Controlling State Power

Abstract

At the end of a two-hour interview I conducted with Bolivian Vice President Alvaro Garcia Linera in La Paz on June 20,2009,1 asked whether he had any thing he had written recently that he would like to see published in English in Latin American Perspectives. He pulled out his latest book, La potencia plebeya: Accidn colectiva e identidades indtgenas, obreras y populares en Bolivia, produced in collaboration with Pablo Stefanoni (Buenos Aires: CLACSO-Promoteo, 2008), and pointed to the last essay, Bloque de poder y punto de bifurcation, writ ten just before the recall referendum that not only reaffirmed both President Evo Morales and Garcia Linera's mandate but also proved to be a significant defeat for the right. LAP's translation of this essay appears in this issue. Garcia Linera emerged as one of Bolivia's leading intellectuals during the late 1990s after he had spent five years imprisoned for his role in the Ejercito Guerrillero Tupac Katari (Tupac Katari Guerrilla Army?EGTK), which rejected Che Guevera's/oco theory in favor of mass insurrection. Raised in Cochabamba in a middle-class family that had been part of the rural landowning elite until the 1953 agrarian reform, he had been politicized as a young man by wide spread popular resistance to the Banzer dictatorship (1971-1978). In the early 1980s, while studying mathematics at the National Autonomous University in Mexico City, he was active in Central America solidarity work and became intrigued by debates over the Maya's role in Guatemalan revolutionary strug gles. Always a voracious reader, he began to read social science broadly, focus ing on the search for a Marxist interpretation adapted to Andean reality. Back in Bolivia, he continued what had become an obsession: to challenge the left's stilted and mechanistic class analysis and develop a theory that articulated Marxism with Bolivia's emerging indigenist discourse and movement. By the end of the 1990s he was teaching sociology in La Paz's public uni versity and was a founding member of Comuna, a radical intellectual forum. He increasingly became a public intellectual, appearing for four years as a panelist on the La Paz television program El Pentdgono. Generally identified with the more indigenist rival to Evo Morales Felipe Quispe, he surprised many people when he agreed to join Evo Morales's ticket in 2005 as vice presidential candidate. With his European racial features, dressed in a suit, and projecting a cultured and sophisticated image, he has taken on a role of mollifying Bolivia's upper and middle classes, terrified by an indigenous run government. However, even while he has played the role of mediator in disputes with the right, his radical discourse has been modified by the prag matism necessary to run a small, historically dependent country.