by Camila Vergara
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Published in Anamesa, Democracy Issue, Spring 2007
For Latin American countries the twentieth century has been an era of convulsions: revolutions, dictatorships, protests, reforms, and ethnic mobilizations have been part of the struggle of achieving equality and democracy. Bolivia, a country that has had more presidents than years of existence as an independent nation-state, has experienced a recent extraordinary change in its political scenario. For the first time, the political elite, conformed of high- and middle-class white and mestizo population, had to step down and let Evo Morales, an outsider with clear indigenous roots, become the legitimate President.
Even though Bolivia has a majority of what is called 'indigenous population,' until recently native peoples have been scarcely represented in the political system. In 1980, for the first time, Indian representatives were elected to serve in Congress. For almost twenty years, development of the inclusion of indigenous people in politics took a slow pace, until the so-called Water War in 1999. This conflict confronted the state with a social coalition in Cochabamba over the privatization of water rights in the region. The achievements of the protests, both in the national and international arena, motivated other groups to present their demands and set up a successful discursive framework linked to anti-globalization and anti-capitalist ideas.
In this paper I intend to show the process of development of the ethnic movements that emerged during this awakening of the indigenous base, as well as the discourses implemented by their leaders. I will try to elucidate the different meanings of being 'indigenous,' the use of ethnicity in the political rhetoric, and how the dangers of misrepresentation and inequality are still hovering over Bolivia’s destiny.
The Rebirth of Eth
nicity?Ethnicity is a socially constructed concept that has to do with self-identification and with positioning within society. J. Weber describes ethnicity as perceptions of common descent, history, fate, and culture, where language, physical appearance (evidenced more in distinctive clothing than in body features), religion, and modes of production are basic unifying characteristics. Identity refers to the cultural values or perspectives to which an individual most strongly relates. To identify with a group, movement, or community is to acknowledge that you share common elements, which makes you part of it.
For Henry Hale, identity is "a set of points of personal reference on which people rely to navigate the social world they inhabit." This "social radar" is created from our perception of and our relation with the social world, and it is our universal tendency to reduce uncertainty, which makes us gather into groups. Ethnicity is a kind of social radar, and one of the strongest social bonds can be found among ethnic groups. This characteristic makes ethnic identity a powerful tool in politics, especially now when ethnicity has acquired international relevance.
It would be just to state that indigeneity has been in trend in the international scenario for a while now. Indigenous culture has stopped being represented as anachronistic and backward, and has started to be depicted as authentic and national. Despite this change in indigeneity’s image, Canessa argues that there is "some ambivalence to this celebration of indigenous culture: the particularity of indigenous culture and language can be represented as marking the genuinely national even as it serves as the marker of social and racial inferiority."
Even though being 'indio' is still associated with inferiority, there has been a revival of ethnic identity in Bolivia. The last Bolivian census revealed that 63 percent of the population declared itself as having an ethnic identity. However, this percentage is at odds with classical ways of classifying ethnicity that emphasize common language and place of residence as fundamental components. Experts in ethnicity agree that language is a pivotal feature for determining ethnic identity. In Bolivia, there has been a slow but consistent loss of indigenous languages for Spanish, especially in the urban areas. Even though a majority of Bolivians declared that Spanish was their mother tongue, yet a greater majority identifies itself as indigenous. The census also shows that only 49.4 percent of the population speaks an indigenous language, thus, 13.6 percent of the population claims to have an ethnic identity, but do not speak an indigenous language. Because ethnicity has to do with self-identification, in this case language seems inaccurate to determine ethnic identity.
The other strong indicator of ethnicity is location. During the colonial period, to be an Indian depended partly on the place of residence: if someone lived in an Indian community was supposedly an Indian. Today almost half of those who self-identify as indigenous live in urban areas. The shift of these two important factors regarding ethnic identification may suggest that in this period indigeneity is becoming a broader and more ambiguous concept that could be used to classify a more heterogeneous sector of the population. However, ethnic identity is a much more complex concept. Besides self-identification, ethnic identity is also constructed based upon social recognition. For instance, a person living in La Paz self-identifies with an indigenous community, but for the people that live in indigenous communities he is a 'cholo, ' thus, not properly an indigenous person.
The case of Bolivia shows the dynamic essence of ethnic identity and how it has changed over time, from being equivalent to second-rate citizenship to being associated to political power. Even though indigenous peoples have always constituted the majority of Bolivia’s population, their movements have been historically co-opt and their rights denied. However, during the last decade, ethnic identity has become a powerful source of political capital, which has catapulted indigenous movements and their leaders to the center of the political arena.
