Nascent activism in times of disillusionment: struggles between Indigenous self-determination and state co-optation in plurinational Bolivia

Abstract

The restructuring of the Bolivian state as plurinational raised high hopes for Indigenous self-determination. In practice, however, attempts by the governing political party to co-opt Indigenous representation have compromised the autonomy and diversity of Indigenous peoples. This article investigates the emergence, forms, and rationale of nascent Indigenous activism in times of disillusionment in the plurinational state of Bolivia, where the politics of the governing left regime are becoming more centralized and the threats related to the rise of the ultra-right wing have become pronounced. The methodology is based on interviews conducted in the city of La Paz among Indigenous activists, scholars, and state officials. By scrutinizing nascent activism and the challenges to it posed by state co-optation and right-wing racism, as well as histories of contested Indigenous identities, the article sheds light on the complex and nuanced relationships between progressive politics and indigeneity, emphasizing the importance of Indigenous self-determination.

Introduction

The restructuring of the Bolivian state as plurinational in the 2009 constitution raised high hopes for Indigenous self-determination. During the 1990s, Indigenous movements across the Andes and the Amazon had mobilized in defence of the sovereignty of their lands and territories against the intensifying intrusion of transnational corporations dictated by the neoliberal restructurings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (Albó, 2008; Brysk, 2000; Yashar, 2005). During the early 2000s, the largest Indigenous movements in Bolivia allied with major peasant unions in the so-called Pacto de Unidad (Unity Pact), which, as an Indigenous-peasant alliance, was a historical political articulation that pushed for constitutional reform and plurinationalism (Makaran & López, 2019). The most widely known culmination of this anti-colonial and anti-neoliberal project, which at its heyday in 2005 brought in workers’ movements, civil society organizations, and left-leaning university scholars, was the presidential election of peasant unionist and coca-growers’ leader Evo Morales (2006–2019), who is often honoured with the title of the first Indigenous president of Bolivia.

This marked the start of processes referred to as the decolonization of the state and the cultural democratic revolution in which left-wing goals for the reduction of inequalities and the redistribution of resources were unified with Indigenous knowledges, epistemologies, and ontologies, alongside Indigenous aims of community-based governance and territorial autonomy. Incorporating left-wing political goals, the plurinational constitution and state politics were organized on Indigenous principles, including the Aymara (Indigenous people of the Central Andean high plain, who live in Bolivia, Peru, Chile, and Argentina) idea of suma qamaña (living well), the Guaraní (South American Indigenous people, who live in Paraguay, Bolivia, Argentina, and Brazil) perception of ñandereko (harmonious life), and their Spanish translations vivir bien (living well) and buen vivir (living well), which characterize Indigenous convivial living with others and the earth (Chuji et al., 2019; Farah & Vasapollo, 2011; Ranta, 2020b). In the eyes of Indigenous movements, the process opted for their own ways of conceptualizing and practicing plural politics, beyond western political categories (Patzi Paco, 2013).

In practice, however, many Indigenous scholars have become critical of the process of change (Choque Mamani, 2014; Mamani Ramírez, 2017; Rivera Cusicanqui, 2015). While Evo Morales continues to be the face of Indigenous politics worldwide, inside Bolivia the governing party—Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement towards Socialism) (MAS)—has been accused of having co-opted Indigenous representation and centralized the state instead of cherishing the diversity and autonomy of Indigenous peoples. While Indigenous peoples have always safeguarded the heterogeneity of indigeneity, it seems that the MAS is increasingly attempting to portray it as one homogeneous totality whose sole voice is the party, which is antithetical to the ideal of the plurinational state. Consequently, Indigenous scholars have described the process analytically as factitious (Choque Mamani, 2014), neocolonial (Mamani Ramírez, 2017), and neo-developmentalist (Rivera Cusicanqui, 2015). There is an increasing concern about what happens to autonomous Indigenous movements if, or when, they become political subjects inside state institutions and the governing political party. New, nascent forms of activism, the concern of this article, seem to be arising in defence of Indigenous self-determination and plurality.

Aymara scholar and politician Felix Patzi Paco, who served as the Minister of Education during Morales’ first government, has retrospectively called the process of change a disillusionment (Patzi Paco, 2013). In this article, there is a dual meaning to the notion of disillusionment, drawing on wider Latin American political dispositions. First, it refers to a situation wherein many of the hopes and expectations directed towards radical Indigenous transformation by anti-imperialist left-wing rebellions and progressive political parties have been withering away. There has been an ongoing regional revival of religious conservatism and right-wing authoritarian populism (Scoones et al., 2018), which is challenging left-wing politics. We have witnessed the emergence of such political leaders as Jair Bolsonaro (2019–2023) in Brazil and Jeanine Añez (2019–2020) in Bolivia, who have directly attacked indigeneity and engaged in racist and xenophobic political discourses and policy practices. Second, while many Indigenous movements for self-determination have historically allied themselves with anti-imperial and anti-capitalist struggles (Portugal Mollinedo & Macusaya Cruz, 2016), they have started to rethink and redefine their contemporary relationships with the progressive political parties of the Latin American pink tide, currently arising for the second time.

