Indigenous Revolution in Ecuador and Bolivia, 1990–2005

INDIGENOUS REVOLUTION IN ECUADOR AND BOLIVIA,

JEFFERY M. PAIGE

INDIGENOUS REVOLUTION IN ECUADOR AND BOLIVIA, e University of Arizona Press www .uapress .arizona .edu

ISBN- : - - - - (hardcover)

Cover design by Leigh McDonald Cover photo: Bolivian Indians and peasants march enroute to La Paz demanding naturalisation of gas. © Reuters Photographer / Reuters Pictures

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Paige, Jeery M., author. Title: Indigenous revolution in Ecuador and Bolivia, – / Jeery M. Paige. Description: Tucson : e University of Arizona Press, . | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identiers: LCCN | ISBN (hardcover) Subjects: LCSH: Revolutions—Bolivia—History—th century. | Revolutions—Bolivia—His- tory—st century. | Revolutions—Ecuador—History—th century. | Revolutions—Ecua- dor—History—st century. | Indigenous peoples—Bolivia. | Indigenous peoples—Ecuador. | Peasant uprisings—Bolivia. | Peasant uprisings—Ecuador. | Bolivia—History—– | Ecuador—History— – Classication: LCC F .P | DDC ./—dc LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/

Printed in the United States of America ♾ is paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z. - (Permanence of Paper). Political revolution nds itself only in the symbolic revolution that makes it exist fully.

PIERRE BOURDIEU

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations ix Preface xi Abbreviations xvii

Prologue: The World Turned Upside Down Introduction: Modernity, Indigeneity, and Revolution

PART I. THE NATION, THE LIVING JUNGLE, AND THE COMMUNAL VISION IN ECUADOR . The Nation and the Living Jungle in the Amazon

¥¦§¨©ª«¨¬® ¬«§¯ °±²³± ´³©³µ©³®, ¶³·³¨¸ °¦§¹¦«, ³¦º »³©¸¼¦ ½³¦§« . ECUARUNARI: Sumak Kawsay and the Communal Vision

¥¦§¨©ª«¨¬® ¬«§¯ ¾¨¸·¿¦ À¨¦¨®³Á³, Â¹±Ã¨©§¼ Ä¯¼¸³¦Å¼, ³¦º Æ¹«® Ä¼¦§¨¦§¼ . Pachakutik: Indigenous Jeffersonians

¥¦§¨©ª«¨¬® ¬«§¯ Ç¨©È¦«±¼ É³¦§³¸¨±³, ½³¸ª³º¼© Ê¹«®¯²¨, ³¦º °¹µ« À«§¹³Ë³ VIII CONTENTS

PART II. “INDIAN REVOLUTION” AND THE MOVEMENT TOWARD SOCIALISM MAS IN BOLIVIA . Katarism-Indianism in the Andes

¥¦§¨©ª«¨¬® ¬«§¯ Ì¨¸«²¨ Ê¹«®²¨, Í¹Å¨¦«¼ ¶¼Î³®, Ï³Ã¸¼ »³±³¦«, ³¦º Í¹Å¨¦«³ Ä¯¼Ð¹¨ . The Sacred Leaf

¥¦§¨©ª«¨¬® ¬«§¯ Æ¨¼¦«¸º³ Ñ¹©«§³ ³¦º Ò¹¸«¼ ½³¸³Ó³© . MAS Unionists: Che Guevara and Túpac Katari

¥¦§¨©ª«¨¬® ¬«§¯ ¥®³³Á °ª³¸¼®, Ì«º¨¸ ½¹©Á¼, ³¦º ÍºÅ³© Ï³§³¦³ . Indianism and Marxism

¥¦§¨©ª«¨¬® ¬«§¯ °¦§¼¦«¼ Ï¨©¨º¼, ÄÔ®³© Õ³ª³©©¼, ³¦º ¶Ö¹¸ Ï©³º³ Conclusion: Twenty- First- Century Revolution Epilogue

Appendix Notes Index ILLUSTRATIONS

MAPS

. Ecuador political divisions, . Bolivia political divisions,

FIGURES

. Marlon Santi and Humberto Cholango, . Indigenous march in Quito, . Indigenous demonstrators break military lines, . Lucio Gutiérrez and Antonio Vargas, . Felipe Quispe, . Leonilda Zurita, . Aymara protesters descend from El Alto into La Paz, . Deputy Evo Morales leads coca producers’ protest march,

TABLES

. Indigenous uprisings in Ecuador, – . Indigenous-popular uprisings in Bolivia, –

PREFACE

HIS PROJECT had its beginnings one quiet Sunday afternoon in the summer of when I picked up the travel section of the Ann Arbor TNews (now sadly defunct) and saw a photo of a Bolivian peasant kneel- ing before an altar dedicated to none other than Ernesto “Che” Guevara, who had been betrayed by that very same peasantry and killed there forty years before. A gigantic bust of Guevara was the centerpiece of the altar and inscribed below were the words “tu ejemplo alumbra un nuevo amanecer” (your example lights a new dawn). I was stunned. e peasantry who had helped kill Guevara was now worshiping him. Something big must be happening in Bolivia. It took two years for me to nally visit Bolivia and nd that not only the peasants but the president of the Plurinational State of Bolivia, as it is now oßcially known, thought of himself as an “hijo del Che” (son of Che). But the president, Evo Morales, the rst indigenous person to rule the area that is now Bolivia since the Spanish conquest, rejected armed struggle and Marxism—what some would say were Guevara’s core principles. He also embraced Túpac Katari, the Aymara leader of the Bolivian phase of the great indigenous uprising of –. Something big was indeed going on in Bolivia—the overthrow of the political and symbolic system inherited from the Spanish conquest and the coming to power of the indigenous majority for the rst time in the history of republican Bolivia. But it was unlike the Nicaraguan or Cuban revolution and, indeed, unlike past revolutions in most respects. It was based on a mass uprising of XII PREFACE the indigenous majority that brought the aairs of a modern nation-state to a complete stop, but Evo Morales assumed power through a democratic election (and has subsequently been reelected twice) and the constitutional order was not violated. Morales was a union organizer in the coca elds of Cochabamba but is widely regarded as the rst indigenous president. What was this peculiar combination of indigeneity, massive resistance, and liberal democracy? Was it a revolution in the twentieth-century sense of the word? Was it a combination of mass protest and electoral democracy or, perhaps, something entirely new, an emerging form of twenty-rst-century revolution? I went to Bolivia to nd out by asking the leaders of the great upheaval themselves what they thought it was, how it came about, and what they wanted for the future. eir answers and my reäections on them make up the second half of this volume. I was fortunate to be accompanied on my rst trip to Bolivia in by my friend and colleague Muge Gocek, who is always ready for a new foreign adventure. At her suggestion we paid a courtesy call on the chair of the sociology department at the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés (UMSA, Higher University of San Andrés), Eduardo Paz Rada. Before I knew it, Eduardo had kindly put me in touch with several of his colleagues and friends who were close to the revolutionary process and my eld research interviews were underway. I also met Pablo Stefanoni, bureau chief of Le Monde Diplomatique in La Paz, and his colleague Hervé do Alto, who were also helpful in providing intro- ductions. I returned the following summer () and completed my Bolivian interviews with the aid of a talented Bolivian research assistant, Rodrigo Elio. e details appear in the appendix but I found particularly helpful an article in the La Paz daily La Razón that nominated the “six people closest to Evo.” I interviewed them all as well as leaders of Morales’s party, the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS, Movement Toward Socialism), and delegations in the Senate and the National Assembly. I also interviewed the leaders of the constituent peasant unions that had come together to form MAS in . e goal of the interviews was to talk to top members of the MAS party just below Morales. But I soon found that an important current, Katarism-Indianism, was not well represented among them so extended the interviews to include leaders in this group as well. I found pictures of Che Guevara in some of the MAS oßces and often the indigenous äag, the wiphala (the rainbow banner of indigeneity), or even pictures of Túpac Katari hanging on their walls. At the same time as I was completing my eldwork in Bolivia, I was super- vising an extraordinary dissertation by Mandi Bane, who had spent more than a PREFACE XIII year living in a Kichwa village in the Andes of Ecuador. In the indigenous people of Ecuador had risen up in an enormous protest that shut down the country for a week. Indeed, Ecuador was where this new form of indigenous revolution began. It subsequently spread to most of the indigenous populations of South America, but Ecuador and Bolivia were the places where it had had the greatest success. In the s it was commonplace to hear the Ecuadorian indigenous movement referred to as the strongest in Latin America. Evo Morales even traveled to Ecuador to nd out why Bolivia, with an indigenous majority, had had so little success in contrast to Ecuador, where the indigenous population was a minority. In the end Morales, riding the back of a huge indigenous uprising, took national power while the Ecuadorian movement was sidelined after it formed a successful electoral coalition to do the same. e two most powerful indigenous movements in the history of Latin America occurred a decade apart, one in power and the other not. e comparison was irresistible. So in I traveled to Ecuador to replicate the research I had by then completed in Bolivia. Once again I had the enormous good fortune of having the assistance of distinguished local social scientists—especially Carlos de la Torre and his spouse, Carmen Martínez. Carlos assigned a graduate student, Lucía Yamá, to me as a research assistant. is duty also fullled a degree require- ment in her program. She had completed her own eld research interviewing indigenous social movement leaders in Colombia and was well connected in the indigenous movement in Ecuador through an anonymous third party who was himself a leader of the movement. e general political framework was similar to Bolivia. A powerful indigenous organization had created an initially successful political party and with Lucía’s help I interviewed many of the leaders of both. Before Mandi Bane left Michigan for a career in public service, I asked her to prepare a list of nationally prominent indigenous leaders. I later shared this list with distinguished Ecuadorianist Marc Becker, who added one name but in general found Mandi’s list to be satisfactory. As in Bolivia, I found that the leaders were expansive in their views and happy to talk with me (see the appendix for details). I asked the same questions, mutatis mutandis, in both countries. eir answers and my commentary make up the rst half of this volume. e names of all those interviewed in both countries may be found in the interviews section at the end of the appendix. ey will be familiar to most specialists. In fact, some specialists may ask, why another comparative volume on Ecua- dor and Bolivia? We already have available in English the foundational volumes XIV PREFACE by Deborah Yashar and José Lucero, to say nothing of the extensive work of the late Donna Lee Van Cott. ese works came out of the excitement generated by the great uprising in Ecuador in or the Bolivian multicultural reforms of the s and were written either before or during the insurrectional turns in both countries at the turn of the century. is is a book about revolution. Indeed, the relationship between the events of – in the Andes and the nature of revolution itself is its central focus. In addition, this is the rst time that interviews of the leaders of these social transformations have appeared in English. I hope that readers will nd some of the revolutionary excitement in the edited transcripts of the interviews that I did in recording them. ey bring with them, as I heard Carl Oglesby once say, the italics of personal experience. Finally, in terms of my own intellectual biography, this is the third and last volume in a series that began with Agrarian Revolution (), which focused on peasant revolts in Peru, Angola, and Vietnam; and continued with Coee and Power (), comparing El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica in the revolutionary decade of the s. I had thought that this research would complete a triad of studies of the peasantry, their landowning opponents, and their intellectual leaders. But it turned out that in the Andes the intellectuals are followers, not leaders, of the indigenous peasantry or the intellectuals leading the great rebellions are indigenous peasants themselves. is was one of the many ways in which the Andes departed from the model of Latin American revolution laid out by Che Guevara and from the concept of “revolution” as it existed in the twentieth century. In retrospect I realize that each volume of this triad actually focused on a phase in the evolution of the postwar world system—Agrarian Revolution on anticolonial revolts often led by communists; Coee and Power on socialist-led revolts in response to the failure of the state-led development model of the immediate postwar decades; and this volume on the collapse of the neoliberal “Washington Consensus” model that took its place. In each phase the system broke at its weakest link—the poorest places in the Latin American periphery. One thing was constant in the three revolutionary situations—my country, the United States of America, always stood against the poor farmers in revolt. e indigenous-military coup of in Ecuador was reversed after U.S. pressure on the military high command. e United States was at odds with Rafael Correa, who adopted much of the indigenous movement’s program despite being in conäict with the movement itself. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was long in sanctuary in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. e Obama PREFACE XV administration, like its predecessors, failed to declare Bolivia in compliance with drug eradication eorts even though it was the U.S. policy of militarized drug eradication that triggered the rise of what Evo Morales calls his “democratic and cultural revolution” in the rst place. Many in Morales’s MAS party suspect U.S. involvement in the “civilian coup,” an armed uprising in the Bolivian East against his government. As I tried to make sense of these interviews as a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center in –, I had the opportunity to hear distinguished Middle Eastern specialists talk about the “Arab Spring.” I was struck by the similarities with the movements I had studied in the Andes. e same combination of massive resistance and democratic elections led to the overthrow of the political system. Only the tragic outcome is dierent. I am indebted to the Woodrow Wilson Center and the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard, where I was a Santander Fellow, for providing stimulating colleagues and a congenial working environment. I am particularly indebted to the director of the Wilson Center, Cynthia Arnson, and to Steve Levitsky and Jorge Rodríguez of Harvard’s Tuesday Seminar for perceptive questions on an earlier version of this work. I have beneted enormously from the Oßce of the Vice President of Research at the University of Michigan, which supported the initial stages of this work as well as my research for Coee and Power. is work would not have been possible without Silvia Varela, who translated approximately half of the interviews. She also compared my translations with the original Spanish transcripts and her editing greatly improved their readability. Let me thank two wonderful colleagues, Muge Gocek and Susan Eckstein, who have been a continual source of critique and support from the earliest days of this project. I owe an enormous debt to my former Harvard University Press editor, Mike Aronson, who nursed me through the publication process. Happily I found a good home with the University of Arizona Press, whose enthusiasm for the book and energy in its production abounded. Special thanks to Kristen Buckles, my editor at Arizona, for her help and encouragement. Finally, my greatest debt is to the forty-ve indigenous leaders in Ecuador and Bolivia who were kind enough to speak with me; I will never see the world in quite the same way again. None of these people or institutions bears any responsibility for the conclusions I have reached.

ABBREVIATIONS

BOLIVIA

ALBA Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América (Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas) ASP Asamblea por la Soberanía de los Pueblos (Assembly for the Sovereignty of the Peoples) CIDOB Confederación Indígena del Oriente Boliviano (Indigenous Confederation of the Bolivian East) COB Central Obrera Boliviana (Bolivian Workers Central) CONALCAM Confederación Nacional para el Cambio (National Confederation for Change) COR– El Alto Central Obrera Regional– El Alto (Regional Workers Central– El Alto) CSCB Confederación Sindical de Colonizadores de Bolivia (Union Confederation of Colonizers of Bolivia) CSUTCB Confederación Sindical Única de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia (Sole Union Confederation of Rural Workers of Bolivia) EGTK Ejército Guerrillero Túpac Katari (Túpac Katari Guerrilla Army) FEJUVE Federación de Juntas Vecinales de El Alto (Federation of Neighborhood Committees of El Alto) XVIII ABBREVIATIONS

FELCN Fuerza Especial de Lucha Contra el Narcotráco (Special Force for the Struggle Against Narcotraßcking) FNMCB- BS Federación Nacional de Mujeres Campesinas de Bolivia–Bartolina Sisa (National Federation of Bolivian Peasant Women–Bartolina Sisa) INRA Instituto Nacional de Reforma Agraria (National Institute of Agrarian Reform) IPSP Instrumento Político por la Soberanía de los Pueblos (Political Instrument for the Sovereignty of the Peoples) MAS Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement Toward Socialism) MAS- IPSP Movimiento al Socialismo– Instrumento Político por la Soberanía de los Pueblos (Movement Toward Socialism– Political Instrument for the Sovereignty of the Peoples) MIP Movimiento Indio Pachakutik (Pachakutik Indian Movement) MITKA Movimiento Indio Túpac Katari (Túpac Katari Indian Movement) MNR Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (National Revolutionary Movement) MRTK Movimiento Revolucionario Túpac Katari (Túpac Katari Revolutionary Movement) MUJA Movimiento Universitario Julián Apasa ( Julián Apasa University Movement) PCB Partido Comunista Boliviano (Communist Party of Bolivia) PIB Partido Indio de Bolivia (Bolivian Indian Party) PIR Partido de la Izquierda Revolucionaria (Party of the Revolutionary Left) POR Partido Obrero Revolucionario (Trotskyist Revolutionary Workers Party) PS Partido Socialista (Socialist Party) TIPNIS Territorio Indígena y Parque Natural Isiboro Sécure (Isiboro Sécure National Park and Indigenous Territory) THOA Taller de Historia Oral Andina (Andean Oral History Workshop) UMOPAR Unidades Móviles Policiales para Áreas Rurales (Mobile Police Units for Rural Areas) UMSA Universidad Mayor de San Andrés (Higher University of San Andrés) UPAE Universidad Pública y Autónoma de El Alto (Public and Autonomous University of El Alto) ABBREVIATIONS XIX

ECUADOR

CONAIE Confederación de Nacionalidades Indígenas del Ecuador (Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador) CONDENPE Consejo de Desarrollo de las Nacionalidades y Pueblos del Ecuador (Council for the Development of Nationalities and Peoples of Ecuador) CONFENIAE Confederación de Nacionalidades Indígenas de la Amazonia Ecuatoriana (Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of the Ecuadorian Amazon) CORPUKIS Coordinadora de Organizaciones del Pueblo Kichwa Saraguro (Coordinator of the Kichwa Saraguro People) ECUARUNARI Ecuador Runacunapak Rikcharimuy (Awakening of the Ecuadorian Indian) FEI Federación Ecuatoriana de Indios (Ecuadorian Federation of Indians) FENOC Federación Nacional de Organizaciones Campesinas (National Confederation of Peasant Organizations) FENOCIN Federación Ecuatoriana de Organizaciones Campesinas, Indigenas y Negras (Ecuadorian Federation of Peasant, Indigenous and Black Organizations) FICSH Federación Interprovincial de Centros Shuar (Interprovincial Federation of Shuar Centers) IERAC Instituto Ecuatoriano de Reforma Agraria y Colonización (Ecuadorian Institute of Agrarian Reform and Colonization) ITT Ishpingo- Tiputani- Tambococha (oil eld within the Yusuní National Park) MPD Movimiento Popular Democrático (Popular Democratic Movement) MUPP- NP Movimiento de Unidad Plurinacional Pachakutik– Nuevo País (Plurinational Unity Movement Pachakutik– New Country) OPIP Organización de Pueblos Indígenas de Pastaza (Organization of Indigenous Peoples of Pastaza)

INDIGENOUS REVOLUTION IN ECUADOR AND BOLIVIA,

PROLOGUE

e World Turned Upside Down

T IS said that as troops of the mightiest empire the world had ever seen surrendered at Yorktown, their band played an old English tune, “ e World ITurned Upside Down.” Between June and December in two successor states of the great Spanish Empire in the Andes, Ecuador and Bolivia, uprisings of indigenous peoples turned the world that empire created upside down. Mass protests shut down both countries, political systems and parties collapsed, and for a brief instant in Ecuador and for much longer in Bolivia indigenous people ruled the areas of these states for the rst time since Fran- cisco Pizarro invaded the Andes in . e word that many indigenous people, who still spoke the language of the Inca Empire, Quechua (Kichwa in Ecuador), used to describe this transformation was pachakutik, the world turned upside down. e Quechua word implies not simply a political change but a transformation in the cosmos including a new worldview (cosmovisión) to comprehend it. ose interviewed for this book led the great overturning and have inherited a world considerably changed by their eorts. It was as if the combined Native American peoples of North America had overturned the governments of Can- ada and the United States and placed one of their own at the head of each. e indigenous uprising began in Ecuador. On May , , indigenous protesters occupied the Santo Domingo Church in the historic central district of Quito. When President Rodrigo Borja refused to enter into negotiations, 4 PROLOGUE eleven of the protesters announced on June that they would begin a hunger strike. Early in the morning of Sunday, June , the great uprising began. Its scale was “unprecedented in the country and in Latin America.”ì According to Leon Zamosc, “popular protest swelled into a general civic strike, a massive moratorium suspending all normal activities.” For an entire week in June, “tens of thousands of Indian peasants stopped delivering farm produce to the towns, blocked the main highways, picketed on the roadsides and marched en masse in regional capitals. . . . Demonstrators seized the oßces of government agencies, [and] localized skirmishes broke out where landowners and Indian communities had been enrolled in unresolved land disputes.”ï At the symbolic focal point of the uprising in the provincial capital of Latacunga in the heavily indigenous Cotopaxi Province, crowds estimated from ten thousand to thirty thousand marched the streets and held a mock trial for the provincial governor and other authorities. Alberto Taxo, a famous shaman, seized a microphone and, according to one participant, “he made fun of [her] and oh, how the people made fun and laughed at authority, which for us signied a new era.”ð President Borja nally agreed to negotiations, not with the protesters but with the newly formed () Confederación de Nacionalidades Indígenas del Ecuador (CONAIE, Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador). CONAIE in turn was formed by a coalition of indigenous organizations from the Andes (Ecuador Runacunapak Rikcharimuy [ECUARUNARI, Awakening of the Ecuadorian Indian]) and the Confederación de Nacionalidades Indígenas de la Amazonia Ecuatoriana (CONFENIAE, Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of the Ecuadorian Amazon). CONAIE President Luis Macas undertook negotiations with the government over a laundry list of demands divided between indigenous ethnic and cultural concerns (that Ecuador be declared a plurinational country, bilingual education, recognition of indigenous medicine), economic issues (water and irrigation, price freezes, fair prices), and some that combined both (land grants to the nationalities). Despite CONAIE’s leading role in the negotiations, its leaders were initially reluctant to call for a rebellion and were forced to do so by the regional organizations that were being äooded with calls for action from indigenous communities all over Ecuador.ñ With the opening of negotiations, the almost entirely peaceful and orderly protest came to an end. Ecuador and its indigenous communities would never be the same again. e great uprising initiated more than a decade of political action and popular mobilization by indigenous peoples (table ). It had brought an entire modern nation-state to a complete stop. THE WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN 5

Table . Indigenous uprisings in Ecuador, –

1990 June e uprising (Levantamiento) 1992 Apr. March from the Amazon 1994 June Mobilization for Life 1997 Indigenous protests; overthrow of Abdalá Bucaram 2000 Jan. Overthrow of Jamil Mahuad by Pachakutik/Military Alliance 2002 Pachakutik Coalition victory with Lucio Gutiérrez 2003 Coalition collapse; Pachakutik leaves government 2005 Fall of Gutiérrez; election of Rafael Correa

e uprising had been concentrated in the Andes. Two years later, in conjunction with the “ Years of Resistance” campaign marking the th anniversary of Columbus’s landfall in the New World, two thousand Kichwa, Shuar, and Shiwiar people organized by the CONFENIAE aßliate in Pastaza Province, the Organización de los Pueblos Indígenas de Pastaza (OPIP, Organization of Indigenous Peoples of Pastaza), staged a -kilometer, -day protest march from Puyo in the Amazon to Quito in the northern highlands. Numbers grew to ve thousand as members of indigenous highland communities joined in and became a national sensation with extensive and generally favorable coverage in the press. By the time they marched on the presidential palace, Borja was ready to grant an audience to selective representatives.ú Memories of the uprising no doubt fresh in his mind, Borja made a stunning concession to the marchers’ principal demand—recognition of territorial rights. He granted ,, hectares to Kichwa, Shiwiar, and Achuar peoples under the aegis of OPIP.û Subsoil mineral rights were not included, setting up an inherent conäict between the indigenous peoples and multinational oil companies. Nevertheless, the march once again placed the indigenous at the center of national politics. Two years after the Amazon march, in June , in response to the government’s Law of Agricultural Development privatizing water and communal land, protesters from , indigenous communities again shut down the country for more than a week in what they called the “Mobilization for Life.”ü e government was once again forced into negotiations, and CONAIE succeeded in reversing the water and communal land provisions of the act, although many other provisions beneting large commercial agriculture remained. Nina Pacari, who was a CONAIE negotiator during the protests, observed that “by linking the demands of Ecuador’s indigenous population and non-indigenous popular sector, the indigenous movement has moved to the forefront of the popular struggle in Ecuador.”ý 6 PROLOGUE

In CONAIE capitalized on its vanguard status by forming its own political party, Movimiento de Unidad Plurinacional Pachakutik–Nuevo País (MUPP-NP, Movement for Plurinational Unity Pachakutik–New Coun- try), in coalition with nonindigenous popular organizations. It enjoyed what Marc Becker calls “moderate success” as the party elected eight deputies to the national congress, including CONAIE leaders Luis Macas, Miguel Lluco, and Nina Pacari; and two mayors, one of whom, Cuban-trained economist Auki Tituaña, became one of the most celebrated mayors in Latin America.ÿ It ran a candidate for the national presidency, which was won by Abdalá Bucaram. In the midst of economic crisis, Bucaram’s presidency was cut short by a mass uprising in February that included, but was not limited to, the indigenous movement. Ecuador would have ten presidents in the next ten years. e s had been a time of ever ascending power and inäuence for the indigenous movement. On January , , the indigenous protesters under the leadership of Antonio Vargas, former president of OPIP and leader of the march from the Amazon, staged mass protests in Quito and, with the acquiescence of the military and police, occupied the presidential palace, the legislature, and the supreme court. A “Junta of National Salvation”—consisting of Vargas; Colonel Lucio Gutiérrez, representing midlevel oßcers; and the chief justice of the supreme court—was hastily assembled and demanded the resignation of President Jamil Mahuad. For a few hours Vargas become co– chief executive of Ecuador, the rst indigenous person to hold such a position since the conquest. Under pressure from the United States, Gutiérrez’s superiors replaced him with General Carlos Mendoza, who in turn dissolved the junta and called for a transition of power to then vice president Gustavo Noboa, who served the remainder of Mahuad’s term.ì~ In the elections to replace Noboa, Pachakutik formed an electoral alliance with Colonel Gutiérrez and won a share of national power once again. Nina Pacari, a leader in the Mobilization for Life, became foreign minister and Luis Macas headed the Ministry of Agriculture. Ministries involved in economic policies were tightly held by Gutiérrez supporters. Almost immediately he declared himself a “good friend” of U.S. president George W. Bush, betrayed his campaign promises, and continued the neoliberal policies of his predecessors. e coalition collapsed in August . Pacari, Macas, and many other indigenous oßcials resigned although a signicant number remained, creating divisions in the indigenous movement. Gutiérrez himself was overthrown in a uprising of civil society that did not involve the indigenous movement. THE WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN 7

Pachakutik made one last eort to return to power through an alliance with a little-known technocrat, Rafael Correa, and his Alianza País movement in the elections, but negotiations broke down and Pachakutik ran its own candidate, Luis Macas, who received only . percent of the vote.ìì Correa won and CONAIE and Pachakutik entered the political wilderness, where they have remained ever since. “We won but we lost” (Ganamos pero perdimos), said longtime CONAIE advisor Pablo Dávalos of the – period.ìï Correa, on the other hand, served three terms in the presidency before being succeeded by his vice president, Lenin Moreno, in . In January , just as protests in Ecuador were reaching their apogee, an epoch of mass protests began in Bolivia with the so-called Water War in Cocha- bamba. Fought out in three “battles” (December – , ; February –, ; April –, ), the Water War was organized by an ad hoc Coordinadora por la Defensa del Agua y la Vida (Coordinating Committee for the Defense of Water and Life) to protest water rate increases accompanying the privatization of Cochabamba water resources through their sale to an international consortium led by a subsidiary of the U.S. construction giant Bechtel.ìð e coordinating committee was led by factory worker Oscar Olivera and eventually brought together a wide variety of organizations and sectors, including Olive- ra’s factory workers; traditional rural water regulators (regantes); coca growers from the Chapare; students and homeless “street kids”; neighborhood, civic, and professional organizations; and Aymara neighborhood committees. By the time the protests ended on April , the center of Cochabamba was occupied by more than , people, government authority had collapsed, and President Hugo Banzer had been forced to reverse the privatization decree. Coming in the aftermath of the “battle of Seattle” antiglobalization protests, the Water War received worldwide attention and made Oscar Olivera an international celebrity. At home, Olivera’s inäuence faded and two indigenous- peasant leaders, radical Aymara Indianist Felipe Quispe and coca producers’ president Evo Morales, emerged as leaders of the two epicenters of the continuing uprising—the indigenous communities of the Aymara heartland of La Paz Department; and the ethnically mixed, but predominantly Quechua, coca producers of Cochabamba. Simultaneously, but uncoordinated, with the Water War’s nal stages in April , Felipe Quispe organized road blockades in the core Aymara province of Omasuyos in pursuit of a laundry list of demands focused on water privatization and land titling. He was joined by the coca producers of Villa Tunari in Cochabamba, and the blockades rapidly became 8 PROLOGUE

Table . Indigenous- popular uprisings in Bolivia, –

2000 Water War in Cochabamba 2000 Apr.– Sept. Aymara protests, Highlands 2001 June– July Aymara protests, Highlands 2003 Feb. Police mutiny 2003 Sept.–Oct. Aymara protest, La Paz Highlands–El Alto, sets o rst Gas War 2003 Oct. Fall of President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada 2005 May– June Second Gas War; resignation of Carlos Mesa 2005 Dec. Election of Evo Morales (reelected 2009, 2014) national, spreading through both Aymara and Quechua areas. Interspersing negotiations and road blockades, Quispe led additional protests in September and June . us began the great Aymara uprising that would bring down the Bolivia nation-state and make possible an electoral transition not to Quispe but to the coca growers’ Evo Morales in . October , “Black October,” was decisive. e year had begun badly enough for the political establishment with mass protest, a police mutiny, and a shoot-out between the police and the national army at the presidential palace in La Paz in February. On September thousands of marchers from the Aymara countryside arrived in the capital to demand the release of Edwin Huampo, a peasant union oßcial charged with murder for presiding over a traditional Aymara assembly that had condemned two cattle rustlers to death.ìñ Quispe’s list of demands was now expanded to include Huampo’s release and the can- cellation of government plans to export natural gas through Bolivia’s hereditary enemy, Chile, to serve customers in Mexico and California. On the very same day, September , a proposed real estate tax on urban property in the overwhelmingly Aymara and poverty-stricken city of El Alto led to a civic strike.ìú ese rural and urban Aymara currents fused to become the rst Gas War, named after what came to be its principal demand—a rm no to the sale of gas. Whatever the specic issue, Quispe’s dream remained the establishment of an Aymara state modeled after the ancient Inca province of Qullasuyu. He talked constantly of the “two Bolivias,” one of the Aymara and the second of the Spanish “invaders.” He never said what would happen to the invader’s descendants, of both European and mixed ancestry, whom he contemptuously referred to as “q’aras” (naked, uncultured, uncivilized), or, for that matter, the other indigenous peoples in Bolivia.ìû On September , Quispe and Aymara supporters began a hunger strike at the oßces of Radio San Gabriel in El Alto, THE WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN 9 demanding the immediate release of Huampo, the abrogation of the gas con- tract, and progress on the demands of –. On the fteenth in El Alto, the Federación de Juntas Vecinales de El Alto (FEJUVE, Federation of Neigh- borhood Committees of El Alto) called another civic strike and road blockades went up in Quispe’s stronghold of Omasuyos on Lake Titicaca north of La Paz. On the twentieth the government triggered a massive response to Quispe’s call for blockades by sending a military expedition under the command of hardline defense minister Carlos Sánchez Berzaín to rescue a group of international tourists who were said to be trapped in the Aymara town of Sorata by road blockades in Warisata in Omasuyos. ree villagers, including an eight-year-old girl, were killed when the army and police opened re in Warisata on the twentieth.ìü From September onward the road blockades generalized throughout the Aymara highlands. On October , a general strike was called by the neighborhood federation and the regional aßliate of the national union confederation in El Alto, and road blockades went up throughout the city. e demands now included the nationalization of the natural gas industry but expanded to include calls for a constituent assembly and, eventually, the resignation of President Gonzalo Sán- chez de Lozada. e “October Agenda,” as these demands were called, appealed to a wide constituency, including students, coca producers, cooperative miners, urban workers, Quechua as well as Aymara peasants, and even the middle classes. As Forrest Hylton and Sinclair omson note, “As the struggle counted on solidarity from miners and other sectors, it went from being an Aymara to a broader ‘popular’ struggle led by Aymaras, rural and urban.”ìý roughout the uprising, Sánchez de Lozada took an unyielding hard line. On October , protestors in El Alto blockaded the installations of the National Hydrocarbons Company, cutting o the supply of gas to La Paz. Eleven were killed as infantry broke the blockade on the eleventh. at same day, Sánchez de Lozada issued his notorious “death decree,” which absolved security forces from any legal culpability in the use of force to suppress the uprising. ìÿ e next day, October , the anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s landfall in the New World, fty-four additional protesters were killed. Each wave of repression provoked another wave of protests. On the thirteenth, , protesters overwhelmed security forces and took over the La Paz city center. On the four- teenth, the uprising spread to provinces to the south and east of La Paz, including Quechua as well as Aymara areas. On the sixteenth, crowds in the La Paz city center swelled to ,. at afternoon news arrived that soldiers at the 10 PROLOGUE

Patacamaya checkpoint had deed their orders and allowed militant Huanuni miners marching on La Paz to pass through. Sánchez de Lozada resigned and left the country the next day, October . e rst Gas War was over.ï~ Following Sánchez de Lozada’s resignation, power passed to his constitutional successor, Vice President Carlos Mesa, who tried but failed to resolve the issues raised by the October Agenda in his two years in oßce. On June , , as many as , Aymara protestors descended once again from El Alto to the La Paz city center in a renewal of the Gas War.ïì Mesa oered his resignation but protests continued until successive resignations brought Supreme Court Chief Justice Eduardo Rodríguez Veltzé to power on June . Faced with continuing popular resistance, Rodríguez resigned and called for new elections in December. e elections were won overwhelmingly not by Quispe, whose militant ideology touched o the Gas Wars, but by Evo Morales, whose Mov- imiento al Socialismo (MAS) party had experienced extraordinary electoral success since its founding in . Morales, at the head of the MAS ticket, had come in a close second in the presidential elections. e beginning of the twenty-rst century marked a gigantic overturning in the Andean world. In January the Ecuadorian indigenous moved toward ultimate power through a coup but ultimately gained power through free elections in before beginning a stunning fall from power. January marked the beginning of an almost continuous wave of protests that culminated ve years later in the election of the rst indigenous president of Bolivia. At the time of writing, Evo Morales remains in power in Bolivia but in Ecuador Rafael Cor- rea held power for ten years. He successfully co-opted the indigenous agenda but not the indigenous. Both waves of indigenous protests were unprecedented in the republican history of Ecuador and Bolivia and indeed in Latin America. Where did they come from? e chapters that follow attempt to answer this question through the presentations and analysis of interviews with leaders who were or still are central to the indigenous movement. e following chapter presents a general theoretical frame derived from past research to guide the analysis, but it is hoped that the interviews may provide grist for many theoretical mills. ey have been edited for length, readability, and punctuation. Otherwise these stories are as they were told to me by the leaders of the great uprisings.ïï INTRODUCTION

Modernity, Indigeneity, and Revolution

HE INDIGENOUS upheavals of to in Ecuador and Bolivia seemed to come from nowhere. In fact they were the result of a decades- Tlong process of political organization and indigenous identity formation. Ultimately they were a paradoxical consequence of the forced imposition of modernity in the Andes after the Bolivian Revolution of and the Ecua- dorian land reform of . An increasing body of research and theory suggests that ambitious attempts to incorporate indigenous peoples into liberal nation- states of equal citizens and capitalist economies of competitive individuals had the exact opposite eect. ey intensied the indigenous experience of racial humiliation, discrimination, and exclusion, and, in response, promoted the rise of indigenous political identity and resistance. is interpretation is strongly supported by the interviews published for the rst time in this book. Only at the end of the twentieth century did a distinct indigenous political identity emerge. is identity was both cause and consequence of organized political action by the people interviewed for this book. Never before had there been a political identity or political movement that unied all the surviving indigenous cultures of each modern nation-state into a single indigenous identity and single national organization. Although indigenous identity and resistance emerged only in the second half of the twentieth century, indigenous peoples lived in the areas that are now 12 INTRODUCTION

Ecuador and Bolivia for millennia. Both modern nations straddle the Andes and extend deep into the Amazon. e largest indigenous groups are to be found in the Andes: the Kichwa in Ecuador and the Aymara and Quechua in Bolivia. ese groups number in the millions. Numerous small band and tribal- level societies are found in the Amazon. ey number between a few hundred and, at the largest, tens of thousands. e intermontane valleys of the eastern slope of the Andes in Bolivia are ecologically and politically important because their climate favors coca production, and coca growers of dierent indigenous groups became the vanguard of the political revolution. e path of indigenous mobilization closely followed these ecological and ethnic divisions. It is important to understand at the outset that, contrary to the claims of many indigenous leaders, the indigenous identity that emerged at the close of the twentieth century was not the reemergence of some pre-Columbian identity suppressed by Spanish conquerors and their descendants. As José Antonio Lucero has denitively demonstrated, this identity was a political construct that grew out of the political action in the late twentieth century, not some primor- dial ethnic identity. As Lucero has also demonstrated, this political identity was rooted in what he calls the “associational ecologies” of the distinct regions in Ecuador and Bolivia.ì In Ecuador the core themes emphasized by leaders from the Amazon (see chapter ) diered markedly from those of the Andes (see chapter ) despite a common commitment to nationality and indigeneity. e indigenous narrative of the coca growers in the intermontane valleys of Bolivia (see chapter ) is distinctly dierent from that of the Aymara peasant communities of the Andes and their intellectual leaders (see chapter ). e Amazon in both Ecuador and Bolivia is a lowland region of dense tropical rain forest where slash-and-burn agriculture supplemented by hunting was the dominant mode of subsistence. Historically, social organization was at the band or tribal level without distinct class or caste stratication (see chapter ). Neither the Spaniards nor the Incas had any success conquering these regions and only in the later twentieth century did the Republics of Ecuador and Bolivia attempt to incorporate them. Resistance tended to be organized along ethnic, territorial, and ecological lines and, in the absence of class stratication, class themes were nonexistent.ï In the Andes, in both countries, by the early twentieth century a racially stratied peasant society had emerged. In the Ecuadorian countryside the dominant institution before the land reform was the Latin American landed estate, the hacienda, worked by indigenous serfs called huasipungeros. e MODERNITY, I NDIGENEITY, AND R EVOLUTION 13 hacienda emerged early in Ecuador (in the seventeenth century), and independent indigenous communities were weak and dominated by the hacienda and its captive indigenous communities.ð In Bolivia the hacienda emerged only in the nineteenth century. Independent indigenous communities organized around the kin-based, territorially localized, Andean community organization, the ayllu, retained their autonomy and fought for a century against expansion by the haciendas.ñ e Bolivian Revolution ended the hacienda system and freed the indigenous serfs (called pongos), but the struggle continued in new forms even after the abolition of the hacienda. Although the dierence between the relative strength of the hacienda and ayllu in the two countries had an enormous eect on the direction taken by their indigenous movement, in both cases initial organization of the indigenous was on the basis of class, not indigeneity. In Ecuador the Communist Party was the most eective organizational force in the countryside from the s to the s, and most Ecuadorian leaders interviewed mentioned communist organizers Dolores Cacuango and Tránsito Amaguaña as symbolic reference points for their own struggles.ú e communists focused on land reform and other class-based issues of hacienda peons. ere were no indigenous leaders in the party, and doctrinaire Marxism discouraged interest in the indigenous question. In Bolivia the victorious center-left party the Movimiento Nacionalista Rev- olucionario (MNR, National Revolutionary Movement) organized top-down corporatist “unions” based on what were called campesinos (roughly translated as “peasants”) in rural areas to negotiate between the indigenous peasant communities and the state (and therefore completely unlike trade unions as they are understood in the United States or the United Kingdom). In both countries, indigenous identity disappeared in the Marxist-inspired category “peasant.” e upsurge in indigenous organization in the s and s therefore appeared as an entirely new phenomenon—the “Return of the Indian,” as Xavier Albó put it in .û e “Indians,” as indigenous people were then called, had always been there. What was new was the emergence of political organization and resistance in the name of Indians, as they rst called themselves. From the nineteenth century onward, Indian was a term of contempt used by the creole ruling classes to describe what they regarded as their racial inferiors. Indige- nous activists, in a tactic used by many racialized groups, reversed the valence of Indian and used it positively to organize against the creoles. By the s, however, the term Indian had begun to give way to the new concept of “indigeneity.” Galo Ramón dates the transition to –, although two decades later 14 INTRODUCTION

Indian continued to be an accepted term in scholarly usage.ü In my interviews conducted in , , and , no one spoke of Indians except in reference to pejorative use by others, and indigenous had become the accepted term. e partial substitution of indigeneity for class by organizations based on an indigenous peasantry had profound political consequences. Some examples may illustrate the remarkable change in consciousness that was the basis of indigenous political identity. e Shuar had ceased to exist as a tribal people of the Ecuadorian Amazon as early as . When they remerged as the Shuar Federation in the same year, they organized themselves as associational, democratic, and bureaucratic—thoroughly modern characteristics (see chapter ). ey at rst used their tribal designation, Shuar, in political organization, but when they joined with indigenous organizations of the Andes, they accepted their indigeneity in the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE). In the ethnically heterogeneous world of the Bolivian coca growers, a common indigeneity was induced by the coca eradication eorts of the United States so that indigeneity was mixed with demands for human rights and anti-imperialist rhetoric (see chapter ). It is true that the Aymara in Bolivia under the leadership of Felipe Quispe retained traditional Aymara forms of community organization that had survived conquest by both the Inca and the Spanish Empires. But the reconstructed and to some extent reinvented history of the Aymara was produced by a small group of ethnically Aymara intellectuals inspired by Fausto Reinaga’s work La revo- lución india ( e Indian revolution), published in (see chapter ). Quispe did not know of Túpac Katari, the great eighteenth-century Aymara rebel, until he heard about him on a radio broadcast. Javier Hurtado has shown that no memory of Katari existed among ordinary rural Aymara as late as the s.ý Similarly, to take an extreme example, Mandi Bane has shown that the Panzuelo people, so designated by CONAIE in the province of Cotopaxi, Ecuador, did not know they were Panzuelo although they considered themselves part of the indigenous movement.ÿ To say that indigeneity is an invented tradition is not to say it was invented out of nothing. e indigenous cultural communities that survived on Ecuador- ian haciendas and the Ecuadorian Amazon provided the discourse and experience out of which indigenous identity was constructed. e Shuar still call themselves Shuar and as late as the time of the interviews Ampam Karakras, the leading intellectual in the formation of the concept of indigenous nationalities, could still argue that indigeneity was just a euphemism for Indian. e MODERNITY, I NDIGENEITY, AND R EVOLUTION 15 ayllu of the Bolivian Andes was (and is) still a functioning entity in the Aymara heartland even if the ethnohistory of the Aymara in political discourse was constructed by Aymara intellectuals. On the other hand, the indigeneity of the coca growers of the subtropical valleys was heterogeneous. based on a mixing of dierent indigenous cultural groups. Indigeneity in the Andes was something entirely new, a consequence of modernity. Indigeneity was not the result of political calculation or “strategic essentialism” on the part of the leaders interviewed for this book. Instead, they reäected the experience of themselves and millions of other indigenous people after the introduction of modernity. Most of those interviewed were at most a generation removed from traditional indigenous life. Some still lived in traditional communities. Modernity arrived in two phases. e rst began with the Bolivian Revolution of (sometimes called the April Revolution) and the Ecuadorian land reform of , a kind of revolution from above. Both “revolutions” destroyed the hacienda system, threw indigenous people into the modern world of liberal citizenship and capitalist individuality, and introduced them to a Western culture of intense racism. e second phase began abruptly with the shock therapy of neoliberal structural adjustment, which began in both countries at the beginning of the s. e rst phase of land reform reäected the nationalist state-dominated development strategy then in favor in Latin America. It led to widespread mobilization and organization on the basis of indigenous identity. e second phase, neoliberal structural adjustment, initiated uprisings verging on the revolutionary. Combined, they created the uprisings of the – period.

AGRARIAN REVOLUTION AND INDIGENEITY

In Bolivia in April , activists from the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucio- nario (MNR) led a revolution that has many similarities to other revolutions of the twentieth or even the eighteenth centuries. As MNR activists seized power and distributed arms, a proletariat of militant leftist miners defeated the Boliv- ian army in pitched battles and indigenous peasants rose to assert traditional land claims and destroy the hacienda system. e center-left nationalists of the MNR were forced to co-opt the revolutionary miners and ratify the peasants’ seizure of land, incorporating both groups into the state, as has been noted, by corporatist “unions.” 16 INTRODUCTION

e victorious MNR was a party of the upper middle class, dominated by lawyers, with a program of revolutionary state-led modernization from above. e enormous prestige of the revolution ensured indigenous peasant support for decades even though MNR never took an oßcial notice of the indigenous component of their identity. Still, the reforms from above were considerably more than cosmetic. Land reform in ratied the indigenous peasant land seizures, the franchise was extended to the indigenous peasants for the rst time, universal primary education (in the Spanish language) was opened to all, mines were seized by the state, and state control extended to broad areas of the economy. e goal was to create a modern capitalist economy and a modern liberal state on the ruins of the ancien régime dominated by three mining families and a backward land-holding class. In the view of the MNR, there was no indigenous problem because the indigenous either had been or soon would be converted into individual citizens of a culturally uniform mestizo (mixed-race) state and into small farmers in a productive capitalist agricultural economy. e revolution, therefore, implied the cultural extinction of the indigenous. A little more than a decade later, another modernizing revolution swept Ecuador. But this time there was no revolutionary upsurge from below but rather a military-imposed land reform from above ( –). To be sure, fear of revolution, in this case the Cuban Revolution, motivated the military juntas that imposed modernization. e land reform was weak and insußcient and was partly reversed. Still, as in Bolivia, the old hacienda system was destroyed and capitalist agriculture encouraged. In the long run, by the beginning of the twenty-rst century the principal beneciaries of the reform appeared to be large capitalist farmers in the highlands. e former indigenous serfs were relegated to the worst lands highest on the mountain sides.ì~ Nevertheless, in Ecuador as in Bolivia the hacienda system was destroyed and halting steps were made to incorporate the indigenous peasantry into full citizenship (in Ecuador the vote was not extended to the peasantry until !). Given the early and absolute dominance of the hacienda in Ecuador, the reform threw millions of peasants into a capitalist economy and a Hispanic nation-state with little or no government assistance or oßcial support. Many entered the casual labor market of rural towns or major cities while still retaining their ties to rural communities. Indigenous communities, on the other hand, survived. Former captive communities of the haciendas made use of a law to legally incorporate themselves. e number of legally incorporated indigenous communities almost doubled from , in before the reform to , by . MODERNITY, I NDIGENEITY, AND R EVOLUTION 17

As Ramón observes, these communities “converted themselves into the most organized sector of civil society.”ìì It was these communities that formed the building blocks of indigenous organization and resistance. In Ecuador there was a distinct dierence between the actual community base of indigenous organization and the theoretical organization of indigenous ideology. In theory CONAIE was an organization of peoples and nationalities like the Shuar in the Amazon or the ctive Panzuelos of the Andes. “Nationality,” borrowed from European, especially Marxist, thought, became the core concept of the indigenous movement in Ecuador. is theme is repeated in every single interview granted by Ecuadorian leaders. is ideological principle has some basis in actuality in the Amazon. But in the Andes the legally recognized indigenous community organized along traditional lines and based on principles of consensus and unanimity was the basic unit; a number of such communities banded together at the parish or canton level to form an organization of the “second grade.” Second-grade organization united to form provincial-level organizations of the “third grade” that, in turn, joined together to form regional organizations. Finally the regional organizations joined together to form one national-level organization, CONAIE.ìï Organization followed political rather than ethnic boundaries. e origins of the regional-level organizations are discussed in chapters and . In Bolivia too the indigenous community was the fundamental unit of organization in the Aymara heartland even if it was designated a union local by the MNR. In the province of Cochabamba, where the indigenous communities were weaker, peasant unions were a more or less accurate description of organization in the countryside. It is of critical importance that the victorious current in the Bolivian uprising of – came from the coca growers of Cocha- bamba who organized as unions rst and acquired an indigenous identity later. In the Aymara heartland, Felipe Quispe created an extremely radical form of Aymara “Indianism” that has no parallel in Ecuador. e Kichwa of the Ecua- dorian Andes, despite their regional organization, ECUARUNARI, chose to think of themselves as divided into localized “peoples,” for example, Otavaleños, Saraguros, and Salasacas.

MODERNITY AND INDIGENEITY IN ECUADOR

It is argued by a number of scholars writing on Ecuador that land reform and subsequent modernization created the conditions for the emergence of both indigenous organization and indigenous identity in Ecuador. According to 18 INTRODUCTION

Amalia Pallares, “In the years following land reform and rural modernization, Indians’ frustrated attempts to coexist with mestizos in diverse institutional settings and in everyday life, as well as their attempts to build coalitions with non-Indians along class lines, made their subordination along racial lines painfully evident.”ìð Ramón speaks of “the ethnogenesis [i.e., the construction of ethnic identity] produced in the world of the Ecuadorian Indian through the process of modernization.”ìñ Leon Zamosc argues that the “contemporary Indian movement can be read as a radical critique of the kind of modernity that has prevailed in Latin America. e ‘really existing modernity’ that befell the Indians . . . was utterly alien to the ideal modernity that had been touted since the Enlightenment as rationalizing progress in the service of freedom and the enrichment of human life.”ìú Pallares provides vivid examples of how land reform and the end of the hacienda brought indigenous people into racially degrading and humiliating encounters with mestizos in towns and cities.ìû Indigenous children were punished and humiliated for speaking Kichwa or wearing traditional clothing in the school. Police brutality, false arrests, and even torture were common. In a continuation of hacienda practices in the public sphere, police sometimes seized the clothing of indigenous people and required days of forced labor on public works before it was returned. e practice of arranche (“snatching”), in which a mestizo would simply grab an item from an indigenous market vendor and then pay anything they chose, continued. Indigenous people were barred from any jobs requiring contact with mestizos and relegated to the most menial positions. All these practices were directed at indigenous people as a group by mestizos and whites as a group. As Pallares notes, “ e new transformations and their eects were understood racially because that is how they were experienced by many.”ìü For Ramón, modernization not only exposed the indigenous peoples to racist mistreatment but also brought them into direct unmediated contact with the Ecuadorian nation-state for the rst time. is led to increasing “Indian nationalism” that demanded inclusion in the state and an end to discrimination rather than separatism.ìý According to Zamosc, the early activities of CONAIE rede- ned Indian identity “from a stigmatized group to a collectivity with rights,” a transformation assisted by some receptivity on the part of the Ecuadorian state.ìÿ Jorge León describes the process of modernization in the highlands too but places fear of cultural extinction as the motivating force in creating indigenous identity.ï~ All these sources agree that land reform and modernization in Ecuador enhanced an oppositional indigenous identity primarily by bringing MODERNITY, I NDIGENEITY, AND R EVOLUTION 19 indigenous peoples into the public sphere and exposing them to general mistreatment and discrimination as a racialized group.

MODERNITY AND INDIGENEITY IN BOLIVIA

Two of Bolivia’s leading social scientists, Álvaro García Linera (see chapter ) and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, discuss the eects of modernity in similar terms. As Rivera Cusicanqui notes, “Each modernizing step appears to generate defence mechanisms in communards [Aymara indigenous communities], at the deepest sub-stratum of the collective memory, where the oldest wounds still bleed, where the memory of the invader who altered the invaded society is still painful.”ïì For Rivera Cusicanqui, the April Revolution simply represented another step in a continuing process of forced modernization. e core of modernization is “the western model of citizenship as modern, ‘rational,’ and propri- etary capable of entering into transactions in the market and of embracing the fetishistic logic of commodities.”ïï According to Rivera Cusicanqui, the two- fold process of the imposition of liberal citizenship and market rationality on indigenous communities is the fundamental contradiction in Bolivian society. Although at times she seems to argue that this contradiction creates indigenous consciousness, at others she emphasizes the objective and essential nature of this conäict. Modernization “generate[s] defence mechanisms” in Aymara communities but “the memory of the invader . . . is still painful” (emphasis added). Nevertheless, there are obvious commonalities with the arguments reviewed above for Ecuador. Modernity is at the core of both. Álvaro García Linera emphasizes the same fundamental contradictions in Bolivian society. In his rst publication, writing under the pseudonym Qhan- anchiri and using Karl Marx’s categories from Capital: Volume I, García Linera contrasts “the family-communal based on use values for self-sußciency” with “exchange value: which is ‘alien and distinct from the former.’”ïð is theme runs throughout his work. He became “obsessed” with tracking down everything that Marx had written on the precapitalist agrarian community. e culmination of his obsession was the mammoth, densely argued theoretical work Forma valor y forma comunidad (Value form and community form), which was a reading of capital informed by Marx’s writings on the agrarian community.ïñ e value form in Marx is the amount of abstract labor embedded in a commodity and is at the heart of his labor theory of value.ïú To a Marxist like García Linera, it was the very essence of capitalism and implied not simply economic change but the cultural and political change required to make capitalist exchange relations possible. He 20 INTRODUCTION contrasted the value form with the communal traditions of the traditional Andean ayllu. As he said in a later work, “In sum we can speak of communities and ayllus as structures of civilization bearing cultural systems, temporal systems, technological systems, political systems and productive systems structurally dierentiated from the constituents of the dominant capitalist civilization.”ïû Like Rivera Cusicanqui, García Linera also saw a fundamental contradiction between the liberal idea of citizenship and the multiple civilizations that constitute Bolivian society. “Bolivia is a country where various civilizations coexist, but where the state structure only recognizes the organizational logic of one of these civilizations—modern commercial capitalism.”ïü According to García Linera, in reality Bolivia was “composed of numerous corporate segments . . . which reveal the fraudulent nature of the liberal ideal of society as a . . . connection of rootless private owners.”ïý is contradiction was stabilized and somatized by race. e state was not only liberal and capitalist but white. e unrepresented corporate indigenous communities that emerged from the revolution of , just as they did from the Ecuadorian land reform, were the rural building blocks of the uprising against the liberal capitalist state that began in . Just as in Ecuador, these conäicts, as Pallares observed, “were understood racially because that is how they were experienced by many.” Rivera Cusicanqui and García Linera both emphasize the same two dimensions of modernity—liberal citizenship and capitalist individuality. ese dimensions could just as well apply to Ecuador. In both cases, imposition of these dimensions of modernity on the indigenous population after the revolution of and the land reform of led to increased organization and resistance. ese dimensions of modernity also led to the formation of an indigenous political identity, although the case is made more strongly by those writing on Ecuador than by Rivera Cusicanqui and García Linera. e same contradictions are involved in both cases. e simple proposition suggested above that modernity causes indigeneity is strongly suggested by researchers and theorists in both countries. Agrarian modernization set the stage for the uprisings of –. Neoliberalism brought the drama to a revolutionary conclusion.

NEOLIBERALISM AND THE UPRISINGS

Neoliberalism, sometimes called the “Washington Consensus,” was a late twentieth-century radical version of nineteenth-century laissez faire economic MODERNITY, I NDIGENEITY, AND R EVOLUTION 21 liberalism. Although the basic elements of the new politico-economic philosophy were rst applied to Chile after Augusto Pinochet’s coup by admirers of Milton Friedman, the doctrine attained international legitimacy, if not absolute hegemony, after the elections of Ronald Reagan and Margaret atcher in . Neoliberalism was the global expression of the “Reagan Revolution” and still forms the basis for the Republican Party’s economic doctrines. In the s and s, as the Washington Consensus, it became the dominant philosophy of the Washington-based international nancial institutions the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, which were strongly backed by the U.S. Department of the Treasury. ey imposed their will on the ird World, now euphemistically (and optimistically) called “emerging markets,” through what came to be called “structural adjustment packages.”ïÿ e typical structural adjustment package included three main elements— privatization, stabilization, and deregulation—which reäected neoliberalism’s hostility to state intervention in the economy in any form and its utopian visions of completely unfettered national and international markets. Privat- ization meant the sale of state-owned enterprises and the end of industrial policy, subsidies, or any other attempt to alter market outcomes by state action. Stabilization required ending scal and trade decits by draconian measures if necessary. Social programs were terminated; state employees were red, state subsidies ended, and taris were radically reduced or eliminated. Deregulation meant freedom from government oversight of business, particularly “reform” of the labor market to reduce or eliminate unions and the government policies they had promoted. Whatever the philosophical basis for these policies, in practice they tended to fall hardest on the poorest and most vulnerable members of society and advantage multinational enterprises.ð~ Bolivia was the site of one of neoliberalism’s greatest economic successes (the virtual elimination of inäation, which, at the time, was running at an astronomical , percent per year) and greatest political failures (the virtual collapse of the Bolivian political system). Remarkably, neoliberalism was imposed by none other than Víctor Paz Estenssoro, hero of the revolution and architect of the “state of ,” the overwhelmingly interventionist state that had imposed modernity on Bolivia and inadvertently triggered the rise of indigenous identity. A single presidential decree () formulated by Paz Estenssoro and his nance minister, Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, aided by Bolivian students of neoliberal guru Jeery Sachs, deconstructed much of the state of ’. Sánchez de Lozada nished more of the work in his own term of president (–).ðì 22 INTRODUCTION

Decree became a rallying cry for opponents of neoliberalism and is explicitly mentioned in a number of the interviews presented here. Álvaro García Linera argues that the neoliberal reforms had an adverse eect on both workers and peasants and led directly to the Bolivian uprisings of –. García Linera mentions in particular the Paz Estenssoro reforms of , the free importation of food after , the closing of the agricultural frontier as a result of export agribusiness expansion, and the destruction of small industry and handicrafts in the cities.ðï Benjamin Kohl and Linda Farthing reach the same conclusions, pointing to the closure of state mines and dismissal of twenty-three thousand of thirty thousand workers, a two-thirds decline in real wages, the loss of ten thousand public sector and twenty-ve thousand rural school employees, the collapse of the tiny industrial sector, and a äood of agricultural imports into the countryside. As a result of the shrinking of the state, the migration of ruined farmers to the cities, and the decline of industry and handicrafts, informal employment skyrocketed to two-thirds of the urban workforce by .ðð By , when Bolivia faced what Kohl and Farthing call “a perfect storm” of economic crises, neoliberal hegemony unraveled. Although not strictly part of the structural adjustment program, a new oensive against coca production devastated the Cochabamba and national economies. e collapse of the Argentine economy threw many of the . million Bolivian migrants in what was Bolivia’s largest labor market out of work. e privatization of the petroleum industry sharply reduced government revenues.ðñ e Water and Gas Wars and Quispe’s Aymara rising followed immediately thereafter. Although the direct consequences of neoliberalism and the simultaneous coca eradication program were the immediate precipitants of the – risings, they could never have happened without the organizational and identity-building work in the previous thirty years. As García Linera notes, “ e Indianist-Katarist movements of the years – . . . succeeded in unifying a growing urban intelligentsia of Aymara cultural origins and whose members took the rst steps in the discursive formation and passive inäuence in those communities that, twenty years later, led the most important indigenous uprising of the last years.”ðú e IMF structural adjustment packages reliably led to mass protests but usually in what came to be called the “IMF riot,” such as the gigantic “Caracazo” in Venezuela in , not sustained mass protest led by indigenous resistance organizations as in Bolivia and Ecuador. Without the formation of these organizations and rise of indigenous identity in response to the imposition of modernity from above in the Bolivian MODERNITY, I NDIGENEITY, AND R EVOLUTION 23 revolution of and Ecuadorian land reform of , no sustained indigenous uprising would have been possible. e gigantic wave that broke in – in response to the crisis of neoliberalism had been building for decades. It is this connection between modernity and indigeneity discussed in the previous section, not neoliberalism alone, that is the ultimate cause of the uprisings in Bolivia. e same is true in Ecuador. Zamosc argues that “in content, the levantamiento [uprising] paralleled what appeared in other Latin American countries as ‘IMF riots,’ a display of popular protest induced by the profound impact of the economic slump and the [structural] adjustment policies of the s.”ðû He found that many of those uprising participants he interviewed emphasized the economic squeeze they felt from high prices of agricultural inputs and low prices for farm products—both a direct result of structural adjustment. Neolib- eral policies were imposed from above in the s, beginning with the administration of Osvaldo Hurtado (– ) and “with a vengeance” under the repres- sive regime of León Febres Cordero ( –), and continuing up to and even after the uprising.ðü e key neoliberal reforms reduced taris, encouraged foreign investment, stabilized the currency, cut corporate and individual tax rates, raised prices, contracted the money supply, cut the public budget and public subsidies, and privatized individual land and water rights. e result was “continuing poverty (if not growing impoverishment), high unemployment, vast inequality, social tensions, and inadequate public investment in education and public services.”ðý Neoliberal reforms triggered indigenous uprisings including not only in but to some extent down to the present day. Antineoliberal- ism is an article of faith among indigenous leaders interviewed for this book. e reforms were a contributing factor in the election of Rafael Correa, who co-opted indigenous opposition to neoliberalism in his campaign. Indigenous leaders, however, believe that in oßce he simply continued neoliberal policies in a new form. In Deborah Yashar’s widely inäuential comparative theory of the early stages of indigenous mobilization in the Andes, neoliberalism is at center stage. ðÿ Although she includes economic changes, her focus is on the political consequences of neoliberalism. She claims that the replacement of the “corporatist” mediation of state-indigenous relations with a neoliberal emphasis on the relation between the isolated individual and the state freed the indigenous to rebel under situations in which state repression was relaxed and previous political solidarities existed. ere is no doubt that Yashar is right about the eect of 24 INTRODUCTION political neoliberalism; it intensied the experience of isolation and racism. But the theory immediately runs into temporal dißculties. Indigenous resistance and indigenous identity in Ecuador as in Bolivia long preceded the neoliberal reforms. e Shuar of the Ecuadorian Amazon organized in ; the Kichwa of the highlands in . Discussions to form CONAIE began in the early s at the outset of the neoliberal reforms. Zamosc found that ethnic solidarity was at least as important as strictly economic consideration among participants in the uprising whom he interviewed. As one of them said, “We wanted to show that we Indians are united, organized and can make our own demands.”ñ~ Far from a spontaneous outburst, the uprising was organized from bottom to top. e base of the uprising was the indigenous communities that emerged in large part as a result of the – land reforms, and their pressure forced the CONAIE leadership to act. As in Bolivia, it was the imposition of modernity from above through land reform and attempts to create individual citizens and economic actors that triggered indigenous political consciousness. e radical neoliberal reforms brought both societies to a crisis in which indigenous political identity was expressed in mass mobilization and protests. e leaders interviewed for this book were key actors in this process (see the appendix).

DIVERGENT OUTCOMES IN ECUADOR AND BOLIVA

us far I have stressed the common pattern of indigenous protest. Both produced national indigenous organizations that, in their time, were regarded as the strongest in Latin America. Both culminated in massive uprisings that shut down the entire nation-state for days or weeks at a time. Both led to the collapse of the party system and threatened to take power at the national level. But in Bolivia Evo Morales and his MAS party did take national power through uprisings and successful election campaigns. At this writing, a decade after the uprising, Morales and MAS are still in power. In Ecuador CONAIE, in coalition with midlevel army oßcers, did seize power for a few hours in January . is coup led directly to their greatest electoral success in in coalition with coup leader Lucio Gutiérrez. But Gutiérrez betrayed his indigenous allies and moved sharply to the right. e coalition broke apart in and most, but not all, indigenous representatives resigned from his government. MODERNITY, I NDIGENEITY, AND R EVOLUTION 25

e elections represented the high point of Pachakutik-CONAIE political power. e collapse of the Gutiérrez coalition relegated them to the political wilderness and cleared the way for the rise of Rafael Correa. At the time of the interviews, ve years into the Correa presidency, the leaders were as militant as ever but unable to assemble the electoral coalitions that had brought them to power in or the mass uprisings that had shaken the state in the nineties. Although CONAIE had initially supported Correa, they soon were at odds. Correa criminalized protests, arrested indigenous protesters as terrorists, and denounced their leaders in strongly racialized terms. e leaders interviewed in Ecuador, with one notable exception, denounced Correa in no uncertain terms. One said that he was worse than León Febres Cordero, who had imposed neoliberalism with an iron hand. Some Pachakutik members continued to win seats in local and national elections, but the party was a shadow of its former self. Why these dierent outcomes? Bolivia enjoyed enormous advantages that Ecuador lacked. Indeed, what is remarkable is that the Ecuadorian indigenous leaders enjoyed the limited success that they did. Bolivia had the largest indigenous population in Latin America with two-thirds of the population claiming indigenous identity. e indigenous population of Ecuador was much smaller. A reasonable estimate for the insurrectionary period would be – percent.ñì Bolivia had a powerful tradition of left ideology and organization rooted in militant trade unions. It had a radical independent peasant union that encom- passed almost all the rural population. ese organizations were the key to MAS success. ey were almost entirely absent in Ecuador. e area that is now Bolivia was the site of powerful Aymara kingdoms whose culture and language survived the Inca and Spanish Empire and the republic to form the basis for the great Katarist risings of the late twentieth century. e Aymara became the most militant and organized of the Bolivian ethnic groups. e pre-Incan strucures of what is now Ecuador were weak and decentralized and were quickly obliterated by the Incas and the Spanish. e dominant Kichwa ethnic group never achieved similar cohesion and militance. e hacienda dominated Ecuadorian society and economy as early as the seventeenth century, weakening the traditional Andean kinship organization the ayllu. Ayllus were and are much more powerful in Bolivia. e hacienda only arrived in the nineteenth century and carried on a battle over land with the Aymara ayllus that lasted down to the revolution. Peasant insurrections 26 INTRODUCTION were common in Bolivia but not in Ecuador. Relations between the landlord- dominated state and the indigenous communities were frequently close to warfare. In Ecuador the state was open to negotiation with a much less militant indigenous population. Coca cultivation in Ecuador was banned by the Church despite ideal ecological conditions. e weakness of the Church and the dominance of mining interests prevented a similar ban in Bolivia. Coca production thrives to this day, and the coca producers became one of the most militant and insurrectionary groups in Bolivian society. It was they who emerged in power after the revolutionary upsurge. Despite these enormous disadvantages, militant indigenous Ecuadorians brought down the state and even placed an indigenous leader in a position of national power. Ideology and organization, however, also contributed to these dierent outcomes. A clue is provided by the names of the peak indigenous organizations in the two nations—the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE) and the Confederación Sindical Única de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia (CSUTCB, Sole Union Confederation of Rural Workers of Bolivia). Nationality had been the key organizing concept in Ecuador, and indigenous resistance grew out of the corporatist peasant unions of the MNR in Bolivia. But as early as the CSUTCB had been taken over by Aymara nationalists with a strong peasant base. Between and it was led by radical Aymara nationalist Felipe Quispe, who initiated major protests in – and . Nationality was a powerful force in Bolivia as well as Ecuador. Nevertheless, as the interviews that follow make clear, in the end Ecuadorian peak organization was based on a “materially informed Indianista politics” while in Bolivia Morales’s MAS party was based on what might be called an “ethnically informed peasant politics.”ñï e dierence is one of emphasis but it nonetheless had a decisive eect on the outcome of indigenous peasant mobilization in the two nations. Both indigenous peasant movements tried to organize broad coalitions of the nonindigenous as well as the indigenous left, but Evo Morales was much more successful than his counterpart in Ecuador, Luis Macas. Morales attained a clear majority or even close to a two-thirds majority in his three election campaigns. Macas only received . percent in his one unsuccessful campaign. e vanguard organization in Bolivia, the coca producers union, was built rst as a union organization in a region where peasant unions had always been strong. It later took on an indigenous discourse, especially when the party began to compete at the national level. Álvaro García Linera argues that this change was attributable to the rise of Evo Morales with a distinctly multicultural perspective.ñð Nevertheless, MODERNITY, I NDIGENEITY, AND R EVOLUTION 27

Morales was strongly inäuenced by his Marxist advisors Filemón Escobar and Álvaro García and supported a strong nationalist and anti-imperialist, as well as indigenous, line. In Ecuador the vanguard organization was the Amazonian confederation and the key theorist of nationality was a Shuar. Nationality became the key concept in the national organization as a result of conversations between the two regional federations. Both CONAIE and Pachakutik retained a strong anti-imperialist and antineoliberal discourse, but after Correa co-opted these themes, it was left with its conceptual root notion, nationality. CONAIE’s idea of plurinationality envisioned an organization with indigenous nations and peoples as its base even though this contradicted the actual organization based on individual communities. e coca producers’ idea of plurinationality was a heterogeneous fusion of dierent indigenous cultures at the individual, not the group, level. e Ecuador- ian idea was supported by Aymara nationalists in Bolivia and by some intellectual dissenters within MAS. e Ecuadorian idea of nations and peoples always functioned as a conceptual limit to the inclusion of the vast nonindigenous majority. MAS ideas of heterogeneous multiculturalism were vague enough to include not only all thirty-six Bolivian indigenous peoples and therefore the majority of the population but even many mestizos and some whites attracted by a rediscovered ancestry or by the MAS’s popular leftist appeals. In the end the “tradition of all dead generations weighed like a nightmare on the brains” of the indigenous rebels at the turn of the twenty-rst century. Histor- ical conjuncture and associational ecologies sent the two indigenous movements in divergent directions. But the shared experience of revolution and modernization created indigenous mobilization in both nations for similar reasons. Liberal modernity with its vision of individualized citizenship and rational individual economic actors brought indigenous people into contact with equally modernist constructions of race with the consequence of politicized indigenous identity. Whatever way history and ecology sent the movements in Ecuador and Bolivia, the origins of the indigenous uprisings were the same. e indigenous uprisings shook the foundation of two modern nation-states with millions of inhabitants.

INDIGENEITY AND REVOLUTION

Are the uprisings in Ecuador and Bolivia revolutions? Adolfo Gilly, distinguished student of the Mexican Revolution, said that in Bolivia was “the 28 INTRODUCTION

rst revolution of the twenty-rst century.”ññ Forrest Hylton and Sinclair omson wrote, “If Latin America has been the site of the most radical opposition to neo-liberal restructuring in the last ve years [–] Bolivia has been its insurrectionary frontline.”ñú James Dunkerley, chronicler of the Bolivian Revolution, said of Bolivia in the period –: “A revolution is widely felt to be underway. Many . . . want it to succeed.”ñû Nevertheless, Dunkerley points out that Bolivia does not satisfy strict social science denitions of revolution. He quotes this well-known formulation by eda Skocpol:

Social Revolutions are rapid, basic transformations of a society’s state and class structure; and they are accompanied and in part carried through by class-based revolts from below.ñü

e same could be said of the Ecuadorian uprisings. In both cases the degree of “societal social change” is certainly less than in the communist revolutions of the twentieth century and the liberal revolutions of the eighteenth century, on which Skocpol bases her denition. At this writing, Evo Morales’s “democratic and cultural revolution” appears to be a program of social democratic reforms combined with a modest expansion of the state sector and some state initiated decolonization. e much heralded “nationalization” of the hydrocarbon sector amounted to a renegotiation of royalties more favorable to the state, and the “agrarian revolution” promised for the countryside has yet to materialize. e owners of the means of production still own them and their workers work just as before. Much the same is true in Ecuador, where, with the exception of a brief moment, the indigenous rebels never took power. Many of the characteristics of twentieth-century revolutions in general and the Cuban and Sandinista Revolutions in Latin America, in particular, are absent. ere is no Leninist vanguard party, no armed seizure of power, no destruction of old state apparatus including the military, no nationalization, no revolutionary land reform, no proletarian rising. e peasant class in both nations did revolt but under the wiphala, the rainbow banner of indigeneity, not the red äag of class struggle. When the indigenous rebels in Bolivia took power, they did so by entirely constitutional means, and, with the exception of the January coup, in Ecuador as well. eir weapons were mass marches and road blockades, the latter of which became the signature form of indigenous protest much as street barricades became the symbol of nineteenth-century Paris rebellions. Without these mass mobilizations, Evo Morales would not MODERNITY, I NDIGENEITY, AND R EVOLUTION 29 have assumed power and CONAIE would have lost its most eective weapon. But Evo Morales was elected (and reelected) president through reasonably free and fair elections and the same was true of Pachakutik in Ecuador. On the other hand, at a deeper level, things have changed profoundly. Arturo Escobar refers to the uprisings as “ontological struggles” in which the “dualis- tic” logic of liberal, capitalist modernity is challenged by the “relational” logic of indigenous cultures emphasizing community and harmony with nature.ñý Boaventura de Sousa Santos refers to a new “epistemology of the South” in Ecuador that will lead to the emergence of a new plurinational state based on respect for indigenous cultures.ñÿ Whatever the terminology, it is clear that both see profound change at the deepest philosophical level as a dening feature of the Andean uprisings. At this level the changes in Ecuador and Bolivia are at least as profound as those in classical revolutions and perhaps more so. ey represent a sharp break not only with Western modernity but also with traditional indigenous cosmology while mixing elements of both. Elsewhere I have argued that too much attention has been given to purely structural factors in the study of revolution and that what makes the classic revolutions revolutionary is change at the deep philosophical level pointed to by Escobar and de Sousa Santos. I have proposed a new view of revolution to emphasize such changes.

