Bolivian Studies Journal
https://bsj.pitt.edu/ojs/bsj
<p>The <em>Bolivian Studies Journal </em>is a peer-reviewed publication that responds to the growing interest in understanding the past and present of historical and cultural processes in Bolivia. Toward this end, it promotes research that is innovative, interdisciplinary, and interested in critically discussing the challenges that Bolivia is facing (and posing) in the new millennium. The journal is also an effort to contribute to the vibrant and committed international community of Bolivianists and welcomes initiatives to re-conceptualize the theoretical and epistemological frameworks that have traditionally oriented interpretations of Bolivian history and culture. We publish once a year and accept research papers, articles, documents, reviews, interviews, and discussion materials written in Spanish, English, Português and Indigenous Languages. </p>University of Pittsburgh, University Library Systemen-USBolivian Studies Journal1074-2247<p>Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:</p><ol><li>The Author retains copyright in the Work, where the term “Work” shall include all digital objects that may result in subsequent electronic publication or distribution.</li><li>Upon acceptance of the Work, the author shall grant to the Publisher the right of first publication of the Work.</li><li>The Author shall grant to the Publisher and its agents the nonexclusive perpetual right and license to publish, archive, and make accessible the Work in whole or in part in all forms of media now or hereafter known under a <a title="CC-BY" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" target="_blank">Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License</a> or its equivalent, which, for the avoidance of doubt, allows others to copy, distribute, and transmit the Work under the following conditions:<ol type="a"><li>Attribution—other users must attribute the Work in the manner specified by the author as indicated on the journal Web site;</li></ol>with the understanding that the above condition can be waived with permission from the Author and that where the Work or any of its elements is in the public domain under applicable law, that status is in no way affected by the license.</li><li>The Author is able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the nonexclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the Work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), as long as there is provided in the document an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.</li><li>Authors are permitted and encouraged to post online a prepublication manuscript (but not the Publisher’s final formatted PDF version of the Work) in institutional repositories or on their Websites prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work. Any such posting made before acceptance and publication of the Work shall be updated upon publication to include a reference to the Publisher-assigned DOI (Digital Object Identifier) and a link to the online abstract for the final published Work in the Journal.</li><li>Upon Publisher’s request, the Author agrees to furnish promptly to Publisher, at the Author’s own expense, written evidence of the permissions, licenses, and consents for use of third-party material included within the Work, except as determined by Publisher to be covered by the principles of Fair Use.</li><li>The Author represents and warrants that:<ol type="a"><li>the Work is the Author’s original work;</li><li>the Author has not transferred, and will not transfer, exclusive rights in the Work to any third party;</li><li>the Work is not pending review or under consideration by another publisher;</li><li>the Work has not previously been published;</li><li>the Work contains no misrepresentation or infringement of the Work or property of other authors or third parties; and</li><li>the Work contains no libel, invasion of privacy, or other unlawful matter.</li></ol></li><li>The Author agrees to indemnify and hold Publisher harmless from Author’s breach of the representations and warranties contained in Paragraph 6 above, as well as any claim or proceeding relating to Publisher’s use and publication of any content contained in the Work, including third-party content.</li></ol><p><span style="font-size: 75%;">Revised 7/16/2018. Revision Description: Removed outdated link. </span></p>Call for Papers 2025
https://bsj.pitt.edu/ojs/bsj/article/view/358
BSJ Editors
Copyright (c) 2024 Elizabeth Monasterios
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2024-11-252024-11-2510.5195/bsj.2024.358Brooke Larson. The Lettered Indian. Race, Nation, and Indigenous Education in Twentieth-Century Bolivia
https://bsj.pitt.edu/ojs/bsj/article/view/355
Elizabeth Monasterios
Copyright (c) 2024 Elizabeth Monasterios
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2024-11-252024-11-2537538010.5195/bsj.2024.355Carlos Macusaya Cruz. “There is no racism in Bolivia, shitty Indians.” Notes on a denied problem
https://bsj.pitt.edu/ojs/bsj/article/view/360
Alexis Argüello Sandoval
Copyright (c) 2024 Alexis Argüello Sandoval
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2024-11-252024-11-2538138610.5195/bsj.2024.360No me jodas, no te jodo. Crónicas escritas por y para El Alto. Segunda edición. Selección y nota preliminar de Alexis Argüello Sandoval.