The notion of the pink tide lends itself to diverse interpretations (Gold & Zagato, 2020). Commonly, it refers to the egalitarian and redistributive politics of left-wing political leaders of the early 2000s, such as Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Rafael Correa in Ecuador, Evo Morales in Bolivia, Luis Inácio Lula Da Silva and Dilma Roussef in Brazil, and Néstor and Cristina Kirchner in Argentina. Their rise was a culmination of popular protests and social movements against neoliberal reforms, including the mobilization of the Confederation of Indigenous Nations of Ecuador for the recognition of Indigenous lands and plurinationalism; the rebellion of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (Zapatista Army of National Liberation) in Chiapas, Mexico, against the North American Free Trade Agreement; and the so-called Water War (2001) and Gas War (2003) in Bolivia, in response to the privatization of natural resources (Gonzalez, 2019). Ultimately, “the ‘pink tide’ is that succession of waves of popular movements which placed very new priorities on the political agenda in Latin America” (Gonzalez, 2019, p. 162). However, while the Latin American left has described itself as major ally of Indigenous peoples, conflicts over extractivism, development, and growth, as well as decoloniality and democracy, have put these collaborations into question (Escobar, 2010; Gudynas, 2015; Rivera Cusicanqui, 2015).

This article investigates the emergence, forms, and rationale of nascent Indigenous activism in times of disillusionment in plurinational Bolivia. As the rise of ultra-right-wing politics is a regional thread, and the power of the MAS in Bolivia was challenged by the opposition during the 2019 electoral violence that some call a coup and others an electoral fraud, Indigenous activists, movements, and politicians are struggling to position themselves politically within the rapidly changing and increasingly polarized scenario. This article focuses on the histories of those ruptures and on identifying whether and what kinds of new Indigenous activism emerges from these moments of contradiction and tension. Activism is defined here as individual and collective protest action, while social movements are one of its organizational forms, in which “social actors constitute collective identities as a means to create democratic spaces for . . . autonomous action” (Escobar & Alvarez, 1992, p. 5). The focus of this article is on nascent Indigenous activism which has not yet translated into large-scale movements or whose collective power has been weakened by co-optation attempts by the governing regime. Attention is primarily directed at activism in extractivist conflicts, electoral protests and emerging anti-racism activism, and internal power struggles within the MAS. Furthermore, the article situates contemporary activisms within long-term histories of contested Indigenous identities.

This article argues that the key political goal for many Bolivian Indigenous peoples has been self-determination, but, as recent left-wing politics in Latin America has tended to centralize rather than decentralize state powers, contradictions have become prevalent, thus generating complicated dynamics between Indigenous self-determination and state co-optation. While acknowledging that much current Indigenous political action in Bolivia happens within the sphere of the state, this article deliberately underlines the importance of autonomous Indigenous activism. While making the nation-state responsible and accountable for recognition, redistribution, and justice is a prime goal for many colonized peoples, extra efforts are needed to make sure that the re-founding of the state does not diminish Indigenous opportunities to promote their own forms of political organization, repatriate their lands and territories, and enact self-determination on their own terms. Consequently, Indigenous activism independent of the state is necessary both from the perspectives of Indigenous self-determination and democracy in a wider sense.

In the following section I elaborate on the methodology and researcher positionality. I then describe the conceptual starting point for examining Indigenous self-determination and its tense relationship with colonial politics before presenting my findings and analysis in four further sections. The first focuses on contested Indigenous identities and their histories in Bolivia; the second, on extractivist conflicts; the third, on electoral protests and emerging anti-racism activism; and the fourth, on internal struggles within the MAS. I conclude with remarks about the future of autonomous Indigenous activism as it relates to progressive politics.

Methodology and positionality

The research is structured around qualitative interviews conducted in the city of La Paz in August–September 2018 and February–March 2020 among Indigenous activists, scholars, trade unionists, and civil society representatives, as well as former public servants, ministers, and parliamentarians, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous. I conducted 11 interviews in 2018 and 16 in 2020. As the research was undertaken in an urban environment rather than a particular Indigenous community, I have sought informed consent and negotiated trust and the rules of data use with the representatives of each Indigenous organization or activist group separately, according to their respective customs. With the guidance and permission of elder from one Indigenous organization, I was able to make contact with numerous Indigenous youth activists, who are currently my main interlocutors. Although this article contains no co-analysis, I have aimed for a non-extractive mode of investigation: listening to people extensively through my connections, testing my own interpretations in frequent reflexive and dialogical conversations, and, when not physically present in Bolivia, continuing discussions online. During the pandemic and in post-pandemic times, the enhanced use of digital tools such as Zoom and WhatsApp has been particularly helpful in bridging geographical distances and facilitating the exchange of ideas. To guarantee the continuation of interlocutors’ informed consent and to continuously negotiate trust, I also send article drafts for inspection to those concerned—in this case, excerpts of the text as a Spanish translation to one Indigenous elder and two Indigenous youth activists. Furthermore, the text of my analytic framework has been read and commented on by Afro-Bolivian scholar, Cecilia Zenteno Lawrence, with whom I have recently, since 2022, started a research collaboration related to this topic, although with a special emphasis on women’s role in Indigenous and Afro-Bolivian activism. To ensure research relevance in Bolivia, I do not solely publish internationally and in academic journals, but also in Spanish (Ranta, 2020a) through a local university partner, Postgrado en Ciencias del Desarrollo (Postgraduate in Development Studies), Universidad Mayor de San Andrés (University of San Andrés), for wide local outreach. In addition, I have engaged in podcast-/radio conversation with Aymara activists on research themes for public outreach to an Aymara audience and activist circles. I also refer extensively to Bolivian Indigenous scholars’ works to foster a dialogical learning process.