A revolution is a rapid and fundamental change in the categories that order social life and consciousness, the metaphysical assumptions on which these categories are based, and the power relations in which they are expressed as a result of widespread popular acceptance of a utopian alternative to the current social order.ú~

is denition is intended to remedy the structural overemphasis in many sociological denitions of revolution, including my own.úì In fact, most sociological denitions, like Skocpol’s at the beginning of this section, do not include any mention of the cultural sphere, let alone the deeper metaphysical issues raised by my denition as well as those of Escobar and de Sousa Santos. Yet as I demonstrated, these issues are fundamental to the understanding of what makes revolutions revolutionary.úï My denition emphasizes not only these dimensions but also the utopian dreams that are the driving force of revolutionary action. Structural change in my denition is condensed to “power relations” in part to emphasize the deeper cultural issues. 30 INTRODUCTION

In philosophy, metaphysics includes both ontology and epistemology. erefore Escobar, de Sousa Santos, and I are all pointing to the same dimension of indigenous revolution. To avoid philosophical discussions that are beyond my disciplinary competence and to simplify the presentation, I will adapt Pierre Bourdieu’s terminology of “symbolic revolution” to refer to this dimension. Bourdieu distinguishes between political revolution, emphasized by Skocpol and other traditional denitions, and what he calls “symbolic revolution”: “Pro- found transformations of styles and thought of life, and, more particularly, of the whole symbolic dimension of everyday existence.”úð For Bourdieu, “political revolution nds itself only in the symbolic revolution that makes it exist fully . . . to think itself in its truth, that is, as unprecedented, unthinkable and unnameable.”úñ is dimension is notably lacking from Skocpol’s structural denition. Without it “the schemes with which one thinks the world overturned are still the product of the world to be overturned.”úú Indigeneity provided the new scheme with which thinking the unthinkable would become practical and turning the political world upside down possible. My denition of revolution was based not on the indigenous movement but on descriptions of symbolic change by leading authorities on the American, French, and Cuban revolutions as well as my eld experience in Central Amer- ica during the long decade of revolution, –. It is broad enough to include the classic revolutions studied by Skocpol but also includes examples such as the socialist revolution of Salvador Allende in Chile (–) that achieved power by entirely democratic means (and paid the price). eoretically, then, revolutions can occur “without violence, class conäict, seizures of state power.”úû e Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua tried to combine guerrilla warfare and democratic elections, to its ultimate undoing. e Sandinista Revolution may have marked the end of the era of armed struggle in the pursuit of radical change inspired by the Cuban Revolution. Remarkably, the symbolic revolutionaries in the Andean nations rejected armed struggle and pursued their objectives through mass mobilizations and democratic elections. Democracy, including the Western liberal form as well as participatory democracy, was a central element of their ideology and practice. Democracy in Ecuador was initially a limited elite project introduced after a long period of military rule. After the overthrow of Abdalá Bucaram in , popular movements were able to overthrow presidents and demand a popular democracy. In Bolivia the transition to democracy in was led by popular forces, particularly the Aymara peasantry. Democracy was therefore linked MODERNITY, I NDIGENEITY, AND R EVOLUTION 31 to popular struggle in both countries. Among the coca producers in Bolivia, human rights and democracy became instruments of survival against forced coca eradication. In the Bolivian elections, indigenous people for the rst time demonstrated their willingness to vote for an indigenous candidate for president. In the coca growers, with support from the indigenous peasantry, founded their own political party to contest democratic elections. In only ten years this party assumed national power through free elections. e indigenous movement founded its own political party in but had a much more mixed experience. Still, democracy was, as Rafael Archondo argues for Bolivia, in the DNA of the indigenous movements in both countries.úü ey were symbolic radicals but democratic reformers. e Ecuadorian and Bolivian uprisings, –, were a new form of revolution, a twenty-rst-century revolution, that combined a profound symbolic revolution with massive but largely peaceful protests leading not to an armed insurrection but to constitutional and democratic transfers of power. Indigenous revolution, like its classical predecessors, was inspired by utopian visions that found wide popular support. e symbolic revolution generated concepts that do not t easily either in Western modernity or the traditional Andean or Ama- zonian thought. e particular symbolic genius of the revolutionaries was to recognize a deep conceptual core of communalism in both traditional Andean thought and popular socialism. e result was a revolutionary ideology I call “indigenous socialism,” which sparked massive mobilizations in both countries. Readers in the Global North, excepting specialists and indigenous peoples, must keep in mind that although these concepts may appear similar to northern ones, they are not the same. To understand what these people say to us in these interviews is to experience a kind of symbolic revolution of our own. e concept of “revolution” itself, with its images of linear temporal progress, is a Western notion. e indigenous peoples in Ecuador and Bolivia use the Kichwa and Aymara term pachakuti(k) in its place. As was noted in chapter , this word can be translated as “the world turned upside down”—as a cosmic transformation between one world and another in Inca history. As Pachakutik party founder Fernando Buendia put it:

Pachakutik is an Andean myth signifying the (re)turn to old and new times. And in Andean mythology there are historical epochs: the epoch before the European invasion, which is considered a moment of harmony; the epoch of European invasion, which is considered a 32 INTRODUCTION

moment of suering and anguish; and a new epoch, which is considered a return to harmony, but in a new situation. Pachakutik is the moment of transition.úý

Pachakutik ts uneasily into the Western notion based on linear time, the separation between nature and culture, and the distinction between the spiritual and the material. It is both a return to a previous era and a turn to a new one. It shakes the cosmos as well as human social organization. It is a revolution in spirituality and consciousness, not simply politics. Pachakutik is in itself a symbolic revolution not only through the process it describes but in the very notion of “revolution” itself. e symbolic revolution and the utopian dreams it inspired were in turn a consequence of the political conäict between indigeneity and modernity as written by the Hispanic nation-states in both countries. e imposition of modernity in the form of a putative liberal democracy and individual capitalist property relations had the unintended eect of intensifying the experience of racism and threatening the very existence of indigenous society. Indigeneity as a political category was an outcome of this “hypocritical modernity,” as Zamosc called it, which proclaimed the virtues of modernity while to a large extent withholding their benets from indigenous people as long as they remained indigenous. As Esteban Ticona perceptively observed for the case of the Boliv- ian Aymara, to survive it was necessary to incorporate the notion that

“you will cease to be discriminated against when you cease to be Indian,” [but] the notion of liberal equality became an unfullled promise that nally led to radical Indian positions, as if to say “treat us as Indian or stop governing us” or “one day we will be real citizens.” ere is no middle way, “that is neither the one nor the other,” and that many times signies a total alienation of the indigenous.úÿ

In Ecuador the pressures were the same, but such extreme positions were less common because the state remained open to negotiations in a way that the Bolivian state never was. e crisis of modernity in both countries opened a breach in the symbolic as well as the political order, generating new symbolic categories that ultimately combined into a new utopian vision. e chapters that follow are organized by symbolic revolutionary categories and by region. To a remarkable degree the associational ecologies of the dierent MODERNITY, I NDIGENEITY, AND R EVOLUTION 33 regions correspond to particular categories of the emerging utopian vision. In Ecuador the fundamental regional division is between the horticultural and foraging societies in the Amazon (see chapter ) and the caste division of the landed estate in the Andes (see chapter ). e key category of Ecuadorian indigenous organizing, the nation, and its integral components, the “plurinational” and the “intercultural,” developed rst in the Amazon but then spread to the Andes so that these concepts appear in all the Ecuadorian interviews. e Amazon also developed the notion of the “living jungle” peculiar to its own region. Each chapter contains an introduction to organizing in the region and a theoretical discussion of these concepts. But ultimately these concepts are dened by their use in political practice, and the interviews ultimately dene them in ways that are unique to each leader but common to the interviews of a particular region. Representative interviews appear in each empirical chapter. Chapter , on the Andean leaders of ECUARUNARI, introduces the “communal” vision of the leaders and the related concept of sumak kawsay (living well). Neither concept means what it seems to mean in English translation. Once again the best way to understand the meanings of these concepts in political practice is to read the interviews. e leaders from the Andes are deeply committed to the concepts of nation, the plurinational and the intercultural, just as those from the Amazon, but in the Andes there is in fact no “living jungle.” e third Ecuadorian chapter, chapter , collects interviews from elected oßce holders of the Ecuadorian indigenous movement’s political party, Pachakutik. Like all Ecuadorian interviewees, they are rmly committed to the ideas of nation, the plurinational and the intercultural. All are from the Andes, although the secretary of the party, Rafael Antuni, is a Shuar from the Amazon (his interview is included in chapter ). But the elected oßcials have clear-cut models of economic development, which appear to be a kind of indigenous Jeersonian- ism although they are concerned with the development of indigenous nations rather than individuals. Nevertheless, they could also appeal to nonindigenous peasants widening their electoral constituencies. e nation, the plurinational, and the intercultural, are found in all the Ecua- dorian interviews. ey are also the building blocks of the fourteen nations and eighteen peoples oßcially recognized by CONAIE, even if the Andes organization is, in fact, based on the local community and regional and provincial organizations. Indeed, the communal vision, based in part on an imagined indigenous community, ts their situation better than the nations and peoples concept borrowed from the Amazon. It is important to keep in mind that in 34 INTRODUCTION

Ecuador the vanguard of indigenous organizing was in the Amazon among the Shuar nation, not among the millions of Kichwa in the Andes, who are divided into the twelve peoples based on regional cultures. In its theory, the Ecuadorian movement is composed of a collection of corporate bodies called “nations and peoples.” e Shuar and Huaorani, along with twelve other largely Amazonian cultures, are “nations,” and the Otavaleños and Saraguros and sixteen other Andean regional cultures are all dierent “peoples” even though they are all Kichwa in language and culture. is vision of indigeneity based on nations and peoples is distinctly dierent from the Bolivian concept of indigeneity, which brings together individual indigenous persons regardless of their nation while recognizing the thirty-six nations that make up the Bolivian indigenous community. In Ecuador the indigenous movement is made of collectivities called nations and peoples; in Bolivia it is made of individuals of dierent nations and peoples. ese dierent kinds of indigeneity are crucial in understanding the dierences between the outcomes of indigenous revolution in the two countries. In Bolivia the regional division that counts is between the Andean peoples organized after into traditional kinship and community units, the ayllu, and the people of the transition zone between the eastern slope of the Andes and the Bolivian Amazon, a semitropical and tropical region of deep river valleys and intense and varied vegetation. e Andean Aymara people, heirs of pre- Incan kingdoms, were the key actors in the initial phases of the Bolivian uprisings. ey were led by their Malku (traditional leader) Felipe Quispe from his base in Achacachi in La Paz Province. Quispe and his close comrade-in-arms Eugenio Rojas (mayor of Achacachi at the time of the interviews) espoused an ultraradical form of Aymara “Indianism” (as it is called in Bolivia) derived ultimately from the immensely inäuential work of Fausto Reinaga in his book La revolución india. Quispe called for a return of the Aymara province of Qullasuyu in the Incan Empire and the establishment of an autonomous Aymara state. But Quispe was no Western nationalist. His idea of the Aymara nation included governance by traditional Aymara community forms and hierarchies; his ideal economy was a kind of primitive communalism neither capitalist nor socialist, as his interview in chapter makes clear. He had no place for any of the other indigenous peoples of Bolivia. It was not clear what would happen to assimilated indigenous people or Euro-Bolivians. Quispe was both a symbolic and a political revolutionary. His Qullasuyu utopia bore little resemblance to any Western notion. His political program included the seizure of the Aymara MODERNITY, I NDIGENEITY, AND R EVOLUTION 35 areas of Bolivia and adjoining Aymara areas of Peru and Chile by force of arms if necessary (he began his career as a guerilla ghter). But he lacked any explicit political program for turning the Aymara areas of republican Bolivia (to say nothing of adjoining areas of Peru and Chile) into Qullasuyu and, after the defeat of his tiny guerrilla army, lacked the force to do so. By the revolution had left him behind. It was the transition zone that produced the symbolic revolutionaries that would eventually take power through democratic elections (see chapter ). e transition zone was ideally suited for the production of coca leaves. Coca had been cultivated for thousands of years, especially in the northern La Paz province called the “Yungas” (from the Aymara for warm earth). Coca is legal in Bolivia and is widely used by millions of Bolivians, especially by poor workers and farmers. Coca, an integral part of indigenous culture, is used on ceremonial occasions such as the blessing of a new house. Its everyday use is similar to coee in the United States. It has little if any euphoric eects. From the point of view of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) at the height of the war on drugs, however, coca served only one function—as a raw material for the production of cocaine. e United States undertook an ill-fated mission to end cocaine (particularly crack cocaine) use in New York and Chicago by attacking the impover- ished peasants who grew coca in Bolivia. Coca eradication through force of arms focused particularly on a new area of production in the transition zone, the Chapare region of Cochabamba Province. In an instant peaceful farmers producing a legal crop were transformed into criminal outlaws, drug dealers, and “narco-terrorists.” In fact, this “satanization” of coca was a chief reason for resistance according to coca growers’ union leaders (see chapter ). Having sowed the wind, the DEA reaped the whirlwind. Forty thousand coca growers in the Chapare, led by union leader Evo Morales, engaged in militant protests and eventually formed their own political party, MAS, which swept to power in . But the symbolic revolution came before the political revolution. In a remarkable symbolic transformation, the despised “narcotic” became a symbol of national pride, resistance to U.S. imperialism, human rights, and, above all, of indigeneity. e constitution enshrines the “sacred leaf ” as a part of the national culture and national patrimony. e DEA is long gone. e Bolivians are allying themselves with the Chinese. All this and more was accomplished by the revolutionary symbolism of the sacred leaf. 36 INTRODUCTION

Political parties are, by denition, coalitions. At its founding in , the MAS was a coalition of the coca producers; the CSUTCB, which the coca growers dominated; the Federación Nacional de Mujeres Campesinas de Bolivia–Bartolina Sisa (FNMCB-BS, National Federation of Bolivian Peasant Women–Bartolina Sisa); and the Confederación Sindical de Colonizadores de Bolivia (CSCB, Union Federation of Bolivian Colonizers), who later named themselves “intercultural communities.” Strongly unionist and peasantist, these unions nevertheless contained images of symbolic revolution. Popular understandings of the gures of Che Guevara and Túpac Katari ran throughout the interviews. Guevara became a symbol of anti-imperialist struggle on behalf of the poor and oppressed; Katari became a symbol of indigenous rebellion against Spanish colonialism and Hispanic neocolonialism. e MAS-allied unions were symbolic revolutionaries. e left had enormous historical inäuence in Bolivia. Early in the MAS party’s existence, nonindigenous intellectuals played important roles in the party’s electoral lists. At the time of the interviews, two former communist intellectuals held the position of MAS delegation leader in both the national senate and the national assembly. Both of them saw a merging of socialism and Andean Amazonian indigenism, later called “communitarian socialism,” as the heart of the party’s discourse. In contrast, two members of the immensely inäuen- tial Grupo Comuna (Commune Group), whose best-known member is MAS vice president Álvaro García Linera, advocated a much more radical vision of indigenous autonomy that in some ways resembles the Ecuadorian concept of nation. In the end Comuna broke up. e communitarian socialism of the MAS legislative leaders and former communists drawing on two symbolically radical traditions, of Marxism and Indianism, carried the day. e symbolic revolutionaries of the indigenous movement in Ecuador and Bolivia have turned the world upside down by challenging the fundamental categories of modernity. Indigeneity per se is a challenge to modernity. Even Evo Morales’s “communitarian socialism” acknowledges the Andean indigenous community as its inspiration and Túpac Katari as well as Che Guevara as its national heroes. e Andean Earth goddess Pachamama became a frequent theme in Morales’s speeches on the environment. Álvaro García Lin- era’s dream was to merge Marxism and indigeneity into a single ideology. e Ecuadorian leaders unanimously remain committed to a plurinational state in which “nations and peoples” will have direct representation, and both republics have renamed themselves “plurinational states.” e indigenous visions of MODERNITY, I NDIGENEITY, AND R EVOLUTION 37 intercultural community and harmony with nature deconstruct such fundamental dualisms of modernity as individual and society, and nature and culture. ey imagine a utopian alternative to the current social order. Or perhaps as the late Fernando Coronil has suggested, the distinction between reform and revolution has lost much of its meaning.û~ What was emerging at the turn of the twenty-rst century in the Andean nations was a new form of democratic revolution merging the symbolic radicalism of the great twentieth- and eighteenth-century revolutions with the worldwide transition to democracy in the late twentieth century. When , largely Aymara demonstrators reached the center of La Paz, they formed a ring around the presidential palace but they did not storm it. CONAIE under its then president Antonio Vargas did seize power in coalition with the military, but the organization quickly returned to electoral politics to achieve its greatest inäuence. In fact, those interviewed rarely spoke in twentieth-century terms of revolution. e preferred term was social transformation in Ecuador and process of change or democratic and cultural revolution in Bolivia. In the chapters that follow, the leaders of this great transformation reveal their own views of the process.

THE NATION, THE LIVING JUNGLE, AND THE COMMUNAL VISION IN ECUADOR

1 THE NATION AND THE LIVING JUNGLE IN THE AMAZON

Interviews with Ampam Karakras, Rafael Antuni, and Marlon Santi

HE AMAZONIAN region of Ecuador (map ) exerts a role in Ecuadorian indigenous politics out of all proportion to its small indigenous popu- Tlation. e Amazon was the site of the rst indigenous organization in Ecuador and in all of Latin America—the Shuar Federation, founded in . Only in the Ecuadorian Amazon have indigenous groups been able to form a national coalition with highland groups. CONFENIAE was a key player in promoting a national indigenous organization, identity, and ideology, and an Ama- zonian was the rst president of CONAIE. Ampam Karakras, a Shuar from the Amazon interviewed for this book, is one of the leading theorists of the national movement’s core concept, “nationality.” Because almost all Ecuadorian oil deposits are located in the Amazon, it has been the center of Ecuadorian indigenous opposition, particularly legal opposition, to oil industry expansion. In distinct contrast to the marginal role of Amazonian groups in the Bolivian MAS, the CONFENIAE has been in the vanguard of indigenous organization in Ecuador.ì is section includes three interviews with national-level indigenous leaders from the Amazon’s two largest Amazonian indigenous nationalities, the Ama- zonian Kichwa (, in the s) (Marlon Santi), and the Amazonian Shuar ( ,) (Ampam Karakras and Rafael Antuni). ese two indigenous groups supply most of the leadership of indigenous organizations at both the regional and national level, and the Shuar in particular have been the leading force in 42 CHAPTER 1

Amazonian indigenous organization. e other smaller Amazonian indigenous groups—the Cofán (); the Siona-Secoya (); the Huaorani (,); the Achuar, closely related to the Shuar (); and the Shiwiar (,)—are all formally represented in CONFENIAE and sometimes play an important role in indigenous and even international politics but are not prominent among national leaders like those interviewed.ï Initial organization in the Amazon took place among the Shuar and the Amazonian Kichwa, followed later by the other groups.

MAP 1. Ecuador political divisions: highest concentrations of Highland Kichwa, Low- land Kichwa, and Shuar indigenous peoples by province. Amazonian provinces (north to south): Sucumbíos, Napo, Orellana, Pastaza, Morono Santiago, Zamora-Chinchipe. Sierra provinces (north to south): Carchi, Imbabura, Pichincha, Cotopaxi, Tungurahua, Bolivar, Chimborazo, Cañar, Azuay, Loja. Data from Walter Fernández, Las cifras del pueblo indígena: Una mirada desde el Censo de Población y Vivienda (Quito: Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Censos, ). Map adapted from https:// d -maps .com/ m/ america/ equateur/ equateur .pdf. THE N ATION AND THE L IVING JUNGLE IN THE AMAZON 43

THE RISE OF THE SHUAR FEDERATION

In the Amazonian indigenous group the Shuar, aided by the Catholic Sale- sian Order, formed what would come to be called the Federación Interprovincial de Centros Shuar (FICSH, Interprovincial Federation of Shuar Centers) or, more commonly, the Shuar Federation. e federation became the nucleus and prototype for indigenous organization throughout Ecuador. In a remarkably short period of time, the Shuar moved from a decentralized, egalitarian society of dispersed homesteads without an authority beyond a local family head and divided by intense internal feuding to a hierarchical, administratively centralized, federated structure with democratically elected leaders. Most accounts of the rise of the Shuar Federation rightly emphasize the role of the Salesian mission, granted administrative authority over Shuar lands in the nineteenth century and active through most of the twentieth.ð After a half century of eorts at the beginning of the twentieth century to extinguish Shuar culture and religion as the work of the devil, in the s the Salesians made an abrupt about-face. According to the new doctrine of “inculturation” emanating from the Vatican after the sea change of the Second Vatican Council (–), they attempted to nd and reinforce elements of indigenous culture that contained the seeds of Catholic doctrine. In eect the Salesians became the chief defenders of an approved version of Shuar society and culture.ñ e Shuar Federation was founded and initially led by the Salesian missionary Father Juan Shutka, who took on the role of a traditional big man in Shuar society. e Shuar eventually broke with the missionaries, and Shuar as well as other Ecuadorian indigenous leaders interviewed for this book emphasize the autonomy and independence of the currently exclusively indigenous leadership, even to the extent of denying or minimizing the Salesians’ early role. Not only did the Salesians found the federation; they were instrumental in bringing about cultural changes that made the federation possible and created a Shuar leadership cadre that would eventually displace them. e Salesians founded mission boarding schools to take the younger generation out of the sinful Shuar culture and indoctrinate them in Catholic teaching and Euro- pean culture. In addition to their studies, students were required to contribute unpaid labor to Salesian economic enterprises. Almost universally the students described the experience as one of “slavery.” ey also said, however, that the most valuable thing they had learned at the school was the Spanish language.ú Inadvertently the Salesians had created an alienated cadre of future leaders 44 CHAPTER 1 who had mastered the basic tools, including the Spanish language, to function in contemporary Hispanic society. All the initial indigenous leadership of the federation were graduates of mission schools. In order to gain greater control over the Shuar’s displaced family groups, extinguish feuding, and facilitate evangelization, the Salesians encouraged the Shuar to move to nucleated settlements called “centers” organized around a chapel and central square. Local trustees and councils were chosen and appointed by the Salesians, creating a political structure that would form the basic building blocks of the Shuar Federation. Locally inäuential family groups frequently formed the core of these centers, easing the transition from the old social structure to the new.û At the same time the pacication of Shuar territory by missionaries aided by the Ecuadorian military undermined the basis of power and inäuence in the traditional system—skill at killing. As late as the s federation oßcials and traditional leaders were still competing for inäuence and authority by adopting traditional Shuar oratory to their diverse leadership principles. For the federation oßcials, this meant redening Shuar values in a new context and promoting a new basis for legitimate leadership.ü Although the Salesians helped create the conditions that made the Shuar Federation possible and served as a catalyst for the federation’s founding, both the traditional structure of Shuar society and the dramatic changes in that structure taking place in the s were of equal or greater importance. Long before the arrival of the Salesians, the Shuar had gained a well-deserved reputation throughout Latin America for their bellicosity and resistance to outsiders. In the Shuar had organized a revolt against the Spanish, driving them from their territory and resisting all subsequent eorts at colonization until the twentieth century. ey were and are the only indigenous population in Latin America to successfully do so. e Shuar are described by ethnographers as individualistic, egalitarian, ercely independent, and intolerant of any kind of authority, including their own.ý e traditional society lacked organized kin groups or any kind of social stratication beyond age and gender. Power, a central concept in Shuar life and cosmology, was an individual quality, not a consequence of social position, and rested on personal qualities, including, in particular, demonstrated skill at killing in internal feuds and external warfare. Feuding was endemic in traditional Shuar society, and success at killing created reservoirs of spiritual power that had to be periodically renewed in vision quests or combat.ÿ According to the distinguished ethnographer Michael Harner, successful pacication by the Salesians THE N ATION AND THE L IVING JUNGLE IN THE AMAZON 45 and the Ecuadorian military in the s therefore “fundamentally alter[ed] the nature of reality upon which much of their socio-economic structure and ideology were built.” “ ere are probably very few cultures in the history of the world,” Harner continues, “that have been so rapidly and signicantly disinte- grated by the simple introduction of centralized law and order.”ì~ Furthermore, the Ecuadorian land reform that destroyed the traditional hacienda in the Highlands opened up the Amazon to colonization from displaced Highland peasants. e reform established the Instituto Ecuatoriano de Reforma Agraria y Colonización (IERAC, Ecuadorian Institute of Agrarian Reform and Colonization), which was as much concerned with the latter as the former. Much more land was declared open to colonization than was ever distributed through land reform. e results for the Shuar were immediate. According to Harner, by , “many members of the tribe seem convinced that the eventual goal of the whites is to wipe them out in order to seize their land. . . . ere is a climate of hostility and unrest which recalls the Jívaro revolt of and the near uprising of .”ìì Despite internal feuding and intense individualism, the Shuar were, as Har- ner points out, capable of mobilizing on a larger scale for raids against external groups or for even larger mobilization against outsiders such as those of and .ìï Faced with the collapse of the traditional order and an existential threat from Highland colonists, the Shuar had good and sußcient reasons of their own for seeking a more eective form of collective organization in the Shuar Federation. e Salesians provided them with the linguistic and cultural tools, the political framework, and early leadership but the Shuar themselves pushed the initiative forward. e Shuar Federation moved decisively to stem the colonist advance, rst experimenting with cattle raising to claim legitimate individual titles to their land and then organizing collectively to successfully petition for control of much of their traditional territory and organizing regionally and locally to make the Shuar part of national consciousness. A nal observation by Harner connects the Shuar mobilization to the general argument presented here. At its root, he argues, the conäict between the Shuar and settlers was over dierent concepts of land utilization held by the Shuar and the colonists.ìð Shuar material culture was based on shifting horticulture supplemented by hunting and shing so that considerable amounts of land were returning to secondary jungle and recovering at any given time. is land, essential to Shuar subsistence and considered by the Shuar as their territory, was, from the perspective of capitalist property relations, 46 CHAPTER 1 simply unused land. e Land Reform Law declared it fallow and subject to colonization and individual claims based on proper utilization. Paradoxically, the Shuar themselves were forced to adopt to the property relations of capitalist ranching even as they continued to defend an idealized version of a horticultural and hunting society with a symbiotic relationship with what would come to be called the rain forest. Even so, recent research has indicated that Shuar ranchers maintain a greater preference for maintaining secondary forest growth on their land than highland settlers.ìñ

THE STRUGGLE CONTINUES: THE SHUAR FEDERATION AND CORREA

On September , , the bilingual Shuar teacher Bosco Wisum was killed by a shotgun blast during a CONAIE demonstration against Correa’s mining and water policies. Wisum had been director of the bilingual school in the Shuar community of Sagrado Corazón and a longtime leftist activist. Pepe Acacho, then president of the Shuar Federation and director of Radio Arutam, the Federation Radio Network, denounced the killing as a “crime of the state” and demanded indemnities for Wisum’s family. e Correa administration in turn charged Acacho with “organized terrorism” for his alleged role in organizing the demonstration and claimed Wisum had been killed by a shotgun blast from another Shuar demonstrator. e death of Bosco Wisum was a key moment in the alienation of not only the Shuar but the entire indigenous movement from the Correa administration. Along with the prosecution of other indigenous leaders on the same charge, it set the context for the interviews that follow (Ampam Karakras discusses the incident directly). e Correa administration continued to press its case against Acacho, nally obtaining a conviction in . Acacho was sentenced to twelve years in prison.ìú At the time of his sentencing, Acacho, his popularity among the Shuar undiminished by an outside threat, was an assemblyman from Morona Santiago and a candidate for president of CONAIE.

SARAYAKU, OPIP, AND THE AMAZONIAN KICHWA

In the s IERAC proposed the colonization of lands south of the Bobonaza River in the Amazonian Kichwa community of Sarayaku. e Kichwa then THE N ATION AND THE L IVING JUNGLE IN THE AMAZON 47 faced the same kind of threat that had led to the organization of the Shuar Federation a decade before. According to Andres Sirén, the indigenous deputy magistrate of Sarayaku “arranged for a representative of the Shuar Federation to come to Sarayaku to talk about the process of organization among Amazonian indigenous peoples. . . . In the Sarayaku formed their rst community organization. . . . In Sarayaku took the initiative to found . . . OPIP.”ìû Sarayaku has remained in the forefront of indigenous organization ever since achieving international renown for its struggles with the Ecuadorian state and international oil companies. Marlon Santi, whose interview appears in this section, was president of the community in when he was elected president of CONAIE. He still holds a traditional leadership position in the community. Organization began in Sarayaku and Pastaza Provinces, as it had in the Shuar lands, with conäicts with colonists over indigenous lands. But conäict intensied with the arrival of oil companies. In the American company ARCO (Atlantic Richeld Company) acquired exploration rights to , hectares of rainforest that include the lands of Sarayaku and other Kichwa communities in Pastaza Province. But eorts to initiate preliminary seismic work were blocked by community members from Sarayaku. In , in an eort to conclude an accord with the rebellious community in a single afternoon, representatives of Empresa Pública Petroecuador (State Petroleum Company of Ecuador), ARCO and its seismic survey contractor, and IERAC äew directly to Sarayaku. e community promptly blocked the airstrip and conscated the keys to the delegation’s helicopters, extending the visit (and negotiations) for twelve days. e result was a document called the “Sarayaku Accord,” which not only stopped seismic activity but, most signicantly, legalized all indigenous landholdings in the Department of Pastaza. In , however, Presi- dent Rodrigo Borja renounced the accord, arguing that it had been signed under duress. ARCO resumed operations, working through more cooperative communities.ìü Sarayaku remained in the forefront of the indigenous resistance, leading the march from the Amazon to Quito. In the struggle between Sarayaku and petroleum exploration resumed when Ecuador granted a , hectare concession to the Argentine rm Compañía General de Combustibles (CGC, General Fuel Company). Sixty-ve percent of the concession was within the territory of Sarayaku. After several years of eorts to overcome indigenous resistance, the company nally initiated seismic activities in . Once again Saray- aku community members physically blocked the seismic teams in the forest. 48 CHAPTER 1

In – the Ecuadorian military intervened directly in Sarayaku territory in defense of the company. Nevertheless, CGC withdrew in February , leaving a large quantity of buried explosives in Sarayaku territory. e conäict drew the attention of human rights groups both national and international. Amnesty International took up the cause of Sarayaku and the Human Rights Commission of the National Congress visited the community. In May an international human rights group, the Center for Economic and Social Rights, presented the community’s position to the Inter-American Court on Human Rights (IACHR), initiating almost a decade of litigation. e presentation of Sarayaku’s complaint to the IACHR in San José, Costa Rica, resulted in a resounding and precedent-setting victory for Sarayaku on June , .ìý In some respects the case broke new ground. For the rst time the court ruled that the obligation to consult with indigenous communities concerning development processes on their traditional territories was a general principle of international law. e court also stated that this consultation was an obligation of the state and could not be delegated to third parties like corporations. Finally, the court called for genuine dialogue in good faith with the goal of reaching a consensus. In other respects, however, the court stepped back from earlier rulings that had seemed to imply a right to free, prior, informed consent rather than simply consultation, even if conducted in good faith. e dierence is critical because even a consultation aimed at achieving consensus can fail to recognize the rights of indigenous people if no consensus can be reached and development proceeds. Consent would give eective veto power to indigenous communities and is likely to be opposed by most nation-states. At this writing, the issue remains unresolved. Nevertheless, an indigenous community of only , persons had managed to place the questions squarely on the agenda for the entire inter-American system (including the United States) and required a modern nation-state to live up to its obligations under international law. As part of the settlement, on October , , President Rafael Correa’s minister of justice, Ledy Zúñiga Rocha, äew to Sarayaku and apologized in person to the community.ìÿ Why Sarayaku? e causes of the rise of the Shuar Federation have been the object of considerable scholarly attention, but the same cannot be said of Sarayaku, despite a growing literature on the community. Nevertheless, a number of possible causal factors can be inferred from the literature. First, Sarayaku is located in one of just ten “global hotspots” that combine abundant biological diversity with intense ecological threat. e colonization frontier is just thirty- ve kilometers away. Yet its , hectares support one of the most biodiverse THE N ATION AND THE L IVING JUNGLE IN THE AMAZON 49 and undisturbed areas of Amazon forest in Ecuador. e forest extends all the way to the Peruvian border. ere is still sußcient land to support a traditional Amazonian subsistence economy of shifting horticulture supplemented by hunting and shing and the social and cultural structures that go with it. On the other hand, it is close enough to Puyo to make contact with the outside possible, if not easy. It is also close enough to the Shuar territory to make indigenous organizing inäuences possible.ï~ Second, Sarayaku was not subject to the rst wave of petroleum development initiated by Texaco in the north. e initial ARCO concession was granted twenty years after Texaco struck oil in the north. In the meantime a dense network of local, regional, and national indigenous organizations had developed. When ARCO and later CGC arrived on the scene, they were faced with the center of OPIP organization rather than the smaller unorganized people of the Ecuadorian north. e Sarayaku leadership was well aware of the northern experience and wanted to ensure that it did not happen to them. By , at the time of the initial CGC concession, the community had already marched to Quito and obtained titles to its lands, acquiring both resources and organizational experience. One of the largest Amazonian Kichwa communities, Saray- aku was also one of the best organized. History as well as location helps explain the success of Sarayaku. Finally, in the realm of less easily quantied explanations lies the community’s long-term reputation as a place of independent and freedom-loving people. Anders Sirén reports the rubber boom never led to the forced servitude that emerged in other places in the Amazon. According to Sirén, the Sarayaku worked when they wanted to and even assaulted abusive labor contractors.ïì Like the Shuar, but without their reputation for bellicosity, the Kichwa of Saray- aku had always been dißcult to subject to outside control. Also like the Shuar, the Sarayaku Kichwa were “civilized” by Catholic missionaries, in this case for the most part by the Dominicans, who, unlike the Salesians, were opposed to independent organization by the Kichwa. is did not stop the Kichwas from nding other sources of support in the previously organized Shuar communities.

NATIONALITY AND TERRITORY

e Shuar, the Kichwa, and other Amazonian peoples organized rst on the basis of ethnicity even when they later organized into provincial or regional 50 CHAPTER 1 associations. e prototype was the Shuar Federation itself, but even OPIP linked together Kichwa, Shiwiar, and Achuar ethnicities in a single organization. In CONFENIAE today the constituent units are overwhelmingly single ethnicities, many of whom, like the Shuar and the Kichwa, have previously maintained distant if not actively hostile relations. e lowland organizations were therefore from the beginning ethnic in orientation. e preferred language in the Amazon was “nationalities” to recognize the distinct languages, cultures, and histories that made up each Amazonian people and to include recognition of the demands for autonomy within the Ecuadorian nation-state. As Shuar intellectual Ampam Karakras observed in a widely inäuential article, “We do not propose state autonomy, we want the unity of the dierent Indian peoples and the Spanish-speaking nation, but within this unity we demand space in order to develop our essential national elements.”ïï Nationality and later plurinationality became foundational concepts not only in the Amazon but in CONAIE itself. All those interviewed from Ecuador spoke of the nation and the plurinational as fundamental demands of the indigenous movement. It should not be assumed that nationality and plurinationality are expressions of the familiar European forms of ethnic nationalism. From the beginning the Amazonians were faced with a situation of uniting many distinct nations in a single organization. Nor did they request a separate nation-state. ey remained Shuar or Kichwa and Ecuadorian. e exact degree of political autonomy and inclusion remains ambiguous. In the interviews it was dißcult to pin down exactly which state functions would be devolved to internal “nationalities,” although no one envisioned a separate military force or foreign policy, and all wanted to have the rights and responsibilities of Ecuadorian citizens. e most common demands were to include national representatives in government administrative and legislative bodies, and to recognize indigenous systems of justice. Demands for “territory” were inherent in the idea of nationality. Although the Shuar had originally attempted to le land claims according to the laws of the agrarian reform, OPIP began shifting the discussion from land to territory. As Deborah Yashar points out, “ ey [OPIP] proclaimed that independent of the agrarian reform and colonization and independent of ‘working the land’ the indigenous communities had a right to their territory.”ïð is right derived from historical use and occupation of the land. e Amazon march to Quito demanded “territory,” not “land.” is territorial control implied some degree of administrative autonomy as well as economic rights, and the exact nature of that THE N ATION AND THE L IVING JUNGLE IN THE AMAZON 51 control and those rights is still a matter of dispute. So the idea of nation includes language, culture, history, and territory. OPIP’s concept of territory was eventually adopted by CONAIE and applied to the Sierra as well as the Amazon. e Amazon as a whole was responsible for the development of the concept of “nation” and the related notions of the plurinational state and interculturality. e interviews in this chapter include one with Ampam Karakras, one of the principal theorists of the concept. Although Ampam Karakras is the originator of the concept, it is most clearly explained by Mónica Chuji, a Sarayaku Kichwa.

Yes we [Amazonian Kichwa] are a nation. Why? Because we are historical entities, because we have a historical process, because we have a language we have sustained through history, because we have a historically inherited space, because we have regulated judicial structures, we have customs, and we have been exercising our self-determination in accord with our own uses. Despite being nations we were completely erased from the map.ïñ

Students of European nationalism will immediately note that this is a denition of “ethnic nationalism,” where state and culture are fused, not “civic nationalism,” in which individuals are considered citizens based on constitutionally determined universal principles. As Chuji also notes, this concept was developed by “compañeros” who had studied in the Soviet Union and reäects communist rather than liberal thinking on nationality.ïú e resemblance between Chu- ji’s denition and Stalin’s famous answer to the question “What is a nation?” is striking. According to Stalin, “A nation is a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological makeup manifested in a common culture.”ïû e core concept in the indigenous movement in Ecuador is not “indigenous” at all but an import from Marxism, if not Western thought more generally. It diers, however, from Max Weber’s classic denition of a nation as a “community of sentiment that would adequately manifest itself in a state of its own.”ïü None of those interviewed in Ecuador wanted a separate state for their own cultural community or for any cultural community. e fusion of state and nation (they are synonyms, says Karakras) is inherent in the Ecuadorian nation’s denition of itself as revealed, for example, in this notorious quotation from a speech by modernizing president Guillermo Rodríguez Lara in : “ ere is no more Indian problem. We become white when we accept the goals 52 CHAPTER 1 of the national culture.”ïý If indigenous notions fused nation and state, it was not surprising as a reaction to the monoethnicity of the Ecuadorian state—a monoethnicity that excluded them. ey also wanted more than the liberal state oered—representations as collectivities, not simply as individuals, as Ampam Karakras argues. Cultures should be treated with equal respect and inequality between cultures rejected even if it is between the culture of the Andes and the diverse cultures of the Amazon, as Rafael Antuni points out in his interview in this chapter. e building blocks are individual cultural communities like the Shuar—not even, as Karakras argues, the indigenous. e ideas of nation, the plurinational state and the intercultural, deconstruct liberal notions of individuality, the mixed-race Latin American state, and, centrally, core notions of race: the “Shuar” nation, not the “Indians.” e concept of “nation” in Ecuadorian indigenous thought cannot be fully understood without considering its derivatives plurinational and intercultural. According to CONAIE:

e plurinational proposes unity in diversity, respect, reciprocity and solidarity among the original nations and peoples that make up Ecua- dor, denes the rights of the original nations to their territories, internal political-administrative autonomy, which is to say to administer their own processes of economic, social, cultural, scientic and technological development; and at the same time to deepen democracy.ïÿ

According to Ampam Karakras, speaking for CONAIE, there are fourteen indigenous nations and eighteen peoples in Ecuador. Each would be guaranteed the right to territorial and communitarian administration but only within the existing unitary nation-state of Ecuador. In contrast to European ethnic nationalism, there will be no eort to destroy the Hispanic Ecuadorian state and substitute a Kichwa state or a Shuar state. ere will be no ethnic cleansing. Instead, the nations and peoples excluded from the uninational Hispanic state of Ecuador will be given limited administrative rights within their territories and collective rights within the administration of the Ecuadorian state. e indigenous want to join the Ecuadorian state, not destroy it. In both Ecua- dor and Bolivia, the indigenous (with the notable exception of the Katarist- Indianists of Bolivia) are patriots. e proper relationship among nationalities and peoples within Ecuador and the relationship between each of them and Hispanic society is dened by THE N ATION AND THE L IVING JUNGLE IN THE AMAZON 53 the word intercultural. According to CONAIE, interculturality is “the political- ideological principle of recognition and practice of persons, communities, peoples and nations to create and live in just, symmetrical, equivalent and harmo- nious relations among the native, Afro-Ecuadorians, montubios and mestizo peoples.”ð~ So despite its origins in Western thought, this contact between modernity and indigenous organizing has created something that is far dierent from the Western understanding of nation. All cultures must be respected, none is above another, and relations must be based on mutual respect, dialogue, and coordination, especially when conäict emerges. Each culture must have autonomy within the structure of the Ecuadorian nation-state. In the age of Donald Trump, when ethnic nationalism seems to be sweeping the Western world, it is important to consider the CONAIE denitions seriously. ey suggest a radical transformation of how we in the West think concerning relations among nations and ethnic groups. As my denition of revolution states, they “alter the categories that order social life and consciousness [and the] metaphysical assumptions on which these relations are based.” ey are an image of utopia. e men and women interviewed in Ecuador are practical politicians and organizers who have experienced ethnic conäict rsthand. ey know that utopia has not arrived. But it is the utopian dream that propels revolutions forward. Plurinationality and interculturality are the stu of just such dreams.

ECOLOGY AND “THE LIVING JUNGLE”

e Amazonian interviews in this chapter contain a powerful and passionate ecological consciousness. Ecological issues are important in all interviews in Ecuador and in most in Bolivia. But they are particularly pronounced in the Amazon. Once again it is important for the reader in the Global North to keep in mind that the indigenous idea of ecology is not the same as our own, however similar it may appear. Like nation, ecology reäects a radically dierent set of social categories and metaphysical assumptions. e indigenous meaning is best captured by the term living jungle (kawsak sacha in Kichwa). According to an interview with Marlon Santi:

e living jungle is a new category of space that the indigenous people have named. ere have been categories of national parks, biologi- 54 CHAPTER 1

cal reserves, ecological corridors, but we are generating a new category with a conceptualization of our life and also as we interpret it in regard to the jungle—why it cannot enter the market, but that this jungle generates life through the present connection and for future generations.

Santi is not only a past president of CONAIE but a traditional leader in Sarayaku. He likely inäuenced this oßcial statement by the community:

KAWSAK SACHA is a living being, with consciousness, constituted by all the beings of the Jungle, from the most innitesimal to the greatest and supreme. It includes the beings of the animal, vegetable, mineral, spiritual and cosmic worlds, in intercommunication with human beings, giving them what is necessary to reanimate their psychological, physical and spiritual facets, thus restoring the energy, life and equilibrium of the original peoples.ðì

e living jungle is more than the ecology of the tropical rain forest. It is the jungle of (indigenous) beings as represented in their spiritual, physical, and emotional life. As Ampam Karakras says, a waterfall is not simply some many kilowatts of electrical power or a tourist attraction. It is a place where young Shuar men go to seek visions that will set in motion the complex spiritual economy of Shuar souls and determine the trajectory of their entire lives and, before pacication, their violent deaths. For the Shuar, building a dam is like driving a bulldozer through the Sistine Chapel. For the Shuar and other peoples of the Amazon, the living jungle is full of spiritual meaning and neither they nor their cultures could exist without it (and vice versa). e unrestricted exploitation of oil and other resources in the “living jungle” (denounced as “extractivism” in the Ecuadorian interviews) represents not only the loss of a biological patrimony but the death of their religion, culture, and ultimately themselves. Invisibility and fear of ethnocide, if not genocide, are recurring themes in the Amazonian interviews. e particular indigenous notion of the nation, the plurinational and the intercultural, are found throughout the Ecuadorian interviews, not simply in those from the Amazon. What distinguishes the Amazon, as the interviews in this section make clear, is the emerging concept of the “living jungle” (kawsak sacha) and a deep-seated fear of cultural extinction. THE N ATION AND THE L IVING JUNGLE IN THE AMAZON 55

INDIGENOUS VOICES

AMPAM KARAKRAS SHUAR: IDENTITY AND INVISIBILITY

Ampam Karakras is one of the intellectual leaders of the indigenous movement. A Shuar from the Amazon, he was educated and learned Spanish at a Salesian mission school. He was one of the rst indigenous university graduates, receiving a degree in accounting from the Universidad Central del Ecuador (Central University of Ecuador). He has been a leader and advisor to the Shuar Feder- ation, CONFENIAE, and CONAIE, and was the rst director of the World Bank–supported Project for the Development of Indigenous and Black People (PRODEPINE). He has been a consultant to the Indigenous People’s Fund and a project director for the Danish nongovernmental organization (NGO) IBIS. His article “Las nacionalidades indias y el estado ecuatoriano” begins, “My name is Ampam Karakras, a Shuar name.”ðï Indigenous culture and identity in general and Shuar culture and identity in particular have been his central intellectual focus, and he is one of the principal theorists of the concept of “nationality” in indigenous usage.

WESTERN REVOLUTION AND THE SHUAR

I’m going to speak for myself, from my own perspective. Most Latin American countries always denied the existence of the various peoples that existed before them. What has existed in recent times, in the past few decades, is the need to acknowledge that there are various identities, various cultures, and that is why Bolivia and Ecuador are plurinational states. Now, what does that mean? What do they want to get out of that? Some call it a “citizens’ revolution,” for example, in the case of Ecuador. From my perspective, citizens’ revolution is a people’s revolution. Individuals. It’s like liberalism. Like France, et cetera, et cetera [i.e., the French and other liberal revolutions recognized individual, not collective, rights]. But for us, all that are important are people’s thoughts, their ideals, dreams, and goals. ey must be accompanied by the rights of the peoples as a collective society. e current constitution acknowledges collective rights as well as individual rights. erefore we see Ecuador as a unitary state but one that has diverse identities and cultures with an equal distribution of the country’s resources and power. 56 CHAPTER 1

Power has always been concentrated in a few hands. My people, the Shuar, fought for our freedom from the Spaniards and later struggled to become visible on a national level. We want to be part of this formation of the plurinational state and intercultural society. I wonder whether or not it has to be through a revolutionary process. Does it have to be right-wing, center, left-wing? Because those are not indigenous peoples’ own visions. ey belong to Western society that brought this message of revolution. And they stole all that land throughout the American continent—because there were indigenous peoples from Canada to Argentina—and then they created new republics. So there’s a whole issue to discuss there. I’m not saying this is ideal, but we have to discuss it. Among my people, the Shuar, there may be some people who have conservative ideas. Others have center-left or left-wing ideas. What matters to me is that the Shuar people are visible, have a presence and actively participate, that others don’t talk and decide for them. In the case of Sandinismo there was a revolution and it triumphed, but there were others ghting for their own space. You know that reality better than I do, and that’s why there is the Atlantic Coast and the South Atlantic Coast [indigenous areas of Nicaragua]. ey’re still Sandinistas now with the Sandinista government but not the Sandinista revolution—that is dierent. Sandinismo almost denied the existence of indigenous peoples’ rights. Likewise, the revolution in El Salvador didn’t have indigenous people’s participation either. Black people, Indians, participated in the revolution that aimed to gain freedom and independence for Latin American countries, among them Ecuador, in the independence war. But we indigenous didn’t end up independent, because others took over power again. So that left concerns about whether we should join the revolution if it excludes the indigenous.

NATURE, THE CONSTITUTION, AND THE AMAZON

One of the positive things I see, for example, is that now the constitution denes nature as a subject of law. But this is in contradiction with mining and oil exploitation, with the development mode. So the constitution requires a new mode of development that must be considered on a global level. Preexisting indigenous peoples always say: “We have an THE N ATION AND THE L IVING JUNGLE IN THE AMAZON 57 equal relationship with nature; we don’t feel superior but rather part of nature.” erefore, if we exploit it whether we are Indian, black, white, we depend on nature; nature doesn’t depend on us. Sooner or later, we’re going to pay the consequences of overexploiting nature—one of them is global warming. at is something that goes beyond individual countries. Rivers drying, the lack of rain, or drought—that doesn’t aect only Ecuador. A polluted river äows into Peru and Brazil, or the boats that get stuck in the Amazon River because it’s drying out, or streams and glaciers that are also drying out: all these are issues that concern both industrialized countries and southern countries. Issues to do with our lifestyle and development model—there are people who produce too much, but don’t eat, but there are others who can’t eat. e world could produce enough for everyone to eat and nobody to starve, yet many people starve. And we’re gradually running out of water. All of that regardless of whether we are, as they say, Afro-Ecuadorian, indigenous, mestizo, or white. In other words, that is a problem we’re going to come up against at some point, because we have to think beyond the local and the national; we have to think on a global level, as human beings. at’s my point of view.

NATIONALITY AND NATION[STATE

For me, more or less in my view—it’s not a nished view, but I’d still like to share it. You have to listen to other points of view, but I’m going to give you my own. Nation and state have always existed as synonyms, thus the nation-state. at’s why there’s been some confusion about this. ere is the German nation-state, to give you an example, because in German society, the population, culture, and language almost match. So for me a nation-state, or national state, would be a state with a national culture. I told you at the start of the interview that the intention in Latin America was to create uniform, homogenous nations, homogenous societies. ey denied that there were Indians in Venezuela, Indians in Argentina. Here also, there were already peoples living here, peasants, and there were a few [Indians] in the Amazon; as we said before we have diverse, dierent cultures and identities. In our state there are various identities, various cultures. ere isn’t a single national culture; there are various national cultures. We actually live in an interculturality 58 CHAPTER 1 since interculturality is the relationship between dierent cultures. ere are fourteen nations or nationalities speaking dierent languages and eighteen peoples; on top of that you have to consider Afro-Ecuadorians, who don’t have a dierent language but who do have a presence and a conscience, and they’re subjects of collective rights. e same goes for the montubios [a mixed-race coastal group]. It’s not the same to talk about dialogue between dierent cultures when they are asymmetric, not homogenous, that is, unequal. ere’s also a plurinational state; there are various nations under construction. For example, nationality, for us, is related to the individual; for example, I am a Shuar. We are members of the Shuar nationality. It could be the Shuar nation but within the plurinational state. e unity of the Ecuadorian state and the diversity of national culture can only exist where there are both individual and collective rights. What is there in the United States? ere is a federal state with federal laws and states, each with their own laws. at’s how it is, more or less, but here there’s a plurinational state that ought to have a constitution, general laws, and jurisdictions, and each people and nationality should also have other laws and jurisdictions. We say, for example, that a nationality, a people, must have its own territory—not a separate territory within the plurinational state but rather like an autonomy, an autonomous regime such as is recognized in the constitution: in other words, one that is decentralized, but it is still centralized. Everything is still centralized in Quito, but gradually we aim to achieve the decentralization of power and services. Secondly, the issue of justice. ere’s ordinary justice and indigenous justice, but there is no ordinary indigenous justice, because each people and nationality has its own justice system, because they have a dierent reality; that is, it’s not unique. For us, we say there should be fourteen dierent types of justice, or justice systems. . . . It’s like that, and in any state anywhere in the world there are con- äicts, interests, and dierent points of view and modes of development. For example, the issues you point out: mining, oil, water, to name a few. ere should be a prior free and informed consultation, which is also recognized in the Constitution of Montecristo [] and in the UN Declaration [of Indigenous Rights, ], because we are subjects of collective rights, as well as individual rights, which are also acknowl- THE N ATION AND THE L IVING JUNGLE IN THE AMAZON 59 edged in the constitution. If you own a property, your home, the state has to ask your permission to enter or do something if it’s a public good, even if it’s also a private right as an individual. A collective right is also a collective territory with properties and collective rights and obligations, as well as the individual. erefore they must also be consulted. It’s complex.

CAPITALISM, SOCIALISM, AND SUSTAINABILITY

Well, in general we don’t escape the [capitalist] model. I think nowhere in the world does anybody escape the model, the existing system, for a start. e socialist model collapsed. at’s a reality. Here they talk of twenty-rst-century socialism, et cetera. If nature is not a subject of rights, if we overexploit nature then we’re only going to have money, stock exchanges, shares, currency, et cetera. But if we destroy nature we are destroying the source of everything we need for our lives. If we don’t nd a balance between using natural resources and overexploitation, the day will come when the world—not Ecuador, the world—runs out. e oceans are overshed; the earth is dug out; oil, gas, and forests are exploited. In the Amazonia they produce biofuel, soy, sugar cane, wood, cattle. If we continue applying that model, if we don’t make it sustainable, we, the human species, will at some point destroy ourselves. erefore we have to nd a basic balance; each of us needs to take responsibility, both our communities and us in the jungles, the countryside and the cities, in developing countries, as they call them, and in developed countries. If we don’t do something together, the future of humanity is uncertain—that’s the way we see it. But the economy for the sake of the economy? In the end we’re not going to eat money, as they say, but we need money to do certain things: to buy something we don’t have, to buy certain things, machinery or other things. We also think that way; we don’t want to be left behind. Our parents, our people, just as in many other cultures, ate what they produced—it’s not only an indigenous thing. ey didn’t need the money, but now we all need to look for money. Money is like a drug, we could say. It’s like a drug. It seems that without money we wouldn’t be able to do anything, but as well as money, which is necessary, we want relationships between peoples, between cultures, to preserve the earth; we 60 CHAPTER 1 wouldn’t want to desperately overexploit the earth or industrialize the earth and the environment for money, but to nd a balance, not depend on the God of money for everything. Sometimes people say, “If there’s no money, I can’t do anything.” So we’d like to nd a middle ground, and if that can be achieved within capitalism with a human face, as some people call it, or within socialism, but only if one doesn’t overexploit like in Chernobyl, for example. But I don’t know, so I don’t have a rigid position. And that’s why I was saying to you it’s not whether it’s a revolution or not but rather that the relationship of any human being in any system with life and nature should be sustainable.

RELIGION AND THE SHUAR

When America was supposedly discovered, and also after the conquest, all the existing cultures, their beliefs and spiritual aspects, their languages, etcetera were dismissed. A culture, a system, a way of life, a lifestyle were imposed, and as you well know the cross and the sword began to conquer, evangelize, and Christianize indigenous peoples. We were believed not to have a soul. So the Catholic Church has been dominant. en came evangelicals from various traditions, and there was a struggle between them all over America. And of course indigenous peoples couldn’t be left out of all of this, why? Here we say that the Summer Institute of Linguistics [Protestant] translated the Bible into other languages for the purpose of evangelizing. So as well as that, indigenous peoples are gradually claiming their right to their own spirituality. Why? eir own beliefs and values were crushed and obscured, and evangelical Catholics imposed their own beliefs instead. So just before you arrived someone gave me this [pamphlet]—the kingdom of Jehovah. I spent ve years at the boarding school. I prayed for ve years, enough to last me the rest of my lifetime, but we also had our own beliefs. We have the Arutam, which is a deity that we feel identied with. All the historical and sacred places that are recognized in the constitution should be respected. For example, a waterfall here, a waterfall in the Amazonia, in Shuar territory, should be respected and valued, because that’s where a Shuar person would go to nd his spirituality and strength. e same as a Christian person does when THE N ATION AND THE L IVING JUNGLE IN THE AMAZON 61 he goes to a church or a cathedral to pray. So we must respect that and not build a hydroelectric power plant in the name of development, because this is a dierent people with dierent beliefs; there isn’t only one set of beliefs. I say, both Catholicism and evangelical Christianity were imposed on peoples; it was a system of spiritual domination that gradually crushed the beliefs and visions of indigenous peoples. At some point we have to ght back with a spiritual vision that is not about crushing peoples’ existing spiritual beliefs and values, however we call them. So some people say to us Shuar people, “But why do you have to believe in the runas [indigenous] if you’re already a Christian, you have Jesus Christ?” More or less that’s what they say to us. But I say, “And why does the Virgin Mary have so many names? Maria Auxiliadora, Maria Purísima. I’ve heard several names.” So we believe that each people had dierent names for a superior being in whom they believed. at’s our point of view and our thinking, because for example the Spaniards, when they came to America, built their cathedral on Cuzco’s ceremonial site. And they built other sacred places. ey gradually changed, they substituted, they made what was already there invisible. We want our own deities, our beliefs, to be valued and respected too, the same as the others. Just as we respect those who go to church or have other beliefs. at is, we tolerate, value, and respect, and if one of us believes and converts to something, we don’t reject him either.

WE ARE SHUAR, NOT INDIGENOUS

Well, here there have been more or less four icons. In the Andean region Cacuango, [we have] Tránsito Amaguaña. Others in the Ama- zonia are not well known like Jumandi. e Shuar fought against their governor, who demanded gold. e Shuar rose [in ] against him and destroyed the railway tracks of Logroño. ey made the governor swallow gold, but that is less well known. We really love our freedom. We were never slaves, not even in Tulcán [a town just beyond the northernmost outpost of the Inca Empire]. We weren’t conquered, perhaps thanks to our geographical location and also our views on Inca peoples. We weren’t part of the curse they talk about. So we have a very strong awareness of our identity. You may not see us ghting 62 CHAPTER 1

in our traditional attire, but we’ve worked to preserve our language, our names, our history, our culture. We’ve strongly contributed to the process of the indigenous movement in Ecuador, even though we don’t agree on the indigenous issue. For example, you have your name, correct? I, Ampam, another Juan, and so on. We all have our names as people. Likewise, each people had their name, their own identity, which were later imposed. We, the Shuar, weren’t told that this was an imposition. e Amazonians were called reds [colorados] generally. So the Amazonians were generally called indigenous, native, aboriginals, primitive, ethnic, everything. In response to that, we said, “We’re nationalities and peoples.” at’s one of our goals—to be able to dene ourselves, as the Assembly of the First Nations in Canada say, or original peoples, as they say in Bolivia, or natives in Peru, but to decide in any case. So the term indigenous is a colonialist term from over ve hundred years ago, which must be gradually eliminated, because it’s an imposed name—Indian, indigenous, all that. It’s like perpetuating that historical role and that colonialist mentality through these colonialist terms. We can’t still say, after ve hundred years, that the Earth is the center of the universe, when we know it’s not true. India is in India because Columbus made four voyages to the Amer- icas and died without knowing he hadn’t reached India. So to keep on calling us indigenous, as they do in the United Nations, the World Bank, the European Union is a mistake. We say that we’re Shuar, and likewise there are Kichwas, Guaranís, Cunas. In other words, that’s their identity. at’s what characterizes them, and they’re unique. For example, there are three thousand Huaorani here. ey’re unique in the world, a unique culture. ey’re not in Central America, North America, Europe, Africa, or Asia; they’re here and they’re a unique culture with their own identity, which must be recognized and valued. Yes, well, some people prefer to use the term indigenous, and I respect it but don’t share it.

RAFAEL ANTUNI SHUAR: ETHNOCIDE AND GENOCIDE IN THE AMAZON

At the time of the interviews, Rafael Antuni was national coordinator of Pacha- kutik. Born in , he is part of a new generation of Shuar leaders who worked THE N ATION AND THE L IVING JUNGLE IN THE AMAZON 63 through the organizations developed in the rst generation. He was an activist in the Shuar Federation at an early age and became a leader of the organization and director of the Shuar Bicultural Radio Education Network. He was elected mayor of the Pablo Sexto canton of Morona Santiago Province and vice prefect of the province. He was also vice president of the Consortium of Municipal Governments of the Amazon and Galápagos. He is a primary school teacher who received a degree in development from the Universidad Estatal de Cuenca. He summarized his overall philosophy in a article: “From nature we learned to live together and to ght; she provides food and health; she is generous providing us with oxygen, water, and, nally, life. Still more she condenses harmony, beauty, and riches. e rain forest shows us life in equilibrium and diversity as its greatest expression”.ðð

ANDES AND AMAZON

Nowadays, [in Bolivia] we have a republican president with an indigenous identity. But his identity is Andean. It also happens here in Ecuador; there are always misunderstandings. e Andean part wants to dominate the Amazonian part. e same occurs in Bolivia, also in Colombia. Here in Ecuador, the Cañaris [a pre-Columbian people], for example, wanted to dominate the Shuar. ey achieved it. In the northern part—Pastaza, Napo—they had churches and followers that assisted them in their domination. Because of this the Kichwas in Pastaza have a very dierent origin. ey could have been Shuar but what language did they learn? ey learned from the [Kichwa-speaking] Cañaris. ere has always been this confrontation for territory. e Amazonians demand that Bolivia not carry out its policy of Amazonian development. is makes us think that the Indian president of the republic [Evo Morales] hates his own indigenous compatriots in Bolivia. Luis Macas says one thing and the Amazon people say something else. No! e Amazon people speak for themselves. Luis Macas could have been president of the republic but I speak for myself. e administration of Evo Morales makes political distinctions and he has divided his people [i.e., the Andean indigenous people from the Amazonians]. We have to be very cautious that that this does not happen here—we are working on this by raising consciousness among ourselves. Traditionally, here in Pachakutik 64 CHAPTER 1

[the indigenous political party; see chapter ] the coordinators and authorities have only been from this part [the Andes]. We also have said, compañeros, participation concerns us; alternatives to what was before concern us. We have had these dialogues and now we Amazonian people are here in Pachakutik. Perhaps it will not be very dierent but we are committed to inviting other sectors so that there is real participation. e solution is that we have spread the responsibility among us—it is not only the Shuars, not only the Amazon people. is is the national Pachakutik coordinator, and I am a Shuar, but we do not need to have only Shuar or Amazon people as oßcials or collaborators. We need to share. We have to practice the plurinational. We are demanding equality with, for example, the parish councils, mayors’ oßces, the prefectures—the administrative parts and autonomous decentralized governments. Participation with plurinational thinking and development, with the perspectives of sumak kawsay—the relationship between man-nature-man—and the investment of resources to improve things so that people can take advantage of nature in a better way. To have a living, a healthy environment, drinking water, that it rains; that trees exist; that health really exists; that traditional medicine exists; that the medical culture that our shamans have given us really exists; that a hospital exists combining Western and indigenous medicine; that doctors exist and have sta, that our shamans exist with their herbs and curative leaves because, yes, we do cure ourselves. e two cultures, the two forms of knowledge, two medicines, foreign teams that come to our envi- ronments so that we may lift our voice, our songs. We think that the dierent cultures and nations need to respect one another in order to build a plurinational state based on respect. But there are those indigenous among us who say, “we are much better than you” and we should always rule.

A PARK IN THE SHAPE OF A SUN

We have to resolve the issues of poverty. Compañeros say, “We see the dollar as a drug.” I would say we see it equally with water. We must not think wrongly about this. Because without money I am not going to educate my child; without money I cannot buy things; without money THE N ATION AND THE L IVING JUNGLE IN THE AMAZON 65

I cannot do anything, I cannot travel. Elected authorities have to go on solving their money problems by generating sources of work for a few whose earnings are invested in improving the communal system of life. We want to show solidarity, [to enable people] to have a little store [where they can] sell essential goods like medicines and school supplies. Education in business practices and supply and demand is lacking— there is much to work on. ere is much for us to do because fteen years after being constituted we have made little progress in terms of social development, identity, and culture. ey have imposed infrastructure on us. ey have built communal houses and classrooms with an architecture that is dierent from our reality. We have a very beautiful architecture that makes things elliptical and this is being done away with. From the local governments we are suggesting alternatives—ways to apply these technologies and structures to form a city. And why not think, for example, of a center, a great park in the shape of a sun? And it is serious if we are losing that. In reality we have much territory. In Ecuador we could say that there are many sources of water, many jungles, many cultures. We would like a new city, a city where we can live like human beings. We want to address the problem that no one knows anything about the other side. Here [in Quito] if you cry out no one comes to your assistance. is world is dierent from our beautiful reality—I do not know if they will invite us in. Moving to the city has made us think and has reinvigorated our forms of knowledge, and we imagine a dignied population that is very dierent, [with an emphasis on the] touristic and the cultural.

ETHNOCIDE AND GENOCIDE

is is how we see things in Ecuador—it is so rich! I believe that we are clearly still materially poor, but we are rich in terms of nature, landscapes, cultures, the regions—coast, sierra, Amazon. Many lakes full of crocodiles, of reptiles, an immense diversity that the Ecuadorian state does not value, especially the government assuming that you are talking of ITT [Ishpingo-Tambococha-Tiputini oil elds located within the Yasuní National Park, home to the Huaorani]. We have made the point that above this subsoil full of petroleum live uncontacted peoples. Some 66 CHAPTER 1 have had contact with the city and others have not had contact with anything. eir inclination is to be free—not in contact with anything—free will. e government wants to implement plan B because plan A was to collect money [from the world community], [in exchange for] keeping the oil at Yasuní underground. So said the president of the republic and the minister of nonrenewable natural resources. We have discovered they are ordering seismic studies for Plan B. If [the world community] doesn’t give them money, then they will extract the petroleum—putting the compañeros that live there at risk. ey have nowhere left to go because now the territories are very limited. rough spontaneous or directed colonization the land has been occupied and now it is privatized. It is a space that CONFENIAE and CONAIE have defended so that the Huaorani who do not want to have anything to do with this Western world are free. But the government is threatening them. We as Pachakutik and CONAIE face these threats and orders even though we are telling the president about these peoples. ey know very well the constitutional arguments that do not allow this type of extraction where there is a risk to human life, but to them this is not important. ere were more than thirty contacts with these groups, armed contacts. ere was an order from the president to push them, to disperse them. We have collected all this information and have brought a lawsuit against the president for ethnocide and genocide, because he intends to take the land and destroy the human beings that live there. Someone who plans to extract oil from the land and then leave after polluting the environment wants the human beings that are there to disappear. Because of this we have brought these charges, and if [the case] doesn’t move forward with the attorney general here in Ecuador, with Ecuadorian justice, we are also preparing to le a complaint before international courts. We have to defend the compañeros that live there and have no place to go. ese are the pretty serious situations we are confronting in this country. Telling you this is a way of spreading the word about what is happening in this country because these actions are nal. Our Huaorani compañeros have their identity and live happily. And as I said they have nowhere left to go because to the south are the Shuar, the Achuar, and the Kichwas, and their communities have never lived together. ey have their territory, their culture, their way of life. We want them to remain THE N ATION AND THE L IVING JUNGLE IN THE AMAZON 67

as they are. ey are being threatened by the presidency, currently led by Rafael Correa. ese situations are real and because of this we are not happy with this government and we are moved to continue suing because we are ghting for the life of our compañeros.

MARLON SANTI KICHWA: CONAIE AND THE LIVING JUNGLE

At the time of the interviews, Marlon Santi had just stepped down as president of CONAIE (–). He grew up in the village of Sarayaku, Pastaza, center of antipetroleum protests since the s. His father was a traditional Karaka, or chief, and his mother a social activist. He followed his father as Karaka of the hamlet of Cali Cali and eventually rose to be president of the community. He distinguished himself as the coordinator of Sarayaku’s legal case against the Argentine petroleum company, Compañía General de Combustibles (CGC), before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in San José, Costa Rica. On July , , in a landmark ruling, the court ruled in favor of Sarayaku and against CGC and Ecuador. e ruling established a standard of Free, Prior and Informed Consent in cases in which economic exploitation was proposed on indigenous lands. In the Correa administration initiated an investigation of possible “sabotage and terrorism” against Santi and Delfín Tenesaca of ECUA- RUNARI (see chapter ) for their participation in a protest at the Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América (ALBA, Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas) summit meeting.ðñ

THE INDIGENOUS MOVEMENT

In , with a great mobilization, the indigenous movement proposed a reform of the constitution so that the representatives of the organizations would participate and an assembly would be constructed where there would be spokespersons for all. It was also proposed that the uninational state, that is, the Ecuadorian state, recognize the plurality of peoples, the existence of many cultures, of many nationalities. e indigenous movement wants these laws not to be solely for the capital, Quito, for Guayaquil or for Cuenca or for the urban sectors but rather that these laws inäuence the daily coexistence, harmony, and “living well” of the entire population whether they are mestizos, indigenous, blacks, cholos, et cetera, et cetera. Today we can rely on a new constitution but it is not 68 CHAPTER 1

a constitution that we totally agree with—there are some parts that do not recognize the aspirations of the social sectors and the indigenous movement. I would say that the Ecuadorian indigenous movement, the CONAIE, and the social sectors have created a model for demanding rights, an example for the people of Latin America.

NATION AND STATE

e state, the Republic of Ecuador, was created two hundred years ago but did not recognize the peoples that existed here, the original peoples or original nations. ese nations have been recognized through history in accords and treaties with various governments throughout the years of republican life. e nationalities, such as the Shuar nation, have a language, their own language, a culture, a territory that has been granted by various governments under these accords and treaties. Many of the politicians have said that we want to make ministates within the Ecuadorian state but we say the United States has states that make up the American nation. e indigenous peoples are also part of the Ecua- dorian nation, but we are also peoples who have our particularity and our historical origins. We were here long before the creation of the republic.

EXTRACTIVE DEVELOPMENT VERSUS THE LIVING JUNGLE

CONAIE proposes a solidary economy that moves from an economy that accumulates resources to a reciprocal economy. We do not understand the economy as do the economists—those who study the accumulation of wealth. We propose a solidary economy that generates resources for all, that gives dignity, gives life, and a future where humanity can continue to exist. It is a communal economic model, not based on capitalizing the economy but rather an economic model that is compatible with civil society, with families. An economy that will benet all, not only some groups or sectors. e economic model applied by the current government is extractive—based on raw materials to generate an economy that supplies Ecuadorian society. It does not respect human rights and the rights of Mother Earth. In this sense the model that sumak kawsay proposes is an alternative to the idea that Ecuador exploits natural resources. Maybe there are resources but they are badly THE N ATION AND THE L IVING JUNGLE IN THE AMAZON 69 distributed. We want a fair redistribution to pay for the necessities of civil society and also encourage development alternatives that are not solely the extraction of natural resources. In the seventies, one of the most productive sectors in Ecuador was agriculture—it was even bigger than oil. e agricultural area has been forgotten by many governments and as a result oil is a very important economic factor. With the oil boom, agriculture moved to the tenth place. Bringing back this communal peasant agriculture of small communities in Ecuador would encourage food sovereignty in the country and also would stimulate the production of food for other countries. e majority of farmers in Ecuador are indigenous peasants, but current developments in this area are being managed by great agricultural industries such as PRONACA [Procesadora Nacional de Alimentos C.A. (National Food Processor Inc.)], and the landowners of Guaya- quil, for example Chiquita Banana, Bonita de Álvaro Noboa. ese are individual properties that do not answer to a collective society. Currently the state’s development plan, sumak kawsay, has four main axes. Within these four axes are two priorities: mining and oil. Mining is something that Ecuador has no experience with on a large scale—it has had experience with artisanal mining, unorganized mining. But it has not been on a large scale. Ecuador—or the current government—is promoting mining that would change the direction of the economy and would also have a great environmental and cultural impact. Oil is the second priority—it is now the rst—but it will become the second because mining will become the rst. ere are two priorities, then, that the government has proposed. Beyond this, within the “sumak kawsay” plan, is the privatization of strategic resources such as water. e water here is going to be privatized in ve years. According to the constitution, water is a human right, but in the water law they want to privatize it. Currently percent of the water in Ecuador can be privatized. Only bottling companies like Coca-Cola, Fanta, and Twitty manage it. If the water law is passed by the government as planned, water will be one of the axes of economic development and seen as an economic resource in the country. And the fourth axis that the government wants to privatize is the forests: humid forests, humid tropical Amazonian forests, forests of the páramo [high treeless plain], the forests of the coasts that are now involved in the charcoal market. Most of 70 CHAPTER 1 the forests are on indigenous territories. I have been in a convention in Geneva where they proposed a bond to receive money in exchange for the forests. ey do not know clearly what processes will take place in the future, what their eects will be, or what will happen with climate change. A CONAIE march, which was convened by CONAIE when I was president, stopped the water law. It was not approved in its original form designed by the executive because we are also co-legislators and presented [an alternative] proposal that was water for all. ere was a discrepancy and it is stopped there, but they created a legal formula that they call prelegislative consultation. Before approving this they have to consult those who are going to be aected. ere are many laws made without consultation—the mineral law, the hydrocarbons law, and others—but the water law was stopped by a mobilization at the national level. I am personally condent that this kind of protest is going to continue. We in the Amazon region—well now I am speaking not as president of CONAIE but as ex-president of CONAIE and as an activist of the nations and peoples that are resisting in the Amazon region—we are creating a network of Amazon peoples, a resistance, that in the future will oppose the expansion of those axes such as mining, oil, and forests, and we are proposing a new alternative currently being developed by the peoples, the resistance, that is called the living jungle. It is a new category of spaces that the indigenous people have named. ere have been categories of national parks, biological reserves, ecological corridors, but we are generating a new category and concept of our life and how we interpret it in regard to the jungle. It cannot enter the market because this jungle generates life through present connections for future generations. e proposal will be launched this month in Manaus, Bra- zil, and then also in the assembly. We are going to give these details to government representatives because it is our model of development.

IDEOLOGICAL INFLUENCES

Historically the indigenous movement was inäuenced by the socialist movement in the sixties, but gradually it has assumed its proper role. I do not share the inäuence of twenty-rst-century socialism, or cap- THE N ATION AND THE L IVING JUNGLE IN THE AMAZON 71 italism, which have had their time. e indigenous movement has its own thinking and its own knowledge that is sumak kawsay [Kichwa for “living well”], ama sua, ama quella, ama llulla [Inca proverb—don’t steal, don’t be lazy, don’t lie], which are philosophical visions and conceptualizations of the nations and peoples of Latin America. And in Ecuador the sumak kawsay is a way of thinking that is not communist, socialist, or capitalist—it is an indigenous way of thinking; it is an indigenous concept that is very dißcult for governments to understand. Respect among human beings, respect for Mother Earth, because we know that without her we would not able to continue existing. Socialism, Patria o Muerte, Venceremos is very dierent from indigenous thought. I believe that Stalin or Marx founded this thinking. It was necessary in its time but now the indigenous movement has its own conception. At one time we said these Western inäuences were good for the indigenous movement, but now we see that they do not work.

PACHAKUTIK, GUTIÉRREZ, AND CORREA

Pachakutik in its time had success. It had a very important political ascendance in the year ’. We had many deputies, around seventeen deputies in the legislature. Pachakutik fell, took the bait, lost credibility when it made a deal with Lucio Gutiérrez. is was a sad moment in the indigenous movement at the base level and at the level of regional organizations. Pachakutik had its peak but also made mistakes. I personally have condence that Pachakutik is going to reemerge as a new force with a new image of indigenous leaders. We are bringing a new cadre of indigenous leaders whose actions the people can and do believe in. Pachakutik is reconstructing itself. We, as an indigenous movement, supported that political project of Alianza País because it collected all the aspirations of all the social movements. But now it is separating itself. Its initial proposals or aspirations are not the national agenda. e political principles of Alianza País did not turn out to be for Ecuadorian society. Now the laws obey the wishes of a combination of national oligarchic groups—the mining interests, for example. None of the articles of the mineral law, for example, set out the rights of indigenous people. e law of hydrocarbons does not set out indigenous rights either. e water law is worse. All the 72 CHAPTER 1

laws go against indigenous rights and against the rights of society. And against the constitution. We now see that it is not in the interests of all citizens, but only of those economic interests that were entrenched in the government. And the laws are made to favor them. We said, “Follow that path and we will not support you,” and we went into the opposition. But they have not been able to destroy the indigenous movement in these thirty years of organizational struggle.

