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CounterPunch
February
1, 2003
The Weight of
Forgetting
The
Bolivian Blockades in Historical Context
by FORREST HYLTON
Though they are usually the first to speak in
the name of tradition, Conservatives tend to ignore history when
evaluating the present, and if anything has been missing in current
debates about violence, democracy, human rights, and authoritarianism
in Bolivia, it is historical perspective. The hysterical reaction
of the media-coupled the near-silence of progressive intellectuals-makes
change on this front unlikely, although occasionally cracks in
the crumbling edifice show through. In an interview on January
23, the day he joined the Joint Chiefs of the People, Felipe
Quispe, leader of the Aymara peasant trade union confederation,
CSUTCB, and political party, MIP, said that he represents the
people to whom the territory known as Bolivia or Qollasuyu belongs,
the people who make it produce, whereas President Sánchez
de Lozada represents the people who loot it, sell it, mortgage
it, run it and ruin it. The simplicity of this truth does not
blunt the force its impact.
The notion that the community Indians
are rightful owners of the land, who, as such, should make all
political decisions that concern them, points to the Tupak Katari
insurgency in 1781, the rebellion of Zárate Willka, Lorenzo
Ramírez, and Juan Lero in 1899, and the Chayanta uprising
of 1927, led by Manuel Michel. If tropes of "savagery"
and "barbarism" are evoked by the names of the abovementioned
Indian caciques, it is because official history has buried the
record of long, arduous legal struggles that preceded each and
every Indian insurrection.
Evo Morales, head of the coca growers'
trade union federations and political party, MAS, and Felipe
Quispe, the two principal leaders of the Joint chiefs of Staff
of the People, inherit a tradition that counterinsurgent discourse
has described as "race" (nineteenth) or "caste"
war (eighteenth century), but which in fact has consistently
explored available legal options while demanding self-government
in a more inclusive and democratic polity. Democratic not in
the liberal sense of delegated representation, but in the directly
participatory sense in which it is being discussed at the World
Social Forum in Porto Alegre. In this respect, Bolivian coca
growers and community Indians are politically ahead of their
time, not behind it.
The insurgent tradition of direct democracy
on the land, which is structured by politico-military-religious
hierarchies and enacted in community assemblies, was rendered
invisible in both the national and international revolutionary
traditions that dominated Bolivian politics after the 1930s.
It only reappeared publicly again in the late-1970s. During
the forty-year period of eclipse, new forms of struggle, based
upon the political party-trade union dyad, emerged with varying
class compositions and a common commitment to mestizaje-race
mixture of the whitening, "civilizing" variety; a process
at once desirable and inevitable. Recent historical scholarship
has demonstrated that in Cochabamba, heartland of the ruling
MNR (National Revolutionary Movement), mestizaje was a
strategy that smallholding Indian peasants created from below,
seeking to escape exploitation and the marks of racial inferiority.
But there can be little doubt that after 1953, the national revolutionary
state made use of it from above. So did the revolutionary internationalists
who challenged the MNR from the left via the miners' movement.
To grasp the scope of the influence of
mestizaje as a political horizon, one only has to look
at the composition and proposals of the National Assembly (1969-71)
under radical nationalist General Juan José Torres, who
personified upward mobility for middling sectors with popular
origins. The proletarian parties and especially the miners'
union set the agenda for the National Assembly with the idea
of making a transition to socialism. But in those years, as
reaction noisily gathered, a new generation of Aymara peasant
leaders emerged within the MNR machine and began to bore away
at its foundations. The project to break with the racist, teleological
paternalism that lay at the core of official rural trade unionism
counted on the support of the first generation of semi-urban
Aymara intellectuals, plus progressive segments of the Catholic
Church. This support was crucial in achieving national projection.
As the Banzer dictatorship took shape
in the years after 1971, the figure of Tupac Katari re-emerged
in the discourse of radical opposition, and by the time of Banzer's
overthrow in 1978 the tradition of Aymara insurgency had, in
modified form, begun to take its place alongside proletarian-led,
Left party-driven trade unionism. Indians, as their leaders
and spokespeople began to call them, even fielded parties once
the political arena was opened to electoral competition, but
none of them were anything less than total failures, except MRTK,
which briefly became part of the panopoly of neoliberal parties
in the 1990s.
During Banzer's reign, even as the Aymara
movement of the altiplano regenerated, Santa Cruz and the tropical
part of Cochabamba became the economic heart of Bolivia, because
Bánzer subsidized agro-industry with profits from mining
exports. After the crisis in the price of primary products hit
the eastern tropics in the mid-1970s, the cocaine business soon
became a convenient way out for an important part of the agro-exporting
bourgeoisie. Further, under Banzer the state encouraged colonization
of the tropics because of it could not manage the crisis its
policies had created in the western highlands and southern valleys.
If we are serious about dealing with the problem of coca production
and commercialization, we must recognize the role the Bolivian
state and reactionary fractions of capital played in fomenting
the transformation of coca into cocaine.
