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Engaging Modernity: the political making of

indigenous movements in Bolivia and Ecuador,
19002008
a
Timo Schaefer
a
Department of History, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
Published online: 28 Jul 2010.

To cite this article: Timo Schaefer (2009) Engaging Modernity: the political making of indigenous movements in
Bolivia and Ecuador, 19002008, Third World Quarterly, 30:2, 397-413, DOI: 10.1080/01436590802681116

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 Third World Quarterly, Vol. 30, No. 2, 2009, pp 397413

Engaging Modernity: the political

making of indigenous movements in
Bolivia and Ecuador, 19002008
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TIMO SCHAEFER

ABSTRACT Most analyses of the recent indigenous mobilisations in Bolivia and

Ecuador (as well as other Latin American countries) have sharply divided the
new indigenous politics from earlier class-based political projects of the left.
The emergence and mass-appeal of indigenous movements, in these analyses,
are rooted in ethnic and cultural cleavages between indigenous peoples and the
rest of Bolivian and Ecuadorean society. This article argues that a political
interpretation of indigenous movements in these countries gives a more coherent
explanation for their historical trajectories as well as their present situation, in
particular their high degree of articulation with other popular political actors.
Its historical section describes the emergence of indigenous movements in
Bolivia and Ecuador as part of an engagement with modernity that began in
the rst half of the twentieth century as part of the cross-ethnic projects
of unions and radical parties of the traditional left and put indigenous
communities into positive relationships to the modernizing Bolivian and
Ecuadorean states.

The current president of Bolivia is short and dark-skinned, of Aymara

descent and self-identication, and gained power after a series of paralysing
protests, organised and spearheaded by the countrys indigenous movement,
drove his white predecessors from the position he now occupies. The
situation is slightly less dramatic in Ecuador, whose president is not
indigenous, but was nevertheless elected with the open support of Latin
Americas largest national indigenous organisation and is attempting to
implement a mandate largely dened by an anti-neoliberal discourse which,
in this country, was itself forged in the heat and occasional ame of more
than a decade of militant indigenous mobilisation. These extraordinary
events, by which historically marginalised and exploited groups suddenly
toppled presidents and framed national political agendas, could hardly
escape the (often sympathetic) notice of scholars. Yet, in a curious twist of
historical irony, many of the analyses that have detailed and tried to explain

Timo Schaefer is an MA student in the Department of History, University of British Columbia, Vancouver,
Canada. Email: tsa3@sfu.ca.

ISSN 0143-6597 print/ISSN 1360-2241 online/09/02039717 2009 Third World Quarterly

DOI: 10.1080/01436590802681116 397
 TIMO SCHAEFER

the processes of indigenous mobilisation in Bolivia and Ecuador have

grounded their interpretations in the very social and cultural dierences that
the movements have nally been overcoming with their appearance on the
common ground of national politics. In this, to be sure, academic studies
have done no more than echo the words of Felipe Quispe, one of the Bolivian
movements most militant leaders: As Indians we were exploited, as Indians
we will free ourselves.1 But the representativeness of Quispes ideas for
Bolivias indigenous movement is at best doubtful, and his words are at any
rate belied by the arena which he has chosen for his actions.2 What cultural
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explanations of the emergence of indigenous movements overlook

including those that incorporate elements of class analysisis that the
process of mobilising is at its most irreducible core a political action, whose
interpretation demands a political analysis under which cultural and
economic factors must be subsumed.
Against prevalent interpretations of indigenous movements in Bolivia and
Ecuador that see their emergence mainly in terms of a politicisation of a
cultural or ethnic cleavage, and their collaboration with other social actors
as a recent phenomenon to be understood within the context of a string of
unpopular neoliberal policies,3 I will show that present alliances between
indigenous and non-indigenous social movements are better understood as
continuations of earlier forms of indigenous-popular articulation dating back
to the struggle against the oligarchic republics in the early twentieth century,
and reaching a momentary highpoint in the early years of corporatism. The
nation-wide indigenous mobilisations which shook Bolivia and Ecuador in the
past 20 years need to be understood within a process of political expansion by
which indigenous political communities responded to, and participated in, the
political and economic conditions of modernity that by the middle of the
twentieth century had begun to colour their day-to-day experiences. Political
conicts in Bolivia and Ecuador can be most coherently explained as the
clashes of modernising projects whose roots are not cultural but political and
go back to the very beginning of Indian communities positive engagements
with an intrusive state in the rst half of the twentieth century.

Modernity and the politics of indigeneity

The political process of modernity
The process of political modernity can be characterised as the incorporation
of the masses into the state as political actors and has found its paradigmatic
representation in the French Revolution, described by Hannah Arendt as the
moment when the poor, driven by the needs of their bodies . . . appeared on
the scene of politics.4 The claim is not that the poor and their necessities had
never played a role in politics before, but that in the course of the French
revolutionary experience they and their needs suddenly became the principal
claimants of and points of reference for the political project of the newly
conceived nation. If before 1789 governments who disregarded the needs and
aspirations of the lower classes had to contend with bread riots and local
398
 THE POLITICAL MAKING OF INDIGENOUS MOVEMENTS IN BOLIVIA AND ECUADOR

uprisings, the French Revolution symbolises the emergence of class-based

political projects that have again and again challenged political elites at the
national level. How to address the dissonances and contradictions that are
the inevitable result of the inclusion of all social classes into one national
political project, and whose potential for atrocious civil strife the revolution
itself so luridly demonstrated, has been the central question for national
politics ever since, and the wide variety of political experiments of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries can be described as so many attempts at
an answer.
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In my analysis of indigenousstate interactions in twentieth century Bolivia

and Ecuador I borrow from Talal Asad and David Scott the notion that, in a
world shaped by European expansion, non-European people everywhere are
conscripts of Western civilisation or conscripts of modernity.5 The
development of a European modernity transformed the world by imposing
upon it the whole weight of the material conditions and the economic, social
and political vision that were constitutive of its power, promising to elevate
to its own heights all those willing to follow its siren call and threatening to
devour those who would stay behind. Thus its very presence in a world in
which all parts are in constant contact with each other was already an
imposition. Wherever a state does not have modern forms and functions, it is
subjected to pressuresinternal and externalto acquire them.6 Any
population within a state that has not been brought into relation with its
modern forms and functions is, by the same means, under constant pressure
to do so. In Bolivia and Ecuador, as in the rest of Latin America, these
modernising pressures catapulted masses and elites into shared yet conictive
projects of national politics in the rst half of the twentieth century.

