conciliators. That was my response. Legions. It’s a multiplying effect. I train you as a conciliator. What will you do? You will speak with your brother, your friend, and [in doing so] you are training [others]. And what will he do? He will speak with another person, and another. And another. Like a chain. That was the intent.

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She came to see it as her personal mission to promote ADR to a broader audience and to train

“legions” of conciliators to carry the mantle of ADR. Much like Garth and Dezalay’s (1996) “Moral

Entrepreneurs” of commercial arbitration, Salazar would become a key player in helping build the legal architecture that would consolidate the work of the Integrated Justice Centers.

Thanks to the efforts of people like Salazar, ADR in Bolivia escaped the realm of private commercial arbitration; Bolivian advocates heralded ADR as a tool for serving Bolivia’s poor, its indigenous communities, and particularly the needs of women. Moreover, these advocates emphasized the usefulness of ADR for managing and “transforming” recurring social conflicts in the country — and for transforming Bolivian “cultural” tendencies toward conflict. This expansive understanding of ADR and its transformative capabilities had two important consequences. First, it consolidated the legal and institutional framework for promoting conciliation under the banner of promoting a culture of peace. Secondly, it has contributed to the growing market for expertise in conflict resolution — for both interpersonal and social disputes.

But these efforts by Bolivian ADR promoters were not spontaneous. As I have shown in earlier chapters, ADR projects — and practitioners themselves — had a much long history tied to judicial reform aid. Prior to the 2003 uprising, Bolivian ADR advocates tended to be involved in efforts to promote commercial arbitration, working with the Bolivian Chamber of Commerce and financial institutions like the World Bank. As I will discuss further below, some Bolivian ADR advocates came to mediation through their work with international NGOs that were promoting negotiation skills for communities faced with transnational corporations operating in their territories

— particularly in the mining sector. ADR took on new resonances following the 2003 uprising as both old and new donors flooded Bolivia with funding related to conflict and its resolution. Both foreign contractors and Bolivian judicial reformers have helped expand this market for conflictologos by enshrining ADR in Bolivian legal codes, donor platforms, and local NGO intervention strategies — ranging from the creation of the Integrated Justice Centers to teaching children tolerance and respect as personal dispositions that are critical building blocks in the construction of a culture of peace. And

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at the same time, Bolivian advocates for alternative dispute resolution mechanisms re-framed their work in terms of broader cultural transformation and conflict management goals, capitalizing on new resources provided by foreign donors.

Much like the USAID-created Integrated Justice Centers, Fundación UNIR explicitly traces its history to the 2003 uprising and a deep concern among foreign donors with the state of Bolivian democracy. As UNIR’s institutional history reads: “In response to the high levels of conflictivity and the increasing confrontation between the State and society that Bolivia experienced in 2003, foreign donors sent a group of consultants to design a program intended to strengthen capabilities so that state and social actors might participate in processes of deliberation”13 (emphasis mine). I want to highlight here that the impetus for creating these programs — for creating UNIR itself — was driven largely by European donors.

Fundación UNIR become one of the key institutional players in helping to promote this more expansive understanding of Alternative Dispute Resolution under the culture of peace banner — with financial support from European Commission and a variety of other European donors. UNIR was initially comprised of a group of social scientists, activists, journalists, and others with a background in nonprofit work, who came together under the leadership of Ana Maria Romero de

Campero. Anamar, as she was lovingly known before her death in 2010, was herself a highly respected journalist, human rights activist (she was the country’s first human rights ombudsman or

Defensor del Pueblo), and public intellectual.

The organization reached out to German aid workers with Ayllus en Paz, among other international experts in conflict transformation to begin building a network of conflict resolution experts. UNIR has helped to consolidate Bolivia’s network of conflictologos by hosting conferences and sponsoring diploma courses like the one described above. Fundación UNIR brought together a dedicated group of people concerned with recurring conflicts in the country, but again, the push for promoting negotiation and other forms of conflict de-escalation were largely driven by the availability

13 http://www.unirbolivia.org/nueva3/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=57&Itemid=2

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of new funds from the European Commission, USAID, and other donors. It was along these circuits that Bolivia’s conflictologos now moved.

Despite the partial and hybrid ways that policies and discourses around economic development, democracy, and culture of peace travel in practice, anthropologists David Lewis and

David Mosse (2005) have insisted that the task of the ethnographer is to show how convergences and homogenization occurs despite apparent heterogeneity. Studies of aid “brokers,” they argue, shouldn’t merely reveal the multiplicity of interests these individuals hold or strategies they employ as they navigate the interstices between funding agencies and their home communities. Rather, ethnographic work can illuminate how, “despite fragmentation and dissent, heterogeneous actors in development are constantly engaged in creating order through political acts of composition” through acts of translation (2005: 14). As Tania Li argues, this array of people, institutions, technologies, are

“lashed up” and “become systematized, their discrepant origins submerged” (Li 2005: 386). They take on the appearance of unity, coherence. They become commonsensical and circumscribe what is thinkable. The anthropological project is not to take that coherence for granted, but rather to investigate how it comes into existence, to look for the artifacts of debate embedded into policy statements, and to examine the material consequences – or lack thereof – of these fragmented documents (cf Warren & Leheny 2010).

Such an approach allows us to examine together the inchoate bits and pieces of culture of peace and ADR interventions — from UN-sponsored TV “spots” and inoculation campaigns against violence to legal aid programs intended to de-escalate social conflict by instilling people with transferable interpersonal conflict resolution skills. New trends in foreign aid have opened new markets for local actors to position themselves as local experts in the field of conflict resolution — as with women’s empowerment initiatives, sustainable development projects, and microcredit lending before it. As Aguilar and Martínez insist, the ability to map the stakes, actors, and possible outcomes of conflict — and to act as a mediator of those conflicts — are skills that can be learned, practiced, and marketed to government offices, local NGOs, and foreign donors alike. As a consequences, a

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growing number of people are invested in not only promoting ADR as a mechanism for intervention

— and culture of peace as a concept — but also in designing projects and creating NGO platforms built around analyzing, intervening upon, and training others in conflict resolution skill sets. Both

Aguilar and Martínez have been active participants in global networks of lawyers receiving international training in ADR, while advocating the benefits of commercial arbitration, conciliation, and negotiation in their home countries.

Moreover, the people tasked with promoting ADR’s transformative agenda are themselves subject to governmental rationalities in order to demonstrate their efficacy and justify continued funding — the lifeblood of NGOs and consultants, as well as many of Bolivia’s state institutions — which also rely heavily on foreign aid. As Rose (2002) argues, the contemporary neoliberal era is characterized by the proliferation of specializations as well as an expanded marketplace for expertise.

“Advanced Liberal Democracy” is distinguishable from previous forms of governance by the extraordinary competition between these claims to expertise, driven by a demand for transparency and accountability that is materialized in the audit, performance indicators, and monitoring and evaluation reports. This pressure to measure up to donor expectations means many NGO workers and ADR advocates spend a great deal of time and energy boosting their numbers and worrying about continued funding, demonstrating that they exemplify donor interests even if they personally

(and politically) have some reservations about the focus, strategy, or end goal.

The crew of professionals participating in the diploma course above constitutes a nascent network of Bolivian ADR practitioners and advocates eager to apply those skills in institutions where they worked and in other emerging opportunities for conflictologos. After spending two months together practicing conflict analysis, learning negotiation skills, and applying those tools to contemporary conflicts in Bolivia, holding class BBQs and sharing personal stories, the group had forged both a professional network and friendships — myself included. And indeed, scholars studying policy and policymaking frequently draw on Actor Network Theory to trace the circulation of policy discourse and mobilization of expertise along networks such as these.

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But one of the dangers of focusing on the ways people work to create and then capitalize on this market for expertise is that it reduces their involvement to instrumental maneuvering of an elite class of people, without accounting for the meaning people derive from their work. Such an approach also makes it difficult to account for the enormous power of ADR and the culture of peace concept: why do activists continue to draw on the concept despite their criticisms of donor assumptions? If, as

I argue in the previous chapter, the culture of peace concept accompanying ADR runs the risk of winnowing out questions of substantive equality and justice, why is it that people with deep political commitments to more radical social change nevertheless invoke it for their own projects? I have suggested that this continued support is due, in part, to the multivalence of the concepts themselves

— which appeal to people across the political spectrum. But here I want to emphasize the interplay between economic need (both individual employment and project funding) and meaning making.

ADR advocates often derive a great deal of personal meaning and satisfaction from their involvement in these projects.

The blockade is the invitation.

Santiago Mujica’s personal and professional trajectory is emblematic of the ways this market for expertise in conflict resolution intersects with people’s professional lives — as they simultaneously seek to earn a living and to make meaning out of their labor. Santiago, a former miner and long-time union organizer, was first introduced to ADR in a workshop sponsored by a Canadian aid agency whose stated objective was to provide Bolivian mining communities with skills that would make them more effective in their negotiations with Canadian and transnational mining corporations.

As we talked about his experience working with the Canadian organization, Santiago often mentioned criticisms he had heard about that kind of work — namely, that it was a form of co- optation. He would pause and pose it to me as a question. Of the time he was flown by a Canadian mining company to a conference with other indigenous groups to talk about their struggles on behalf of their communities: “Do you think that could have been — what do they call it? Co-optation?”

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And then before I could answer: “I suppose it could have been. I can see that.” Nevertheless, he had found the work meaningful — and, he believed, useful for the communities he cared most about: miners and their families.

Over the course of his life, Santiago moved from working as a militante (member of the union base) and dirigente sindical (labor leader) in one of Bolivia’s most famous mines to working with foreign funded NGO projects with the mining sector. Following the 2003 uprising, Santiago parlayed his experience training mining organizations in negotiation skills into a job with the newly-created

Fundación UNIR. Santiago’s work with NGOs and foreign donors was both a source of financial security and part of a moral imaginary in which he understood his efforts to promote ADR as enmeshed in a longer life project — luchando or struggling on behalf of Bolivia’s mining communities.

Santiago came of age politically and as a dirigente sindicalista during the late 1960s and early

1970s — a period of enormous social and political upheaval, when Bolivian military dictatorships targeted and violently repressed mining unions with the financial and ideological support of the U.S. government. At age 16, Santiago went to work in the Catavi mine, replacing his father who had taken ill with silicosis (black lung), and stepping in for an older brother who was at university. Santiago spent two years working in the mine while attending night school, along with an older group of adults. His older classmates first introduced Santiago to class analysis and exposed him to Marxist thought. “Among older people, they talk a lot about politics,” Santiago explained. “They talk a lot about sindicalismo. They talk a lot about the perspective of the people.” For Santiago, political engagement and sindicalismo was a process of on-the-job training. “1967 is an important era for me.

Because they talk of it as the era of Che’s Guerilla. It’s the youth who begin to talk about ‘how do we incorporate ourselves into the Guerrilla del Che?’ ‘What was going on with the Communist party?14‘

This was the process of formation. You start to learn who are the Trotskyites, who are the

14 When Ernesto “Che” Guevara was captured and executed in Bolivia’s lowlands in 1967, it sparked widespread debate about the relationship between the America CIA and Bolivian counter-insurgency targeting Leftist movements in the country.

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Communists, who are the Maoists. How many kinds of Trotskyism there are in the [mining union’s]

Assembly.”

Santiago took time away from the mine to fulfill his requisite military service (cuartel), but he continued to debate politics with his peers. While in cuartel, Santiago read the work of Marcelo

Quiroga Santa Cruz, a major political intellectual and social critic who served as the Minister of

Mining and Energy under Bolivian President Alfredo Ovando. “A group of us would talk about nationalization — what was it? Who was directing it?…So we started to read something that Marcelo

Quiroga wrote about the need to recover [natural resources]. This [experience] led me to an affiliation a little more to the Left.”

Santiago’s return to the mines coincided with a series of nearly back-to-back coups and military dictatorships, as well as human rights abuses including the disappearance social critics, and a crack down on Bolivia’s labor sector. Many of those crack downs were enabled by previous waves of

American military aid (Siekemeier 2011). Over the next decade Santiago would work in various capacities with the mining unions, including taking on roles as intermediary between COMIBOL and the workers’ union, and later with the national The Union Federation of Bolivian Mine Workers

(Federación Sindical de Trabajadores Mineros de Bolivia, FSTMB). He spent time mobilizing to free political prisoners, and was a political prisoner himself.

Santiago’s experiences as militante and dirigente (member of the base and a union leader) profoundly shaped his understanding of conflict and how it could be mobilized as both a right and a political strategy. Santiago explained, “My understanding of conflict was that it was a necessity. An arm of the struggle for revindicación15 of the interests of the workers and the impoverished. I understood conflict, like a strike, a blockade, other actions, were a right of the people to make their

15 “A good dirigente sindical” Santiago told me “had to know what kind of conflict you were starting — a struggle of revindicación or a political struggle…” A political struggle, Santiago explained, entailed building alliances across sectors for a broader platform of change. “You have to weave together a network of unions. Huanuni. The Federación [FSTMB], fabriles [factory workers].” It was a struggle that, once begun, was harder to control, and more difficult to win. By contrast, a struggle for revindicación, Santiago explained, was a a more demand-specific to the needs of the mining sector; you, as a leader, had more control over its beginning and end. The struggle for revindicación “involved fewer groups. Fewer interests were in play for the other side as well. The other side could negotiate this conflict.”

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views known.” Santiago would look back at these experiences16 as a period when he learned to

“make conflict” as a political tactic.

When Santiago was finally introduced to theories of negotiation as a tool of conflict resolution,

Santiago approached the new conceptual apparatus through the lens of an experienced union organizer. He came to ADR later in life — but he also picked up ADR alongside a whole technical toolkit: the planning methodologies of NGO work and donor reporting processes. Santiago was working on a project with the Bolivian organization called the Center for the Promotion of Mining

(CEPROMIN), and CEPROMIN enjoyed financial support from Canadian donors. For Santiago, his experience working with foreign donors and with NGOs changed his way of thinking. He learned how to speak in the language of NGO projects, operating budgets, and measurable goals.

There I learned about [project] planning, about POAs [plan operativo anual or annual project operating budgets], but also about results, objectives, marcos logicos. I learned about what it means to work for results, for objectives. But I also learned about popular education models. UNITAS was based on the alternative education [model] of Paulo Freire. So there we also were trained in pedagogical methods. There I learned the theory of capacitación. I learned that what I had been doing with my life was completely different. I needed to adjust myself to these new theories.

“Why,” I asked, “did you feel it was necessary to make the adjustment?” I asked him.

Santiago explained, “Because we were accustomed to deliberation and vertical management in the unions. Right? First the debate, one accusing the other.” The deliberation Santiago went on to describe was not the kind of deliberation most deliberative democracy programs envisioned.

“Accusations?” I asked.

“Of course. Accusations. Your base accuses you,” Santiago explained, using the term base used to mean rank and file union members. “But also your political opposition. The Maoist comrades will never agree with a Trotskyite comrade. Or if a Trotskyite spoke, you always had to disagree.”

16 Santiago was among the last waves of miners to accept relocation during the era of structural adjustment, and along with his sindicalista companions, he continued to pursue the re-invigoration of the mining sector. “When 21060 happened, some of us continued to insist that we needed to refuse to capitulate… The apparatus of the state was poorly administered. We said the [Democratic and Popular Union party] was wrong, that the sector had been de-capitalized. We tried to convince [our bases] that we needed to stay and fight [and not accept the government’s displacement package].” Ultimately Santiago and his family would cede, and they moved to La Paz in 1987, where he found work difficult to come by.

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“You always had to disagree? Always? It was just taken as a given?” I asked.

“Of course,” Santiago continued. So it was a debate of positions. In which you needed to use coercion, pressure, manipulation to get the vote. Union diplomacy involved organizing your buddies.

‘You, go stand in that corner. You, in the other. I will call on you in the right moment.’ That was our methodology,” he told me, chuckling.

Santiago explained that when he was introduced to Freirian popular education, he found the approach compelling. “I thought, these were tools we could have used before, but since we didn’t know about them, we didn’t use them. I thought, we’ve got to take them to the unions. That was my view. I thought this methodology, this way of reflecting with groups could help — should help the workers to be more reflective. I didn’t see it as a rejection of what I was doing before, but rather a different way of doing what I had been, only more productive.” Along side the work of Freire,

Santiago was also exposed to new models of conflict resolution through his involvement with the

Canadian Cooperación. He came to see these new tools offered by ADR, namely the concept and theories of negotiation, as compelling resources for furthering the interests of workers in the mining sector —and marginalized Bolivians more generally.

Through his work with CEPROMIN and their Canadian funders, Santiago began to travel

— to international conferences, to Peru and Canada where he received training and also began to forge his own methods of capacitación, combining his experience and sensibilities from working as a dirigente with the new concepts and theories he was encountering. Santiago grew critical of the ubiquitous Harvard school of negotiation, arguing that its assumptions about equal footing between parties ignored real power imbalances at the negotiating table, and failed to account of the kinds of realities Bolivian dirigentes usually encountered when they left their communities to negotiate with government officials. As he explained, “In my experience they name you as representative in the

[union] Assembly at 4pm and by 7pm you are on an overnight bus to the capital. You travel all night by bus, and when you arrive in the morning have a meeting with the Minister…You only have time to prepare in the corridor if the Minister or some authority is running late to the meeting.”

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Santiago, who described his union job as strategically “making conflict,” said he found ADR to be really just a “systematization” of the work he was already doing. “Culture of Peace” and conflict resolution, Santiago told me, gave him a language and a conceptual map to think about those strategies in a more methodical and non-violent way. He now trains others in those tools in his work with UNIR. But sometimes Santiago clashed with donors’ interpretations of the kinds of political tactics employed by sindicatos — the strikes, blockades, and forms of political pressure that, I learned in the Diploma course, constituted an escalation of social conflict and a form of coercion. As

Santiago once told me during a tea break in the ADR diploma course, “the blockade isn’t the end of negotiation. It’s the beginning. It’s the invitation to negotiation.”

The multiple meanings of conflict become evident when people like Santiago are dismayed to find that the donor institutions that they work with differently interpret the words, symbols, and practices utilized by trade unions and neighborhood associations, among other loci of protest. While his Canadian and later European colleagues understood strikes and blockades to signal an escalation of violent conflict, Santiago insisted on recognizing those political tactics as an invitation to dialogue.

The blockade was not the final stage of an escalating conflict, but rather the beginning of a much longer process, he told me. They didn’t understand the Bolivian logic of mobilization.

Santiago was surprised and a little dismayed by the ways his foreign colleagues reacted when sindicalista strategies did not fit neatly within the ADR toolkit. “For them, the first blockade, or the first strike, and you were already operating outside the book. First you had to make your demands known.” Santiago explained, indicating the proper procedure for opening a negotiation. “But [that’s not how it works] in Bolivia. So I would sit there and listen silently [during workshop presentations].

Partly because I was paid to be there. But partly because I was already starting to get annoyed.”

“What was annoying you?” I asked Santiago, “Because their negotiation methods were inadequate for the Bolivian context?”

“Yes, but also because they isolated me. They seemed to see me as competition. Like, ‘how are we going to train this guy so he can just take our pega” Santiago said, using a word that implies a

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job attained by connections, by patronage. “And to a certain extent, that was my goal. I said to myself, they don’t know I can win at this game.”

Santiago began to suspect that the foreign experts brought in to conduct training in conflict analysis and resolution saw him — their local counterpart — as competition. And Santiago admits that they were right to do so — he was studying their methods, learning their concepts, and finding them wanting. He believed he was better positioned to articulate them to audiences like the ones he used to lead as a young dirigente in the mines. He realized he could market himself as a local expert with specialized knowledge in the politics and practices of social movements, particularly in the mining sector.

Santiago did win at the game, successfully parlaying his knowledge of the tactics and logics of sindicalismo and his exposure to the conceptual tools of Alternative Dispute Resolution into a late- in-life career as a respected conflictologo.

Santiago now interprets his union organizing experience through the lens of ADR — and vice versa. As a consequence, both Santiago and his ideas about effective organizing for social change have become entangled in donor projects promoting ADR — and as a consequence, entangled in national debates about the role of foreign funding in influencing politics. But Santiago’s involvement with culture of peace programs was not a rejection of those sindicalista tactics. Instead, Santiago incorporated his understanding of those tactics into the ADR framework that identifies a conflict’s

“lifecycle” — something he saw as dynamic, recurring, and culturally specific to Bolivia and its peasant and mining unions. He plugged his understanding of Bolivian sindicalista tactics into the conflict analysis methods he’d been exposed to and found them wanting. He reconfigured the ADR toolkit accordingly — in his presentations to other mining communities, in the examples he used during training courses. And in doing so, he made himself a more marketable local expert, a broker of sindicalista knowledge, an interpreter of ADR for new audiences, both foreign and national.

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Proyectos de vida, Made in Bolivia Life Projects, Made in Bolivia

Many studies of policymaking show how policy paradigms circulate, are appropriated, and transformed through intermediaries or local brokers. What I want to emphasize here is the ways working toward building a “culture of peace” and promoting Alternative Dispute Resolution have become a source of both gainful and meaningful employment in the growing market for local expertise in conflict resolution. Pamela Chacón, for example, talked about her role in helping to design the Integrated Justice Centers as her first exposure Figure 3 Advertisement for a training workshop on working with NGOs, to thinking seriously about her own rights and foundations, and foreign donors. Photo S. Ellison obligations as a Bolivian citizen, and particularly as a woman. Pamela narrated her experience helping to develop the Centers as a process of personal transformation. For Pamela, her own embodied experience of traversing El Alto’s unlit, unpaved neighborhoods — sometimes late at night and with an acute sense of vulnerability — deepened her sense that she had been involved in something important, in something meaningful, in something that might contribute to Bolivian society and especially the plight of the poor. An educator by training, she felt the experience had educated her into her own rights as well as the needs of others, particularly women.

One way to interpret Pamela’s narrative is as that of an aid contractor maneuvering within the moral economy of NGOs and donor-funded projects, in which notions of personal and social transformation are at a premium. But I think that such an opportunistic interpretation of Pamela’s personal and professional narrative both reduces Pamela to cynical calculations and also obscures

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some of the powerful ways notions like constructing a culture of peace or promoting ADR become hegemonic precisely because they have become a meaningful framework for both advocates and critics.

Many Bolivians who have worked with social organizations like unions and indigenous rights movements have also been the recipients/targets of NGO projects aiming to provide capacitación — to provide training in a variety of topics, from project management and budgeting under the Law of

Popular Participation, to Freirian-style alternative/adult education, or negotiation skills for engaging with multinationals. Similarly, many Bolivians who received degrees in social communication, sociology, and anthropology, put that training to work on NGO and donor-financed projects.

Bolivian academics and activists are increasingly dependent on the NGO sector for both their livelihoods and as vehicles for their own proyectos de vida (life projects), as many expressed it during our conversations.

The concept itself — having a proyecto de vida — even draws on the language of NGO and donor projects to articulate a sense of purpose. A proyecto de vida invokes life’s Vision and Mission statement, its objectives and indicators, where one’s gainful employment, political commitments, and life trajectory become intertwined. Much like a religious calling, for many of the ADR advocates I interviewed, this notion of constructing a proyecto de vida allowed them to articulate a sense of self that was deeply inflected by work on social issues, where NGOs and conflict resolution could not be reduced to a paycheck and a bump in class status. For NGO workers and culture of peace promoters, these were deeply meaningful projects.

But as Gustafson explains, throughout Latin America, social scientists “allied with movements for social change” have been criticized for becoming “agents of a depoliticizing, technocratic approach to development in support of the market” (2009: 137; cf Gill 1997 on “neoliberal” NGOs in El Alto). Along with Gustafson, I would argue that this critique sometimes flattens the dynamic ways social scientists and professional NGO workers have been involved in development programs that often straddle the line between pro-market programs and pro-indigenous social movements —

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appealing to decolonization while also promoting a variety of market-friendly projects. Like

Gustafson I am more interested in the ways researchers, NGO workers, and applied social scientists are “inseparably entangled” in the politics of these programs, whether they are organized around education or judicial reform, promoting empowerment through microcredit or sustainable development projects. As Gustafson insists, in Bolivia academic knowledge – often produced in collaboration with NGOs and donor agencies – has “constituted the battleground in the unsettled war over the future of the market, state and nation” (2009: 138).

This entanglement is particularly evident in the battle over how to achieve substantive equality, a responsive democratic system, and how justice should be enacted in a country with a large indigenous majority. How should Bolivia redress historical forms of social, political, and economic exclusion? For many of the people who have taken on the mantle of promoting a culture of peace and expanding the availability of ADR, their involvement reflects their own commitments to social justice, in addition to an opportunity to make a living in the increasingly lucrative realm of conflict resolution. ADR brokers are drawn by the promise of new resources – both economic and technical

– but often struggle with the contradictions and political baggage those resources entail. In the process, certain ways of talking about conflict — particularly by focusing on method and skill sets — have come to dominate the conversation.

Conclusion

William Roseberry has argued for using Gramsci’s concept of hegemony “not to understand consent but to understand struggle.” Roseberry’s key point is that the way people relate to the institutions, symbols, language, and other expressions of the dominant order of things is always

“shaped by the process of domination itself” (1994: 360-361). As Roseberry insists, “what hegemony constructs, then, is not a shared ideology but a common material and meaningful framework for living through, talking about, and acting upon social orders characterized by domination” (1994:

361). It is difficult to think, speak, or act outside of that framework. Thus the widespread use of the

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notion of promoting ADR is not merely a case of people using the master’s language to construct something wholly and radically other. It is not simply a “hidden transcript” in the sense that Scott describes some forms of subaltern resistance. Rather, ADR and its accompany discourse of promoting a “culture of peace,” is that meaningful framework through which people like Santiago,

Cecilia , Pamela, Esteban and countless others think about what it means to be politically engaged in

El Alto and in Bolivia more generally.

But ADR and culture of peace advocates like Santiago Mujica have not “autonomously chosen the particular issue over which they will struggle” (Roseberry 1994: 362). In the case of ADR and

Culture of Peace campaigns, foreign donors have largely defined the terms of contestation by defining the terms of financing, as well as by determining which kinds of institutions they wish to engage — for example, by increasingly targeting non-governmental organizations and civil society rather than state bureaucracies or government ministries. While Roseberry is particularly interested in the ways hegemony operates with regard to the state, his insights are also useful for considering the ways hegemony operates through a transnational network of foreign donors, international NGOs, and multilateral organizations.

This network of international actors and institutions are also part of the winnowing process; preoccupied with governance and civil society, they co-construct hegemonic discourses as well as the institutional arrangements, lines of funding, calls for projects, and a variety of other mechanisms which further narrow the terms of the debate about social conflict in Bolivia. And “to the extent that a dominant order establishes such legitimate forms of procedure, to the extent that it establishes not consent but prescribed forms of expressing both acceptance and discontent, it has established a common discursive framework” (ibid, 364). Nevertheless, as Roseberry and many other ethnographers studying such projects insist, the very people interpolated through these projects and discourses nevertheless “encounter inconsistencies that provide grist for critical insights” (Li 2007:

26; cf Tsing 2005). These are the fissures into which ADR’s brokers and intermediaries, make meaning, make policies, speak back to donors, strategically utilize donor language to obtain funding

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for their projects, and generally make their livelihoods in the field of conflict resolution. This is not flat resistance or total acquiescence, but rather something far more complex, dynamic, yet nonetheless circumscribed.

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CHAPTER FOUR

Between Compadres There is no Interest

“You are not part of this conflict.”

Nine people and a child have arranged themselves in a semi-circle in the back room of the

Integrated Justice Center. The room, which once housed ADR training sessions and celebratory group meals for volunteers, is now gathering dust. Several ceiling panels have gone missing, exposing the structure behind. Pigeons flutter and scrape between the corrugated plastic roof and foam ceiling.

Bird droppings speckle the salmon-colored walls and cake on the floor. As funding for training and community building has evaporated, staff now uses the space irregularly — for cases like this one, when a mass of people shows up for a conciliation session. Usually, Center staff siphon off all those extra people — explaining that only the two feuding parties may enter, except in cases involving minor children who are party to a dispute.

Parents, godparents (compadres), siblings and cousins of disputants regularly sit in clumps in the waiting room, or pace outside, beyond the spiked metal gate surrounding the Center. Unsure of what to do while they wait, these relatives buy Coca-Cola at the small corner store, whose business also specializes in photocopies, manila folders, timbres (judicial stamps), and other items clients must obtain during their sojourn in the Center and the adjacent courthouse. Sometimes feuding families engage in a little informal negotiating themselves, for example, quietly trying to repair relationships between their two households while a young couple works through their marital problems with the conciliator. Other times those families erupted into tense arguments or even physical altercations, and interns like myself scramble to intervene or call for the security guard. Periodically, anxious

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parents of adult children approach interns, imploring that they be allowed into the session, that they be allowed to speak, to offer their advice.

The response they get is often the same: conciliation is only between the two people directly involved in the conflict. But occasionally – like today, when these nine adults and a child are gathered in that semicircle – Dra. Paloma,1 the Center Director, will make an exception.

Dra. Paloma understands Aymara but has asked Alvaro, one of the Center’s interns, to help her with the translation for an elderly disputant (and I’ve been invited to observe the session).

Paloma and Alvaro stand before the thick wood table at the front of the room. A small child sidles up beside them and blinks back at the gathered crowd. An Aymara man in his 70s sits closest to the table. He wears a smart grey suit, baby blue button down shirt, and moss green fedora. The small feather tucked into the band of his hat and his lapel pin indicates that he is an Amauta (a wise or learned man, a kind of Andean philosopher). He stands to introduce himself as the younger nephew of the elderly woman at the center of this conciliation session. Her name is Doña Petrona and she is a slight woman in her 80s.

Doña Petrona sits silently through most of the session, her deeply-creased eyes gazing downward as she quietly gums her coca leaves. Her family has brought along a stout young lawyer who periodically wanders off into the waiting room to talk on his cell phone. Dra. Paloma has informed the family that he can sit in as an observer, but that he will not play a role in this conciliation session.

Several younger women de pollera2 sit like a Greek chorus behind Doña Petrona, clucking their worry and discontent.

1 Doctora and Doctor are terms used to indicate that a person is a lawyer. In Bolivia, people frequently invoke these formal titles to show respect and deference. For example, calling someone who has a professional degree “licenciado” (Licensed) or a lawyer “Doctor,” a person with an engineering degree is routinely called “ingeniero,” etc. 2 A Pollera is the thick, multitiered skirts worn by urban Aymara women. Bolivians often distinguish between women who dress de pollera (indigenous dress) and those who dress de vestido (in “Western” dress such as wearing jeans, trousers, or non-pollera skirts). The quality of the fabric and style communicate a great deal about a person’s class, whether one lives more in surrounding rural hamlets or in the city proper, among other things.

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A third, distinct pair sits apart in the semicircle: a husband and wife who have lived with

Doña Petrona in her small household compound for the last 12 years.

This complicated mass of people are all members of an extended network of biological and fictive kin — relatives and compadres trying to deal with a disagreement that has arisen between the elderly woman and the middle-aged couple. The compound where the couple has been living with

Doña Petrona is just one of thousands that fill El Alto: an enclosed patio with high adobe walls subdivided into smaller household units. Doña Petrona and the couple have been living in one such compound.

The couple — Gregoria and her husband Rene — has been paying 10Bs a month in rent

(roughly US$1.40). Over the course of their decade-long stay, however, they have also paid to install the water and sewage system in the compound, wired the house for electricity, and made other improvements. They are now seeking reimbursement for their investment: 4,000 bolivianos (or about

US$571.-).3 Doña Petrona and other members of the family reject their request and want them to vacate the premises. Those kin argue that the low rental cost should offset the price of the household improvements, and that Doña Petrona has no obligation to reimburse Gregoria and her husband.

As the Center’s Director, Dra. Paloma, explains the aims of conciliation, a 30-something woman leaps up in the back, identifying herself as a neighbor. Her voice trembles with anger or nerves and she punctuates her words with “Doctora” and “Doctorita,” showing her deference to

Paloma (who is a lawyer and middle-class professional, a bureaucrat) while trying to establish some intimacy and elicit sympathy (the diminutive “doctorita” is familiar). The woman is incensed.

Describing Doña Petrona’s plight, she implores, “She lives in misery. She lives with a dirt floor with just her little rabbit and a cat. No human should live that way.”4

3 The GDP per person (PPP) for 2011, according to the CIA World Factbook was US$4,800. 4 I come to understand that the 10bs rent was one of Doña Petrona’s few sources of income, probably along with whatever small bono she receives from the state.

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Dra. Paloma has allowed the full group of extended kin and neighbors into the conciliation room, but now interrupts the woman to rein in her participation: “Excuse me, Señora, but you, the neighbor, are not part of this conflict.”

By allowing Petrona’s extended family and neighbors into the room, Dra. Paloma has in some ways acknowledged the widespread expectation in El Alto that kin and other social relations should be present and involved in resolving the conflict. Nevertheless, Dra. Paloma quickly moves to reassert the dyadic nature of the conflict by silencing terceros: This conflict is between two parties, she insists. You, Señora, are not part of the conflict.

Doña Gregoria’s husband Rene interjects “To pay for gas, we worked hard. Water, electricity

— I have been generous enough to pay for all of these things [for the household].” The neighbor woman now stands indignantly and pets Doña Petrona’s shoulder: “She has suffered so much!”

Gregoria jumps in, “To pay for the installations I had to borrow from the bank! Forgive me, doctorita, but I have suffered to pay [for these improvements].”

Doña Petrona’s nephew, the elderly amauta, now speaks up, appealing to the group. “We are brothers, are we not?” [Somos hermanos,5 no ve?] he asks the room. But before he can get his footing to continue, his appeal to familial solidarity sparks an angry exchange of words.

More arguing ensues as Dra. Paloma tries to work the group toward a compromise, offering suggestions which different sides reject. Finally, Paloma exasperatedly throws her hands in the air to indicate the possibility of defeat: “This is not the court, I cannot do any more [than what I am doing].

Nobody is obligated to sign an accord here. Everyone needs to calm down. If you want to go the judicial route that can be done. If you cannot [resolve this dispute] by conciliation you can do so through the courts. You have your lawyer here, so you will have to rely on him.6“ After months of talking with Dra. Paloma about her approach, I have learned that this warning – and the theatrical

5 Hermanos — or brother and sisters — is the Spanish version of the Aymara terms kullakanaka and jilatanaka (sisters and brothers) used frequently in greeting and addressing groups among Aymara residents in El Alto. 6 The Director points out that because Petrona’s family already has legal council, if they go the legal route they will have to rely upon and -- pay for -- his services rather than the free conciliation services or Dra. Paloma’s services as a pro-bono lawyer, which is reserved for clients without legal representation

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arm gesture – is a common strategic device she uses. One of her tools for persuading stubborn, warring clients to compromise and opt for conciliation is to invoke their other option: the lengthy and often expensive formal legal system.7 Wouldn’t compromise be a better option? And indeed, compromise they often do.

Yet beyond immediate strategies for encouraging conciliation over the formal courts, the above exchange also points to a recurring tension in El Alto’s Integrated Justice Centers. It’s a tension between efforts to narrow the range of voices present in conciliation sessions to directly disputing parties, and efforts to respect people’s expectations that conflicts are best resolved through the active involvement of multiple intermediators. Those expectations are shaped by their experiences with rural Andean authorities (Mallkus) and kin (especially compadres) who frequently act as mediators when conflicts arise. They are also shaped by their experiences with state agents and local magistrates working in rural outposts. In many ways these expectations about conciliation and the role of conciliators are emblematic of what Boaventura de Sousa Santos (1995) has called

“interlegality.” As Santos explains, interlegality reflects the complicated ways multiple legal and moral orders become “superimposed, interpenetrated and mixed in our minds” and find expression in mundane, everyday encounters like those we saw at the Centers (1995: 473). My aim here is not to resolve these ongoing debates over how legal pluralism should be enacted in Bolivia, but rather to show what interlegality looks like ethnographically. But legal interpenetration is not the only explanation for why these tensions emerge.

This clash between ADR principals and local expectations is also provoked by the complexity of how such disputes actually occur in the everyday lives of Alteños — where social worlds and

7 Anthropologists have contributed to rich and sizable body of research on these kinds of tactics -- and their effects. Legal anthropology was particularly interested in these issues in the 1970s and 1980s as anthropological studies of conflict resolution / popular justice in village settings coincided with growing interest in the American Community Mediation movement (cf. Merry, Sally Engle & Neal Milner, eds. 1993). These works in comparative mediation include: Felstiner & Williams (1978), Abel (1979 and 1982), Nader (1969), Nader and Metzger (1963), Merry (1982), Greenhouse (1985), among many others. These works examine questions of mediator neutrality, appeals to shared norms, and mediators’ relationships to a hierarchy (or lack thereof) of other legal systems or the disputants themselves, training models and selection criteria for community mediators, among other themes shaping mediator tactics and efficacy. In particular, see Greenhouse (1985) for a review of some of these foundational debates.