I am a white, non-Indigenous, Finnish woman coming from a rural area of Lapland, although not one populated by the Sámi (Indigenous people of the northern Europe, who live in Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia). I have a broad view of allying with Indigenous movements and Indigenous politics in Bolivia and long-term experience in the field that predates my academic research. In 2001, I worked in a Quechua (Indigenous people of the South American Andes, who live in Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina, Colombia, and Chile)-led Indigenous organization which participated in an Indigenous university framework. Through the organization, I had an opportunity to visit and live in several Aymara and Quechua communities, and to actively learn from Indigenous wisdom, land-based knowledge, and relational epistemologies. The learning I gained from Indigenous elders and community members diversified my education and changed my conceptualizations of societal development and desirable societal futures (Ranta, 2016, 2018b). As part of an Andean network involving Indigenous movements in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru, and in collaboration with Finnish and Swedish organizations and Sámi Indigenous movements in Sápmi (Sámi peoples traditional territory), the organization promoted Indigenous self-determination through intercultural encounters related to the concept of sumak kawsay (living well), or vivir bien in Spanish. This stance changed my own understandings of destructive western development and led to my conceptual, analytical, and pedagogical rethinking of what development and global justice means. Beyond academia, it inspired my active engagement in actions and organizations whose goal it is to change unequal global power relations, capitalist exploitation, and structural racism embedded in Global South–Global North relations (Kothari, 2006) and with regard to Indigenous peoples. When the notion of vivir bien became Bolivian state policy in 2006, some members of the Indigenous network with which I engaged became parliamentarians and policy advisors for the MAS. Meanwhile, I started a PhD project to contribute to and accompany the process with critical and engaged knowledge production (Hutchings & Holcombe, 2022), discussing the potentials and possible dangers of translating Indigenous life philosophies, such as sumak kawsay, into state policies (Ranta, 2018a). While I lived in rural Indigenous communities in 2001 with the consent of the respective Indigenous authorities, I have primarily conducted my subsequent research periods in 2018, 2020, and 2022, as well as long-term ethnographic work, 2008–2009, in state institutions and with urban Indigenous scholars and activists, with their oral consent. As my doctoral research framework focused on Indigenous approaches in state policies, I negotiated it with Indigenous and non-Indigenous ministries and state officials.

Indigenous self-determination and coloniality of state

Many of the fierce scholarly debates concerning Indigenous politics in Latin America have taken place through the lens of western political concepts. Arguments dating back to the Cold War are particularly polarized in terms of the concepts of the political right and political left. Indigenous peoples’ political goals—let alone their epistemologies and ontologies (de la Cadena, 2015)—do not always sit easily with the prevailing political system and ideological stances, which are rooted in European history. Although a decolonizing and intersectional analysis based on class, race, indigeneity, and gender would be preferable, some scholars may still neglect Indigenous knowledges, epistemologies, and ontologies because they do not easily attune with pre-existing political categorizations. While Indigenous peoples have struggled intensively against the coloniality, exploitation, and violence produced by the darker side of western modernity (Mignolo, 2011), many scientific paradigms continue to celebrate “modernity, Enlightenment knowledge and an ever-expanding capitalist world economy” (Tickner, 2015, p. 539), ignoring concerns related to global inequalities, colonialism, racism, and specific Indigenous histories and experiences. As Distinguished Professor Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2012) reminds us, “the pursuit of knowledge is deeply embedded in the multiple layers of imperial and colonial practices” (p. 2).

Beyond the left–right dyad, Indigenous scholars have tended to criticize political parties and governance structures for cherishing the western matrix of development (Yampara & Temple, 2008) and remaining deeply rooted in the colonial state, which tends to restrict, control, and impede Indigenous self-determination (Kuokkanen, 2019). There is a notable discordance between the Westphalian notion of the sovereignty of nation-states and self-determination by Indigenous peoples, for whom the state has historically manifested itself through colonialism, dispossession, and repression. Often, state and corporate interests differ starkly from the interests of Indigenous peoples who are struggling to repatriate their lands and territories. The term autonomy, or self-government, represents the concrete manifestation of self-determination. Thus, for Indigenous research, such issues as self-determination, decolonization, and social justice, are crucial (Smith, 2012).