The articulation of indigeneity in Bolivia and Ecuador

Although by no means blind to the political (or, for that matter, economic)
aspects of social mobilisation, scholars of indigenous movements in Bolivia
and Ecuador have tended to treat indigenous politics as ultimately
subordinate to a cultural reality from which it arises and which, in a way,
it actualises through a process of politicisation. Deborah Yashar argues that
ethnic cleavages in these countries became politicised when the state
impinged on communal autonomy and thereby challenged the cultural
reproduction of indigeneity by implementing neoliberal policies.7 Donna Lee
Van Cott similarly speaks of ethnic cleavages, which are becoming poli-
tically salient at a time when class cleavages appear to be eroding.8 Van Cott
and Yashar are aware that indigenous cultures, and the cleavages by which
they separate themselves from the dominant culture, are malleable
constructs. In the Latin American context of the past few decades, indeed,
the emergence of nation-wide indigenous movements out of a diverse set of
indigenous groups and communities could hardly be otherwise explained.
But Van Cott and Yashar characterise these formations of new alliances and
constructions of supra-ethnic indigeneities not in terms of their demands
and intentions, but in terms of their cultural commonalities. In the 1980s and
399
 TIMO SCHAEFER

1990s, indigenous organisations throughout Latin America presented to

allies and adversaries an objectied indigenous identity based on a relatively
consistent set of cultural traits that were chosen for their genuine resonance
within the indigenous population.9 Indigenous mobilisation thus explained
occupies a sort of political twilight zoneit appears on the scene of politics
only to press demands that are in themselves cultural: the ocial recognition
of indigenous languages, of traditional authority structures, etc. The state
becomes the object of indigenous demands, in other words, not in its function
as an instrument of political actionthe organ through which the national
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future is planned and shapedbut in its function as a public stage for

cultural recognition and re-vindication. Whereas national identities had
previously been construed as ethnically homogeneous (the mestizo nation),
indigenous peoples mobilised for a new model based on the veneration of
ethnic and cultural diversity, for inclusion and equitable participation in the
larger state and society, while protecting a zone of autonomy for the
development of indigenous culture.10
Recent developments have made the thesis of a cultural explanation for the
occurrence of indigenous mobilisation dicult to defend. The large-scale
blockades and protests that toppled Bolivian President Sanchez de Lozada in
October 2003 were carried out by a convergence of indigenous and national
popular movements which were united by an anti-neoliberal agenda, while
Ecuadors indigenous movement has recently been eclipsed by the populist
politics of Rafael Correa, who easily defeated Pachakutikthe party that had
grown out of the indigenous mobilisations of the 1990sat the polls by
appropriating precisely that part of the indigenous movements discourse
which was least connected to cultural or ethnic demands.11 This has led Nancy
Grey Postero and Leon Zamosc to suggest an ambiguity between ethnicity
and class, which in many cases appear as two faces of the same coin in Latin
America in general, and in Bolivia and Ecuador in particular.12 I agree that
the close interrelation between class and ethnicity in recent mobilisations
manifest in the popular alliances between indigenous organisations and other
groups representing peasants, workers or the poormust be a central datum
in any interpretation of indigenous politics in Bolivia and Ecuador. But while
Grey Postero and Zamosc interpret the elements of class in indigenous
discourse and the indigenouspopular coalition as recent additions, to be
understood in the context of the social and economic crises associated with
neoliberalism,13 I will try to show that they can be more coherently
understood by recognising their continuity with earlier forms of indigen-
ouspopular articulation during the era of corporatism.
With this historical perspective I follow in part previous analyses by Albo
and Gustafson for Bolivia and Korovkin and Macdonald for Ecuador. I also
draw on the work of Greg Grandin, whose interpretation of a century of
radicalism in the Polochic Valley in Guatemala emphasises the transforma-
tive potential for the formation of group identities inherent in political
engagement: Participation in mass politics to demand that the state
administer justice provided for many a way to catapult out of daily traps
of humiliation and savagery, fashioning a commonsensical understanding of
400
 THE POLITICAL MAKING OF INDIGENOUS MOVEMENTS IN BOLIVIA AND ECUADOR

democracy not as procedural constitutionalism but as the felt experience of

individual sovereignty and social solidarity.14 Thus, while it is possible to
describe popular politics as having gone through a class phase in which
questions of ethnicity were hardly addressed, followed by an identity
politics phase which put indigeneity at centre stage, both phases were
ultimately linked together as a single quest for the creation of an inclusive
and equitable state.
My argument about the political experience of indigenous mobilisation in
Bolivia and Ecuador takes a similar direction, but goes a step farther. I argue
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that, in these two countries, the making of ethnic identities itself has been a
process dened as much by elements of political articulation as by elements of
tradition, even before the arrival of mass politics in the 1930s in Bolivia and
1960s in Ecuador. In Aymara communities in Bolivia, in which traditional
forms of communal life and politics have survived, anthropologist Xavier
Albo remarks on the extraordinary extent to which the life project of each
individual community member is immersed in the life of the community. In
this community environment it is impossible to not be active in politics,
because political oces are lled on a rotation basis from which nobody can
be exempt, and really important decisions pass through the community
assembly in which all male family heads actively participate, and pass then,
less visibly but perhaps more eectively, through the sieve of each home where
husband and wife consult about the item before coming to a rm decision.15
In such a context identity is determined, to be sure, by communal bonds of
belonging, by a shared language, shared traditions, shared cultural and
behavioural norms. But it is determined also by a shared process of deliberate
initiative through which the community decides on how to organise the joint
process of economic, social and cultural (re)productiona shared surpassing
of the actual marked by foresight and intentionality that holds the community
together in a political project and thus puts it into a positive relationship with
the future. In these communities the participatory nature of politics has partly
made ethnicity itselfunderstood as the creation and inhabitation of a joint
symbolic and material worldinto a political project, continually surpassed
through joint acts of imagining and deliberation.
In the twentieth century the Bolivian and Ecuadorean states, by claiming
sovereignty over territories inhabited by indigenous peoples, of necessity
entered into their communally envisioned futures as the bearers of a
modernity that was both threat and opportunity. Indigenous mobilisations
did not occur as the politicisation of ethnic or cultural identities, but as the
extension of communal political concerns to the level of a state which, for
good or ill, was the site on which the nature of local engagements with
modernity must be contested.

