MAS Relations with Social Movements: The Yungas Cocaleros and the 2019 Crisis

Reviewed by: A Revolution in Fragments: Traversing Scales of Justice, Ideology, and Practice in Bolivia by Mark Goodale Mareike Winchell Mark Goodale. A Revolution in Fragments: Traversing Scales of Justice, Ideology, and Practice in Bolivia. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019. 320 pp. In A Revolution in Fragments: Traversing Scales of Justice, Ideology, and Practice in Bolivia, Mark Goodale skillfully tracks the political history of President Evo Morales’s legal and political reform project in Bolivia from 2006 to 2015. The book draws from interviews and conversations with Bolivian intellectuals, political leaders, jurists, and indigenous activists, as well as detailed readings of federal legislation and constitutional texts. Goodale argues that the juridification of Bolivian politics during this period became a “mechanism for much more limited, exclusionary, and ambiguous shifts” (241). Through new kinds of legislation, Morales’ government was able to “harness the power of the rule of law” as a principal mechanism for actualizing its revolutionary visions (25). However, this project was complicated by the fact that its central pillar, a proto-nationalist re-fashioning of indigeneity, was not itself the basis of an existing indigenous movement at that time. Rather, this notion of indigeneity was generated as a “socio-juridical concept” that also circulated among social movement actors, and often in ways that departed from Morales party agendas (238). Goodale’s book complicates romantic accounts of Morales to reveal how his agenda was “embedded in an emerging hybrid ideology” based on reworking an older Orientalist imaginary of the Andean into an emergent ideal of lo indígena (7). The book consists of a Preface, Introduction, Conclusion and six substantive chapters. The Preface begins with Che Guevara’s hands or, rather, [End Page 375] their absence. Their severing was crucial to the body’s identification by retired Bolivian military officers in the mid-1990s. Guevara’s bodily remains were displayed to visitors by the Castro government in Havana. Goodale takes this as a point of insight into the “prismatic quality” marking quotidian experiences of revolution and their various afterlives (x). Similarly, he approaches the MAS political era of 2006 to 2015 in terms of “shifting fragments that came together [...] at particular moments in time” (x). In the Introduction, Goodale extends this discussion to outline a “politics of allochrony—the reification of past, present, and future into categories that did certain kinds of public work.” Not all epochs were weighted evenly in this configuration. In particular, Bolivia’s Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) party government drew from notions of “cosmic time,” or Pachakuti. Following Indianista writer Fausto Reinaga, Pachakuti was understood by some MAS officials as a subterranean force that returns to break down racialized hierarchies and liberate Bolivia’s marginalized indigenous majority (5). Here and in the Conclusion the book offers a refreshing discussion of how ethnographic armatures of authority and certainty broke down (15, 243). Most notably the book recounts interlocutors’ challenges to Goodale and their rejection of the need for white, non-Bolivian scholars to ventriloquize indigenous voices. The book then turns to a detailed institutional history of legal shifts under Morales that will interest scholars of Bolivian politics and Latin American social movements. Additionallly, Goodale offers fascinating meta-commentaries on this reform project itself. He does so through the eyes of people charged with carrying it out as well as by those, like older Leftist Trotskyites, who felt alienated by the government’s increasing alignment with extractivism and its seeming abandonment of class politics (29). Chapter 1 looks at the ways that this juridification occurred through the re-making, rather than displacement, of earlier bureaucratic channels in order to “forge a dominant cadre of public and social actors” in the absence of a well-defined ruling class. Chapter 2 examines “revolution by constitution,” the translation of a revolutionary program into law, and maps the tensions that emerged out of this codification effort. Chapter 3 traces the resistance that faced the MAS project, particularly in the wake of a conflict over a highway to be built through protected indigenous regions in Bolivia’s lowlands. Chapter 4 considers the internal conflicts facing Bolivia’s process of change, which Goodale argues emerged out of a “patchwork state ideology” that provided a...

Since 2005, the Bolivian government has been in the hands of the MAS (Movimiento al Socialismo), a party which defines itself as the ‘political instrument’ of Bolivia’s strong social movements which brought Evo Morales and the MAS to power. The chapter explores how conceptions of class and race are reflected in the policies of a government in which many leading figures come from a community organising and social movement background. The MAS claims that ‘state power circuits (now) pass through the debates and decisions of indigenous, worker and neighbourhood assemblies’, rather than elite channels. However, as the MAS nears its first decade in power, tensions are beginning to show. In exploring these tensions, the chapter helps to illuminate both the potential and the pitfalls of an attempt to embed radical conceptions of class and race in the state, and to foreground community organising and community development principles in government policy.

