The Failure of Radical Democracy in the Andes

Abstract

Indigenous movements in Latin America are considered as important actors in the processes of 'radical democracy' (Nash, 1997; Van Cott, 2008; Postero, 2010). In Bolivia and Ecuador political parties representing indigenous people have promoted legal and institutional reforms towards the creation of a multicultural state. In Peru, indigenous movements have supported the candidature of the recently left-wing elected president, forming 'chains of equivalence' with environmentalists, unions, and liberal democrats against a radical conservative neoliberal party. And yet, in these three countries, many indigenous people are still ignored or repressed, particularly when they protest against mining, oil and developmental projects led either by the government or transnational corporations (Bebbington and Humphreys, 2011). By exploring the discordance between multicultural policies on the one hand, and extractivist economic dependence on the other hand, I suggest that 'radical democracy' is not an adequate theoretical framework to explore indigenous political struggles in the Andes because it does not facilitate an analysis of colonialism (Dhaliwal, 1996; Kapoor, 2002) and therefore provides an inadequate emphasis of the economic dimension (Žižek, 2000) of indigenous people’s mobilisations. I suggests that the theoretical framework of the Latin American ‘modernity-coloniality’ group (Quijano, 2000; Mignolo, 2007; Grosfoguel, 2007), which offers a critique of both the modern and the colonial projects, and their relation to the current neoliberal governance, provides a more insightful framework than ‘radical democracy’ to theorize the struggles directed to ‘decolonize democracy’.