From oligarchic crises to post-liberalism: indigenous politics in Bolivia and

Ecuador in the twentieth and twenty-rst centuries
Mid-century corporatism in Latin America developed as the states solution
to the problems posed by socio-political conditions of modernity: As the
401
 TIMO SCHAEFER

working class and peasantry started to mobilise for resources, inclusion, and
justice, political parties and the state sought to capture political support and
to control the masses with new modes of interest intermediation and social
rights.16 Corporatism overcame the crises faced by the oligarchic republics
by making substantial concessions to organised sectors of the lower classes,
while at the same time taking advantage of the opportunities oered by the
presence of new political actors for the extension of state power.
Indigenous communities were among the social actors that battered
against the walls of the exclusionary oligarchies and entered the public space
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of national politics when they nally crumbled: in 1952 in Bolivia, in a long

drawn-out process lasting into the 1970s in Ecuador. While indigenous
communities had been in constant conict and negotiation over the intensity
of their exploitation and degree of autonomy throughout colonial and early
republican times, and could thus draw on 400 years of experience of engaging
a powerful supra-local authority, it was only in the rst half of the twentieth
century thatenraged at the expropriation of lands by liberal regimes,
supported by incipient leftwing movements, and drawing on the examples of
the Russian and Mexican Revolutionsthey began to make demands that
placed them into a positive relationship to a modernising state. To their
perennial struggles for land and autonomy they now added a classist vision of
a better society that situated their local struggles within an alternative
national project. They demanded access to education, and in the 1940s rst
eorts were made in both countries to institutionalise indigenous alliances on
a national scale.17
Under corporatism, radical popular demands were co-opted and mitigated
by their insertion into elite-dominated state structures and institutions, into
workers unions and peasant federations responsive to the state that
monopolised popular political representation. At the same time popular
sectors gained a minimum of concessions which could not easily be
withdrawn in the future, since the very legitimacy of the new state now
rested on the incorporation of popular concerns into government policy
formation. At least rhetorically, [the] new national project extolled the
common people as the essence and symbol of the nation.18 The common
people, however, were not Indians: any organisation on the basis of ethnic or
cultural identity was ruled out in the interest of national unity and
consolidation, and indigenous people had a place in the nation only insofar
as they tted into the broader social categories of peasants or workers.
Latin American corporatism was also a modernising project, popular
inclusion a precondition for the construction of strong, competitive states.19
The nationalisation of natural resource extraction, a national economic
development initiative based on import substitution, a minimum wage for
workers to stimulate internal demand, the penetration of the state into
isolated areas through the creation of peasant unions, the abolition of feudal
property ownership and servile labour relations through land reform, of
backwardness through rural schoolingall these were so many steps hewn
into the steep cli that separated the nations from a European or North
American modernity. Yet the direction that national development would
402
 THE POLITICAL MAKING OF INDIGENOUS MOVEMENTS IN BOLIVIA AND ECUADOR

take was always contested. If political elites could nally attempt to achieve
their old aim to extend the state to a rural hinterland viewed as stateless,20
the enduring weakness of state institutions often meant that in reality
indigenous peasant communities were able to carve out spaces within the
national development project in which they could exercise a high level of
political autonomy in the governing of local, and mediation of national,
aairs. The abolition of servile forms of labour relations and the
implementation of land reforms, in particular, gave many villages the degree
of freedom as well as the geographical territory on which communal
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indigenous politics could ourish, while local unions in the national peasant
federations institutionalised local modes of access to state resources.21
For indigenous communities, corporatism therefore signied the inclusion
into a national state while allowing a quiet resistance to the states hege-
monising discourse: indigenous people were able to keep alive their commu-
nal political projects while inserting them into the larger project of a
modernising state.22 Local autonomy was maintained, but the principal
points of reference for communal politics and the resource base over which
communities presided were greatly enlarged. To the traditional concerns of
local politics were now added the utilisation of state services like irrigation or
education, the attempt to ensure that national policy initiatives would really
reach the community, and the ltering of such initiatives through local
governing institutions.
Indigenous mobilisation in the Bolivian and Ecuadorean highlands had its
origin in the experience of citizenship that followed the creation of the
corporatist states and did not, at rst, make any clear distinction between
indigenous and peasant demands. It gained momentum when the erosion of
the corporatist states threatened the de facto terms of indigenous
participation in the national project, and acquired great urgency with the
implementation of neoliberal policies in the 1980s that threatened the
integrity of indigenous communities and their local politics as well as their
meaningful inclusion in the state. The move to neoliberalism in both
countries involved a dismantling of the corporatist structures that had been
the guarantor of a limited local autonomy; a liberalisation of land markets
that challenged the territoriality on which local politics depended; a slashing
of the social services and developmentalist support programmes (providing
infrastructure, microcredits, subsidies, etc) that had integrated indigenous
communities into a national modernising project; and a turn from the
import-substitution industrialisation model of national development that had
equipped that project with a practical and visionary framework.23 In
response, indigenous people mobilised to defend both their local projects
based on communal land tenure and political autonomy, and, in alliance with
other sectors of the Left, the national classist projects of inclusive,
developmentalist states based on social solidarity and implemented through
interventionist and redistributive policies.
There are several reasons why it has proved so tempting to interpret the
newly emerging movements in terms of their cultural and ethnic backgrounds
and to overlook their origin in and continuation of an expansionist political
403
 TIMO SCHAEFER

programme that tried to attach local, ethnic identities to a modernising state.