THE NATION AND THE LIVING JUNGLE

e “nation” and the “living jungle” are two fundamental notions in the Ama- zonian worldview. e concept of the nation originated in the Amazon but then was adopted by the national confederation, CONAIE, and runs through all the Ecuadorian interviews. As has been noted, Ampam Karakras was one of the original theorists of the concept. Shuar intellectuals like Karakras who had mastered Western concepts in mission schools and Ecuadorian universities were quick to apply these concepts to their basic struggle—against ethnocide and cultural extinction. What emerged was not the exclusive and homogenizing model of Western ethnic nationalism and the Ecuadorian state but a plurinational and intercultural concept of nationality that permitted the Shuar a distinct existence but did not require that Ecuador transform itself into an exclusively Shuar nation-state. Western models of nationalism provide an extremely poor guide to the concept of “nation” as it was adopted by CONAIE and discussed in most of the Ecuadorian interviews. Nationality, as it is articulated by the Amazonians, is a symbolically revolutionary notion. It challenges the assumption of Western liberal states that the individual is the basic unit of society and citizenship. According to Ampam Karakras, what is important is “people’s thoughts, their ideals, dreams, and goals. ey must be accompanied by the rights of peoples as a collective society” (emphasis added). But there is no single indigenous state. As Karakras argues, “ ere are fourteen nations or nationalities speaking dierent languages and eighteen peoples.” In such a culturally diverse world interculturally, respect for dierent cultures is a prerequisite for a successful indigenous movement and the liberal state must be displaced by a plurinational state that recognizes them all. e Amazonian concept of nation ts their own ecological situation best. Applied to the Andes, it lumps several million Kichwa speakers into a single nation logically equivalent to several hundred Huaorani. Furthermore, the THE N ATION AND THE L IVING JUNGLE IN THE AMAZON 73

Andean Kichwa, while satisfying Chuji’s denition, do not have a cohesive sense of ethnic identity. For historical reasons those identities exist only for localized “peoples,” such as the Otavaleños, world famous for their mastery of handicraft and ornamental textiles, hence the reference by Karakras to “fourteen nations or nationalities . . . and eighteen peoples,” oßcially recognized by CONAIE. Since in political fact the Andean Kichwa are organized by community, canton, and province, not by putative nations, the use of nation in this region is a political ction. e concept of the living jungle (kawsak sacha) as it is described by Marlon Santi is the key to the metaphysical world and transformational politics of the indigenous Amazon. It is the jungle of living beings, including but not limited to the peoples who live there, and extends to spiritual and cultural life as well as material life and subsistence production. It is not simply that the Shuar or the Huaorani live in the rain forest or that it has enormous biological diversity, or that it contributes positively to the global carbon cycle, or that many rare and threatened species live there, but it is all these things as they are joined in the cultural and spiritual world of the Amazonian peoples. Jaguars are at the end of the forest food chain and one of the rst species to disappear when the forest is disturbed, but the Huaorani describe themselves as sons and daughters of the Jaguar and the animal occupies a place of supreme importance in their spirituality. As Ampam Karakras points out, a waterfall is more than so many cubic feet of water falling in so many seconds, or even a point of spectacular natural beauty to Western tourists. For the Shuar it is a sacred place where in traditional Shuar society young men went to seek visions and, as he points out, even now Shuar go to seek spiritual renewal. According to the people of Sarayaku, the living jungle is “a living being” that restores “the energy, life and equilibrium of the original peoples.” Indeed, the two cannot be separated. e emotional, psychological, physical, cultural, and spiritual aspects of the Amazonian peoples are tied up in the rain forest. As Rafael Antuni has written, the rain forest not only is the source of life but also “condenses harmony, beauty, and riches. e rain forest shows us life in equilibrium and diversity as its greatest expression.” For Antuni the riches of a poor country like Ecuador are in its “nature, landscapes, cultures . . . many lakes full of crocodiles, of reptiles, an immense diversity.” For him traditional shamans, a central element in the “living jungle,” can continue to exist alongside Western medical teams. Antuni described the natural world of the rain forest in äights of poetic oratory (associated with leadership among the Shuar). e rain forest also represents freedom or a free life as illustrated by those Huaorani who have 74 CHAPTER 1 remained voluntarily removed from contact. e rain forest and the culture and spirituality of the people who inhabit it are not separate and distinct as they are in Western thought but are fused in the concept of the living jungle. According to those interviewed, the living jungle is under threat from a number of dierent sources. Most directly the “extractivist” policies of Rafael Correa threaten not only the rain forest itself but the spiritual and cultural worlds of which it is a central part. is is most directly illustrated by the privatization and commercialization of the humid tropical rainforest itself under the Ecuadorian government’s development plan as described by Marlon Santi. Petroleum extraction, according to Santi, one of the axes of the development plan, brings with it the possibility of oil spills and pollution. Open-pit mining, new to Ecuador, according to Santi, has the potential for similar eects. Transcontinental highways and road construction associated with the development axis have similar consequences because, as Mónica Chuji points out, “the indigenous do not live in the roads.” Road construction can even pit indigenous cultures of the sierra against those of the Amazon, as Rafael Antuni argues has happened in Bolivia. Even the assumptions on which public policy is based promote the legal invisibility of indigenous people. Many people in the developed world cheered Rafael Correa’s oer to solve the Yasuní-ITT conäict by agreeing to leave the oil underground if the world community would put up the equivalent of half the revenues from the deposits under the biosphere reserve (Plan A). If the funds were not forthcoming, then Ecuador would go ahead with petroleum development (Plan B—now being implemented). Neither plan involves the informed and prior consent of the people who live in the reserve, both those in contact with the West and those who still are not. For all practical purposes, these people do not legally exist and neither does the “living jungle” of which they are the heart and soul. e international community, the Ecuadorian state, and oil companies legally exist. e sons and daughters of the Jaguar do not. Invisibility extends not only to political and legal representation but to culture and even language. As Ampam Karakras points out, all Latin American nation-states ignored the Amazonian groups in their claims for territory and nationality and, in the case of Ecuador, continue to do so. As he explains, the Catholic Church and later evangelical Protestant groups ignored the spirituality of the Amazon and proceeded to try to Christianize its “savage” inhabitants. Schools ignored Shuar language, history, and culture. According to Karakras, even language itself submerged the existence of the Shuar rst in the racist term THE N ATION AND THE L IVING JUNGLE IN THE AMAZON 75

Indian derived from Columbus’s geographical error and later in the euphemistic (and still current) language of indigenous. We are Shuar, he asserts, not “indigenous.” Similarly, he says, the “indigenous” term sumak kawsay (living well) is a Kichwa term from the Andes, not a reäection of Shuar conceptualizations of the living jungle; nor will a single indigenous justice system t all the peoples and nations of Ecuador. For the Shuar, the Huaorani, the Kichwa, and the other peoples of the Amazon, the policies, politics, and cultural practices of the Ecuadorian state in general and the Correa administration in particular are existential, not simply economic or political, questions. According to Rafael Antuni, that is why Pachakutik has undertaken a lawsuit to charge the Correa administration with genocide and ethnocide. Without the Yasuní biosphere reserve there will be no Huaorani because they and the biosphere are part of one single system—the living jungle. ere is only one Huaorani people, Ampam Karakras points out, and they are there in the biosphere. is culture and other Amazonian cultures have endured for thousands of years but they will be gone, its members dispersed or exterminated, their cultures obliterated with the jungles that nurtured them. e concepts of “indigenous nationalities” and the “living jungle” both represent symbolic rejections of the “fundamental categories of social life and consciousness” of Western modernity. ey are hybrid concepts that emerged out of indigenous struggles against the development policies of the Ecuadorian state and the monocultural nature of that state. ey are symbolically revolutionary. But the leaders from the Amazon categorically reject the Western concept of revolution as it manifested itself in the twentieth and even the eighteenth century. For Ampam Karakras, the rejection of revolution is part of a wider rejection of liberal modernity—“From my perspective, citizen revolution is a people’s revolution. Individuals. It’s like liberalism. Like France”—and it includes twentieth-century Central American revolutions: “Sandinismo almost denied the existence of people’s [collective] rights. Likewise, the revolution in El Salvador didn’t have indigenous people’s participation either.” Marlon Santi acknowledges the positive inäuence of the Marxist revolutionary traditions but adds, “Now we see that they do not work.” e leaders, however, also reject reform and call for a “social transformation.” ese symbolic revolutionaries want changes to be brought about by mass protest and elections, as the leaders’ own biographies show, not by armed struggle. Revolutionaries at the symbolic level, these leaders want to transform Western understandings of the relationship between the indigenous and the state and 76 CHAPTER 1 between human beings and nature. But at the practical level of political action, they want to accomplish their revolutionary goals through mass action in civil society. In fact, they reject Western liberal and socialist ideas of revolution tout court. ese leaders are proposing a new model of utopian social change symbolically revolutionary but practically democratic. Mass protests and elections are their tools even if utopian dreams of interculturality and the living jungle are their goals. 2 ECUARUNARI

Sumak Kawsay and the Communal Vision

Interviews with Delfín Tenesaca, Humberto Cholango, and Luis Contento

CUARUNARI ECUADOR Runakunapak Rikcharimuy, or “Awakening of the Ecuadorian Indian” in Kichwa) was founded in , eight years after Ethe Shuar Federation, and eventually came to represent all the Kichwa in the Andean Highlands. It now calls itself the Confederation of Kichwa Organi- zations of Ecuador although it does not represent the Amazonian Kichwa. Like the Shuar, much of the initial organization was promoted by Catholic priests inäuenced by liberation theology and the doctrine of inculturation, but unlike the Shuar, a strong tradition of left organizing in the Sierra also inäuenced and continues to inäuence both the organization and philosophy of ECUA- RUNARI. Everyone interviewed for this chapter is a past or present oßcer of ECUARUNARI and its aßliates, all are Highland Kichwa, and all reäect the profound inäuence of progressive Catholicism and socialism as well as the indigenous experience in their thinking and discourse. eir current views have been shaped by decades of organizing experience, conäict, and negotiation with the Ecuadorian state and coalition building with both progressive left and Ama- zonian indigenous organizations. Highland society is very dierent from that of the unstratied, horticultural societies of the Amazon. e Highland Kichwa formed the lower caste in a class- and race-stratied peasant society. From independence to the land reform, the Sierra was controlled by the “trinity” of the hacienda, the Catholic 78 CHAPTER 2

Church, and the local representative of civil authority, the sheri. Ecuador was notable for the early (seventeenth-century) and almost complete agrarian dominance of the hacienda. Hacienda owners (including the Church) worked their lands through a system of serfdom (called huasipunguaje in Ecuador) in which Kichwa received the usufruct of a plot of land in exchange for work on the owner’s land. e owner controlled not only the land and labor but the social, political, and even the cultural life of resident Kichwa communities on his land and exerted considerable control over the minority of free communities. In practical terms, the owner granted limited social and cultural autonomy to the resident indigenous communities and relied on traditional authorities as well as his overseer to maintain control. e system created a local, community-based system of loyalties and tended to undermine any sense of collective Kichwa identity in the highlands. ese loyalties were, in any case, weak because of the disruptions of the Incan conquest and the decentralized nature of pre-Inca social structure.ì e absence of social stratication in the Amazon provided little basis for class-based ideologies and organizations, and most of the organizing was done by the Catholic Church or indigenous activists themselves. e highlands, on the other hand, have a long tradition of class-based organizing by both socialists and communists. e Communist Party of Ecuador rst organized peasant unions on haciendas as early as the s through its indigenous aßliate, the Federación Ecuatoriana de Indios (FEI, Federation of Ecuadorian Indians). Two of the icons of indigenous mobilization most often mentioned by those interviewed, Dolores Cacuango and Tránsito Amaguaña, were both Commu- nist Party members and indigenous activists. Nevertheless, the leadership of the party and FEI were composed almost entirely of the nonindigenous. In socialists took control of the Church-based Federación Nacional de Orga- nizaciones Campesinas (FENOC, National Federation of Peasant Organiza- tions), originally founded by Catholics to contest communist control of the countryside, and followed a class line emphasizing solidarity between indigenous and nonindigenous peasants.ï e rise of ECUARUNARI after did not so much represent a replacement of class identity by indigenous identity as an incorporation of the former into the latter. e early history of the organization was replete with internal debates between “peasantists” representing a peasant or class line and “indigenists” representing an ethnic orientation. By the indigenists, aided by ethnically oriented allies from the Amazon, had won both the internal ECUARUNARI 79 and external debate but, as the interviews that follow indicate, there was no lack of concern for such peasant material concerns as land, wages, working conditions, water, credit, prices, development assistance, and rural economic inequality.ð FEI, which had focused on the working conditions of serfs, lost its raison d’être and most of its inäuence with the abolition of serfdom in the land reform. FENOC, which continued to press land issues and other peasant concerns, lost inäuence because of its failure to recognize the intertwined issues of race and class in the highlands. Eventually it changed its name to the Federación Ecuatoriana de Organizaciones Campesinas, Indi- genas y Negras (FENOCIN, Ecuadorian Federation of Peasant, Indigenas and Black Organizations) but it could never overcome its fundamentally peasantist orientation.ñ e and land reforms not only undermined the class line of both FEI and FENOC; it radically changed the class structure itself. Lords and serfs were replaced by independent communities composed of small, poor landowners held together by indigenous traditions and ownership of community land. Landowners converted their holdings to commercial operations not subject to expropriation. Most of these communities took advantage of a law that provided them with a legal identity.ú ese communities (not ethnic groups or peoples) became the base unit of ECUARUNARI formal organization. A regional alliance of communities formed an organization of the second grade; a provincial association of regional alliances became an organization of the third grade and provincial organizations constituted ECUARUNARI. e communities were subject to rules of consensus and governed by assemblies with an executive council (cabildo).û Unlike FEI and FENOC, ECUARUNARI had indigenous people in positions of leadership from the start. But the initial organization was undertaken by priests and nuns inäuenced by liberation theology. Since liberation theology was itself strongly inäuenced by Marxism, the shift to church organizers did not represent a sharp break with the left and in some places various strains of Catholic theology and socialism were simultaneously involved in the organization of ECUARUNARI aßliates.ü Monsignor Leonidas Proaño, the “Bishop of the Indians,” became the most inäuential gure in the turn to liberation theology. Delfín Tenesaca, president of ECUARUNARI, whose interview follows, was a Catholic catechist and a student of Monsignor Proaño. e monsignor had his greatest inäuence in the province of Chimborazo, but his inäuence, even after his death in , was (and is) national. He established radio schools 80 CHAPTER 2 broadcasting in Kichwa, conducted his own land reform of state-owned haciendas, and in sponsored the meeting at the former Church-owned hacienda community of Teyepeque that gave birth to ECUARUNARI.ý

SUMAK KAWSAY AND THE COMMUNAL VISION

True to the post–Vatican II doctrine of “inculturation,” the Church activists emphasized those aspects of indigenous life that they found appealing. As Barry J. Lyons notes, “Pastoral agents and indigenous activists often por- tray indigenous tradition as economically ‘communitarian.’ ey urge communities to maintain communal land tenure where it exists, to continue or revive communal labor practices, and to initiate communal productive projects.”ÿ Nonindigenous leftists and Catholic activists were both expelled from ECUARUNARI in but their inäuence lingers, as is evident in the discussion of communitarian values, anticapitalism, and rural poverty that are so prominent in the interviews that follow. e “preferential option for the poor” emphasized by liberation theology also endures. As late as the s, portraits of Che Guevara were common in the oßces of ECUARUNARI leaders, and the organization strongly identied with the revolutionary struggles in Central America.ì~ Today the inäuence of liberation theology and the traditional left is down- played in favor of emphasizing the origins of ECUARUNARI’s discourse in the traditions of indigenous communities. And, as Amalia Pallares points out, the anticapitalism of ECUARUNARI is quite dierent from the surplus labor– based anticapitalism of the orthodox communist and socialist left: “Instead of focusing on the economic exploitation attributed to the capitalist system . . . they viewed capitalism, as embodied in mestizo culture, as the culprit that led to acculturation. . . . e recovery of cultural forms and traditions and the maintenance of Indianness were understood as an anti-capitalist struggle.”ìì Communalism favored by Catholic activists is seen as a product of indigenous society itself and is a far cry from the utopian communism of the traditional left. But like the traditional left, indigenous activists believe that a radical transformation of existing society, if not a revolution in the traditional sense, will be needed to infuse society with these values. e communalism stressed by those interviewed is in fact closer to that of the utopian socialists denounced by Frie- drich Engels than it is to the state control of traditional socialism. Nevertheless, ECUARUNARI 81 there are clear continuities among the Catholicism of liberation theology, the communism and socialism of the left, and the nationalist indigeneity of contemporary leaders of ECUARUNARI. e communal vision is often expressed by the Kichwa phrase sumak kawsay, often translated (or mistranslated) as “living well.” According to Luis Macas, the phrase contains two concepts or expressions: “Sumak signies plenty, greatness, the just, the complementary, the superior.” Kawsay, he says, is the “interaction of the totality of existence, movement,” “being itself.”ìï So together the phrase means, according to this denition by the oßcial organization Consejo de Desarrollo de las Nacionalidades y Pueblos del Ecuador (CONDENPE, Coun- cil for the Development of Nationalities and Peoples of Ecuador), “to live in community, plenty, solidarity, relationships between human beings and nature, human beings and spirituality.”ìð As imagined by those interviewed here, sumak kawsay is not living well in the Western sense of material success. It is building a rich social and community life in which the success of all is dependent on the success of each. In development terms it signies that it is better that all advance together than a few get rich at the expense of the many, even if the latter leads to faster development. e communitarian life signied by sumak kawsay is a symbolically radical notion. It would undermine the fundamental cosmology of Western capitalism and substitute an indigenous communal vision in its stead. If implemented it would turn the world upside down. e interviews that follow are shaped by these ideas. ey also are shaped by the common experience of early life in rural highland indigenous communities and the course of indigenous struggles in recent decades.

VOICES OF ECUARUNARI

DELFÍN TENESACA: COLONIALISM, COSMOVISION, AND THE STATE

Delfín Tenesaca was born into extreme poverty in the indigenous community of San José de Mayorazgo in Chimborazo. He dropped out of primary school at age eleven and worked in a factory manufacturing ponchos. He completed his education while at the same time working as an organizer in indigenous communities, not entering high school until age thirty. He also became a Catholic catechist, for two years was a student of Monseñor Proaño, and was exposed to the theology of liberation. He later became director of the Leonidas Proaño Center for Indigenous Education, which provided leadership training 82 CHAPTER 2 for indigenous students. In he was elected president of the Movimiento Indígena de Chimborazo (MICH, Indigenous Movement of Chimborazo), where he was twice reelected and served until . In he was elected president of ECUARUNARI, where he was serving at the time of the interview. In April he submitted his thesis for the licenciatura at the Salesian Polytechnic University in Quito.ìñ

REVOLUTION AND SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION

For Tenesaca it is necessary to change not only “the entire system, the structure of the state” but also the interstate system that allows multinational companies to destroy the natural base of life in indigenous communities and sentence them to “certain death.”

We have colonialist states that continue colonizing. ere is political colonization, economic colonization, even spiritual colonization—the multinational companies continue colonizing our lands and little by little they are destroying them. Exhausting the land, doing away with the forests, polluting the rivers, making the slopes disappear, doing away with the sources of water—this is the certain death of the people, the certain death of generations, and the certain death of nature. It is not important to them that hundreds of indigenous are in these territories and that they live o Mother Nature.

For Tenesaca, the most fundamental problem is the underlying way of thinking of the state and the multinationals.

ey all have a mentality of thinking only of money—money, money, money, prot, prot, to hoard, accumulate and all of this. It does not appear to them that they have to change their way of thinking. e whole system, the laws are made by this mentality. e constitution, in spite of our having changed it, remains only words. For example, sumak kawsay. Sumak kawsay for us means beautiful, lovely, wonderful. Look- ing at the scenery we see it’s nice. But within this scenery the people are not living well, the territories are not good, the production is bad. How are the poor living? When they have breakfast, when they have lunch, ECUARUNARI 83

when they get sick? is is terrible. From the point of view of those who suer hunger in their own äesh, the republic has not changed, and is not going to change.

According to Tenesaca, even Evo Morales, who appeared as a “continental reference” for the indigenous movement, is being absorbed by the old structures: “To open the highways in the jungle, take everything that is there.” “What has to be done to govern ourselves in a better manner,” Tenesaca asks and then answers his own question by saying the following:

e rules, the economic system, the institutions, need to change direction to say, “We should consume as people, as humans.” We are going to spend the resources that are here and we are going to live the way you do. is is how the exploitation of resources is going to be, but meanwhile we have to renew them. I, like the last [ECUARUNARI president], live in the community. We are equal. You respect me and I respect you. It is a community of brothers. And I believe here is where sumak kawsay happens—when we respect one another. Not killing the poor as it is here—killing with hunger, killing with bullets, and killing with fear as is happening now in Ecuador. Killing with fear by accusing the leaders of being terrorists. From this often comes the courage to even say “armed revolution” (or even arm ourselves) as they did in Cuba. What is it that prevents us from acting? Because if we struggle in this way they will not attend to us because they will not respect us—what shall we do? Our proposal ultimately at the level of organizations is to touch the consciousness, change ourselves and live with ourselves. If the government, the police, the armed forces, the companies come, to say, “Get out of these territories”—here we are going to die, here we are going to confront them. is is the reality of the communities. It is tremendous, this situation.

COMMUNITY AND COSMOVISION

What is important to both Tenesaca and the indigenous communities is a dif- ferent organization and structure of life and a distinct vision of the world, or “cosmovision,” which is threatened by the Ecuadorian state. 84 CHAPTER 2

We are completing years the th of October []. We have our structure as indigenous peoples and nationalities. At the margin of a state, at the margin of a government, at the margin, or perhaps forgotten, excluded from a system—we have lived in our territories murdered and everything. What is our practice—the care of the Pachamama? What is our practice—the redistribution of land? What is our practice—the sharing of water? Shared living is what we most have in common. We have made an eort to be united and in our experience the communitarian system, the collective system is very important. We are living here with our practice and here is the confrontation with the state. What does the state do? It does not come and say, “Look you are the people of this place; I am bringing this project to do that.” No, they say, “We need this territory, get out of here.” And then we say, “How’s that?” It’s ours; it is our territory. Here we develop economically, politically, culturally, socially. We are living here and no one can take it. If they don’t respect my territories, I have to take up arms against he who comes and kill them. If they don’t respect my source of water and my territories, how do I make them see? Kill or not kill? ose are our reäections because before, when we didn’t do so, the police came with bombs, bullets, and everything and we were frightened. We don’t cross our arms; we run or we confront them. If we confront them, who wins? Will it be the army? Us? I don’t believe we are going to win, and from here comes a collective reäection. e millenarian experience says, “We are not men of arms; we are men of peace.” As a result, we have our territory of harmony, our land of peace. Instead of confrontation with the police, with the armed forces, we say, “Mr. President, why do you send the police, why do you send the military? We want to talk with you. But if you don’t pay attention we are going to give our lives.” I believe that the most important thing for us in practice is that we need harmony between Mother Nature and human beings. Everyone has the same right to live according to the principles of equality and solidarity—to aid one another mutually. Also the communal principle, the communitarian. Another principle is reciprocity and complementarity. If you lack something, I aid you; and, through reciprocity, I aid you today, you aid me tomorrow. is is the millennial experience that ECUARUNARI 85 we have lived. We cannot have hoarding. We cannot have inequality. We cannot take from the mother [Earth], as we say here, in order to acquire something. I believe that the source of our ideas is our organizations, our base, our adults, our elders, our millenarian sources. e speeches of some leaders could have transformed, in some respects, the ideological thinking of socialism. For example, ama sua, don’t lie, ama llulla, don’t steal, ama quella, don’t be lazy, right? You could transform this into socialist discourse. We as indigenous living in the communities have sources of ideas that, we say, “we have to respect.” e land is for all, the air is for all, the water is for all. And everything that is a resource is for everyone at the service of everyone. And another principal source is responsibility. You take the blame if this water source dries out; you take the blame for those damaged trees, for this land that bears no fruit. We are responsible where we have caused something wrong. is then is the principle of responsibility. You take responsibility if those human beings are not well. ere is responsibility then, another very important principle. Every one of these principles comes with details and from here comes all that they call cosmovision. We could say, for example, “ at hill there—it is angry with us.” If I say to you, “Señor, come and see if the hill is angry or not,” you are not able to determine if it is angry. But if I ask my mother, “Is this hill angry or tranquil?” my mother is going to say, “Tranquil.” You are going to say to me, “Why is the sun there?” but my mother is going to say, “It isn’t why the sun is there, but why is it laughing?” “And how do you see that it is laughing?” My mother is going to give you an explanation. It is a dierent vision. From there comes all that they call complementarity— with the system of education coming from other places, but also with our principles and the cosmovision, the culture. I believe that the source of our ideas is in that daily, everyday experience. Because of this a farmer knows when he plants, when he harvests, when he must not plant, when he must not cut trees. But an agronomist, also knowledgeable, will know many reasons why this occurs. But the indigenous farmer will say, “No, I do it in this moment for God.” Why? Because the agronomist at the most will explain technically and the farmer is going to show practically. Similarly in all the areas we can understand—anthropology, sociology, politics, social, and cultural aairs. 86 CHAPTER 2

Tenesaca is an admirer of the Cuban Revolution and Che Guevara and believes this is true for other indigenous leaders. But this is not true in the communities and he would not “include Che in his political discourse.” Indeed, he believes that the dominance of the left has been an obstacle to indigenous organization.

What has happened here in Ecuador is that socialist ideology, MPDist [Movimiento Popular Democrático (Popular Democratic Movement)], Marxist-Leninist has interfered. We, as an organization, we are going to celebrate forty years [in ], as the rst organization, ECUA- RUNARI, that included a national project. is organization arose from the struggle for land, for liberty for education, for everything, but above all for cultural identity. We have lived almost all our lives with persecution from the great economic powers. And also in this country there is terrible racism. ey are going to say that they don’t know whether a man with a poncho, with a sombrero, has thoughts. ey don’t know if it is in his capabilities. Faced with all this there still is discrimination. Despite these experiences, it is dißcult to maintain loyalty even among movement leaders. What has happened recently conrms this. e currently designated ambassador [to Bolivia], Ricardo Ulcuango, is a leader and someone who has made the journey a process. He has the prestige of man of experience. No one would have thought that he would be proposed as ambassador by a government that is criminalizing the indigenous. If he had been a decent person, rational, coherent, he would have said, “No, stop persecuting my brothers. I will talk to them. I will be ambassador but if and only if you lift these charges, these attacks or change the minerals law, or stop exploiting ITT-Yasuní or stop the water law, improve the law. Improve the agrarian revolution.” But he didn’t say it; the only thing he was ready to say was, “I am indebted, I need resources, I was a leader and they didn’t take notice of me and now I am leaving.” What does this mean? In the hour of truth we drop our pants.

RAFAEL CORREA AND THE INDIGENOUS MOVEMENT

Every time we are alienated. Why are we alienated? Every time it is surprising to us what is being done against the indigenous movement. ECUARUNARI 87

Perhaps we are saying, “Look, Mr. President, we are face to face, talking seriously,” and now, bam! He appears on television giving gifts to some group. Perhaps we say, “Now stop the foolishness. We are going to talk about the issue of water.” Bam! He is naming one of us as ambassador. We are saying, “Leave o the bullshit, now we are going to talk about the agrarian revolution; look, let’s sit down.” Bam! e result is someone is sentenced to jail. As Ecuadorians we are expecting some response from the state and bam! We receive surprises. Now, for example, we have said, “We are going to strengthen the communal governments” and the government tells us we are going to create another organization parallel to ECUARUNARI. e government is creating another organization called the Coor- dinator of Social Movements and Indigenous Movements. What they are doing is taking from our rank and le. ey want them to see the bad, the malaise of our organization. So they say, “Delfín Tenesaca is negotiating with the government, Delfín Tenesaca is a puppet, Delfín Tenesaca is a thief, Delfín Tenesaca is a drunk, Delfín Tenesaca is a womanizer, Delfín Tenesaca doesn’t lead—don’t join or follow him.” Clearly the intention is to silence me. I am going to give you an example. You are a member of a community and are the head of this community. e government is interested in your community because there is petroleum there or because there is water. You haven’t done anything against the government, but they are going to attack you. Let’s see. First attempt, “Head of the community, do you want a job, do you want money to let me enter the community and take the petroleum?” And the leader says, “No, I can’t take the money, nor do I want a job—I am going to defend the community.” en the president of the republic begins to say, “Now they can’t do it because of him; we are going to create another leader to see if this leader accepts my proposal and lets them enter to take everything that is there.” is is Ecuador and because of this they are declaring war.

HUMBERTO CHOLANGO: COMMUNALISM AND EXTRACTIVISM

Humberto Cholango was born in the indigenous community of Los Andes in Pinchina Province. He is a member of the Kayambi Kichwa people. He was secretary of the community when his father was community president. He was the 88 CHAPTER 2

rst indigenous person registered at the mestizo school José Acosta Vallejo and became the best student in his class. He is a graduate of Salesian Polytechnic University in Quito. Among his numerous civic activities and positions, he was coordinator of the Confederation of Kayambi, founder and secretary of Radio Intipacha, and director of youth and education of ECUARUNARI from to . He was elected president of ECUARUNARI for the term –. At the time of the interviews he had just been elected president of CONAIE, which he served from to .ìú

SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION AND THE PLURINATIONAL STATE

For us the struggle for the plurinational state is the transformation of the nature of the power of the state. Currently we have a colonial state, a uninational state, a hegemonic state with colonial principles. We have colonial institutions—justice, executive power—practices, culture. As a result we believe that it is fundamental that the plurinational state should include the diversity of these people. We are fourteen very dif- ferent peoples [nations]. We have culture, we have languages, we have dierent practices of democracy, and the plurinational state includes this and strengthens democracy through a state in union. For us the plurinational state transforms the nature of power on economic issues, on issues of participation, on the issue of the administration of justice, on the issue of education because we do not want a scientic and cultural homogenization of only one vision. Obviously for us the goal is to construct an equitable society, not a society with enormous asymmetries that do not permit an adequate redistribution of the national wealth. ose are the goals, the projects of the plurinational state that we have proposed. We want to guarantee the participation of those peoples and nationalities in decision-making because these are peoples and nationalities that are here. We are making a contribution, not becoming an obstacle to development. We are strengthening democracy and making a fundamental contribution to the development of the country.

COMMUNAL PRACTICE AND SUMAK KAWSAY

For us the fundamental characteristic is communal practice—a communal economy, intercultural bilingual communal education; a communal ECUARUNARI 89 state; but obviously respecting individual rights, respecting individual property. But the most fundamental question is how the individual and the private connect and coexist with the communal. For example, in the exercise of land administration, we have individual properties, but, above all, we have collective properties, collective territories that are administered by peoples and nationalities. In the administration of justice, for example, traditional judges do not exist; instruments such as the police and jails do not exist. For us the family exists, the community exists; purication, not sanction, exists. For us rehabilitation happens through reintegration into human society rather than by a sanction, a punishment, a ne, a sentence. For us the important thing is the unity of the community, the harmony of the community, not the division that judging and imprisoning individuals generates. For us the issue of nonrenewable resources is a point of debate that we have posed not only for the country but as a challenge for all humanity. We want to build a development regime of living well, of sumak kawsay, a harmony, an equilibrium with nature and the beings that live here. Not just humans but the plants, the animals—all the living beings that are in this good country, in this world we live in. Because of this we believe that peoples and states should not depend solely on an extractivist economy; we must look at other development alternatives. e extractive petroleum and mineral economies are leading the world to a catastrophe and, above all, they have created a culture of corruption, have created a culture of vices, of petroleum, minerals, and agriculture maas. It is an inhumane model. It is a model that does not respect the basic norms of human beings. It contaminates rivers, destroys nature, displaces peoples, and destroys cultures. It does not respect the economic, social, and cultural rights that the United Nations has proposed. For us then the most fundamental issue is how to build a new development regime as a great challenge for humanity. We are not opposed to development or to investment, but what we do want is for mineral and petroleum exploitation to be banned in certain territories. It is banned in Yasuní-ITT, the Cordillera del Condor, for example. It is not the same as in Atacama in Chile or Potosí Bolivia. For us high levels of biodiversity and water sources that give life to the peoples, to all living things, exist. For us economic goals do not exist. How do you measure an economic goal that includes perhaps a car, a nice house, a good education, 90 CHAPTER 2 some dollars in the bank—no, no. For us what is important is life—that a human being has consciousness and lives in harmony, that he lives in peace and tranquility. Economic objectives do not exist for us but rather a good life. A good life includes good nutrition, a good education, a good farm, a good crop to feed yourself, and having internal peace. But if you pollute rivers, if you come to impose alien things from outside, if you persecute, if you generate conditions that are going to disturb our culture, our people, obviously this is cultural violence. ere is diversity in the indigenous movement, but the ideological thinking of the indigenous movement is communal thinking. Communal thinking, collective thinking. If you propose Marxism, socialism, communism, propose what you like, but we from our origin are communalists. Our struggle is inspired by Rumiñahui, our struggle is inspired by Fer- nando Daquilema, our struggle is inspired by many mestizos who also struggled. e gure of Che Guevara is universal—you could not say he is solely for the indigenous—hated by some, admired by others. I admire his independent struggles whether they were indigenous or not, not the methods that he used but the concept, the ideology, the position that he took.

RAFAEL CORREA, THE STATE, AND THE INDIGENOUS MOVEMENT

It is not only a conäict between President Correa and the indigenous movement. It is a conäict with the state—with a uninational state, with a vision of cultural homogenization, with various practices and vices. It is not only conäict because before we got along well with the governments, since , with this government as well. After all the dialogues that the indigenous movement has had, all the dialogues that failed, we have not arrived at an accord, a happy end with the government. ere exist here two visions, two cultures, two civilizations—one with an occidental vision and another civilization, the indigenous civilization, with a communal vision. Now with President Correa the conäicts are very intense obviously on issues of the economy, on issues of the exercise of political power, of the vision concerning natural resources. He continues with the same idea of the extraction of petroleum, of the international market. Obviously the country needs investment; the country needs foreign exchange to implement public policy. But what is fundamental for us is to begin to develop the sumak kawsay and “el buen vivir.” ECUARUNARI 91

Extractivism is not part of sumak kawsay. It is the opposite position, because extractivism creates pollution, devastates cultures, devastates nature. Would sumak kawsay do this? If you extract petroleum, you can live well for a moment. Perhaps for twenty or thirty years you have money, but what will happen to the rest of the generations, the rest of society afterward? Mining and petroleum pollution lasts or years until nature once again regenerates, practically restores itself. But what will happen with those people who lose their cultures? [To change this situation] it is fundamental to have a national debate not only with the government but with all the actors in society, with academe, with the powers of the state, with other functions of the state. It is necessary to debate with the intellectuals; it is necessary to debate even with the Church or with the armed forces. A debate that is not going to be resolved in one year, two years, three years—it is necessary to plan a process for the long term. Obviously mobilizations [will be necessary] but even beyond the mobilizations there is a civilized debate, a debate about understanding, and in this academia has to play a role—the universities, the schools have to change their vision of the weight of their studies, their vision of looking at a single Ecuador, not a single Ecuador but diverse in its interior.

LUIS CONTENTO: SUMAK KAWSAY AND THE CITIZENS’ REVOLUTION

At the time of the interview, Luis Contento was serving as vice president of ECUARUNARI. He had previously been named mayor of an alternative indigenous municipal government of Saraguro. e elected mayor was eventually forced to resign. Contento is a leader of the Coordinadora de Organizaciones del Pueblo Kichwa Saraguro (CORPUKIS, Coordinator of the Kichwa Saraguro People).ìû

REVOLUTION AND SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION

e rst proposal that we made in was that Ecuador had to be a plurinational and multicultural state. Twenty years had to pass before the proposal that we made in [was acknowledged]. Now recently in our constitution recognized the country as a plurinational and 92 CHAPTER 2 intercultural state. is is obviously an advance on paper, but we have not been able to see Article of the constitution in practice. e Ecuadorian state maintains the same structure and the same secondary laws. e constitution says beautiful things but the secondary laws contradict what the constitution says. We are living then in an epoch of contradictions—in an epoch of uncertainty. Laws that we want to change so that they are aligned with the constitution are simply not passed and remain in limbo. is does not give us sußcient guarantees to continue thinking they will put this constitution into practice. We are seriously worried. Nevertheless, we maintain the rm position that Ecuador needs a total reconstruction. We have proposed that all the laws have to have the plurinational as their common thread. is is the dißculty—the rst problem we had with the mineral law. It was not passed. It remained in limbo. e dead- line passed and the law was approved by the ministry. Clearly it is legal, but for us on the other hand it was not legitimized by society because it was approved solely by the president. e problem is that there was not an understanding between the legislature and the executive and the law remains in limbo. Why does it remain in limbo? Precisely because there were no accords between civil society and the government. We have said, rst, that there should not be open-pit mining on a large scale in Ecuador. is is the rst point of total disagreement. e other thing we have said is that there should not be mining in con- servation sites and national reserves. Another thing we have said is that if there are going to be sites where indigenous communities or campesinos live, rst they have to consult the communities in accord with Convention of the Declaration of the United Nations, which says that indigenous communities must be consulted where they will be aected by some law or activity of the state. In accord with this, as we have said, and in accord with Article of the constitution where we are authorized to make use of collective rights, we have said that if we are going to see mining in sites of settlement of indigenous communities, they have to be consulted.

THE NATION

Nationality or nation—it is the same. We consider that a nationality or a nation has to combine various elements. First it should have territory, then it should have a language, its own style of dress, common ancestral ECUARUNARI 93 roots, and its own contemporary cultural manifestations. If you combine these ve elements, you can dene nation or nationality. Similarly Covenant [?] of the United Nations Declaration says that each people or nation can dene itself. Here [in Ecuador], for example, are the Kichwas. We are a nationality, a Kichwa nation that has eighteen peoples. Here there are Saraguros, Salasacas, Otavaleños, et cetera, but we are a nation, a Kichwa nationality that combines those elements. We have territory in that we are in the Andes; we have a language that is Kichwa; we have our forms of dress; we have common roots; we have dierent cultural manifestations. e Shuar are another nation, another nationality we have and so on. is is the condition of being a nation or nationality. But obviously we are part of a state; we are not a dierent state. We have the right to receive the benets that the state grants to the inhabitants of Ecuador. We also have obligations to contribute to the state that are right and proper as Ecuadorians. But as a nation and nationality we have our autonomy and the exercise of collective rights according to Article of the constitution—our autonomy not in the sense of iso- lating us from the administration of the state but in the sense of having our own education, exercising our own forms of health, making our own forms of solidary, having a communal economy. is is what they have not understood, because they have said that when we considered ourselves as a nationality, as a nation, we are forming another state and this is not so. No one denies that in Ecuador there are various cultures. No one denies it because it is visible. But, in contrast, we are not living the intercultural in social relations. To be intercultural you have to have respect toward other cultures, and we consider that here there is not that respect. ere is always racism, at times even of the indigenous toward the mestizos, but particularly from the mestizos toward the indigenous. While we continue to have this racism, there is not interculturality. We are arguing that the relationship between the peoples and nationalities and the mestizos in the rural and urban sectors has to be equal. How can you explain, for example, the fact that the state assigns ^ annually per urban child for education but they give ^ annually per rural child for education? Why this dierence? ey should have the same treatment. Why is it that only the mestizo have access to public 94 CHAPTER 2

institutions like ministries and boards and the indigenous do not? Only in CONDENPE, which is an institution for the indigenous, are there indigenous representatives. In other places they make him a janitor or a secretary, but there is no decision-making power.

ELECTIONS, THE LEFT, AND SUMAK KAWSAY

I asked Luis Contento how he would bring about the profound changes he sought and what were the principal inäuences on the development of the ideology of the indigenous movement. He replied:

Denitely in a democratic country it has to be through elections. We have to create in society the conditions for our proposal to be understood and accepted because the other way around we are always going to lose. To win we would have to win the government as they have done, for example, in Bolivia. ey easily won the government but if it is to be the same with us, we would have to ally with a strong political party. We identify with the left sector. Not the extreme left, not the revolutionary left, but an intelligent left, hardworking, committed. We cannot run to ally ourselves with the MPD, with socialism; we can’t do that because this is not our vision. ey act from a party point of view. We act from the point of view of life, of sumak kawsay. We can’t understand one another. Similarly, with the Right. Why? Because for them sumak kawsay is to take everything that there is in Mother Earth to assist with education, health, housing. For us, on the contrary, it says, “No, to respect nature is to be reciprocal with nature.” Why? To guarantee the life of this generation and those to come. On the other hand, our form of extractivism is to guarantee life and sumak kawsay for this generation and those that come so that they are not without water, or with unproductive lands, pollution, weak ozone layers. What guarantees do we leave them? It is not only the survival of the indigenous; it is life in its broadest extension over the universe. e life of plants, of animals, of human beings. To be able to talk of life, then, is to talk of reducing the emission of gases by the industrialized countries, conserve what we have at the least, not pollute the air, not pollute the environment, and guarantee clean air, clean water, and a healthy environment. No transgenics, no insecticides, ECUARUNARI 95 no soy of this type, to have healthy food and be able to guarantee the life of human beings. Our proposal is really very broad: sumak kawsay, food sovereignty—it is not a simple question, a small question. We are planning a total change that comes from our own experience in life, from our own experience in the communities. I, the vice president [of Ecuarunari], and the compañeros that I know, ten compañeros, come from a community where we have experienced daily national problems: the lack of work, pollution, contaminated products, the lack of money, the absence of the state. We have experienced these problems, right? e lack of attention to health, education, and production—we have experienced it. is is where our proposals come from. At the most initially there was some inäuence but not ideological; rather, from persons who wanted to give some guidance—from the progressive Church, for example. Perhaps from the parties of the left. Initially there was some relation with them, with Cuba, but recently I believe that it is our own proposal. We are young leaders. I have no such inäuences, either from the left or Russia or Cuba, not even from the Church, because we have had our own education. We have very important personalities, such as Dolores Cacuango and Monsignor Proaño, who have lived in the communities, who have been with us, who proposed a new form of work, of orienting the Church, for example. And also compañeros who at the moment are still alive, who are in the communities, such as “Lucho” Macas himself, for example, who is a national leader. José María Cabascango. Nina Pacari aiding us from the judiciary, giving us judgments. ese are our compañeros whom we believe in.

PACHAKUTIK AND RAFAEL CORREA

Pachakutik is the political arm of CONAIE but has independence. Why? Because CONAIE is only from the indigenous movement and Pachakutik is for various sectors, not only for the indigenous. Here there are intellectuals, professionals, guilds, urban sectors, indigenous, campesinos, blacks—all the tendencies. Not political tendencies but rather all the sectors—this is Pachakutik. First, Correa is intelligent. I supposed that he was trained to govern the country because at rst he took all our proposals and presented them 96 CHAPTER 2 to the nation. As a result we said, “Clearly he is someone who is going to execute our proposals here, we are going forward with Correa.” Our compañeros in Pachakutik thought so to. We co-governed some three, four months like this. We governed with him. Our compañeros were ministers and everything. But little by little he faded and ended up on a dierent side—not following the path that our political project laid out. We said to our compañeros, “We have nothing to do here. Get out.” As a result some of our compañeros, like Virgilio Hernández, renounced Pachakutik and stayed with Correa to this day. Now his discourse is vanishing and no one believes him. At the moment he talks of a “citizens’ revolution” but nothing about fundamentals. He is talking about a revolution only in words. It is the same partocracy that has governed the country seeking immediate, not long-term, solutions. is is not our way of thinking. Our way of thinking is life in the long run. e principal [point of disagreement] is the economic model. We have said, “No to extractivism”; Correa says, “Yes to extractivism.” We have said, “No to mining”; Correa says, “Yes to mining.” We have said, “Yes to the agrarian revolution, but redistribute the land”; and Correa says, “No.” We have said, “Yes to the new water law,” but redistribute the water, reform the rates, make a plurinational water council; and Correa says, “No, the only entity that may have authority over water is the government.” We say, “Clearly, but a council has to issue policies concerning the use of water.” ere are these dierences but more so the economic part. We have said that they must think of a sustainable economy, sustainable without aecting nature, without aecting the Pachamama, and in this regard we do not agree with him. e other is our vision of government. We believe always in a participative government— alternative, democratic. is government has only mentioned it in words. It is governing with the same political elite that has [always] governed the country. e same oßcials that have been advising and forming part of government after government. ere has not been an alternative. I am not saying that they are bad but I am saying simply that there should be an alternative; there should be other proposals as well. We are proposing that Ecuador has to be refounded or restructured in the institutional realm, in the realm of rules. ey only want to prepare Ecuador’s regulations, to pave the way for mining. We, on the other ECUARUNARI 97

hand, are trying to make this legislation very clear so that people understand where they can mine if they do mine. It should not be that only percent of the royalties benet the country, and the rms that come to extract various minerals take away percent. Life is dierent for us and the government and we are not going to understand one another unless Rafael has a thought transplant.

SUMAK KAWSAY AND THE COMMUNAL VISION

COSMOVISION, COMMUNAL THINKING, AND COMMUNITY EXPERIENCE

Like all revolutionaries, the leaders of ECUARUNARI dream of a new world built on the ashes of the old. is new world comes, to some extent, from a romanticized version of the old world of the pre-Columbian community inäu- enced indirectly through the reigning ideologies of the twentieth century and the organizational methods and contemporary concerns of the twenty-rst. At the core of the revolutionary mission is a “symbolic struggle” between peripheral capitalism as a cultural and social system and communalism as a distinct and antithetical vision of the world and its fundamental social categories and symbolic assumptions. is alternative vision is expressed in various terms by Delfín Tenesaca, Humberto Cholango, and Luis Contento. For Delfín Tene- saca, indigenous cosmovision provides an alternative philosophical frame where suns laugh and people live together in equality, community, and reciprocity. He rejects the capitalist culture based on “money, money, money, prot, prot” hoarding and accumulation on which Ecuadorian society and its system of laws, including its constitution, are based: “Everyone has the same right to live and this principle of equality and the principle of solidarity—to aid one another mutually. . . . Also the communal . . . the land is for all . . . everything that is a resource is for everyone, at the service of everyone.” Humberto Cholango and Luis Contento express exactly the same concept in slightly dierent terms—“communal thinking” for Cholango, and community experience for Contento. According to Cholango, “communal practice” is a fundamental characteristic of indigenous life—“a communal economy, intercultural, bilingual communal education, a communal state . . . collective properties”—a system of justice that is based on reinserting the individual into the community. Capitalism in its peripheral manifestation 98 CHAPTER 2 is “an inhumane model” that does not respect “the minimal needs of human beings, contaminating rivers, destroying nature, displacing people, destroying cultures.” It leads to “cultural violence.” But at an even deeper level there exist “two visions, two cultures, two civilizations, one with an occidental vision and another civilization, the indigenous civilization, with a communal vision.” e alternative is communal thinking, collective thinking: “We from our origin are communalists.” Cholango even goes so far as to say that “for us economic goals do not exist . . . for us what is important is life—that a human being has consciousness” and lives in harmony, peace, and tranquility supported by good nutrition, good education, and a “good farm.” For Contento, the kind of “total change” they are planning comes from “our own experience in the communities” and is so dierent from Correa’s that only a “thought transplant” for the president would bring them into agreement.

EQUALITY, SOLIDARITY, AND COMMUNITY

All the ECUARUNARI leaders emphasize the origin of communal thinking in the generational experience of indigenous peoples in their own communities. Communalism is now at the heart of the ECUARUNARI vision but even Humberto Cholango—while conceding that Marxism, socialism, and communism also emphasize communal thinking—still insists that “we from our origin are communalists.” Given ECUARUNARI’s origins in liberation theology and the revolutionary Marxist left, it seems unlikely that the millennial experience of communities alone gave rise to this particular pattern of communalist thought, but such an assertion cannot be conrmed with the materials at hand. In any case, the parallels between socialist notions of community and solidarity and indigenous “communal thought” are striking. So are the dierences. ere are few Marxists among those interviewed in Ecuador or Bolivia, and solidarity of the indigenous poor has replaced class solidarity as the dominant narrative. Still, “the poor” as a social category and economic inequality as a social problem are themes in the ECUARUNARI interviews in a way in which they did not appear in interviews from the Amazon. Close to the beginning of his interview, Delfín Tenesaca brings up the problem of poverty directly, “How are the poor living?” and then answers his own question by saying that from the point of view of those who suer from hunger, the republic has not and will not change: “It is terrible.” For Humberto Cholango, the extractivist ECUARUNARI 99 model does not even respect the minimum norms of human beings or the economic, social, and cultural rights that the United Nations has proposed. Luis Contento emphasizes not only poverty but also massive inequality in the distribution of educational funds between urban and rural (indigenous) schools, and in the redistribution of land in agrarian reform.

SUMAK KAWSAY AND THE AMERICAN DREAM

Sumak kawsay is a concept in general use in the indigenous movement in the Andes and in all three interviews. As Luis Contento says, “We act from the point of view of life, of sumak kawsay.” For Delfín Tenesaca, sumak kawsay means “beautiful, lovely, wonderful,” and it happens when “we are equal. You respect me and I respect you. It is a community of brothers.” Cholango rejects core elements of the American dream, “a car, a nice house, a good education, some dollars in the bank,” saying that “what is important is life— that a human being has consciousness and lives in harmony; that he lives in peace and tranquility.” For him a development regime should reäect these goals. Sumak kawsay is the embodiment of communal thinking in economic practice. Individual economic achievement is replaced with the idea of living well (and living better) collectively and equally. Sumak kawsay includes the idea of living not only in harmony with other human beings but in harmony with nature. According to Tenesaca, Cholango, and Contento, this harmony is under immediate and lethal threat from the development policies of Rafael Correa.

EXTRACTIVISM AND THE PACHAMAMA

Now, as in the past, there is a strong strain of anticapitalism in the views of the ECUARUNARI leaders. Nevertheless, “extractivism,” as it is called by indigenous leaders, the form that capitalism and capitalist development have taken in Rafael Correa’s Ecuador, is a particular target for criticism and antisystemic mobilization. Based on these interviews and others in Ecuador, the meaning of extractivism on the indigenous left is an economic model based on the unrestricted and unlimited exploitation of natural resources by multinational or Ecuadorian corporations, whatever the human, cultural, or ecological costs. As Humberto Cholango notes, CONAIE is not opposed to investment or development but the particular form it has taken in a dependent country like 100 CHAPTER 2

Ecuador. e country is now and always has been an export economy dependent on a few or often only one primary commodity (now oil). In the Correa version of extractivism, the revenues from the export economy are diverted into large-scale social programs and infrastructure improvements rather than wasted on the lifestyles and business ventures of the ruling political caste. e ECUARUNARI leaders are adamantly opposed to the Correa model. e basis of their objections is as much moral as material. Extractivism violates fundamental assumptions about the natural world that are part of communal thinking, cosmovision, and sumak kawsay. Often the gure of the Kichwa and Aymara earth goddess Pachamama is invoked to capture this bundle of meanings. “Our practice,” says Delfín Tenesaca, is “the care of the Pachamama.” For him one of the most important components of cosmovision is the harmony between Mother Nature and human beings. Cholango wants a development regime that shows “a harmony, an equilibrium with nature and the beings that live here. Not just humans but the plants, the animals.” For Contento the ideas of the Right (i.e., Correa) are to “take everything that there is in Mother Earth” while for the indigenous it is “to respect nature,” to “be reciprocal with nature.” e consequences of “extractivism” are described in moral absolutes: “ is is the certain death of the people, the certain death of generations, and the certain death of nature” (Tenesaca). “It is a model that does not respect the basic norms of human beings” (Cholango). “It is not only the survival of indigenous life; it is life in its broadest extension over the universe” (Contento).

THE PLURINATIONAL STATE AND RAFAEL CORREA

e demand for a plurinational state was the foundational principle of CONAIE and its constituent organizations and is reäected in all three interviews in this chapter, although it is emphasized especially by Luis Contento. All repeat the ethnic denition of a nation in terms of territory, language, culture, and history, and all denounce the current Ecuadorian state and the Correa administration in particular as uninational and unicultural. Even though they acknowledge that the constitution recognizes Ecuador as a plurinational and intercultural state, all deny that, at least so far, this has had little, if any, practical signicance. In fact, they claim, under Rafael Correa a bad situation has become even worse. As Tenesaca and Contento both contend, Rafael Correa’s “citizens’ revolution” is a revolution in words only. ECUARUNARI 101

In the opinions of all three leaders, Correa has made a mockery of the very notion of a state where the collective interests of indigenous groups have formal representation through their chosen leaders. On the contrary, these interests are ignored and the leaders criminalized and insulted in the rush to extract natural resources from their traditional lands. Delfín Tenesaca, himself arrested and charged with terrorism, put it most directly—“they are declaring war.” For Humberto Cholango, “we have a colonial state, a uninational state, a hegemonic state with colonial principles—justice, executive power—practices, culture.” And as has already been noted, this hegemonic culture or civilization is in direct contradiction to the communal world that Cholango represents. Or, in Contento’s words, “We have said that they must think of a sustainable economy, sustainable without aecting nature, without aecting the Pacham- ama, and in this regard we do not agree with him.” Delfín Tenesaca sees his colleague in the struggle and Correa’s newly appointed ambassador Ricardo Ulcuango as another example of Correa’s eorts to undermine the indigenous leadership by luring away disaected leaders with political plums so that the government can “take everything that is there” on indigenous community lands.

REVOLUTIONARIES WITHOUT A REVOLUTION

A revolution, I have argued, is based on a fundamental transformation of the categories of social life and consciousness, and the symbolic assumptions on which these are based. To say that Delfín Tenesaca’s cosmovision is based on alternative symbolic assumptions is to belabor the obvious. Suns do not laugh in occidental thought; nor is land held by all. At the deepest level, as all these leaders conrm, the leadership of ECUARUNARI thinks in communal, not individual, terms. It is a question, as Cholango says, of two dierent civilizations—not simply two civilizations that are dierent from one another, but two civilizations in contradiction. Such contradictions can be resolved in ways other than revolution, and perhaps they will be. But the current political polarization in Ecuador has made such compromise dißcult although not impossible. Still, ECUARUNARI leaders think that only a total transformation of state and society will resolve this contradiction, and although they have retreated to their communities, they have no intention of giving up political struggle. With power added to the equation, symbolic contradictions become revolutionary ones. 102 CHAPTER 2

But I am not referring to revolution in the twentieth-century sense of an armed uprising, overthrowing the state, and seizing power. e leaders of ECUARUNARI are democrats and wish to act in civil society, symbolic revolutionaries though they may be. None of them have abandoned the idea of a mass uprising in the style of . Cholango is building coalitions with other members of the left; Tenesaca wants to change not only the structure of the state but the multinational system that supports it, although according to him, “the millenarian experience says, ‘We are not men of arms; we are men of peace.’” Contento wants to follow the model of Evo Morales in Bolivia and take power through mass protest and elections. As in the Amazon, the Ecuadorian paradox is symbolic revolution and democratic action.

FIGURE 1. Marlon Santi (left) and Humberto Cholango (center) hold a press conference on September , , to announce a protest. Courtesy of AP. FIGURE 2. As part of a nationwide strike that shut down most provincial capitals and major roads in an echo of , indigenous people march in Quito on August , . Courtesy of Reuters.

FIGURE 3. Indigenous protesters storm military lines outside National Congress Build- ing, January , . Courtesy of Reuters. FIGURE 4. Colonel Lucio Gutiérrez (left) and CONAIE president Antonio Vargas (right) stand in the National Congress Building and celebrate their temporary seizure of power, January , . Courtesy of Reuters. 3 PACHAKUTIK

Indigenous Jeersonians

Interviews with Gerónimo Yantalema, Salvador Quishpe, and Auki Tituaña

T THE beginning of , CONAIE began its ill-fated entry into electoral politics with the formation of its own political party, the AMovimiento de Unidad Plurinacional Pachakutik–Nuevo País (MUPP-NP), usually called simply Pachakutik. e entry into politics, instead of unifying the movement, polarized it and revealed deep contradictions in the strategy itself—between the Sierra and Amazonian wings of CONAIE; between a social movement based on mass protest and a political party focused on winning elections; and, most signicantly, between a movement focused on indigenous demands and a party attempting to form coalitions with the nonindigenous left. e Sierra leadership of ECUARUNARI had always been suspicious of electoral involvement, and enthusiasm for an indigenous political party came rst from the Amazon. As early as , Amazon leaders Rafael Pandam and Valerio Grefa had been pushing for electoral involvement, and CONFENIAE was the rst to form its own political party, the Movimiento Político Pachakutik in .ì e CONAIE leadership responded with its own party, Movimiento Alternativo Plurinacional, and in a compromise the formal party title included elements of both (Movimiento de Unidad Plurinacional Pachakutik). For the elections the new party decided to ally with the Nuevo País movement of Freddy Ehlers, a prominent nonindigenous television personality, hence the full title.ï 106 CHAPTER 3

Coalitions with nonindigenous popular groups were essential for Pacha- kutik, and in the elections the party allied not only with Ehlers’s Nuevo País movement but with a broad grouping of labor, environmental, and human rights groups and neighborhood associations, the Coordinadora de Movimien- tos Sociales (CMS, Social Movements Coordinator).ð As Marc Becker notes, the new party’s rst outing was a “moderate success,” gaining eight deputies and two mayors, including Auki Tituaña, who went on to become one of Ecua- dor’s most successful mayors and whose interview follows, and Luis Macas as a national deputy.ñ Ehlers lost the presidential race to Abdala Bucaram (–), whose term was cut short by mass protests led by CONAIE. At the same time, Amazon Pachakutik enthusiasts Rafael Pandam and Valerio Grefa supported Bucaram in the election and accepted positions in his government. Bucaram was removed from oßce based on alleged mental incompetence in what amounted to a constitutional overthrow of the government. In the subsequent elections, a center-right candidate, the ill-fated Jamil Mahuad, was elected as his replacement. On January , , Mahuad was overthrown by a coalition of indigenous protestors lead by CONAIE president Antonio Vargas and midlevel oßcers in the army. e army stood back and allowed the protestors to occupy the presidential palace and the national legislative and Supreme Court buildings. For a few heady hours, a “Junta of National Salvation”—consisting of Vargas representing CONAIE, Colonel Lucio Gutiérrrez representing the midlevel oßcers, and the head of the Supreme Court to provide the appearance of legality—ruled in the name of the Pachakutik motto and Incan injunction, ama llulla, ama quella, ama sua (don’t lie, don’t be lazy, don’t steal). e senior command, reacting to U.S. pressure, ordered Gutiérrez to step down and replaced him with one of their own, General Carlos Mendoza, who promptly resigned, dissolving the junta. e presidency then passed to Vice President Gustavo Noboa (– ), one of Ecuador’s richest men.ú e coup and the subsequent election represented both the apogee of Pachakutik power and the beginning of its rapid decline. In the election, coup plotter Lucio Gutiérrez ran for president in coalition with Pachakutik and with the backing of CONAIE. In the second round Gutiérrez may have received more than percent of the indigenous vote; although Pachakutik legislative candidates only received at most percent, this vote represented a historic high.û Pachakutik since its founding in has never received a majority of the indigenous vote, let alone a substantial share of the nonindigenous vote. PACHAKUTIK 107

Nevertheless, the widespread view that Pachakutik-CONAIE was responsible for the Gutiérrez victory gave them bargaining power in the new administration. Notably, Nina Pacari was appointed foreign minister (the rst indigenous woman to hold that oßce in the history of Latin America) and Luis Macas was appointed minister of agriculture. e coalition was short lived as Gutiérrez moved to the right, abandoning the antineoliberal discourse of his campaign. Tensions increased as Gutiér- rez tried to build a clientelist structure in indigenous communities, bypass- ing CONAIE and returning to neoliberal economic policies. In August Gutiérrez declared the coalition at an end and demanded the resignation of all Pachakutik appointees. e next day Nina Pacari, Luis Macas, and many others resigned.ü e failed coalition with Gutiérrez was, said Nina Pacari in , like a “political cyclone” sweeping through Pachakutik. “When the hurricane passes it uproots things. . . . At that moment some remain standing but others are uprooted” and go with the äow. Although Pacari went on to say that the movement was reconstructing itself, the Gutiérrez “political cyclone” did permanent damage and even today Pachakutik is a shadow of its former self.ý at damage was only increased by Pachakutik’s disastrous relationship with current Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa. Burned by its association with Gutiérrez, Pachakutik rejected coalitions with Rafael Correa in the rst round of the elections. Luis Macas even declined an oer of the vice presidency from Correa. Instead, Pachakutik decided to run Macas himself in the presidential voting. e results were disastrous. Despite near universal name recognition, Macas received only . percent of the national vote and only percent of the indigenous vote.ÿ Although Pachakutik supported Correa in the second round and in the early months of his administration, dierences over CONAIE control of government entities concerned with indigenous aairs and mining concessions in largely indigenous areas broke the alliance and led to a bitter and rancorous conäict. Correa resorted to name calling, which many indigenous leaders, as the interviews indicate, found insulting, if not openly racist. CONAIE criticism of Cor- rea, as the interviews also indicate, was unrelenting. His growing popularity, as evidenced by his subsequent success in the presidential elections of and in , did nothing to diminish this conäict and may have even deepened it. By the split, as revealed in all the interviews, seemed irrevocable. e interviews that follow are all with Pachakutik elected oßcials who managed to be elected post-Gutiérrez and post-Correa. e interviews dier 108 CHAPTER 3 from those of ECUARUNARI oßcials that appear in chapter . Read alongside ndings of previous research, they suggest that the deepest contradiction in Pachakutik was between the material discourse popular with the indigenous base of the party (and many nonindigenous voters) and the cultural discourse of plurinationality evoked by the party leadership and in all the interviews of Pachakutik elected oßcials that appear in this chapter. Plurinationality is the founding principle of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE) and is emphasized by almost all indigenous leaders interviewed in Ecuador. e strong emphasis on issues of economic development and the material concerns of rural people in general and rural indigenous people in particular, however, sets these interviews o from most others collected in Ecuador. In the age of Correa, surviving Pachakutik elected oßcials share his concern with economic development but strongly oppose his methods of accomplishing it.

VOICES OF PACHAKUTIK

GERÓNIMO YANTALEMA: EXTRACTIVISM VERSUS THE INDIGENOUS PEASANTRY

Gerónimo Yantalema, a Puruway Kichwa, was born on March , , on a hacienda in Guamote, Chimborazo, where as a child he worked as a shepherd and absorbed the culture and religion of a traditional indigenous community. He worked as a carpenter to support his studies for an electrician’s degree at the Riobamba extension of the Universidad Central del Ecuador. His life was fundamentally transformed by the uprising; he associated himself with the Indigenous Evangelical Church of Chimborazo and later founded the Indigenous Center for eological Studies, inspired by liberation theology. He participated in all the major indigenous mobilizations of the s and was an adviser to the rst indigenous prefect of Chimborazo. He served as an adviser to Pachakutik campaigns in Chimborazo before being elected to the National Assembly as deputy from Chimborazo, a position that he held at the time of the interviews.ì~

SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION

e Pachakutik movement emerges from a discussion between the indigenous movements and the social movements. e model imposed PACHAKUTIK 109 by the colony has no respect for nature. e people are not involved in decision-making and only those in government decide. In other words, this colonial state is vertical; decisions are made by the government; indigenous peoples are excluded. It’s as if they don’t exist. e change we’re proposing is a structural change toward a government that stems from the diversity of Ecuador’s peoples and nationalities, and which deepens participatory and communal democracy. In our communities communal government is not the responsibility of the leader, of the president, but rather it is our collective responsibility. e most important decisions are not made by the president; they’re made collectively. at is what we call participatory and communal democracy, as opposed to representative democracy, a democracy based on majorities and minorities. e majority decides through their vote. We believe it shouldn’t be that way. Democracy has to be participatory and communal. Every collective must take part in decision-making.

EXTRACTIVISM AND AGRICULTURAL DEVELOPMENT

With regard to the economy, we’re very concerned about this government’s extractivist model. For them, the economy should be based on hydrocarbons, mining, and agricultural exports. We say this is a very limited and destructive model, which will bring in money during certain periods but not others. What’s more, it aects the Pachamama and nature, because both oil extraction and mining destroy the biodiversity of entire areas, and pollute the earth and water where indigenous peoples live. is pollution systematically destroys biodiversity and human life. Moreover, the state has invested all its resources in export agriculture, that is, agricultural products to sell abroad [for the benet of ] large landowners, while it’s forgotten about peasants and indigenous people. It’s not just this government; every government has done the same. ey’ve all scrambled to invest money on roads, irrigation infrastructure, pesticides, herbicides, all for export agriculture. Peasant and indigenous producers who cultivate the land every day to produce their daily food are forgotten. ey have no political, economic, or social backing, and we believe the balance has to be restored. It can’t be that one sector alone benets from state policies; every sector has to benet equally. Just as the export agriculture sector needs state resources to enable it to 110 CHAPTER 3 export and generate foreign exchange, small-scale indigenous farmers need not only state resources but also the redistribution of the land and water to produce food for the country and even consider exporting their products. We’ve always advocated a very open culture. For example, the Tawantinsuyu model, which dates back to the times before the colonial conquest, demonstrates that we weren’t closed o but that there was a great deal of engagement and an economic dynamic based on exchange. And we wholeheartedly reject any economic model that is only concerned about today and not tomorrow, and is only concerned about money and not human beings and the Pachamama. So that’s in terms of economics. As for society and culture, we believe that every culture and language has to be strengthened on equal terms. But in this country, as in the rest of Latin America, indigenous cultures are being progressively exterminated, murdered, through state policies. Speaking the language of indigenous peoples, using our clothing, cel- ebrating our festivities, and carrying out our rituals, our ceremonies, is seen as folklore, as something inferior, underdeveloped or reäecting a lack of civilization. ey believed this to such an extent that this government issued a decree that gave the Catholic missions permission to civilize indigenous people. It’s outrageous that this is our state model, and we want to change it. at state model can’t continue to exist after ve hundred years of destroying nature and destroying human beings. It needs to be structurally changed, and that’s a key element of the indigenous movement’s proposal. Of course, part of our experience is living with the Pacham- ama and with the land. Our culture comes from living with the land, cultivating it, growing seeds, looking after the water, looking after the moorlands, so the cities can have water. at’s why we ask how there can be a system of government that ignores the sector that feeds the people; that ignores the sector that looks after the water so there’s water for everyone; and that instead invests in this extractive, agricultural export model. So those are broadly the structural changes we’re proposing in the political, economic, and social spheres. ese are deep changes totally opposed to the current model, which, as I said earlier, seeks to make money from everything, regardless of whom it hurts. It’s money-centered, and wants money for everything. PACHAKUTIK 111

ey think that they can solve everything just with money, bureaucracy, projects, everything. But that money comes from exploiting nature, so we say you don’t need money rst for everything. We say you need to learn to live in harmony with other human beings and with the Pachamama.

LAND REFORM

at’s another key issue in structural change. In Ecuador, percent of the population owns and privatizes the water and the land, and percent of the water is in the hands of agricultural exporters, which make up percent of the population. In other words, it’s in the hands of large banana- or sugar-producing haciendas and other production systems, while barely percent of the water is in the hands of small-scale indigenous peasants, who produce food to guarantee our food sovereignty. e Montecristi Constitution [] gave the government two years to carry out a comprehensive audit of all the water concessions and implement a redistribution plan, especially for small-scale indigenous peasants, but absolutely nothing has been done. It’s the same with the land. ere are vast expanses of land [in the sierra], but the best land for cultivation is concentrated in the hands of percent, percent of the population. It’s a major business, land. Meanwhile, small-scale indigenous peasants, the productive units of food sovereignty, barely have access to small areas. In the Andean sierras, each property is no larger than a block, or a hectare. [Land reform] has been been practically useless, because all it’s done is hand out land that had been destroyed by the haciendas’ monocul- tures without accompanying policies to improve salaries, for example. Another major problem that the indigenous-peasant sector faces is the fact that their products have no value in the market, while the price of agricultural exports is regulated, with minimum and maximum prices. Indigenous peasants’ products aren’t regulated by the government. e market regulates them. In other words, one can work the land for a whole year, or six months, and end up with a useless product. In many cases one has to sell, for example, a sack of potatoes for as little as a dollar, at best ve, even ten dollars. But imagine, a sack of sugar now costs forty dollars, which means I have to sell ten sacks of my product to be able to buy the other 112 CHAPTER 3 agricultural export product. ese are specic examples of the fact that even though the constitution now describes our country’s new model as a popular solidarity economy, in reality that’s not applied. e markets or middlemen still set the rules of the game ere’s been no concern for other sectors. It’s not enough to hand over land to the peasants. Investment is required to make the land usable and to implement basic irrigation infrastructure so that water that is mostly going to hydroelectric dams, which in many cases are private, goes to indigenous peasant producers and to use the water that is going to the agricultural export sector for indigenous peasant producers too. In the Andean highlands of Ecuador we still use äood irrigation, and the state hasn’t considered investing in new technology to improve irrigation such as sprinkler or spray irrigation systems. at’s where we see a lack of policies. Certain lands were redistrib- uted but others remained intact. For example, here in Cotopaxi and Pichincha, there are vast swaths of land still in the hands of haciendas. It’s even worse in the coast; it’s brutal there, you can see how irrigation channels go straight through to the banana plantations, straight past the Montubios, but it’s no use to them or the peasants, no use. All this requires a huge structural change, a change in the way we think, because people, governments, have so far only been concerned with generating foreign exchange in the medium term. Because they know that in the short term those lands will be destroyed and eroded, don’t they? So that’s the principle behind what we’re proposing.

NATION AND NATIONALITY

Well, our starting point is the fact that the colony, the Spanish conquerors, claimed that there was only one civilization here, the colonizers’ civilization, and those that were already here were uncivilized, they didn’t have a civilization. We’ve argued that they were wrong. Here in Ecuador, as in the whole of Latin America, there are many other peoples and civilizations. In Ecuador, we have veried and proved the formal existence of fourteen nationalities and eighteen peoples, which is to say there isn’t a single civilization. Each of these fourteen nationalities has its own government, its own language, and its own territories, as well as its memory and history. PACHAKUTIK 113

Why are they called nationalities? Because they have their own language; that’s why I’m Kichwa. My nationality is Kichwa, and we’ve just had a meeting with the people of Shuar, Ashuar nationality, etcetera. Each has its own language, through which it communicates and creates its own thought structures, its own way of seeing the world, which is expressed through its language. So, for example, you do so through English, right? We do so through Kichwa, and Spaniards through Spanish. erefore we’ve said that Ecuador shouldn’t be a nation but a plurinational state, that is, plural. ere is a territory, or diverse territories, diverse languages, diverse systems of justice or of law. Because people here also used to think that there was only one justice system in Ecuador, one legal system, but we’ve argued that isn’t the case. ere are also dierent jurisdictions, there’s the ordinary jurisdiction that comes from the West, but each nationality also has its own jurisdiction, which we call indigenous justice. at means that the law under the ordinary justice system is not necessarily the same, or even similar to the law of indigenous peoples, which in Ecuador we call indigenous justice. at’s why in Ecuador there’s a serious confrontation when we say, “OK, let ordinary justice do what it must in its own jurisdiction, and indigenous justice will enforce the law in its indigenous jurisdiction.” So a nationality, as we see it, is a group of human beings who speak the same language, who inhabit a common territory, who share a historical memory, and of course who have the same form of government and economic system. Because the Amazon is not the same as the mountains, is it? We have dierent economic systems in the mountains and in the Amazon. at’s why we say that Ecuador is a plurinational state. at is, it’s not just another state. It is a state where there are many nationalities that come together, each with its own indigenous justice system. at’s why we say we have to establish a plurinational government, not a colonial or uninational government. Well, under Article of our current constitution, all internal conäicts of the communities, peoples, and nationalities must be handled internally by the indigenous justice system. So when conäicts in the communities end up in the hands of ordinary justice—not state justice, because the state encompasses both, but Western justice—they should be sent back to indigenous justice. When there’s a conäict between the two jurisdictions, the body respon- 114 CHAPTER 3 sible for resolving such conäicts, according to the constitution, is the Constitutional Court of Ecuador. e court must decide whether or not the indigenous justice system acted according to its own laws and whether or not it respected human rights—to a judge or a prosecutor; they belong to a dierent jurisdiction. Indigenous justice has no judges or prosecutors. It works through assemblies and their authorities who are the leaders of the communities.

IDEOLOGICAL INFLUENCES

Well, our thinking is based mainly on our people’s ancestral heritage—on all this wisdom accumulated over thousands of years, about economics, society, government, and politics, even spirituality or religion. We say our starting point is our thousands-of-years-old heritage, which is a way to see and live in the world. However, over these thousands of years of colonization there have been many external inäuences, for example, the Catholic Church itself, which practically legitimized the violence of the conquest. ey legitimized it through the Bible and the cross, because these uncivilized people needed to be civilized. ese earthly creatures needed to know God, the Catholic God, right? Even though we have our own spirituality that is very much based on the acknowledgment of the divinity of the Pachamama, in the past few decades certain radical tendencies have emerged within Catholicism that seek to civilize us to make us children of God. ough there are others within the Catholic Church who are saying no, they’re also children of God even if they don’t become Catholic. It’s liberation theology that begins to argue that there’s a possibility of nding God outside the Church. In fact, indigenous peoples were very spiritual. Right here we have a sanctuary, opposite a mountain, the most important holy place for the Quitu Cara people. And where I come from, Chimborazo, the highest mountain is a major spiritual center for the Puruháes, and there’s also the Colca lake, so we had very important spiritual centers. In Chim- borazo the rst Catholic church was built exactly on the most important spiritual site for the Puruháes. ey gradually built their statues there, the symbols of their Gods, to systematically destroy indigenous spirituality. PACHAKUTIK 115

So there’s a very strong inäuence of the Church, but also other sectors such as Proaño in the case of Chimborazo, who begins to see the face of God in indigenous peoples, and begins to doubt himself. For example, Proaño begins to question the seizure of indigenous peasants’ land; he believed that it had to be returned. He leads an initiative to give back the land the Church has seized, because it’s stolen from our grandparents. So they didn’t have to buy the land; they had to give it back to us. at was very important. And then there is a Protestant sector that came to Ecuador one hundred years ago and established missionary stations in Chimborazo and elsewhere in the country. ey also had a strong inäuence on the indigenous movement’s current thinking. eir inäuence has to do with the fact that one of the key measures of the Protestants in Ecuador is that they begin to work in the language of the communities. ey research the language, they speak the language, they even translate and rene the Kichwa language. e rst translation was done in Chimborazo. And that opened up the possibility of establishing indigenous evangelical churches, with no control from the pope, or an oßce in the United States or anything even though the missionaries were from the United States. And that independence allows them to begin to value their own spirituality. Because, of course, the strategy was to accept Protestantism in order to be able to experience indigenous spirituality—they were independent; they didn’t depend on anyone from outside. en in the Indigenous Evangelical Association is created. In other words, it wasn’t a Methodist Church or Lutheran Church association but an association of indigenous evangelicals from Chimborazo. It was a very important break. en they begin to practice their worship, with their music; they invent their own chants; they begin to meet up to eat like they used to do during festivities, and that allows them to value their spirituality but also their identity. e missionaries were very much against identity. ey disagreed with our music because they wanted us to sing North American music. ey didn’t agree with us going to school, because they said we might go out into the world and sin. ey didn’t like us driving cars either. ey didn’t even drive themselves. But all of this made indigenous people react by doing the opposite, sending their kids to school, buying cars and 116 CHAPTER 3 driving them. So the indigenous movement in Ecuador was inäuenced by Catholic violence, but there was also another line that was beginning to understand us, and also by the Protestant violence that imposed certain things on us but also gave us other options. Yes and of course we were very inäuenced by politics, in this case by the Communist Party, because it had a lot in common with the communal aspects of our ancestral heritage. Communism begins to have points in common with the communal, and it begins to exert its inäuence, particularly in the way we assert our demands. So we could say we’ve had religious and political inäuences, and of course also from the right. Protestantism in particular comes from a right-wing line of thinking, doesn’t it? We’re God’s children, and therefore we’re the richest in the world. We’re not far behind the United States. So we could say those are our inäuences, among others. But in the face of all this we’ve had the strength of our own culture—our language, our wisdom, the way we dress, the way we do things, our products, our food. We always say that, to date, no other culture in Ecuador has been able to produce what we’ve produced: quinoa, potatoes, amaranth, and corn—these are all produced by our cultures, by our peoples. Spain hardly brought any products to contribute to this dynamic. All of this has led to a need to not do everything from a single point of view but rather from this diversity that coexists in Ecuador.

SYMBOLS AND FIGURES

ey are both indigenous and nonindigenous gures. Proaño was one of the precursors of liberation theory, particularly the fact that he began to see indigenous people as a civilization when the trend was to see them as uncivilized people who needed to be civilized. Among the women, in Chimborazo, we talk of Dolores Cacuango; Tránsito Amaguaña on a national level, currently and for the past few decades; Nina Pacari, a brilliant woman who has brought a lot to the debate and is now a minister of the Constitutional Court. ere’s also Blanca Chancoso, another woman leader who has contributed a great deal. Among the men, in Chimborazo we talk of Ambrosio Lasso, for example, who led the struggle to reclaim the land. He was even sent PACHAKUTIK 117 to jail in the Galápagos, but he came back and continued to organize the people to reclaim the land. Luis Macas has also contributed a lot to the resurgence of the indigenous movement. ere have been many men and women who have contributed and, of course, men and women who gave their lives in these struggles. ere’s a very important man in Chimborazo, Fernando Daquilema, who led an uprising against the haciendas and alcabalas [sales taxes] that involved more than ten thousand men and women. at means we never just stand by. All along we’ve resisted but also made proposals, just like we do now. Now, in the decade of , we continue to resist, while we also make proposals. We are in the assembly, but that doesn’t mean we sit down; rather, we do a lot of collective work with the communities, with the peoples and nationalities. When they’re not being listened to at the assembly, we take the assembly to the communities. With the water law, we mobilized around ten thousand people to close the assembly, to ensure the opinion of the communities was also heard. Pachakutik has been very successful in local elections; not so in national elections. Locally, we have parish councils, municipalities, and provincial governments. We control ve key provinces in Ecuador: Chimborazo and Cotopaxi in the mountains, and Orellana, Morona Santiago, and Zamora Chinchipe in the Amazon. ose provinces are where most oil exploitation and mining takes place, and the provinces that produce food for domestic consumption, or food sovereignty, are located in the Andean highlands. Where we haven’t been successful is at the national level. at’s been due to several factors. It’s been partly due to the fact that certain groups that identify themselves with indigenous causes were initially with us but later went with the highest bidder. Yes, for example, in the last elections, when we went with Lucho Macas, these nonindigenous sectors that were with Pachakutik went with the other side. Nonindigenous sectors still can’t understand the indigenous movement’s proposal, and they’re only concerned with the media—they don’t think about the long term. ey’re concerned with gaining a seat in government; they think being in government is the answer, but they’re wrong. We don’t believe being in government is the solution; we believe that structural changes have to be eected on every front—communities, peoples, nationalities, and the central government. 118 CHAPTER 3

Initially we [indigenous people] backed our own proposal, and later we had no choice. We had to decide between Álvaro Noboa and Correa. Of course, we chose the least bad alternative, apparently; only it turned out we’d chosen the worst. So we’ve been very successful in terms of everything we’ve incorporated into the new constitution: participatory democracy, participatory budget, the empty chair, indigenous justice, collective rights, the new popular solidarity economy, because we began to implement these measures in the local governments. When we took oßce in the municipalities, we began to establish parliaments for them to legislate and supervise, so it’s no longer the mayor who decides for everyone. e changes we made when we took oßce in local governments are now part of the constitution. us we could say that we’ve been very successful and we’ve shaped the new structure of the state. Unfortunately, those currently in government see this as a hindrance. It’s no longer what they want. A case in point is Ecuador’s justice system. First, the constitution establishes that citizens can change the members of the Council of the Judiciary through a public merit-based competitive process, but they say, “No, that’s no use to us, to the interests of the government; let us select the members ourselves.” It’s a step back from everything we achieved in the constitution, because their logic is the Western logic of a vertical government imposing everything. Of course, their strategy of controlling the justice system is designed to cover up the government’s corruption and the deals they’re making under the table with transnational corporations: for example, the deals they’re making with oil and mining companies; not with community or local businesses but with multinational corporations. And credits too. In the past, governments were very tough on the external debt. Now this government happily borrows from other countries, and makes bad loans too. For instance, they’ve just sold Ecuador’s oil to China for four years. And at the same time, China has just loaned Ecuador ^ billion. Wow. China’s making an excellent deal there.

CORREA AND THE INDIGENOUS MOVEMENT

Well, there’s a very simple explanation. We indigenous people have learned to know the others. First, we speak the others’ language, Span- ish. Because we speak their language, we know their thought structures, PACHAKUTIK 119 and we’ve also studied at their schools and universities, so we know how they think, how they design the state, how they do things; but the others don’t know our language, haven’t studied our thinking, and don’t know what it is we’re proposing. [Correa speaks] some Kichwa. e only thing he can do is to speak badly. You know very well that you can’t communicate with others if you don’t speak their language, much less understand their thought structures. at’s why there’s this contradiction in Ecuador. at’s the greatest discrepancy, in my view. But also, initially Correa claimed that [his policies] were based on the ideas of the indigenous movement, on the sumak kawsay. What is sumak kawsay? It’s to achieve harmony between human beings and nature. But Correa comes along and says, “Yes, sumak kawsay, but exploiting oil, mining, and destroying the Pachamama.” We say that’s not sumak kawsay. at’s destroying the lives of human beings, and it’s not something new. In Ecuador, percent of the rivers and streams have already been contaminated by the mining and hydrocarbons industry, and every city dumps its waste in the river. e only city that processes its water is Cuenca. Every other city is dumping polluted water into the rivers—hospital, industrial, and household waste; in other words, total destruction. And Correa is nowhere to be heard saying, “Let’s put an end to this” and “ at’s where we need to invest money.” ey have no interest in investing in that. ey only want to invest in roads, huge things, monuments, buildings that show that the government is doing something, bridges. But what’s the use of a beautiful bridge when the river is dead? What’s the point of beautiful roads when indigenous peasants have no means to produce and get a fair price for their products? What’s the point of having so many built-up cities if below them indigenous peasants are drinking their wastewater? And not just that—those peasants’ produce comes to the city, and city dwellers eat that contaminated produce. Now Correa says, “I’m going to build more hospitals and buy more equipment,” but unless he nips the problem of pollution in the bud, people will continue to crowd hospitals. at’s not sumak kawsay. It’s all back to front, isn’t it? He’s continuing the same extractive, colonial model; that’s why there’s a confrontation. And it’s going to be the same with every government. When governments arrive they have 120 CHAPTER 3 good ideas, but when they get into oßce they realize that power does not belong to those who govern but to the companies they hire. ey’re the ones that call the shots: mining companies, oil companies, export companies. Take, for example, the issue of äour in Ecuador. ere is a single importer of äour, Álvaro Noboa, and he sets the rules of the game in Ecuador. e government doesn’t promote the production of barley or wheat in Ecuador because it follows the orders of this importer, on whom Ecuador depends for its bread. If we had a sumak kawsay government, right now rural areas would be active to ensure that there’s äour available, and that there are no maas telling you this is the price, even though they’re the biggest tax evaders. e biggest tax evader is an exporter that controls the country’s economy, and so on with the rest of them. Every government in Ecua- dor has ended up handing itself over to these companies, which control everything—most of them are international, transnational corporations. And now they are also countries—public corporations from China, Ven- ezuela, Brazil, which do the same as private corporations. Of course, they buy your oil, process it, and sell it back to you. We’re selling them oil at sixty, forty dollars, but we buy it back at twice, three times that price as gasoline, diesel, and lubricants. It’s a brutal, unresolved relationship. So the greatest conäict is not that Correa is who he is but that his government surrendered to the same old model, and later began to defend that model and confront the poor, whereas if he were a true revolutionary he’d be ghting those corporations, those maas, and defending the poor. But instead he ghts the poor. He gives alms to the people. He doesn’t give us social assistance programs. Indigenous peasants have taken care of our own health. I come from Cebadas, where the doctor only works four hours a day; for the remaining twenty hours there’s no medical care. It’s the same with education in the communities; there are no classrooms, no equipment, no infrastructure, but he claims he’s running millennium schools. I think he’s built fteen in the whole country, and there are over three thousand schools in Ecuador. at’s the main problem, and he’s given indigenous people subsidies, charity, to keep them quiet. But he hasn’t invested, even though it’s us, indigenous peasants, who cultivate the land to guarantee the food supply. Go to any market from Quito to Riobamba and you’ll nd none of the products of the export PACHAKUTIK 121 agriculture sector; you’ll nd the indigenous peasants’ products. We are the main food suppliers in Ecuador, and not only do we provide food, but we do so at subsidized prices; that is, the consumer doesn’t pay us even percent or percent of the value of our products. We’re giving away food to the state. Of course, because if I produce a sack of potatoes for ten dollars or twenty and I sell it in the market for one dollar or ve dollars I’m giving away the dierence to the state, but the state has done absolutely nothing about this. ere are no [price] controls; that’s the main problem. Correa says, “I’m supporting indigenous people, I’m lifting them out of poverty,” but as long as he keeps handing out charity subsidies, people are going to continue depending on them and casting aside their wisdom and ability. at’s why we say, “Why doesn’t he invest?” For example, state banks don’t give credits to indigenous peasants, but they should, and their work, the food they provide, should be enough of a guarantee. But since they don’t own vast swaths of land, they can’t mortgage their land and therefore have no access to loans. I’ve just visited the corn producers from the coast, the Montubios, and they say, “ e government barely gives us urea; they hand out herbicides and pesticides, but they deliver the urea two months late, when the season is over and it’s no longer any use.” We believe policies like these further impoverish the poor instead of lifting them out of poverty. For example, the government invests several million dollars in development bonds. ose resources could instead have been invested in productive enterprises, and we’d now have a great economic momentum in the community. Instead, each person receives their thirty dollars and that’s how much I spend each month, so it’s no use to me whatsoever. It creates dependency and reduces capacities. With the subsidies I don’t develop my capacities; rather, I wait for the next installment so I can buy something. Before we didn’t need that, we didn’t need a dollar to survive. We knew how to rotate crops so we could eat our own products, as well as generating a surplus to enable us to deal with other issues. Regarding education, indigenous people were forced to migrate to big cities because there are no good schools in the parishes and the cantons. Where’s the government’s investment? Rather, it forces us to come to Quito or Riobamba to study, to work as hired workers, to buy our food, to buy everything. Since we can’t live like that, we quit uni- 122 CHAPTER 3

versity after one or two years. So the government has no social policies for indigenous people. It’s even worse in the Amazon, where in some places there isn’t even a phone line, no television, no radio; they are completely abandoned and isolated. To get there you need to travel up the river by boat for several days. ere are no government policies in those areas, so it’s not true that there are policies that serve the interests of the peoples and nationalities. On the other hand, we have established four indigenous institutions in Ecuador: the Secretaría de Salud Indígena [Indigenous Health Secre- tariat]; the Peoples’ Secretariat [CONDENPE]; the Dirección de Edu- cación Intercultural Bilingüe [Directorate for Bilingual Intercultural Education]; and the Fondo de los Pueblos y Nacionalidades [FODEPE, Peoples and Nationalities’ Fund]. e purpose of FODEPE is to give loans. Indigenous children receive ^ toward their bilingual education.