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interpersonal conflicts cannot be reduced to neat dyads. At the heart of this chapter is a tension between ADR’s dyadic way of conceptualizing conflict and the social reality of El Alto residents — a conflict that is exemplified by relationships that are woven and frayed by multilayered exchanges of debt. When ADR scholars and practitioners talk about dyadic forms of conflict resolution, they are usually referring to “negotiation” between two parties without the aid of a third party mediator. The presence of a third party makes conciliation itself “triadic.” Here, however, I am using “dyad” to point to the ways that conciliators both conceptualized conflict and tried to impose order onto the conflicts they were helping to resolve amid conflicting expectations. I use “dyad” to highlight how

Center staff regularly slough-off “terceros” or third parties, winnowing the group down to the two people in conflict despite further complexity. In ADR’s cosmology, this sloughing off of terceros is also a matter of more deeply penetrating into the unspoken needs and interests fueling a conflict, below the surface noise generated by third parties.

To get at that tension between ADR in practice and Alteños’ social worlds, I examine the overlay between conflicts we saw in the Integrated Justice Centers and practices related to compadrazgo or co-parenting/god parenting. Compadrazgo deeply shapes the ways that Alteños think about themselves and their relationships to others. It would be difficult to overstate the power of compadrazgo as a means of knitting together and extending social ties in Bolivia, creating expansive webs of intimacy and obligation, care and mutual indebtedness (Van Vleet 2008; Leinaweaver 2008;

Lazar 2004; Koch 2006; Albro 2000). These debt-laden relationships are vital to social life in El Alto, and produce understandings of the self as constituted by these intersubjective relationships. Yet those social ties are also taxed by the very practices that help to (re)constitute them, including lending practices. Thus the tension provoked by the dyad is not merely a disjuncture between notions of personhood and practices of ADR (e.g. between Liberal concepts of the self and Andean ones).

Rather, practices of compadrazgo deeply shape the kinds of conflicts we saw in the Integrated Justice

Centers, where disputants are often entangled in complex webs of debt (both material and moral) that map onto extended kin relations.

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Accordingly, this chapter aims to do two things: 1) To show how everyday social practices in

El Alto chafe against some of the assumptions guiding ADR interventions in the city — with the effect of stripping those interpersonal conflicts of their political meaning, and 2) To offer some context for understanding social life in El Alto and the work of the Integrated Justice Centers. In doing so, I hope to lay the groundwork for the two chapters that follow, and to begin to demonstrate how good faith efforts to improve the lives or ordinary Alteños may nevertheless fail to offer lasting solutions to the problems they face.

I begin by considering how El Alto’s Integrated Justice Centers constitute one site where ideas about legal pluralism intersect with practices of interlegality in the everyday encounters between staff and clients. I then turn my attention to the broader context of social and economic life in Alto

Lima, where many of these disputants identify as comerciantes or merchants in the District’s vast marketplaces. I then hone in on practices of compadrazgo, which shape personhood, lending practices, and people’s expectations of how conflicts will be resolved when they come to the Centers. In the final section I look at the interplay between compadrazgo, interpersonal lending, and clients’ use of conciliation services in Alto Lima. As I show, ADR’s dyadic approach to conflict resolution often overwrites the complex ways that conflicts in Alto Lima are intertwined, treating their separation as a practical, technical matter. I conclude with a meditation on how the forms of sociality I describe in this chapter — which have served as the basis for many micro lending programs — are increasingly viewed as impediments to entrepreneurial forms of subjectivity, namely the kinds of friendship and kinship that are expressed through alcohol consumption.

Throughout this chapter I highlight the ways conciliators must often disentangle unwieldy, multi-faceted conflicts involving multiple, overlapping parties to make them more manageable, but with little opportunity for considering recurring patterns in debt conflicts. But beyond showing how these artificial simplifications provoke tension, misunderstanding, frustration, or discomfort, my larger point in this chapter is a political one: efforts to produce neat dyads are not merely a conflict management tactic. Ultimately, they have enormous consequences for how conflicts in El Alto are

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conceptualized and treated — by disputants, state agents, and nongovernmental agencies seeking to intervene into El Alto’s (and Bolivia’s) so-called hyper “conflictiveness.”

Interlegality, Authority, and Conciliation

As Bolivian legal scholars, anthropologists, activists, and government officials increasingly grapple with how, exactly, Bolivia’s 2009 Constitution will enact judicial pluralism, many people have turned their attention to places like Jesus de Machaca, one of the first communities to apply for recognition as an indigenous autonomous region with its own constitution, statutes, and mechanisms for resolving conflict. Places like Jesus de Machaca have become emblematic of indigenous demands for autonomous political power and the Morales Administration’s transformative political platform

(el proceso de cambio), which Evo has framed as a direct response to social movements. As I conducted research, however, the Ministry of Autonomy and Ministry of Justice were still working through the statutes that would make it possible to enact these political visions concretely, spawning workshops and national conferences, Op-Ed pieces and scholarly debates about legal pluralism, liberal democracy, and jurisdictional limits. Yet this unfinished state-restructuring project was sometimes paralleled in El Alto’s Integrated Justice Centers. District 6 Director, Dra. Paloma Gil would reminisce about the times in recent years when community leaders from rural hamlets — known as

Mallkus — would come to the Center to contest the jurisdiction and moral authority of conciliators to resolve disputes that they saw as their domain. Other times, she recalled, community authorities would seek her services on conflicts they had failed to resolve, hoping she might have better luck.

Interns were often perplexed with how to direct inquiries for clients whose conflicts spanned both their rural, natal communities and their urban dwellings in Alto Lima; anxious that they would be

“observed” or reprimanded by the judge or his staff for overstepping their jurisdiction, interns would redirect those inquiries to the central offices at the Ministry of Justice for clarification.

Coincidentally, Alvaro, the young legal intern who was helping to translate Doña Petrona’s session above, was involved with the team working to design the statutes of the new autonomia indigena

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(indigenous autonomy) in Jesus de Machaca. He linked his own nascent legal career to helping

“plurinational” Bolivia resolve what autonomia indigena would really mean in practice.

In some ways, the conciliation session between Petrona, Gregoria, and Rene reflects

Bolivia’s struggle to implement legal pluralism in miniature. A conciliator and an amauta are present, all appealing to their (moral or bureaucratic) authority at different times in an effort to resolve this dispute. A lawyer skulks around in the background, a reminder of the formal legal system hovering just beyond failed attempts at mediation — as does Dra. Paloma’s warning about the courts. But the presence — and silencing — of terceros points to a more subtle tension. Rather than legal pluralism, this tension is perhaps more reflective of what legal scholar Boaventura de Sousa Santos has called

“interlegality.”

Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ notion of interlegality is useful for getting beyond the reductive, billiard-ball approach to legal pluralism. It is also useful for understanding how Center staff, conciliators, and jurists tried to make sense of the practices of their clients — and their own assumptions about how ADR should function. As Santos explains, interlegality,

is not the legal pluralism of traditional legal anthropology, in which the different legal order are conceived as separate entities coexisting in the same political space, but rather, the conception of different legal spaces superimposed, interpenetrated and mixed in our minds, as much as in our actions, either on occasions of qualitative leaps or sweeping crises in our life trajectories, or in the dull routine of eventless everyday life” (1995: 473).

My aim here is not to resolve these ongoing debates over how legal pluralism should be enacted, but rather to examine the ways that interlegality shapes how people experience and relate to ADR as they utilize the services offer by the Integrated Justice Centers, as well as how Center staff imagine the role they should play in mediating these normative tensions. So what does interlegality look like ethnographically? I want to suggest that the interpenetration of multiple legal and moral orders was evident in the ways people imagined how disputes should and would be resolved when they came to the Center in District 6.

Frequently, after explaining how Alternative Dispute Resolution worked, conciliators would find themselves in the position of having clients ask them to render judgments, despite their

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insistence that participants needed to assume responsibility for negotiating their own solutions. It was a recurring request, one I witnessed repeatedly and that conciliators mentioned in our interviews:

“People always expect me to render a judgment. I have to tell them, I’m not a judge, I can’t decide for you. I cannot make you sign any document.” One interpretation of this pattern might be that

Clients simply misunderstand the conciliation process due to a lack of experience with it or an unclear explanation at the outset (cf Nader 1980); maybe they mistake the conciliator for a judge, just as many people couldn’t quite understand the separation between the judges quarters and Center meant to demarcate a space between the formal and informal. Or, it might reflect, as some conciliators insisted, a matter of human psychology: people want an affirmation for their perspective

— and judgment in their favor — despite the fact that conciliation is intended to elicit mutually- beneficial solutions. This is an argument that has circulated among critics of informal justice since the early 1980s: People want to have their views and positions affirmed, and want to utilize the state to do so (cf Abel 1982: 8; Merry 1990). To paraphrase Merry (1990), people want justice, and they want to get even.

In the Bolivian context, this constant appeal to the intervention of the conciliator to adjudicate the conflict may also reflect people’s experiences with dispute resolution practices in rural hamlets, where authorities are responsible for managing conflicts: allowing people to air their grievances

(often with extended family and the larger community present), and then adjudicating solutions with appeals to both shared norms and community mechanisms of enforcement. Yet many clients and their families come to accept Conciliators’ efforts to weed-out non-directly involved disputants. Their families patiently (if anxiously) await the outcome of sessions, nodding their understanding of why they might be excluded.

By examining these expectations through the lens of interlegality, we might avoid some of the pitfalls of the legal pluralism model, which can re-inscribe tropes about some rural-urban/Indian- mestizo divide. In practice, Andean Bolivians regularly circulate between rural hamlets and large cities; they appeal to both Mallkus in their natal communities and presidents of the urban neighborhood

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association to help adjudicate disputes. And, they rely on compadres de matrimonio (godparents of a matrimony) to offer advice and to “correct” the behavior of young couples gone astray.

Nevertheless, experiences with authorities in those rural natal communities, as well as experiences with judges and other state officials, may shape people’s expectation of how a dispute will be resolved.

Conciliators and interns frequently tried to make sense of the expectations clients brought to their sessions, including expectations about the role of the conciliator. Some, like Dra. Sonia, narrated it with exasperation: after so many countless appeals that she render judgment, she was baffled by the inability of people to “take responsibility” for their own solutions. Others saw a direct relationship between people’s culturally informed expectations and their requests – though their prescriptions for handling those tensions differed. Sebastián Costa, for example, saw it as a cultural norm that demanded transformation. For Alvaro, it was a cultural expectation worthy of respect and accommodation in plurinational Bolivia.

Consider how Alvaro -- the young, Aymara legal intern -- reflected on Dona Petrona’s case after the session ended:

Dra. Paloma has asked Doña Petrona’s group to take a quarto-intermedio (recess) to reflect on their positions before trying, once more, to reach a solution. As we wait, Alvaro asks me how

Americans think about conciliation. I offer a simple definition: that the conciliator is a third party trained to facilitate communication and help disputing parties arrive at their own, mutually-beneficial and jointly agreed-upon solution.

Alvaro responds, “Sure, an academic could say that about the role of the conciliator, but you have to remember, a humble citizen isn’t going to think that way. He’s going to think [of the conciliator] in terms of authority. That’s the difference between an academic and the people here…Who are the people who come to the Center? What is their birthplace? Their origins? Their reality?”

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“Largely, they are from the provinces?” I offer. “I have seen the case files, I know that most were born in the [rural] provinces but now they live in El Alto and return to their home communities periodically — although the younger generation was often born here.”

“Exactly,” Alvaro nods. “They are from the provinces, so their reality is in the province from which they have migrated. Their cultural roots are in the countryside. Under what logic do they understand how to resolve disputes? Under the logic of an authority — to see authority is to respect it; it is not a synonym with mockery. It is respect. Authority is almost sacramental, but this is why authority exists — you must offer your services [as an authority] as a free social service.” As we speak, Alvaro builds his argument: People using ADR services at the CIJ are primarily rural indigenous in origin, and that accordingly, “however long they have been in the city, their expectation is that authorities enact a kind of sacramental leadership, a role that demands respect and reverence, and that the person in the conciliator role should understand that cultural context and carry out their sessions accordingly.

“You have to take culture into account,” Alvaro concludes. “Some say that the law is a normative product. But I think it is always going to be a cultural product.”

When pressed to offer his version of what “culturally-appropriate” conciliation might look like, Alvaro called for more formalism, verticalism, and ritual that would mimic people’s expectations

— expectations, he insisted, that were transposed from their experience with rural authorities. In doing so, Alvaro argued against some of the primary aims celebrated by many ADR advocates, including building toward horizontal relations that do not rely on an external imposition by an adjudicator. Thus Alvaro — and other staff — interpreted the constant appeal to the conciliator as the ultimate arbiter of the decision may reflect people’s experiences with the formal courts and their understanding of how judges work, but also how community authorities manage disputes in their rural hamlets (cf Abercrombie 1998: 87).

The concept of interlegality is also useful for understanding how Center staff, conciliators, and jurists tried to make sense of the practices and expectations of their clients — and their own

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assumptions about how ADR should function. What Alvaro identifies as a quality meriting respect and accommodation, Sebastián Costa characterized as vertical, authoritarian logics that required transformation. And unlike Alvaro, other conciliators saw this “culturally-informed” expectation of authority as the explicit target for transformation. This clash was civilizational, one that demanded gentle yet firm guidance — toward new forms of self-actualization.

As I show in the following sections, one of the practices that most provoked consternation among both clients and staff was the presence of terceros or third parties — the gaggle of kin many clients brought along to their appointments. The presence of terceros is emblematic of some of the ways personhood is constructed in the Andes. This understanding of personhood — where a person is comprised of her relationships with others knit together through practices such as compadrazgo — is regularly reasserted through everyday and ritual practices, and has enormous emotional and material consequences for people’s lives. But it also structured many of the conflicts that people brought to the Integrated Justice Centers.

To help contextualize my discussion of the relationship between debt and kinship, conflict and compadrazgo let me begin by offering a glimpse into life in District 6’s energetic commercial zones, where many of the Center’s clients work. I will then turn to the practices of compadrazgo that shape so much of social life in El Alto, and how commerce and kinship are intertwined. Finally, I will consider what those practices mean for how people approach conciliation, but also for how they experience and cope with economic insecurity — and how these social and economic practices intersect, ultimately bringing people to the Centers to mediate lending conflicts with their kin.

Life in Alto Lima

The road to Alto Lima and the Integrated Justice Center is paved in pollera shops and microfinance institutions. The market stalls and lending agencies that line these streets are central to the lives and livelihoods of the people living in District 6, but they also fuel many of the conflicts that bring residents to the legal aid and conciliation center there. District 6 is comprised of many small

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neighborhoods, but it is most famous for the sprawling 16 de Julio open-air market, which unfurls twice a week — on Thursdays and Sundays.

16 de Julio’s broad commercial avenue is lined with multi-story brick and concrete structures with enormous picture windows where shopkeepers display their wares. These permanent storefronts sell the tools of El Alto’s many informal trades: hand-operated and high-powered electric sewing machines, huge warehouses selling spindly metal gas ranges and the pushcarts used by itinerant food peddlers, large plastic tubs women use to wash clothes or clean yarn for knitting alpaca shawls.

Fashion savvy seamstresses display their most striking or cutting-edge pollera styles and color combinations. Other storefronts boast a variety of ornate Morenada costumes they rent to neighborhood associations planning their anniversary entrada (dance parade). Jewelry shops carefully display the extravagant gold and pearl broaches worn by Aymara women on special occasions — when dancing or serving as patron for those entradas. And in among these storefronts, the avenue is punctuated with the brightly-painted satellite offices of microfinance institutions, and the omnipresent concrete rooms rented by prestamistas or moneylenders.

On Thursdays and Sundays vendors erect temporary stands that overtake the streets of 16 de

Julio. Shop owners unfold wooden stands where they sell tennis shoes and tracksuits, sweater sets and pollera petticoats, decorative plastic flowers and soccer balls. Like most commercial districts in

Bolivia, products and produce are organized thematically. Blocks of electronics and plumbing supplies give way to used cars and used clothing, cleaning supplies, stacked crates of newborn chicks and guinea pigs. Produce vendors hawk mottled pink and yellow sweet potatoes known as oka, while butchers display thick, elongated cow’s tongue. Along the periphery of the market, small metal shacks are home to Yatiris (traditional healers) and vendors who prepare mesas (offerings to the

Pachamama) according to the particular yearnings or challenges each customer is facing. They cobble together candies shaped like desired objects (a house, a car, a sign of better health), bright cotton, tinsel, and incense, and then pack the offering in butcher paper until it can be burned. Taxis heavily laden with wooden wardrobes or mattresses lurch slowly among the throngs of people. Along the

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periphery of 16 de Julio, less-established vendors drape blue plastic tarps over dusty stretches of packed earth and unload huge mounds of lower-quality used American clothing. Many items still bear the tags from Goodwill and the Salvation Army, where they originated before being shipped in massive containers to ports in Chile, distributed to middlemen on the coast, and then redistribute them to vendors in El Alto.8 Here on the edge of the market, El Alto drops off precipitously into the gaping bowl of La Paz.

The seamstresses, part-time prestamistas (moneylenders), and storefront butchers working in 16 de Julio and neighborhood markets are the primary clients of District 6’s Integrated Justice Center.

Many residents of District 6 migrated to El Alto during the 1980s and 1990s from rural Andean hamlets, alongside the droves of miners who were “relocated” from “capitalized” mines like Catavi and Siglo XX (as I described in Chs. 1 & 2). Others have settled in El Alto far more recently. But like much of El Alto, the residents of District 6 are often on the move: circulating back and forth to their natal communities in the rural provinces where they continue to plant potatoes and quinoa in family plots, act as patrons for an annual fiesta or serve a term among their community’s rotating leadership roles (both critical to continuing to lay claim to land and prestige in the community). Others migrate for stretches of time to Brazil to work in garment factories, or try-out Cochabamba’s warmer climate, returning to El Alto for brief visits or longer stays.

Every year El Alto’s unpaved streets turn churning brown rivers during the stormy summer months when the temperatures reach into the 60s — downright balmy for the city’s 13,000 feet.

Aymara women in plastic flats step delicately through the mud as they enter building. They scrape their shoes vigorously against the stone steps and remove their bowler hats — which they wear wrapped in plastic bags to protect the expensive felt from the recurring rain. It’s a funny sight: women in elegant, multi-tiered pollera skirts and glittering, sparkle-encrusted shawls, a plastic bag- engulfed hat balanced delicately on their heads.

8 Used clothes vendors often specialize in selling higher, mid, or lower-end items.

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And when these potential clients come to the Integrated Justice Centers, they often bring along sisters and mothers, cousins and compadres, aunties and neighbors. Much like Doña Petrona, they bring along a lot of kin. They bring along terceros. Those kin are often as important to people’s lives and livelihoods as the commercial endeavors they undertake in the markets. But they are also central to how people experience conflict and seek its resolution.

Personhood, Compadres and Conciliation

In urban El Alto, multigenerational household compounds frequently shelter extended kin networks: adult siblings and their spouses, parents, grandchildren, sometimes elderly aunts or others unable to care for themselves, as well as unrelated tenants. Plots of land are divided into smaller units within a single walled compound, or families build upward, adding uneven concrete floors and skeletal brick structures that they leave unfinished until the family can accumulate enough money to finish the project. These rough exteriors mask interior walls plastered smooth and painted eggshell white, bright yellow, or salmony pink. But El Alto is not an economically homogenous city.

Displaced miners helped establish El Alto’s older, middle class neighborhoods with finished cottages, full plumbing, gas installations, and decorative gates.

These neat, settled neighborhoods give way to unfinished homesteads, where adobe bricks temporarily fill the empty brick frames until a family can gather the funds necessary to complete the project. El Alto is now famous for its glaringly bright “Chalets” — multi-storied homes painted in various shades of neon or sporting gleaming tile exteriors and reflective glass siding. These towering homes sometimes include parlors rented for birthday parties and wedding celebrations.9 They are testimonies to accruing wealth and comfort in a city that is often misrepresented as universally poor.

They dot the dusty grey-brown landscape with shocking blues and oranges, alongside the soaring,

German-style church spires that El Alto’s charismatic missionary priest, Father Sebastian Obermaier, has made his life’s work. The solid brick structures of Alto Lima’s commercial district and the 16 de

9 Many homes in El Alto are mixed commercial-residential, with small businesses operating out of the ground floor.

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Julio market transitions to mixed brick and adobe compounds that are unevenly connected to sewage, electricity, and paved roads.

El Alto’s extended family units frequently — though not always — reflect the virilocal practices of rural Andean communities, with women moving to live with their in-laws. In those intimate spaces, kin share the daily activities of washing clothes, caring for children, and tending to a few sheep or small brood of chickens. They also share troubles and frustrations — a son who stumbles home drunk after a soccer match to a fight with his young wife in the wee hours of the morning, a daughter-in-law’s moneylender coming to collect and making scandal while neighbors watch through their windows, a bank that spray-paints the adobe outer walls “defaulting debtor,” a brother’s former common-law wife trying to serve him court papers for child support.

As I have shown elsewhere (Ellison MA, 2009) an enormous amount of work goes into producing what scholars frequently describe as Bolivia’s “collective subjectivities,” or the intersubjective relations of care and obligation that shape domestic as well as political relations in El

Alto’s trade unions and neighborhood associations. These are not some essentially Andean trait, but rather are everyday social practices that reinforce the importance of meeting social and political obligations — obligations that sometimes grate against personal desires or economic constraints. For example, the obligation to contribute that case of beer at a wedding celebration despite mounting debts (a scenario I address in the following chapter), or the slip of paper left by your neighborhood association reminding you that you will be fined10 if you fail to attend a protest march on the

Ministry of Education — despite having to miss a day’s work (and therefore a day’s income) selling produce in the market.

One of the most powerful ways Bolivians construct extended kin relations through the practice of compadrazgo, or co-parenting. Families name godparents for a child’s baptism, rutucha (the rite of the first haircut) or a first communion. Young couples also select godparents for their weddings. Ideally, godfathers (padrinos) and godmothers (madrinas) will continue to play a role in a

10 A “multa” or fine. See Ellison 2009.

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child’s life, and will forevermore be addressed deferentially as such. But the term compadre or comadre refers to a different relationship. It’s the relationship between the parents of those children and the godparent. That is, compadres are co-parents to that child; the relationship god parenting forges is not merely between the godmother and her godson, but rather between the two forms of parentage. First names fall out of usage. Between adults, comadre and compadre become an almost singular means of address. It is both solicitous and affectionate. Those relationships are keenly felt and ritually reasserted; they are also lived out in the everyday practices of rearing children, loaning money, unloading potatoes to share during an apthapi (shared meal), p’ichando coca leaves, and other mundane and spiritually-inflected moments people share as they go about their lives. Through compadrazgo, people extend these kin networks outward, inviting others to share those responsibilities and in doing so, to be drawn into an ever-expanding web of care and obligation.

As Andeanists have shown, such compadrazgo networks constitute broader social ties in which people are deeply nested; rather than seeing individuals as connected to others through these ties, anthropologists have insisted that the intersubjective relations produced through god parenting and other forms of kinship constitute the person herself: an individual is not merely tied to others.

Rather, she is made up of, or knit together by, those thickly interwoven ties (cf Sahlins 2011 on kinship as a “mutuality of being”; Strathern 1988 on “dividuals” versus individuals). Compadrazgo or co-parenting is one of the principal practices through which relatedness and its accompanying expectations about obligation and care are constantly asserted and re-asserted (Van Vleet 2008;

Leinaweaver 2008; Lazar 2004; Koch 2006; Albro 2000).

Compadres ideally provide spiritual and material sustenance to their godchildren, compadrazgo is also a principal mechanism for resolving disputes. When a young couple marries, for example, they choose compadres de matrimonio, godparents of the marriage. Those godparents usually an older married couple — one that has shown itself able to cope with the challenges of married life, who can act as mentors to the young couple and to whom they can turn when conflicts arise. During intake sessions at the Center, clients often described seeking out the advice and mediation of their compadres de

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matrimonio during fights over drinking, household expenses, or accusations of infidelity. These were not the imagined neutral third party mediator of ADR, but rather an intimately involved padrino or madrina (plural: padrinos) who was part of the larger social network of the couple, who would sometimes chastise or comfort, encourage or rebuke their godchildren,11 but would also act as a kind of (re)conciliator.12 Sometimes that intermediary padrino enacted what critics like Laura Nader describe as a “harmony ideology” at the expense of exposing and ending abuse. Other times, padrinos worked to chasten abusive spouses or to offer refuge to a godchild who chose to leave the marriage.

And often, those padrinos and compadres — along with a gaggle of other kin — accompanied residents of District 6 when they came to the Integrated Justice Centers seeking guidance.

This practice of bringing along extended family members — and the expectations it reflected

— was unevenly addressed in the Centers where I worked and interviewed staff. Interns anticipated this practice and would warn clients that only they and the invitee would be allowed into the conciliator’s office for the session. Usually conciliators would explicitly forbid additional parties

(terceros) from entering the session, forcing disputants to identify the primary individuals in conflict, and requiring others to wait outside. Occasionally, those extended families would break into fights, or would try to do a little extra-institutional conflict resolution among themselves while they waited.

Dissatisfied fathers or other kin would continue to beg permission to enter.

By weeding out terceros, Conciliators were asserting the boundaries of dispute management, and also articulating an ideal of how conflict should be resolved. Conciliators who forbid the entry of terceros argued that family members usually worsened conflicts as they brought their own sensibilities and influence to bear on problems. Several conciliators gave examples of young couples whose

11 As a godmother of seven (!) I was sometimes asked to play such an intermediary role, though as a young unmarried woman it was not expected that I had the life experience or authority to speak to quarreling spouses. But I was asked to weigh in on certain family conflicts and engage in behind-the-scenes negotiations, working parties toward a willingness to resume communication during fights. 12 Many early studies of mediation tended to consider “mediation’s varied forms and functions” (Greenhouse 1985) and sought to identify comparable and incomparable mediator practices for ethnographic study. See for example Greenhouse’s 1985 discussion of the “inclusive” versus “exclusive” forms of third party mediation variety of “socio-cultural context[s]” they reflect. In Greenhouse’s 1985 review of the early literature on the relationship of third party mediators to the disputing parties, she discusses how these relationships shape mediator tactics.

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quarrels were exacerbated by meddling in-laws or other nosey family members. On the cusp of reaching an agreement, they told me, those extended family members could send a conflict spiraling out of control and undermine all the hard work that had been done to bring the two parties to a solution.

Some conciliators — like Dra. Paloma — would occasionally incorporate family members into the conciliation process, bringing the rag-tag bunch of aunties, compadres, and squirming children into the larger back room for an extended session where they too could weigh-in on the conflict.

Nevertheless, Paloma believed that practice shouldn’t be the norm. Instead, she told me, “only the interested parties should enter — in reality the family shouldn’t be there because sometimes they make things worse.” It was a view born of her experiences working in the Center for eight years, where she came to see as extended families as a barrier to successful conciliation — not during the session itself, but afterward. On her first day on the job in 2004, Paloma was “thrown into the pool like somebody who doesn’t know how to swim” and asked to conciliate a dispute between a young couple. “I had no idea what conciliation was!” she told me. But Paloma, with the help of an experienced neighborhood volunteer, helped the couple reach an agreement. Then the couple left her office— and things quickly soured. She explained, “we had it really well conciliated and then the couple went out side and their relatives grabbed hold of them and once again started the conflict, and we had to conciliate all over again.”

Those experiences led Paloma to devise a plan where she would meet with extended families after conciliation to try to explain the agreement, anticipating their intervention:

What I decided to do was to first conciliate the two parts and ask the family to wait outside, and then I would call the family in and explain to them ‘they have decided,’ so the family would understand and support [their decision] and maybe hug and give kisses and calm down — it’s best to calm people down that way. I’m not conciliating as much as I used to, but the practice is the same. I bring the family in and explain, “this is the agreement they have reached” because I don’t want them to think I imposed it. Because that’s a big problem in the courts — the case ends and everyone goes out and attacks each other. It’s important that it’s just the two parties. I once said as a joke, “do you live and eat together? Do you sleep with her too? NO? Then no, [it’s not your problem].”

But Dra. Paloma’s approach to managed inclusion did not seem to be the norm.

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For some ADR advocates I spoke with in Bolivia, this was a sociological difference that demanded transformation for the good of the people involved. As Sebastián Costa, a conciliator working in the peri-urban District 4 told me, “There is a clash of visions between the Integrated

Justice Centers with their Western visions that establish that it is the generators of the conflict who should generate the solutions: those individuals.” Costa agreed that conflict resolution practices in rural communities often involved extended families and other neighbors who would seek the advice and adjudication of Mallkus or indigenous authorities. But those practices, he insisted, were unproductive, instead “generating dependency, taking away people’s power of decision. If you are interested in generating a culture of peace you have to be willing to question these ‘traditional’ practices,” he told me.

Conciliators like Costa acknowledged how this nested way of understanding oneself and one’s relationship to others shaped how people sought to resolve disputes. He reported that disputing parties frequently arrived at conciliation sessions in his District with extended kin networks in tow, and with the expectation that people like padrinos of the marriage would be able to tener la palabra

(have the word, or be allowed to speak — an oft-invoked phrase in Bolivia). He was sympathetic to the impulse. But, he told me, these practices were ultimately destructive, not conducive to people taking personal responsibility for their conflicts and their resolution. They needed to be replaced with new values that would enable — empower — individuals to direct their own lives. Others were not convinced. Alvaro, for example, watched these tensions unfold in District 6 and offered his own critique: “Western” ADR assumptions and methods — the idea of isolating the conflicting parties from their kin — was incommensurate with how clients imagined and related to their social worlds, and therefore should be amended to accommodate those practices and expectations.

As I’ve shown, conciliation appointments became spaces where clients’ expectations of authority, conflict and its resolution, and the role of terceros like compadres and other kin often chafed against ADR’s dyadic approach to disputing and the underlying assumptions it represented: that individuals alone should be responsible for resolving their interpersonal conflicts. In the approach

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advocated and practiced by many conciliators, the third party mediator merely serves as a mechanism to facilitate the work of the dyad, to teach and empower clients to exercise personal responsibility.

That might be, as Cecilia Ibáñez had envisioned, an opportunity to learn self reliance in the face of an unresponsive or absent state. Or, as Sebastián Costa of District 4 hoped, an opportunity for Clients to turn inward for solutions rather than relying on family members, whose presence at best complicated, at worst escalated, interpersonal conflicts. Or, as Dr. José Pérez of District 1 articulated,

ADR offered people a chance to grow and take responsibility, to learn to embody a culture of peace.

In all of these visions, the focus of the work being done is first and foremost on one’s interior self.

There is a theory of the person at work in these ADR sessions that often stands in tension with other ways of experiencing or imagining personhood: A person is like a closed system, an isolated whole, who comes into contact with another, similarly independent person. These two people may find themselves in conflict, and can and should be able to bear the responsibility for negotiation a solution between the two, with the aid of a mediator to keep them on track when old angers or unarticulated desires arise. This understanding of personhood strains against the social practices that construct personhood as nested in and indeed comprised of social relationships — who are often both party to a conflict and to its resolution.

But the tension between the dyadic approach to personhood and personal responsibility that is emblematic in these efforts to filter out terceros is also indicative of just how difficult it is to compartmentalize conflicts in El Alto, especially as they occur among extended kin networks. Doña

Gregoria’s reference to the debts she incurred helping to improve the household compound she shared with her elderly relative, Doña Petrona, invokes a broader range of conflicts we saw at the

Centers, particularly revolving around debts that mapped onto kin relations. As I watched Alto

Limeños come to the Center trying to resolve conflicts between neighbors and kin over financial and social obligations, I also observed staff compartmentalize conflicts into isolated pairs. As I show,

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imposing that neat dyad on to disputes — like filtering out terceros — often failed to reflect the sociological reality of Center clients — and the tangled webs of disputes they brought to conciliation.

This is not merely an ideological or conceptual difference (e.g. between liberal notions of personhood as unfettered from social constraints and collective subjectivities or notions of a “dividual” self

(Strathern 1988).13 Rather, I am arguing that it is a sociological difference in the ways people understand themselves in relation to others as well as how those forms of sociality structure the kinds of conflicts we saw at the Integrated Justice Centers. This tension over terceros also reflects real differences between how ADR conceptualizes conflict and how Alteños experience the conflicts they bring to the Centers. In the Integrated Justice Centers, these tensions came to a head in conflicts over debt. Examining the ways lending relationships produce both kin and conflict helps us get away from timeless, romanticized notions of Andean subjectivities by instead seeing how those subjectivities as well as the social ties that comprise them are forged and unmade through practices such as lending. In doing so, I am attentive to the critique made by Sahlins (2011) that anthropological discussions of personhood — drawing on Strathern’s work on “dividual” selves — often conflate personhood and kinship. Sahlins cautions against confusing the idea of a partible self with the social practices through which the “mutuality of being” is made and unmade. My interest here is to push past discussion of personhood to show how lending practices both create kin (care giving through money both expresses and produces kin) while also creating conflicts that resist dyadic forms of resolution.

As I show in the remainder of this chapter and the two that follow, debts were one of the primary reasons people came to the Centers pursuing conciliation. But while conciliation seeks to isolate conflicts between disputing parties, debts like the ones described here belie the sociological reality of those debts and their resulting conflicts: they cannot be reduced to dyadic relationships

13 For example, the notion of “dividual” as a Melanesian understanding of personhood (Strathern 1988) among other concepts meant to capture the mutually-imbricated or plural or partible selves and forms of interdependence belonging that do not fit neatly into liberal notions of the individual. cf Sahlins 2011 on the dangers of making dividual into “a universal form of pre-modern subjectivity” owing to “some confusion between personhood and kinship relations, with its corollary conflation of partibility and participation” (13).

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between disputing parties. Thus conciliation sessions over debt both exposed the ways Microfinance has mapped onto existing social networks among the poor residents of El Alto — especially women

— and the limits of ADR for redressing some of the primary sources of (sometimes violent) conflict in the city.

While conciliators tried to simplify and isolate conflicts in order to construct “actionable” accords, these conflicts reveal just how artificial the boundaries between disputants, disputes, and terceros (third parties) really are in practice. As I discuss further below, this practice of compartmentalizing such disputes — or insisting on the dyadic nature of individual debt conflicts — may contribute to the further depoliticization of debt conflicts in El Alto. By asserting the dyad, conciliation encourages the circumvention of the state rather than seeing these conflicts as a part of a pattern — a broader social phenomenon — which may require more robust, interventionist state policies to achieve the kind of justice people seek. Let me give an example for one such conciliation session.

Between Compadres There is no Interest

On this bright October morning, the Center conciliator calls me into her office. She is swamped with a conciliation appointment that is taking longer than expected. Another tangle of extended families is waiting for their session. She asks if I can get things started, outline conciliation, help them start working through the issues until she can take over to formalize the agreement — if they can reach one.

There are two issues, she explains to me, pulling out a sheet of paper. “A debt between two men, and then another woman who has shown up saying she is also owed a debt from the first man.”

She draws me a diagram:

Person who made loan to (1) —> (2) Debtor, (3)Person who made loan —> person (1)

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“Be emphatic,” she tells me, “you are dealing with one loan, and then the other. Separately.”

First up, Hilario and Ignacia owe −−> Severino and Nieves14

I start by explaining conciliation, using a variation of the script I have learned working at the

Center, and invite Don Severino, who has called for the conciliation, to explain what happened. Don

Severnino is a badger of a man. He is also quite possibly drunk — an issue I raised with the conciliator, who encouraged me to continue anyway since he has insisted he is only a little hungover from the previous night. “I am,” he insists, “perfectly able to continue.” Compact but muscular, Don

Severino’s hair is a thick crown of curls. He is regularly on his feet, shouting, speaking over people, while his wife tries to shush him, slapping at his arm. As I have learned in my training, I repeatedly remind them that if we cannot remain respectful we will have to suspend the appointment until people are in a better frame of mind to do conciliation. This admonition usually brings everyone back to their seats. We spend the next hour talking through their frustrations and grievances, trying to move from accusations to a working agreement they can take to the conciliator for finalization and formalization in a written accord.

Severino explains that his neighbor, Hilario, approached him, asking for a loan. “He came crying to me, ‘I owe this bank, that bank, another bank. Please lend me some money.’ I gave him a loan for a week. But he never paid. He did give me 150bs (approx US$21.50), but that was just for interest.” Both parties still understand the remaining amount to be 500bs or roughly US$71.-

Hilario, his hair thinning, his mouth holding only a smattering of teeth points at Severino and says, “He came to my house to threaten my children. My son said ‘why not kick his ass?’ But I am not that class of person who goes around hitting people.” Hilario counters by trying to insert the other debt into the conversation, the one Severino owes his compadres.

14 The below account is a much abridged version of proto-conciliation session, which took well over an hour. I am only here highlighting moments that are useful to my argument about conciliation, debt, and kinship.

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Before I can intervene, Severino mimics the conciliator’s words before we began the session

— when she told the parties we would have to deal with the two debts separately. He shoots back at

Hilario: “I know the law, the law of God, and those things cannot enter, this is just about us!”

Hilario’ wife Ignacia offers her version of the situation: “I had all these debts and my daughter was also sick, so we couldn’t get enough money together to pay them back. So this man,” she says, indicating Severino, “went around to all our neighbors telling stories, saying we didn’t even have enough food to eat.” Ignacia is trembling as she speaks. Severino tries to speak over her. His wife slaps at his shoulder “Listen, listen,” she hisses at him. Ignacia continues, “And then he comes to our house and starts kicking the door and screaming ‘Piece of shit! When are you going to pay me?’”

Ignacia explains that she and her husband believe they have already paid one quota to Severino and Nieves. She and her husband Hilario, she explains, made a payment to Doña Lourdes — the woman waiting outside for her turn — toward a debt owed by Nieves and Severino. It looks like this:

(1) Nieves (and Severino) owe money to their compadres —> (3) Lourdes & her husband

Miguel.