The mobilisation of highland indigenous communities coincided with similar
organisational eorts on the part of Amazonian indigenous groups, whose
political agendas diered substantially from those of their Andean counter-
parts. In both Bolivia and Ecuador the Amazon had been a sort of last
frontier, a borderland beyond the reach of the state, in which indigenous
groups, encompassing only a small percentage of the total indigenous
population in both countries, had been able to survive relatively unmolested
into the second half of the century. Beginning in the 1960s, however,
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agricultural colonisation schemes and the development of natural resource

extraction began to disturb Amazonian Indians economic reproduction,
prompting the organised defence of their land from encroachment and
environmental degradation. Unconcerned with national inclusion, their
demands did indeed focus on issues of territorial integrity, self-governance
and cultural rights. When, in the 1980s in Ecuador and in the 1990s in
Bolivia, indigenous groups from the lowlands and the highlands entered into
organisational alliances in order to gain political weight, strategic considera-
tions made it advisable to adopt the ethnic discourse of the Amazonian
Indians, which best attracted the sponsorship of international environmental
groups and captured the imagination and sympathy of non-indigenous
Bolivians and Ecuadoreans.24 Finally, there also occurredespecially in
Boliviaa real shift in the programmes of highland organisations from
classist demands (favouring aid and services for small farmers and farming
communities within a policy-context of economic nationalism) towards
demands for political autonomy, cultural recognition and new forms of
multinational citizenship recognising collective identities. This shift corre-
sponded to the decline of the traditional Left and took advantage of the
favourable context of decentralisation linked to neoliberal policies. A
mobilisation around demands for cultural recognition in constitutions,
bilingual education, legal pluralism and the recognition of group rights,
including the right to self-government in indigenous territories, not only
oered the best chance to make an impact within an international context of
triumphant liberal capitalism after the fall of the USSR and a national
context of scal and monetary crisis, but also provided a practical space
through which the classist demand for landdressed up in the exotic garb of
indigenous culturecould still be put on the political agenda. Bolivia and
Ecuador went through important reform processes, including constitutional
reforms with signicant indigenous input, in the 1990s. Both countries
recognised their multi-ethnic composition and protected indigenous lan-
guages, cultures, forms of governance and land. Implementation of the new
laws was disappointing, however, and clearly demonstrated the limits of a
political programme privileging cultural rights in the absence of a national-
policy context responsive to popular demands. Multicultural reforms were
therefore unable to put an end to large-scale, indigenous-led popular protests
in either country.25
This is not to say that the adoption of multicultural constitutions in
countries which have historically discriminated against their indigenous
404
 THE POLITICAL MAKING OF INDIGENOUS MOVEMENTS IN BOLIVIA AND ECUADOR

population and still have a high incidence of racism has not been an
important victory for indigenous movements in Bolivia and Ecuador.
However, they are victories only if seen in the context of a larger struggle
over the meaning of modernity. To the neoliberal modernity of autonomous
producers, traders and consumers linked by means of a free market, the
indigenous movements, allied with other popular sectors (including parts of
the middle classes) have opposed the model of a post-liberal modernity in
which growth is directed and spread through society according to a
decentralised system of political participation that privileges the local, but
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comes together and is co-ordinated ultimately by national policy-making

bodies. According to Benjamin Arditi, such a post-liberal vision of politics
revolves around a notion of social citizenship that refers . . . to modes of
expression of the popular will that seek a voice in the allocation of public
resources rather than in the designation of public authorities, while refusing
to perceive the contamination between the multitude and representation as
something particularly problematic.26 It continues to address itself to the
modern state while challenging its practices. On a most basic level it
represents an attempt to reconcile the classic demands of the Leftequality
and solidarity27with a participatory politics that is rooted in the local, and
thus to solve the tension between two expansionist political projectsthe
indigenouscommunal and the nationalthat has existed ever since the
emergence of modernity forced them into dialogue.

Bolivia
Bolivians experienced the appearance of modern socio-political conditions as
a period of acute crisis that followed the disastrous Chaco War (193235) and
found relief in the 1952 Revolution and subsequent inauguration of a cor-
poratist regime. The period between these events, writes Klein, saw the transi-
tion from a classic intra-class republican regime, with limited participation, to
one based on class politics, with a major struggle developing over the parti-
cipation of the lower classes in national political life.28 But even before the
conditions of modern warfare made the immersion of the masses into the
political life of the nation inevitable, both state and indigenous communities had
taken some steps toward an approximation between liberal state and rural
villages through the medium of rural education. While the state, beginning in the
1920s, built and staed rural schools for the purpose of integrating Indian
villagers into the economic life of the nation as a hardworking but docile subject
population, Indians themselves were highly active in petitioning the government
for local schools or, at least, the redemption of state promises to protect and
support peasant-based initiatives to found local primary schools in the villages
or on the haciendas where they lived.29
The 1952 Revolution was carried out by the MNR, a middle class party with
a radical populist platform acting in loose coalition with workers and
peasants.30 Following the overthrow of the old regime, indigenous peasants
took charge of their destiny by invading land and driving awayin some
cases killinghacienda owners and overseers. The new regime endorsed the
405
 TIMO SCHAEFER

land take-over, organised the communities into a national peasant syndicate,

and made the provision of health and education facilities in the communities
a national priority. Indians were thus, for the rst time, fully integrated into
the Bolivian nation. The structure of their integration, however, was a class-
based one: their access to the state went via their occupation as peasants, not
their indigenous heritage, culture and language. At the same time local
communities that were nominally part of the state-organised union structure
often managed to accommodate previous forms of communal governance to
the new institutional requirements. In many cases, [indigenous authorities]
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simply inserted union structures into preexisting indigenous community