https://bsj.pitt.edu/ojs/bsj/article/view/361
Tara Daly
Copyright (c) 2024 Tara Daly
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2024-11-252024-11-2538739010.5195/bsj.2024.361Bolivia's 2019 Political Crisis and the Challenges to the Plurinational Project
https://bsj.pitt.edu/ojs/bsj/article/view/349
M. Ximena PostigoXimena Córdova Oviedo
Copyright (c) 2024 María Ximena Postigo
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2024-11-252024-11-2513510.5195/bsj.2024.349¿Si esto no es el pueblo, el pueblo dónde está? Discursive Disagreement in the 2019-2020 Post-electoral Conflict in Bolivia
https://bsj.pitt.edu/ojs/bsj/article/view/330
<p>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” (<em>el pueblo</em>). 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. </p>Jonathan Alderman
Copyright (c) 2024 Jonathan Alderman
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2024-11-252024-11-25366610.5195/bsj.2024.330Qullasuyu Rising: Indianista-Katarista Politics, Paradoxes of the Plurinational State, and the Fall of Evo Morales
https://bsj.pitt.edu/ojs/bsj/article/view/331
<p>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 <em>wiphala</em> 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.</p>Jordan Cooper
Copyright (c) 2024 Jordan Cooper
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2024-11-252024-11-25679610.5195/bsj.2024.331Beyond Innocence: Indigeneity and Violent Deployments of Political Unreason in Bolivia
https://bsj.pitt.edu/ojs/bsj/article/view/319
<p>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.</p>Mareike Winchell
Copyright (c) 2023 Mareike Winchell
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2024-11-252024-11-259712610.5195/bsj.2024.319MAS Relations with Social Movements: The Yungas Cocaleros and the 2019 Crisis
https://bsj.pitt.edu/ojs/bsj/article/view/338
<p>The <em>Movimiento al Socialismo</em> (MAS) emerged from a diverse coalition of social movements centered on <em>cocalero</em> 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 <em>Asociación Departmental de Productores de Coca</em> (ADEPCOCA), the article develops two main claims. First, it examines the political divisions within the <em>cocalero</em> sector, which contradict a common view of <em>cocaleros</em> 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.</p>Susan Brewer-Osorio
Copyright (c) 2024 Susan Virginia Brewer-Osorio
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2024-11-252024-11-2512715810.5195/bsj.2024.338(Un)cooperative Labor? Mining Cooperatives and the State in Bolivia
https://bsj.pitt.edu/ojs/bsj/article/view/317
<p>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 <em>cooperativistas,</em> 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. </p>Elena McGrath
Copyright (c) 2023 Elena McGrath
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2024-11-252024-11-2515918710.5195/bsj.2024.317Tactics of Political Violence in the 2019 Bolivian Crisis
https://bsj.pitt.edu/ojs/bsj/article/view/320
<p>During Bolivia’s 2019 political crisis, reactivated modes of political violence occurred within and alongside familiar forms of mass mobilization. In Bolivia’s recent history, this period is most comparable to the 2006–2009 partisan conflict over constitutional reform and departmental autonomy known by the Gramscian term <em>empate catastrófico</em>, or catastrophic stalemate. Although there are many similarities between the two periods, both social movement and institutional norms limiting violence were weakened between the two, resulting in more rapid deployment of destructive tactics and deadlier violence by security forces. As Gramsci’s model argues, greater deployment of force was no guarantee of political success in either crisis. This article examines three extraordinary and destructive tactics: partisan street clashes, sometimes involving firearms; arson attacks on electoral authorities, party offices, politicians’ homes, and police stations; and mass shootings of demonstrators. I describe these three tactics as part of Bolivia’s repertoire of contention—that is, as routinized forms of political action with commonly understood meanings—and compare their use in both the 2006–2009 stalemate and the 2019 crisis. Quantitatively, I analyze the deadly violence in 2019 by drawing on Ultimate Consequences, a comprehensive database of nearly six hundred deaths in Bolivian political conflict since 1982. In the final weeks of Morales’s presidency, violence between opposed civilian groups accounted for all four deaths, whereas several incidents of partisan street clashes involved potentially lethal force. Following Morales’s ouster, however, the security forces became the central violent actor, perpetrating at least twenty-nine of the thirty-four violent deaths.</p>Carwil Bjork-James