(2) Hilario & Ignacia —> made a payment to (3) Lourdes & Miguel on behalf of (1) Severino

& Nieves’s debt to their kin.

Hilario and Ignacia want the amount they gave to the couple waiting outside (Lourdes and

Miguel) to be considered as if it were a quota already repaid to Severino and Nieves.

Severino is incensed by the proposal -- and uses the conciliator’s efforts to compartmentalize the debts as fodder to mount his defense. “That’s between my compadre and me, you have nothing to say about that. I am a man. I am a man!” I ask Severino to lower his voice and to be respectful, he pushes hard on my shoulder and barks, “No, you listen to me! Escuchamepues.” His wife is alarmed. I try to maintain my composure and calm voice: “Don Severino, please take a seat.”

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The group eventually reaches an agreement of two payments of 250bs (US$36.-), and the return of a sound system that Severino and Nieves are holding as collateral. Having arrived at a tentative plan, I prepare to send them to the conciliator to formalize and finalize the agreement.

But as we close, Nieves introduces a new issue. She starts speaking angrily about a funeral they had all attended several months prior. “We put in two cases of beer, but Hilario’s brothers only returned one of the cases. His brothers owe us another 160bs for that other case of beer,” Nieves explains. Hilario is furious, “That’s a problem you have with my brothers, not me,” he says, waving his hand dismissively. Nieves has taken off her hat and extends her hand in their direction, imploring.

“But how are we supposed to cobrar [to recover the debt]?” she laments. “Doña Nieves,” I say, mimicking my instructions, “For now we need to focus on this specific debt between your two families. We would need to address the other situation directly with the people involved.” I have attempted to re-assert the dyad, and Nieves nods her acquiescence mournfully.

Eventually the two families settle on a preliminary payment system, amounts, dates, and a timetable for returning the collateral. Hilario and Ignacia leave the room to wait for a meeting with the conciliator to finalize the agreement and sign the accord. The waiting couple, Miguel and

Lourdes, enters the room.

Miguel says that Severino approached him asking for a loan because he didn’t have any capital.

Miguel originally loaned Severino a thousand bolivianos (approx. US$143.-), and now he owes him the last 400bs (US$57.-) of the original loan.

Nieves, Severino’s wife, challenges this version of the events.

Nieves takes over. “That’s not how it happened,” she says. “They approached me.15 They encouraged me to take the money. They made me take the money — they loaned me 500bs

15 CF Strathern (1992) on prestamistas or predatory money lenders who create a market for their services by pushing potential clients to take on loans. These studies have particular resonance for Americans following the ways credit card companies target young people as they arrive on college campuses, not to mention the subprime loan mortgage crisis that recently rocked the U.S. economy, leading to widespread foreclosure and public debate over financial institutions. This case, however, is a case not between anonymous moneylenders and potential borrowers, but between compadres -- between kin who accuse each other of similarly “pushy” practices.

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(US$71.50). When I did that, my husband beat me. Later they asked me, ‘how much do you want?’”

Nieves mimics someone pulling out a bundle of money from inside a jacket and pretends to thumb through the cash. She suggests it was her compadres who encouraged her to take more money, to

“hold on to it” [agarrarlo] for a while. She implies that this was pushy and suspicious on their part, and implies that they were acting like prestamistas (moneylenders) toward her. Nieves then starts tallying her own memory of small repayments she says are not being acknowledged. “I only owe

300bs (US$43.-),” she concludes.

“We still haven’t addressed the interest,” Miguel interjects.

Nieves’s face falls and she beseeches her kin, “Entre compadres no hay interest!” “Between compadres one doesn’t charge interest! My husband doesn’t want to hear anything about the debt. He drags me around, he hits me. But we went into debt as a family,” Nieves pleads with her commadre

Lourdes. “You know how much I gave you,” she moans in Lourdes’s direction.

Lourdes responds by turning her body away from Nieves. She wraps her face ever more tightly in the fleece shawl she has pulled up around her mouth. She pulls her broad rimmed bonnet down over her eyes. She barely lifts her face as she shakes her head, “No.” Lourdes seems to be sinking further and further under the discomfort of confronting her comadre over the debt. She slips open her shawl enough to count on her fingers, tallying the small payments Nieves has made. She insists that her comadre still owes her 400bs.

But Lourdes seems to have been moved by her comadre’s appeals. She mumbles something under her breath. I ask her to speak up. “I am a mother too,” she says, “I understand what it’s like to feed children.” Lourdes turns to her husband and quietly implores him, “Just accept the 300bs.”

Miguel looks frustrated and shakes his head no, saying “I also have children and bills to pay.” He wavers a moment and then gives in to his wife’s intercession. He sighs and agrees to negotiate the quotas based on a 300 boliviano debt. Severino, who has remained silent, suddenly sits up and interjects “I don’t want to swindle anyone, I follow the law of the Lord!” His compadres and wife ignore his outburst, and continue to negotiate.

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Nieves offers that she can start paying at the end of November -- 100bs, then another 100bs in December and January. Miguel shakes his head. “No, we want it in one lump sum. It’s been four years! Look, We don’t have a problem with [Nieves], but her husband, he’s a drunk. You see how he is. He comes to assault the family. He’s really aggressive. We don’t have a problem with our comadre.”

Nieves interjects “He isn’t helping me at all with this. He doesn’t want to hear anything about the debt. He beats me. He yells at me. [The debt] is just between me and them,” she says emphatically. Nieves and her compadres reach an agreement: one lump sum of 300bs (roughly US$50) on January 30th. Miguel and Lourdes request garantias (a mutual restraining order) with Severino. The couples return to the main offices, where they will meet with the conciliator to finalize the payments and sign an accord.

Ayni in an era of Microcredit

For months I watched as

Center interns extolled the value of

ADR for resolving such conflicts, and I myself conducted intake sessions with clients and set-up appointments for precisely these kinds of messy, interlocking debts reflected in the conciliation sessions Figure 4 The sign for District 8’s Integrated Justice Center above. At first, as I watched the alongside signs for several microfinance institutions. Photo S. Ellison. debt-related conciliation appointments mount in District 6, I wondered if we were witnessing issues that were specific to the residents of Alto Lima — a neighborhood populated largely by comerciantes (merchants) who made their living working in the massive 16 de Julio open air market each week, or in the smaller neighborhood markets that spring up each Wednesday along a wide road leading to the Integrated

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Justice Center. But as I spoke with conciliators and Center directors in other neighborhoods in El

Alto, I was able to track that same pattern in other parts of the city. As the Conciliator in District 4,

Sebastián Costa, told me, “In the past family conflicts —especially child support and violence — seemed to dominate, but this year the thing I am seeing more of is debt.” Costa opened his appointment calendar and quickly tallied the cases. “For example, this week I am seeing seven sessions on debt. Microcredit is just really generating a lot of conflict.” And the more I followed cases like the one above, the more I saw how microfinance had become entangled with kinship practices ranging from sharing household compounds to lending to one’s comadre to help her pay off microfinance quotas or to cover a child’s medical bills.

In El Alto, as with other places in Bolivia, social obligations frequently involve social and material debts that are understood to be dynamic and reciprocal, often expressed in the concept of ayni. Ayni has both temporal and material dimensions; embedded in the concept itself is the notion that life is fraught with moments in which we all find ourselves with unmet needs and must rely on others for support — emotional, physical, and economic. People can reciprocate that support by helping to raise the roof of new homes or by contributing cases of beer during wedding celebrations, by lending cash when a comadre needs capital for her small pollera-making business. Increasingly, residents of El Alto are calling on those kinship ties — including blood relations, relatives through marriage, and compadres — in order to meet monthly microcredit payments.

Anthropologists have been particularly attentive to the entanglements between notions of kinship and debt, for example, debts owed to ancestors (Strathern 1988; Kilma 2002), and the ways that human bodies — particularly women’s bodies — circulate in such a way that kinship and debt/creditor relations are co-constitutive (Peebles 2010; Hirsch and Strathern 2004; Strathern 1988; cf Hamdy 2012 on organ transfer among kin in Egypt). Ethnographers working in the Andes have examined practices such as feeding, labor reciprocity including roof raising, and child circulation, among other embodied practices that express the moral economies of kinship obligation, care, and mutual indebtedness (Van Vleet 2008; Leinaweaver 2008, 2009; Albro 2000). These authors show

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the work that goes into constantly creating and maintaining that relatedness and the sense of cariño that accompanies it. Understood within the broader literature on credit and debt, anthropologists have shown that indebtedness must be understood as socially productive; a debt is not inherently positive for the lender or negative for the person in debt.

Anthropological studies of credit and debt have been heavily influenced by Mauss’s (1954) seminal work, The Gift, which examined the role of gift exchange as a kind of reciprocal credit/debt relation that both creates group solidarity and builds systems of domination or hierarchy16 (cf

Roitman 2003 on “sanctioned” and “unsanctioned” wealth in Northern Cameroon; Tassi 2010 on the “postulate of abundance” among Bolivian market vendors). As Peebles explains, “the ethnographic task over many years has been to study how the credit/debt nexus is productive of social ties,17 alliances, enmities,18 and hostilities, rather than to make normative pronouncements concerning whether credit is liberating or debt is debilitating” (2010: 234). Clara Han similarly qualifies her study of the domestic strains produced by “the double-edged credit economy” in Chile, saying that although credit “has generated perpetual indebtedness, it also offers material and temporal resources for livelihoods affected by labor instability” (2010: 25, 9; cf Han 2004). For Han,

16 Ethnographic studies further helped to theorize credit/debt relations, including the speculative and spacio- temporal dimensions of lending, as the two parties link their respective pasts and futures (Peebles 2010: 227; cf. Han 2011 on the “phenomenology of waiting” in Chile’s credit economy). These studies also elucidate the relationship between credit, consumption and social status (Han 2011; O’Dougherty 2002; Cahn 2008). 17 Like many anthropologists studying credit/debt, Nico Tassi seeks to trouble the divide between the material and the moral — as well as that between absence and abundance. In his work with Chola market vendors in La Paz, Bolivia (2010), Tassi has argued that a “postulate of abundance” operates among debtors and creditors — many of whom work alongside each other in the sprawling electronics and domestic goods stalls that wind like catacombs in the city’s steep hillsides. As Tassi shows, the debtor/creditor relations that operate in La Paz’s cholo market districts are deeply shaped by this understanding of the productive nature of debt/credit relations, where the material objects accumulated through such relations are themselves “functioning bodies” that demand sociality. 18 Ethnographic research helps illuminate the processes whereby these definitions are negotiated and contested, as well as the ways certain people and practices are vilified or excluded due to the asymmetries in debt relations (Peebles 2010: 230). For example, Africanist scholars have been particularly attentive to the moral economies surrounding “sanctioned” and “unsanctioned” wealth, particularly as they manifest in accusations of witchcraft, in which “witch hunts are instruments of social divination” (Comaroff & Comaroff 1999: 293; cf Jensen & Buur 2004; Smith 2001, 2007). And indeed, Alteños using the Integrated Justice Centers sometimes invoked spectral images and hinted at demonic practices when they accused particularly ruthless prestamistas of excessive greed and of violently demanding payment. Ethnographic studies offer intimate accounts of the experience of usury, as debtors struggle with compounding interest or face the seizure of collateral when they are unable to pay (cf Mauer 2006; Gregory 1997; Brett 2006).

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credit, while enormously stressful, also allows debtors to imagine alternative futures, and to care for kin suffering from mental illness and addiction in the wake of neoliberal economic restructuring and the roll-back of state services (ibid).

Anthropologists aren’t the only ones to notice how poor people marshal their social networks during times of economic duress. Microcredit agencies have targeted the social networks of poor people to expand the reach of capital while helping to insure against risk. For example, in her research among craftsmen in Cairo, Egypt, Elyachar shows how the rubric of “social capital” reconceptualized the survival strategies of the poor. Rather than acting as “obstacles to economic development,” planners and social scientists now characterized those social practices, networks, and survival strategies — the “social capital” of the poor — as a critical “resource for reproducing global markets, maintaining global stability, and achieving economic growth” (Elyachar 2005: 9).19

In Bolivia, microfinance institutions have followed this global trend in celebrating the social capital of the poor. In particular, they have targeted the social networks of poor women to channel capital and encourage entrepreneurship, promoting microfinance as a mechanism of social and economic empowerment for women (Brett 2006; Maclean 2010; Lazar 2004). Clients at the

Integrated Justice Centers frequently carried the glossy folders given out by microfinance institutions targeting poor women for incorporation into mancomunales or lending groups in which women are expected to hold each other accountable for meeting monthly microcredit quotas. There is an enormous amount of research done on these institutional practices and the variety of forms they take, and microfinance cannot be reduced to a single institutional model.

My intervention here is not intended to debate microfinance in and of itself, but rather to show how one foreign aid intervention — promoting Alternative Dispute Resolution — has become

19 These interventions, Elyachar argues, occurred during an era of intense neoliberal economic restructuring, when “social scientists and development planners realized that important sectors of the population could be left to take care of themselves. A talent for self-help among the poor could no longer be ignored. Those who had to survive on their own and would be cast to the mercies of the market were reconfigured as a sector of the economy. They became ‘the informal economy.’ The most important thing they produced was survival itself” (Elyachar 2005: 9).

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entangled with another development platform promoted by private institutions, the Bolivian government, and foreign donors alike. This entanglement is sometimes evident in the ways that foreign democracy promotion institutions like the International Republic Institute (IRI) focus on promoting microfinance and entrepreneurship as a central component of democratic citizenship and democratization, explicitly linking liberal citizenship practices to entrepreneurship. But it is also evident in these intimate encounters between compadres who have come to the Integrated Justice

Centers to try to resolve their disputes.

Anthropologists studying microcredit have illuminated the disjuncture between the ways microfinance institutions market themselves as providing seed capital for small enterprise, and the actual uses of those loans. By contrast to the popular microfinance narrative, in practice many borrowers frequently take out loans to cover basic needs in the face of “eroding and unstable wages and the privatization of public services” (Han 2011: 26; Schild 2007). And indeed, I found that although many Center clients stated they were taking out loans to help finance their pollera sewing business or to purchase merchandise for sale in El Alto’s vast marketplaces, many, many others were accessing credit to pay school fees or to cover unexpected medical bills. Others used those funds to meet social obligations, for example financing their responsibilities as sponsors of fiesta-cargo celebrations in their rural natal communities. A number of women reported that they had taken out loans with the intent of becoming credit lenders themselves: they sub-divided those MFI loans among their friends, hoping to make a profit off of the interest rate they charged as they distributed the original loan among their own network of friends, neighbors and relatives. I take up their stories in the following chapter, and show how those money lending practices further strain relations between kin.

Microfinance is not responsible for the advent of informal lending practices in El Alto.

Bolivian women — including indigenous Aymara and Quechua women — have long been involved in lending and borrowing practices, acting as moneylenders or simply helping out friends, neighbors, and kin during periods of economic duress. Those lending practices are often central to — and

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constitutive of — kinship. Microcredit has, however, complicated these webs of debt, largely by creating bigger and more unwieldy debts, and by pulling more members of families into debt relationships through mancomunales or microfinance groups.

As the conciliation session above indicates, there are multiple levels at which kinship is being created, re-asserted, and also tested through these debts and their ripple effects throughout the extended kin network. Nieves appeals to the moral economy of compadrazgo-mediated debt: between compadres, she insists, there is no interest. In the conciliation session she tries to assert the moral economy of lending between compadres even as those debts have become so unwieldy that they threaten to undo both the emotional and material bond. Here Nieves tries to draw a distinction between debts loaned between kin and the lending practices of moneylenders. Entre compadres no hay interes. She insists that there is something different between a loan made by a comadre and a loan made by a prestamista. But in fact I found that often between compadres there was, increasingly, interest.

As I spoke with women who admittedly worked as moneylenders and others who simply claimed to frequently loan out funds to desperate kin (but rejected the title of prestamista), it became clear that many were charging montly – and sometimes weekly or even daily – interest rates upward of 10% and 20%, and demanding collateral for those loans. This was, they insisted, a matter of necessity: they too owed countless debts to other friends, kin and neighbors, prestamistas, microcredit agencies, and larger banks. Those debts helped produce and re-produce forms of kinship, care, and obligation. But they were also fraying social ties as friends and kin called in loans, demanding abrupt repayment years later — as Lourdes and Miguel demanded of Nieves.

During intake sessions or conciliation appointments, lenders often expressed pity for their comadre or their cousin as she struggled with unexpected — and expensive — life events, or as she wept under the stress of meeting bank payments. Women expressed a sense of moral obligation to help kin during crises, and enormous grief at another person’s suffering. Lenders would reflect on the times they, too, had been saved in a moment of need by a sister, comadre, or uncle. These were stories about ayni. But lenders were also borrowers, and they generally recounted their own situations

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of indebtedness as the justification for why they had finally, sometimes after years of waiting for repayment, chosen to pursue conciliation in an effort to obtain some leverage for repayment.

Lenders were tangled in their own webs of debt, and now those webs of care and obligation — which so many people rely on to survive — threatened to strangle both intimate relations and the economic survival strategies of entire households and extended kin networks.

As Clara Han (2011) shows in her study of credit and “neoliberal depression” in post-

Dictatorship Chile, kin networks play a critical role in mitigating economic precariousness and structural violence. These domestic relations nevertheless can fray under the “constant and awkward friction among kinship obligations and dependencies, liberal family forms and discourses of self- responsibility” that now circulate in El Alto as with neoliberal Chile (Han 2011: 13; cf Povinelli

2006). Like Han (2011), I found that my own fictive kin, friends and Center clients articulating a similar sense of living a “vida prestada” — a life on loan. They regularly lamented how those debts shot-through nearly all their interactions. As one Client told me, her family’s life had been so structured by the tensions of indebtedness that her children’s first word “may as well have been

‘debt.’” As Sahlins (2011) has said, “where being is mutual, the experience is more than individual.”

And where being is constructed in part by mutual indebtedness, when the bank comes for one, it comes for all.

Privatizing Debt, Privatizing Conflict

This is the complex, interwoven nature of many of the debt-fueled conflicts that came to the

Center. In practice, however, Center staff regularly re-asserts the dyadic relationship of each conflict as interpersonal. They employed this tactic partly to make conflicts more manageable — it’s a logistical problem, particularly when it comes to disentangling complex webs of debt. Could the disputes between Hilario and his wife Ignacia, Lourdes and her husband Miguel, and their compadres

Severino and Nieves have been resolved in one massive group session? Perhaps not. Probably not.

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But staff also insists on this compartmentalization of conflicts because of how they conceptualize conflict and the responsibility to resolve it. As I described earlier, staff I spoke with often envisioned conciliation as a means of instilling people with the skills they need to personally manage conflict, to be empowered to assume some responsibility for the lives they lead. To do so required blocking out terceros, cultivating personal accountability.

In practice, however, this insistence on a dyadic approach to conflict resolution in El Alto may only serve to privatize and depoliticize patterns of broader social conflict that are threatening to unmake the social lives and survival strategies of Alteños, particularly women. I don’t mean to suggest that Bolivian staff and other service providers were unaware of these challenges — or unsympathetic to the strains they produced. Many staff and interns, I found, were grappling with similar debts and disputes in their own households. When I asked Center staff and bureaucrats at the

Ministry of Justice about these patterns, many acknowledged and lamented the extraordinary case load built around informal debts — usually a third to half of conciliation cases. Staff was deeply concerned about the increase in debt-related caseloads and the extremely complex webs of debt they uncovered as they helped Clients map out their payment schedules. Some Centers did try to help the occasional client think about how to re-negotiate debt payments with their creditors — including financial institution.

But the possibility of intervention remained at the level of the individual debtor-creditor relation, a private little dyad divorced from broader patterns. As such ADR serves to reinforce the idea that these are interpersonal, private disputes requiring intervention at the level of the dyadic relationship between disputants. The room for structural critique or political intervention is reduced to deep sighs, painful grimaces, and sympathy for the Señoras and their desperation. As I show in this and the chapters that follow, this winnowing of patterns of social conflict, this process of reframing them as private disputes, reflects larger trends that accompany a neoliberal economic reforms and efforts to produce an entrepreneurial and counterinsurgent citizenry.

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Ironically, this shift toward the privatization of debt is now mirrored in an emerging discourse among microfinance institutions themselves. Borrowers and lenders increasingly view the model of micro lending that built off of the social practices of the poor as a problem, and not the much- heralded solution. That is, microfinance institutions are starting to deride those same social networks.

Specifically, banking institutions, loan officers, and borrowers themselves express concern over alcohol consumption and other forms of sociality they view as antithetical to entrepreneurship — promoting vice and irresponsible behavior. These discourses conjure up again old idioms of cultures of poverty to talk about the barriers to individual success. In doing so, they place the blame for the kinds of distressing scenes described above at the feet of people who have failed to sufficiently adopt an entrepreneurial subjectivity, who remain encumbered by their kin. Let me conclude this chapter by reflecting a little on this turn to placing the blame for debt problems at the feet of alcohol consumption and the forms of sociality it entails. Here, compadrazgo and related forms of sociality are not a resource for poor people to help themselves, but one that they must escape if they want to succeed.

“I prefer to stop eating, dancing, and drinking in order to pay my quotas.”

A great deal of anthropological and ethno historical work in Bolivia examines the centrality of alcohol consumption patterns in Andean sociality — both intimate and communal. These practices include, for example, inviting neighbors to share beer and pich’ar [chew] coca leaves after they offer prayers to your recently-deceased kin during All Souls Day memorializations to the dead. Friends, siblings, and compadres may pack themselves into a brother-in-law’s minibus to drive out to the rural hamlet where his wife and her sisters grew up — as I once did with my friend Enriqueta and her extended family. On the way there we took turns inviting each other to swigs of vino casero

[homemade wine] and munched on roasted peanuts and sugar-coated puffed corn (pasank’allas). The bus was heavily loaded with tant’awawas [bread babies] and cane stalks used to construct a memorial to Enriqueta’s mother. Each of us carried heavy woven bags brimming with oranges and other

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brightly-colored treats that the family would hand out to neighbors and kin who offered prayers for the deceased in the small community graveyard.

During the many meals we shared over the course of the day — delicacies like spicy pork poured rehydrated chuño and boiled potatoes, and served with smoky roasted bananas — kin hauled cases of beer and dispensed overflowing handfuls of coca leaves. We sat on the hard, dusty earth for a late afternoon lunch following the prayers. The women sat in one circle while the men formed another ring. Chatting quietly, we took turns invitando [inviting drinks] each other to glasses of beer and offered overflowing plates to late arrivals. Parents dispensed sugar cane slices to small children with wind-chapped cheeks, while the three sisters would periodically retreat to the edges of the field to mumble prayers and bury offerings to the Pachamama. In addition to beer and homemade wine, some men passed around a small plastic bottle of what amounts to rubbing alcohol — used to sprinkle mesas (offerings) and providing the wince-inducing sips that burn your lips, throat, and stomach lining (cf Heath 1958; Gladwell 2010).

Alcohol is central to many such moments in the day-to-day lives and celebrations of Bolivians living in El Alto and surrounding rural hamlets: inviting new compadres to drink during the ritual first haircut [rutucha] or at the baptism of a child, providing cases of beer at wedding celebrations for a cousin or brother-in-law, or acting as a sponsor of the annual fiesta in your natal community in a rural hamlet near the shores of Lake Titicaca. Neighbors stack cases of beer and pour full, frothy glasses for each other at neighborhood entradas — the frequent dance parades that shut down entire blocks of El Alto as residents celebrate patron saints and their neighborhood anniversary (cf Lazar

2008). Alcohol consumption in these celebrations is a form of communion with kin and spirits, ancestors and neighbors. It is almost always done in pairs — or more accurately pairs upon pairs upon pairs, as each person repeatedly invites another in the circle to drink with him or her – and is in turn invited by others to partake. These are not isolated dyads, but dyads that are knit into larger webs of relations enacted through invitations to drink, to eat, to p’ichar coca. Those shared glasses of beer, which circulate between two people at a time, help re-assert the primacy of social relationships

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with both the living and dead. Andeanist scholars have emphasized the ways alcohol is central to creating and re-creating forms of social memory, and to producing a sense of self that is comprised of these deeply nested social relationships — much like practices of compadrazgo.

But alcohol consumption also produces a great deal of anxiety, frustration, anger, and debate about excess and alcohol-fueled violence — both intimate violence and violence that occurs on the street between total strangers. Refusing the invitation to drink at fiestas has proven particularly taxing on relationships between Catholic Andeans and their Evangelical kin and neighbors. Evangelical

Christians (cristianos) generally eschew alcohol consumption (in word if not always in deed), among other practices that cristianos reject as idolatrous and morally corrupt. Evangelical and Catholic

Bolivians have had to re-negotiate the ways that sociality is both embodied and imbibed (Van Vleet

2011; Orta 2004).

Alteño friends and kin — both Evangelical and Catholic — often describe to me their discomfort and the difficulty of refusing alcohol without causing discord and consternation among their friends and relatives. Asusena, for example, told stories of feeling enormous pressure to participate in weekly outings with her colleagues at the bank where she once worked. Unable to refuse drinks during their workplace outings, Asusena started skipping-out on the after-work celebrations, only to find herself marginalized in the office. My own attempts to refuse alcohol (after consuming copious amounts during All Saints celebrations) were met with scorn and anger. I often relied on female friends to intercede with their relatives, begging forgiveness for the gringuita’s inability to keep up with the prolonged celebrations without becoming very sick.

The harmful dimensions of alcohol consumption and its influence in El Alto are hotly debated

— among residents and non-residents alike. In the city itself, neighborhood watch groups and youth organizations have recently attacked brothels and bars, accusing owners and patrons of fomenting deviancy, enabling violent assault, and promoting promiscuity. These moral panics have given way to very real efforts to torch and shutter houses of ill repute. President Evo Morales even declared alcohol consumption to be a national security issue. The Morales Administration has moved to

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develop new regulations on adulterated and homemade alcohol [casera] as a public health concern, and has introduced new legislation and policing efforts aiming to crack down on drunk driving.

These platforms are quite similar to movements in the U.S. where, as Malcom Gladwell puts it, we

“moralize, medicalize, and legalize” the social and personal burdens of alcohol consumption (2010:

71).

But this concern for Andean alcohol consumption patterns is not new. Rather, they are deeply rooted in colonial efforts to manage indigenous populations, as Spanish conquistadors and colonial authorities sought to make sense of libation rituals and Andean religiosity. Colonial authorities frequently derided Andean Indians for being slothful, drunken, and idolatrous. As Abercrombie

(1998) has shown “Andean libation rituals came to be inscribed as forms of excessive drinking, and memory techniques were taken for drunkenness and amnesia” (140). This “triumvirate” of

“drunkenness, idolatry, and avoidance of labor” (222), was particularly disconcerting to colonial rulers who worried about how to discipline Indian labor in order to secure tribute. Abercrombie suggests that industriousness was a euphemism for coercing Indians into a forced wage labor system where authorities hoped they might learn to “conduct social relations and construct social position and obedience to the laws of god and king through the medium of money” (1998: 225). And alcohol was an impediment to industriousness. Thus alcohol has long been central to both social life in the

Andes and to anxieties over the inefficient and undisciplined labor of Andean Indians.

The residue of those Colonial concerns with alcohol consumption — as an impediment to efficient labor — continues to bubble up in everyday conversations about life and work in El Alto.

Take, for example, an ad that appeared in a special pull-out promotional section of the popular newspaper Pagina Siete [Page Seven]. In a special edition of the paper’s business section,20 the microfinance institution Ecofuturo took out a full-page “advertorial”21 with one of their model clients,

20 Pull out section “Ranking Economia y Negocios.” Pagina Siete. Sunday, July 24 2011, edition 20, page 9. 21 A hybrid interview-adveritisement, or an ad that is masked as an article, with its commercial origin appearing only in the fine print.

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José Silvestre Quisbert.22 In the advertorial, Silvestre Quisbert, a 57-year-old carpenter, expresses gratitude for the ways that the demands and repayment timelines of microfinance have restructured his own spending and saving habits. That new timeline, he suggests, has profoundly transformed his personhood and his relationships with others. Silvestre Quisbert describes being previously involved in microfinance groups where relations among members was mediated through shared loans and heavy drinking:

I didn’t know about credit before, but I learned that were institutions that gave loans to groups of people. I formed a group and took out credit, but the group didn’t work for me — because I met my quotas but others failed to make their payments, and everyone was punished. They punished us for three months denying us credit, but afterward they didn’t want to loan to us. Since I have a strong personality, I even had fights with my loan officer — since I was the head of the group I lost my temper. I was left saddened by the experience of working in a group. The thing is, we as Bolivians have a the custom of grabbing the money and spending it in the pension [cantina], but we don’t leave after dividing up the money. Instead we start (to drink heavily). [Emphasis mine].

With the word borrachera [heavy drinking] is inserted into the text as the implied tendency to drink heavily with the microfinance capital itself. Now, he tells the interviewer, he is able to take out private loans that he alone administers with the help of his loan officer, freed from the tethers and the burden of other participants —once celebrated as the social capital of the poor.

Further down in the interview, José Silvestre Quisbert expresses pride in his punctuality and a life now organized around meeting his monthly quotas: “I prefer to stop eating, dancing and drinking for the 8th or 9th of every month in order to have my quota ready,” he asserts. The advertorial siphons off a few words for its headline. In bold letters it declares: “I prefer to stop eating, dancing, and drinking in order to pay my quotas.” Silvestre Quisbert is a model microfinance recipient, a model citizen-entrepreneur who places responsibility, seriousness, and sobriety above the siren song of drink. In doing so, Silvestre Quisbert positions himself as one willing to give up forms of drunken sociality, replaced by the virtues of sobriety and individual responsibility.

22 The client’s maternal surname, Quisbert, may indeed have been a family name — but it struck at the time because of its popularity among Indigenous Bolivians who have adopted Spanish surnames to replace the racially marked “Quispes” and “Huancas,” “Callisayas” and “Condoris,” among others.

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Andeanist scholars have argued that the triumvirate of drinking, dancing, and eating are particularly central to constructing and reinforcing social ties in Bolivia. With the testimony of José

Silvestre Quisbert, however, we see how the temporality and moral economy of microfinance also calls on participants to eschew those practices as anathema to economic security.

In the promotional piece we see how contemporary discourses about the value of entrepreneurship and individual responsibility have supplanted previous efforts to extirpate the idols and sloth associated with Andean libration practices. In his testimony, the entrepreneurial self rejects the social obligations associated with — and the social burdens produced by —alcohol for the promise of individual prosperity23. What’s interesting about this “advertorial” is how it is beginning to anticipate and re-direct emerging critiques of microfinance practices, especially the mancomunal groups that were once at the heart of microcredit lending targeting the poor. As I discuss further in the next chapter, Bolivians are increasingly critical of the dynamics created by these groups, especially among the women who are the primary clientele for such programs. I heard many Center clients express similar frustrations as Ecofuturo’s model client about the ways group lending practices trapped them in further spirals of debt.

Here, however, the advertorial cleverly braids together this emergent critique of microfinance lending practices with local idioms concerning cultural patterns of alcohol consumption. The publicity piece simultaneously acknowledges the critique and distances the institution (Ecofuturo) from these increasingly-maligned micro lending practices, positioning itself as aware of these problems and offering a better alternative to borrowers. Yet through the “testimony” of José Silvestre Quisbert, the piece suggests that the failure of those loan groups was not due to the banking institutions themselves or their lending approach per se. Rather, the problem lay in the ways those lending practices were warped by borrowers themselves — misused in the service of partying, drinking, and

23 This is not to say that there are not real social and personal costs to alcohol consumption. Concerns about excessive alcohol consumption are intertwined with real concerns about violence, particularly domestic violence, as I explore in the next chapter. In the Integrated Justice Centers, many clients brought complaints of violence they experienced at the hands of drunken spouses, mothers-in-law, neighbors, and other kin.

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other self-harming social behavior. The entrepreneurial model of development and citizenship is not to blame for these failures, but rather borrowers who have failed to slough off those social practices and cultural vices that stand as barriers to successful loan repayment and productive citizenship.

Ecofuturo invites borrowers who are willing, like Don José, to sever those ties. Ironically, as I found at the Center, those social ties are often the only ways borrowers are able to pay off mounting debts – including ones incurred through individual loans from microfinance institutions. And as they face the increased difficulty of paying back those loans, clients spun ever more complex webs of interpersonal debt through their friends and kin.

Conclusion

Conciliation in El Alto’s Integrated Justice Centers frequently relies on a “triadic” approach to resolving conflicts: with the aid of a third party, disputants are meant to forge their own solutions to interpersonal problems. Nevertheless, these sessions assume that conflict occurs between two parties: a dyad of disputants. Conciliators frequently attempt to impose a dyadic model of conflict onto the situation to make it more manageable, as well as to instill in people a willingness to take personal responsibility for the solution to conflict. In this chapter, however, I have suggested this practice often chafes against the ways that many residents of El Alto conceptualize conflict and its resolution. These ostensibly interpersonal conflicts — presumed between two parties — are frequently far more complex precisely because of the forms of intersubjectivity created in El Alto through the interrelated practice of compadrazgo, as well as Andean practices of conflict resolution that people encounter in rural hamlets as they circulate back and forth between El Alto and their natal communities. In these ways, the dynamic quality of interlegality manifested in the mundane daily labor of the Integrated Justice Centers and as clients circulated between their rural communities and their peri-urban El Alto neighborhoods.

Examining the intersection between debt and compadrazgo illustrates two dimensions of the tension between ADR’s dyadic conceptualization of conflict as well as the broader social context in

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which these services are offered. First, I have shown how conciliation in practice assumes a dyadic relationship between disputants, and how staff regularly tries to reassert that dyad by filtering out

“terceros” — the surplus parties to a given conflict — even though they themselves are aware of these tensions. Through conciliation, these conflicts are not only a private matter to be resolved in a therapeutic, informal context, but also a matter that must be restricted to the directly-disputing parties: a husband and wife working through child support payments, two neighbors fighting over disruptive fiestas, a young couple struggling with marital woes. But secondly, as I have shown, that characterization of how conflicts occur does not reflect the sociological experiences of El Alto residents, many of whom are Aymara immigrants from surrounding rural hamlets who bring different expectations of who should participate in conflict resolution. Compadrazgo practices exemplify the ways these nested relationships deeply shape people’s intersubjective lives, as well as they ways they seek to resolve interpersonal disputes.

Imagining the person as constituted by this web of relationships is both more reflective of kinship practices such as compadrazgo, but it is also more representative of how conflicts actually unfold. These are not private, interpersonal disputes between two parties; rather, specific conflicts operated more like nodes in a complex network of relationships that are both forged and frayed by debt practices. Beyond “cultural” expectations, the dyadic compartmentalization of conflict belies the real complexity of how conflict occurs in El Alto.

By erasing those patterns, by compartmentalizing conflict into neat dyads, aid programs and the Ministry of Justice may miss an opportunity to identify and redress the larger macroeconomic dimensions of these “interpersonal” disputes. But this compartmentalization does raise another question: Is this merely a missed opportunity? Is the depoliticization of these recurring conflicts merely an unintended consequence of a good faith effort to redress the frustrations and conflicts many Alteños experience in their everyday lives? Or, is ADR functioning in the way

American critics warned during the 1980s: as a mechanism for “dampening class conflict” by individualizing disputes (Hofrichter 1982: 240)? Do dyads function to depoliticize and de-escalate

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social conflicts that are fueled by the model of capitalist development now promoted throughout El

Alto under the banner of microcredit — at the expense of structural analysis and collective action?

As I suggested in my earlier chapters on the effort to promote a “culture of peace” in contradistinction to El Alto’s supposed “culture of conflict,” target populations frequently contest the aims of ADR programs and accuse them of seeking to demobilize powerful social movements.

Nevertheless, many Alteños do pursue conciliation to “make do” in the meantime, as they struggle to cope with the enormous interpersonal tensions provoked by ongoing economic woes. I continue to explore some of these tactical uses of ADR in the two chapters that follow.

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CHAPTER FIVE

The Conflictual Social Life of an Industrial Sewing Machine1

When microfinance institutions started to proliferate in El Alto, Doña Pilar seized on the opportunity. Pilar had several income-generating strategies, including selling rotisserie chicken from a stand in front of her home and later packaging homemade “chocolate-like” drink mix with her teenage children. But Pilar’s other microenterprise was lending. Pilar, like a number of women I met in District 6, took out small loans from microfinance institutions like Promujer, Crecer, and Diakonia that she then redistributed among friends. She charged her borrowers interest on those interpersonal loans with the aim of generating a profit. She lent to friends and neighbors, but also to strangers, as her own social network started telling their friends, kin, and acquaintances that Pilar might also lend to them.

Soon, however, Pilar’s borrowers began to fail her. Enmeshed in their own webs of institutional microcredit loans and informal debts owed to friends and kin, Pilar told me, her borrowers simply stopped paying her back. Friends asked her for money, then begged for understanding when they couldn’t repay the principal, let alone the added interest she charged.

Burned by several such experiences, Pilar decided she would start requiring that people leave her collateral. They left electronics and pollera skirts, important paperwork and jewelry — “all kinds of things,” she told me. One man even left the deed to his house. “I still have it here,” she said, “the deed and even the document verifying signatures. I have all his documents. He never came back to get them,” Pilar shrugged.