SALVADOR QUISHPE: MULTINATIONAL MINING VERSUS CÁPAC RAYMI

Salvador Quishpe, a Saraguro Kichwa, was born on March , , in Piuntza, Zamora. He studied locally in Loja and Zamora Chinchipe before advancing to the Universidad de San Francisco in Quito, where he received a sociology degree with subspecialties in Kichwa and English. He was an exchange student at Eastern Mennonite University for the – academic year. He has participated in the Ecuadorian indigenous movement since childhood and has served in various positions, including director of the Federation of Saraguros of Zamora Chinchipe, president of ECUARUNARI, and political coordinator of CONAIE. A longtime Pachakutik militant, he was elected to two terms as deputy from Zamora Chinchipe (in and again in ). Since he has been prefect of Zamora Chinchipe.ìì

REVOLUTION AND SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION

Yes, we’re proposing many things that were never part of Ecuador’s constitutional and political framework. Maybe, in some respects, what we want is not a reform. In some respects perhaps we’re talking about reform, but one of the points we’ve proposed is plurinationality, right? And plurinationality includes many aspects, minor issues that can dis- PACHAKUTIK 123 rupt the political, economic, cultural, and social modus vivendi but it’s not like we’re proposing a revolution in the Cuban or leftist style. No, we’re not proposing a revolution of that nature, because today revolution is understood as a Cuban-style revolution. Isn’t it? Abolishing private property. at’s Cuba. And we’re not proposing to abolish private property. I think this is important to note in order to compare it to the changes we’re proposing in our own style. en what are we talking about? at’s why I wouldn’t want to talk about a revolution, because today a revolution is understood in relation to private property. at’s the concept of revolution nowadays, to abolish private property, and we don’t propose to do so; therefore I don’t want to talk of revolution. We propose including certain changes in Ecuador’s political, economic, social, and cultural context. We need the territory to be seen not just as an economic instrument but also as a living space that is about much more than buying and selling. Territory is a priceless good, since life is priceless. For example, we propose that certain resources, such as water, be considered collectively owned resources, and we’ve managed to write into the constitution a ban on privatizing water. We want to guarantee that water remains a common good, to be used by all. Of course it’s necessary to pay the infrastructure cost for the use of water, but in itself it’s a resource that can’t be privatized; those resources must be at the service of the general public. Like water, land is essential to our lives. at’s why I use water as an example, because it’s essential for life, and so is land. Perhaps this is somewhat hard to understand for the political sectors currently in power in Ecuador. Even the revolutionary left has problems because in practice we’ve seen the revolutionary left use the land as merchandise, especially natural resources: oil, gold, copper. We think we need to properly assess whether there’s a lot of gold in this territory, but is it better to exploit it or to leave it? is question hasn’t been taken into account in the history of humanity, because wherever a resource such as gold or oil has been found, it’s been a cause for celebration. But today we can already see that the exploitation of natural resources has had a very serious impact, and that the planet is more than sick, so we say this is not the time. We don’t share the view that nding gold or copper is cause for celebration; it’s cause for respect. at’s why we disagree a lot with Cuba and now Venezuela, a country going through a 124 CHAPTER 3 revolution. In Ecuador they say they’re going through a revolution. But with regard to natural resources it’s the same. Capitalism or revolution, they’re doing exactly the same.

EXTRACTIVISM VERSUS “INFANTILE ECOLOGISTS”

If they nd gold or copper, they’re not thinking about the consequences of exploiting those resources for the peoples, for the future; they’re only thinking, “I have to extract this copper, because if I don’t I’ll die and Ecuador may fall apart.” So we say, “We don’t agree with that. Stop for a moment; let’s properly evaluate it rst.” I live in the province ur- thest south in the southernmost tip of Ecuador. And my province is known for its mining resources: gold, silver, copper, and there are fty other metals. Of course, if we start thinking of today’s prots, perhaps I should’ve said, “OK, no problem, we’ll start to exploit the land and I’ll get percent, percent, let’s negotiate and that’s that, everything’s alright.” But it’s not only about what percentage I’m going to get, even if it’s percent; it’s about what’s going to happen to that territory. Here we strongly disagree with the current government, because it says that the gold must be extracted, and we must agree with them. e current government says we’re sitting on a chair made of gold and we’re begging for alms. Of course, this might make sense from a capitalist point of view, but from the perspective of our people it’s the other way round. For us, those mountains, that water, is not only giving us life but also guaranteeing the life of the rest of Ecuador and the rest of humanity. In those mountains here in South America and the Amazon, there is still so much äora, so many biological reserves. ere are reserves in other places in the world too. ey are small lungs that are still alive and which allow us to go on living. We believe it’s about time that humanity takes into account the value of food supplies in its thinking. Otherwise we’re all on our way to die. How many more years can the Earth resist if we keep using natural resources at this rate? It’s a dißcult issue for our governments to understand, be they right-wing or left-wing. We have the same problem with both right-wing and left-wing governments, since both think only of obtaining dollars for the present moment; they don’t think of water, PACHAKUTIK 125 or biological reserves, or the Earth’s forests for the future. I think it’s necessary. What we’re doing is love. at’s the problem; the government doesn’t want to have anything to do with this. When we talk about these issues, it turns out we’re “infantile ecologists.” Yes, we’re the stupid left, the pawns, the Indian clique. ose are the names the government has given us on account of our views. But we can’t not say these things given our past experience with oil.

STATE ENTERPRISE AND FOREIGN CAPITAL

Here they created a state-owned mining company. Now there’s a state- owned mining company, but Ecuador’s major copper and gold reserves are not in the hands of the state-owned mining company but in the hands of companies like Kinross, which you probably know. Kinross is a Canadian company. Copper is in the hands of Corriente Resources, which is also Canadian, with capital from many other countries. Now copper is also in the hands of Chinese businessmen. e Chinese own percent of my province’s copper. ey bought percent of the shares of the mining project for ^ million last June. It is one of the largest copper projects in southern Ecuador. So what is the government talking about? ey’re not even doing what Cuba did back in the day, bringing assets back into state ownership. No, they’re not doing that. I don’t know why people abroad are scared that there’s a supposedly statist government in Ecuador. ere isn’t such a thing in Ecuador. Otherwise, let them tell us of a single piece of land anywhere in Ecuador that has been nationalized. ere aren’t any. I think a market model is necessary, but a market model that’s a bit fairer and does not play into the hands of this or that private company to the detriment of the people’s interests. We’re not proposing alternative models in these cases. I repeat, we’ve never proposed to privatize, to conscate, to nationalize, to expropriate. We’ve not proposed that. If you look at the Ecuadorian movement’s proposals, there’s nothing about nationalizing, conscating. ere’s none of that, but there is, let’s see, strengthening the state to allow it to compete with the private sector under better conditions. How hard is that? We don’t think it’s that hard; 126 CHAPTER 3

I think it’s possible. All it needs is the ruler’s willingness, but if there’s no such willingness, nothing happens.

LIVING WELL `SUMAK KAWSAY@

Sumak kawsay is part of our conception. Basically, what’s the relationship between the peoples and nature? at’s sumak kawsay. A harmony between peoples and nature. So look, harmony doesn’t mean banning; harmony means everything is allowed, but with some judgment and respect, because without respect there is no harmony. So I need copper to manufacture something. OK, let’s extract copper, but let’s do so thinking that the Earth has its own rights. at’s where we disagree with investment as seen by neoliberalism, investment based on speed, competition, on who gets larger prots quicker. What do I have to do to increase the price of my shares in the stock market? at is the concept of neoliberalism. Speed, paying what you can as fast as you can. If in a year you can extract all the copper in a given area, all the better. Your investments grew, your prots grew, you’re like the best company in the world, right? Your prots increased by , percent. But for us it’s not about prot; it’s about taking what we need to live. at’s the dierence. erefore we’re not banning, we’re not saying zero mining. It’s the same with oil, copper, gold, silver, water, even the land itself if it’s not essential to life. e thing is we’re not businessmen who are here today, tomorrow in Africa, after that in Russia, then in Australia or anywhere else. We’re the people who live here, and we’re thinking of today and also tomorrow, but we’re also thinking of the rest of humanity. Perhaps this is a silly idea for the neoliberal concept, which is based on investment, prots, earnings, but we think it’s necessary.

CATHOLICISM AND INDIGENOUS OBSERVANCE

e Catholic Church has inäuenced us a lot, but it’s been very harmful. It’s taught us to be poor from a capitalist point of view, and it’s made us poor in spirit, poor in personality, and for me that’s the worst thing the Church could’ve done. ey’re still repeating the same things to this day; that’s why I haven’t sent my kids to catechism and I’m not going to PACHAKUTIK 127 do so. I consider myself a Catholic, but there are a lot of things I don’t agree with: for example, when they tell me, “You must suer patiently, for you’ll be rewarded in the next life.” en my granny tells me, “If they take your land you mustn’t complain, better to leave it. We’ll be rewarded in the next life.” ey’ve drummed these phrases into our heads, like, “It’s easier for a poor man to go through whatever than a rich man.” ey’ve made us believe that we have to be submissive, we have to be quiet; we mustn’t take part. Nowadays, they’re still saying that politics is corrupt, that we shouldn’t get into politics, that politics is only for the corrupt, but who is saying that? Politicians themselves. So of course, they’re probably stealing so that nobody gets involved and tries to discuss and debate things. ey’re probably praying to keep the political stage to themselves, and to govern by themselves. When we talk about plurinationality we’re proposing that we try to understand the other, respect the other, as far as we can. I think we need to give indigenous peoples back their philosophy and allow them to frame themselves in that philosophy and use their own judgment in their daily lives. at way, those peoples will grow; otherwise we’ll do as we’re told, but we won’t be creators. What we need is to create ourselves. Fortunately, today interesting things are emerging. Where I come from, until a few hundred years ago, there was a winter solstice festival on December . December, right? December , and that was cause for a massive celebration. en Christianity came along and told us that was a pagan celebration, and that we had to celebrate baby Jesus, the birth of baby Jesus, and they lay Christmas on top of our Cápac Raymi. It wasn’t on December , but three days later, on Decem- ber . And in order to make people go to Mass they put a very large sun outside the churches. From then on it was no longer called Cápac Raymi but Christmas, though the content of the celebration remained exactly the same. at’s why Christmas where I come from is something else. It has nothing to do with Christmas in Quito. Christmas where I come from is a huge festival. People come from every village, from every home, from every community; we all share food. ere are some very strange costumes that have nothing to do with Christmas elsewhere—anyway, there are lots of things that I’d need more time to tell you about, but it’s called Christmas. 128 CHAPTER 3

In the past few years we’ve said, “Well, this isn’t called Christmas; this is called Cápac Raymi, and we’re going to celebrate Cápac Raymi.” It’s been very tough, very dißcult, because our parents had Christmas and baby Jesus in mind and the birth of Jesus, and all those things based around Jesus, but we have continued to say, “No, what’s the meaning of Jesus? We have something much more real here: Decem- ber .” is changed even the atmosphere of all these things; it’s the new year in terms of production and all that, and we’re going to celebrate Cápac Raymi, and little by little it’s become Cápac Raymi, Cápac Raymi. And now happily even the elders are beginning to talk about Cápac Raymi. But we have problems with the priest, who says, “You’re being pagan. We have to respect Christmas here.” So to avoid ghting with the priest, we say, “No problem. If you pay for Mass, we’ll go to Mass. But we’re also going to do what we want.” But what’s important about all this is that in the context of the celebration people begin to create things. e guys begin to create crafts, to create employment, even small businesses, tourism. Before, what interest did tourists have in going to Mass? Jesus? at didn’t attract anybody’s attention. So to change things, when it’s Cápac Raymi, as a prefect I invite other prefects from other provinces and we celebrate in our own style, let people come to the festivities, then a lot of people start coming. at’s what we’ve been doing for the past two years, since I became a prefect for my province. Before, this wasn’t done, it was harder, but now it’s become a bit easier. Of course, the fact that I’m a prefect helps a lot, it attracts people, and we’re going to continue doing these things. We began to create things, to do what used to be done before: for example, building a bridge, a metallic structure, cement, iron, a bridge, that’s it. e bridge is done, and vehicles cross it, and that’s that. We began to build bridges so that vehicles can cross, but we were also sending a message about what nature means to us and all that: culture, peoples, traditions, our gastronomy, all our aairs. I think we need to put diversity into practice. at’s why I can’t say, and we’re never going to say, “Out with Christianity! From now on nobody can be a Christian; we’re going to be what we used to be.” No, we’re not proposing that, we’re proposing that we share. How did we get to the point of sharing? at’s what we’ve called plurinationality or intercultur- PACHAKUTIK 129 ality. In my province I talk a lot about interculturality, and people have understood; otherwise I wouldn’t be a prefect.

PACHAKUTIK

We’ve made a lot of mistakes. I think some of my compañeros haven’t had the breadth of vision that’s required when you talk of interculturality. Some of my compañeros have limited themselves excessively to indigenism. at’s a mistake. Pachakutik isn’t an indigenous movement. In my province we’re a minority of the population, perhaps percent if you include all the indigenous peoples. e rest is a mestizo Hispanic population, and yet the province has put its trust in us. is is not my rst time as a prefect. I’ve represented the province twice already before the National Congress. I think we’ve managed to put forward a very clear message and proposal. We don’t want to work only for ourselves, we’re not out to get revenge for history, we’re aiming to create a new historical moment based on sharing and cohabitation. And this is what’s allowed us not only to succeed in some other provinces, especially in provinces where there isn’t a majority indigenous population. Nowadays it’s very dierent to win the elections in Cotopaxi or in Chimborazo than to win elections in my province. More than percent of the population of Chimborazo is indigenous, so it’s dierent. It’s a case of sending a message in our own language, clearly telling them what we’re going to do, and they can all rally around that person. In my province it’s dierent, because only a small percentage of the population is indigenous. I think we need to do this also at the national level. ere have been some mistakes there, but also this isn’t just Pachakutik’s job. It’s not just about Pachakutik nding its way to power, and that’s what I’m telling my compañeros. We must come together in a much broader space, of which Pachakutik is one of the members, but which also includes other sectors, many other nonindigenous sectors.

LEADING FIGURES: DOLORES CACUANGO

She’s a woman who fought politically, especially for children’s education, by establishing clandestine schools, since at that time schools for indig- 130 CHAPTER 3 enous children were banned. Dolores Cacuango lived here, very near Quito, and she set up schools behind the mountains to prevent them from being destroyed. And of course she always fought for the land too. ere are many; from the times of the conquest we can mention Atahualpa, Rumiñahui, and many others. More recently, we can mention Dolores Cacuango, and Tránsito Amaguaña, who died recently, two years ago. Both these women set life examples for our people. ere’s a lot of unacknowledged history that only we talked about—names that years later begin to be recovered and slowly start to be featured in history textbooks. Although you won’t nd those sorts of characters in the history of Alonso de Mercadillo—you will nd Pizarro and all those other people. You won’t nd much literature about those people, but they are in our minds and they are a source of inspiration because their ideals remain the same. ey’ve always been the same. e problems have also remained very similar. Five hundred years ago the problem was also natural resources. e term wasn’t used at the time; it was gold. Either they looked for man- ufactured gold, or they sent people to the mines to extract it; either way it was a serious problem. And that problem isn’t over; it’s still relevant today. Now the company comes along and oers you a wage of ^ to come and work in the mines, and since there are no jobs, of course a lot of people go to work in the mines for ^. So it’s very similar, because what is ^ dollars today for a worker at one of the company’s most important mines? So the problem is still relevant, and so are the reasons behind Atahualpa’s, Rumiñahui’s, and Dolores Cacuango’s struggles.

PRESIDENT CORREA

I don’t think President Correa is going to stay in power for much longer. No, he has his tactics, he has his agreements, his strategies, but he’s not going to last long. Because people nd out about deceit. It would’ve been better for President Correa to tell Ecuadorians the truth, and he would’ve lasted as long as he lasts, but based on the truth. President Correa has lied a lot here. And it’s not deceit in the sense that I promised you public works, I promised you a bridge, I oered you a school and I let you down. We’re not talking about that kind of confusion. We’re talking about concepts, deceitful concepts. ere’s talk of recovering the PACHAKUTIK 131 homeland, when there is no such recovery of the homeland. ere’s talk of emerging from the long neoliberal night, and in practice these are times of new privatizations: of telecoms, of electric power through the investment of Chinese capital to create new plants controlled by the Chinese. ese are times of giving away our mining reserves to foreign corporations. In other words, there is a huge contradiction between what they say and what they do. ey have certain advantages, some very good strategies. Since they have a very good income from oil at the moment, they have a lot of money to cover whatever they want in the media. ey have control of the four main TV channels, or the three largest, I think: Gama TV and Ecuador TV. Perhaps the three channels are not the largest, but they’re the ones that have national coverage. ey control some newspapers; they control print media. Now very few dare to write what they’d like to write, and those that do go to jail, like Emilio Palacio. e ruling against the newspa- per El Universo is a problem, not for El Universo but for all of us, because nobody wants to publish articles that speak truth to power anymore. In my province, radio stations are very scared of giving me air time. ey’re worried that if they do so the president is going to remove their license. e indigenous movement isn’t looking for just a discourse. In fact, the president has even spoken a few sentences in Kichwa, and indigenous peoples have applauded. You’ve seen his suits, his clothes; occasionally he’s worn shirts embroidered with indigenous motifs. e president has done all that, yet the indigenous movement has said no. e president may come up with a discourse to the indigenous peoples’ liking, but as long as the government keeps oering up the land as merchandise, be it to extract gold, copper, or silver, indigenous peoples will not listen to the discourse. ey’ll look at the facts. I don’t think the government can recover in the eyes of the indigenous movement, because at this very moment the government is planning to exploit indigenous territories. Even if he wants to reconcile, in four years this problem is going to be much more serious. So yes, I don’t think there’s going to be a reconciliation.

ETHNOCIDE

What else did I want to talk to you about? Let’s see. We oppose mining on various grounds, not only for environmental reasons. Environmental 132 CHAPTER 3

concerns are one of the reasons: water, forests, mountains, the land; pollution is one of the reasons. But there’s another reason: the problem of our territories, where indigenous peoples live. at’s one of the main problems. For example, in my province—here’s Peru, and here’s Ecuador. Here’s the Cordillera del Cóndor. It’s partly in Ecuador and partly here. All of this used to be Shuar territory, but they’ve gradually been cornered by colonization, and now they only have a few spaces left. And it turns out they’re going to start mining right here. So we’re also concerned about the cultural survival of the peoples that live here. en it’s not just an environmental problem; it’s also a cultural problem: the survival of the peoples who live here. Mining companies tell us that they’re going to employ the Shuar who live here. Well, even if they give us not ^ but ^,, they’re not going to solve the cultural problem. Cultural extermination is in sight; that’s one of the issues we’re concerned about.

EXTRACTION AND PUBLIC INVESTMENT

ere are no plans to invest the prots from copper or gold exploitation. ere is no planning in Ecuador. If I were president, I would take that money. First, to increase production in the elds, to increase food production, and I’d have food for export. Obviously, education—you need education so that you don’t have to keep selling wheat, grains, right? So that you don’t have to keep selling gold as a raw material, oil as a raw material, which means then we have to continue buying diesel from Venezuela or anywhere; we’re buying diesel. We need to develop our ability to do things. Invest in tourism, for example, in tourism infrastructure. We have many tourist attractions here.

AUKI TITUAÑA

“CHE AS SYMBOL OF LIFE AND SONG”

Auki Tituaña, an ethnic Kichwa, was born on January , , in Cotacachi, Imbabura. He studied at the Universidad Central del Ecuador in Quito, where he won a scholarship to study economics in Cuba. He lived in Cuba for six years, rst in Camagüey and then in Havana. He remains a strong admirer of both Che Guevara and Fidel Castro. A founder of the Pachakutik party, he was PACHAKUTIK 133 elected as one of the rst indigenous mayors in Ecuador in , and reelected in and before being defeated in by a candidate from Rafael Correa’s Alianza País party. He became internationally famous for his stew- ardship of Cotacachi, winning four international awards. Particularly notable were his literacy campaign (backed by Cuba), his introduction of participatory budgeting, and his health policies that succeeded in drastically reducing infant mortality. In he emerged as the popular choice as Pachakutik candidate for the presidency but division within CONAIE caused him to withdraw. Ten years later, in October , he was denounced by CONAIE leaders and expelled from the organization after accepting the vice presidential nomination on an anti-Correa ticket headed by ex-banker Guillermo Lasso.ìï

THE CONSTITUTION AND SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION

e indigenous movement in Ecuador has experienced signicant political and organizational development since the ’s. After a stage of demands and reforms in the areas of education, health, and access to the land in , [the movement] became a political actor with much greater inäuence in the economy, politics, and democracy, and indeed it demanded structural changes in the Ecuadorian state, based on constitutional reforms. In there was new drive to establish a new constituent assembly to write another constitution. I’d say that indigenous peoples were listened to and somehow included in this new constitution, but it’s not enough, because this new constitution was led by a group of people with rather disparate ideologies—right-wing parties, extreme left-wing parties—and there was a lack of clarity regarding indigenous peoples’ demands and their proposal to include sumak kawsay, the concept of buen vivir (living well) in the new constitution. It doesn’t say anything about crime, insecurity, the failure to carry out land reforms, about genuine support for bilingual, intercultural education, about the fact that there isn’t a single indigenous minister. erefore buen vivir is nothing more than words, and the current government, which appeared to be a friend of indigenous peoples and nations, took advantage of this phrase and other issues—the environment, participation, for example. So I’d say this constitution is still empty of the indigenous peoples’ and nations’ historical proposal. Pseudo-revolutionaries 134 CHAPTER 3 in Ecuador think they understand the indigenous movement, and they simply hand out subsidies and houses among the communities. What is needed is structural change, a change in democracy, from representative democracy to participatory democracy, which is real, genuine, inclusive, and pluralist. I’d say that indigenous peoples weren’t direct protagonists in these stages of the constitution in and in .

INDIGENOUS DEMANDS

Land reform. Well, there are dierent currents within the indigenous movement: some are very radical, others very democratic, others very conformist. Some accept what the political parties and the mestizos are doing; others want radical changes, like the nationalization of oil. And today, a signicant part of the indigenous movement is working on initiating structural reforms by democratic means, not by means of violence or armed struggle. I think our management of public policy has proven that, as I say, simply by complying with percent of the law you can achieve important results. It all depends on whether we act with transparency and discipline, and have an organizational process. In my view, citizen participation must be at the heart of any decision-making and any political, economic, and environmental changes promoted in a society. e fundamental demand of indigenous groups in general is for genuine land reform, which has never happened in Ecuador. In , when the military was in power, what they did was to distribute the most inhospi- table lands, land in the mountains with no irrigation, unsuitable for crops. So the military didn’t even give up the state’s land; rather, they forced the Church, which also owned a vast amount of land, to give some of it up for certain indigenous communities. Of course, this stemmed from the desire to put a stop to the popular struggle, the peasants’ struggle that was on the rise in the s after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution. Agrarian reform was already underway in Cuba, and in order to prevent that from happening here they pretended to do the same, but they handed out the worst lands. Later, another government tried to carry out another land reform, and created the Instituto Ecuatoriano de Reforma Agraria y Colonización [IERAC]. In the ’s there was talk of colonizing areas inhabited by indigenous populations, which was the wrong idea, and since then there hasn’t been a genuine process of agrarian reform. PACHAKUTIK 135

ere has been talk of revolution. To this day, yes? So in ’ there was an attempt to conduct agrarian reform, but no government has put forward a clear proposal to solve the issue of agrarian reform, because they think that the sole source of revenue for the state is oil, and there’s no need to coordinate with other economic sectors. But I think Ecuador should make agricultural development its rst priority, to conduct an agrarian reform that involves land, water, training, credits, markets—a comprehensive proposal. Not merely handing out land and credits, there has to be a complete proposal, and the state must concern itself with output and fair trade.

SUMAK KAWSAY

Sumak kawsay has a dierent connotation. It’s not just material well- being; it’s not merely access to a salary, to a job. Sumak kawsay is a balance between nature, human beings, the earth—a material and spiritual issue. at’s something governments don’t understand. So agrarian reform would be an element of the goal of sumak kawsay and well-being. Personally, I don’t use the term buen vivir, because it’s been prostituted. is proposal—this experience of the indigenous peoples, communities, and nation—sounds very hypocritical, very empty, in the hands of President Correa’s current politicians, doesn’t it? ere will come a time when we’re able to nd another term that allows us to communicate the message that we don’t just want material change but total, spiritual change, to go back to our roots, to spirituality, and also toward a dierent organizational process, a real, transparent democracy without persecution. Today indigenous leaders are declared terrorists. It’s the only country in the world where a social activist is considered a terrorist. e FARC [Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia)], for example, aren’t declared terrorists, are they? at isn’t revolution, that isn’t sumak kawsay, even for an appren- tice politician, is it?

IDEOLOGICAL INFLUENCES

I think in Ecuador there’s been a sort of resurgence of the indigenous movement with a degree of autonomy. Until the ’s we went through a 136 CHAPTER 3 stage of tutelage under the union movement, the left-wing parties, the right-wing parties, the Church; and everyone at the UN gave speeches about combating poverty. Who were the poor? Indigenous people—and they spoke in our name. ey managed humanitarian aid funds for the poorest rural populations. Who were they? Indigenous people. And the discourse of poverty was also used to manage domestic resources. Who were the poor? Indigenous people. We gradually overcame that tutelage through the constitution of the CONAIE, in . We’ve also had the support of certain sectors of the Church, of liberation theology, and also of dierent left-wing intellectuals, some more inäuenced by what was going on in Eastern Europe and others by China, although none of them have been able to understand the idea of plurinationality, for example. It’s even been hard for us to write about our proposal for plurinationality. It’s an innovative proposal, not separatist, as Correa has stated. Around twenty years ago, the social democratic government of Rodrigo Borja responded to our demand for the recognition of peoples and nations’ ancestral lands by saying, “ ese indigenous peoples want to create a state within a state; they’re separatists.” So there’s a sort of fear of recognizing the true and legitimate rights of peoples and nations, because that would imply redistributing the budget and, instead of “assistentialism,” of paternalism, it would mean acknowledging the right of peoples and nations not merely to a communal house or a small church, or paved roads, but to invest in development plans. It’s important to have a bank, for example a bank that gives nancial assistance to peoples and nations, and to have a tourism industry in all our territories, in our communities. We could build great hotels, nance projects, create employment, move forward in the industrialization of our production. Today we produce, but only for our own use or for direct sale. We don’t manufacture products. We could also promote the new artisan markets in the cities. at way, resources would come to us as our right, by law, not by the goodwill of whoever happens to be in power. at’s why we think that, in terms of politics and economics, Ecuador is still waiting. PACHAKUTIK 137

SYMBOLS AND PERSONALITIES

[Che Guevara is] much loved. Yes, our [indigenous] emblematic gure is Rumiñahui—Rumiñahui, who resisted the invasion of the Spanish conquerors. He’s an example, isn’t he? Of the history of resistance, dignity, struggle, and as I say in a poem I wrote, Rumiñahui preferred to set Quito on re rather than let them have the gold and the city. He gave us his life as an example; he chose to die rather than be a prisoner. So for us indigenous peoples, and I think also in the history of Ecuador, he’s seen as one of the main examples of resistance and struggle against the Spanish invasion.

THE INDIGENOUS MOVEMENT AND CORREA

Well, the indigenous movement made a serious mistake when it backed Correa’s political project. Personally, I’ve always been critical of, and opposed to, Rafael Correa. e indigenous leaders currently in the CONAIE have ended up admitting that they made a mistake; they were initially confused by Correa’s antisystem, radical, leftist discourse. Of course, now it’s hard for them to admit their mistake. As I said earlier, a real revolutionary would not accuse indigenous social leaders, however wrong they may be, of being terrorists. Or use language loaded with racist ideology as Rafael Correa has done. To call us the Indian clique is a very strong statement, isn’t it? It’s an acknowledgment of the past, of the hacienda system, of landowners, even slavery. It’s refusing to recognize identity and the current moment of humanity, which has moved toward universal principles and rights. It’s loaded with racist ideology, isn’t it? A revolutionary wouldn’t call us “infantile ecologists,” would he? A real revolutionary wouldn’t hand out lambs to indigenous people in times of election, because he’d be buying their vote. A human being deserves a modicum of respect. Look how this attitude and behavior of Rafael Correa’s government reveals the fact that he belongs more to a neoliberal political current. We said, “Go on and be right-wing, because you’re governing with right-wing ministers, populist ministers, ministers 138 CHAPTER 3 from other governments.” In the end, after four years the leaders that made that mistake have acknowledged that we were right and they were wrong. He’s still a liberal. His priority is the extraction of oil, gold, and copper, which aects forests, rivers, the coexistence of communities, and handing over our wealth to the same transnational rms. So while there may be a pretty new road, or an increased health or education budget, the results are not reäected in our well-being. at’s why I believe that this stage of pseudo-revolution is devoid of political content. Initially it was called twenty-rst-century socialism, but they haven’t given it any content. [ e main] brain behind this idea, this theory, the German Heinz Dieterich, said that neither Chávez, nor Correa, nor Morales are following his theory. Nor Morales either, nobody. Yes, but he is an indigenous person who aligned himself too closely with Chávez’s politics and lost his identity, and obviously he’s not wholly connected with the indigenous movement itself. I think there are internal problems. Populism, left-wing or right-wing, is not good for the country, and Morales is handing out subsidies like Plan Cuaderno and Plan Leche. No way; that’s not how you change things. Populism has done a lot of harm, and left-wing populism has the same eect as right-wing populism. So I think we need to be more self-critical about the movement’s own mistakes. At some point we left our own ideals to follow an electoral trend. Our participation must be dierent. We must recover our political project and believe that if we’re directly in charge of a process of political change, based on our own dynamics and cosmovision, we will ensure important changes—changes regarding our language, which the current government has refused to recognize as an oßcial language. He refused, and later accepted it as a nonoßcial language. We went through such an important stage where we fought for the recognition of our languages, and now a supposedly revolutionary government. A revolutionary socialist government, on top of everything. e currency should’ve changed, but we’re still dependent on the United States, aren’t we? So there’s no legitimacy, I’m a revolutionary, but I preserve the dollar as my national currency. Ours is the only constitution in the world that doesn’t specify the oßcial currency, whether it’s the sucre, or the dollar, nothing. at’s a great hypocrisy. In my view, this stage will pass, no doubt, but there’s absolutely nothing revolution- PACHAKUTIK 139 ary about it, and I’m telling you as someone who has known a genuinely revolutionary process, as it was in Cuba. I had the opportunity to study there, to analyze and understand the process. I’m not a Fidelist or a blind follower of the Cuban Revolution. Each country has its own idiosyncrasies; each culture its own realities, its cosmovision, but nobody can say Fidel wasn’t a genuine revolutionary. at kind of gure, of personality, of politician, undoubtedly inspires a great deal of respect in me, inspires me to follow their path and their struggle against powerful interests, against imperialism, but without populism or lies, or racism. at’s why one of the catchphrases of our struggle was, “Correa, racist, false socialist,” because to me a genuine revolutionary respects human beings above all, respects proposals of interculturality, and practices real democracy. [Correa’s economic model] is populist, neoliberal, and Christian democratic. It’s the same old right, now with a leftist discourse. You shouldn’t have a problem with saying that Correa’s model is neoliberal. He believes that the extraction of natural resources is the solution to the problem. High oil prices have earned him extra resources, but there have been absolutely no changes in the productive structure and apparatus. At least I saw from the beginning that it was clearly a pseudo-revolutionary, populist, neoliberal, Christian democratic model. For example, four years ago this government was a great friend of the indigenous peoples. Correa even gave speeches in Kichwa and everything, but two or three years on, we’re an obstacle, we’re useless infantile Indians. Why didn’t he see that indigenous people were weak, opportu- nistic, leftist, as he calls us now, four years ago, when he was starting his electoral project? So it turns out that when we’re no use to him elector- ally we’re an obstacle. He has certain control over other populations, the disabled, or the Montubio groups in the coast. Simply, the various actors are useful to him for just a moment. e mistake that the leaders, the old actors, the old guard made was to follow a man who had no political trajectory, merely because they wanted to win an election—a citizen like Rafael Correa, an academic at the university for the country’s elite, the most expensive university. He was an economics researcher, and I think he taught a little. en he jumps onto the political stage without any struggle, with no prior training or experience, and he improvises a convenient dis- 140 CHAPTER 3 course against the system, against imperialism, against transnational companies, against corruption, against partocracy. I think that was a mistake on the part of our leaders, which had an impact because the bases are expecting results, and they wonder, “Why are they ghting up there, when we’re being given subsidies down here?” e lambs, as I call them, because it’s a very populist policy; many of them have gone with the government; they’re second, third in line in certain public institutions. e system absorbs people, doesn’t it? A secure job, a secure salary; many take that alternative. Many leaders have even sold certain bills of law, by not ghting to ensure they legitimately reäect the original proposal but instead making only very lukewarm, very supercial changes and reforms. Certain elements of the indigenous movement have some inäuence; for example, the peoples of the Ama- zon are opting to leave CONAIE and create their own organization, but that’s because those nations are where the oil is. Of course, the government oers them ^ million in development plans for territorial districts, and they leave for million. So there has been confusion, desertions, and a weakening within the movement due to the mistakes of the indigenous leadership.

THE INDIGENOUS MOVEMENT AND LUIS MACAS

e movement as such may inspire sympathy, respect, in society, but there also needs to be a gure that puts forward a message and a proposal that society can engage with. Luis Macas has been around for a very long time, and important steps have been taken under his leadership, but he didn’t perform while he was in public oßce. When he was a minister, he wasn’t one of the most important ministers—unlike Nina Pacari, who was a diplomat at the Foreign Ministry; she was the rst female indigenous minister in Latin America. She was very skillful and capable, and stood out as a minister, but Luis Macas didn’t see plans through. He was very simplistic. He wasn’t the right gure. Unfortunately, that was another mistake of the leadership, who, having other options, among them myself, didn’t give us the chance to represent ourselves with greater energy, youth, with positive results. We talked of an innovative mayoralty, recognized nationally and inter- PACHAKUTIK 141 nationally, but they chose the old ways. e indigenous movement at times gives out the message that indigenous people are going to govern, that it can’t be done without us, an intercultural country led by an indigenous person—cool, it’s positive, isn’t it? Because it demonstrates a change in the exercise of the country’s politics, but this person shouldn’t only represent the views of indigenous people; they should represent the diversity of the country; they should be capable, dynamic, most impor- tantly honest, and open to dialogue, to interacting with every sector: business, banks, unions, students, environmentalists—we must try to bring together every sector. In the case of Ecuador, in particular, I think a totally leftist proposal— nationalizing, making education completely public, all that—would have no chance of succeeding at this moment due to all the mistakes, all of these governments’ improvisations. e previous government of Gutiérrez, which called itself left wing and was military, ex-military, failed. e current government, led by an academic who came from nowhere with a leftist discourse, is failing. It will hold on thanks only to the budget, but it will not have any future relevance or lead to real democratic changes. As I said earlier, there’s an extremist current that believes that only indigenous peoples have rights, and that we’re capable of making major changes. Others veer more to the center; we believe that positive changes have to include diverse actors, and have clear rules and participative, innovative legislation that is sustainable in the medium and long term. en there are others who believe we have to follow whichever government or party happens to be in power. And that’s where I place Luis Macas. We leaders have the duty to leave our own imprint. So if Macas, as a traditional leader, is unable to engage with the changes that are taking place in national and international politics, his proposal is obviously outdated and unfeasible. I insist, and some professional politicians and experts agree, that Ecuador may have an indigenous president one day, but one that governs for the whole country, not necessarily an indigenous government for indigenous peoples. I’m aligned with this current, which believes in ghting so that an indigenous person may become a national authority, but with a multicultural team. 142 CHAPTER 3

EXTRACTIVISM VERSUS AGRARIAN DEVELOPMENT

Given that Pachakutik is the political arm of CONAIE, it is not surprising that many of the themes of Pachakutik elected oßcials mirror those of the national indigenous confederation, in general, and its Sierra aßliate, ECUARUNARI, in particular. All call for a plurinational state and discuss it in some detail. Denitions of nation follow those of the national indigenous confederation. For Gerónimo Yantalema, each nationality “has its own government, its own language, and its own territories, as well as its memory and history.” Ecua- dor should be a state, he adds, “where there are many nationalities that come together, each with its own indigenous justice system.” For Auki Tituaña, plurinationality is recognizing “the true and legitimate rights of peoples and nations.” Similarly, the core organizing principle of the ECUARUNARI interviews, sumak kawsay, is recognized by all these Pachakutik oßcials. All are opposed to the “extractivism” and other policies of Rafael Correa, whom they harshly criticize. Dolores Cacuango and Tránsito Amaguaña, along with indigenous gures like Rumiñahui and Daquilema, are listed as leading gures just as they are in the ECUARUNARI interviews. Where Pachakutik elected oßcials dier from the other interviews in the Sierra and the Amazon is the strong emphasis they place on economic development based on the peasant producer. Each has his own variant of an agricultural development plan. Although the plans dier in detail and emphasis, all share one critical component—they benet indigenous and nonindigenous peasant farmers equally. is outreach to the nonindigenous farmer echoes Pachakutik’s early emphasis on broad, inclusive coalitions and is indispensable for an oßcial like Prefect Salvador Quishpe, elected in a province with an indigenous population of only percent. It is not surprising then that Quishpe cites the excessive indigenism of some CONAIE and Pachakutik leaders as a cause of Pachakutik loss of power at the national level. Auki Tituaña also rejects an “extremist current that believes only indigenous peoples have rights” and supports a centrist position that would include “diverse actors.” Instead they emphasize the economic concerns of the small farmer and the development of the nation as a whole, not simply its indigenous sector. Gerón- imo Yantalema complains that “the state has invested all its resources in export agriculture” for the benet of “large landowners, while it’s forgotten about peasants and indigenous people. . . . Small-scale indigenous farmers need not only state resources but also the redistribution of land and water to produce food PACHAKUTIK 143 for the country and even consider exporting their products.” He regards land reform as another key issue: “ ere are vast expanses of land [in the sierra], but the best land for cultivation is concentrated in the hands of percent, percent of the population. . . . Meanwhile, small-scale indigenous peasants, the productive units of food sovereignty, have access to small areas.” Furthermore, it is not enough to hand over land to the peasants; investment is required to make the land usable. Price supports are necessary not only for agricultural exports but for peasant food crops. Overall Yantalema is advocating U.S.-style development based on productive small farmers and the internal market, aided by the government, rather than the traditional “extractive colonial model” favored by Rafael Correa: “ at’s why there’s a confrontation.” Salvador Quishpe, prefect of the mining department of Zamora Chinchipe, emphasizes controls on the mineral export economy to benet small peasant food producers: “We believe it’s about time that humanity takes into account the value of food supplies in its thinking. Otherwise we’re all on our way to die. How many more years can the Earth resist if we keep using natural resources at this rate?” If he were president, he would take the prots from mineral exports “to increase food production, and I’d have food for export.” Quishpe also argues for increasing the value added in mining exports by, for example, exporting rened copper ore and reclaiming mining revenues for the state rather than turning them over to foreign corporations and the Chinese. Quishpe shares with Yantalema an emphasis on internal food production by small farmers, indigenous and nonindigenous. He adds a particular concern with capturing revenues from export mining to be reinvested in development projects and, particularly, for food production. Both propose a development plan distinctly dierent from Correa’s extractivism. Like Yantalema and Quishpe, Auki Tituaña believes that “Ecuador should make agricultural development its rst priority, to conduct an agrarian reform that involves land, water, training, credits, markets—a comprehensive proposal.” Tituaña believes that “the fundamental demand of indigenous groups in general is for genuine land reform.” e land reform, inspired, he says, by fear of the Cuban Revolution, only gave away the worst land. But “merely handing out land and credits” is not enough. “ ere has to be a complete proposal, and the state must concern itself with output and fair trade.” He also calls for “a bank that gives nancial assistance to peoples and nations” to “move forward in the industrialization of our production.” He rejects Correa as a “racist, false socialist” and condemns his economic model based on “the extraction of 144 CHAPTER 3 natural resources.” Like Yantalema and Quishpe, Tituaña wants a structural transformation of Ecuadorian development from the colonial export model to one based on the small farmer and the internal market. e divisions between Correa and Pachakutik elected oßcials run deep. ey want a revolution in economic structure leading not to Cuban-style socialism but to American-style government-assisted small, farmer-based development. On this the three oß- cials agree. Elected Pachakutik oßcials, like leaders from the Amazon and the Andes, reject both reform and armed twentieth-century-style revolution. Even Auki Tituaña, who studied in Cuba and admires both Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, said, “A signicant part of the indigenous movement is working on initiating structural reforms by democratic means, not by means of violence or armed struggle.” Salvador Quishpe says, “What we want is not a reform . . . but it’s not like we’re proposing a revolution in the Cuban or leftist style. . . . We’re not proposing to abolish private property . . . we’re proposing [changes] in our own style.” Insofar as these oßcials share the CONAIE commitment to plurinationality, they are proposing a symbolic revolution in the Western concept of the nation-state. But even their proposals for internal agrarian development rather than export-oriented “extractivism” would require massive structural change in Ecuador even if the outcome would be Jeerson-style agrarianism. is is revolution in the Ecuadorian style. II

“INDIAN REVOLUTION” AND THE MOVEMENT TOWARD SOCIALISM MAS¦ IN BOLIVIA

4 KATARISM§INDIANISM IN THE ANDES

Interviews with Felipe Quispe, Eugenio Rojas, Pablo Mamani, and Eugenia Choque

HE REVOLUTION of in Bolivia brought with it vastly expanded horizons for the Aymara peasants of the altiplano but at the same time Tcreated an enduring existential dilemma that had reached crisis propor- tions by the beginning of the twenty-rst century. As Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui eloquently puts it, “massive rural schooling, the expansion of the internal market, the universal vote, a smallholder based agrarian reform of vast extent,” but at the same time completing the tasks of “individuation and ethnocide” began with the liberal reforms of the nineteenth century.ì e plan of the victorious MNR was “civilizing the Indian by means of Creole racial amalgamation, Hispani- cization, the subdivision of land and the commercialization of agriculture . . . which was summed up in the phrase ‘integrating the Indian into the nation.’”ï e dilemma described by Rivera Cusicanqui can be simply put. e Aymara could only join the nation dened by the revolution if they ceased to exist. e structure of the ayllu dating to preconquest time, the Aymara language, Andean norms of reciprocity and solidarity, and indeed any element of Aymara culture or history would be absorbed by a “mestizo” nation, modern and Hispanic in all respects. Individual citizenship would replace ayllu membership, electoral democracy would replace consensual decision-making and customary leadership, individual landholding would replace what remained of community lands, the possessive individual would replace the community, market mechanisms 148 CHAPTER 4 would replace reciprocal exchange, Creole heroes would replace Aymara ones, and of course Spanish would replace Aymara. e Aymara and their ancestral cultures would remain in the monuments at Tiwanaku, dancing the morenada, popular festivals and codied folklore.

MAP 2. Bolivia political divisions: highest concentrations of Aymara and Quechua indigenous peoples by department. Eastern lowlands (north to south): Pando, Beni, Santa Cruz. Data from Xavier Albó, Movimientos y poder indígena en Bolivia, Ecuador y Perú (La Paz: Centro de Investigacíon y Promoción del Campesinado, ), . Map adapted from https:// d -maps .com/ m/ america/ bolivia/ bolivie/ bolivie .pdf. KATARISM INDIANISM IN THE A NDES 149

e enormous prestige of the revolution, its utopian vision and real accomplishments, generated unquestioning support for the generation of Aymara peasants who had experienced these changes rsthand and even endured the military overthrow of the revolution in by General René Bar- rientos and the imposition of his “anti-communist peasant military pact.” It even survived the death of Barrientos in a suspicious helicopter crash in , although subsequent military rulers lacked his äuent Quechua and folksy appeal to the peasantry.ð But the existential dilemma remained unresolved, and as time passed and the educated children of the altiplano communities made their way through the Hispanic education system, some even reaching the university, another element of the dilemma became apparent. Even those Aymara who were willing to accept the conditions of the MNR’s assimilationist vision were deprived of real participation in the society and state of . e higher ranks of the government, the military, the universities, and both private and state enterprises remained closed to Aymara, who were met everywhere by a racism undiminished by the Revolution of . e greater the contact with the city and the mestizo world, the greater the disillusionment. It turned out that even ceasing to be culturally Aymara was insußcient for assimilation into Bolivian society. Racism insured that an apartheid-like structure existed in public and private institutions. e great Aymara uprising of the rst ve years of the twentieth century reäected not only the dilemmas of the revolution of but a long history of polarization between Aymaras and Creoles that dated to the conquest. As René Zavaleta famously observed:

All the nation’s centuries are marked by uprisings or rebellions, it is as if Bolivia were nothing but that which had been built between the walls of defensive barricades erected against a territory populated by the Indian masses.ñ

e colonial epoch had pitted the Spanish overlords against the Aymara ayllus in a system based on forced labor in the mines of Potosí, forced sale of Spanish merchandise, and direct tribute. e republican era had substituted Creoles and ctive “whites” (mestizos) for the Spanish but otherwise the system was little changed. Toward the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, haciendas expanded at the expense of the Aymara ayllus and tribute was eventually abolished.ú e revolution of put an end to this structure but replaced it with new forms of domination and exclusion. As 150 CHAPTER 4

Xavier Albó summarizes the Aymara experience, it had been “to ght together against the Spanish/creole q’ara and that although the latter might pretend to be a friend, the story always ended with betrayal.”û Acute ethnic (and later racial) polarization always existed in the altiplano; the revolution did not end it. Furthermore, the Military Peasant Pact that replaced the revolutionary state always depended as much on coercion as consent and consistently promised more than it delivered. At the rst sign of serious resistance, the military reverted to that tried and true Bolivian method of social control, the Indian massacre. e so-called Massacre of the Valley in Tolanta in Cochabamba on January , , was a turning point. Peasants protesting price increases had assembled, or so they thought, to meet the paternalistic president of the “military-peasant- pact.” Instead they were shot down by armored cars. e massacre was the beginning of the end not only of the “pact” but of military rule and, in a wider sense, of the utopian imaginary of the revolution.ü As Albó notes, it was the Aymara of the Altiplano, not the Quechua-speaking peasants of Cochabamba, who rst drew the lessons of the massacre.ý e existential dilemma of the Aymara was acute because of the profound ethnic polarization on which it was based and the bloodshed with which it was imposed.

THE INDIAN REVOLUTION AND THE RISE OF KATARISMINDIANISM

No matter how acute the existential dilemma of the Aymara, it could not rise to the level of insurgency without a symbolic revolution to give it meaning and undermine the social narrative of the old order. A single work, La revolu- ción india, self-published by the Quechua intellectual Fausto Reinaga in , provided that symbolic revolution.ÿ It is dißcult to overstate the importance of this work for subsequent events. Asked in what politician he admired most, Evo Morales replied, “More than any politician I admired a writer, Fausto Reinaga and his works like La revolución india. . . . He allowed me to understand who we are as Quechuas and Aymaras.”ì~ Esteban Ticona Alejo argued in , “In the post uprisings of indigenous people and campesinos . . . it is not an exaggeration to say that his [Reinaga’s] ideas have been present among indigenous actors urban and rural.”ìì Reinaga’s account, told from the indigenous perspective, turns Bolivian history upside down. at history begins with the betrayal and murder of the Inca KATARISM INDIANISM IN THE A NDES 151 emperor Atahualpa and the destruction of his empire, not with the triumphal conquest of Pizarro. e Bolivian independence struggle did not begin with the “shout” of liberty by Diego Murillo celebrated on independence day every year but with the revolt of the indigenous leader Julián Apasa (nom de guerre, Túpac Katari) and his siege of La Paz (). Murillo is portrayed as the conqueror and executioner of Katari. Reinaga discusses at length the other leaders of the revolt, including Katari’s wife, Bartolina Sisa, and his own direct ancestor Tomás Katari. e hero of the liberal revolution of is not creole General Pando but Zárate Willka, the leader of Pando’s indigenous allies. Willka, like Atahualpa and Túpac Katari before him, is betrayed and murdered by the Western or West- ernized elite. e land reform is ushered in by the indigenous peasantry, but once again they are betrayed as the victorious MNR gives the best land to the former land owners and imposes private property on the indigenous ayllus. National heroes, statues on the Prado (the main boulevard of La Paz), and even the national anthem celebrate not the vast indigenous minority of Bolivia but their conquerors and murderers. La revolución india denounces the hypocrisies and evasions of Bolivia’s Westernized elite and its history in no uncertain terms. is elite has created a ctitious nation and a powerless state—“democratic-bourgeois ideas coming from Europe äoat like the clouds over the economic reality of the feudal-slave exploitation of the Indian” not only in the colonial past but today (). Rein- aga makes the following observations. e Spanish conquest: “Western feudal- ism imposed on Incan communism.” e republic: “ e Viceroyalty [of colonial Peru] in the disguise of a Republic.” e Bolivian state: “‘ e committee that administers the interests’ of Euro-Yankee capitalism . . . the West.” e Bolivian armed forces: “A conglomeration of uniformed people [that] . . . specialize in their oßce of killing Indians.” Christianity: “For the Indian . . . hunger, stupidity and slavery.”ìï As the quotes indicate, the language is blunt, unforgiving, and often intem- perate. e Westernized Bolivian elite, some of which has some indigenous ancestry, is denounced as “the cholaje” (chola is a pejorative term for a Western- ized indigenous person), the “blancos-mestizos” (“whites” and people of both indigenous and European ancestry who have adopted European ways), and in conjunction with the frequent racialized depiction of the bearers of European civilization in general as “white” or sometimes “blonde” beasts. ere are two Bolivias, says Reinaga, “a chola Bolivia and an Indian Bolivia,” and the Indian revolution will liberate one and eliminate the other. Given the frequency of 152 CHAPTER 4 racial epithets, it would be easy to read these passages as racist calls for the destruction of all European and their various colonial descendants in Bolivia and elsewhere. But Reinaga claims that his real goal is to liberate not only the Indian Bolivia “but also the chola Bolivia” by creating a real nation and real state out of the ction that is contemporary Bolivia.ìð In any case, according to Reinaga there is only a “minimum minority white” in a country that is “ percent” Indian.ìñ Reinaga sees the Indian revolution as a ird World liberation movement against a neocolonial regime and favorably quotes Frantz Fanon, Stokely Car- michael, and other Black Power advocates in the United States. is is a work that clearly evokes the global ethos of the s, not the rights talk or environmentalism of the later part of the twentieth century, however important these ideas would become decades later. Like the contemporaneous liberation movements in Africa, the problem is liberation from a colonial—or, in this case, neocolonial—ruling elite. Reinaga’s response to the dilemma of national assimilation and societal exclusion is simplicity itself: “ e problem of the Indian is not assimilation, it is liberation.” is liberation is not to come through armed struggle but through the ballot box. “Because of this our motto is: §¯¨ «¦º«³¦ ª¼§¨ ·¼© §¯¨ «¦º«³¦.” ìú irty-six years later, in December , this is exactly what happened even though Reinaga’s own Partido Indio de Bolivia (BPI, Bolivian Indian Party) never had any electoral success. e Indian revolution is clearly a national revolution, but Reinaga also claims that it is a “racial revolution.” e concepts of nation, culture, and race are completely confounded in Reinaga’s writing although it is clear that the racial binary Indian/white is for him the fundamental contradiction, not Marx’s proletariat/ capitalist. He writes, for example, “ e problem of the Indian . . . is not a problem of class (campesino class) but of race, spirit, culture, of a people, of a Nation.” His denition of nation repeats nearly word for word Stalin’s classic denition. “It is a stable human community, formed historically and arising from the base of a community of language, territory, economic life, psychology and culture.”ìû Yet at the same time nation equals race. is contradiction remains unresolved in La revolución india. But his real target is Western culture and especially its Bolivian imitators. e Indian revolution is an “impetuous confrontation of Indian ideology with Western culture. . . . What the Indian wants is to liberate themselves, precisely, from Europe.”ìü Neither Western liberalism nor Western communism is spared since both want to assimilate the Indian into Western culture and the Indian KATARISM INDIANISM IN THE A NDES 153 ideal is “to be, not to disappear.” Despite Reinaga’s own background as a Marx- ist, communism, in particular, comes in for unäinching criticism. e Indian in the ranks of the Communist Party “suers brutal racial discrimination,” and all the party bosses are “of white skin, always of the white cholaje.” Even more fundamentally, the party has tried to squeeze the Indian into the class category of “campesino,” which is totally inappropriate for a society like Bolivia without developed capitalist property relations. Nevertheless, Reinaga’s Marxist background and previous socialist commit- ments are evident in his insistence that the Indian revolution will be a socialist revolution—not the socialist revolution of the communists but rather a socialism rooted in an “Indian socialism” based on a romanticized utopian image of the Inca Empire as “a perfect society, in which every person was happy.”ìý In the conclusion of the “Bolivian Indian Party Manifesto,” he proposes that a syncretic collection of principles be inscribed in gold letters everywhere in his Indian socialist republic.

Ama llulla, ama sua, ama quella [Don’t lie, don’t steal, don’t be lazy] He who does not work does not eat From each according to his ability and to each according to his needs.ìÿ

e rst principle is one of moral maxims of the Inca Empire; the second, an unacknowledged homage to colonial Virginia. But the last quote indicates how deeply Marxist ideas have been fused with “Indianism” in Reinaga’s socialist utopia. Nevertheless, at the close of Reinaga’s “Manifesto” it is the Indians of Bolivia, not the workers of the world, who are exhorted to unite. Reinaga, both in his life and in his greatest work, has fused the principal currents of revolutionary imagery in Bolivia: nationalism, Marxism, and Indianism. Despite Reinaga’s famous aphorism, “Neither Christ nor Marx,” his Indian revolution cannot exist without the latter. Although Reinaga would not live to see his ideas explode into the mass mobilization of millions in the rst decade of the twenty-rst-century, La rev- olución india had immediate and far-reaching political eects. As Marcia Ste- phenson points out, “His thought led to numerous movements derived from his own Partido Indio de Bolivia, Julián Apasa University Movement (MUJA), including the Túpac Katari Indian Movement (MITKA), the Túpac Katari Revolutionary Movement (MRTK), and the Red Ayllu Oensive of Felipe Quispe [see interview in this chapter].”ï~ ese movements came to be called 154 CHAPTER 4 the “Kataristas” after the eighteenth-century rebel Túpac Katari.ïì eir inäu- ence and thereby Reinaga’s echoes to this day. e Katarist movement began with a small group of Aymara students at the Villarroel high school in La Paz who called themselves the th of November movement after the date of Túpac Katari’s martyrdom in . All these students had come of age after the revolution and all came from the same province, Aroma, where haciendas had never been strong and Aymara ayllu bonds were correspondingly most powerful. All maintained their ties to the villages where they were born and often returned to assume positions in the traditional civil religious hierarchy after completing their studies. ey began by reading the works of Fausto Reinaga, and most went on to be members of his Bolivian Indian Party.ïï Many continued to UMSA, where in they founded another student group, the Movimiento Universitario Julián Apasa (MUJA, using Túpac Katari’s civilian name), which was most active in the years –.ïð MUJA became the student branch of the Katarist movement and the source of many of its principal leaders, including such luminaries as Raimundo Tambo and Genaro Flores. It also became the intellectual wellspring of the other Katarist organizations mentioned by Stephenson and, eventually, the Aymara mobilizations of –. e intellectual roots of Katarism were to be found among those Aymara who most acutely experienced the existential dilemma of the state of ’. As Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui notes:

In the s there emerged a new generation of young Aymaras, who felt they were “foreigners in their own country,” despite their formal inclusion in the citizenry, since they experience the daily phenomena of ethnic discrimination, political manipulation and humiliation. is oppressive everyday reality, which to the Indians was anachronistic, contradicted the “integrationist” rhetoric that prevailed in the oßcial ideology of revolutionary nationalism.ïñ

e MUJA had in fact begun to ght discrimination among students and faculty at UMSA in La Paz. At the intellectual level, one of the most important oshoots of MUJA was the Taller de Historia Oral Andina (THOA, Andean Oral History Workshop), founded in . THOA set itself the task of documenting indigenous movements in the period – and produced a number of important works of KATARISM INDIANISM IN THE A NDES 155 scholarly historical reconstruction.ïú But it also had a critical impact on Aymara consciousness by creating soap operas (radio novellas) based on the lives of signicant Aymara leaders, like Santos Marka T’ula or intellectuals like Edu- ardo L. Nina Qhispi. As Eugenia Choque notes, these shows were broadcast in Aymara and had a widespread impact on peasant communities in the Altiplano, some of whom were inspired to investigate their own community’s history and search for legal titles dating back centuries. THOA had a signicant impact in building a positive Aymara consciousness, which directly contradicted the racist stereotypes and the assimilationist assumptions of the state of ’. MUJA and its alumni also opened the intellectual space for a new generation of “Aymara intellectuals,” as they are called in Bolivia, who were also strongly inäuenced by these ideas and those of Reinaga. Eugenia Choque, whose interview follows, is representative of this new group of Aymara intellectuals, which includes other MUJA alumni such as Roberto Choque Canqui; prominent oß- cials of the MAS government, including his rst education minister, columnist and sociologist Félix Patzi Paco; and vice minister of community justice and distinguished anthropologist Esteban Ticona Alejo; Fausto Reinaga’s son Ramiro Reinaga; and a rising star of Bolivian sociology, Pablo Mamani Ramírez, whose interview is also included in this chapter. Mamani has emerged as a leading theorist of the Indianist strains of the Katarist movement. He was a leader in the movement to found a separate university for El Alto, the Universidad Pública y Autónoma de El Alto (UPAE, Public University of El Alto), where he is now a member of the faculty. ese Aymara intellectuals have had an enormous eect on public discourse in Bolivia and many, like Mamani and Choque, remain in close touch with Aymara communities in the Altiplano. e social movements spawned by MUJA actually contained two competing intellectual positions. e rst, the Indianists, were faithful followers of Reinaga and placed the racial issue at the forefront of their analysis and program. As Albó notes, “ eir thesis was centered on the idea that the root of the problems was the Spanish conquest of the Andean ‘Indian’ peoples.”ïû In this tendency created its own political party, the Movimiento Indio Túpac Katari (MITKA, Túpac Katari Indian Movement). Although the party had little electoral success, it remained a presence both in Katarism and in the Confederación Sindical Única de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia (CSUTCB, Sole Union Confederation of Rural Workers of Bolivia). e second tendency also organized its own political party, the Movimiento Revolucionario Túpac Katari (MRTK, Túpac Katari Revolutionary Movement), 156 CHAPTER 4 but, despite its name, it took a more moderate position combining elements of Indianism and peasantist class analysis and working through both the electoral system and the government-controlled CSUTCB. In it succeeded in seizing power in the peasant confederation. In the leader of one of its splinter parties, Víctor Hugo Cárdenas, was elected vice president of Bolivia on a ticket with Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada in his rst administration (–). e rst, Indianist, tendency in MITKA had equally far-reaching eects. A radical faction of the tendency formed a caucus, Ofensiva Roja de Ayllus Túpac- Kataristas (Red Oensive of the Túpac-Katarist Ayllus), within and, eventually, outside the CSUTCB. Its principal theorist was none other than current Bolivian vice president and distinguished sociologist and public intellectual Álvaro García Linera. Its political leader, however, was the outspoken Aymara revolutionary Felipe Quispe. Together with García’s partner, Raquel Gutiérrez, and a core of Aymara militants they organized the Ejército Guerrillero Túpac Katari (EGTK, Túpac Katari Guerrilla Army), which was active in –. By the principal leaders, including García, Gutiérrez, and Quispe, had been captured and the three of them and other leaders spent the next ve years in Chonchocoro prison. On their emergence, however, they immediately became heroes in the eyes of many Aymara peasants and creole intellectuals disaected by a dozen years of neoliberal economic restructuring. García was appointed as a professor in the Department of Sociology at UMSA in La Paz, where one of his colleagues was the distinguished social scientist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, who was also the founding director of THOA. Quispe, however, found himself suddenly proposed as president of the national peasant federation as a compromise candidate to resolve a conäict between two peasant leaders from Cochabamba, Evo Morales and Alejo Véliz. Beginning in in step with the Cochabamba war, Quispe led a series of ever more militant protests, which culminated in the Gas War of that nally brought down the regime of Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada. By that time the protests had moved beyond Quispe’s or anyone else’s control. In , however, in a bewildering change of tactics for the old revolutionary, he ran for president with his own newly formed party, the Movimiento Indio Pachakuti (MIP, Pachakuti Indian Movement), which reaßrmed his commitment to Indianism and, at least symbolically, to revolution, which is one of the ways the Aymara word pachakuti can be translated. Quispe’s narrative is the rst of the interviews in this section. He is as unre- pentant, revolutionary, and vituperative as ever, dismissing Evo Morales as a KATARISM INDIANISM IN THE A NDES 157

“mestizo” and calling for even more Indian revolution until the Aymara have their own state, even if it takes “rivers of blood.” As John Crabtree notes, “ e strident and sometimes violent tone of Quispe’s language also nds an echo among people fed up with corrupt oßcials, self-satised NGO representatives, and even churchmen who do less than they promise to tackle poverty and marginalization.”ïü But Crabtree also notes that Quispe has had “a major impact on helping build up a sense of self-respect and assertiveness among a people who believe they are second (if not third) class citizens in today’s Bolivia.” But when the government collapsed and the revolutionary found himself on the verge of power, he demurred and left his supporters without any plan of action, let alone governance. Having already spilled blood for Quispe’s Indian revolution, his supporters rapidly abandoned him. In he was unceremoniously voted out of the peasant union at a meeting to which he was not even invited. Today he is almost completely marginalized both in politics and increasingly in histories of the rise of MAS written by sympathizers of the ultimate victors in the revolution that Quispe did so much to initiate. Even in his former revolutionary capital, Achacachi, the mayor at the time of the interviews (), elected on Quispe’s MIP slate, had abandoned him and joined MAS. Eugenio Rojas, whose interview follows Quispe’s, had been with Quispe from the beginning, rst in the EGTK and later in electoral politics. His interview makes clear that the ideas of Reinaga and Quispe of a twenty-rst-century Qullasuyu (one of the four provinces of Tawantinsuyu) had great currency in the Aymara Altiplano in the early years of the century. Aymara cosmovision and the indigenous community still remain the core of power in Achacachi, no matter who rules from La Paz. Rojas, who became a MAS senator from La Paz, has decided that Aymara nationalism is not the root of national power in a country as diverse as Bolivia. Many other Aymara appear to have discovered the same thing. In the presidential election of , Evo Morales swept the Aymara heartland that, three years before, had been Quispe’s (and Rojas’s) base. rough MITKA, Ofensiva Roja, the EGTK, and Felipe Quispe, radical Indianism has had a profound inäuence on the thinking of Aymara and other indigenous people. But the inäuence of the other tendency in the Katarist movement, the MRTK, may have been even more profound. rough the work of Raimundo Tambo and, after his death in , Genaro Flores, the movement worked to create an independent Katarist peasant union movement within the very union structure created by the MNR and the Peasant Military Pact. e 158 CHAPTER 4 tendency would culminate in the formation of the MRTK in and the establishment of a new peasant union confederation, the Confederación Sindi- cal Única de Trabajadores Rurales de Bolivia (CSUTCB) in . From the beginning this was the dominant current in the Katarist movement, however spectacular the results of the radical tendencies of Quispe and the MITKA. e close connection between the Aymara leaders and their base communities and the profound changes brought to the latter by the April revolution extended its inäuence far beyond intellectual circles. Tambo and Flores and the other members of this tendency always combined Indianist themes with class analysis, claiming to see oppression of the Aymara peasantry with “two eyes,” one of class and one of ethnicity. eir famous “Man- ifesto of Tiwanaku,” issued in , in distinct contrast to Reinaga’s PIB Mani- festo, issued only four years earlier, strongly emphasizes peasant class concerns, anathema to Reinaga. Nevertheless, from the outset it combines class and cultural themes:

Inca Yupanqui told the Spaniards, “A people who oppress another people cannot be free.” We, the Qhechwa and Aymara peasants and other indigenous people of the country feel the same. We feel economically exploited and culturally and politically oppressed.ïý

Twenty years after the revolution they did not want to be considered second- class citizens, and in a much-quoted phrase they wrote, “We are foreigners in our own country.”ïÿ Although the Manifesto speaks of revolution, their immediate goal is to “start a powerful autonomous peasant movement”—a goal that in the midst of the brutal dictatorship of Hugo Banzer, under the control of a national peasant union established by the MNR at the height of its revolutionary power and maintained at gunpoint by the Peasant Military Pact, seemed if not utopian then almost impossible. But six years later they did just that, changing the history of Bolivia forever. e powerful combination of Indianist thought and class analysis made it possible to respond to the very real material privations of the “peasantry” while at the same time speaking to their indigenous souls. e CSUTCB eventually became an organization of more than three million members. e Kataristas, however, began to splinter politically almost immediately, and their hold on the CSUTCB was eventually broken by Evo Morales’s cocaleros, KATARISM INDIANISM IN THE A NDES 159 who seized power in . e election of Víctor Hugo Cárdenas in marked the end, not the beginning, of their political power despite the important reforms, such as the Law of Popular Participation ( ), which radically shifted power to local government and provided an opening for Evo Morales, who was rst elected as a deputy in . e creation of an independent peasant movement was nonetheless a decisive step in the political process that would lead to Morales’s “democratic and cultural revolution.” Although Morales came from Quechua-speaking Cochabamba, where ethnic nationalism, traditional communities, and indigenous culture had always been weaker and unions, the MNR, and peasantist themes had always been stronger, he had to come to terms with the changed world that the Kataristas in both their radical “Indian” and their moderate “revolutionary” form had left behind. During and after the election campaign, his discourse became notably more indigenist and by MAS party posters pictured him with Túpac Katari. e spread and popularization of Fausto Reinaga’s ideas and the rise of Katarism provide the alternative symbolic frame that promised the resolution of the economic abandonment of the countryside and the extinction of indigenous culture and identity that the state of imposed, and the system of apartheid it left behind. Reinaga’s Revolución india was a symbolic inversion of Bolivian history that placed the indigenous and indigenous identity at the center of Bolivian history and society. e Kataristas who both transformed and communicated his ideas throughout Bolivian society provided a positive, even triumphant, image for second-class citizens who felt they were strangers in their own land. At the moment of its triumph on April , , the MNR-led revolution contained the contradictions that would eventually lead to its demise (and the demise of its leading party). Indigenous people in general and the Aymara in particular had to live simultaneously with their full enfranchisement as citizens and their planned extinction as Aymaras. Racism was the societal glue that held this unlikely combination together. If the Aymara accepted the negative image of themselves presented by a racist history and society, the contradiction was resolved. eir role as second-class citizens was exactly what they, as racial inferiors, deserved. Reinaga and Katarism changed all that. Radio programs, political organizers, and indigenous intellectuals brought them a new history and a new identity. Ultimately these inäuences undermined the one category from the old order that Fausto Reinaga did not challenge— race. Quispe’s eorts to polarize the society between the Aymaras and the q’aras ultimately failed, not only because of vacillating tactics but because his appeal 160 CHAPTER 4 was too narrow and ignored the increasing number of urban migrants and others who found themselves caught in the middle. Evo Morales, with his class and plurinational appeals, captured a much broader audience and in the end his vision prevailed at the ballot box and very likely in history. Race, that indispensable ingredient in the old order, seems to be dying an ideological, if not yet popular, death. At his second inauguration, Morales stood before portraits not only of Túpac Katari and Apiaguaiki Tumpa (a Guaraní) but also of the liberator and proponent of Western civilization Simón Bolívar. As has been noted, the interviews that follow include a wide range of stories of the continuing inäuence of Fausto Reinaga and Katarism. e interviews begin with Felipe Quispe himself, the most radical Indianist of them all and a loyal follower of Túpac Katari and Fausto Reinaga. Eugenio Rojas fought with Quispe but now is a senator for MAS supporting a plurinational, not an Aymara, state. Pablo Mamani and Eugenia Choque are part of that äowering of Aymara thought that Reinaga and the Katarists did so much to stimulate. Mamani was an activist and founder of one of the most important intellectual institutions in Aymara society, the public university of El Alto. Choque was a member of the Movimiento Universitario Julián Apasa and a founding member of the Taller de Historia Oral Andina. Together these interviews show the overwhelming importance of the indigenous revolution (and La revolución india) in the transformation of contemporary Bolivia. Evo Morales is the head of that revolution but La revolución india may be its soul. e interviews that follow demonstrate the enduring inäuence of Reinaga and Katarism for the revolutionary transformations of the twenty-rst century. It is striking how many ideas that began with Reinaga appear in the interviews: the restoration of Qullasuyu/Tiwantinsuyu, “two Bolivias”; Túpac Katari, Bartolina Sisa, and Zárate Willka; the wiphala; the sacred site of Tiwanaku; the indigenous New Year ( June ); the q’ara or blanco-mestizo clique; and of course the idea of indigenous revolution itself. Reinaga’s Revolución india reversed the categories of Hispanic modernity and provided the symbolic revolution that, decades later, climaxed in the political revolution of –.

FELIPE QUISPE: REVOLUTIONARY INDIANIST

“El Malku” Felipe Quispe was born in to a poor Aymara campesino family in the province of Omasuyos not far from La Paz. He was, as he says in this interview, “born a revolutionary.” During his military service in the s he KATARISM INDIANISM IN THE A NDES 161 was indoctrinated in the strict anticommunism of the time and emerged in with a burning desire to read Marx in the original to see if what they had told him was true. After reading ¥e Communist Manifesto, he concluded that he had been lied to, and Marx became a fundamental inäuence on his radicalism. He was also inäuenced by Fausto Reinaga and in was one of the founders and permanent secretary of the MITKA until Luis García Meza’s military coup in , when he was expelled from the country. He traveled to Mexico and Cen- tral America, where he trained with the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front in El Salvador and the Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres (EGP, Guer- rilla Army of the Poor) in Guatemala. In he returned to Bolivia, where he assumed a leadership role in the CSUTCB La Paz and then in February formed the Ofensiva Roja de Ayllus Túpac-Kataristas, from which emerged the short-lived EGTK, active in –. By Quispe and other leaders such as Álvaro García Linera, his brother Raúl, and social partner Raquel Gutiérrez along with many Aymara activists from the altiplano were arrested. Quispe spent the next ve years in Chonchocoro prison. On his emergence he found himself selected in as a compromise candidate to head the CSUTCB and resolve a leadership conäict between Alejo Véliz and Evo Morales. In – he led militant protests in the altiplano that culminated in September in a protest that touched o a nationwide rebellion. In Quispe formed his own party, the Movimiento Indio Pachakutik (MIP), and ran for president, receiving percent of the vote, and elected six deputies, including himself. By , however, his power began to decline at the very moment that a Quispe-inspired protest brought down the government. In that same year he was voted out of his union position in a meeting to which he was not invited. In he resigned his seat in the assembly. In Evo Morales carried the Aymara altiplano and Quispe’s MIP was reduced to percent of the vote. He has remained at the margins of Bolivian politics ever since.ð~

REVOLUTION AND SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION

It has cost us much blood to have an Indian president. We have had mestizos such as Andrés de Santa Cruz, of a Spanish father and an Indian mother, such as Víctor Hugo Cárdenas (although he changed his [Aymara] name) but he has been vice president with Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, but this last one, Evo Morales Ayma, his name 162 CHAPTER 4 is not Indian; he is a mestizo. Augustín Morales has governed in this country—many Morales have governed in this country. We Indians maintain our original surname, Quispe or Quispe Huanca, Mamani, Condori. We have not become absorbed by the imperialist capitalist system. Morales is there because he is a mestizo puppet that has been put in the palace. He is a puppet because he dresses dierently than we do. He is a fake in the rst place because he does not dress like an ordinary and normal Indian. Secondly, he does not think with his own brain but others think for him, and, nally, I should say that the ministers are not Indians. Juan Ramón Quintana, Álvaro García Linera, Walter San Miguel, and including Alfredo Rada: all these people have nothing to do with Indians. Clearly the Morales people put on a poncho, pretend they are Indian, but are just gureheads in the palace. I see that in this respect there is change. Because before the president was white and the Indians were excluded. Now the president is an Indian but they continue having white ministers, white ambassadors—the bosses are white. Because of this he is just a servant. Evo Morales is servile. Now if you arrive at my community, where we had planned a mechanization of agriculture, it does not exist. We have overthrown Gon- zalo Sánchez de Lozada, we have overthrown Carlos Mesa Quisbert, including [Hugo] Banzer, three presidents. We have proposed mechanization, electrication—bringing power to our communities; we have proposed indigenous social security, but we are not insured. We are like those animals that are in the hills, in the mountains; we do not count. We have proposed to have our own university; we have proposed autonomy, our own state, not the blanco mestizo state but rather an Indian state. In ancient times we would have been in Qullasuyu, but things changed after the Spaniards arrived in the year —Pizarro, Almagro, Valverde. e situation changed and then the republic arrived and now Evo Morales has not changed anything. We will continue being the same until tomorrow or until tomorrow is past. ey are going to record the bicentennial, the two hundred years from the death [sic] of Pedro Domingo Murillo, and who was Pedro Domingo Murillo? He was the murderer of our ancestors. Who fought Túpac Katari? Murillo saw the quartering of Túpac Katari. e most ignorant KATARISM INDIANISM IN THE A NDES 163 people celebrate a murderer. e streets, the plazas, the names of the universities, high schools, military academies, police academies continue to bear the name of our murderer. Nothing has changed. ere is no decolonization; there is no change. ere is no [refoundation of the state] because if we had arrived in power, I am certain that this country would not be called Bolivia. We would have changed it to our original name, Qullasuyu. We would have our own laws, code, language, religion; all that surrounds us. ey do not know how to extinguish Qullasuyu because it was a very strong culture—petried like the stones of Tiwanaku. In an Indian state the culture diers greatly, the language is dierent; for example, it is like German and English.

THE MAKING OF A REVOLUTIONARY

Señor, I have been doing politics since I was standing in my mother’s roadside restaurant. When I was born, I was shouting “patria o muerte [motherland or death]” when my community washed me all over in urine. I wasn’t born in a hospital. I screamed for milk. I was born a revolutionary and a politician and until I go under to the Pachamama, when they bury me, I will continue to be a revolutionary politician. Even if those mean sons of bitches exterminate me I will still be a revolutionary. As a boy I even thought myself capable of making war. is I have not renounced. It is clear that they have slandered me; politics is dirty, mean, but I was born for this—I am made of this. I am part of this model that wishes to follow the path traced by our ancestors—the struggle for total and denitive liberation. You know that founding a political party is easy; it is set out in laws. Whoever doesn’t agree with the system or does not share the ideology of the government in power is persecuted, is clandestine, is a conspirator. In the nineties I spent ve years in jail for my revolutionary ideals. When I came out of prison I organized mass mobilizations—from to . I continue to think the same as before, but now this requires looking for human resources in order to make the revolution, because to do so in a legal context is not easy. It is expensive to le a lawsuit, but we have to do so in order to ght. 164 CHAPTER 4

THE CSUTCB AND THE MOBILIZATIONS, 2000? 2005

I had been elected [president of the CSUTCB] in the year , ’. I was in the process of redening and reorganizing the union cadres and nding people at the national level, particularly here in La Paz. In I went public with my rst and last name, organizing the mobilizations using the same tactics as Túpac Katari. e life of Túpac Katari had inspired us. We blockaded roads and highways; we blocked agricultural products from the country and laid siege to cities in order to strangle our captors. We managed things very intelligently. Between and we overthrew the governments of Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, Banzer, and nally Carlos Mesa Quisbert, but we have not been working for ourselves—the devil does not know for whom he works. We have worked for Evo Morales. Evo Morales had been a leader from , but he had not done anything. He was simply a guy who moved from one party to another. He never had a political line, but in they bought this emblem of MAS that came from the Bolivian Socialist Pha- lange and with this party he has reached the palace. We are not envious because the values still remain with us. Our political culture still is here. e äag that we have äown is not that äown by the MAS party and Evo Morales. We still have the äag. We can return to the political scene at any point through mobilizations or democracy, or through another more united and more revolutionary way. I had done my military service in , ’ . I was green clearly. My parents did not tell me to be political because they did not have a party. ere was a master sergeant of the army named Aureliano Tórrez, an anticommunist. We shared pamphlets and the pamphlet said that Marx was an atheist, that communism was going to take our lands, our animals, that communism was going to kill our parents, our grandparents. is scared me—it entered into the depths of my heart. When I left the barracks I bought ¥e Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx. I wanted to nd where he said they were going to take my land, that they were going to kill, and there was nothing. Everything Tórrez told me was a lie—from that moment I was political. I learned to be political thanks to the military. Because of this I was working from ’ , through the seventies, from ’ to ’ , more or less, in organic work, going through the communities, sleeping with our brothers in the countryside and there- KATARISM INDIANISM IN THE A NDES 165 fore dirty, without bathing, without washing, sharing the same lice, the same äeas, eating the same food, talking in Aymara, Quechua, winning people over to make a great revolt. In the ’s we did not know how to do it and we fell into the hands of state intelligence. In all of these people responded. What we had been organizing now emerged. I did not utilize money but used the strategy and the tactics of our ancestors. One day I stopped at a community, went in from : a.m., spent the night, departed the following day, went into another community—there was rotation. Sometimes when we were going in we were unlucky and collided with the army. Sometimes we didn’t collide with the army; then we could last a year, two years. Collisions with the army did not aect us because one, two, three communities enter a blockade and other communities are working, agricultural work. At night we went in with äash- lights while the others were resting. We used communal food so that we didn’t even spend ten cents. My compañeros were not mercenaries but instead were aware that we needed a good discourse. We needed concepts and terms, categories in accord with our realities; sweet words, to speak well to our people. Our people responded in the year when we dealt with the issue of water—clearly partly thanks to our discourse. For example, in [] on September we began with mobilizations; on the tenth, eleventh we kidnapped the ministers at Radio San Gabriel, we went on a hunger strike. It was incredible that we could go on a hunger strike for almost two months from September until October , until the overthrow [of Sánchez de Lozada]. is we managed with considerable intelligence. First we studied the government of Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, minister by minister—who was the more intelligent, who was the most foolish—because Goni was nothing for us. Carlos Sánchez Berzaín [defense minister] was crazy, demented—he wanted to make Goni kill. First he provoked confrontations between the police and the army. We studied the psychology of the people—if you strike an Aymara so that he sees his blood, he is capable of killing you. Furthermore, if there is death the Aymara people become furious—all of this we have studied. A leader cannot be a fool, cannot be a sheep, but a leader has to know how to balance, manage, like chewing gum, pulling little by little until it breaks—that is what we did. ere were many people who only wanted to participate in two weeks of demonstrations. en we ordered them back to the community for a week and another 166 CHAPTER 4 community demonstrated—we were replacing demonstrators because our people are as hard as a rock. But I do not believe we have this type of leadership now in Bolivia. e government says do you want money or do you want to die—two things, nothing more. e leader has to choose. If you get the money, it does not accomplish anything—now you have totally fallen. If you raise the revolver, you are going to die with dignity. I always choose the revolver. I say, “I am not a fool.” Because of this they imprisoned me in San Joaquín [San Pedro]. It has cost me a piece of äesh, but this is the story. But I would tell you there are gains; there is value in this enthusiasm, this revolutionary spirit. We could return—the members of the confederation. I know that if there was a mobilization, this government of Evo would fall in ve minutes. I know members of the Morales government. I know Juan Ramón Quintana; he was my lecturer in the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés. I took general sociology with him. I know Roberto Aguilar. I studied political economy with him; Magdalena Cajías, studied guerrilla movements in Latin America, and so on. I know all of them so that I can study how to make them fall, what issue we are going to work with. In we worked on the issue of gas and oil; now autonomy is fash- ionable and this I can handle. I know that with this we can make great mobilizations but currently the confederation [CSUTCB] is controlled by MAS. ey are eunuchs that are not going to do anything; they only protect the government.

