Bolivian Studies Journal

Call for Papers 2025

BSJ Editors — 2024-11-25

Brooke Larson. The Lettered Indian. Race, Nation, and Indigenous Education in Twentieth-Century Bolivia

Elizabeth Monasterios — 2024-11-25

Carlos Macusaya Cruz. “There is no racism in Bolivia, shitty Indians.” Notes on a denied problem

Alexis Argüello Sandoval — 2024-11-25

No me jodas, no te jodo. Crónicas escritas por y para El Alto. Segunda edición. Selección y nota preliminar de Alexis Argüello Sandoval.

Tara Daly — 2024-11-25

Bolivia's 2019 Political Crisis and the Challenges to the Plurinational Project

M. Ximena Postigo — 2024-11-25

¿Si esto no es el pueblo, el pueblo dónde está? Discursive Disagreement in the 2019-2020 Post-electoral Conflict in Bolivia

Jonathan Alderman — 2024-11-25

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.

Qullasuyu Rising: Indianista-Katarista Politics, Paradoxes of the Plurinational State, and the Fall of Evo Morales

Jordan Cooper — 2024-11-25

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.

Beyond Innocence: Indigeneity and Violent Deployments of Political Unreason in Bolivia

Mareike Winchell — 2024-11-25

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.

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

Susan Brewer-Osorio — 2024-11-25

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.

(Un)cooperative Labor? Mining Cooperatives and the State in Bolivia

Elena McGrath — 2024-11-25

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.

Tactics of Political Violence in the 2019 Bolivian Crisis

Carwil Bjork-James — 2024-11-25

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 empate catastrófico, 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.

Chiquitania, Wildfires and Elections: The First Synopsis of the 2019 Political Crisis

Reyna Maribel Suñagua Copa (Quya Reyna) — 2024-11-25

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 cabildo, 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.

There are in life such Hard Blows . . .

Julieta Elisa Paredes — 2024-11-25

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.

The Endless Transition. The “Oligarchic Insurrection” Against the Plurinational State

Rafael Bautista S. — 2024-11-25

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.

The Crisis After the Crisis: The Return of the MAS, the Uncertain Future of the Living Well project, and the People's Urgent Reemergence

M. Ximena Postigo — 2024-11-25

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.

Interview with Soyelgas, photographer of the 2019 conflicts

Ximena Córdova Oviedo — 2024-11-25

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 La Paz newspaper Página Siete, 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.

Photo Gallery

Soyelgas (Gastón Brito Miserocchi) — 2024-11-25

Announcements

BSJ Editors — 2024-11-25

Preliminary Pages

BSJ Editors — 2024-11-25