Here we need only look at García
Meza's "cocaine coup" of 1980, which made explicit
the connection between extreme right-wing politics and narcotics
trafficking that Miami Cubans forged in the 1960s and shared
with the Brazilian, Argentine, Chilean, and Venezuelan military
and police with whom they worked in the 1970s. Though the Reagan
administration repudiated García Meza, it supported the
Brazilian generals who backed García Meza, not to mention
the Argentine colonels who were soon to train Nicaraguan mercenaries
in the arts of narcotics-financed counter-insurgency in Honduras.
To anyone familiar with the history of U.S. covert operations
in Burma in the 1950s, Laos in the 1960s and 70s, Afghanistan
and Nicaragua in the 1980s, this should come as no surprise.
More recently, here in Bolivia the entrepreneurial sector from
Santa Cruz and Beni-organically linked to cocaine exports-has
cried for a state of siege, which, when coupled with their vigilante
actions, demonstrates that its traditions are alive and well.
It is worth asking what role this sector will play in newly
arrived Ambassador Greenlee's strategy to pacify the Bolvian
tropics.
To place the blame for cocaine exports
on coca growers and the Left is the cruelest of historical ironies:
cocaleros choose to grow and sell coca because it provides them
with a monetary income 3-5 times greater than what they could
earn on the altiplano or the valleys, where more than 9 out of
10 people live in poverty. With their proposal to export the
leaf to Argentina, the cocaleros are, at least in this respect,
true believers in free trade and market rationality. Nearly
alone after the destruction of the miners' union (FSTMB) in 1986,
they formed a social movement that challenged the destruction
of the working class and "drug war" imperialism. Many
criticisms of neoliberalism that have become common currency
in Bolivia since 2000 were, as recently as 1998, almost exclusively
the property of cocaleros and their sympathizers.
To insist that Evo Morales should stick
to coca and forget about the FTAA, privatization, or the export
of Bolivian gas to the U.S. via Chile is to forget that when
the failed national revolution plunged into the neoliberal abyss,
the coca growers, more than any other movement, spoke to the
interests of the nation composed of the excluded, working majority.
Hopes that they could speak effectively to majority interests
through Congress, raised in the elections of 2002, have been
dashed, and not because of the eloquence or competence of the
governing coalition.
How are we to situate the cocaleros against
the background of a long history of Aymara insurgency and a short
history of Quechua-mestizo industrial and agrarian trade unionism?
Clearly the cocaleros are a hybrid of both traditions, and arose
as a group of petty producers because of the dual crisis in highland
industry and agriculture into which Banzer plunged all Bolivian
workers-women and children as well as men, waged and unwaged,
rural and urban. The role of the miners in the formation of
the coca growers' federations is legendary, but we should not
overlook the contribution of the traditions of collective labor
and struggle that the highland Aymara and, above all, Quechuas
from the valleys brought with them when they migrated to the
tropics. As Robert Smale's forthcoming research on the formation
of the miners' movement reveals, earlier generations of Quechua
petty producers from the valleys and Aymara communities from
the highlands decisively shaped political culture in the trade
unions between 1900-30.
In terms of identity, the cocaleros are
mestizo in the sense that they are not highland community members
and own property individually rather than collectively, but not
in the national or international revolutionary sense that dominated
through the 1980s. Cocaleros do not repudiate Indian cultural
traditions or collectivism; in Evo Morales' recent article in
Pulso as well as his election campaign, key aspects of the discourse
of Indian liberation featured prominently. While they may own
property as individuals, coca growers' daily lives and their
mode of struggle are collective and communal. Following the
re-emergence of the long Aymara tradition of insurgency to the
center of the historical stage in 2000-2, the tendency to affirm
Indian identity has been reinforced to the point where, at least
within the political opposition, parliamentary as well as extra-parliamentary,
the whitening, homogenizing discourses on which Bolivian national
identity was based for fifty years have died-and good riddance.
The question of what Bolvia is, what it has been, and what it
might become can now be more freely debated.
Historically, it is beyond question that
insurgent Indian movements from below in Bolivia have always
championed legalism and worked within the formal political
system, and one could argue that they have prioritized legalist
tactics even when their rulers relied on violence and disobeyed
the law. But they have never been willing to confine their horizons
of thought and action to a political system designed to exclude
them, either. Insofar as Bolivia has become a more inclusive
polity in the past 177 years, it is because pressure from below,
applied with various tactics, has forced the hand of power, and
not because the dominated have obeyed the changing rules of a
political game the dominant have made in order to continue dominating
with a minimum of resistance.
*This was written for a Bolivia's
major newsweekly, Pulso, because our Mobilization Support
Collective wanted to respond to the tidal wave of reactionary
commentary that the ongoing blockades have unleashed in Bolivia.
It might hold some interest for the North Atlantic reader nonetheless.
Forrest Hylton
is conducting doctoral research in history in Bolivia and can
be reached at forresthylton@hotmail.com.
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