Now We Are in Power: The Politics of Passive Revolution in Twenty-First-Century Bolivia 0822947781, 9780822947783

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NOW WE ARE

IN POWER

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PITT LATIN AMERICAN SERIES Catherine M. Conaghan, Editor

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NOW WE ARE

IN POWER

THE POLITICS OF PASSIVE REVOLUTION

IN TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY BOLIVIA

ANGUS MCNELLY

UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH PRESS

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Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260 Copyright © 2023, University of Pittsburgh Press All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Printed on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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To Kari

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments 000 Introduction 000

1. Black October: Crisis, Catharsis, and Social Movement Insurgency 000

2. Building the Government of Social Movements: Transformism under the MAS 000

3. The Autonomy Movement, Two Bolivias, and the Spatiality of Passive Revolution 000

4. The Indigenous Apostle: Caesarism, State Formation, and the Figure of Evo Morales 000

5. Extractivism, Infrastructure, and the Spatiotemporal Dimensions of Passive Revolution 000

6. Contradictions, Crisis, and the End of Evo Morales 000

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Conclusion: Theoretical and Political Reflections on Passive Revolution 000 Notes 000 List of Interviews 000 References 000 Index 000

VIII

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

So many people have helped me throughout the writing of this book that it is difficult to know where to start. Jeffery Webber was an exemplary PhD supervisor and set me on the path toward researching this book long before it was written. I am a better, smarter scholar thanks to his input and advice. James Dunkerley was also on hand with wise words when needed, and his knowledge of Latin America never ceases to amaze me. I am very grateful to the ESRC for funding the project, grant number ES/J500124/1. I would not be the scholar I am today without the Latin American Marxism reading group organized by Jeff and by Juan Grigera all those years ago. It was a much-needed introduction to radical Latin American scholarship; thanks to Jeff, Juan, Aiko Ikemura Amaral, Mara Duer, Sue Iamamoto, Pedro Mendes Loureiro, Roseline McDonnell, and Luciana Zorzoli. The state theory reading group with Jeff, Luke Cooper, Kerem Nisancioglu, and Paul Rekret also played a big part in my early intellectual formation. Thanks to my friends at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) for brightening day-to-day university life with tea breaks, trips to the local Wetherspoons, and, on special occasions, the Lord Tredegar. Marisa Díaz and Tania Gomez, Kristin Ciupa, Kyla Sankey, Daniel Gover, Sofa Grandin, Sue Iamamoto, Matheus Lock, Jenna Marshall, Koen Slootmaeckers, and Alen Toplišek were all so welcoming when I arrived, and Alex Blanchard, Farai Chipato, Andi Dickenson, Simca Simpson, and Gaia Taffoni have been excellent additions to my life. The wider school in general has been very friendly and I particularly enjoyed getting to know the department on the picket lines during the various University and College Union disputes that occurred during my time at QMUL. In Bolivia so many people helped me through the process. Carolina Turano made sure I was met off the plane and had a VIP reception. CarIX

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

men Solíz introduced me to Amy Kennemore, who was to become a great source of knowledge. Our conversations on Monday afternoons, usually in the company of the indefatigable Lisbeth Vargas, sometimes joined too by Andrea Marston, Carly Rojas, and Pedro Pachaguaya, were lessons not only in Bolivian politics but also in research ethics and ethnography. Amaru Villanueva and Susanna Rance gave me a place to stay, and Amaru, as the head of the Centro de Investigaciones Sociales in La Paz, was very helpful in introducing me to local researchers. I think every Bolivianista scholar who comes through La Paz owes a debt of gratitude to Linda Farthing, and I am no exception. Linda helped shape my project through thoughtful, probing questions and made my time in La Paz more fun than it otherwise would have been. José Blanes and CEBEM (Centro Boliviano de Estudios Multidisciplinarios) gave me a desk in La Paz, for which I was very grateful. The La Paz-based scholars Ricardo Calla, Gonzalo Colque, Cecilia Salazar, and Fernanda Wanderley all pointed me in the right direction when I arrived and each offered helpful suggestions about where the project could go. Javier Gómez Arce, Carlos Arze, and everyone at CEDLA have been very supportive in helping me publish Spanish translations of my research in Bolivia. The kindness I was shown by working-class Bolivians I met during my travels knew no bounds, with people making sure that I was included in orders for saleñas, soft drinks, and soups. I was met with patience and interest at all the local offices I visited, often turning up unannounced to be greeted with maté and a smile. Severiche Brosque and Eliana Zorrilla gave me access to the Bolivian labor movement that most have not had the privilege of enjoying, and both went above and beyond to help me. The cadre of leaders from the 2003 Federation of Neighborhood Councils (FEJUVE)-El Alto all gave me a significant amount of their time, helping me map out the events so central to the social movements I study. Félix Muruchi was kind enough to introduce me to the 2016 leadership of the FEJUVE-El Alto and take me on a whirlwind tour of the offices in the Ceja. Christian Estebes invited me to the School of Political Formation and his invitation formed the basis for chapter 6, an invaluable contribution. Away from research, my life in La Paz would not have been the same without my football team Colonia La Paz. Playing football twice a week gave me something to look forward to and a great group of friends. Gabriel Zeballos was a source of great entertainment on arrival. Aiko Ikemura Amaral was my partner in crime in La Paz and I would have been lost without her. In Santa Cruz, I must thank Kris Francescone and Vladimir Díaz-Cuellar for helping me find a place to live in Plan 3000 and to Ivan X

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for welcoming us into his home. Our neighbors in Plan 3000 were forever kind, sharing their time in activities from playing cards with Ramiro to being driven to football with José, making our stay in Santa Cruz a lot of fun. In the Rotonda, Daniel Suárez and Enrique Gonzalo Alba were welcoming and very helpful, upstanding examples of good leadership under adverse conditions. Celestino Vacaflor and Sosimo Paniagua were good guides through the cruceño labor movement and quickly directed me to the relevant people, making sure I hit the ground running at my second research site. So many people have shaped the formation of this book in one way or another. Through my network of friends in La Paz I was able to enlist the help of a seeming army of transcribers to assist with organizing the apparently endless interview material I gathered during fieldwork. This army included Feliza Ali Ramos, Dafne Lopez, Sayuri Loza, and Valeria. Back in the UK, Laleh Khalili, Sharri Plonski, Chris Hesketh, Rowan Lubbock, Enrique Castáñon Ballivián, and Aiko Ikemura Amaral all read draft chapters at different stages of the writing process. Angela McNelly was an invaluable help in getting the manuscript ready for submission. Josh Shanholtzer at the University of Pittsburgh Press has been encouraging and patient throughout, and I doubt the book would have make it into print without his help. My family has also been a constant source of support, with my parents Angela and Nigel, and siblings Juliet and Charlie always offering help and encouragement when needed. The best thing to happen during my PhD years was that I met my wife Karina Guzmán Miranda. She has had the greatest impact on this project, which would be nothing without the love and support she and her family Ramiro, Eva, and Lucia have given me. It is to her that this project is dedicated.

XI

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NOW WE ARE

IN POWER

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INTRODUCTION

After 500 years of resistance, we now move forward and take power for another 500 years . . . the battles for water, for coca, for natural gas have brought us to this point, brothers, and sisters. . . . We want to govern with the law that our ancestors left us. . . . I am confident it will now be Bolivia that teaches me to manage well. I will fulfil my commitment, as Subcomandante Marcos says,1 to lead by obeying. I will lead by obeying the Bolivian people (Evo Morales inauguration speech, cited in Sivak 2010, 161, his translation). You [the United States] came here because we were overthrowing presidents. Now you come because we elected a president (Evo Morales speaking to journalists the day after his election, cited in Sader 2008, 42).2 I am renouncing [the presidency] so that our brother leaders [of social movements] do not continue to be persecuted. I lament this civic coup. I want to say to my brothers and sisters that the fight does not finish here. We will continue to fight for equality and peace (Evo Morales stepping down as president, cited in Página Siete 2019ad).

I arrived in Bolivia in January 2016 eager to study firsthand the relationship between radical social movements, which represented the culmination of years of Indigenous and working-class struggles, and the government of Evo Morales. During the first decade of the century, the ascent of left-wing governments to power across much of Latin America—collectively known as the pink tide (see below)—sparked hope among subaltern people and progressives in the region and beyond. Nowhere was the sense that something different was happening more palpable than in Bolivia, where in 2005 the country’s first Indigenous president, Evo Morales, was elected following five years of popular insurrection. Hermano Evo (Brother Evo), as Morales came to be known in Bolivia, was 3

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considered by many the people’s president. He represented an end to colonial oppression and the racism against Indigenous people fostered by Spanish colonialism—whose legacies are still keenly felt to this day—and to the hardships of the neoliberal period (1985–2005). Morales’s supporters from historically oppressed and excluded groups proclaimed, “Now we are in power,” encapsulating some of the fervor that surrounded his presidency. As Morales’s inauguration speech suggests, his election as president was the culmination of years of social movement struggle and represented for many Indigenous, working-class, and peasant Bolivians a moment of hope, a sign that things were changing after five hundred years of colonial and republican domination and twenty years of some of the harshest neoliberal reforms experienced in Latin America. The initial weeks in the field shattered my preconceptions about Morales’s presidency. January 2016 was the period leading up to the referendum to decide whether he could contravene constitutional term limits and run for a fourth term. Having followed dusty pathways and an abandoned railway, I arrived at a rally in the city of El Alto calling for people to vote against Morales and his running for a fourth term in the next elections. El Alto was one of Morales’s strongholds throughout his presidency, so I was initially surprised by the location of the protest. Its participants likewise took me aback: they were not the historic right-wing opposition to Morales, but a coalition of Indigenous and working-class groups frustrated by the continued poverty and inequality in Bolivia and the country’s subordinate position in the global system. At the rally Morales was labeled a “vende patria”—a traitor to his country—and a stooge of “Yankee imperialism” by speakers who lamented the continuation of historic injustices under his government. What had happened to the radical potential and revolutionary hope that initially surrounded Morales’s regime? This was the question that shaped my subsequent seventeen months in the field, which I spent investigating the organization and actions of different social movements across the country. It was, however, the violent protests and the coup d’état against Morales in late 2019 that laid bare the need to interrogate the transition from a radical opening for social transformation to a right-wing resurgence. Following Morales’s fall from power, those in social movements who had collective dreams of a different society at the turn of the century remained frustrated, still at arm’s length after fourteen years of Morales’s presidency. This book tells the story between the opening quotations, statements made by the former Bolivian president, Evo Morales, at either end of his presidency that paint a vivid picture. Morales’s words conjure the hope for and expectation of a better Bolivia that accompanied his election in 4

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2005, and capture his unceremonious fall from grace in November 2019 following a coup d’état that threw the country into turmoil. I tell the story of the rise and fall of Evo Morales to interrogate the possibilities of radical change within capitalism. This is not the only story one could tell drawing from this period of Bolivian history, but I believe it is a compelling one. It plays out over Bolivia’s political scenery, shaped as it is by the legacies of colonialism and natural resource extraction, Indigenous social movements, and a history of radical working-class activism, neoliberalism, and crisis. The cast of characters is colorful, but does not fit neatly into the Manichean world often portrayed in Hollywood films. The radical social movements, government officials, working-class and Indigenous people, and conservative elites are complex and multifaceted and are characterized by the messiness of human interaction and social life. I try to capture this incongruence by homing in on snippets of quotidian life through which I hope to bring Bolivia during this period to life. It is, as we shall see, a gripping tale. INTRODUCING BOLIVIA Bolivia is not a place whose history is generally well known across the globe. As a country that is often overlooked even by those who study Latin America, it needs a proper introduction. This is no small feat, for despite its relative obscurity, it is a country with a rich and complex history. Bolivia is a poor, landlocked South American country with roughly eleven million inhabitants. It straddles the Andean cordillera and extends into the Amazon to the west and the Gran Chaco desert region to the south. This geographical variation blesses Bolivia with incredible biological diversity, and it is no surprise that the country is considered “one of the world’s thirty-six biodiversity hotspots” (Farthing and Becker 2021, 1). It is also culturally diverse, home to thirty-six recognized Indigenous groups (including the Aymara, Chiquitano, Guaraní, and Quechua); notably, Bolivia is the Latin American country where Indigenous people compose the highest proportion of the population.3 Moving beyond such descriptions, I want to highlight three important historical characteristics of Bolivia: the role of popular movements from below, particularly Indigenous and working-class movements; regional tensions; and the omnipresence of natural resource extraction. What is now modern-day Bolivia was placed firmly on the Spanish colonial map following the discovery of a mountain of silver in Potosí in 1545. The mining of silver in Potosí would shape the colonial period: Indigenous peoples from the Andean highlands, the Altiplano, were forced down into the mines through the mita labor system;4 tributes to 5

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the Spanish crown were paid on crops farmed by communities, cementing Cochabamba’s place as the food basket of the region; and Aymara communities were concentrated into villages (Klein 2011). The brutal oppression of Indigenous communities was far from unresisted. Túpak Amaru and later Túpak Katari led mass Indigenous uprisings in what became known as the Great Andean Civil War (1780–1782) (Thomson 2002). Katari laid siege to La Paz for over six months, killing half the city’s population. This etched Indigenous resistance into the memories of the local elite and left a legacy that would later be recovered by Indigenous activists during the twentieth century, initially by Kataristas and later by the Taller de Historia Oral Andina (Andean Oral History Workshop, THOA) in the 1980s (Stephenson 2002). Indigenous struggles—by early precursors of what today we call “social movements”— and natural resources were important features of Bolivian history from the outset. Following independence in 1825, the country remained relatively unchanged for several decades, ruled by a backward feudal elite with little interest in transforming the country and dependent on natural resource exports. Nonetheless, a series of wars from the late nineteenth century until the early twentieth century would leave an indelible mark on the country. First, the War of the Pacific (1879–1883) would see Bolivia lose its seacoast to Chile: the sense of historic injustice surrounding this war persists in Bolivia today, a loss that is mourned annually in Day of the Sea celebrations. Next, the Federal War (1899) pitted the elites of the capital, Sucre, against those of the city of La Paz. The elites of La Paz allied with Indigenous forces led by Zárate Willka, an alliance that ruptured following a massacre of sucrense troops by Willka’s men (Condarco Morales 1983).5 This brought back the ghosts of Túpak Katari and, terrified of an Indigenous rebellion, the elite factions put aside their differences to defend their position at the top of a social hierarchy defined by race. Part of the compromise between elite groups saw the seat of government moved from Sucre to La Paz, shifting the economy toward La Paz in the process. The Bolivian economy moved away from silver (controlled by Sucre) toward tin (controlled by the liberal elites of La Paz), ushering in a prolonged period when the export of tin was the principal driver of capital accumulation in the country. Finally, the Chaco War (1932–1935) between Bolivia and Paraguay saw tens of thousands of Indigenous men recruited to fight and sent into the Gran Chaco without food, water, or supplies (Arze Aguirre 1987; Zavaleta 1990). It was perceived that the war had been started by the oil giants Standard Oil (of the United States) and Royal Dutch Shell (of the United Kingdom), stok6

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ing the fires of resource nationalism (Almaraz Paz 2009). As a result, the military populist governments that followed the Chaco War created the Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales de Bolivia (Bolivian State Petroleum Company, YPFB). The disquiet surrounding foreign influence over Bolivian resources, as well as that of Indigenous communities about their treatment during the Chaco War, laid the ground for the National Revolution. In April 1952, workers and the middle classes toppled the national government in a relatively bloodless revolution (Dunkerley 1984, 39). A nationalist government was formed by the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (Nationalist Revolutionary Movement, MNR), supported by the workers, who established the Central Obrero Boliviano (Bolivian Workers’ Central, COB) (García Linera, Chávez León, and Costas Monje 2004). The COB formed one pillar of the National Revolutionary State, supporting the national government (Zavaleta 1988). The tin mines were nationalized, cementing the potent political force of tin miners in the country, and universal suffrage was granted to all Bolivians for the first time (Gotkowitz 2007, 287). Indigenous peoples were included in this new Bolivia through an assimilation process known as mestizaje (which roughly translates as “mixing”). For their part, Indigenous communities across the Altiplano occupied the semifeudal latifundia and started de facto processes of agrarian reform,6 which the MNR government formalized a year after the revolution in 1953 (Gotkowitz 2003). The inclusion of Indigenous communities was always uneven and incomplete, and in large parts of the country they maintained significant autonomy from the state (Rivera Cusicanqui 2003). Agrarian reform also created new capitalist agricultural production units, which were offered access to new technology and credit by the state, and encouraged Aymara peasants from the Altiplano to migrate to the agricultural frontier to “colonize” Bolivian territory in lowland Amazon regions (Eckstein 1979; Gill 1987). A military coup in 1964 ended the democratically elected MNR governments. Although the economy was still centered on tin, the Hugo Banzer dictatorship (1971–1778) directed capital and state resources toward Banzer’s home department of Santa Cruz (Gill 1987). This laid the basis for the consolidation of the lowland elite, which started producing monocrops such as cotton, coffee, rice, and later soybeans, becoming increasingly integrated into transnational circuits of capital in the process (Soruco 2008). The COB was still a central pillar of the National Revolutionary State, although during this period it was a foil for state violence. Struggles between the COB and the Bolivian state formed the 7

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center of politics during the dictatorships. Indigenous communities, particularly in Quechua-speaking regions in the semitropical valleys of Cochabamba formed a pact with the military, though this pact did not stop Indigenous communities from supporting miners during periods of particularly intense state violence (Hylton and Thomson 2007, 84). When this pact shattered following the massacre of Indigenous peasants by Banzer’s government at Tolata in 1974 (Albó 1987, 388–96; Rivera Cusicanqui 2003, 156–58), the dissident Indigenous groups that emerged as the backbone of the Katarismo movement increasingly aligned with the COB (Albó 1987; Hurtado Mercado 1981). Indigenous activists and the COB eventually took to the streets together for the first time to resist the violent coup d’état of Alberto Natusch Busch in 1979 (Zavaleta [1983] 2013). The struggles of workers and Indigenous groups were integral to ensuring the return of Bolivian democracy in 1982. Out of these struggles the Confederación Sindical Única de los Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia (Trade Union Confederation of Bolivian Peasant Workers, CSUTCB) emerged and became the principal organizational node of the Indigenous movement following its inception in 1979. In 1985, following a period of record-breaking hyperinflation, Bolivia received the harshest neoliberal shock therapy in the entire region (Conaghan, Malloy, and Abugattas 1990). The Bolivian peso was drastically devalued through its floatation and the economy liberalized as food subsidies were removed, protection for labor decimated, and the financial sector opened to foreign capital (Gamarra 1994, 105). The New Economy Policy closed state-owned tin mines and starved the miners out of their encampments. The COB resisted the implication of neoliberal reforms but was defeated after a confrontation with the military at Calamarca, marking the end of its status as one-half of the Bolivian state (Nash 1992). The state’s functions were massively reduced and it stepped back from productive activities and the provision of social programs. The result was an enormous increase in poverty, the informalization of labor, the mass migration of peasants to urban centers in search of work, and the explosion of informal settlements around urban centers, particularly in El Alto, Cochabamba, and Santa Cruz (Farthing and Kohl 2006; Rivera Cusicanqui 1996). During the 1990s, state-owned enterprises were privatized, including the YPFB. This significantly decreased the income of the Bolivian state and led to a fiscal crisis in the late 1990s (McGuigan 2007). The social immiseration and crisis of the state precipitated by neoliberal reforms constituted the backdrop of radical social movements that punctuated the period 2000–2005 in Bolivia. Massive protests took 8

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place against the privatization of water in Cochabamba in 2000 (Olivera and Lewis 2004), and again in El Alto in 2004 (Spronk 2007). Cocaleros (coca growers), who had emerged as an important part of the Bolivian economy and the CSUTCB following neoliberal shock therapy, battled with the US-directed programs aimed at eradicating coca (Ledebur 2002). And most notably, huge nationwide protests centered around the city of El Alto demanding the nationalization of gas toppled two national governments (Hylton and Thomson 2005; Mamani 2005; Webber 2012a). It is easy to pick out the threads of working-class as well as Indigenous natural resources and social movements that run through this historiography. These are the central tenets of Bolivian history that formed the basis of Evo Morales’s rise to power. Morales was the leader of the coca growers’ federation and came to power promising to refound the state and give Bolivians control over their natural resources. To this end, he promulgated the nationalization of hydrocarbons and oversaw a Constituent Assembly that produced one of Latin America’s most progressive constitutions when it came into force in 2009. Following the period of social movement struggle between 2000 and 2005, Morales proclaimed his government a “government of social movements” enacting a “process of change” (proceso de cambio). It is this process of change that sits at the heart of this book. DEBATES ABOUT THE LATIN AMERICAN PINK TIDE Now We Are in Power unfolds over two different levels. On the one hand, I draw from the Bolivian case to develop theoretical claims about passive revolution and how the politics of change function in capitalism. We will get to the theoretical substance of these claims in due course. On the other hand, I interrogate the historical processes of change in Bolivia to make a series of empirical claims about the possibilities, limitations, and durability of change there, pointing to some tentative political lessons to be learned for the next generation of left-wing movements in the region. Forming the backdrop for this book are several important debates around the Latin American pink tide and the government of Evo Morales in Bolivia. The first set of debates concerns the continuity with or change from the prior neoliberal period. It is widely accepted that Latin America was the region where the transformations wrought by the neoliberal phase of capitalism were most keenly felt (e.g., Anderson et al. 2003), so the political upheaval and crisis provoked by neoliberal transformations produced great interest from scholars and activists alike. Slippages in the term “neoliberalism,” however, meant that there was no clear consen9

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sus on appropriate terminology to capture the character or significance of the historical changes under study (Ruckert, Macdonald, and Proulx 2017). “Post-neoliberalism,” “New Latin American Left,” and “pink tide” were all bandied about in debates over this period. While “pink tide” and the “New Latin American Left” were used to capture the ideological and political content of movements and governments in the region (e.g., Levitsky and Roberts 2011; Webber and Carr 2013), “post-neoliberalism” was harder to pin down. “Pos-neoliberalismo” was first used by the political sociologist Atilio Borón (2003) to underscore the emergent political forces and alternatives to the Washington Consensus that began to flourish in Latin America following the ripple effects from the 1997 East Asia Crisis in the region. It offered the Latin American Left a hybrid solution to the maladies of neoliberalism, treading a third way that balanced the democratic socialism of Salvador Allende and the guerrilla warfare of Cuba and the Central American conflicts of the 1970s and 1980s. Debates around post-neoliberalism reveal some of the optimism around the Latin American pink tide and highlight the sense that something different was indeed happening. Emir Sader (2008, 22) saw this as a moment when it was possible not only to propose alternatives on paper but also to build forces capable of reoccupying public space and moving beyond the economism of the traditional Left to include social movements animated along other axes of oppression (see also Tapia 2011). The trouble was that the hybrid solution offered by post-neoliberalism meant different things to different people. For example, while the Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez spoke of leading Venezuela toward a post-neoliberal “twenty-first century socialism,” the Bolivian vice president Álvaro García Linera maintained (at least initially) that Bolivia was only capable of a post-neoliberal future characterized by Andean-Amazonian capitalism (Stefanoni 2008, 23). Most agreed, however, that post-neoliberalism captured a combination of the various elements present in Latin America at the turn of the millennium: “popular uprisings, electoral exits and a refounding of the state” (Sader 2008, 21). Julian Yates and Karen Bakker (2014, 64) helpfully distinguish between post-neoliberalism as a “utopian-ideological project” and as a “set of onthe-ground processes and practices.” On the one hand, scholars, politicians, and movements debated the possible alternatives offered by the pink tide. These included heightened social inclusion and new forms of citizenship (Grugel and Riggirozzi 2012), the redefinition of the relationship between the public and private spheres at the national and regional level (Sader 2008, 29), increased and redefined autonomy (Marston 2015), and forms of governance drawing on Indigenous knowledge and 10

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worldviews, most notably in the notions of vivir bien (good living) and plurinationality (Farah H. and Vasapollo 2011; Schavelzon 2015). On the other hand, post-neoliberalism addressed the concrete implementation of pink tide political projects. Here, debates focused on the best processes and practices to implement post-neoliberal imaginaries and centered on the novel role of the state, the new development models, and political economic forms. Neo-structuralism, neo-developmentalism, and neo-extractivism were all used by authors to underscore different dimensions of the political projects of the pink tide. Neo-structuralism was promoted by Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) economists such as Fernando Fajnzylber, José Antonio Ocampos, and Oswaldo Sunkel (e.g., ECLAC 1990; Sunkel 1991; Treviño 2000).7 It was an attempt to create a new political economic orthodoxy in Latin America and reimagine the role of the state, democracy, the market, and growth in development processes (Leiva 2008a, 2; Webber 2010b, 211). Neo-structuralism aimed to achieve this goal by focusing on five interrelated areas: systemic competitiveness, technical progress, proactive labor flexibility, concerted action, and virtuous circles (Leiva 2008a). Neo-structuralism became popular with pink tide governments for two reasons: (1) it lent itself to state-led development programs that had clear policy briefs; and (2) it proved discursively seductive (Leiva 2008a). The upshot of neo-structuralism’s influence on the pink tide was the consolidation of “export-orientated regimes of accumulation” across the region (Leiva 2008b, 15; see also McNelly 2020b). This in turn, sparked debates over the other concepts prefixed with “neo-” Parallel to neo-structuralism, neo-developmentalism gained influence in Latin America through the work of, among others, Luis Carlos Bresser-Pereira and Aldo Ferrer. However, Claudio Katz (2015) gave the concept its most analytical purchase. Katz (2015, 141) argues that the development models followed by Cristina Kirchner in Argentina and Lula da Silva in Brazil were distinct from the developmentalism of the prior period of import substitution industrialization (ISI). He contends that neodevelopmentalism—instead of focusing on industrialization as a move away from agriculture—sought growth through the industrialization of agriculture. The period of the pink tide consolidated the position of agribusiness established during neoliberalism, with the exportation of monocrops such as soy and beef becoming central to the political economy of Argentina, Brazil, and, to a lesser extent, Bolivia (Colque 2014; Giraudo 2019; McKay and Colque 2016; Vergara-Camus and Kay 2017). “Neo-extractivism” is probably the post-neoliberal practice that has proved most controversial and sparked the greatest debate. The 11

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move away from the Washington Consensus imagined by Borón, argues Maristella Svampa (2013), led to a new consensus on development models driven by natural resource extraction. Although claims about the reprimitization of Latin America may be overstated (Grigera 2013), there is no doubt that the commodities boom between 2002 and 2013 provided the backdrop for pink tide governments. These governments were able to take advantage of the knock-on effects on the global economy caused by the rapid rise of China, with the high demand for primary commodities raising prices for an extended period, allowing states to claim a larger slice of the pie and fill their coffers. The political ecologist Eduardo Gudynas (2010) argues that neo-extractivism is qualitatively distinct from its neoliberal predecessor by dint of the role of the state in managing and redistributing natural resource rents. However, this form of extractivism still came at an ecological and social cost, sparking rounds of political conflicts with communities dispossessed and displaced by the mining of natural resources and the growing networks of infrastructures needed for their expanded extraction (Acosta 2013; Svampa 2017, 2019). Throughout Now We Are in Power, I pick up some of the central threads of these debates. However, I am less interested in highlighting similarities and differences with the neoliberal period than in tracing the evolution of social forces, the state form and its functions, and political economic trends through the frame of passive revolution. Using this approach, I touch on the cornerstones of the debates outlined above without, in some cases, making a definitive intervention. This is partly due to the political developments that have transpired in the time between these discussions and my writing of this book. Where I do make a decisive intervention is in the debates around the end of the progressive cycle (Gago and Sztulwark 2016; Gaudichaud 2015; Katz 2017; Modonesi 2015; Modonesi and Iglesias 2016; Modonesi and Svampa 2016; Salazar 2015; Svampa 2017). In the context of the end of the commodities boom and the return of the Right to power across the region, scholars and activists have sought to explicate the limitations and legacies of the pink tide, reflecting on the dynamics that led to the “end of the progressive cycle.” In a sense, my arguments here are driven by these tasks. However, I contend that the cycle narrative prematurely forecloses the possibilities opened by the pink tide. I am thus interested in the field of possibilities and alternatives opened by the post-neoliberal frame, and I take up some of the theoretical strands of my arguments and extend them to reflect on the possible lessons the pink tide offers to the new generation of leftist social movements.

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THE CENTRAL ARGUMENTS OF THE BOOK Bolivia has long been a country of missed chances, of lost riches, of natural resource wealth that slips agonizingly through the fingers and out of reach. In the introduction to her seminal piece of scholarship on Bolivia We Eat the Mines and the Mines Eat Us,anthropologist June Nash (1993, 1) laments the paradox of stupendous wealth—first silver, then tin (now hydrocarbons)—that has led to nothing but abject poverty for most of those who live in this landlocked South American country. Many feel that the government of Morales offered an opportunity for change that has been “squandered” (Farthing 2018). After the initial optimism surrounding the election of Morales, the former llama herder who sat at the helm of a broad-based coalition of some of Latin America’s most powerful anti-neoliberal working-class and Indigenous social movements, why was his government unable to fulfill its apparent potential and enact meaningful social change? Or, in more general terms, what are the prospects for pursuing a transformative political agenda of change at the peripheries of capitalism? Are places like Bolivia doomed to play out a preordained destiny or can alternative futures be built here? The central arguments of the book emerge from my attempts to grapple with these questions. Starting from crumbling capitalist hegemony at the end of the twentieth century across Latin America—the product of an economic crisis, fiscal crises of the state, and widespread rejection of neoliberalism—I explore the politics of change pursued by social movements and the reestablishment of the conditions required for capital accumulation through what I contend are processes of passive revolution. Drawing on Antonio Gramsci’s framing of the politics of crisis through the revolution/restoration dialectic (which we will discuss later), I argue that pink tide governments were the state forms assumed in the face of a regional crisis of capitalist hegemony, the vehicles by which processes of capitalist accumulation based on extractive rents from primary commodities were reestablished and extended. This argument has two dialectically interwoven sides. The first side explores the “passive” element of Gramsci’s oxymoronic concept of passive revolution. It concerns the revolutionary drive of social movements that in a moment of crisis were able to transcend a mere challenge of the status quo and establish alternative future horizons (Dinerstein 2015; Gutiérrez 2014). However, following the zenith of the moment of catharsis (we will fully explore the significance of this term below), movement leaders, along with their central demands, were incorporated into the state, thus turning movements from offensive actors pushing for change 13

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to defenders of the Left in state power. This is the second moment of passive revolution, transformism, and addresses the trajectory of revolutionary forces after they have unseated their initial opponents from power. In short, I trace the mechanisms and effects of social movement pacification through the course of passive revolution. The second side of my argument examines the dynamics of restoration set in motion by passive revolution. I show how the new social and spatial configuration of power—the novel forms of power and the capitalist state that emerged in twenty-first-century Latin America—established through passive revolution are contradictory, unstable, and in continual need of renewal. By placing movement incorporation and transformism in conversation with the spatial and scalar dynamics of passive revolution, I show the tensions inherent in processes of passive revolution. I underscore how passive revolutions are also a set of sociospatial processes that unsettle social movement incorporation and how neo-extractivism—the dominant form of value creation established by passive revolution in twenty-first-century Latin America—not only provided the material foundations for new hegemonic state practices and forms but also undermined the basis of their newfound hegemony, sparking new rounds of social conflict over accumulation by dispossession and the environmental and ecological maladies that leak from the pores of extractive industries and their associated infrastructures. These interconnected arguments are novel in several ways. First, separating passive revolution into distinct yet intertwined threads allows me to evaluate how the contradictory and contested character of passive revolution unfolds over time and explore how its different moving parts interact with one another and shape its dynamics. Second, exploring the extractive political economy that passive revolution reestablishes alongside its composite processes teases out the dialectical fusion of the economic and political within passive revolution. Most, if not all, uses of passive revolution to explore historical moments of crisis focus largely on the superstructural level, an approach that runs the risk of reproducing the crudest economistic readings of historical materialism, which conceive the economic base and the superstructure to be two discrete levels of capitalism.8 I, on the other hand, read the restoration of natural resource extraction and its attendant infrastructures as a dialectical part of passive revolution. I use the temporalities produced by processes and infrastructures of natural resource extraction to underscore how passive revolution also forges contradictory and contested political economic forms that can unsettle the pacification processes at its very heart. To make these arguments, I must first briefly outline the theoretical components of passive revolution. 14

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PASSIVE REVOLUTION AND GRAPPLING WITH THE POLITICS OF CHANGE Many critical Latin American scholars turned to Gramsci in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, not only because of the explanatory power that his concepts—particularly “hegemony” and “passive revolution”—had during this conjuncture but also because of the intellectual legacy of the previous moment of progressive governments in Latin American history. Gramsci originally arrived in Latin America during the 1950s via Argentina and Brazil, and was—largely thanks to the Cuban Revolution—read principally through a Leninist tradition that maintained Gramsci’s revolutionary dimension (Burgos 2002, 9–10). However, the violent military backlash to the populist regimes of the Southern Cone during the 1960s and 1970s, together with the “Soviet vulgate” of many Latin American communist parties, sparked a second wave of (re)reading Gramsci (Freeland 2014, 279–80). Exile in Mexico, in the case of militants such as José Aricó, offered the opportunity to dissect the failures of the “old” and “revolutionary” Lefts; and in Brazil, intellectuals including Carlos Nelson Coutinho drew on “the humanistic and historicist reading of Marxism” present in Gramsci (as well as Georg Lukács and Jean-Paul Sartre) to rethink “the radical transformation of society [based on] the logic of construction of hegemony” (Burgos 2002, 11–14). This secondary rereading of Gramsci centering on hegemony (rather than passive revolution) fed into the founding principles of the Brazilian Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers’ Party, PT) and the municipal socialism experiments across Latin America in the 1980s and 1990s (Burgos 2002, 17–25), as well as the rise of cultural studies in the Latin American academy (Hesketh 2019, 1475). It transformed hegemony into a socialist strategy and “the people” replaced “the working classes” as the agents of historical change.9 It is these more social-democratic readings of Gramsci that would come to bear directly on pink tide governments across Latin America, particularly in Argentina, Bolivia, and Brazil. Although the concept of passive revolution remained in the background of the major contributions of the first generation of Latin American Gramscian scholars—such as Aricó, Juan Carlos Portantiero, and René Zavaleta Mercado (Modonesi 2019, 123–41)—it became central to the Gramscian readings of pink tide governments (e.g., Bosteels 2014; Hesketh and Morton 2014; Modonesi 2012; Modonesi and Svampa 2016; Webber 2016). Passive revolution is the critical framework developed by Gramsci amid the crisis of his age and his person: namely, the rise of Fascism across Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. Gramsci drew on a compar15

