Left-indigenous struggles in Bolivia: searching for revolutionary democracy

Monthly Review, Sept, 2005 by Jeffery R. Webber

When the price of tin bottomed out, neoliberal protagonists in the state took the opportunity to privatize the mines, forcing nearly thirty thousand miners to "relocate" and find means of survival in the cities (including El Alto) or in the Chapare region growing coca leaves for export. The miners continued their protests, but feebly and without impact. The vanguard of the left moved to the cocaleros, coca growers, who, because of constant harassment and repression from the U.S.-led "drug war," developed an impressive anti-imperial ideological orientation, imbued with the revolutionary Marxism of the relocated miners and the indigenous resistance politics of Chapare's peasants. The latter aspect of the cocaleros' ideological development would be further refined as years passed, epitomized in the sanctified symbol of the coca leaf and the wiphala, the multicolored indigenous flag.

While the cocaleros put up a fierce localized fight against imperialism and the neoliberal project, and while they would come to constitute the basis of the strongest reconstituted left party in Bolivia, the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS), during the 1980s and 1990s they nonetheless resembled nothing remotely similar to the historic, far-reaching movement of the miners within the Bolivian left. The period of neoliberal hegemony, 1985-2000, clearly represented a historic defeat of the left and seemed to inculcate profound sentiments of loss within popular sectors that otherwise may have been able to mount some resistance. Meanwhile, other prominent figures on the left migrated to work with nongovernmental organizations or converted squarely to the neoliberal project.

Things began to change dramatically in February-April 2000 when the rural-urban and multiclass Cochabamba Water War reversed the privatization of water demanded by the World Bank, and led to the ousting of a multinational consortium led by the American corporation Bechtel. Angry at tariff increases and the government's water privatization laws, people from distinct social groups, including irrigating peasant farmers, water committees of the urban poor, and urban water users coalesced under the umbrella of the Coordinator for the Defense of Water and Life, from which Oscar Olivera emerged as a leader. This was one of two initial moments in the cycle of rearticulation of left-indigenous forces (2000-2005), the other being a series of road-blockades and protests in 2000 in Aymara communities in the altiplano. The Water War signaled the first rupture in the fifteen-year-old neoliberal fabric exposing the failure of the economic model to produce the wonders promised by a series of governments, and it breathed life and organization into existing societal discontent.

By "rearticulation" of left-indigenous forces I am referring to historical moments when common elements of class exploitation and racial oppression are consciously recognized by the exploited and oppressed and they are able to organize themselves to fight for their interests. They are always exploited and oppressed, but only occasionally capable of organizing and mobilizing themselves.