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The Culture of Democracy and Bolivia's Indigenous Movements

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The Culture of Democracy and Bolivia's Indigenous Movements Article The Culture of Democracy and Bolivia’s Indigenous Movements Robert Albro The George Washington University Abstract ■ This article describes the participation of Bolivia’s indigenous move- ments in encompassing popular protest coalitions of the last five years. Pointing to the importance of cultural heritage in current social movement efforts to revi- talize Bolivian democracy, this argument examines the importance of the ‘terms of recognition’ in the negotiation of the very meaning of democratic partici- pation, between the traditional political class and popular protesters, but also within protesting coalitions. As both indigenous and popular traditions of struggle increasingly make common cause, Bolivia’s indigenous movements are providing the cultural resources that frame the terms of popular protest. At the same time, the terms of indigenous identity are also changing form, becoming more available to growing urban-indigenous and non-indigenous popular social sectors now willing to claim or reclaim an indigenous heritage. This article also explores key transnational and national networks now involved in this transform- ation of the terms of indigenous cultural heritage, making it the basis of an alternative democratic public in Bolivia. Keywords ■ Bolivia ■ democratization ■ indigenous movements ■ publics ■ recognition ‘Looking back, we will move forward.’ Carlos Mamani Condori (1992), Aymara activist and historian ‘We need a space where the people can talk not about the past, but the future.’ Oscar Olivera (2004), social movement spokesperson On 6 June 2005, Bolivian president Carlos Mesa resigned for the second time, citing his inability to govern while mired in another round of large- scale social mobilizations that had paralyzed the country since mid-May. Mesa’s government was beset by over 800 protests during his year and a half in office (Dangl, 2005). The protests of May and June were touched off by the passage of a new hydrocarbons law that did not grant national control of gas reserves to the satisfaction of popular leaders. Sparring with police, approximately 15,000 people filled the Plaza Murillo in La Paz on 30 May. On 1 June mostly Aymara peasants blockaded access to La Paz. Meanwhile, in the city of Cochabamba, peasants and factory workers led a massive march through the city center. By 4 June all of Bolivia’s major highways were blockaded at 55 points throughout the country, bringing it to an economic stand-still and provoking an exasperated Mesa to step down. Vol 26(4) 387–410 [DOI:10.1177/0308275X06070122] Copyright 2006 © SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) www.sagepublications.com Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at SMITH COLLEGE on February 17, 2016 388 Critique of Anthropology 26(4) As it has been since the first Water War of 2000, public assemblies convened by social movement leaders were instrumental in the run up to Mesa’s resignation, including a referendum on 23 May (see Gomez, 2005; Martin, 2005). After three weeks of strikes, marches, and road blocks, on the day of Mesa’s resignation hundreds of thousands of people converged on the center of La Paz, the capital city. And in what became a massive open-air forum (popularly called a cabildo abierto), the call went up to found a new ‘Popular Assembly’.1 The proposed assembly would be composed of delegates from indigenous communities and urban neighborhood associ- ations, along with worker, trade, and agrarian unions. Delegates would be elected in meetings of each grassroots organization according to their respective and preexistent ‘customary’ procedures (usos y costumbres).2 The assembly’s first order of business would be to address two popular calls repeatedly raised in recent years: for the nationalization of Bolivia’s natural gas and for a referendum to redraft a national constitution that better represents the rights of the country’s indigenous majority. As I argue here, such efforts illustrate a deepening entanglement of indigenous with national-popular traditions of struggle (see also Hylton, 2005a). A former vice-president, Mesa himself came to power in October 2003 only after his predecessor, Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, fled the country in the face of outrage over bloody efforts to control similar protests through- out that year, resulting in at least 60 deaths and hundreds injured (see Ledebur, 2003: 2). It is estimated that a crowd of up to 500,000 people assembled in La Paz the day Sánchez de Lozada’s helicopter took off. Prior to his own resignation Mesa’s exasperation was apparent, as he declared the El Alto protests to be a ‘carnival of lunatics’ (Mamani, 2005). The recent travails and premature end of