While self-determination tackles Indigenous peoples’ relation to states in international law and politics, for Indigenous peoples, as Sámi political sciences scholar Rauna Kuokkanen (2019) aptly argues, the notion of self-determination extends beyond that “to encompass myriad other relationships, including the land, kinship, spirituality, and others” (p. 22). According to Kuokkanen, self-determination is a foundational value informed by the norm of integrity, which fosters individual and collective well-being (Kuokkanen, 2019). Engaging with land, water, plants, and the living environment in relations that are fundamental for survival and well-being creates a personal and communal responsibility for their care. As explained by legal scholar Deborah McGregor (2018), many Anishinabek (a group of First Nations in Canada and the USA, who live around the Great Lakes) consider animals as relatives and the earth as a living entity with feelings and agency. In the Andes, Marisol de la Cadena (2015) has conceptualized this ontological relationship through discussion of ayllu—the Indigenous community and territory of the Aymara and the Quechua—where people and the so-called earth-beings jointly formulate a reciprocal living environment. This makes Indigenous politics different from that of most political parties which, despite discourses of sustainable development or anti-imperialist alternatives, tend to opt for growth, development, and progress. Consequently, the starting points for Indigenous activism may differ immensely from other forms of political activism.

In Bolivia, as well as in Latin American countries such as Ecuador and Chile, Indigenous self-determination has been closely interrelated with plurinationalism. Plurinationalism refers to the decentralization of the colonial nation-state into Indigenous autonomies and self-governing nations, and the transformation of the state and economy by Indigenous worldviews and conceptualizations. Indigenous scholars have emphasized that, ideally, “the plurinational state would be the incorporation of Indigenous institutions and political practices to the new institutional map of the state for the self-determination and self-government [of Indigenous peoples]” (Choque Mamani, 2014, p. 14). Consequently, the plurinational state would become “a confederation of peoples” (Mamani Ramírez, 2017, p. 49), governed by diverse usos y costumbres (traditions and customs) and autonomous decision-making by Indigenous nationalities. In the following section, I continue to elaborate on these ideas by looking at complex histories of contested Indigenous identities in Bolivia.

Contested Indigenous identities and their histories in Bolivia

According to the most recent National Census in 2012, 41% of the Bolivian population over the age of 15 self-identifies as being of Indigenous origin. The Aymara and the Quechua, who reside predominantly in the Andean mountains and valleys, comprise the vast majority of Indigenous peoples in Bolivia (Mamo, 2022). In total, there are 36 recognized Indigenous peoples, mostly small nationalities that reside in the fragile yet resource-rich Amazonian area (Mamo, 2022). Indigenous identities in Bolivia are historically complex and have been contested by majority and minority Indigenous groups and also between diverse territories and regions; objections have also been raised about the contemporary constitutional definition of Indigenous peoples as pueblos indígenas, originarios, campesinos (Indigenous, Native, and peasant peoples) which, by categorizing peasants as Indigenous peoples, expands the notion considerably to include peoples with diverse interests and societal positionings. Indeed, indigeneity is a “positioning which draws upon historically sedimented practices, landscapes, and repertoires of meaning, and emerges through. . .engagement and struggle” (Li, 2000, p. 151). Thus, Indigenous identities are “the contingent products of agency and. . .articulation” (Li, 2000, p. 151).

In Bolivia, the conceptualization of Indigenous peoples as peasants dates back to the 1952 nationalist revolution, which was a totalizing nation-building process that arose as a result of a coalition between middle-class military officials and intellectuals, miners, and some highland Indigenous nations. The previously utilized notion of indio (Indian) was abolished as pejorative, and all rural citizens despite their identities and cultural origins were labelled campesino (peasant) (Albó, 2008). Citizens gained universal voting rights, forced labour in large-estates was abolished, and the land was distributed little by little to rural Indigenous peoples through the Agrarian Reform Law 1953, particularly in the Andean mountains and valleys although less so in the Amazonian and other lowlands areas. Despite their own diverse political systems, rural Andean Indigenous communities were organized into state-led peasant unions. Universal rural education was established; however, Indigenous children and youth were taught in Spanish instead of in their own languages, a course of action seen as crucial in the elite-led and deeply derogatory process of transforming indio into mestizo (Indigenous and European mixed-race person) peasants, and the Bolivian state into a unified mestizo state (Albó, 2008).

A long-term Aymara activist (Blinded for safety, personal communication, August 24, 2018), told me that, for them, the 1952 revolution was “a great period of profound changes in Bolivia and at the same time a great period of frustrations.” Indianistas (Indianists) were a group of Aymara students and activists who, during the late 1960s, began to rebel against the homogenizing revolutionary project. Questioning the centrally led peasant movement, they revived the concept of indio as a political identity and pushed for an anti-colonial struggle to address indigeneity, racism, decolonization, and colonialism beyond the totalizing view according to which peasantry should be discussed only through their class position (Portugal Mollinedo & Macusaya Cruz, 2016). However, indianistas were fiercely opposed by the Bolivian elites of the time, as the activist (Blinded for safety, personal communication, August 24, 2018) explained:

Both the right and the left opposed us, because we Indians questioned their legitimacy in similar ways as had been done in decolonization struggles in other countries. . . . The radically decolonizing discourse was very confusing here, because the same population that was colonizing us Indians had already decolonized the country against their own Spanish fathers. Even if the criollos [Spanish descendants] were leftists and pushed for social consciousness and solidarity, they were against us Indians because they perceived that we were denying their identity, and, in fact, they feared for their existence.