Raquel Gutierrez Aguilar, Rhythms of the Pachakuti: Indigenous Uprising and State Power in Bolivia. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. 284 pages. ISBN 978-0-8223-5604-2. $25.95 USD paperback.This is an excellent but demanding read on contemporary Indigenous politics in Bolivia. The book explores the interplay of ideas, processes, and strategies that shaped Bolivian Indigenous social uprisings in the early 2000s. These Indigenous uprisings played a critical role in effectively contesting the neoliberal policies carried out during the 1990s and early 2000s by the White and Mestizo political class. This class historically dominated Bolivian politics, but the election of Evo Morales, the first Bolivian Indigenous president, in 2006 put an end to its dominance. Since coming to power, Morales has fundamentally transformed Bolivia's socioeconomic structure by promoting political and inclusion. Morales' Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement Toward Socialism, MAS) has become a powerful grassroots political tool to advance new visions and practices of political and democracy. Indigenous movements have been at the forefront of this transformation. Gutierrez's book examines the origins and dynamics of these movements by employing critical neo-Marxist historical analysis supported by participatory observation. The author herself was deeply involved in the formation of MAS and the subsequent struggle for socioeconomic and political emancipation.The book is carefully divided into two main parts: Community Uprisings and Democratization and From Governmental Collapse to Pachakuti's Suspension. This division allows the author to analytically and chronologically examine the ideas, processes, and strategies pursued by Bolivian Indigenous movements since the early 2000s. It also allows the author to critically reflect on the tensions, shortcomings, and outcomes of broad-based Indigenous social movements. Gutierrez recognizes that tensions and conflicts are inevitable within broad-based social movements due to the ideological heterogeneity and strategic orientation of their participants. Also, Bolivia's diverse regional socio-economic and cultural landscape tends to shape tensions, which, if not managed or resolved, produce conflicts within social movements. Despite these challenges, Gutierrez recognizes that Bolivian Indigenous movements have made great efforts to overcome differences in order to strengthen their commitment to reclaim and exercise their fundamental social, cultural, economic, and political rights. In fact, these objectives are what have linked different regional Indigenous movements to a national common cause. Without doubt, MAS best represent, this type of broad-based and concerted popular movement.In my view, Part 1 has the most important content of the book. This part contains three important chapters. Chapter one deals with the first broad-based popular struggle to contest the privatization of water service in Bolivia. La Coordinadora de Defensa del Agua y de la Vida (Coalition in Defense of Water and Life) played a key role in this process. Led by the charismatic Oscar Olivera, La Coordinadora reversed the misguided privatization of the water system in Cochabamba, Bolivia in 2000. Gutierrez describes how the diverse popular movements came together to forge a strong political front against the neoliberal government of Hugo Banzer. The neoliberal fever that reached Bolivia in the early 1990s led to the rapid privatization of state-owned corporations and public services under the rationale of economic efficiency. The privatization of the mining, energy, and banking sectors did not encounter significant popular resistance, due mainly to the fragmentary nature of labour politics. However, the privatization of public services, water systems in particular, encountered strong resistance, due to broad-based and well-organized grassroots opposition.From the 1970s on, Cochabamba's population increased rapidly, primarily due to rural migration from poor areas. …

Rhythms of the Pachakuti: Indigenous Uprising and State Power in Bolivia, by Raquel Gutierrez Aguilar, translated by Stacey Alba D. Skar. Durham, Duke University Press, 2014. xlv, 284 pp. $94.95 US (cloth), $25.95 US (paper). As the historian Sinclair Thomson writes in his Foreword to this book, Mexican sociologist Raquel Gutierrez Aguilar has acquired a quasi-legendary status (p. ix) for her role as an intellectual activist during the series of popular revolts that roiled Bolivia during the first few years of the twenty-first century. Her decision to write Ritmos de la Pachakuti, originally published in 2008 and translated ably here by Stacey Alba D. Skar, represents a kind of postmortem. Why, Gutierrez asks, did collective social movements with such enormous emancipatory potential eventually run out of steam by 2005, thus paving the way for the reconstruction of in the hands of Evo Morales Ayma's Movimiento al Socialismo (mas; Movement toward Socialism)? Her ultimate goal in Ritmos is to develop a strategy (p. xxi) that will encourage participants in future emancipatory convulsions to recognize their capacity to move capital and the state (p. xxxv, emphasis in original) by establishing non-liberal forms of economic self-management and political self-rule. After trudging through forty-five pages of front matter, including a dense, twenty-six page theoretical preface, the reader is rewarded with a gripping narrative of Bolivia's recent revolutionary upheavals, which the author calls Pachakuti, a cosmic Quechua concept representing the periodic and rhythmic inversion of the political and social order, of time and space. Part I includes three chapters, each of which narrates the initial struggles of one of the principle collective protagonists in the coming revolt: Cochabamba's water-defending Coordinadora (2000), El Alto's Aymara insurgents (2000-2001), and Chapare's coca growers union (2000-2003). True to what Gutierrez calls her strategy, each social movement is evaluated not just in terms of its success in obtaining material goals, but also on the basis of how its interior horizon reflects an alternative form of collective political, social, and economic organization, standing against and beyond the hierarchical nature of the Western and private capital relations. Gutierrez reserves her strongest praise for Cochabamba's elastic, independent, nimble Coordinadora, which not only forced the expulsion of Bechtel subsidiary Aguas del Tunari, but also succeeded in placing water management into collective hands. Coordinadora's autonomous noninstitutional politicization (p. 19) stands in contrast to the dual track followed by the Aymara Indianist movement in the suburbs of La Paz. On the one hand, neighbourhood associations in El Alto replicated the insurgent strategies of the Coordinadora, successfully inverting the chain of command and the dynamic between rulers and ruled subjects (p. 63). On the other hand, charismatic leaders like peasant union leader Felipe Quispe sought to mobilize Indianism toward institutionalized party politics, frequently allowing statist terminology such as taking power to crowd out more horizontal concepts of self-governance (p. …