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ative historical methodology to explicate the politics of crisis in different historical conjunctures. Passive revolution captures the politics of pacification that nullifies a revolutionary challenge from below and (re)establishes the conditions for capitalist class rule. Gramsci first used the concept to explore how the liberal bourgeoisie was able to enact “revolution without a revolution” during the Italian Risorgimento (Gramsci 2011a, 137, Q1§44). Gramsci developed his notion of passive revolution through a dialectical combination of Vincenzo Cuoco’s original concept (used to analyze the 1799 Neapolitan Revolution) and Edgar Quinet’s formulation of “restoration and renovation,” which Gramsci also referred to as “conservation/innovation” (see Gramsci 2011c, 252–54, Q8§25, Q8§27). For Gramsci (1971, 219, Q13§27), “the problem is to see whether in this dialectic ‘revolution/restoration’ it is revolution or restoration that predominates.” Passive revolution is not another way of describing capitalism writ large but a theoretical tool kit with which to comprehend a particular response to crises of capitalism.10 It provides a lens through which to examine the novel configurations of power that reestablish the conditions of capitalist accumulation while also transforming the physiognomy of a social formation. As Gramsci (1971, 109) states, “One may apply to the concept of passive revolution . . . the interpretative criterion of molecular changes which in fact progressively modify the pre-existing composition of forces, and hence become the matrix of new changes.” Gramsci identified several moments within passive revolution to better interrogate the relationship between restoration and revolution. He used the term “catharsis” to describe the moment of revolutionary potential within passive revolution, a moment when the masses move from corporatist self-interest into definite action (Gramsci Q10I§6, cited in Thomas 2009a, 263). This is a moment when class struggle becomes a historical driving force so strong that, on the one hand, it produces new collective political subjects, and, on the other hand, it provokes a crisis of hegemony that the state is unable to contain. The upshot of catharsis is that the appearance of state power must change, the crisis must be resolved on the plane of civil as well as political society, and the radical potential of new political subjects needs to be curtailed through processes of resubjectification (Modonesi 2019). The state regains its position as the political protagonists, while the social movements at the heart of catharsis are resubordinated to the state, a resubjectification process that Modonesi (2017, 17) also labels “re-subalternization.” Another two moments within passive revolution capture this restoration of state power and the conditions for capital accumulation: transformism and Caesarism. On the one hand, transformism is the absorp16

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tion of revolutionary potential into the state, the pacification of social movements within civil society through their co-optation by the state, and the resubjectification of social movements (both individually and collectively). This happens initially through a molecular process, whereby individual leaders are integrated into the new state project, and latterly through a qualitative shift as whole movements become part of the state (Gramsci 2011c, 257, Q8§36). Their revolutionary ideas form part of the new hegemonic project, twisted into bells and whistles without substance, lacking the revolutionary challenge to the status quo that drives moments of catharsis. On the other hand, Caesarism captures the exit to a particular configuration of the revolution/restoration dialectic marked by impasse and stasis, a moment that Gramsci (2011c, 211, Q7§80) called “catastrophic equilibrium.” Here, neither the revolutionary forces pushing for radical change from below nor the conversative forces attempting to restore the ancien régime are strong enough to become hegemonic. The equilibrium between conservation and innovation is broken by a third force that capitalizes on the crisis sparked by catharsis and pushes its own agenda. Historically, this third force has often been personified in a leader—such as Caesar or Napoleon Bonaparte—but Gramsci (1971, 220, Q13§27) is quick to stress that a political party can also offer a similar exit and replace the role played by individual leaders. These three moments or mechanisms in passive revolution structure the analysis in the subsequent chapters of the book and offer the theoretical purchase needed to grapple with the politics of change in twenty-first-century Bolivia. THE SPATIOTEMPORAL DIMENSIONS OF PASSIVE REVOLUTION Having outlined the mechanisms through which passive revolution operates, we turn to the dimensions of passive revolution: space and time. These are often overlooked components of the story but are vital if we are to contend fully with how passive revolution functions and assess its outcomes in concrete historical situations. Exploring space and time in twenty-first-century Bolivia helps illuminate some of the contradictions of passive revolution and the limitations to processes of change in capitalism. And to do this, we first need to define space and time and how they both function within capitalism. To begin with, every society produces its own forms of space and time. In capitalism, these are “abstract space” and “abstract time,” the forms of space and time that are the necessary conditions for capital accumulation. On the one hand, abstract space is homogeneous, empty, alienated space where form and function have become decoupled. It is 17

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quantifiable, mappable, and therefore, importantly, comparable. It is a blank slate that can be represented as geometrical space and placed in relation to other abstract spaces, meaning that abstract space is simultaneously homogeneous and hierarchical. Capital accumulation can only occur if its spatial parts are differentiable from one another, if they can perform different functions, and if they can be inserted into sociospatial hierarchies (Lefebvre 2009, 188). Capital accumulation simultaneously requires and produces homogeneity from/of the whole and differentiated hierarchies formed by fragments of its parts, with different spatial segments produced to perform different sociospatial functions. The production of capitalist space, therefore, is characterized by the tension between equalization tendencies across space and structural barriers within capitalism that lead to geographical disequilibrium. Neil Smith (2008, 180) highlights how abstract space is always produced “at some scale”—urban, regional, national, and international scales—which allows capital to achieve “a degree of spatial fixity organized into identifiable separate scales of social activity.” This is the relative character of abstract space, which is composed of different scales. These “organize and integrate the different processes involved in the circulation and accumulation of capital, [becoming] the geographic foundation for the overall circulation and expansion of value” (Smith 2008, 180). However, abstract space is not purely the space of capital accumulation but the consequence of historically and geographically specific dynamics of class struggle (Massey 1994, 22). Space is “produced, differentiated, and contested within any hegemonic project” (Ekers and Loftus 2013, 26–27), and, as a corollary of this, space is shaped by the “uneven development of class struggle” (Hesketh 2017, 40). This is where space enters the equation of revolution/restoration that underpins passive revolution. Passive revolution must, as Adam Morton (2013, 48–49) argues, be understood as “an emergent spatialization strategy that structure[s] and shape[s] state power.” Passive revolution analyzes “uneven and discontinuous geographies” and is concerned with how relational dynamics between areas of backwardness and economic “progress,” and between city and country, bear on processes of class struggle and state formation (Morton 2013, 51). Moments of catharsis emerge out of geohistorical contexts, while transformism, in absorbing the central actors and ideals from the wouldbe challengers to class power, also disperses and displaces revolutionary actors in and through space. There are multiple ways to disrupt the logic of abstract space during moments of catharsis. Social struggle is the most visible example, but practices that subvert the dominant produc18

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tion of space itself can also prove effective. For example, the spontaneous architecture of self-construction produces a “spatial duality,” whereby the effective organization of space by residents rather than the state produces the impression of a duality of political power (Lefebvre 1991, 373–74). The struggle to survive through practices of social reproduction confronts the dominant logic of capitalist space organized through production. The disequilibrium contained in the facing off of these two opposing logics makes places of radical potential of the liminal spaces at capitalism’s peripheries, although these are buried beneath the drudgery and hardship that poverty, urbanization, and proletarianization entail. This radical potential appears in moments of catharsis and forms an integral part of Indigenous, anticolonial, and working-class struggle. Transformism also has a spatial dimension. The incorporation of popular sectors can be organized territorially and “defined by the physical location of the actors,” including rural Indigenous movements and urban neighborhood organizations (Rossi 2018, 24). In twenty-first-century Latin America, this had the effect of varying transformism across space as public policies and pathways to the state (and its resources) were directed at localities (rather than sectors), determined by the needs and the militancy of a place’s constituents. At its core, passive revolution contains a spatial/scalar contradiction between dispersal and concentration. The incorporation of different sectors happens at certain localized points in space and the benefits of supposedly national projects are felt unevenly across national territory. Moreover, in the context of the Commodity Consensus in twentyfirst-century Latin America, the costs of extractivism and its attendant infrastructures are concentrated at points in space. People who find themselves in the pathway of extraction are subject to displacement and dispossession, or the “slow violence” wrought by dust kicked up by trucks carrying mined minerals, drinking water contaminated by chemicals used in mining, or the trafficking of humans that follows the same extractive routes and logics (Nixon 2011). Where benefits from incorporation matters as much as who benefits, as does where is slated as a sacrifice zone. Indeed, it is these very spatial tensions that sit center stage in chapters 3 and 5. On the other hand, abstract time, produced and propagated by capitalism, is “uniform, continuous, homogeneous, ‘empty’ time, [time] independent of events” (Postone 2009, 202). “It is a mathematical hollow,” writes Andreas Malm (2015, 305), “an incorporeal repository of events which stands independent of them all and never betrays their influence.” While abstract time predates capitalism, it only became generalized 19

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alongside the commodity form of social relations, as it is intrinsic to processes of social alienation that underpin capitalist development (Postone 2009, 211–15). Capitalist development “advances by ordering humans and the rest of nature in abstract space and time because that is where most surplus-value can be produced” (Malm 2015, 308, emphasis in the original). That is to say, the generalization of abstract time must be conceptualized as an immanent dimension of the generalization of capitalist social relations, of capitalist development itself. Generalized conceptions of time “as a kind of linear progression measured by the clock and calendar” only supplanted “cyclical conceptions of time” in Europe within the past couple of hundred years (Postone 2009, 200). Before this, time was grasped through the passing of “natural cycles and the periodicities of human life as well as particular tasks or processes, for example, the time required to cook rice or to say one paternoster” (Postone 2009, 201). Moishe Postone (2009, 201), calls this “concrete time.” Concrete time when a day’s tasks—“which might vary from fishing to farming, building, mending of nets, thatching, making a cradle or a coffin” (Thompson 1967, 59)—determine the length of the working day and therefore orient time. The expenditure of concrete time is itself the result of human activity and daily tasks (Postone 2009, 214–15). It is immanent to events and thus cannot be expressed as an autonomous unit; it can have qualitative as well as quantitative determinants and be cast as sublime or profane. In contrast to concrete time, abstract time allows for different spaces to be placed in temporal relation to one another. Abstract time allows for certain spaces to be situated “ahead” of others, building temporal as well as spatial hierarchies. Teleological notions of progress that underpin much of the discussion over development in mainstream development economics are symptoms of abstract time. However, abstract time does not obliterate heterogeneous concrete times (Benjamin 1973, 265). Rather, as Fouad Makki (2015, 489) underscores, “the two temporalities coexist in tension with each other and shape the dialectic of the abstract and the concrete, the universal and the particular, and the uneven and yet combined forms of social change.” This gives modernity in the Latin American context, as I have argued elsewhere (McNelly 2022), a multiple, contradictory, and contested temporal character. Postone (2004, 64) captures the uneven temporal character of contemporary capitalism best, stating: “The historical dynamic of the modern capitalist world, within this framework, then, is not simply a linear succession of presents but entails a complex dialectic of two forms of constituted time. This dialectic involves the accumulation of the past. . . It does so, however, in a 20

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form that entails the ongoing reconstruction of the fundamental features of capitalism as an apparently necessary present—even as it is hurtled forward by another form of time, which is concrete, heterogeneous, and directional. This latter movement of time is ‘historical time.’” That capitalism is marked by the articulation of one temporality (abstract time) by another (concrete time) is even more evident in peripheral places, where processes of capitalist expansion come up against societal forms that have not been fully subsumed to the logic of capital. And they never will be, as capitalist development is uneven and combined in spatiotemporal terms: continued capital accumulation is predicated on spatial and temporal unity and difference. Although the heterogeneous character of historical time is true for all of capitalism, it is at peripheral places where these differences are most evident—hence the perception of development at peripheries as “delayed” or temporally behind that of the capitalist core. This temporal dissidence is captured by the Bolivian political theorist René Zavaleta Mercado’s notion of sociedades abigarradas. Abigarrada or abigarramiento roughly translate as motley or heterogeneous and “connote disjointedness, incongruousness, beyond mere difference” (Freeland 2016, 272). Zavaleta introduces abigarramiento to capture situations where the multiple temporalities of manifold modes of production are not constrained to the homogeneous time of the state; that is, contexts where the state fails to become hegemonic (Lagos Rojas 2018, 140). Zavaleta’s characterization of Bolivia as a sociedad abigarrada captures the concrete historical articulation of multiple modes of production— the organization of productive forces by different forms and grades of the development of productive relations—and how these articulations (re)produce multiple civilizational and societal forms.11 Abigarramiento helps capture how historic time is articulated in Latin American social formations. It also draws attention to the temporalities of deferral, ruination, suspension, and abandonment that characterize processes of passive revolution. Gramsci viewed the present as “contradictory and non-contemporaneous,” comprehended through the triad of politics, philosophy/ideology, and history that underpins his absolute historicism (Thomas 2009b, 293). Gramsci’s historicism, contends Stefan Kipfer (2013, 85), was “rooted in a method of investigation that begins with particular historical conjunctures [which] he saw as forms of a confluence of distinct, but intertwined temporalities . . . not as interchangeable instants in linear succession or as dependent variables determined by atemporal structural totalities.” Although Gramsci did not frame it in this way, I contend that passive revolution plays out over the 21

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complex web of historical time, with its ebbs and flows shaped by the perpetual interaction between abstract and concrete time. Catharsis is a moment when social movements disrupt the hegemonic time of the state, opening new political and temporal horizons that stretch beyond capitalism and its abstract time. Part and parcel of passive revolution is the reestablishment of abstract time. As this occurs through concrete tasks that form the basis of concrete time, the tensions between concrete and abstract time come to the fore during passive revolution. For example, the incorporation of demands around natural resources begets construction projects and the building of infrastructure projects. Here, the presence of concrete time is inescapable, as delays to construction—the lengthening of abstract time but not concrete time— can become political crises. The temporal dimensions of passive revolution can undermine the mechanisms of passive revolution, sparking new conflicts between civil society and the state, and limiting the pacifying effects of passive revolution. These are the temporal dimensions of passive revolution that form the basis of chapter 5. STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK The narrative arc of the book traces political developments in Bolivia from the crisis of neoliberalism in the late 1990s through the end of Evo Morales’s time in power in 2019. The book starts at the moment of catharsis that emerged from the crisis of neoliberalism in the late 1999s. Chapter 1 analyzes the explosive social movements in El Alto—the epicenter of struggle at the turn of the twenty-first century—and argues that the demand for the nationalization of gas politicized the configuration of social relations forged under neoliberalism. It traces the sociospatial dimension of the crisis in El Alto and contends that the crisis of liberal democracy in the city allowed the local social organizations to be captured and to direct protest from below. Chapter 1 thus offers a fine-grained analysis of the moment of catharsis in Bolivia that preceded Evo Morales’s election to power in 2005. Chapter 2 explores the reconfiguration and decomposition of social movements through their incorporation into the Movimiento al Socialism (Movement for Socialism, MAS) government’s political project through transformism. During the initial period of the MAS government, there were three dimensions of movement incorporation: (1) co-optation from above; (2) the creation of parallel social movements by the government; and (3) the propensity of social movements to be co-opted. The central demands of the radical social movements of the

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previous period, 2000–2005, were incorporated into the government’s project. However, the technocratic government responses were, to an extent, “conservative reforms dressed up as revolutionary transformations” (Modonesi 2012, 143), consolidating the position of the MAS government and stripping movements of their most powerful collective mobilizing frames. By 2010, the dynamics of social movement incorporation had led to a loss of independent mobilizing capabilities, creative capacity, and militancy. Following their incorporation into the political project of the MAS, social movements found themselves left only with the power to reject government policies through informal contestation. Chapter 3 argues that the crisis of the state not only galvanized a wave of working-class and Indigenous social movements but also sparked a conservative reaction that leveraged regional differences and articulated an elite bloc on the regional scale of the eastern lowlands of the country. The chapter also explores the shockwaves of spatial pacification on social movements during transformism, revealing the contradictory and destabilizing dynamics within passive revolution in this moment. The spatial dissidence caused by the autonomy struggles of the “media luna” departments of Beni, Pando, Santa Cruz, and Tarija and a class compromise between the lowland agribusiness elite and the MAS produced a sense of “being forgotten,” undermining modes of incorporation and the quantitative element of transformism. The chapter therefore contends that adding a sociospatial dimension to passive revolution evinces its unstable and contradictory, contested and incomplete character. Chapter 4 explores the functioning of Caesarism in passive revolution and its potentially explosive shortcomings. It interrogates how Caesarism played out through a careful positioning of President Evo Morales as simultaneously a fallible leader and a quasi-apostle—through what I call the sublime/profane dialectic. While the government was adept at sustaining the affective draw of Morales among much of the Bolivian population through an astute use of Morales’s Janus-faced persona—thereby advancing the formation of the state through passive revolution—this proved but a temporary fix (not resolution) to the contradictions underpinning the different processes contained within passive revolution. In the Bolivian context, Caesarism concentrated the gains and the limitations of the MAS government in the figure of Morales, personalizing politics and further displacing social movements as agents of political change. Chapter 5 evaluates the pacifying role of extractivism, interrogating the different temporal dynamics of passive revolution and the tensions between the temporalities of extractivism and infrastructure. On the one 23

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hand, developmental or oil time is a shared teleology toward modernity embodied in hydrocarbons and other natural resources. Extractive-led development, I contend, attempts to reestablish a hegemonic temporality of a unilinear pathway toward a modern utopia. On the other hand, infrastructural time is marked by stasis, postponement, regression, and decay rather than any single pathway to modernity (Stoler 2013). Infrastructure projects are started but not always finished, sometimes abandoned after a few short years, at other times repurposed by the communities in their vicinity for functions not envisioned by engineers or planners. Infrastructure needs constant upkeep and maintenance, making it impossible to speak of infrastructures as finished projects in any meaningful way (Appel 2018; Khalili 2020). By analyzing extractivism and its attendant infrastructures through these two different temporalities, I shed light on their role in the pacification processes animated by passive revolution and the importance of framing passive revolution as advancing through dialectically interconnected political and economic processes. Chapter 6 ties together the different threads of the politics of crisis analyzed in the previous five chapters. In October–November 2019, the national elections triggered a period of upheaval and unrest amid accusations of fraud and foreign intervention that polarized the country. A wave of violence followed the election on October 20, leading to Morales’s resignation on November 10 and culminating in two state-led massacres in the MAS strongholds of Senkata, El Alto, and Sacaba. A tragic sense of déjà vu was present in these moments of violence, which were both sites of deadly violence perpetrated by previous neoliberal governments. This final chapter evaluates the limits of passive revolution. It explores the diachronism and dissonance between the processes of social movement incorporation, state formation, capital accumulation, and the sociospatial dynamics of passive revolution. It highlights how, ultimately, the different structural, spatial, and temporal fixes to the crisis of the previous period destabilized and undermined one another on the plane of politics. In doing so, the chapter ties together the different threads of passive revolution and reveals the perpetual, contradictory, and contested character of processes of passive revolution. A BRIEF NOTE ON ETHICS AND METHODOLOGY Before we turn to the moment of catharsis in chapter 1, I want to briefly situate myself as a researcher. The country examined in the bulk of this study, Bolivia, is a good place to explore the politics of passive revolution 24

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and how capitalist peripheries are (re)produced. However, even leaving aside the seeming impossibility of conducting social science investigations in Bolivia, as Zavaleta ([1986] 2008, 9) noted long ago, doing research there raises several ethical challenges. After all, investigators are always inserted into social and spatial scales constructed through difference while doing research (Massey 1993). As a white, western male, I am endowed with historic privilege emanating from the colonial condition that forms part of my research. My positionality conferred legitimacy and power on me as a researcher (and by extension, on my research); coming from a university in London implied an insertion into social hierarchies through my apparent expertise. It also raised suspicion of my being “CIA,” which is unsurprising given the long histories of US intervention in Bolivia and Latin America more generally.12 As much was glaringly apparent when I was invited to speak and explain my research to a group of local activists at a political meeting soon after my arrival in Bolivia in January 2016. My companion, also a researcher and also studying Bolivia, but Brazilian, female, and not racialized as white, was not. My racialization as a white European of male gender and inserted into the patriarchal norms that structure Bolivian society shaped my entrance into spaces of social movements and governments, enabling my research in certain ways, and limiting it in others. I was permitted entry into union meetings and protests, treated as an “expert” and therefore given access by my interlocutors, but simultaneously viewed with trepidation (for the reasons outlined above) and thus nearly always kept at arm’s-length. This shaped my interactions with movements and political leaders, both enabling and limiting the access I was given (see also Werner 2016, 19). I have always been cognizant of the ethical dimensions of my research and the process of researching, hence my raising them here. Ethical issues crop up not just in the field, but as Sam Halvorsen (2018) has underscored, doing research in postcolonial contexts risks reproducing the colonial relations of extraction. Researchers operate in the mental space of (mainly western) academia, and the use of theoretical categories comes, some argue, with its own politics (Moore 2008). I have attempted to overcome these problems by publishing my work in Spanish in Bolivia and presenting my research findings, both at local academic events in Bolivia and by way of informal presentations to my interlocutors and their organizations. The research itself is drawn from seventeen months of participant observation and more than one hundred semi-structured interviews. My time in La Paz, El Alto, and Santa Cruz was spent marching, attending 25

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meetings, and talking to people in the street and in the marketplaces. The bulk of my research focused on four different types of urban working-class organizations: labor unions, neighborhood councils, market guilds, and transport unions. Having said that, I also interviewed state officials and politicians and participated in events, activities, and protests with sections of the highland Indigenous movement. Without really realizing it, walking was a central part of my research (see Castán Broto 2019), a way to get to grips with the social and spatial configurations of power at the heart of my study. However, this book is not simply an ethnography but an attempt to grapple with the dynamics of crisis and the politics of change. It thus draws from across different disciplinary boundaries—from anthropology to geography, politics, political economy, and sociology—to build the arguments outlined here.

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CHAPTER 1

BLACK OCTOBER Crisis, Catharsis, and Social Movement Insurgency

After the massacre in Warista, many different strands came together to form a larger resistance. It sparked the complete fury of the alteño population. For this reason, the people of El Alto self-organized into the mobilizations of October 2003.1 I remember that the first [person] killed [in Río Seco] was called Mamani . . . we saw him when “Bang!” . . . I saw the blood spouting and the only thing we had to stop the bleeding was a blanket. I remember that a neighbor from the ground floor grabbed a blanket, a colcha [bedspread] as they say in El Alto. And it was new, a new blanket, and I say this because she was crying. Everybody saw her and she was crying because she could not stop the bleeding.2 Many things happened here. In October 2003 we forced the government of Sánchez de Lozada from power. This city forced him to escape. Here, in this place, here below in the highway, there was a battle. Many dead. Let me see, 76 dead and more than 450 injured here.3

For two weeks in October 2003, a coalition of social movements turned the city of El Alto into a tool of social struggle. By digging ditches, building blockades, and coordinating citywide disruption of space, these movements laid siege to the seat of the Bolivian government, La Paz, eventually forcing President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada from office. The events here came to define the political landscape in Bolivia for the years that followed. It is difficult to adequately capture the events of October 2003 in words alone. As the quotations above demonstrate, it was a moment of resistance—a synchronism of long histories of anticolonial resistance and short histories of struggles against neoliberal capitalism 27

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(Hylton and Thomson 2007)—and extreme state violence. This violence was experienced in microcosms embodied in and exerted on (largely Indigenous) working-class and peasant bodies, and on the national scale through aggregate death tolls and the subsequent loss of legitimacy experienced by the government of Sánchez de Lozada (known colloquially as Goni). Goni’s hands were bloodied by the actions of his government and his military in what became known among alteños as octubre negro—Black October.4 Throughout this chapter, I argue that it is fruitful to analyze this period in Bolivian history as one of what Antonio Gramsci called “catharsis.” Localized pockets of resistance were able to join the dots between different causes and groups, challenging the hegemony of the neoliberal state across its different spatial scales, protesting against municipal tax and service charge hikes and national government policy privatizing natural resources. In doing so, these movements set the stage for what followed, paving the way for Evo Morales and his “government of social movements.” Interrogating the radicalization of social movements at the epicenter of Black October in the city of El Alto offers a unique lens through which to grapple with the social impacts of neoliberalism, the loss of political legitimacy around neoliberal policies, and the parties responsible for their implementation and the alternatives that were put forward in their place. SOCIAL MOVEMENT LINEAGES AND CATHARSIS IN BOLIVIA Bolivia is a country with a long history of insurrection, rebellion, and resistance, stretching back beyond the sieges against colonial power by Indigenous rebels Túpak Amaru, Túpak Katari, and his partner Bartolina Sisa during the Great Andean Civil War (1780–1782), a moment that is etched in the popular memory of both Indigenous peoples and the mestizo (mixed Indigenous and Spanish descent) elite.5 Since the arrival of the Spanish in the sixteenth century, there has been continual resistance against and subversion of colonial and later republican power by Indigenous communities, something that only becomes visible at the level of national politics in particular moments—such as those of the actions of Zarate “El Temible” Willka during the Federal War (1899) and the cycle of rural revolt in the 1940s. The labor movement and its main articulator, the Central Obrera Boliviana (Bolivian Workers’ Center, COB), played a vital role in the period following the 1952 National Revolution, although it was decimated by a full frontal attack by the state after the introduction of the New 28

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Economic Policy in 1985. For too long, accounts of Bolivian history downplayed or overlooked the agency of Indigenous people in shaping the country’s history, although Laura Gotkowitz (2007) went a long way in correcting this oversight for the 1952 revolution. 6 The COB was not the only important social force during the period of the National Revolutionary State (1952–1985), and the emergence of Katarismo during the late 1960s,7 as we shall see, would have effects that continued to shape social dynamics of protest at the turn of the twenty-first century. The highland and lowland Indigenous movements grew in importance from the late 1970s onward. The highland Katarista movement coalesced into the Confederación Sindical Única de los Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia (Trade Union Confederation of Bolivian Peasant Workers, CSUTCB) (see Van Cott 2005), which drew in different Indigenous groups from across the Altiplano and the valleys of Cochabamba (Rivera Cusicanqui 2003). It affiliated itself with the COB almost immediately after its inception, becoming a significant political movement on the national stage, with the cocalero (coca grower) movement forming its radical core in the face of increasing state persecution (García Linera, Chávez León, and Costas Monje 2004). However, the shift away from class as an axis of contestation under neoliberalism caused a crisis in the CSUTCB. Ethnicity became the new axis of contention and Indigenous movements started to move toward a more “authentic” indigeneity (Lucero 2009, 67). In this context, the Confederación Nacional de Ayllus y Markas del Qullasuyu (National Confederation of Ayllus and Markas of Qullasuyu, CONAMAQ) was formed in 1997. The lowland Indigenous movement had a slightly different trajectory, initially eschewing national politics in favor of a regional agenda. Formed in the 1980s, the Central Indígena del Oriente de Bolivia (Indigenous Confederation of Eastern Bolivia, CIDOB) broke onto the national stage through a series of marches in defense of Indigenous territory during the 1990s. CIDOB was successful in garnering international support and negotiating with neoliberal governments (Lucero 2009, 67). Although CIDOB and CONAMAQ consisted of marginal figures in the movements that brought Morales to power, they were an important feature of the landscape of social organizations nationally and would become key actors in the Morales years. And while the social organizations, the CSUTCB, and the COB appeared to lose their relevance during the neoliberal period, they were captured from below by the radicalizing forces explored in this chapter and proved capable of coordinating (rather than leading) intense protests against neoliberalism and the colonial state. 29

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The gradual degradation of living standards under neoliberalism caused poverty rates among the population to soar in the late 1990s, leading to widespread social discontent. This social crisis was coupled with a fiscal crisis of the Bolivia state, triggered by crises in Argentina and Brazil in the wake of the 1997 East Asian crisis (Webber 2012a, 143). These crises severely affected Bolivia, both because agribusiness in the eastern lowlands had attracted significant Brazilian investment and because Argentina and Brazil were the main export markets for Bolivian gas. Consequently, annual growth rates fell from 4.6 percent between 1993 and 1997 to below 2 percent between 1999 and 2001 (INE 2020). Low growth rates in the hydrocarbons sector, which made up roughly half of legal exports, compounded the disastrous effect of the privatization of the state hydrocarbons firm Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales de Bolivia (Bolivian State Petroleum Company, YPFB) in 1994, draining the state coffers.8 By the late 1990s, neoliberal reforms and the political parties that implemented them—namely, Acción Democrática Nacional (National Democratic Action, ADN), Movimiento Izquierda Revolucionario (Left Revolutionary Movement, MIR), and Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (Revolutionary Nationalist Movement, MNR)—had lost all semblance of legitimacy, and new social movements began to emerge. Urban and rural social movements increasingly started to push back against encroaching state and market forces through agrarian reform (Law INRA), the privatization of water, coca eradication, and timber laws. Violent struggles against the privatization of water in Cochabamba in April 2000 were the first skirmishes between strengthening social movements and the Bolivian state. These were quickly followed by struggles spearheaded by the CSUTCB in the rural provinces of La Paz and the cocaleros in the department of Cochabamba, who were confronted by violent coca eradication programs that formed part of the US-led war on drugs in the region. After almost three years of low-intensity rural mobilizations in the departments of La Paz by the CSUTCB and of Cochabamba by the cocaleros, it was the blockage of urban space in El Alto during October 2003 that proved to be decisive. Black October emerged from the local struggles against municipal tax legislation in El Alto, the CSUTCB struggles during September, and protests against the proposal to export Bolivian natural gas through Chilean seaports. The course of the events outlined below helped establish the Federación de las Juntas Vecinales El Alto (El Alto Federation of Neighborhood Councils, FEJUVE-El Alto) as a major social movement player in the country. Although the FEJUVE-El Alto was initially formed 30

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in the 1950s (García Linera, Chávez León, and Costas Monje 2004, 593), it became central to city life in El Alto during the city’s massive growth as an urban sprawl in the 1980s, helping newly arrived migrants to install themselves in recently created urbanizations and lobby the municipal authorities for drinking water, electricity, and transport services (Albó 2006). During the 1990s, it became stymied by clientelist networks, still central to community life in the city but not an organization of any political note (Lazar 2008). As we shall see, the course of events leading to Black October changed all this. In the run-up to Black October, the alteño population mobilized from mid-September onward, when the FEJUVE-El Alto initiated an indefinite blockade against the Maya and Paya (“one” and “two” in Aymara) municipal tax. The COB, already vocal supporters of the mobilizations, joined the fray with an indefinite strike at the end of September. Miners from the mining center Huanuni arrived in El Alto at the beginning of October to participate in the protests, which were by this time a daily occurrence. The arrival of the miners coincided with the third civic strike in El Alto. By the fourth day of the civic strike La Paz had effectively run out of gas, and the government issued a state of emergency. Simultaneously, downtown Cochabamba was shut down by a coalition of the urban social movements at the heart of the water struggles three years earlier and the cocaleros. The powder keg exploded on October 11, when the military tried to force a caravan of gas tankers through El Alto from the depot in Senkata to the La Paz-El Alto highway, leaving scores dead. State violence was undoubtedly a vital mobilizing factor during this period. Attacks on Aymara protesters in the town of Warisata (near Lake Titicaca) in mid-September left 5 dead (Iamamoto 2015, 116), and by the end of Black October, the Bolivian military had killed over 70 alteños (Andrade 2004). The killings mobilized massive social movements during Black October. Around 100,000 people marched to La Paz on October 13, and again on October 16. By this time marches and protests had emerged in solidarity across the country. President Sánchez de Lozada resigned on October 17, upon hearing that 58 trucks of miners were let through a military checkpoint at Patacamaya (some 100 kilometers from La Paz), with an estimated 400,000 people occupying the streets of La Paz (Dunkerley 2007a, 12). However, this violence was only the spark, and Black October must be viewed as a point of inflection within the wider period of turmoil, upheaval, and radical opportunity between 2000 and 2005. Black October was the apogee of what Gramsci calls “catharsis,” a moment of radical struggle from below and a crisis in state hegemony from above that 31

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triggers processes of passive revolution. Gramsci divides passive revolution into two stages—“catharsis” and “transformism”—to capture the dynamics contained in the restoration/revolution dialectic. Catharsis is the revolutionary opening from below, seen by Gramsci (Q10II§6, cited in Thomas 2009a, 263) as “the passage from ‘objective to subjective’ and from ‘necessity to freedom.’” In moments of catharsis, the collective horizons of social movements expand from a myopic defense of the status quo and individual or sectional interests (economic corporatism) to a radical envisioning of the transformation of the entire social formation and its attendant state form (the ethical-political). In this sense, Gramsci followed Marx’s preoccupation with “praxis” (which is partly why Gramsci labeled Marxism the “philosophy of praxis”), a concern present very early in Marx’s writings. In his critique of German philosophy (especially that of Georg Hegel), Marx writes: “The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism of the weapon, material force must be overthrown by material force, but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses. Theory can grip the masses as soon as it demonstrates ad hominem [to the person], and it demonstrates ad hominem as soon as it becomes radical. To be radical is to grasp the root of the matter. But, for human beings, the root is human beings themselves” (Marx 1977b, 137; emphasis added). Radicalism challenges the root of social phenomenon through social interaction with other humans. It appears only through material struggle; ergo, the jump from economic corporatism to the ethical-political always occurs through social struggle. Social struggle constructs the subject through acting collectively and expanding the boundaries of the possible, both in spatial terms, as revolutionary ideas spread through the subaltern population, and in ideological terms, as revolution begins to seem possible (Tapia 2011, 77). Catharsis thus captures a historical conjuncture when radical change appears possible. Moreover, it is in moments of catharsis that one can begin to identify the central features of postcolonial social formations that have been inserted into capitalism as peripheries. These social formations are characterized by abigarramiento, which roughly translates as heterogeneity but captures the persistence of various historical social relations and practices that have emerged over the five-hundred-year period of the colonial encounter. During crises, numerous social forces and their multiple temporalities come to share a common time: that of politics. In other words, in the absence of a hegemonic state and its “state time,” crisis provides synchronism through a shared political moment, which in turn unveils the complex and enigmatic social reality in places 32

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like Bolivia. The multitude of diverse, contradictory, and seemingly unconnected parts of the abigarrado whole suddenly appear in relation to one another, with the relationships between parts of society becoming visible and read through the particular form that the crisis assumes. After all, crisis is not preparation for what is to come but an accumulation of what has already come to pass, and it thus “not only reveals what is national in Bolivia, but that which is itself a nationalizing event” (Zavaleta [1983] 2013, 216). Therefore, the empirical story told in this book starts with the crisis of neoliberalism and the subsequent moment of catharsis, as it is precisely by examining catharsis that we can grapple with Bolivia’s social formation, the different social forces at play, and the character of the state and its institutions. FROM RADICAL POTENTIAL TO A REBEL CITY At the heart of Black October was the city of El Alto, a poor, largely Indigenous offshoot of La Paz. The nature of urban space in El Alto proved to be a decisive factor during the protests of 2003. El Alto, a product of the social transformations wrought on Bolivia by neoliberal reforms, grew from a handful of latifundia home to some 10,000 Indigenous peons at the time of the 1952 National Revolution, to a city of 848,000 according to the 2012 census (INE 2012). Although El Alto was initially a neighborhood of its contiguous twin, La Paz, it was awarded city status in 1988. This effectively concentrated the poverty of La Paz in the highly Indigenous city (Albó 2006, 331–32), leading the geographer Juan Arbona (2007, 128) to contend that El Alto was composed of “a large population of the (social and economic) outcasts of neoliberal policies.” Sitting at over 4,000 meters on the Altiplano, overlooking the city of La Paz, El Alto was self-constructed by ex-miners and newly proletarianized migrants from rural Indigenous communities. The manner of its construction left remnants of the processes of class formation and migration etched in urban space, with whole communities transplanted from their rural homes into an emergent urban sprawl. Although La Paz has a large population of Aymara, El Alto is the “Aymara capital” (Albó 2006, 334), with 74.2 percent of alteños over the age of fifteen self-identifying as Indigenous in the 2001 census (INE 2001). El Alto itself is divided approximately along ethnic lines, with the north of the city mainly Aymara campesinos and the South home to the city’s 6.4 percent Quechua population (as well as the relocated miners settled in the Santiago II neighborhood) (Sandóval and Sostres 1989, 35). According to the 2001 census, in El Alto, 77 percent of houses were built from adobe, only 54 percent of homes had access to running water, and 37 percent of households lacked access 33

