The Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) emerged from a diverse coalition of social movements centered on cocalero unions and their participatory organizational structure. Some scholars argue that the MAS became a top-down ruling party that relegated and weakened social movements. This article challenges these predominate claims about MAS relations with social organizations. Based on a case study of the Asociación Departmental de Productores de Coca (ADEPCOCA), the article develops two main claims. First, it examines the political divisions within the cocalero sector, which contradict a common view of cocaleros as united with the MAS, and which therefore presented a governance dilemma for the MAS. Second, the article considers how, in the ADEPCOCA case, rural social organizations were able to both remain autonomous under the MAS and confront government power. These findings have implications for understanding how the MAS shaped Bolivian political development leading up to the 2019 crisis; namely, that there was significant tension between the MAS’s commitments to state-building and participatory governance, and that this tension contributed to resistance from within the MAS coalition, leaving the regime vulnerable to overthrow in 2019.

The 2019 electoral crisis in Bolivia was characterized by division and disagreement. In the three weeks between the country’s presidential election in October 2019 and sitting President Evo Morales’s resignation, both Morales’s supporters and his detractors marched in the streets chanting parallel slogans in which each identified themselves as “the people” (el pueblo). This article examines what it means to identify collectively as “the people” in contemporary Bolivia and the nature of the term as a floating signifier used to justify opposing claims by protestors on both sides of defending Bolivian democracy. The use of the same self-identification by different groups represents a disagreement of the kind referred to by Jacques Rancière when two actors use the same term without recognizing the meaning given to it by the other. This disagreement is representative of competing ideas about democracy, belonging and the nation itself operating simultaneously within Bolivia.

This work centers activist critiques of Evo Morales’s government in order to understand how growing alienation of Indigenous social movements from the state-party apparatus contributed to his controversial fall in November 2019’s right wing coup. To that end, I engage the work of Indigenous activists pertaining to the Indianista and Katarista movements as an evolving body of critical theory produced from the vantage point of racialized subjects engaged in a multivalent, anti-colonial struggle. Rather than considering the introduction of neoliberal reforms from 1985 as the inflection point for Indigenous political participation, a more organic understanding of the scope of these movements and their evolving conceptions of their own struggle requires a longer view, beginning with the fallout from the 1952 National Revolution. Such a perspective calls for closer attention to the various militant Indian organizations active throughout the twentieth century and positions them as key protagonists in Bolivia’s numerous social, political, and economic conflicts. Borrowing from political ontology and activists’ criticisms of the traditional Left, this essay argues that Indianismo and Katarismo are anti-colonial political ideologies whose practices mobilize an ontological politics that goes beyond the nation-state but not necessarily the nation, diverging from the state-led Process of Change. Indeed, the proliferation of the wiphala as a symbol of popular revolt across South America in the ongoing protest cycle since 2019 points to both the importance of Plurinational Bolivia in the contemporary progressive imaginary and the centrality of decolonization to autonomous political projects and horizons of possibility.

El golpe que se dio en Bolivia en octubre de 2019 no puede ser abordado como si se tratara de un “golpe clásico”, sino que se inscribe en la nueva definición conceptual de lo que significa un “golpe suave”, al interior de la terminología que usa el “smart power” imperial. Fue planificado como una “revolución de colores” pensada para implosionar procesos democráticos desde adentro. Precisamente la novedad de esta modalidad golpista es uno de los factores que descolocó a muchos analistas, pues si lo que se tiene es una idea clásica de “golpe”, mal se puede entender este tipo de modalidad que el Imperio ha desarrollado para ejercer un nuevo tipo de control y dominación de su ámbito periférico. En ese sentido, la definición de “transición infinita” quiere señalar el carácter embaucador que usó el gobierno golpista para autodefinirse como “de transición” cuando, en los hechos, se atribuyó un comportamiento estatal que desdecía su pretendido carácter transitorio.

This paper focuses on what critics have charged were false and duplicitous appeals to Indigeneity on the part of elected officials in twenty-first century Bolivia, a narrative confirmed by President Evo Morales’s continued support for neo-extractivist nationalism. Although such critiques gained sway among far-right critics of Morales in the months preceding his 2019 ousting, scholarly efforts to account for his removal also often approach Indigeneity either as a resilient anti-extractivist plurality or as a manipulated instrument emptied of content. Building from fieldwork and historiographical studies, this article shifts away from such charges of falsity or innocence to instead examine the relational workings of Indigeneity in a setting long defined by Quechua and Aymara skepticism toward programs of government-based uplift and historical redemption. Beyond providing a framework for authorizing and “knowing” Indigeneity, I examine how introduced notions of racialized difference have been key to popular Quechua and Aymara efforts to contest political, religious, and labor incursions. Among rural supporters in the decade preceding Morales’s ousting, shared appeals to Indigenous belonging and historical rootedness allowed new channels of claim-making. Rather than being neutralized, politicized invocations of shared Indigeneity contributed to a relational terrain by which supporters demanded elected officials’ responsiveness given what they perceived as the failures of institutional decolonization and the tragedies of state abandonment.

In 2019, Bolivian cooperative miners, once staunch allies of MAS and Evo Morales, helped inflame the crisis that toppled the Morales government. This paper explores the roots of the confounded, often explosive relationship between cooperative miners, nationalization, and MAS. Tracing the history of cooperative mining and its relationship to ore theft since the colonial period, this article shows how cooperative mining and salaried miners’ unions emerged as twin responses to the precarity of labor and production in the twentieth century. In the 1950s and 1960s, cooperative workers emerged as a shadow on the nationalized mining economy, competing for space and political influence with salaried workers. After the closure of COMIBOL in the late 1980s, cooperatives absorbed laid-off workers as well as migrants from the countryside and expanded into claims once belonging to state and union workers. When Morales reopened Bolivia’s national mining company in 2006 and sought to increase state participation in the mineral economy, he set the stage for a direct confrontation between the interests of cooperativistas, the vast majority of mineworkers at the time, and the state itself. This underacknowledged conflict of interests between different kinds of mineworkers has haunted MAS, culminating in the crisis of 2019 that drove Morales from power and from Bolivia.