Eventually, Indigenous activists started to divide into two strands: indianistas, who pushed for their own ways of conceptualizing and practicing plural politics beyond western political categories, and kataristas, a political movement, named after the Indigenous rebel hero, Tupaj Katari (c. 1750–1781), which combined Indigenous ideas with the concerns of peasants and the political left (Portugal Mollinedo & Macusaya Cruz, 2016).

The notion of Indigenous peoples started to gain salience in Bolivia and elsewhere in the world during the 1970s. The first major organization, Confederación de Pueblos Indígenas de Bolivia (Confederation of Indigenous Peoples of Bolivia) (CIDOB), which had the term indígena (Indigenous) in its name, was established in the Bolivian lowlands in 1982 as an alliance for small Indigenous nations in Santa Cruz, Chaco, and the Amazon (Yashar, 2005). Unlike the Aymara and Quechua, they were peoples who had until then lived predominantly at the margins of state interference and national imaginaries. However, Bolivia’s shift from military dictatorships to representative democracy during the 1980s coincided with neoliberal restructuring policies. The privatization of mines in the Andes caused unemployment and accelerated mass-scale migration of the Aymara and Quechua to Indigenous territories in the lowlands, and particularly to areas such as Chaparé, where coca leaf was cultivated. Furthermore, with neoliberal globalization the intrusion of transnational oil companies, loggers, and cattle ranchers into Indigenous territories increased (Brysk, 2000). At the same time, however, the so-called neoliberal multiculturalism of the 1990s led Bolivia to have its first Aymara vice-president, to ratify international Indigenous agreements, to initiate bilingual intercultural education, and—as part of the World Bank-led decentralization process—to recognize tierras comunitarias de Origen (Native community lands) (Postero, 2007). The legislation established Indigenous community lands particularly in areas of the Amazon and the lowlands that had not benefitted from the 1953 Agrarian Reform; the CIDOB had been a crucial actor in this repatriation process.

Bolivians also use the word originario (Native) to reference such Aymara and Quechua communities of the central Andean high plains that despite the impacts of large-estate economy and post-revolutionary peasant unionism were able to maintain parts of their own autonomous organizational forms and territorial units, known as ayllu (Albó, 2008). Aymara scholar Simon Yampara (2001) explains that the ayllu is “a multisectoral and multifaceted organizational system, an Andean institution, which interacts. . .the strength and energy of the pacha [world and cosmos] in the life of the peoples” (p. 69). The main Andean Indigenous organization that has worked for the ayllu principles has been the Consejo Nacional de Ayllus y Markas del Qullasuyu (National Council of Ayllus and Markas of Qullasuyu, CONAMAQ), established in 1997, for the repatriation of Indigenous territories and defence of collective land rights. In contrast to peasant unionism and private land ownership, both the CIDOB and the CONAMAQ have promoted collective land rights and the repatriation of territories.

According to the earlier mentioned Aymara activist (Blinded for personal safety, personal communication, August 24, 2018), when the Soviet Union collapsed and socialism disappeared as a viable option, the organized working class disintegrated and left-wing thinkers and activists in Bolivia started to reconceptualize their stance vis-à-vis Indigenous peoples, who gradually became the new progressive political subject. This can be easily seen among the peasantry, including the former president Evo Morales, who was the leading unionist of the coca growers of the Chaparé region during the 1990s. As the coca growers’ class-based discourses lost momentum, they increasingly mobilized through claims of being authentic Natives (Grisaffi, 2010), thus paving the way for combining left-wing politics and Indigenous issues. At the same time, kataristas, who combined Indigenous, peasant, and left-wing views, had consolidated their presence and power among Bolivia’s largest peasant unions, including the Confederación Sindical Única de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia (Unified Syndical Confederation of Rural Workers of Bolivia) and its women’s organization, Confederación Nacional de Mujeres Campesinas Indígenas Originarias de Bolivia Bartolina Sisa (The Bartolina Sisa National Confederation of Peasant, Indigenous, and Native Women of Bolivia) (Albó, 2008). A third peasant union, Confederación Sindical de Comunidades Interculturales de Bolivia (Syndicalist Confederation of Intercultural Communities of Bolivia), formerly known as colonizadores (colonizers), represented Andean migrant peasants seeking land from the lowlands. These three peasant unions comprise the core of the Pacto de Unidad in support of Morales, thus complicating what Indigenous identity means.