Mesa’s government exemplify the kinds of concerns cited in a 2004 report by the United Nations Development Program, titled ‘Democracy in Latin America: Toward a Citizen’s Democ- racy’, which somberly concluded that democracy in the region is at best ‘fragile’.3 The almost routine inability of presidents to finish out their elected terms of office in Bolivia, and elsewhere, has renewed debate over the status and meaning of democracy for the region’s popular majority. The landslide election to the presidency in December 2005 of Evo Morales – leader of the coca growers and one of Bolivia’s more militant social movements – has raised fears among foreign observers that Bolivia’s democracy is heading in the wrong direction. Until very recently the US State Department identi- fied Morales as an ‘illegal coca agitator’ and as the leader of the ‘radial MAS’ (his political party) – part of a pattern of labeling Bolivia’s indigen- ous-dominated social movements as ‘anti-systemic’ (Lindsay, 2005: 6). Bolivia continues to be a litmus test for the ongoing success of democrati- zation in Latin America. The phenomenal popularity of Morales, as leader of a movement long in the cross-hairs of the US-backed War on Drugs in Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at SMITH COLLEGE on February 17, 2016 389 Albro: The Culture of Democracy and Bolivia’s Indigenous Movements Bolivia, makes it increasingly clear that the terms of democracy in this country mean different things to foreign and national policy-makers and to the grassroots groups that have been actively participating in the large- scale protests of the last six years. What are the democratic stakes in Bolivia? This is not as straight- forward a question as former presidents would have us believe. In his analysis of contemporary Mexican democracy, Matthew Gutmann (2002: xviii) draws attention to the imprecise ‘elusiveness of the term democracy’, combining as it does a wide range of aspirations and multiple meanings. Observers of Bolivia’s current paroxysms describe the present crisis as competing concepts of democracy ‘locked in fierce combat’ (Hylton, 2005b). And protesting coalitions speak and act in the name of a ‘real democracy’, in their view betrayed by government caretakers. Bolivia’s predicament illustrates what James Holston and Teresa Caldeira (1998) have called ‘disjunctive democracy’, which draws attention to the daily experiences of democracy, its variable depth and uneven distribution, currently lived in Bolivia in unbalanced, irregular, and increasingly contra- dictory ways. Distinguishing the state’s caretakers from the state itself, the object of Bolivia’s current protests is to revitalize the very terms of democ- ratization. As I develop here, this includes expanding criteria of recog- nition for inclusion in Bolivia’s democratic project, renovating the collective political subject of a national democratic process, and dramati- cally framing the cultural terms of this subject as a specific moral community. Given the apparent exhaustion of the neoliberal state in Bolivia, along with political scientist Patrick Deneen (2004: 27–8), the present analysis of popular protest efforts seeks to redress the potential ‘presence of tragedy embedded in democratic overconfidence’ as a ‘cosmic optimism’ in prin- ciples of liberal democracy characterized by an absolutist and uncritical faith in a fully liberal and democratic future. At a moment of rejection of neoliberalism as state policy in Bolivia, the democratic alternatives of popular protest movements also self-consciously reject the ‘natural’ equation of the free market with democratic freedoms (Paley, 2001). In order to better appreciate the range of democratic aspirations in contem- porary Bolivia, in what follows I examine contributions of Bolivia’s indigen- ous movements to encompassing popular mobilizations of protest in this country. I unpack how an Andean cultural heritage works as a constructive resource for the ‘democratic’ discourse and practice of Bolivia’s social movements, which seek to re-imagine and to realign the growing gulf between the experiences of actually existing democracy and the unrepre- sentative institution-building of democratization. I sketch out how cultural heritage is used as a political resource for popular coalition-building and in an effort by social movements to frame an alternative democratic public outside of Bolivia’s ‘politics as usual’. Downloaded from coa.sagepub.com at SMITH COLLEGE on February 17, 2016 390 Critique of Anthropology 26(4) Vicissitudes of neoliberal democracy Eduardo Gamarra (1994: 10–11) has described the application of neoliberal democracy in Bolivia since 1985 as a negotiation between ‘tech- nocrats, managers, and government officials’, on the one hand, and ‘distinct social sectors attempting to find a niche’ on the other. Reformists promoted a conception of democracy
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