From disappearance to protagonismAfter the 1952 Revolution, the new government of the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement (MNR) officially abolished the term 'indio' because of its stigmatization, and replaced it with 'campesino.' This change of concepts veered the discourse of the government and the leaders of the nascent movements from ethnic identity to class identity. The MNR objective was to solve the 'Indian problem' by assimilating Indian communities, eliminating their autonomy and way of life. The concepts of 'civilization,' 'progress,' and 'modernization' filled up the state’s discourse as a way of imposing the cultural values of the dominant groups into society as a whole.
Juliana Strobele-Gregor argues that the revolution heirs made the mestizo a fundamental ideological support for the newly formed Bolivian nation. "The glorification of Creole-mestizo identity as the substance of the nation was an essential part of the party ideology that became the ideology of the state." The state was conceived as the guardian of the national patrimony and of the people. After the legal dissolution of the hacienda system in 1953, the state sponsored an official peasant’s organization, aimed to keep Indian demands in control while extending a homogenizing veil to transform Indians into modern peasants.
The MNR had a strong rural base that was captured by General Rene Barrientos, who took the government by force in 1964. A fluent Quechua-speaker, Barrientos established the Military-Peasant Pact, which initially supported his anti-labor policies in exchange for public works in the countryside. The attempt to introduce a tax on individual rural property brought animosity among the Indian peasants and revealed the demise of the Pact. This disengagement from the official discourse propitiated the emergence of a new kind of social movement based on ethnic identity.
At the end of the 1960s the indigenous group Katarismo gained power in the structure of the CNTCB, the official peasant union, and began taking an independent course. By the late 1970s, even though Katarismo had become a leading force in the rural trade unions in the highlands, it didn’t play a significant role in politics. From within its 'Indianist current' emerged a new political group, the Indian Tupaj Katari Movement (MITK), which under the leadership of Felipe Quispe elected the first two indigenous leaders as deputies to the lower chamber of Congress in 1980.
After the New Economic Policy was launched in 1985, trade liberalization flooded Bolivian markets with cheap imported goods, with the consequent closure of many national factories and the increase of unemployment. Seven years later, Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada decided to run for president in alliance with the Aymara leader Victor Hugo Cárdenas as his vice-president. For Willem Assies and Ton Salman this surprising nomination of Cárdenas "as a running mate was in good part the outcome of a political marketing study and was designed to attract electors" who otherwise would have voted for indigenous parties.
Parallel to the deepening of economic reforms, Sánchez de Lozada also carried out a Constitutional reform that recognized the multicultural composition of the population, and a Law on Popular Participation (1994), aimed to decentralize the country’s political-administrative system. Consequently, the municipality became an important source of regional power that gave indigenous people space for self-rule. In the 1995 municipal election, 29 percent of the total councilors
elected were from a peasant-indigenous background. Moreover, with the creation of new districts and the modification of the electoral system in 1996, local interests began to be better represented.
The new notoriety acquire by indigenous peoples in this period can be attributed to this modifications of the system. Donna Lee Van Cott argues that significant changes in electoral rules and institutional design tend to influence indigenous population to form political parties and to achieve electoral success. Bolivia has had, since its return to democracy in 1982, one of the most fragmented party systems in the region: five parties sharing 90 percent of the vote. Because of this, seat allocation formulas that favored larger parties have prevailed, thus restricting congressional representation of small parties such as the indigenous.
The 1994 Constitutional reform changed the system from one that bolstered a unitary representation to one that gave advantages to smaller, regionally based parties. This encouraged indigenous leaders to run for office and pushed local indigenous organizations to form pragmatic alliances with national parties in order to achieve representation. However, Assies and Salman show that the concrete effects of the multicultural recognition and the institutional reforms were limited because they were embedded in a neoliberal economic framework, which hurt large sections of the population. "The polity is characterized by a 'representation deficit' that forces popular feelings and demands to be expressed in extra-institutional or even anti-institutional ways." This social frustration, led by indigenous people, came to a turning point in the events that started with the so-called Water War.
In 1999, Banzer’s government privatized the water supplies of Cochabamba. The contract was immediately criticized because it carried a sharp increase in consumer prices, which might reach 180 percent for some sectors of the population. A coalition of urban and rural organizations called Coordinadora de Defensa del Agua y de la Vida was created to oppose the project by sponsoring a series of protests. For Assies and Salman, the case of the Water War reflects the typical contempt for and insensitivity for popular needs and feelings from the political elite, who always choose first to ignore their demands, then to repress them, and finally to negotiate without any intention of complying to the agreements, which ultimately ignites a new round of protest.