In the following, I represent three forms of nascent Indigenous activism in the process of plurinational state transformation, focusing on the complex relationships between the Bolivian left-leaning state transformation process and Indigenous activism, and seeking explanations for frictions and conflicts, while also highlighting the plurality of Indigenous experience.

Extractivist conflicts in Bolivia

One form of autonomous activism by Indigenous activists concerning the plurinational state has to do with extractivist conflicts. In an interview with two representatives of the Organic National Council of Ayllus and Markas of Qullasuyu—the aforementioned Andean high plateau organization, the contradictions related to left-wing politics and indigeneity were explained in the following way:

We all supported Morales’ presidency, because we thought that when an Indigenous person were governing, all Indigenous peoples would gain benefits. We also thought that we would be controlling our own natural resources. However, it did not go that way; on the contrary. Until approximately 2010, Morales listened to us, but after that, he stopped listening to Indigenous peoples. (Blinded for safety, personal communication, March 4, 2020)

The start of disagreements between the CONAMAQ and the MAS government coincided with the internationally known resource conflict at the Territorio Indígena y Parque Nacional Isiboro Sécure (Isiboro Sécure Indigenous Territory and National Park) (TIPNIS), the home of many Indigenous peoples. The interests of Amazonian Indigenous groups, coca-growing peasant migrants, and the MAS government clashed, which in 2011 led to governmental repression of, and violence against Indigenous activists (Makaran & López, 2019) who resisted the government’s road building plans and extractivist development policies.

During the pink tide, several countries strengthened the role of the state in politics and the economy, particularly through intensified extractivism (Gudynas, 2015). In Bolivia, highly popular social benefit programmes depended on such revenues, which put further pressure on exploring and extracting in Indigenous territories and protected national parks (Gudynas, 2015). Rivera Cusicanqui (2015) has called this development model “neo-extractivist” (p. 15), claiming that Bolivia’s former dependency on neoliberal extractivism, conditioned by the USA, has been replaced by state-led extractivist developmentalism, conditioned now by such left-wing Latin American countries as Brazil and Venezuela. In a similar vein, Escobar (2010) has referred to Venezuelan, Bolivian, and Ecuadorian progressive projects as alternative modernizations because, while they rhetorically promoted post-capitalist agendas, in practice their policies drew on growth paradigms and modernist ideas of development and rebuilding the state.

Indigenous activists in the TIPNIS controversy also resisted the expansion of export agriculture and coca-growing activities at the expense of the Amazon forests and Indigenous territories. The MAS government was pushing for both, despite its rhetoric to the contrary, as the CONAMAQ elder continued to explain:

Evo Morales has always defended Pachamama [Mother Earth] abroad. However, here in Bolivia, it was the opposite. He did not defend Mother Earth, as was visible in the case of the TIPNIS, in the case of Bala and Chepete [dams], and other cases. If he were defending Mother Earth, he would not be extending the agricultural frontier. (Blinded for safety, personal communication, March 4, 2020).

Much like the TIPNIS project, Bala and Chepete dams were part of a government developmental plan that included the construction of hydroelectric mega dams in the Madidi National Park, where Indigenous peoples were in danger of losing their territories. In practice, the MAS government seemed to promote state-led development and growth agendas that were very far from their rhetorical emphasis on Indigenous knowledges, epistemologies, and ontologies (Makaran & López, 2019; Ranta, 2018b). According to the CONAMAQ representative, the MAS appropriated and emptied Indigenous peoples’ terminologies, including vivir bien and suma qamaña, which for them mean “[L]iving well with nature, with the environment that surrounds us, with animals, with plants, with mountains, with rivers, with lakes, and with water. We have been practicing [these principles] because they are the legacies of our ancestral roots” (Blinded for safety, personal communication, March 4, 2020).

Due to the TIPNIS conflict, the CONAMAQ and the CIDOB withdrew from the Indigenous-peasant alliance, which had brought Morales into state power. The MAS responded to the emergence of Indigenous protests via police intervention at the premises of the CONAMAQ, expelling them and replacing them with pro-MAS members. The same co-optation happened with the CIDOB, whose protest actions had been instrumental in the TIPNIS conflict. Both Indigenous movements were divided into pro-government factions and the original factions, called organic factions. The government demonstrated that they did not accept Indigenous activism outside the realm of the MAS political party and encouraged pro-government peasant unions to work against Indigenous organizations (Makaran & López, 2019). Instead of cherishing the plurality of Indigenous voices, those voices that opposed the government’s policies and actions became enemies, which started to rupture and polarize Indigenous movements, as well as undermining their self-determination. According to Rivera Cusicanqui (2015), instead of working towards plurinationalism, these were the acts of the colonial state and colonized mindsets.

While this section has looked at nascent Indigenous activism from the perspective of minority Indigenous groups in the lowlands and the organic CONAMAQ as an Andean Indigenous organization, the following section focuses on indianista (Indianist) activism among the Aymara in the city of El Alto, which surrounds the Bolivian capital, La Paz.