THE DREAM OF QULLASUYU

As I just told you a moment ago, [our dream is] to reconstitute our nation, Qullasuyu [name of the region of the Inca Empire that corre- sponds to modern Bolivia], Tawantinsuyu (literally “four regions,” the name of the entire Inca Empire) because we have Aymaras in Peru, where there are eight provinces, Aymaras in Chile, in the north of Argentina—all of this. We Aymaras have another nation that does not have a border but is implied at the international level. We are not now talking simply of the autonomy of one province. Our proposal goes far beyond what the government proposes. We have made much progress with the people in Peru, where we continue working, because for the KATARISM INDIANISM IN THE A NDES 167

Aymara there are no borders. Today I am going to Chile and I am going to continue looking for people to organize. I believe that Qullasuyu will be one day. It is going to cost blood, mountains of dead bodies perhaps, or we will have to cross rivers of blood. To have our own nation again: an Aymara nation with our own state, our own laws. To have our police, our armed forces, to have everything, to no longer depend on the Bolivian nation. Quechuas and Guaraní—all three are large. But the Quechuas also think the same. In Peru there are also Quechua. Here in the north of La Paz we have two or three provinces that are Quechua; the departments of Cochabamba, Potosí, and Chuquisaca are Quechua. I believe that the Quechua also have another plan. e Guaraní also because to this day they still do not belong to the CSUTCB. e Guaranís do not have their own nation. ey are working on this. But since they are managed by the current government, by MAS, the people are now silenced, but little by little they are going to smash this—because there has been no change. ey could have various remedies, because the government has a lot of money at the national and international level. For example, the dignity voucher pays bolivianos to seniors [similar to U.S. social security], then they are going to pay the mothers [maternity care], the Juancito Pinto cash grant for children [cash transfer program conditional on children remaining in school], and with this they are going to bring in more people, since people are happy to be seeing money for the rst time. ere are very poor people living in extreme conditions, and it helps them. is is their policy. You know that in the Aymara culture no one remains in power forever; everyone takes their turn. If the government or Evo Morales wants to stay in the [presidential] palace forever, I believe that it is not going to go well for him. He is thinking as a Westerner; he wants to be like Castro—die in the palace. But this is not going to happen. Many presidents have thought the same thing. Villarroel, for example; he wanted to govern for twenty years at gunpoint, but he was not able to do so. e same with García Meza, who wanted to govern for twenty years and ended up in jail. Our people are rebellious. It is because we are not made of a single race or culture. Here there are dierent races and cultures; therefore it is dißcult to manage the nation—we have to be very conscious of this. 168 CHAPTER 4

CAPITALIST AND COMMUNAL ECONOMIES

Although money has not been eliminated, the barter of products for products survives in the communities and in the towns. But this is our model in the communities. I would like you to visit my community as an example. You are not going to see rich people—the majority has two cows, three cows, some ten sheep. e richest may have some fty sheep. We are almost equal then. Some have six children, others will have twelve children; they are all equal. We cannot multiply the land but the population grows. ere no one begs; thieves are punished by community justice; immoral people are thrown out of the community. I believe this system can be implemented in the cities, in other places—it is applied in El Alto in many places. On Sunday everyone does communal work. Yesterday I was doing communal work because we are bringing water to the community. My people are going to get three [cubic] meters, the other side three meters. ere is no inequality; because of this there are no great entrepreneurs. People always think of the community. We have lived in that way for years. But what brought inequality? Colonialism did. I believe in a communitarian economy and a communitarian state. We believe this still. It is not as cruel as the capitalist system where one person owns ten houses or ve hundred hectares of land as in the East. But now we need to create a communal economy. We are talking and forming commissions to theorize the economy.

THE BODY OF TÚPAC KATARI

I believe that any change is going to come about with blood. We are going to shed our blood on Pachamama. I believe that this is so. I am not going to lie to you; I cannot tell you that we are going to make changes democratically. I do not believe it. In order to move from one system to another system, one day we are going to say “war” in this country. You do not see the standard of living of your slave. We are as slaves in this country. Look—the person who works at this hostel is an Indian; the cook here is also an Indian; the person who sweeps the patio here, an Indian; the person who drives the car is an Indian; the policeman, an Indian. We do the most dißcult jobs. e bosses here in this country, the KATARISM INDIANISM IN THE A NDES 169

managers, are white; the workers are Indian; in the military academies it is the same. e colonel, the boss has Spanish European blood. We are lower than them here; we are on the äoor. ose who are below have to rise and own themselves. We must own the political power that we lost with the death of Atahualpa. We must control the land, the territory, the soil, the subsoil, over the soil, including äight paths. We are not owners—the state is the owner. I am thinking of doing something they call conquest—to win the war. I remember in ’, in El Salvador, the Front for Social Libera- tion [in fact the Peoples Liberation Army] led by Joaquín Villalobos. I knew Comandante Marcial [Salvador Cayetano Carpio]. He died at age seventy-six at that time. I was forty. I was in Guatemala. I know Rolando Morán of the EGP. After that they formed an organizing committee. But I was there in passing. It is how one learns. It is like, for example, going to Colombia now to see the FARC; how they are, because the science advances. We have prepared for another war, but now the context is dierent. It would be the same if I went to Colombia, but here we are just organizing. But we have held out. Our own comrades have played dirty with us—more than anyone, Álvaro García [Linera]. We are not sorry because there are new people, a more intelligent new generation. You can organize; you can put the body of Túpac Katari together again. It is not very far—almost in our hands. It depends on the wisdom of the Indian.

EUGENIO ROJAS: FROM FELIPE QUISPE TO EVO MORALES

Achacachi had the reputation of being the radical capital of the Aymara during the – protests and was Felipe Quispe’s home base. At the time of the interviews, Eugenio Rojas was completing his term (–) as its mayor. Elected originally on Felipe Quispe’s MIP party slate, his association with Quispe dated back to his days as a member of the EGTK. But by he was supporting Evo Morales and in was elected MAS senator from the Department of La Paz and eventually elected president of the Senate. He was also the leader of the Achacachi-based Aymara militia, the Ponchos Rojos, which by had, at least symbolically, integrated themselves into the national army by appearing in the army’s annual parade. He received his bachelor’s degree in sociology at UMSA but taught mathematics in various secondary 170 CHAPTER 4 schools. He was a teacher in the famed Normal School in Warisata (the rst indigenous school in the nation) immediately before his term as mayor. As he notes in the interview, opinions of leaders can shift rapidly in Achacachi. In he was voted the second most distrusted politician by residents of Achacachi (Vice President Álvaro García Linera was rst) because of his role in building a dam that collapsed after a rain. To add insult to injury, in September he was brieäy held hostage in El Alto by a group of Ponchos Rojos from Achacachi demanding the resignation of two of Evo Morales’s ministers.ðì

QULLASUYU AND THE TWO BOLIVIAS

For us democracy at that time [before ] was another scam. Democ- racy meant giving power to a few people in the ruling government. e MNR came in; then the ADN [Acción Democrática Nacionalista (Nationalist Democratic Action)] came in; then the MIR [Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (Revolutionary Left Movement)]—they took turns among themselves. ey all made their plan to perpetuate themselves in government and in power and, above all, to take advantage of the economy for the benet of a few families and regions. Democracy for us has meant massacring people, tricking people, selling state enterprises or giving away our businesses. ey have had us; they have used democracy to fool us, and people realized this. ey could no longer live in this kind of democracy, a false democracy that did not favor us. is is why the mobilizations come to be. Because this region had been abandoned by governments for a long time. All of this high plateau region was rarely or never aided by the governments that came and went. With the exception of health and education. But even then only a little—they worked with us, nothing more. e government did not aid us. ey gave us almost nothing. Few roads, little education—education depends on the teacher and the teachers were not well trained. e conditions—for example, the school rooms, the infrastructure, furniture, equipment— abandoned. [ e agricultural sector] is poor and got almost nothing from the government, nothing to improve, nothing for agricultural production or ranching; until now there was nothing. at is what people were asking for—to see roads, education, health, the improvement of production, agricultural mechanization—those are the requests. ose requests bothered the government. KATARISM INDIANISM IN THE A NDES 171

At bottom the uprisings were to destroy the government, overthrow the government. But the people at the grassroots, the communities, still did not understand this—they simply fought. But for those who led, in all the movements, it was to take the government and destroy the government. e strategy was the blockade of roads—a better strategy. e government was going to militarize us—it is always going to use repression—[with a] state of siege, persecution of leaders, connement of leaders in other regions. e government has had the same position for years, from the military governments to the dictatorial to the democratic governments. Every strategy that you use for a long time becomes a losing strategy. ese strategies are not permanent. In many cases there was no persecution. In many cases the strategy was to buy the leaders—to give them money, to give the leaders positions. is is one of the strategies. But in this period of rebellion this strategy did not work. Now they could not buy all the leaders; they bought only some. ey were buying some but they could not buy the base. at strategy failed the government. So the rebellion emerged. In this region we are mostly Aymaras. e Aymaras call for the reconstitution of Qullasuyu, for the reconstruction of our own ways of doing politics, our own ways of dening our economy, our values, our religion, and above all the territory and the government. From there arose the idea that “we are millions”—why can’t we govern ourselves? en there emerged these very profound messages. We should govern among ourselves. at another should not govern us. We have always considered them others, not ourselves, although we are of one country, but we said they are others; they are not our own. Because of this a very dierent Aymara message emerged that says, “We will vote for our blood.” When we say for our blood, for our own people, we mean we will vote for ourselves. And they still do not understand the word blood when we say we are voting for our blood. For us the idea of blood is like a family, but bigger. ese words were emerging. We are managing our own Bolivia and reconstituting a new Bolivia. en they spoke of the reconstitution of Qullasuyu. And many people were frightened, were appalled. For them, to reconstruct Qullasuyu meant going back one hundred years, two hundred years. Never, you cannot do that. And many in the universities, intellectuals, politicians, said to us, “You are lost because this is not reality. You cannot deny 172 CHAPTER 4 cell phones, roads; you cannot deny the other modern tendencies; we’re in another era.” ey did not understand, and still do not understand, but we are making progress. When we talk of the reconstitution of Qullasuyu, we are talking of two Bolivias: the Bolivia of the rich and the Bolivia of the marginalized, the millions. en they told us that to speak of two Bolivias was very bad for them—there are not two Boliv- ias; only one Bolivia exists. But the society of the Aymara was totally marginalized. ere were some who wanted to perpetuate themselves in power, in the economy, in politics, but others were simply used in the elections even though they may be dying of hunger—we protested for this Bolivia. ey worked hard using various strategies: street blockades, marches to the city of La Paz; the nal siege of the city of La Paz; armed confrontation with the army, here in Achacachi. In Warisata there were deaths so we also armed ourselves. ey thought, How do we destroy this Bolivia that is doing damage? Before, in the eighties, the nineties, they thought of arming guerrilla groups, here in Achacachi and in other regions, the EGTK, Ejér- cito Guerrillero Túpac Katari. is was headed by Felipe [Quispe] and Álvaro García Linera. And this aided us a lot. ese people, when they were talking of the guerrilla they were not talking of you but rather of our people—a lot of people with a very radical commitment and a very strong discipline. We are the fruit of that. When I was very young I was committed to the guerrilla. And when you are formed in that discipline, you never forget. And many people were formed. ese people propelled the rebellion—not as persons but within all the organizations. e guerrilla was some two thousand strong but at that time they were not able to overthrow the government because they had the army, the police; they had all the apparatus. But this time around, when there were two thousand of us, the two thousand got into the communities. We, the two thousand, stirred up many people—we mobilized ten thousand, one hundred thousand, many more. e guerrilla formation was not in vain. Many more who are now not guerrillas, normal people but very tough, served with us. If that had not been the case, perhaps they would not have mobilized in , , , . ere would not have been so many people. e mobilization would not have been possible because those who served with the guerrillas inspired, talked to the people, shaping them, explaining why we wanted to ght. ere was consciousness- KATARISM INDIANISM IN THE A NDES 173 raising from the base. ey stirred up people in the meetings, saying, “We are going! We are going! We are going!” If this had not been the case, perhaps there would not have been this mobilization. at has been a great help as we struggle together with the people. Now we were no longer clandestine. We are public now; publicly we said, “Now we are going to do this, we are going to blockade, we will do it like this, brother.” We spoke of the strategies—the road blockade is the strongest. e road blockade is not easy to set up. You must raise consciousness among the people. ree or four persons are not a blockade because the same number can come and take down the blockade. We have to raise consciousness among these people because we have to get the people’s approval to organize blockades—not the leader’s. e leader gives us guidance; the assemblies give us their approval. Here the most important thing is that the base approves it by a majority—it could be percent or percent. We have to respect the minority, but a decision is made to blockade. We decide in an assembly; we cannot decide alone. If only a few decide, nothing will last—not even for one day. ey will throw you out; they will expel you. Deciding alone means treason to the people. You have to always obey the masses. If you decide alone, you betray them. You are expelled and they will almost never welcome you. If they receive you, they will receive you with indierence. “No, this one is a traitor,” they will say. ey will not want to see you. ey will talk, yes, they talk to you, but afterward they do not respect you.

PEACEFUL REVOLUTION

Now ideas have changed. Now not Qullasuyu, but Bolivia. Bolivia, yes, and our own Bolivia. Nor do we want to impose our thinking. When we talked of Qullasuyu it was not bad, but others did not understand. When you talk of Qullasuyu, it is not accepted in urban centers like La Paz. In Santa Cruz it is even worse—yes in La Paz, no in Santa Cruz. It is bad in other cities like Cochabamba, Chuquisaca, Tarija, or Beni. When you talk of Qullasuyu they see evil, so now it is better to talk of Bolivia and feel more Bolivian. Why? Because before only the elite were Bolivians. ey decided who was going to rule as Bolivians. ey had everything in their hands—the army, the Supreme Court of Justice, 174 CHAPTER 4 the government. ey dominated everything. Only small things were handed to us and because of this we did not feel Bolivian; because of this we said, no, we must destroy this Bolivia. If this is the Bolivia they want to strengthen, we want our Qullasuyu. At the time people agreed with the reconstruction of Qullasuyu—not Bolivia, just Qullasuyu. But for so many years— years, or years—it has been the Bolivia of the elite. ey have introduced their Bolivia in our minds. To remove this from our minds is very dißcult. It may create more problems— instability, for example. It is a revolution for us, but it is a very peaceful revolution. So peaceful. Not like in other times and places, such as the revolution of ’ and other revolutions. For example, in Peru the revolution of Sendero Lumi- noso [Shining Path] was very violent. Our strategy was very dierent. I say that we have made a very peaceful revolution. It was limited so that there were not more deaths. It was limited so that it did not cause confrontations with the army—ultimately, the soldiers are our sons. It is our sons who join the police. e police are our brothers who come from the communities and we have tried to avoid confrontation. I believe that few countries have done this. Here the people said to me when I was a leader, “Alcalde, we will take the barracks of the Ayacucho Regiment; we have to take the barracks.” It would have been easy, but how many deaths would there have been? Let’s see, who would have died? Our sons, the soldiers. I asked the elders. It is good to always ask, not to decide alone. is is our people. ey are characterized by asking, by consulting among ourselves, especially with the oldest. I consulted, “What would you do?” ey said to me, “Eugenio, it’s bad.” Why? “Because if we go and enter the barracks we’re going to kill our sons.” Here in this region, for example, the non- commissioned oßcers, even some oßcers, are from this region. We have many from here so it’s better if we don’t act; we will wait, and that’s what I did. I could have taken the barracks as vengeance or to take weapons. But this is terrible. It is better always to look ahead and avoid more deaths. We’ve tried to avoid causing more deaths. at’s what we asked for—to avoid more confrontations. Clearly it was the government that killed in El Alto; they provoked it. If the government had also tried to avoid causing more deaths, perhaps the mobilizations of – would not have happened. KATARISM INDIANISM IN THE A NDES 175

e government has been very stubborn. [Carlos] Sánchez Berzaín has been very stubborn. Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada—also very stubborn. He was very violent. We understood that this government was very weak. When one is more reactive, wants to do things rapidly, to force things, one is going to lose. at’s what the government was. It was so weak, so reactionary, wanted to kill rapidly, introduce bullets—we saw these disadvantages in the government. Another disadvantage is that people no longer believed in the government at all. We saw the government was hanging by a thread. We had worked toward this moment. Above all we had understood its weaknesses. It had nothing in the way of strengths. Its weaknesses were compounded by its previous record. ose were studied by the leaders. e leaders talked to the people of the base, little by little, about other things. We said to the people that they did not give us education, health, roads. at they imprisoned us for carrying out community justice, for Pucarani [a notorious case of such imprisonment]; we will turn it around and liberate the prisoners. But this was no more than an excuse. It was not the truth; basically the purpose was to overthrow the government. We are waiting. e people here say that we have to wait for another ve years at least. Four more years. We are expecting that Evo will act and most people are observing. What they are doing with the new constitution now is a fundamental step for us—the Constitución Política del Estado [Political Constitution of the State]. e people are awaiting nationalizations. ey have recovered some businesses. is is more or less how the government is proceeding, but much more is needed. e new constitution requires regulations, new laws. at is what the people are expecting. Now it is a little distorted with the election; the government must be ratied. e people are going to ratify the government in this region.

COSMOVISION

Above all is the cosmovision. Our language also. When they come, the people always want them to speak our language. If they do not speak it, they say go away. Clearly, in your case, not so much. ey are not going to bother you, because you are visitors. But for anyone who wants to be an authority, they say, “Let’s see how well he speaks Aymara rst; 176 CHAPTER 4 his language, his religion, the actions that he takes.” Clothing also; the poncho is very common even though a proper poncho is not our cus- tom. We have appropriated the poncho. e poncho is good; the way you behave and eat also matters. If you do not eat, ah no, this will not do. ey will say, “What do you eat?” It looks like they have nothing to feed you if you do not eat, so you have to eat. It is good if you drink beer and you dance—dances are good. ose things are like the identity of a people, like culture. Also observe the people and their ways of doing things—this is what drives them. Above all you have to get their way of thinking. e Aymara religion, their thinking. ere are others who do not adapt and then the people are very distrustful. Or it might be you lie about something; they will quickly exclude you. You have to speak the truth. Where have you come from? What do you want? What are you going to do? Be smart. But if you lie, they will quickly kick you out and show you the whip. e people are very zealous. is is the cosmovision—Aymara thinking—for this region. Cosmo- vision charactizes the Aymara people above all. Our language also. We are also characterized by our form of organization and our discipline. Now there are other peoples like us, but they are not equal to us because they do not have discipline; they do not respect our authorities; they do not even respect their own leaders. Here we have to have respect among ourselves. Because of this if one makes a mistake, they will punish it. Even we mayors have to obey them because every time they ask us for some report, we have to do it just right. For me, to be mayor of La Paz is easy. It is very screwed-up to be mayor of Achacachi. It is a rebellious people, a disciplined people, a controlling people, a vigilant people. With these people, if you miss one word you are screwed. Because of this I have to say the truth—this I can do, this I cannot do, this we will do— and the people show respect. is is how it is. It is good if you do not lie.

PONCHOS ROJOS

Yes, I am the leader of the Ponchos Rojos [an Aymara militia]. It is not unusual to have two or three functions. I have to mobilize the people, but as mayor it is against the law to mobilize the people, to lead the people, to protest, to order people to go to Sucre or Santa Cruz. For me it is against the law, but nevertheless we have to do it. We cannot KATARISM INDIANISM IN THE A NDES 177

ignore the municipal norms, but we also have to respect the communal norms. Because of this I am here in Achacachi, as mayor. e Ponchos Rojos function. ey are here. ey are going to parade here, and this is always going to be the case while the rural communities exist. ey are going to function if this people are to exist and continue its struggle. e communities must be strengthened. at is our law; our communities have to exist. ey are going to be maintained with basic services like education. People who had migrated to the city are returning in order to fulll their function in the community, even though they do not own land. ey return for the pride of having been born here—this is the blood. I was born here and I should become an authority—this is good. Since Achacachi is close to La Paz, the majority of the authorities here are those who came back. ose who live in La Paz do not forget. Yes, the Ponchos Rojos are important in this process. Who has supported the government and who took the initiative in , ? It was very tough, but this region led the uprising—not El Alto. ey just rose up in . is region is adjacent to El Alto. El Alto helped us, because they are our brothers; our people are neighbors in this region and neighbors of the other regions.

“AYMARA INTELLECTUALS”

PABLO MAMANI: NEITHER MARX NOR CHE GUEVARA

Pablo Mamani was born in the Aymara Ayllu of Jila Uta Manasaya in Oruro and retained close ties with the community up to the present day. Educated at UMSA in La Paz, he received a master’s in social science from the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO, Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences) in Quito and is now a doctoral candidate at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM, National Autonomous University of Mexico). He has emerged as a major interpreter of Bolivian indigenous social movements in general and the period – in particular through such books as El rugir de las multitudes, Gobiernos microbarriales, and Geopolíticos indigenas. He has taught and been a researcher at UMSA and is a faculty member at the Universidad Pública y Autónoma de El Alto (UPAE), and past chair of the Department of Sociology, and an editor of the journal Willka. As an activist, he participated in the protests that led to the founding of UPAE in . He 178 CHAPTER 4 himself was one of the founders. He sees those events as part of the birth of indigenous consciousness in Bolivia. For him Achacachi / El Alto and Chapare/ Cochabamba are the two epicenters of rebellion in twenty-rst-century Bolivia. He is part of the process he studies.ðï

REVOLUTION AND REFORM

Obviously it has not been a violent taking of power through force of arms. at which preceded it, the indigenous and popular uprisings, has been sußciently hard and also violent but ended in an electoral democratic era for now. By all the indicators that one can read, the Boliv- ian process could be categorized as a reform—a reform with structural intentions of fundamental change in the state, its institutions, and the society; a reform in the middle range that structurally transforms the state and symbolically transforms the social imaginary. I believe that that could be interesting. In colonial or neocolonial societies, there is a sense in the mind of the dominated that they do not believe themselve possessors of political power. In the subjective plane, it is important to strengthen the self-esteem of the collective. In cities such as this, self-esteem is an element too much denigrated. You do not feel it is a project of the nation. At the symbolic, cultural level self-esteem in this moment has a fundamental impact. [We have an] Indian president who does not have a bachelor or even university studies, much less postgraduate or doctoral degrees, but who can talk politics, can talk of dignity, can talk of daily life and, furthermore, is seen as one of the people, who talks with the people. It is a vital subjective element for the process of deconstructing the colonial. I believe that it is fundamental on the symbolic level. Now obviously at the level of structurally transforming the state and its political and judicial institutions, to install a regime of greater democratic breadth, including the indigenous popular and mestizo world, could follow but would still be a reform. at is to say there is a type of intention to include the indigenous in the state, but this inclusion has still recently arrived. e totality of power among the indigenous and peasant, the popular sector, should be normal in a country with an indigenous majority. But there are still sectors in the state that see the indigenous as incapable of public administration. It is KATARISM INDIANISM IN THE A NDES 179 necessary to train indigenous people with administrative and bureaucratic experience, and since they do not exist, there are ideas in the state, in the government of Evo Morales itself, that the indigenous should learn how to administer the state. is is something that the government itself still needs to overcome. In this sense this process of transformation remains questionable. Have you seen our journal article where we called this phenomenon “ e White Clique Around the Indian President?” It is important how they managed the state at the symbolic level, as well as the practical level. e white clique can expropriate the struggle of the people—the deaths in El Alto, the deaths in Achacachi, the deaths in the Chapare, the deaths in other places—taking the voice of the people who should be actors in the palace. It is not to say that whites and mestizos should not be in the government—they should be, but not in the hegemonic manner that they are now. is I believe is a foundation that still has not been realized, so in many ways I categorize this government as a government of reform—more of the mestizo, indigenous, and nationalist left. It is complicated. An important sector of mestizo intellectuals is part of the government. ere are indigenous people—Román Loayza, Félix Patzi, who was in the government for a short time—who support the complexity of the issue: an indigenous, mestizo, and left reform. is is a dißcult nomenclature, but more or less this is the situation. What I said in this article is that there is a local and regional micro dynamic rich enough in strategic construction and liberal discourse at the local-regional level. In the case of Omasuyos, Felipe Quispe, afterward Eugenio Rojas; in the case of the Chapare, Evo Morales; in the case of El Alto, Roberto de la Cruz or FEJUVE; COR [Central Obrera Regional (Regional Workers Central)]; Dionisio Núñez in the Yungas; CIDOB [Confederación Indígena del Oriente Boliviano (Indigenous Confederation of the Bolivian East)] in the Amazon. In my conception this very rich social potential could end in a social revolution in its horizontal articulation and in its social struggle and forms of organization. But the Right to a certain extent is trying to contain it any way it can. It is also clear that if this process goes more or less in this direction, the Right will interrupt the government of Evo Morales. ey will cut short his mandate or there will be a coup d’état or something violent like that so the Right can take back the government—it is not certain. 180 CHAPTER 4

ere would be a reaction on the other side through violence or, in more classical terms, by revolution. But it would not be a revolution in my thinking because of the socio- demographic condition of the country: more indigenous or Indian than worker or proletarian. Because of this it is not happening, because the government is committed to a reform, for now, and the Right is trying to contain that process of reform. But what I say to you is that if this thing comes from the right, the people are much stronger because of the manner in which they are organized. ey can reverse the Right and come back—a revolution this time by force. It is possible. If there were an extreme action by the Right, the people in the southern sector— where I was this weekend, Potosí, Cochabamba, Oruro, as in La Paz— are prepared to take the momentous decision, as in ’, to undertake revolution through force of arms.

HOUR OF THE SOCIOLOGISTS

Now is the hour of the sociologists, the sociologists in power—not state or governmental power but a generation of Aymara young people as you have seen. We are Aymaras. Félix Patzi is Aymara. ere are young and old and very old Aymara intellectuals who are the motor of the process both now and previously. It is the old Katarist-Indianist intellectuals who burst into this colonial country in the ’s and ’s, after the revolution of ’. e issue is very long and complex but there is this very powerful Aymara intellectual movement in this country. It is not simply from egocentrism that I say this—it is a reality. ere are various intellectuals, young and old, some more visible, some less visible, all over. Some produce studies on the economy, politics, sociological studies, studies on social movements, studies about discrimination, and now nally studies on racism and elites. We Aymaras want to study the Bolivian elites. It is a challenge because we were objects of study ourselves. Anthropologists from all over the world came to study us—it is OK, but we want to study them now. Do you know Rich Neal, North American, Rich Neal? He is a sociologist. If you are part of the elite, you could be part of my vision. It could be two things that are the axis of change in Bolivia—class condition or ethnic condition. Campesino could be a condition of social KATARISM INDIANISM IN THE A NDES 181 class. Indigenous could be a condition of ethnicity or nationality or people. I believe that these two things serve as frameworks in this process, plus the popular factor: the nonindigenous sector in the urban spaces that is not necessarily indigenous or has lost its indigenous roots but is a wage worker. It could be a matrix—indigenous-campesino-popular—as the axis of the process in Bolivia. Of course it is the Katarism of Tiwan- aku of ’ that has to see reality with two eyes—the left eye and the right eye—but it is also a metaphor for class and ethnicity.

IDEOLOGIES AND SYMBOLS

Katarism has been a great inäuence in those moments but not as a discourse. e movements are more indigenous, more national, more anti- imperialist. ey are not an overt expression of Katarism-Indianism. Katarism has remained but in the background. e inäuence is there in the wiphala. Without Katarism, without Indianism you cannot understand the wiphala. e wiphala is a reinvention by Katarism-Indianism. e wiphala is a modern thing. In the time of the Inca they had their own forms of wiphala and a variety of wiphalas. e wiphala of seven colors and squares is a modern wiphala. It has been redesigned. e modern wiphala has many more squares and more colors, but it is the wiphala that is in use. It is the wiphala of Qullasuyu. ere are also wiphalas of Antisuyu and Kuntisuyu; there is the red wiphala, the white wiphala. ere are a variety of wiphalas in the indigenous world. ere is also the gay wiphala—that is a wiphala that is not ours! In reality Che does not mean much for the Aymara world. Aymara historic symbols include Túpac Katari, Bartolina Sisa, Zárate Willka, Túpac Amaru in Peru, Tomás Katari in the north of Potosí. Che Gue- vara is a kind of imposition of certain sectors of the government to make a revolutionary ideal, the humanist Che—the “new man”—but he is not an Aymara. If you see iconography of Che, he is portrayed with a beard and whiskers. He looks like the same white person who oppressed us. So there is no direct link. For the people here, clearly Che is white. For the English or the North Americans, the concept of white is dierent. ose we call the whites here are not whites for you. We say white here for descendants of the Spanish or European. When we say whites it is a kind of disre- 182 CHAPTER 4 spect. In reality they are mestizos, but we call them whites as a form of disrespect. Whites and mestizos are two distinct categories, but there could be white mestizos. ere are more mestizos than whites. But since they believe themselves to be “whites,” we use the term whites. Che Guevara, whose roots are Basque, is Argentine. For us he is a white like the Bolivian white but obviously his ideas were never like theirs. It is also true that he was a ghter against the bourgeois, imperialist system. But if you show people who do not have a historical education or an ideology a picture of Che and ask, “Who is he?” they will answer, “He is a white who oppresses me equally.” It’s the same with Marx, Karl Marx, the great Marx, an icon of revolution. If you set his picture beside the indigenous Túpac Katari and ask, “Who is who?” they will say Marx is a white and an oppressor of the people. But the people who have not gone to university, if you simply show them the photos they will say this one is the same as the other one who tramples on me, who exploits me, who oppresses me—what is the dierence? It is a visual colonialism and an imposition by force. Che thought dierently, but for the people it is not so. He is the same as the other whites. Because of this, Che was not welcome in Ñancawasú in the Guaraní world. Che, the great revolutionary, comes and expects the indigenous peasants to join the guerrilla, but they didn’t. Afterward the Guevarists treated them like traitors to the Bolivians and to the Guaranís in general terms. ey said these ignorant peasants can never understand the revolution. e old leftists and young people too, even with their humanist ideals, still do not understand that this is not the reading of the people. eir reading is more about indigenous icons like Túpac Katari, Bartolina Sisa, Pablo Zárate Willka, Tomás Katari, Túpac Amaru, Micaela Bastidas, as the ideal leader. Or at least they want Felipe Quispe or Evo Morales—those are their ideals. And the next time that Álvaro García puts himself forward for the presidency, I am not going to vote for him and many people will not vote for him because he is white and mestizo. A week ago they inaugurated a monument of Che in the Ceja that they call “Liberty Square.” I feel that it is an outrage from circles that did not think well enough about the images, the symbols. My opinion is that in that place there should be a monument to the fallen of October of and not Che Guevara, who had nothing to do with October KATARISM INDIANISM IN THE A NDES 183 and means nothing to El Alto. I agree that they should get rid of it. It is not a symbol of El Alto.

MICROGOVERNMENT AND THE STATE

e current Bolivian state does not t the logic of neighborhood microgovernments that arose during the mobilizations. Another type of state will arise with the microgovernments but it will not be a colonial, liberal, republican state such as this. e category of state has a historical burden, a philosophical burden, a military burden—not simply for now. What emerged in October in El Alto was another type of social and sociopolitical organization—horizontal, decentralized, decentered, autonomous leaders on every side, rotating systems of the organization of power, systems of territorial control from the communities or neighborhoods, food self-sußciency, childbirth in families. e medical clinics in El Alto collapsed in October. ere were no hospitals, there were no nurses, there were no medicines to cure the wounded, but other types of medicine emerged, the medicine of indigenous customs—plants, herbs, k’oas [ceremonies of reciprocity with Mother Earth]. For children who could not sleep, the grandparents did those types of actions to balance the psychology or the psyches of the children. Another thing that emerged was the seventeenth of October organizations. ey were absolutely well planned inside each neighborhood, ways of organizing shifts of vigilance. We would call it perhaps a horizon of an indigenous kind of state, a type of confederation of ayllus, a confederation of neighborhoods that acted, articulated autonomously—out with Goni, gas, no to Chile; out with centralized politics because everyone dispersed in every direction. I believe, then, this is the Bolivian context. I believe that we are much more than a Venezuela. Venezuela is an interesting era and very important without a doubt, but here things came from below with much greater force. In Venezuela things develop from above, from the president. ey generate movements from the government and here it is the reverse—it comes from below toward the top and that could be a distinct, historical horizon but with a great popular, indigenous, historic trunk; two historical matrices that can found a new system of state and civilization. is is the great challenge of designing a new type of state. 184 CHAPTER 4

CONCLUDING COMMENTS

Bolivia really is a laboratory—a social laboratory. I wish good luck to the sociologists. I have been born in this historical time and it is a time of abundance. If this time arrived when I was much older or much younger, suddenly I would not have all the tools. I know you are in this time. It is a privilege for me also. I am in this exact historical time in a country such as this.

MARÍA EUGENIA CHOQUE: THE REVOLUTIONARY RECONSTRUCTION OF THE PAST

Eugenia Choque was born in the Aymara province of Tiwanaku in the department of La Paz. In – she was a leader of the MUJA, where she interacted with the founders of Katarism. She was a founder of the Taller de la Historia Oral Andina (THOA). As she notes in this interview, THOA was active not only in historical investigations of the indigenous movement in the period – but also in returning this work to indigenous communities through radio programs and direct outreach. THOA has been a critical force in the reconstruction of Aymara identity. She has also been an advisor to the Consejo de Ayllus y Markas de Qullasuyu (CONAMAQ, Council of Ayllus and Markas of Qullasuyu) and has worked on the role of women in the reconstruction of Ayllus since . In her many articles and pamphlets, she has explored Andean history and the role of women in Aymara society. She has traveled widely both in Latin America and around the world to participate in conferences or serve as a consultant and speaker. She graduated from UMSA in in social work and received a master’s in Andean history at FLACSO in Quito in .ðð

THE JULIÁN APASA UNIVERSITY MOVEMENT `MUJA@

e Julián Apasa University Movement appeared more or less in ’, ’ until ’. e leadership was very strong in the university. At the Universidad de San Andrés I had the good fortune to accompany this process in the eighties. Today it is very easy to talk indigenous issues. Everyone puts on a little hat, a little poncho, chews their coca, and thinks that is what it means to be indigenous. In the ’s, ’s in KATARISM INDIANISM IN THE A NDES 185 open repression by García Meza they began to speak in the streets. At the university level it was particularly dißcult because of the racism and discrimination that existed in the university itself. is has a very tight relationship with the Julián Apasa University Movement and with Indianism. For example, in the various manifestos that came out in the Bolivian press, they said that García Meza was the continuation of a government elite; that in practice he had a continuity with a colonial government, of a class, an elite government, that looked down on, hated, discriminated against, was racist against the indigenous movement. We are talking of a period where the indigenous theme is very, very strong. Clearly it has been the Indianist who has shown an Indian face. ey showed to Bolivian society that within the majority population are workers, peasants, street vendors, factory workers, masons, drivers who have an indigenous identity and are part of the people. ey made up the Julián Apasa University Movement that in the eighties, more or less, began to participate in national elections as the Indian party of Bolivia closely linked to Fausto Reinaga. Since then MUJA has had political independence in its work. at does not imply that there was no debate on Reinaga’s books. After that came some encounters in Tiwanaku itself. Tiwanaku has been the site of the recovery of memory. e colonial haciendas and communities are the original local social organizations. Because of this we have two forms of organization in Bolivia: one form is the union, which is currently in power. e whole country is practically unionist after . e other organizations are the organizations of the ayllus and markas, traditional organizations that are pre-Columbian. We realized that Indianism has an earlier base of authorities among the caciques. Katarism, on the other hand, has strong links to peasant unions and began to stand in elections as in the Katarism of Don Víctor Hugo Cárdenas. e indigenous movement of the Indianist line should be understood in the context of its own intellectuals—the Aymara intellectuals. I believe that there are no Quechua or Guaraní intellectuals. ere are Aymara intellectuals who have to do with the MUJA such as Ramón Conde, Carlos Mamani. Later there are other very, very recent people such as Simón Yampara, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Javier Hurtado who 186 CHAPTER 4 come from the Katarist, not the Indianist, wing. ey worked very hard with the Union Confederation, with Genaro Flores, who in his time had an element of vanguardism. In the ’s, the Taller de Historia Oral Andina appeared and began the process of reconstitution of the ayllus in open confrontation with the peasant union. e peasant union and the ayllus and traditional indigenous authorities have always lived in contradiction and opposition.

THE ANDEAN ORAL HISTORY WORKSHOP

e Andean Oral History Workshop has been working on the political recovery of identity: To remake history based on oral history. To ask our own grandparents and parents, how was it in the time of the haciendas; how were the authorities; what role they fullled; what was the system of positions; what was the system of elections; what was the ritual; what force did ritual have in this movement of reclaiming territories? ere are historical documents where they say this territory had been bought for fty charges of gold, twenty charges of silver. Every time the king of Spain was paid, this territory was bought. We have collected this rich history and made it into radio programs in the Aymara language. In the ’s, radio programs began at seven in the morning, and the whole day was Spanish. So what the radio broadcasters did—they were not broadcasters by profession; they were the ice cream salesman, the shoe shiner, the mason—was to ll up the radio spaces from ve in the morning in the Aymara language. e boss, the owner of the radio, did not know what they were talking about, but fundamentally they were creating identity and consciousness. e discrimination they experienced in the street was presented in Aymara. e rst radio drama in Aymara came out in ’, called Túpac Katari. Rooted in this experience, we retook the radio. e history of the network of caciques from to that we created was presented as radio dramas in the Aymara language. We created the radio drama. When the people listened to this, they came and brought their colonial titles dating from or and they said we want our history—here are the documents. Really their consciousness was born. It is a continuous process that was stirring a very long process, very, very strong and very profound. KATARISM INDIANISM IN THE A NDES 187

EVO MORALES AND MAS

We have met Don Evo Morales numerous times, in Geneva, for the issue of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples []. All the people were expecting a good speech. Clearly in the national and above all international context, he gave his speech an indigenous connotation, but earlier he did not have an indigenous connotation. No, he had an entirely peasantist vision. We believe that there is a strong presence of union leadership and not of indigenous peoples. All the ministers and vice ministers follow a unionist line. ere is not a vision of the indigenous peoples. But it is part of the process of struggle—it is not that MAS is opposed to this process. We have fought for this process; we have been beaten for this process; we have lost the lives of human beings for this process. But the inauguration of this process is also related to historical antecedents that come from much further back. I have told you, more or less, how the movement arises and all the circumstances that it made possible. ey crowned a very important era in this country. e process is the consciousness of identity. It is the consciousness of recovery of land and territory. e national struggle, the struggle for recovery, has an inäuence in the external context as well, the Declara- tion on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. How do they relate to this? ey relate this process of identity and of recovery to the degree of discrimination that they feel on their skin. One interprets the expressions because we are the majority and have lived in a racist society. We always have lived in a racist society. We are very conscious that the level of racism is such that it is not acceptable. It is naturalized. I have published a few writings on the women of the city of El Alto describing chacha-warmi, reciprocal relations between men and women. You can see the degree of racism, the degree of crisis of chacha-warmi. We are speaking of the women of El Alto. Aymara women who have not been born in the community, they have been born in the city of El Alto, but they live this conäict, they live this problem. How do they relate with the movement? How do they insert themselves in the movement for water, or how do they insert themselves in after the massacre by extremists? Was it simply the question of gas? No, but in this country the life of an Indian is not valued; they killed them [in El Alto]. is 188 CHAPTER 4 was the last straw. Now it was not the issue of gas. It was simply that Goni be gone. As one who is not a MAS or Evo supporter, I believe that there is a natural alliance with Don Evo Morales. We are still not well-o. If you observe the standard of living of the people, you will see that they have less money in their pockets. It is not good, but the people are conscious that this process has certainly allowed an indigenous government. It is the rst time. It is the rst time that there is a brown face governing in this country. ere never was. e wiphala never äew. ere is a referent. If you ask the taxi driver or ask in the town halls, they will tell you that the next authority, whoever he is, has to be indigenous. ere is a consciousness, this we have won, a consciousness of identity that ended the government for the mestizos and for the whites—that is the hope. Before there was not a social referent or a political referent. Now there is a political referent. e ideal of the children is to study to be in government, something that before would not happen to anyone but now, yes. e people say it is possible. If Evo did it, why not me? In some ways I would say the MAS party has been very intelligent to mount a process of identity recovery itself, because MAS intellectuals do not think at all of what we have been talking about, such as the feeling of the people. ey don’t understand this struggle. ey understand the indigenous, but for them it is merely discursive. We gambled in the elections. We voted for MAS because if we want another process in Bolivia, the people need to keep voting. I believe that the people of the hard wing of MAS do not take this process into account because they say “decolonization” when they sing the national anthem. ey say to us “decolonization” when they continue paying tribute to Pedro Domingo Murillo. e issue of decolonization is not understood. But for decolonization, at the very least we must speak Aymara. We aspire to speak English so we have to make the eort to speak it. Similarly they have to make the eort to learn to speak Aymara. ey are not going to do it themselves. at will be a long process that we will continue ghting.

AYMARA COSMOVISION

e CSUTCB has a peasantist vision. ey think that because they are peasants and now are in government they do not have to consider who KATARISM INDIANISM IN THE A NDES 189

speaks for the indigenous people. CONAMAQ speaks for the indigenous because they are traditional authorities. Because what do the people of CONAMAQ say? We, they say, [are] “indigenous government.” And Don Evo recognizes this. In Jachicaranga Don Evo said, “I am going to visit the government of Jachacara [the traditional ayllu].” Don Evo is very conscious. He knows where this process is leading. e problem is that his bureaucratic apparatus does not understand the process. But Don Evo is clear. He knows where he is going.

SPEAKING AYMARA

For us language has been a weapon of political recovery. I at times see the people in their indigenous community with their chamarrita [dance], their aguayito [woven cloth], their chuspita [woven coca bag]. at is nothing compared to language—the eort we make so that our children speak the language. e people construct knowledge through language. I don’t know which part of speech—subject, predicate, verb—is individual and which is collective. For example, the concept of jake, that is a concept of unity between man and woman. It can be neither man nor woman alone. If they do not arrive in a couple, jake is not appropriate. It is the unity of the man and the woman; it is not chacha, nor is it warmi. When they combine they are jake. It is the institutionalization of the family. You can even talk of relations, of how the people construct relations between men and women through jake. If I do not know the language, if I do not know the cosmovision of that language, the interpretation of that language—what can I contribute? Because of this the language has a very powerful potential. Because the language is not only to speak, it is not only to communicate, it is the profound cosmovision of the peoples, the profound sentiment of the peoples. I found clearly, as we talked of chacha-warmi, the theme of jake was necessary; how the people interpret jake, what is jake. at epistemological process is part of the internal construction.

REVOLUTION AND CONSCIOUSNESS

e core of the MAS party was and is to be found among the cocaleros of the Chapare and the closely allied and geographically proximate organizations of 190 CHAPTER 4 colonizers and indigenous peasants and, after and before , the national- level organization CSUTCB. ese organizations have a pronounced peasantist orientation, as Eugenia Choque points out, with a very strong subtext of indigeneity. To build a national movement and to become the electoral successors of a popular rebellion, it was necessary for Evo Morales and MAS to harness the enormous mobilizing of Aymara Katarism-Indianism. e Aymara protests of – led by Felipe Quispe paralleled the Water War in Cochabamba, and water was the key, although far from the only, issue they raised. e decisive protests, the Gas War and the El Alto uprising, were all initiated under Quispe’s leadership although they soon became self-sustaining and organized at the local level, as Pablo Mamani argues. Aymara indigenism, particularly the revolutionary Indianism-Katarism of Felipe Quispe, was the major force in all these uprisings and in the nal denouement in . Although the most radical strains of this discourse lie outside the politics and discourse of MAS, Evo has, according to Eugenia Choque, adopted many themes from Aymara indigenism in his public pronouncements, and the MAS organization has attempted to recruit Aymara leaders into the informal alliance that constituted the party at the time of the interviews. Felipe Quispe continues to enunciate a pure revolutionary form of Aymara Indianism-Katarism, but all those whose interviews are included in this section reäect to a greater or lesser extent his principal themes. Despite the putative inclusion of the indigenous in the postrevolutionary state of ’, the Aymara indigenists talk of abandonment, exclusion, and state violence. For Quispe himself, “We are like animals who live in the hills; we do not count.” For Eugenio Rojas, a “false democracy” had abandoned the Aymara region of the high plateau for a long time—“the government did not aid us. ey gave us almost nothing”—while a rotating door of political parties enriched themselves at the countryside’s expense. “Democracy for us has meant massacring people, tricking people, . . . giving away our businesses.” According to Quispe, oppression and exclusion are rooted in Bolivia’s history as a colonial state, a history that has been concealed by the oßcial history of that same state. “Who was Pedro Domingo Murillo?” asks Quispe, noting the celebration of his bicentennial in . “He was the murderer of our ancestors. Who fought Túpac Katari? Murillo saw the quartering of Túpac Katari.” Reconstructing the history of the millenarian peoples is the explicit aim of the Taller de Historia Oral Andina founded by Aymara intellectuals. Not only did they collect oral histories of the caciqueal struggles from to but they KATARISM INDIANISM IN THE A NDES 191 converted them into radio dramas that were then widely broadcast in Aymara. As Eugenia Choque points out, the rst of these radio novellas in Aymara was the telling of the story of Túpac Katari himself. It is clear that reconstructing and decolonizing the history of Bolivia has been an act of symbolic transformation but also a source of a new base of mobilizing identity. As Pablo Mamani notes, this reconstituted history and symbols like Túpac Katari, the wiphala, and the Aymara New Year were inherited from the early Túpac Katarists such as the student group Julián Apasa but continue to be sources of revolutionary identity and mobilization in the present. For all those interviewed in this section, Aymara identity and worldviews are the basis for their political mobilization and political thinking. For Eugenio Rojas, the rebellious people of Achacachi are characterized by “the cosmovision—Aymara thinking—for this region. . . . Our language also.” For sociologist Pablo Mamani, “self-esteem is an element too much denigrated,” in understanding consciousness in the cities, and the “symbolic, cultural” importance of the rst indigenous president is not to be underestimated. All these people have been active participants in the revolutionary upsurge of Aymara consciousness that led to and accompanied the great uprising of –. All have contributed in signicant ways in forging that consciousness. And all owe an intellectual and emotional debt to Fausto Reinaga. Felipe Quispe, now and in the past, has dedicated his life to the restoration of Qulla- suyu, wrote a popular book of his own on Túpac Katari, and traces his political lineage to the original Katarist study groups reading Reinaga. Eugenio Rojas fought with Quispe in the name of Qullasuyu to destroy Reinaga’s two Bolivias and still nds sustenance in an Aymara worldview that Reinaga above all helped dene. Mamani’s complaints about the “white clique” surrounding Evo Morales echo Reinaga’s denunciation of the blancos-mestizos who rule Bolivia. e four interviews presented in this chapter describe two distinct Aymara routes to revolutionary consciousness. Quispe and Rojas emphasize the EGTK’s consciousness-raising eorts in the communities rather than its minimal military achievements. For Rojas the two thousand guerrillas “stirred up many people—we mobilized ten thousand, one hundred thousand, many more. . . . If that had not been the case, perhaps they would not have mobilized in , , , .” e guerrillas “inspired, talked to the people, shaping them, explaining why we wanted to ght.” Quispe used the “tactics of our ancestors. One day I stopped at a community, went in from : a.m., spent the night, departed the following day, went into another community.” is process lasted 192 CHAPTER 4 for years before the guerrillas declared themselves; as Quispe said, “Going through the communities, sleeping with our brothers . . . dirty, without bathing, without washing, sharing the same lice, the same äeas, eating the same food, talking in Aymara, Quechua, winning people over to make a great revolt.” Whatever the particular issue, both Rojas and Quispe emphasize that the guerrilla goal was always to overthrow the government and reestablish Qullasuyu. Equally important were the consciousness-raising eorts of the “Aymara intellectuals” such as Pablo Mamani and Eugenia Choque. Mamani is an internationally known sociologist and political activist, and was inäuential in the movement that established the public university of El Alto, Universidad Pública y Autónoma de El Alto. Eugenia Choque was a founding member of two institutions key in the revival of Aymara consciousness—the Movimiento Universitario Julián Apasa and the Taller de Historia Oral Andina. e MUJA, organized to study and debate the works of Fausto Reinaga, was the precursor to many other Aymara resistance organizations. e THOA, through its innovative use of radio transmissions in the Aymara language, spread the ideas of Kastarism-Indianism throughout the countryside. e Aymara intellectuals also diused their ideas through the CSUTCB, which was under Katarist control from until a MAS takeover in the s. Quispe himself led the organization from to . Most Katarist-Indianist intellectuals remained in close contact with their home villages, some returning to assume traditional positions in their civil-religious hierarchies. e two prongs of the consciousness-raising movement, the guerrilla and the Aymara intellectuals, prepared the ground years before the culminating mobilization in –. e Aymara uprising, not Evo Morales’s cocaleros, was the force that actually overthrew the “blanco- mestizo” government. It should be noted that there was no similar consciousness-raising movement in the Kichwa-dominated Andean region in Ecuador. ere was no cohesive Kichwa identity. e Kichwas thought of themselves as local “peoples,” such as the Salasacas or Otavaleños. ere was no guerrilla movement in Ecuador. ere were intellectuals of Kichwa origins but no social group of “Kichwa intellectuals” and no specically Kichwa consciousness-raising institutions. Although ECUARUNARI is a Kichwa organization, it divided into eighteen peoples in the “nations and peoples” framework of CONAIE. e ayllu was a vastly stronger institution in Bolivia than in Ecuador. It provided the framework for consciousness-raising eorts. Ecuadorian leaders sometimes mentioned indigenous heroes like Rumiñahui, but they more often mentioned communist leaders KATARISM INDIANISM IN THE A NDES 193

Dolores Cacuango and Tránsito Amaguaña. ere could be no analogue to the Bolivian Katarist movement in Ecuador because there was no equivalent to Túpac Katari. e interviews reveal not only the enormous importance of Aymara Katarism-Indianism in the events of – but also its continued importance in Bolivian cultural and intellectual life. is Aymara revolution grew out of the racism, exclusion, isolation, and outright murder of indigenous people even after the revolution of . It was felt most acutely by intellectuals like Mamani and Choque, but clearly it was shared by organic intellectuals like Quispe and Rojas who rose with the social movements. Aymara cosmovision, Aymara identity, and Aymara history represent a sharp break with the Western- ized categories of the Bolivian variant of European thought. Even the category of race, which still haunted Reinaga, has been deconstructed. Only Quispe still uses the polarizing language of “Indian” versus “q’ara,” and all those interviewed placed a strong emphasis on the ethnocultural term Aymara. In any case, the negative connotations of Indian could hardly survive the positive identity that emerged among the Aymara since the rise of Katarism. To be Aymara meant not simply an identity but an entire symbolic philosophy radically at odds with the Western tradition. is vision could not be contained by the old categories of Bolivian social life, and the writings of Reinaga and the rise of Katarism and Indianism provided a symbolically revolutionary alternative. e dream of Qullasuyu was not the dream of a Western nation-state but of a coordination of local Aymara ayllus united by the common dream of a romanticized Inca imperial province. e economy would not reäect socialist dreams of a communist system but an idealized vision of the village economy without great inequalities of wealth or power. Traditional Aymara religion would replace European Catholicism: Inti Rani, the traditional Aymara winter solstice festival, not Christmas. Aymaras would replace whites and mestizos in the ruling elite in the state, commerce, and intellectual life. e Ponchos Rojos would replace the army. Aymara ethnic borders would replace the Peruvian, Chilean, and Argentine frontiers. Túpac Katari would replace Pedro Domingo Murrillo as the national hero. Western ideas of gender would be abandoned in favor of chacha-warmi and jake. Local government would be managed not through Western democracy or by Western trade unions but by those who who had gained respect in the traditional civil religious hierarchy. A communal vision, not Western individualism, would govern interpersonal and economic relations. Wholesale symbolic revolution would be the order of the day. Quispe believed 194 CHAPTER 4 that such a revolution could only be guaranteed by force of arms. He had no such force. is in the end proved his undoing. ose interviewed in Ecuador remained committed to mass protest and democratic elections to achieve the symbolic revolution. Felipe Quispe and his Indianist followers disagreed: “I cannot tell you that we are going to make changes democratically. . . . One day we are going to say ‘war’ in this country. . . . It is going to cost blood, mountains of dead bodies perhaps, or we will have to cross rivers of blood.” For Eugenio Rojas, who fought with Quispe, democracy meant massacring the people, although in the end he allied with MAS and its electoral strategy and now says, “We have made a very peaceful revolution.” Pablo Mamani acknowledges that at the time (), a violent revolution was still possible in the event of a coup from the right. But Quispe and his allies did not take power though armed struggle. Instead, Evo Morales and his largely electoral strategy prevailed, as we shall see in the following chapter. 5 THE SACRED LEAF

Interviews with Leonilda Zurita and Julio Salazar

N MARCH , representatives of the most important indigenous-peasant organizations in Bolivia met in Santa Cruz to form a new kind of polit- Iical party intended as an instrument of indigenous peasant people and a coalition of their constituent organizations. Ten years later the candidate of this “political instrument,” Evo Morales, was elected president of Bolivia, a position he still holds after reelection in and . His party now controls two-thirds majorities in both houses of Congress. After divisions in the party, name changes, and nally the loan of another party’s name to achieve oß- cial recognition, Morales’s party is now called the Movimiento al Socialismo– Instrumento Político por la Soberanía de los Pueblos (MAS-IPSP, Movement Toward Socialism–Political Instrument for the Sovereignty of the Peoples).ì e meteoric rise of Evo Morales and MAS reäects in turn the improbable rise of his coca growers’ movement to national and even international prominence and to a position of leadership in the indigenous peasant unions that continue to form the core of MAS. e dynamic core of these organizations was and is the Coordinadora de las Seis Federaciones del Trópico de Cochabamba (Coordinating Committee of the Six Federations of the Tropics of Cochabamba), whose president was and continues to be Evo Morales. By the late s the coca growers had displaced the Katarists as the dominant force in the CSUTCB and by the 196 CHAPTER 5 organization “had become devoted mainly to the defense of the coca growers, notwithstanding the fact that they made up approximately percent of the national campesino population.”ï Although the Six Federations functioned independently, they were organically linked to the other three organizations. ree of the six coca growers’ federations were formally aßliated with the Con- federación Sindical de Colonizadores de Bolivia (CSCB) and three with the CSUTCB.ð e women coca growers of the Chapare were the most militant local of the Bartolinas, and their leader, Leonilda Zurita, also became executive secretary of the organization in – and again at the time of the interviews ().ñ She has been a close condant and comrade-in-arms of Evo Morales since the beginning of his career.

THE METEORIC RISE OF THE COCA PRODUCERS

e coca leaf has been cultivated in Bolivia for millennia. It is been consumed by chewing (acullico) and functions as a mild stimulant much as do coee or tea in the United States. It is particularly important for workers in the mining industry but is widely used among poor and working-class Boliv- ians. It has also played a central role in Andean ritual life from before the time of the Incas to the present day. Coca leaves may be legally bought and sold in Bolivia. Coca leaves are, however, the raw material for the production of cocaine hydrochloride, sold as cocaine or crack in its largest market, the United States. It is the identication of coca leaves with cocaine in U.S. foreign policy that has determined the fate of the coca producers of Bolivia and other Andean countries. In response to an unprecedented explosion of demand and a spike in prices for cocaine in the United States, the price of coca leaves in Bolivia skyrocketed in the early s. At the same time, Bolivia entered into a profound economic crisis characterized by hyperinäation and, in response, a draconian structural adjustment program (). e combination created enormous incentives for coca cultivation by ruined peasant farmers and downsized miners from the Altiplano who migrated in large numbers to the subtropical forested slopes and valleys of the Department of Cochabamba known collectively as “the Chapare.” From the later s to the mid-s, the area of coca cultivation in the Chapare increased from , to more than , hectares and the population exploded from , in to , in the mid-s.ú THE SAC RED L EAF 197

As Allison Spedding describes it, coca is ideally suited to production by a peasant semiproletariat of former miners and ruined farmers.

e simple techniques of coca plantation in the Chapare allow any person to immediately involve themselves in production (they can learn in a couple of days through transfer of knowledge from one peasant to another). . . . Coca, like coee, is a classic crop of small peasant producers, because it requires much labor and in some periods of production, especially the harvest, is resistant to mechanization. . . . Coca is superior to coee because the initial investment, although high, is almost all in the form of labor and once established yields harvests three times a year . . . for some thirty years, while coee in the same ecological niche, only yields once a year and, contrary to coca, does not thrive on exhausted soils.û

Coca can be grown in conjunction with subsistence crops and provides year- round work for all members of a peasant family. As in other Andean countries, large areas of subtropical Bolivia are suitable for coca cultivation. Even after the price spike of the early eighties had passed, coca continued to provide a living for peasant farmers and their families with few, if any, other employment opportunities in Bolivia. Attempts to develop alternative crops in the Chapare have largely failed through ignorance of the economics of coca and lack of understanding of the limited (or nonexistent) markets for other tropical crops in this remote region of a very poor country.ü Most coca leaf production in the Chapare is destined for the international drug trade but it also commands a domestic market among traditional users, where its lower price osets its lower quality in comparison to leaves from the traditional area of production in the Yungas region of the province of La Paz.ý Although the peasant union had existed in the Chapare as early as , immediately after the revolution, the coca boom of the eighties brought about a massive expansion. e number of unions increased from organized into two federations in to organized in six federations in the late s. In the federations formed the Coordinadora de las Seis Federaciones del Trópico de Cochabamba.ÿ Approximately percent of the Chapare unions are, however, organized into just two of these federations and the strongest, the Fed- eración del Trópico (Federation of the Tropics), aßliated with the CSUTCB, controls the Coordinating Committee. Its president since has been (and still is) Evo Morales. e Coordinating Committee of the Six Federations has 198 CHAPTER 5 been the springboard for the coca growers’ ascent through the national peasant union and, through its CSTB aßliates, in that organization as well. e rural unions have in turn given the Six Federations an inäuential position in the national workers movement and, in coalition with left parties and nally in their own party, MAS, in a national political party.ì~ Remarkably, just forty thousand extremely well-organized and militant coca growers under the leadership of Evo Morales have succeeded in leading a mass movement that overthrew the political structure of a nation-state with nine million inhabitants! How did they do it? ey could not have succeeded without the U.S. war on drugs, which sought to reduce drug consumption in the United States by targeting peasant coca producers in the Andes. As Kevin Healy argues, “ e international war on drugs . . . has succeeded in antagonizing coca leaf growers to the point that anti-US sentiment is widespread throughout the countryside.”ìì e antagonism was well justied according to Andrea Viola Recasens.

In July the Bolivian government, under United States pressure, authorized the introduction of American troops backed by Black Hawk helicopters and established a permanent base in the Chapare for two United States nanced and trained Bolivian coca eradication forces, the Unidades Móviles para Áreas Rurales [UMOPAR, Mobile Police Units for Rural Areas] and the shock units of the Fuerza Especial de Lucha Contra el Narcotráco [FELCN, Special Force for the Struggle Against Narcotraßcking].ìï

e Bolivian drug enforcement units, particularly UMOPAR, earned a fearsome reputation for violence and repression, including “economic coercion, arbitrary arrests without due process, physical abuses, verbal threats, intimida- tions, warnings of forced eradication of coca plants by armed security forces and arbitrary conscation of personal belongings, cash and coca.”ìð On June , , UMOPAR troops machine-gunned a peaceful demonstration in Villa Tunari in the Chapare with a toll of sixteen dead or missing and ten wounded. e massacre further radicalized the coca growers. As a direct consequence, June was declared National Day of Commemoration of the Sacred Leaf [i.e., the Coca Leaf ], celebrated by collective coca chewing demonstrations to this day. A month later, the Federation of the Tropics inaugurated a new and more militant leadership headed by Evo Morales himself.ìñ THE SAC RED L EAF 199

In that same year (), the Bolivian Congress passed Law , Ley del Régimen de la Coca y Sustancias Controladas (Law for the Regulation of Coca and Controlled Substances), which dramatically tightened the legal structure of coca eradication and intensied conäict with the coca producers. In eect all coca production in the Chapare was declared “excess” and therefore illegal and subject to eradication over a ten-year period. With the stroke of a pen, Bolivia had made peasant producers of a traditional crop with an ancient social and cultural history into outlaws.ìú e repeal of Law and the expulsion of UMOPAR and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) from the Chapare became the coca producers movement’s two principal demands. Protest marches, demonstrations, and road blockades (the signature form of indigenous-peasant protest in the Andes) multiplied, culminating in the August March for Life, Coca and National Sovereignty that ended in La Paz with general celebration by a massive turnout of supporters. A year later the women producers of the Chapare, in a move unprecedented in the history of Bolivian social movements, staged their own exclusively feminine march to La Paz and received the same kind of celebratory welcome. By the s the coca producers had moved “to occupy the role of ‘vanguard of the popular movement’ in the country’s political imagination that the miners had occupied before the structural adjustment of .”ìû ey had also come to occupy as strong a role in Bolivian revolutionary consciousness as the Katarists of the highlands. e coca producers’ rise to national prominence was aided by a change in their discourse. Before the s the coca growers were focused on narrow economic demands within the general framework of a class-based peasant movement. With the rise of Evo Morales and a more militant leadership, however, increasingly, issues of indigenous identity came to the fore inspired in part by the indigenous movements in the Highlands and in Ecuador and in part because the repression was seen as targeting the indigenous in particular (almost all producers were indigenous).ìü In coca producers’ declarations, eradication represented “the social ethnocide of the original nations.” Paradoxically indigenous identity became even stronger among the recent migrants from a variety of dierent indigenous groups (predominantly in the Chapare) than it was in the traditional and ancient coca-producing areas of La Paz Province that were homogeneously Aymara.ìý It is important to note that, as a result, the indigenism of the coca producers was inherently a plural national identication including not only the predominant Quechua and Aymara migrant populations but also smaller groups like the Yuracaré who were indigenous to the Chapare 200 CHAPTER 5 region. In the s the oßces of the Six Federations in Cochabamba were decorated with “chuspas [pouches for carrying coca], garlands of coca leaves, wiphalas, a pre-Columbian calendar, Yuracaré bows and arrows, a portrait of Che Guevara and the national shield of Bolivia in a large golden frame.”ìÿ Por- traits of Guevara and wiphalas were common but not universal in the oßces of those interviewed for this book. e shift to an ethnic discourse and the elevation of coca to “the sacred leaf ” enabled the coca growers to appeal to the association of coca with Andean religious and cultural traditions and to the large number of coca users outside the coca zone. e coca leaf became a symbol of indigenous cultural identity and national pride. e prominence of U.S. troops and Bolivian forces trained and nanced by the United States in the eradication enabled the coca producers to forge a sharp dualism between their symbolic representation of the nation and the “antination” of U.S. troops, coca eradication forces, and the compliant creole political class that submitted to U.S. demands.ï~ e coca eradication eort soon found itself in a vicious circle. e more violence used to suppress coca growing the greater the solidarity and ethnic identity of the producers. e stronger the ethnic identity of the producers the greater their ability to appeal to broader issues of indigenous cultural traditions. e greater the strength of coca-based cultural traditions the easier it was for the coca producers to appeal to deep- seated anti-imperialist nationalism that extended back to the revolution of . All these themes are evident in the interviews that follow. Paradoxically the violence of the eradication eort and criminalization of the producers did not lead to any signicant support for armed struggle and, despite the images of Guevara, created a struggle for human rights and democratic process. e coca producers took advantage of the modest democratic openings in the s to entrench themselves in the political system of the Chapare, where they were the overwhelming majority, and then work their way up the national political system. In , two years after founding of MAS, it elected four national deputies in coalition with a left-wing party. One of them was Evo Morales. In in municipal elections it won nine mayor’s oßces. To the great surprise of political analysts and the MAS party members themselves, in the national elections of June it became the second largest party in the legislature and came within a hair’s breadth of electing Evo Morales as president. In , ten years after its founding, Evo Morales won the presidency outright. In interview after interview, leaders described this extraordinary rise as if they could hardly believe it themselves. rough their emphasis on the coca THE SAC RED L EAF 201 leaf as a cultural and national symbol and the ruling party elites as sellouts to the United States, forty thousand coca growers in part of one of Bolivia’s nine provinces had become a symbol of a new popular nationalism based on indigenous identity. e coca producers did so, however, while remaining a peasant-based, class-oriented party. e voices in this chapter speak from positions of leadership in the coca producers’ movement in the Chapare (Leonilda Zurita and Julio Salazar), and the FNMCB-BS (Zurita). Both were enthusiastic members of MAS and both are among the six people ranked by MAS vice president Gerardo García as politically “closest to Evo.”ïì Together they represent an expression of what the national leadership of this party of social movements was thinking in the year () just before Evo announced that the ideology of his movement was “communitarian socialism” and so provide insight into this discourse while still in formation. Just as MAS is not a conventional political party, neither does it have anything that might be called a political ideology in the formal sense. Indeed, Pablo Stefanoni and Hervé do Alto have referred to the “inscrutable ideology of MAS” while nevertheless attempting to decipher it.ïï Some themes in these interviews are, however, more prominent than others, and together they delineate if not a formal ideology then at least a discourse that shares some common elements. e heart of this discourse as well as the core of the peasant organizations is to be found in the coca elds of the Chapare.

COCA PRODUCERS: THE CHAPARE

LEONILDA ZURITA: LIFE AND DEATH IN THE COCA FIELDS

Leonilda Zurita was born on April , , in what would be the epicenter of the coca producers’ movement, Villa Tunari in the Chapare. Her Quechua parents were migrants from the highland portions of Cochabamba and, like so many others, became coca producers. Forced to drop out of school to help in her mother’s coca farm (her father died when she was two), she completed only her primary and one year of secondary schooling. Leonilda began her union career by cooking and cleaning up after the men’s union meetings and, eventually, being named secretary for minutes. In she founded the rst women’s association in the Chapare and in a women’s organization parallel to the male Six Federations of the Tropics of Cochabamba. She has been a close colleague of Evo Morales since those early years. In – she served as secretary general 202 CHAPTER 5 of the Federación Nacional de Mujeres Campesinas de Bolivia–Bartolina Sisa (FNMCB-BS), and was serving in that capacity once again at the time of the interviews. She also served as director of international relations of MAS. She has traveled widely and become an international spokesperson for coca growers and Bolivian women. She continues to work her own coca farm.ïð

REVOLUTION AND SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION: EVO MORALES AND TÚPAC KATARI

For us it [poster of Evo and Katari] means that our ancestral brothers and sisters such as Túpac Katari, Bartolina Sisa, and other martyrs, who had given their lives for the liberation of our people, now move us to carry on the revolution to liberate our peoples from things imposed on us in dierent areas—political, economic, social. Because of this we say that our ancestors have made a rebellion and today comes the revolution—revolution to recover, to defend, to free us to have everything that is ours, for our country. And because of this Túpac Katari has struggled and today our brother Evo Morales struggles for our peoples, for our countries, recovering riches that have been capitalized, turned over to the empire, to the rich, today recovered for the people. For us our democratic and cultural revolution is the hope that we will recover our cultures, our identity, our language, our discourse. e democratic and cultural revolution is to recover. It is democratic, participatory, and based on the people. Culturally the revolution will recover our wisdom, our intellectual traditions, our clothes, our discourse—all that we have—thirty-six cultures, thirty-six languages. To recover for our people what they lost under previous governments that imposed their own cultures. For example, we were ashamed to speak Aymara or Quechua. But today with the democratic revolution headed by our president, it is a duty and a right to recover the wisdom, the discourse, the languages, the cultures that we have lost. e rich are like this above [gestures] and the poor below [gestures]. What we want with the democratic and cultural revolution is to equalize ourselves, the rich and the poor, because we have the same rights. e rich cannot be above and the poor below. Under this process of change that President Evo Morales directs, one day we may have “living well,” everyone equal. It cannot be that you eat meat and I only eat cooking oil. THE SAC RED L EAF 203

To eat, then, what the rich eat. It cannot be that a poor person continues working as a slave, as a worker for the rich person and the rich person becomes richer. Today the struggle is between the rich and the poor. We want “living well.” e democratic revolution is there because the capitalists and their socioeconomic, political models want us to continue as workers, continue enriching the rich. But what we want is equality through “living well,” suma qamaña, sumak kawsay as they say in Aymara and Quechua. We are in the process of recovering everything. We are working for the people, serving the people and not serving ourselves from the people. We lack many things to live in equality. But there is consciousness that we want to put our constitution in practice—to implement it. Afterward laws have to be put forward with the participation of the people. erefore it is down to us to participate democratically and make ourselves equal. But we are still here [gestures] and we are going here [gestures] little by little. We have to arrive at being equal.

THE CONSTITUTION

With the new constitution [] we will refound the nation. ey have proposed new constitutions more than eighteen times and the campesinos and the women have never been taken into account. Today the constitution proposes equality and opportunity for women in education. Before, women did not have the right to schooling. If you had money you studied. If not, you did not. From the times of our grandparents, only men with a little poncho on their shoulders studied. Women did not, because the women get pregnant and only the men have to study. But today it is mandatory for both men and women to go to school until they leave as college graduates or professionals—in the economic realm as well, where before a male secretary earned but a woman secretary earned bolivianos. Today there is equality—/. In theory there is no discrimination. But it is still necessary to put this idea into practice. From the democratic and cultural revolution also comes health— today in our day. Now there is health, with health comes the Juana Azurduy [maternity] benet, for the children Juancito Pinto [a cash- transfer program contingent on school attendance], from there comes the pension [social security] that the grandmothers and grandfathers 204 CHAPTER 5 can receive and much more. In the political realm we can achieve women’s equality. Today we are thinking of having women mayors. Of the [] deputies in the national assembly, I dream that at least there will be or women deputies, but this still has to be put into practice [in there were women deputies constituting percent of the total, the second highest number of women deputies in the world]. ere is also the issue of land. Historically the land was solely in the name of the man. ey used to say, for example, Mario Guzmán and Señora. We didn’t know which of the señoras. Now I can have my title in my name. President Evo is turning over titles to the women. For us this is more important than all the articles in history that did not say we have that right. e constitution recognizes our nationality, our languages; it also speaks to us of the young. Now young people at eighteen can be oßcials. Before it only said you could vote. In previous constitutions you can only elect but you cannot be elected. Now it says to you, you can be elected as a woman. We see then that it has been very important because with the democratic revolution for change, we are putting it in eect step by step. We are going to succeed because there are also the social movements such as Bartolina Sisa; the Confederation of Original, Indigenous, Peas- ant Women of Bolivia; Bartolina Sisa [also known as FNMCB-BS]; the CSUTCB; and the intercultural communities [CSCIB (Feder- acíon Sindical de Comunidades Interculturales de Bolivia, formerly the CSCB)]. e three organizations have founded this process of change and therefore have to ensure that boys and girls are pointed in the right direction. We are the hope of continuing to deepen this democratic revolution and also the process of change. We want to create respect for the Political Consitution of the State and its implementation through other regulations. And because of this it remains for us to continue working, unifying, defending. We have, as social movements, proposals, agreements that we have made—such as the pact of unity with organizations. Furthermore, now a deputy does not have immunity. Right now a senator has immunity, but soon he will not. ose who are elected as assembly members of the plurinational state do not have immunity. If I am stealing, they will take me directly to jail. e state cannot defend me as they now defend the petty thieves, the corrupt, because those who have immunity are not charged. Now it says to us you cannot have immunity for the deputies. THE SAC RED L EAF 205

We all want autonomy. Tomorrow at three in the afternoon we have a meeting in the Ministry of Autonomy to put forth the indigenous original peasant autonomies. is launch of autonomy is important for us as we want the structure in each province, department, county. For us autonomy is to dene, to decide what structure we want, how we want education, how we want our counties, and how we want our OTBs [Organizaciones Territorial de Base (Territorial Base Organizations)]. It is a very important advance that today the people are consulted. Pre- viously what was done by those of the east was illegal, unconstitutional, because no law had said that they may create their autonomies. e constitution creates its autonomies under the Political Constitution of the State: legal, legitimate, and constitutional. is is what we are doing now. [ e indigenous] have entered the constitution [for the rst time] in history; the voice of the campesino, of the indigenous, had never been heard. Because of this each sixth of August, seventh of August we march together with all our indigenous brothers. So we are included.

COCA

I am a coca producer; having been born in the Chapare it is in my personal history. I have, in Article , [ ], that our coca is included in the Political Consitution of the State as never before. It has never been included, but now more than ever our sacred coca leaf is included. First, it is not cocaine; second, it is a natural medicine; and third, for me it is the computer of our people—like technology for the rich. For us it is our computer. Because you can read the fate that is going to come to you and furthermore when you chew sweet coca, things are going to go well; when you chew bitter coca things are going to go badly. And so we have coca in two areas—the Tropics and the Yungas of La Paz. ey are preparing to make coca äour, to make chewing gum and other things. Before, under Law , coca was satanized. But today it is not; our sacred leaf is constitutionalized. e important thing is to defend the coca leaf, as they say, a cato [a plot forty meters by forty meters] of coca for our peoples. We have coca in Cochabamba and La Paz. Before it was being eradicated. Now there is reduction, but before there was violence, deaths, wounded, detained, jailed. ey ate our foods; they threw poison on 206 CHAPTER 5 the food; they grab you and you are a drug dealer, they say. We have always struggled against drug traßcking; they have never fought against the drug traßckers. But today, our government has a program saying coca, yes, drugs, no. Before there was violence, with bullets, with gas. Today the colonel comes, talks with the leader, in consensus, leaves a cato of coca and eradicates the rest. It is consolidated. ey enter into an agreement, talking; now there is no violence. From the moment that they signed an agreement on the third of October , , until this minute not even one death, not one wounded, no one arrested. But before every day there were deaths, wounded, confrontations, once again deaths. We want that plot of coca to survive. Not to become rich but to survive. Because of this today our president is for “coca, yes, drugs, no,” and social control comes from the communities. A compañero cannot increase the cato of coca a little bit more—he cannot. Nor can he become a drug dealer. Because of this we are in the struggle against drug dealing. But now they are saying to us it is a path to drug dealing. But we are ghting against drug dealing, because if not what will we become? We must comply, as our president does. Until , every day, death. ey were telling us in , in three years they were going to do away with the coca. After that a quinquen- nial plan, in ve years. Afterward in ten years, Law . Now in [] comes the Dignity Plan with the military, like Plan Colombia for Colombia, with fumigation. And here is the Dignity Plan with militarization. Every day deaths and wounded but today, thanks to the agreement not even one death, not one—chatting, talking, conversing. e cato of coca measures forty meters by forty meters And they respect that. And for the rest they have to reduce it and that is coordinated by talking, not with violence now, not with bullets. Because, clearly, we know that there has been a lot of money but it has not come to us, only to the very rich—salaries, real estate: it goes to those things.

SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

We, as social movements, are the founders of the process of change. We have a role in the government. It is therefore a duty and a right to defend the process of change. Previously governments worked only for themselves and not for the people. Because of this there was migration. THE SAC RED L EAF 207

Because of this, misery; there was no work; they capitalized on this; they did what they wanted but not today. ings have changed. Before the nationalization of hydrocarbons, out of every one hundred dollars, they took eighty-two dollars to the exterior and left eighteen dollars for Bolivia. Today, with nationalization this has changed—eighty-two dollars for Bolivia and eighteen dollars to the exterior. We have pensions, Juancito Pinto, the Juana Azurduy benet. We have so many things that our president has done for us. Because of this it is a duty and a right to defend him with the social movements. e government coordinates with each department, with us, and with the president. e United States says with the ATPDEA [Andean Trade Protection and Drug Enforcement Act] that unionism was being made to disappear by Evo Morales. When Evo Morales was born, unionism emerged—the U.S. cannot change it.