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to basic services (INE 2001). Neoliberalism not only built El Alto, but it built in social inequalities and excluded the city’s largely Indigenous population. As we shall see, this proved to be explosive in the long weeks of Black October. El Alto is also a liminal space, sitting between the rural and the urban, with many residents during the 1990s and early 2000s regularly visiting their communities in the Altiplano (Rivera Cusicanqui 1996).9 As essentially one large marketplace, El Alto is where the rural economy meets the urban consumer, a vital nexus of exchange (Rivera Cusicanqui 1996; Seligmann 1989, 698–703). The cholo residents of El Alto are neither Indigenous nor criollo, and the city also straddles (and defies) the boundary between formal and informal space (Risør 2016, 337). And vitally, as Sue Iamamoto (2015, 130–31) stresses, El Alto “also mediates between the state and the rest of the country, the ‘nation.’ Therefore, El Alto not only raised the demands and expectations of Indigenous people in Bolivia, but it also—and more importantly—embodied one of the most rooted and unfulfilled promises of the Bolivian nation: socioeconomic development.” Migration flows under neoliberalism moved the site of Bolivia as a nation into an urban space, as the country’s predominant groups and classes came in swathes to cities including El Alto. Through its political and social dynamics, El Alto became a trope for the Bolivian nation itself, the place where national demands—the recuperation of hydrocarbons, natural resources, and sovereignty itself—were made (Prada Alcoreza 2003, 42–43). The city of El Alto is marked by a duality of space produced by self-construction that in turn produces urban space here as liminal space. While El Alto at the turn of the twenty-first century was a very poor city that lacked many basic services (as discussed above), this duality also caused El Alto to be a city with radical potential. Class struggle has the potential to intensify the contradictions between processes of social reproduction and production, disrupting the logic of capital accumulation. Moreover, liminality opens up space to “do something different” (Harvey 2012, xvii), a “position that fosters human agency” (Iamamoto 2015, 130). Iamamoto (130) has already noted how chola market women disrupt predominant gender stereotypes in Bolivia and alteños are known for their strong, no-nonsense attitude. This “doing something different” can be a small subversion of daily practices, tiny changes that are not immediately obvious and are often buried under the weight of social necessity in a poor, marginalized city. This is part of the reason that Sian Lazar (2008) missed the radical potential of El Alto in her ethnography of the city at the turn of the century, when the rich 34

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social fabric and practices contained in the everyday lives of the working classes in El Alto formed the basis of social movements that took advantage of the emerging crisis of the state. It also helps explain why radical spaces were hidden among the hopelessness captured by Lesley Gill’s (2000) ethnography of the city during the 1990s, and how radical ideas spread through socioeconomic and ethnic cleavages. This radicalization occurred through daily practices, interactions, and exchanges and through moments where class struggle and the crisis of the state exploded and became visible for all to see. LINKING THE LIVED EXPERIENCE OF CLASS WITH NEOLIBERALISM One of the contributing factors leading to Black October was the role played by struggles against the declining quality of life—which included struggles for rights to education and against increased taxes, and feelings of frustration directed at representatives of neoliberalism—in revealing the connection between systemic processes and the lived experience of class. These localized struggles allowed activists to connect the dots and shifted social movement activity from corporate demands to broader critiques of neoliberalism and the Republican State; that is to say, to an ethical-political condition. Toward the end of the millennium, after years of being abandoned by the state and enduring the harsh day-to-day realities of life in El Alto, residents began organizing to demand an autonomous university. Education was seen as a way out of poverty for many, and parents worked hard to send their children to university (Albó 2006, 340). By the late 1990s, the lack of university places available for alteños at the local state Universidad Mayor de San Andrés (Higher University of San Andrés, UMSA) in La Paz provoked a reaction from the city’s youth, who demanded educational opportunities. The government began to discuss establishing a university in the city, while students and professors started organizing courses independently, with reportedly tens of thousands of students registering for a public university in El Alto (Lazar 2008, 52). In May 2000, a group of students occupied the technical annex of UMSA in Villa Esperanza; in response, the government announced the formation of the Universidad Pública de El Alto (Public University of El Alto, UPEA), which was granted autonomous status in 2003. The formation of UPEA was a sign that a change was underway in El Alto. Abraham Mansilla, a student leader at the time, argues, “UPEA is a product of racial exclusion from the public university [UMSA].”10 As the formation of the UPEA shows, by the time the cycle of protests had started across 35

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Bolivia in the year 2000, alteños were already drawing connections between quotidian experiences of poverty, exclusion, and class, and wider historical dynamics of the Bolivian state. In February 2003, the cycle of protest notched up a gear when the Sánchez de Lozada government announced that the International Monetary Fund had dictated a 12.5 percent increase of tax on monthly salaries of more than USD 110 (Hylton and Thomson 2007, 108; Mamani 2005, 42). On February 12, the police’s Special Group marched peacefully on the presidential palace, only to be met by state violence administered by the military police, which killed 34 people and injured another 205 (Schultz 2005, 29). High school students, university students from UPEA, the formal and informal working classes, and residents of the cities of El Alto and La Paz took to the streets and, taking advantage of the lack of police presence, attacked symbols of neoliberalism: the headquarters of the three main neoliberal parties (MNR, MIR, and ADN), supermarkets, ATMs, the water company Aguas de Illimani, BancoSol, and the mayor’s office (Hylton 2003; Patzi 2003, 233). For some (e.g., Farthing and Kohl 2006, 86–87; Lazar 2006, 196), this was random looting and rioting. However, the impuestazo (big tax protest) cannot be understood outside the context of the worsening material conditions of the working classes in already impoverished cities, the decline in legitimacy of the neoliberal model and its associated political parties, and the increased political radicalism accumulated over the previous three years of struggle.11 Although spontaneous and unorganized, these protests represented the direct reaction of the population to increasingly visible injustices, as many of my interviewees stressed.12 The anti-neoliberal facet of these protests was confirmed the following day when protesters took over the bottling plants of Coca-Cola and Pepsi in El Alto (Hylton 2003). By February 18, Sánchez de Lozada had restored order, repealed the tax, and replaced his cabinet, but not before the erosion of state legitimacy had been laid bare for all to see (Hylton and Thomson 2005, 53). The impuestazo revealed both the weakness of the state at this moment and the historic injustice faced by the people of El Alto. Neoliberalism had forced an increasing number of Bolivians into cities, and massive processes of proletarianization made precarious forms of wage labor the modus operandi for survival as peasants moved off the land and into the cities. In this context, activists began coupling the decreasing quality of everyday life and regressive taxation imposed upon the general population with neoliberalism. Simultaneously, the struggles around social reproduction gradually became politicized, as dependence on the market 36

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for basic goods and services tied worsening social conditions to government reforms. These connections became evermore evident during September 2003, when El Alto’s mayor, José Luis Paredes, proposed the Maya and Paya legislation, designed to increase municipal taxes on building and home construction. The FEJUVE-El Alto and the Central Obrero Regional de El Alto (Regional Workers’ Center-El Alto, COR-El Alto) led a civic strike in El Alto in protest, blocking streets in all nine districts of the city (Webber 2012a, 206). A second, indefinite strike was called for September 15, forcing the mayor to cancel the initiative, but not before the city had been set in motion and the horizons of protesters had moved beyond the specific issue of Maya and Paya (Iamamoto 2015, 113). The protests against the Maya and Paya were linked to social inequality by the growing popular consciousness of alteños, who saw the municipal taxes as an attempt to “collect more money at the expense of the people.”13 The poverty of state provision of service in the city at the time led alteños to view taxes as a drain on people’s resources. Jorge Villca, a leader in the FEJUVE-El Alto in 2016, points to the possible rise in taxes as a key moment in the run-up to October 2003: “The problem with these Maya and Paya taxes proposed by Pepe Lucho [José Luis Paredes] . . . was [that] the tax charged citizens a lot of money to raise municipal resources. [The municipal government] had already taken from the pocket of the people, from poor people who have no money, who did not have any work because during this time it was very difficult to find employment. Our country’s exports were completely dead, we could not export anything, we could not consolidate [the economy].”14 Jorge Villca’s account is indicative of the ways in which increasing numbers of alteños connected the proposed Maya and Paya taxes with the rising inequality—and the broader political economic context more generally—that had become more and more visible during the previous two decades in El Alto. During this period, alteños perceived taxes as paid by the poor to aid the rich, not vice versa. For alteño activists, the class component of neoliberalism as a project to restore bourgeois power was revealed through its inability to promote the promised economic growth and neoliberal governments’s unwillingness to tax multinational businesses over the ordinary people of El Alto. DEMOCRACY AND CLIENTELISM IN EL ALTO One of the important features of the crisis of the state in El Alto during 2003, and a central reason that it played out over the terrain of civil society rather than the state, was the deficiency in Bolivian liberal democra37

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cy and its incapacity to offer a solution to the unfolding crisis. The weakness of liberal democracy in Bolivia is, in part, due to the difficulty of rendering sociedades abigarradas as a homogeneous group of individuals able to be represented by an elected official, and in part due to the related historic weakness of the Republican State that emerged from the colonial period (see Zavaleta 2008). Bolivian democracy during the country’s neoliberal period was characterized by governments cobbled together through negotiations among the three major parties behind closed doors. This created a representative system in which “the political parties had become predominantly electoral machines and, when successful, administrators of state reforms with an international character. As a result, parties ceased to be a space for the elaboration of the political projects at the heart of civil society” (Tapia 2011, 146).15 This reduced political action to the ballot box and transformed citizens into voters to be bought in a political marketplace. The relationship between political parties and citizens became one characterized by clientelism—unequal political exchanges between a patron and multiple clients—as political parties offered visible economic resources in exchange for less visible political goods (i.e., votes) (Quisbert 2003, 13). This form of political reciprocity was further embedded in El Alto by the Aymara practices of ayni and mink’a. Ayni involves the distribution of communal labor through a system of the direct return of favors—help from ten people for a day’s work building a wall in exchange for ten days’ labor helping others in the community build a wall (Quispe 1988; cited in Gutiérrez 2008, 103). Mink’a is the demonstration of solidarity with the community through collaboration on communal projects. Both ayni and mink’a have been important in the selfconstruction of zones (manzanos), basic services, streets, health centers, and homes, enabling migrants to settle in El Alto despite (or because of) the absence of the state (Linsalata 2010, 46). On the one hand, while displays of genuine ayni were common in El Alto during festivals and in everyday encounters, especially among newer migrants, the practice was also subsumed into a hierarchical political culture of exclusion and domination whereby citizens, engaging in political reciprocity, were offered economic gains in return for their vote (Quisbert 2003, 31). On the other hand, mink’a contributed to regarding leadership positions as an individual’s turn to reap the rewards of the community’s shared labor (and wealth). During neoliberalism, the champion of these forms of political relationships in El Alto was the TV personality Carlos Palenque, leader of the Conciencia de Patria (Conscience of the Fatherland, CONDEPA) 38

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party (Lazar 2008). Palenque operated a form of populism in El Alto that explicitly recognized the reciprocity and solidarity of ayni and mink’a (although in distorted forms) as parts of Andean culture to be celebrated (Quisbert 2003, 51). CONDEPA acted as a valve to release discontent toward the unrepresentative nature of the neoliberal political parties that built up in El Alto.16 Through constructing personal relationships with the leaders of social organizations—including the market vendors’ guilds (gremios), the COR-El Alto, and the FEJUVE-El Alto—the CONDEPA was able to dominate politics in El Alto throughout the 1990s until Palenque’s death in March 1997 (Quisbert 2003, 51–55). Without his charisma, the CONDEPA was unable to maintain unity and political power and had lost its hold over social organizations by 1999 (Lazar 2008, 258). The loss of Palenque left a political vacuum in El Alto, which the traditional political parties proved unable to fill. By the time of the 1997 elections, the three main parties had become ideologically indistinguishable, all wed to the neoliberal reforms set in motion more than a decade earlier, and differentiable only by their contrasting pragmatic relations and cultural or symbolic characteristics (Quisbert 2003, 50). Thus, as the economic crisis began to intensify in the late 1990s, these parties had no answer to increasing discontent except the deepening of neoliberalism itself, which proved unpopular in the context of growing political radicalism in El Alto at the time. ELIMINATING CLIENTELISM During the economic and political crisis that swept Bolivia during the late 1990s the working-class bases of alteño social organizations—the COR-El Alto and, vitally, the FEJUVE-El Alto—turned against leaders who cultivated clientelist relationships with these parties, giving space for a new generation of leaders who emerged from the radicalizing rankand-file alteños. The embryonic emergence of this rupture with the old order can be seen in the protests demanding the formation of UPEA from May 2000 onward, a struggle that would come to play a significant role in breaking with the old generations of leaders.17 The UPEA students were able to maintain their autonomy from political parties and other social organizations even as the movement fractured. For Sian Lazar (2008, 20), who was teaching at the university at the time, this movement (like many others) was riven with factionalism. However, these were not warring factions of different political parties, but struggles for power between the old leadership attempting to maintain its weakening grip on clientelist networks and a new generation of leaders not yet integrated into such relations. Abraham Mansilla argues: “There was a 39

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new generation that was not political [not linked to political parties] . . . that took the directive and defeated the old leaders. . . . The first phase of the struggle that conquered the university broke into two factions, an extremely pro-government faction and an antisystemic faction . . . and this [antisystemic] movement of the students defeated the [pro-government] leaders and expelled them for good from UPEA.”18 Mansilla underscores how at this moment local leaders were divided between those wedded to existing forms of clientelism and a more radical current, his comments illustrating the breaks that were happening within struggles more broadly in El Alto during the period after the fall of CONDEPA. The autonomy from political parties—leaders who “had not yet been politicized” in Mansilla’s words—allowed a new generation of radical leaders to take control of the UPEA student movement and push toward an antisystemic agenda.19 The rejection of leaders integrated into the old clientelist networks intensified in the period running up to 2003, with part of the disorder and anger displayed toward symbols of neoliberal power during 2003 being a reaction to the stifling effects of clientelism on politics in the city. When speaking about the impuestazo, the FEJUVE-El Alto leader Lucho Zapata stressed the containment of the discontent in El Alto by the old leadership of social organizations in the prior period, and how the people broke out in February 2003: “The people were furious because of everything that was happening, and that was because there was too much corruption [prebendalismo] in certain sectors.20 In order to be politically dominant, the anger [of the pueblo alteño] was contained for a long time [by the old leadership], and [then] it leaped, and we all broke away but we did not know how to control it.”21 For Zapata, February 2003 was the first moment when the working classes were freed of the old system of political bribes (prebendalismo) that had stymied independent political actions during the previous decade or so, but there was no organizational capacity to direct and sustain mobilizations when they emerged. Luis Flores also argues that the break with clientelism and the old leadership was important in the positioning of the FEJUVE-El Alto as an organization capable of fomenting and sustaining class struggle during October 2003: “We had come [to the leadership] to ask for work, not pegas [political favors]. This is how we spoke, we did not want [clientelism] . . . we came to make the FEJUVE . . . transparent. This time the authorities did not trample upon us, we did not let them . . . they were not going to offer us anything, not pegas or prebendas [political bribes]. This was going to be a healthy FEJUVE, and it was going to be healthy until our last day in office.”22 40

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In the face of the climate of clientelist relationships between different factions of the FEJUVE-El Alto and the political parties of the Movement for Socialism (MAS) and Unidad Nacional (National Unity, UN) in which I interviewed Flores in 2016, the cohort of the FEJUVE-El Alto 2003 was always going to stress its independence from political parties. Indeed, one of the foundational pillars of the neighborhood councils is their civic rather than political status, and their statute ostensibly prohibits alliances with political parties, although this is rarely the case in practice. However, there is enough evidence—from both firsthand accounts and commentary on the events of Black October—that suggests the FEJUVE-El Alto did attain a greater degree of political autonomy during this period and had largely managed to free itself from poisonous clientelist relationships that had hampered its ability to be a political representative of the alteño population. This was important as the FEJUVE-El Alto, more than leading or galvanizing the protests, coordinated them. Instead of stifling radicalism, it allowed the rank and file to assume control of the organization from below in October 2003.23 GAS, NATIONALISM, AND MEMORIES OF THE WAR OF THE PACIFIC Growing political consciousness visible in moments of struggle against proposed tax hikes connected the everyday class practices with macro processes, but this alone was insufficient to produce the cross-sector alliances seen in 2003 (see Webber 2012a, 233). While symbolically important, previous protests over water in Cochabamba and the blockades across the rural Altiplano between 2000 and 2003 did not affect the political economy of the country as a whole. However, the politicization of the issue of exporting gas to Mexico through Chilean seaports placed the political economy of neoliberalism at the heart of protests challenging the material basis of the neoliberal state (Spronk and Webber 2007). The political scientists Susan Spronk and Jeffery Webber (2007, 40) contend that because of the salience of natural gas in industrial production—and in turn, its importance to the capitalist global market and the Bolivian state—political struggles around natural gas were able to build alliances between class fractions and across classes, in this case between the peasantry and the urban working classes. Black October was framed through the historic injustice of the loss of the Bolivian seacoast during an “illegal” war with Chile (the War of the Pacific 1879–1883), helping unify protestors through demands for the nationalization of gas for the good of the Bolivian nation.24 According to the Centro de Estudios para el Desarrollo Laboral y Agrario (Center for Latin American Research 41

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and Documentation, CEDLA) economist Carlos Arze, the plan was to allow the sale of gas at approximately USD 0.18 per thousand cubic feet, a twentieth of the price of USD 3.50–USD 4.00 commanded in California (cited in Dangl 2007, 121). Bolivia was only to profit from the measly tax income recouped at the first stage of the process, leaving many Bolivians feeling that historic injustices were repeating themselves. As the comments of Carlos Rojas, a leader of the 2003 FEJUVE-El Alto, illustrate, the issue of national gas managed to capture the indignation felt by the subaltern classes (both rural and urban) in Bolivia at the time: “They told us that from the moment the petroleum left the wellhead we were no longer its owners. The transnational companies were absolute owners and we were only owners of the resource in the ground. All of this combined at different levels, starting the discussion [about natural resources].”25 The exportation of natural gas through Chilean seaports was considered symptomatic of the historic injustices faced by the Bolivian people, which included: the loss of natural resources to foreign imperial/colonial powers; Chile industrializing (again) at the expense of Bolivia; and the unequal distribution of the country’s resources between different strata of the Bolivian society (Iamamoto 2015, 115). In October 2003, the head of the COR-El Alto stated that “gas will be the mother of all battles, if the gringo government insists on selling off our hydrocarbons at the price of a dead chicken,” and Evo Morales said, “If Goni decides to give gas away to Chile this government will not last 24 hours. We are going to strike and blockade until we recover the gas” (both cited in Webber 2012a, 215). It is thus no surprise that this became the major frame of the protests in 2003, or that local protest against taxation, once synchronized with these broader concerns, could not be stopped at the local level. Activists in this scenario swiftly moved from a conjunctural analysis of events to structural explanations through these struggles, as Carlos Barrera, another FEJUVE-El Alto leader in 2003, explains: “In the end, we understood that the problem is not a conjunctural but structural problem, that [neoliberalism] is causing a profound structural change. So, before 2003, there were big mobilizations such as the Water War in Cochabamba, el Mallku [Felipe Quispe and the CSUTCB in the Altiplano], etc., but all of these mobilizations were sectoral.”26 In short, protest against municipal taxation revealed the relationship between the increasingly acute crisis of neoliberalism and its effects on social reproduction. Simultaneously, the breakdown of the legitimacy of neoliberal political parties created a political vacuum in the city and broke all the old patronage networks, freeing the FEJUVE-El Alto from the clientelism that had stymied independent radical politics for years, 42

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and it became radicalized from below. However, it was demands around the nationalization of gas that built a broad Left–Indigenous alliance and made the movement take flight and challenge the legitimacy of state power itself. Together, these are the different dynamics that transformed El Alto, with its radical potential, into a rebel city. To fold these contentions back into the general argument of the book, following the ebbs and flows of social movement activity in Bolivia through the course of the revolutionary cycle (2000–2005) offers a finegrained account of how a moment of catharsis developed. The mobilizing frame of the nationalization of gas was the final piece in the puzzle that enabled protestors to move toward definite political action that struck at the very heart of neoliberalism. This is the radical potential present at the peripheries of capitalism and it highlights the ways this potential can threaten the conditions that facilitate either the extraction of natural resources required for capitalist production (which is the case in Bolivia) or alternatively the construction of labor subjectivities that form part of the international division of labor. Now I want to explore how catharsis plays out in this context and the role of class struggle in producing and contesting space. THE FEJUVE-EL ALTO AND SPATIAL REPERTOIRES OF STRUGGLE Black October represented a moment of mass political action during which the neighborhoods across El Alto were shut down by barricades, and decisions were made in some five hundred communal assemblies across the city (Mamani 2006, 277). These communal assemblies were spaces of democracy outside of the state, which was prevented from entering neighborhoods both physically by roadblocks and symbolically by public discussions and displays of direct democracy that subverted its representative cousin. Pablo Mamani (2005), an alteño activist present at the heart of these moments, calls these new political units microgobiernos barriales (neighborhood micro governments). The rich social fabric of El Alto, forged through migration patterns (mass migration of people from particular regions of Bolivia to the same neighborhoods of El Alto), family relations, shared work efforts and materials, and the high levels of social need, formed the basis for these microgobiernos (Mamani 2005, 10). This dense social fabric was strengthened to differing degrees across the city through daily interpersonal relations that characterize life in El Alto, and the collective struggles for social survival, construction of public works (e.g., schools, plazas, health-care centers, paving of roads, installation of electricity and water), and periodic festivals. 43

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By October 2003, Mamani (2006, 277) argues, such was the intensification of these social relationships among the alteño population that not even the FEJUVE-El Alto or COR-El Alto could exert themselves across the city. Many commentators—including Mamani (2005, 107–9)—have stressed the importance of ayni urbano at this moment, pointing to symbolic moments when alteños emphasized their Aymara culture through speaking the language, chewing coca, waving the checkered rainbow (the wiphala, the Indigenous flag), communal meals known as apthapis and blessings called ch’allas.27 While I do not deny the importance of the indigeneity of the alteños in reproducing struggle, I would also like to underscore the material channels through which ayni operated, namely, the preexisting structure (operating with a great degree of autonomy) of the neighborhood councils within the larger citywide structure of the FEJUVE-El Alto. While the radicalism of October 2003 originated from the rank and file, the organizational structures of the FEJUVE-El Alto were vital to sustaining and amplifying the protests. During this moment, neighbors used effective methods of social control, borrowed from the meetings of neighborhood councils, and the attendance lists for each manzano were used to ensure solidarity (Mamani 2005, 71).28 Neighbors would also pass door to door along the street, marking the doors of families who had not sent a representative to participate in local meetings and barricades with white crosses. This was also a moment when the FEJUVE-El Alto was able to respond to the demands of the bases and structure a response by passing coordinated instructions for actions via youths on bicycles and on foot, the radio, and, occasionally, conversations with district leaders on mobile phones (Mamani 2005, 119). Marco Llanos, a local youth activist in 2003, highlights the transparency of the FEJUVE-El Alto at this moment, when decisions made at the local level of zones were passed up to the FEJUVE leadership via the nine district directives, with coordinated responses passed down the other way via the same channels.29 This enabled strategically organized and coordinated struggle to be sustained over the entire city. The spatial tactics of struggle employed during Black October are hardly surprising given the FEJUVE-El Alto’s role in constructing the city. The main avenues and streets were dug up, with trenches and ditches making the city impassable. Stones, cans, adobe bricks, and bottles were used to build blockades (Mamani 2005, 89–90, 108). Neighbors set up checkpoints to exert control over territories and prevent the military and the police from entering neighborhoods. Footbridges were toppled to block the road, and railway carriages were heaved off the bridge over 44

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the La Paz-El Alto highway to divide the two cities in dramatic fashion (García Linera, Chávez León, and Costas Monje 2004, 614). The flashpoints during the struggles in El Alto during October 2003 were strategic locations within the space of the city: Río Seco, Senkata, and La Ceja. Río Seco is the location of the one bridge that crosses the river, over which all vehicles coming along the Copacabana highway (the road from Lake Titicaca and the northern Altiplano) must pass. Senkata is home to the gas depository and is the place from which gas going to La Paz from El Alto starts its journey. Finally, La Ceja is the vibrant commercial and symbolic center (as opposed to the geographic center) of El Alto. It is where the leader of the 1781 Indigenous insurrection, Túpak Katari, and his followers are supposed to have camped during the siege of La Paz, home to swathes of street vendors, and the end of the main highway to La Paz. These three locations were vital in the battles of Black October, the epicenters of state violence perpetrated by the military, and the places that witnessed the most deaths. Unsurprisingly, given the inequality traced into neoliberal space, there were radical areas within the protests and some conservative zones. As well as District 4 (near Río Seco) and District 5 (Senkata), the underserviced outer districts (particularly Districts 7 and 8) proved the best organized and most receptive to radical ideas (García Linera, Chávez León, and Costas Monje 2004, 615).30 Interestingly, the radicalism of the struggles in 2003 was so uneven across the city that antirevolutionary districts also organized vigilante squads to protect the zone from their “disorderly” neighbors.31 The ways in which processes of class formation were traced in space during the 1990s created pockets of the middle classes in El Alto who disapproved of the disruption caused by the protests and the disorder of their unruly neighbors. They barricaded themselves in their manzanos and emerged only after the drama had played out. These zones highlight the importance of the traces of inequality in space during this protest, and the uneven ways that Black October unfolded, despite the insistence of some alteños almost fifteen years later that the city arose as one.32 Black October was the culmination of historical dynamics that started decades before. The economic crisis of the late 1990s stripped the neoliberal economic model and the traditional political parties of their legitimacy. Amid deteriorating living conditions, the experience of class led to the accumulation of a critical class consciousness, which started becoming visible during the protests against tax hikes. The old clientelist networks disintegrated in the face of a political crisis, allowing the FEJUVE-El Alto to become an infrastructure of class struggle. Residents 45

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coordinated through neighborhood councils used spatial repertoires of struggle accumulated via the self-construction of the city to lay siege to the city of La Paz, galvanizing a political crisis that abated only after President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada had left the country. Here residents were able to reforge peripheral space into their repertoires of struggle, showing the radical potential of abigarramiento. OUT OF THE SHADOWS, INTO THE LIGHT This chapter addressed the social movements of Black October, the zenith of the cycle of social movement struggle (2000–2005) in Bolivia, with the aim of shedding light on how moments of catharsis emerge out of crisis. My goal was not to offer a set of prescriptions to be mechanically applied, but to explore how the move from corporatism to definite political action occurred in a particular historical moment, to trace the emergence of social movements strong enough to topple governments, and to understand the importance of their central demand, the nationalization of gas. This, I argue, is central to understanding the emergence of a moment of catharsis that placed the hegemony of neoliberalism and the Bolivian state in question and to understanding the political period that followed, which forms the core of the analysis in this book. In this chapter, I sought to answer the question of why the FEJUVEEl Alto became the infrastructure of class struggle at the heart of the actions in October 2003. I traced the growing radicalism of alteños through the creation of the public university, UPEA, the impuestazo of February 2003, and the fights against the implementation of the municipal taxes maya and paya, arguing that in these moments, alteños connected the deterioration of the quality of their everyday lives to the broader deleterious effects of neoliberalism. However, these struggles were still unorganized and needed a social organization to coordinate them. The FEJUVE-El Alto provided this infrastructure, having been freed of clientelist relations following the death of Carlos Palenque in 1997 and the crisis of political parties in the city, assisted by a new generation of leaders formed through struggle. The result of these interconnected processes, I argue, was an organization that could sustain citywide protests for over two weeks and topple a government using spatial repertoires of struggle drawn from its role as a territorial organization involved in the (self-)organization and construction of the city. These social movements put a stake through the heart of neoliberalism, with alternative political forms and political economic visions of how the world could look emerging from these struggles. In this sense, Bolivia found itself at the apex of debates over post-neoliberalism, alter46

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natives to development, and legal pluralisms, among other issues. While the theoretical axes of these debates were diverse, they confirmed that the peripheral forms forged under neoliberalism were no longer politically feasible. Social movements pointed to the need for new sociospatial configurations of power and they were by no means short of possible alternatives. But what happened to these behemoths of social movements once Morales assumed power? It is to this question that we now turn.

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CHAPTER 2

BUILDING THE GOVERNMENT OF SOCIAL MOVEMENTS Transformism under the MAS

During recent times, comrades [compañeros], we have been converted from the protagonists of the proceso de cambio [process of change] into its benefactors.1 We are waiting to see what is going to benefit us, to see which public works Evo is going to do for us. And we are still waiting/hoping [esperando], but this revolution will happen only when we mobilize ourselves to transform the country. . . . The state is performing its function, but other than that, the other fundamental wheels that need to turn are the social movements, and they have stopped participating.2

These words were among the opening remarks at the Movement for Socialism (MAS)–organized School of Political Formation (SPF) in El Alto, held in the latter half of 2016 and discussed further below. The sentiments expressed in this quotation illustrate the challenges faced by social movements under the MAS government and point to a demobilization of social movements across the country, a fragmentation of the social forces outlined in chapter 1. The radicalism of the cycle of social movements between 2000 and 2005 was always going to cast a long profile over future generations, but, as the opening quotation suggests, after the MAS’s decade in power, social movements were a shadow of their former selves. One of the central reasons I have framed the story told in this book in terms of “passive revolution” is because it offers a powerful theoretical lens through which to examine social movement incorporation and 48

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demobilization. Passive revolution captures political situations in which the disorganized masses of the subaltern classes are unable to capitalize on the crumbling of state power because they do not possess the capacity to project a centralized unity to replace the state (Thomas 2009b, 222). It addresses a moment of impasse when the dominant social forces can retain their position only through coercive force (Gramsci 2011c, 211, Q7§80), a moment of “catastrophic equilibrium” when, in Antonio Gramsci’s (2011a, 32, Q3§34) famous formulation, “the old is dying and the new cannot be born.” Gramsci labels these moments “organic crises” that cannot be contained by the levees of the political terrain and engulf the entire state structure, transferring confidence and trust from political to civil society institutions, which are normally insulated from the vicissitudes of the turbulent political climate. This “places the very foundations of bourgeois hegemony in doubt,” forcing a response from the state on both political and civil society (Thomas 2009b, 147). In this moment of impasse, the state absorbs the challenge mounted from below by the subaltern classes, “consolidating [the] state apparatus and its ‘representative’ organs in civil society” (Thomas 2009b, 151). Gramsci (2011c, 257, Q8§36) labels this process “transformism,” consisting of an initial “molecular” transformation as individual political figures are absorbed into the dominant classes, followed by a quantitative shift whereby entire subaltern groups are subverted and absorbed. The incorporation of social movements into the state and their subsequent demobilization captured by transformism is precisely what the opening remarks at the SPF address. The social movements so decisive in carrying Evo Morales to power had been, I initially thought, completely pacified. However, as a closer examination of the SPF reveals, the transformations of social movements over this period are multidimensional and not as straightforward as my first impressions had suggested. Before the first session of the SPF, I had made my way through the warren-like maze of passages that form the market in La Ceja at the heart of El Alto to the white cholet where the SPF was held filled with a sense of excitement and curiosity.3 It was June 2016, and I had already been doing fieldwork in La Paz and El Alto for almost six months. At first, it had appeared that social movements were divided neatly along party political lines and that the critical effervescence of the period 2000–2005 (analyzed in chapter 1) had evaporated. However, the SPF was a window into a world beyond the veil, a chance to see the inner workings of state–social movement relations in a city known across the country as a rebel city because of its radical social movement tradition. The SPF was an initiative to engage with the party’s rank-and-file 49

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supporters and affiliated social movements in El Alto in the wake of the February 2016 referendum defeat (21F) over the reelection of Morales for a fourth presidential term (Cambio 2017).4 I assumed my seat among the sea of plastic garden furniture on the third floor of the cholet, clutching my bag of coca, acutely aware of my positionality as a white, western researcher in a room full of largely Aymara working-class activists. What followed did not disappoint, and it challenged my preconceived notions about MAS-aligned social movements and their role in the government of Evo Morales. MAS activists who participated in the SPF were not passively co-opted from above, nor did they simply parrot or even accept the party line uncritically. The SPF revealed the incomplete and ongoing nature of transformism, its ebbs and flows, and the contradictions and struggles between the dynamics of social movements and the inertia of state logic. Examining the minutiae of social movement incorporation through the SPF thus not only offers an empirical exploration of social movement incorporation in Bolivia but also a theoretical evaluation of the passive element of passive revolution, highlighting the salience of viewing passive revolution not as an absolutist description or end goal, but as an ongoing process where “passivity predominates” (Modonesi 2019, 93; emphasis in the original). THE DYNAMICS OF TRANSFORMISM AND SOCIAL MOVEMENT INCORPORATION, 2006–2009 The social movements—both rural and urban—that had been radicalized and accumulated political consciousness during the previous period turned out in massive numbers to vote for the MAS, with their votes helping to carry Evo Morales to the presidential palace in 2006. Following the radical protests of 2000–2005, social movements were able to force the MAS to incorporate a wide range of actors and demands into its political project through a “segmented popular interest intermediation regime” (Silva 2018, 312). The fragmented social forms produced by neoliberalism meant that social movements had also fragmented and fractured, and needed new modalities of social movement incorporation capable of “differentially articulat[ing] heterogeneous popular sector social groups and their interests to the political arena” (Silva 2015, 92; emphasis in the original). As well as more traditional forms of incorporation such as clientelism (the trading of votes for state funds), these segmented regimes included new forms of incorporation, “state managerialism” and “informal contestation” (discussed below). From 2006 to 2009, social movements were incorporated through MAS “state mana50

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gerialism,” with the MAS government recognizing popular sector demands and formulating technocratic policy responses without the input of affected sectors. This meant that during this period, the six largest of the thirty or so movements that composed the political instrument of the MAS—the campesino/Indigenous organizations, the Trade Union Confederation of Bolivian Peasant Workers (CSUTCB), the colonizadores, the cocaleros of the Chapare, the Bartolina Sisa, and the Ponchos Rojos (Red Ponchos, Aymara activists from Lake Titicaca region), as well as the El Alto Regional Workers’ Central (COR-El Alto)—had the president’s ear on a wide range of policy issues (La Razón 2008t). Their demands shaped the initial agenda of the MAS government. During the first four years of the MAS government, there were, I contend, three dimensions to the incorporation of social movements into the state through state managerialism. First, the integration of individual social movement leaders into the government administration was an important facet of the MAS government. Following his election, Morales met with the heads of all the MAS-aligned social movements and, in an attempt to mediate and offer representation to the different interests of what is undoubtedly a broad church, offered a quota of positions within the government—known as pegas—to each social movement (do Alto and Stefanoni 2010, 330–32).5 This formed a pillar of the MAS’s interpretation of one of its central concepts—“decolonization” of the state— which they understood as giving voice to the historically oppressed: Already with the election of Evo Morales, historically excluded sectors became the new actors making political decisions in this country thanks to the importance of social movements . . . that represent the large majority of a people that have been historically marginalized. Here we have [the Indigenous organizations from the Altiplano] Túpak Katari and Bartolina Sisa, FENCOMIN [cooperative miners’ federation], the cocaleros [coca growers], the colonizers (who are now known as the interculturals).6 This is a coalition of social movements that represent these sectors, these social classes that had been “under the table” [bajo la mesa] and forms a part of what we understand as a process of decolonization.7

The MAS offered high-ranking positions within the government and state administration to government supporters from within movements, giving movements power to implement their demands as government policy (Espinoza 2015, 129). Ten out of sixteen ministers of Morales’s first ministerial cabinet were drawn from social movements, including the Bolivian Workers’ Central (COB), the El Alto Federation of Neighborhood Councils (FEJUVE-El Alto), the Federación Nacional 51