Two anthologies published in the 1990s declared a theoretical and empirical watershed by advocating for and applying New Social Movement (NSM) theorizing to studies of Latin American social-movement activism, at the same time declaring older movements and theories passé. We criticize both the novelty and the fruitful applicability of NSM-style theory to Latin America’s social-movement universe of recent decades, and re-advocate the virtues and analytical powers of perspectives rooted in political economy and political sociology. The claims made by advocates of NSM theorizing, that certain social movements—those rooted in economic interests or in material and political deprivations—have been eclipsed in number and importance by culture-and-identity-focused movements are shown to be without merit. We buttress that assertion with reference to a wide array of recent movements among workers, consumers, debtors, racial and ethnic groups, women, and students, among others. We also look closely at two very large, yet rather different movements, the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST) in Brazil and Bolivia’s Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS).

On January 22,2010, Evo Morales began his second term in office as the first president eligible to serve consecutive terms under the new constitution approved in a 2009 referendum. His first electoral victory in 2005 had made him Bolivia's first president and represented a watershed in Bolivian politics, ending a peculiar form of Andean apartheid. Even though the majority people1?who are estimated to account for from 60 to 70 percent of the country's population?had finally gained the right to vote after the 1952 Revolution, they were still socially and culturally subordinate and largely excluded from formal participation in government. As discussed by Postero (2010) in the previous issue, Morales's Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement Toward Socialism?MAS) merged activism with opposition to neoliberalism from socialist and populist sectors in support of an indigenous nationalist agenda advocating rights and eco nomic and popular democracy. Having spent much of his first term consolidating political power, Morales entered office in 2010 controlling the majority of the new Plurinational Legislative Assembly This issue, the second to examine Bolivia under Morales, analyzes the country's historic struggle focusing on the new phase heralded by his inauguration in 2006.2 Dominant classes do not give up privi lege without a fight, and Morales's first term was marked by their struggle to maintain their power. Opposition came largely from the old dominant politi cal classes represented by conservatives centered in the Media Luna (Half Moon), the country's four eastern departments of Santa Cruz, Tarija, Beni, and Pando (Figure 1).

The article reviews the backgrounds and prerequisites of the actual split into two actions within the ruling party «Move-ment for Socialism» (Movimiento al Socialismo, MAS) in Bo-livia, that are the fraction of «evistas» (who supports Evo Morales) and the one of «arcistas» (who supports Luis Arce). The evolution of the party is considered since Evo Morales took presidential office in 2005, including the crucial for the ruling elites loss of power during the crisis of 2019, electoral victory in the 2020 of the candidate from MAS Luis Arce, as well as the results of the regional elections 2021, up to the present. It reveals the particular interdependence between the political apparatus, trade unions and public organizations, that predetermined the vulnerability of intra-party interrelation.

Unresolved Tensions: Bolivia Past and Present

The convergence of social movements in Bolivia was a decisive factor in bringing President Evo Morales and the Movement Towards Socialism (Movimiento al Socialismo, hereafter MAS) to power in 2006. Yet in recent years, this convergence has become fraught with internal tensions as the state’s extractivist development model and promises for plurinationalism and alternative forms of development reveal fundamental contradictions. This paper traces the formation of social movement alliances over time, revealing their power to effect change and their strength when there is unity in diversity. Rather than ‘neoliberalism’ which represented the injustice frame and united identity- and class-based politics during the rise of the MAS, the single greatest threat to the indigenous, peasants, originarios, women and the youth in the current context is extractivism.