JULIO SALAZAR: THE EMPIRE AND THE CHAPARE

Julio Salazar was born in the province of Tiraque, Cochabamba, on December , , of Quechua origins. He completed his primary and secondary education while working as an agricultural day laborer. In he migrated to the Chapare, where he became a coca farmer and a close friend and colleague of Evo Morales. In he was elected to a six-year term as general secretary of the Six Federations (the presidency of the federation was held by Evo Morales) after many years of work in the federation and in MAS beginning as secretary of sports at a local union (like Evo, he loved soccer) in . In he was elected to a ve-year term (–) as senator for Cochabamba. He is äuent in both Quechua and Spanish.ïñ

REVOLUTION AND SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION

e Tropics of Cochabamba have gone through historic, dißcult moments and now from the Tropics of Cochabamba history in Bolivia is changing. e empire, the United States, has invented the ght against drug traßcking in order to suppress the people, to intervene among the people. is is how the struggle in the Chapare began. For me the principal author of this is the multilateral convention of where they prohibited our coca leaf as a narcotic, as a drug. is is totally false. 208 CHAPTER 5

Because of this all the governments have drawn up plans to get rid of coca in ve years, in three years. Because of this there was the draconian Law that created traditional, excess, and prohibited zones. Chapare is an excess zone in transition. erefore all the governments always proposed alternative development, substitution, eradication—get rid of the coca, change to another product. But there is no other plant that can replace the coca leaf. Our brothers in the United States should know that the coca leaf is part of our cultural identity: it is medicine, it is food; it represents our ritual uses. Every Friday we always say k’oa [ceremony to Mother Earth]. We use coca to dedicate your business, your land, to give food to Mother Earth, and this is sacred. It is used especially when there are deceased. Because of this the conäict in the Chapare has begun—the fault of the neoliberal system. Why? Because in the neoliberal system was implanted and therefore they have privatized our strategic enterprises, the mining centers have closed, and as a result there were massive relocations to the Chapare in the ’s. I recall that there were eighty-ve thousand hectares of production of coca leaf and now we are only ghting for seven thousand hectares for traditional legal consumption and for our customs. Before clearly much production used to go to narcotics traf- cking and thus all the governments have massacred us, so many deaths, so many wounded, but this was the fault of imperialism. ey had their military base in Chimore, the American DEA operated from Chimore. e North American military came to Chimore and directed the police, the combined forces. It used to be the police, the army, and combined forces, as for example in UMOPAR. e economic arm of the North American DEA was involved in indemnifying, paying, and buying leaders. We proposed to defend coca and the governments proposed eradication—here the struggle began, as I told you, to let the international community know. To have a dialogue we had to have a death. Imagine a week or two weeks of road blockades just so the government would pay attention to us, just so they would sign an agreement. But they never fullled these agreements and from here the struggle began. We have gone from union struggle to political struggle. In the Chapare we began with the defense of the coca leaf, which is a renewable natural resource, and have gone on to defend our other natural resources such as our hydrocarbons. In this way we have realized THE SAC RED L EAF 209 that in Bolivia foreign people were governing. Sánchez de Lozada, as you see—you can speak better Spanish than Sánchez de Lozada. Sánchez de Lozada came to impose neoliberal policy and occidental culture. He only thought about his person, about his ideology, his secto- rial views, his personalistic leadership and did not think of the rest. e people were not important; the environment was not important. What is important is money—for this they are going to cause the destruction of humanity, especially planet Earth. Meanwhile in the indigenous culture of the Amazon, we think of everything. We think of equality; we think of justice; we think of equilibrium. Because of this we would say that at some point we have to care for Mother Earth. Imagine every Friday they have to give coca to the Earth, in other words, value the Earth. But this does not exist in occidental culture—loot, loot, the natural resources. And this is totally contrary to our culture. We have said we are not going to be a ladder for the neoliberal parties. For us neoliberalism is privatization of natural resources, looting of our natural resources, and, furthermore, economic and political dependence on the United States. e United States was dening who could be a minister. Imagine, the North American Embassy was deciding which project is executed, what project is not executed, to which sectors aid is being given, to which sectors aid is not being given. In other words, put away your coca and we will give you aid. Imagine in this time they have interfered politically, have nanced the parties of the Right, have bought our leaders, have made us ght among ourselves. It has cost us to consolidate this process of change. What have we said? In Bolivia percent are indigenous peoples, thousand-year-old people, historically owners of this Mother Earth. We were left without land, without work, relocated, and meanwhile a few families, looting our natural resources, owning our land. Because of this we said that we have to have our political arm. Yesterday we began to form our political instrument, to have our own political party, our own candidate, our own mayor. In this way we have put in force the ideological principles of the indigenous peoples. Political parties decided everything—where they were going to execute some project, how much they were going to nance. But we have put this idea to the test in the Chapare, where the social movements met and approved the POAS [Planes Operativos Anuales (Annual Operat- ing Plans)] that the mayor executes. ey cannot be modied without 210 CHAPTER 5 consulting the communities. In this way we have put our principles into practice and it has gone well for us. In the beginning, with so much discrimination, there were only a few mayors. I recall what they said when we won—how are these idiots with sandals going to administer the city? But we have demonstrated honesty, transparency, and created consensus for many projects so we went on to win some counties. en we won a seat as deputy for compañero Evo Morales. We ratied compañero Evo Morales in the following election, and after that launched him to the presidency. Imagine, compañero Evo Morales in his rst candidacy as a leader. Like any other compañero he had nothing; we had more to give. We also wanted them to know that in the Chapare we do not depend on any government. Because our base contributes union dues we do not depend on anyone. is is how democracy, dignity is practiced. Now we believe patriotism has been born in Bolivia—civic pride, love of country, love of our people. Now there are volunteers who want to help the campaign. Recently the oligarchs have understood and say, “How is this Indian going to govern—he will last three months; he will last six months.” But after one year the oligarchs were shocked—the Santa Cruz oligarchs who manage percent of our economy; the state manages only percent. Because of this our country was a beggar country. When November, December came our president used to go abroad to ask for charity to pay annual bonuses in exchange for coca, a decree, a law, a privatization, but now this has totally changed because, as I told you, now this consciousness has arisen. No one wanted to put MAS äags on their car—whoever talked of the political instrument was a drug traßcker. But [now] we feel proud of the political instrument. Why? Because we are changing. Refounding our beloved Bolivia; we are going to recover our natural resources; we are going to recover our lands, live in harmony with nature. We say, “Do not seek to live better than others.” We all want to live well in complementarity, with equality and justice. All the measures our president has taken are based on these principles, many of which you know. Bolivia was considered the poorest country, with great infant mortality, with illiteracy; you would see our compañeros and compañeras begging in the main plaza. Now thanks to the recovery of our hydrocarbons, of our natural resources, our economy has grown. At the moment the state manages percent but we have not recovered THE SAC RED L EAF 211 the percent still in private hands. Some of our strategic enterprises are still privatized, for example electric power. It has been very diß- cult to get the constitution approved. e new constitution is clear that basic services should be a human right and not a private business. What does this mean? e state has the obligation to provide basic necessities. Before they wanted to privatize water; they wanted to privatize light, everything privatized. e most important thing in our new constitution is that there will never be foreign military bases in Bolivia. Other important things are that they will never privatize basic services and, furthermore, that the department of lands bans large landholdings (latifundios) of more than ve thousand hectares. But before a few families owned expanses of land and the majority that were Aymaras, Quechuas did not have land. It appeared that they were without land in their own country. Further- more, the constitution recognizes our thirty-six nationalities. Before, the oßcial religion of Catholicism was obligatory; now there is freedom of religion so that I can be of whatever religion. We lacked condence in some members of the Church because in all the mobilizations when the government massacred us, they never said anything. When the people overthrew the government, they came out to defend the government. is is the history of the Tropics but now there is tranquility, peace. ere is economic stability; there is economic growth. Before it was a debtor country and a country with a scal decit. Now there is no scal decit—even better there is a surplus—and because of this there is more public investment; there are more public works. ere is more work and if there is more work there is more money. Because of this we are content. Our president once said we are not going to suer this global crisis, because we were eating the garbage of the United States. Bolivia was the garbage can of the United States. ey gave us used clothes, wheat that was not useful to them, and external debt. Now we are becoming dignied and are aiding the small and medium enterprises. We are able to export some products and are aiding production. Bolivia can now survive with our own products. Before we imported and the Santa Cruz oligarchs did not make claims to the ATPDEA; they did not pay taxes here or in the United States. ey were only selling abroad, not even producing for internal use, only to export, and we had to import and subsidize many products in order to eat. Now thanks to the aid that our 212 CHAPTER 5 government has given to production, there has not been a shortage of rice this year; there has not been a shortage of many products. We are well with this economic stability and because of this we are going to continue to promote this process of change. What the United States imposed always generated conäict between peoples. Bolivia, a poor and indigent country, was obliged as a condition of aid to do away with coca and incite confrontation. I recall, I believe it was in the government of Banzer, they were saying that there would be decertication; there would not be aid for Bolivia. In order to have aid we would have to reduce our coca leaf crops. United States aid to Bolivia was totally conditional. As I should say, not the United States, but the empire has taken advantage of us. I would say Obama-Bin Laden [sic], Obama the president of the United States, made great changes but they are going to remove him or kill him. We see this from Bolivia. Why? Because the empire is not going to change so simply. Even in Bolivia at the moment, yes, we are the government, but we are not the real power. Judicial and legislative power is against the process of change. e government does not have a majority in the legislature and, as a result, it is governing by decree. e electoral power, the electoral court in Bolivia is against this process of change to extend democracy. If we win with percent on the sixth of December [], there will be elections in the Supreme Court; there will be democratic elections. If there is a two- thirds majority surely many decrees will be constitutionalized and in this way Bolivia will continue seeking equality between human beings. Before, they self-described it as representative democracy; they were representing us. Now it is participatory democracy. Many decisions on natural resources, on our authorities have been submitted to the people. e people decide on the nationalization of the hydrocarbons, on the constituent assembly, on the new constitution, on the recall of some authorities. erefore in Bolivia it is not a representative but a participatory democracy. Now surely the people will continue to be consulted with regard to specics and the people will continue deciding the des- tiny of the country. You know that democratic revolution is making a democracy without bullets, without deaths. Cultural revolution is making great changes. Before, indigenous peoples were hidden. He who spoke Quechua, he who did not speak good Spanish, was marginalized. Review the data, THE SAC RED L EAF 213 brother. Only the whites, the higher-ups, had the right to be military oßcers. e class of what I would call indigenous—Aymara, Quechua— had no rights. Now thanks to our government they can be oßcers. Sim- ilarly in the police, they were marginalized according to their surname. Until now you could not nd a colonel Mamani in Bolivia! It is incredible but we were below, indoctrinated in Western culture. But now in the cultural revolution we no longer remain in another language, our customs to the rear. Some have been born and have lived in this Western culture. Clearly the young are already forgetting—our grandfathers and grandmothers still, I would say, practice this humanity in the community. ey give us an example. Surely you should know of the Bolivian history of colonization. With the colonization they have wanted to annul our cultural roots, but they have not been able.

EVO MORALES, THE SIX FEDERATIONS, AND MAS

Compañero Evo is our leader and president and the rest of us are his followers. When we have to meet, even if it is : in the morning, we meet. Sometimes in an emergency it is necessary for the high command of the people, the principal leaders, mayors, city council members, to decide. e maximum authority, however, is the meeting of the Six Fed- erations. All the leaders of all the Tropics participate and decide and that is law. We always support the decision of the broadest authority. In many cases even our president has to support the decision of the majority. at is the way it is, compañero. At the least every two or three months we meet to make evaluations of our economic and social policies. We make better decisions when we are well informed, still better ones if there is consciousness. e organizations are an instrument to unify us, an instrument to communicate, to understand one another. Some are unionists, some are indigenists, but we are the largest peoples—we are the Aymara- Quechuas. Some are Catholics, some are evangelicals, but in the end we belong to the indigenous Andean culture where we understand one another perfectly. In Bolivia we have thirty-six nationalities, but we understand one another on the basis of complementarity, on the basis of unity. e oligarchs want to divide Bolivia and continue making a joke of it. To prevent this we have to maintain the consciousness that 214 CHAPTER 5

has been achieved. We have always mobilized to defend Bolivia. Andean cosmovision is important because we have a trilogy: Ama sua, don’t be a thief; ama llulla, don’t lie; and ama quella, don’t be lazy—on the basis of these principles the political instrument is advancing as the Movement Toward Socialism. Clearly Che Guevara and Túpac Katari are our ideological leaders who have thought of liberating the people. You know that in Bolivia in the colonization there was serfdom. Everyone was subjugated by the patron; everyone worked for the patron. e ideology of Che, the MAS ideology, goes against the exploitation of man against man. ey are our leaders—Che Guevara—there are many indigenous leaders and because of this on the basis of our principles we are advancing. Before, the unions were only for seeking economic demands, but now they seek not only social but political demands. Before, to talk of the political was prohibited. Now it is necessary to say that the organization, the political, the organic are one. Sometimes we speak freely of politics. We know politically that we have been dominated for so much time and now we are confronting; we are speaking politically; we are going to change this bad history.

IMPERIALISM, COCA, AND INDIGENOUS IDENTITY

As Leonilda Zurita and Julio Salazar persuasively argue, the conäict that brought Evo Morales and his “democratic and cultural revolution” to power began in the coca elds of the Chapare region. According to Zurita, “We proposed to defend coca and the governments proposed eradication.” For both Salazar and Zurita, the turning point was “draconian” Law , adopted under pressure from the United States in . By essentially declaring all coca production in the Chapare (but not in the Yungas) region excess and subject to eradication, it instantly criminalized what had been an agricultural activity enshrined in traditional Andean cultural practice and an economic escape valve for thousands of farmers and others displaced by neoliberal economic policies. Since, as Salazar notes, none of the alternative agricultural activities proposed in the various eradication plans could substitute for coca, in eect Law made the quotidian round of life in the Chapare economically perilous, physically dangerous, and existentially meaningless. e basic categories of everyday life and the political THE SAC RED L EAF 215 and social structures associated with them were under direct legal and physical threat. ere was no alternative. e unrelenting nightmare of state violence that engulfed the Chapare was described in vivid terms by both Zurita and Salazar. Particularly in the case of the former, these descriptions were the most intensely emotional and personal parts of the interview: “Violence, deaths, wounded, detained, jailed . . . violence, with bullets, with gas. . . . Every day there were deaths, wounded, confrontations, once again deaths” (Zurita); “To have a dialogue we had to have a death. . . . All the governments have massacred us, so many deaths, so many wounded” (Salazar). In essence the eradication of coca had become the eradication of coca growers. As Zurita notes, people in the Chapare could be treated with an absolute contempt for their lives and liberty. eir food could be poisoned; they could be arrested at any time as “drug traßckers”; they could be shot, gassed, or beaten without legal recourse or consequences. As Salazar notes, political organization on the part of coca growers in the Chapare was automatically denounced as “drug traßcking.” Zurita points out that the war on drug traßcking was not directed at the drug traßckers themselves but at the most accessible, vulnerable, and defenseless part of the rural coca-growing population. e increasing militarization of the anti-coca-grower struggle under former dictator but subsequently elected president Hugo Banzer only expanded the war on the poor. Human rights for coca growers were not so much violated as simply unrecognized. As Leonilda Zurita points out, Law “satanized” coca by equating coca with cocaine and conäating cocaine use in the United States with the production of coca in Bolivia. As Salazar himself notes, much of the coca production in the Chapare was diverted to cocaine production in the eighties, but sataniz- ing the leaf was part of a process by which coca growers became criminals and terrorists subject to draconian countermeasures and militarized eradication. It also imposed the categories of the U.S. drug war on a much larger group of Bolivian coca users, many of whom, like the producers, were poor and indigenous. e close connection between coca use and indigenous culture meant that the satanization of coca was to satanize the indigenous poor, who made up a majority of Bolivia’s inhabitants. As Fernando Coronil has argued, state violence in Latin America is as often a means to degrade and marginalize its targets (as, for example, in the response to the Caracazo in Venezuela in ) as it is a cal- culated instrument of control.ïú e satanization of the coca leaf and the violent degradation of the coca-grower indigenous poor were part of the same process. 216 CHAPTER 5

In both interviews with the most prominent leaders of the cocalero movement, there is a close connection between coca use (and production) and indigeneity. For Leonilda Zurita, it is always “our sacred leaf.” For her it is not cocaine but instead a natural medicine and “the computer of our people” because with it “you can read the fate that is going to come to you.” Salazar hopes that “our brothers in the United States” know that “the coca leaf is part of our cultural identity, it is medicine, it is food; it represents our ritual uses . . . to dedicate your business, your lands, to give food to Mother Earth, and this is sacred.” It is especially important, he says, in the treatment of the dead. Satanization of the coca leaf and the promiscuous use of violence against coca growers, almost all of whom are indigenous, raise broader questions of racism and Bolivian history. “Surely you should know the Bolivian history of colonization,” Julio Salazar said to me. “With the colonization they have wanted to annul our cultural roots, but they have not been able.” For Leonilda Zurita, “we were ashamed to speak Aymara or Quechua,” but that is changing with the election of Evo Morales, and “it is a duty and a right to recover the wisdom, the discourse, the languages, the cultures that we have lost.” Degradation through promiscuous violence, satanization of the culture of the coca leaf, and humiliation of the indigenous are all part of the story the coca growers’ leaders tell. ese mechanisms are intensied and nationalized by the association of the United States, particularly its Drug Enforcement Agency, and the complicity of the Bolivian political elite and traditional political parties in the war on the coca growers. For Salazar, “the empire, the United States, has invented the ght against drug traßcking in order to suppress the people, to intervene among the people. is is how the struggle in the Chapare began.” In Zurita’s view, “Evo Morales struggles for our peoples, for our countries, recovering riches that have been capitalized, turned over to the empire, to the rich, today recovered for the people.” According to Salazar, the struggle for coca led him to the realization that “in Bolivia foreign people were governing,” epitomized by Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, whose policies were made in the United States and who came to impose neoliberal economic policies and occidental thinking on Bolivia. Salazar explains that the American Embassy made not only the important decisions but unim- portant ones as well. An obsequious and mendicant Bolivian elite went to Washington every year to beg for aid in exchange for policy adjustments such as outlawing coca in the Chapare. is narrow foreign elite, serving U.S. interests, is counterposed to the percent of Bolivians who are “indigenous THE SAC RED L EAF 217 peoples, thousand-year-old people, historically owners of this Mother Earth.” For Zurita, “ e voice of the campesino, of the indigenous, had never been heard” before the promulgation of the constitution. e conäict between indigenous identity and Western cultural, political, and economic imperialism is a fundamental principle for these leaders. e Westernized Bolivian elite and the Bolivian drug enforcement units are simply a part of the project of the “empire.” e drug war heightened perceptions of foreign, imperial control by the United States and the division between a narrow Westernized and largely European-descended elite and the indigenous coca growers and coca users. e coca war was certainly a matter of economic survival for the producers. But it was also a violation of their persons, their culture, and their indigenous selves. Even if the coca growers unions were established, as Julio Salazar notes, to achieve economic objectives for the producers the struggle, they said, rapidly generalized to social and political questions rst at the local and ultimately at the national level. Salazar was one of a number of MAS leaders who retold with a mixture of celebration and wonder the story of the coca growers’ meteoric rise from control of municipal government to the national legislature and ultimately to the presidency just ten years after the founding of the party. Indeed, the MAS party was not a conventional party at all, as its original name—Instrumento Político por la Soberanía de los Pueblos (IPSP, Political Instrument for the Sovereignty of the People)—indicates. Instead it was, as Julio Salazar notes, an expression of the “ideological principles of the indigenous peoples,” and an expression of the will of the social movements expressed rst at the local level in the Chapare and ultimately at the national level. “We, as social movements,” says Leonilda Zurita, “are founders of the process of change. We have a role in the government.” It is therefore a duty and a right to defend the change process. Political success, in turn, required rejecting the degradation of the indigenous as sandal-wearing idiots who were incapable of government, as Julio Salazar notes for the local level in the Chapare. For Zurita, the process of change that culminated in the election of Evo Morales and the new constitution meant that the indigenous “have entered the constitution [for the rst time] in history.” Symbolically represented by the inclusion of the indigenous in the Indepen- dence Day military parade, a new denition of what Salazar calls “our beloved Bolivia” has emerged through the rise of Evo Morales and the cocaleros—a 218 CHAPTER 5 nation in which an inclusive indigeneity is at its core. Furthermore, this rise has been accomplished not only through protests, road blockades, and other forms of direct action but through a stunning ascent through the preexisting electoral system. e result, as Leonilda Zurita notes, is Evo Morales’s “democratic and cultural revolution.” e result of this “revolution” or “process of change,” as it is more commonly called in the interviews, is a reversal of the symbolic degradation, demonization, and racial humiliation of the drug war. e use of violence as symbolic degradation and practical repression ended with an agreement with President Carlos Mesa Gisbert in limiting each coca grower to one “cato” of coca (, square meters), a principle that has been ratied by Evo Morales. Leonilda Zurita claims that since that time there has not been “one death, not one wounded, no one arrested.” At an end too was the treatment of coca growers as “excess” producers to be eradicated rather than citizens with rights that even drug enforcement agencies must respect. Not only is coca not satanized; it is, as Leonilda Zurita notes, “constitutionalized” in Article of the constitution.

e State shall protect native and ancestral coca as cultural patrimony, a renewable natural resource of Bolivia’s biodiversity, and as a factor of social cohesion; in its natural state it is not a narcotic. Its revaluing, production, commercialization, and industrialization shall be regulated by the state.

e categories of the coca war are here reversed. e categorization of coca as a narcotic is legally and symbolically revoked. e criminalization of the Chapare production in Law is ended. e drug war’s implicit equation of coca and cocaine is denied. e cultural and social uses of coca in indigenous Bolivian society are not only recognized but elevated to the level of cultural patrimony. Coca is, as Julio Salazar argues in his interview, a renewable natural resource of the Bolivian nation and as such is under the control of the Bolivian state. “In the Chapare we began with the defense of the coca leaf, which is a renewable natural resource, and we have gone on to defend our other natural resources such as our hydrocarbons.” e result, evident in both interviews, is a resounding sense of pride in a new Bolivian nation where for the rst time those marginalized in the coca war and the creole nation—the poor and the indigenous—have come to dene THE SAC RED L EAF 219 the nation “to have our own political party, our own candidate, our own mayor,” and nally their own poor indigenous coca grower as president. e new nation has thrown out foreign military bases; eliminated scal decits and with it dependency on foreigners; taken control of its natural resources, including but not limited to coca; defeated the disloyal oligarchs from Santa Cruz; provided opportunities for small producers and other small business people like Zurita and Salazar; incorporated the indigenous into the national political system for the rst time; created opportunities for women that had never existed before; and provided social programs like maternity care, state pensions, and school attendance subsidies. e coca growers and their political party had gone from being pariahs and outcasts to being the core of a new “beloved Bolivia.” And Bolivia itself had gone from being the “garbage can” of the United States to a self-supporting member of the international community. According to these leaders, national humiliation that came with the drug war has been reversed under MAS. Concepts of an exclusionary ethnic nationalism, however, are of little use in understanding the particular concept of the plurinational and the intercultural that emerges in these and other MAS interviews. It is inclusionary rather than exclusionary. ere are thirty-six dierent nationalities in Bolivia, says Zurita, and now all can be constitutionally included. e coca growers union has both Quechua and Aymara, evangelical and Catholic members, says Salazar. In the Chapare interviews, the opposition is dened in class, economic, and nationalist terms—the Santa Cruz oligarchs, lackeys of the United States or the rich more generally—not in the racial language of “blancos y mestizos” or “q’aras.” And in any case the objective is to create greater equality among productive citizens, not eliminate the rich in a communist revolution. Leonilda Zurita’s gestures indicate that she wants a reduction, not the elimination, of economic inequality. e “sacred leaf,” however, became a symbol of an indigenous nation repressed by a narrow Hispanic elite. is extraordinary reversal of coca from dangerous narcotic to sacred leaf was at the core of symbolic revolution in the Chapare. By destroying the categories of social life and consciousness associated with coca, it undermined the symbolic foundations of the old order. It was a decisive step in the symbolic and political revolution that brought the coca producers to power. FIGURE 5. Felipe Quispe holds a press conference in occupied Radio Station San Gabriel, Septem- ber , . Courtesy of Reuters.

FIGURE 6. Leonilda Zurita leads a protest in La Paz, October , . Courtesy of Reuters. FIGURE 7. Aymara protesters descend from El Alto to the hollow of La Paz to join a crowd that would reach ,, over- whelm the security forces, and seize the La Paz city center, October , . Courtesy of Reuters.

FIGURE 8. Newly elected deputy Evo Morales leads a coca growers’ protest march from the Chapare to La Paz, August , . Courtesy of Reuters. 6 MAS UNIONISTS

Che Guevara and Túpac Katari

Interviews with Isaac Avalos, Fidel Surco, and Edgar Patana

HEN MAS was founded in by the coca producers, there were three closely aßliated organizations. e Confederación Sindical WÚnica de Trabajadores Campesinos (CSUTCB) had been founded in , as we have seen (chapter ), as a consequence of the rise of Katarism. By it was an independent labor union that had a presence in almost every rural community in Bolivia and claimed, in , three million members. Most were members of Aymara- or Quechua-speaking indigenous communities.ì e Federación Nacional de Mujeres Campesinas de Bolivia–Bartolina Sisa (FNMCB-BS), commonly called the “Bartolinas,” was the parallel women’s organization founded in as a result of the increasing importance of women in peasant indigenous mobilizations and the exclusion of women from the CSUTCB leadership. e Confederación Sindical de Colonizadores de Bolivia (CSCB) was founded in to provide an organized voice to highland peasants who were encouraged to migrate to the subtropical and tropical frontier by oßcial government “colonization programs.” e Confederación Indígena del Oriente Boliviano (CIDOB) was founded in with substantial assistance from international NGOs in response to increasing commercial encroachments on the traditional territories of indigenous groups in the Bolivian tropical lowlands.ï CIDOB eventually drifted away from the original MAS coalition and by it was in direct conäict with the MAS government over a road project MAS UNIONISTS 223 that would pass through traditional indigenous territory in the lowlands.ð e other three organizations remain the core of the party and have ex-oßcio representation in the party’s ruling council. e Bartolinas “moved in the shadow of the CSUTCB” and, with the exception of some regions, functioned as an aßliated organization with some autonomy rather than a fully independent women’s organization.ñ Even though it was in no sense a feminist organization, some women, such as Leonilda Zurita, achieved considerable prominence through their positions in the Bartolinas. e “Colonizers” (CSCB), who eventually rejected that title and renamed themselves Confederación Syndical de Comunidades Interculturales de Bolivia (CSCIB, Union Confederation of Intercultural Communities of Bolivia), were strongest in the transitional zones between the highlands and the lowlands in the departments of Cochabamba and adjoining areas of Santa Cruz; in the province of Caranavi in the department of La Paz; and in Beni among peasant producers of a wide range of tropical and semitropical crops, including, signicantly, coca. Paradoxically, the very dependence of the colonizers on the state and the state prohibition of unions pushed the colonizers to militant independent unionism.ú When the MAS reached out to form alliances with the militant Aymara of the province of La Paz, they found a critical ally in Edgar Patana, at the time of the interviews secretary of Central Obrera Regional–El Alto (COR–El Alto). He was later elected mayor of the entire city of El Alto. e almost entirely indigenous and largely Aymara city on the plains above La Paz was at the core of the great uprising of and . Although a unionist to the core, he shares a deep commitment to Aymara identity. He was one of the six named as “closest to Evo” by La Razón. A dialectic between the symbolic meaning of Che Guevara and Túpac Katari runs throughout the union leaders’ interviews. ey bring the symbolic revolution to large areas of Bolivia outside the MAS base in the Chapare. Neither symbol is exactly what it appears to mean. As Luis Tapia observes, “ e MAS party is not a party that favors armed struggle, and they don’t have in mind the economic program that Che proposed, not only in his thinking but also as a minister [in Cuba]. It’s like a form of anti-imperialist identication . . . and in favor of change, of revolution.”û He also notes while there are few actual Gue- varists in Bolivia, there is widespread identication with Guevara among the popular classes and the young. Túpac Katari is a symbol of indigenous identity and rebellion. He is also a symbol of an intercultural Bolivia. Together they symbolize an intercultural and indigenous revolution against imperialism. 224 CHAPTER 6

But the intercultural in Bolivia is very dierent from the identical term in Ecuador. e concept of nation is seldom mentioned in Bolivia so that interculturality means relations not between dierent indigenous nations but between individuals with dierent national origins. Furthermore, the term indigenous original peasant, as used in the interviews and in the constitution, suggests a merging of indigenous peoples in the Amazon, the Aymara and Quechua peoples of the Andes, and even mestizos from Santa Cruz. e Bolivian term is widely inclusive and invites all the popular classes to unite against U.S. imperialism. is reading of the intercultural allows the Bolivians to combine in ways that were not theoretically possible in Ecuador. ese themes run throughout the interviews that follow.

ISAAC AVALOS: COLLAS, CAMBAS, AND CAMPESINOS

Isaac Avalos was born in June in Vallegrande in Santa Cruz Depart- ment—a place where the legend of Che Guevara has achieved the status of a religious cult. He is a “camba,” as residents of Santa Cruz are familiarly called (in contrast to the “collas” of the highlands) and therefore not self-identied as indigenous. He completed only two years of formal education. He has spent more than twenty-ve years in union work, including as executive secretary of the Santa Cruz regional branch of the CSUTCB and leadership of the regional Central Obrera Boliviana (COB, Bolivian Workers Central) before he assumed the post of executive secretary of the national CSUTCB. He was a founding member of MAS and served as a supplementary deputy from Santa Cruz before being elected to the national Senate from Santa Cruz for the – term.ü

REVOLUTION AND SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION

I am from the Bolivian East. I am from Santa Cruz. I am from the province where they killed Che Guevara. My name is Isaac Avalos C. I am the leader of the CSUTCB—three and a half million members counting men, women, adults. When I was twenty we did not have the right to go to school. I studied rst, second grade—basic, nothing more. e governments in power they forgot about the campesinos— the Quechua, the Aymara, the Guaraní—the indigenous people, the campesinos. ey forgot them. ere was no health; there were no roads; MAS UNIONISTS 225 there were no markets; there was no production; there were no credits— there was nothing. We have been educating ourselves to liberate ourselves, to advance and look for a change in our country, and a leader appeared in our path—Evo Morales, cocalero: in reality a llama herder from Oruro who went to the coca sector. He, I—coming from the east—leaders of the altiplano, all of us made a team, people with consciousness, and we have been advancing democratically in elections in the country. We have been advancing against the neoliberal right in Bolivia with their own weapons, because for them democracy is a fantasy. Because there was slavery, there was mistreatment, discrimination; even today it still exists between “collas” and “cambas” but we do not want this—the politics of division. But now we want a change, in the issues of the economy, politics, land, water, electricity for all the Bolivians without discrimination. We are not spiteful; we do not want it for ourselves—the poor—only but also for everyone: the city, the countryside, the middle class. is is our desire and because of this we are seeking this process of change, this transformation of our country. is is why we the leaders at the head of the social movements are aiding the process of change from our bases— and at the head is President Evo Morales—by necessity, because now we do not want to be excluded. We are a country rich in resources, in oil, wood, in land, but we are poor. e governments devoted themselves to selling, to giving away, to submitting to the North American government. I give you a hundred million dollars so that you give me a business that is going to come in to extract your oil. We need to capital- ize ourselves; we need to let them in; we need to leave nothing with the Bolivians; everything must be taken by the foreigner. We do not want this. We want partners, but we do not want them to exploit us. We want our riches to improve our way of life to “live well”—this we look for in this process of change.

THE ECONOMY

We are content because when President Evo Morales took oßce we had international reserves of . billion. Now we have billion. If there were to be a crisis in our country, we could take billion from this and 226 CHAPTER 6 resolve the economic problem, food, everything. If there is no money in a country, poverty comes, or if you do not have money it is bad. en all the people would be hungry, would suer, and even die. But we feel content because there is money and there is aid from all the nations. e most important thing for us is that there are programs, for example, in the issue of production, where yes, there are problems, but it has to go on improving. ere are campesino credits, which never existed before, also with problems, but they are there. We have a program called the Indigenous Fund [Fondo para el Desarrollo de los Pueblos Indígenas de Latin America y El Caribe]—^ million for the year—and we are going to execute productive projects directly. is country has begun to change. e economy will not be at percent. It has not reached that; it should improve but it is advancing.

DECOLONIZATION AND INDIGENOUS AUTONOMY

Decolonization means various things. First, we must end racism, and second, we must end the issue of personal interest and also outside interests. We want to decolonize. We want all to be equal. e rich can remain, but we want an honest rich, not crafty, not thieves. We want to put in the mentality of our people that the colony that dominated the country, a group of persons, is nished. For us this is decolonization. To make our people understand that Bolivia is for all the Bolivians—not for a few, nor for a colony, nor for a group of people. We have Quechuas, we have Aymaras, and together the indigenous population makes up percent of the total population of Bolivia. e largest population is the Quechua and the second population is Aymara and after that come the Guaraní people, or the Chiquitanos, who are now, I would say, the third. ere are around a half-million Chiquitanos [< ,] and after the others the peoples are smaller. We have then around percent indigenous people and white people such as me, if you want, this “camba” of shit [a play on the racist expression Indian of shit], we are percent, more or less. We have accommodated indigenous autonomy well in the constitution. Campesinos are working on creating regional autonomies. Indig- enous peoples are working on making indigenous, original autonomies. MAS UNIONISTS 227

We have worked on the constitution to a great extent so that no one will remain outside, especially the campesinos, who are more numerous in the East. We cannot leave the campesinos of the east outside the constitution: original indigenous autonomies, as well as regional autonomies and within the regional autonomies are the campesino, such as me, for example. I am in that category because I am not indigenous. I am the national leader of the indigenous peoples, Quechuas, Aymaras. It is good that there are organic, democratic things that work in this country regardless of ethnicity. When there were neoliberal governments, they wanted to exterminate our race, our culture. Now we are strengthening them. is is thanks to the president because he is indigenous. e indigenous people, the Aymara people, are becoming stronger. e Quechua people are becoming stronger. In Potosí there are more than fty kinds of people who have not been taken into account, but they are there. With this government they are being strengthened, the Quechua, the Aymara, the Guaraní. e indigenous peoples are strengthening themselves more; they are being strengthened more. ere is diversity. Andean cosmovision came from ve hundred years ago, our grandparents’ way of life. Túpac Katari, Bartolina Sisa were our grandparents. ey used to have their way of life, their way of working, their way of organizing, and their way of struggling. We remember this Andean cosmovision; we remember until today and we bring them to the present. ey are stronger now because the ancestral cultures, the Andean cosmovision, the Aymara, the Quechua, our grandparents were peoples who were subjugated by the Spaniards; sadly, exterminated; killed by the Spaniards, but they carried our blood—this will never end. Now we have constitutionalized the wiphala. e Bolivian äag is the wiphala; the putujú [a traditional horn] is also oßcial. We have constitutionalized the äag of our struggle; it is in the constitution. And furthermore in the old Constitution the Quechuas, the Aymaras, the indigenous were not recognized; they were not part of the constitution. Now the thirty-six peoples, thirty-seven peoples [including Afro-Bolivians] are in the constitution; we are part of the constitution. Because we have made this constitution ourselves. 228 CHAPTER 6

CHE GUEVARA AND THE FUTURE

Che reminds us of the considerable struggle. We the Bolivians have great respect for Che because he struggled for our riches; he was struggling for us, the poor. Sadly, we did not understand him in that moment and had him killed. But we make Che present in every way, with photo- graphs, with anything, we make him present as a leader of the struggle, just like Bartolina Sisa, Apiaguaiki Tumpa of the East, equally. In reality they are our symbols of struggle. ey are grandparents who have left us. As when they were going to kill Túpac Katari, he said, “ ey kill me, but I will return as millions.” And here in Bolivia we are millions; now we are millions; now we are millions. To liberate, to live united, to live well, eat well, to be attended to; we do not want there to be discrimination—this is gringo, this is cholo—we want a single country, wherever we may be, without racial discrimination. We want an organized country; we want a country in order to live well—this is what we want. Because of this we support the process of change. And as we see President Evo Morales is walking forward, we also are going to support him from below, strengthening him, and also sending him proposals, ideas, proposals that we send in writing, legal projects—he listens and makes them reality. is is what we want.

FIDEL SURCO: INTERCULTURAL COMMUNITIES AND CHE GUEVARA

Fidel Surco, the son of Quechua activist Jacinto Surco, was born on November , , in the department of La Paz. He began his union activities in Alto Beni, province of Caranavi, department of La Paz, and progressed from being a local confederation leader to CSCB executive secretary at the time of the interviews (). at same year he was the target of a letter bomb. His wife, who mistak- enly opened the envelope, was blinded and seriously wounded in the blast. He stepped down from the CSCB leadership in . He served one term (–) as MAS senator from La Paz. As executive secretary (–) of the Confed- eración Nacional para el Cambio (CONALCAM, National Coordinator for Change), an umbrella organization including a range of more than social movement organizations, he was one of the most powerful men in Bolivia. He is a part owner of one of the largest transportation rms in Bolivia, Turbus Totaí.ý MAS UNIONISTS 229

THE CSCB

We [the CSCB] are an organization that has been around for thirty- seven years. e CSUTCB is now thirty years old. We are thirty-seven years old. is organization was founded on February , . We began with a few confederations in the country. ey have been adjusting, consolidating throughout all this time to be able to carry forward the objective of our organization—to be a combative organization. In the times of the dictators there was total oppression. e governments were racist and classist with no element of participation. We made contested decisions to orient the union leadership not as a political party but as a union organization. We wanted a leader who would defend his base organization, his colonies, his communities. What was the base of this organization? At the time of the relocation of the miners of the west to the east in colonies, the Right imposed the name “colonizers” on us. is type of community existed, with the name of colonies. We were colonizers until last year. We do not see ourselves as colonizers, but the colonizers, who migrated from the west to the east, are Aymaras and Quechuas, and include the local indigenous—Guaranís, Mosetenes, Tacanas, Tsimanés—all types of indigenous. Now the collas have joined the indigenous in an interculturality. We have had good times; we have also had bad times. Our organization has suered crises along with other parallel organizations. Before there were two confederations. Our organization of colonizers of agricultural products was the CSCB; the other added P and A for “agricultural producers.” ey were more to the right and more allied with yellow unionism. We were a union more organically linked to the left. Not to the center-left, neither sh nor fowl. Whenever we have had an imbalance, we have held congresses of unity. We have always been strengthening ourselves and now more than ever. We are the rst organization in the country, more united than ever. ere are not two organizations even when there was a division in the CSUTCB. ey had two leaders, two heads. Now this process is being consolidated as the people themselves have realized. But in our organization was one of the fundamental pillars— when Gerardo García was the executive—of consolidating [the political process]. In the Central Obrera Boliviana [COB] they told us, “You 230 CHAPTER 6 never should intervene in politics. Your politics are the axe and the machete.” We always carried the axe and the machete on our logo and, below, the national map on our äag. Because we cultivate; we live from agricultural production. We are not timber companies, we are not businessmen; we are small producers of ecological and organic products in the north of La Paz. We are characterized by the production of coee, by the production of bananas, by the production of citrus, by the production of cane or other ecological products. We could say cacao in the north of La Paz; in small quantities, livestock, also pigs. We know how to handle these products. But from ’ on we began to change the statutes, to debate the issues of the political process. We saw how as organizations it was useful to organize ourselves politically to take power locally. We did not govern even a municipality. We did not govern a department, nor at the national level; nor did we have the right to be deputies, to be senators. We did not have anything. Everything was imposed from above. e politicians put forward those to whom they were going to give the victory—the whites. We were always discriminated against. e campesinos, the Indians, the indigenous could never even enter parliament, congress. On the basis of this, Evo Morales was in the Tropic of Cochabamba, still a young leader at this time. In ’ with Gerardo García there was the rst march from the Tropic of Cochabamba, on bicycles; they were going to Santa Cruz, to a congress, to shape a political direction. But those of the Tropics proposed that it was going to be a political instrument, ASP [Asamblea por la Soberanía de los Pueblos (Assembly for the Sovereignty of the Peoples)]. And in ’ there was conäict in this congress. We always supported the ASP and we are the only ones who stayed. Our aßliates in the Tropic of Cochabamba had always had a rm position. In ’ in Cochabamba, in the Universidad Mayor de San Simón, the political instrument [Instrumento Político por la Soberanía de los Pueblos (IPSP)] was formed. We, as the Confederation of Col- onizers [CSCB], were always part of this. We worked together with all of them until we consolidated the entire process, and were part of the party [MAS] that the CSUTCB, Colonizers, and Bartolinas constructed politically. Now after all of this we arrive at the decade of onward. We developed a more revolutionary process with mobilizations and every- MAS UNIONISTS 231 thing, to put pressure on, even to remove, Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, who had alienated the national resources of our country. We were one of the fundamental pillars in the north of La Paz in trying to put a stop to all of that. We came here ourselves to hit Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada. When our brothers were shot here in El Alto, here in the hollow, people lled the city of La Paz. is is where our organization itself was involved in the refoundation of the country and made a commitment to the Bolivian people. We have now changed our name to “intercultural communities” as recognized by the Constitución Política del Estado. Article of the current constitution recognizes all the organizations, including Afro-Bolivians, in our country. We are involved, we say, within the constitution as intercultural communities. is is where our organization stands at the moment. [ e interview is interrupted by a press conference.]

COMMENTS ON PRESS CONFERENCE

Clearly the only patron who is behind buying the election of for Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada is the Embassy of the United States, USAID, including some nanciers, that are carrying out antidemocratic coups d’état in Latin America, even in Europe. And I know that Bolivia does not want foreign interference. Víctor Hugo Cárdenas was an indigenous candidate. Indigenous? He does not have anything indigenous. An Aymara? He has sold out; he has lowered his pants with Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada and has been his solitary Indian llama herder. From there [rst Sánchez de Lozada administration, –] comes capitalism, decentralization, various laws that have sold, alienated our hydrocarbons, our natural resources to transnational corporations. [ e interview then continues.]

REBELLION, NOT REVOLUTION

Our indigenous brothers and sisters Túpac Katari, Bartolina Sisa, Micaela Bastidas, Túpac Amaru, and many others rose in rebellion— such as, for example, Juana Azurduy de Padilla, who was not even Bolivian; she was Argentine. She was defending our land, the territory 232 CHAPTER 6 of our country. e theme of land and territory has always been central to our struggle. When we are talking of land and territory, we are speaking in general. We are speaking of natural resources, the forest, the environment—everything that involves the issue of territory. It has always been our struggle to live well. We would say clearly that it is still our objective. It has been laid out in congress after congress that the confederation has held. Recently we concluded a congress at the national level in Santa Cruz. I was once again reelected in order to be able to advance with this process. Because of this we have great admiration for Fidel Castro; we have admiration for Che Guevara and we always remember him. Because of this we say we are brothers of Che, we are brothers—now including Venezuela. Also, ALBA was formed based on Venezuela, Cuba, and Bolivia. Now there are more of us. We are the same number as the Rio Group. It is Central America and South America. Now the constitution recognizes us as an intercultural community; we are rm in our commitment to the process of change. Our political line is clear: it is the Instrumento Político por la Soberanía de los Pueblos, the Movi- miento al Socialismo. is is our ideological, political, organic principle that will not be taken away; nor will we distance ourselves from it. We have always had some leaders who have passed through this organization who disguised themselves as lambs. Afterward they have gone with other groups. But now we continue rmly in this process. We have a goal of social, political, cultural change—in production more than anything. All of this is at the national level. And this is our fundamental work. e democratic, cultural revolution comes from the revolutionary process of our social movements. Our country has been able to construct nothing without mobilizations. is is an ideological, political, and structural principle that carries forward. Our position and what Evo Morales wants and everyone thinks of after the new constitution is participatory democracy that involves everyone, everyone. Because before there was imposed democracy such as what occurred in Hon- duras. Surely it is not a crime to speak of participatory democracy and a revolutionary, democratic, and participatory process. We speak of a cultural, democratic, and revolutionary process—cultural because there are diverse cultures in our country: thirty-six nationalities plus the Afro- MAS UNIONISTS 233

Bolivians. e constitution now recognizes the blacks, the browns. en there are thirty-seven. We are intercultural, each with its own culture, with its own way of life, its own living—all of this. e democratic revolutionary process is to make a revolution, including a democratic revolution, in the sphere of production. Because we must develop the area of production in our country. Because at this time we lack much in the area of technical development, development in the area of credits, in mechanization, and the improvement of organic ecological production. Bolivia is the best, a rich country, in organic and ecological production. Bolivia is independent, sovereign—a people with dignity and sovereignty. e constitution says this clearly. e Bolivians are not simply concerned with having to live well. e Bolivians are concerned about who they are and that their country lives in peace, in tranquility, in harmony—this is what Bolivia wants. Bolivia does not want interference, does not want to divide the country. Here we want the country to develop, but not as some bad politicians here, who do not want the process of change, wish. e process of change is going to continue changing the way things were; from colonialism to the interculturality of a plurinational state. Before we were subjugated by colonialism because all our enterprises were in the hands of the transnational elite. Because of this we are nationalizing little by little—a change that brings dignity and sovereignty to Bolivia. e issue of cosmovision is much talked about. We are in the cosmovision, including Andean cosmovision, Ama- zonian cosmovision. ere three types of cosmovision. We are in all of this working and coordinating.

EDGAR PATANA: CHE GUEVARA AND TÚPAC KATARI

Edgar Patana has been a leader in the urban equivalent of Achacachi, the largely indigenous and overwhelmingly Aymara city of El Alto on the plain above La Paz, during the – uprising and before. He was the oldest in a family of twelve children of Aymara immigrants to El Alto from the countryside. Born in , he began his career as a bookseller and in became president of an association of small street traders. He helped organize the construction of barricades in the Gas War of . In he was elected executive secretary of COR–El Alto and from that position led his organization in the so-called second Gas War in . In April he was elected mayor of El Alto with a 234 CHAPTER 6 little more than percent of the vote. In he received the title of architect from UMSA.ÿ

MOBILIZATION IN EL ALTO

OK, the city of El Alto has two representative institutions: the COB that represents workers on union and political issues and the FEJUVE in civil matters. We believe that in the ongoing process in our country since the ’s—in the coup d’état—somehow it is the popular neighborhoods of La Paz that react in order to bring democracy back to our country. In the city of El Alto was created by the pressure and initiative of these organizations. Before, the COB was CUTAL [Central Única de Trabajadores de El Alto (Sole Union of Workers of El Alto)] and the Federación de Juntas Vecinales. We achieved independence in the town hall in ’ and the mobilization and political formation of the compañeros at the union level and the political leadership in the city of El Alto began. e vice president [Carlos Mesa Quisbert, –] comes to power, promising everything but does nothing. We noticed that in El Alto they were organizing big demonstrations but they were not preparing leadership and they did not teach how to lead the country in the future. Two years later, President Carlos Mesa does not respond to our main ideas—not to sell gas to Chile, nationalization of the hydrocarbons, bringing Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada to justice, and other claims we made in the protests of October . We called a new strike. e leader of the FEJUVE, Abel Mamani, is not present. We took advantage of that. In my second month as a member of the executive branch in the COB, we organized the movement. We said: “Carlos Mesa has to either answer or not.” “Sell gas or not.” Based on those demands, we started the movement. e regional workers union [COR–El Alto] organized a great strike and permanent demonstrations. In the end, because of fear, it dismissed Carlos Mesa and not just Carlos Mesa, the others too—they had to leave. We settled with Rodríguez Veltzé, president of the Supreme Court. In that regard, I believe that we made another mistake. I was new; it was not even my second month in the executive branch. We resigned ourselves to Rodríguez Veltzé and hoped for a general election. MAS UNIONISTS 235

EVO AND EL ALTO

President Evo Morales resurfaced, the only one who was visible, a former congressman, who also had his demands at the level of the cocaleros, and it allowed him to assume the responsibility of leading the country. And at that time we supported any representatives on condition that they demand what is right for the city of El Alto. Initially, we supported Luis Vázquez Villamor from the MIR [Movimiento de Izquierda Revolu- cionaria]. en we chose Carlos Palenque, former populist leader from La Paz, even a neoliberal opponent like José Luis Paredes. But then we turned over our votes to MAS, led by Evo Morales. What do you expect from a president? At least he remembers the poor, his people. We belong to the people, because of identity, race, and origin. Second, we saw him as a ghting leader, we saw his position. ird, he was the only option among similar alternatives. But honestly, so far we have seen changes at a general level; some small things reach the public, but they forget the development of the city of El Alto on the issue of job creation, input to the productive sector, further improving all necessary basic services. But given the lack of consolidated leadership at the moment—some conäicts in the city of El Alto prevent the rise of new leaders—we have to support Evo Morales and hope he responds to us the next time. If not, if he does not respond, we are sure that he is not going to complete his next mandate. We can rise again, and El Alto can sweep out even Evo Morales if he does not help us. It will not be fast. It can take three years or so, but if he helps us, people will support him for another ve or ten years depending on what the president does. Internally, we have been developing leaders of the city of El Alto. From here, in the absence of leaders who can represent us in government, we have been building other leaders who can join the fray in the coming years—who will serve the people of the city of Alto. We have to support the president to make them respect us. We also have been maturing. Nowadays we have ideology, thought, judgment, and the strength to say we gave you the power, but you have to give something to El Alto. Before, we were shy and did not talk. Now we can. So we have to do it in an eective way. We have been seeing and hop- ing the president would govern as the people want him to. People will not forgive him if he becomes a neoliberal or rightist. ey loved him 236 CHAPTER 6

ercely and they can hate him ercely. Alteño people are that way. ey are rebels; even I don’t trust the city of El Alto. One day they praise me, the following they curse me. One day they congratulate you, they greet you, and then they kick you. e city of El Alto is terrible. A coup from the right can happen. Recently a coup was mentioned, but El Alto will bleed a lot because most of the population does not fear, would rather die or be beaten than surrender. e rst place they will be shot down and the last to fall, El Alto.

A COUNTRY LIKE THE UNITED STATES

ere are two forms of ideology. For me, when I consider myself, I am a little bit conservative and a little bit not so radical. But there are many radical compañeros, in distant sectors or in the city itself. A little example: percent of the hydrocarbons, in taxes and prots, must belong to Bolivia. Even with the control we do have we have many problems in the international and external level. Just imagine if we had complete control. Imagine trials, international blockades—no assistance for Bolivia. It would be incredible. Radicals think in another way. We think, indeed, what we said a moment ago. Create more jobs, more money for the productive area, the chance to sell, export, or just make what we produce known. We are not given that chance. Subsis- tence: that is all we do. We don’t have alternatives. I personally debated and listened. Some are against the U.S. because in their view America is an empire that takes out natural resources through transnational corporations, not only here but also in other ird World nations. I, who knew a little—I don’t know the United States; I have to go—but I knew something of the countries of Europe. When I was young, until I was twenty-one, I dreamed of traveling to the U.S. It was the American dream to overcome and prosper. I worked as a waiter in Argentina but since I started in the area of leadership, I have felt new ideals. In the year ’ I was leaving Bolivia forever but instead returned from Argentina and I said, “I will make my country, my city, a city, or a country like the United States.” So, what do we want? We do not want to immigrate to the U.S.; we want to have economic conditions to emerge in our country—that is the only thing we want. e people are content to have dignied employment but we do not have it. MAS UNIONISTS 237

Yesterday we talked about the labor exploitation in El Alto. Ter- rible. ere are children, people who are being exploited by the same compañeros of the city of El Alto and that is because of lack of union orientation or simply the lack of opportunities that are given to many colleagues who have to tolerate these conditions because there is no work, bad hours, and abusive exploitation by their fellow workers. at worries me, and it is a boom. Honestly it worries me sometimes. We would want, honestly, sincere help from the U.S. although we would not want to reach out, because that doesn’t characterize us. It is only sincere when such support comes to the people and helps you reach the people, for the people know how to return it with products. ey can even repay the United States. at has not come as of today; if it comes it is to control and silence the majority, and we do not like that. at is the only thing we ask. Opportunities, but real opportunities for the people. In the past only whites had opportunities. ey had opportunities for education, generation after generation. Today, the president has given opportunities to all but we have been confused. What does confused mean? Anyone thinks they can be president. It is not correct. Even I, honestly, I am not ready to be the president in my condition. It is a step, a process, and we have to have the idea of when we will reach the limit. But people start to dignify themselves and feel Bolivian, very Aymara, in origin and in the language that everyone has, Aymara or Quechua, and says, “I can have an opportunity someday.” If not now, maybe in two, ve, or ten years we will have it. If it is not me, maybe my son, they say. And yes, we are almost there. I will not say equality, but we are dreaming too; at some point it will arrive and do a lot for our city, our country, and for our department.

EVO AND THE FUTURE

at is what, at the least, is valuable about this government. With little things, it made people love it and, despite the feeling of my people, the demands we have, personally, I am going to support President Evo Morales until the end, because I saw in him their values. I will support President Evo Morales because I have seen his personal and particular values and his gift and innate vocation for leadership that is not seen in many. I will back him and we will do it with determination, despite hav- 238 CHAPTER 6 ing no position in government. We will support him and many feel the same. Here we debate. ere are opponents. Moments before I said that we have to go on with this process, but we do not want to mix it with the political-union issue. ey go hand in hand. I told the compañeros as a union we will defend ourselves, but also with the MAS with President Evo Morales. I will support Evo Morales and I am one of those who helped him. It was a debate. Here, percent; eight out of ten support him. Two do not because of dierent motives—resentment, opposition. In general, we will keep the eight—we are sure about that. We are going to reach nine, but now eight. e October agenda was not fullled. We have to move in the direction that the president wants, but telling him not to tease us. He did recover, during his administration, some of the resources, some of our sold hydrocarbon resources, yes, but they said it was nationalization, and that is wrong. ough the population got lost and confused when we explained, so we said there was nationalization. Another pillar was the Constitutional Assembly. e Assembly was called; we said, “Take the best leaders—El Alto representatives.” ey took others from the party for political reasons. e president was wrong. It did not succeed. We did not have the best results in the Constitutional Assembly. ose who were bad we had to get approved by the organizations and the mobilized people. What we have now under the new constitution is the continuity of neoliberalism in disguise. Some things are playing the indigenous theme; it rescues some things. e worker is given more dignity; the new constitution includes respect for union charters. It is well developed and we experienced it rsthand when they red fty unionized compañeros with seniority. I am sure if I came out with that speech I would stir up a com- motion here in El Alto and they would begin a revolt. My last declaration on Tuesday was shocking. It was published in La Razón and I put it there. So, if I have to debate, I will do it. Now is not the time. My people are dizzy with the mobilization and support of Evo Morales. But when we actually have the ability to discuss, yes sir. But for now, honestly, we disagree. We feel a bit sad because there is a new constitution but it is not being implemented as such now. ere is an excuse, they say, to consolidate and change the laws, to strengthen existing laws, or simply repeal them; there must be a Plurinational Assembly and for this we need an election and we support this a little and we say it is going to be done. But when, alas, they do not respect what they have written, MAS UNIONISTS 239 then we are going to lead the movements. Perhaps we will perish. I do not know, because when you tell the truth, when you come to the fore, the number one response is to discredit you. ey call you corrupt, or sold out, or a traitor, or a rightist. Despite that we will continue going forward. Everything has a limit, as they say, but it will give El Alto and Bolivia a lot to talk about for a few good years.

IDEOLOGIES AND SYMBOLS

COR–El Alto has always been revolutionary, leftist, militant, longing for a better future for the population. In addition, we believe that El Alto is sui generis. ey have never thought only about El Alto; they thought at the country level. ey have thought about the “camba” [Easterner], the “chapaco” [Grand Chaco region], the “cochala” [Cochabamba], of La Paz. But how sad it was when we fought from El Alto, we mobilized ourselves, we sacriced, we did hara-kiri, but in the end they carried the prots to Santa Cruz, Tarija, and little remained. at is what worries us then. We have always been nationalists; we are very patriotic in the sense of protecting and caring for our resources, the interests of our country, but we have forgotten regionalism. Today regionalism is äoated more, so we say dignity, identity, regionalism in El Alto. Indeed, when we say the Aymara identity in the city of El Alto, we mean that we just want sources of employment and dignity and quality of life. COR–El Alto is more unionist. It is also a bit worrying because the vast majority is rural-urban migrant people. ey lose their identity as indigenous peasants when they enter the city and urban life. So we have the way of the parents, perhaps migrant, and they have a new generation. e new generation, the rst in El Alto, the young Alteños, sometimes do not know where to nd their own identity. But that’s why sometimes they become rappers, even assimilate American trends. But in the end they realize and say, “What am I doing?” and return to their origin, even to their culture or other things. We are in that now.

BETWEEN CHE GUEVARA AND TÚPAC KATARI

Túpac has more feeling, more patriotism. I prefer Túpac Katari. I can t in with Túpac Katari. I could say for you, brother, we are here. But not for Che [a statue in El Alto]. It was an imposition of MAS support- 240 CHAPTER 6 ers and the Guevara Foundation. We here are more likely to support Túpac Katari. e wiphala theme. At the level of the West [the Andes], we respect the wiphala äag. at really is our war äag. We respect the red, yellow, and green; we respect all our symbols, and also respect the wiphala that has given us identity as well. But Che was an imposition and soon, when I am mayor, I will change it to another place. I like it. I like arts, sculpture, but we need something else next to it. It’s in the middle for us. It is being done now—Túpac Katari and Bartolina Sisa. In El Alto the tendency is for duality in the Aymara culture. ere is Father Sun and Mother Earth and chacha-warmi, husband and wife, Túpac Katari and Bartolina Sisa, and in El Alto. Look, it is not an organization that leads all of El Alto forward. When we act together, any movement succeeds—chacha-warmi, couple and duality. Incredible. Another thing, for example; we do not have institutions for the elderly. e old man is cared for in his own house and he is respected and venerated. Yes, women ght more. For example, I have many compañeros here, but when the moment for any action, a protest, arrives, women come without fear. eir rst weapon, just in case: their blankets with hooks. It is a hook, don’t you see? Bam! e point hits you. Yes, we respect the compañeras. If he adapts and goes in the people’s direction, he will be supported. If he does what the people want, he will be supported. But if he is wrong about some things, like choosing false representatives, the people can stir again; he may have problems. Some demonstrations can occur and that is worrying. ere is the option to create dierent movements; we will see what happens in the next administrations. We have an uncertain future. We the people of El Alto protected this government in the process of change. is has cost us—not the president—the people of El Alto, us. If one day the president came up here, we would say it. Right now! Who is taking hold strongly and rmly? It is the city of El Alto, simply. ere is no other.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

I wanted to travel to America in but I couldn’t. at very day I was demonstrating against the previous governor, José Luis Paredes. I MAS UNIONISTS 241

had to travel and when I went to Europe, I realized the importance of speaking English. Each country has its own language, but English is universal. I want my children to speak English. I only know Aymara, Quechua, and Spanish.

INTERCULTURALITY AND ANTIIMPERIALISM

For Isaac Avalos, the leader of the peak peasant confederation CSUTCB; Fidel Surco, leader of the renamed CSCIB colonizers; and Edgar Patana, COR–El Alto, issues of peasant subsistence farmers and small urban producers are clearly at the forefront. e goals of Avalos and Surco are strongly peasantist—health, roads, credits, markets, electricity, land, water, technical development, mechanization, and ecological organic production are mentioned by one or more of the leaders. “We are small producers,” says Surco, of organic products, coee, bananas, citrus fruits, sugar cane, and pork. Edgar Patana identies his organization (COR–El Alto) as “more unionist, concerned with the ‘labor exploitation in El Alto’” He worries that the “lack of union orientation” will lead colleagues to tolerate these conditions because “there is no work, bad hours, and abusive exploitation.” All of these unions are radical. e CSUTCB was strongly inäu- enced by Katarism and Indianism, the Colonizers were originally organized by Maoists, and COR–El Alto was, as Edgar Patana says, always “revolutionary, leftist, militant.” Despite unionist materialism, indigenous cultural identity (symbolized by Túpac Katari) and anti-imperialism (symbolized by Che Guevara) are emphasized by all the peasant leaders. All four organizations are culturally heterogeneous. Surco notes the “colonizers,” “who have migrated from the west to the east, are Aymaras, Quechuas” and include the “local indigenous—Guaranís, Mosetenes, Tacanas, Tsimanés—all types of indigenous.” Avalos, a self-described “camba of shit” and campesino from Santa Cruz, nevertheless presides over an organization overwhelmingly composed of Aymara and Quechua peasants. Edgar Patana, a strong Aymara nationalist, speaks Quechua and Spanish along with his native Aymara. e coca growers of the Six Federations of the Tropics of Cochabamba are similarly heterogeneous with regard to indigenous identity, and the Bartolinas core support base is to be found among the women of the Chapare and in nearby regions of Santa Cruz Province. e founding organizations of MAS, 242 CHAPTER 6 the CSUTCB led by the coca growers of the Chapare, the Bartolinas, and the Colonizers are all based in culturally heterogeneous areas and all must appeal to a “plurinational” or “intercultural” indigenous base. Insofar as it is a national organization (and not simply an expression of its vanguard, the coca growers), the CSUTCB is inherently plural in cultural identity, including Aymara, Quechua, and mestizo campesinos from the East. In contrast to the Ecuadorian movements that are based on culturally homogeneous communities organized into culturally homogeneous “nations and peoples,” the MAS social movements and Evo Morales himself needed to have multiple indigenous nations appeal from the beginning to succeed even at the base level. ey are culturally heterogeneous. e leaders contrast this broadly dened indigenous “people” against a Euro- pean cultural, economic, and political elite allied with the United States. Decol- onization for Avalos is the end of a mentality that saw “the colony . . . a group of persons” dominating the country. Quoting Túpac Katari’s famous words at his execution, “I will return as millions,” Avalos repeated three times with some sat- isfaction “we are millions.” For Surco, politics before Evo Morales was a game in which the goal was to turn over power to “the whites.” In his comments on the election campaign, Surco equates Sánchez de Lozada with the American Embassy, USAID, and “nanciers” trying to produce an antidemocratic coup in Latin America. Avalos says much the same thing: “Governments devoted themselves to selling, to giving away, to submitting to the North American government.” For Surco as for other MAS leaders, the story of the rise of MAS is the story of the rise of the indigenous peoples excluded from the political system. For all three union leaders, the end of the racism of the previous system (including conäict between “collas” and “cambas”) is one of the principal goals of the process of change. Both Isaac Avalos and Fidel Surco have pictures of Che Guevara on the walls of their oßces (Avalos sat at a desk in front of a large wiphala on the opposite wall during the interview). For Avalos, Guevara is a symbol of struggles for the poor and for the “riches” of Bolivia. Born in Vallegrande, he is well aware of Che Guevara’s campaign but took pains to contrast Guevara’s method of armed struggle with the bottom-up process of democratic change that had brought him together with Evo Morales at the outset. For Surco, “brother of Che,” he embodies struggle but he also symbolizes international solidarity among Bolivia, Cuba, and Venezuela. Surco too emphasizes that the Boliv- ian process of change is a revolution in participatory democracy and popular MAS UNIONISTS 243 mobilization from below, not armed struggle. Nor do Avalos or Surco share Guevara’s admiration for a command economy. Avalos sounds like an oßcial of the IMF praising the surplus state of Bolivia’s foreign exchange reserves, and Surco values production (by smallholders) more than anything else. Edgar Patana, on the other hand, favors replacing the statue of Che Guevara erected by MAS enthusiasts in El Alto with a statue of Túpac Katari. Guevara emerges as a symbol of struggle for the poor and oppressed, especially the indigenous, and of anti-imperial Latin American internationalism. Guevara’s unorthodox communism and armed struggle are not part of the Bolivian process of change.

CHE GUEVARA AND TÚPAC KATARI

ose interviewed in this chapter are leaders of three of the four peasant organizations that formed the IPSP in and one unionist ally in the Aymara city of El Alto. ey continue to be the organic base of the current MAS. All three leaders were among the six people regarded as “closest to Evo” in . e fourth, Avalos, in addition to Surco and Salazar were elected to the Bolivia Senate on the MAS ticket subsequent to the interviews and Edgar Patana was elected mayor of El Alto. eir views then represent those of the core leadership of the indigenous- peasant base of MAS at a time before the party had tried to develop a uniform ideology. ey are a window into what constituted the “inscrutable ideology of MAS” and provide a base for some tentative generalization on the discourse of MAS, particularly in contrast to the indigenous-peasant discourse of Ecuador. First, peasant themes are much more evident in these interviews than in those from the Ecuadorian Andes or Amazon. e coca producers began as a purely peasant organization with an economic interest in a particular commodity. e current leaders of the CSUTCB and the Colonizers are centrally focused on peasant concerns. For the CSUTCB this represents a distinct change from the Quispe period (–), when the organization was dominated by radical Aymara indigenism, or even the Katarist period, in which the leadership was dominated by Aymara intellectuals. Quispe’s defeat and the triumph of MAS allied leaders restored peasant-oriented leaders to power. Isaac Avalos, a peasant leader from Santa Cruz, is not indigenous himself but speaks movingly about the Aymara, Quechua, and poor cambas, such as himself, as a single oppressed indigenous group. Although the other leaders share a common indigenous identication, they too do not talk about any “nation or people” in particular. 244 CHAPTER 6

is is not to say that indigeneity is not an important theme in the interviews. In the minds of these leaders, the central polarity in Bolivian society is between an indigenous Bolivia and U.S. imperialism and its Bolivian agents. e core of this ideology developed in the coca elds of the Chapare, but it runs through the interviews with union leaders as well. e attempt to eradicate coca by criminalizing its producers actually produced increasing identication with the “sacred leaf ” and induced a sense of ethnic solidarity through resistance and persecution even among a diverse group of migrants to the Chapare. But in the Chapare, coca producers were not organized into Aymaras, Quechuas, or Yuracarés as separate people or nationalities (even though local federations sometime had an ethnic tinge) but into a single producers confederation that included many dierent indigenous groups. Although in practical terms the organization of indigenous peoples in both Ecuador and Bolivia was based on the local community, in ideological principle they were supposed to be based on indigenous nations or peoples in Ecuador but (with the exception of the Quispe period) multiethnic union federations in Bolivia. Although both countries eventually declared themselves “plurinational” and “intercultural,” the terminological similarity disguises signicant dierence. Consider the odd phrasing of the denition of citizenship in Article of the MAS-inäuenced Constitución Política del Estado ():

e Bolivian nation is composed by the totality of Bolivian women and men, the indigenous original peasant nations and peoples, the intercultural communities and Afro-Bolivians that together constitute the Bolivian nation.

While the opening phrase includes all Bolivian women and men and, logically, would include indigenous and Afro-Bolivians, the constitution nds it necessary to explicitly give these groups separate legal denition and citizenship. But in the phrase indigenous original peasant, the language of the constitution reäects the language of indigenous peasant leaders in this chapter. Indigenous is a term used more commonly for the lowland peoples organized into CIDOB (and not part of MAS directly); original is commonly used for highland Aymara and Quechua, and peasant could refer to any poor rural highland (and some lowland) residents no matter what their ethnicity, including in particular a poor peasant like Isaac Avalos with no identication with any indigenous group. e phrase intercultural communities in the title of the renamed CSCB also MAS UNIONISTS 245 captures the heterogeneous and inclusive nature of MAS indigeneity. It is broad enough, says Surco, to accommodate “all types of indigenous. Now the collas have joined the indigenous in an interculturality.” Joining the “collas,” the indigenous Aymara and Quechua peoples of the Highlands, with the “indigenous” makes sense only if indigenous is being used in the restrictive Bolivian sense to emphasize the lowland peoples mentioned. Interculturality includes all of them. It would not be accurate to refer to MAS peasant leaders as pure peasantist even though peasant demands are much more prominent in these interviews than in those of the Ecuadorians (they are hardly absent in the latter). e strong “indigenous original peasant” identity is a powerful current in all the Bolivia peasant interviews and in the Bolivian constitution. But the denition of indigeneity is broad enough to include indigenous people in the highlands and the lowlands, those living in traditional homogenous ayllus in the highlands, and those living in diverse immigrant communities in the semitropical and tropical regions, and even those who claim to have no indigenous identity at all. Evo Morales himself is representative. He was born in a traditional Aymara highland community to a Aymara father and a Quechua mother, spent most of his career as a peasant leader in the Quechua-speaking but intercultural Chapare, and is äuent only in Spanish, not in either of the indigenous languages that he knows but cannot speak well. e sense of indigeneity that evolves from these interviews is even more inclusive because the idea of the Bolivian nation, although strongly indigenous, is broad enough to include everyone who is not part of the “antination” of sellouts and lackeys of U.S. imperialism. Strangely the indigenous nation seems to include people who do not think of themselves as indigenous and even creole aristocrats like Vice President Álvaro García Linera. In fact Vice President García Linera, who fought with radical Aymara nationalist Felipe Quispe, is even more committed to an indigenist line than is Evo Morales himself. With- out this inclusive notion of indigenous nationalism, it is unlikely that the coca growers would ever have been able to extend their political instrument beyond the narrow but powerful base of the Chapare. As it was, the powerful combination of anti-U.S. imperialism, indigenous nationalism, and the symbol of the sacred leaf sparked the most successful indigenous-peasant movement that the Andes have ever seen. Evo Morales and most of those interviewed spoke of their process of change as a “democratic and cultural revolution.” e roots of the cultural revolution should now be clear. But what of democracy? e vivid history of the violence 246 CHAPTER 6 and repression of the coca eradication process as described particularly by Leonilda Zurita and Julio Salazar and the general support for revolutionary leader Che Guevara, who even in death left an indelible mark on Bolivia (see in particular Isaac Avalos’s reäections on Guevara as “Present!”), raises the question of why MAS from the beginning committed itself to electoral democracy rather than to the armed struggle that Guevara advocated. As Bolivian political scientist Rafael Archondo has observed, “ e rst experience that they [the coca producers] took in was the advantage of the legal struggle. . . . is is a central element in their experience in contrast to the whole left . . . that proposed an armed struggle.”ì~ Even when in , after ve years of almost continuous uprisings, marches, and demonstrations, power lay in the streets, Evo Morales refused to lead a “revolutionary junta.” ere is no evidence that he ever seriously considered it. In the end Morales came to power through the entirely legal and constitutional process of a reasonably free and fair democratic election. Why this extraordinary commitment to democracy—one of the key features of the transformation of the revolutionary dream in the twenty-rst century? Several factors stand out. First, from its inception the coca growers union had an intensely organized base in the Chapare and had great success in gaining power through the peak peasant unions. As early as they had succeeded in taking eective power away from the Katarists in the CSUTCB. Mass organization and political struggle were part of the DNA of the organization. Second, in the same year eighteen years of military dictatorship ended and a democratic regime dominated by the left was installed in power (only to squander their mandate through disastrous economic policies). By the time the most violent phase of the eradication began with Law in , the coca producers were already a mass union organization with a national presence. Furthermore, as Donna Lee Van Cott has pointed out, the political opportunity structure in the s was especially advantageous for the emergence of a political party rather than a guerrilla band. e Law of Popular Participation ( ) had for the rst time opened up municipal government to popular vote and created an extraordinary opportunity for indigenous actors who rapidly achieved a substantial presence in local government. At the same time uninominal districts were declared (rather than through election by national party lists) so that concentrated base areas like the Chapare could elect national delegates.ìì As a result, Evo Morales was able to become a senator as early as . e incredible success of MAS rising from obscurity in to become the nation’s second largest party in and then electing Morales as the rst indigenous president in only ten years after MAS UNIONISTS 247 its founding solidied the democratic strategy’s dominance. In retrospect the dominance of an electoral strategy seems overdetermined. Yet the armed struggle was not only a historical possibility but realized in fact by Quispe, Eugenio Rojas, and García Linera in the EGTK. Anti-imperialism; peasant interests; an inclusive, heterogeneous, and non- group, specic indigeneity with the coca leaf as its center; and democracy were all key building blocks of MAS. But Evo Morales could not have been elected president without absorbing and co-opting the radical Aymara nationalism of Felipe Quispe. Quispe, using the traditional Aymara leadership title El Malku, dominated the CSUTCB and Aymara protests of –. As Félix Patzi pointed out, he suered a stunning collapse of his popularity in when Aymara and Quechua protests brought down the government of Gonzalo Sán- chez de Lozada. Quispe had no practical plan to govern and no clear route back to the political structures of Qullasuyu. After many of them had died in his cause, supporters were disillusioned by his failure to use the power their protests had brought him and because of his vacillation between electoral and revolutionary strategies.ìï In the national elections, Morales and Quispe had both emerged as prominent national leaders. By Quispe was gone as a practical political force. As Rafael Archondo points out, “In what happened was that Evo Morales obtained the votes of the [Aymara] La Paz highlands that had previously supported Felipe Quispe. ey transferred their votes to MAS and also transferred their äags, their ideas, their demands, and their struggles.”ìð Aymara nationalists like Eugenio Rojas, whose interview appears in chapter , transferred their loyalty from Quispe to MAS. At the time of the interview, Rojas was MAS mayor of the Malku’s bastion of Achacachi, famous for its combative Aymara nationalism. Edgar Patana was a natural union ally of MAS because of his leadership of the street peddlers association but also remained at heart an Aymara Katarist who preferred statues of Túpac Katari to those of Che Guevara. e transfer of these leaders, their followers, and their ideas to MAS solidied the party’s national hold and shifted MAS in a more indigenist direction. Evo held his inaugural ceremony at the indigenous historical site of Tiwanaku and celebrated both Che Guevara and Túpac Katari. Katari became almost as central to MAS imagery as the sacred leaf. Although the Aymara highlands became a key part of Evo Morales’s electoral coalition, the connection was always more tenuous than with the MAS founding organizations. Eugenio Rojas has achieved a leadership position in MAS as a national senator but his (and Quispe’s) base in Achacachi is no longer 248 CHAPTER 6 with him. He was actually surrounded and taken prisoner in La Paz by protestors from the town. Edgar Patana has gone on to become mayor of El Alto, but as he himself admits, the people of this Aymara city are with Morales as long as he responds to the needs of the city. e discourse of Aymara nationalism as described in chapter remains a signicant part of MAS discourse but it has never been its core conception of indigeneity. at core is to be found in the ethnically heterogeneous coca producers of the Chapare and their allied union leaders. e symbolic revolution substituted the sacred leaf for a dangerous narcotic despised by the modern world. It welded popular images (not the historical gures) of Túpac Katari and Che Guevara into a symbolically revolutionary combination of indigenous interculturality and anti-imperialist nationalism. e symbolic revolution subverted the old order based on the repression of the indigenous and the dominance of the United States. Instead of provok- ing the guerrilla war favored by Guevara or the indigenous uprising favored by Katari, this symbolic transformation brought to power a modern political leader through democratic elections and at least formally constitutional means. Quispe’s Aymara revolt and the great indigenous uprisings of and that left Quispe behind brought down the old order. e MAS is in the process of building a new one. is potent combination of symbolic revolution, mass uprising, and democratic elections characterized both Ecuadorian and Bolivian uprisings at the turn of the twenty-rst century. ey may have invented a new form of twenty-rst-century revolution that shares the symbolic revolution and mass uprisings of earlier revolutions but adds to them the democratic legality emerging in Latin America at the end of the twentieth century. 7 INDIANISM AND MARXISM

Interviews with Antonio Peredo, César Navarro, and Rául Prada

HE BASE of MAS was formed by the heterogeneous indigeneity of the Chapare symbolized by the sacred leaf. e co-option of Katarism- TIndianism expanded that base. e party also constructed coalitions with left intellectuals. e left has a long and inäuential history in Bolivia, and alliance with the largely creole left intellectual leadership broadened the party’s reach. is chapter includes interviews with representatives of two strains of the left allied with MAS—the Partido Comunista Boliviano (PCB, Com- munist Party of Bolivia) and the radical, heterodox Marxism of the Grupo Comuna (Commune Group) around Vice President Álvaro García Linera. At the time of the interviews, these strains of Marxism had enormous inäuence in government. Antonio Peredo, a self-described Guevarist and longtime communist activist, was Evo Morales’s vice presidential running mate in and later served a term as senator for MAS when he chaired the MAS delegation. César Navarro, who began his career as a communist youth leader, was elected deputy and leader of the MAS delegation in the assembly. Comuna had direct inäuence through Vice President Álvaro García Linera. Raúl Prada and Luis Tapia were his two closest Comuna colleagues. Prada held a position in the MAS government (from which he resigned in ) and Luis Tapia does not consider himself a MAS member. eir indirect intellectual inäuence through Vice President García Linera was considerable. 250 CHAPTER 7

TROTSKYISTS, STALINISTS, AND COMUNA

e Communist left, both Stalinist and Trotskyist, had disproportionate inäu- ence in Bolivian society and politics, largely through their role in the miners’ union and the labor movement more generally.ì e Trotskyists may have reached their apogee with their famous “ esis of Pulacayo” ( ), ratied by the mine workers’ union and applying Leon Trotsky’s thesis of permanent revolution to Bolivian conditions. Although they remained inäuential in some unions (e.g., the teachers) into the twenty-rst century, they did not ally themselves with MAS, which they regarded as reformist, not revolutionary, and remained in the political wilderness. Nevertheless, the famous Trotskyist mine workers organizer Filemón Escobar eventually moved to the Chapare, where he declared that “the revolution will come from the Chapare not the mines” and became one of Evo Morales’s principal advisors.ï e Communist Party, whose controversial role in Che Guevara’s revolutionary expedition to Bolivia is still being debated, moved to wholehearted support for MAS and, as noted, at the time of the interviews former communists controlled the leadership of the MAS delegation in both the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate.ð As a Bolivian intellectual with long experience on the left (and now an ambassador for Evo Morales) noted, there are many “sleeping Stalinists” in MAS. He was alluding to the old Soviet Empire, where, he said, after Nikita Khrushchev’s destalinization campaign, covert Stalinists used to begin the party meeting with the invocation “Stalin Sleeps” (and therefore could still awake!). So far, at least, the Bolivian Stalinists have not woken up and, indeed, according to this same source, cannot believe their good fortune in having their revolutionary dreams realized in the form of Evo Morales.ñ According to the distinguished Bolivianist Herbert S. Klein, the left, both communist and noncommunist, had its origins in the radical change in the consciousness of the predominantly white upper middle class after the disastrous Chaco War with Paraguay (–). Klein points out that three left to center-left parties emerged from the Bolivian defeat—the Partido Obrero Rev- olucionario (POR, Trotskyist Revolutionary Workers Party) founded in ; an orthodox communist party rst called the Partido de la Izquierda Revolucio- naria (PIR, Party of the Revolutionary Left), founded in and later () reorganized as the Partido Comunista Boliviano (PCB, Bolivian Communist Party); and the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR), initially a party with fascist sympathies, but, after cutting ties with Axis powers during INDIANISM AND MARXISM 251

World War II and moving to the center left, it would become the leader and heir of the Bolivian Revolution.ú It was still contesting elections as late as the s when it became the tribune of U.S.-backed neoliberalism under the leadership of some of the very same leaders as in . After the return of democracy in , a unied left (including the communists) took control of the government (–), but its disastrous economic policies triggered hyperinäa- tion and the return of the MNR to power in its guise as neoliberal avatar.û e subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union’s empire in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union itself (–) discredited the Leninist left everywhere, including Bolivia, and opened the way for alliances with MAS. e leader of the left in the twenties and thirties, the distinguished man of letters Tristán Marof (Gustavo Navarro), was strongly inäuenced by the indigenist Marxism of the great Peruvian theorist Carlos Mariátegui and early left ideology reäected his combination of proletarian and indigenous revolution summarized in the slogan “Land to the Indians, Mines to the State.”ü By the time of the thesis of Pulacayo, however, strict Trotskyist orthodoxy had prevailed. e rst principle of the thesis was this: “ e proletariat, even in Bolivia, constitutes the revolutionary class.” “ e mine workers,” it continued, were “the most advanced and combative sector of the national proletariat.” e remainder of the thesis followed Trotskyist orthodoxy. In accord with his thesis of “permanent revolution,” the revolt of the proletariat and peasants would “grow over” into a socialist revolution without the need for a “bourgeois” revolution rst (the position of the Stalinists of the PIR).ý e thesis did not say a word about the indigenous (except indirectly as subsumed by the class category “peasant”). In late and the Quechua and Aymara peasants rose on their own and destroyed the hacienda system and seized its lands. Although the left recognized their indigeneity, subsequent organization under the MNR was on class, not indigenous, lines. Having regained their lands, the indigenous peasantry became a conservative force allied rst with the right wing of the MNR and then with a succession of military regimes under the notorious military peasant pact. e left, outlawed during the military period, found its base in the miner proletariat, some student groups, and teachers’ unions. In a break with these Trotskyist and Stalinist party traditions, Álvaro García Linera, a young Bolivian Marxist intellectual, later professor of sociology at UMSA in La Paz, and, since , Evo Morales’s vice president, argued that the Bolivian left had forsaken its roots in the work of Marof and Mariáte- gui and represented only a “primitive Marxism” that ignored indigeneity and 252 CHAPTER 7 thought only in class categories.ÿ García Linera became the leader of Comuna that developed a critical Marxism that attempted to combine Indianism and Marxism and rejected both the orthodox communist and Trotskyist traditions in Bolivia. As he said in a interview with Jeery R. Webber, “I think we’re in a new historic eort after almost years, of a much more fruitful dialogue between the two grand readings of the transformation of Bolivia, that is Indi- anism and Marxism.”ì~ García Linera came of age during the tumultuous transition between military and civilian rule in –. His experience of the Aymara blockades of La Paz demanding the restoration of democracy was transformative. “Who were these actors that had blockaded the city, demanding democracy, talking in a language that I didn’t know, with äags I didn’t understand,” he told Webber.ìì e experience set in motion years of reading, study, and practical experience to try to understand who these (indigenous) people were. A self-taught sociologist, he devoted his undergraduate studies (–) to mathematics at the Universidad National Autónoma de México (UNAM). ere he came in contact with Central American revolutionary support groups. He was particularly impressed by the Salvadoran guerrilla ghters and by the Guatemalans’ eorts to organize the indigenous Maya into an armed revolution. He returned to Bolivia in , became more involved in miner and indigenous politics, and also began what he called a ten-year “obsession” with tracking down everything Marx had written about precapitalist economic formations, even going to Amsterdam to consult unpublished manuscripts.ìï García Linera became more involved in revolutionary politics, eventually joining with Felipe Quispe (see chapter ) to found the Ofensiva Roja de Ayllus Túpac-Kataristas, and later in the armed guerrilla group Ejército Guerrillero Túpac Katari (EGTK). He was arrested on April , , shortly after the EGTK began armed action with attacks on utility poles. He spent ve years in Chonchocoro prison, where he continued his intellectual work. When indigenous revolution swept Bolivia (–), Comuna and García Linera became its chief interpreters. García Linera argued that neoliberalism radically undermined the condition of the traditional agrarian community by introducing new land titling legislation, permitting the import of low-cost foreign food, decentralizing political activity, and privatizing natural resources like water. e result, he said, was the “rising of the clans” led by Felipe Quispe.ìð ese risings, García Linera argued, would precipitate a state crisis because of the particular vulnerabilities of the Bolivian state. “Mono-ethnicity or INDIANISM AND MARXISM 253 mono-nationality in a multiethnic society is therefore the primary fracture in an eßcient and democratic relationship between state and society.” Or to put the same principle in another way, “Bolivia is a country where various civilizations exist but where the state structure only recognizes the organizational logic of one of these civilizations, the modern merchant capitalism.” ìñ Capi- talism or the “value form” was recognized in the individualized, “white” citizen of liberal democracy but the other civilizational logics—artisan, peasant and informal economy, the communal agrarian, and the Amazonian—were not. Since these dierent civilizations cross-cut dierent indigenous ethnic groups, Bolivia is a “motley” or “disjointed” society (abigarrada) with a ctive liberal democratic state run by whites. It is racist and exclusionary. In the – uprisings, “[that] the social leaders are indigenous and [the] new Lefts are now led by Indians certainly tells of a cataclysm in the symbolic structures of a profoundly racialized society with respect to its forms of mentally signifying and ordering the world.”ìú e legitimacy of the monoracial state as well as its administrative structures and ruling coalitions were brought into question. e result is what García Linera (after Marx) calls a revolutionary epoch, which was nally resolved by the election of Evo Morales and Álvaro García Linera as president and vice president of Bolivia in , positions they still hold. e Comuna group chronicled and analyzed these changes and proposed a decolonized and decentralized state to defuse the state crisis. Among García Linera’s closest colleagues in Comuna, Raúl Prada joined the new MAS administration while Luis Tapia remained independent. Eventually both Prada and Tapia broke with García Linera and the eective end of the Comuna group was marked by a bitter public exchange between a group of critics, including Prada and the vice president, in . ìû Nevertheless, García Linera and Comuna had not only emerged as the principal interpreters of Bolivia’s late twentieth- and early twenty-rst-century history; they had played a role in changing it. ey had also broken denitively with the Stalinist and Trotskyist formulations that had dominated the thought of the Bolivian left since the s. In the interviews that follow, the late Antonio Peredo and César Navarro, both former members of the Communist Youth League and then leaders of MAS legislative delegations, represent the communist tradition. Both Prada and Tapia of Comuna were interviewed for this book but only the interview with Prada is presented, in abridged form. e Tapia interview, however, is discussed in the conclusions. 254 CHAPTER 7

ANTONIO PEREDO: ANDEAN COSMOVISION AND CHE GUEVARA

Antonio Peredo was born in Trinidad, Beni, in . He was politically active from an early age, joining the Young Communists in at age fourteen. He was an active journalist, radio commentator, and columnist throughout his life. In , together with Jesuit Priest and follower of liberation theology Luis Espinal, he founded the weekly Aquí. Espinal was assassinated by the military in but Peredo continued writing for the journal throughout his active life. His brothers also died in the revolutionary struggle. Both Guido “Inti” and Roberto “Coco” Peredo fought with Che Guevara in his disastrous campaign. Coco was killed in an ambush. Inti survived but died in a confrontation with the military in La Paz in . After the Communist Party betrayed Guevara, Antonio joined the Guevarist Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN, Army of National Liberation). Antonio Peredo was imprisoned by the military from to and spent long periods in exile in Mexico, Chile, and Nicaragua. Returning to Bolivia with the transition to democracy in , he resumed publishing Aquí and became a leading critic of neoliberalism. He was a supporter of the Aymara and Quechua movements and agreed to become Evo’s vice presidential candidate in and later served as leader of the MAS delegation in the Senate (–). According to his obituary in La Razón, “His ideological, political and symbolic support for the transformations that the country experienced after the year was indisputable.” At the time of his death () he was professor emeritus at the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés in La Paz.ìü

REVOLUTION AND SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION

e people put forward a very clear proposal of what is needed to change the situation: a new hydrocarbons law and a new Constituent Assem- bly to change the laws in the country. Another alternative could have been street clashes and the imposition of a new revolutionary junta that would’ve thrown out the existing legality and established a new legality. is alternative would’ve caused many more casualties than the repression ordered by Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada in October . So the people have been very wise, and have accompanied the process with much clarity. I don’t think there are similar examples of such a massive level of participation in all the consultations and elections that have occurred in Bolivia. INDIANISM AND MARXISM 255

DEMOCRATIC TRANSITION

[A violent transition] has been tried more than once, and it could have happened anytime, couldn’t it, the apparently easier way, violent imposition? Yet, even though the Right now accuses this government of being authoritarian, what it has done is to follow a process of understanding, of seeking consensus with society as a whole. ere is a very clear vision of how processes have been carried out in our country. We have many experiences, all of which are frustrating. Probably the most recent, and the best known, is the national revolution of . It was a violent process, in which the people won after three days of battle. It was never known how many people died. Here in La Paz there were more than one thousand dead. e process radically transformed the social structure, and responsibility for taking forward the process of change was handed to one party. But the change that this party wanted was not the change the people were looking for. ere was something like a betrayal in the eyes of the people. e people considered it a betrayal when seven years later, in , the Central Obrera Boliviana [COB], which had been one of the instruments created by the revolution, breaks with the government and says, “We can’t go along with this government, which is giving itself to the old structures and rebuilding them. We’re not going to follow that road.” In the sixties there were a series of actions, most notably the guerrilla exploits of Commander Che Guevara. at road was not viable either. So we had to nd this other road, which is taking us to a dierent situation, and we acknowledge that one of the points in its favor is that it’s not taking place only in our country, isolated from the rest of the continent, but in a group of countries where the popular movement is demanding a structural change.