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de Cooperativas Mineras (National Federation of Cooperative Miners, FENCOMIN), the domestic workers’ union and Indigenous sectors (Espinoza 2015, 133). Many more social movement actors were drafted into the mid-level state bureaucracy, with the size of the state administration ballooning under Morales, from 38,000 public functionaries in 2001 to over 297,000 in 2013 (Soruco, Franco, and Durán 2014, 40). In their study of three MAS government departments within the plurinational bureaucracy, Ximena Soruco, Daniela Franco, and Mariela Durán (2014) find that an increasing number of state functionaries were women, Indigenous people, or people drawn from the popular classes. Moreover, their study highlights the appearance, on a massive scale, of functionaries drawn from social movements (37 percent of their total sample) (Soruco, Franco, and Durán 2014, 121). This mid-level incorporation was uneven, with the CSUTCB particularly benefiting thanks to the genesis of the MAS as its political instrument (do Alto and Stefanoni 2010, 333).8 However, leaders from the COB, the FEJUVEs across the departmental capitals and El Alto, market guilds, and transport unions were all given opportunities, with movement leaders filling ministerial, departmental, and municipal government posts.9 Co-optation of social movement leaders was accompanied by the second dimension of state-society relations under the MAS: the creation of government-sponsored parallel organizations. The institutional relationship between government-aligned social movements and the MAS was formalized by the creation of the Viceministeria para la Coordinación con Movimientos Sociales y Sociedad Civil (Vice-Ministry for Coordination with Social Movements and Civil Society—VMCMSSC) in February 2006 and the Coordinador Nacional pro Cambio (National Coordinator for Change—CONALCAM) in January 2007. CONALCAM was designed to “give content” to the government’s claim to be a “government of social movements” (Zuazo 2010, 130), and to be the mechanism through which social movements would participate in Bolivian politics: “CONALCAM will come to be not only a space of social control but also a space where social demands are presented, laws are agreed upon, measures against militants or leaders who generate conflict or division are decided, new leaders are formed, and actions to defend Evo Morales are coordinated” (La Razón 2010). These two new entities effectively institutionalized the relationships between social movements and the MAS government to garner popular support and formalize the informal contestation element of its segmented popular interest intermediation regime. This was an important part of the changing nature of the 52

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relationship between the MAS and social movements, stifling the creative power of independent movements and limiting their ability to set the agenda from below. Displacing organic alliances as the recognized voice of Indigenous social movements (Salazar 2015, 202), these two new state instruments became, as the quotation above suggests, mechanisms to control and direct struggles to advance the political goals of the MAS and defend Morales, or otherwise to resolve social conflict quickly and efficiently. They were not a means to foster the transformative potential of social struggle (Mokrani 2009, 207). The third dimension of state-society relations under the MAS government comprises the experiences from below of the social movements themselves. The roots of the MAS as a political instrument of the highland Indigenous movement, its involvement (however peripheral) in the cycle of social mobilizations (2000–2005), and the indigeneity of President Evo Morales caused many movements to believe they were now in power: “Evo came to power . . . now we are in power . . . now the Aymara and Quechua [are in power], we are more than 65 percent of the population and no one is going to arrive at power through a coup d’état, because we know that we are going to govern eternally.”10 Access to government jobs was more than mere top-down co-optation, it was also a key social movement demand. “Ahora nos toca” (Now it’s our turn) was commonly heard in social movements during this period and the election of the MAS brought an expectation that social movement delegates would be given positions within the government administration (Farthing 2018, 9).11 Similar public statements were commonplace during the first term of Morales. For example, following a meeting with the president, Ruperto Quispe, a leader in the Poncho Rojos, noted: “We are going to ask for the Ministry of Rural Development. We know the countryside, we know about agriculture, and I think nos toca the Ministry for Rural Development. Otherwise, it could be the Ministry for Water” (cited in La Razón 2008f). Quispe, like other movement leaders at the time, was not merely asking for positions within the government, he expected them. After the electoral success of the MAS in 2005, its social movement supporters expected a white massacre of the state and public administration—that is, a complete overhaul of the staff of the state bureaucracy. However, this was not forthcoming, and Vice President Álvaro García Linera confirmed to a frustrated audience at the party’s 2006 conference that the MAS would replace no more than 5 percent of public functionaries. The MAS needed “committed comrades in the state [compañeros comprometidos dentro del Estado],” García Linera explained to the crowd, “but comrades who 53

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know what they are doing [pero compañeros que sepan]” (cited in do Alto and Stefanoni 2010, 332). Not only did García Linera mirror the colonial discourses that were used to deny Indigenous peoples positions of responsibility—labeled the not yet of colonialism by the subaltern studies scholar Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000)—but his party’s unwillingness to supplant the existing state bureaucracy also forced social movements to compete for limited positions within the state apparatus, something that in time would shift the horizons of social movement struggles from broader transformative goals toward positions of influence within the state itself. From the perspective of social movements, demands for positions of influence within the state are a logical part of a social movement strategy to capture the levers of state power—a decision that was explicitly made within the CSUTCB as early as the mid-1990s after a decade or so of debate,12 and must be seen as part of a dialectic of incorporation rather than solely top-down co-optation. As the political theorist and ex-director of the Centro de Investigación Social. (Center for Social Research, CIS), Jorge Viaña, astutely puts it: “Some people only see the co-optation, the tutelage, the subordination and then the clientelism and political bribes [prebendalismo]. But this is a Manichean view of history. There are not only absolute executioners and absolute victims . . . if we are talking about the strength and decision making of the powerful movements of 2000 to 2005, they also have a history and a tendency to be co-opted.”13 Viaña’s perspective captures the multiple dynamics of incorporation and the slow reduction of radical possibilities of challenges to capitalist modes of accumulation and the capitalist state over time. “Conservative processes that weaken progressive advancements,” Viaña argues, “are strengthened through processes of alienation both in society and the state” (2012, 389; emphasis added). Focusing only on the state or society separately—to analyze the co-optation of social movements simply from the side of MAS actions— leads to an incomplete analysis. In layman’s terms, the optimism surrounding the MAS and its position as the representative of social movements, coupled with pragmatic assessments of the best possible route to (partially) fulfill demands such as the nationalization of gas or a Constituent Assembly, reduced the impetus of social movements to remain mobilized following a series of victories.14 The first term of the MAS, I argue, must be viewed in this light. Together, these three dimensions of incorporation allowed the government to curtail and contain the more radical movement demands from the prior period and transform a broad coalition of social movements into its 54

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party base, inducing Vice President Álvaro García Linera to pronounce the MAS a government of social movements. This was central to the political and electoral strategy of the MAS, with movement incorporation and control over umbrella organizations allowing the party to build hegemony in civil society (Anria 2018, 23). While it is relatively straightforward to show the first two dimensions empirically, the third dimension offers more of a methodological headache. However, the dynamics and perceptions of the implementation of movement demands, coupled with the fine-grained detail I provide in my ethnographic account of the SPF, offer a window through which this final dimension can be examined and a lens to analyze the changing modalities of incorporation under Morales. STATE MANAGERIALISM, SOCIAL MOVEMENT VICTORIES, AND THE REGIONAL AUTONOMY AGENDA, 2006–2009 Two important moments in the first term of the MAS help explain the tendency of social movements to be co-opted by Morales’s government: the technocratic incorporation of social movement demands into the political project of the MAS, and right-wing destabilization tactics through the regional autonomy agenda. Shifts and struggles on the broader political landscape are a vital part of the puzzle of state–social movement relations—the internal dynamics of social movements alone do not have the power to explain the alignment of movements under the MAS (Mokrani and Chávez 2012, 381). The Nationalization of Gas as a Social Movement Demand The first moment aligning social movements with the political project of the MAS was the ostensible completion of the most radical demands of the social movements through state managerialism, including the 2007 agrarian reform and the 2010 creation of Indigenous autonomies, the 2006 nationalization of gas, and the 2006–2008 rewriting of the constitution through a popular Constituent Assembly. Here I focus on the nationalization of hydrocarbons and the Constituent Assembly, although several other facets of the MAS government are analyzed in subsequent chapters. The nationalization of gas was one of the central demands of the social movements of the eponymous Gas Wars in 2003 and 2005, the epicenter of which was in the city of El Alto (Spronk and Webber 2007). In fact, such was the power of this collective action frame, as Linda Farthing and Ben Kohl (2006, 6) contend, that “gas ha[d] spawned the 55

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Andean equivalent of a cargo cult, transformed from a commodity to a magical resource in the national imaginary.”15 Social movement leaders proved to be masters of animating political action through this collective action frame, pushing gas to center stage in Bolivian politics (Kohl and Farthing 2012, 229). On May 1, 2006, the MAS government announced the completion of this demand in a theatrical military occupation of the Margarita gas fields in the Chaco region of southern Bolivia (Farthing and Kohl 2014, 38). The Supreme Decree giving producers the rights to commercialization at the point of extraction was declared unconstitutional by the Morales regime, thus allowing the government to renegotiate exportation contracts (and a higher export price of gas) with Argentina and Brazil (Kaup 2010, 129). The government then announced a temporary royalties and taxation regime, which allowed the government to capture 82 percent of hydrocarbon profits while it negotiated forty-four new contracts with twelve petroleum companies, including the two biggest players, Petrobras and Repsol (Webber 2011, 81). In a sense, the nationalization of hydrocarbon is a faux nationalization. It did not change the ownership of Bolivia’s natural resources because the state did not appropriate any property of transnational companies. The new contracts signed in October 2006 contained shared production elements of the 2005 Hydrocarbons Law 3058, which positioned the state as an overseer of production while private capital “executes the entirety of its operations at its own expense and receives direct payment defined in relation to the recuperation of costs, prices, volumes and investments” (Webber 2011, 82). The upshot of this contractual arrangement was that the control of production stayed in the hands of multinational companies, with Petrobras and Repsol increasing their share of production (Arze and Gómez 2013, 80). The technocratic incorporation of the radical demand for gas enabled the MAS government to win the support of sections of social movements in El Alto while simultaneously stripping more radical factions of one of their central mobilizing frames. On my travels among the social movements in El Alto, the nationalization of gas was expounded as one of the primary achievements of the MAS government, as the words of a FEJUVE-El Alto leader demonstrate: “For years we suffered. We did not understand what gas petroleum and hydrocarbons were, much less that we have lots here in Bolivia. So, previous politicians chose to take it for themselves and to sell it to other countries at a very low price. Nobody understood then, but little by little we taught ourselves its importance. Now, we have captured [pescado] what was gas, petroleum, and every56

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thing no?”16 During my fieldwork, even the leader of the oppositional (anti-MAS) FEJUVE-El Alto used nationalization as one of the few successes of the MAS (counterposed with what he argued was the failure of the government to industrialize).17 For many, nationalization was the base of a transformation of Bolivia from a poor country to a country with natural resource wealth, a perspective encapsulated by Cecilia Blanco Romero and Christian Esebes. Romero told me: “I am very thankful to our president because Bolivia has changed and now, we are not poor . . . we are not poor thanks to our president Evo Morales.”18 Esebes explained: “Before the government submitted to the will of the US. Today, our government, thanks to the struggles of the social movements in the previous period, thanks to compañero Morales, no longer submits to [the will of] the US.”19 These comments demonstrate the temporal politics in state managerialism. In El Alto (and beyond), the nationalization of gas came to be associated with past actions of social movements and the actions of Morales during his time as president. The government successfully presented the demand for the nationalization of gas as complete, and the movements struggling for gas as relics of the past, drawing a temporal line under the issue. The effect of this, in short, was to strip the demand for the nationalization of gas of the radical potential it once held. Social Movement Demands and the Constituent Assembly The second social movement demand incorporated into the political project of the MAS was the demand for a Constituent Assembly. Originating from lowland Indigenous movements during the 1990s (Schavelzon 2012, 4), the idea of a Constituent Assembly was taken up by the social movements of the period 2000–2005, synchronizing with the popular democracy of the open-air meetings (cabildos) used to organize and sustain protest. The Constituent Assembly was conceived as a popular mechanism for Indigenous groups to recoup self-determination from the state, rather than as a mechanism enabling integration into the existing liberal state. National social movements articulated this demand through the Pacto de Unidad (Unity Pact), a coalition of numerous lowland and highland Indigenous and working-class organizations.20 Underpinning the Pacto de Unidad’s demand for a Constituent Assembly to rewrite the constitution was the notion of a plurinational reconfiguration of the Bolivian state, where the Indigenous originary and peasant nations and peoples of Bolivia would have direct representation at all government levels and powers as collective subjects, in accordance with their customary practices (Pacto de Unidad 2006, 5). Direct and participatory 57

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democracy—through mechanisms including communal assemblies, a social movement veto on unpopular policies and referendums—would be positioned alongside the representative democracy of the liberal state, and the three powers of the liberal state (executive, legislative, and judiciary) extended to include “plurinational social power” (Pacto de Unidad 2006, 6). Responding to this demand of social movements, the MAS passed the Law of Convocation of the Constituent Assembly in March 2006. However, from the outset, the Constituent Assembly assumed a different form from the suggestions of social movements. First, the election of assembly delegates acquired a partisan nature and blocked the participation of social movements (including the Pacto de Unidad) in the Constituent Assembly as separate collective subjects. This cemented the centrality of the MAS in the constitutional process and forced Indigenous groups into an alliance with the political party (Iamamoto 2013, 170–71). This was vital as the MAS did not have proposals of its own and used the process to generate stability around the nucleus of state power (Salazar 2015, 199). Second, as the MAS did not control the Bolivian Senate, it was forced to enter political negotiations with the opposition, limiting the possibility of direct Indigenous representation (Schavelzon 2012, 143–44). Following these compromises, it was agreed that there would be 255 assembly deputies: 210 deputies directly elected through a list system where the top 3 candidates from the 70 electoral districts were elected; and 45 proportionately elected deputies through a relative majority (Mokrani and Gutiérrez 2006). However, the law contained a “minority protection rule” whereby a party could only win a maximum of two (out of three) deputies in each constituency even if they received over 75 percent of the vote. The final delegate would be from a minority party that won over 5 percent of the vote (Mokrani and Gutiérrez 2006). This clause gave representation to otherwise excluded far-right groups within the process and denied the MAS the stipulated two-thirds majority needed to approve a prospective constitutional text (Schavelzon 2012, 146). The MAS won 137 of the 255 delegates but, importantly, the political Right won 39 percent of the Constituent Assembly seats, more than the 33 percent they needed to block any proposed text (Mokrani and Gutiérrez 2006). The final feature of the Constituent Assembly that moved it away from being the process envisioned by social movements was the creation of the Representación Presidental para la Asamblea Constituyente (Presidential Representation for the Constituent Assembly, REPAC) in March 2006. The REPAC was a space dominated by García Linera and 58

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it positioned itself as the “articulator nucleus” of the Pacto de Unidad, transforming the form and content of the Pacto de Unidad’s proposals to fit into liberal constitutional models (Salazar 2015, 200). This effectively denied the Pacto de Unidad an independent voice in the Constituent Assembly process. Moreover, from January 2007, REPAC created a small group of technocrats from different organizations, the “grupo de 12” (group of 12), in a move ostensibly designed to speed up the negotiating process. This small group was only half drawn from the Pacto de Unidad, with the other members coming from different MAS delegations (Salazar 2015, 201). In this way, the MAS was able to place itself as the power within the assembly and sideline social movement forces, as revealed in the words of the CSUTCB leader Isaac Ávalos: “We have almost done no work with the group of 12 because that group is on a different path; they wanted to impose something that we do not agree with . . . we decided not to work with them and instead to work directly with the commissions of the assembly, the CSUTCB and the Unity Pact” (cited in Garcés 2011, 61). The MAS used the Constituent Assembly to reinforce the processes of social control that had already begun outside the Constituent Assembly, transforming one of the central demands of radical social movement into a technocratic exercise within the confines of the liberal state (Salazar 2015; Tapia 2011). As much is clear if the original proposals of the Pacto de Unidad are compared to the form assumed by the Constituent Assembly and the outcomes achieved. This reduced the ability of leaders and social movements in general to be a genuinely creative force and pushed them toward increasingly aligning themselves in a defensive position behind Morales. Autonomy Battles The broader political landscape also shaped the realignment of social movements as a defensive force behind the MAS. The election of Morales realized the worst fears of the lowland elite, who amplified their opposition to Morales’s government and Indigenous and working-class social movements through the notion of autonomy. They increasingly tried to divide the country into two Bolivias: the region of the western highlands, defined as an Andean-kollo colonial state; and the “modern,” mestizo eastern lowlands (Schavelzon 2012, 190–91). While this was part of the wider spatial dynamics of passive revolution (discussed in chapter 3), struggles over regional autonomy also had the effect of aligning social movements as a defensive force behind the MAS government. The opposition used a variety of tactics linked to the autonomy agenda to try to derail the Constituent Assembly and destabilize the Mo59

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rales government, including marches, assemblies, and hunger strikes, with opposition delegates boycotting the assembly. Santa Cruz unilaterally declared departmental autonomy in December 2006 (Fabricant and Postero 2013, 203–4). The governor of Cochabamba, Manfred Reyes, attempted to follow suit, provoking widespread violence between government and opposition supporters (Webber 2011, 111–14). The autonomy movement reached its apogee in August–September 2008. A civic strike on August 19, in the lowland departments of Beni, Pando, Santa Cruz, and Tarija was accompanied by a wave of violence from the protofascist Unión Juvenil Cruceñista (Cruceña Youth Union, UJC), who spearheaded the violent occupation of forty-five institutions across lowland departments and the blockade of the gas pipelines to Argentina and Brazil (Argirakis 2016, 91–92). On September 11, tens of peasant activists were slaughtered at Porvenir in an attack orchestrated by the prefect of Pando, Leopoldo Fernández, laying bare the autonomist movement’s violent and racist nature. Throughout the Constituent Assembly, the MAS called on social movements to defend the government (Webber 2011, 95). Social movements emphatically answered Morales’s call for a show of support for the government in Cochabamba in early 2007 and again in Sucre later that year, organizing the biggest open-air cabildo in Bolivia’s history in defense of the government (Schavelzon 2012, 244). During the tempestuous period in the months running up to the illegal autonomy referendums of May 2008, the MAS laid the groundwork for the government reaction through social movements, preparing MAS-aligned cocaleros, trade unionists, neighborhood councils, and Indigenous movements for action across the department of Santa Cruz and in their strongholds of the Chapare and the El Alto-La Paz conurbation (La Razón 2008i). On May 4, 2008, the day of the autonomy referendum in Santa Cruz, the MAS bussed activists from party strongholds in the Chapare to three key MAS-supporting areas of the department—San Julián, Cuatro Cañadas, and Yapacaní—demonstrating the ways in which union activism was directly feeding into the government’s political strategies against an increasingly bellicose lowland opposition (La Razón 2008j). By August 2008 social movements had largely become positioned as defenders of Morales and his government (Kohl 2010, 111). During the “Yes” campaign for the recall referendum on August 10, 2008, the MAS mobilized CONALCAM against opposition prefects, rather than for the proceso de cambio (La Razón 2008u). The Confederation of Colonizers and the Indigenous Confederation of Eastern Bolivia (CIDOB), for example, were used by the MAS to target the most “aggressive spots 60

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to confront oppositional prefects, places where there were links with previous governments and those accused of corruption, racism, and violence” rather than to extol the benefits brought to lowland peasant and Indigenous communities by the MAS government (La Razón 2008v). This defensive strategy continued after the Porvenir massacre, which was a point of inflection for the MAS government as it represented the complete alignment of social movement forces with the MAS (Salazar 2015, 156).21 Following the events of September 11, 2008, the government mobilized social movements through CONALCAM to pressure congress, forcing the Bolivian bourgeoisie to ally (temporarily) with the MAS (Salazar 2015, 212). Through CONALCAM, the MAS government directed social movements away from further pressuring the elites based in the city of Santa Cruz (a struggle that might have completely defeated the old cruceño landowners) and instead directed them at congress to ensure it accepted the constitutional text García Linera had negotiated with representatives of the opposition behind closed doors during September–October 2008 (Salazar 2015, 213–14). Thus, the radical opening created by the social movements of the revolutionary cycle (2000–2005) closed with the ostensible implementation of their central demands, the nationalization of gas and the refoundation of the country through a popular Constituent Assembly. Through this process, social movements were redirected toward the state as a pressure point for change by the MAS via CONALCAM. This, I argue, marked the transformation of offensive social movements with radical transformative horizons beyond the state to defensive movements protecting the social moment demands incorporated through technocratic means during the early years of the MAS government. INFORMAL CONTESTATION AND SPONTANEOUS REACTION, 2010–2016 The shift from offensive to defensive movements in political terms was, in a sense, the tip of the iceberg, and it reveals the ossification of movements through their formal relationships with the state. Instead of allowing social movements to direct the state from below, government pegas had perverse effects on the internal dynamics of social movements, transforming leadership roles in social movements into stepping-stones to a formal political career. The strategic focus of organizations aligned with the government was turned away from the needs of their bases to those of the MAS. Unsurprisingly, this disconnect was a common complaint of social movement bases—even those most sympathetic toward the MAS—and a development that did not go unnoticed by Bolivian politi61

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cal commentators.22 Oscar Vega, a onetime ally of the government and a delegate to the Constituent Assembly, contends that “what becomes increasingly pronounced after 2010 is a separation between leadership and bases [within social movements], which today [2019] is clearly evident. . . . There was a counter-current in [2010] against the leadership, who were not the base’s leadership. . . . The period after the promulgation of the constitution was one of survival, and social tendencies to conserve what had been achieved emerged. We entered a time when one had to look after what one had.”23 This conservative current, coupled with the separation of leadership from its bases, transformed movements into empty shells, and as a result, movements lost their dynamism and ceased to move. Whereas their radicalism forced a more substantive incorporation of movements and their demands during Morales’s first presidential term, by 2010 social movements had been restricted to a de facto veto on policies through “informal contestation.” Informal contestation is when progressive regimes announce policy and affected groups protest, eventually entering direct negotiations with the government. Rather than being the driving force behind the MAS political project, social movements were recast in a supporting role: “[Social movements engaged] with the state in collaborative terms in some matters of common purpose (such as assisting in the passing of contested policies and reforms) while at the same time mobilizing against it in other instances” (Anria 2018, 23). The reduced ability of social movements to propose and actively influence government policy before its implementation is reflected in the composition of the MAS cabinets during this period. By 2013, only four ministerial positions were filled by social movement leaders, with the rest drawn largely from the ranks of professional economists, university professors, and lawyers (Espinoza 2015, 144–46). The changing ministerial composition is symptomatic of broader shifts in the modalities of the second incorporation of popular sectors in Bolivia after 2010. The initial years of Bolivia’s second incorporation were marked by relatively fewer conflicts (some five hundred per year), as social movements were incorporated into the state and aligned with the MAS, which fulfilled movement demands through state managerialism (Campero 2017, 15). However, as explained above, there was a significant uptick in the number of social conflicts from 2008 onward when the autonomy battles were raging. These were largely confrontations between the Indigenous rural and working-class social forces representing the government and the right-wing opposition from the lowland departments. 62

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However, the defeat of the opposition following the Porvenir massacre and the compromise with certain sections of capital reduced confrontation between the government and the lowland opposition. This, coupled with the demobilizing tendencies within movements, meant that the government did not need the protection of social movements to the same extent after its 2009 electoral success, and the imperative to implement movement demands waned. This was not an inevitable outcome of the relationship between social movements and the MAS, but the result of the political context and modalities of incorporation of movements under the Morales regime. The upshot of these dovetailing dynamics was a shift in the government’s agenda away from that of its social base toward the consolidation of its position in power, sparking an increasing number of social conflicts between Indigenous peasant and working-class groups and the government, which jumped to a high of nine hundred per year in 2011 (Campero 2017, 15). This was a central facet of the growing tensions between the MAS government and social movements from 2010 onward: it marked a change in the balance of power within the MAS government away from social movements toward fractions of capital operating in agribusiness, mining, and hydrocarbon extraction (discussed in more detail in chapter 4). EXPERIENCING TRANSFORMISM Using transformism as a frame to understand recent Bolivian history is powerful as it maps out how and why the MAS government was able to pacify, demobilize, and divide some social movements. Gramsci (2011c, 170, Q7§18) underscores how the state intervenes “to educate the educator, the social milieu in general,” suggesting that social movement incorporation imposes the logic of the state on movements themselves. Evaluating movement incorporation through Gramsci illuminates how incorporation of social movements blunted the revolutionary edge of their push for social transformation. However, in approaching movement incorporation in this manner we must be careful that its incongruence, contradictions, and incompleteness are not lost. For example, the otherwise lucid work of Luis Tapia (2011, 114–25) paints a somewhat mechanistic reading of the integration of social movements into the state through the partisan nature of the Constituent Assembly and the absorption of social movement leaders in the party structures of the MAS. Here transformism is presented as complete, a foregone conclusion. In their spatiotemporal reading of class struggle and state formation through passive revolution in Bolivia, Chris Hesketh and David Morton (2014, 163–64) only see mobilizations for or against the MAS govern63

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ment, reading the complex rhythms of transformism and the contestations that arise in response to incorporation solely through party politics (or in Gramsci’s terms, the terrain of political society). Jeffery Webber (2016, 1861) leaves unanswered the questions of how, why, and to what extent transformism “guarantee[s] passivity to the new order and encourag[es] demobilization, or at least control[s] what mobilization of the popular classes occurs.” In these readings of passive revolution, the messiness of everyday life is sidelined and questions of where the limits of support and opposition lie and under what circumstances they are reached are neglected. This is significant and it is a problem, not concerning the concept per se, but with particular readings of transformism. After all, as the prominent translator of Gramsci to the Latin American context Massimo Modonesi (2012, 144) argues, “The question of the contradictory and ambiguous process [of passive revolution] is principally about the revolutionary form, that is to say, the problem of the subjectivity as an actor, of subversion as an act, and of the subordination-insubordination of the subaltern classes in historical processes.” In other words, to grapple with the dynamics of passive revolution we must pay close attention to the agency of those who are incorporated into the state and the new forms of political subjectivities that passive revolution creates. It is not that passive revolution is “de-subjectivizing,” a set of processes that eliminates political subjects, but that passive revolution creates new political subjects with increasingly constrained fields of possible actions and future political horizons. According to Modonesi (2019, 85), passive revolution “drive[s] a (re)subalternation and tend[s] to deactivate, demobilize, and passivize, reducing the spaces for antagonism and autonomy.”24 Antagonism and autonomy capture the possible moments of political negation, of doing something different that moves beyond the sterile opposition of “reformism” with “revolution” that has characterized debates on the Left since the times of Marx himself.25 In this section, I traced how incorporation transformed movements from offensive vehicles pushing for social transformation into defensive foils for the MAS government: in turn, this had an impact on the character of their incorporation, with the principal mechanism of social movement incorporation shifting from initially being state managerialism to becoming informal contestation around 2010. However, thus far I have said nothing about how this affected the pacifying element of passive revolution, or how it produced novel forms of political subjectivities. This is the aim of the following section, which uses the SPF as a snapshot to interrogate these two dimensions of passive revolution following ten years of incorporation. 64

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The School of Political Formation in El Alto The SPF offers a lens through which to further unearth experiences of transformism under the Evo Morales government. I maintain that the SPF illuminates the popular perception of the political project of the MAS in El Alto, the contested and contradictory character of incorporation, and how pacification is never complete but always in constant need of renewal. The SPF was an attempt to rejuvenate MAS-aligned social movements in El Alto following the government’s defeat in the reelection referendum of February 2016.26 The SPF set out a strategy to disseminate information and the political message of the MAS among government supporters through a series of workshops led by MAS politicians, academics, and journalists, complemented by a public communication strategy through social media and the press.27 The SPF aimed to set in motion the political project of the MAS on the ground in El Alto. To this end, organizers invited the participation of prominent leaders from the MAS-aligned social movements as well as local MAS activists. Members of the FEJUVE-El Alto leadership were warmly welcomed by SPF attendees. Their presence and role within the organization was announced at the start of the meetings and greeted with loud applause from other participants. Members of the COR-El Alto and other commercial guilds were also present and equally welcomed, as were transportistas and members of the parent groups, the juntas escolares. Special seats were reserved for these distinguished guests, placed to the right of the speaker in plain sight of the rest of the audience.28 The remainder of the audience was a mixture of male and female rank-and-file party activists, many of whom also belonged to their local MAS-aligned neighborhood associations, and nearly all of whom would have self-identified as Indigenous. The different backgrounds of attendees reflected those of El Alto in general, with the usage of hermano (brother) and compañero (comrade) underscoring people’s campesino roots or mining heritage, respectively.29 The SPF is one place where the MAS attempted most explicitly to disseminate its ideas and align the interests of the rank-and-file working classes with the broader political project of the MAS. A brief examination of the presentations and workshop themes addressed throughout the six months of the SPF demonstrate how the government expected to achieve this goal. Presenters included many notable figures from within the MAS government of the period, including: Chancellor David Choquehuanca; Minister of Government Carlos Romero; Minister of the Productive Economy Verónica Morales; Minister of Justice Virginia 65

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2.1. Author in the El Alto School of Political Formation, 2016. Author’s photo.

Velasco Condori; former minister of the productive economy Antonia Rodríguez; La Paz city councilor Jorge Silva; and Vice Minister of Decolonization Félix Cárdenas.30 The sessions themselves had a wide range of themes. Some were presented by government ministers and addressed the policy areas and strategies of a particular ministry and vice-ministry and how these fitted into the wider political project of the MAS. Then there were sessions given by historians and sociologists that examined, among other topics, the histories of colonialism in Bolivia, the Republican State (1825–2009), military coup d’états, and neoliberalism. While most of the sessions traced the historical dynamics behind these processes, others were explicitly directed at the political opponents of the MAS.31 Combined, the sessions attempted to place the MAS within the historical dynamics of the country and explore some of the key tenets of their political project—such as the proceso de cambio, decolonization, communitarian socialism, Agenda Patriótica 2025 (Patriotic Agenda 2025), and the plural economy.32 What follows is largely drawn from my conversations with attendees and the questions that participants asked the presenters between June and December 2016. Although the SPF was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for most attendees, their questions were especially revealing of the tensions, incongruence, and contradictions present in rank-andfile political support for the MAS. They did not pull any punches when 66

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speaking with representatives of the MAS government. Their questions and comments reveal how the MAS government had been experienced by people in El Alto and the quotidian aspects of the proceso de cambio, including the rank and file’s reception of the ideological tensions within the MAS and their assessment of the implementation of the promises of Morales’s government. Sellouts, Political Consciousness, and the Invitados How processes of transformism have been understood by those inside organizations that were incorporated by the MAS government adds another dimension to the analysis of social movement incorporation and pacification. During my time attending the SPF sessions, several central themes that shaped the experience of the MAS government by alteños became apparent. Participants repeatedly returned to the question of the relationship between social movements and the MAS government, comparing the past strength of movements in the city to the context in 2016. To grapple with the pacifying effects of social movement incorporation, participants spoke of the increasingly top-down character of the political project of the MAS (the proceso de cambio), the political consciousness of local leaders, and the communications channels to the government open to local movement and party activists. I explore each of these themes in turn to assess the incompleteness and contradictions of transformism as it unfurls in historical processes. One of the preoccupations of the MAS militants throughout the SPF was the growing top-down nature of the proceso de cambio: It appears in the last couple of years, there has been a reduction in the popular initiatives from the bases which have been replaced by an initiative from above, passed down through political lines. The proceso has been increasingly done from above. At first, there was wide recognition [of the importance of social movements] and accumulation [of political consciousness] which has now been left behind. Now, when it comes to the question of how to tackle [the referendum result] 21F, it should be a popular initiative from below. It should be from the bases [de base]. How do we reinitiate in the bases, in the common [lo común], in the citizen herself? How do we confront the everyday of the proceso de cambio?33

The first thing that jumps out from these comments is the temporal dimension, the comparison with previous moments of social movement activity past. Although recollections about past struggles and events are always viewed through rose-tinted glasses, the message is clear: the proceso de cambio began as an initiative from below but, over a decade of 67

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MAS government, had increasingly become a top-down process. However, in contrast to the temporal line in the sand drawn by the MAS government to curtail more radical movement demands, for MAS supporters in El Alto social movements were still important political actors capable of more than simply supporting the government. These comments evince how the shift in the mechanisms of social movement incorporation, from state managerialism to informal contestation traced over the first part of this chapter, was not only the result of the shift from offensive to defensive movements. It also had the consequence of reinforcing the pacification of movements. What is most surprising about the quotation above is that it displays some awareness of and discomfort about processes of co-optation of MAS-supporting members of social movements by the government. This, I would argue, is a product of the tendency to be co-opted highlighted by Jorge Viaña and of the agency exerted by social movement actors in negotiating processes of incorporation. For many of the SPF attendees, the reduced participation of social movement in the MAS government was part of a two-sided dynamic: the gradual decline of political consciousness and organization accumulated through social struggle on the one hand, and the simultaneous consolidation of power within the state (and especially in the executive branch of government) on the other. When discussing the declining political power of social movements, participants of the SPF bemoaned the lack of political formation of many MAS activists and regretted the loss of the political consciousness accumulated during the social struggles in 2000–2005. In other words, they expressed frustration about the tendency of movement leaders to be co-opted and demonstrated an awareness of the pacifying impact of incorporation. Many of the local leaders who were integrated into the government have been unable to implement the demands of their social movement bases, and some were jailed for corruption. As one SPF participant stated: Building on what the other compañeros have said about us not working well together to win the alcaldía [in the 2015 municipal elections] . . . there was no social consciousness. First, to be able to work to advance the proceso de cambio is linked to social consciousness and the ability to work 100 percent together, united, not in separate groups who gather and go work in different areas. We have been working since 2006 and we are still not working well together now. . . . Consciousness is the key, each one of us needs to be conscious of what we are trying to do and work together, because division and discord cause the problems we had in the alcaldía, where everyone who

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was bought [se han vendido] went to work there, leaving a few of us behind to work. It should not be that way.34

The participant’s remarks not only draw attention to the perceived need of individuals to diligently uphold and maintain their political consciousness (however this might be done), they also form a critique of those who have entered power and, in the words of the participant, been “bought,” causing them to subsequently forget about the constituency they supposedly represent. The remarks form a commentary on social movement incorporation in El Alto and the problems associated with ex-movement leaders who entered the state through the first stage of transformism (the molecular transformation catalyzed by the incorporation of individual leaders). The former FEJUVE-El Alto leader, Abel Mamani, a key figure in the 2004 El Alto Water War, is a good example of the shortcomings of local alteño leaders when in power. Despite lacking technical and administrative experience, Mamani was appointed minister of public works in 2006 (Laurie and Crespo 2007, 841). He was responsible for the creation of a new state water company, La Empresa Pública Social de Agua y Saneamiento (The Public Social Water and Sanitation Company, EPSAS), which proved unable to ameliorate the condition of water utilities in El Alto, making service provision worse in some cases (Farthing and Kohl 2014, 36). Mamani placed the sectoral interests of the FEJUVE-El Alto first and offered “government jobs for some of its affiliates” (Anria 2015, 88). He was forced out of office after a scandal in 2008 and left a legacy of a failing water company that was eventually closed in 2013 (Tapia 2013). The nature of Mamani’s dismissal in disgrace encapsulates the perspective held by many SPF participants: political consciousness is needed if local leaders are to keep the interests of the general political project of the MAS above their own personal interests. A case that is symptomatic of the shortcomings of the MAS in El Alto involves the former MAS mayor of El Alto, Edgar Patana. Like Abel Mamani, Patana also rose to public office through one of the social movements of El Alto, the COR-El Alto (Anria 2015, 89). He was mayor of El Alto between 2010 and 2015, losing in the 2015 municipal elections to Soledad Chapetón before he was subsequently jailed for corruption in 2016 (Erbol 2017).35 It was widely recognized that Patana followed the sectoral interests of the COR-El Alto and operated his administration in an unorthodox manner.36 He was known for offering COR affiliates jobs in local offices, earning the MAS the title of busca-pegas (pega searchers) in the city of El Alto, and he oversaw the propagation of payments 69