1 The title of this chapter and my discussion of the sewing machine and its biography as both a commodity and collateral on a series of loans of course draws on Appadurai’s Introduction to The Social Life of Things, as well as

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One woman left her an electric Mitsubishi “industrial” sewing machine as collateral.

I would soon came to see that industrial sewing machine as emblematic of a much bigger pattern of conflicts affecting Alteños, especially women. The story of the industrial sewing machine is a story about the ways that debt and violence are entangled — as entangled as the lives of the women connected to that machine. At first, however, the violence associated with the sewing machine was itself invisible.

I might have never known it was there.

“The señora was supposed to pay me back in 15 days and I would return it,” Pilar told me. But the woman never returned for her machine — or paid Pilar back. When Pilar ran into the woman in the market several months later, the woman simply told her to keep the machine; she was in no shape to pay the debt. So Pilar was left with the a sewing machine she didn’t really need or want.

Pilar had a friend, Doña Justa. Doña Justa was involved in several microfinance groups with other women in the neighborhood. Justa and another friend, Doña Nicolasa,2 had started a small storefront shop to sell their polleras, the thick, multitiered skirts worn by Aymara and Quechua women. Pilar had loaned money to Justa before, and Justa had always paid her back. Then, four years ago, Pilar approached Justa and suggested she buy the sewing machine. Making polleras is a heavy project — stitching the thick layers of fabric is tough with a hand-powered crank. “I told her, ‘Since you are a pollera seamstress, this machine can help your work — can make it easier’.”

“Ya,” said Justa, recounting her version of the events to me later, “I was curious, I thought why not? It will help me in my business.” So Justa bought the sewing machine from Pilar, planning to pay her a whopping 2,000Bs in small installments (Approx. US$286, a huge sum by Alteño standards).

Justa paid an installment or two — 100bs, 200bs. And then the payments stopped. “A few times I found her in the market,” Pilar told me, “And she’d say, ‘I’m gonna pay you back, Doña Pilar! I promise I am going to pay you back.’” But she never did.

Kopytoff’s contribution on “commoditization as a process” (1988). 22 St. Nicholas is the patron saint of money problems.

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Meanwhile, Justa was struggling to make ends meet in her small business venture with Doña

Nicolasa. The two women borrowed money to pay rent for a small storefront, located in the nearby

16 de Julio market. They were also borrowing money to purchase materials for the substantial pollera skirts they sewed. Both Justa and Nicolasa were involved in several microcredit groups or mancomunales, including one with Justa’s sister Marta, and her mother. Both women also took out additional loans from other women — people like Pilar — to help meet their monthly microfinance quotas.

While Justa and Nicolasa collaborated on the rent payment, each woman sold her merchandise separately. Justa later insisted to me that her sales were doing okay, but Nicolasa was unable to cover her side of the partnership as her own sales flagged.

Justa, her sister Marta, and Doña Pilar all remembered that Nicolasa had started to run into trouble when she tried to make it as a prestamista (moneylender) too: Nicolasa started taking out microcredit loans and then distributing the funds among other women, charging interest rates and collecting collateral — much as Pilar had done. But Nicolasa’s borrowers weren’t paying her back, and she didn’t have supplementary income like Pilar did. The failing business was affecting both women. Marta implied that Nicolasa’s decision to go into money lending and make fast cash — money she didn’t earn but rather borrowed — had tainted her pollera business. Expressing her disapproval, Marta said Nicolasa was running around in jewels and beautiful shawls bought on credit

— and on the backs of other women to whom she gave loans with high interest rates. But Nicolasa’s flash was, Marta suggested, a house of cards that began to collapse as her own debtors failed to pay her back — including her friend and business partner, Justa.

Scrambling for funds herself, and struggling to pay off multiple debts with friends and their microfinance groups, Justa asked Nicolasa for advice. Nicolasa introduced her to Doña Carmen, another neighborhood woman known as a prestamista (moneylender). Justa begged Carmen for a loan, but because Carmen didn’t know Justa personally, she refused to make a loan to her directly. Instead,

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Carmen gave the money to Nicolasa to then pass along to Justa. Nicolasa was now responsible for repaying the loan she took from Carmen to give to Justa.

At some point, Carmen demanded that Justa provide collateral for the loans she was making to her through Nicolasa. For collateral, Justa offered Carmen the sewing machine she had bought a few years earlier from Doña Pilar (but had yet to pay off).

Once again Justa paid a quota on her debt to Carmen here and there, but never returned the full principal. Carmen held on to the industrial sewing machine and an additional pollera skirt as collateral, and hounded Justa in the market when she would catch her there.

And the interest started to mount.

Justa later told me she practically became a shut-in as she tried to avoid her creditors, especially

Doña Carmen. She would run into Carmen on the street, where Carmen would berate her and publicly humiliate her over the unpaid debt.

“Pay me back and I won’t have any more reason to bother you,” Carmen spat at Justa during their conciliation session, admitting to the harassment.

The looks from her neighbors were too much to bear, Justa told me, and her elderly father — with whom she lived — was irate at the shame she had brought to the family. But the debt Justa owed Carmen was just one among many. Justa was trying to avoid a lot of women, and was feeling strained with her siblings, who also loaned her money to help cover her debts. As more creditors showed up on the family doorstep, Justa’s father repeatedly threatened to throw her out, while her siblings intervened on her behalf. Her relationship with her husband grew more strained, and often turned violent.

A couple of years later, Justa’s creditor, Doña Carmen, needed a loan herself. Carmen approached a neighborhood acquaintance, who was known as a moneylender (much like Carmen was known around the neighborhood). “I can give you some collateral,” Carmen assured the woman.

Carmen offered the moneylender an industrial sewing machine — it was electric and in good shape,

Carmen promised.

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Doña Carmen’s moneylender later told me, “I asked her, ‘How much do you want?’ ‘A thousand bolivianos,’ Carmen told me. ‘Ya,’ I said, but I told her I needed to see [the sewing machine] for myself first before I would give her the loan. People give me all kinds of [useless] things. I used to accept collateral without seeing it first. People would give me televisions that were even older than even the [rubbish] one I had.”

So the moneylender requested to see the sewing machine before she would give Doña Carmen the loan. She headed over to Carmen’s house but was shocked by what she found there.

“That is my machine!” the woman yelped at Carmen. “I sold that to Justa!”

Carmen’s moneylender was Doña Pilar.

“Even the table was the original,” Pilar later told me, “With the name Mitsubishi. The motor, the table, the machine itself — all original.” Carmen realized what had happened and acknowledged that the sewing machine must be the same one Pilar had sold Justa several years earlier.

Pilar remembered, “[Carmen] told me ‘Yes, Doña Justa gave it to me as collateral when I loaned her money.’ And I said no, I [sold] it to Justa, so Justa cannot [offer] it to you [as collateral in exchange for a loan].” Pilar was in a snit over the situation. Justa had never finished paying for the machine and here she was offering it as collateral on other loans.

Pilar told Carmen that she would have to resolve the situation. Carmen, for her part, found Justa in the market one afternoon and dragged her to the Integrated Justice Center, where I met them for the first time. We set up a conciliation appointment for the next day. Carmen told Pilar about the appointment, and all three women showed up at the Integrated Justice Center on a muddy Tuesday afternoon, where they all agreed to allow me to follow their case as it unfolded.

As I followed their case(s) over the next several months, I learned just how deeply entangled that sewing machine was in a messy web of debt, inter- and intra-family conflicts, and physical, psychological, and structural violence. I began to see that sewing machine as an artifact of the model of entrepreneurial and counterinsurgent citizenship that has been promoted by foreign donors and

Bolivian officials alike — a development model that ultimately depends on privatizing the conflicts

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and obscuring the violence it helps to generate. I began to see the Integrated Justice Centers as both a party to — and a resource to cope with — the forms of misery and violence that sit at the intersection of Bolivia’s ongoing confrontation with capitalism and its contradictions. As conciliators try to compartmentalize violence and debt, to treat them as distinct problems, those artificial distinctions erase debt from cases of domestic violence, and erase violence from cases of interpersonal debt.

***

This chapter builds on the story of Doña Justa and a network of friends and kin who are interconnected through the broken-down industrial sewing machine. That machine circulated first as a commodity and then as collateral on interpersonal debts, and has been tied to domestic violence and a possible femicide, as I describe below. Anthropologists have long wrestled with how to represent the violence they encounter in their field sites and among their closest informants, particularly as they try to avoid demonizing particular groups or cultures. This discomfort with the

“ugly” side of fieldwork is particularly salient in El Alto, a city whose residents are often pathologized as exceptionally “conflictual,” violent, drunken, and disorderly. This chapter confronts these characterizations and the very real violence El Alto residents deal with (and perpetrate) on a daily basis in their homes, neighborhoods, and social organizations as they pursue conciliation services.

Building on Adelman’s (2004) call to examine the political economy of domestic violence or the “battering state,” this chapter examines the relationship between economic formations and domestic violence as we encountered them in the Integrated Justice Centers. The critical literature on

Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) has pointed to the ways mediation “disappears” violence as it promotes harmony and (re)conciliation (Cobb 1997; Lazarus-Black 2007). In Bolivia, however, ADR practitioners regularly insisted to me and to their clients that “you cannot conciliate violence, you must adjudicate.” Despite this assertion, however, I found that Bolivian ADR practitioners regularly mediate “around” domestic violence as they draw-up agreements on issues ranging from child support to debt payments to a husband’s alcohol consumption patterns. Yet they often did so at the

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behest of their clients — who were anxious to obtain conciliation documents that would help them cope with vast webs of debt and other sources of economic and interpersonal insecurity. Conciliation, for many women, was a form of leverage — however weak.

This chapter is divided into two parts. In the first I return to the case of the sewing machine to show the ways that conciliation cases dealing with debt were shot-through with references to domestic and structural violence, and highlight the interplay between the two. Much like the conciliation case described in the previous chapter, where the conciliator compartmentalized the two debt conflicts, so too this case was handled in a series of independent conciliation sessions (Between

Carmen and Justa and Pilar and Justa), but my reconstruction of the events attempts to weave the story back together, to follow the sewing machine itself as it connects these women, their debts and experiences of violence, and as that seemingly isolated, dyadic conflict radiates outward into the lives of other friends and kin, who tell their own stories of debt-related violence. Those narratives about violence rarely make it into the final accord — though as we will see in the following chapter, they do periodically bubble up. When violence does come up, the Center staff worries over the inappropriateness of conciliation. Usually, however, those violent tales remain peripheral, written out.

The second half of the chapter looks more explicitly at the entanglements of domestic violence and debt by examining the reasons why women might choose to bypass the courts in favor of conciliation when it comes to abusive partners.

As I argued in the previous chapter, conciliation services contribute to the ongoing individualization or privatization of broader patterns of social conflict — despite the best intentions and efforts of staff and conciliators. Some might argue such depoliticization is not merely an unintended consequence but rather an explicit goal of ADR. Whatever the intent, the results are the same. These practices not only obscure violence, but also depoliticize forms of violence that are rooted in and exacerbated by an entrepreneurial model of capitalist development promoted by foreign aid organizations, the Bolivian government, and nongovernmental organizations alike. Yet

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even as conciliation programs treat these as isolated problems to be resolved by signing interpersonal conciliation documents, many clients point to the macro political-economic dimension of their woes.

The Violence of Debt

Doña Nicolasa, Justa’s business partner, was dead. Whether by suicide or femicide, her friends were not sure. When Justa had gone to Nicolasa’s house upon hearing of her death, Nicolasa’s husband claimed suicide, but blamed Justa for her death, for driving his wife into the abyss. Terrified by what was unfolding, Justa called her sister Marta and brother-in-law Germán, who immediately came to her defense. The showed up at Nicolasa’s house shortly after Justa called them, desperate to help her.

The multiple accounts I heard of what happened next described a chaotic and unclear scene:

Nicolasa’s husband demanding that Justa go procure a death certificate for his wife (without the body) or he would cause legal problems for her; Marta and Germán calling 110 (the Bolivian emergency services number) only to have Nicolasa’s husband lock them in the house and refuse to open the door when they heard the police siren pass by.

Was it grief, guilt, or something else that made him act so strangely? Everyone found the circumstances of her “suicide” suspicious, though nobody would say “murder.” Instead they told me how Nicolasa had supposedly hung herself using a towel on a shower rod. They shook their heads with disbelieving looks on their face.

“Do you think it was…” I would ask, trailing off.

“Yes, we thought it was strange. She was a big woman,” Marta nodded. “That shower rod was so flimsy. How could it have supported her weight? We thought maybe he….” Marta trailed off.

Fearful, though, of the threats Nicolasa’s husband made about causing Justa legal problems, of holding her responsible by association for Nicolasa’s death, everyone shrunk from pressing the

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matter further.3 I never interviewed Nicolasa’s family, and was left contending with rumors and suspicions, fears and grief, accusations and ambiguous recollections. “He had no idea how deeply she was in debt,” Marta said of Nicolasa’s husband. “A cousin of ours who worked in the bank had to pull her credit list from the Central de Riesgos for us to prove how bad it was. Only then did [Nicolasa’s family] believe that it wasn’t just Justa’s fault [that she was in debt]. Doña Nicolasa had something like debts with 7 different banks — Promujer, Diakonia, Crecer…” Not to mention the interpersonal debts with people like Carmen — who had loaned money to Nicolasa, who in turn loaned money to

Justa.

One of the last times Marta remembered seeing Nicolasa was at a microfinance meeting. Only months earlier, Marta’s cousin had begun working at a microfinance institution and needed to get more clients. He encouraged his cousin Marta to form her own mancomunal group with women she knew — and he would act as their loan officer. Marta invited Nicolasa, and for the first round things went fine: everyone paid back their quotas and the group completed the cycle. But when the group applied for a second loan, Marta’s cousin pulled her aside. “He told me, ‘This woman has a lot of problems. I’m not going to be able to give her a loan,’” Marta recalled. Her cousin had access to national credit and risk assessment center, he told her, and could see just how deeply in debt she was.

When Nicolasa came to the group meeting that day, expecting to get a loan, Marta tried to explain to her that she couldn’t continue with the group.

Nicolasa became desperate. She pleaded for understanding. She insisted that she was only a guarantor on someone else’s loan, but that she herself was in good standing. But Marta’s cousin the loan officer was insistent. He showed Marta a print out: Nicolasa had some 5 outstanding loans. She had been blacklisted from receiving more in the Central de Riesgos [National Credit Bureau. Literally, the “Risk Bureau” or risk assessment center]. The other women in the group chided Nicolasa for perjudicando [screwing up] their own loan process — for causing trouble. They hissed and told her to

3 When I later reported by suspicions to my supervisor at the Integrated Justice Center, she shrugged and shook her head, saying, “There’s nothing, really, that we can do at this point,” since the event had occurred several years prior.

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move on so they could finalize their new loan with the officer. Marta accompanied her out of the meeting space and said that she later chastised the other woman for making Nicolasa feel bad.

“Who hasn’t been in that position?” She asked them.

When Marta reported next seeing Nicolasa, the woman was in the streets looking disheveled. She pleaded with Marta to help her out. Struggling herself financially, Marta turned her down. She now looked back guiltily at that moment. Could she have done something to encourage Nicolasa, to prevent her death?

Uncertain of the means — hanging herself or strangled by her husband — all the women connected to the industrial sewing machine were certain of one thing: it was debt that dealt the final blow to Nicolasa’s life. Marta wavered between lamenting a life lost to mounting debts and tendency to blame Nicolasa for the choices she had made: Nicolasa had given in to temptation and greed — temptation and greed promoted by microfinance institutions. Marta reiterated that Nicolasa walked the streets in all kinds of finery — polleras and gold adornitos [little embellishments and jewels] purchased not through the sweat of her labor but rather by her own decision to be a prestamista to other women. By her own hand or that of her husband, Marta suggested that Nicolasa’s death was tied to debt and to the seductions and abuses of microfinance.

Justa was herself deeply scarred — emotionally and physically — from abuses heaped on her by a husband enraged at her debts and unwilling to help his languishing wife pay them off. As we sat in the windowless concrete slab she called home, piles of unfinished polleras in the corner, Justa pulled down her sweater to reveal a raw-looking mass of flesh, twisted and folded on itself. She grasped at my chest to show me how her husband had clawed at her skin. Although initially superficial, the wound had become infected and healed badly, leaving a hunk of red scar tissue knotted on her light brown skin. I looked up at the Styrofoam swans posted high on the wall bearing Justa and her husband’s names — party decorations from their wedding. “I bet things turned out much differently than you had hoped when you got married,” I offered sympathetically.

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“I just wish he would support me emotionally,” Justa lamented. “I wish he were like Marta’s husband. He gives Marta moral support. But my husband doesn’t care. He says,

‘The debts are her problem, let her deal with them’.” Justa felt the strain in her other family relations as well. Again and again, her siblings had helped her cover her debts. Her brother

Daniel sat down with her one day and systematically mapped them all out, trying to develop a payment scheme. They were many.

Some were from debts in microfinance groups

(mancomunales) where she participated with other siblings and friends. Others were debts owed Figure 5 A more established moneylender’s storefront in the commercial district of Alto people like Carmen and Pilar, debts taken out Lima. Photo S. Ellison for business endeavors or school supplies for her kids, and more often than not, to simply help her cover other debts. But Justa’s brothers and sisters were growing weary with the stress that her spiraling debts caused — after all, they too were dealing with their own debts. And they, too, made loans to other friends and neighbors, and would wander the markets trying to keep an eye out for their debtors, begging for repayment.

Tying the Noose

Justa’s sister Marta told many stories of being an ambivalent participant in the brigades of women from her mancomunal sent to collect collateral from members of their microfinance groups — to collect money from people like her sister. “Our loan officers would send us off to demand collateral. They never had to get their hands dirty,” she told me. Acting like collection agencies on

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overdue microfinance loans, these groups of women — friends and relatives — would sometimes strip the debtors’ homes, taking blankets and televisions, cooking gas canisters and clothing, all held until the woman could repay her debt. In Marta’s recounting, microfinance asesoras — the people meant to guide the women in managing their finances — were to blame, as well as the institution, for encouraging the women to take out larger loans. Like Marta, other mancomunal participants who came to the Centers reported the uncomfortable times their presence collecting collateral would awaken the rage of a husband, who, unaware of the extent of his wife’s debts, would beat her in front of the group while the women pleaded for his understanding.

When women were unable to pay their monthly quota, the loan officer (asesora) would send the women to find a way to make the cuota sagrada or sacred quota, locking the women in the meeting room until one could procure the missing amount, sending the women out to the prestamistas sitting outside the institutional doors (cf Lazar 2004). Pretty soon, other women learned they could make a business out of providing quick loans to desperate women. Marta remembered,

[The prestamistas] opened their eyes, there — because they saw that women who didn’t make their payments got locked inside until [they could come up with the amount]. So [the prestamistas], they made a business of it! They saw that those people would have to find something, by force [of the institution]. So they came with their money — there, with their little bag of money, they came to make loans for just a moment…Those women were out there — like wolves, they were waiting.

She blamed the institution for pushing the women toward these compounding forms of debt:

[Our asesora] was always saying ‘Get out there — come on, you’ve got a little something in your house [that you can bring]. Those women are out there giving loans — go get a quick loan outside [from the prestamistas].’ And the women [of the mancomunal] developed vices, became liars. That is what [microfinance] taught the women, to become liars, to become depraved.

Again and again, Marta invoked the image of a noose — a noose that was tied by the financial institution. “They put the noose around her neck,” she said of her sister Justa’s experience with microfinance. “They were putting the noose around our neck,” Marta said of her experience in a mancomunal group with her mother. “For me it was absurd,” she said of loan officers encouraging women to take out large loans. “You were just putting a noose around each person’s neck. You were tempting them with money they don’t need.” In our conversations Marta often returned to the noose

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metaphor without, it seemed, any purposeful reference to Nicolasa’s death. But the metaphor struck me as an unfortunately apt one.

It was a cycle that, Marta insisted, led other members of the group to engage in anti-social behavior: turning on each other, making threats, “acting unjustly” — stripping women bare, leaving them pelada [stripped, nude]. In Marta’s account, women learned vice and learned to lie through their involvement in microfinance, and in turn microfinance and the industry of prestamistas who sprung up to help women meet their cuotas sagradas was skinning women alive.

There are banks that don’t understand. They want to see you there destroyed, stripped bare [pelada], they want to see you risking your family, your belongings, even the prestamistas live off of this — to make themselves rich, to make themselves bigger, they charge interest upon interest. They have no compassion for bleeding these women dry, they have no compassion for the tears of their children. And the small businesses that have given these microcredits are the ones who opened the eyes of these women to this kind of business [of becoming a moneylender]. Even Dona Pilar is a moneylender [prestamista].

Banks, Marta insist, want to see you destroyed, stripped bare. And friends, kin, neighbors have

“learned” to imitate that model of lending.

Marta’s use of the word pelada or stripped is particularly poignant in El Alto, where the majority of women are Aymara. Pelada, is often used as the translation for the Aymara word “K’ara” — one who is naked, bare, fleshless. It’s a word that is sometimes invoked as a derogative slur to describe people of European descent and city dwellers, a word that connotes anti-social individuals who are naked in the sense of being without social ties or community. In effect, Marta is suggesting that microfinance encourages anti-social behaviors, lying, vice, and produces people who are left stripped of their material objects, but also of the very social ties that make a person human.

People turn to prestamistas due to the structural conditions of microfinance, and they learn to be prestamistas for the same reasons: the new opportunities for lending those conditions produce. This is not reciprocal lending or ayni between kin, this is a different animal altogether, one that lacks compassion, one that leaves its subjects of lending objectified — not more and more deeply enmeshed in webs of reciprocal care and obligation, but rather pelada. Stripped of material goods — or more troublingly of social relations. That stripping was figurative, but it was also physical: it often

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involved collecting objects as collateral when women missed payments — by force if necessary.

Clients told stories of structural violence intertwined with physical assault — perpetrated by men and women alike.

It was a theme Marta returned to when recounting what happened after the conciliation session the day I met her, her sister, Carmen and Pilar. The conciliator was busy finalizing the accord that

Justa and Carmen would sign — and a second one between Justa and Pilar. Justa, her sister and brother-in-law had all gone to wait in the warmer sun outside the Center, buying a 2 liter Coca-Cola from a neighboring stand and passing around a single plastic cup. Suddenly there was a commotion, and I ventured out to make sure we didn’t need to separate the parties. I heard only the final exchange of angry words, when Marta and Justa rushed toward me. “She’s threatening to light candles!” they exclaimed. Confused by the meaning I tried to de-escalate the tension and invited

Carmen and Pilar to step away from Justa and her family. Later I asked Marta to help me understand her version of the exchange.

They were insulting us — when they saw I was [Justa’s] sister, [Carmen] started to insult me too. She was trying all kinds of ways to upset me. She said “Oh, you’re the sister. You must be a big debtor too, just like your sister!’ My husband [Germán] tried to calm me down. He said “Don’t listen to them — they are just trying to provoke you. The Lord knows us. Don’t listen to them, don’t pay them any attention. Close your ears — let’s talk of something else. They are trying to provoke you so you lash out and then they can accuse you of harassing them.” And they were doing exactly that. These cunning women are good at [stirring up trouble]! That’s why Doña Pilar has the skull of her mother. They dug it up from the cemetery and each year they do the mass for her skull. They are constantly doing that — each year her mass. I don’t know. I don’t believe in these things.

In Marta’s account, Pilar threatens to offer libations and light candles to her mother’s skull or calavera. Bolivians who own skulls, often called ñatitas, preserve them in glass cases, offering drink, cigarettes, adorning them with flowers, and taking them out for special celebrations every 9th of

November. Through their ñatita, celebrants seek protection and intermediation from the deceased

(whether or not they knew the owner of the skull in life). In Marta’s account, however, Pilar invokes her mother’s spirit, borne in her skull, for vengeance against Justa. It is an act of spiritual violence.

Marta continued,

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Carmen said, “Ah! Now Justa thinks that bringing me here she will solve her problems — now we’ll see. Right now I am going to go buy [candles]. I am going to light up the skull.” And so they carried on insulting my sister about everything and about nothing. And she said ‘We are going to buy candles now [to ask for her ruin].” That day I learned that the two of them are sisters [Carmen and Pilar]. I didn’t know they were before! Carmen carried on “Here [at the Integrated Justice Center] you are paying me without the interest. You are shameless — you say you believe in God, that you praise God, what does God matter to me?” They started talking that sort of nonsense. Good thing my husband intervened.

I have not been able to confirm whether Carmen and Pilar are in fact sisters, but if they are, it adds another complex layer of kin-based lending to the tale of the sewing machine. But Marta’s story of the calavera [skull], alongside her tale of Nicolasa’s descent into greed as a prestamista locates these women outside of the social mores of compassionate lending between friends and kin. It was a theme she returned to again and again in our conversations when she would compare prestamistas to large financial institutions, to banks that showed no mercy, no understanding of women’s plight, and that refused to recognize the kinds of social obligations that laid claim to her family’s finances — including a wedding celebration for her brother-in-law, which I describe below.

Much like anthropological discussions of fast money in postcolonial Africa — where people accuse the inexplicably wealthy of utilizing occult means to gain riches while shirking social obligations — Marta positions Carmen and Pilar as prestamistas who are without remorse or pity, are willing to use whatever means necessary to enrich themselves off of the suffering of others (cf Smith

2001; Comaroff & Comaroff 1999; Jensen & Buur 2004). Godless4 and lacking compassion, they are willing to leave a woman pelada (stripped bare), they are themselves engaged in a kind of socially- stripped lending that invokes, for evangelical Marta, a darker, occult undertone represented by the calavera. This is not to say that lending and market relations are themselves devilish, but rather the stripping of those practices bare of sociality is what makes them sinister (cf Van Vleet 2011; Tassi

2010). The form of kinship Marta sees between Pilar and Carmen, and the calavera [skull] of their

4 cf Van Vleet 2011 on a reverse story -- a Catholic narrating the possession of an evangelical Protestant as punishment from the devil and the differential protection God offers to Protestants or Catholics. Van Vleet’s account also speaks to the ways anthropologists have sought to understand attribution of occult practices to peasant views of immoral wage labor regimes.

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mother is itself abused for immoral gain and now utilized to enact a form of spiritual violence against

Justa and her family as retribution for the partial repayment of her debt (the principal and not the interest she has accumulated).

“Debt brings nothing but enemies.”

Justa’s money troubles and requests for support strained Marta’s finances -- and those of

Justa’s extended family. Those financial woes caused tension between Justa and her elderly parents

(with whom she now lived, along with her husband), and the reverberations of those tensions could be felt rippling through the lives of her sisters and brothers. But the drama unfolding over the sewing machine was just one node in a larger web of family relations strained by lending.

As Marta recounted her sister’s struggles with debt and violence, it prompted her to reflect on her own difficulty paying off a bank loan that she and her husband, Germán, took- out to purchase a large Micro bus from Marta’s mother-in-law. “I had this experience with my own Figure 6 A micro like that bought by Marta and Germán. Photo S. Ellison mother-in-law,” she told me. “This ‘pay me every cent’ of the cost of the micro experience, if you can call it that.” Marta had worked as a seamstress while her husband Germán tried to eek out a living as a taxi driver. In 2000, her mother-in-law convinced the couple that they should purchase a lumbering Blue Bird school bus she owned with her second husband. These “Micros” originated in the U.S. in the 1960s, and are now driven up the steep inclines between El Alto and La Paz, charging lower fees to passengers

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because of their trudging pace. But they also carry more passengers and can be packed late into the evening when commuters are desperate to find a bus heading to El Alto’s unlit peripheries.

Marta’s mother-in-law (suegra) procured a US$3,500 loan from Bancosol. To do so, she mortgaged Marta and Germán’s home, which she also shared. Marta’s suegra then handed the money over to her son and daughter-in-law. Marta and Germán then handed the money back to her, theatrically enacting the sale. The couple now bore the responsibility of repaying the bank. What scandalized Marta was her mother-in-law’s refusal to lower the cost of the micro, a refusal that was made all the more painful by her sense that she was doing everything she could to be a good daughter-in-law. Marta recounted years of personal sacrifice to help care for her father-in-law as his health declined, and for a brother-in-law who was unemployed. “I always had to be stretching things.

And that’s how it is with the bank too.”

The loan from her mother-in-law ushered in a time that Marta remembered as extremely taxing, a period of deprivation, unrelenting anxiety — and a continuous need for smaller loans to help cover unexpected repairs. “Sometimes the micro broke down,” she told me. “Sometimes it needed expensive repairs on the motor. What are we going to do? To be honest, Susan, sometimes I took money out [of these microcredit groups] in order to pay off a few quotas with the bank. But we paid it back. Thank God we always paid it back.”

With just a few months left to pay back the loan, Marta and Germán found themselves in a bind of conflicting obligations. Germán needed to help finance his brother’s upcoming wedding.

The tension between the moral economy of kinship and the bank’s repayment schedule stretched

Marta and Germán’s finances to a breaking point. Germán asked their loan manager if they could get an extension on their next quota. The answer they got was an emphatic “No.” They cobbled together enough money to just barely make the deadline, but as a consequence they were unable to contribute to his brother’s wedding expenses. At the party, Marta recounted, her mother-in-law got drunk and unleashed a scathing public attack on Marta and Germán, accusing them of not caring enough to make a contribution. “I was sitting in a corner of shame,” Marta told me, “because I was

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so indebted. I had gone off and gotten into debt all over again [to make the bank payment], and I knew that soon have to pay all those people back.”

As Marta tacked back and forth between her tense relationship with her mother-in-law, kinship obligations, and looming bank quotas, Marta’s personal story dovetailed with the 2003 uprising and the widespread frustrations it expressed. “This was just a little before the fire — before

[Alteños] burned [Banco Sol’s branch office in Rio Seco]. Couldn’t they understand? They didn’t want to understand!” As she spoke, I wasn’t sure if the lack of understanding was directed toward her loan officer or the entire microfinance industry. I suspect both.

Marta gestured only briefly to the events of 2003, but as she did, she once again invoked the sense of being denuded, pelada by banking institutions. She told me, “There are banks that don’t understand, they want to see you thrown out, pelada [denuded]. They want to see you risking your family, your goods — even those prestamistas live off of that. They make themselves big and rich charging interest upon interest….” In doing so, Marta made explicit connections between the ongoing tensions with her mother-in-law and banking institutions, between prestamistas and the violent confrontations between sister and Nicolasa’s family. Marta tied these interpersonal conflicts to a larger economic system that, she believed, was deforming their lives. The sense of vulnerability and betrayal — by both an unsympathetic mother-in-law and the loan manager who wouldn’t let me miss a payment — was made all the more bitter when Marta’s brother decided to go into banking.

“And now my brother, who is an accountant, is working for the Banco Nacional,” She told me. “My own brother!”

In the Integrated Justice Centers, stories of debt were also stories of violence. It was present in the humiliating words “Deudor Moroso” (defaulting debtor) that banks and moneylenders would paint in startling white on the brown adobe walls, provoking household fights between fathers and daughters. It was present in the screaming fights women had in the open-air market, shouting about long-overdue loans. And, it was present in the kinds of domestic violence cases that we handled in the Integrated Justice Centers, as we drafted letters of referral to the forensic medical examiner a

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woman could gather pruebas5 [proof] of the violence “just in case” she decided to pursue a legal case against her partner. Those expanding circles of conflict radiated outward, as neighbors and kin were drawn into overlapping lender and borrower relationships. And like a noose, they threatened to strangulate friendships, kinships, and marriages alike.

Toward a Political Economy of Domestic Violence

In the United States, when people talk about domestic violence, the terms are often individualized. It’s a characterological problem. In popular discourses and intervention programs alike, it’s the individual pathology of an individual perpetrator. Intervention models premised on this understanding of domestic violence tend to criminalize the perpetrator while seeking to understand and intervene upon his (or her) individual psychology (Adelman 2004: 49). By contrast, in Bolivia, popular discourses about domestic violence often characterize it as a cultural pathology: it is rural, it is uneducated, and it is, above all else, indigenous.

Much as I described in earlier chapters on the “culturalization” of conflict in general, popular discourses about violence against women in Bolivia frequently attribute the problem to the patriarchal culture of rural Andean Indians and Indian migrants to urban peripheries like El Alto. It’s a matter of “education” (which, as I described earlier, is a euphemism for race and class). In these accounts, domestic violence is a practice that rural Indians have brought with them to the city as they migrated, packed like coca leaves and alpaca yarn into their heavy aguayo bundles. I heard many different people articulate this theory of domestic violence in our conversations, from government bureaucrats to the well-meaning middle class employers who brought their empleadas (domestic servants) to the Center in an attempt to help them escape from under the thumb of abusive husbands. I also heard it from Center clients themselves — who often blamed mothers for reproducing machista sons in the city or for being complicit in violence against their daughters-in-law

(cf Van Vleet 2008).

5 Forensic medical certificates used as proof in the court.

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One of the other major causes people cite for gender-based violence in El Alto is alcohol consumption. Indeed, one of the introductory lessons I learned at the Integrated Justice Center in

District 6 was about the ebb and flow of clients, particularly women. On my first day at the Center, the Director, Dra. Paloma Gil, explained that Mondays and Tuesdays were their busiest days — and the days when she most needed extra support. Other staff made similar claims, and I soon came to witness the pattern myself.

But why were Mondays and Tuesdays so busy?

One explanation might be that Wednesdays and Thursdays were market days in this heavily commercial district, and the Center emptied to only a trickle as potential clients (especially women) went to work. On Wednesdays, many neighbors living near the Center focused their energies on the local street market — unfurling plastic tarps over muddy, unpaved streets where they displayed household wares, used clothing, bags of powdered soap, and thick slabs of recently-butchered meat.

Others roamed the streets pushing rolling carts where they sold freshly squeezed orange juice and pork sandwiches. But on Thursdays, the 16 de Julio market practically shut down access into and out of District 6; as vendors set-up makeshift stalls and throngs of shoppers from El Alto and La Paz choked the streets, the stream of people into the Center slowed to a trickle. Some neighbors were working, and others were out shopping.

But that was not the explanation I got. Instead, staff almost universally explained the preponderance of cases on Mondays and Tuesdays in the same way: Men get drunk on the weekends and beat their wives, and then on Mondays and Tuesdays the women come to the Center to lodge a complaint. Weekends were time for parties and soccer games with buddies, baptisms and wedding celebrations, times for going out on the town [farrear] with your compadres, or dancing in your neighborhood’s anniversary celebration. These were the kinds of social events where people drank, and drank heavily. Men, staff would tell me, would come home drunk and fight with their wives, and those fights would escalate into violence. Occasionally, staff and clients would talk about women’s drinking and the resulting fights — with husbands and with in-laws. Stories of drinking and violence

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were often intertwined. And indeed I spent many weekend nights listening to my own neighbor angrily and then mournfully bang on his compound’s thin metal door when his young wife punished his drunkenness by locking him out.

One such Monday I arrived to find Asusena, one of the Center’s interns, looking bewildered as she spoke with 12 people who had crowded around her desk. I slipped into her office and face the bloodied group of middle aged men and teenage boys with gashed foreheads and split lips, young mothers with bandages wrapped around their heads, and a few unscathed children. “They were here when I arrived at 8:30 this morning,” Asusena mumbled quickly to me. Everyone present was related: they were all siblings, parents, and cousins of a single man who had been holding a baptismal celebration the previous day for his infant daughter. The man’s wife and her extended family, I came to understand, was in equally bad shape. The wife’s extended family had taken their battle wounds elsewhere.

Wearing fresh bandages, bruised faces, and with confetti still plastered to their skin and hair, the family smelled very distinctly of the alcohol they had consumed the previous day. One young man’s hand was heavily bandaged — the result of a pickaxe wound. The group had been to the neighborhood free health clinic run by a crew of Cuban doctors, and had already received forensic medical certificates. Asusena looked over their paperwork and shook her head. “These injuries are too severe for us to handle,” she explained as she eyed the degree of gravity ascribed to each patient’s injuries. “This is a criminal case. I’m going to have to write you a letter of referral to the prosecutor’s office.” As the group departed sullenly, Asusena opened the windows of the Center to try to air out the stench of blood, soiled bodies, and alcohol. I don’t know if the man and his relatives pursued criminal charges against his wife and her family, but clearly that festive occasion — and perhaps the marriage — had been deeply marred, regardless of further legal action.

It’s stories like these that troubled me as I started thinking about how to represent intimate, interpersonal violence and its relationship to alcohol in El Alto.

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One way Andeanist scholars have tried to complicate our understanding of the relationship between violence and alcohol is through studies of the Tinku celebrations in northern Potosi. The word Tinku means “encounter” in Quechua and speaks to an understanding of the productive nature of conflict. Participants, Tinku scholars argue, believe that blood must be spilled during these annual ritual battles in order to ensure their land’s fertility. In this cosmology, spilling blood is a source of strength and social reproduction; rather than an expression of anti-social violence, Tinku as a kind of socially-productive violence. But many popular discourses about Tinku often emphasize

Indian propensities to violence — fueled by alcohol.