Copyright (c) 2023 Carwil Bjork-James
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2024-11-252024-11-2518822610.5195/bsj.2024.320Chiquitania, Wildfires and Elections: The First Synopsis of the 2019 Political Crisis
https://bsj.pitt.edu/ojs/bsj/article/view/335
<p>This article analyzes the link between the forest fires that affected the Chiquitanía in Bolivia in 2019 and the political crisis that resulted in the resignation of Evo Morales as president of the country after the 2019 elections. It is argued that the environmental disaster was used by groups opposed to the government with the dual objective of eroding Morales' popularity in view of the presidential elections and positioning the then president of the Pro Santa Cruz Civic Committee, Luis Fernando Camacho. This was achieved through the political capitalization of the forest catastrophe through social networks. To develop this argument, this article presents a data study on the dynamics of disinformation surrounding the forest burning; among others, the use of false images. It also examines the webpage of the Comité Civico Pro Santa Cruz, whose call for a massive <em>cabildo</em>, which was made under the slogan of defending the land, gave rise to a federalist and regionalist discourse rather than an environmentalist one. The article also analyzes the anti-MAS media campaign of the environmentalist group Ríos de Pie. In conclusion, it is argued that the manipulation of environmental activism for political ends, added to the social and legitimate discontent with Morales' administration, led to the events that provoked his resignation in a polarized electoral context that resulted in the last great Bolivian political crisis.</p>Reyna Maribel Suñagua Copa (Quya Reyna)
Copyright (c) 2024 Reyna Maribel Suñagua Copa
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2024-11-252024-11-2522725210.5195/bsj.2024.335There are in life such Hard Blows . . .
https://bsj.pitt.edu/ojs/bsj/article/view/348
<p>Out of evocation, this article gathers feelings and positions emerged in the heat of the commitment with the struggles of the social organizations of the Bolivian people. It expresses a vital starting point for the memory of the territory: the daring of men and women of the original peoples who, boldly and creatively, used democracy, an instrument created by the bourgeoisie, in favor of a process of change that proposed the re-foundation and re-signification of the territories of the so-called Bolivia. In the midst of these reflections, the article points out the role played by conservative and racist women in the gestation of the 2019 coup and seeks to make visible the political positions of men and women who, regardless of stigmatizing analysis, showed that they were far from the mass behavior that followed the caudillo. I am referring to mobilizations of the people in defense of historical achievements never-before-seen or felt by the heirs of a millenary ancestry.</p>Julieta Elisa Paredes
Copyright (c) 2024 Julieta Elisa Paredes
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2024-11-252024-11-2525327810.5195/bsj.2024.348The Endless Transition. The “Oligarchic Insurrection” Against the Plurinational State
https://bsj.pitt.edu/ojs/bsj/article/view/342
<p>The coup that took place in Bolivia in October 2019 cannot be approached as if it were a "classic coup", since it is inscribed in the new conceptual definition of what a "soft coup" means, within the terminology used by the imperial "smart power". It was planned as a "color revolution" designed to implode democratic processes from within. Precisely the novelty of this coup modality is one of the factors that confused many analysts, because if what we have is a classic idea of a "coup", it is difficult to understand this type of modality developed by the Empire to exercise a new type of control and domination of its peripheral sphere. In this sense, the definition of "infinite transition" is intended to point out the deceitful character used by the coup government to define itself as "transitional" when, in fact, it attributed to itself a state behavior that belied its pretended transitory character. </p>Rafael Bautista S.