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by local firms to win municipal contracts for public works projects. He had a close relationship with the MAS-aligned social movements of El Alto, all of which backed his reelection campaign in 2015 (Mancilla 2016, 135). Unsurprisingly, the MAS activists were frustrated by the label busca-pega and stressed the need to break with this configuration of state–social movement relations, as the introductory remarks at the SPF reveal: “We have to not fall into the trap of governing in the neoliberal style like some other left-wing political parties who say, ‘They have robbed us, why am I not going to steal too?’ Some compañeros who did not have the opportunity to lead before now find themselves as authorities and sometimes they forget the critical mentality and proposals . . . they follow their own personal gains.”37 The pursuit of personal gains was seen as being due to a lack of political consciousness and was framed as a symptom of the demobilization of social movements in El Alto. The last line from the quotation that opened this chapter captures this perspective perfectly: “The state is performing its function, but other than that, the other fundamental wheels that need to turn are the social movements that have stopped participating.”38 For many SPF participants, leaders had lost sight of the broader goals of the proceso de cambio and their bases were not able to keep them in check. Leadership roles had become one of the best ways into public office, and rank-and-file activists viewed leadership positions as a means to personal improvement, rather than positions of responsibility inside a broader political project of social transformation (Anria 2015, 88). These instances were particularly painful for alteños from social movements because both Mamani and Patana had risen through local social movements, proving themselves to be dedicated and upstanding members of the alteño community via social struggles. Many alteños had held both in high regard, making their fall from grace even harder to take. Such critical responses to the actions of individual leaders incorporated into the MAS political project through processes that Gramsci would call molecular transformations challenge fatalistic readings of transformism presented as a teleology of definite stages (from the incorporation of individuals to entire movements) that cannot be undone. Incorporation, as the questions and comments of the SPF participants reveal, is always contested. On the other hand, incorporation is also negotiated. The alteños who had played such an important role in bringing the MAS to power complained about the power of the central government over them, its very representatives. Despite recognizing the shortcomings of local alteño leaders in positions of power, SPF participants simultaneously rued the lack of opportunities for and influence of MAS activists in the city: 70

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“Despite what we are doing at the level of the bases, they [government ministers] are damaging the proceso de cambio, they are not listening to us. Because of this, I think we have to generate a current that makes them listen to us, the rank and file.”39 In other words, SPF participants explicitly manifested a desire not to turn away from either trying to get local activists into positions of political power or influencing state power more indirectly. They demanded more incorporation into the state even as they recognized its demobilizing effects. The first SPF meeting happened in the wake of the referendum defeat and the closure of the staterun textiles firm Enatex.40 In the face of these political developments, there was widespread agreement that the MAS had made a series of political missteps, and that the increasing centralization of decision making in parts of the government away from MAS militants was causing the government to err. Part of the problem, argued some MASistas, was that without a proper political opponent, all the old political caste had become members of the MAS political party: “There are several themes to reflect upon, compañeros. One is that the MAS has become hegemonic in the sense that nothing is opposing it. The tiny group of elites that ran the country before do not have any proposals for the country. Their proposal is neoliberalism. And what did neoliberalism deliver? Nothing! That is their proposal. But when a force becomes hegemonic, everybody jumps aboard [todos se suben al coche] and the ex-ADNistas become MASistas, founders of the party and ministers to boot.”41 These political chameleons were the invited professional politicians (invitados), who had not risen through the party ranks: “Our ministers are all middle-class, ex-ADNistas, MNRistas, MIRistas,” one participant exclaimed.42 Another said: “The children of the ADNistas, MNRistas, MIRistas are in the government. . . . We must govern, we have come to power to exercise power and not to give power to MNRistas, ADNistas, MIRistas.”43 As I explain in more detail in chapter 4, the invitados were a vital part of Morales’s sublimity; shifting political errors and unpopular decisions onto his surrounding ministers enabled Morales to maintain high personal political support for more than a decade, even through the most challenging periods.44 However, what the questions of the alteño participants of the SPF reveal is that the pacification of movements through transformism is never complete, and the molecular co-optation of individual leaders had not enabled the passive absorption of MAS ideology. Indeed, the experiences in El Alto serve as a reminder that methods of statecraft are only ever partially completed and are always in perpetual need of renewal. It is also clear that transformism was relatively successful at demo71

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bilizing social movements in El Alto and reorienting the horizons of possibility away from political action from below to state action. The radical political subject that branded El Alto as a “rebel city” morphed from a protagonist of social change to a recipient of state resources. This is best encapsulated in the pleading of one SPF participant. Having sat through an hour-long presentation on the lengthy histories of military intervention in Bolivian politics,45 a woman in the front row raised her hand and claimed the microphone. She got to her feet and looking directly into the eyes of the history professor who had just given the lecture said: “I want to say, as a victim of the Gas War [Black October], unfortunately, I do not have a job or gas. So, I want to ask, how is it that we have arrived here? I want to ask our president and those that fill the ministries how come there are no jobs down there in the bowl of La Paz [for us] and up here in the city of El Alto, there are people, people who live in poverty and cannot find adequate work.”46 There are several facets to this quotation. First, the questioner positions herself (and by extension El Alto) as a victim to make demands of the central government. In the process, it could be argued that she gives too much agency to Morales and his ministers, making them the only political actors capable of finding solutions to the city’s problems. However, the second facet of this quotation also suggests a specter of political organization away from the state. The use of the collective “we,” coupled with the reference to Black October, hints at the role that El Alto had (and continues to have, as the events analyzed in chapter 6 demonstrate) in shaping the political agenda through informal contestation, while the juxtaposition of Evo, his ministers, and public officials with the poor of El Alto is a reminder of the unfulfilled promise of the MAS government. Through her intervention, the alteña captured the partiality of transformism in El Alto. She drew attention to the shift in the political subjectivities within El Alto from subjects to objects of change and the disquiet of El Alto over the MAS government’s inability to transform the prospects of the city. She captured how pacification transformed the participants in Black October from antagonistic political subjects, fighting against historic subordination to both the Bolivian state and capitalism more generally, to political subjects under the tutelage of the state— from activists demanding justice and change to victims in need of state protection. She also recast the shadow of Black October and reminded the MAS representative of the historic strength of the city of El Alto. Here I have explored how the shift from offensive to defensive social movements and the change in the mechanisms of social movement incorporation was experienced and comprehended on the ground. El 72

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Alto was ground zero during the cycle of social movements that placed neoliberal hegemony in doubt and provided the backdrop for Morales’s rapid ascent to power, making it an ideal place to explore the experiences of movement incorporation. I wish to underscore two features of the short discussion on the SPF. On the one hand, the above discussion reveals that local activists are all too aware of the pacifying effects of social movement incorporation and they display some agency in deciding to be co-opted and in trying to set the terms of their incorporation with representatives of the MAS government. The political subjectivities of the previous period remain, with many local activists still defined by their participation in Black October some thirteen years prior. However, the content of these subjectivities had shifted from their being protagonists of political change to being recipients of benefits doled out by the state (at the level of either local or national government). By 2016, the pacifying effects of incorporation had made political and social incorporation the principal demand of local activists. However, I maintain that rather than incorporation having been the central demand of movements all along, only masked by radical language in periods of intense struggle—as Federico Rossi (2017) contends for the Argentinean case—demands for incorporation coexisted (and were sometimes overshadowed) by more radical demands of movements, such as the nationalization of gas and a Constituent Assembly. On the other hand, the SPF sessions reveal the partial and incomplete character of social movement incorporation and, by extension, pacification. This became all too apparent in the days following Evo Morales’s exit from power in November 2019, but we will get to that historical moment in chapter 6. Here it suffices to say that the confrontational manner in which questions were asked, the hostility to certain speakers, and the suspicion toward particular government policies, projects, or claims all point toward the contingency that marks social movement incorporation. In 2016, even though movements were a shadow of their former selves, unable to mobilize an entire city and lacking legitimacy in the eyes of many city residents, their radical potential remained; their support for the MAS government was far from organic and far from guaranteed. The SPF reveals transformism to be an ongoing process, always incomplete and a long way from unidirectional. THE LIMITS TO PACIFICATION AND INCORPORATION The dynamics of transformism in Bolivia ebbed and flowed under the MAS government. Evo Morales’s first presidential term was marked by 73

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the incorporation of social movement leaders and the technocratic implementation of social movement demands through state managerialism. Two of the central demands of the radical social movements of the previous period 2000–2005—the nationalization of gas and the rewriting of the constitution through a popular Constituent Assembly—were fulfilled by the government, simultaneously ratifying the credentials of the MAS as a government of social movements and robbing more radical sectors of their most effective mobilizing frames. These processes of incorporation played out within a broader political conjuncture in which the MAS was forced to confront a belligerent right-wing movement drawn from the eastern lowland departments. In this context, the priority of movements was to protect the government from attack from its other flank and prevent the right-wing opposition from successfully splitting the country in two. However, with the defeat of the opposition after the Porvenir massacre and concessions made by the government to appease different sections of capital, the MAS was able to placate and subsequently enter an alliance with previously oppositional groups. From 2010 onward, the political importance of its social bases diminished, while the ability of movements to organize independently of the government and influence the political project of the government waned. Social movements were reduced to informal contestation to block government policies and remained unable to successfully force the incorporation of policy directives from below, as was initially the case during the second incorporation. Processes of incorporation are never uniform or uncontested, as the experiences of the MAS School of Political Formation in 2016 demonstrate. Questions asked by the audience and my conversations with attendees reveal the incomplete and ongoing nature of transformism. Pacification of social movements through the incorporation of movement leaders and the technocratic implementation of demands is only ever partial and temporary, underscoring the nature of transformism as a contested, ongoing process. The radical political subjectivities produced by the period of social protest (2000–2005) were altered, either through leaders entering government positions and being warped by the inertial logic of state administration, or through the reduction of the horizons of transformation to the state. In the SPF, this was articulated by MAS activists as a loss of political consciousness and, as suggested in the chapter’s opening quotation, as movements that were not playing their part in the government of social movements. However, the shadow of a sleeping beast was present in the SPF, a sense that the pacification of this rebel city was only temporary. The rebel character (as chapter 6 reveals) was only 74

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dormant in 2016, not extinct. The question we must concern ourselves with now is how the other dimensions of passive revolution played out, and particularly how the sociospatial aspects of passive revolution interplayed with the social movement incorporation analyzed in this chapter.

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CHAPTER 3

THE AUTONOMY MOVEMENT, TWO BOLIVIAS, AND THE SPATIALITY OF PASSIVE REVOLUTION

The major exasperation right now [May 2008] is due to the convergence and conjoining of too many polarizations at once: of class—those much richer versus those much poorer; of geography—Santa Cruz versus La Paz, Sucre versus La Paz, city versus countryside; of politics—between government and opposition, which wants to flip the tortilla yet again . . . so the racist condiments that have been added—between kollas and cambas, Indigenous and white (who now say almost everyone is mestizo)—do not blend in. Everything appears raw [en su crudeza]. (Albó 2008a)

In the wake of a rising tide of violence and division in June 2008, a political crisis that seemingly had the potential to split the country, the Jesuit anthropologist Xavier Albó expressed concern about the polarization of Bolivian society. It is difficult not to hear echoes of René Zavaleta Mercado in Albó’s words. Wrestling with the fallout of the attempted coup d’état of Colonel Alberto Natusch in November 1979, Zavaleta ([1983] 2013) proposed crisis as method, since during periods of crises, the social threads of a society fray and are laid bare for all to see. The intensification of these divisions before the crisis broke and was (temporarily) resolved in September 2008 appeared to offer no solution other than the downfall of the Evo Morales government and the bifurcation of Bolivia. This was, in the words of the ex-president, Carlos Mesa, “a crisis of the state, not of government”; a crisis that Mesa believed to contain the pos76

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sibility of civil war (cited in Prados 2008). However, it appears that once again Hegel’s (possibly hackneyed) Owl of Minerva spread its wings and took flight only at dusk, once the excitement of the day had long since passed. Although I am by no means the first to do so (see, in particular, Hesketh and Morton 2014; Modonesi 2012; Tapia 2011; Webber 2016), I contend that these divisions can be placed within broader processes of passive revolution, whereby the bifurcation of the country can be seen as a spatialization strategy that had the effect of curtailing the potential for transformative radical change driven by social movement forces from below. Because transformism is, in part, the spatial resolution of an organic crisis that restores the hegemony of the state through civil society, it maintains the conditions for capital accumulation writ large but not necessarily under the same social and spatial configurations of power. It is in this light that I want to examine the struggles for power between regions and between regions and the national government that punctuated the first three years of Morales’s government. The sociospatial dimensions of passive revolution presented here complement the analysis of social organization incorporation dissected in chapter 2. They reveal how the politics of space and scale dampened the radical potential of the Morales government and formed the contours of the compromises made by the MAS government with agricultural and extractive capital (mainly based in the lowlands). My analysis explores the shockwaves of spatial pacification on social organizations during transformism and reveals the contradictory and destabilizing dynamics within passive revolution in this moment. The spatial dissidence of the early Morales years, coupled with the class compromise between the MAS and the lowland elite, produced, as detailed below, a sense of “being forgotten,” undermining modes of incorporation and the quantitative element of transformism. Thus, in this chapter I demonstrate how adding a sociospatial dimension to passive revolution evinces its unstable and contradictory as well as contested and incomplete character. THE GENESIS OF SOCIOSPATIAL DIVISIONS The political crisis at the turn of the millennium, marked by an upsurge of Indigenous and working-class social movements in the Andean highlands and the valleys around Cochabamba, was not resolved with the election of Evo Morales. While the beginning of Morales’s presidency marked a new phase in the dynamics of passive revolution in Bolivia, it did not represent either the radical transformations demanded by social movements pushing for change from below or the complete restoration of the hegemony of the dominant classes and previous patterns of cap77

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ital accumulation. The defense of the dominant white-mestizo classes and modes of capital accumulation linked to transnational circuits of capital was articulated on a regional scale. And this conservative movement only became more pronounced and belligerent with the election of Evo Morales. To fully grasp the spatial contours of passive revolution and how the conservative element of passive revolution was articulated through the construction of a regional bloc, we need to return to the genesis of the lowland elite. The lowland elite was initially consolidated through the rubber boom of the 1920s, when European managers attracted to the Amazon basin by the fledging extractive industry married into the landowning classes. Immigration from Europe as well as Argentina and Brazil during the first two decades of the twentieth century gave the lowland elite some of its sociological features (see Soruco 2008). As Ximena Soruco (2008) demonstrates, in the first half of the twentieth century, political power in the Bolivian lowland regions was determined by landownership patterns, rather than its productive use. Land use was only transformed with the 1953 agrarian reform and the creation of the legal category “agricultural enterprise,” although this also prevented land redistribution in the Media Luna and left patterns of landownership here virtually untouched (Gill 1987, 32; Klein 2003, 236). Agricultural loans from the US Agency for International Development (USAID), distributed by the Banco Agrario Boliviano (Bolivian Agricultural Bank, BAB), and investment in roads, production techniques, and technology, coupled with the migration of freed surplus labor from the western part of the country, repositioned Santa Cruz as a capitalist agricultural production center of national importance (Eckstein 1983, 108–10; Soruco 2008, 38–39). The growth of the political and economic importance of the lowlands initiated by the “March to the East” was reinforced under the dictatorship of Hugo Banzer (1971–1978). Hailing from Santa Cruz and backed by the lowland elite and their representative organization, the Confederación de Empresarios Privados de Bolivia (Confederation of Private Companies of Bolivia, CEPB), Banzer bestowed economic and political privileges upon his home department while in power. His government directed cheap credit that was freely available following the first oil shock of 1973 to the emergent agribusiness bourgeoisie and his allies in government. Military chiefs took advantage of their position within the state to grab land on the agricultural frontier. The higher commodity prices due to the 1973 oil shock also made the production of nontraditional export crops and the husbandry of cattle in Bolivia’s eastern lowland an inviting prospect (Gill 1987, 51). This galvanized the proliferation of export crops 78

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cultivation—including sugar, cotton, rice, and coffee—and enabled Banzer’s allies to amass personal fortunes, further concentrating landownership in the lowlands (Eckstein 1979, 466; Gill 1987, 50). Coupled with the cheap credit available to agricultural enterprises, this allowed lowland haciendas to be transformed into capitalist agribusinesses generating profit (Eckstein 1983, 127), a process that further intensified following the soy boom of the early 1990s (Castañón 2017; McKay and Colque 2016). The upshot of these trends was a transformation of the space of Bolivia, as the axis of accumulation shifted from La Paz–Oruro–Potosí to La Paz–Cochabamba–Santa Cruz from the 1970s onward (Klein 2003, 252). At the turn of the century, 25 percent of the population of the department of Santa Cruz and 38 percent of the city originated from other regions in the country, largely from the departments of Cochabamba, Chuquisaca, and Potosí (Kirshner 2013, 549).1 Many more of the city’s residents were migrants from rural areas of the department itself. Migrants mostly settled in the popular, self-constructed barrios outside the fourth ring of the city, leading many to speak of Santa Cruz as “twocities” (Prado 2010, 2014): a white mestizo space occupied by the lowland elite and shaped by transnational circuits of capital linked to agribusiness and finance situated in the innermost four rings of the city; and a popular space marked by ethnic diversity and poverty, inserted into local hierarchies through the racializing category of kolla, which lumps migrants from departments outside the eastern lowlands together in opposition to the camba identity discussed below. THE TWO BOLIVIAS This is the sociological foundation of the lowland elite, which is linked into transnational circuits of capital and sees itself as politically, economically, and ethnically distinct from the rest of the country. So it is no surprise that the Indigenous social movements discussed in chapter 1 sent shockwaves through the lowlands. The growing strength of Indigenous groups provoked a violent reaction from the white mestizo cruceño elite,2 who were alarmed at the prospect of losing the economic and political privileges historically bestowed upon their class and race (Plata 2008, 102). As the Aymara inhabitants of the Altiplano and El Alto were transforming the highlands into a space of struggle and radical opportunity, the lowland elite—sensing that it was losing its grip on the centralized state on which it had long depended (Gustafson 2006)—rearticulated itself as a political force on a regional scale, positioning the eastern lowlands of the country against the majority Indigenous highlands. 79

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Table 3.1. Social blocs and political polarization, 2003–2005 Eastern-bourgeois bloc Social forces CPSC Civic Committees—Tarija, Pando, Beni CAO Cattle Ranchers’ Federation Hydrocarbons Chamber CAINCO Finance, agroindustrial, petroleum capital

Left-Indigenous bloc Social forces FEJUVE-El Alto COR-El Alto COB FSTMB Rural and urban teachers FSTCLP-TK CSUTCB (Quispe) Coordinator of gas (Olivera) Overwhelmingly Indigenous working classes and peasantry

Oscillating actors Social forces Carlos Mesa MAS Middle classes CSUTCB (Loayza) Cocaleros

January agenda Departmental autonomy Regional control over natural resources Departmental control over most tax revenue Departmental authority over all policies, excluding defense, currency, tariffs, and foreign relations “Free market” capitalism Openness to foreign direct investment Racism toward Indigenous majority State repression against Left-Indigenous protesters

October agenda Nationalization of natural gas Revolutionary Constituent Assembly Resignation of Carlos Mesa Indigenous liberation from internally colonial race relations Nationalization and social/ workers’ control over natural resources and strategic industries Radical redistribution of wealth and land

Mixed agenda Carlos Mesa Initial rhetorical support for October Agenda shifts to right-wing discourse against Left-Indigenous bloc by March 2007 Continuous practical support for perpetuation of neoliberal development model Middle class Follow Mesa as he shifts right MAS Support for Mesa government until March 2005 Subsequent support for modest reformism Increase to 50 percent royalties in hydrocarbons tax regime (against nationalization) Support for nonrevolutionary Constituent Assembly

Source: Data based on Webber (2011b, 233). 80

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The result was the emergence of the Media Luna regional bloc (Dunkerley 2007a, 16). Two distinct political projects—traced in space as the division between east and west—thus emerged from this context: “One that want[ed] to constitute Bolivia through the presence of the Indigenous majority, with the constitution of a plurinational state; and the other of the cruceña elite, which postulate[d] autonomous departments and, within their radical sectors, the ethnic reinvention of the ‘Nación Camba’ [Camba Nation]” (Plata 2008, 102).3 The Nación Camba movement was the most extreme voice within the autonomous movement; it proposed a “peaceful” separation of the country through a “freely associated state” (Sivak 2007, 26). Complementing Nación Camba were a number of powerful interrelated groups: the unelected Comité Pro Santa Cruz (Pro-Santa Cruz Committee, CPSC), led by business and agroindustrial elites; the Federación de Empresarios Privados de Santa Cruz (Santa Cruz Federation of Private Entrepreneurs, FEPSC), which united regional business associations such as the Eastern Cámara Agropecuaria del Oriente (Chamber of Agriculture, CAO) and the Cámara de Industria, Comercio, Servicios y Turismo de Santa Cruz (Chamber of Industry and Commerce, CAINCO); and the Unión Juvenil Cruceñista (Cruceña Youth Union, UJC), the violent protofascist youth wing of the CPSC (Sivak 2007, 29). By the end of the Gas War, as table 3.1 demonstrates, two social blocs composed of alliances from across the social spectrum in Bolivia had emerged, with some actors—including the MAS led by Evo Morales—oscillating between the two positions. As working-class and Indigenous movements were prizing open cracks in the hegemony of the colonial state and neoliberal model in the city of El Alto and the surrounding highland plateau, the lowland elite was also on the move. Under the pretext of protesting the rise in government-subsidized diesel prices (a key input in agro-industrial production), the CPSC organized a series of actions—“hunger strikes, work stoppages, the naming of a ‘pre-autonomous’ council, and the physical occupation of state institutions”—designed to demonstrate the regional strength of the Media Luna departments (Gustafson 2006, 354). Huge open-air cabildos were called to discuss and promote regional autonomy, producing the Agenda de Junio (June Agenda) in 2004 and the Agenda de Enero (January Agenda) in 2005, when a reported half-million cruceños participated in a pro-autonomy meeting (Argirakis 2016, 63). AUTONOMY BATTLES AND THE MEDIA LUNA Following Morales’s election in late 2005, the autonomy movement of the Media Luna built on the June and January Agendas and intensified the 81

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struggle to form “two Bolivias” (Dunkerley 2007a, 16). The spearhead of right-wing cruceño demands for autonomy, the Nación Camba movement, used a racist lens (disseminated via local radio and TV channels, the Santa Cruz newspaper El Deber, as well as the movement’s website [www.nacioncamba.net]) to portray the country as on the brink of civil war. Opposition parties and politicians used the growing spatial divisions to undermine support for the government among middle-class voters, with the threat of splitting the country (or the promise of autonomy) a major factor in changing political allegiances (Crabtree and Rios 2008). Although 57.6 percent of the electorate voted “No” in the autonomy referendum of June 2006 on the national level, the “Yes” vote won in the four Media Luna departments of Beni, Pando, Santa Cruz, and Tarija (Argirakis 2016, 77). The autonomy movement built on this popular support and convoked the cabildo for “the Yes vote,” where a reported 350,000– 400,000 took to the streets of Santa Cruz on July 2, 2006, to voice their support for regional autonomy (Miranda 2012, 154; Plata 2008; Schavelzon 2012, 150, 189). While these figures are probably inflated, they do demonstrate the effectiveness of the agenda at aligning popular support behind the elite’s agenda (Webber 2011, 95). The anthropologist Nicole Fabricant (2009, 770) argues that public spectacles like that of the Cabildo del Millón (Assembly of a Million) were essential in winning popular support for the autonomy movement: “Elite-backed public spectacle is an attempt to make certain things dramatically visible, it is also, by extension, an attempt to render things invisible. . . . Identity-based performances, the public celebration of the region’s most beautiful women, and the ritualized burning of effigies of the president hide or mask the true intentions of destructive economic and social policies of accumulation by dispossession or the commoditization and privatization of land and the forceful expulsion of peasant populations by militant youth groups.” Through these spectacles, the camba elites managed to successfully obscure their underlying class interests and frame autonomy as in the interests of all cruceños regardless of class. They sought to garner popular support by stressing the bureaucratic nature of the central state (at the time official bureaucratic procedures [trámites] could only be done in La Paz) and argued that control of the department’s resources would bring increased investment in the city of Santa Cruz (Kirshner 2010). The conservative political agenda of the lowland elite, in other words, was presented as the political agenda of the Media Luna as a whole in such spectacles (see also Gustafson 2006), which helped form opposition to the MAS on a regional scale. As the anthropologist Nancy Postero (2017, 48–51) notes, the dis82

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course of autonomy was also a strategy to disrupt the Constituent Assembly, which was in session in the city of Sucre during the period when the autonomy movement intensified. Ensuring that all articles of the new constitution had to be passed by a two-thirds majority meant that the Bolivian Right could influence (if not control) the dynamics of the assembly. In his work on the autonomy discourse of cruceño elites, Wilfredo Plata (2008, 155) argues that the lowland elite used the threat of splitting the country in an attempt to manipulate the dynamics of the Constituent Assembly to produce a constitution that “entrusted the executive and legislative competencies to [the Media Luna departments].” The connection between autonomy and the Constituent Assembly was easy to make given the decision of the MAS to announce a referendum on departmental autonomy—a concession to their political opponents— on the same day (March 4, 2006) that the decree proclaiming the Constituent Assembly was passed (Webber 2011, 85). This political jockeying around autonomy would prove to be an important part of the Constituent Assembly. In September 2006, MAS delegates attempted to change the rules of debate, arguing that the Constituent Assembly was original, rather than derived from the previous constitution, and thus not constrained by its legal framework and the Convocation Law (Postero 2017, 49). In response, the opposition paralyzed the Constituent Assembly for months through a variety of marches, assemblies, and hunger strikes, while opposition delegates boycotted the assembly. One of the most visible protests was the Cabildo de Millón in Santa Cruz in December 2006, which enacted departmental autonomy through a popular vote that was later ruled illegal by the Supreme Court. The governor of Cochabamba, Manfred Reyes, attempted to follow suit, proposing a new referendum on departmental autonomy in December 2006. Violent clashes followed between right-wing supporters of Reyes and popular forces—both rural and urban organizations including the Central Obrera Departamental (Departmental Workers’ Center, COD)-Cochabamba, university students, the transport unions, and rank-and-file cocaleros—who were mobilized by the MAS government (Webber 2011, 111–14). Although negotiations between the opposition and the MAS started procedures again in February 2007, protests and violence punctuated the assembly (Postero 2017, 50). By the end of November 2007, the violence orchestrated by the opposition and their supporters made continuing negotiations difficult, with three people dying in street violence directed at Indigenous groups in Sucre (Salazar 2015, 204). Worried that the Constituent Assembly would run aground again, Morales bused MAS83

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delegates to Oruro to convene a sixteen-hour second session without the opposition that produced a preliminary constitution text (Postero 2017, 50). The autonomy movement ramped up following this controversial second session of the Constituent Assembly. By January 2008, the opposition had intertwined the two issues, using their demand for autonomy to try to reopen the constitution text for negotiation. Secretary for Autonomies for the Prefecture of Santa Cruz, Carlos Dabdoub (cited in La Prensa 2008), stated: “We believe that the autonomous regime, which is our central demand, should be transversal in the constitution.” While the new Constitución Política del Estado de Bolivia (Political Constitution of the State of Bolivia, CPE) was being celebrated in La Paz, Santa Cruz announced the promulgation of the Autonomous Statute of the Department of Santa Cruz as a response to the drafting of the new constitution with “ethnic features” (Plata 2008, 156–57).4 The autonomy law established Santa Cruz as a full-fledged federal state with control over its natural resources, including land, hydrocarbons, and forests (Plata 2008, 159–61). Although this was also declared illegal by the government, Beni, Pando, and Tarija each followed suit and attempted to unilaterally implement their own autonomy laws (Kohl 2010, 110). The government and the lowland opposition returned to the negotiating table in January 2008, but talks broke down when it became apparent that the executive branch of government would not sanction a departmental referendum on autonomy. Unperturbed, the Departmental Council of Santa Cruz approved a budget of BOB 11.2 million and set a date for the referendum in May 2008.5 Eighty-two percent of voters opted for autonomy (La Razón 2008k).6 Despite being lauded as a “fiesta of democracy” by the cruceño senator Oscar Ortiz (cited in La Razón 2008f), the referendum was again declared illegal and unconstitutional by several organizations, including the National Electoral Court (CNE) (Dangl 2008).7 Voting stations were staffed by members of the protofascist UJC, and graffiti appeared across the city: “This 4 May grab your weapon, we’re gonna kill all the kollas” (cited in Carroll and Schipani 2008). In response, government supporters converged on the city in thousands and, with tensions running high, violent skirmishes between pro-government and pro-autonomy factions broke out in various sites across the city of Santa Cruz de la Sierra, including in Plan 3000 (Chávez 2009; Van Schaick and Bluestone 2008), where “hundreds of pro- and anti-autonomy youths wielding sticks ran through the [streets] as the riot police . . . stood idle” (Romero 2008a). The months that followed the referendum were tense and full of uncertainty, with political commentators speaking of the possibility of a 84

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“new political map” (La Razón 2008m), and Bolivia facing a “rupture of order” (La Razón 2008l). Impasse, equilibrium, and “terminal crisis” were all descriptions bandied about by political commentators. The contrast and conflict between the “two Bolivias” intensified to such an extent that the schism could be seen—and was commented on—from afar in the international press (see Carroll 2008; Carroll and Schipani 2008; Coló 2008; Reid 2008; Romero 2008a). The Washington Post went as far as suggesting that the country was on the brink of civil war (see La Nación 2008). Indeed, the lines drawn in the sand did appear to harden during this period, with representatives of the Media Luna departments beginning to negotiate as a bloc with the national government following the events of May 4 (Redacción Bolpress 2008). After the autonomy referendum in Tarija on June 22—completing the set across the Media Luna departments—prefects from the four departments announced that a new, autonomous Bolivia had been born (La Razón 2008s). Rubén Costas, keen to stress both the legitimacy of the movement and the equation between Bolivia and the mestizo groups of the Media Luna, called the chain of autonomy referendums “the true revolution and the true unification of Bolivia” (Marirrodriga 2008).8 The political force of the Media Luna reached its apogee in August– September 2008. On August 17, 2008, civic prefects in Beni, Pando, Santa Cruz, and Tarija announced a civic strike for August 19. In the following days, the head of the Civic Committee of Santa Cruz, Branko Marinkovic, called for federalism, and civic prefects from across the Media Luna met to coordinate actions (Argirakis 2016, 91). This was accompanied by a wave of violence from the UJC, who—flanked in this moment by thousands of paid youths (Miranda 2012, 140)—were at the forefront of the actions reclaiming autonomy, beating unarmed trade unionists and peasants with sticks, whips, and two-by-fours (Webber 2011, 135–36). By September 10, the UJC had spearheaded the violent occupation of forty-five institutions across the Media Luna departments, while autonomy protesters simultaneously blockaded hydrocarbons installations and shut off the gas pipelines to Argentina and Brazil (Argirakis 2016, 92). On September 11, the anniversary of the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 coup, violence reached fever pitch, with clashes between government supporters and the UJC in Plan 3000 throughout the day (Chávez 2009; Zibechi 2010b). On the same day, in a distant part of the country, dozens of peasant activists were slaughtered with machine-gun fire in an attack orchestrated by the prefect of Pando, Leopoldo Fernández (Soruco 2008). In what became known as the “Porvenir massacre,” the autonomist movement’s violent and racist nature was laid bare and 85

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its pretense of being a pro-democracy movement fighting against an oppressive dictatorship evaporated.9 ETHNIC DIVISIONS, SPATIAL SCHISMS Underlying the autonomy movement was a racist politics used to divide the country between “kollas” (a racially charged name for highlanders) and “cambas”, with cruceños stressing the purity of their lineage as Spanish descendants and their implicit “whiteness” in the face of the Indigenous movements of the Altiplano (Gustafson 2006, 356).10 This was a central element of the sociospatial dimension of passive revolution, and the autonomy movement worked tirelessly to present the conflict as a battle between modernity and backwardness by exploiting both racial stereotypes about Indigenous people and the invented tradition of the “camba.” Indeed, as the anthropologist Bret Gustafson (2006, 354) stresses, one of the central contradictions of Nación Camba is an emphasis on a mestizo heritage with Guaraní influence that sits alongside a racial politics juxtaposing European descent against indigeneity. In the weeks following the illegal autonomy referendum in Santa Cruz, the indefatigable and ever-insightful Xavier Albó (2008b) traced the different forms of racism through the longue durée of Bolivian history since Francisco Pizarro’s bloody sixteenth-century campaign against the Inca, describing racism in Bolivia as a “virus that continues mutating but that persists, as we shall see in the next installment.” One does not have to look far to find the target of Albó’s polemic, as Percy Fernández, the mayor of Santa Cruz, wades into the fold: “What the executive [branch of government] wants is to keep all the power for itself and ‘con toda la indiada’ [all this indian scum]” (La Razón 2008a). However, if we raise our eyes beyond the immediate horizon of larger-than-life political personae (Fernández is a controversial figure at the best of times), Albó’s poignant intervention reflects not only Bolivia’s long history of colonialism and racial exclusion but also the ways in which, during this moment, spatial divisions had been opened through the (re)tracing of these divisions into space. The effects of this modality of tracing divisions in space became increasingly visible during the first three years of Morales’s premiership. The violence around the Constituent Assembly outlined in the previous section was also tinted by racism (Schavelzon 2012). Refusal to meet demands to make Sucre the national capital again led to violence in the city, with protesters marching down Sucre’s streets armed with flaming torches—images that evoke a comparison with lynch mobs of old in the US Southern states—and declaring the head of the Assembly, “Silvia 86

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Lazarte, chola ignorante [ignorant chola].” This racist streak in opposition movements only intensified in the period following the Constituent Assembly, as the protests in Sucre fed into autonomy protests. Albó’s sentiment reverberated around the country in the wake of what became known as the “day of shame” (el día de vergüenza) in Sucre, when on May 24, 2008, protests against Morales during his visit to the city to open public works turned violent. Groups of protesters took the Patria Stadium and attacked campesinos—videos surfaced of demonstrators leading groups of over fifty campesinos into the square, stripping them to the waist and making them kneel while the wiphalas and aguayos were burned by a mob shouting “on your knees, indio de mierda” (La Razón 2008p). Thirty-five people were reportedly injured in this episode of violence, with the racist mob depriving the campesinos of their official documents and the few possessions they carried on their persons. In his cutting analysis of the events in Sucre, César Brie (2008), stresses that racism never disappeared from the country’s constitutional capital, it simply “subsisted, veiled by good manners and a hypocritical cultural veneer.” Brie underscores the ties between the perpetrators of violence on that fateful day in 2008 and the municipal government of the time, with the city’s mayor, Aidée Nava, apparently applauding the events in front of Sucre’s House of Liberty as they unfolded (Bolivia Information Forum 2008). Civil society organizations—the Comité Interinstitucional (Interinstitutional Committee), along with the Rector of the Universidad Pública de San Francisco Xavier de Chuquisaca (Public University San Francisco Xavier of Chuquisaca) and the Comité Cívico (Civic Committee) of Sucre—played a big part in promoting the barbarism of May 24, 2008, and Brie’s account reveals the articulation of racist street violence and formal right-wing political organizations in positions of power. It is hardly surprising that his observations lead Brie to label Sucre the “capital of racism.” If racism never disappeared in Sucre, what matters here is that in May 2008 it was laid bare for all to see. Crises, after all, argues Zavaleta ([1983] 2013, 106), unveil the complex and enigmatic Bolivian social reality and reveal its different composite threads. The events in Sucre exhibit the racist foundations of Bolivia as both state and nation, and the ongoing and incomplete nature of nationalizing projects. They also evince how racism functioned as part of conservative challenges to the MAS government articulated on a regional scale. As mentioned above, the autonomy movement in Santa Cruz also couched their arguments in explicitly racist terms, using the distinction between highland “kollas” and lowland “cambas” as the basis for 87