From electoral protests to anti-racism activism

In 2019, the streets of La Paz became the epicentre of protest actions during the electoral disputes that eventually led to violence and polarization, as well as exile of Morales and his closest allies. Morales and his vice-president, left-wing intellectual Alvaro García Linera, were running for the fourth time for the presidency, which transgressed the dictates of the constitution and a referendum in which the Bolivians had voted against a constitutional modification that would allow their re-election (Rojas, 2019). Suspicions of electoral fraud by the MAS to secure re-election sparked mass-scale protests by the urban middle-class population and urban youth, as well as some popular and Indigenous sectors. After a series of resignations by members of the MAS, both at the presidency level and the senate, the presidency was eventually, under conflictive and ambiguous circumstances, taken over by the evangelical, right-wing, landowning senator, Jeanine Añez (Zegada et al., 2021). During Añez’ term (2019–2020), which coincided with the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the interim government postponed the elections multiple times, raising concerns about the future of democracy (García Yapur, 2022). Furthermore, in addition to mass-scale corruption and disastrous management of the COVID-19 pandemic, the interim government committed human rights violations that included massacres (Alejo, 2020; Grupo Interdisciplinario de Expertos Independientes, 2021).

However, it would be misleading to interpret the electoral protests and violence solely as a battle between the left and right, or between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. For example, Indigenous activists from the original CONAMAQ organization had not been in favour of the candidature of Morales and García Linera in the 2019 elections, and they campaigned publicly against the constitutional modification for presidential re-election in the 2016 referendum. The rationale for their activism was that centralizing the state into one-party rule was antithetical to plural forms of Indigenous political organizing and the ideal of the plurinational state, a view which had been previously expressed by several Indigenous scholars (Choque Mamani, 2014; Mamani Ramírez, 2017; Rivera Cusicanqui, 2015).

According to Carlos Macusaya (2022), a member of Jichha (Aymara activist collective in the city of El Alto), the MAS has created a new white elite that has carnevalized indigeneity into performances and discourses, without real-life structural changes in the division of labour and political representation. Iván Apaza (2020) has expressed a similar concern:

In the government, the MAS appropriated diverse cultural elements of [Indigenous] nations to its own service; [Indigenous peoples], silenced by the barbarian caudillo [leader], never ruled, but rather a group of white and mestizo peoples who utilized an Indian as a symbol has made us believe that we ruled and were in power. (p. 31)

The concern here was that while Indigenous peoples are currently better represented in the parliament and ministries than before, they do not represent autonomous Indigenous movements but the MAS, thus compromising Indigenous self-determination.

Jichha activists also fiercely criticized the old and new right-wing racisms, which expanded enormously in the 2019 conflicts, legitimizing serious human rights violations, including massacres of Indigenous peoples, who were portrayed as savages in right-wing political speeches and in the mainstream media. An Aymara indianista youth activist who shared their experiences with me in March 2020 was of the opinion that the old neoliberal right had made a comeback and Añez’ rhetoric was racist and anti-Indigenous. In a racialized way, the interim government started to treat almost anyone outside criollo (Spanish descendant) and mestizo circles as a potential MAS supporter and, thus, under suspicion for sedition or terrorism, which sparked stark criticism from indianistas, aptly captured by Macusaya’s (2020) anti-racist phrase, “my face does not tell about my ideology” (p. 36). The growing racism caused nascent forms of anti-racism activism to emerge among young indianistas as exemplified by pamphlets, radio programmes, podcasts, and TikTok clips. Some of them emphasized that the Aymara need to fully distance themselves from both the right and the left, to overcome their coloniality, and to assume self-determination as members of the ancient Aymara nation (Mansilla et al., 2021). Others, however, returned to voting for the MAS in October 2020 elections as the result of the racialized polarization and violence caused by the right-wing revivalism. Many indianistas supported the MAS’ Aymara vice-presidential candidate, David Choquehuanca, and the Aymara leader of the senate, Eva Copa, who both seemed to offer new faces for Indigenous leadership, yet expectations of change were not fully realized, as explained in the following section.

Internal divisions and renewal within the MAS

The third form of Indigenous activism has arisen from within the governing party itself. The MAS regained state power in October 2020 through the presidency of left-wing economist Luis Arce and the vice-presidency of David Choquehuanca; however, the numerous internal disputes have resulted in the emergence of Indigenous activism within the governing party, including initial disagreements between those who promoted Choquehuanca as president, and Evo Morales as the secretary general and campaign manager of the MAS who forced Arce to presidency. This seemed to parallel longer-term ruptures between left-wing peasant syndicalists, whom many perceive Morales to represent, and the indianista strand that opts for Indigenous self-determination with the idea of “total social and historical transformation” (Mamani Ramírez, 2017, p. 50).

Demands for internal renovación (renewal) and democratization have been made, calling into question the paramount role that Morales still plays within the MAS. Macusaya (2020), for example, suggests that “it is necessary for the renewal of leadership to take place, and for this, the end of evismo [Evo-ism] is a condition” (p. 38), reassuring those worried about the future of plurinationalism by saying that “Evo is not the beginning or the end of the transformations” (p. 38). According to another Aymara scholar, Gustavo Calle (2020), evismo as such is a hindrance to Indigenous political subjectivity and the democratization of Indigenous politics in Bolivia, as indigeneity is too easily reduced from its real-life diversities to one sole figure.