Multiple audiences now “consume” Tinku fights as a form of spectacular entertainment. Late night television programs run videos of Tinku fights. These programs show a particular fascination with Quechua women pulverizing each other: their arms and long braids swinging as they pummel each others’ faces and bodies. No narrative about the meaning or context of these fights accompanies the grainy videos, which vendors also hawked on street corners alongside videos of

American and Mexican wrestling matches and clips of the destruction wrought by the 2011 Japanese tsunami. A few travel agencies have begun running Tinku tours for American and Europeans willing to witness the “brutality” and take the risk that accompanies getting a little too close to the action.

Andeanists studying instances of gender-based violence in Bolivia have also tried to complicate our understanding of the role alcohol plays in domestic disputes. Krista Van Vleet (2008), for example, argues that many of the more pervasive human rights and women’s rights discourses that circulate in Bolivia fail to account for the complex ways people in the rural Andean community of

Sullk’ata perceive, justify, or, alternately, denounce certain forms of interpersonal violence. People’s response to and interpretation of that violence, Van Vleet argues, depends heavily on whether the perpetrator is sober or drunk: violent acts committed when a person is drunk are “normalized.” A drunken person is not in her right mind, and can be forgiven, “but violence between affines is decidedly not considered to be custom when people are sober” (168). As Van Vleet explains, “The

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one incident of violence that I heard of between a husband and wife that occurred when both were sober was met with horrified exclamations and discussions of the man’s improper upbringing” (168).

Van Vleet pushes accounts of gender violence in the Andes further by examining the interplay between violence, alcohol, and relationships between women. Van Vleet argues that violent episodes between women often stem from struggles over kinship obligations, as daughters-in-law work to earn their place among their in-laws — and mothers-in-law judge those efforts to be insufficient or incomplete. She argues,

Although gender hierarchy is not an inconsequential aspect of domestic violence, kinship obligations and ambiguities of hierarchy significantly shape the way in which relationships are negotiated. These obligations and ambiguities create the conditions for the emergence of conflict among individuals, especially those related by marriage. Thus violence among women, though not as frequently acknowledged as violence between husbands and wives, is crucial to a more general understanding of domestic violence in the Andes. The violence among women also highlights the ways in which relatedness is at once intimate and antagonistic (Van Vleet 2008: 181, emphasis mine).

Mother-in-law jokes aside, Van Vleet’s aim is to challenge the simplifying accounts and worn-out clichés of Andean women being merely (willing) victims of abusive, drunk men. Drunkenness, in Van

Vleet’s account, is an altered state that allows men and women to violently express the real ambiguities and inequalities between kin, including between women who occupy vastly different positions of power in a particular household.

In the Centers I observed similar debates about how to make sense of, criticize, or justify violence. Those debates included clients who blamed their mothers-in-law for fomenting discord with their husbands or legitimating his violence if they failed to fulfill certain wifely duties. Clients in

District 6 also reported spouses that were decidedly not drunk when they hit them. As one woman told me, “My husband is [an Evangelical] Christian. He only hits me when he is sober.” But clients did not save their criticism of violence for cases when perpetrators were sober and therefore presumed to be in control of their faculties, as Van Vleet describes. I regularly watched as extended family members, fathers, mothers, compadres, grown children, and neighbors urged a woman to seek shelter and press charges against her violent husband or adult son — regardless of his sobriety.

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Others, however, expressed concern about the shame a woman might bring on the family if she were to denounce her husband — and these were the arguments and justifications that many staff and clients attributed to culture.

Bolivian debates over the relationship between culture and gender-based violence are not new. Many Bolivians I spoke with reconfigured the “Western” feminist critique of patriarchy to incorporate national debates over indigenous notions of gender complementarity or chacha-warmi. The concept of chacha-warmi suggests that a person is whole and fully adult (jaqi) who may play leadership roles within his/her community when s/he forms part of a (heterosexual) couple, a couple whose lives and individual tasks are carried out in complementary and mutually beneficial ways. Bolivian feminist organizations, policymakers, and NGOs have wrestled with how to respond to indigenous intellectuals’ assertion that Andean Indians did not engage in forms of violence against women until they were exposed to Colonial/Western ideals of male supremacy and women’s exclusion from political and economic power. Andean concepts of chacha-warmi, activists argue, offer an alternative, egalitarian conceptualization of gender relations that nevertheless presupposes (complementary) differences between the sexes.

I witnessed the debate over the ideals versus reality of chacha-warmi unfold in numerous small workshops, national conferences, and in informal conversations over coffee. Those conversations frequently devolved into an argument over whether or not there ever existed a pristine, non-violent

Indian past that was only later “infected” by the colonial encounter. Chacha-warmi advocates frequently provoked a great deal of eye-rolling and head-shaking from skeptical audience members.

Critics, like those I encountered at a conference analyzing Bolivia’s Katarista movement6, would push back at the claim, pointing to forms of violence and hierarchy that existed within the Inca Empire, and challenging the idea of egalitarianism within indigenous communities. They drew on ethnohistorical data as well as composite theories of human nature.

6 Named after Tupac Katari, the leader of a significant indigenous rebellion, Katarismo is a political movement that took shape in the 1970s, led by one of the first generations of Aymara intellectuals to attend university.

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Some Aymara women leaders I spoke with would chuckle at the assertion that indigenous communities practice chacha-warmi, telling me “it’s always the men insisting there was no gender discrimination before the Colonial period.” But they, too, would nevertheless appeal to the chacha- warmi concept of gender complementarity as an ideal worth pursuing, even if it did not exist in contemporary practice. Urban indigenous feminists such as Julieta Paredes urge greater attention to the interplay of indigeneity and class, and highlight the complex class dynamics among urban Aymara residents in cities like El Alto. Paredes has famously sought to rearticulate the Aymara concept of chacha-warmi (gender complementarity) in such a way that the concept might gain purchase among both urban feminist movements and indigenous rights groups, particularly as these groups have found themselves at odds. Those terms and their consequences for both movements continue to be hotly debated.

In recent months, the Morales Administration has sought to implement new legislation targeting violence against women in the wake of the strangulation murder of councilwoman Juana Quispe

Apaza7 — from the rural municipality of Ancoraimes8. Activist organizations worked with the

Morales Administration to quickly approve Law 243 “Against Harassment and Political Violence

Against Women” (May 28, 2012) in the wake of her killing. Quispe Apaza had reportedly experienced ongoing aggression and threats prior to her death, and was repeatedly barred entrance to participate in political meetings in the rural municipality she ostensibly represented. Women’s rights groups interpreted Apaza Quispe’s murder as a politically-motivated and culturally-inflected femicide and emphasized the “rural” — re: indigenous — origin of Quispe Apaza, whose last name also indicates her indigenous parentage, although the circumstances of her murder remain unclear. Many organizations such as the human rights ombudsman, Derechos Humanos, focused on how Quispe

The movement sought to articulate class analysis with an analysis of the economic exploitation and exclusion of indigenous people from political power. 7 Juana Quispe Apaza was a member of both the Federación Departamental de Mujeres Campesinas Indígenas y Originarias de La Paz Bartolina Sisa and of the La Asociación de Concejalas y Alcaldesas de Bolivia (ACOBOL). 8 http://www.laprensa.com.bo/diario/actualidad/seguridad/20120315/mujer-asesinada-y-botada-a-un-rio-era- una-concejal_21294_34195.html

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Apaza’s murder reflected broader patterns in the exclusion of women from political power and violence aimed at preventing their usurpation of local political elites, without resorting to cultural frameworks. Others, however, made oblique and sometimes more explicit references to the

“cultural” dimensions of the violence. As an editorial in the Bolivian newspaper Los Tiempos argued

Without a doubt the great number of cases of violence exercised [against women] are with the singular goal of preventing women from being incorporated into public life…This position is supported by the more than 4,000 cases of violence exercised against councilwomen [over a 12-year period], by men who refuse to admit women’s participation in the public sphere in the name of traditions, ancestral culture, or simply the most primitive form of machismo.9 (emphasis mine. cf Saida Hodžić 2009 on the selective invocation of culture in gender violence debates and the challenges it poses to anthropologists).10

Shortly after her murder, the Morales Administration swiftly moved to approve Law 243 — but the law itself was nearly ten years in the making.11 A great deal of research on domestic violence bills like the one named for Apaza Quispe examines what happens after such a bill is passed — the micropolitics of its implementation — the many gaps and barriers to enforcement, the creative reinterpretations and efforts to disseminate and interpret the law through local idioms (cf Merry

2006).

My point here, however, is that the debate over how “culture” perpetuates (or challenges) violence against women regularly locates the focus of debate on “culture” itself. In doing so, it may dismiss the implicit critique of chacha-warmi activists: that we need to historicize and interrogate the relationship between capitalist governance and violence. As anthropologist Sally Engle Merry insists,

9 Editorial in Los Tiempos published online on May 30, 2012. http://www.lostiempos.com/diario/opiniones/editorial/20120530/ley-contra-el-acoso-y-violencia- politica_173167_364395.html 10 Saida Hodžić’s (2009) analysis of the political struggle sparked by a domestic violence bill in Ghana raises questions about how anthropologists tackle the place of “culture” in human rights and gender violence debates. While frequently critical of how activists, policy makers, critics, and advocates alike produce essentialized, static notions of culture, Hodžić argues that anthropology nevertheless tends to priviledge appeals to ‘culture’ as a form of counter-hegemonic resistance. By contrast, Hodžić wants to push anthropologists to consider how people — particularly state agents — may utilize “culture” to shore-up their power, particularly around gender issues. They may do so, for example, by appealing to customary law and ‘tradition’ as a selectively anti-imperialist stance against the imposition of domestic violence or rape laws, even as they welcome other “Western” interventions. Hodžić argues that the challenge for ethnographers is to document “when, by whom, and to what end” people mobilize this amorphous notion of “culture” for political ends (350). 11 Editorial from the Human Rights Ombudsman Derechos Humanos, May 31, 2012. http://www.derechoshumanosbolivia.org/editorial.php?cod_editorial=ED20120531101150

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Blaming culture for the disadvantages faced by women, minorities, and other vulnerable groups is an appealing ideology for proponents of contemporary neoliberal globalization. It blames the havoc wreaked by expansive capitalism and global conflicts on the culture of the ‘other.’ This absolves the rich countries of responsibility for the suffering caused by these processes and blames local people, such as battering husbands, oppressive men who veil their wives, and knife-wielding fans of FGM, for the suffering. Yet these practices are not necessarily ancient…The developed countries have political incentives to insist on a cultural interpretation of women’s subordination (2003a: 63-64).

By contrast to these “culturalist” explanations, Adelman (2004) calls on scholars to examine the political economy of domestic violence. Adelman (2004) asks instead, “How did the current state/economy logic rely on normative ideas about ‘the family’ to create conditions supportive of flexible capitalist accumulation? How do shifting patterns of employment, when coupled with the contractions of the welfare state map onto pre-existing intra-familial relations? What does the capitalist governance of domestic violence look like?” (52).

What would such an approach entail in Bolivia?

Asking what the capitalist governance of domestic violence looks like in District 6 of El Alto would require tracing colonial relations of exploitation forward into the contemporary era. How have intra-familial relations been reconfigured under structural adjustment and more recent efforts to further flexibilize labor? How have efforts to promote conciliation (unintentionally) intersected with parallel efforts to produce an entrepreneurial, self-reliant populace in El Alto? How does conciliation figure within the political economy of microfinance, especially as it relates to cases of debt and its entanglement with interpersonal violence? In El Alto, the everyday practices of indigenous women challenge simplistic urban-rural dichotomies, and instead point to the ways indigenous women engage with capitalist markets and relate to state institutions through their kinship networks and other social practices. These practices are critical to understanding the unfolding micro- and geo- politics of aid interventions targeting urban poor and indigenous women, especially as those interventions are mediated through, are reconfiguring – and are reconfigured by – kinship relations, state policies, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

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As I described in the first chapter, international aid institutions including USAID and the

World Bank began to promote conciliation during the 1990s alongside a broader array of economic and political reforms. Those reforms included the “capitalization” (privatization) of state-owned industries and stringent economic restructuring — a process that helped to produce the city of El

Alto. But it also included efforts to remake Bolivian citizens to be more amenable to (neo)liberal democratic governance by encouraging citizens to assume greater responsibility for the management of their own lives, livelihoods, and local resources. Conciliation emerged alongside these parallel efforts to promote entrepreneurial solutions to poverty and state failure, and, I argue, residents of

District 6 are increasingly turning to its resources to mitigate the violent outcomes of this entrepreneurial model.

Women clients at the Integrated Justice Centers often blame their experiences of violence on a number of different causes, including alcohol consumption and spousal jealousy. But again and again, when they described tensions in their home and mounting violence at the hands of their partners, they also emphasized the contributing factor of economic insecurity and debt. As I we saw in the

Centers, economic insecurity, exacerbated by spiraling and compounding debt, has become a significant source of intrafamilial tension and violence. Nevertheless, women like Justa, Pilar,

Carmen and Marta, pursue conciliation as a stop-gap measure, a means to make do with the everyday pressures and forms of violence they face — and sometimes enact themselves.

This is not a monocausal argument about violence.12 Yet popular discourses about gender violence in Bolivia are heavily inflected with cultural blame, at the expense of recognizing other factors that may escalate violence or limit women’s choices for how to deal with it. Alongside the push for transforming political cultures (rather than political institutions), I want to suggest that this culturalization of domestic violence further contributes to the depoliticization of intimate forms of

12 I do not mean to suggest that Bolivians do not experience or engage in forms of intimate violence among the wealthy or middle class. The limited statistics available suggest that domestic violence in Bolivia cuts across class and race backgrounds. Nor do I mean to suggest that gender norms and cultural practices such as women living in the household of their in-laws play no role in how certain forms of violence against women are normalized and justified (cf Van Vleet 2008).

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violence. In doing so, it also erases violence from the very economic models being promoted as a solution to women’s social, political, and economic subordination.

A political-economic approach to domestic violence invites us to examine the interplay between factors that shape people’s experience of violence, and the ways people navigate those experiences of violence through recourse to the Integrated Justice Centers. Entrepreneurial forms of citizenship now being promoted in El Alto target women’s social networks in ways that may exacerbate, create, or perpetuate forms of violence they experience in their interpersonal relationships.

As the case of the industrial sewing machine illustrates, the structural violence of debt intersected with, exacerbated, and produced forms of interpersonal and social violence, including between women. These multifaceted experiences of violence challenge more simplified stories of male-on-female violence that tend to predominate discussions of domestic violence in El Alto. For example, Marta’s experience grappling with the debt she and her husband Germán owed her mother- in-law exemplifies the many complex ways debt maps onto existing social obligations and familial hierarchies, and often troubles already-strained relationships within families. Marta’s tensions with her mother-in-law complicates the trope of the abusive, alcoholic husband: even as mounting debt and kinship obligations cause tensions and enormous strife within Marta’s family, she provides a strikingly different account of her relationship with her husband. “We were strong enough to confront the situation, and I am proud of my husband, proud of my husband, because together we new how to support each other in the good and the bad times. We knew how,” she told me. Both

Marta and her sister Justa describe Germán as a kind, supportive, and committed husband who often stands with both women as they face deepening debt crises and violence from other sources. It is the relationship with her suegra, her mother-in-law, that proved most taxing and that she felt posed a real threat to the family’s economic security because of the unforgiving way she made the loan.

Nevertheless, the Center also dealt with many, many cases of violence that did fit more neatly into categories of domestic violence perpetrated by men against women. Those cases raised difficult

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questions about the relationship between violence, debt, and alcohol consumption. But they also raise questions about the role of Alternative Dispute Resolution in a context where debt and physical, gender-based violence are so deeply intertwined — even as staff insist that one must not conciliate violence.

We do not conciliate violence.

Authors concerned with gender-based or domestic violence have been particularly critical about the ways that harmony ideologies inherent in mediation programs act to “disappear” violence

(Cobb 1997). For example, Mindie Lazarus-Black (2007) argues that women’s experiences in

Trinidadian courts are deeply shaped by court rites and a culture of reconciliation that contribute to a process of “delegalizing” domestic violence cases. That delegalization process involves “converting a discourse about legal rights into a complaint that is not worthy of legal redress” (Ibid: 102). Similarly,

Merry (1990: ix) found that American court officials in New England frequently “redefine litigants’ troubles as moral or therapeutic problems, requiring counseling or mediation but not legal remedy”

(Lazarus-Black 2007: 102).

Women’s rights organizations in Bolivia have voiced similar critiques. Bolivian gender justice

NGOs accuse police officers, judges, and lawyers of de-legalizing gender violence through many of these same processes. Critics point to the many impediments that prevent women from pursing redress for domestic violence, ranging from refusing to respond to distressed emergency calls13 to encouraging women to reconsider divorce for the good of their children, as well as the many costs associated with pursuing domestic violence cases (from time lost to bribes). Thus the barriers to pursing legal cases against violent partners in Bolivia are many, and overlap with some of the court rites described by Lazarus-Black (2007). They included legal bureaucracies and other institutional

13 For example, in 2004, my neighbors and I called the police on another neighbor -- who we could hear throwing his wife against the wall and breaking furniture. The emergency operator answering the phone told me that it was a “private family matter, not police business,” and then hung up on me. We resorted to banging on the door until it stopped. For the moment at least.

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barriers, as well as family pressures for women to return to abusive partners in order to avoid shame and gossip from neighbors.

Yet by contrast to the de-legalizing processes observed by Merry and Lazarus-Black — where court officials pushed for therapeutic intervention or reconciliation — I found that conciliators and legal aid interns in District 6 regularly pushed back against women’s requests for conciliation appointments with their abusive spouses. Staff asserted that domestic violence was a delito (crime) and not appropriate for conciliation, urging instead that women press charges against their abusive spouses in the formal courts — with the aid of the Center’s pro-bono lawyer14. Take, for example, the interaction between Asusena and the mother of a young client. The 18-year-old woman “Berta” first came to the Center badly battered and 9 months pregnant. Her young husband had kicked her repeatedly in the stomach, nearly causing her to lose the baby. A woman at her evangelical church learned of the incident and brought the young woman to the Center.

The next time I saw Berta, she cradled her infant daughter in her arms. Her nose still bore the broad scar from the beating that brought her to the Center. Asusena had helped Berta initiated her domestic violence case against her husband just a few months prior, but this was the first day her mother accompanied her to the Center. Asusena asked Berta’s mother why she had not accompanied her daughter to the Center before. “What would the neighbors say?” the older woman pleaded anxiously. The woman’s husband — Berta’s father — stood silently by her side, gazing down.

Asusena furrowed her brow at Berta’s mother and shook her head, clucking her tongue disapprovingly: “And what, ma’am, will the neighbors say if next time he kills her?” Berta’s mother fell silent, and Asusena began drawing up the report she would submit to the judge.

Similarly, I regularly heard interns and staff push women to reconsider their desire to simply sentar una denuncia — to register a complaint — rather than to initiate a full-scale court case against

14 Indeed, Dra. Paloma Gil — who began working at the Centers as a volunteer under USAID’s direction before being formally hired as the Director of District 6 — was one of the principal advocates for institutionalizing pro-bono lawyers in the Center in order to help women pursue domestic violence and child support cases.

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their abusers. On the one hand, many Clients (mistakenly) believed that by making contact with the

Centers they had formally documented the abuse — and could utilize that documentation in the event that they decided to take the next step. Interns struggled to explain that their registry was not a formal legal complaint, that it was just a first step toward such a denuncia, and urged further action.

The computer system was filled with numerous domestic violence registries that Clients never pursued further. These were the unfulfilled beginnings of formal domestic violence cases whose clients came to the Centers for orientation about their options, but did not return, or would return months later to sentar otra denuncia, to leave another complaint, to get another referral to the forensic medical examiner. Women returned with old certificates from previous visits to the medical examiner, reports from psychological services NGOs, or complaint registries from the Brigada de la familia (special Family Brigade of the police force), which they accumulated in plastic folders and tried to hide from their partners. Many others never returned.

Again and again I heard conciliators, staff and interns assert that no se concilia la violencia: one does not conciliate violence. And although the Integrated Justice Centers encouraged a “culture of conciliation,” or talking things through por la via buena (taking the good road, talking it through), staff was quick to assert that conciliation was not the same as reconciliation. In practice, however, the line between conciliating and not conciliating violence was a lot less clear. Violence often hovered around the edges of conciliation appointments, mentioned obliquely in quiet filler conversations between parties as conciliators typed-up accords, or as clients filled the silence as staff registered follow-up appointments.

Women who were hammering out debt payments with friends, moneylenders, and comadres would allude to spouses who beat them angrily when they learned of the extent of their debts or when collectors showed up at the house unannounced (including their friends in mancomunal groups).

Here domestic violence was peripheral to these particular, dyadic cases meant to resolve disputes between debtor/lenders (who were often also relatives or friends). But these stories were not just about domestic violence enacted by male partners. Stories of physical abuse at the hands of mothers-

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in-law, sisters-in-law, or other family members emerged in the longer narratives women told conciliators about the conflicts that brought them to the Center — for example how Lourdes and her husband derided their compadre Severino for his drunkenness and abuse in the previous chapter.

In these cases, violence remained peripheral to the issue on the conciliation table.

Frequently, however, violence was central to a person’s narrative about why they came to the

Center. Despite this centrality, however, many women pushed first for conciliation even as they amassed the documentation they would need to pursue a domestic violence case at some imagined point in the future. These tactical maneuvers were most blatant in cases where women clients were seeking leverage with partners to help them repay loans. The case of Luz and her husband Jhonny is emblematic of this strategizing.

Luz V. Jhonny

My alarm goes off at 4:45AM. I wake exhausted but move into action, boiling water for coffee and getting dressed in the bitter cold. I’m supposed to meet one of the Center clients, Luz, at Cruce

Villa Adela15 by 5:30AM. From there, we will make our way through the back roads of El Alto to the

Delizia Yogurt Factory — aiming to arrive by 6am, when Luz’s husband, Jhonny, is supposed to get off work from the nightshift. We are going to “serve” him with an invitation to conciliation.

This little stakeout is unusual.16 Most Center clients are expected to deliver their invitations to conciliation on their own — it is, after all, an invitation, not a court summons. How, then, did we get here?

As I describe in the next chapter, I regularly heard interns suggest that clients take neighborhood police along to deliver invitations to conciliation — partly to intimidate the other party, to convince them, with the presence of the police, that conciliation was serious business and

15 A major intersection in El Alto. 16 I was asked by Clients on several occasions if I would accompany them to deliver conciliation invitations and explain the process to the other party. When I consulted with the Center Director about doing so, she said it was fine so long as I was comfortable doing so. Most requests never panned-out. Luz’s was the only case where I accompanied a Client to deliver her invitation.

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not to be mocked. Sometimes that additional police presence was meant to provide some protection from retribution in cases where Clients feared the other party might lash out violently, or in situations where there was — as in Luz’s case — a history of violence. This effort to intimidate the other party or to protect the person issuing the invitation already speaks to some of the ambiguities of conciliation, which advocates characterize as a friendly, welcome opportunity to restore trust and improve communication. By contrast, I found that staff frequently assumed that some degree of intimidation and coercion was necessary to bring people to the table. Similarly, Clients regularly voiced fears that the other party might react violently to their efforts to “serve” invitations, especially in cases where relationships were already plagued by violence. The need for a kind of bodyguard or witness to these deliveries belies the ideals of conciliation, and highlights the irony of the phrase “we do not conciliate violence.”

Luz has come to the Center to ask for a letter of conciliation for a husband she claims is violent, abusive, and who has been hiding out at his sister’s house. “If I go to his sister’s house, she’ll just refuse to open the door,” Luz explains. “I want to catch him at work so that he can’t escape.”

Angelica, one of the interns, has discussed with Luz her options for initiating a domestic violence case against her estranged husband, and has elaborated letters of referral to the forensic medical examiner and a local psychological services NGO to obtain the documentation she would need to initiate a domestic violence claim. But Luz decides that she wants to bring her husband to the Center sooner, to try conciliation first. She suggests, however, that she is afraid to go alone, and begs me to accompany her. I happen to live close to the factory where Jhonny works, and agree to go with her.

She shows up for our meeting in a car she has borrowed from her compadre de matrimonio — the godfather of her marriage. A male friend has accompanied her — he works with Jhonny and supplied the information about his shift hours. I never learn if he is Luzs’ friend, a relative, or lover.

When we arrive at the factory, trucks bearing the Delizia logo are lined up awaiting entry.

Minibuses periodically deliver workers for the early-morning shift. The sky begins to turn rosy hue as a slow trickle of workers begins to exit the factory from the night shift.

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We wait. And Wait. On edge. As we continue to monitor the exit, Luz turns to me and pleads:

“I’m too nervous! Can you do it? I don’t want him to see me. Can you just do it?”

I waver, but eventually agree to hand Jhonny the letter and explain conciliation to him.

After much waiting and several close calls, a lean, hunched man appears in the doorway. “IT’S

HIM,” Luz and her friend yelp in unison.

I’m out the door, calling his name, walking briskly. No response.

I call again “Jhonny!” He turns his head slightly in my direction, but continues walking down the block. Jhonny! I insist, trotting across the dusty, cobbled street. Jhonny stops, startled, and turns toward me. “No te asustes, no te asustes!” Do not be afraid, I try to reassure him.

I tell him, “My Name is Susan and I am from an Integrated Justice Center. Your wife came to us asking for help inviting you to conciliation. Conciliation is not a court process. Conciliation is about trying to find a solution to our conflicts. The idea is to have the help of a conciliator or mediator create a space where the two of you can talk through your problems and arrive at a mutually-beneficial agreement,” I say, repeating my oft-rehearsed script. As I speak, I run my finger along the lines in the letter that explains conciliation to invitees.

Jhonny nods, hesitantly, his arms still outstretched as if anticipating a punch. He says, “You know my wife came here claiming I had abandoned her with five kids — making a scene at work.”

I respond, “Whatever your problems, with conciliation you can talk about the issues and try to reach an agreement that is satisfying to the both of you. Conciliation isn’t reconciliation. Some people do decide to work things out, but others want to separate definitively. Those are things you two can discuss and put in the accord.”

Jhonny nods again, “I understand.”

“You should really think about coming,” I say, adding the little push I have learned from my colleagues: “It’s a good way to avoid the courts.” I do not mention the fact that Luz may simultaneously pursue a legal case against him for violence. I also feel a deep twinge of ambivalence

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about advocating conciliation in a case I know is explicitly tied to violence, whether or not Luz pursues a case against her husband for domestic violence in addition to the conciliation appointment.

“Yes, yes, I understand,” Jhonny repeats, “I will come.”

I had met Luz the previous day, when she approached the desk I was sharing with Angelica, the Center’s newest intern. Luz explained to Angelica that eight years ago, her husband Jhonny shoved her down a deep ravine, shattering her leg. She was hoping to bring him to the Integrated

Justice Center so that he would promise to use his medical insurance to pay for the removal of several screws that were supposed to come out years ago. But her more pressing concern, she explains, is a debt she owes — she is due to make a quota payment on a loan from Bancosol, and she needs her husband to help her cover the payment.

“In February [my husband Jhonny] made me take out a loan — five thousand dollars from

BancoSol,” she says as she settles in with Angelica. “I said ‘What in the world could be doing with that money?’ But the quota is due soon, and now I am the only one paying it off.” As she speaks, Luz slides a receipt over to me to show what is due for her monthly quota: it’s Bs. 1,538 (approx

US$219). Angelica opens a new case file on her computer and asks Luz to detail the history of conflicts with her husband. As she does, Luz weaves together accusations of infidelity and violence.

Luz goes on to detail an increasingly unhappy marriage, one that fell apart further after the death of their young son. “We had a baby, Angelo, who died when he was three. He had been sick with a cough; he had the flu. The doctor told me to give him chamomile water. But he died,” She told us. Around the time that the baby died, Luz says that Jhonny was accused of raping a minor. “I had to pay for the girl’s medical appointments to make sure she wasn’t pregnant while he was being held in jail. We had to pay her family restitution. We paid 1,200 or 1,300…I don’t remember how much we paid that girl.”

Angelica interjects, “Uf! You also must not conciliate rape, but they did it anyway!”

“He was always unfaithful,” Luz responds.

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“Did you catch him?” Angelica asks. “Yes, with a neighbor. He was going out with that woman, while I was left carrying the baby.”

Suddenly Luz switches back to the incident that left her with metal screws in her leg. “He knows what he did!” she exclaims. “He brings me medicin[al plants] from his community. He says

‘The curandero [traditional healer] told me these would fix you.”

Angelica tries to get Luz to be specific with dates of violence — the beatings, the times he kicked her: “We want you to tell us everything,” she explains.

“He grabbed me, he kicked me. He threw me over a stool,” Luz says. “Were you able to get up that time?” Angelica asks. “Yes,” Luz nods.

“Does he hit you when he’s drunk?” Angelica asks.

“No, when he’s sober,” Luz responds. “He didn’t hit me when I was pregnant, though,” she says. “He was excited about the baby.”

Angelica continues to nudge for clarity on particular incidents Luz has mentioned in a jumble of stories.

“He was working as a carpenter and one night in 2008 he went out drinking with his uncles. I don’t know what happened, but they fought and he was taken to the PTJ (the Judicial Technical

Police or Policía Técnica Judicial ). He was cut on his hand and he accused me of doing it! They had been drinking in the bar at 2AM and then he was locked in the PTJ but he got out. I don’t know who did it, but it wasn’t superficial — it was pretty bad, with a knife. Or maybe glass. But he said ‘you did it.’ And then he told my family I had done it.”

Angelica asks, “How did the fight start in 2008?”

“He was drunk. He kicked me really bad that time, and punched me on the face — always punched me on the face. I was on the ground,” she explains. Luz lifts her fists and starts punching downward, imitating Jhonny. We are interrupted by loud shouts from the conciliator’s office and I leap up to go fetch the guard. I stick my head in the office to make sure the conciliator is okay and hear her holding off one of the incensed men: “Don Pedro, I am the one speaking right now,” she

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says firmly but softly. No longer seated at her desk, the conciliator has placed herself between the two men. When I return to my seat I catch the end of a sentence: Angelica repeating the word

“knife.”

“And your leg?” Angelica prods.

“I was in bed for three months,” Luz explains. “It was raining in the afternoon and I was on the side of the river planting potatoes. There was a wooden plank over the river. And he pushed me in the ravine! The ravine was filling with water. And he pushed me! I fainted. I was stuck in the river and I couldn’t get out. Someone heard me. [Jhonny] had gone to work. I shouted and shouted. An old man — the neighbor’s grandfather — saw me. He [unclear if she means Jhonny or the old man] left me in the river, as if to say ‘let her die!’

“Did the grandfather help you?” I ask.

“No, he saw me. He said, ‘What happened?’ I said I fell. Then he went to call [for help]. The pain was terrible. [My leg] was broken in two places.”

Angelica: “Did he take you to get treated?”

“With herbs. He took me to a curandero [traditional healer]. It is on his conscience! But it seemed to be getting better. Three months later they took me to get X-rays.”

Susan: “They didn’t take you to the doctor for three months?!”

“Just curanderos!” Angelica responds incredulously, shaking her head.

“They did the Xray and the bones were all crossed” Luz explains, holding her fingers up to imitate misaligned bones. “So he took out a loan from his brother [to pay for treatment], but mostly my family had to help [with the bills]. He came to see me in the hospital, but just for an hour. He said he doesn’t like hospitals. He was embarrassed to get me crutches. So my cousin brought them to me. He was afraid of bringing them to me”

“Because he didn’t want to admit he did it?” I ask.

“Maybe that was it,” Luz shrugs.

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At the hospital, doctors set Luz’s leg with metal screws. She explains that were supposed to come out after a year and a half, but it’s been eight years since the incident and now they are really bothering her. Jhonny has a job with medical insurance, and she wants to get him to pay her bills to have the screws removed. She wants Jhonny to come to conciliation and sign a document saying he will help her with both costs: the medical bills and the debt.

As Luz and Angelica discuss her options, I am reminded of the words uttered by another couple grappling with how to manage their own complicated web of debts. The couple was waiting for a hearing with a judge to adjudicate their divorce proceedings, but had come to the Center to try to reformulate the conciliation agreement they had previously reached. Amid accusations of interpersonal violence, cheating, and angry creditors (including family members), the husband explained that despite their ongoing divorce proceedings, they needed to hammer out a conciliation agreement immediately. “Debts do not wait,” he told me. The temporality of the courts did not match the temporality of the couple’s outstanding debts — particularly those tied to microfinance institutions. While some debts owed to kin and friends might be postponed or paid through the acquisition of other loans, the debts owed to financial institutions had none of the flexibility afforded by appealing to a comadre’s compassion or avoiding a moneylender in the markets. Similarly, Luz was facing a deadline for her MFI quota. She might initiate a domestic violence complaint against her husband, but in the meantime, debts don’t wait.

As I write up my fieldnotes the following day, I can hear Luz sobbing through the conciliator’s glass window. She sits next to Jhonny, who has — despite my doubts — shown up for the session.

Luz gasps for breath and the conciliator holds an X-ray up to the light. The metal screws in her leg are visible even to the untrained eye. Whether the injury occurred as Luz describes it, I cannot verify, but Jhonny sits next to her looking sullen. I don’t enter the conciliation session since I delivered the invitation and don’t want to create any feelings of partiality.

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An hour later, the couple emerges. Jhonny runs next door to make copies of the agreement they have apparently reached. I am surprised and impressed, and wish Luz good luck as I head out to an interview in La Paz.

Later that evening, however, I get a call from a very upset Luz. “Doctorita”17 she moans, “he falsified his signature!”

“On the accord?” I ask.

“Yes,” Luz responds mournfully, “He used a fake signature.”

“Debts Can’t Wait”

A great deal of anthropological work in settings like the Integrated Justice Center — in addiction clinics, in legal aid centers for refugees making asylum claims, and in talk therapy programs — has focused on the co-construction of narratives between staff and clientele. Through ethno-linguistic attention to the way these narratives are assembled, anthropologists warn us not to read such encounters as flatly referential — that is, they don’t simply refer to actual events in history or a person’s life story. Legal aid staff in France help mold narratives to fit the appropriate legal and moral categories for claiming asylum, and asylum seekers learn to speak back their stories in ways that are intelligible to immigration judges (cf Ticktin 2006). Social Workers in American addiction programs try to get their clientele to match the ways they talk about addiction to their interior feelings — to get them to demonstrate through words that they are no longer in denial about their addiction. At the same time, program participants admit to “flipping the script” in order to maneuver for resources within the confines of talk therapy and its confessional apparatus (cf Carr 2011).

During her intake with Luz, Angelica seeks to elicit a history of violence that she can massage into a legible narrative for multiple audiences. Those audiences include the computer system records, which will provide background information for the Conciliator when she sees the couple. Angelica

17 Again, people use the term “doctor/a” to address lawyers. People often assumed I was a lawyer. Even when I explained I was not, they still used the term to show deference (to acknowledge my “professional” status) -- when speaking with me and the other interns and staff.

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will utilize that computerized case file for her own records — as evidence of her efficacy as a legal aid intern. The Center’s director and Angelica’s internship coordinator at her university will further reinterpreted her self-reporting as they draw up their own evaluations of her work. Luz’s case will be tallied in reports to the Ministry of Justice just as it was once tallied for reporting functions to

USAID. Angelica will adapt snippets of that history into a narrative used in referral letters to the forensic medical examiner or psychological services NGOs, among other institutions — and the evidence of abuse contained in that brief, synthesized account will be used to justify the client’s need for free services.

The documents produced by those institutions — the certificate from the forensic medical examiner, the detailed history of psychological abuse produced by a local NGO — will in turn provide Luz with an official record of her abuse, which she can submit as evidence in a court hearing

(with the aid of the Center’s pro-bono lawyer, in this case, Dra. Paloma). In the event that Luz chooses to pursue a legal case against Jhonny, Angelica will co-construct a memorial or legal brief, which she will submit to the judge further describing the complaint. Staff will adjust templates to detail the specific instances of violence of this particular couple, while the accused will have to procure his own lawyer to co-construct a counter narrative before the judge. These are discursive and documentary practices where clients make claims for protection and state intervention, and for restitution from abusive parties. And at each step along the way, Clients’ narratives are elicited, tightened, reframed, re-packaged, and simplified.

But beyond insight into this process of co-constructing violence narratives for multiple audiences, the turn to conciliation reveals deep entanglement between conciliation, debt, and domestic violence. As women like Luz recount their experiences of violence, they frequently rebuff the staff’s efforts to get them to immediately pursue domestic violence charges against their partners.

There are a number of reasons why they may do so, including fear over how their own family might respond, as well as their own views on what constitutes acceptable or unacceptable levels of violence in a domestic partnership (cf Van Vleet 2008). But one reason, I want to suggest, is because many

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women like Luz are seeking immediate relief of more pressing concerns. Clients like Luz often come to the Center seeking leverage to cope with outstanding debt payments.

In turn, Center staff work to compartmentalize violent and non-violent conflicts discursively so that they can conciliate those debt issues. Fake signature or not, Luz and Jhonny’s case is emblematic of the ways conciliators and clients themselves often seek to conciliate around violence.

Luz is collecting the documents necessary to initiate a domestic violence case in the courts, but also wants to conciliate because, she explains, she wants Jhonny to quickly pay for her operation. But more pressing than the screws that are now causing her discomfort is a loan quota she owes to

BancoSol. Luz and Jhonny’s case is illustrative of the many cases I saw at the Center that challenged the idea that one cannot, should not, and must not conciliate violence.