DEMOCRATIC AND CULTURAL REVOLUTION

Democratic, in the sense that we aim for this revolutionary change to be eected through permanent consultation and under the people’s supervision. at is democracy. Cultural, in the sense of recognizing that we are a country made up of many cultures, which have to emerge to express the dierent forms of development in this country. In the liberal structure of the previous constitution and of the constitutions 256 CHAPTER 7 of most Latin American countries, the economy privileges two types of actions: public, or state, and private. In Bolivia’s cultures there is a community economy that is not recognized, or was not recognized, by any laws. at economy needs to develop, because it has always been active, even when it’s been underground. Now it is emerging. It’s part of the economic structure of the country, and it’s going to be a factor in the development of the country. Socially, it means the participation of these cultures with their habits, with their customs, in the development of the justice, education, and health sectors, all of which is recognized in the new constitution. Politically, these cultures are going to be properly represented in the three branches. is is the cultural aspect of the revolution we are carrying out.

ECONOMIC MODEL

A fundamental change is the inclusion of the community economy. e recognition of private property is guaranteed by the constitution, because we consider that nationalizing the private economy is not a favorable response for the country. Experience shows that it would hin- der private initiative and make people disregard economic development, which would become the sole responsibility of the state. And we consider that society is responsible for the development of the country. So it’s a substantial change in the fact that the community economy was included alongside the private economy and the state economy. ere are strategic sectors that cannot be left in the hands of the private economy; the rst major struggle against the neoliberal model was the ght against privatization, giving away water management. Water is a good that cannot be privatized; it belongs to the whole of society.

DECOLONIZING THE STATE

e recently created Ministry of Culture has a vice minister for decolonization. What does this mean? One, we have an ideal model that is the European model for politics, social issues, culture, art, even beauty— there are beauty contests. Miss Bolivia—even the name is foreign, isn’t it—is subject to certain measurements. What is a perfect woman? - -. What does that mean? It’s a European model. It has nothing to INDIANISM AND MARXISM 257 do with the way our people are. Latin Americans, people from these lands, are men and women of shorter stature, with black hair, in countries where being blond means being better, more beautiful. To have blue eyes, instead of our gray eyes, is to be prettier. But it’s not just that. What does the theater mean? Latin American culture has dierent perceptions from European culture, and yet for us, Shakespeare, Cervantes are still the parameters, the cultural references. Our own references are nonexistent—we have hidden them; we have driven them under. In politics, we form parties in the same way and style as in Europe, yet it’s not the way in which parties and politics should develop in our countries. And we could go on; there is a need to decolonize every area. But it’s not a technical issue. It’s about decolonizing our mind; our mind is colonized.

IDEOLOGICAL CURRENTS IN MAS

ere are various currents. ere are various ideological currents. Around the ’s, ’, ’, ’, labor organizations began to debate the issue of political representation. ey didn’t feel represented by the parties, neither the right-wing nor the left-wing parties. ey felt that the parties told them, “You know, this is our program. anks to this program, we are going to move forward.” eir choice was between “yes, I’ll go with you” or “no, I will not go with you.” But it was something alien to them. en they thought about it and concluded that the people’s social organizations ought to have their own political instrument. ere were many attempts until this was materialized in the Asamblea por la Soberanía de los Pueblos [ASP], led by Alejo Véliz and Evo Morales. ere was a break, and Evo Morales begins to develop the political instrument for the sovereignty of the people in Chapare. e grassroots organization is not a militant core. It’s the coca growers’ labor organization, and this spreads throughout [the] Chapare. Later, when this reaches the city, us city dwellers will organize ourselves through the municipal districts. So people take part with the idea that there is a need for change, but with dierent ideologies. I think, among others, there are three ideologies in the MAS that are worth highlighting: e Andean-Amazonian perspective, an indigenous perspective that is about coexisting, searching for the integration of nature and human beings and the expression we have adopted: that our goal is to live well, not to live better, but to live 258 CHAPTER 7 well, that is, to reach a point where we don’t keep outdoing ourselves, but to have what we need, just enough, without harming nature. at’s the ideology of the Andean-Amazonian perspective. ere is also liberation theology. Some people in the MAS followed the principles of liberation theology. And there is Guevarist thinking, which also guides us—I am a Guevarist—it guides us in the sense that it’s the people that must govern; the people with all their traits, virtues, and äaws. And we all come together under one program, the program to change this country. at is the meeting point of all these ideologies, and I don’t think the time will come when the MAS will have a single ideology; it will always be the combination of many ideologies.

SYMBOLS OF MAS

[Che Guevara] and Túpac Katari and Zárate Willka; Marcelo Quiroga. Yes, Luis Espinal.

COMBINING COSMOVISION AND CHE

ose who think that the Andean-Amazonian cosmovision is closed forget the fact that in this perspective there was a large world called Abya Yala, that is, we were talking about a continent. ey weren’t people limited to this space but people who thought about the world. e cosmovision also integrates all of humanity’s knowledge. It’s not simply our knowledge versus humanity’s knowledge. People talk about traditional medicine, for example, but the Callahuayas, who are traditional doctors, have studied Western medicine, European medicine. And they have done so in Cuba. And at the same time they are Callahuaya doctors. In other words, it’s not as if each of these things is a closed-o idea. When we mention Che, most people say, “Oh, guerrilla!” at is not the case. Che writes about it: they push us to war because there is no other alternative. If there are any alternatives, we will take those alternatives. And when Che was in Bolivia, there were no other alternatives. Power was contested with force; there was no other way of doing it. But if there are other ways to do it, you take those other ways. It is not about going to war rst and then deciding what to ght for. No. First we are going to see what we are ghting for, and if that requires war, we will INDIANISM AND MARXISM 259 go to war. But if war is not necessary, why do it? We are not soldiers of fortune; we are revolutionaries.

PEOPLE AND CHE

I thought the same as you [that there was no popular support for Che] and I was worried. In I ran for vice president with Evo Morales. We toured [the] Chapare. And when we started in Bulo Bulo, in Chapare, on the border with Santa Cruz, I asked myself the same question: “If I speak to them about Che, how are they going to react? No, I don’t think peasants are going to be interested in hearing about Che.” And they started to ask me to speak about him. roughout the whole campaign, Che was the subject of my speeches. And people expected me to talk about Che, and people in rural areas wanted to learn more about him. It was dierent in the cities. And when peasant deputies and senators had business cards made, they featured the Virgin of Copacabana and Che Guevara.

GOVERNMENT AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

It’s a relationship built on personal contact: rst, of the president with social organizations and second of the ministers—Evo is constantly demanding that they have contact with social sectors. Like every hyperactive person, Evo starts his day at ve in the morning and usually nishes at two in the morning. He uses all that time to meet with social organizations. Initially he thought that everybody else should do the same, so he organized cabinet meetings at ve in the morning. He realized that it didn’t work. People in the city are dierent, they can’t do anything at that time; they can’t reason at that time. Now he knows a city man is awake at nine in the morning; he is not the same as a man from the country. So he uses those hours to meet with peasant organizations, mainly. He talks about the relevant issues with each of the social organizations. We have been discussing a new pension law with the social organizations for the past two years. It has not been passed yet because some points still need to be addressed with the social organizations. is morning I have a meeting with the miners’ cooperative to talk about the pension law. So the people in government are always, one 260 CHAPTER 7 way or another, consulting social organizations. is does not mean we are going to do everything they say. ere are criteria, precise guidelines, but we have to discuss with them, sometimes convince them, and other times understand the reasons behind their approach.

CHE’S VISION AND MAS

We live in a world, Latin America, where to live well means, humbly, to have basic services. If you read Che’s speeches from the conference he gave in Punta del Este [August , ] or at the UN Assembly [December , ], you will nd that he puts this very clearly. It is what we need, nothing more. How can we achieve this? Very simply: Buy what we produce at a fair price. Sell us what you produce at a fair price. at is what we ask the whole world. It’s certainly diß- cult, because it means sharing. And a society based on waste, like rich societies, cannot accept that there are fair prices. I still meet Europe- ans who think we put on a suit to go to Europe, that here we wear loincloths and feathers, and who think that in Latin America we still carry out human sacrices, not considering that in Yugoslavia there were human sacrices considerably more barbaric than anything that could have been imagined in Latin America. But understanding who we are will go side by side with understanding who the people that live in rich countries are. at is Che’s thinking, and the thinking of liberation theology, and the thinking of the Andean cosmovision. Per- haps later there will be dierences. But at the moment we are ghting for people’s basic welfare, for peasants in our country to have access to drinking water, electricity, sewer services, housing, education, and healthcare. We ask for nothing more. When people take to the streets to ght in our countries, they ght because they lack water. When people go out to ght in Europe, they ght because they lack butter. Butter is still not part of our welfare system.

CONCLUDING EXCHANGE

JP: is conversation was very valuable. AP: Very kind. It is important, because these are the conversations that help rich countries begin to understand our people. INDIANISM AND MARXISM 261

CÉSAR NAVARRO: “ANDEAN COSMOVISION AND MARXISM”

César Navarro was born in Potosí on July , . Like Antonio Peredo, he joined the Communist Party at an early age (fteen) but left the party at twenty- ve and later joined the Partido Socialista (PS, Socialist Party) and nally MAS in at age thirty- ve. He was a student leader in both secondary school and law school and, after graduation, became vice president of the Asamblea Permanente de Derechos Humanos de Potosí (Permanent Assembly of Human Rights of Potosí) and was also city councilor for Potosí. In he was elected MAS deputy from Potosí and then elected chief of the MAS delegation in the Assembly, where he was serving at the time of the interview. In May , at the height of separatist tensions in the East, he was attacked by a mob in Sucre while returning to his district. He survived the attack and later served as vice minister for social movement and civil society (–). In Evo Morales appointed him minister of mining and metallurgy. He is the author of Crímenes de la democracia neoliberal: Movimientos sociales desde la masacre en Villa Tunari a El Alto (La Paz: Fondo Editorial de los Diputados, ), among other works.ìý

THE YEAR 2000

Many thanks for the interview and many thanks for giving us the opportunity to tell our political truth based on our political experiences. I think the gas war of is the culmination and the beginning. It is the culmination of various social struggles that had been going on since , when neoliberalism was imposed through a state of emergency. And while there were various acts of social resistance, the state’s political logic of neoliberalism imposed itself in the end. We resisted, for example, the privatization of lithium in the department of Potosí. In the government of Jaime Paz Zamora wanted to hand over nonmetallic reserves to the Lithium Corporation, and we opposed their privatization. We opposed the privatization of hydrocarbons, but they were privatized. We opposed the privatization of social security, but it was privatized. We opposed the INRA [Instituto Nacional de la Reforma Agraria (National Institute of Agrarian Reform)] law, which legalized mass ownership of land, but the law was passed. e cocalero comrades opposed Law in , but it was passed, signaling the beginning of the massacre of 262 CHAPTER 7 several comrades in May . In other words, at various times there were dierent political and social acts of resistance to neoliberalism, and signaled a conäuence. I think it happened through a political coincidence of three concurrent events with dierent demands. First, in April regantes [traditional water distributors] and users in Cochabamba protested against the privatization of water and basic sanitation. Second, there were the demands of indigenous comrades from the Altiplano with Felipe Quispe in Achacachi, and nally there was also the strike of our police comrades.

POLITICAL CYCLES

I think that through the years our political struggle has been marked by political cycles, and those political cycles are a very signicant form of political accumulation. For example, marks the ve- hundred-year political cycle of resistance against the Spanish invasion. e ’s and the ’s are the struggle against North American neoliberalism. So I think that each decade, and what we lived through in , is the result of political accumulation at dierent times, in dierent territories, with dierent leaders. One can see that in there is a combination of the urban and rural modes of organization for political struggle, but salaried workers’ unions do not play a role. Resistance against the military dictatorship, against state capitalism, against North American imperialism, was based on the salaried workers union. Salary was the identity. ere was a union organizational model. Today there is still a union organizational model, but identity is territorial and cultural. at is the dierence with this union organizational model. So I think is the result of several decades of struggle and several decades of scattered struggles. In my case, for example, we resisted neoliberalism as university students; we were arrested, persecuted everywhere, and often that struggle ended there, and after they graduated, our comrades went over to the other side. It would seem, then, that we felt politically frustrated, or that we were romantics from a failed generation. But I think is a political result of that great social and political struggle of so many years. And I think that is what we experienced in . INDIANISM AND MARXISM 263

LIVING WELL `SUMA QAMAÑA@

Professor, the president, before he became the president, as a leader, and based on his daily experiences, dened himself as anti-imperialist. But the struggles of the peasant movements are also the struggle against external and internal colonialism. at is why anticolonialism is a central element, and we have resisted neoliberalism. erefore, the three central elements of our struggle are anti-imperialism, anticolonialism, and antineoliberalism. ey are reäected in the new Constitución Política del Estado and in the new organizational structure of the Bolivian state. I remember when we began to discuss the government plan, in August , around the corner at Hotel Torino; when we announced that Álvaro was going to be our vice presidential candidate, one of our comrades, comrade David Choquehuanca, said, “Our goal is to live well,” he said, “to live well.” I remember another comrade from Cochabamba said to him, “No, the goal is to live better.” And David Choquehuanca stood up and said, “If we live better, others live worse. To live well means that we can all have what we need to live.” en it’s about balance, harmony. So it’s also like the maxim of socialism. To live well is, in a philosophical sense, for some not to have more while others have nothing, to achieve a balance. at does not mean stripping the wealthy from their riches and distributing them among the poor. We are not about Robin Hood politics. e goal of , our philosophy, is to live well. at is a key central element that we must put into practice.

INTERNAL COLONIALISM

But we cannot ght for better living conditions unless we overcome the internal barriers of internal colonialism. It cannot be that some speak Quechua, others speak Aymara, but their language is merely a lexicon and we are all dependent on Spanish. Or that the legal organizational model is Western, the political organizational model is Western, liberal. Where is our experience? erefore it wasn’t just about ghting against capitalism, against neoliberalism, in the sense of anticolonialism, but about ghting against the internal colonial structures imposed by the Spanish invasion. at is why the cultural revolution aims not only to 264 CHAPTER 7 reclaim our identity but to translate our cultural experience into political organization, the reproduction of society, the economy, the land, and Bolivian state institutions. e cultural revolution is very clearly expressed in Article of our constitution when it says that Bolivia is a plurinational communal state. at is the meaning of the cultural and democratic revolution. Why democratic? Because we consider that democracy is not just about procedure; it is also about participation. Democracy used to be about participation. You are obliged to vote, full stop. And you are obliged to accept whoever is elected president. Nowadays, for us, you are not only obliged to vote, but you have a right to decide who your president is; that is why there is a second round, if a majority is not reached. at is why we have the recall referendum. If I voted for a certain deputy, a certain senator, because I trust him, and two and a half years later I see that he has done nothing, I have a right to tell him to go. So democracy is not just about procedure; it is also about participation. at is why the purpose of the cultural revolution is to break with all the structures of internal colonialism imposed on us by the Spanish invasion and later the various political processes we experienced in , , , , and in . And the democratic revolution is not only about procedure but about the mass participation of Bolivian society.

REVOLUTION AND SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION

e revolution not only has an academic meaning; it has a profound historical and political meaning: to see commander Ernesto Che Gue- vara speak of the revolution here, to listen to his speeches, to see Fidel and understand that the revolution is a way to alter, to overcome, to transform, but also to build. at is why we consider that our current revolution is a very constitutive event. Why? For us is the third constitutive moment in the country’s republican life. e rst constitutive moment is and , when the cry for freedom begins in in Charcas, Sucre, from some pro-Spanish bourgeois people who didn’t want to be under Spain’s rule. ey cry for freedom and after fteen years of struggle throughout the Bolivian territory, the Bolivian republic is founded. But it’s founded essentially under the logic of liberalism, with neocolonial traits. at is the rst constitutive moment in the founda- INDIANISM AND MARXISM 265 tion of the republic. e second constitutive moment, in our view, is the revolution of . Because it breaks up the mining-feudal clique that owned the mines, the land, and not only did they own the renewable and nonrenewable natural resources; they also owned and exercised political power. ey wanted to vote into power whichever president they saw t. And today we are going through a third constitutive moment. We are reclaiming, recovering those rights that achieved constitutional status in ’. Today we are expanding them, we are overcoming the old logic of colonialism imposed on us in –, and we are considering a new kind of state. e kind of state we have today—its legal, political, and ideological superstructure—is completely dierent from it was in . And that third moment is the third historical moment of our republican life. erefore it’s not merely a change in government; the country is experiencing a new era. Evo, in my view, is a continental leader, without precedent in the history of Latin America. Evo is an unprecedented worldwide icon at the moment. So today we are promoting and leading a continent-wide process, and this is the third cycle of our republican life. [Is there a revolution?] Yes, the refounding of the state.

ECONOMIC MODELS

I think each political moment is the antithesis of the previous one. What do I mean by this? Until , three people—Hochschild, Patiño, and Aramayo—owned the large mining centers. en, on October , , mining is nationalized. e major tin barons’ property is conscated and it becomes the property of the state. So there is a social appropriation by the state. But the state doesn’t have a vision of how to invest the surplus from social appropriation. at ends up degenerating, because COMIBOL [Corporación Minera de Bolivia (Mining Corporation of Bolivia)] is still a rm, a rm with no ability to invest in the country. e state lacks vision to reinvest the economic surplus in the country. e year is the antithesis of state capitalism: everything that had been nationalized was privatized and given away. In we cannot repeat what happened in the revolution of ’. at is why when the president returns from Europe, before he is sworn into oßce, he very clearly denes what he wants from nationalization. He says, “We don’t want bosses; we want partners.” ese four words and this phrase absolutely 266 CHAPTER 7 dene the hydrocarbons nationalization policy in the country. at’s why the purpose of nationalization is not to expropriate investment but to control production, control transport, control sales, and increase revenue for the Bolivian state, without reducing private investors’ revenue. With Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, with the hydrocarbons law, out of every one hundred dollars exported, eighty-two dollars remained in private hands and eighteen dollars in the hands of the Bolivian state. How was this distributed? Of the eighteen dollars, eleven dollars went to producing departments, as royalties; one dollar went to Beni and Pando because those departments don’t get royalties; and the remaining six dollars went to the National Treasury, to invest in hydrocarbon elds. It was daylight robbery. en when we arrived in government we changed the relationship and generated a very signicant income. at is why, when Evo says, “We don’t want bosses; we want partners,” he is saying to them, “You are going to earn less than the state. But you are going to make money.” at is the vision. But it’s not just about this. In economic policy was centered on the key role of the market, the market, the market, and in this case the private investor. But neither the market nor the private investor had the vision or the ability to develop our own internal productive potential. I am from the department of Potosí, a mining department. Since the Spanish invasion and the foundation of Potosí in until now, it has always produced mineral concentrates. Sadly, lead and silver ingots are made in Africa and Asia, and what we export is raw materials; we export economic surplus. So our president has set himself the goal of transforming production. is means that in the twenty-rst century, a century behind our neighboring countries, we are about to enter the age of industrialization of natural resources. ere is lithium in Bolivia, in Potosí. ere is iron in El Mutún. e previous government wanted to sell iron, to exploit it for export. Today we transform iron. In the case of lithium, in the ’s they wanted to sell it for export. Today we are going to transform Potosí. And in Potosí, for example, we are also working on a plant to manufacture silver and lead compounds, and building a zinc plant to produce lead, silver, and zinc ingots instead of exporting concentrates and allowing other private investors to take our riches. e goal of a vision based on the exploitation of natural resources is to increase INDIANISM AND MARXISM 267 their domestic value-added, and that is what our constitution says, the transformation of raw materials. We are going to do what the republic didn’t do, what liberalism, state capitalism, and neoliberalism didn’t do, because it is the only way for the state to accumulate wealth and reinvest it. at is a key element. But also, professor, our constitution recognizes four types of economic organization. e rst is the state economy. e second is the social cooperative economy. e third is the private economy, and the fourth is the community economy. We are recognizing what has existed before. We are not inventing anything. And by recognizing what has existed before we are ensuring that the four economic axes become institutional state policies. Neoliberalism does not support the community sector. With neoliberalism, the state economy disappears. With neoliberalism, the cooperative economy survives, but it receives no nancial help. But with neoliberalism we give a lot of money to private investment; the other sectors are over- looked by the state, and there is a single private sector. With us, on the other hand, there is also going to be a private sector, but it is not going to be the only privileged sector; it’s just going to be another sector—that is the dierence.

INDIGENOUS AUTONOMY

And when we say plurinational, community state it’s not just a word, not just a concept; it is a pillar of the constitution. Plurinational means the decolonization of the state. And decolonization means recognition of the land that belongs to the country’s indigenous populations. And we cannot just recognize them symbolically; we must recognize their land but also their mode of government. at is indigenous autonomy. It doesn’t mean taking rights away from people like me, who live in the city. It means for them to exercise their rights in their own land. us, the goal of indigenous autonomy is the reconstitution of indigenous territories but only in rural areas, not in urban areas. is is perhaps a backward step, because we are saying to indigenous peoples, you only live in the country, not in the city. We have to acknowledge that this is a backward step that we agreed to during October last year’s negotiations to adopt the constitution. So the purpose of indigenous autonomy is to reconstitute indigenous territories, be they municipalities or provinces. 268 CHAPTER 7

e way they dene things is through internal consultation, that is, a referendum; the way they elect their authorities reäects their usages and customs. What are our usages and customs? I, César Navarro, a citizen, want to run for president, so I need a political party and people can vote for me. at is the liberal Western logic of the organization of the state and universal society, I would say. On the other hand, according to indigenous usages and customs I don’t need a political party; my ayllu will put me forward. Who will elect me? e popular vote or the cabildo [council]? If it’s the cabildo then I am elected through deliberative, horizontal participation. It’s not whoever has more money to manipulate the apparatus but whoever has greater legitimacy. Liberal usages and customs are written into the Bolivian constitution, whereas the communities’ usages and customs used to be unknown, formally acknowledged but constitutionally unknown. Today they are acknowledged by the constitution. In this indigenous autonomy a mayor or governor will be elected according to ancient usages and customs. at is not violating rights but exercising a valid state policy in practice. Indigenous autonomy is about the reconstitution of its territories, the form of political organization of its government, and the administration of its own resources, but it’s also about another fundamental pillar, which is the administration of justice. at is why I said earlier that the political superstructure used to be the executive and the legislative, full stop. Today it’s the executive, the legislative, but also the autonomies. e political superstructure has been expanded. e legal superstructure was just the ordinary justice system. Today it includes the indigenous-peasant jurisdiction. ere has been an expansion of the justice system. e superstructure has been substantially transformed. Today, thanks to indigenous autonomy, there is an indigenous justice system. It would make no sense to have an indigenous political identity unless we also recognized its judicial mode of organization, under which the administration of justice is the responsibility of the eldest member. ere are no lawyers; it is the eldest. All this is being acknowledged as part of the process of decolonization, which is why the plurinational issue is not merely a concept but is already a constitutional institution reäected in the economic, political, territorial, legal, and cultural realms. INDIANISM AND MARXISM 269

IDEOLOGY

ere are two currents: the Andean cosmovision and Marxism. Some say also liberation theology, but I think what you nd through time is the Andean-Amazonian cosmovision and Marxism. My background is Marxist, communist, and other comrades are left wing but don’t have a Marxist, a nationalist background but rather a reading of our sociocultural and sociopolitical context shaped by our Andean mode of organization. We managed to come together, I think, thanks to Evo. at is why there can be a struggle against neoliberalism, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be against imperialism or colonialism. ere can be a struggle against neoliberalism while racist, colonialist struggles persist. ere can be a struggle against neoliberalism but not against capital. Here we have a combination of the three axes of imperialism, neoliberalism, and neocolonialism, which have been structures of subjugation and domination in Latin America and also in our country. Our ideology is based on that identity, on that Andean-Amazonian cosmovision. at is the meaning of living well, the concept of living well that David was talking about, and that is why, when Evo promulgated the constitution on February this year, in El Alto, he said our goal is communitarian socialism. He is giving a deep meaning to our revolution. We seek communitarian socialism. at means our socialism has our own identity; it’s not the Cuban version, or the Chinese version, or the Vietnamese version, or the Soviet version—it is the Bolivian version. We seek socialism.

COMMUNITARIAN SOCIALISM

I think it’s the meeting of the two [Marxism and Andean cosmovision]. I think it’s a concurrence. Evo talks of complementarity. Because there can be decolonization while there is also capitalism. We can have indigenous structures in a framework of capitalist dominance. We can ght against neocolonialism at the same time as there is neoliberalism. e goal of communitarian socialism is to nd a common historical objective. It’s not the sum of two concepts but their complementarity, their concurrence, a historical encounter. ere cannot be socialism without decolonization. ere cannot be decolonization without abolishing neo- 270 CHAPTER 7 liberalism. erefore community socialism shows a concurrence. at is why Marxism and the Andean cosmovision are two axes that come together under the leadership of Evo, but also that ideological union raises the possibility of a historical strategic project: communitarian socialism.

PARTY SYMBOLISM

Professor, I think the MAS has managed to overcome that old logic of ideological patrimonialism of the ’s and ’s. As an active member of the communist youth, my gures were Marx, Engels, Lenin, full stop. For the Trotskyists, it was comrade Leon Trotsky, full stop. And for the ELN comrades it was Commander Ernesto Che Guevara. Instead of gures, we had patrimonial symbols, and I think that’s been a political mistake of the left and communist parties in Latin America. On the other hand, our leaders today are the leaders who gave birth to the revolution and the struggle for freedom in Bolivia: Túpac Katari, Túpac Amaru, Bartolina Sisa. ey are not just names; they are examples of key moments in our struggle against the Spanish invasion. Marcelo Quiroga Santa Cruz is not just a name but the expression of a generation: in the ’s in favor of a second nationalization, in the ’s against the military dictatorship, and in the ’s of the struggle for democracy. Che is the image that symbolizes organized armed struggle against North American imperialism. Father Luis Espinal looked deeply at us. He is a Jesuit father who came from Spain and was murdered by the military dictatorship of García Meza. And he said in his poems and in his prayers, “Perhaps the poor nd in communism what you always predicated, the hunger and thirst for justice.” Nowadays, Luis Espinal, Marcelo Quiroga, Ernesto Che Guevara, Bartolina Sisa, Túpac Katari, Túpac Amaru are our symbols, because they reäect our country’s struggle for freedom. Today we cannot say Che belongs to the MAS. He belongs to every man and woman ghting for freedom. We don’t claim ownership; we assume an ideal. ere are several comrades who reäect our ideal of the revolutionary struggle for freedom. e wiphala is a symbol of resistance to the Spanish invasion. But nowadays it is a symbol of our national identity. It’s not about discrimination. e wiphala doesn’t replace the Bolivian äag. e Bolivian äag, with its three colors, represents every Bolivian. But the wiphala also has its own cultural and territorial mode of representation. INDIANISM AND MARXISM 271

DEMOCRACY

Representative democracy is no use. It is insußcient. Very insußcient, because I think we not only have the obligation to choose; we have the right to participate. And that’s why democracy has been transformed in the country. Today we have representative democracy, but we also have participatory and community democracy. And I think the three are very complementary. Representative democracy means that people elect their representatives through popular vote. It means society is a user, not the subject. Every four, ve years, it has to elect its president or its mayor, and then forget about it. No, we say no. Representative democracy is no use. It is insußcient. It has to be expanded, improved. Today, we also say participatory democracy. at means referendum. It means Constituent Assembly. So if as a government tomorrow we want to, say, privatize the hydrocarbons industry and the people are against it, there will be a major national consultation. at means participatory democracy. But also, if we choose our authorities and they begin to lose touch with the people, the people will say, “I voted for this person, for this authority, and they let me down; I want them to go, and I will also use my vote to remove them.” Recall referendum. We also included community democracy, which doesn’t mean one day all ten million Bolivians will sit together in a stadium to deliberate—we would never t in! Rather, community democracy means recognizing the various deliberative arenas, cabildos, general meetings, and assemblies that can take place in the country and the city, recognizing them as deliberative arenas where things can be proposed. en the proposals of a neighborhood council can be taken on board by the municipal government in a democratic setting such as the cabildos, the general meetings. In other words, the dierent forms of democratic participation must be absolutely recognized. A community or deliberative democracy is not going to refuse to recognize the authorities elected through representative democracy. It would be political chaos. A general meeting, a cabildo, is not going to say, “I don’t like this mayor” or “ is deputy has to go.” A deputy who was elected through representative democracy will leave according to the same rules. So nowadays we are transforming or substantially modifying the political meaning of democracy. As I said to you earlier, democracy cannot be just about procedure—I participate according to the rules—but it also has to be about social, active participation. us democracy is transformed, because it acquires a totally dierent political meaning. 272 CHAPTER 7

THE PARTY AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

It’s very dißcult, professor, because it’s not a classic revolution, and the MAS is not a classic party. We don’t have what Lenin talked about, and then the communist parties made their central committee, their political bureau. at bureaucratic form of politics collapsed. It’s a form of politics that has prevailed in many liberal parties. is is sui generis and not a classical revolution, because the MAS party was founded by decision of the social movements. We are going to have our own political instrument. en in ’ the social movements dene a strategy: the current social and political, electoral and political strategy. e social and political strategy is about social struggle, mobilization, organized clashes with the state. And that means marches from La Paz, from Cochabamba to La Paz, et cetera. And the electoral political ght is about taking part in municipal or national elections, which in the short term generates an amazing, unprecedented encounter. Because they say, “Our mayoral candidate is going to be our leader; he’s being elected at a cabildo, or a general meeting in Cochabamba.” And everyone votes for him. And the political parties that were presenting their candidates in ’, in ’, lose. e rst example of participative and community democracy I was telling you about a while ago is when they nominate a candidate and use representative democracy to legally help their candidate rise to power. And there are councilors and mayors in ’ and deputies in ’, and councilors and mayors in ’. at is, in four years an interesting political practice begins to develop in the country. But the political instrument of the MAS was dependent on the union. I was the rst secretary of the communist youth of Bolivia, in Potosí. And the student youth organizations depended on the party. e party was the ruler, the boss. Nowadays, the party is dependent on the union boss. e union is the CONALCAM, which is led by a colonizer leader, comrade Fidel Surco [see chapter ]. e CONALCAM brings together various social and productive organizations, such as cooperatives. ey don’t necessarily have to belong to the MAS; they just have to politically share the social struggle of the revolutionary people. So when we talk of government, party, social organizations, I would say that, at the moment, the social base of the government are social organizations. e greatest political triumph for the social organizations was the pass- INDIANISM AND MARXISM 273

ing of the law that called for a referendum to adopt the constitution. Never in the democratic history of the country had there been such a mobilization, with almost half a million people marching for ten days, headed by the president, to force us congress members to pass the law. is had no precedent in history, none at all, and it shows with great political clarity that social movements have taken over and are leading this revolutionary process. erefore there is a relationship between the government, the social movements, and the political instrument. Yesterday comrade Andrés Vilca, president of the Federación Nacional de Cooperativas Mineras de Bolivia [National Federation of Mining Cooperatives of Bolivia], was made senator. How is he going to become a senator? rough the elections. For which party? For the MAS, which is the political instrument. at is why this is a particular revolution. e party doesn’t rule; the party is ruled. at is what Evo says, paraphrasing Che [Subcomandante Marcos], “We are going to rule by obeying.” at is a central element. Two days ago we met with the president at the palace, for four hours: deputies, senators, and him. ree weeks ago the cabinet and several deputies met with the president at Huajchilla to talk about government policy for four, no, eight hours. e president meets with the social movements and then the MAS. So the president meets with political, social, and legislative sectors, with what aim? Not only to maintain the horizontal relationship but because Evo receives feedback from members of parliament, social leaders and political leaders, and this allows Evo to have a complete picture of the political reality. at contributes to Evo’s strength and greatness as a leader.

RAÚL PRADA: MARXISM AND COMUNA

Raúl Prada is a prolic author, a demographer, and a lecturer-researcher at UMSA in La Paz. In a colleague described to me his and Luis Tapia’s relationship to Álvaro García Linera in Comuna as “like this,” squeezing his thumb and forengers tightly together. He played a leading role in the Constituent Assembly (–) that drafted the new constitution ratied in . He also served brieäy (February to September ) as vice minister of strategic planning in the rst administration of Evo Morales. He has been advisor to the Bolivian indigenous organizations’ Consejo Nacional de 274 CHAPTER 7

Ayllus y Markas del Qullasuyu (CONAMAQ) and Confederación Indígena del Oriente Boliviano (CIDOB). He was an enthusiastic supporter of MAS and the “process of change” at the time of the interviews (), but after his resignation as vice minister he became a bitter critic of Evo Morales and, eventually, broke with the Comuna group. In June he signed a manifesto demanding “ e Recuperation of the Process of Change for the People and with the People,” which drew a bitter book-length response from Álvaro García Linera, who accused him and the other signatories of being “infantile rightists.”ìÿ

REVOLUTION AND SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION

Well, in some ways I agree with [Pierre] Bourdieu’s idea that the para- digms of the revolution emerged roughly in the nineteenth or twentieth century, and they concern a solution with certain insurrectional and revolutionary traits. I think the paradigm of the revolution belongs fundamentally to the twentieth century—that is when the great attempts to radically transform society take place. But it seems that in the twenty- rst century we entered a new condition that alters the nature of social transformations. I think what takes place in the twenty-rst century in a rather complex way is globalization, dierentiation, the eruption of dierence, interculturality, the erosion of revolutionary processes once they are in government. Because the main issue, the main problem in Bolivia, in America, I would say, in the whole continent, in Mexico, Guatemala, Peru, Ecua- dor, Bolivia, and also other countries, is the indigenous question. ese countries have not been able to decolonize; meanwhile they didn’t solve the indigenous question, and their democracies were theatrical, symbolic. ey were not real democracies, because they were not solving the main problem, which was the indigenous problem. Now, however, the indigenous question has been raised as a fundamental issue. So it’s a deep change. I would say it’s a decolonizing change, which aims at developing a dierent kind of institution, incorporating indigenous institutions to the state form. ese are deep changes with very strong cultural, political-cultural projects. Yes, they are deep changes, but deep changes are happening dierently. INDIANISM AND MARXISM 275

INDIGENOUS AUTONOMIES

In the part of the constitution concerning the territorial organization of the state, you see the indigenous autonomies. I think the form in which we have resolved the plurinational question is the indigenous autonomy. I think that it could be a revolutionary change. at is why I say it could be radical. It could be radical if we give full validity, full consequence, total freedom to the indigenous autonomy to allow it to turn administrative-political decentralization into true indigenous self- management and self-government. And that would also imply review- ing the state itself. at is, the organization of the state cannot remain the same—not only because there is a central level and decentralized levels but also because the state form, as you said, is now a dierent idea. Really, it is a state form that needs to move forward toward institutional pluralism. Yes, how to incorporate indigenous organizations, indigenous institutions, to the state form: that is the issue, not only as an indigenous autonomy but at the central level. How do we organize ourselves? How do we incorporate the indigenous into the organization of the state at the central level? I think there is a challenge there, precisely to leave behind the liberal legacy of the state. So I think we are facing very serious challenges. I think whether they are radical depends on practices. I think the struggle is not over. I mean, I think the constitution has to be understood as a living constitution. And the living constitution will depend on the extent to which social movements and indigenous movements stand their ground and manage to materialize and make viable the constitution. It all depends on that.

MARXISM AND COMUNA

I would say I belong to Comuna, which is part of the political instrument, and some of the members of Comuna are Álvaro García, vice president; myself; Luis Tapia; Raquel Gutiérrez; Oscar Vega; also Karina Monasterios; and there are several groups. Most members of Comuna have declared themselves Marxist. Critical Marxism, yes. From contemporary Marxist currents they have taken on their criticism of the old Marxist and economistic schools. I think our main discussion has 276 CHAPTER 7 been with economistic Marxism, and perhaps with a Marxism that is very much based on a tremendously linear notion of the modes of production. So I think it has been a critical Marxism, a critique of Marxism, but also I think it is a Marxism that, from the outset, faces the challenge of the indigenous question. Perhaps the most signicant precursor was Mariátegui, who tackles the indigenous question as a key issue in the interpretation of Marxism. I think what happens in Mexico at the end of the twentieth century is very important. Because, what happens with the group that goes to Chi- apas, to the Lacandón jungle? It was a guerrilla group from Monterrey, in the north of Mexico, who saw themselves losing and came down; one went to Guerrero and another went to the Lacondón jungle. But in the Lacandón jungle, when they came into contact with the indigenous authorities, they criticized Marxism from the perspective of Indianism, from the Mayan viewpoint. And they understood the indigenous issue from the perspective of Marxism; they do not renounce Marxism. I think something similar happens with Comuna, with Álvaro, Raquel Gutiérrez. We take on the indigenous issue as a key issue, but we con- ceive our critique of capitalism from the perspective of Marxism. We cannot separate the two. at is the dierence with culturalist positions. ere are culturalist positions, which are not Marxist, that take the indigenous position but from a culturalist perspective. ey tackle the indigenous question independently from capitalism; they do not criticize capitalism. And we believe that a critique of capitalism is essential. Without it, we would not be able to propose a transformation, and decolonization, and the liberation of indigenous people. It is essential to understand capitalism, and even colonialism in terms of capitalism, of the cycles of capitalism. Conquest is not only a problem of territorial conquest, but the problem of conquest was fundamentally an expansion of Genovese capitalism. So you cannot understand the indigenous question without a critique of capitalism. And the critique of capitalism is Marxist. So we consider ourselves Marxist. Why? Because we believe the fundamental critique of colonialism, of modernity, of the modes of development, of inequality, of the multiple forms of exploitation, etcetera is a struggle against capitalism. Now, within that struggle, it was necessary to understand INDIANISM AND MARXISM 277 the historical nuances, and sadly traditional Marxism never saw the indigenous issue as a key issue. So that is our critique of Marxism. Tra- ditional left-wing parties didn’t understand the indigenous issue, except for Mariátegui and perhaps Tristán Marof, who brings up the issue of indigenous land when he talks about land reform before . ere were very interesting signs that pointed to an understanding of the indigenous question, but traditional Marxism never quite understood it. It remained stuck in a “workerist” vision and never understood the indigenous question. So I think that is the great sin of traditional Marxism, which was very closely linked to leftist parties, and that now, after the experience of the socialist states of Eastern Europe, Marxism has opened up to a much richer understanding, acknowledging that the socialism we have experienced so far was also an extension of capitalism. ey hadn’t quite broken with the value form, and they haven’t quite broken with capitalism’s ways of making a prot. I think with the experience of the socialist states of Eastern Europe, Marxism was strengthened. at Marxism goes beyond that socialism. at Marxism is aiming at a kind of communism but understood as a movement based on reality, not a utopia. So most members of the Comuna consider themselves Marxist.

CHE

But they don’t like this statue of Che [in El Alto], because they want a statue of Túpac Katari instead of Che Guevara, and how do you solve this contradiction? Which is more important? What is the symbolism of MAS? Or are all of the above symbols of MAS? Well, the thing is that MAS is very complex. ere are many currents. In El Alto, Félix [Patzi] and Pablo [Mamani], mainly, have a more Indianist position, and the neighborhood association of El Alto is more inäuenced by Indian- ist positions, and obviously there is a tendency to think that a Túpac Katari monument should be there instead of Che. Where is the Che vision stronger? Where are there more Guevarists? In the Chapare. Yes, of course, in the Chapare. Really, the cocaleros. Really there is a sense of respect for Che Guevara. People from Chapare come from a strong mining tradition; that is, many of the unions of Chapare were miners’ unions before the relocation. When the relocation took place in , 278 CHAPTER 7 many miners went to Chapare. So the union of Chapare, really, is based on the miners’ union, and miners were traditionally closer to traditional leftist parties, and in the Chapare there are Guevarist groups, and Gue- varist groups are from Chapare and they are made up of young people, especially in Santa Cruz, for example. But MAS does its own thing. Really, MAS has several symbols. It has Túpac Katari, it has coca, it has the wiphala, it has the Pachamama, the chakana—the Andean cross—but it also has Che Guevara. So there are several currents; it’s part of the discussion within MAS. I think it’s also part of the diversity of sources and currents within MAS. But obviously there has been a tendency, from to the present, to have a portion that is more markedly Indianist. However, there are still issues that have not been resolved by the dierent organizations of the MAS, that is, how to conduct the process.

DECOLONIZATION

I think an important issue that needs to be discussed and is under discussion with the Indianists is the issue of decolonization. Pablo Mamani, Félix Patzi, Roberto Choque himself, and Simón Yampara have dierent views on decolonization. But the issue of what decolonization means is not very clear—not just decolonization but decolonization in the institutional sense, in the political and economic sense. I think these issues have still not been resolved. I think they are expressed in abstract terms. I think they cannot be resolved if we don’t understand, if we don’t link the issue of decolonization with the issue of the struggle against capitalism: decolonization, coloniality, colonialism; the structuring of societies according to social class but ethnied social classes, based on racial discrimination, which is basically the basis of colonialism, has been built on the expansion of capitalism and the way in which capitalism has turned indigenous people into a labor force. So there you have an issue that needs to be discussed, that is unresolved. So I think there are still issues to be resolved. Because it is not about having a general heading, decolonization, and then it doesn’t change things much. What does decolonization mean? As well as speaking Aymara, Quechua, Guaraní, Mojeño, as well as making the languages and cultures oßcial, what does it mean from the point of view of the constitution of institutions and INDIANISM AND MARXISM 279

subjects? I think there are issues that have been raised in theory that we are going to have to raise in practice. e issue of the colony has been raised by [Aníbal] Quijano, in postcolonial studies, in subaltern studies, but still in terms of theory and research. Now that there is a government tasked with decolonizing, these problems become practical problems. ese problems are not solved; they are expressed theoretically. I think we still need to solve those problems.

COMUNITARIAN SOCIALISM

Remarkably, the two former members of the Communist Youth League (Peredo and Navarro) have embraced the then () emerging ideology of “communitarian socialism,” even though they have to shed almost all the elements of both the Stalinist and Trotskyist orthodoxy to do so. Gone is the orthodox ideology, the armed struggle, the socialist command economy, obeisance to Lenin (or Trotsky) and his principles of democratic centralism, the vanguard party and its political ideological work, the primacy of the working class, and even the idea of revolution itself. e rejection of armed struggle is particularly striking in the case of Antonio Peredo, a self-described Guevarist, who has personally experienced his share of the personal violence that characterized the old methods of struggle—two brothers lost to Che Guevara’s failed expedition and a life of exile and imprisonment: “[A violent transition] has been tried more than once, and it could’ve happened anytime, couldn’t it, the apparently easier way, violent imposition?” But in Bolivia “that road was not viable.” For Navarro, the movement led by Evo Morales is the third major revolution (after and ) in Bolivia; it is not about armed struggle but about “mass participation in Bolivian society.” e command economy is as dead as the former Soviet Union that gave birth to it. In fact, both Peredo and Navarro are opposed to a particular from of capitalism—neoliberalism—rather than to capitalism per se. ere is plenty of room for private capitalists; perhaps the state sector will be strengthened a bit, and communal and cooperative forms given more space and public support, but the overthrow of capitalism has been consigned to the dust bin of history. Indeed, for Antonio Peredo, the message of armed revolutionary and heterodox communist Che Guevara amounts to providing water for all, if not yet butter. “We live in a world, Latin America, where to live well means, humbly, to have 280 CHAPTER 7 basic services. If you read Che’s speeches . . . you will nd he puts this very clearly.” “We are not about Robin Hood politics,” says César Navarro, indicating the limited nature of redistribution. Nevertheless, providing basic health care, nutrition, employment, social security, and a more equal income distribution, to say nothing of water, in the context of neoliberal Bolivia is a transformation of no small compass. From to , battles were fought and won by thousands of protestors to bring public water and natural gas to ordinary people. And of course the “democratic and cultural revolution” adds “decolonization” to the basic social democratic demands. In fact, Peredo and Navarro agree on the basic ideological tendencies within MAS-Guevarism—socialism, liberation theology, the Andean-Amazonian perspective—and the symbolic gures revered by the party: Che Guevara, Túpac Katari, Marcelo Quiroga, Luis Espinal. But like all others who commented on the subject for this book, they argue that there is no single MAS ideology or even ideological tendencies within the party. Ex-communists, even Stalinists, there may be but as individuals, not as members of their former party. ere are no literal followers of the ideologies of Lenin, Stalin, or Trotsky among leftists or even Che Guevara among Guevarists. ere is no vanguard party, no central committee, no politbureau, and no work of ideological production. ere is simply Evo Morales and the social organizations tied together by a “hyperactive” leader who meets constantly with all of them beginning, as Peredo observes, with the peasants at : a.m. and not ending until two in the morning. Following the example of Subcomandante Marcos (Rafael Guillén Vicente), according to Navarro, Morales “rule[s] by obeying.” His ministers and subordinates are expected to do likewise, but still this is a system enormously dependent on one man. At the time of the interviews, the party had recently adopted (at the Seventh Party Congress, January –, ) “communitarian socialism” as the party’s guiding principle. is was meant to be a particularly Bolivian style of socialism linked to the communal principles of traditional Andean communities.ï~ For Navarro, this idea had its origins in the fusion of Andean cosmovision (or worldview) and Marxism and indeed for him the idea of living well (suma qamaña in Aymara) and the ideals of socialism converge. Peredo too thinks that MAS (insofar as there is ideological analysis at all) represents a convergence of Amazonian-Andean cosmovision and Marxism. Both are enthusiastic and optimistic about the possibilities for “decolonization” of Bolivia’s centuries-old racially stratied society: for Peredo, in particular, not only the liberation of indigenous peoples but the liberation of Bolivian intellectuals enslaved to the INDIANISM AND MARXISM 281 models of Shakespeare and Cervantes. e former communists have abandoned their old faith in its entirety and embraced the ideas of Amazonian-Andean cosmovision and democratic socialism as their guiding principles. In this respect they are faithful followers of Vice President Álvaro García Linera, who has always dreamed of just such a fusion. His colleagues in the Comuna group could not, in the end, disagree more. e cleavages in their positions and those of Álvaro García Linera and the ex- communists Peredo and Navarro have become evident over time. As has been noted, Prada and Tapia have both broken with MAS and Comuna and become bitter critics of MAS in general and García Linera in particular. With the aid of hindsight, it is easy to see the lines of cleavages forming at the time of the interviews. e cleavage can be simply stated. Peredo and Navarro believe in “decolonization”; Prada and Tapia were doubtful in and are certain today that MAS has no fundamental interest in the project. e late Antonio Peredo, at the time of his death, was still actively working with MAS as vice minister of tourism, marking the points of Guevara’s march through Bolivia. Navarro had risen to cabinet rank as minister of metallurgy and mines. Raúl Prada resigned his post as MAS vice minister of strategic planning the year after the interview () and is one of MAS’s most vehement critics. Luis Tapia never was a member and could not now be more opposed to MAS and its program. e two closest comrades of Álvaro García Linera in Comuna have parted with him nally and denitively. e emerging cleavages, as revealed in the interviews, were based on distinct, although converging, lines of thought. For Prada, it is a question of the distinction between the ringing decolonizing principles annunciated in the constitution and their limited implementation. For Tapia, the MAS commitment to “decolonization” was never more than a “supercial discourse” cynically adopted by a fundamentally class-based party. For both, the “indigenous” question still remains unanswered by MAS in and answered in the negative by . For both, the democratic revolution praised by both Peredo and Navarro is either not a revolution at all (Tapia) or a new kind of twenty-rst-century revolution based on indigenous rights (but only if they are implemented). Otherwise it is not a revolution. In practical terms the treatment of “indigenous autonomies” and indigenous representation in the state are the key issues. Like the leaders of CONAIE in Ecuador, Prada and Tapia demand the autonomy of “nations and peoples” as such, not simply the predominance of an indigenous-based movement in a centralized government. 282 CHAPTER 7

Furthermore, although Prada saw many of the same currents in MAS as did Peredo and Navarro—unionist currents, indigenist currents, socialist currents, old Marxist and old leftist currents, currents like Comuna, with a critical Marxist vision—like others he agreed that “the overall ideological-political conception of MAS hasn’t quite been resolved.” ere is, he said, no “ideological political activism” in the sense Lenin understood it. is is not true of the “critical Marxism” of Comuna, of which he was still a member. Comuna member though he was, Prada’s heart is clearly with the Indianists (whose organizations he advises) rather than the communitarian socialists and former Marxists who dominate the MAS legislative leadership. In he still thought that the details of practical implementation would save the revolution. By he was writing of a revolution betrayed. In his interview, Luis Tapia expands on traditional Marxist class categories to analyze the Bolivian “process of change” and the social base of MAS. But surprisingly he arrives at exactly the same end point as Prada—the indigenous revolution was betrayed. Unlike Prada, Tapia doesn’t have “a very positive opinion about” indigenous autonomies. He has an even lower opinion of eorts to implement Article of the constitution on collective indigenous rights and representation: “ e system of representation—how the parliament is going to be congured—in my view is at least as bad or worse than the previous one. What does it mean if you announce there is going to be a plurinational state but then you opt for a system of majority representation in single member districts?” It means that there will be no guarantees of indigenous representation except for the seven designated seats in the assembly: “ at is not going to aect parliamentary decisions, is it? I would say it’s symbolic.” Still worse, he fears the indigenous autonomies are “going to generate many ghts among indigenous peoples over territorial boundaries.” Along with the other left intellectuals, Tapia views MAS as a “party with limited ideological production. It’s not an ideological party. . . . e cores of ideological production are elsewhere and the MAS brings them together.” e elements include internal colonialism from Katarism, nationalization from the nationalists and socialists, and the mentality of Che Guevara from Guevarist members (e.g., Antonio Peredo), and other ideas from the people who used to belong to the Communist Party or other left-wing organizations (Peredo and Navarro): “Since originally the MAS stems from a union, albeit a peasant union, it takes on all the experience of Bolivian unionism and combines it with elements of the Indianist-Katarist discourse.” But “there are also many Indianist activists who come from another discourse, more centered on reclaiming the INDIANISM AND MARXISM 283 identities and cultures of the peoples.” Tapia agrees with other left intellectuals that none of these tendencies form political factions and that members of other left organizations participate as individuals, not as representatives of their former organizations. He also agrees that MAS is organically committed to democracy externally but that “it looks like there is not much internal democracy,” describing the same sort of whirlwind consultations with Evo Morales as did the other intellectuals. What he calls the “cocalero core” actually runs MAS. But for Tapia, MAS is fundamentally “a class party” with “no strong indigenous identity.” An “invisible world of workers” in the new informal working class, as described by García Linera (quoted directly by Tapia), is a key component of that class base. So are proletarianized agricultural workers in the east. In the relentless class analysis of Tapia, MAS is a workers’ party—their principal opponents are agrarian capitalists in Santa Cruz; agrarian reform and fundamental changes in the economic arrangements are dead because of opposition from the latter. Indigenous autonomy is an attempt to contain the drive for departmental autonomy in the east. Indigenist trends are a supercial discourse of a class-based party with a cocalero core, not a policy position reäecting Andean-Amazonian thought. No revolution occurred because class relations did not change. It is not surprising that Tapia in would argue that the MAS government was “the most anti-indigenous in the history of Bolivia” since he believes this class-based party had no serious interest in the indigenous question from its beginnings.ïì Paradoxically, the optic of Tapia’s keen class-based analysis reveals the MAS failure to address the indigenous question, just as does Prada’s indigenous perspective. For both, the revolution betrayed the indigenous. is may seem like an odd conclusion concerning a political and symbolic revolution that has brought an indigenous party to power with indigenous majorities in parliament and a new indigenous consciousness to the entire society. But Prada and Tapia want more. ey want the same representation for the collective rights of peoples and nations as do leaders of CONAIE. In the Territorio Indígena y Parque Natural Isiboro Sécure (TIPNIS, Isiboro Sécure National Park and Indigenous Territory) protests of , these two conäicting perspectives on the meaning of indigeneity came to open conäict and police repression. Felipe Quispe led both a symbolic and political revolution not only for Aymara independence but for a radical restructuring of the modern nation-state and modern capitalist political economy. Quispe did not want the kind of capitalist protonations that emerged after the fall of capitalism in Eastern Europe. He wanted Qullasuyu. So did his followers such as Eugenio Rojas and, in an 284 CHAPTER 7 earlier epoch, Álvaro García Linera and many Aymara intellectuals, including in this book Pablo Mamani and Eugenia Choque. Katarism-Indianism wanted a symbolic and political revolution. It failed. e coca producers’ core of MAS and its allied union wanted a dierent form of symbolic revolution. But pace Prada and Tapia, they always considered themselves indigenous and oppressed as indigenous—not by whites per se but by the forces of imperialism, neoliberalism, and colonialism. e evidence from their interviews is unambiguous. MAS did build alliances with mining cooperatives and members of the new neoliberal-created invisible working class. But they also constructed alliances with the Aymara heartland, as interviews with Rojas and Patana clearly showed. But as Prada perceptively noted, the Aymara were already a majority in the areas they controlled. All that was needed was a change in consciousness so they would be willing to vote for indigenous candidates instead of white populists, which the Bolivian revolution accomplished. Who would have believed that the ve-hundred-year-old ethno-political order could be turned upside down by forty thousand coca farmers from the Chapare? But the kind of anti-imperialist heterogeneous indigeneity developed under MAS also represents a sharp symbolic break with what had gone before. e plurinational assembly actually is plurinational, even with only a handful of designated indigenous districts. e partidocracy of the ancien régime has completely collapsed, to be replaced by the rst indigenous-led mass party in Bolivian history. e constitution has been rewritten, including, as all the left intellectuals agree, some of the most radical language on indigenous rights seen in the Western Hemisphere. e central symbolic structures of CONAIE leaders and those of MAS are distinct. Suma qamana / sumak kawsay—buen vivir, or living well—is clearly a central notion for the ECUARUNARI leadership. ey discuss it at length and give detailed and informed illustrations from Ecuadorian community life. Except for intellectuals like Navarro, the concept is scarcely mentioned except in passing among MAS leaders. Similarly, the living jungle of the Amazonians in Ecuador has no equivalent in MAS. is is to be expected since the Amazonian groups that could produce such a discourse drifted away from MAS early on and for that reason were not included in this book. Still, there is no doubt that the Ecuadorians are symbolic revolutionaries with an indigenous-peasant base. MAS is an indigenous peasant party in which symbolic revolution is central. ese are dierent kinds of symbolic revolution. e Ecuadorians and the Bolivian theorists of indigeneity want some form of confederation of indigenous INDIANISM AND MARXISM 285 peoples and nations with broad power and territorial authority devolved to them. e Bolivians of MAS want an indigenous political party to take state power and use it on behalf of the poor, indigenous majority. In the context of the twentieth-century Andes, these are both proposals for a radical symbolic break. But they have dierent political possibilities. e indigeneity of the MAS is heterogeneous and open ended. e indigeneity of the Ecuadorians and the dissident Comuna intellectuals is closed and circumscribed by territory and ethnicity. Alliances with a powerful left were both symbolically and practically possible in Bolivia but not in Ecuador, where there was no powerful left and the theoretical commitment to “nations and peoples” had limited outreach. e dierent outcomes of indigenous peasant movements in the two countries are striking. e analysis thus far suggests that the diering constructions of indigeneity may play a role. e strong but heterogeneous indigenous base of MAS and its roots in peasant unionism and the left more generally enable it to ally broadly with millions of Aymara and Quechua voters who are at the same time workers and peasants. MAS has an electoral interest in including those of mixed or ambiguous indigeneity and even those of pure European ancestry as long as they are not aligned with the imperialists. As long as the Ecuadorians stick strictly to the nations and peoples playbook, such broad alliances with those indigenous people who call themselves mestizo and those who do not are more dißcult. CONCLUSION

Twenty-First-Century Revolution

HE SHUAR of Ecuador, according to Rafael Antuni, are a society based on the ellipse, not a rectilinear society like the West. He imagines “a Tgreat park in the shape of a sun.” For Delfín Tenesaca’s Ecuadorian Kichwa mother, hills can be angry and the sun can laugh. Tenesaca argues that such concepts reäect a separate vision of the world, a “cosmovision,” distinct from Western thought. For Eugenio Rojas, the rebellious people of Achacachi, Bolivia, equate this “cosmovision” with “Aymara thinking.” ere is little doubt that most people in these interviews have a symbolic worldview distinct from that of the West. ey are symbolic revolutionaries who demand “change in the categories that order social life and consciousness [and] the metaphysical assumptions on which these categories are based,” as I have argued elsewhere. ey have a utopian vision that would make these categories real social facts even if this vision, as the interviews attest, has not come to pass, their constitutions notwithstanding.

ECUADOR

Both the Ecuadorian and Bolivian leaders were symbolic revolutionaries, but the new worldviews they advocated were not simply returns to the Andean past TWENTY FIRST CENTURY R EVOLUTION 287 but modern reconstructions of that past and its worldview. CONAIE’s core notion of “nation,” for example, is not indigenous at all but was imported from Western Marxism. It developed out of resistance to the modernizers’ attempt to impose a culturally homogeneous Hispanic nation-state on the diverse cultures of Ecuador. Although the concept developed in the Amazon (see chapter ), it became the oßcial doctrine of CONAIE and is repeated again and again in the Ecuadorian interviews. e same dening characteristics are repeated each time: common language, culture, history, territory, administration, and systems of justice. It is an ethnic, not a civic, notion of nation and includes collective rights as well as individual rights. It is clearly distinct from Max Weber’s classic denition of a nation as a community of sentiment that would manifest itself in a state. ose interviewed do not want a separate nation-state with its own military and foreign policy. ey want to join the state, not replace it. ey want national autonomy, not ethnic cleansing; Canada, not Yugoslavia; a plurinational, not an indigenous, state. e notion of interculturality demands respect for each individual indigenous culture but also for the dominant Hispanic version of modernity. ose interviewed want respect for indigenous language, culture, history, justice, and, in some cases, traditional territories. ey want recognition of indigenous justice. Beyond this there was little agreement on the exact state functions to be devolved to the indigenous. More common was an insistence on including indigenous representatives at all levels of the state, from local to national power. Nor do they want to cede their individual rights as citizens of Ecuador. ey do not want to destroy modernity but want to extend it to include collective rights for indigenous peoples. e Amazonian notion of “the living jungle” (kawsak sacha) as dened by the people of Sarayaku—the jungle of beings restores “the energy, life and equilibrium of the original peoples”—also represents a symbolic break. As former Sarayaku leader and CONAIE president Marlon Santi put it, “we are proposing a new alternative currently being developed by the peoples, the resistance, that is called the living jungle. It is a new category of spaces that the indigenous people have named.” Like “nation,” “the living jungle” is a modern concept developed as a tool of resistance against the “extractivism” of Rafael Correa and his modernizing predecessors. It obviously resonates with the contemporary environmentalism of the developed world, which constitutes a large part of the narrative of Ampam Karakras, but it is not identical to it. It also resonates with the Shuar conception of the rain forest, as described by Rafael Antuni, which 288 CONCLUSION is “providing us with oxygen, water, and, nally, life . . . condens[ing] harmony, beauty, and riches.” e concept of “the living jungle” (kawsak sacha) challenges the dualism between the human and the natural; between the spiritual and the material; between the individual and the community in Western modernity. In the Ama- zon beneath the Shuar nation, the Kichwa nation, and the Cofán nation is the living jungle, which unites all these nations in a common way of life and a common cosmology. It provides a common point of resistance not only against the oil companies but against the extractive capitalism of which they are a part. Indigenous people “do not live in the roads,” says Mónica Chuji, however useful they may be for open-pit mining. e prot motive, the stock exchange, and even money itself are outside the living jungle. “Money is like a drug,” says Ampam Karakras. For Antuni, the real riches of Ecuador lie in its “nature, landscapes, cultures . . . many lakes full of crocodiles, of reptiles, an immense diversity that the Ecuadorian state does not value.” Kichwa leaders in the Andes share the view of nation of the Amazonians and dene it in identical terms. Like the Amazonians, they regard the promises of plurinationality in the constitution to be unfullled or even reversed under Rafael Correa. Instead of the living jungle, however, they emphasize communalism and the related concept of sumak kawsay (living well together) in symbolic contrast to Western notions of individualism and materialism. Indeed, Hum- berto Cholango argues explicitly that there exist “two visions, two cultures, two civilizations—one with an occidental vision and another civilization, the indigenous civilization, with a communal vision” (emphasis added). e communal vision emphasizes solidarity, reciprocity, and mutual aid based on a communal economy, a communal state, and community justice. Occidental justice is based on separating the oender from the community through imprisonment; community justice is based on integrating the individual back into the community after suering punishment. ose interviewed in the Andes are well aware of the symbolically radical nature of their communal vision. It would take a “thought transplant” for Rafael Correa to think in communal terms, says Luis Contento. e term sumak kawsay (Kichwa) has come into general use in the indigenous movements in Ecuador and Bolivia (in Aymara, suma qamaña) and is a core notion of the Andean interviews in Ecuador.ì According to the oßcial denition of the Consejo de Desarrollo de las Nacionalidades y Pueblos del Ecuador (CONDENPE), “SK [sumak kawsay] . . . is to live in community, plenty, solidarity, relationships between human beings and nature, human TWENTY FIRST CENTURY R EVOLUTION 289 beings and spirituality.” Similarly, for Delfín Tenesaca, sumak kawsay means “beautiful, lovely, wonderful,” and it happens when “we are equal. You respect me and I respect you.” e CONDENPE denitional statement goes on to say that sumak kawsay is not a romantic notion but denes “profound transformations in our societies, in opposition to the capitalist logic of economic growth and prot accumulation.”ï Humberto Cholango rejects the American dream of a “car, a nice house, a good education, some dollars in the bank,” saying that “for us what is important is life—that a human being has consciousness and lives in harmony, that lives in peace and tranquility.” Both dream of a change in the fundamental categories of social life and consciousness and both recognize the profound transformation required to realize their dreams. e ECUARUNARI leaders invoke the Andean earth goddess, Pachamama, in opposition to the resource-based development model of Rafael Correa, which they decry as “extractivism.” Mama is the Aymara and Quechua word for mother, but pacha is much broader than the English word earth, including the cosmos and time as well as space.ð “What is our practice?” says Delfín Tenesaca. “ e care of the Pachamama.” According to Luis Contento, extractivism threatens “not only the survival of indigenous life; it is life in its broadest extension over the universe.” It “is the certain death of the people, the certain death of generations, and the certain death of nature,” says Tenesaca. e Ecuador- ian constitution grants legal rights to nature in the name of the Pachamama, although all those interviewed consider this clause to be nullied by President Correa’s development policy. e leaders want a symbolic break in which the Pachamama replaces the Western notion of development not only constitutionally but practically. At the heart of classical revolutions, I have argued, is a “rapid and fundamental change in the categories that order social life and consciousness; [and] the metaphysical assumptions on which these categories are based.” ere is little doubt that just such a fundamental change was and is advocated by the leaders of the indigenous movement in Ecuador whether it is expressed as the plurinational, kawsak sacha, sumak kawsay, the Pachamama, or a broader communal vision. As Arturo Escobar argued, they demand a symbolic (ontological) change from the categories of Western modernity to the relational categories of indigenous thought, from the occidental vision to the indigenous vision, as Humberto Cholango puts it. ey could and did, for a few hours on January , , unfold, as did the classical revolutions, through an armed seizure of state power by an (indigenous) vanguard backed by a mass uprising. 290 CONCLUSION

But in the end the Ecuadorian indigenous movement rejected armed struggle and followed the route of mass protest and electoral politics. Not one of the Ecuadorian leaders interviewed for this book advocated armed struggle, and their own life trajectories show their commitment to mass organization, protest, and even electoral politics. Humberto Cholango was one of the most symbolically radical of any of these interviewed and called for a fundamental change to an indigenous communal vision. But he rejected a classical revolution and at the time of the interviews was attempting to build a political coalition with left groups in civil society. e paradox of the Ecuadorian indigenous movement is that it sought the symbolic upending of the liberal democratic order by liberal democratic means. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the Ecuadorian indigenous movement’s political party, Pachakutik, the Kichwa and Aymara word for the cosmos turned upside down. But the Ecuadorian political party Movimiento de Unidad Plurinacional Pachakutik–Nuevo País (MUPP-NP) plays by the rules of liberal democratic modernity and in many respects is a conventional Western political party with an indigenous core. Pachakutik elected oßcials embrace not only the party name but the concept of nation as it is understood by CONAIE. “Plurinational unity” in the party’s oßcial title depends on a radical rethinking of the Western nation-state. ese leaders may dream of pachakutik and a radical reconceptualization of the nation but at the time of the interviews all held elected oßce in a Latin American nation-state that they condemn as uninational, constitutional provisions notwithstanding. In most respects the Pacha- kutik elected oßcials share the Ecuadorian indigenous paradox—revolutionary dreams and democratic politics. ey dier from other indigenous leaders, however, in one important respect. All those who commented on the subject had detailed plans for smallholder- based economic development that would benet both indigenous and nonindigenous farmers. ey closely resemble the development plans of FENO- CIN as expressed by its leader and deputy, Pedro de la Cruz. In the context of contemporary Ecuador, the shift from an export-based colonial economy to a smallholder economy producing for the domestic market would be a radical change. But unlike other themes in the Ecuadorian interviews, it does not call for replacing Western civilization with indigenous civilization in whole or in part. In fact, the economic plans of Pachakutik elected oßcials closely resemble American-style smallholder development aided by the government and focused on the internal market. Further land reform, credit, and technical assistance TWENTY FIRST CENTURY R EVOLUTION 291 for peasant producers are all needed. is relatively moderate platform enables Pachakutik representatives to be elected even in places like Morono Santiago with a small percentage of indigenous people. Despite the cosmic overturning implied by the party’s name, Pachakutik elected oßcials favor both Western democracy and a Western model of economic development. In the context of Ecuador and Latin America in general, the replacement of the colonial model of primary product “extractivism” with smallholder development would be a radical act. Together with concepts of the plurinational and the intercultural, the living jungle, sumak kawsay, and the communal vision, it describes a revolutionary utopia that deconstructs the metaphysical assumptions of Western capitalist modernity. e Ecuadorian leaders imagine a world in which dierent cultures (including Western culture) can interact with solidarity, autonomy, and respect; where people are a spiritual part of nature rather than its conquerors; and in which solidarity, community, and reciprocity, not individual material success, are the standard of a society’s worth. ey dream of a utopia that would apply not only to the indigenous but to us all.

BOLIVIA

It was in Bolivia, however, where the most symbolically radical and politically revolutionary discourse emerged in the “Indianism-Katarism” of Felipe Quispe and the “Aymara intellectuals” associated with him. For them the Revo- lution brought not participation but intensied marginalization and exclusion. As Quispe himself said, “We are like those animals that are in the hills, in the mountains; we do not count.” “In this country,” said Eugenia Choque, “the life of an Indian is not valued; they killed them [in El Alto].” is exclusion is interpreted through the framework of Fausto Reinaga’s inversion of the history of the “two Bolivias.” “Who was Pedro Domingo Murillo?” asks Quispe. “He was the murderer of our ancestors. Who fought Túpac Katari? Murillo saw the quartering of Túpac Katari.” e Western history of Bolivia is rejected along with the worldview of those who wrote it. For Eugenio Rojas, the people of Achacachi are characterized by “the cosmovision—Aymara thinking—for this region.Our language also.” Edgar Patana reäects on the duality of Aymara culture that inäuences the people of El Alto and himself. For Eugenia Choque, the work of the new Aymara university is to raise revolutionary consciousness. For Quispe, the ultimate goal of 292 CONCLUSION his movement is to restore the lost Incan province of Qullasuyu and return to the communal economy of his home village. For Quispe and the other Boliv- ian “Indianists,” the goal is a symbolic revolution that would turn the world upside down and bring about the Indian revolution that Reinaga dreamed of. But unlike the Ecuadorians, Quispe’s idea of revolution was and still is a mass uprising to overthrow the government by force of arms if necessary. He makes clear in his interview that he regarded the protests of – as a stepping stone to his version of Indian revolution. Yet when Black October came and the largely Aymara people were in control of the streets, Quispe oered no plan to assume power and the people surrounded but did not seize (as in Ecuador in ) the presidential palace. Quispe lacked any independent military force or any allies in the military, and in any case the rebellion has passed behind his or anyone else’s control. According to his vice presidential candidate, Antonio Peredo, Evo Morales resisted all calls for a “revolutionary junta” and remained strictly in the democratic path, and the transition in Bolivia occurred by constitutional means. Morales had no plan to restore dictatorship. Quispe lacked any concrete plan for seizing power. It is unlikely that a dictatorship by either would have gained support from the people whose protests had created a democratic society to begin with. Despite the iconography of Che Guevara in MAS’s discourse, the party rejected armed struggle and was rmly committed to electoral democracy from its origins in to today. It also retained a strong peasant orientation from its origins in a coca growers union to its takeover of the CSUTCB. Are Evo Morales and his party then simply “peasantists,” as Eugenia Choque contends? e interviews indicate that this is only partly true. e coca leaf became a much broader symbol of indigeneity, anti-imperialism, and national sovereignty. e “satanization” of the coca leaf and the lawless violence of the U.S.-backed eradication campaign induced a strong sense of indigeneity based on the “sacred leaf ” that attracted the support of a much wider group of indigenous Bolivians, including those who chewed but did not produce coca themselves. is indigeneity diered markedly from that of the Ecuadorians based on the recognition of individual “nations.” It was a heterogeneous and inclusive identity that dened the indigenous people in opposition to the United States and its Bolivian allies. e coca leaf then became a unifying national symbol in a way that the Shuar or the Aymara nation could never be. e constitution reversed the valence of coca in the Western pharma- copeia and made it a national patrimony, not a national addiction. Its growers TWENTY FIRST CENTURY R EVOLUTION 293 became patriots, not stigmatized drug dealers. e close symbolic association of the coca leaf with indigeneity and indigeneity with the Bolivian nation created a new denition, a “plurinational state” in the sense that the original inhabitants were specically included. e plurinational was broad enough to include “cambas” like Isaac Avalos or even Euro-Bolivians like Antonio Peredo. e antination, as René Zavaleta called it in an earlier period, consisted then of the American imperialists and their Bolivian allies. e sacred leaf then had enormous symbolic power, overturning imperial thought and imperial power. So did the popular images of Che Guevara and Túpac Katari that interacted to produce revolutionary anti-imperialism (symbolized by Guevara) and indigenous rebellion (symbolized by Katari). As we know, Evo Morales considered himself a “son of Che.” Fidel Surco considered himself Guevara’s brother. Isaac Avalos continually reminded himself that Guevara was “present.” Antonio Peredo’s brothers fought with Guevara. e Katarist-Indianist movement had brought Túpac Katari to national consciousness as early as the s. A popular campaign poster in showed a picture of Evo Morales superimposed on one of Katari with the caption, “Túpac Katari, the Rebellion. Evo Morales, the Revolution.” Together they symbolized an indigenous–anti-imperialist revolution. Coca, Guevara, and Katari were central to MAS iconography. Together they made the symbolic revolution. Communitarian socialism combined all these elements into a single utopian vision. MAS dreamed of a new Bolivian nation in which all thirty-six indigenous groups, as well as the Afro-Bolivians and the Hispanic Bolivians, would live together in “interculturality” and mutual respect. e symbol of this new intercultural nation, improbably, became the coca leaf. e new vision, symbolized by Guevara, would throw out the American imperialists and their Bolivian allies on behalf of the poor and indigenous majority. For the rst time the indigenous would rule and their history—from Atahualpa, to Túpac Katari, to Evo Morales—respected. Communitarian socialism would combine the communal values of the traditional Andean communities with the common-sense socialism of the left and, ultimately, Marxism.