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regional autonomy. The autonomy leader, Rubén Costas, gives a flavor of the racism of the lowland elite in his vitriolic attack on Evo Morales: “This shameless person, this biggest macaque of Chávez. He will never support autonomy, because autonomy requires the sharing of economic and administrative power with different peoples” (La Razón 2008a). Although anecdotal, the words of Costas capture the essence of the autonomy movement: anti-Left (and by extension, vehemently anti-Hugo Chávez), anti-Morales, and anti-Indigenous. That Costas still speaks of Indigenous people as animals sadly fits into the longue durée of racism in Bolivia (and Latin America more widely) underscored by Albó. A focus on how the autonomy movement played out in the peripheral neighborhood of Santa Cruz, Plan 3000, illustrates how racism functioned as part of the autonomy movement in practice. Due to its sociological composition, Plan 3000 offers a window into the autonomy movement. It is a neighborhood formed after the River Piraí burst its banks in 1983 and is composed almost entirely of migrants from the interior of the country—mainly the Aymara and Quechua regions of Chuquisaca, Cochabamba, La Paz, Oruro, and Potosí. Given that most residents of Plan 3000 are migrants from the interior of the country drawn from the two largest Indigenous groups (Aymara and Quechua), residents had been subject to abuse and violence by the UJC for many years before the autonomy movement ramped up in 2008. It is not hard to guess at whom the UJC’s trademark graffiti “kollas de mierda” was directed. On May 4, 2008, the day of the autonomy referendum, residents of Plan 3000 finally decided to organize defense committees against the violence of the UJC (Chávez 2010, 126), proclaiming that the autonomy referendum vote concerned “the autonomy statute of the rich” (Miranda 2012, 108). For the first time, huge numbers of people gathered at the Rotonda (the Roundabout, the commercial hub of the neighborhood) at the center of Plan 3000 in defense of the proceso de cambio—but not necessarily the MAS. By May 5, the UJC had not entered Plan 3000 and residents felt they had won, which built a sense of solidarity between them (Chávez 2010, 129–31). As described above, in the months leading up to the Battle of Plan 3000 on September 11, 2008, divisions within the country intensified and reached a reaching crisis point on August 15—the day Evo Morales’s presidency was confirmed in a recall referendum with a two-thirds majority—when the UJC brutally attacked the Santa Cruz police commander (Zibechi 2009). This crisis approached its zenith with the occupation of public buildings and employer lockouts led by the UJC, which only 88

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ended in the fallout of the violence in Porvenir and the Battle of Plan 3000. In this moment, Plan 3000 became the epicenter of the conflict, the space in which the two sides met. Following the violence of August 19 during the civic strike in Santa Cruz (La Razón 2008w), on September 10, the UJC arrived and attempted to encircle the Plan (Zibechi 2009), paying hundreds of thugs to attack the residents (Chávez 2009, 110–11). The UJC and its hired muscle were met by the resistance of the Plan 3000 residents, who took to the streets in defense of their neighborhood.11 Eduardo Loayza, the former director of the local Radio Integración, which kept residents up to date on every battle and skirmish during the violence, explained to Marxa Chávez (2009, 112) why the UJC attacked Plan 3000: “The idea was for all of them to come in and burn the symbolic central part of the neighborhood. . . . They attack the Plan because it is a symbol. Plan 3000 has no industry, no prefecture, no mayor’s office, not a lot of money changes hands, it is simply working people. But the Plan is a symbol, a bastion of the left wing in Santa Cruz. Thus, taking over the Plan, taking over La Rotonda, destroying everything was a question of power. . . . There was going to be violence, there was going to be a massacre.” Plan 3000 was targeted especially because it was associated with the MAS—both politically as an area of support and due to racial stereotypes that, as Costas’s words above suggest, lump migrants from the highlands together with President Evo Morales as “kollas”. This massacre, however, never came to fruition, thanks to the selforganization and vigilance of the residents of Plan 3000. Resistance in the Plan was matched in this moment by a coalition of Indigenous peoples, peasants, colonizers, street vendors and their guilds, workers, and students that numbered thirty thousand by some accounts (Zibechi 2010b, 145). Cocaleros marching from the Chapare joined Indigenous peoples and peasants from the surrounding area and came to Plan 3000 to show support for the forces opposing the autonomy movement, further underscoring the racial divisions within the conflict of September 2008. THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE AUTONOMY MOVEMENT As Denise Humphreys Bebbington and Anthony Bebbington (2010) correctly stress, the autonomy movement was more than just visceral racism and must be placed within the uneven geography of resource extraction in Bolivia. So, while ethnic divisions were an important dimension of the autonomy movement, they alone are insufficient to understand the sociospatial dynamics of passive revolution. During the course of the two sessions of the Constituent Assembly, autonomy demands became inter89

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woven with broader questions around the distribution of power among different social groups in the country (La Razón 2008r). The initial divisions between capital and the MAS government are visible in the clear opposition of the CEPB to Morales. Gabriel Dabdoub, president of the CEPB, proclaimed the need to protect the economy from politics, stating that “the vision of the MAS government was not economic. It has the vision to be a producer government, a producer state, which in the past has been disastrous because state companies only provide space for political favoritism and serve political interests, leading to inefficiency and poverty” (La Razón 2008n). Challenges to the repositioning of the state through the National Development Plan of the MAS (see chapter 5) were rescaled, articulated through the spatial politics of the autonomy movement. During this period, questions surrounding the fiscal pact—how state revenue is distributed among different levels (particularly municipalities) of the state—came to the fore. To put it another way, the political project for the recuperation of natural resources that emerged from the moment of catharsis—above all in El Alto—was increasingly curtailed and challenged by politics of space and scale. At two moments, the political economic dimensions of the autonomy movement are most visible: in the struggles over changes to the Direct Hydrocarbon Tax at the beginning of 2008; and in the limited advances of the agrarian reform process between 2006 and 2009. Both offer insights into how the sociospatial dynamics of passive revolution consolidated a political economic model that did not break with that of the previous period, and allowed for the continuation of accumulation both by national elites and transnational capital through extractive processes and their derivative operations (such as finance). Contesting Resources and the Direct Hydrocarbon Tax The IDH was created under Carlos Mesa’s government by the 2005 Hydrocarbons Law (Law 3058), which established that the tax was to be “directed to Bolivia’s departments, municipalities, universities, and Indigenous groups and [was] intended to be used for primarily for education, roads, and health care” (Kaup 2010, 131–32). Thus, although Mesa’s hydrocarbon law increased the state’s capture of hydrocarbon rents by 32 percent, it also placed limits on what these expanded fiscal resources could be spent on and gave municipal and departmental governments responsibility for their management at the expense of the national government. Hydrocarbon-producing departments benefited nicely from this arrangement, as the IDH boosted their tax revenues, while the treasury and nonproducer departments lost out (McGuigan 2007, 54). 90

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This changed on January 1, 2008, when alterations of the IDH came into force. Using these changes, Morales recentralized the management of the Bolivian state’s greatest asset and stripped municipal and departmental governments of their automatic rights to manage IDH generated in their constituencies (Zelaya 2008). Unsurprisingly, this sparked a bellicose response from the Media Luna departments. The opposition prefect of Beni, Ernesto Suárez, argued, “The IDH [must be] left untouched . . . we cannot continue to raffle off our progress,” while Manfred Reyes Villa, the Prefect of Cochabamba, stated that the creation of a compensatory fund would not work. Somewhat predictably, the clearest connection of the question of autonomy with the management of resource rents through the IDH came from prefectures of the two biggest hydrocarbon-producing departments, Santa Cruz, and Tarija, which insisted that “the IDH is a right of autonomous regimes.” The Prefecture of Santa Cruz went as far as to declare the modifications to IDH a “conquest of departments” (all cited in La Razón 2008d). All leaders from the Media Luna opposed the creation of a compensatory regime, designed to (re)distribute hydrocarbon rents equally throughout Bolivia’s national territory, overseen by the national government. They considered this an infringement on the ability of departments to manage their own resources and thus a factor incompatible with their ongoing demands for regional autonomy. Indeed, two of the central pillars of the 2006 autonomy statute drafted in Santa Cruz was the demand to retain “two-thirds of all tax revenue generated in the department” and “departmental control over natural resources and their exploitation (including rights to negotiate contracts with hydrocarbon and mining firms)” (Fabricant and Postero 2013, 202). In May 2008, negotiations between the MAS government and the opposition parties Poder Democrático Social (Social Democratic Power, PODEMOS), Unidad Nacional (National Unity, UN), and the Nationalist Revolutionary Movement (MNR) began, with the intent of “harmonizing” the constitutional text with the autonomy statutes developed in the lowland departments. At the center of negotiations was the IDH, with the UN head of the legislators, Alejandro Colzanzi, explaining that “the basis of these negotiations is the revision of the constitutional text . . . to return the IDH to the regions whence it came” (cited in La Razón 2008l). Resource extraction has a long, melancholic history in Bolivia: histories of unfulfilled hope, broken promises, and frustration that extend far beyond the timeframe of passive revolution, the focus here. This is certainly the case for Tarija, for example, the department home to extensive hydrocarbon reserves and the place where the civic committees 91

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and municipalities of the Chaco region set up blockades demanding the return of hydrocarbon resources lost through the changes to the IDH (La Razón 2008x). The autonomy movement here was contradictory, and its supporters were divided along spatial—particularly urban–rural—and class lines. Some felt no affinity with the racist diatribe proclaimed by the UJC outlined above. For Tarijeños,12 gas was the central factor: “The conflicts in Tarija cannot be understood independently of natural gas. The history of hydrocarbons and the failure to derive either great national or significant regional benefit from their extraction inspires latent regionalist and nationalistic grievances for many actors” (Humphreys Bebbington and Bebbington 2010, 154). As Humphreys Bebbington and Bebbington demonstrate, the principal source of tension between Tarija and the central government during this period was the conflicting imaginaries for resource rent usage. Tarijeño elites “have increasingly coupled the department’s future economic development with large-scale, export-oriented extractive industry activity” (Humphreys Bebbington and Bebbington 2010, 146), in much the same way that the MAS hung its hat on hydrocarbon extraction (discussed further in chapter 5).13 Indeed, the Morales government carefully drew a direct line through its political rhetoric from hydrocarbon rents to the conditional cash transfer programs, Renta Dignidad, Bono Juancito Pinto, and Bono Juana Azurduy, which targeted pensioners, schoolchildren, and pregnant women/young mothers, respectively (Haarstad 2014, 983). It was the same story with the Teleférico, the cable car system in La Paz, which displayed the logo of the Bolivian State Petroleum Company (YPFB) on its gondolas. Although demands centered on the IDH were eventually ceded in the wake of the Porvenir massacre, this does not imply that they were insignificant. In fact, one might be tempted to think so given the dearth of material written about this aspect of the autonomy movement. Nonetheless, the struggles over the distribution of the IDH at the beginning of 2008 reveal the political economic dimension of the autonomy movement and how resistance to the shifting balance of political and economic power represented by the election of Evo Morales coalesced around spatial and scalar strategies. As the quotation of Gabriel Dabdoub above suggests, there was significant resistance to state-led reforms that confronted the dominant forms of accumulation through the market. And besides being masked by the language of economic literacy, this resistance was also couched in the vernacular of autonomy. Turning to the relationship between the MAS government’s agrarian reform and the autonomy movement further elaborates this dimension of my argument. 92

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Agrarian Reform “The great landowners of the Oriente are crying. They are hysterically crying because they know that their glory days are over. . . . We will seize their unproductive land and give it to poor campesinos!” (Evo Morales, cited in Fabricant 2012, 140).

When Morales assumed power, the initial signs indicated that the MAS government was willing to confront large landowners and export-oriented agribusiness. Morales appointed Alejandro Almaraz, a longtime proponent of agrarian reform and one of the founders of the MAS, as vice-minister of land (Colque, Tinta, and Sanjinés 2016, 91). Almaraz set to work quickly, promulgating the first agrarian reform legislation in late 2006 in the Law of Communitarian Renewal of Agrarian Reform (Law 3545) (Colque 2014, 66–67). Law 3545 ostensibly enacted an “agrarian revolution” aimed toward guaranteeing food sovereignty, ensuring that land serves a “socio-economic function,” redefining the expropriation of medium and large landholdings, distributing public lands for Indigenous communities, and preventing forced or bonded labor (McKay 2018, 411). Law 3545 both responded to the demands for social justice in rural areas that emanated from the social movements of 2000–2005 and extended the processes of land registration laid out in the 1996 INRA Law, which until this point had achieved limited success (Webber 2017, 335).14 As the Fundación TIERRA investigators Gonzalo Colque, Efraín Tinta, and Esteban Sanjinés (2016, 163) underscore, one of the novelties of Law 3545 was the “modification of the mechanisms of saneamiento and titling to better align them with the declared ends” of redistributing unproductive land.15 As a result, the process of land titling through saneamiento was accelerated, with 11.7 million hectares titled between 2007 and 2009 (compared to 12.4 million in the ten years prior) (Colque, Tinta, and Sanjinés 2016, 163). Initially, the distribution of land to landless and land-poor Indigenous peasants was prioritized. Nevertheless, the government was quickly confronted by fierce resistance from the landed elite concentrated in the eastern lowlands, where the 1953 agrarian reform had left large landholding intact (Webber 2017, 335). It is hardly surprising that Morales’s words at a rally of Indigenous supporters in the heartland of the agricultural elite during June 2006, and the agrarian revolution in general, provoked intense resistance from large landowners, who saw the prospect of agrarian reform as an existential threat. To illustrate the tensions and sociopolitical aspects of this moment, a diversion via the story of Ronald Larsen, a large landown93

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er hailing from the US, is well worthwhile. Larsen arrived in Bolivia in the late 1960s having driven his pickup truck all the way from Montana to Caraparicito in the department of Santa Cruz. Larsen made news in early 2008 when he allegedly shot out Almaraz’s car tires during the deputy land minister’s visit to his ranch to carry out an inspection—the stage in the saneamiento process before seizing land and redistributing it among Indigenous communities and peasant farmers. Indignant about the prospect of losing his land, Larsen proceeded to kidnap Almaraz, instantly becoming a local hero in the autonomy movement and provoking an angry reaction from the government. If Larsen’s story were not bizarre enough, his son Duston won the Mr. Bolivia beauty pageant in 2004, only a matter of months after arriving from the US, and later played himself in Rodrigo Bellott’s brilliant political satire about Bolivia ¿Quién mató a la llamita blanca? Ronald Larsen was by no means alone in fighting land reform—and what many landowners in the lowlands saw as the state overstepping the mark—with violence. Indeed, many landowners hired private militia to protect their land. The story of the Larsen family nonetheless provides a nice vignette that expresses the sentiment of this period of autonomy battles in Bolivia. The New York Times reported that Duston Larsen—who was more than a mere actor or bon vivant and was eager to continue his father’s legacy—was relishing the political battle with the president (see Romero 2008b), although the irony of a white, US-raised large landowner facing off against the Aymara president, who rose through the ranks of peasant unions over the issue of much-needed land reform, was lost on Duston himself. This somehow captures the continuing difficulties of land reform in the country, and highlights the ways in which colonial patterns of landownership and the associated racialized labor regimes (see McKay and Colque 2016) continue to be interwoven with the current political economy of lowland agribusiness. As the autonomy battles intensified, the Constituent Assembly, particularly the Land Commission, became the battleground for struggles over agrarian reform (Schavelzon 2012, 171–76). On the one hand, the Unity Pact articulated demands for land through a sociospatial conception of territory, which drew together material use of land with the cultural and symbolic dimensions integral to territory for many Indigenous communities (Garcés 2013). The Unity Pact pushed for the refounding of the state based on new understandings of territory, and the annulment of past land titles distributed by the dictatorships of Hugo Banzer and García Meza (in particular) and those given to transnational capital under neoliberalism (Schavelzon 2012, 175). On the other hand, largescale 94

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Table 3.2. Articles on Land, Territory, and Agrarian Reform in the Draft Constitution Text versus Autonomy Statute of Santa Cruz Constitution Text (Prenegotiation)

Autonomy Statute of Santa Cruz

Article 170 The president of the state has the power to: (23) Exercise the maximum authority over Agrarian Reform and award executive titles redistributing land.

Article 86 The regulation and administration of natural and renewable resources is the role of the departmental government.

Article 391 The state recognizes public property and individual private property or communal lands as long as it performs a social function

Article 101 (1) It is the power of the Autonomous Department of Santa Cruz to approve, through the corresponding departmental law, the Departmental Plan for the Territorial Codes (PDOT) and the Plan for the Use of the Ground (PLUS), within its territorial jurisdiction, within the national legal framework, and in accordance with the best use of the land.

Art 392 (1) Individual agrarian property is classified as either small or industrial by cultivated area, production functions, and development criteria. Art 393 (1 and 2) The state provides fiscal lands to Indigenous originary peasants and intercultural communities that have no land or insufficient land. Art 394 (1) The state regulates the land market, preventing the accumulation of land above the maximum size as stipulated by law, which otherwise is to be divided into smaller parcels and distributed to small landowners.

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Article 395 (1) Work is the fundamental source for the acquisition and conservation of agrarian property. (2) For small and communitarian landholdings, the social function is understood as the sustainable use of the land. (3) The economic function should be understood as the sustainable use of land in the development of productive activities. (4) All forms of land tenancy, except for small and communitarian holdings, are subject to revision.

Article 102 Property rights over land, the regulation of these rights, the distribution, redistribution, and administration of lands in the Department of Santa Cruz is the responsibility of the departmental government and is regulated through departmental law as approved by the Departmental Legislative Assembly.

Article 396 Latifundia are prohibited. Article 397 (1) The noncompletion of social economic functions or latifundia tenancy is cause for revision. Article 398 The state has the obligation to: (1) Foment plans for human settlements to reach a rational demographic distribution and the best use of land.

(1) The statute recognizes and protects private property over land in the Autonomous Department of Santa Cruz, whether it be individual or collective, as long as it performs a social function and a socioeconomic function.

Art 399 (1) The state recognizes the totality of Indigenous originary peasant territory and its communities. Note: The maximum amount of land one company can hold is 5,000 hectares Sources: Elaborated by the author using Bolivia (2009) and Gobierno Autónomo Departmental Santa Cruz (2008).

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landowners, represented at the Constituent Assembly by PODEMOS, denied the existence of latifundia in Bolivia and argued that for much of the land under consideration, neither intensive nor semi-intensive exploitation was possible, so this land should be excluded from the land titling and redistribution processes (Schavelzon 2012, 173). PODEMOS also used autonomy as a way to block the agrarian reform and resist the titling and redistribution of land by the state in the department of Santa Cruz (Schavelzon 2012, 173). This tactic ramped up following the second session of the Constituent Assembly in Oruro in December 2007. The draft of the new constitutional text developed in Oruro contained several articles that directly addressed the question of agrarian reform, as outlined in table 3.2. Broadly speaking, the prenegotiation constitutional text repositioned the central state as the arbitrator of land titling and mediator of land markets, connected landownership to the social and economic function of land use (in effect challenging many of the lowland elite’s claims to land), and placed a limit of five thousand hectares on landholdings. This would have embedded the state-led agrarian revolution laid out in Law 3545 in the new constitution, giving the MAS government a constitutional basis to break up large latifundia and agro-industrial landholdings and redistribute them to Indigenous communities and peasants. This challenge to the property rights of the lowland elite was partly countered by the autonomy statutes passed in the Media Luna departments in the first half of 2008. By comparing the prenegotiation CPE text to the Santa Cruz Autonomy Statute, we see that the latter is explicitly designed to curtail the power of the central state in proceeding with agrarian reform and land titling in the department of Santa Cruz. Here, the right of the autonomous municipal government to oversee land titling and the property rights of land are stressed, contradicting numerous articles in the proposed CPE text (see table 3.2). The autonomy movement argued that agrarian reform was impossible because it foreclosed their right as departments to manage their own resources, in this case, land and economic activities linked to land. As the autonomy movement ramped up, so did resistance to agrarian reform. This is the context in which Ronald Larsen rose to fame in the autonomy movement, as the belligerent lowland elite who turned to violence to destabilize Morales’s government and undermine some of the more radical reforms demanded by the social movements that were becoming the social base of the MAS government (outlined in chapter 2). The collapse of the autonomy movement following the events at Porvenir forced the lowland agroindustrial elites to the negotiating table. 97

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CONSOLIDATION AND COMPROMISE AFTER PORVENIR Salazar (2015, 156) argue the Porvenir massacre was a point of inflection for the MAS government. As I contend in chapter 2, it represented the complete alignment of social movement forces with the MAS and limited its horizons to the state.16 It also marked the demise of violent opposition to the MAS government from the lowland autonomy movement and the beginning of a period of class conciliation. Though Porvenir marked the end of the autonomy offensive by the lowland elite, as Fabricant and Postero (2013, 204) contend, “the force of the autonomy movement pressured the Morales government to negotiate with lowland elites, and ultimately to include many of their demands for regional autonomy in the final constitution.” However, the MAS government was more than happy to negotiate. Following the second session of the Constituent Assembly, Morales increasingly used the language of “national unity” in an attempt to build compromise with the lowland opposition, going as far as declaring: “I have not heard one departmental prefect that opposes change” (La Razón 2008b). In September–October 2008, Vice President Álvaro García Linera negotiated changes to the constitutional text with representatives of the opposition behind closed doors. While the MAS government kept any amendments to the IDH off the table, over 120 articles of the constitution’s text were modified; Morales agreed to these changes on October 21, 2008 (Eaton 2011, 297; Salazar 2015, 213–14). One of the most significant alterations to the proposed constitutional text was “a non-retroactivity clause that exempts existing agrarian property from the new five-thousand-hectare limit on the size of landholdings” (Wolff 2016, 128), which permitted the continuation of dominant forms of capital accumulation through agrarian extractivism in the lowland regions. These negotiated compromises paved the way for the constitutional referendum, which ratified the modified constitutional text in January 2009 (Wolff 2016, 130). However, these were by no means the last concessions on agrarian reform to be granted to the lowland elite by the MAS government. Despite two years of careful consultation with the Unity Pact, Law 3545 was revised under the watchful eyes of the representatives of the agro-industrial elite—namely, the Asociación de Productores de Oleaginosas y Trigo (Assocation of Oil and Wheat Producers, ANAPO) and CAINCO—who ensured favorable outcomes for agribusiness (Francescone 2012, 41–44). With the new CPE approved, relations between the MAS government and representatives of lowland business elites thawed, and Morales 98

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was invited to the international fair of Santa Cruz, ExpoCruz, for the first time in September 2009. Despite declining this first invitation, he did attend the following year, which marked the beginning of an alliance between the MAS and the economic elites of the department of Santa Cruz, in particular their representative organization, the FEPSC. Such was the satisfaction with what Gabriel Dabdoub (cited in Wolff 2016, 131) referred to as its new “working-relationship” with the MAS government that the FEPSC “largely stopped funding the Comité Pro Santa Cruz, plunging this once all-powerful institution into a financial crisis” (Crabtree and Chaplin 2013, 137). Following this warming of relations, the MAS government pursued a political program that consolidated the agro-industrial complex in the department and encouraged the expansion of the agricultural frontier (McKay 2018, 418). Several authors (e.g., Salazar 2015; Webber 2011) note that land reform left large landholding virtually intact. Following initial concessions to large landowners, the MAS government later proceeded to retroactively legalize unlawful deforestation through Law 337, permitted the cultivation of genetically modified crops, and attempted to extend the two-year timeframe for verifying the economic and social function of land to up to ten years (Ormachea and Ramirez 2013). Largescale agro-industrial monocrop production controlled by transnational capital, especially along the agricultural frontier in the department of Santa Cruz, increased to such an extent under Morales that by 2017, agricultural production in Santa Cruz was dominated by global capital linked to six giant transnational conglomerates that controlled 75 percent of the global agrochemical market, and four transnational firms responsible for 90 percent of the world’s grain production (Castañón 2017, 11–12).17 The results of these concessions were stark: a 500 percent increase in cultivable surface area between 1991 and 2014, and a growth in annual soy production from 322,000 tonnes to over 2.8 million during the same period (Castañón 2017, 20), while “the agrarian structure [was] left largely unchanged as new forms of marginalization, exclusion, and debt relations exacerbate existing rural inequalities” (McKay 2018, 417; see also McKay and Colque 2016). In sum, sociospatial strategies of dividing the country into two apparently opposing political blocs—articulating opposition to the political economic demands of radical social movements on a regional scale— were successful in curtailing the most radical proposals and challenges to the dominant forms of capital accumulation linked to hydrocarbons and agribusiness. However, as the above discussion demonstrates, the MAS government was able to take greater control over Bolivia’s natural 99

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resources rents from both private capital and regional elites and use them to fund moderate redistributive programs directed at the poor, largely Indigenous working classes, and peasantry. The lowland elite, although contentedly allied with the MAS between 2010 and 2016, were forced to relinquish some of the direct political power they had enjoyed since the time of Hugo Banzer (1971–1978). In other words, passive revolution was successful in restoring the hegemony of capital accumulation through new emergent sociospatial configurations of power. FORGOTTEN CITIES AND THE SOCIOSPATIAL LIMITS TO INCORPORATION The question that now emerges is how these compromises affected the processes of transformism and social movement incorporation outlined in chapter 2. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the cities of El Alto and Santa Cruz, this section demonstrates the inherent instability in processes of passive revolution, and hence their continual need for renewal as class struggle perpetually shifts the balance of the restoration/ revolution dialectic. In the case of Evo Morales’s Bolivia, the sociospatial dimensions of pacification discussed above undid some of the processes of transformism. This lead to a sense of resentment and dissatisfaction that was unable to be channeled through social movement organizations previously demobilized by incorporation into the MAS government. This can be seen in narratives about “being forgotten,” and was an important factor in the demise of the MAS government analyzed in chapter 6 of the book. Part of the sense of being forgotten derives from the perception among certain sectors that the government of Evo Morales was their government. As outlined in chapter 2, this was certainly the case for Trade Union Confederation of Bolivian Peasant Workers (CSUTCB), in particular the cocaleros and the interculturales (formally colonizers), which had an organic relationship with the MAS because the party formed as its political instrument in the mid-1990s (do Alto and Stefanoni 2010; García, García, and Romero 2014; Grisaffi 2013). In El Alto, militants of the Gas War considered themselves to be the reason Morales assumed power, as the words of Julian suggest: “The truth behind what happened, the struggles, the Gas War in 2003 was that we, in El Alto, caused change. I am always going to speak of El Alto because it is my pueblo [people/ town] . . . but other departments did not fight.”18 Although other departments “did not fight” in the eyes of some alteños, working-class and Indigenous people in, for instance, Santa Cruz still felt an affinity to the government of Evo Morales, a shared sense that they, too, were now in 100

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power: “We were all blue, we were all MASistas, it was prohibited to support another party [in the nineteen associations of the Rotonda].19 Why? Because we chose the people, the poorest families. And in their moment, MAS emerged from the poorest families. Evo, like me, is from Oruro, he is from my people/village [mi pueblo]. All the gremiales [market guilds and their associates] were MASistas, we always respected and admired President Evo.”20 The above quotation is from Enrique Gonzalo Alba, the leader of the gremiales in the Rotonda, Plan 3000, where MAS supporters confronted the violence of the autonomy movement in the battle of Plan 3000 outlined above. His fellow gremio leader Daniel Suárez, one of the longest-standing leaders in the Rotonda, echoed Gonzalo Alba’s sentiments: “We have always been strong, and everyone was MAS. Everyone identified with President Evo Morales and because of this, it was said that Plan 3000 was a bastion of the MAS.”21 However, while El Alto and Plan 3000 formed two of the strongholds of the MAS for many years, by 2016 when I conducted fieldwork, this support had already begun to ebb. If the MAS and Morales had been “their government,” what happened? The answer to this question is complex, but I contend that a large part of this eroding support is due to the contradictions within the processes of passive revolution, as the incorporation of social organizations through transformism is undermined by the sociospatial dynamics of crisis resolution outlined above. The maintenance of dominant forms of capital accumulation comes at a cost, even under new sociospatial configurations of power. The social bases of the MAS expressed disappointment with the transformations of their material conditions under the MAS and harbored a growing resentment toward other sectors or localities that were perceived to be reaping the rewards of Morales’s government. Returning to the other side of the cordillera (Andean mountain range), the events of October 2003 cemented an imaginary of El Alto as a “rebel city” (Lazar 2006; McNelly 2019c), a city of militants who were the reason that Morales came to power. In 2016, this perspective traversed support for political parties and was a widely held opinion in neighborhood associations and El Alto Federation of Neighborhood Councils (FEJUVE-El Alto) leaders of all political stripes, as the comments of the resident of the rebellious FEJUVE-El Alto, Benigno Siñani, demonstrate: “There is another governmental lineage. Thanks to El Alto, Evo is where he is, but we have not ever received any thanks. This is what we are trying to put into the alteña public consciousness: ‘We have supported the government but what have we received in return?’”22 Alteños began to foster a self-identification as “militants” of Black October who were solely re101

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sponsible for recouping Bolivia’s sovereignty over its natural resources, namely, gas. This militant identity was used to underscore the dissatisfaction of alteños that the central demands of the social movements (2000–2005) were implemented by the MAS in ways that diverged from their radical imaginaries. The frame of gas became so powerful in this moment that it was viewed as a silver bullet for the multitude of problems produced by the interwoven histories of colonialism and neoliberalism in the city (see Kohl and Farthing 2012). That the gas fields were located in Santa Cruz and Tarija stoked suspicion that the continued economic and social strife that characterized life in El Alto was due to these far-flung places benefiting from their struggles and their hard work. The continued hardships experienced by alteños on a daily basis bred resentment: “Evo Morales has forgotten Black October and the militants of El Alto. El Alto gave the country political and economic direction, but we are forgotten. We need the title of ‘militants of Black October’ so that the president and this process have to take note of El Alto. We need this title so we can go to the fiscal pact and demand more resources and economic activity in the city of El Alto.”23 In short, El Alto had not transformed in the way that alteños expected. Symptomatic of their dissatisfaction with the MAS government are arguments around El Alto as a forgotten city. This narrative was common among FEJUVE-El Alto leaders both past and present, who situate the FEJUVE-El Alto at the heart of social struggles of Black October. They argue that El Alto fought and died for the country and for struggles that have subsequently been disregarded by the government. However, El Alto was by no means the only disgruntled Bolivian city or region. The civic strikes in Potosí during 2010 were partly driven by a historic sense of injustice. Potosí is a city located on a mountain of silver, but the imagined prosperity that mineral wealth brings perpetually fails to match up with the reality for its residents, a bitterness captured in the local proverb of a potosino (resident of Potosí) being a “poor man sitting in a chair of gold” (hombre pobre sentado en un sillón de oro) (Iamamoto 2015, 189).24 Even the governor of La Paz, José Luis Paredes, declared La Paz the “ashtray of Bolivia” in 2008, after a series of mudslides caused by heavy rainfall left the residents of the city of La Paz without drinking water for over a week, complaining that Morales had done “nothing” for the region “whose votes had brought him to the presidency” (cited in Azcui 2008). In Plan 3000, onetime MAS supporters expressed their frustration and disappointment with Morales’s governments when I was a resident there during the first five months of 2017: “Unfortunately, there are times 102

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when power corrupts [el poder emborracha]. Power makes those that carried Evo to power disappear in the eyes of the government. For example, before one could meet with Evo or one of his ministers but now it is very difficult, the people who brought Evo to power wait.”25 Daniel Suárez underscores the invisibility of the people of Plan 3000 in the eyes of the government, and the difficulty local leaders have in meeting with Morales or his ministers, which implies a significant deterioration in the relationship between local MAS-affiliated organizations in Santa Cruz and the central government. If Morales’s first ministerial cabinet contained no less than ten ministers from social organizations (see chapter 2), it should come as no surprise that none of those social organization leaders came from Santa Cruz. Those from the wider department were only integrated into the party apparatus after the forced division of Indigenous Confederation of Eastern Bolivia (CIDOB) into pro-government and anti-government factions (see McNelly 2017; Webber 2015)—the clearest case being pro-MAS CIDOB leaders in high positions of the Fondo Indígena (Indigenous Fund) (see Ayo 2016; Morales 2015)—and even then no urban organizations from Santa Cruz found representation. Gonzalo Alba also highlights the feeling of being forgotten and the way the MAS has appeared to actively prevent a new generation of leaders from emerging: The leaders who have been criticized [se rajan] for supporting the party and Evo, how have they been paid back? It seems as if Evo has abandoned society, those who supported the MAS have been forgotten. It is not the same struggle as before, when the government fought for the poor. . . . There is no new generation of leaders and if there were, they would fall into what is now the proceso de cambio and would be shut down. The MAS does not encourage new leaders to emerge, only they can be leaders. The people have started to realize this, and because of this, in the next elections [in 2019] the MAS are not going to win, there is no point in continuing to support them. We thought that they were going to be a government of the poor, but now that does not seem so. Although they have a pro-poor discourse, in practice this is not the case.26

For Suárez and Gonzalo Alba, the MAS government has done little for the poor of Plan 3000, who have been abandoned by Evo over the course of his presidency. Plan 3000 remains one of the poorest districts in the country, with some of the neighborhood still without basic services such as running water and electricity. The dirt roads flood with every downpour (a daily occurrence during the rainy season), and employment opportunities for the residents of the Plan are limited, re103

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stricted to informal work in small textile workshops or in commerce. Moreover, opportunities to renew the proceso de cambio are continually blocked as those currently in positions of power within the MAS prevent the emergence of new leaders. This was a common sentiment shared by current and former MAS supporters across the country, but it was felt more acutely in Plan 3000 where the obvious lack of support and attention from the government had led almost the entire community to turn its back on the MAS. There is a second important aspect to this narrative of being forgotten: it is not simply that the MAS is failing to deliver change for all communities, but that change is happening elsewhere: “Over the past ten years, this country has gotten better, but it is still insufficient. Why are Cochabamba and Santa Cruz always given higher priority than El Alto? In El Alto, we have serious problems, but Cochabamba has more projects.”27 Linking the aggrieved parties in El Alto, Potosí, and Plan 3000 are the sociospatial consequences of passive revolution, the ways in which historic uneven geographical development mapped onto the articulation of political challenges to the MAS government on a regional scale. Many disgruntled social movement leaders and city residents alike framed their complaints of the MAS in comparative terms: “What have we received until now? And what has the opposition received? Who is the opposition in my opinion? Where does Santa Cruz come from? What has Cochabamba received? And if El Alto has given Evo his presidential seat, what have we received? Nothing! But those who have been the opposition and given Morales a hard time [un palo duro] have received economic resources and large-scale projects. In other words, what we must understand and make the alteño rank and file analyze is that El Alto has well and truly been forgotten.”28 The productive investments in hydrocarbons and mineral mining (outlined in chapter 5) were concentrated in mega projects situated in the departments of Tarija, Santa Cruz, and Cochabamba, in rural areas far from all metropolitan centers and on the other side of the country from El Alto. The infrastructure projects have likewise been in distant areas, including the TIPNIS highway between the departments of Cochabamba and Beni, a highway linking Santa Cruz and Cochabamba, and new railway infrastructure on the eastern network in the departments of Cochabamba and Santa Cruz. The exceptions to this pattern are the new cable car system linking La Paz and El Alto, and the major improvement of the Pan American highway. The above quotations reveal the inherently unstable nature of passive revolution. From the perspective of chapter 2, social movements 104

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were incorporated and pacified, albeit incompletely. However, technocratic incorporation of movement demands is not enough to maintain government support within the bases of these organizations, as passive revolution is also a set of sociospatial processes that play out over the terrain of uneven capitalist development. In the Bolivian case, processes of transformism were destabilized by the sociospatial dimensions of passive revolution, with the new sociospatial configurations of power rippling through the country’s political terrain and undermining processes of movement incorporation. This was expressed by growing disenchantment with the MAS political project through the notion of being forgotten. THE SOCIOSPATIAL DYNAMICS OF PASSIVE REVOLUTION The goal of this chapter has been to explore the sociospatial dynamics of passive revolution in Bolivia. I argue that the autonomy movement must be seen as a spatiopolitical movement whereby conservative challenges to the MAS government were rescaled and articulated on the regional scale of the Media Luna. Following Morales’s election, the conservative opposition to the MAS government used the notion of autonomy, coupled with racism, to present the country as inherently divided and on the brink of civil war. The regional autonomy movement became the vehicle for defending and maintaining the dominant forms of capital accumulation through hydrocarbon extraction and agro-industrial monocrop cultivation, even as the revolutionary element of the passive revolution dialectic produced new sociospatial configurations of power. The MAS was able to wrestle an increased share of hydrocarbon rents from both transnational capital and regional elites and direct them into redistributive policies, but it came at a price. Transnational capital maintained its control over extraction and production, while the lowland elites dug in their heels over agrarian reform. The proclaimed agrarian revolution, which started with such flourish, was watered down to the extent that large landholdings in Santa Cruz and the other Media Luna departments remained mostly intact. Worse still, from 2010 onward the conciliatory approach to agribusiness permitted the resumed expansion of extractive agricultural practices, extending the agricultural frontier and laying the Bolivian Amazon to waste, with devastating ecological effects. The sociospatial dimensions of passive revolution also demonstrate the intrinsic unstable and incomplete character of passive revolution. Here, appeasing the lowland elite came at a cost, and the sociospatial dynamics of passive revolution undermined the processes of social move105

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ment incorporation and pacification explored in chapter 2. Indeed, read together they tell complementary but contradictory stories. The frustration of the government’s social base at the inability of the MAS to fulfill the promise of radical change offered by the horizons of social movement activism in the period 2000–2005 fostered growing resentment in working-class and Indigenous groups. In many cases, there was a sense that the fruits of change were being enjoyed elsewhere in the country, that others had it better thanks to the MAS. In El Alto, movement leaders felt that the victory won through their sacrifice, their struggles, and their hard work was being gifted to other regions, particularly Santa Cruz. In Santa Cruz, the residents of Plan 3000—not a place at the heart of the social movements that brought Morales to power, but still a community that had earned its stripes fighting the autonomy movement during the tense months of 2008—felt forgotten, a neighborhood virtually untouched by the proceso de cambio. Passive revolution, which unfurled over the terrain of uneven development in the country, remained incapable of addressing the root of this unevenness. In fact, in certain instances it further enhanced this unevenness as it produced new sociospatial configurations of political power, demonstrating the destabilizing tendencies of passive revolution in this instance. In the light of the chronic instability of processes of passive revolution in the Bolivian case, it is remarkable that political and economic stability were sustained for such a prolonged period; this is noteworthy given the tumultuous backdrop of Bolivian history.29 If we were to leave our story here, the political pacification achieved under the MAS appears not only improbable but nigh on impossible. There was one further important part to this puzzle, and that is Evo Morales himself.