I found one of District 6’s conciliators, Dra. Sonia, in a reflective mood one afternoon as the workday came to a close. The Center was nearly empty. People occasionally popped their heads in the door to collect child support payments, or to make deposits on outstanding debts. I had spent the last few hours observing several sessions, all of them dealing with debts or domestic conflict.

Often parties were contending with both. As we chatted about the last round of sessions, Sonia played with her cell phone and sighed. “You know, there are just a lot of contradictions. Like, we aren’t supposed to do conciliation for violence. It says in the law, no se concilia violencia. But we do it all the time. Even the judge is contradictory, conciliating violence cases.”

For Dra. Sonia, this contradiction was most palpable in cases where women were unwilling to separate from or pursue domestic violence complaints against abusive partners — and instead asked for conciliation accords. “So what do we do?” Sonia asked me rhetorically. “Do we say, ‘Señora, you have to denunciar (make a formal legal declaration against an abusive spouse)’? If she comes in asking for aid and she says she wants to conciliate, do we say, I’m sorry, señora, but you must begin a legal case for violence? Because [their husbands] will probably ruin their lives worse, saying ‘you went off and declared against me.’ We are confused on these issues,” Sonia tells me. “If someone comes in

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and says I want to give him a second chance, do I say No, Señora, you have to leave a denuncia for violence? It can make things worse for her. What am I supposed to do?”

As I tried to compare the kinds of cases conciliators were encountering in other districts in El

Alto, I spoke with Sebastián Costa about what he was seeing in District 4. Costa reported that debt was quickly supplanting child support and other domestic conflicts in conciliation sessions. And he, too, saw debt and domestic violence issues as deeply interrelated. He told me,

I would say that debt is now is the principal cause of family conflict and separation. People start signing documents among themselves to help them pay off debts -- these interpersonal debts to pay off microfinance. So you have all these little interpersonal debts generated to pay off the larger microcredit payments. For example, right now I am seeing someone with 15,000 bolivianos (approx. US$2,143) in debt with various places and people.

For Costa, the challenge was figuring out what the Center could do to be of assistance in the face of this pattern. He told me, “There’s not much we can do for the microcredit debts -- that’s a separate issue we can’t really address. But sometimes the pro-bono lawyer can work with a person and the institution — like Banco FIE to help them renegotiate their debt payments. They can help in those ways.” These were temporary solutions, he told me parches or patches, Band-Aids on larger problems and larger patterns facing his clientele. But they were also problems with troughs and crests. Costa concluded, “So the principal problems [in District 4] are debt -- and what you see is people separate over the debt and then once the debt is paid they go back to living together.”

Conclusion

I never met the original owner of the sewing machine. Did it start its life as a commodity in the 16 de Julio market, bought by the anonymous woman as she was trying to get a pollera business off the ground? Was it a gift from her husband or a loaner from her comadre? Did she ask Pilar for the loan in order to cover a child’s school fees or her husband’s medical bills, or to pay off a microcredit quota with another institution? Whatever its origin, its entry into this network of prestamistas and debtors, sisters and neighbors was as collateral on a loan, then a commodity sold to Justa, then twice more collateral. And as it moved between these women it accumulated a biography shot-through

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with violence — violence it helped to produce and to perpetuate. That violence was both physical and structural. In the process, the sewing machine helped stitch together new relationships as well as hostilities. It is a singular biography that speaks to a broader pattern of both sociality and its unraveling.

In this chapter I have shown how indebtedness and economic precarity intersects with and intensifies people’s experiences of interpersonal and domestic violence, and how Alto Limeña women seek to ameliorate that sense of vulnerability through conciliation. As Center clients narrated their family histories of violence, or pursued conciliation appointments with their partners, they invoked debt as a central cause of tension and marital strife — as well violence. And as conciliators worked to hammer out accords that dealt solely with debts — between friends and family members, or even between spouses looking to separate — they often did so while skirting broader issues of domestic violence. Stories of violence always hovered just around the edge of conciliation appointments dealing with debt, while problems with paying debts were often at the heart of “family conflict” cases brought to the conciliator.

This compartmentalizing of debt and domestic violence did two things. First, it erased the violence entangled in debt complaints. But it also obscured the recurring pattern of debt that was so often present in domestic violence cases. This pattern was not something conciliators and Center staff failed to see. Conciliators often commented on the ways these issues were entangled. It was a troubling dilemma that conciliators like Dra. Sonia were unsure of how to resolve. In trying to resolve those tensions, however, staff often reproduced the erasure.

Several times in my conversations with Bolivian USAID contractors, program managers told me that foreign donors had missed earlier opportunities to “really intervene into the family,” as one told me. Had they targeted the family earlier, one Aid contractor suggested, la cooperación internacional might have transformed conflict and violence at the level of those intimate social relations and in doing so helped to de-escalate social conflict in El Alto. In a sense, the Integrated Justice Centers were operating out of such a model: a model that imagined social conflict to be an expression of

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interpersonal disputes “scaled-up” into broader patterns of confrontation and abuse. By teaching people to manage their conflicts with spouses and mothers-in-law, Alteños would in effect be dismantling the interpersonal foundations of social conflicts — conflicts that threatened to destabilize Bolivian democracy. In this explanation of political upheaval, social conflict is constituted by the city’s many un-redressed interpersonal disputes.

On one level, this interpretation is correct: social conflict and interpersonal conflict are deeply entangled, as I have shown in this chapter. But the idea of a unidirectional relationship between social and interpersonal conflict — where interpersonal disputes and individual grievances “scale up” to produce social conflict — merely locates the roots of social violence at the level of individual or interpersonal problems that are mismanaged or misdirected. In doing so, this understanding also locates the solution to these conflicts at the level of interpersonal relationships: justice can be offered at the level of the dyad, as I discussed in the previous chapter. Doing so fails to account for the ways that interpersonal disputes and experiences of domestic violence are in fact shaped, exacerbated, and often fueled by larger political-economic forces. Those political economic forces penetrate and deform individual lives, households, and extended kin relations, relationships between neighbors and friends.

And indeed, many of the efforts to produce a counterinsurgent and entrepreneurial citizenry continue to locate the solution to people’s woes at this private, interpersonal level — while disparaging the “conflictual” forms of social and political mobilization that might draw attention to these broader patterns of conflict and their causes.

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CHAPTER SIX

Words are Carried Off by the Wind

Doña Virginia, Over Papers

Doña Virginia settles in as I fill out a receipt for a deposit she will be leaving with the conciliator — her monthly quota on a debt she owes. She wears a broad straw hat and a quizzical expression as I note down her information on the tri-partite receipts: one copy for her, one for the lender, one for the Center’s records. After reaching a conciliation agreement, many clients choose to make child support and debt payments through the Integrated Justice Center, ensuring a paper trail will document their compliance with the agreement. For some, there is an added bonus of not having to interact with the person on the other side of that agreement. Doña Virginia has been coming to the Center for many months to deposit her quota.

“This is payment number 23,” Virginia tells me. It’s 80bs (approx. US$ 11.40).1 I only have two more payments to go. I took this debt out years ago,” she intones. “My son was only five. Now he’s 14. But the interest! The interest rate was what got me. It was 10%, but what could I do? [The lender] saved me in that moment of need. I am a seamstress, but that’s not why I took out the money,” she trails off. “But when we came to the Center, the conciliator insisted on a lower interest rate.”2

“Who lent you the money?” I ask. “A prestamista [moneylender]?”

“No,” Doña Virginia says. “A friend.”

“Those interests rates can really be hard,” I offer.

1 For a total loan of Bs.2,000.- or approximately US$285.- 22 I regularly heard one of the Center conciliators reprimand people who were attempting to charge high rates of interest for breaking Bolivian laws on usury.

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“Yes. And I couldn’t pay her for a year! So she raised the rate. She told me, now you owe

20% interest. Double! I had left her some collateral. A heavy blanket. A ring. What can you do? I lost it all. But now I have been paying her back over two years. 80 bolivianos a month. No matter what, I must make the deposit [Tengo que venir a cancelar, o si o si]. Before I had troubles with my husband, but now he has a job, now we are doing better. Sometimes he deposits the money for me.

The attention here was good. I can’t read, so the conciliator read [the conciliation accord] to me

[before signing it]. The attention here was good.”

“Who initiated the conciliation,” I ask. “You or the other Señora?”

“The Señora invited me. But then I needed another accord — for an anticrético.3 That’s why I came back. We must do everything over papers. You have to comply with papers [tenemos que acatar al papel]. Before, there weren’t papers and it really hurt me bad,” she says, elongating the word. “I sold my sister a room in the house, but she hadn’t made a paper for me yet. Paper is important. You have to fulfill your papers.”

“So even with your own sister you had trouble?” I ask.

“We signed papers with a public notary in the market. But she didn’t pay me. So I came here. Paper is important. You have to fulfill [your obligations] with the paper [tienes que cumplir con el papel].”

“Even with a family member there is distrust?” I ask.

Doña Virginia nods. “Yes, but not anymore. Now I get along with her. It ended well. She got the money and paid me back. Everything is normal now.”

***

This chapter explores how foreign aid programs aimed at de-escalating social conflict in El

Alto, Bolivia have become entangled with local kinship practices during periods of prolonged

3 Anticrético is a widespread Bolivian system of property rental in which the landlord asks for a lump sum -- often a fairly large amount -- up front, but with the obligation of returning the amount when the tenant leaves. People usually use anticrético when they need capital for a business project or other investments.

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economic uncertainty. I argue that conciliation documents are one means through which clients and staff of Bolivia’s Integrated Justice Centers are seeking to re-introduce mechanisms for coercion and compliance/enforcement within the confines of Alternative Dispute Resolution. These tactical maneuvers betray deep entanglements between “formal” state institutions and “informal” social relationships – but not in the direction we might expect.

Donors intended ADR to be a voluntary, therapeutic, “friendly” means of resolving conflicts, one that helps clients circumvent the formal legal system. As I have described in earlier chapters, the stated aim of these programs was to equip residents with interpersonal conflict resolution skills that would be transferable to broader social conflict, and to redress residents’ everyday frustrations with state institutions, particularly the justice system — largely by pulling residents out of that system.

And yet, ADR has not neatly transformed Alteño (political) subjectivities and relieved overcrowded

Bolivian courts -- as donors intended. Instead, I argue that Alteños increasingly use mediation programs to render informal, interpersonal loans into formal legal contracts. As friends and kin make informal loans to help each other meet monthly microcredit quotas or social obligations, Alteños have deployed ADR in unexpected ways, frequently to accomplish goals that are antithetical to the stated aims of ADR advocates and donors.

I begin this chapter by examining the way Alteños — and Bolivians more generally — imagine documents to operate powerfully, frequently endowing them with coercive properties in and of themselves. I argue that this slippage is further evident in a heated debate among Center staff about the isomorphism between conciliation accords and formal legal documents — that is, the parallels in form and function between two: If it looks like the law, it must act like the law. By viewing conciliation documents through this isomorphism, I argue that residents of El Alto are progressively seeking to judicialize their relationships with friends and relatives — to bring the state home with them.

This fetishizing of conciliation accords, I suggest, reflects a much longer history of colonial and liberal efforts to shape Andean subjectivities through the law — and especially through the

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production of bureaucratic and legal documents. That is, bureaucratic authorities in the colonial and contemporary era have used documents strategically to manage populations and produce governable subjectivities. Yet even as the promoters of conciliation hoped that the Integrated Justice Centers would encourage residents of El Alto to circumvent the formal legal system, this constant turn to documents and their imagined coercive capabilities reflects a broader (re)turn to the judicial realm — in both the institutional life of the Centers as well as the intimate lives of Center clients.

I then turn to the ways conciliation has become entangled with debt in El Alto. As I described in the previous chapter, informal loan practices and microfinance institutions alike operate by activating people’s kinship ties. Microcredit programs have intensified the availability of capital in

El Alto— expanding its reach through the social networks of poor women. At the same time, it has intersected with and intensified complicated webs of informal debts, as many women seek the support of their relatives to help meet those monthly microfinance quotas. In the final section of this chapter, I build on the previous chapter to show how clients seek out conciliation to try to mediate the strains those debts place on their relationships.

This is not a story about microfinance, debt, or documents in and of themselves. Rather, this is a story about formalization. Clients in El Alto’s Integrated Justice Centers are utilizing conciliation documents tactically to formalize informal debt relations with friends and kin through the (imagined and real) coercive powers of conciliation documents. They are using those documents to mediate intimacies and obligations with their kin during periods of enormous economic and interpersonal duress. But what are the consequences of people taking bureaucracy home with them in the shape of legally binding contracts? Although clients are often desperate to formalize these arrangements, as we have seen in some of the previous chapters, the process is frequently quite distressing. It forces

Alteños to make explicit the often-implicit social obligations that operate so powerfully between

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compadres4 and other kin — to judicialize forms of reciprocal care and obligation that so many rely upon to survive.

The Case of The Good Path v. The Bad Path

“You have to comply with papers,” Doña Virginia insisted to me. I could just as easily translate the word she uses — papel — as document. Clients in El Alto’s Integrated Justice Centers used a variety of terms to refer to conciliation agreements they signed, including acuerdo (accord), documento (document), and contrato (contract). But Doña Virginia consistently used papel — paper — in our conversation: “You have to comply with papers.” In doing so, she highlights the material object— not merely the words/commitment recorded therein (and which the conciliator had to read to her). Everything, Virginia insisted, must be done over papers. Even managing arrangements between sisters, between kin. Doña Virginia’s preoccupation with getting things down on that paper resonated with the ways I heard other Center clients explain their desire for conciliation appointments. Staff and interns would appeal to the value of working things through “por la via buena, hablando” — opting for the “good path” of talking through interpersonal conflicts to reach a mutually beneficial agreement, all while avoiding la via mala (bad path) of the courts or overt violence.

Globally, ADR advocates celebrate informality as a means to improve access to justice for poor people, and to free-up backlogged courts. In the face of corrupt, inefficient, and abusive state

4 Elsewhere I go into greater depth about compadrazgo (co-parenting). In Bolivia, people frequently construct extended kin relations through the practice of compadrazgo, or co-parenting. Compadres or co/godparents are named for baptism, rutucha (the rite of the first haircut), for weddings, and first communion. Those relationships are keenly felt and ritually reasserted; they are also lived out in the everyday practices of rearing children, loaning money, unloading potatoes to share during an apthapi (shared meal), p’ichando coca, and other mundane and spiritually-inflected moments people share as they go about their lives. While one person may be asked to serve as compadre of a baptism as well as the rite of the first haircut (rutucha) or a child’s highschool graduation, more frequently people extend these kin networks outward, inviting others to share those responsibilities and in doing so, to be drawn into an ever-expanding web of care and obligation. As Andeanists have shown, such compadrazgo networks constitute broader social ties in which people are deeply nested; rather than seeing individuals as connected to others through these ties, anthropologists have insisted that the intersubjective relations produced through god parenting and other forms of kinship constitute the person herself: an individual is not merely tied to others. Rather, she is made up of, or knitted together by, those thickly interwoven ties. Compadrazgo or co-parenting is one of the principal practices through which relatedness and its accompanying expectations about obligation and care are constantly asserted and re-asserted (Van Vleet 2008; Leinaweaver 2008; Lazar 2004; Koch 2006; Albro 2000).

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bureaucracies, advocates argue, local communities are better prepared to redress the grievances of their neighbors. A great deal of the ADR practitioner literature and critical studies of the Bolivian justice system has pointed to people’s deep dissatisfaction with — and abuse at the hands of — the formal legal system. These works tend to emphasize people’s profound mistrust of state agents in poor, marginalized barrios like those in El Alto, where residents often accuse state agents of colluding with criminals — or at least failing to provide any protection from them (cf Goldstein 2012). These approaches tend to paint a dystopian view of the formal legal apparatus in Bolivia: from the utter disinterest of the police — or their complicity with criminal elements — to self-serving lawyers who prey on illiterate clients, corrupt judges, and 911 operators who simply ignore distressed calls for help. Many of these works — both scholarly and practitioner — insist on people’s desire to avoid the formal legal system all together.5 Practitioner accounts celebrate informality and la via buena as a mechanism to help poor residents avoid an abusive state apparatus — or as a means to promote creative alternatives, participatory justice, and community solutions in the absence/neglect of effective, efficient, and credible state institutions. And indeed, during my many months at the Center, in my conversations with friends and my own fictive kin, and around El Alto, people frequently expressed their deeply-felt frustration, fear, distrust, and rage at the formal legal system and state bureaucracies more generally. As I described in Chapter 1, Center staff, who had frequently come to

ADR work and the Integrated Justice Centers after careers in the formal legal system (as unpaid interns or lawyers), also bemoaned the failings and abuses of the formal legal system.

Against the via mala of the courts (or overt violence), ADR programs world-wide tend to emphasize improved communication and delving into personal feelings in order to get at the

(private) root of interpersonal conflicts. Conciliator training sessions emphasize the auditory and speech dimensions of conciliation rather than the written product. Handbooks developed by donor organizations and adapted by local NGOs teach potential mediators how to peel back the layers of a

5 By contrast see Merry 1990 on people’s desire to “get justice and get even” through the courts, despite their frustrations with the results.

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conflict’s “onion”: Is this conflict between spouses really about what your mother-in-law said at the baptism last week, or is it about the fact that I don’t feel like you pull your weight on household chores? Is what I am asking for a real “need” or is it merely an “interest” that is negotiable? Training workshops and materials teach “I” statements and other ways of phrasing and re-orienting participants’ speech, as well as “active” listening techniques. These are therapeutic models of treating conflict through talk, hablando — choosing la via buena (c.f. Carr 2011 on the “talking cure” of

American addiction treatment). In Bolivia, ADR advocates often insist on the parallels between

Western ADR and Andean oral traditions and conflict resolution strategies, arguing for the cultural appropriateness of such talk-heavy techniques6 aimed at circumventing the formal legal system.

By contrast, I found that El Alto’s clients emphasized the value of getting things in writing, getting things on paper. Conciliation became one mechanism through which clients hoped to formalize informal arrangements with friends, relatives, and neighbors. Indeed, clients and staff alike would frequently invoke a phrase I came to view as the unofficial mantra of the Integrated Justice

Centers and its primary product, the conciliation document: “las palabras se llevan el viento.” “Words are carried off by the wind.” Oral agreements, they insisted, were fleeting, fragile things. This attitude ironically undercut the presumed historical importance of Andean oral traditions — and the renewed emphasis that global ADR advocates place on “talking things through” until people discover the underlying causes of their disagreements. But this issue of formalism was also a matter of how people imagined and sought to relate to the state as they navigated interpersonal conflict.

Clients seeking conciliation appointments would shake their heads in frustration over prior attempts to cobrar or demand payment for outstanding loans, or to get their common-law spouses to pay child support. They pulled tattered copies of prior informal agreements out of sturdy plastic folders — long lists of items purchased on credit, or money offered for capital: timber, adobe bricks, fifty bolivianos, two hundred dollars. Other clients had scribbled summaries of the amounts loaned

6 Bolivian ADR advocates easily invoke the acronym MORCs (Indigenous Methods of Conflict Resolution) alongside MARCs (Alternative Dispute Resolution methods).

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into flimsy notebooks, tallying the score at the bottom with the signature of both parties. The lists might mention a woman’s pollera skirt or an alpaca shawl offered as collateral. During our intake sessions, clients would verbally add other outstanding debts, both moral and material: cases of beer still owed from a wedding or baptismal celebration, the personal funds spent completing the sewage system, outhouse, or electrical wiring in a property shared by extended family.

Those scraps of paper were like stained maps of old friendships, business relations, and extended kin networks. In addition to adobe bricks, dollars, and promised payments, they tallied disappointments and soured trust. Sometimes the amount was so small, one wondered if a client had spent more in bus fares trying to recover the money than the original loan itself. Often, lenders would describe their own complicated webs of debt to explain why they so desperately needed to recover every penny of the many small loans they had made to the people they loved.

Adult children would often accompany elderly mothers who were illiterate or were insecure about their Spanish, but who were desperate to get a comadre (co-parent) or cousin to repay a loan as her own financial situation worsened. Sometimes the recipients of those loans — the borrower — would approach the Center first, hoping that a conciliation document would provide them with a set schedule of repayment. Borrowers hoped that conciliation documents would convince irate lenders that they intended to repay — even if only in small quotas extended over long periods of time. Some borrowers would denounce their lenders — usually female friends, family members, neighbors — declaring them prestamistas or moneylenders (inflected with the connotation of loan sharks). They would accuse them of harassing them in the street, driving them from the market, making scandal in front of neighbors, scaring their children, or even threatening overt violence. Other borrowers would weep with embarrassment, recount downward spirals of debt, and speak of the patience of the person to whom they owed much money and gratitude.

Clients often brought the artifacts of previous conciliation attempts at non-governmental organizations like El Alto’s Gregoria Apaza Center for Women or the Police Brigade for Family

Protection. Many had been disappointed when the other party never showed up for the session, or

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when payments tapered off after a month or two. But again and again, clients insisted on the need to get it down on paper, and expressed their hope that this time the document might appear formidable enough to ensure compliance.

Indeed, Clients were heartened by the sense that Center invitations carried the symbolic weight of judicial coding. The inky stamps, seals, signatures, the fingerprints of illiterate clients, and a juridical-sounding name seemed to inspire hope that this time things might be different. The slippage between the informal and formal, voluntary and compulsory was evident as people asked for

“citations” — the legal term for the court summons that people are served in civil and criminal cases

— when making conciliation appointments. Even interns and staff sometimes slipped into judicial speak, forgetting to use the correct term, “invitation,” to indicate that the letter issued by the Center was for an informal, voluntary appointment — where conciliators would invariably clarify to the disputing parties, “I cannot force you to sign this document; I am not a judge.” Nevertheless, many clients expressed hope that the mere act of signing an accord would itself ensure compliance. Yet even “successful” conciliation appointments — sessions that produced written agreements — proved unsatisfying when co-signees were tardy with payments. As I show below, clients’ insistence on getting a conciliation accord — and the depths of people’s disappointment when they failed — offers insights into the ways residents of El Alto endow conciliation documents with coercive capabilities.

A Document Should Fix Things

That deep disappointment over the failures of conciliation was evident one morning as I helped train Angelica, the newest intern at the Integrated Justice Center (just as I had been trained months earlier). On that brisk October morning, Angelica wore a sweet disposition, a crooked smile, and a heavy fleece jacket against the bitter cold that usually pervades the Center office. During the

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months we worked side by side, Angelica’s earnest commitment7 to her job was sometimes taxed when she felt manipulated by clients. But she remained anxious to “do justice” by the people whose cases she managed. She was quite nervous about her new job, trying to retain all of the information we were giving her: how to adjust conciliation invitation templates for each client, how to register them in the system, how to tally clients referred to other agencies — from the forensic medical examiner to a psychological services NGO to the Family Police Brigade.

That morning a familiar figure approached us, looking vexed. Don Moises was notorious in the Center for the sheer quantity of conciliation appointments he kept. He would often end one session with a bricklayer or some other manual worker, and as the document was signed, he would request an appointment letter for another laborer, family member, tenant, or neighbor. One afternoon as I spoke with the conciliator she shook her head in dismay at his frequency. “Este señor” she sighed, “he’s always coming in here wanting to citar [make an appointment with] someone for conciliation. Over and over. It’s always someone new. And none of them know he’s doing it [to others].”

Don Moises was looking agitated. “Is the conciliator available?” He asked me.

“She was called down to the Ministry of Justice for a meeting this morning,” I explained.

“She’ll be back in the afternoon.” Don Moises shifted his weight back and forth, dissatisfied. He hovered for a moment before sitting down tensely in the chair in front of us. He leaned over. “I want

7 Unlike the abusive and neglectful legal aid center employees described by Harri Englund (2006), I found Center interns to be almost universally preoccupied with doing justice for their clients. Some, like Angelica, expressed enormous embarrassment when they made even minor redaction mistakes, and grew anxious thinking about the consequences for their client (as well as their own performance evaluations). I sometimes heard staff at other Centers recall interns who “fell into the old patterns” of corruption in the justice system. People were often quick to try to distinguish the attitudes and practices of Center staff and interns from that of “traditional” bureaucrats and jurists. Those who helped design the Centers -- as well as those who came to work there --were heavily invested in distancing themselves from the extremely negative image many Bolivians hold of people affiliated with the court system -- who are perceived to be corrupt, self-interested, heartless, and intentionally-misleading. These are discursive strategies people use to defend and distinguish their own behavior and that of Center staff more broadly. And yet, I also found it to be consistent with what I observed among young interns, some of whom admitted to cobrando during internships in the juzgados, but who seemed genuinely uncomfortable when Center clients would try to offer them money for services, or who fretted their mistakes might perjudicar or impede their client’s case.

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to make a complaint,” he intoned. “I had these people sign conciliation documents and they are not fulfilling them.”

“I understand your frustration.” I nodded. “When the conciliator is back you can discuss the next steps for incumplimiento [breach] of the accord.”

Don Moises shook his head. “No. No! My complaint is a bigger complaint. I want to tell the

Ministry of Justice that conciliation does not work,” he growled. I glanced over at Angelica, who has just been learning about conciliation and its supposed benefits for clients. As I had done months before, Angelica was now learning to parrot the list of reasons conciliation was a better alternative to the formal legal system, to try to encourage clients to begin with conciliation before pursuing a legal case in the courts.

“I know it can be frustrating when people don’t fulfill the obligations outlined in the agreement,” I responded. “But once the conciliator returns you can discuss your options in greater depth. She’ll be able to orient you about how to deal with the specific cases.”

“That’s just it,” Don Moises complained bitterly. “Conciliation doesn’t work [la conciliación no sirve]. They signed a document. If they signed a document it means they have to fulfill it. It shouldn’t have to require next steps. Once a document is signed, it should be finished. Documents should mean something. Conciliation doesn’t work if I have to make another appointment for breach of contract [si tengo que citarlos por incumplimiento]. With the document they must comply [con el documento tienen que cumplir]. It should fix things.” Don Moises stood up, continuing to grumble about the failed promise of the conciliation accord. He’d be back later, he muttered, adding that I should tell the

Ministry of Justice that conciliation doesn’t work if the document is useless.

Take a Police Officer

Don Moises’ frustration is understandable. He had reached agreements via conciliation with a variety of people — some of them workmen, some tenants, some relatives — and he complained that many were not fulfilling the obligations they had outlined in those accords. Center clients and

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staff frequently characterized this failure to fulfill conciliation agreements — or to even show up for conciliation appointments — in the same terms they described their frustrations with the formal justice system. Again and again, people requesting invitation letters for conciliation would worry that, as with the courts, their intended recipient would “laugh at justice” [burlarse de la justicia], and refuse to attend. And indeed, unless court-mandated, conciliation is intended to be a wholly voluntary process.

Part of the “alternative” in alternative dispute resolution is that both parties ostensibly have chosen to work through their problems with the aid of a third party whose role is to facilitate dialogue and help them build consensus on the terms of their agreement. But this voluntary nature of conciliation posed a problem to staff and Center clients; conciliation advocates and clients often worried about the non-coercive nature of conciliation in a context where, they argued, few people would comply without some degree of coercion, some threat.

For Dr. Paloma Gil, the Director of the Integrated Justice Center in District 6, those threats were often necessary to get parties to agree to even attend conciliation. “You have to make them reflect about the consequences if they don’t do conciliation. Some say, no, I am not going to pay, I’m not worried about a warrant. And you point to the part about child support that says they can be sent to jail in San Pedro. Some come in extremely arrogant. And they say, ‘go ahead, throw me in prison.

See what I care.’ and I tell them, you don’t know what prison is like, they even rape the men. It’s no vacation, right? You are supposed to receive money for meals but often you don’t get even that.”

Paloma smiles and nods as she speaks, her eyes glittering as she savors the tactic. “You have to make them think about the consequences. That’s how I pressure them into conciliation. You have to do it, otherwise nobody will pay attention.”

Center staff sometimes noted that if the recipient of a conciliation invitation sought out the advice of lawyers, they would be encouraged to burlarse de la conciliacion [mock conciliation], noting the backlogged courts and the many other impediments to enforcement, despite the kinds of warnings issued by Dr. Paloma and others. The expectation that people would burlarse de la conciliación was one reason some staff members argued it was necessary to make threats about starting civil cases against

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those who failed to attend — even if they also acknowledged that people could just as easily burlarse de la justicia ordinaria [mock formal justice]. And thus despite conciliation’s rhetorical emphasis on volunteerism and mutually-beneficial outcomes, staff frequently encouraged — or themselves employed — strategies aimed coercing attendance and compliance with conciliation accords.

Sometimes these strategies included making threats of legal action in order to encourage the other party to take the “easier,” less costly path of conciliation, even if everyone believed they were engaged in a kind of collusive lie about the consequences or real possibility of enforcement.

One way I heard interns do this was by encouraging clients to present the other party with the document with the aid of a local police officer. As Asusena once told a woman trying to demand child support from her former spouse “I suggest you give him the invitation letter [to conciliation] with a police officer. How would you react if a police officer showed up at your house? Intimidated!

So it’s best to go with an officer. It makes people take it more seriously.” This practice is very much in keeping with a much earlier ethnographic insight from earlier anthropological studies of ADR.

Anthropologist Sally Merry (1982) has notably argued against the presumption that mediation is voluntary and therapeutic, and instead asserted that effective mediators often invoke forms of authority or mechanisms that are coercive.8 But while Center interns sometimes encouraged the use of state agents to instill fear and a sense of seriousness in conciliation invitees, Don Moises’ dismay at the conciliation document’s failure to ensure compliance indicates another expectation: that the conciliation accords themselves are endowed with coercive capabilities by virtue of their isomorphism with legal documents.

Don Moises viewed the conciliation accord itself as an instrument of enforcement. And indeed, conciliators and Center staff often emphasized that conciliation documents are a cosa juzgada, or equivalent to a judicial sentence that can then be introduced in court for ejecución forzosa [forcible

8 Merry’s insight inspired other anthropologists like Carol Greenhouse (1985) to consider forms of mediation that occur in communities that are “semi-autonomous” versus those that have some recourse to external mechanisms of coercion such as the formal legal system, as well as the explicit social norms mediators invoke in their efforts to produce effective conciliation (as well as the implications of this variety of approaches for how we understand mediator “neutrality”).

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execution] by a judge in the case of breach/incumplimiento. But Don Moises’ critique that “conciliation doesn’t work” suggests a different register of meaning. Rather than seeing the document as a means to enforcement (as a legally binding contract that enables civil court cases in the event of incumplimiento),

Don Moises imagined that the signature itself should necessarily produce the desired action. Were conciliation a meaningful act, he argued, the document itself would cause people to acatar — to obey and meet those obligations. As I argue in the next section, this fetishizing of the conciliation document itself reflects a longer history in which legal documents have played a central role in the management of individual people and entire populations, especially Andeans Indians.

Without papers you aren’t a person

Anthropologists have shown how state institutions and bureaucratic agents use documents to make populations “legible,” as well as the ways these documentary practices make the state “real,” tangible in people’s everyday lives (Abrams 1988, Sharma & Gupta 2006, Ferguson & Gupta 2002,

Gupta 2009, Das and Poole 2004, Li 2005; Scott 1998). Organizational sociologists have been influenced by Weber’s analysis of the role documents played in the advent of modern bureaucracy

(Heimer 2009), while many anthropologists have been similarly inspired by Foucault’s (1972, 1991) genealogy of the multiform “artifacts of bureaucratic knowledge,” as well as an interest in the role of documents in producing colonial and modern subjectivities (Riles 1998: 378, 2009; Dery 1998, Stoler

2009, 2002; Biehl 2009). In the Andes, ethnohistorians have traced how Spanish colonial authorities explicitly used those administrative and legal documentary procedures as “tools for changing native life-ways” or transforming forms of Andean social memory and “other habits of life” (Abercrombi

1998: 190, 215). To use Michel de Certeau’s (1984) terms, documents are critical to the institutional, bureaucratic strategies that profoundly shape the everyday life practices and tactics of managed populations.

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Colonial authorities and their army of scribes produced reams of bureaucratic documents, certifications and “proofs of merit and service,” deeds, and legal writs in their efforts to remake indigenous subjectivities under the sign of the law. This civilizing project was symbolized by the sword and the cross, but it was also enabled by the pen: document-making became a key tool in a larger effort to impose order on the New World (Abercrombie 1998: 191). Through reducciones and colonial cities populated by scribes and administrators, the church and the new colonial authorities hoped to draw the Indios further along the spectrum of civilization, while also incorporating them into new taxation schemes and conscripted labor systems (Saignes 1995, Abercrombie 1998). By contrast to the kinds of embodied, oral and ritual practices through which memory and meaning were constructed in Highland indigenous communities (and which later served as the inspiration for contemporary ADR advocates), historians and anthropologists have shown the concerted effort colonial administrators made to impose a new order of things through writing, amassing an “archival memory” of land titles, expedientes (thick court records bound together by string), and lists compiled and signed by notaries (Abercrombie 1998: 9; cf. Stoler 2009, 2002).

These efforts introduced labyrinthine bureaucratic procedures and amassed enormous compendiums of ritually-recorded legal documents. The Catholic church was one of the primary institutions of record keeping, further sacralizing birth, death, and marriage certificates, and other accountings of Indian peasants (cf Rama 1996, Abercrombie 1998). But Andeanists have shown that these were not mere impositions, but rather that the Indian targets of colonial management schemes were soon engaged in their own juridical endeavors and processes of legal meaning making (Stern

1982, cf Merry 2003).

My point here is not to suggest that registry or record keeping is peculiar to Spanish colonial authorities. And indeed, ethnohistorians have shown that Andeans had their own mechanisms for record keeping through the quipu. Rather, drawing on Abercrombie (1998), I want to suggest that the intensification and sacralization of documentary practice under the colonial enterprise continues to have repercussions for the ways people think about themselves and their relationship to the state

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(cf Wogan 2004). This hyper emphasis on the documentary form continues to find new expressions in state bureaucracies (indeed, Gupta would say they constitute the state), as well as pervasive NGO projects and reporting functions. And in Bolivia, it has consequences for how people relate to and utilize the Integrated Justice Centers, as well as how they seek to use utilize the state — in the form of conciliation accords — to mediate social relations.

In Bolivia, for example, the colonial preoccupation with obtaining written testaments or

“proofs of merit and service” (Abercrombie 1998, 169) lives on in practices such as offering certificates of participation for attending NGO training sessions and workshops. This concern for

CV building through paper certificates cannot be overstated, and it strikingly reflects similar practices from the colonial era. But in contemporary Bolivia, NGOs have become a new force for credentialing. During my time working with NGOs in Bolivia (2001-2005) we were always careful to produce sturdy, official looking certificates for all attendees, which would be signed by key leaders in the organization, stamped, sealed, and presented during a photo-op at the end of the course. I was reminded of the importance of those certificates on several occasions during my work at the

Integrated Justice Center. On one occasion, Lucia, who had been a long-time community volunteer with the Centers from their inception, had come to the office asking the director for a letter of recommendation as she applied for a job at another institution. She brought with her a thick manila file folder stuffed with light pink, baby blue, eggshell, and crisp white certificates. Many were from her training at the Center, but they also included participation in gender, handicraft, and leadership workshops sponsored a variety of NGOs. She proudly displayed them to me as evidence of her preparation,9 a tangible documentation of “proofs of merit and service.”

In addition to providing a testament to Lucia’s preparedness, those certificates indexed ongoing efforts to transform Alteño subjectivities — the many NGO projects aimed at helping remake residents of El Alto into democratic participants, capable leaders, or entrepreneurs. In doing

9 Lucia was shocked to learn I did not have to present a similar compendium of certificates when I applied for affiliation with the Ministry of Justice. “No,” I explained to her, “I think they understand that we just don’t have those practices in the U.S. so I wouldn’t have any certificates to offer, just my CV and maybe transcripts.”

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so, those certificates bridged historical moments, linking colonial bureaucratic practices that targeted

Andean Indians with contemporary efforts to transform individual people and whole populations in

Bolivia. Take, for example, the ways that Maria — one of the Center’s clients — talked about her experience working with the Pro Mujer a microcredit institution. As we chatted over tea and pastries,

Maria retreated into the back room of her home and returned hugging her prized possession: a heavy folder bursting with certificates. Maria gently opened the folder and slid it toward me, beaming about her accomplishments and pointing to particularly meaningful certifications. These diplomas were a material expression of her years of attending workshops – workshops that explicitly aimed to shape her sense of self as well as her behavior. As I leafed through them, I noted that many were tied to the microfinance sector (e.g. entrepreneurship and accounting modules), sponsored by USAID, or run by NGOs advocating (a generalized notion of) women’s empowerment and leadership through economic independence.

These were the documentary accounts of projects that aimed to remake Maria into a deliberative, entrepreneurial citizen who knows her rights and obligations within a liberal human rights framework. But those certificates also made visible many of her disappointments. As she delicately turned over the certificates, her tone turned bittersweet; she remembered friendships forged with foreign aid workers who lost touch, a sense that she had been used to marshal a network of women for an early Pro Mujer pilot project only to feel shut out from meaningful leadership because she lacked the formal education and social status of more elite mestiza women. Her certificates served to verify her capabilities — but only to a point; there was a limit to her expertise as a poor Aymara woman. But the certificates also made Maria legible to the expanding network of governmental institutions operating in El Alto and frequently displacing the state — NGOs — which would enumerate her participation for their own record keeping, reporting functions, and grant applications to funding agencies back home in the U.S. and Europe.

