Left-indigenous struggles in Bolivia: searching for revolutionary democracy

Monthly Review, Sept, 2005 by Jeffery R. Webber

The Geography of Struggle

La Paz, the Bolivian capital, rests in a deep valley in the heart of the Andes. The geographical terrain of the city is marked clearly with deep class divisions and the racist legacies of Spanish colonial impositions and ongoing internal colonialism, present since the founding of the republic in 1825. The indigenous peoples--over 60 percent of the population according to the 2001 census--have suffered at the bottom of a wickedly steep social hierarchy that whitens in accordance with class privilege.

Neighboring El Alto rests on the brink of the altiplano, the high-plateau overlooking the valley which cradles La Paz. With seven hundred thousand residents living at four thousand meters above sea level, El Alto is technically a separate city from La Paz, but it acts more as the latter's massive shantytown, many workers descending each day to look for precarious work in La Paz in construction, sales, or services; the two urban areas are deeply if unevenly interlinked economically, socially, and politically. Eighty-two percent of altenos, the residents of El Alto, identify themselves as indigenous. The class and racial hierarchies between these cities are visually striking. As one descends the mountainside from El Alto, into the downtown of La Paz and through to the southern zone, adobe shacks, indigenous women street vendors, and the absence of basic urban infrastructure, are gradually replaced with whiter faces, taller buildings, sidewalks, and, eventually, mansions and Mercedes.

El Alto was the epicenter of the Gas War of September-October 2003 that rocked the Bolivian political landscape with a force not seen since the national revolution of 1952. The Aymara peasants of the altiplano, the miners of the altiplano community of Huanuni, the poor indigenous residents of El Alto, and eventually the poorer sectors of La Paz threw out hated president Gonzalo "Goni" Sanchez de Lozada. Even some middle-class pacenos, as residents of La Paz are called, led hunger strikes in the final days of the revolt, expressing their revulsion in the face of Goni's massacre of over seventy people. (1) Lacking a left political project capable of taking state power, however, popular forces accepted Carlos Mesa Gisbert, then vice president, as Goni's replacement hoping he would make good on his promise to enact the October Agenda, which included nationalizing the production and distribution of natural gas, bringing Goni to trial, and convening a Constituent Assembly to remake the Bolivian state to serve the interests of the poor indigenous majority.

Of course, Mesa, the former journalist and historian, has not carried through with the October Agenda. Instead, with a rhetoric steeped in soft-neoliberalism, he has advanced the neoliberal political and economic project first set on course in 1985 under the reign of Victor Paz Estenssoro.

In response to Mesa's abject failure to fulfill the October Agenda, in 2005 popular social forces have re-emerged to confront state power, first with the El Alto Water War in January and March, and, second, and most importantly, with the Second Gas War of May and June. El Alto-La Paz is once again the center of strikes, marches, exploding dynamite, confrontations with police, and attempts to take the Plaza Murillo, which contains the Presidential Palace. These are met with tear-gas and rubber bullets. We have also witnessed the mobilization of regional right-wing forces under the banner of "autonomy" in the department of Santa Cruz, and rumors of coups and military dissent. In order to understand the complexity of the contemporary conflict, we need first to reach back, if only briefly, to its historical roots.

The Renewal of Popular Forces and the Prolonged Crisis of the Neoliberal State

From 1964 until 1982 Bolivia suffered through a series of coups and primarily right-wing military dictatorships. In 1982, procedural democracy was restored through a valiant popular struggle, and a loose coalition of left-wing forces took state power under the banner of Democratic Popular Unity (UDP). Inheriting the extraordinary debt accrued during the dictatorship of Hugo Banzer (1971-1978), suffering from innumerable internal divisions, battling extraordinary levels of hyperinflation, and being paralyzed by right-wing obstructionist efforts on a number of fronts, the UDP government was forced to call early elections (1985), and a period of neoliberal hegemony (1985-2000) was installed.

Fifteen years of "pacted democracy"--a series of governments cobbled together by coalitions of right-wing parties with longstanding rivalries--was reinforced by the military, a friendly international environment of imperialist powers and international financial institutions, and an unprecedented unity between the factions of the Bolivian bourgeoisie. This context made it possible to ram down the throat of Bolivian society a "free market" capitalism with devastating social consequences.

With the depressing legacy of the UDP government haunting their party structures and social movement and union bases, the left was in shambles and could project no political, social, or economic alternative to the neoliberal assault. The final nail was driven into the coffin of the popular forces in 1985. That year, the international price of tin collapsed, destroying the tin miners who had been the vanguard of the Bolivian left since the 1952 revolution. They represented the backbone of the extraordinarily radical and militantly independent Bolivian Workers' Central (COB).