WHY BOLIVIA AND NOT ECUADOR?

Why did the Bolivian Revolution have greater success? As was noted in the introduction, the demographic and structural obstacles facing the Ecuadorians 294 CONCLUSION were substantial, but the analysis of interviews from both countries reveals another important and perhaps decisive factor—the dierent kinds of indigeneity advocated by the two movements. Indigeneity in Bolivia began as a homogenous and exclusive from of Aymara nationalism. But the ultimately successful cocalero movement was heterogeneous and inclusive. It was so broad, in fact, that it united all but the American imperialists and their Bolivian allies. It brought in almost the entire left indigenous and nonindigenous, as the interviews in chapter clearly show. In Ecuador CONAIE’s theory of nations and peoples divided the country into homogenous indigenous cultures opposed to the Hispanic state. Once Correa co-opted the more inclusive leftist message of the early indigenous protests, they were left isolated. Both indigenism and socialism inäuenced the rebels in both countries, but the balance between them was dierent. As we have seen, the concept of the indigenous nation was the focal point of Ecuadorian activism although the Pachakutik party drew on a popular socialism and early communist organizing as well. In Bolivia this popular and historical socialism was vastly stronger and was incorporated explicitly into the oßcial ideology of “communitarian socialism.” Evo Morales’s principal advisors, Filemón Escobar and Álvaro García Linera, but not Morales himself, were both heretical Marxists. Morales had come up through the socialist-inäuenced and vastly powerful labor union movement. Both societies recognized indigenous nationalities and declared themselves “plurinational states,” but the Bolivians’ socialist tradition enabled them to appeal to poor Bolivians who did not think of themselves as indigenous and to Bolivia’s powerful left parties vastly expanding their electoral reach. Especially after Rafael Correa co-opted the left-socialist part of their message, the Ecuadorians increasingly became a lobbying movement in favor of indigenous nations, limiting their electoral outreach. ese dierences do much to explain the greater success of the Bolivians.

INDIGENISM AND SOCIAL DEMOCRACY

In both Bolivia and Ecuador, the symbolic revolution was carried out by mass demonstrations and elections. Proponents of armed struggle, Antonio Vargas in Ecuador and Felipe Quispe in Bolivia, lost out while the greatest success was attained by indigenous-based political parties. Nevertheless, at the level of the fundamental categories of social thought and consciousness, the changes TWENTY FIRST CENTURY R EVOLUTION 295 have been enormous and the collapse of the traditional political system, if not the state itself, was stunning. What was emerging at the turn of the twentieth century in the Andes was a new form of revolution that combined the symbolic radicalism of the classical revolutions with democratic practices emerging in Latin America as a consequence of neoliberal doctrine. In the Andes, political change came through a simultaneous rejection and acceptance of modernity. e indigenous movements were born of the rejection of what Leon Zamosc called the “hypocritical modernity” of the agrarian transformation of and that declared liberal rights to property and person for all except the enormous indigenous populations. For them it meant intensied racism and exclusion at the same time they acquired the political tools and, eventually, the democratic rights to resist. is combination led to the revolutionary journées of the uprising in Ecuador and Black October in Bolivia when the political systems of both countries were on the verge of collapse. Without the symbolic and political radicalism of these days, there would have been no transition to a new political order, democratic or otherwise. ere were calls in both countries for a revolution of the classical sort, but in the end the popular forces stopped just at the edge of power and returned to the methods of liberal modernity to win by democratic elections. e symbolic revolutions in both countries resemble those of other classical revolutions. So do the militant popular mobilizations. Indigeneity as the mobilizing identity of the movements is new at least for Latin America; so is the resolution of the revolutionary crisis through democratic means. So after this long inquiry into the nature of revolution, are these events revolutions? It depends on the denition of revolution. If the reigning twentieth-century denition of revolution is used, they are most certainly not. Only Quispe and his allies thought they were creating such revolutions. Everyone else interviewed rejected the language of revolution and spoke of “social transformation” (in Ecuador) or “process of change” (in Bolivia). In both cases they meant profound changes and not simply reforms. What happened might be best understood as a new twenty-rst-century form of revolution that combines the radical dreams and mass mobilizations of the twentieth-century revolutions with the democratic legality of late twentieth-century Latin America. is new form of social transformation has implications far beyond the region that gave it birth. It suggests that utopian dreams can be compatible with democratic politics—but not without massive resistance to set the democratic changes in motion. 296 CONCLUSION

Delfín Tenesaca, one of the most philosophical of all those interviewed, observed that “the speeches of some indigenous leaders could have transformed, in some respects, the ideological thinking of socialism.” He thinks that indigenous discourse could easily be translated into socialist discourse. It is at this deep symbolic level that the transformations of the indigenous revolutions are greatest. ey have created a new form of democratic socialism that makes issues of ethnicity and culture as central as class transformations. Evo Morales’s “communitarian socialism” makes the symbolic equation explicit, but it is also explicit in the Ecuadorian interviews, especially among leaders of ECUARUNARI such as Tenesaca. Only the Bolivian left intellectuals speak explicitly of Marxism and Indigenism. But the traditions of a more popular, less sectarian socialism are widespread in both Ecuador and Bolivia. It was the genius of the revolutionaries to combine this popular socialism with the millennial experience of indigenous communities to create something entirely new—indigenous socialism. EPILOGUE

On May , , Rafael Correa completed his third successive turn as president of Ecuador and was succeeded by his vice president and democratically elected successor Lenín Moreno. e long-term consequences of this succession remain to be seen, but in the short run, particularly at the discursive level, the changes are substantial. Gone is the insulting, racist, and bitterly resented language used by Correa in his frequent attacks on indigenous leaders. Instead, Moreno opened a dialogue with CONAIE (suspended for eight years under Correa) and declared that the organization was a “fundamental pillar of the New Ecuador.” He granted a one-hundred-year lease to CONAIE’s headquarters in Quito. He moved to restore the intercultural bilingual education program that had been suspended under Correa and granted pardons to seven indigenous leaders charged with “terrorism” for participation in demonstrations. He announced that the former Unión de Naciones Suramericanas (UNASUR, Union of South American Nations) building in Quito would be the site of a new indigenous university. After a meeting with indigenous leaders, Moreno suspended all mining and petroleum concessions until they had satised the condition of prior consultation with indigenous communities.ì On the other hand, CONAIE still complained that there had not been any advance in the economic model, which remained extractive as many of those interviewed had noted in . Indeed, the most ambitious of Correa’s extractive 298 EPILOGUE initiatives, the Coco Codo Sinclair Dam and associated projects, nanced by Chinese loans, is deeply mired in scandal, broken machinery, and accumulating silt, sand, and trees, and it may never achieve its ambitious goal of supplying a third of Ecuador’s electrical output. Ecuador owes ^ billion in Chinese loans and has mortgaged percent of its oil output to repay them. Moreno has inherited this mess and has had to slash social spending to make up for the losses.ï Even if he wanted to, Moreno cannot recover the sunk cost of extractivism. ere is little evidence that he will change the model. On the core issue of extractivism versus the Pachamama and agrarian development, the president and CONAIE are still far apart. Nevertheless, the indigenous revolution had nally earned them a position in Ecuadorian society that they had never held before. Evo Morales is still in oßce after being resoundingly reelected twice in internationally recognized free and fair elections. He will complete his third successive presidential term in January . e October election race has already begun. anks to a Supreme Court decision, Morales will be able to run for an unprecedented fourth term and is very likely to do so. His likely opponent is former center-left president Carlos Mesa, who was forced to resign after the massive protests and yield the presidency to Morales. e Trump administration expressed “deep concern” over the Supreme Court decision, although it has not, as yet, assigned Bolivia to National Security Advisor John Bolton’s “Troika of Tyranny” (Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela). e results of such a classication have recently taken shape in Venezuela. Whether such a fate awaits Bolivia remains to be seen but already the Bolivian opposition has warned of an imminent “Venezuela-Cuban-style” dictatorship if Morales runs.ð Such concerns are even being expressed in more moderate language in the New York Times.ñ Whatever the future holds, it is clear that Morales has established a lasting legacy, including such startling achievements as the highest economic growth rate in Latin America (), the longest period of political stability in Bolivia’s tumultuous history, the highest ratio in the world of nancial reserves to the size of its economy, and (by ) the largest percentage of female legislatures in the world (despite the almost total neglect of the issue among Bolivian male leaders interviewed for this book).ú Spinning overhead is the Túpac Katari telecommunications satellite (supplied by China). In his rst term, Morales moved quickly to settle the gas issue that had ignited the mass mobilizations in the rst place by radically reversing royalties from hydrocarbons from an – split in favor EPILOGUE 299 of the producers (mostly transnationals) to – in favor of the government.û Morales called this “nationalization” even though it was nothing of the kind. Increased hydrocarbons revenues enabled Morales to rapidly expand social welfare expenditures. He moved quickly to establish a cash transfer program contingent on poor Bolivian families keeping their kids in school and placed the social security system on a sound nancial basis with a retirement age that was eventually reduced to fty-eight in recognition of the short life span of many Bolivian workers, especially miners. He introduced a maternity care program for childbirth and later pregnancy contingent on frequent health checkups for mothers.ü Limited nationalizations took place in industries that are often public utilities in other countries such as telecommunications, railways, and electricity. Including hydrocarbons, the state sector increased from percent in to percent in .ý A mixed capitalist economy remained in place with bankers in particular enjoying an especially privileged position.ÿ In many respects Morales’s policies mirrored the extractivism and social welfare spending of Rafael Correa in Ecuador but on a much more ambitious scale. Morales also quickly moved to recognize indigenous nations in Bolivia by holding an assembly to draw up a new constitution that was eventually ratied in . e new constitution declared Bolivia a “plurinational state” and oß- cially recognized all of Bolivia’s thirty-six indigenous societies in its rst article. State employees were required to study indigenous languages, three new indigenous universities were founded, and an oßcial oßce of “decolonization” was established. e new plurinational assembly had more indigenous members ( percent) than ever before in Bolivian (or Latin American) history even though the constitution only reserved seven indigenous seats. A antiracism and antidiscrimination law criminalizes such activities in private businesses and the media. In the same year a new education law was passed, emphasizing instruc- tion in indigenous culture and requiring each student to study an indigenous language (or English).ì~ As Leonilda Zurita noted, indigenous Bolivians are no longer afraid to speak their own languages in the streets. Morales did not, of course, neglect the “sacred leaf ” that had brought him to power in the rst place and enjoyed widespread consumption among indigenous people. He continued to support the so-called cato accord that allowed one cato (, square meters) per producers and limited total hectarage. Violence sub- sided almost immediately.ìì Morales achieved another surprising and signicant victory when Bolivia convinced the United Nations Convention on Narcotic Drugs to reverse a sixty-year-old policy and recognize the traditional use of coca 300 EPILOGUE as nonnarcotic.ìï By Morales’s policies had not only stopped the expansion of coca cultivation but reduced it by percent.ìð Remarkably, there is almost no cocaine (as opposed to coca) use in Bolivia. e long-term results of these policies and a favorable commodity price environment have been striking. e IMF reports that moderate and extreme poverty rates were reduced from and percent to and percent, respec- tively, between and . e Gini index of inequality dropped from . to . in the same period. Bolivia’s gross domestic product (GDP) in terms of per capita purchasing power increased percent in the same period. e IMF accurately describes these changes as “dramatic.” e report notes that “a high proportion of these new resources were allocated to vulnerable jobs concentrated in low-skilled and informal activities.”ìñ Morales’s “communitarian socialism” has clearly and markedly improved the conditions of all Bolivians but the poorest by the most. But his prudent nancial management, enormous nancial reserves, and rapid economic growth have also endeared him to the international nancial community. Morales was even spotted playing soccer with World Bank president Jim Yong Kim despite his frequent denunciations of just that institution.ìú In Morales’s second and third terms, the pace of social reforms slowed but did not end. At the same time, he struggled to fend o defections within his own coalition. An economically sensible plan to reduce subsidies and raise prices for combustibles led to mass uprisings throughout the country and forced Morales to retreat.ìû A proposal to cut a road to Brazil through TIPNIS provoked a violent struggle between ecologists and lowland indigenous on one side and coca producers and the federal government on the other.ìü Nevertheless, Morales and MAS continued to hold widespread popular support. Perhaps the greatest changes, however, were at the symbolic level, as was noted by Edgar Patana, Pablo Mamani, and Eugenia Choque: “If Evo did it, why not me?” Any indigenous child could dream of becoming president. Perhaps this was Morales’s greatest achievement of all. APPENDIX

INTERVIEW SELECTION AND ORGANIZATION

is book began as a study of the MAS party in Bolivia. e goal was to conduct open-ended interviews with leading gures in the party and its constituent social movement organizations. ose interviewed fall into two groups: () thirteen critical intellectuals-—ve independent intellectuals, three intellectuals from the Comuna group centered on Vice President Álvaro García Linera, and ve Aymara intellectuals identied with indigenous rights (and Aymara ethnicity) but not, in most cases, with MAS (Felipe Quispe, the revolutionary Aymara leader, has been included in this group because of his enormous inäu- ence in formulating indigenous discourse); and () twelve MAS legislative and social movement leaders. is population was dened through nominations by a prominent Bolivian social scientist (Eduardo Paz), a prominent Argentine journalist (Pablo Stefanoni), and a French eld worker (Hervé do Alto); by others that I interviewed; and by citations in secondary sources and in the press, particularly an article in La Paz’s leading daily La Razón ( June , ). In that article MAS’s vice chair lists the six leaders “closest to Evo.” All of them were interviewed. I also interviewed the leaders and sometimes past leaders of each of the social movement organizations most closely associated with MAS (the national peasant confederation) CSUTCB; the union of Bolivian colonizers, CSCB; 302 APPENDIX the national women’s peasant organization, FNCB-BS; the cocaleros of the Six Federations of the Tropics of Cochabamba; COR–El Alto; and the leaders of the MAS delegation in the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate. I also interviewed the secretary of international relations of MAS, Evo Morales’s former party treasurer and administrative assistant, and a longtime left and MAS activist (who asked for anonymity) now serving in the diplomatic service. For reasons of length and intellectual coherence, the interviews with the independent intellectuals are not reproduced in this volume. A number of interviews were not included because they duplicated material already selected. Two interviews were not recorded and a few interviews were not included simply because they did not t into the major chapter groupings. In Ecuador the goal of selecting nationally prominent leaders of the leading indigenous party Pachakutik and its constituent organization (CONAIE) was the same but the process was dierent. I asked my student Mandi Bane, who had recently completed an outstanding dissertation based on eldwork in an indigenous community in Ecuador, to propose a list of such leaders, including both contemporary and historical leaders. I then showed this list to a leading Ecuadorianist, Mark Becker, and asked for additions or deletions. He liked Mandi’s list and made one addition. I worked from this amended list. Some on the list were out of the country or were otherwise unavailable. ere were only two refusals but unfortunately they were Blanca Chancoso and Nina Pacari— both very visible national leaders of the indigenous movement and, unusual in the male-dominated indigenous leadership in both Ecuador and Bolivia, both women. eir absence could aect not only the almost complete absence of women’s issues in the Ecuadoran interviews published here but might also inäuence their ideological balance. I wish I could have talked with them. Trained as I was in mid-twentieth-century quantitative social science, I take matters of population denition and selection seriously. I am less comfortable talking about myself and my relationship to the leaders interviewed; not only is this now the fashion but I too now believe that this is indispensable to a complete understanding of what was said and why. At the time of the interviews, I was a white male in my late sixties; '", pounds, with the bearing of the Alpine skier that I was; with thinning, longish gray hair and blue eyes; and neatly dressed in what might be called business casual. I was a professor at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and this fact alone opened many doors. In both countries, but especially in Bolivia, intellectuals are much more highly valued than they are in the United States. As a matter of fact, I look like APPENDIX 303 the image a Trump supporter might have of those “tenured radicals” who have supposedly taken over the country. Harvard educated and of colonial English background, I also appear to be the quintessential Yankee. Almost everyone was glad to talk to me. Most knew exactly what my status was in the global stratication system and one (Luis Macas in Ecuador) had even been a visiting professor at the University of Michigan. ey knew that I would be publishing work based on this research in the United States and looked forward to the opportunity to explain themselves to this audience. Par- ticularly in Ecuador, many of those interviewed held advanced degrees and were multilingual. In Bolivia, Edgar Patana apologized for not speaking English, saying he only knew Quechua and Aymara in addition to the Spanish we were speaking. Particularly in Bolivia, some of the peasant leaders, like Evo Morales, had a grade-school education or less but these were sophisticated men and women of aairs with long experience in union and political life. At the same time, many retained ties to their natal villages despite functioning in a Hispanic environment for most of their adult lives. Most were accustomed to giving interviews to the press and social scientists. eir names are well known by specialists. A bit shy and awkward myself in social situations, I have found interviews in Latin America to be fascinating. e ethnographic question might be: did I enjoy myself too much? I found myself in broad agreement with the views of the leaders and they assumed I was a sympathizer. Since I am a lifetime democratic socialist and a supporter of Bernie Sanders, this convergence was not surprising. Nevertheless, I strived for scholarly objectivity and distance and only asked, but did not answer, questions myself. Rarely did I feel that I was being fed a party line. Most of those interviewed were emotionally and intellectually engaged. I was fascinated by what they had to say and it showed. is might be my greatest talent as an interviewer and served me well when I was interviewing Central American aristocrats with whom I did not agree politically. Race, a concept being undermined by the indigenous leaders themselves, did not seem to be a hindrance (although those interviewed may feel dierently). ose interviewed were asked the following questions, although in practice many issues were discussed at the same time. All the interviews were in Spanish.

. How would you describe the process of social change from [] to the present. Would you say it is a revolution, an insurrection, a reform, a refoundation, or some other sort of change (e.g., pachakutik)? Why? 304 APPENDIX

. Is there a new economic model emerging in Bolivia [Ecuador] after the collapse of neoliberalism? How would you describe this model? What are its key elements? . What are the most important elements in the new constitution in regard to indigenous rights? Will they be [have they been] implemented? . What do you believe to be the most important ideological currents that have inäuenced MAS [CONAIE]? . What symbols or images do you think are most important in the social movements and MAS [CONAIE and Pachakutik]? . Could you explain to me your understanding of the relationship among the party, the government, left intellectuals, and the social movements?

INTERVIEWS

ECUADOR

Alberto Acosta, Quito, August , Rafael Antuni, Quito, June , José María Cabascango, Pijal, July , Humberto Cholango, Quito, July , Mónica Chuji, Quito, July , Luis Contento, Quito, June , Pablo Davalos, Quito, June , Pedro de la Cruz, Quito, July , Miguel Guatemal, Quito, July , Ampam Karakras, Quito, June , Jorge León, Quito, June , Luis Macas, Quito, June , Luis Madonado, Quito, June , Rafael Pandam, Quito, July , Salvador Quishpe, Quito, July , Marlon Santi, Quito, July , Delfín Tenesaca, Quito, August , Lourdes Tibán, Quito, July , APPENDIX 305

Auki Tituaña, Quito, July , Ricardo Ulcuango, Quito, June , Gerónimo Yantalema, Quito, June ,

BOLIVIA

Anonymous MAS militant, La Paz, summer Rafael Archondo, La Paz, summer Isaac Ávalos, La Paz, July, , Eugenia Choque, La Paz, August , Pablo Mamani, El Alto, July , César Navarro, La Paz, July , Edgar Patana, La Paz, summer Félix Patzi, La Paz, July , Eduardo Paz Rada, La Paz, June , Antonio Peredo, La Paz, July , Rául Prada, La Paz, summer Marcelo Quezado Iporre, La Paz, summer José Antonio Quiroga, La Paz, summer Felipe Quispe, La Paz, July , Julia Ramos, La Paz, July , Eugenio Rojas, Achacachi, July , Julio Salazar, Villa Tunari, August , Ximena Soruco, La Paz, June , Pablo Stefanoni, La Paz, summer Fidel Surco, La Paz, August , Luis Tapia, La Paz, July , Oscar Vega, La Paz, summer Lino Vilca, La Paz, summer Leonilda Zurita, La Paz, July ,

NOTES

PROLOGUE

. Amalia Pallares, From Peasant Struggles to Indian Resistance: ¥e Ecuadorian Andes in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, ), x. . Leon Zamosc, “Agrarian Protest and the Indian Movement in the Ecuadorian Highlands,” Latin American Research Review , no. ( ): . . Mandi Bane, “Social Change in the Neoliberal Era: e Indigenous Movement in Saquisili, Ecuador” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, ), . . Zamosc, “Agrarian Protest,” . . Susan Sawyer, Crude Chronicles: Indigenous Politics, Multinational Oil, and Neolib- eralism in Ecuador (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, ), – . . Deborah Yashar, Contesting Citizenship in Latin America: ¥e Rise of Indigenous Movements and the Postliberal Challenge (New York: Cambridge University Press, ), . . Nina Pacari, “Taking on the Neoliberal Agenda,” NACLA Report on the Americas , no. (): . . Pacari, “Neoliberal Agenda,” . . Marc Becker, ¡Pachakutik! Indigenous Movements and Electoral Politics in Ecuador (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littleeld, ), . . Xavier Albó, Movimientos y poder indígena en Bolivia, Ecuador y Perú (La Paz: CIPCA [Centro de Investigación y Promoción del Campesinado], ), – . . Kenneth J. Mijeski and Scott H. Beck, Pachakutik and the Rise of the Ecuadorian Indigenous Movement, Ohio Research in International Studies, Latin American Series, no. (Athens: Ohio University Press, ), . 308 NOTES TO PAGES 713

. Quoted in Albó, Movimientos, . Translations from published sources are mine unless otherwise noted. . Rachel Gutiérrez Aguilar, Levantamiento y movilización en Bolivia (– °) (Mexico City: Sísifo Ediciones, ), – , table . . Félix Patzi, Insurgencia y sumisión: Movimientos sociales e indígenas, nd ed. (La Paz: Ediciones Yachaywasi, ), . Patzi notes that the death penalty was not customary in Aymara traditional law. . Forrest Hylton and Sinclair ompson, Revolutionary Horizons: Past and Present in Bolivian Politics (London: Verso, ), . . Six years after the Gas War, in an interview for this book, Quispe’s positions remained essentially unchanged. e denition of q’ara is from Bruce Mannheim, ¥e Language of the Inka Since the European Invasion (Austin: University of Texas Press, ), ; “uncultured” and “uncivilized” are from the point of view of traditional Andean society. . Luis A. Gómez, El Alto de pie: Una insurrección Aymara in Bolivia (La Paz: Waldo Gutiérrez, ), – . . Hylton and omson, Revolutionary Horizons, . . Gutiérrez Aguilar, Levantamiento, . . e October sequence of events is from Hylton and omson, Revolutionary Hori- zons, – . . Hylton and omson, Revolutionary Horizons, . . ose interviewed in Ecuador had been out of power six years at the time of the interviews (). ose in Bolivia were very much part of an ongoing revolutionary process when they were interviewed in and . In both cases they were asked about their current views.

INTRODUCTION

. José Antonio Lucero, Struggles of Voice: ¥e Politics of Indigenous Representation in the Andes (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, ): constructivism, ; “associational ecologies,” . . Deborah Yashar, Contesting Citizenship in Latin America: ¥e Rise of Indigenous Movements and the Postliberal Challenge (New York: Cambridge University Press, ), – . . Amalia Pallares, From Peasant Struggles to Indian Resistance: ¥e Ecuadorian Andes in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, ), . . Galo Ramón Valarezo, El regreso de los runas: La potencialidad del proyecto indio en el Ecuador contemporáneo (Quito: COMUNIC [Comunidades y Desarrollo en el Ecuador]- Federación Interamericana, ), . . On the Communist Party in Ecuador, see Marc Becker, Indians and Leftists in the Making of Ecuador’s Modern Indigenous Movements (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univer- sity Press, ). . Xavier Albó, “El retorno del Indio,” Revista Andina , no. (): – . NOTES TO PAGES 1320 309

. Ramón Valarezo, El regreso, . . Javier Hurtado, El katarismo (La Paz: Instituto de Historia Social Boliviana [HIS- BOL], ), . . Mandi Bane, “Social Change in the Neoliberal Era: e Indigenous Movement in Saquisili, Ecuador” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, ), . . Pallares, Peasant Struggles, . . Ramón Valarezo, El regreso, . . Bane, “Social Change,” . . Pallares, Peasant Struggles, . . Ramón Valarezo, El regreso, . . Leon Zamosc, “Agrarian Protest and the Indian Movement in the Ecuadorian Highlands,” Latin American Research Review , no. ( ): . . Pallares, Peasant Struggles, – . . Pallares, Peasant Struggles, . . Ramón Valarezo, El regreso, . . Zamosc, “Agrarian Protest,” . . Jorge León, “Las organizaciones indígenas: Igualdad y diferencia: La armación de los conquistados,” in Indios: Una re±exión sobre el levantamiento indígena de ²², ed. Ileana Almeida et al. (Quito: Ediciones Abya Yala, ), . . Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, “Liberal Democracy and Ayllu Democracy in Bolivia: e Case of Northern Potosí,” Journal of Development Studies , no. ( July ): . . Rivera Cusicanqui, “Liberal Democracy,” . . Álvaro García Linera [Qhananchiri], Crítica de la nación y nación crítica naciente (La Paz: Ediciones Ofensiva Roja, ), . . Álvaro García Linera, Forma valor y forma comunidad: Aproximación teórica abstracta a los fundamentos civilizatorios que preceden al ayllu universal (Conchocoro, Bolivia: n.p., ). . Karl Marx, Capital, vol. (New York: Penguin Classics, ), – . . Álvaro García Linera, “Sindicato, multitud y comunidad: Movimientos sociales y formas de autonomía política en Bolivia,” in Tiempos de rebelión, ed. Álvaro García, Raquel Gutiérrez, Raúl Prada, and Luis Tapia (La Paz: Muela del Diablo Editores, ), . . Álvaro García Linera, “Estado plurinacional: Una propuesta democrática y pluralista para la extinción de la exclusión de las naciones indígenas,” in La transfor- mación pluralista del estado, ed. Álvaro García Linera, Luis Tapia Mealla, and Raúl Prada Alcoreza (La Paz: Muela del Diablo Editores, ), . . Álvaro García Linera, “Citizenship and Democracy in Bolivia (–),” in Ple- beian Power: Collective Action and Indigenous, Working- Class and Popular Identities in Bolivia (Leiden: Brill, ), . . For the dening statement of the “Washington Consensus,” see John Williamson, “ e Progress of Policy Reform in Latin America,” in Latin America Adjustment: How Much Has Happened?, ed. John Williamson (Washington, D.C.: Institute 310 NOTES TO PAGES 2130

for International Economics, ), – . For a critical perspective, see David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, ). . Benjamin Kohl and Linda Farthing, Impasse in Bolivia (London: Zed Books, ), –. . Kohl and Farthing, Impasse in Bolivia, . . García Linera, “Sindicato,” – . . Kohl and Farthing, Impasse in Bolivia, . . Kohl and Farthing, Impasse in Bolivia, , . . García Linera, “Sindicato,” . . Zamosc, “Agrarian Protest,” – . . Jeanne A. K. Hey and omas Klak, “From Protectionism Towards Neoliberalism: Ecuador Across Four Administrations (–),” Studies in Comparative Inter- national Development , no. (): – . . Hey and Klak, “From Protectionism Towards Neoliberalism,” . . Deborah Yashar, Contesting Citizenship in Latin America: ¥e Rise of Indigenous Move- ments and the Postliberal Challenge (New York: Cambridge University Press, ). . Zamosc, “Agrarian Protest,” . . Pallares, Peasant Struggles, . . Pallares, Peasant Struggles, . . Álvaro García Linera, Marxa Chávez León, and Patricia Costas Monje, Sociología de los movimientos sociales en Bolivia: Estructuras de movilización, repertorios culturales y acción política (La Paz: Diakonia/Oxfam, ), . . Adolfo Gilly, “Bolivia: A Twenty-First- Century Revolution,” Socialism and Democ- racy , no. (): – . . Forrest Hylton and Sinclair ompson, Revolutionary Horizons: Past and Present in Bolivian Politics (London: Verso, ), . . James Dunkerley, Bolivia: Revolution and the Power of History in the Present (Lon- don: Institute for the Study of the Americas, ), . . Quoted in Dunkerley, Bolivia, . . Arturo Escobar, “Latin America at a Crossroads,” Cultural Studies , no. (): . . Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Refundación del estado en América Latina: Perspectivas desde una epistemología del Sur (Quito: Ediciones de Abya Yala, ). . Jeery M. Paige, “Finding the Revolutionary in the Revolution: Social Science Concepts and the Future of Revolution,” in ¥e Future of Revolutions, ed. John Foran (London: Zed Books, ), (emphasis added). . Paige, “Finding the Revolutionary in the Revolution,” – . . Paige, “Finding the Revolutionary in the Revolution.” . Quoted in Jeremy F. Lane, Pierre Bourdieu: A Critical Introduction (London: Pluto, ), . . Pierre Bourdieu, “Genesis and Structure of the Religious Field,” in Business as Usual: ¥e Roots of the Global Financial Meltdown, ed. Craig Calhoun and Georgi Derlugian (New York: New York University Press, ), . NOTES TO PAGES 3043 311

. Bourdieu, “Genesis and Structure of the Religious Field,” . . Paige, “Finding the Revolutionary in the Revolution,” . . Interview with the author, La Paz, summer . As mentioned in the preface, interview translations are by the author or Silvia Varela. . Quoted in “Mitos Andinos,” May , , accessed June , , http:// perezcanhotmailcom .blogspot .com/ / / mitos -andinos .html. . Esteban Ticona, Organización y liderazgo Aymara: La experiencia indígena en la política boliviana, ²²– ²²³ (La Paz: Universidad de Cordillera, ), . . Fernando Coronil, “ e Future in Question: History and Utopia in Latin America (– ),” in Business as Usual: ¥e Roots of the Global Financial Meltdown, ed. Craig Calhoun and Georgi Derlugian (New York: New York University Press, ), – .

CHAPTER 1

. On the national role of Amazonian organizations, see Deborah Yashar, Contesting Citizenship in Latin America: ¥e Rise of Indigenous Movements and the Post liberal Challenge (New York: Cambridge University Press, ), –; and Robert Ando- lina, “Colonial Legacies and Plurinational Imaginaries: Indigenous Movement Pol- itics in Ecuador and Bolivia” (PhD diss., University of Minnesota, ), . On oil in the Amazon, see Susan Sawyer, Crude Chronicles: Indigenous Politics, Multinational Oil, and Neoliberalism in Ecuador (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, ). . Population estimates for Amazonian ethnic groups are from Amalia Pallares, From Peasant Struggles to Indian Resistance: ¥e Ecuadorian Andes in the Late Twenti- eth Century (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, ), . Published results from the Census indicate similar numbers for most groups, but the Shuar have almost doubled to , and the Achuar have increased more than tenfold to ,. No separate numbers are given for the Amazonian Kichwa. See Walter Fernández, Las cifras del pueblo indígena: Una mirada desde el censo de población y vivienda (Quito: Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Censos, ). For current constituent members of CONFENIAE, see the organization’s website, accessed July , , http:// www .ecuanex .net .ec/ confeniae/. . Carmen Martínez Novo, “Building an Anti- Neoliberal Nation with the Indig- enous Movement: e Salesian Missions of Ecuador,” in Bridging the Gaps: Faith-Based Organizations, Neoliberalism, and Development in Latin America and the Caribbean, ed. Tara Heeran, Julie Adkins, and Laurie Occhippinti (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, ), – ; Steve Rubenstein, “Colonialism, the Shuar Federation, and the Ecuadorian State,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space , no. (): –; Ernesto Salazar, “ e Federation Shuar and the Col- onization Frontier,” in Cultural Transformations and Ethnicity in Modern Ecuador, ed. Norman E. Whitten Jr. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press), –; Yashar, Contesting Citizenship, – . 312 NOTES TO PAGES 4351

. Martínez Novo, “Building an Anti-Neoliberal Nation,” –. . Rubenstein, “Colonialism,” , . . Salazar, “ e Federation Shuar,” . . Janet Wall Hendricks, “Power and Knowledge: Discourse and Ideological Trans- formation Among the Shuar,” American Ethnologist , no. (): – . . Michael J. Harner, ¥e Jívaro: People of the Sacred Waterfalls (; repr., Berkeley: University of California Press, ), vii–viii, ; Salazar, “ e Federation Shuar,” . . Harner, ¥e Jívaro, – . . Harner, ¥e Jívaro, . . Harner, ¥e Jívaro, . . Harner, ¥e Jívaro, vii– viii. . Harner, ¥e Jívaro, – . . omas K. Rudel, Diane Bates, and Rafael Machinguiashi, “Ecologically Noble Amerindians?: Cattle Ranching and Cash Cropping Among Shuar and Colonists in Ecuador,” Latin American Research Review , no. (): – . . “Bosco Wisum es símbolo de lucha para amazónicos,” El Universo, October , , https://www .eluniverso .com/ / / / / / bosco -wisum -simbolo -lucha -amazonicos.html; Front Line Defenders, “Imminent Arrest of Pepe Acacho,” n.d. [October ?], accessed June , , https:// www .frontlinedefenders.org/ en/ case/ imminent -arrest -pepe -acacho. . Anders Sirén, “Changing Interaction Between Humans and Nature in Sarayaku” (PhD diss., Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, ), . . Sawyer, Crude Chronicles, – . . Rommel Lara, “La construcción de la etnicidad en el conäicto entre Sarayaku y el estado nacional ecuatoriano” (master’s thesis, Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales [FLACSO]Sede Ecuador, ), – . . See Carol Y. Verbeek, “Free, Prior, Informed Consent: e Key to Self Determi- nation: An Analysis of ¥e Kichwa People of Sarayaku v. Ecuador,” American Indian Law Review , no. (–): – ; Lisi Brunner and Karla Quintana, “ e Duty to Consult in the Inter- American System: Legal Standards after Sarayaku, “American Society of International Law Insights , no. (): –; and “Ecua- doran State Asks for Forgiveness in Sarayaku,” Telesur TV, October , . . Sirén, “Changing Interaction,” – . . Sirén, “Changing Interaction,” . . Ampam Karakras, “Las nacionalidades indias y el estado ecuatoriano” ( ), repr. in Biblioteca básica del pensamiento ecuatoriana, vol. , Pensamiento indigenista del Ecuador (Quito: Banco Central del Ecuador, ), . . Yashar, Contesting Citizenship, . . Mónica Chuji, interview with the author, Quito, July , . All subsequent references to Chuji in the book are from this interview. . Marc Becker, in ¡Pachakutik! Indigenous Movements and Electoral Politics in Ecua- dor (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littleeld, ), – , conrms the communist origins of the nation concept. NOTES TO PAGES 5180 313

. J. V. Stalin, “Marxism and the National Question,” in Collected Works, vol. (Mos- cow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, ), . . H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, ), . . Norman E. Whitten, Sacha Runa: Ethnicity and Adaptation of Ecuadorian Jungle Quechua (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, ), . . CONAIE, Proyecto político para la construcción del estado plurinacional (Quito: CONAIE, Consejo de Gobierno, ), https:// conaie .org/ / / / proyecto -politico -conaie -/. . CONAIE, Proyecto político. . “Declaration,” accessed July , , https:// kawsaksacha .org. . Karakras, “Las nacionalidades indias,” . . Rafael Antuni, “Unir lo diverso para construir un Ecuador intercultural y equita- tivo,” Agora Política, September , . . “Marlon Santi, New Amazonian President of CONAIE,” Redamazon, Janu- ary , , https:// redamazon .wordpress .com/ / / / marlon -santi -new -amazonian -president -of -conaie/.

CHAPTER 2

. Barry J. Lyons, Remembering the Hacienda: Religion, Authority, and Social Change in Highland Ecuador (Austin: University of Texas Press, ); Amalia Pallares, From Peasant Struggle to Indian Resistance: ¥e Ecuadorian Andes in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, ), – . . Marc Becker, Indians and Leftists in the Making of Ecuador’s Modern Indigenous Movements (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, ), , . . Pallares, Peasant Struggle, – . . Pallares, Peasant Struggle, ; Becker, Indians and Leftists, – . . Galo Ramón, El regreso de los runas: La potencialidad del proyecto indio en el Ecuador contemporáneo (Quito: COMUNIC [Comunidades y Desarrollo en el Ecuador]- Fundación Interaméricana, ), . . Mandi A. Bane, “Social Change in the Neoliberal Era: e Indigenous Movement in Saquisili, Ecuador” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, ), . . Bane, “Social Change,” . . Bane, “Social Change,” . . Lyons, Remembering the Hacienda, . . José Antonio Lucero, Voices of Struggles: ¥e Politics of Indigenous Representation in the Andes (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, ), . . Pallares, Peasant Struggle, . . Luis Macas, “Sumak Kawsay: La vida en plenitud,” in Sumak Kawsay Yuyay: Antología del pensamiento indigenista ecuatoriano sobre Sumak Kawsay, ed. Anto- nio Luis Hidalgo- Capitán, Alejandro Guillén García, and Nancy Deleg Guazha (Huelva: Centro de Investigación en Migraciones, Universidad de Huelva, ), . 314 NOTES TO PAGES 81133

. Quoted in Santiago García Álvarez, “Qué es el sumak kawsay o buen vivir,” accessed July , , https:// www .academia .edu/ / Qué _es _el _sumak _kawsay _o _buen _vivir. . “Seguidor de la Teoría de Liberación en la Ecuarunari,” El Universo, December , , https://www .eluniverso .com/ / / / / / seguidor -teoria -liberacion -ecuarunari .html; ECUARUNARI, “¿Quién es Delfín Tenesaca?,” December , , accessed August , , http:// ecuarunari .org/ portal/ Qui -C -An -es -Delfín -Tenesaca -. . ECUARUNARI, “Hoja de vida de Humberto Cholango, Presidente ECUA- RUNARI,” April , , https:// movimientos .org/ es/ enlacei/ show _text .php -Fkey -D . . “Construyendo gobiernos locales alternativos,” May , , accessed October , , http:// qollasuyu .indymedia .org/ es/ / / .shtml.

CHAPTER 3

. Marc Becker, ¡Pachakutik! Indigenous Movements and Electoral Politics in Ecuador (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littleeld, ), . . Donna Lee Van Cott, From Movements to Parties in Latin America: ¥e Evolution of Ethnic Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . . Becker, ¡Pachakutik!, . . Becker, ¡Pachakutik!, . . Becker, ¡Pachakutik!, ; Kenneth J. Mijeski and Scott M. Beck, Pachakutik and the Rise and Fall of the Ecuadorian Indigenous Movement, Ohio Research in Interna- tional Studies Latin American Series (Athens: Ohio University Press), –. . Mijeski and Beck, Pachakutik, . . Mijeski and Beck, Pachakutik, . . Marta Harnecker, “Gobierno de Correa y movimiento indígena: Entrevistas a Osvaldo León, Ricardo Patiño, Alberta Acosta, Daniel Suarez, Miguel Lluco y Ricardo Carrillo” (unpublished manuscript, October , , in author’s possession). . Mijeski and Beck, Pachakutik, . . Gerónimo Yantalema, Asambleísta por Chimborazo, accessed November , , http:// geronimoyantalema .com/ geronimo -yantalema -asambleista .php. . Salvador Quishpe Lozano, Atento Ecuador, accessed December , , http:// atentoecuador .blogspot/ p/ salvador -quishpe -lozano -salva -html; “Salvador Quishpe Lozano: Student at the Universidad de San Francisco de Quito,” accessed October , , http:// www .saraguro .org/ salvador .htm. . “El admirador de Fidel que acompaña al ex banquero,” El Telégrafo, October , , https:// www .eltelegrafo .com .ec/ noticias/ informacion/ / el -admirador -de -del -que -acompana -al -ex -banquero; “Auki Tituaña: Una parte de mi corazón está en Camagüey,” Camagüeybax, accessed July , , http:// camagüeybax .awardspace .com/ generos _periodisticos/ auki _tituana .htm. NOTES TO PAGES 147154 315

CHAPTER 4

. Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, “Pachakuti: Los horizontes históricos del colonialismo interno,” in Violencias encubiertas en Bolivia, ed. Xavier Albó and Raul Barrientos (La Paz: Ediciones Aruwiyiri, ), . . Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, “Oppressed but Not Defeated”: Peasant Struggles Among the Aymara and Quechua in Bolivia, ²–²¶ (Geneva: United Nations Institute for Social Development, ), . . Xavier Albó, “From MNRistas to Kataristas to Katari,” in Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness in the Andean Peasant World, ¶th to th Centuries, ed. Steve J. Stern (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, ), – . . Quoted in José Antonio Lucero, Struggles of Voice: ¥e Politics of Indigenous Repre- sentation in the Andes (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, ), . . Brooke Larson, Trials of Nation Making: Liberalism, Race, and Ethnicity in the Andes, ¶– ² (New York: Cambridge University Press, ). . Albó, “MNRistas,” . . Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, “Luchas campesinas contemporáneas en Bolivia: El movimiento ‘Katarista,’ – ,” in Bolivia Hoy, ed. René Zavaleta Mercado (Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno, ), . . Albó, “MNRistas,” . . Fausto Reinaga, La revolución india (La Paz: Ediciones PIB [Partido Indio de Bolivia], . is edition includes Reinaga’s political manifesto, “Maniesto del partido indio de Bolivia,” as chapter . . Quoted in Jose Antonio Lucero, “Fanon in the Andes: Fausto Reinaga, Indianismo and the Black Atlantic,” International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies , no. (): . . Esteban Ticona Alejo, “La necesidad de investigar sobre la vigencia del pensamiento de Fausto Reinaga en Qullasuyu—Bolivia,” Mallki , no. (), http:// www .faustoreinaga .org .bo/ mallki/ revistas. . Reinaga, Revolución, , , , , , . . Reinaga, Revolución, . . Reinaga, Revolución, . . Reinaga, Revolución, , . . Reinaga, Revolución, . . Reinaga, Revolución, , . . Reinaga, Revolución, . . Reinaga, Revolución, . . Marcia Stephenson, “Fausto Reinaga y el discurso Indianista en Bolivia,” accessed February , , http:// faustoreinaga .com/ index/ .php ?view = article & catid = -Arevista -nro - & id = -. . e fundamental source on the Katarist movement remains Javier Hurtado, El katarismo (La Paz: Instituto de Historia Social Boliviana [HISBOL], ). See also Rivera Cusicanqui, “Oppressed but Not Defeated”; and Albó, “MNRistas.” An excellent source in English is Deborah J. Yashar, Contesting Citizenship in Latin 316 NOTES TO PAGES 154196

America: ¥e Rise of Indigenous Movements and the Postliberal Challenge (New York: Cambridge University Press, ). . Hurtado, El katarismo, . . Yashar, Contesting Citizenship, . . Rivera Cusicanqui, “Oppressed but Not Defeated,” . . Marcia Stephenson, “Forging an Indigenous Public Sphere: e Taller de Historia Oral Andina in Bolivia,” Latin American Research Review , no. (): –. . Albó, “MNRistas,” . . John Crabtree, Patterns of Protest: Politics and Social Movements in Bolivia (London: Latin American Bureau, ), . . Quoted in Rivera Cusicanqui, “Oppressed but Not Defeated,” . . Quoted in Rivera Cusicanqui, “Oppressed but Not Defeated,” . . Martín Cúneo, “Bolivia: Felipe Quispe: El último Mallku,” Viejo Topo, no. (September ), http:// losmovimientoscontraatacan .wordpress .com/ / / / bolivia -felipe -quispe -el -ultimo -mallku/. . Jeery R. Webber, “Evismo— Reform? Revolution? Counter- Revolution,” Inter- national Viewpoint: Online Magazine , no. (October ), http:// www .internationalviewpoint .org/ spip .php ?article ; Rugen Roxas, “Fides Survey Shows at Eugenio Rojas Former Achacachi’s Mayor Is Considered the Most Deceitful and Corrupt Personality,” Achacachi Post: Online News, April , , http:// achacachi .blogspot .com/ / / des -survey -shows -that -eugenio -rojas .html; “Ponchos rojos retienen al gobernador Cocarico y al senador Rojas en El Alto,” El País, September , , http:// www .opinion .com .bo/ opinion/ articulos/ / / noticias .php ?id = . . “Pablo Mamani Ramírez,” accessed November , , http://revistawillka .org/ index .php ?option = com _contact & view = contact. . “Curriculum Vitae: María Eugenia Choque Quispe,” accessed October , , www .reduii .org/ cii/ sites/ default/ les/ mariaeugeniachoque .pdf.

CHAPTER 5

. Hervé do Alto, “El MAS boliviano, entre la protesta callejera y la política insti- tucional,” in Reinventando la nación en Bolivia: Movimientos sociales, estado y post colonialidad, ed. Karin Monasteros, Pablo Stefanoni, and Hervé do Alto (La Paz: CLASCO/Plural Editores, ), , . . Donna Lee Van Cott, From Movements to Parties in Latin America: ¥e Evolution of Ethnic Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . . Álvaro García Linera, Marxa Chávez León, and Patricia Costas Monje, Sociología de los movimientos sociales en Bolivia: Estructuras de movilización, repertorios culturales y acción política (La Paz: Diakonia/Oxfam, ), – , , claim that there are four CSCB aßliates and only two CSUTCB. ey classify the most powerful federation, that of the Tropics, as part of the CSCB even though Evo Morales himself says (quoted on n) that his organization is aßliated with the CSUTCB. NOTES TO PAGES 196201 317

Kevin Healy, “Political Ascent of Bolivia’s Peasant Coca Leaf Producers,” Journal of International Studies and World Aairs (Spring ): , agrees with Morales. Andrea Viola Recasens, “¡Viva la coca, mueran los gringos!”: Movilizaciones campesinas y etnicidad en El Chapare (Bolivia), Estudis D’Antropologia Social I Cultural (Barcelona: Departament d’Antropolgia Cultural i Histria i Africa, Universitat de Barcelona, ), , lists only three federations associated with the colonizers and does not include the Federation of the Tropics. . García Linera, Chávez León, and Costas Monje, Sociología de los movimientos sociales, , . . Viola Recasens, “Viva la coca,” , . . Allison Spedding, Wachu wachu: Cultivo de coca e identidad en los Yunkas de La Paz (La Paz: Instituto de Historia Social Boliviana [HISBOL], ), . . Spedding, Wachu wachu, . . Viola Recasens, “Viva la coca,” . . Donna Lee Van Cott, Radical Democracy in the Andes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . . Healy, “Political Ascent,” . . Healy, “Political Ascent,” . . Viola Recasens, “Viva la coca,” . . Harry Sanabria, “ e Discourse and Practice of Repression and Resistance in the Chapare,” in Coca, Cocaine, and the Bolivian Reality, ed. Madeline Barber Léons and Harry Sanabria (Albany: State University of New York Press, ), . . Viola Recasens, “Viva la coca,” – . . Healy, “Political Ascent,” . . Viola Recasens, “Viva la coca”: demands, ; marches, ; quote, . . García Linera, Chávez León, and Costas Monje, Sociología de los movimientos sociales, – . . Viola Recasens, “Viva la coca”: quote, ; Yungas/Chapare comparison, ; based on data from H. C. F. Mansilla, Repercusiones ecológicas y éticas del complejo coca/cocaína (La Paz: Sistema Educativo Antidrogas y de Movilización Social (SEAMOS), ), . . Viola Recasens, “Viva la coca,” . . Healy, “Political Ascent,” . . La Razón, June , . e two others were Achacachi mayor and now senator Eugenio Rojas (see chapter ) and COR–El Alto leader and now El Alto mayor Édgar Patana (see chapter ). e article was prescient. Five of the six went on to hold high oßce after the article was published (and the interviews were nished). e conspicuous exception was Leonilda Zurita— the one woman in the group. . Pablo Stefanoni and Hervé do Alto, Evo Morales: De la coca al palacio (La Paz: Imprenta Cervantes, ), . . Benjamin Dangl, “Leonilda Zurita: Growing Coca in a Fight for Survival in Bolivia,” Canadian Dimension , no. (September– October ), https:// canadiandimension .com/ articles/ view/ leonilda -zurita -growing -coca -in -a -ght -for -survival -in -bolivia -benjamin -da. 318 NOTES TO PAGES 201234

. “Senador Julio Salazar: Datos Personales,” Agencia Boliviana de Información, accessed November , , http:// senadorjuliosalazarcbba .blogspot .com/ p/ leyes -aprovadas .html. . Fernando Coronil, “Dismembering and Remembering the Nation: e Semantics of Political Violence in Venezuela,” Society for Comparative Study of Society and History , no. (April ): – .

CHAPTER 6

. Isaac Avalos, interview with the author, La Paz, July , . . FNMCB-BS: Esteban Ticona Alejo, CSUTCB: Trayectoria y desafíos (La Paz: Centro de Documentación e Información [CEDOIN], ), –; CSCB: Xavier Albó, “From MNRistas to Kataristas to Katari,” in Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness in the Andean Peasant World, ¶th to th Centuries, ed. Steve J. Stern (Madison: Uni- versity of Wisconsin Press, ), –; CIDOB: Deborah J. Yashar, Contesting Citizenship in Latin America: ¥e Rise of Indigenous Movements and the Postliberal Challenge (New York: Cambridge University Press, ), –. . Nancy Postero, “‘El Pueblo Boliviano, de Composición Plural’: A Look at Pluri- nationalism in Bolivia” (paper presented at the conference “Power to the People,” University of Kentucky, April ). . Álvaro García Linera, Marxa Chávez León, and Patricia Costas Monje, Sociología de los movimientos sociales en Bolivia: Estructuras de movilización, repertorios culturales y acción política (La Paz: Diakonia/Oxfam, ), – . . García Linera, Chávez León, and Costas Monje, Sociología de los movimientos sociales, : Ticona Alejo, CSUTCB, . . Luis Tapia, interview with the author, La Paz, July , . . Confederación Sindical Única de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia, Plan estratégico de vida ¶– (La Paz: Confederación Sindical Única de Traba- jadores Campesinos de Bolivia: Coordinadora de Organizaciones Indígenas Cam- pesinas de Bolivia, ), . . “Fidel Surco Cañasaca: Ex senador transportista,” La Razón, September , ; “Surco: ‘Atentados son inicio de una guerra sucia contra el proceso de cambio,’” August , , www .eabolivia .com/ political/ -surco -qatentados -son -inicio -de -una -guerra -sucia -contra -el -proceso -de -cambioq .html. . “Biografía ocial: Edgar Patana,” accessed November , , www .edgarpatana .com; “Edgar Patana, de vendedor ambulante a Alcalde de El Alto,” Bolpress, April , , http:// www .bolpress .net/ art .php ?Cod = . . Rafael Archondo, interview with the author, La Paz, summer . . Donna Lee Van Cott, “Exclusion to Inclusion: Bolivia’s Elections,” Journal of Latin American Studies , no. (November ): – . . Félix Patzi Paco, Insurgencia y sumisión: Movimientos sociales e indígenas, nd ed. (La Paz: Ediciones Yachaywasi, ), . . Rafael Archondo, interview with the author, La Paz, summer . NOTES TO PAGES 246252 319

CHAPTER 7

. e important Siglo XX miners’ union was founded by the communists. As late as the Trotskyists may have controlled as many as half of the seats on the peak workers organization the Central Obrera Boliviana (COB). James Dunkerley, Rebellion in the Veins: Political Struggle in Bolivia, ²°– ²¶ (London: Verso, ), , . . Pablo Stefanoni and Hervé do Alto, Evo Morales: De la coca al palacio (La Paz: Mal- estata, ), , quoted in S. Sandor John, Bolivia’s Radical Traditions: Permanent Revolution in the Andes (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, ), . . For a summary of the controversy, see John Lee Anderson, Che Guevara: A Revo- lutionary Life (New York: Grove, ), – . . Anonymous activist, interview with the author, July , . . Herbert S. Klein, A Concise History of Bolivia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), , – . . In – inäation reached the astronomical level of , percent. Benjamin Kohl and Linda Farthing, Impasse in Bolivia: Neoliberal Hegemony and Popular Resistance (London: Zed Books, ), . . Klein, A Concise History, – . . NACLA, “ e esis of Pulacayo,” September , , https:// nacla .org/ article/ thesis -pulacayo. . Álvaro García Linera, “Indianism and Marxism: e Disparity Between Two Rev- olutionary Rationales,” in Plebian Power: Collective Action and Indigenous, Working- Class and Popular Identities in Bolivia (; repr., Leiden: Brill, ), . . Álvaro García Linera, “Marxism and Indigenism in Bolivia: A Dialectic of Dia- logue and Conäict,” interview with Jeery R. Webber, Znet Bolivia, April , , https://zcomm .org/ znetarticle/ marxism -and -indigenism -in -bolivia -a -dialectic -of -dialogue -and -conäict-by -lvaro -garc -a -linera/. . García Linera, “Marxism and Indigenism in Bolivia.” . Álvaro García Linera, interview with Franklin Ramírez and Pablo Stefanoni, La Paz, April , , translated from the Spanish by Agatha Huan for the website Axis of Logic, www .tlaxcala .es/ pp .esp ?lg = en & reference = . . Álvaro García Linera, “Sindicato, multitud y comunidad: Movimientos sociales y formas de autonomía política en Bolivia,” in Tiempos de rebelión, ed. Álvaro García Linera, Raquel Gutiérrez, Raúl Prada, Felipe Quispe, and Luis Tapia (La Paz: Muela del Diablo, ), – . . Álvaro García Linera, “Estado plurinacional: Una propuesta democrática y pluralista para la extinción de la exclusión de las naciones indígenas,” in La transfor- mación pluralista del estado, ed. Álvaro García Linera, Luis Tapia Maella, and Raúl Prada Alcoreza (La Paz: Muela del Diablo, ), . . Álvaro García Linera, “ e Crisis of State and Indigenous- Plebeian Uprisings in Bolivia,” in Plebeian Power: Collective Action and Indigenous, Working- Class and Popular Identities in Bolivia (; repr., Leiden: Brill, ), . 320 NOTES TO PAGES 253297

. Colectivo Maniesto de Junio, “For the Recuperation of the Process of Change for the People and with the People,” Dialectical Anthropology , no. (September ): – ; Álvaro García Linera, El “oenegismo”: La enfermedad infantil del dere- chismo (O cómo la “reconducción” del proceso de cambio es la restauración neoliberal) (La Paz: Vicepresidencia del Estado Plurinacional, ). . “Hombre sin mancha,” La Razón, June , . . “Bolivia’s Racial Onslaught,” New Statesmen, June , , https:// www .newstatesman .com/ south -america/ / / bolivia -violence -indigenous; César Navarro, Crímenes de la democracia neoliberal: Movimientos sociales desde la masacre de Villa Tunari a El Alto (La Paz: Fundación Editorial de los Diputados, ), cover äap. . García Linera, El “oenegismo.” . Federico Fuentes, “Bolivia: National Revolution and ‘Communitarian Socialism,’” Green Left Weekly, March , , https:// www .greenleft .org .au/ node/ . . Katy Watson, “Indigenous Bolivia Begins to Shine Under Morales,” BBC News, December , , https:// www .bbc .com/ news/ world -latin -america - .

CONCLUSION

. Antonio Luis Hidalgo-Capitán, Alejandro Guillén García, and Nancy Deleg Guazha, eds., Sumak Kawsay Yuyay: Antología del pensamiento indigenista ecuatoriano sobre Sumak Kawsay (Huelva: Centro de Investigación en Migraciones, Uni- versidad de Huelva, ). . Quoted in Santiago García Álvarez, “Qué es el sumak kawsay o buen vivir,” accessed July , , https:// www .academia .edu/ / Qué _es _el _sumak _kawsay _o _buen _vivir. . According to a Quechua vocabulary collected by Philip Jacobs, Pachamama literally means “our mother in time and space,” and it can be understood as both the spirit of Mother Earth and a cosmic divine feminine principle. Philip Jacobs, Runasimi, s.v. “Pachamama,” accessed July , , http://www .cs .cmu .edu/ ~aria/ quechua/ dict/ PolyglotDictionary .Readme .htm.

EPILOGUE

. “Lenín Moreno se reúne con la CONAIE y arma que ‘es un pilar fundamental,’” NODAL, September , , https://www .nodal .am/ / / lenin -moreno -se -reune -la -conaie -arma -pilar -fundamental/; “Ecuador: Renewed Dialogue Between President Moreno and Indigenous Movement Yields Important Steps Forward,” Unrepresented Nations & Peoples Organization, September , , https:// unpo .org/ article/ ?id = ; “Conaie a la expectativa por gobierno de Lenín Moreno,” El Comercio, August , , https:// www .elcomercio .com/ actualidad/ conaie -expectativa -gobierno -ecuador -leninmoreno .html; “El presidente de Ecuador convertirá la sede de Unasur en Quito en una universidad indí- NOTES TO PAGES 298300 321

gena,” EFE, July , , https://www.efe.com/efe/america/portada/el-presidente -de -ecuador -convertira -la -sede -de -unasur -en -quito -una -universidad -indigena/ -; Isabel Riofrio, “Ecuador: Lenín Moreno detiene entrega de concesiones mineras y petroleras tras reunirse con líderes indígenas,” MONG- ABAY, December , , https:// es .mongabay .com/ / / ecuador -lenin -moreno -detiene -entrega -concesiones -mineras -petroleras -tras -reunirse -lideres -indigenas/. . Nicholas Casey and Cliord Krauss, “It Doesn’t Matter If Ecuador Can Aord is Dam. China Still Gets Paid,” New York Times, December , . . Laurence Blair, “Evo For Ever? Bolivia Scraps Term Limits as Critics Blast ‘Coup’ to Keep Morales in Power,” ¥e Guardian, December , . . To whit, “With the election set for next year, the issue of a boundless presidency has become a broader concern for a Latin America where threats to democracy are mounting.” Nicholas Casey, “In Bolivia, Morales’s Indigenous Base Backtracks on Support,” New York Times, December , . . “Bolivia Closes Among the Highest Economic Growth Rates,” Telesur, December , , https:// www .telesurenglish .net/ news/ Bolivia -Closes - -Among - e -Highest -Economic -Growth -Rates - - .html; William Neuman, “Turnabout in Bolivia as Economy Rises from Instability,” New York Times, February , ; World Bank, “World Development Indicators: Women and Development,” data for , http://wdi .worldbank .org/ table/ WV .. . Martin Sivak, Evo Morales: ¥e Extraordinay Rise of the First Indigenous President of Bolivia (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, ), . . Jeery R. Webber, From Rebellion to Reform in Bolivia: Class Struggle, Indigenous Liberation, and the Poltics of Evo Morales (Chicago: Haymarket, ), – . . Webber, From Rebellion to Reform in Bolivia, . . Pablo Stefanoni, interview with the author, La Paz, summer . . Linda C. Farthing and Benjamin Kohl, Evo’s Bolivia: Continuity and Change (Aus- tin: University of Texas Press, ), , , , . . Farthing and Kohl, Evo’s Bolivia, . . Farthing and Kohl, Evo’s Bolivia, . . Farthing and Kohl, Evo’s Bolivia, . . José P. Mauricio Vargas, “Preserving Bolivia’s Impressive Reduction in Poverty and Inequality,” Diálogo a fondo (blog), January , , https:// www .imf .org/ external/ np/ blog/ dialogo/ .pdf. . Neuman, “Turnabout in Bolivia.” . Carlos Alberta Quiroga, “Bolivians in Streets to Protest Fuel Hikes,” Reuters, December , . . Nancy Postero, “‘El Pueblo Boliviano, de Composición Plural’: A Look at Pluri- nationalism in Bolivia” (paper presented at the conference “Power to the People,” University of Kentucky, April ).

INDEX

Page numbers for interviews are indicated in bold; page numbers for illustrations and gures are indicated in italics.

Acacho, Pepe, ayllu, , , , – , , – Afro- Bolivians (people), – , Aymara (language), , – , , Afro- Ecuadorians (people), Aymara (people): region and history of, , agrarian revolution. See land reform ¸¶, –, ; sociopolitical identity agriculture, , . See also coca; food of, , , , , – ; uprising of, ¶, sovereignty; land – , – , , – , – , –, Albó, Xavier, , , , – , , Alianza País movement, Amaguaña, Tránsito, , Bane, Mandi, xii– xiii, ama sua, ama llulla, ama quella, , , Banzer, Hugo, , , , Amazon, , , – , – . See also kawsak Bartolinas. See Federación Nacional de sacha; Kichwa; Sarayaku; Shuar Mujeres Campesinas de Bolivia– Andean Oral History Workshop. See Taller Bartolina Sisa de Historia Oral Andina Becker, Marc, , Andes, – , . See also Aymara; Quechua Black October (), – Antuni, Rafael, , , , – , – , blockades, – , , – , , – , , – , Apasa, Julián. See Katari, Túpac Bolivia: comparison with Ecuador, –, April Revolution. See Bolivian Revolution – , – ; constitution of (see () constitution); demographics of, ; Archondo, Rafael, , , economy of, – , – , – (see ARCO, also hacienda system); geography of, ; Argentina, – plurinationality of (see plurinationality); Avalos, Isaac, – , – sociopolitical transformations of, xi– xiii, 324 INDEX

–, ¶, –, –, – (see also , , , – , – ; war revolution); as “two Bolivias,” – (see against, , , – , – also Reinaga, Fausto) coca growers: indigeneity of, , , – ; Bolivian Revolution (), , , , – , political mobilization of, , , , – , , , ; unions, , , – (see also Borja, Rodrigo, – , , , Six Federations); women, , – BPI. See Partido Indio de Bolivia Cochabamba, , ¶, , , , – , Bucaram, Abdalá, , , , colonialism, , – , – , – colonists, – , . see also peasantry Cacuango, Dolores, , , , – colonization, . see also capitalism; decolo- Cápac Raymi, – nization; extractivism; neoliberalism capitalism, – , – , – , – , – communal vision. see also cosmovision; , , , – . See also extractivism; sumak kawsay: summarized, – , neoliberalism; socialism – , – ; according to interviewees, Cárdenas, Victor Hugo, , , , – , – , , ; as challenge to Catholic Church, – , , – , , – neoliberalism, , ; as organizing , – , –, . See also incultura- principle, – , , , tion; liberation theology Communist Party, , , , , , , Central Obrera Boliviana (COB), , n Central Obrera Regional– El Alto communitarian socialism. see socialism (COR– El Alto), , , Compañía General de Combustibles CGC. See Compañía General de (CGC), – , Combustibles Comuna. see Grupo Comuna Chaco War, CONAIE. see Confederación de Nacionali- the Chapare, – dades Indígenas del Ecuador Che. See Guevara, Ernesto “Che” CONALCAM. see Confederación Nacional China, , , – para el Cambio Cholango, Humberto, – , , , , CONAMAQ. see Consejo de Ayllus y Choque, María Eugenia, , , – , Markas de Qullasuyu , CONDENPE. see Consejo de Desarrollo Choquehuanca, David, de las Nacionalidades y Pueblos del Christianity. see Catholic Church; Ecuador evangelicals Confederación de Nacionalidades Indígenas Christmas, – de la Amazonia Ecuatoriana (CONFE- Chuji, Mónica, , NIAE), , , , CIDOB. see Confederación Indígena del Confederación de Nacionalidades Indígenas Oriente Boliviano del Ecuador (CONAIE): history and citizenship, , – , , , , political activities of, – , – , , , class. see Marxism; peasantry , – , – ; plurinationality of, COB. see Central Obrera Boliviana , , , ; political vision of, , , coca: place in indigenous culture, , , , – , , , , , – ; production of, , , Confederación Indígena del Oriente Bolivi- – , – , ; as “sacred leaf,” , ano (CIDOB), , – INDEX 325

Confederación Nacional para el Cambio CSCB. see Confederación Sindical de Colo- (CONALCAM), , nizadores de Bolivia Confederación Sindical de Colonizadores CSUTCB. see Confederación Sindical de Bolivia (CSCB), , , – Única de Trabajadores Campesinos de Confederación Sindical Única de Tra- Bolivia bajadores Campesinos de Bolivia Cuban Revolution, , , , (CSUTCB), , , – , – , , – , , DEA. see United States CONFENIAE. see Confederación de Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Nacionalidades Indígenas de la Amazo- Peoples, , nia Ecuatoriana decolonization, , – , , –, Consejo de Ayllus y Markas de Qullasuyu – , , – , – . see also (CONAMAQ), , colonization Consejo de Desarrollo de las Nacionali- democracy. see also plurinationality: as dades y Pueblos del Ecuador (CON- means of revolution, – , , –, DENPE), , – , – , – , , – ; partic- consent, right to, , , . see also consult, ipatory, , – , – , – , , obligation to ; representative, – constitution. see also plurinationality: deregulation, . see also neoliberalism Bolivian, , – , – , , , , development, – , – , – , –, – , – , – , ; Ecuadorian, – . see also extractivism , – , – , – , do Alto, Hervé, consult, obligation to, , – , , . see also consent, right to ecology, . see also kawsak sacha Contento, Luis, – , , Ecuador: comparison with Bolivia, – , Coordinadora de las Seis Federaciones – , – ; economy of, – , – del Trópico de Cochabamba. see Six (see also hacienda system); geography Federations of, , ¸; sociopolitical transformations Coordinadora por la Defensa del Agua y la of, xii– xiii, – , °, – , – , – Vida, Ecuador Runacunapak Rikcharimuy COR– El Alto. see Central Obrera Region- (ECUARUNARI), – al– El Alto education, – , , , , – , , Correa, Rafael: economic policies of, –, – , – , , – , – , – , EGTK. see Ejército Guerrillero Túpac , , – (see also extractivism); Katari indigenous self-presentation of, , ; Ejército Guerrillero Túpac Katari (EGTK), relationship with indigenous Ecuador- , – ians, , , – , – , – , –, El Alto, , – , , –, – , – , – , El Salvador, revolution in, , cosmovision (worldview), – , – , , Escobar, Arturo, , – , – , , , , – , . evangelicals, – , , – see also communal vision; socialism; extractivism. see also capitalism; Correa, sumak kawsay Rafael; neoliberalism: alternatives to, – 326 INDEX

, –, –; indigenous criticism hacienda system, – , – , – , – , of, , – , – , – , – , , . see also land reform – , – , , Huampo, Edwin, , Huaorani (people), , – , – , Febres Cordero, León, , hunger strikes, Federación de Juntas Vecinales de El Alto Hurtado, Javier, (FEJUVE), , hydrocarbons. see also extractivism; Gas Federación del Trópico, Wars: environmental eects of extract- Federación Ecuatoriana de Indios (FEI), ing, , , ; indigenous resistance to – extraction of, , – , – , – , Federación Interprovincial de Centros ; laws and policies concerning, , Shuar (FICSH). see Shuar Federation – ; nationalization of, , , , , Federación Nacional de Mujeres Cam- – , – ; private control of, , , pesinas de Bolivia– Bartolina Sisa , , (FNMCB- BS/Bartolinas), , , , Hylton, Forrest, , , Federación Nacional de Organizaciones IACHR. see Inter- American Court of Campesinas (FENOC), – Human Rights FEI. see Federación Ecuatoriana de Indios ideology, role in organizing, FEJUVE. see Federación de Juntas Vecina- IERAC. see Instituto Ecuatoriano de les de El Alto Reforma Agraria y Colonización FENOC. see Federación Nacional de Orga- IMF riots, , nizaciones Campesinas inculturation, , – . see also Catholic FICSH. see Shuar Federation Church FNMCB- BS. see Federación Nacional indigeneity: comparing Ecuadorian and de Mujeres Campesinas de Bolivia– Bolivian, – , , – , – , , Bartolina Sisa ; erasure and invisibility, – , – , food sovereignty, , , , , – – , , (see also racism); as modern political identity, – , – , García Linera, Álvaro, – , , , , , , – , , – , – , – , , , – – , – ; overlaps with class, – , Gas Wars, ¶, – , , , , , – , – (see also peasantry); rela- global warming, tionship to modernity, – , , –, Grupo Comuna, , , , – , – Guaraní (people), , indigenous communities, – , – , , guerrillas, – – , – , – , – . see also Guevara, Ernesto “Che”: Bolivian expe- ayllu dition of, ; El Alto monument to, indigenous movement, – , , , , – , – , ; as inspiration and , – . see also Katarist- Indianist role model, xi, , , – , , , movements; coalitions with nonindig- – ; as symbol for MAS, , , – enous interests, – , , , – , – , – (see also Movimiento al Socialismo; Gutiérrez, Lucio, , – , , ¸, – Movimiento de Unidad Plurinacional Gutiérrez, Raquel, Pachakutik– Nuevo País) INDEX 327

indigenous peoples. see also specic groups: land, – , , , , . see also territory critiques of and alternatives to capital- land reform: in Bolivia, – , , ; in ism, – , – , – , – , –, Ecuador, – , , – , , – , – , , – ; demographics, , – , – , ¸, ; discrimination against, – , language, – , – , , – , –, – , , – , , – , – , , – , (see also racism); identity of La Paz, , , , (see indigeneity); opportunities for, ; La revolución india. see Reinaga, Fausto participation in government, , – , Law (Ley del Régimen de la Coca y – , – ; spiritual beliefs of, –, Sustancias Controladas), , , – , – , ; threats to and vio- Law of Agricultural Development, lence against, – , – , , – the Left, , – , , – . see also (see also racism) Marxism infrastructure, , , . see also Levantamiento (uprising) (), – , ° development liberation theology, , – , , , . see Instituto Ecuatoriano de Reforma Agraria y also Catholic Church; Marxism Colonización (IERAC), , – lithium, intellectuals, , , – , – , – , , – , . see also specic Macas, Luis, , , – , , , , – individuals Mahuad, Jamil, , Inter- American Court of Human Rights Mamani Ramírez, Pablo, , , – , (IACHR), , , interculturality: as basis for political orga- Manifesto of Tiwanaku, nization, – , – ; Bolivian versus marches, as protest strategy and tactic, , Ecuadorian, – ; conceptions of, – ; as counter to racism and discrim- March from the Amazon (), , °, ination, – , – ; understandings Marxism, – , , , – , , – , of, , – , , – , – , – . see also interviews, methodology of, – Communist Party; Grupo Comuna; Ishpingo- Tiputani- Tambococha, – , , socialism . see also Yasuní National Park MAS. see Movimiento al Socialismo Massacre of the Valley, jungle, living. see kawsak sacha media, . see also radio Mesa Quisbert, Carlos, , Karakras, Ampam, , , , – , – Military Peasant Pact, Katari, Túpac, , , , , , miners, – , – , , , , , , Katarist- Indianist movements, , , – , n. see also colonists – , , , , – , – , , mining, , – , , , , , –, – . see also Quispe, Felipe – . see also extractivism kawsak sacha (living jungle), , – , , M I P. see Movimiento Indio Pachakutik – , – . see also cosmovision; missionaries, – , – . see also Catholic Pachamama Church; evangelicals Kichwa (people), , , , – , ¸, – , MITKA. see Movimiento Indio Túpac –. see also Quechua Katari 328 INDEX

MNR. see Movimiento Nacionalista MUPP-N P. see Movimiento de Unidad Revolucionario Plurinacional Pachakutik– Nuevo País Mobilization for Life ( ), , ° modernity, – , nationality, , , , – , – , – , Morales, Evo: criticisms of, , – , – – , – , – , , , – ; indigeneity of, – , Navarro, César, – , , ; leadership of, , , , neoliberalism, , – , , – , , , – , , , – , , – , , – , , ; peasant background of, , ; policies and priorities of, , – , oil. see hydrocarbons – ; political career of, xii, , – , Organización de Pueblos Indígenas de , , – Pastaza (OPIP), , – , Moreno, Lenín, – Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS). see also Pacari, Nina, , , Morales, Evo: anti- imperialism of, , Pachakutik. see Movimiento de Unidad – , ; as coalition, , , – , Plurinacional Pachakutik– Nuevo País – ; engagement with the indige- pachakutik (the world turned upside down), nous, , – , – , – , – , , – . see also revolution ; ideology and priorities, , – , Pachamama, – , , , , n. see – , –, – ; interculturality also cosmovision; kawsak sacha of, – , – ; peasantist base of, , Paige, Jeery M., xii, xiii, – – , – , , ; political success Pallares, Amalia, , of, – , , – ; symbols of, , Partido Indio de Bolivia (BPI), , – Patana, Edgar, , – , Movimiento de Unidad Plurinacional Paz Estenssoro, Victor, – Pachakutik– Nuevo País (MUPP- NP/ peasantry, – , , – , – , – , Pachakutik), – , , – , – , , , – , – . see also coca growers; , – , –, , – colonists; hacienda system; indigenous Movimiento Indio Pachakutik (MIP), , peoples Peredo, Antonio, – , Movimiento Indio Túpac Katari (MITKA), petroleum. see hydrocarbons , plurinationality: as basis for political Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario organization, , – , – , – , (MNR), , – , , , – – , , , – , – , – ; Movimiento Revolucionario Túpac Katari conceptions of, , , – , , , ; (MRTK), – , – constitutional recognition of, – , Movimiento Universitario Julián Apasa – ; goals and priorities of, , – , (MUJA), – , – , – , – , , , , , –, MRTK. see Movimiento Revolucionario – , – , – Túpac Katari Ponchos Rojos, , , – MUJA. see Movimiento Universitario Julián poverty, – , – , – , , – , Apasa – , , – , multiculturalism. see interculturality; Prada, Raúl, – plurinationality Presidential Decree (Bolivia), – INDEX 329

price controls, –, – Shuar (people), , , , – , ¸, – , privatization, , , ¶, , – , , , . – , . see also Confederación de see also neoliberalism; water Nacionalidades Indígenas del Ecuador; Proaño, Leonidas, – , , Shuar Federation Shuar Federation, , – , . see also Quechua (people), , ¸¶, , . see also Shuar (people) Kichwa Sirén, Andres, , Quishpe, Salvador, – , , Sisa, Bartolina, , , , , , , Quispe, Felipe, ; biography and Six Federations, – , , – interview of, – ; political rise and Skocpol, eda, , , fall, – , , , – , – , , , social assistance, , – , , , –, – ; radicalism of, , – , –, – , – , socialism, – , – , – , – , – , Qullasuyu, , – , , – , – , . see also Marxism; Movimiento al Socialismo; communitarian, , – , racism, – , , – , , – , , – – , , – , – , – ; as shaping Spaniards (people), indigenous identity, – , – , – Spanish (language), – , – , – , stabilization, . see also neoliberalism radio, , , , , , , . see also Taller Stefanoni, Pablo, de Historia Oral Andina sumak kawsay (living well). see also communal Ramón, Galo, – , , vision; cosmovision: as basis for gov- Reinaga, Fausto, La revolución india, , , ernment, – , , –, –, ; – , , , – . see also Katarist- explained and described, , –, –, Indianist movements –, , , , , –; at odds with revolution: according to interviewees, – , extractivism, –, –; as organizing – , , – , – , – ; dened vision, , , –, , – and summarized, – , – , , , suma qamaña. see sumak kawsay – ; goals and priorities of, – , Surco, Fidel, – , – , – , – , – , , , ; rejection of violence in, – , – , Taller de Historia Oral Andina (THOA), – , , , ; use of violence in, – , , , – , – , , , – , – Tenesaca, Deln, , , – , Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia, , , , territory, , – , , . see also indige- Rojas, Eugenio, , – , – , , nous communities; land; nationality Rumiñahui, esis of Pulacayo, , . see also Marx- ism; miners Salazar, Julio, – , – THOA. see Taller de Historia Oral Andina Salesians, – . see also Catholic Church omson, Sinclair, , Sánchez de Lozada, Gonzalo, – , –, Ticona Alejo, Esteban, , , , Tituaña, Auki, – , – Sandinista Revolution, , , , Tiwanaku, , , , Santi, Marlon, – , – , , , , Sarayaku, – Ulcuango, Ricardo, 330 INDEX

Unidades Móviles Policiales para Áreas whiteness, – Rurales (UMOPAR), , , wiphala, , , , unions: miners, – , , , ; peasant, Wisum, Bosco, , , – , – , – , ; workers, women, , , – , , , – , , , , , , , . see also coca growers; Federación United States, , , ; involvement in Nacional de Mujeres Campesinas Bolivia, xv, , , , – , –, de Bolivia– Bartolina Sisa; individual – , (see also coca); involvement women in Ecuador, xiv, , workers, urban, , , , , ,

Vargas, Antonio, , ¸, Yantalema, Gerónimo, – , – Villa Tunari massacre, Yashar, Deborah, – , Yasuní National Park, – . see also war on drugs, , , – . see also coca; Ishpingo- Tiputani- Tambococha United States water, , , ¶, – , – , Zamosc, Leon, , , , , Water War (– ), , ¶ Zurita, Leonilda, , – , – , ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Je ery M. Paige is a professor emeritus in the Department of Sociology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is the author of Coee and Power: Rev- olution and the Rise of Democracy in Central America (), ¥e Politics of Repro- ductive Ritual (), and Agrarian Revolution: Social Movements and Export Agriculture in the Underdeveloped World (). His work has also appeared in academic journals such as Nature, Society and ¥ought, American Journal of Sociol- ogy, Latin American Research Review, and Journal of Developing Societies. From to he was a Santander Fellow for the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University, and from to he was a Fellow in the Latin American Program for the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Between and , Paige served as the associate editor of Political Power and Social ¥eory. He earned his PhD from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in .