I highlight Maria and Lucia’s preoccupation with collecting certificates as just one expression of the powerful role documents play in making particular populations legible to state and non-state

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agencies alike while also shaping how people imagine their own life trajectories. In El Alto, documents — and especially legal documents — occupy a powerful place in people’s imagination, but with real consequences for how people exercise their belonging to the state and their social worlds. It is evident when Center interns chastise clients for failing to get proper documentation for their children — as one intern, Olivia, did when she told a client “Sin papeles no eres persona”

(“without papers you aren’t a person”; see Wogan 2004 for similar proclamations). The ways documents mediate people’s relationship to the state is further evident as clients compile heavy legal- sized folders packed with birth, death, marriage, baptismal, and other certificates, as well as lengthy memoriales (court documents), military service and voting booklets, and all the appropriate bureaucratic stamps and signatures necessary to apply to jobs, file for child support, or correct misspelled names on their high school diplomas. These become the material proofs of existence, as well as formal (if not substantive) citizenship. One cannot advance a legal claim, register for school, correct typos on a marriage license, or apply for inheritance without your own — and your extended family members’10 — certifications.

Thus the influence of the law and document making did not wane at the end of the colonial period. Mark Goodale (2009) has argued that Bolivia’s founding constitution further institutionalized the power of the law to shape Bolivian subjectivities. By encoding liberalism into the founding logic of the state, Goodale argues that “Modern Bolivia was constituted in a very particular way, through a liberal conception of law in which law does much more than merely establish the mechanism for creating and enforcing rules, or for expressing moral aspirations; rather, law is the basic social mechanism through which subjectivity itself is given its fullest meaning” (Goodale 2009: 45). In the contemporary era, this liberal conception of law has found expression in human rights discourses, for example, Olivia’s criticism that a Center client was denying her child his basic human right to an identity mediated by a birth certificate.

10 Indeed, many bureaucratic and legal procedures require copies of certificates -- birth, death, marriage, etc. -- from multiple people in your immediate family.

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The Integrated Justice Centers similarly produced reams and reams of documents, including letters of referral to the forensic medical examiner, psychological services, and other state entities like

Derechos Humanos (the human rights ombudsman) and the FELC-C (special criminal investigations unit of the Bolivian police), as well as memoriales (petitions or statements delivered to the court) for clients who sought to initiate formal legal cases for domestic violence or child support. But the central and emblematic document produced by the Integrated Justice Centers was their conciliation accords. Those accords outlined the agreement parties reached in a given appointment, as well as the stipulations for how that agreement would be actualized. But the content, format, and purpose of those documents was never fixed — despite efforts to “regularize” the production of the accords through periodic workshops and training sessions aimed at staff and interns.

As I have described, the fetishizing of legal documents in Bolivia can be traced back to the colonial project (Abercrombie 1998; Rama 1996; Stern 1982; Stoler 2009, 2002; Goodale 2009), and it continues to be reproduced in contemporary governance projects — from efforts to register children’s parentage to the dissemination of workshop certificates. I don’t mean to suggest that this is a strange, exotic quirk of Aymara Indians. As Wogan argues, comparing magical writing in Salasaca,

Ecuador to census practices in the United States, “seemingly mundane state documents can shape the way people view themselves, making groups virtually appear and disappear from the social landscape” (2004: 2). But anthropologists have been particularly attentive to the ragged edges and fissures in these colonial and contemporary governance strategies, and ways colonial and bureaucratic agents are themselves shaped by the documentary encounter.

Anthropological accounts of how people relate to and deploy bureaucratic documents (and their counterfeits) offers insight into how the “documented” speak back, subvert, and try to influence the outcomes of enumeration, categorization, and surveillance, and to obtain resources and services

(Hoag 2010, Merry 2003, Gupta & Sharma 2006; Wogan 2004). In de Certeau’s (1984) terms, my aim here is to show how Alteños tactically engage with the law and legal-like documents. Similarly, I argue here that the production of conciliation accords both shape and are shaped by the ways Bolivians think

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about themselves and their relationship to the state — and to others — through the production of legal-like documents. As I show in the remainder of this chapter, Center clients often have their own idea about what it is that conciliation documents can and should do, just as Center staff debate the uses and abuses of conciliation accords. It is to those debates over conciliation accords that I now turn.

Legal-sized V. Letter-sized paper.

The staff and interns working in El Alto and La Paz’s Integrated Justice Centers are slowly gathering on a Saturday morning for a training session on preparing conciliation documents. We make our way down the stairwell, several floors into the basement of the Ministry of Justice to a lecture hall, complete with university-style rows of seating facing a stage, podium, and white dry erase board. Ximena Abramović, the chief psychologist working out of the Ministry, divides us into groups. She mixes interns, coordinators, pro-bono lawyers and other personnel, and instructs us on an icebreaker: holding hands in knot of tangled bodies, we must unravel ourselves without losing contact. The lesson, she explains, is about teamwork and communication. Ice sufficiently broken, we settle into small group circles, a mix of interns and staff from El Alto’s six different Centers, as well as the staff from the La Paz central branch at the Ministry. Abramović hands us conciliation documents with the names of clients and conciliators blotted out for privacy. Our task is to find the errors in the documents — errors in form, errors in content. We spend the next hour working through the conciliation accords.

Our small group’s Coordinator reads the first document aloud. It’s a conciliation agreement on child support. She pauses briefly, looking around for a response, and then quickly rattles off a series of her own observations: “This accord is full of redaction errors,” she begins. “The [author] clearly didn’t take the time to adjust the template for the particular case, failed to specify the visitation hours for the father and children. Are they married or common-law? It doesn’t stipulate if the separation is definitive or for a trial period.” She sighs, holding the document out for others to peruse: “It seems

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to me that this accord is very deficient. It’s a document that was expelled by the [computer] system without good modifications to the specific case.”

We identify similar redaction errors in the other sample accords. But it’s the third conciliation document that finally sparks debate: what kinds of cases, exactly, are appropriate to conciliation? This particular accord deals with spousal conflict. In it, the husband agrees to stop drinking and to stop speaking cruelly to his wife. Asusena points to the content of the accord: “I think this accord should have included a commitment to therapy in this particular case. But really, this kind of accord should never have gone to conciliation.”

The Director in our small group nods. “This is a case of psychological violence, it’s admitted in the document itself.”

“Yes,” continues Asusena, “How could you ever enforce such an agreement? This document is purely moralist.”

The Coordinator picks up on Asusena’s point: “Before, clients would come in saying he hits me, he insults me, he mistreats me psychologically. He drinks. And they signed documents of commitment [actas de compromiso] about not drinking, behaving nice, but there is no judicial entity that can enforce that kind of moral commitment. This accord should have never been signed. It should have been transferred directly to the psychologist and then the judge in a psychological violence court case. There are errors of form and content here. It isn’t viable. This accord is useless.”

The Coordinator’s critique points to the larger issue of the interpenetration of conciliation and violence, a as we saw in the previous chapter. But her comments did not end with her statement about the inappropriateness of addressing domestic violence through conciliation. She continued,

“You [interns] are from El Alto. You understand. The women demand it anyway. They say, ‘It doesn’t matter. I want him to sign the document.’ But you have to make them understand, a week will pass and he will fall into the same patterns. They want him to sign a document, but you have to make them understand.”

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I often heard conciliators who were trained in law express similar critiques and bemoan cases that were “inappropriate” for conciliation, arguing that they were better suited to the therapeutic intervention of a psychologist or social worker. Their critiques chafed against the views of other conciliators and ADR proponents who viewed conciliation as a therapeutic process itself. It was a recurring, unresolved tension in workshops like this one and in the daily work of the Centers themselves. But this Saturday-morning debate pointed to another pattern of tension. Rather than suggesting interns were misdirecting cases prematurely to conciliation, workshop participants suggest that it is the Centers’ clientele11 who are insistent on attaining the material outcome of conciliation appointments: their documents.

Before we can discuss the issue further, Ivankovic calls us to gather again in a large group for a plenary discussion. We sit loosely in our small groups, now scattered among the lecture hall rows.

Ivankovic begins to sort through the scraps of paper she has collected — where we have noted our critiques of the conciliation documents we’ve been asked to analyze. In classic Bolivian group-work fashion, she begins to tack them on the board, grouping our overlapping thoughts, identifying outliers, letting each rectangular slip of paper guide our conversation. It’s a question of form and content, she explains: Which of these critiques are simple errors of form, and which are bigger problems that would ultimately threaten the viability of the conciliation accords themselves?

Suddenly we come upon a critique that prompts tension among the otherwise chatty, relaxed group: one of the groups presents the error of a conciliation accord printed on papel tamaño carta

(letter-sized paper). Abramović pauses and turns to the group. “Is this a problem de forma o de fondo”

(in form or content) she asks. A chorus of competing answers goes up. We discover that some

Centers use legal-sized paper. Others adhere to letter-sized accords. People are surprised to learn that there are varying practices across the Centers. Someone makes a case for needing to be

11 As I described in earlier chapters, Bolivian jurists and ADR advocates often characterize this festishizing of the judicial realm as a reflection of “conservative Bolivian legal culture.” Among ordinary citizens, that “legal culture” reflects the value poor, working class, and especially indigenous citizens place on professionalization and the socio-economic status associated with having legal representation (cf. Interviews with Gloria Salazar, Eduardo Rodriguez Veltze).

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consistent. “We are in the Ministry of Justice,” he argues, “our documents need to be consistent with judicial documents. They should be printed on papel oficio [legal sized paper].”

Dr. José Pérez, coordinator for the District 1 Integrated Justice Center is seated toward the front of the auditorium. He twists around to peer at his colleagues in the back, brow furrowed, and raises his hand to comment. Dr. Pérez tenses his face as he speaks. He’s against using tamaño oficio, he explains, because it’s part of a bigger trend in pulling the Centers away from their original objectives.

“We’re turning into little courts (pequeño juzgados),” he laments. “We have lost sight of the original purpose of the Centers.” Another voice pipes up: “But it’s a matter of consistency.” Another: “What does the reglamentación say?” “We need to be consistent across the Centers. It should be tamaño oficio like all documents that come out of the juzgados.” I can see Ivankovic growing impatient with the turn the conversation has taken — focusing so heavily on document size. She waves her hand trying to indicate that this is not a critical point. But Dr. Pérez is insistent. Form reflects content, he insinuates: “We have lost sight of our origins.”

***

I meet with Dr. Pérez just a few weeks after the Ministry of Justice’s workshop, and ask him to expand on his argument that the Centers had lost sight of their original purpose, that they were, in effect, being “re-judicialized.” We sit in his office in the District 1 Integrated Justice Center. The blue-green building is a shock of color amid the concrete grays, muted brick, and muddy browns along Santa Rosa’s broad Avenida Cívica. The light entering Dr. Pérez’s office filters through layers of paper hung on the glass partition: women’s rights posters and broad sheets of butcher paper covered in diagrams, legal terms, and inspirational quotes about the work of social transformation.

“What I was suggesting on that occasion,” he explains, “was a concern I have about this tendency I have seen [in the Centers] — toward focusing on the conciliation accord as the primary product or expression of conciliation, or the idea that the accord must contain technical elements that are jurisdictional. That is to say, for example, [the notion] that an accord should necessarily be

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founded upon [legal] articles and things like that. This implies a regression [in the aims of] conciliation.”

For Dr. Pérez, this overemphasis on the material expression of the Centers’ work — conciliation documents — indexed a shift in the meaning or purpose of their “original” goal. The

Centers, he insisted, were intended to distance people from the formal legal system. Increasingly, he suggested, Conciliators were drawing up documents that mirrored memoriales (legal briefs) and other court documents — not only in form, but in content: they integrated and often built the document around specific articles in Bolivia’s many, many legal codes. Dr. Pérez continued, “For me conciliation, at least in the way we trained people at the beginning [when the program was run by

USAID], was an alternative. When we speak of alternatives, we are saying that it is another path or different option. And when we said it was a different option, we meant that it was something what had other characteristics [distinct from the formal legal system]. A different temperament. That [the clients] are more satisfied. So the concept of conciliation determines a lot. There is a subtle but substantial difference.”

Dr. Pérez argued that the introduction of technical legal concepts into the conciliation accord reflected a subtle yet insidious corruption of the original intent of the Centers, one that paralleled the shift in ownership of the Centers from a program created and run through USAID to one that is fully under the auspices of the Ministry of Justice.12 He continued, “When a conciliator insists that the [conciliation] accord should contain elements of formal justice, obviously we can correct them that there is a kind of inclination, or a tendency to speak of conciliation [in legal terms], to utilize it as an instrument of jurisdictional activity. That [usage of conciliation accords] is a misinterpretation — a perversion, if you will — of the initial concept.” The debate at the Ministry of

Justice workshop, he suggested, was part of an ongoing tension between those who wanted to tilt

12 FURTHER DEVELOP THIS POINT RE: Interview with the Vice Minister of Justice and his perception of the shift and what it says about the role of the state in being responsible for improving access to justice versus the role of NGOs and other quasi-governmental institutions like the Centers.

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conciliation toward the realm of the formal legal system, to “pervert” and distort its original aims, to shed the “alternative” of “Alternative Dispute Resolution.”

Sebastián Costa, a conciliator at the District 4 Center, shared Dr. Pérez’s concerns. Interns and conciliators, he suggested, were erroneously encouraging clients to homologar (get a judge’s signature to legalize a document) conciliation accords immediately after finalizing the agreement.

“What’s the point then [of conciliation],” he asked rhetorically, “if all we do is send people back to the courts instead of really resolving their problems? What’s the point of the Centers if all we do is pile everything back on the courts? Conciliation accords should only be homologado in case of going unfulfilled. Otherwise, we aren’t empowering civil society -- we are just falling back into the same patterns. For what purpose do we exist? Homologaciones can take up to six months. Six months! But if we do a good job resolving the conflict we can avoid all this. And honestly, we can’t rely on the courts. The cases in my court [in his district] spent six months paralyzed because the judge had to rotate to another district. There is no consistency. It generated a huge backlog.”

But Costa went further in his critique, arguing that a good conciliation session would so effectively allow clients to get at the root causes of their disputes that no conciliation accord would be necessary. Effective conciliation shouldn’t require a document, Costa told me. But Center staff, he argued regularly turned to documents because it was what they knew from their legal training, a habit, a rut. They fell back into old patterns of legalism. Costa also blamed this tendency on the pressure staff faced to generate numbers that would justify their continued funding — from both foreign donors and the Ministry of Justice alike. These pressures fed a pre-existing tendency to hyper- emphasize the importance of documents. And like Dr. Pérez, Costa believed that Center staff and interns were tending to reintroduce conciliation into the judicial realm to the detriment of both conciliation and the formal legal system.

Despite their vocal opposition to using legal sized paper — and to the judicial turn it indexed — not everyone involved in the creation of the Centers shared the position. Rather, it reflected a recurring tension among staff. Pamela Chacón, the educator who conducted the focus

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groups and workshops that formed the basis of the Integrated Justice Centers, frequently downplayed her own, initial legal knowledge, and described the process of getting involved in designing the Centers as an educational experience in its own right. It was, she told me, the first time she started thinking about her own rights and the law. But, she said, the issue of paper size had come up before, as the USAID contracting team was first designing the Centers. “We had to systematize the paper size the centers were using. The conciliation accord,” she told me, “has the same legal standing or value as a judge’s verdict, so it has to have the same form as a verdict.13“ That meant using papel oficio rather than tamaño carta [legal sized versus letter sized paper]. For people like Chacón, this mirroring of conciliation documents and judicial documents was natural. It was a necessary process of formalization. Pamela continued,

We have gotten on the wavelength of judges — format, spacing. All those things we learned. Since in the end, they are the ones who will get [the accords] and have to enforce them, we are kind of doing what they should do. I don’t know if that was how it should have been done. For me, paper is paper. But the format can give it greater formality. And you’ve got to fulfill [those regulations] it if the paper is going to matter, right?

In Pamela’s characterization, the form of conciliation documents mirrors that of judicial documents because although they are voluntary agreements, they carry the weight of the judicial ruling. Form indexes function.

This expectation about what such documents do created a number of tensions. For Dr. Pérez and Sebastián Costa, this judicial mimicry, this intentional isomorphism, was an adulteration of the alternative dimension of ADR — an abandonment of ADR values. The Centers, they worried, were becoming “little courts” rather than true alternatives. Other staff rejected the “merely moralist” orientation of ADR approaches that weren’t more closely tied to the law. Too many women wanted their husbands to stop drinking, stop carousing with their friends, stop seeing other women. In addition to the kinds of child support payments that might be outlined in an agreement, along with visitation rights and other logistics of shared child care, clients, especially women, wanted to include a

13 “Tiene valor de juez [literally, “the same value as a judge”], va a tener la forma de juez [literally, “it will have the same form as the judge”].”

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range of behavioral changes that staff and interns often lamented were not “actionable” or grounded in the law.

The notion that conciliation accords might include behavioral and “moral” stipulations — something Center staff criticized as inappropriate because it was not

“actionable” in the formal courts — reflects a common practice in rural hamlets.

Abercrombie (1998: 79), for example, found that local Canton authorities often required that people accused of harmful behavior frequently must sign an acta de buena conducta (acts of good Figure 7 Case files in one of La Paz’s criminal courts. Photo S. Ellison conduct) — regardless of guilt (cf Van Vleet

2008). That oath pledges future good behavior, can incur a fine if violated, and is often accompanied by ritual acts of reconciliation — practices now gaining more attention as Bolivia tries to instantiate legal pluralism and indigenous autonomy under the 2009 Constitution.

As I suggested in Chapter Four, many Alteño clients came to the Center with these practices in mind, as they circulated between their rural natal communities and their urban El Alto neighborhoods, and as they sought the advice and mediation of dirigentes (neighborhood association leaders) in their barrio. Those experiences shaped their expectation of how conciliation would occur

— sometimes chafing against, other times reshaping the norms and guidelines advocated by conciliation specialists and practitioners who tried to accommodate their clientele’s expectations.

This interplay or interpenetration of dispute resolution practice suggests that the distinction between the formal legal system and “traditional” or community justice, Metodos Originarios de Resolucion de

Conflict (MORCS or Indigenous Conflict Resolution Methods, as they are known in Bolivia), cannot

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be sustained. Rather, conciliation documents — like actas de buena conducta in rural Aymara communities, or garantias mutuas (literally “mutual guarantees” or restraining orders) signed in the police station, among other written contracts — are a critical site of judicial interpenetration or interlegality (de Sousa Santos 1995).

This tension over the relationship between conciliation and the formal legal system often centered around philosophical debates about what kind of training people require in order to be successful conciliators. Could social workers, psychologists, and neighborhood housewives provide effective conciliation, or did conciliators necessarily require training in the law14. I am not interested in advocating one position or the other here, nor in resolving the tension between legal and letter- sized paper. Both the practitioner literature and variable-based ADR studies are concerned with identifying and quantifying ADR practices foster trust, enable legitimacy, and ensure neutrality (or, among critics, deconstructing all of these practices). Moreover, these debates are not unique to

Bolivia. There is a large practitioner and scholarly literature that examines the relationship between

ADR’s ostensibly informal approach to (“popular”) justice and its relationship to the formal legal system.15 By contrast, I am more interested in how and why, in the Bolivian context, these debates coalesced around the conciliation document itself — and with what consequences.

What does the recurring debate over paper size reveal about how Bolivians imagine their relationship to the formal legal system and how written documents shape people’s inter-subjective lives? If the turn to the judicial realm is driven not solely by conciliators or law interns but also by

Center clientele themselves, what does this tactic reveal about how ADR has become entangled in

14 By extension, I often heard staff debate the content of conciliation documents themselves. Law interns and legally-trained staff regularly decried what they saw as the production of “merely moralist” and “non- actionable” documents, such a conciliation accords where Clients made their husbands promise to stop drinking with their buddies at soccer matches or to end their philandering ways. Some staff went further, insisting “actionable” accords needed to demonstrate their fundamentos legales — the legal basis for their arrangements, whether it was a debt payment or child support arrangement. Only conciliators trained in the law, they argued, were in a position to adequately draft such agreements. Others insisted that social workers, psychologists, and others with adequate training in conciliation were better positioned to do the work of helping people dig deep into the reasons for their interpersonal disputes. These kinds of debates have long haunted ADR, which in the U.S. context initially reflected an effort to de-professionalize conflict resolution and later fed debates over other forms of professionalization into ADR techniques. Cf Adler 1993 on de/professionalization debates in the U.S. context.

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local understandings of the law — as well as recurring conflicts that are particular to the residents of

El Alto? I want to suggest that unlike the American case, where scholars argue that the informal is always entangled with the formal despite efforts to escape its grasp,16 in Bolivia poor ADR clients are interested in conciliation specifically because they are trying to mimic legal documentary procedures

— and to bring that mimicry to bear on their intimate social relations.

Drawing on Veena Das (2006), anthropologist Akil Gupta (2009) analyzes how poor Indians use forgery as a strategy to overcome bureaucratic domination; forgery not only reveals the way writing functions in a teleological narrative about the relationship between literacy and democracy

(e.g. ideals about voting and informed citizenship), but this simulacra also illuminates the actual mechanisms through which the state achieves its legitimacy, as people strive to “mimic the processes of the Indian state” through their use of fake documents (188). As Gupta explains, “the counterfeit thus shadows the authenticating procedures of the state” (188). Das’ ethnographic work (2006) demonstrates that the “unreadability” of the state does not uniformly produce progressive forms of resistance to oppressive socio-political orders. Whereas Gupta emphasizes forgery and counterfeit as means of resisting bureaucratic domination that is exercised through literacy requirements, Das suggests that the state’s iterability and illegibility can be marshaled in moments of political violence in the service of local conflicts — sometimes with brutal effects. Similarly, I am asking how Alteños are marshaling the illegibility of conciliation accords — their size and formatting, the document itself — to mimic the “authenticating procedures” of the state as they navigate intimacies and obligations.

What, then, are the consequences of this turn to conciliation accords, which blur the line in people’s minds between informal dispute resolution mechanisms and the formal legal system, precisely due to their documentary form? Regardless of the “friendly,” oral dimensions of conciliation emphasized by ADR theories and advocates, my argument here is that in El Alto, the accords themselves invoke the formal legal system and its accompanying enforcement apparatus.

15 cf Adler 1993 for a concise summary of similar debates in the U.S. ADR movement 16 cf Merry and Milner et. al. (1993) for an extensive examination of the San Francisco Boards model of ADR which has influenced the spread of ADR globally

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This is will not be a surprise to anthropologists, who have long been interested in the ways popular justice practices depend on or explicitly invoke the formal legal apparatus — its coercive capabilities always haunting the informal realm (cf Merry 1982; Greenhouse 1985). But my argument here is that it is not just a matter of mediator strategies that introduces coercion into a so-called therapeutic, conciliatory session. Coercion is not an unintended consequence of conciliation, but rather is central to it — both in practice (using threats to get people to attend sessions) and in people’s imagination

(desiring a document that conjures the coercive apparatus of the legal system). Thus the debate over conciliation documents and their isomorphism with formal legal documents is instructive for understanding the entanglements of formal state institutions and informal social relations, as people seek to inscribe actionable and “non-actionable” behavior alike into written documents, to make infidelity and social debts legible to the state apparatus and to each other.

Anthropologists have shown how people strategically construct intimacy and appeal to affect in supposedly impartial and anonymous encounters with state agents. For example, Daniel Smith

(2007) draws on his own experience appealing to his “brother-in-law” status when encountering state bureaucrats in Nigeria. It’s an ethnographic insight that strikingly contradicts Weber’s notion of the depersonalized/rationalized modern bureaucratic state. But by obtaining these accords, Center clients were not trying to establish intimacy with state bureaucrats (although that also occurred in other contexts, as I mentioned briefly in the Chapter 4). Rather, they were seeking to introduce the state’s formal legal apparatus into their intimate social relations and informal kinship practices. While colonial and liberal democratic governments in Bolivia have used documents strategically to manage populations, residents of El Alto and especially clients at the Integrated Justice Centers are using those same institutional and documentary practices tactically. The tactical pursuit of conciliation accords was especially evident in the ways people pursued conciliation in the face of mounting debt and the inability of their friends and kin to repay social obligations. In a way, Alteños are taking bureaucracy home with them through conciliation documents.

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As Don Moises’ complaint indicated, documents in El Alto are frequently fetishized, imagined to hold enormous power to ensure compliance; and yet, they are also material objects that index widespread distrust and disappointment in state institutions. This tension between desiring legal documents and disbelieving their efficacy ran throughout many of my conversations with clients and staff alike. Yet despite this ambivalence, I argue that residents of El Alto continue to pursue conciliation documents in an effort to formalize informal loan arrangements and to enforce social obligations between relatives. They are, in effect, making implicit social obligations and kinship relations contractually binding. While it seems obvious that people would use both conciliation and the courts to negotiate some family conflicts — like child support, divorce, and domestic violence — the preponderance of cases involving informal, interpersonal debts offers insights into the ways people are using conciliation in a context where both the Bolivian state and la cooperación internacional are promoting entrepreneurial forms of citizenship through microcredit.

Contracting Kinship

On this brisk October morning, Doña Rosa has come to pick up the monthly quota her nephew owes her — a debt he is paying-off via conciliation. Unfortunately, he hasn’t made the deposit. Doña Rosa sighs, resigned, and says she’ll come back tomorrow. “He’s always late,” she tells me. I learn that Doña Rosa is a comerciante [vendor] — and her nephew is too. She loaned him the money as capital for his small business, but he never paid it back, she explains. “He hid. He ran off to Santa Cruz to escape [the debt]. But I had to start paying it back because the loan was money I had borrowed from another person.” Doña Rosa had taken out a loan from another woman, lending it to her nephew for his business. When he never paid her back, Rosa was left to contend with her own lender. Rosa eventually cajoled her nephew into attending a conciliation appointment and to signing an agreement for monthly payments. He pays his quotas, she explained, but often late, missing dates. His inconsistency forces her to return repeatedly, anxiously, to see if he has made the deposit — so she can pay her own debts. It was frustrating, she explained, but at least he was paying.

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***

As I described in the previous chapter, residents of El Alto, people like Rosa and her nephew,

Virginia and her sister — are using ADR to mediate conflicts and obligations generated by the ways microfinance institutions have targeted the social networks of the poor, especially women. Nearly all of these families, when asked about the source of the original debt they owed their friends and relatives, pointed back to quota payments they were trying to make to financial institutions. Most of the women listed institutions like Crecer, ProMujer, Diakonia, and several other institutions specializing in microcredit loans to women, particularly through the practice of mancomunal groups. Thus many

Center clients had come to their debts through their social networks and the obligations they entailed, and now many were coming to the Centers to mediate the conflicts generated by those debts. Yet this effort to make informal social obligations into formal contracts has enormous consequences for the ways people think about and enact those kin relations.

These strains manifest, for example, as kin convinced each other to join credit groups or to sign as guarantors on bank loans, only to find themselves falling mortally behind on payments. When compadres, siblings or aunties failed to pay back the principal or the interest, other members of the family would be pulled into the spiral of debt as their names were blacklisted in Bolivia’s national credit registry, which one Bolivian bank employee described to me as “the equivalent of having a criminal record.”

Doña Dionicia, for example, did not realize she was on the “list” at the Central de Riesgo

[Central Database of Risk] — and therefore unable to take out a new loan until she went to apply for funds from Pro Mujer, one of El Alto’s many microcredit agency targeting poor women for empowerment through small loans. It was only when she was refused credit that she discovered her uncle had defaulted on a loan for which she had signed as guarantor. The bank also sent someone to paint her adobe wall with thick brush strokes reading “defaulting debtor,” causing Dionicia and her family enormous embarrassment in their neighborhood — and deep-seated anger toward her uncle and his family. She bitterly accused him of having the money but refusing to take responsibility for

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the loan, and suggested he had tricked Dionicia into “signing” the bank papers despite her illiteracy

(many illiterate Bolivians are able to sign their name — and take great care in doing so — even if they struggle to read more generally).

Here documents became the mechanism of her effective criminalization — though she did not face prison, she did face both stigmatization (the spray painted wall) and a total barring from access to credit. As kin signed bank loans as guarantors, or participated in mancomunal credit groups, that shared moral stigma reflected a shared debt with real, material consequences for access to future credit. The materiality of that shared debt was enacted when mancomunal groups came to collect household items like gas canisters, televisions, and bedspreads as collateral when debtors in their solidarity group were late with payments. As Sahlins (2011) has said, “where being is mutual, the experience is more than individual.” And where being is constructed through mutual indebtedness, when the bank comes for one, it comes for all.

Yet even as they came to the Centers anxious for a conciliation document, many clients expressed enormous unease and ambivalence about mapping out those debts with their kin and formalizing them in the accord. I want to suggest that the discomfort lay in the fact that conciliation documents made explicit the kinds of social obligations and expectations of care that normally remained implicit in everyday kinship practices. While poor Alteño vecinos and rural indigenous community members frequently appeal to a sense of Ayni of reciprocal obligation to help a neighbor or kin during moments of need — particularly by activating one’s compadrazgo network — those expectations are usually unwritten, their calculus remains invisible even if it is always present in people’s minds as they navigate intimate-communal moments: sharing a meal or celebrating a wedding or baptism, preparing food for a funeral or helping raise a compadre’s roof. But as Alteños are seeking to formalize those informal modes of care and obligation by cajoling — and sometimes threatening — kin into signing conciliation accords, those implicit expectations and perpetual, dynamic debts are crystallized into a material accounting of the relationship and its (im)balance of

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payments. The “informal” social contract of compadrazgo becomes a binding legal document — with an expiration date.

This process transforms the weighty — but often implicit — balance of social obligations into a physical ledger, where one party has fallen behind in their quotas. As I showed in the previous section, the law has profoundly shaped people’s intersubjective lives and documents occupy a powerful place in people’s imaginary about their relationship to the state. By producing a private conciliation accord, I want to suggest that people are in effect trying to introduce the (im)balance of payments between kin into the state’s legal infrastructure, while also bringing the law and its coercive capabilities home with them — through the conciliation accord and its imagined capacity to enforce social obligations. They do so by appealing to legal documents (or trying to mimic them), by utilizing the strategies of state bureaucracies to tactically manage these ever-extending webs of debt.

Conciliation documents thus serve to judicialize kinship relations — both figuratively and literally.

Painfully, many people who come to the Centers find themselves so constrained by pre-existing debt payments to other people or institutions, that they are unable to meet the obligations outlined in their accords without seeking additional loans from other kin — who often bellyache about the constant requests for help and pursue conciliation with their own debtors. And so the cycle continues.

Despite deep ambivalences and frustrations with state institutions and bureaucrats, I am arguing that Alteños turn to the formal justice system both because the law so deeply inflects people’s subjectivities and the ways they imagine themselves relating to others — as well as the state — and because they are searching for mechanisms to resolve very pragmatic needs. That is, the law shapes the ways people think about themselves and relate to others — it infuses the social and political lives of individuals and the communities in which they are nested. But the law also provides an institutional framework for people in extremely precarious positions who are searching for ways to introduce coercion into informal social practices and the fictive kin relations that sustain them. As a consequence, Center clients are using conciliation documents in ways never anticipated by ADR advocates. I found that clients generally are not using conciliation because of the ways it opens space

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to work through interpersonal tensions, nor to gain communication skills to mediate future interpersonal conflicts. Rather, they come to the Centers with the expectation that a conciliation document will help them transform informal loans and other social obligations into binding contracts with coercive capabilities.

Rule of law and judicial reform critics have argued that the enormous amount of faith reformers have placed in the law as a means to achieve justice is bound to disappoint. Comaroff &

Comaroff critique these approaches for “fetishizing old panaceas,” including constitutional reform and voting as solutions to what prove to be much deeper structural inequalities (2006: 20). As Godoy argues, “enhancing the effectiveness of the courts while reducing the scope of state involvement in other aspects of social justice thus promotes a vision of law unlikely to confer more meaningful benefits on marginalized communities” (2004: 642). As I described in the first chapter, prior waves of decentralization and informalism emphasized the value of getting people out of the courts and justified the abandonment of institutional reform as hopelessly doomed to failure. In Bolivia, however, the “old panaceas” of the courts have been rejected alongside a governmental emphasis on self-care, informalism, and de-legalization. Are Alteños, then, mimicking a vision of the legal system that is incapable of offering real solutions — not because the courts have failed, but because other forms of state involvement in securing justice have been relegated to NGOs and entrepreneurial solutions to poverty that are is incapable of satisfying their needs as the old panaceas of the courts?

On the one hand, these contracts provide borrowers with clear expectations about quota payments and often allow them stagger those payments according to more manageable sums and timelines. They also offer lenders — who are facing their own tangle of debts — a promise of payment that is otherwise without recourse in the formal legal system without such an “antecedent” document. Nevertheless, this formalization (of the informal) has enormous consequences for how people relate to the very network of friends and kin that usually serves as a social safety net in the absence of state provisions. What happens to the relationship once that balance of payments is paid off? For some, the repayment restores trust and provides relief, both economic and emotional. For

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others, the end of a payment cycle is also the end of the relationship; the contract transforms the moral economy of compadrazgo — with its many material and immaterial obligations, notions of mutuality and extended temporality — into a formal creditor-debtor relationship with an expiration date.

It’s just a moral document.

In cases like that of Doña Rosa and her nephew, conciliators treated the clients as individuals with verbal contracts in need of physical ones to make them legible before the state and each other.

These tactics became more complicated, however, when women clients sought to invite their husbands (common law or legally married) for conciliation appointments also connected to debt.

Take, for example, the case of Doña Dionicia. Dionicia came to the Center heavily indebted with a number of microcredit institutions targeting poor women, including Pro-Mujer and Diakonia, as well other microfinance institutions (Crecer, Emprender). The day we met, she had brought her estranged husband, Oscar, who accompanied her begrudgingly. Clutching his stomach, Oscar grimaced throughout their intake, excusing himself periodically to stumble out into the courtyard.

“There’s a bathroom if he’s feeling sick,” I told Dionicia. “Nah, he’s just hung over. He drank all last night and came home at 2AM,” she shrugged, suggesting he could just deal with the discomfort.

Dionicia and Oscar had previously signed a conciliation agreement where he promised to contribute to the payments she was making to several financial institutions. He had failed to fulfill those obligations, and now she was wanting to see about possible legal action for breach of contract.

Oscar sat listless and Dionicia listed off the various debts to formal institutions, and then the many interpersonal loans that remained outstanding. “I need 800bs by 2pm this afternoon [to meet one of her microcredit quotas,” she explained. “But in addition to those debts I owe other people. I owe

Doña Julia 500bs. I owe Doña Lidia 600bs. I owe Marta almost 1,700Bs. I own Doña Cecilia 500Bs.

I am always begging. The person who loaned me 1,000bs did so with interest.” She gestures to

Oscar, “He thinks I just complain for no reason. He doesn’t understand.”

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A few days later I would witness a follow-up conversation between Doña Dionicia and the conciliator, Dr. Sonia Campos.

Looking over Dionicia’s conciliation accord, Dr. Sonia shakes her head and clarifies that the conciliator who had drawn up the previous agreement between Dionicia and her husband Oscar had done so in error. “He could just make a mockery of this accord,” Dra. Sonia explains, “because between spouses there are no debts. There is no legal basis for it,” she continues. “If you want to have your husband sign a document, you must understand it is a moral commitment. It has no backing from the law. We can do a moral agreement, but if you decide to separate we can do one for child support.”

Dionicia pauses to consider her options. “Below [in the market] I have my little store, my workshop [chomperia]. I have two machines. What happens if we separate?” Dionicia asks.

“What does the law say? The law says that all of your belongings will be divided. If you do conciliation you can fix things by talking it out, you can discuss how to share. But if you can’t reach an agreement, a judge will take all your belongings and divide them. If you can’t reach an agreement over how to do that, the judge will make you sell them off and split the money.”

At this possibility, Dionicia shakes her head, alarmed. “The last time we separated I gave him the [sewing] machine because, why fight? So I just went ahead and gave it to him. But he used it as collateral on a debt. Where’s that machine now? Who knows. But these machines I bought myself.”

“But under the law it is shared,” Sonia explains.

Dionicia reiterates that she wants to sign a conciliation accord with her husband.

Sonia insists, “Fine, but it’s just a moral document.”

Once again, Dra. Sonia underscores a distinction between “merely moralist” and legally actionable documents as the Center staff and interns debated in the Ministry of Justice workshop described above. A legally actionable would be something like an agreed plan of payments between a debtor and creditor, with specific dates and amounts. In the event that the debtor fails to make payments according to that plan, the lender can request ejecucion forzosa or a judge’s order for

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immediate payment of the full amount under threat of further sanction (e.g. Sending a father to prison for being delinquent on child support much as we do in the U.S.). But Sonia explains to

Dionicia that this kind of agreement between a creditor and debtor is not legally recognized between spouses. The kind of document Dionicia is requesting would therefore be “merely moralist.” Sonia’s criticism of another conciliator for being willing to draw up such an accord speaks to the earlier debate about whether such agreements must have their grounding in the law — actionable — or whether they can be flexible agreements that reflect the desires of disputing parties.

Yet while some conciliators insisted that this overly legalistic approach to conciliation misunderstood and undermined the alternative dimensions of ADR, here we can see how important it is to Dionicia to get that document even as she recognizes that she faces unsatisfying alternatives.