The internal renovation rhetoric grew particularly strong during the electoral campaign for regional governing bodies and mayors held in early 2021. In four places, popular groups opposed Morales’ candidates, sometimes violently, and announced their own Indigenous and non-Indigenous candidates. The most controversial case, and a source of political opportunities for nascent Indigenous activism, was the mayoral race in the city of El Alto. During Añez’s interim government, Eva Copa, a young Aymara woman from El Alto, led the senate, as two-thirds of the parliament stayed in the hands of the MAS, even though Morales and other top leaders had left the country. In this process, Copa became a popular politician: the new, young face of indigeneity. Despite Copa’s popular support, Morales, who returned to the country after Arce’s election, rejected her mayoral candidacy. Many perceived this as a purge in which the top MAS leaders were castigating those MAS politicians and social movement leaders who had not obeyed their commands to resign during the 2019 revolt.

As the MAS remained opposed to Copa, she decided to run as the candidate of a small political group, Juntos al Llamado de Los Pueblos (Together to the Call of the Peoples) (JALLALLA-LP), in which the famous Aymara leader and activist Felipe Quispe also enacted (Alanoca, 2020). As a result, the MAS expelled her and started a smear campaign claiming she was a coup plotting “traidora [traitor]” (“Evo llama traidora a Copa. . .”, 2021, para. 1). However, representatives of some popular peasant movements, such as the Bartolina Sisa Women’s Movement, criticized her expulsion and asked for the internal reorganization of the MAS (“Bartolinas consideran que el MAS. . .”, 2021). Gaining nearly 70% of the votes, Copa became the mayor of El Alto, and the new face of the Aymara indianista movement. Quispe’s son, Santos Quispe, became the governor of La Paz with the JALLALLA-LP grouping, surpassing the MAS’s own candidate. Since the regional elections, new Indigenous groupings have started to emerge in the MAS, demanding the renewal of the party, thus demonstrating the diversity and plurality of indigeneity.

Conclusions

This article has examined the emergence, forms, and rationale of nascent Indigenous activism in times of disillusionment in plurinational Bolivia, a country where the governing MAS party has attempted to centralize Indigenous voices under its command—sometimes violently—and where the right-wing opposition has reinstalled discrimination, racism, and human rights violations. Polarization has increased, and authoritarianism and the decline of democracy have returned to Bolivian politics after more than three decades of vibrant Indigenous organizing. As Indigenous movements and peasant unions were foundational in the rise of the MAS, they have formed the core of the state leadership, thereby transforming themselves from autonomous organizations into state representatives, whose instrument has been the MAS party. Considering the avenues for nascent Indigenous activisms in this kind of situation—one that initially raised high hopes and expectations but which has later also demonstrated pitfalls—some broader lessons can be drawn in regard to Indigenous organizing and its relations with progressive politics.

It is important to emphasize that progressive politics has several aspects that can be beneficial for Indigenous peoples, including the promotion of social and economic equality, as well as global justice and redistribution. However, one has to ask who will benefit from redistribution and on what conditions. Although the MAS government emphasizes that extractivism benefits all Bolivians, it fundamentally endangers the self-determination, living conditions, and environment of minority Indigenous peoples in the Amazon struggling for survival and the defence of their ancestral land. On a larger note, extractivism as an income-generating mechanism for the state is not only environmentally unsustainable, it tends to pit different Indigenous peoples against each other instead of building an economy that demands greater responsibility and accountability from the rich towards common welfare: through progressive taxation, for example.

For a just redistribution, progressive politics needs a strong democracy that protects Indigenous minorities from the rule of the majority. In countries such as Bolivia, where conceptualizations of the meaning of indigeneity have become broad and contested, this also concerns majority Indigenous groups, who should find ways to oppose the appeal of the homogenizing and totalizing politics typical of coloniality. While first allied, interests between those identifying as peasants and those identifying as Indigenous differ in regard to their views of capitalism, ownership, and desirable society. Unfortunately, politics in Bolivia has become defined by the personification and concentration of power, as so often happens in Latin America. In the case of Bolivia, the authoritarian turn has been particularly noteworthy because Indigenous peoples have always emphasized their diversity and the pluralism and democracy of their autonomous governance models.

Indigeneity in Bolivia is, and always has been, dynamic, diverse, and plural. Its reduction to one president and one party is the opposite of ideals of plurinationalism and the real-life heterogeneity of Indigenous experiences, which is reflected in nascent forms of societal activism among Indigenous activists. Currently, however, it seems as if the governing regime, as well as the ultra-right-wing opposition, perceives this as a danger rather than offering the possibility—and precondition—for real democratization and plurinationalism. Cherishing plural Indigenous activism for self-determination in Bolivia and in Latin America is crucial for breaking with the colonial past of hierarchies, authoritarianism, and violence, and in the search for decolonizing futures.