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CHAPTER 4

THE INDIGENOUS APOSTLE Caesarism, State Formation, and the Figure of Evo Morales

Dressed in the red poncho of Indigenous leaders from the Altiplano and through tears of suppressed emotion, Evo Morales thanks his hometown of Orinoca, situated in the department of Oruro,1 for everything it had done for him over his lifetime. It was February 2017, and Morales had returned home to inaugurate the new Museum of the Democratic and Cultural Revolution, the name given to the period of Morales’s presidency by the Movement for Socialism (MAS) and its supporters (Molina 2017). Vice President Álvaro García Linera proclaimed the museum to be the first of its kind, concerned not with “histories, oligarchs, or painters” but with the Bolivian people. The head of the Trade Union Confederation of Bolivian Peasant Workers (CSUTCB) followed suit, telling the gathered crowd that it was “high time for highlighting the struggle of the Indigenous peoples” (Benavides 2017). However, the trials and tribulations of one Bolivian were stressed more than most in the exhibits of the new museum. Among the collections of pre-Columbian and colonial objects were statutes of the then president himself, his hat collection, and his football shirts. If the museum addressed the democratic and cultural revolution, then Morales stood in as a metonym for this revolution and the Bolivian people more generally. 107

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Throughout his presidency, Evo Morales carefully cultivated his political persona. His inauguration in January 2006 took place on two very different stages. Among the ruins of Tiwanaku,2 he was blessed by Indigenous leaders and recognized as the highest Indigenous authority, the Apumallku, declaring to the crowd in attendance: “A new millennium has arrived for the original peoples [pueblos originarios] of the world” (cited in Postero 2010, 18). In doing so, Morales positioned himself in the minds of some as the fulfillment of the Aymara rebel Túpak Katari’s famous pronouncement: “I will return, and I will be millions.”3 The next day, in the official ceremony in Plaza Murillo at the heart of La Paz, he held “a moment of silence for ‘martyrs of liberation’ such as the Indigenous insurrectionists of the colonial period, the intellectuals and priests killed during the dictatorship, the cocaleros killed in the struggles over drug eradication, and the urban activists killed during struggles against neoliberalism” (Postero 2010, 18). Since his inauguration, this presentation of Morales as, on the one hand, Indigenous and one of the people, and, on the other, a sublime figure who represents the culmination of centuries of struggle, was central to both the continued popularity of Morales and ongoing processes of passive revolution. I argue that we can understand Morales’s presidency as a form of Caesarism, whereby the catastrophic equilibrium between neoliberal governments and radical social movements was resolved by the figure of Morales himself. He alone proved able to balance the restoration/revolution dialectic and pacify the most radical sectors pushing for change. The principal mechanism that allowed him to do this was the sublime/ profane dialectic. This is not the same as calling Morales a populist; it captures the very particular form of leadership cultivated by a man from an Indigenous community who rose through the ranks of social movements before becoming the first Indigenous president of the country. The Caesarism that operated through Morales also had profound impacts on the state itself, expanding the size and remit of the state bureaucracy, altering the social composition of public employees and functionaries and of the public’s perception of the state from something “out there” that spoke a foreign language to a vehicle for social change that spoke their language. Morales’s Janus-faced presidency legitimized both the state, extending its reach over Bolivian territory and its heterogeneous social formation, and the president himself. However, this was a double-edged sword, since by presenting the MAS’s gains as being solely due to Morales’s actions, its shortcomings were also treated as being due to his personal failings.

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POPULISM AND THE LATIN AMERICAN LEFT Before we delve into the core of my argument around the importance of the figure of Evo Morales and leaders more generally in passive revolution, it is worth briefly turning to debates around populism and the Latin American pink tide. Long before the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom and the 2016 election of Donald Trump as US president sparked a populist scare among liberal commentators in the capitalist core,4 populism was used by critics of the New Left in Latin America to articulate political opposition to figures like Morales. The New Left’s adversaries framed their objections in terms of democracy (and themselves as its defenders), which they cast as the antidote to populism. Following a period of historic defeat for the Latin American Left in the 1990s—a nadir so deep that Forrest Colburn (2002) declared the “end of politics” in the region—the rise of the pink tide in the region came as a surprise for some. As commentators scrambled to comprehend the rapidly shifting political landscapes, some turned to the historical experience at hand to make sweeping normative assessments of the changes unfolding in front of their eyes. Populism had made an indelible mark on Latin America during the twentieth century, shaping the nascent forms of mass politics in the region. Import substitution industrialization development models were accompanied by cross-class political projects, held together by charismatic leaders such as Juan Perón (1946–1955) in Argentina, Getúlio Vargas (1934–1945) in Brazil, and, it could be argued for the Bolivian case, Víctor Paz Estensorro (1952–1956). While mid-century experiments with populism gave way to harder-edged military regimes in many cases, the legacies of populism lived on. It provided conservative commentators and politicians with easily available ideological material, which they used to grapple with the emergent Latin American pink tide. First, the Venezuelan politician Teodoro Petkoff (2005) and then, the Mexican social commentator Jorge Castañeda (2006) divided the pink tide into “good” and “bad” Left. Both associated the “good” Left with democracy and modernizing tendencies that broke with the old Marxist Left, and the “bad” Left with authoritarianism, populism, and an irresponsible attitude toward fiscal policy and the market. “Morales is not an indigenous Che,” stated Castañeda (2006, 38), “he is a skillful and irresponsible populist,” while the Bolivian political theorist Roberto Laserna (2007) contended that the unstable pillars of indigenismo, statism, and populism that underpinned Morales’s political project were likely to collapse under the weight of their internal contradictions and bring Bolivian democracy down with it. However, just why any of this 109

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was the case remains unclear. Laserna’s concern with Morales’s populism derived from the way that Morales encouraged politics outside liberal democratic institutions, which Laserna implicitly presented as the only institutional forms capable of managing democratic decision making. The political organization of the coca growers’ unions may be antiliberal, but as the anthropologist Thomas Grisaffi (2013) argues, that does not necessarily make them antidemocratic. And why political organizations outside liberal institutions lead to authoritarianism, Laserna does not feel the need to explain. For his part, Castañeda (2006, 41) claimed Morales had given the Bolivian people “very little”—a bold observation to make after only two months of a president’s time in office. In the months following the publication of Castañeda’s article, Morales’s government promulgated legislation calling a Constituent Assembly, nationalizing hydrocarbons, and transforming social spending through conditional cash transfers. This makes Castañeda’s assertions appear preposterous in retrospect, lacking not only scholarly rigor but also any resemblance (however minimal) to reality. In fact, Castañeda provides little substance for his normative schism in the Latin American Left, other than his patent dislike for certain “populist” leaders. Given these politicized readings of populism and the manner in which the concept was mobilized for particular political ends, it was clear from the outset that dissecting the Latin American pink tide through the lens of populism was going to be fraught with analytical as well as political difficulties. Much of the discussion around populism in Latin America is theoretically thin and must be understood as part of the conservative reaction to pink tide governments (at least when the term appears in more popular publications). Part of the problem is that populism means different things to different people: it has been conceptualized as an ideology (Mudde 2004), a mood (Canovan 1999), a set of values (Inglehart and Norris 2016), a discourse (Laclau 2005), and a political strategy (Germani 1971; Weyland 1996), to name but a few of its different uses.5 Despite their differences, all these approaches see populism as Manichean politics that divides society into “the people” versus “the (corrupt) elite.” The more sophisticated perspectives on populism developed by the Essex school—which derives from the work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985) on Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony—draw from a post-Marxist framework to examine the discursive construction of these two antagonistic groups. Nearly all scholars of populism stress that, far from being a pathology or a deviation from western democracy, populism needs to be seen as an intimate part of politics. Given this, it is somewhat ironic that populism itself has been 110

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mobilized as a Manichean discourse dividing the world along normative lines: the “good” and “bad” Left. There are countless examples of the discursive work populism (rather than “the people”) does in the politics around pink tide governments, but nowhere is this Manichean logic clearer than in Álvaro Vargas Llosa’s (2009) declaration that the Latin American pink tide represented the “return of the idiot.” Where does this leave discussions about the role of Evo Morales as a leader in my analysis? Are there not undoubtedly traces of populism in Morales as Bolivian president? How could there not be given the breadth of available definitions? Does skirting around discussions of Morales as a populist leave us unable to explore his importance as a leader? These are difficult questions, but I do not think they represent a fatal blow to what follows here. I am avoiding the concept of populism because my focus here is on the function of Morales’s leadership inside passive revolution and, in particular, how the figure of Morales acted as a mechanism of state formation, maintaining political stability and extending the institutional reach of the Bolivian state. I do not think that establishing the ways Morales is (or is not) a populist or how “populist reason” functions (or not) in his government is necessary or helpful for my argument here. Moreover, in concentrating my analysis on passive revolution rather than populism, I avoid the common pitfall of overlooking the importance of the political economic conditions of the commodities boom (2002–2013) in enabling the pink tide (Grigera 2017), but we will get to that in more detail in chapter 5. For now, let us turn to the role of leaders and leadership in passive revolution. CAESARISM AND STATE FORMATION IN PASSIVE REVOLUTION Evo Morales was a central part of processes of state formation during his time in power. At this point in the book, that should not surprise us. We saw in chapter 2 how Morales positioned himself as the representative of social movements at the head of “a government of social movements” and how, for many Bolivians, his presidency was tantamount to their being in power. In chapter 2, my focus was the dynamics of transformism, so I did not touch on the affective pull of Morales as a leader, or on the work this did in processes of state formation. Now is the time to rectify this oversight. According to Massimo Modonesi (2012, 152): “The modality of passive revolution in Latin America draws on the caudillo tradition and assumes the form of progressive Caesarism,6 insofar as the catastrophic balance between neoliberalism and anti-neoliberalism was resolved through a progressive synthesis (that is to say, tendentially 111

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anti- and post-neoliberal) around a charismatic figure as faithful to the balance of forces placed in the center of the process.” The route out of the crisis of neoliberalism described at the beginning of the book was initially blocked: neither the radical horizons of social movements nor the return to the status quo attempted by neoliberal governments and their elite supporters provided pathways that could (for political reasons) be trodden. The vehicle out of this cul-de-sac was provided by charismatic leaders from popular sectors—Evo Morales in the Bolivian case, but we could say the same thing about Lula da Silva in Brazil, Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, and to a lesser extent Nestor Kirshner and Rafael Correra in Argentina and Ecuador, respectively—who did not guarantee a definite outcome between restoration and revolution but who pacified the social movements threatening radical change. This gave pink tide governments a more progressive character than their neoliberal predecessors and enabled these governments to implement pro-poor policies that reduced poverty and inequality across the region. These governments sat along the “conservative-reformist” spectrum identified by Gramsci and were marked by common regional and global conditions (in particular, the commodities boom and the long shockwaves of the 2008 crisis) and by the specific historical context of their social formations (Modonesi 2012, 150). Caesarism is the concept developed by Gramsci to tackle the thorny question of the role of leadership in passive revolution. However, as Modonesi (2019, 98) underscores, the relationship between passive revolution and Caesarism is somewhat vexed, partly because, in some places, Gramsci frames passive revolution as “historical interpretation” and Caesarism as “a polemical-ideological formulation” (a theoretical concept) (Gramsci 1971, 220, Q13§27). Here I attempt to sidestep the theoretical disagreements around the two terms and focus solely on the role of Caesarism as a mechanism of passive revolution. We often think of Caesarism as alluding to a charismatic leader or “heroic personality” capable of stepping into the breach of crisis and leading both sets of social forces away from the abyss. However, “a Caesarist solution can exist even without a Caesar,” as Gramsci (1971, 220, Q13§27) argues, “without any great, ‘heroic’ and representative personality through mass organizations, political parties and parliament.” Caesarism moves beyond a focus on the individual to interrogate the function of leadership in moments of crisis. For Gramsci: Caesarism can be said to express a situation in which the forces in conflict balance each other in a catastrophic manner; that is to say, they balance

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each other in such a way that a continuation of the conflict can only terminate in their reciprocal destruction. When the progressive force A struggles with the reactionary force B, not only may A defeat B or B defeat A, but it may happen that neither A nor B defeats the other—that they bleed each other mutually and then a third force C intervenes from outside, subjugating what is left of both A and B. (Gramsci 1971, 219, Q13§27)

Caesarism thus captures a particular resolution to moments of catastrophic equilibrium, providing direction to the spontaneous action of the masses and offering a way out of the crisis that is neither complete restoration nor complete revolution.7 It acts as a mediator that replaces the revolutionary social forces as the motor of historical change, propelling what Modonesi (2019, 101) calls a “hybrid process of modernization,” ambiguous in terms of its conservation/transformation content but with a central role in the pacifying of revolutionary movements. For this reason, “there can be both progressive and reactionary forms of Caesarism; the exact significance of each form can, in the last analysis, be reconstructed only through concrete history, and not by means of any sociological rule of thumb. Caesarism is progressive when its intervention helps the progressive force to triumph, albeit with its victory tempered by certain compromises and limitations. It is reactionary when its intervention helps the reactionary force to triumph—in this case too with certain compromises and limitations, which have, however, a different value, extent, and significance than in the former” (Gramsci 1971, 219, Q13§27). It is not that through distinguishing types of Caesarisms Gramsci is creating a typology within which to fit different examples, but that all Caesarisms contain elements of progressive and reactionary forms as a consequence of the “revolution/restoration” dialectic. Caesarism thus provides the mechanism through which Evo Morales and his MAS political party emerged in broader processes of passive revolution. As we shall see, this helps tie together social movement incorporation and the sociospatial processes contained in passive revolution with the importance of Morales as a leader, moving beyond his characterization as a populist. Let us now turn to Evo Morales’s ascent to power. THE RISE OF MORALES AND THE MAS The MAS emerged during the 1990s as the political instrument of the CSUTCB. Morales rose through the ranks of the cocalero federations based in the Chapare, the semitropical valleys of the coca-growing region in the department of Cochabamba, and the cocaleros initially viewed the MAS as an extension of their federations (Grisaffi 2013). The MAS first 113

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participated in national elections in 1997, winning 3.27 percent of the vote (García, García, and Romero 2014, 107–8). State repression toward coca growers of the Chapare in the department of Cochabamba—many of whom were Trotskyist ex-miners with a strong trade union tradition— galvanized strong, organized resistance and positioned the cocaleros as the radical force at the heart of the CSUTCB (Albro 2005, 438; Stefanoni 2002, 17–21).8 The strength of the cocaleros resided in their willingness to pursue multiple strategies simultaneously—including “agreements with the government, mobilizations, struggles, and even localized clashes with public forces, along with negotiations at various levels for small and large demands” (Gutiérrez 2014, 82)—and during this period they embarked on an electoral strategy to challenge the dominant neoliberal paradigm. In November 2001, the struggle of the cocaleros intensified when President Jorge “Tuto” Quiroga promulgated a supreme decree “prohibiting the drying, transport, and sale of coca planted in illicit zones in the principal market” (Salazar 2013, 66). The resultant clashes in the central coca market in Sacaba, which left scores dead, came to be known as the Coca War (Ledebur 2002, 9–10). These struggles contributed to the rise of the MAS as an electoral force, which until 2002 was largely a rural-based party with little institutional structure that drew support from the cocaleros and informal workers (Farthing 2018). However, this changed in the 2002 elections, when the MAS announced itself on the national political scene, garnering 20.9 percent of the vote, only 2 percent less than the eventual victors, the Nationalist Revolutionary Movement (MNR) led by Sánchez de Lozada (Van Cott 2005, 89). Two notable moments have been credited with helping this meteoric rise: Morales’s expulsion from Congress in 2002 and the ill-judged comments of the US ambassador to Bolivia, Manuel Rocha (Van Cott 2005, 90). The expulsion of Morales from Congress for his role in the 2002 Coca War aligned the interests of social movements and the MAS political party, as Morales became a metonym for the poor, oppressed Bolivia rebelde (rebel Bolivia). Their flexibility positioned the cocaleros well and they were able to navigate the complex political terrain at the time through social movement activism and parliamentary politics. Morales was considered the voice of marginalized Bolivians in the face of US-led programs, and which caused Félix Patzi (2003, 223) to go as far as to claim that this moment “was stamped as a new way of doing politics.” This image was further reinforced by Rocha’s comments a matter of days before the 2002 elections: “I want to remind the Bolivian electorate that if they vote for those who want Bolivia to return to exporting cocaine, that will seriously jeopardize any future aid to Bolivia from 114

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the United States” (cited in Campbell 2002). Following these comments, Morales’s running mate Filemón Escobar promised: “Each vote that you give to the MAS is a kick in the behind of the Ambassador” (cited in Van Cott 2005, 90). Morales and the MAS were thus transformed into an anti-imperial vote, and the representatives of the social movements of the insurrectionary cycle 2000–2005 pushed back against US-based privatization and drug eradication programs. Although the MAS briefly aligned itself with the government of Carlos Mesa (2003–2005), it broke with Goni’s successor over the issue of natural gas (which as we saw was central to Black October). The second Gas War of May–June 2005 was sparked by Mesa’s intransigence over progressive reforms to natural gas extraction in the country and sparked marches across the country, with a half-million people taking to the streets in the cities of El Alto and La Paz (Hylton and Thomson 2005, 59). Although these protests were led by social movements—with the El Alto Federation of Neighborhood Councils (FEJUVE-El Alto) once again playing a central role in the protests (Webber 2010a, 66)—the MAS was presented as the electoral alternative to conservative parties that attempted to hijack protests and seize power in the wake of Mesa’s resignation (Webber 2012a, 258). As we saw in chapter 2, this formed the basis of the image of the MAS cultivated by its main ideologue during the following years, Vice President Álvaro García Linera, who successfully transformed Morales into the victory of the social movements and the pinnacle of the social struggles of the period (Salazar 2015, 128). CULTIVATING THE PERSONA OF EVO MORALES Morales thus came to power carried on the backs of radical social movements and represented for many a rupture with previous political projects in the country. This much is clear from my analysis thus far. However, Morales had to navigate treacherous waters thanks to the historic weight and expectation placed on his shoulders by Bolivia’s historically poor, oppressed, and marginalized. Perhaps most impressively in electoral terms, Morales increased his majority between 2005 and 2009, from 52 percent to 64 percent of the popular vote. Despite his being the incumbent of eight years in 2014, Morales still won 61 percent of the vote. How did he hold together the broad coalition of supporters built during the social movement cycle, placating radical Indigenous movements, the formal working classes represented by the Bolivian Workers’ Center (COB), and the informalized working classes in commerce or cooperative mining, all the while maintaining the support of urban middle-class 115

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voters? And how can we understand his continued popularity in the face of frustrated social movement demands and a belligerent regional opposition? The answers to these questions, I contend, lie in Ernst Kantorowicz’s (1957) portrait of the king’s two bodies. The king (or prince), Kantorowicz argues, has a profane side containing his “mortal body” and a sublime side, divined from God, containing the eternal “body politic.” Coronil (1997) contends that, in a twist of historical irony, the formation of the European early modern state through the regent’s concurrent sublimity and profanity is repeated as a parody in peripheral resource-rich contexts, where the divinity of God is replaced by the sublimity of the nation and the mortal body of the king by the profanity of Mother Earth. The state emerges as the solvent capable of reconciling the two contradictory bodies of the nation, in the process fulfilling the promise of development presented by the bounty of nature. This “state fetishism” puts both the affective pull of the state and citizens’ expectations of the state—as an entity that not only can but should deliver the promise of progress—in analytical focus (Coronil 2000). I build on this relationship with respect to extractivism and infrastructure in chapter 5. Here we focus on the state itself. Thomas Blom Hansen (2001, 225) has also developed this perspective, arguing that in formerly colonized places with historically weak state institutions and limited territorial integrity, the state is characterized by this unification of the profane and the sublime. On the one hand, the state is uneven and incoherent, constantly struggling to exert itself over the whole of its terrain, functioning through a logic of corruption and corporatism that is constantly shaping and reshaping people’s relationships with the state. It is brutal and, at times, openly aggressive toward its citizens. This is the state’s authoritarian face, “a more naked representation of [its] sovereign power” (Blom Hansen and Stepputat 2005, 23). On the other hand, the state is sublime, a labyrinth of state secrets, technical knowledge, and practices of apparent prestidigitation, secrets kept from all but a small section of society. It is the unity of these two sides that maintains the state and its legitimacy, so the understanding of these two opposites is in principle essential for a complete understanding of the state. Understanding these two sides of the state is vital if we are to grapple with how Morales functioned in processes of passive revolution. Positioning Evo Morales as both an Indigenous president and a saintlike figure incapable of doing wrong was a crucial aspect of how the government positioned him at the center of its political project, the proceso de 116

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cambio. Morales’s presentation as a leader was a vital part of the political integration of social movements and state formation in the transformism stage of passive revolution. However, as the discussion on Caesarism shows, Morales’s role within passive revolution was more than simply an affective draw for social movements enabling transformism. He was able to balance the restorative and revolutionary elements of the restoration/ revolution dialectic and provide an exit from the tumultuous five-year period of social movement activity that represented a catastrophic equilibrium. On the one hand, Evo Morales was a lowly campesino, the son of a llama herder who cultivated coca in the Chapare and fought alongside the cocaleros during their battles against coca eradication and neoliberalism during the 1990s.9 On the other hand, he was (for a time) the president who could do no wrong, an almost-deity capable of leading Bolivia out of its historic quagmire. This seemingly contradictory presentation of Morales as concurrently sublime and profane did not have the magical effects of oil as in the Venezuelan case (Coronil 1997); nevertheless, it played an important part in sustaining Morales’s affective pull for almost a decade. It allowed him to manage the different antagonistic social forces present in Bolivian society and keep passive revolution’s destabilizing tendencies in check for that period. It was this stability that provided the conditions for social movement pacification evaluated in chapter 2. Understanding how the sublime and profane operated through Evo Morales is of utmost importance if we are to grasp why passive revolution’s internal contradictions identified in this book did not undermine its central pacifying function. THE INDIGENOUS PRESIDENT AND THE INDIGENOUS STATE Morales and the MAS combined Marxist, indigenista, and nationalist intellectual currents that emanated from radical social movements in an attempt to present themselves as representatives of historically marginalized Bolivians. They presented themselves as the “government of the humble people,” which represented all Bolivians rather than a select few,10 a perspective reflected in the party motto: “Somos pueblo, somos MAS” (We are the people, we are MAS [we are more]) (Postero 2017, 33). Morales was a brother (hermano Evo), who until the end of his tenure maintained some of the face-to-face relationships with social movements that Pablo Stefanoni (2006, 40) identified at the start of his presidency. Morales was also the leader of the coordinator of the Six Coca Growers’ Federations of Tropical Cochabamba throughout his time in office. As an infamous video of the president kneeing an opponent in the crotch 117

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while playing football revealed, he was also happy to make mistakes just like the “average” Bolivian.11 Morales carefully presented himself as the archetypical Indigenous actor of the MAS, enabling him and the MAS to concurrently consolidate and take advantage of the transformation of Indigeneity precipitated by the struggles outlined in chapter 1. The election of Morales fostered (but also followed) a new sense of pride in people’s Indigenous roots, causing many—predominantly from urban areas—to rediscover their heritage while at the same time lifting the self-esteem of others who had been historically stigmatized because of their ethnicity (interview with Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, in Farthing and Kohl 2014, 37). As the opening vignette suggests, there were open signs that the practices of the state were, at the very least, tinted by Indigeneity—be it Morales’s Tiwanaku inauguration, the government flying the Indigenous flag (the checkered rainbow of the Wiphala) in Plaza Murillo, or Bolivia’s new satellite named Túpak Katari 1 (after the Indigenous insurgent of the eighteenth century). This shift in perception toward indigenous people was partly reflected in the 2009 constitution. Despite the major limitations in the process of the Constituent Assembly that I identified in chapters 2 and 3, the constitution was heralded for its efforts to advance the rights of Indigenous peoples and incorporate their social and political perspectives into the state. The final document officially recognized naciones y pueblos indígena originario campesinos (Indigenous originary peasant nations and peoples, IOC) (article 2) and thirty-six Indigenous languages as official languages of the state (articles 5 and 234). Moreover, it became compulsory for civil servants to speak at least one of these languages as well as Spanish (Bolivia 2009). As the anthropologist Salvador Schavelzon (2012, 467) contends, this gave Indigenous people, especially those from the largest Aymara and Quechua groups, an advantage in obtaining positions in public administration, increasing the number of Indigenous state bureaucrats (Soruco 2015). Changing the official languages of the state does more than merely recognize difference. It alters the functional specifications of public administrators and state employees, creating new constraints on the practices of state actors and offering new opportunities to subaltern groups to become state officials. As Indigenous languages became part of the official bureaucracy, non-Spanish-speaking (and largely rural) actors also gained unprecedented access to the state. As a result, the repeated practices of state actors and quotidian relations between citizens and the state were reshaped. While the extent to which these changes were felt is uneven, the veneer of the state was transformed from an unfamiliar 118

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structure speaking a foreign language to a comprehendible part of society. Now citizens can speak to the state and, importantly, the state can reply, fostering consent in communities that previously had limited interactions with and respect for the state. The category of the IOC managed to reinforce the hegemonic representation of Indigeneity as encompassing the bulk of the support bases of the MAS while presenting the remaining groups under a similar minority politics used by neoliberal multiculturalism in the 1990s. The MAS mobilized an Indigeneity modeled on Morales’s own projected Indigenous identity to create the presumption that Indigenous communities supported the government (Zimmerer 2015). Recognition, autonomy, and access to state institutions were granted to the Indigenous groups who best fit the definition of IOC according to the parameters set by the MAS government. The changes to state practices and relations thus not only opened many avenues for Indigenous communities to access the state, reshaping the relationship between the Bolivian state and society, they also allowed the MAS government to control who was Indigenous and what this Indigeneity entailed. Given that Indigeneity is defined by “the enduring power relations that arise out of [a specific] moment in history” and determines how particular racialized subaltern groups access justice via the state (Canessa 2012b, 208; see also Sawyer 2004), the IOC also gave the MAS the means to determine who has access to state justice, and who can mobilize as Indigenous peoples. As we will see in chapter 5, this enabled Morales’s government to contain the most pernicious effects produced by the expansion of extractive development and infrastructure construction into the territory of Indigenous peoples. Thus, through the image of Evo Morales, the MAS government attempted to transform the appearance of the state from that of a foreign and distant entity into an integral part of plurinational Bolivia. As an “Indigenous” former coca farmer, the president ruptured the colonial and republican image of the state as from above and non-Indigenous. By stressing hermano Evo as one of the pueblo (people) and a social movement leader, the MAS tried to make the state relatable to previously marginalized groups while also denying opposition groups the ability to oppose Morales’s government as Indigenous peoples. THE PRESIDENT WHO CAN DO NO WRONG On the other hand, Evo Morales was presented as a pure, incorruptible figure working tirelessly for the good of the Bolivian people.12 In the words of the Partido Obrero Revolucionario (Revolutionary Workers’ Party, POR) leader and left-wing critic of the MAS, José Luis Álvares, 119

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4.1. Túpak Katari satellite advertising, Oruro, Bolivia, 2016. Andrea Marston.

the government “has made people believe that Evo Morales is a type of saint or apostle.”13 State propaganda for the Túpak Katari satellite juxtaposed the figure of Evo Morales and Túpak Katari, using the same facial features to underscore the historical lineage between the Indigenous liberator at the heart of the Katarista movement and Evo Morales (see figure 4.1). However, this lineage did not simply stop with Morales in the present but extended into the future along the development pathway laid by Morales himself. In a sense, then, Álvarez put the metaphorical cart before the horse in calling Morales an apostle—rather than a follower, Morales was a leader, the modern-day Caesar capable of shepherding the country out of neoliberalism and its attendant crises. The MAS positioned Evo Morales as a figurehead of infrastructure projects, which, despite provoking large-scale protests, played a vital role in constructing the state (see Marston and Kennemore 2019). The significance of extractivism and infrastructure are discussed in detail in chapter 5, so here I focus only on their political presentation by the MAS government. Projects were portrayed as if they were the result of hard toil by the president himself, and publicity for all the projects was adorned with a picture of Morales. The spectacle of the state was, in a sense, performed by Evo through infrastructure undertakings: new water projects and domestic gas systems (as we will see in chapter 5) were activated

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by Morales, and tractors adorned with the president’s face lined up in a stadium before being gifted by the president to participants of state-led development projects. In addition to hydroelectric dams and highways, the central government built synthetic football pitches, coliseums, and schools across the country, trading political support for construction projects (Postero 2017, 140–41). Most of this construction was under the auspices of the “Bolivia Cambia, Evo Cumple” (Bolivia Changes, Evo Fulfills) project, which started in 2006 with initial financial support from Venezuela and other members of the Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América (Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America, ALBA) (Fontana 2013a, 31). Evo Cumple projects were tangible evidence of the state, its increasing role in people’s lives, and the government’s efforts to support ordinary Bolivian people. They provided proof that the “nationalization” of gas by the MAS had affected the lives of Bolivians across the country. Through the lens of the sociospatial dynamics of passive revolution (see chapter 3), this can be read as a spatialization strategy to try to overcome the spatial and scalar tensions underpinning the proceso de cambio. Massive billboards and painted walls across the country attempted to spread the imagined gains of resource extraction and the nationalization of gas evenly across Bolivian territory and society. Through the “Evo Cumple” tagline, the MAS government extended the political (if not the economic) reach of its political projects, building “monuments” to the state in the process. Furthermore, Evo distanced himself from any problems with MAS policy or unpopular political decisions taken the government through deflecting blame onto the invitados.14 Following their surprise success in the 2002 elections, the MAS started to recruit middle-class urban professionals and intellectuals into the party. Many government insiders argued that these invited intellectuals were essential in transforming the MAS from the “political instrument” of rural campesinos and coca growers into a ruling party able to govern across the entire country (Contartese and Deledicque 2013, 61; Do Alto 2011, 104). Having given the majority of ministerial posts to representatives of social organizations in his first cabinet (see chapter 2), subsequent cabinet reshuffles gradually reduced the social organization representation in government (Oikonomakis and Espinoza 2014, 295). By 2013, the majority of Morales’s ministerial cabinet was composed of invitados, who by that point were not politicians moving across from other political parties but trained professional technocrats being drawn from the ranks of university lecturers (particularly economists), lawyers, and public administrators (Espinoza 2015, 121

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144–46). The most well-known of these invitados was Vice President Álvaro García Linera, who together with Evo supposedly represented the complementarity and duality of the “two Bolivias” (Schavelzon 2012, 80). As Schavelzon’s (2012, 80–83) detailed ethnography of the Constituent Assembly reveals, the invitados (especially García Linera through Presidential Representation for the Constituent Assembly, REPAC) played an important role in the dynamics of writing the constitution (see Garcés 2013). With each further Morales administration, the proportion of social movement representatives and MAS militants in the cabinet decreased vis-à-vis the invitados. However, the invitados were a permanent fixture in the Morales government. As far back as 2008, the La Paz-based newspaper La Razón (2008g) was speculating about how Juan Ramón Quintana—ex-head of the military and a minister under the governments of former dictator Hugo Banzer (1997–2001) and later his predecessor, Jorge “Tuto” Quiroga (2001–2002)—had become indispensable to the MAS in only two years. The questions asked by La Razón reflected the disquiet felt by sections of the social bases of the MAS, especially given he was known to have been trained by the controversial US Cold War military program, the School of the Americas.15 As explained in chapter 2, the social movement bases, although rewarded with pegas, did not (at least initially) have the administrative and technical capacity to run the government, so the MAS was forced to recruit state bureaucrats and a smattering of ministers and vice-ministers from other political parties who knew how the Bolivian state functioned.16 The MAS actively presented the invitados as “opportunists” who, in the words of the ex-MAS minister, Antonia Rodríguez, “damage us.”17 As a prominent member of the MAS government, Jorge Silva, the municipal councilor of La Paz, stated: “The invitados are not wedded to the project or Evo . . . and say that they have been invited for their merits and that they are not MASistas or revolutionaries or of the proceso nor Evistas but professionals. So, they do not feel the love for their colors. It is like playing for a football team. You have to love the shirt to defend it.”18 For Silva and others inside the MAS, the invitados were not there at the start and they did not live and breathe the MAS. Their loyalty was not unwavering, and they were not there on the barricades with Evo and the other social movement leaders of the period 2000–2005. Although this last fact was true of very few MAS politicians and public functionaries, there was a sense that their late arrival to the party and lack of social movement roots were responsible for the party’s missteps. In fact, the invitados were presented by MAS politicians and activists as the only political error made by Evo Morales, a single mistake that can be used to explain away the 122