authority systems. In other regions ocial union structures were unable to
penetrate at all.31 The production of communal political projects, then, was
not abolished or interrupted, but rather integrated into another, larger level
of political production. Indigenous people retained their old communal
political identities, while overlaying them with a national one. According to
Klein, While often working at odds with each other, and constantly being
suborned by the regimes in power, the peasants nevertheless retained total
control over their own sindicatos and have been vital sources of national
political strength from 1952 until the present day [1992].32
The way in which local and national politics meshed in indigenous
communities can be divided into two steps. Once peasants had gained land
titles and, to various degrees, access to state services, they became reliable
supporters of the status quo, the main base of power of the right wing of the
33
MNR and, after 1964, of the rst military governments. At the same time,
however, the opportunity now existed for a minority of indigenous youths to
pass through the countrys educational system, attend university in La Paz, and
plot their lives within a wider, national orbit. For these young intellectuals,
strangers in a social environment dominated by whites and mestizos, their
indigenous background emerged as a principal factor in their political
consciousness. Beginning their organisational activity at a time when military
governments were turning their back on established patronage ties to
smallholding peasants in favour of big agro-industrial development projects
in the eastern department of Santa Cruz, they became instrumental to the
development of katarismo, a revolutionary movement blending classist and
indigenist ideology. They slowly took control over the local union organisations
in their places of origin and in the 1970s made katarismo the principal force in
the mobilisation of peasants against the military government of Hugo Banzer.
After Bolivias turn to democracy the kataristas have continued to play a huge
role in indigenous mobilising through the Trade Union Confederation of
Bolivian Peasant Workers (CSUTCB), founded in 1979.34
The kataristas integrated local communities into a national movement with
a national vision. No longer able to count on a state that, in exchange for
loyalty, had protected their lands and brought them schools and health
facilities, indigenous peasants combined their frustrated expectations into a
broad national project of oppositional politics. Their allies on the left,
however, soon fell on hard times. The electoral left lost credibility when the
national economy plummeted, and ination spiralled, under the watch of
406
 THE POLITICAL MAKING OF INDIGENOUS MOVEMENTS IN BOLIVIA AND ECUADOR

Hernan Siles Zuazo and the MNR from 1982 to 1984. The trade union left was
hit hard by the implementation of a neoliberal policy agenda in 1985 which,
by dismantling the state-owned tin sector, with one stroke also dismantled
the urban core of the Bolivian Workers Central (COB).35 At the same time,
however, the old katarista core of the CSUTCB gained two important allies in
the growing coca growers movement and among Indians from the
Amazonian lowlands, organised in the Indigenous Confederation of the
Orient, Chaco and Amazon of Bolivia (CIDOB).36 The indigenous movement
was now at the helm of organised civil society.
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The Bolivian state responded to increasingly public indigenous protests with

a divisive negotiating tactic that acknowledged the legitimacy of the cultural
and territorial demands of the lowland Indians, but excluded the more
radical CSTUCB with its demands for an alternative national project.37 In par-
ticular, the rst government of Sanchez de Lozada passed constitutional reforms
recognising the multiethnic and pluricultural diversity of the Bolivian
population, passed a Law of Popular Representation which guaranteed indi-
genous representatives places in municipal governments, and, in 1996, instituted
a land reform that allowed indigenous groups to petition the state
for recognition of their ownership of traditional territories.38 If indigenous
movements really did for a time substantially divorce their struggle for cultural
rights from a broader agenda for social justiceas, it may be argued, happened
during the rst presidency of Sanchez de Lozada (199397)the actual
experience with what Charles Hale has called multicultural neoliberalism
brought quick disenchantment.39 Not only did the titling of communal land
soon stall and the promise of increased electoral representation through ethnic
quotas prove hollow, but the global impact of the East Asian economic crisis at
the end of the 1990s brought the economy to a complete halt, while the
privatisation of hydrocarbons dried up government scal revenue and forced
the simultaneous suspension of social programmes and the introduction of taxes
on energy consumption.40 At the same time increased state eorts to comply
with US demands for coca eradication under the Banzer presidency (19972001)
attacked the one sector of the economy that in the previous decade had provided
an avenue for survival to the rural poor.41 The focus on indigenous rights lost its
attractiveness in the context of a national economic policy which viewed
economic and nancial elites as the sole purveyors of a modernity whose thin
downward trickles the poor were left to ght over, and would have satised
Bolivias indigenes only if their desire had really been exhausted with the
achievement of political autonomy and isolation.
Popular disenchantment with the multicultural reforms of the late 1990s,
combined with the experience of great economic hardship as the economy
ground to a halt under the neoliberal model, found its outlet in an oppositional
politics once again cutting through lines of ethnicity and class. Bolivians
mobilised around an alternative vision of the nation in which the state would
oversee the extraction of resourcesoil and gasfor the benet of the people,
provide essential services like energy and water, and devolve local political
decision making to those aected by it. What began with a struggle against the
privatisation of water in the municipality of Cochabamba in 2000 turned into a
407
 TIMO SCHAEFER

series of nation-wide protests and blockades which eventually forced the

resignation of President Sanchez de Lozada in his second term of oce and, in
2005, enabled the presidential victory of Evo Morales, leader of the coca
growers movement. In spite of his great popularity, the future of Moraless
presidency hangs in the balance as he faces a tough struggle with regional
economic elites in the resource-rich eastern lowland provinces over the new
political direction the country is taking. The question of whether he is willing
and able to articulate his state-centred populist project with local indigenous
projects into an inclusive, participatory political modernity has for the time
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being taken a subordinate position.

Ecuador
In Ecuador a well dened break with an exclusive, oligarchic political system
never took place. Corporatist structures were introduced late and thinly,
mainly during two periods of military rule from 1963 to 1966 and 1972 to
1979. Although the nationalmodernist project of incorporating indigenous
peasant communities into the state goes back at least to the 1937 Ley de
Comunas, which homogenized rural communities . . . by juridically acknowl-
edging and labeling them as comunas, the smallest politicaladministrative
unit in Ecuador,42 only the modest land reforms implemented by the military
governments were able to disrupt the power of large landholders over
indigenous communities in the highlands and draw indigenous people into a
national political project.
Integrationist initiatives, however, in Ecuador as in Bolivia, preceded the
formal turn to an inclusive corporatist regime. They were closely linked to
modernising eorts and originated from sectors of the elite as well as from
indigenous communities. At the beginning of the twentieth century the liberal
Eloy Alfaro, brought to power in 1895 by military action with a high degree
of indigenous participation, headed a modernising regime closely allied to the
coastal entrepreneurial class and abolished some of the labour services to
which indigenous people were subject on the highland haciendasmainly
with the aim of creating a modern proletarian labour force to work the
coastal plantations.43 His radical indigenista rhetoric nevertheless oered
discursive instruments by which indigenous peasants could formulate their
grievances and political struggles,44 and therefore cast the entire struggle for
land and freedom of highland Indians into the ideological framework of
modernist nationalism. Subsequent regimes kept up rhetorical and sometimes
practical eorts to integrate and assimilate indigenous people, and
indigenous people, increasingly with the help of an itinerant national Left,
kept up eorts to participate in the political life of the nation.45 Until the
second half of the century, however, conservatives tied to the large highland
estates retained enough power to prevent the country from taking any
practical steps toward economic, social and political modernisation. Only
after 1950, with the acceleration of capital accumulation, the growth of the
middle class and the emergence of a reformist faction in the landholding elite,
did the situation tip in favour of a national modernising agenda.46
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 THE POLITICAL MAKING OF INDIGENOUS MOVEMENTS IN BOLIVIA AND ECUADOR