The article reports an analysis of the institutional foundations and historical overview for the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) in Bolivia that is one of the most prominent and successful left parties in the modern political landscape of Latin American region. During three decades of its development, MAS has gone through a path of ups and downs, which are considered through the prism of the electoral process and are related to the specificity of organizational structure and ideological platform of the party.

La presente investigación lleva a cabo un análisis teórico sobre el rol que partidos políticos y movimientos sociales desempeñan durante los procesos de cambio social y político y sus relaciones. En este sentido, las diferencias en cuanto a organización, campo de juego o medios les permiten desempeñar roles en ocasiones complementarios pero frecuentemente antagonistas. Ejemplo de ello, se presenta la experiencia del Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) en Bolivia como ilustración de los límites y oportunidades que los movimientos sociales y partidos políticos representan, especialmente notorios en coyunturas críticas y contextos donde las instituciones formales tienden a mostrar resistencia al cambio.

Parties are central agents of democratic representation. The literature assumes that this function is an automatic consequence of social structure and/or a product of incentives derived from electoral competition. However, representation is contingent upon the organizational structure of parties. The connection between a party and an organized constituency is not limited to electoral strategy; it includes an organic connection through permanent formal or informal linkages that bind party programmatic positions to social groups’ preferences, regardless of the electoral returns. This article analyzes how the Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement toward Socialism, MAS) in Bolivia and the Frente Amplio (Broad Front, FA) in Uruguay developed two different forms of relationship with social organizations that result from the interplay of historical factors traceable to the parties’ formative phases and party organizational attributes. Party organizational features that grant voice to grassroots activists serve as crucial mechanisms for bottom-up incorporation of societal interests and demands.

ABSTRACTSince their early days in government, and particularly since 2010, President Evo Morales and the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) in Bolivia have put forward a vision of state-centered hegemonic change. In this process, they play the role of a vanguard that relies on the extraction of natural resources, agro-industrial expansion, and the ideas of resource nationalism and development while maintaining the institutional structure of the pre-existing liberal nation-state. In contrast, many of the social actors that sustained the 2000–2005 insurrectionary mobilizations have challenged neoliberalism and its model of development and political representation, and the very legitimacy of the nation-state form. In its place, they offer a vision of plurinationality that seeks to ‘refound’ Bolivia through the recognition of the diversity – indigenous and non-indigenous – of cultures, economies, systems of social and political organization, and overall worldviews that co-exist in the country. One of the most important struggles within Bolivia today, and which clearly reveals the relationship between hegemony and plurinationality, revolves around the issue of indigenous autonomy. This article investigates the diversity of complex paths to autonomy based on fieldwork carried out in three indigenous majority municipalities.

Future historians may well look back upon the beginning of the twenty-first century as a major turning point in the social and economic history of the Americas. In quick succession, left-wing political parties were elected to office in the majority of Latin American countries, and close to 60 percent of Latin America’s total population is currently governed by leaders who consider themselves to be on the left of the political spectrum (Arnson 2007b: 3). This shift to the left started when, in Venezuela, Hugo Chavez ascended to power in a landslide victory in 1998 with a strong commitment to progressive social policy and the promise of developing a “new socialism for the 21st century.” This was followed by the election of Ricardo Lagos, leader of the Socialist Party of Chile in 2000, and the electoral victory of Lula da Silva’s Worker’s Party in Brazil in 2002, both promising to address the dismal situation of their countries’ poor and to modify prevailing neoliberal policies. In South America, Argentina and Bolivia followed suit, with Nestor Kirchner ascending to power in Argentina in 2003 and Evo Morales, leader of the first indigenous socialist movement in Bolivia —El Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS)—entering office on an anti-neoliberal platform in 2005.

Bolivia’s political transition in 2006 represented more than just a transfer of power. It also marked the arrival of a new political, economic and social paradigm. The newly elected leader (Evo Morales Ayma) and his political party, the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) brought with them an ambitious agenda for social change. Most of the initial efforts were aimed at responding to electoral promises and the demands from the myriad of social movements that supported Morales’ ticket. As time progressed, the ideological components of the model were refined and transformed from an anti-neoliberal rhetoric to a comprehensive agenda of state reform. Part of the ideological components were rooted in the notion of “Vivir Bien” [Living Well], which in essence is a balanced approach for development considering human wellbeing in harmony with mother nature. The political challenge, however, has been the transformation of this holistic approach into a practical one and the policy implications that this entails ‒a particularly difficult issue in a country with weak institutional settings and limited state capacity. This article argues that although there have been many gains, particularly in reorienting the notion of the welfare state and in key economic and social areas, the model is still highly dependent on a neo-patrimonial state that relies heavily on a few commodities to support a growing social agenda. Moreover, in the past years the political emphasis and efforts have favored economic reforms over social ones, which might jeopardize the whole model in the not so near future.