This notion of moral versus legally actionable conciliation accords further demonstrates how people like Dionicia seek out conciliation documents in order to try to bring the state home in the form of contract-mimicking documents — including to mediate conflicts between spouses. In some ways, these agreements reproduce similar practices in rural communities where community authorities often draw up moral documents stipulating agreements between parties. (Cf Van Vleet 2008).

Conciliation clients like Dionicia strategically pursue conciliation documents not despite of, but because of this slippage between documents that mimic state legal bureaucracies and documents that evoke the kind of agreements reached by rural authorities. And as I described in the preceding chapter, conciliation accords became one such strategy through which women sought to negotiate these dilemmas through their mimicry of the formal legal system. But here I want to highlight the ways conciliation documents also serve as an “in the meantime” tactic for managing economic insecurity and limited legal options, especially for women.

Conclusion

Since the colonial era, authorities have deployed the law as an explicit strategy to manage and re-shape the subjectivities of Andean populations. Here I am drawing on the work of Michel de

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Certeau (2011 [1984]) to distinguish between formal governance strategies and everyday tactics employed by people caught up in those strategies. But this colonial governance strategy did not disappear with the advent of the Bolivian Republic and the proliferation of liberal political thought.

Rather, colonial, Republican, and contemporary “plurinational” Bolivian authorities have all employed a variety of law-based strategies to manage populations. As I showed in chapter one, these governance projects have also been bolstered by the efforts of a transnational apparatus of donor institutions dedicated to (re)shaping the interior lives of Alteños to be more amenable to liberal democratic practice through their encounters with both the law and informal dispute resolution services. Alteños are deeply embedded in this historically-produced “legal culture,” which fetishizes the production of documents to achieve its ends. And yet, I want to suggest that Alteños are turning to documents tactically to mediate social obligations and kin relations. This turn to legal documents — or their simulacra in the form of conciliation accords — is particularly ironic given the stated aims of donor institutions, which have promoted informal Alternative Dispute Resolution as a substitute to the formal courts.

This faith in the document — particularly a judicial document or its conciliation doppelgänger

— and its capacity to ensure compliance belies an equally powerful distrust in the ability of the justice system to provide satisfying results. Just as I often heard clients and staff invoke the phrase “las palabras se llevan el viento” when justifying the need for conciliation accords and other written contracts,

Alteños regularly lament that “noy hay justicia” (there is no justice), or, more tellingly, that others simply “se burlan de la justicia” (“they make a mockery of justice”). When clients invoked this phrasing, they express the widespread sentiment that formal state institutions and the justice system regularly fail to ensure compliance or to effectively resolve disputes. But they also express an underlying sentiment: that the economic constraints shaping and deforming their lives are unjust, and there is no way to hold people, whether kin or politician, to account. Yet although people feel deeply ambivalent about that system — its legitimacy and its enforcement capabilities — it nevertheless occupies a

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powerful place in people’s imagination about how they relate to the state and to each other — through the production of bureaucratic and legal documents.

Despite these misgivings, I argue that Alteños are using conciliation documents tactically to navigate conflicts that threaten to unravel their intimate social relations. While ADR advocates characterize conciliation as a voluntary and mutually-beneficial practice, clients frequently approach the Centers hoping that written documents will act as a mechanism of enforcement — and indeed of coercion — for otherwise informal practices with ambiguous timelines. But what are the consequences of this turn to written conciliation accords — to contracts between kin — as Alteños seek to formalize informal social obligations amid ongoing economic insecurity? Don Moises was ultimately dissatisfied by his many attempts at conciliate; the document itself did not produce the desired compliance. Other people, like Doña Virginia, express relief at being able to sort-out growing tensions with friends and loved ones — like Rosa’s sister — through conciliation accords. Those documents offered both Doña Virginia and Doña Rosa some sense of resolution and compliance, the promise of payment, even if that payment was often overdue. Many others, however, experience enormous grief as they try to formalize loans and hold each other accountable to payment — as they introduce coercive mechanisms into their relationships with friends and kin. This turn to formalizing informal loans via conciliation accords illuminates the ways Alteños may use both state and para-state institutions to further instantiate their relatedness — and their obligations to each other. Yet that process can produce enormous tension and pain as people bring legal bureaucracy home with them, in the shape of a written contract.

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CONCLUSION

Rumor Has It

“President Evo Morales has said that an alleged assassination plot against him by Balkan mercenaries and an Irishman may have been backed by the US embassy in the Bolivian capital La Paz.” — The Guardian, Monday 20 April 2009

“If you lend money to one of my people among you who is needy, do not treat it like a business deal; charge no interest. If you take your neighbor’s cloak as collateral, return it by sunset, because that cloak is the only covering your neighbor has. What else can they sleep in? When they cry out to me, I will hear, for I am compassionate.” — Exodus 22: 26-28

Bolivia and the Balkan imagination

In July of 2008, I met Rocío, a militante of the Movement Toward Socialism party (MAS) and an elected representative to Bolivia’s Constitutional Assembly. I had been referred to Rocío through a chain of friends, each one opening a new link by expressing their conviction that I was someone they trusted, someone who was “transparent,” who had nothing to hide. Very quickly,

Rocío seemed to have sized me up as someone she, too, was willing to trust; she hurried me into a small internet café in El Alto where we perched on plastic stools while she composed an email to her compañeros (comrades) asking for their assistance. She was in contact, she told them, with a researcher who was studying the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

She wrote them that my research would “allow us to unmask the supposed activities of cooperation and aid and the supposed promotion of democracy” that, she asserted, is in fact a facade for efforts to unseat Bolivia’s first indigenous president, Evo Morales. My efforts to

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nuance my research project were for naught: Rocío said she was thrilled; she believed my research would add to the mounting evidence that American foreign aid was part of a larger conspiracy between the Bush Administration, multinational corporations tied to the extractive industries, multilateral aid agencies like the IMF and World Bank, and Bolivia’s elite, concentrated in the Eastern region of the country known as the Media Luna.

As I conducted my research on USAID programs in El Alto, I heard numerous rumors about aid projects and other theories about American collaborations and collusions with

Bolivia’s mestizo elite. In whispered voices, friends and informants told me about USAID paying- off Alteño union leaders with hush funds, and surveillance programs aimed at breaking the organizational capacity of El Alto’s Federation of Neighborhood Associations (FEJUVE). One recurrent theory was that American Ambassador Philip Goldberg was using his training and experience working in the former Yugoslavia to “Balkanize” Bolivia by funding the Media Luna’s secessionist agenda -- led by Santa Cruz’s Croatian-descendent oligarchy. The theories connected

Bolivia’s resurgent and virulent racism with the country’s colonial – and contemporary – history of rapacious natural resource extraction, as well as deepening inequality attributed to the stringent structural adjustment programs the Bolivian government adopted during the 1980s and

1990s under the guidance of multilateral organizations like the IMF and World Bank. Some explanations further connected these histories with the former war in Bosnia and the Media

Luna’s demand for regional autonomy.

A few weeks after our conversation, Rocío sent me a deflated-sounding email. Confident that her contacts would flood her message box with evidence of American “injerencia” (political meddling), she was disappointed to find that the few links she did receive seemed weak, unconvincing.

Anthropologists have long been interested in rumor and other narratives like those circulating in El Alto -- conspiracy theories and discourses that ostensibly lack proof (cf Briggs

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2004; Comaroff & Comaroff 1999; Dean 2000; Feldman-Savelsberg et al 2000; Kroeger 2003;

Marcus 1999; Silverstein 2002; Stewart 1999). But how do we interpret rumors and conspiracy theories in a context in which there is a traceable history of U.S. political and military intervention? As I described in Chapter 1, the U.S. government has a long history of supporting counter insurgency efforts in the Americas, and seeking to undermine the power of the labor sector, backing right wing militaries and destabilizing governments that weren’t favorable to U.S. interests. Morales initially accused USAID of backing the wealthy mestizo elites of the Media Luna, of plotting his ouster much in the vein of American intervention in Latin America during the

1970s and 1980s.

But at the time, I was struck by the ways Alteños tended to weave together concerns about surveillance and suspicions that USAID was buying off the Left. As I listened to rumors circulating about USAID in El Alto, I was often reminded of two powerful idioms expressing distrust of public leaders and fears of betrayal: the terrifying trope of the karisiri or pishtaco

(Andean fat stealer) and accusations of corruption lodged against dirigentes (neighborhood association or union leaders). One of these tropes exemplifies some of the mechanisms through which Bolivians hold their leaders accountable for the proper allocation or misuse of funds. The other expresses anxieties about more intimate kinds of estrangement. Let me begin with the former.

When aid workers bemoaned the hyper-politicization of their projects, they frequently focused on the accusations made by Morales, and assumed that when Alteños voiced similar accusations, they only did so because they were parroting Evo. Bolivian contractors working with USAID and their American counterparts warned me not to be duped — yet another Lefty gringo taken in by rumormongering — and instead urged me to recognize that Evo was simply employing age-old populist strategies. These were rhetorical devices meant to rally his base of support, they informed me. Others seemed mystified and alarmed by the ferocity of the

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accusations. Take, for example, my encounter with the leadership team of OTI’s successor program, Strengthening Democratic Institutions (FIDEM).1

FIDEM’s director, Reginald Todd, grew visibly agitated as his colleague described to me the content of their programs’ work with Bolivia’s departmental (state) governments. Todd broke in to voice his exasperation at the Morales Administration’s intensifying accusations against USAID, calling them baseless, but also contradictory. Todd left the room momentarily and returned with a photocopied letter from a mayor in the Chapare region. Evo Morales, first emerged as a leader for the coca growers’ association in the lowland territory, and the region continues to be a stronghold of Morales supporters. This point was not lost on Todd. Angrily,

Todd pointed to the letter: “This mayor is asking for our help, even though he is in the heart of

Morales’ territory. But they want our help.” To Todd, the seemingly contradictory messages of strident critique and requests for American aid revealed the purely political motivations behind the Morales administration’s attacks. Clearly, he suggested, those at the ground level want USAID to continue its work of supporting economic development and democratic strengthening.

As I have suggested in the preceding chapters, the story of foreign aid in Bolivia is more complex than straightforward support or rejection of American funding. What I want to argue here is that American aid touched down in a political context in which rumors and gossip play a central role in holding dirigentes and political leaders accountable for their work. Regardless of concerns about American political meddling, foreign donors are operating in a contested political landscape where efforts to obtain obras (projects) drive both individual ambition and collective organization. Bolivia’s “project mentality” – as one of my former colleagues used to call it -- means that a great deal of social life and political ambition is organized around accessing foreign funding and learning to speak the donor language of performance indicators and annual operating budgets (cf Sampson 1996). But this desire for projects is counterbalanced by a deep

1 FIDEM was run by one of USAID’s main contractors, the private development firm, Chemonics.

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skepticism of the very people who obtain those funds. Residents of El Alto often express that deep skepticism through rumor and gossip (even as foreign donors raise their own doubts about corruption and patronage among funding recipients).

Anthropologist Sian Lazar (2008) has argued that in El Alto, neighbors construct their collective interests and define what constitutes good and bad leadership, build political alliances, and generally conduct local politics through rumor and gossip, particularly through accusations against dirigentes (2008: 76). Lodging accusations of corruption are as much about positioning oneself vis-à-vis correct / moral practice as it is about holding leaders accountable for their failure to provide obras or public works. With the organizational transformations ushered in by

Law of Popular Participation (LPP), those public works projects became one of the principal means through which dirigentes proved themselves successful leaders — for example obtaining material benefits like cobbled streets for their neighborhood. Ironically, that liberal political project — which re-organized mechanisms for demanding development projects and political inclusion — helped arm Alteños’ political imaginary about how foreign aid programs were influencing national politics. Through local idioms of accusing dirigentes of selling out the collective and acting out of self interest (being interesado) or being individualistic (personalistas),

Alteños hold leaders accountable for their failure to provide obras (cf Lazar 2008; Postero 2007).

Accordingly, rumor and gossip play a productive role in demarcating whose behavior stands outside of those boundaries. Rumors acts to delineate expectations about collective- oriented leadership and behavior by contrast to “personalist” or self-interested leaders. Lazar ties the importance of obras to ritual practices of publically presenting (entregando) those works, and accompanying discourses about corruption and accountability. I have participated in many such events where community leaders must cha’llar (bless with libations) a new community water pump or school building. These events are opportunities for dirigentes to demonstrate their efficacy and to pre-empt (or silence) accusations of corruption with much fanfare, and are

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accompanied by lengthy speeches by community leaders, donors, public officials, and other key parties. Similarly, I once was asked to testify on cassette tape to the fact that a group of rural

Mallkus (community leaders) had not received funding for a small community development project they had designed. They had applied for funding from the organization I represented in

Bolivia, and I had confirmed with my superiors that their application was not successful. But they wanted me saying it on tape. The three Mallkus needed evidence that they could take back to the residents of their rural hamlet demonstrating that they had not received and then pocketed the funds themselves. They were anticipating accusations of corruption, of using their community for personal gain. It was an accusation I heard again and again lodged against colleagues and neighborhood leaders, NGO projects and church fundraising campaigns.

The ubiquity of these accusations points to a number of useful themes when considering the kinds of rumors that swirl around USAID-funded projects – as well as rumors surrounding the presence of American aid workers and diplomats more generally. Beyond Morales’ accusations of geopolitical meddling, USAID-funded programs and public works projects are embedded in a loaded political and project-oriented environment, and are likely to be subject to existing discourses and rituals of accusation and accountability. When American-funded obras replace or supplement obras that neighborhood association or trade union leaders (dirigentes) previously attained through the municipal government, USAID may be subject to similar suspicions and rumor-mongering. Against the backdrop of local idioms of corruption and personalist politics, it makes sense that USAID programs might be targeted in the process of distinguishing good (collective-oriented) practices from bad, self-interested ones. Thus USAID may find itself in the crosshairs of corruption rumors previously reserved for local dirigentes and state agents suspected of profiting off of funding intended for the pubic, especially the poor. The rumors swirling around foreign funded projects may be even more powerful precisely because of

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the perception that these projects bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars, much of which goes to overhead, contractor salaries, and other invisible costs.

But beyond these idioms of corruption and holding dirigentes accountable for delivering on promised obras, I think there is a deeper suspicion surrounding American aid programs. One of the recurrent themes in anthropological accounts of rumor and conspiracy is what those stories tell us about the fragility of human relationships — the sense of social vulnerability and the distrust that they frequently express. The history of documented American “injerencia” or interference in Latin America exacerbates the sense of “the real” informing suspicions and accusations, fueling rumors and conspiracy theories (cf Das). Rumor and conspiracy theories may act as a “productive” form of social control, as described by Lazar, but they also give voice to deep misgivings about shifting social relations and the “uncanny” sense that the predator – or conspirator – may not be a stranger after all. Those fears reflect widely known stories about historical acts of betrayal, as well as terror-inspiring tales of supernatural creatures that roam the

Andean social landscape.

Weismantel’s (2001) study of the “kharisiri” stories (or pishtaco) in the Andes makes a compelling case for they ways lurid tales of bodily destruction give voice to a racialized (and gendered) history that links ecological exploitation with the exploitation of Indian and black bodies, “forms of labor, and of life, that eat Indians alive – often very slowly, through exchanges of debilitating work for poor wages…” (203). The pishtaco (also known as the kharisiri and nakaq) is a grotesque figure, an Other whose physical manifestation is never fixed. The pishtaco may be costumed as a Spanish priest or a mining engineer, a butcher grinding the bodies of Indians for soup to feed company laborers, or a wandering stranger stealing and selling the fat of poor

Indians in order to generate electricity or produce “perfumed luxury bath soap for export, for tourists, and for the Bolivian elite” (Weismantel 2001: 209).

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Weistmental suggests that one of the most terrifying dimensions of the pishtaco is the terrible sense of the “uncanny” he invokes: “the lurking suspicion that the knife-wielding killer might not, in fact, be a stranger at all” (2001: 15). In Weistmental’s account, the pishtaco is chillingly and easily recognizable; he is at once the stranger and the all-too-familiar: “the pishtaco is not so much strange as estranged – a part of one’s social universe, but terrifyingly alien nevertheless” (ibid: 11). For Weistmental, many anthropological accounts tend to hold that either “Indians and whites either inhabit separate spheres, or there is no boundary between them at all” (ibid). By contrast, Weistmental a more complex account of race is the key to understanding the terrorizing figure of the pishtaco. The pishtaco roams

a social world so deeply divided that its members can frighten one another by their strangeness, yet so inexorably unified that they know one another intimately. A model that could interpret this dialectic between horror and familiarity would have to encompass not merely cultural difference, but also the vicious epistemology of race, which makes neighbors appear as monsters to one another (11-12).

The pishtaco therefore, is not merely Other or intimate relation. He embodies a more complex familiar-stranger; he wanders a centuries-old racialized social terrain in which “Indians and whites in the Andes confront each other not as autochthon and alien, but with the lethal familiarity of estranged kin” (16). Pishtaco rumors, therefore, express more than fears about the commodification of bodies in late capitalism; they acknowledge the inescapable entanglements of

Indian and White lives and fortunes -- from the colonial period to the present. And it is that inescapable entanglement that, I think, fuels some of the enormous distrust regarding the objectives and methods of remaking Bolivian society from the inside out, whether it is funded by foreign donors or championed by former union organizers.

This entanglement is particularly terrifying in a context where the racial geography of the

Andes is pock-marked by more than fifteen years of state terror (Peru’s “Dirty War”), military dictatorships, and both colonial and more contemporary accounts of Indian informants who betrayed their friends and allies to the Spanish and later state special forces operations. My point

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is there are deep roots to people’s suspicion of foreign aid that includes -- but extends beyond -- the contemporary strategic interests of American development diplomacy.

Betrayal, conspiracy, double-agents, and Indian collaborators occupy a powerful place in

Andean imaginaries, exemplified in the figure of Túpac Katari. Katari, the 18th century leader of an Indian uprising in Bolivia, is frequently portrayed as having been betrayed by mutinous comrades. The tropes of Indian collaborators, “bad” or turn-coat peasants, and corrupt dirigentes frequently surfaced in rumors about USAID in El Alto. Similarly, accusations of betrayal haunt contemporary labor leaders whose compañeros (comrades) suspect them of complicity in union busting during Bolivia’s dictatorships. Thus conspiracy theories in Andean cities like El Alto may give voice to deep-seated fears of the intimate-stranger. Following Weistmental, they also may express a troubling yet inescapable racial reality: Indian and White live(lihood)s are bound together in relations of exploitative interdependency. The notion of pacification is far more disconcerting when it is perceived as a form of betrayal by someone familiar, yet estranged.

Rumors in El Alto reveal and reinforce ideas about anti-social behavior and effective leadership in a country where much of social and political life is now bound up in obras — whether public works projects or foreign funded development schemes (and, in fact, the two regularly overlap). Those rumors circulate in a country where both the “NGO class” and many social movements depend on foreign assistance for their incomes and programmatic platforms, a country where state agencies often depend on donor funding for basic infrastructure projects, and where dirigentes prove themselves efficacious by obtaining resources for their neighborhood or group.

But as Marta’s (Ch. 5) discussion of the skull and her sister’s moneylenders indicates, rumors speak to more than geopolitical tensions. Rumors also map other forms of anti-social behavior, such as the ways care-giving may bleed into predation. People like Marta express enormous anxiety as they perceive their social worlds as increasingly warped by a foe that is

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often difficult to distinguish from friend. As Marta once told me, “debt brings nothing but enemies” — and she was talking about her kin. In this fraught social landscape, foreign donors aren’t the only ones suspected of being malevolent.

Paradoxes in American Aid and Neoliberal Governance

By the time I concluded my fieldwork, the rumors and accusations of political meddling and covert operations had begun to feel like a John le Carré novel. Evo himself had shifted his accusations against USAID, accusing his critics on the Left and among indigenous movements of being infiltrated by American and Right wing political saboteurs. For example, the Morales

Administration charged lowland indigenous leaders and conservationists associated with the unfolding TIPNIS conflict — in which a federation of lowland indigenous communities demanded the suspension of a massive road project that would bisect their territory — of taking funding from USAID to mount their resistance. Those accusations split many of his supporters, some of whom rallied behind those accusations and argued that the Right was capitalizing on the

TIPNIS conflict to pursue their own political agenda, with no real concern for indigenous communities. Critics, including many among the Left, derided Evo’s accusations as a pathetic attempt to dismiss legitimate critiques of his policies — particularly the gap between his pro- environment, pro-Indian discourse and a national development model that was still predicated on natural resource extraction in the heart of indigenous territory. Evo is reproducing the extractive model of development, they would tell me, and now he silences his detractors by accusing them of being infiltrated by USAID.

In many ways Morales and his supporters cannot be faulted for their suspicion about the

U.S. supporting his right wing opposition — even if that funding pre-dates his presidency, even if his rhetoric employs populist flourish. Historically, American policy toward Latin America has been characterized by a willingness to not only support right wing governments but also to

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enable violent dictatorships that served American anti-communist agendas. There is historical precedent for that intervention model. In Chile, for example, the US actively supported such a destabilization campaign by funding both the Right and Left — fueling tensions between both extremes, encouraging instability in an effort to precipitate a military coup — and to justify its necessity. They succeeded. One way to interpret American funding targeting Bolivia’s Left is along those same lines, the old-school “destabilization” approach that the U.S. adopted in Chile: fund both sides, let them go at each other, created a toxic political environment where a dictator and his “firm hand” (mano dura) are welcome to re-establish order. In the build up to Mesa’s resignation in 2005 (following on the heels of his predecessor, Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada), I listened to middle class Bolivians chant “mano dura, mano dura” outside the presidential palace, calling on Mesa to step up and do whatever was necessary to crack down on ongoing protests.

Their chants chillingly paralleled similar demands Chileans made for an imposed order just before Pinochet seized power (and killed the President) in Chile on September 11th, 1973.

Between American stated and strategic interests, political rhetoric and rumors that express real anxiety and suspicion about personal and political betrayal, it can be difficult glean fact from figment, naïveté from healthy skepticism. Ultimately neither explanation (American injerencia or mere populist rhetoric) is very satisfying for explaining the intent or impact of foreign democracy assistance and judicial reform projects, in particular the insistence on informalism as a more meaningful solution to poor people’s problems. As I have shown throughout this dissertation, the Cold War anxieties of American aid targeting Bolivia are entangled with late liberal logics that inform a broader constellation of efforts to transform Bolivian citizens. Those logics cannot be reduced to explicit efforts to fund the Right or to destabilize Morales’ Administration.

Given the common characterizations of American interventionism in Latin America and accounts of neoliberal logics, it is worth reiterating two paradoxes in the Bolivian case. First, as

Seikmeier (2011) has argued, Bolivia has always been a bit of an outlier in American policy

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toward the Americas. During the cold war, the U.S. sought to shore-up centrist Bolivian administrations that it might not have otherwise supported -- in an attempt to stave-off more radical, Leftist labor movements. That strategy included funneling weapons to suppress mining unions and other tactics that were clearly interventionist. But the point is the intervention was one aimed toward stabilization and not destabilization: it was the stabilization of relatively friendly governments against the possibility of very antagonistic/pro-communist ones.

I think something far more complex, and more in line with this historical effort to stabilize

Bolivia, better reflects American democracy promotion interventions: stabilizing a particular form of politics and of political subjectivity according to a liberal logic that is more amenable to the kind of predictability that foreign capitalists crave and foreign governments deem friendly.

While Africanists like James Ferguson (2006) have argued that stability isn’t necessary for capital to thrive among extractive industries — capital hopping and islands of security are sufficient — in Bolivia donors, development workers, and chamber of commerce members worry a great deal about the blockades and other disruptions that make it hard to invest in Bolivia, a country with so little infrastructure of which to speak. The promotion of ADR in many ways reflects an effort to quench the social and interpersonal conflicts that, donors believe, threaten to leave

Bolivia a barren wasteland, devoid of foreign investment. The explicit references I heard program staff make to establishing a “presence” in El Alto was not so much about fomenting discord as “calming the waters” of El Alto, as one contractor told me. Here surveillance is not in the service of disappearing union leaders but rather domesticating and re-channeling the ways they express their political desires and objectives. Donors hope that reformed communicative practices will offer a stabilizing force where institutional reform has failed.

The second paradox is Bolivia’s relationship to neoliberalism. As Postero (2007) has argued, neoliberalism in Bolivia has not merely involved a roll-back on state institutions, but rather efforts to bolster democratic institutions alongside the introduction of stringent economic

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restructuring policies. Bolivian neoliberalism included a whole new series of participatory channels and decentralization projects, ushering in an era when dirigentes would prove their leadership mettle through their ability to obtain obras (projects) for their constituencies, as I described above (cf Lazar 2008; Postero 2007). Yet Bolivian indigenous movements were able to exploit the political apertures created by the Law of Popular Participation in order push beyond the superficial model of neoliberal multiculturalism it offered. Without intending to, the authors of the LPP created the institutional and ideational resources that Alteños mobilized in 2003, and continue to utilize to make their demands for more substantive inclusion known (alongside other

Bolivians, including lowland indigenous groups).

All this is to say that both of these political-economic projects — American-back democracy promotion programs and neoliberal reforms — are not easily reduced simplistic accounts of intentionality or their consequences. And as I have shown throughout this dissertation, efforts to remake Bolivia’s justice sector and to promote informalism — as both a substitute to the courts and a political ethos that might transform social conflict more broadly — have not resulted in neat transformations. It is a truism in the anthropology of development that aid projects become entangled with the very social, political, and economic processes they seek to change. Anthropologists have further shown how neoliberalism does not flatten and homogenize all forms of subjectivity and political engagement in its path. Although late liberalism has triggered “a robust defense of western liberal principles,” it is nevertheless, an

“uneven terrain of social maneuver” — a dynamic that was most obvious when Culture of Peace advocates encountered skeptical audiences (Povinelli 2011: 28). Amid ADR’s emphasis on procedure, on methods for managing expressions of conflict, target audiences often refuse the terms of the debate, speaking back against efforts to bracket their critiques.

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The shift from capacity building to capacitación exemplifies the late liberal anti- institutional shift from formalism is to informalism (cf Riles 2002). It is now a maxim among anthropologists that Alternative Dispute Resolution’s (ADR) toolkit erases politics and power while gesturing toward them, acknowledging their absence and therefore pre-empting critique.

Such late liberal notions of expertise and informality now inflect debates over how to achieve justice in “Plurinational” Bolivia. The expertise of ADR, however, has been further outsourced to volunteers and community members who are both targets for transformation and new agents of this transformative agenda. ADR is no longer the technique of a select few — though there is a tiered market for expertise in conflict resolution, as Bolivian NGO workers and union leaders, educators and lawyers, seek to capitalize on foreign funded programs to earn a living while enacting their own proyectos de vida (life projects). ADR has become a powerful resource — both economic and philosophical — for activists and reformers alike. But like many other projects aiming to quench social protest in the country, ADR also provokes enormous distrust among its target populations. Some of that distrust, as I have described above, stems from concerns over who is providing the funding (namely foreign donors). But it also expresses a deeper skepticism born of the “lethal familiarity” undergirding racial and class struggles that have plagued Bolivia since the colonial era.

Moreover, it isn’t enough to say that there are late liberal governmental logics guiding foreign aid programs and ADR movements in Bolivia. Yes, the push for informalism in the justice sector has contributed to the privatization of conflict resolution methods over examining the political dimensions of recurring interpersonal and social conflicts. Yet these same tools have provided residents of El Alto with resources for managing everyday experiences of violence and interpersonal conflict that is often fueled by large-scale political and economic processes beyond their control.

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As Conciliators attempt to impose order on Alteños’ ever-expanding webs of debt, they often obscure how entrepreneurial approaches to development — which have relied on the social networks of the poor to enact their aims — now threaten to unravel the kinship ties that bind and sustain people during these economically-trying times. Alteños, for their part, regularly turn toward the “authenticating procedures” of the state to resolve their recurring problems, relying on the law — or something that looks like the law — to endure amid ever-deepening interpersonal crises. Nevertheless, many clients who come to the center to map out their debts do recognize those patterns and complain about them bitterly, acknowledging that the real resolution to their problems would take something more than a conciliation accord. Despite this critique, many clients are also facing pressing deadlines and need a solution now. Povinelli calls this the “jerry-rigged” quality of social worlds where survival often occurs in the “gray zone between the legal and illegal” (2011: 144). Many conciliation accords reflect this “jerry-rigged” effort to lash together some kind of coping mechanism, to instill intimate partners and kin with a sense of obligation now backed by the law (or something that looks like it). By pursuing ADR -- or trying to reinsert themselves into the formal legal system by procuring conciliation documents as a first step toward a civil case -- many Center clients do participate in and co-produce the ongoing “displacement of the political into the legal” (Comaroff & Comaroff 2006).

Anthropologists have shown that the informal and formal are always already entangled, and many efforts to promote informalism depend on a threat of intervention in the realm of the formal (e.g. taking it to the courts). In fact, as I have shown, two are often interpenetrated. As

Riles argues, to position ADR and the formal courts as alternatives to each other “is to participate in the very vocabulary that ultimately enshrines ADR as a powerful (that is: effective, efficient, modern, technical, expert, sensitive, flexible, user friendly) alternative” (615). The bigger question is how this “genre of expertise,” with its emphasis on liberal modalities of communication (talking things through, por la via buena) further supplants politics while

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“gesturing” toward it. It is that gesture that allows advocates to denude critique by acknowledging that they, too, are concerned with power and politics -- while nevertheless continuing to emphasize form and method.

As such, there is a kind of convergence between ADR agendas, late liberal logics, and

Alteño endurance strategies. Alteños are utilizing conciliation tactically to mediate conflicts and violence that is fueled and exacerbated by economic insecurity. ADR operates in service of the this logic of entrepreneurial and counterinsurgent forms of citizenship by erasing broader patterns and privatizing conflict resolution strategies. Alteños, for their part, utilize ADR to manage the economic vulnerability produced by entrepreneurial development models. The question is whether those forms of endurance — the tactical maneuvers people employ to “make do” in the meantime — ultimately usurp more collective forms of political engagement.

Alternatively, they may allow people to survive until such a time that they can rally once more to the level of Event, to demand the substantive redress of their shared problems. As women like Marta narrate mundane acts of violence and the grinding, exhausting quality of precarious living, they often refuse to let the state, banking institutions, and foreign donors off the hook. Alteños clamor for a broader conceptualization of justice – and a democratic system capable of redressing structural forms of inequality and violence – even as they utilize these stopgap measures to make do in the meantime. Yet beyond pointing to the macro political- economic realm, to institutions and government administrations, policies and aid platforms, people like Marta and her family continue to endure and to enact forms of sociality that may not scale up into mass protest or major big “E” Events like the 2003 uprising.

Making Do in Late Liberalism

Months after I had followed the industrial sewing machine as it moved from commodity to collateral to commodity and back again — and in doing so, stitched together the lives of Justa

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and Pilar, Carmen, Marta, and Nicolasa — Doña Justa asked if I would be godmother to her son. I agonized over her request for a very long time. I had not acted as conciliator in her sessions with Pilar and Carmen, but I had been present. I had then conducted many interviews with the women and men connected to that machine — at least the living ones. Was it a conflict of interest to say “yes” because of my work at the Center? Did I want to become entangled in this story too?

Justa had long since paid back those particular debts to Carmen and Pilar, and I had concluded my research at the Center. Still feeling deeply ambivalent, I finally acquiesced to be the madrina (godmother) to her ten-year-old son, Abel. By the time I had met her, Justa was a practicing evangelica (evangelical) — but she wanted her son baptized in the Catholic cathedral where she married her husband. We went to the information and training session on baptism and compadrazgo, smiling along quietly as the catechist gravely intoned that the role of the godparent was spiritual uplift and direction — and keeping their godchildren away from the specter of evangelicalism (oops).

On the day of the Baptism, Justa arrived at the cathedral in an elegant baby-blue pollera, with a magenta shawl fastened neatly by a gold broach. It was the first time I had seen her this polished, with her thick black braids freshly folded in neat plaits. My new compadre, Ruben, drove his micro bus (like the one owned by Marta’s husband) and dressed in a smart green suit jacket.

Abel wore the gleaming white sweater I had bought him as part of his baptismal garb to symbolize (as we were instructed), this re-birth. He sat earnestly next to me throughout the service, periodically glancing up with nervous enthusiasm. I thought I stood out like his gleaming white sweater — gringa, blonde, and out of place.

The biblical texts, which were part of the lectionary, were not specific to this cathedral or

Mass. And so I couldn’t help but giggle at the first reading — and all the faces that swiveled toward me in unison:

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“When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the Lord your God.” — Leviticus 19: 33-34

An elderly man approached the microphone and began reading the second passage with an

Aymara-inflected accent. My stomach dropped as he spoke.

I listened to that passage and immediately related its injunctions to my new comadre’s struggles and the sewing machine that had served her as collateral. I saw connections between these

Biblical commands against the commodification of debt and usury and the messy entanglements of kin and business deals unfolding in El Alto. The passage struck me as ridiculously fitting for the moment, as Justa and I cemented our new bond as comadres. And frankly, I was pretty moved.

Coincidentally, during one of our first interviews, Justa had told me how she had taken emotional refuge from all of her debts and the stress they were causing her in an evangelical congregation. During that first interview, I perked up, adding that I was struck by how debt and concerns about usury appear regularly in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) — alongside a serious preoccupation with contracts and their breach. This is the stuff that has fueled many theological-political debates in Latin American Christian Base Communities, among Liberation and Political Theologians, and fueled fiery sermons against economic exploitation and ecological degradation within Bolivia’s emergent teologia indigenia (indigenous theology movement). Justa nodded along, “Ya, ya.” But she did not pick up the thread — nor seem terribly interested in discussing it further.

I now peered at Justa to see if she registered any response to the text. Justa stared forward, looking at the liturgist. After the service I made a weak reference to the texts and got a shrugging

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response. Here, at the baptism, amid biblical references to foreigners and debt, she seemed equally uninterested in the personal or the political-economic ramifications of the passage, the connections between the biblical references to collateral and her own experience of suffocating debt. Maybe it was awkward — why would she want to talk ceaselessly about her own money troubles, especially on such a happy occasion? Maybe it was all far from her mind. Instead, Justa seemed focused on the celebration at hand. As we exited the church, she excitedly positioned us for the congratulatory handshakes and embraces that follow every such occasion, as friends and kin douse the newly baptized, parents, and godparent in thick handfuls of confetti.

Our crew of siblings and cousins, aunties and grandmothers, and now, compadres, piled into

Ruben’s Microbus and went bumping across El Alto to the compound shared by Justa and her parents and other kin. We chowed down on neon-orange cheese puffs and Sprite soda, and heaping piles of spicy pork served with flakey, white, freeze-dried tunta potatoes. Justa’s brother

Daniel and I discussed the recent judicial elections that had sparked heated political debates for months on end. In the national press, political analysts argued over whether Morales was manipulating or decolonizing the justice sector. Critics accused Evo of stacking the courts with judges favorable to his own political agenda (namely his expressed desire to run for a third term), and of persecuting his political enemies through the law. Daniel rejected these criticisms.

“Look,” he told me, in the past all of these political elites made fortunes off of their positions in leadership. The only thing Evo is doing is finally cracking down on all that corruption. Sure, they may be his enemies, but MAS has also gone after its own people. They are really just cracking down, against opposition and MASistas alike. It’s about time.” Our political conversation faded into the background, as Abel opened his presents and his uncles and aunts offered words of advice.

Justa’s father, the one who had nearly thrown out his middle-aged daughter because of the shame her debts brought to the family (Ch. 5), sat laughing with us. He told stories about the

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decades he spent working for a foreign-owned rail company before it went out of business. The walls of the small living room were covered in pennants from company soccer matches sponsored by the transportation union (sindicato) that he later joined, and he laced his stories with his own take on the national economy.

Justa’s mother howled in exasperation as she recounted how her adult children had surprised the couple on their 50th wedding anniversary, arranging a special Mass in their honor and a professional photographer to take a commemorative portrait, which now hung on the wall.

“I wasn’t even dressed-up! I was a disaster! Nobody even gave me a chance to pull myself together,” she reproached her children, who giggled at her consternation. Marta and her husband showed up carrying a brand new desk for Abel — and firm words about the importance of being studious.

In other words, life carried on.

I never got to ask Justa about those scriptural passages or what she thought of them — I was leaving for the U.S. just the following week. Instead, Justa got busy celebrating our newly forged kinship. She was still dealing with debts, and would quietly vocalize her desire to get more collateral, to try to make another go of the failed pollera business. Justa was stitching new kinship bonds — this time with me — reconstructing a social world that had been frayed and torn by mounting debts and soured trust.

There was no promise that the same might not happen to us.

But Justa went on living, creating new webs of care giving amid the chronic and cruddy, her everyday experiences of economic insecurity and violence. And suddenly I was stitched into the story of the sewing machine, alongside a group of women whose ties were forged through informal loans and microfinance quotas, cases of beer bought for wedding celebrations and the business transaction between a mother-in-law and her son, crisply-wrapped baptismal gifts and freshly anointed godparents plastered in confetti. These were also proyectos de vida, life projects

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and forms of sociality that are at once intimate and geopolitical. These intimate moments are entwined with foreign aid and judicial reform, spectacular protests and the quasi-events of impassioned conciliation sessions — where tangled webs of kin and the struggles they endure are always, already, inflected by national political projects and international aid platforms.

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