Reforms were slow and gradual, and the transition to a corporatist

regime was fully completed only in the 1970s, when the discovery of major
oil reserves in the Amazon enabled the military government of Rodrigo
Lara to deepen the reform process begun in the 1960s. Both military
regimes encouraged industrialisation through import substitution,
national integration through social programmes and the modernisation
of agriculture through limited land reform.47 But indigenous peasants were
not merely the passive recipients of government initiatives. Already in the
1950s indigenous communities had contested traditional labour and land
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ownership relations in the highlands, and in a few cases, aided by

modernisation eorts on the part of large landowners, purchased land for
themselves.48 The concrete mechanism of land transfer under the military
regimes also required a high level of initiative on the part of the peasants, who
had to involve themselves in complicated negotiations with state agencies and
hacendados over the location, extent, quality and value of land to be
transferred, as well as the value of labour services previously rendered to
landholders, which were to be balanced against it. Following the redistribu-
tion of land, indigenous communities used their organisational capaci-
ties . . . to negotiate with agencies for public works (especially waterworks and
electricity), irrigation, and integrated rural development projects.49 Unlike in
Bolivia, where peasants nominally had to join state unions in order to be
eligible for land titling and state services, indigenous people in Ecuador had
the possibility of entering into a direct, unmediated relationship with the
corporatist state by formally registering as communities.50
Indigenous movements in Ecuador emerged out of pre-corporatist unions
and peasant organisationslinked to the Catholic Church as well as rural
unions and the Socialist and Communist partiesthat had been instrumental
in putting the issue of land reform on the national agenda. In 1972 the rst
Andean-wide indigenous organisation, Ecuarunari, was founded with a class-
based, national political agenda.51
The transition to an openly oppositional movement began at the end of the
1970s, when social programmes that had been part and parcel of the second
land reform were cut as a result of emerging scal restraints while public
credit for agricultural modernisation programmes was channelled principally
to large landholders. It gained momentum in the 1980s, when governments
oversaw socioeconomic reforms that fundamentally replaced redistributive
policies and corporatist institutions with neoliberal ones.52 In these years the
organisational initiative of Ecuadors indigenous peoples passed largely to
Amazonian Indians, whose various regional organisations had come together
in Confenaie in 1980. As in Bolivia the Amazonian groups mobilised for a
more explicitly cultural agenda, advocating the protection of traditional
territories from colonising farmers and extractive industries on the basis of
their necessity for ethnic survival. The Amazonian federation had a great
impact on the demands and discourse adopted by the national indigenous
movement, Conaie, that brought Amazonian and highland Indians together
in 1986, but never completely eclipsed the Andean vision of a redistributive
and developmentalist national state.53
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 TIMO SCHAEFER

Throughout the 1990s subsequent Ecuadorean governments persisted in

the application of a neoliberal economic model that hurt indigenous peasants
and other popular sectors while failing to x the countrys economic crisis.
Because neoliberal reforms continued to hand out favours to the economic
elitesfor example by abolishing income tax and spending US$4 billion to
bail out private banks during the Mahuad presidency (19982000)while
placing the burden of adjustment on the lower classes, public debt spiralled in
spite of a steep decline of the percentage of state expenditure on social
services.54
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During this time the Ecuadorean indigenous movement became the main
player in oppositional politics. In a series of blockades and uprisings that
forced three presidents out of oce, Conaie combined indigenous cultural
demands with a classist discourse against neoliberalism that attracted
support throughout society, without, however, being able to change the
general direction of national politics.55 Although Ecuador passed a new
constitution that was drafted with signicant indigenous input and included
broad recognition of indigenous rights and a promise to consolidate Ecuador
through recognition of regional diversity of peoples, ethnic groups, and
cultures in 1998,56 the constitutional reform brought no substantial policy
changes and contained no provisions to deal with the context of economic
crisis and neoliberal politics that were devastating the countrys social fabric.
Faced with the failure to force eective policy changes using the tactics of
social mobilisation and protest, which proved adept at toppling governments
but couldnt prevent the adoption of similar policies by their successors, the
indigenous movement formed its own party, the Movement of Plurinational
Unity, Pachacutik, and began participating in electoral politics in 1996, only
to become embroiled in disastrous strategical alliances with the military and
the neoliberal government of President Gutierrez in the rst years of the new
century.57 Instead, it was the white and foreign-educated populist Rafael
Correa who, after winning the 2006 presidential elections, became the rst
president whose policies seemed to lend some credibility to his declared anti-
neoliberal socialism. In the elections won by Correa, the indigenous Luis
Maca, running for Pachacutik and endorsed by Conaie in the rst electoral
round, won a mere 2% of total votes and 18% of Andean indigenous votes.
The clear victory of the socialist Correa over the indigenous Maca seems to
point to a broad national vision on the part of the countrys indigenous
population that prioritises a credible project of national change over a
concern for ethnic re-vindication.58

Conclusion
When Alma Guillermoprieto asked a village elder in the Bolivian highland
community of Jesus de Machaca whether he considered the new president
Evo Morales an Indian or not, the man bypassed the question by answering
that what the community expected from the MAS government was money for
education and to develop tourism in the area. The villagers of Jesus de
Machaca, concludes Guillermoprieto, were much more interested in the
410
 THE POLITICAL MAKING OF INDIGENOUS MOVEMENTS IN BOLIVIA AND ECUADOR

things that can provide them with access to modernity than in their
presidents ethnic aliation.59
Over the past century indigenous peoples in Bolivia and Ecuador who have
fought for inclusion in projects of national modernity have above all desired
tangible things, concrete opportunities to improve their social and material
standing: access to schools, healthcare facilities, land, irrigation works,
electricity, credit, perhaps even decently paid jobs in the urban centres. They
have dened themselves not so much through their culture as through their
visions for a national future into which they might t their hopes and
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aspirations. By joining local projects and visions with those of a variety of

