Rhythms of the Pachakuti: Indigenous Uprising and State Power in Bolivia

Abstract

Of the many studies of Bolivia’s popular uprisings of 2000–2005, Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar’s participatory-observer account stands out. In addition to furnishing an innovative framework for understanding the “rhythms” of social struggle during those years, the book grapples with some of the tensions and dilemmas common to diverse emancipatory struggles. This translation of the 2008 original (with a helpful new foreword by Sinclair Thomson) makes the analysis available to English readers.Gutiérrez Aguilar’s first objective is to illuminate the “interior horizon” of the forces that mobilized during this period (xx). She sees two common threads: an anticapitalist quest to recover collective resource wealth and an anti-authoritarian struggle to replace the state with participatory decision-making structures. These two impulses were central to the successful campaign against water privatization in Cochabamba in 2000; the Aymara protests over water, land, and coca cultivation rights starting that same year; Chapare coca farmers’ resistance to forced eradication in 2000–2003; and the popular coalition against neoliberal hydrocarbon policies in 2003–2005.For Gutiérrez Aguilar these dual aims distinguish these movements from the older, “orthodox” left. Whereas a “national-popular,” state-centric perspective guided many struggles in twentieth-century Bolivia, the revolts of 2000–2005 were animated at least as much by a “communitarian-popular” ideal that prioritized participatory democracy. Many recent Bolivian activists sought not to take state power but to replace the institutions of governance themselves. Nor did they merely want to return privatized water or natural gas to state hands, insisting instead that resources “should be self-managed by the citizens themselves” (26). The Quechua concept of pachakuti—“an inversion of the fundamental order of things” (51)—captures this far-reaching desire to supplant existing social relationships with new ones modeled on indigenous and popular communal norms. I think the book oversimplifies the twentieth-century Left just a bit, but its analysis of recent struggles is still compelling.Gutiérrez Aguilar’s second overarching objective is to explain why the resultant changes fell short of popular aspirations. Though the Evo Morales administration (2006–present) has partially fulfilled some popular demands, Morales’s MAS (Movement to Socialism) party represented a relatively conservative current among the resistance. For example, while many demanded renationalization of gas under “social control” (217), the MAS favored only a substantial increase in taxes on private companies. In various ways, it has helped to suppress and domesticate more radical elements.The explanation for this outcome, Gutiérrez Aguilar argues, lies not only in external actors but also in radical movements’ own mistakes and contradictions. A key recurring tension was between “the rejection of the general order” and a desire for integration into that order on different terms (48). Many activists remained wedded to the routine of negotiating with the state, perhaps lured by the prospect of winning concessions. At crucial moments, they seemed to cede decision-making power back to state officials, allowing their demands to be “translated and locked into dominant state conceptual and linguistic codes” (65). Also lacking was detailed movement debate about what new institutions should look like. Developing a longer-term collective vision might have been difficult, but it arguably could have made popular forces more resistant to co-optation.Gutiérrez Aguilar’s analysis raises crucial questions for social movements everywhere: If some sort of engagement with existing state institutions is necessary to achieve reforms, how can movements avoid state co-optation in the process? How can radical, antistate forces avoid being eclipsed by more reformist state-oriented competitors, as happened with the rise of the MAS? Rhythms of the Pachakuti admittedly offers no clear answers. Overcoming capitalism and the state are, in the author’s words, “a challenge and an open agenda for everyone” (188).