Copyright (c) 2024 Rafael Felix Bautista
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2024-11-252024-11-2527931010.5195/bsj.2024.342The Crisis After the Crisis: The Return of the MAS, the Uncertain Future of the Living Well project, and the People's Urgent Reemergence
https://bsj.pitt.edu/ojs/bsj/article/view/351
<p>Unlike the Bolivian political crisis of 2006-2009, which marked a clear division in the country's history between the republican era and the subsequent plurinational state, the 2019 crisis did not result in a decisive turning point. The brief resurgence of the right in power quickly faded, and the MAS victory in the 2020 elections did not bring about a new moment in the revolutionary process that the party has pursued since it came to power in 2006. Moreover, the social issues brought to light by the 2019 political crisis remain unresolved; they have either persisted or intensified. Compounding these challenges are new issues, including a noticeable scarcity of foreign currency, a growing fiscal deficit, declining gas sales, and deepening internal divisions within the MAS, among others. In this context, references to the Process of Change seem to remain rhetorical, and there is no discernible effort by the current government to rectify the deviation of Evo Morales' administration from the initial idea of the plurinational project. Given the current situation, the post-crisis period seems to be yet another moment of crisis that, heading into the 2025 elections, could crystallize into another political crisis, potentially greater in magnitude than that of 2019. In light of this situation, averting the catastrophe of another political crisis hinges on the articulation of social organizations—the people as a collective political subject—rather than relying on the leadership of the MAS. Thus, a visionary MAS would urgently seek to bridge the gap between its leadership and the people who, in 2020, successfully defended the plurinational project at the polls.</p>M. Ximena Postigo
Copyright (c) 2024 María Ximena Postigo
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2024-11-252024-11-2531133210.5195/bsj.2024.351Interview with Soyelgas, photographer of the 2019 conflicts
https://bsj.pitt.edu/ojs/bsj/article/view/332
<p>The Bolivian crisis of 2019 was unleashed with accusations of electoral fraud against Evo Morales, then president and presidential candidate in the elections of October 20, 2019. Soyelgas covered this period for the <em>La Paz</em> newspaper <em>Página Siete</em>, working together with several other foreign and local journalists. “Soyelgas” is the artistic name of Gastón Brito Miserocchi, a Bolivian-Italian photographer who covered the most critical period of the post-electoral conflicts of 2019. His generous testimony as a first-hand witness is a valuable contribution to the analysis of the 2019 conflicts, since that allows us to glimpse a perspective rarely exposed: that of press workers, who carried out their work in conditions of risk and insecurity in the midst of a period of extreme polarization of Bolivian society. The photo gallery titled “2019 Elections and Post-Election Crisis” in this special edition, curated by Ximena Córdova and Ximena Postigo, offers a sample of his photographic work on the events of 2019.</p>Ximena Córdova Oviedo
Copyright (c) 2024 Ximena Córdova Oviedo
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2024-11-252024-11-2533334810.5195/bsj.2024.332Photo Gallery
https://bsj.pitt.edu/ojs/bsj/article/view/337
Soyelgas (Gastón Brito Miserocchi)
Copyright (c) 2024 María Ximena Postigo, Ximena Córdova, Gastón Brito Miserocchi
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2024-11-252024-11-2534937410.5195/bsj.2024.337Announcements
https://bsj.pitt.edu/ojs/bsj/article/view/359
BSJ Editors
Copyright (c) 2024 Elizabeth Monasterios
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2024-11-252024-11-2510.5195/bsj.2024.359Preliminary Pages
https://bsj.pitt.edu/ojs/bsj/article/view/356
BSJ Editors
Copyright (c) 2024 Elizabeth Monasterios
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2024-11-252024-11-25ix10.5195/bsj.2024.356