national actorsother indigenous groups, trade unions, parties, those
Bolivians and Ecuadoreans who, though lacking clearly dened political
identities, nevertheless joined in the strikes and protests against neoliberal-
ismtheir political identity formation, and with it the meaning of ethnicity
itself, underwent crucial changes. Indigenous communities replaced the
negative demands of communal autonomy of the nineteenth century with
demands that marked their positive participation in the Bolivian and
Ecuadorean states. Present demands for autonomy and self-governance are
no longer rejections of these states but attempts to transform them, along with
the modernity of which they are the vehicles, into projects of local import.
Whether this reconciliation of the communallocal with the modern
national can be successful is an open question. Even if the reformist govern-
ments of Morales and Correa can overcome the opposition of their powerful
enemies, it remains to be seen whether the conditions of modernity
depending on access to goods and services that are brought into being by
competitive capital ows and investments dwarng the budget of many Latin
American governments, let alone small farming communitiesare compatible
with, and will lend themselves to guidance from, a locally rooted participatory
politics.

Notes
I would like to thank Eric Hershberg for invaluable discussion, feedback and guidance at every stage of the
writing of this essay. Max A Cameron and an anonymous reviewer also commented on an earlier draft of
the paper; I am grateful for their insightful and challenging criticisms and suggestions.
1 X Albo, Pueblos Indios en la Poltica, La Paz: CIPCA, 2002, p 60.
2 Quispe has, in fact, at times expressed a desire to create an independent, racially dened Aymara state,
and at one point in 2004 extended an invitation to rebellious Aymaras in Peru to join their Bolivian
brethren in a new Aymara nation. It is presumably because he knows that such a project would nd
scant support among his constituents that he has not made it a permanent part of his political
discourse. See JA Lucero, Barricades and articulations: comparing Ecuadorian and Bolivian
indigenous politics, in A Kim Clark & M Becker (eds), Highland Indians and the State in Modern
Ecuador, Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007, pp 220221.
3 See, for example, N Grey Postero, Articulations and fragmentations: indigenous politics in Bolivia, in
N Grey Postero & L Zamosc (eds), The Struggle for Indigenous Rights in Latin America, Portland, OR:
Sussex Academic Press, 2004; Grey Postero & L Zamosc, Indigenous movements and the Indian
question in Latin America, in Grey Postero & Zamosc (eds), The Struggle for Indigenous Rights in
Latin America; F Hylton & S Thomson, Revolutionary Horizons: Past and Present in Bolivian Politics,
New York: Verso, 2007; DL Van Cott, The Friendly Liquidation of the Past: The Politics of Diversity in
Latin America, Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000; Van Cott, From Movements to
Parties in Latin America: The Politics of Ethnic Diversity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2005; D Yashar, Contesting Citizenship in Latin America: The Rise of Indigenous Movements and the

411
 TIMO SCHAEFER

Postliberal Challenge, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005; and L Zamosc, The Indian
movement in Ecuador: from politics of inuence to politics of power, in Grey Postero & Zamosc, The
Struggle for Indigenous Rights in Latin America.
4 H Arendt, On Revolution, New York: Viking Press, 1963, p 54.
5 T Asad, Conscripts of Western civilization, in CW Gailey (ed), Dialectical Anthropology: Essays in Honor of
Stanley Diamond, Vol 1, Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1992; and D Scott, Conscripts of
Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004.
6 Asad, Conscripts of Western civilization, p 335.
7 Yashar, Contesting Citizenship in Latin America, pp 34, 283.
8 Van Cott, From Movements to Parties in Latin America, p 2.
9 Van Cott, The Friendly Liquidation of the Past, pp 2425.
10 Ibid, p 8; and Van Cott, From Movements to Parties in Latin America, p 228. See also Yashar,
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Contesting Citizenship in Latin America, ch 7.

11 Hylton & Thompson, Revolutionary Horizons; C Conaghan, Ecuador: Correas plebiscitary
presidency, Journal of Democracy, 19 (2), 2008, p 57; and T Korovkin, The indigenous movement
and left-wing politics in Ecuador, paper presented at the left-turns conference in Vancouver,
organised by Simon Fraser University and the University of British Columbia, Spring 2007, p 1.
12 Grey Postero & Zamosc, Indigenous movements and the Indian question in Latin America, pp 12, 24.
13 Grey Postero, Articulations and fragmentations, pp 204206; and Zamosc, The Indian movement in
Ecuador, pp 132, 143144.
14 X Albo, From MNRistas to Kataristas to Katari, in Steve Stern (ed), Resistance, Rebellion, and
Consciousness in the Andean Peasant World, 18th to 20th Centuries, Madison, WI: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1987; Albo, Pueblos Indios en la Poltica; B Gustafson, Paradoxes of liberal
indigenism: indigenous movements, state processes, and intercultural reform in Bolivia, in D Maybury-
Lewis (ed), The Politics of Ethnicity: Indigenous Peoples in Latin American States, Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2002; Korovkin, The indigenous movement and left-wing politics in
Ecuador; Th Macdonald, Jr, Ecuadors Indian movement: pawn in a short game or agent in state
reconguration?, in Maybury-Lewis, The Politics of Ethnicity; and G Grandin, The Last Colonial
Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004, p 4.
15 Albo, Pueblos Indios en la Poltica, p 20. Few people would share Albos uncritical interpretation of
gender relations in Aymara communities.
16 Yashar, Contesting Citizenship in Latin America, p 57.
17 Albo, Pueblos Indios en la Poltica, pp 180181; B Larson, Capturing Indian bodies, hearths and minds:
el hogar campesino and rural school reform in Bolivia, 1920s1940s, in MS Grindle & P Domingo
(eds), Proclaiming Revolution: Bolivia in Comparative Perspective, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2003; J Dandler & JA Torrico, From the National Indigenous Congress to the Ayopaya
Rebellion: Bolivia, 19451947, in Stern, Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness in the Andean Peasant
World; L Gotkowitz, Revisiting the rural roots of the revolution, in Grindle & Domingo, Proclaiming
Revolution; and M Becker, State building and ethnic discourse in Ecuadors 19441945 Asamblea
Constituyente, in Clark & Becker, Highland Indians and the State in Modern Ecuador.
18 P Drake & E Hershberg, The crisis of statesociety relations in the post-1980s Andes, in Drake &
Hershberg (eds), State and Society in Conict: Comparative Perspectives on Andean Crises, Pittsburgh,
PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006, p 5.
19 Albo, From MNRistas to Kataristas, p 382; A Isaacs, Military Rule and Transition in Ecuador, 1972
92, London: Macmillan Press, 1993, pp 1316; Larson, Capturing Indian bodies, hearths, and minds,
p 203; and A Pallares, Contesting membership: citizenship, pluriculturalism(s), and the contemporary
indigenous movement, in Clark & Becker, Highland Indians and the State in Modern Ecuador, p 142.
20 Gotkowitz, Revisiting the rural roots of the revolution, p 166.
21 Yashar, Contesting Citizenship in Latin America, pp 54, 60.
22 Ibid, pp 6465.
23 Grey Postero & Zamosc, Indigenous movements and the Indian question in Latin America, pp 2025;
and Yashar, Contesting Citizenship in Latin America, pp 6569.
24 A Brysk, Acting globally: Indian rights and international politics in Latin America, in Donna Lee
Van Cott (ed), Indigenous Peoples and Democracy in Latin America, New York: St Martins Press,
1994, pp 3338; Lucero, Barricades and articulations, p 212; and Yashar, Contesting Citizenship in
Latin America, pp 6971, 130133, 215218.
25 Macdonald, Ecuadors Indian movement, pp 184187; and Gustafson, Paradoxes of liberal indigenism.
26 B Arditi, Arguments about the left turn(s) in Latin America: a post-liberal politics?, paper presented
at the left-turns conference in Vancouver, organised by Simon Fraser University and the University of
British Columbia, 2008, pp 1415.
27 Ibid, p 3.
28 H Klein, Bolivia: The Evolution of a Multi-Ethnic Society, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992, p 210.

