Bolivia’s Rocky Path Ahead

Abstract

A fair yet critical assessment of President Evo Morales and his MAS (Movement toward Socialism) party’s “refounding revolution” in Bolivia, initiated in 2005, presents a challenge to scholars and policy makers. Critics and supporters alike must walk the fine line between political reality and partisan rhetoric and between achievements and setbacks in governance. In their insightful evaluation of the continuity and change in Evo’s Bolivia from 2009 to 2014, two well-established country experts, Linda Farthing and the late Benjamin Kohl, have done precisely that. It would be a mistake to treat this comprehensive, extensively researched, and readable book as anything but excellent scholarship by two solidarity activists who are unafraid to be critical as well as thoughtful and balanced in their assessments of Bolivia’s first indigenousand socialmovements-dominated administration. In this spirit, the authors frame their complex narrative around the Aymara concept of ch’ixi, which is described as something “simultaneously white and not white and black and not black,” a “third state” that superficially appears to be gray, as when black and white threads are woven together, but is not (7). Fittingly, the book is dedicated to the memory of coauthor Ben Kohl, an educator and scholar of Bolivia who died suddenly in 2013, and to that of Domitila Barrios de Chungara, a miner’s daughter and wife and celebrated early women’s activist who suffered under military repression in the 1960s and 1970s and died in 2012. In this context the authors position the rise of Evo Morales along the continuum of struggle for political and socioeconomic rights from the 1952 National Revolution to the birth of “new” social movements in the 1990s. To tap the complexity and contestation inherent in Evo’s Bolivia, they include vignettes from diverse Bolivian personalities that provide interesting and insightful perspectives on the ongoing process of change and continuity. The authors’ interviews indicate that even supporters, both indigenous and nonindigenous, have reservations about or are disillusioned with Morales’s policies, especially concerning the disastrous attempt to cancel the gas subsidy in 2010, the extraction-driven development model, and the ongoing dispute that erupted in 2012 over the proposed new road through the Isiboro Secure National Park and Indigenous Territory. Various MAS supporters feel that the “process of change is stalled” (147) and that the so-called Morales revolution is not a true revolution and remains an “unfinished” transition (144). The country still confronts almost daily protests and roadblocks that are economically costly, yet the fundamental system and structures of economy and state—despite the groundbreaking new 2009 constitution and expansion of politi-