What made this protests successful and precipitated the breakage of the violence spiral? Canessa argues it was the adoption of the language of indigeneity, which attracted the interest of the international press that gave the movement its winning edge. The Water War protesters portrayed themselves as indigenous people fighting the forces of globalization. The New York Times article "Where Incas Ruled, Indians Are Hoping for Power" depicted the incident in Cochabamba as carried out by a singular united movement aimed to "wrest power from the largely European elite." Paradoxically, the leadership of the Coordinadora was neither indigenous nor rural; it was composed basically of Creole and middle-class mestizos who "understood the potential potency of defending their interests with the language of indigeneity." This strategy helped engage an important group of Quechua-speakers and yielded an international press coverage accustomed to reporting indigenous rights and environmental concerns as a combined topic.
The example of the Water War showed that broad coalitions could be successfully mobilized against multinational companies in the protection of natural resources. The use of ethnic language and the invocation of indigenous deities and mythology proved successful for mobilizing indigenous communities and attracting international attention, which in the end forced the government to comply with the demands. This triumph proved the strength of ethnic identity and evidenced the diminishing power of the state to repress new social manifestations. This awareness would be further capitalized in the 2002 elections, the 2003 Gas War, and the victory of Evo Morales as President of Bolivia in 2005.
Ethnic identity as political discourseIn Bolivia, ethnic identity has been used to buttress movements and demands, particularly after the Water War. The utilization of ethnicity can be elucidated through the analysis of today’s two major leaders of indigenous politics, Felipe Quispe and Evo Morales, who have contrasting visions of indigenism. Both politicians were born in an Aymara-speaking family on the highland and are representative figures of the post-revolutionary generation that received a relatively good educational level. Their political careers were also forged in union-based politics. However, they have different objectives and appeal to different sectors of the population.
Quispe and his party, Movimiento Indigena Pachakutik (MIP), are frequently cataloged as extremists because their indigeneity is “much more specific and much more hostile to the current nation-state. Quispe’s vision of the future is one where the current state is replaced by an indigenous nation." His language is highly racialized and he usually talks about ‘eliminating’ the white and mestizo population. He is hostile to Bolivian nationalism and wants to change the name of the country to Republica de Qullasuyu. Because of his radical political approach, his electoral base has remained rather small compared to the appeal Morales has achieved nationwide.
In contrast, Morales’ basic grassroots base are the coca-growers’ unions, so his party Movimiento Al Socialismo (MAS), appeals to mestizos and criollos as well as to indigenous people. From Quispe’s perspective, this broad appeal makes MAS not properly an indigenous party. Morales’ language is inclusive, and instead of replacing the cu
rrent nation-state, he preaches to defend the country by transforming indigenous concerns into national affairs. "MAS is the expression of all marginalized sectors of the society, which oppressed by the neoliberal model and globalization, struggles for redress, identity, self-determination, sovereignty, and dignity."
Between the Water War events and the national elections of 2002, the demands of diverse ethnic groups escalated from the typical land petition to a 90-point manifesto that was negotiated several times with the government. During the protests, the contrasting visions of indigeneity purported by Quispe and Morales began to take shape in the media. Quispe articulated a discourse in which he envisioned two Bolivias, one Indian and one white. This radical separatists’ vision went against the acceptance of multiculturalism. After this backlash against the 'pluri-multi' ideology that had been mainstream since the institutional change in 1994, George Gray argues that "the notion of easy coexistence and unity in diversity were perceived as naïve and distorting of the true shape of power relations which favored definite moves toward a modern and liberal or at least formally-liberal state."
Even though the ethnic discourse tends to radicalize national projects in Bolivia, the 2002 election shows that the majority of the voters preferred a more inclusive approach. MAS won 20.94 percent of the national vote, coming in second place, less than 2 points behind the leader, and placing eight senators and 27 deputies in Congress. In comparison, Quispe’s party, MIP, won only 6.09 percent of the vote, and placed six deputes in the lower chamber. Assies and Salman argue that these outcomes, more than being a punishment for the incumbent parties or a growing sympathy for radical ideas, "suggest that the government⎯and all 'established' parties, for that matter⎯failed to disqualify the main protagonists of the protest cycles as extremists and democracy-unworthy politicians, and at the same time failed to qualify themselves as the exclusive legitimate representational 'game in town.'" Therefore, there is a questioning of the whole traditional system of power and democratic legitimacy, which has been based upon the exclusion of indigenous peoples and the legitimacy of the dominant group as political representatives.