412
 THE POLITICAL MAKING OF INDIGENOUS MOVEMENTS IN BOLIVIA AND ECUADOR

29 Larson, Capturing Indian bodies, hearths, and minds, p 192.

30 Gotkowitz, Revisiting the rural roots of the revolution; Klein, Bolivia, p 225; and A Knight, The
domestic dynamics of the Mexican and Bolivian revolutions compared, in Grindle & Domingo,
Proclaiming Revolution, p 67.
31 Yashar, Contesting Citizenship in Latin America, pp 161162.
32 Klein, Bolivia, p 235.
33 Ibid, p 236.
34 Albo, From MNRistas to Kataristas, pp 3951; Hylton & Thomson, Revolutionary Horizons, pp 869;
and Yashar, Contesting Citizenship in Latin America, pp 167181.
35 Klein, Bolivia, pp 275276.
36 Grey Postero, Articulations and fragmentations, pp 195196; Hylton & Thomson, Revolutionary
Horizons, pp 9798; and Yashar, Contesting Citizenship in Latin America, pp 181187.
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37 Gustafson, Paradoxes of liberal indigenism, p 272; Lucero, Barricades and articulations, p 228; and
Yashar, Contesting Citizenship in Latin America, p 217.
38 Yashar, Contesting Citizenship in Latin America, pp 216218; and Grey Postero, Articulations and
fragmentations, pp 197, 200.
39 C Hale, Does multiculturalism menace? Governance, cultural rights and the politics of identity in
Guatemala, Journal for Latin American Studies, 34 (3), 2002, pp 485524.
40 Grey Postero, Articulations and fragmentations, pp 201204; and Hylton & Thomson, Revolutionary
Horizons, pp 99100.
41 Hylton & Thomson, Revolutionary Horizons, pp 101102.
42 Yashar, Contesting Citizenship in Latin America, p 89.
43 M Baud, Liberalism, indigenismo, and social mobilization, in Clark & Becker, Highland Indians and
the State in Modern Ecaudor, p 76; A Kim Clark & M Becker, Indigenous peoples and state formation
in modern Ecuador, in Clark & Becker, Highland Indians and the State in Modern Ecuador, p 10; and E
Ayala Mora, Ecuador since 1930, in The Cambridge History of Latin America, Vol 8, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1984, pp 687689.
44 Baud, Liberalism, indigenismo and social mobilization, p 80.
45 Becker, State building and ethnic discourse.
46 W Waters, Indigenous communities, landlords, and the state: land and labor in highland Ecuador,
19501975, in Clark & Becker, Highland Indians and the State in Modern Ecuador, pp 124127; and
Mora, Ecuador since 1930, pp 706707.
47 Isaacs, Military Rule and Transition in Ecuador; and Waters, Indigenous communities, landlords and
the state, pp 126127.
48 Waters, Indigenous communities, landlords and the state, pp 132, 136.
49 Ibid, pp 133, 137.
50 Yashar, Contesting Citizenship in Latin America, pp 9597.
51 Korovkin, The indigenous movement and left-wing politics in Ecuador, p 2; and Yashar, Contesting
Citizenship in Latin America, pp 99102, 106109.
52 Yashar, Contesting Citizenship in Latin America, p 134.
53 Korovkin, The indigenous movement and left-wing politics in Ecuador, pp 34; Lucero, Barricades
and articulations, pp 211212; Macdonald, Ecuadors Indian movement, pp 176178; and Yashar,
Contesting Citizenship in Latin America, pp 109151.
54 Zamosc, The Indian movement in Ecuador, pp 142143.
55 Macdonald, Ecuadors Indian movement, pp 181184; and Zamosc, The Indian movement in
Ecuador.
56 Macdonald, Ecuadors Indian movement, p 185.
57 Ibid, pp 187188; and Zamosc, The Indian movement in Ecuador.
58 Korovkin, The indigenous movement and left-wing politics in Ecuador, p 1.
59 A Guillermoprieto, A new Bolivia?, New York Review of Books, 10 August 2006, p 38.

Notes on Contributor
Timo Schaefer graduated from Simon Fraser University in 2008 with a joint
major in History and Latin American Studies and is now an SSHRC-funded
MA student in the History Department of the University of British
Columbia. He plans to do thesis research on the articulation between local
and national political projects and ideologies on the part of Oaxacan
insurgent villagers during Mexicos War of Independence.
413