The outcome of the elections and the increasing 'ethnicitization' of politics in Bolivia evidence that there is more at stake that the simple inclusion of indigenous peoples in the political system. More than specific demands, indigenous peoples want to have influence in the formulation and development of democracy. The ethnic discourse of both Morales and Quispe suggest that there is an incompatibility between globalization and the values and way of life of indigenous society. Morales’ principal ideas are focused on anti-imperialism, and how to protect dignity and sovereignty.
Clearly, MAS strategically brings together ethnic and class discourses, and combines them with an even broader anti-globalization speech. In Canessa’s words "Morales’ indigeneity here is a strategic position against which to challenge global capitalism." Even though ethnic identity has been used before to articulate diverse demands and to unify people for a common cause, the innovative feature of MAS is how it has transformed indigenous ideology into a mainstream creed. Moreover, Morales has managed to appeal to a broad public and made them identify with an indigenous cause, despite the fact that an important sector of his followers does not identify itself with an ethnic group at all. In this sense, Canessa argues that Morales does not fit in a radical model of ethnic politics, but rather in an inclusive one, which "has replaced the mestizo as the iconic citizen with the indígena." Does this mean, then, that ethnic identity can lose its particularity and broaden in order to include non-indigenous peoples? And if so, could this broadening weaken the indigenous people identification with the movement, thus losing its representativeness?
Conclusion: Ethnic Politics and the Dangers of UniformityIn various ways, ethnicity has become an increasingly important factor in Bolivian politics. The reforms introduced in 1994 can be understood as an effort to address multiculturalism, but because these reforms were framed in terms of neoliberalism, they could only address part of Bolivia’s problems. With the institutional change, multiculturalism was dealt with and indigenous people were given space in the political system. But the ideology of multiculturalism, even though it brought a limited incorporation into the polity, failed to resolve issues such as poverty and inequality. Bolivia is presently one of the most unequal countries in Latin America, and the second most unequal country in South America, only below Brazil, which has an income four times higher.
Nevertheless, the institutional change and the international prominence of ethnicity have helped indigenous peoples to go from 'disappearance' to the center of Bolivian politics. Indigeneity has become the language of protests over resources and the defense of the nation against the forces of globalization. This has given ethnic movements a prominence they did not have before, which has yielded political representation and the power to achieve beneficial reforms. In 2005 the cocalero leader Evo Morales was elected Bolivia’s President with an impressive 54 percent of the national vote. Besides being elected with an ample majority in a country with one of the most fragmented party systems, Morales has achieved an unprecedented power for indigenous people and other oppressed groups.
Canessa points out an essential question regarding this new type of 'inclusionist' ethnic identity. He argues that "just as inclusive mestizaje contained within it the exclusion of the Indian, the inclusive indigenism MAS espouses contains within it the potential for a similar form of exclusion." In other words, Morales’ indigenist discourse tends to unify all ethnic identities into one broad national ethnic identity, which is at odds with the reality of the country.
According to Weber, there are 38 indigenous peoples within the Bolivian borders. Even though in the highlands Quechua and Aymara speakers predominate, it is estimated that the lowlands harbor some 220,000 indigenous persons of 36 different ethnic affiliations. Could these diverse ethnic groups identify themselves with the homogenic ethnic identity propelled by Morales, or would they remain excluded?
Canessa tries to answer this question drawing conclusions from his field research in the community of Pocobaya. He argues that ethnic identity in this region is ayllu-based and that even though the Pocobayeños speak Aymara, they do not identify themselves with an Aymara nation. "Whereas Pocobayeños will recognize their shared oppression with other poor people, this does not translate into a sense of shared ethnic identity." They also do not seem to share an identity with urban dwellers. Moreover, they do not consider urban people to be indigenous at all, because migration to an urban setting brings attached a loss of identity.
For the Pocobayeños to be indigenous is not to share a common language or to have Indian blood; it is more a way of life. Under this lens, ethnic identity is not the broader concept used by Morales, but a very specific local link shared by indigenous communities. Does this mean that Morales and his followers are not 'true' indigenous?
Even though this question cannot be properly answered, because identity depends on personal as well as social elements, what is clear is that the identity portrayed by the Pocobayeños is very different from the one expressed by indigenous leaders such as Morales. These different identifications, even though they could be currently combined in public discourse, there is danger of marginalization embedded in it. If the concept of indigenous becomes broader enough to impose uniformity among the population, indigenous groups that do not share that identity, would continue to be marginalized from the political system and the process of nation-formation.
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