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contradictions at the heart of the MAS government.19 An activist from El Alto, Mariana Pensalla, explains: “His ministers do not inform Evo well, they tell him that everything’s fine, everything’s better but it is not like that. So, sometimes we as leaders would like it if the president spoke with us leaders to convey to him our point of view. At times the ministers do not inform him on what is happening and tell him what we need him to know.”20 The invitados, in a sense then, represent the sublimity of the state itself, its illegibility in the mind of many Bolivians, who assume that Morales—as an Indigenous person, one of the pueblo—was also unable to fully comprehend the actions of the state. Through the prism of the invitados, the policy failures and missteps of the MAS could be rectified and overcome if only Morales knew the “truth.” One example serves to illustrate how the government has used the invitados in practical terms as a political maneuver. The gasolinazo (roughly translated as “The Big Gas Hit”) of December 2010 was the first popular protest against the MAS government’s natural resource policy, followed by some of the largest urban protests witnessed during Morales’s time in power. The conflict started when, encouraged by the International Monetary Fund, Vice President García Linera announced that the government would be removing the national gas subsidy (Webber 2014, 326), increasing the price of transport fuel by between 73 percent and 99 percent virtually overnight (Mokrani and Uriona Crespo 2011, 122). Across the country protests arose in defense of the subsidy, demanding the nullification of the decree and the reinstatement of fuel subsidies (Fontana 2013b, 205). The subsequent protests forced the government to abrogate the decree a mere six days after its introduction, with Evo Morales using his New Year’s Eve message to reassure the Bolivian people: “In my oath I promised to govern for the Bolivian people, I have listened to my comrades who have said to me that although it is important, now is not the moment [to eliminate fuel subsidies]” (cited in La Nación 2011). Morales was outside the country on official business when García Linera announced the cuts to gas subsidies. It was never going to be a popular decision and, as one of the invitados, García Linera was charged with giving the bad news. When the extent of popular protest and resistance to the changes became apparent Morales stepped in as the savior, begging forgiveness for his ministers’ errors that had occurred in his absence. STATE FORMATION IN THE SHADOW OF EVO MORALES The apparently contradictory presentation of Evo Morales as sublime and profane had several implications for both the political project of 123

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the MAS government and processes of state formation in Bolivia during his time in power. First, it enabled the MAS government to contain the multiple contradictions that lie at the heart of pursuing a development strategy through natural resource extraction led by private capital and distributing resource rents through modest social redistribution programs. It allowed the MAS government to navigate the frustrated expectations contained in extractivism outlined in chapter 5 and to disarm opposition to projects in Indigenous territories by presenting Morales as the embodiment of the legitimate Indigenous subject recognized by the Bolivian state. The sublime/profane dialectic made him impervious to criticism for unpopular decisions such as the removal of the gas subsidy that sparked the gasolinazo, and helped sustain the common perception that Morales and his government were doing everything in their power to fulfill the potential promised by Bolivia’s hydrocarbon wealth. Morales’s positionality as Bolivia’s “first Indigenous president” proved extremely successful in the international sphere, and his strategic use of Indigenous signs, symbols, and discourses in spaces such as the United Nations won legions of supporters and sympathizers the world over. These included the ex-leader of the UK Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, and the European Union, which in 2008 expressed nothing but admiration for a “man who had emerged from Indigenous and campesino sectors” (La Razón 2008o). Morales’s Indigeneity allowed Bolivia more leeway than most in the international realm, and drew the attention of the international press in a way that this small, landlocked country had never previously enjoyed.21 This sustained domestic support for Morales, despite limited success in delivering promises of social transformation drawn from the demands of social movements, growing social conflicts over extractivism and infrastructure projects, the failure of industrialization projects led by the state, and the corruption scandals that plagued all three of Morales’s administrations. Second, the presentation of Evo Morales as an Indigenous president who was one of the people and the second coming of Túpak Katari (see Goodale 2019; Marston and Kennemore 2019) relegitimized the state itself and oriented many working classes and subaltern sectors throughout the country toward the state. Hermano Evo and the state were positioned as the route to a better life for Bolivians. While the principal superstructural function of passive revolution lies with the first term of the portmanteau concept (passivity), passive revolution also has the effect of catalyzing particular modalities of state formation that lead to the formation of what Gramsci called the “integral state.” For Gramsci (2011c, 169, Q7§16), the “modern” (integral) state represents “just a forward 124

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trench; behind it [stands] a succession of sturdy fortresses and emplacements.” This metaphor captures the dialectical articulation of political and civil society, and the ways in which the state is embedded in both. These two superstructural levels are in constant interaction with one another, influenced but not determined by the economic base, their form the result of historical processes of, among other things, passive revolution (Gramsci 2011b, 153, Q4§12). What differentiates the “modern” state from its previous forms is the presence of both consent and coercion, which complement each other as sections of civil society are absorbed by political society through processes of transformism, allowing the state to forge hegemony and to dominate and lead society (Thomas 2009b, 222). One of the modalities through which the Bolivian state was embedded in civil society during the Morales years, I contend, was precisely through the sublimity/profanity of Morales himself. The effects of state formation through passive revolution in Bolivia are visible through the ways in which many Indigenous and nonIndigenous people, members of the working class, and peasants in Bolivia came to perceive the state as the entity able to fulfill their desires and needs. For example, rural Indigenous movements turned to the state to claim rights, autonomy, and justice, with twelve municipalities voting to become Indigenous autonomies following the new constitution.22 Sectors of the working classes affiliated with the COB participated with the government on a wide range of issues from health and safety regulations to labor law reforms.23 Even those in the COB who were critical of the MAS looked toward the state to fulfill their desires, as criticisms of the government’s inability to industrialize demonstrate. Surprisingly, the market guilds in Santa Cruz have looked toward the state to resolve their problems in certain situations, as the words of Enrique Gonzalo Aro of the eighteen associations of the Rotonda reveal: “We told Evo ‘Come, we are going to inform you about the true reality. We are going to tell you the truth that your ministers, your vice-ministers are mistaken. This way we will tell you how things are and how they are not.’ But he never let us. Three or four times we traveled to La Paz but he never saw us.”24 Aro returned to La Paz three or four times trying to see Evo, despite being the leader of market vendors attempting to construct a new market independently of the state. This continued endurance of the notion that a meeting with Evo would solve the problems of a small group of vendors in a marginal marketplace in the city of Santa Cruz encapsulates how the sublime and profane nature of Morales relegitimized the state. For Aro and his colleagues, Evo contained the cluster of promises that, if realized, would lead to the completion of their project, so they attempted 125

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at first to follow a political strategy that positioned themselves as close to Evo as possible. According to Lauren Berlant (2006, 20, emphasis in the original), “Our sense of our endurance in the object” is explained by our perception that “proximity to the object means proximity to the cluster of things that the object promises.” The gremiales from Santa Cruz were not alone in trying to get near to Morales, and social organizations from the COB to the FEJUVE often lamented meetings with the government at which Evo was not present, frustrated both by the lack of proximity to the president and by ministers who did not report the content of meetings back to Morales accurately. That actors position themselves “close” to the state in a political sense through development programs or social movements that clash with the state points to the promises that the capitalist state was seen to embody by many marginalized Bolivians. It underscores the increasing legitimacy of the state in the eyes of those who had been historically marginalized or oppressed by the Bolivian state. Third, and following from the previous point, the positioning of Morales contained the contradictions unleashed by passive revolution within the president himself. Caesarism allowed Morales to balance the restoration/revolution dialectic and displace social movements as drivers of political change. The political centrality of Morales to the political project of the MAS helped channel the energy and support of the social movements into the MAS and the new constitution, orienting movements as defensive and protecting the state as outlined in chapter 2. As a result, the liberal state regained the legitimacy it had lost during the crises from the late 1990s onward. Moreover, though the new constitution “refounded” Bolivia, the underlying presidential political regime remained intact (albeit with some new political institutions) (Tapia 2011, 179). Morales’s parliamentary majority, coupled with the fact that the judiciary and the Senate were controlled by traditional economic and political opposition (Farthing and Kohl 2014, 34),25 meant that power under Morales was further concentrated in the executive over and above the other branches of government (Tapia 2011, 176).26 When Tapia was writing in 2011, the scope of the political ramifications of this tendency remained to be seen, and many authors in the following years predicted the continued importance of organizations operating along lines of logic different from the state. However, the fallout of the 2016 reelection referendum revealed a political vacuum around Evo. Possible future leaders within the MAS—particularly Luis Arze Catacora, the ex-minister of the economy; Eva Copa, an MAS activist from El Alto; and Andrónico Rodríguez, the leader of the next generation of cocaleros from the Chapare—only emerged during the fall of Morales (that 126

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is, too late in the day). As we shall see in the chapter 6, the formal political arena remained divided at the time of Morales’s demise, with most of the main political competitors coming from the old neoliberal parties (e.g., Rúben Costas, Samuel Dorria Medina, Carlos Mesa, and Tuto Quiroga). Beyond formal politics, there were instances of social movement activism in the later Morales years, but they lacked the radicalism and dynamism of prior movements. Come the crisis of October–November 2019, social organizations such as the COB and the FEJUVE-El Alto remained divided and restricted (if not entirely controlled) by government supporters. From the perspective of the MAS, part of the problem was that the omnipotence of Morales led to the proceso de cambio becoming almost exclusively Evo’s project. Evo was, in the eyes of many, personally responsible for the changes since 2006, as the words of the MAS activist Christian Estebes demonstrate: “I am very thankful to our president because Bolivia has changed and now we are not poor. . . . We are not poor thanks to our president Evo Morales.”27 For many, without Evo Morales, these changes evaporate, gains that came to be understood as not won by social movement radicalism but as gifted by the great hermano Evo himself. It is here that Morales’s function within Caesarism becomes apparent. He successfully led the country out of the catastrophic impasse that characterized the period following Black October, initially implementing central social movement demands. The strength of the social movements discussed in chapter 1 gave the MAS government its progressive character and its position on the radical end of the pink tide spectrum. The progressive character of Morales’s Caesarism was the price paid to pacify the revolutionary challenges to the capitalist state and to maintain the conditions for capital accumulation in the face of a threat from below. However, movements were pacified with every further step Morales took as president, leaving him as the only apparent driver of political change. The progressive outcomes achieved under Morales came to be presented as those of Morales alone, with the revolutionary forces of catharsis confused with the compromise of Caesarism. The contradictory positioning of Evo Morales thus had a significant impact on processes of state formation in Bolivia over the decade following his election. It helped the MAS garner considerable popular support and win two subsequent elections with a majority of the vote, containing the class contradictions of its development plan for longer than many of its pink tide counterparts. It also relegitimized the Bolivian state, which following the crisis of neoliberalism had lost the ability to govern the Bolivian population and ensure the conditions of capital accumulation in 127

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the country. Last, this had the effect of embodying the gains of the MAS government in the figure of Evo Morales, leading to a political impasse encapsulated by the reelection referendum of February 2016 and the chaotic, tragic end of Morales’s presidency in November 2019. CREATING A LATIN AMERICAN CAESAR As president, Evo Morales enjoyed a decade of high popularity, sustained over a period of intense social conflict with the regional elite, struggles with Indigenous communities affected by extractivism and infrastructure projects (explored in chapter 5), and the end of the commodities boom. The backwash of the 2008 crisis when it hit Latin America spelled the end for many pink tide governments. Nowhere was this more dramatic than in Brazil, where the worsening economic context broke the class compromise between the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers’ Party, PT) and the domestic bourgeoisie in spectacular fashion, leading to the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff in 2016 (see Anderson 2019; Boito and Saad-Filho 2016; Loureiro and Saad-Filho 2019). For a time, at least, Morales seemed impervious to the regional crisis enveloping South America. While that crisis did eventually manifest in Bolivia, Morales proved particularly resilient as a political leader. Here, I have argued that a large part of the reason for this was the sublime/profane representation of the president. This is where hermano Evo, the llama herder and the apostle who can do no wrong, enters the frame. Through the careful cultivation of his public persona as an Indigenous person, as the bringer of development, and as the translator of the black box of the state who still errs at times, Morales was able to contain the contradictions of passive revolution and oversee a period of relative political stability and extractive-led development. However, the personification of his political project made him politically vulnerable, as we will see in chapter 6, and ultimately his sublime/profane persona could not resolve the contradictions of passive revolution; it was only capable of delaying them. The Caesarism embodied in Morales also transformed the appearance of the Bolivian state. The profanity and sublimity of Morales, coupled with the inclusion of Indigenous rights and ideals (albeit in a watered-down form) into the new constitution extended the state bureaucracy and increased the number of Indigenous state bureaucrats. Conditional cash transfers gave marginalized groups regular contact with organs of the state, which extended the state’s reach and altered its form without transforming the underlying state institutions. The liberal democratic logic remained and, apart from the reorganization of 128

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several government ministries, the essence of the state was not radically changed. However, the extension of the state and the modification of everyday practices and relations associated with state institutions, along with the association of the state with Morales, built the state’s legitimacy. Indigenous and working-class groups turned toward the state as a source of social change, and many organizations used strategies of positioning themselves close to Morales in an attempt to realize a cluster of promises related to justice and development. The promise of development was particularly strong, and the Bolivia Cambia, Evo Cumple program effectively tied development projects to the figure of Morales himself. Now we look at why development projects had such affective pull, and we examine the role of natural resources and infrastructure in processes of passive revolution.

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EXTRACTIVISM, INFRASTRUCTURE, AND THE SPATIOTEMPORAL DIMENSIONS OF PASSIVE REVOLUTION

“The time has come, the awaited day, a historic day in which Bolivia retakes absolute control of our natural resources” (Evo Morales, cited in Hoyo and Blas 2006, 15). If the ceremonial confirmation of Evo Morales as the Bolivian president at Tiwanaku was a quasi-prophetic spectacle, then May 1, 2006, was likewise a day of historic significance. Indeed, Morales’s declaration above, which announced to the Bolivian people the military occupation of the Margarita gas field through a spectacle of state power, is almost dripping with prescience. Natural gas was one of the central political issues that propelled Morales to power and, as Fernando Olivera (2006) so astutely notes writing for the Argentinean daily La Nación, “The rhythm of all of the country changed with the nationalization of hydrocarbons.” It was as if, as Morales suggested, the whole country had been waiting for this day. The theater around hydrocarbons at the start of Morales’s presidency points to salient questions around extractivism, state formation, and the politics of affect that need to be answered if we are to fully grapple with the dynamics of passive revolution. 130

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Until now, my story about passive revolution in Bolivia has focused mainly on political dynamics. I have explored the incorporation of social movements into the state; the spatiopolitical divisions between the social movements incorporated into the Movement for Socialism (MAS) political project and the elite opposition based in the lowland Media Luna departments; and the role of Evo Morales as a political leader. Dividing passive revolution into these heuristic threads has allowed me to draw attention to the incomplete and contradictory character of passive revolution, both in Bolivia and more generally. However, we must not lose sight of the underlying function of passive revolution: the pacification of social movements pushing for political change in order to maintain and extend the dominant forms of capitalist accumulation. In Bolivia, capital accumulation is driven by extractive activities linked to agro-industrial monocrop production (of soybeans in particular), the mining of metals and minerals, and the extraction of hydrocarbons. It is here that most conventional accounts of passive revolution stop, but I want to go a step further. I examine the politics that emanates from the expansion of extractivism and how it interplays with processes of passive revolution. Extractivism captures “processes of valorisation and accumulation predicated on the subjugation of human and extra-human nature to intensified exploitation” (Thame 2021, 1), which take the appearance of the flow of unprocessed natural resources away from capitalist peripheries (see Acosta 2013; Gudynas 2012, 2018; McKay 2017). This subjugation has political as well as economic dimensions and is far from straightforward, insofar as although extractivism is inherently violent, it also contains a kernel of promised modernity. Interrogating the temporal dimensions of extractivism and its attendant infrastructures—both those necessary for extractive processes and those built as monuments to extractivism’s modernizing impacts— allows us to explore how the political economy reestablished by passive revolution is itself part of the restoration/revolution dialectic. The temporal dimensions of passive revolution thus add to its contradictory and unstable character, especially at sites of extraction such as Bolivia. Among the important aspects of pacification through passive revolution are the ways in which the multiple temporal horizons of radical change that give moments of catharsis their radical potential (see Gutiérrez 2014) are displaced by temporalities of development and infrastructure. On the one hand, alternative futures imagined by social movements are replaced by a shared teleology toward modernity embodied in hydrocarbons—this is the temporal horizon of fossil capital (Malm 2015), which Hannah Appel (2018) labels “oil time.” Extractivism reestablishes a hege131

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monic temporality of a unilinear pathway toward a modern utopia and, in the process, reproduces sites of extraction as “backward” or peripheral places. On the other hand, struggles over life-affirming infrastructures that shape the choreographies of urban life (see Castán Broto 2019) help mediate the contradictions of extractive-led development, shifting the responsibility for realizing the promise contained in hydrocarbons to the level of local government. Infrastructure may “move matter,” but it is so much more than the tarmac, concrete, and metal found in bridges, roads, and pipelines. Infrastructure produces (social) relations with other objects and, in turn, the social relations become embodied by these objects (Larkin 2013, 329). These social relations are part and parcel of a living society. Therefore, infrastructural time is more akin to that of lifecycles marked by deferral, ruination, suspension, and abandonment than any telos (Stoler 2013). Projects are started but not always completed and at times abandoned after a few short years, depending on the financial resources available to the state or the changing winds of local politics. Moreover, infrastructure projects are never “finished” because the use of infrastructure wears out its material components, which need constant maintenance and repair. They form a part of the everyday rhythms of people’s lives, sometimes standing as metonyms for a better future, and sometimes dashing these same hopes. The different temporalities animated by extractive infrastructures and infrastructural expectations, as we will see, are important in pacifying radical demands and notions of social change. The spatial dimensions of extractivism, however, undermine these pacification processes because pulling resources out of the ground is both violent and contested. The fraught relationship between the ideological and material products of extractivism maps onto the production of space and further destabilizes the pacifying push of passive revolution. To some extent, the MAS government was successful in keeping the potentially explosive contradictions unearthed by extractivism in check, and it maintained relative political stability (and popularity) for a decade through the promise of infrastructure. The different spatiotemporal dimensions of extractivism—the conditions of which are (re)established by passive revolution—are a dialectical part of passive revolution itself in the Bolivian case. Although drawn from the particular historical conjuncture of passive revolution in Bolivia, these contentions have more general theoretical consequences for the way we conceptualize the rhythms of passive revolution and the importance of examining the interplay between their political and economic dimensions.

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THE PROMISE OF CHANGE AND RESOURCE NATIONALISM IN BOLIVIA In his modern classic on Venezuela and magical petrostates, Fernando Coronil (1997, 1) opens with a quotation from the Venezuelan playwright and political commentator José Ignacio Cabrujes. Conjuring images of routine tricks of prestidigitation and the magic surrounding statecraft in oil-rich countries, the passage wonderfully sets the tone for the rest of the book, which throws itself headlong into questions of dependent development, ground rents, and the role of the state in peripheral places that find themselves endowed with spectacular natural wealth. In The Magical State, Coronil writes about the formation of Venezuela as a petrostate during the period when the world was remade by oil. During this historical forging of an oil-driven world, oil became fetishized to such an extent that oil as a commodity and oil-rich states assumed magical properties. The ways in which parts of nature are commodified under capitalism produce political and ideological consequences as well as economic ones—it is not that specific affective or temporal properties are intrinsic to natural resources but that the particular social relations embodied in resources through their extraction and commodification produce temporal and affective characteristics. Not all minerals and hydrocarbons coveted by extractive capital are fetishized to the point of becoming magical. While Fernando Coronil’s “magical” state was not conjured in Bolivia as it was in Venezuela, hydrocarbons still possessed an affective pull, a cluster of promises around modernity. As discussed in chapter 4, Coronil (2019, 250) sustains that the “modern” nation is also composed of “‘two bodies’: its social body (citizens, people) and its natural body (territory and natural resources, especially oil, which by law belongs to all [citizens/people of a nation]).” “The haunting and tantalizing promise of well-being and national redemption for the citizenry” offered by natural resource wealth looms large in both Venezuela and Bolivia, a specter of progress and development that is always apparently just out of reach (Murphy 2019, 168). Coronil’s frame of the nation’s two metaphorical bodies provides analytical pointers when examining extractivism, state development plans, and passive revolution in resource-rich countries. It is not just that Bolivia has been inserted into the global market in a subordinate position as a source of primary commodities—although the material impacts of this are vast, to be sure—but that being situated simultaneously as backward and as a deposit of untapped mineral and hydrocarbon wealth has

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shaped the political and ideological horizons of political actors (both in Bolivia and elsewhere). In the wake of social conflicts over extractivism and infrastructure projects that intensified from 2011 onward (discussed in more detail below), the MAS government’s development model—predicated on extending natural gas extraction and redistributing the rents into social programs—came increasingly under fire, as the words of the sociologist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui suggest: “The fact is that our governors seem incapable of thinking about national problems for themselves and they continue to replicate models of dubious validity, proposing policies of ‘development’ that only open space for corporate interests, foreign and domestic alike. If previously [governments] replicated the development models imposed by the global North through the Alliance for Progress and USAID, today we follow the same path in trying to copy what is happening, for better or for worse, in Venezuela or Brazil, despite the cultural and historical differences that separate us from both countries” (Rivera Cusicanqui 2015, 15). Rivera’s cutting critique of the internal colonialism of the MAS presents one of the more sophisticated charges brought against Morales’s government. However, it would be misleading to frame the MAS as alone in its pursuit of this development model. As we saw in chapter 1, natural gas became the mobilizing frame of social movements, transcending the rural/urban divide and launching movements onto the national stage, with devastating consequences for two successive neoliberal governments (see Kohl and Farthing 2012). Through these social struggles, the appropriation and the proper use of natural gas rents became of principal concern to social movement activists. Such is the deep imbrication of the importance of gas in the popular imaginary in Bolivia, that even Indigenous movements such as National Confederation of Ayllus and Markas of Qullasuyu (CONAMAQ) give an important place to resource extraction: “[We have to use] our resources sustainably. We are not going to impede resource exploitation, but [resources] must be exploited very sustainably because, from the past, there was always mining, and we are not saying that we have to stop mining. Neither do we want to stop hydrocarbon [extraction] but we do not want the rich to fight the poor. . . . We suggest a taypi, and to implement a taypi we are proposing the right to prior consultation and the right to form our own companies.”1 A taypi is the place where two rivers meet, and it denotes a place of difference, a meeting place where antagonistic elements (awqa) confront one another (Prada Alcoreza 2013, 158). In suggesting a taypi, CONAMAQ—an Indigenous organization that represents the Aymara 134

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communities of the ayllus and markas of the Andean highlands (which the Aymara call “Qollasuyu”)—is fusing Indigenous knowledge with the extraction of natural resource wealth. In 2013, CONAMAQ entered into conflict with the MAS government over the Mallku Khota silver mine in Potosí (Salazar 2015). Again, the struggle was not over whether the project should go ahead, but who would undertake it and whom it would ultimately benefit. This struggle over extractive resources evidently tints Aurelio Ambrocio Muruchi’s words, but the above quotation still begs the question: Why are natural resources so central to popular imaginaries in Bolivia? An effective way to address this question is through the ghosts of prior natural resource booms. The imperial city of Potosí, as touched on in chapter 4, was the jewel in the Spanish empire’s crown, a place tainted by spectacular wealth ever since Diego Huallpa stumbled upon a rich vein of pure silver in Cerro Rico way back in 1545 (Galeano 1973, 21). Potosí was a place where the streets were paved with silver, the physical manifestation of the mythical El Dorado in Hispanic America. The fortunes of Potosí waxed and waned through the centuries, with silver eventually being replaced by tin as the most significant economic (and political) resource in the aftermath of the 1899 Federal War (Zavaleta 2008). However, the demise of silver did not mean the demise of the promise of natural resource wealth, and the early twentieth century saw the rise of a select elite group off the back of tin: Simón Patiño, Mauricio Aramayo, and Carlos Víctor Hochchild, more commonly known as the “rosca” (Dunkerley 1984). While the first half of the twentieth century in Bolivia was the age of the tin barons, it was punctuated by the influence of another important natural resource. The discovery of hydrocarbons in South America only occurred at the end of the nineteenth century, but such was the ruckus caused by the arrival (imaginary at least) of black gold that by the end of the Chaco War (1932–1935), it had made an indelible mark on Bolivian history (Young 2017, 151–53). The American petroleum company Standard Oil and its British counterpart Royal Dutch Shell were cast as provocateurs of war in the region (Young 2017, 175), leading the National Socialist government of David Toro to nationalize the American giant and form the Bolivian State Petroleum Company (YPFB) (Webber 2012a, 54). Here, for the first time in Bolivia’s history, we see the intertwining of popular national sentiment and extractive-driven development. Resource nationalism—the idea that Bolivia’s resources should be used by the state for the country’s economic development and social welfare—was central in drawing together the broad coalition of forces leading the drive for revolutionary 135

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change (Young 2017, 2). This resource nationalism emerged as a potent political force precisely because of the perceived role of foreign oil companies, which lit the match that ignited the Chaco War (see, for example, Almaraz Paz 2009). Despite the protestations of the oil companies, Bret Gustafson (2020) effectively shows how the oil–finance–military nexus of fossil capital was principal in leading the country in the Chaco War and how the families of those who lost their lives came to see Bolivians who fought in the war as “defending Bolivia’s oil.” Although the Nationalist Socialist governments were short-lived, they marked a change in the position of natural resources in Bolivia’s national imaginary. Almost two decades later, the entanglement of popular national sentiment with extractive-led development—albeit based on a different resource, tin—became central to the 1952 National Revolution. In the National Revolution, among the principal targets of the broad coalition of revolutionary forces were the rosca, who needed to be swept away by the revolutionary fervor if a modernizing national bourgeoisie were to develop (Zavaleta [1978] 2009, 154). Not only did tin have the potential to foment a sense of nation and thereby cement the advances of the revolution, it was also the material out of which the National Revolutionary state could simultaneously forge a national bourgeoisie to lead the drive to modernity and its dialectical pair, an industrial working class (see, in particular, Zavaleta 1988, 1990, [1978] 2009). Hydrocarbons, while secondary to tin in the 1950s, would also grow in political and economic importance during this period, and resentment surrounding the 1955 oil code was the glue that held together the unlikely alliance between the military and the Bolivian Left under the nationalist military regimes of General Alfredo Ovando (1969–1970) and General Juan José Torres (1970–1971), a brief moment in Bolivian history that witnessed the privatization of Gulf Oil under the tutelage of Marcelo Quiroga Santa Cruz on the “Day of National Dignity” (Young 2017, 163). The enormous fiscal burden placed on the state by compensation payments made to the tin barons after their mines were nationalized, coupled with the collapse of the global price of tin as the US dumped its reserves on the world market, severely hampered successive Bolivian governments during the 1950s (Crabtree et al. 1987; Malloy 1970). But while the National Revolution failed to produce a national bourgeoisie as a hegemonic political force capable of leading the country (until much later), the tin mines did produce a small but radical working class, whose ideas around nation, class, and revolution were molded by the materiality of the mines, as June Nash’s (1993) We Eat the Mines and the Mines Eat Us shows with such clarity. The miners became the political actors of 136

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the National Revolutionary period and, along with the military, formed one of pole of the National Revolutionary state (Zavaleta [1983] 2009). The advent of neoliberalism violently brought down the curtain on the miners’ political drama, but it did not extinguish the flame of resource nationalism. In fact, quite the opposite was true. By 2003, Bolivians across the wide expanse of the political spectrum believed, in the words of the journalist Gustavo Guzmán (2003): “Gas [was] everything. . . . [Bolivia’s] gas reserves [were] all that [were] left in the country looking forward.” The botched privatization of hydrocarbons by Sánchez de Lozada in the 1990s melded with the proposal to export Bolivian gas through Chilean seaports, sparking a bellicose reaction from social movements that saw this as but the latest in a long line of historic injustices linked to their natural resources. As we saw in chapter 1, these social movements challenged the hegemonic social and spatial configurations of power that enabled capital access to natural resources. They believed that Bolivian gas was theirs (¡carajo!) and theirs to do with what they will. This was the heavy historic burden placed on the MAS government when elected in 2005. Not only was Morales an Indigenous president, one of the people (as we saw in chapter 4), he was also the man elected to fulfill the demands of the two Gas Wars and to use Bolivia’s natural gas reserves to realize the until now frustrated promise offered by—to borrow the term of the Venezuelan intellectual, Arturo Uslar Pietri (1936)—“sowing” Bolivia’s natural resource wealth. THE NATIONAL DEVELOPMENT PLAN AND INDUSTRIALIZING EXTRACTIVISM One does not have to look far to find traces of the historical lineages of resource nationalism in the political project of Evo Morales. The Presidential Decree for the Nationalization of Hydrocarbons in 2006 was named the “Heroés del Chaco” (Heroes of the Chaco) and begins, “Considering: That after a historic struggle the people have conquered at the cost of their blood the return of our hydrocarbon wealth to the hands of the nation, [which now] will be used to benefit the country” (Bolivia 2006a, cited in Kohl and Farthing 2012, 231). Morales came to power amid a global commodities boom between 2002 and 2013, driven by the rapid growth of the Chinese economy on a construction binge, which devoured many of the world’s resources, in the process driving natural resource prices sky-high. On top of that, at the turn of the century, natural gas production accelerated rapidly in Bolivia thanks to the completion of gas ducts to Argentina and Brazil, massively expanding the export market for Bolivian gas (Kohl and Farthing 2012, 229). 137

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5.1. Government productive investment by economic activity (millions of USD). Elaborated by the author using INE data.

This simultaneously gave Morales a strong hand to play and increased the weight of expectation on his government. The 2006 New Development Plan of the MAS government divided the Bolivian economy along a main axis, differentiating strategic sectors producing surplus from employment and tax producing sectors (Bolivia 2006b, 91).2 Surplus producing sectors—including hydrocarbons, mining, and energy production—would provide the state resources that would then be redistributed and redirected into employment-intensive areas, such as industry, manufacturing and artisan production, tourism, agricultural development, housing, commerce, transport, and other services. The Renta Dignidad, Bono Juancito Pinto, and Bono Juana Azurduy conditional cash transfers, the improvement of infrastructure (especially roads), and support for agricultural sectors provided the policy mechanisms for this redistribution.3 This main axis was crossed by a transversal axis, with the government dividing state infrastructure into production infrastructure (transport, telecommunications, and electricity) and productive services, including the Bolivian System of Innovations and the Productive Development Bank (Cunha Filho and Santaella Gonçalves 2010, 183). These two axes lay at the heart of the government’s plan to construct a “plural economy” (García Linera 2008). The old neoliberal power bloc—composed of capital operating in agribusiness, hydrocarbon and mining extraction, and private banks (García Linera 2008, 7)—was to be replaced by a new national economic power bloc; this positioned the state as the principal protagonist in economic activity, working 138

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with small and medium rural and urban producers and subordinating the large capital of the neoliberal bloc, forming a new plural economy (García Linera 2008, 14). Industrialization attempts followed the logic of the New Development Plan and concentrated on redistributing income generated from the surplus-producing sectors to the employment-intensive sectors. To this end, industrialization efforts focused on the capital-intensive hydrocarbons and mineral extraction sectors in an attempt to add value to primary exports before they left the country (Wanderley 2013, 137). Whereas, on the one hand, agribusiness accounted for 86 percent of the government’s productive investments in 2000, it only represented 24 percent in 2016. On the other hand, hydrocarbon investments grew from 5.6 percent of the government’s productive outlay in 2006 to 53.5 percent in 2016 (see figure 5.1). These investments were largely concentrated in and around the gas fields of Tarija, and included the two liquid separation plants at Rio Grande and Gran Chaco, the proposed polyethylene and polypropylene plastic plants in Tarija, the ammonia and urea plant at Bulo Bulo, and the pipe fittings plant in El Alto (Arze 2014, 25). This investment drove growth in the manufacturing sector with direct linkages to the extractive industries mentioned above (INE 2020). The government also tried to encourage industrialization in the mining sectors through the Plan Sectoral de Minería (Mining Sector Plan), most notably with a political push to commence the extraction and industrialization of the massive iron ore deposits at Mutún (Arze 2014, 45–60; Farthing and Kohl 2014, 89). The effect of this development program was to sow the seeds of promised change through extractivism and to embed the teleology of progress at the heart of the proceso de cambio. Morales gifted tractors to Indigenous communities as part of the government’s agrarian policies in a stadium spectacle attended by thousands of government supporters, an event that could not help but recall Venezuela’s attempts to use oil revenues to produce tractors during the twentieth century (see Coronil 1997, ch. 7). One of the principal political rituals during the Evo Morales years, as Bret Gustafson (2020, 10) is quick to draw our attention to, was the act of “the president or vice president opening the gas valve in a kitchen.” This moment of almost banal domesticity was celebrated “as one of domestic progress, modernity, and the outcome of a long revolutionary struggle against imperialism” (Gustafson 2020, 10), highlighting the intertwining of public imaginaries of “modernity” and “progress” with hydrocarbon extraction. These rituals, aimed at different political constituencies across the national territory, projected the notion of 139

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the Bolivian nation advancing as a whole at the same pace—a quickstep march—along the pathway to modernity. However, the promise of progress held by gas brought its own set of political issues. Industrialization projects under Morales were blighted by a lack of technical capacity and poor planning, perpetuating the common conception in Bolivia that there was no industrialization under Morales whatsoever.4 In the labor movement, it was not that the development through extractivism model was erroneous, but that government policy was poor, incapable of meeting its expectations of a seismic shift. As much is clear in the words of Celestino Vacaflor, a regional leader in the Departmental Workers’ Center (COD)-Santa Cruz: “The theme most pertinent is gold. Have you been to the Chiquitanía [eastern Bolivian region in Santa Cruz]? It is gold, that with gold there has been no dramatic change,” he said emphatically, “and the reason there has been no change is that it is not the mining of the western [highland] regions. Here mining is different.”5 Regional suspicions mapped onto frustration that the government did not understand the local context, that elsewhere it was changing and it would be changing there too, if only the right approach to extractivism was implemented. Similar frustrations can be found in the words of Ramón Villar Peñas, a trade union leader and railway worker from Santa Cruz: “When we speak of industrialization we have . . . Mutún, for example, which should be producing iron ore already. . . . It’s humiliating,” he emphasized, “that we have iron and, until today, it has not been exported.”6 As the above quotations demonstrate, industrialization was framed as a golden bullet, and discussions about the direction in which the MAS took the country were focused on the (lack of) success in leading an industrializing development program to diversify the economy. Such was the affective pull of industrialization as a historical motor driving change that it evoked emotional responses: in the case of Don Ramón, humiliation. From across the Andean cordillera—and from a slightly more optimistic perspective—we can see the same political markers underpinning the analysis of the head of the COD-La Paz, Hugo Luis Torres Quispe: “We do not suffer from much dependency anymore, although it is certain that even a couple of years back, we were dependent on hydrocarbons. Now the government is trying to diversify the economy, but it lacks a solid set of policies . . . this is not simply a hydrocarbons issue but something that has to include clear and concrete policies toward industrialization and strategic enterprises, some of which are still owned by transnationals, as is the case with Pil Andino, the [Paceña] brewery and SOBOCE cement.”7 140

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5.2. Trade balance 2007–2016. Elaborated by the author using INE data.

For the labor movement, industrialization, particularly the industrialization of extractive industries, was the marker of the successes and failures of the MAS government. This is not surprising, given the continued centrality of the miners at the head of the COB (McNelly 2019b). However, even beyond the labor movement, industrialization was almost ubiquitously considered the sine qua non of development by workingclass sectors and even some Indigenous groups, as the above-cited quotation from CONAMAQ hammers home. In effect, resource nationalism placed temporal constrictions on the politics of change in Bolivia, with imagined positive change only possible through productivism and development conflated with industrialization. This was not the only temporal horizon that opened from the social movement period (2000– 2005); some social movements struggled against the commodification of nature, viewing natural gas (naively or not) as a pathway to a world beyond capitalism (Gutiérrez 2014; Linsalata 2010). This was the temporal dynamic that emanated from the development plan followed by the MAS government and the demands to nationalize the country’s natural resources without transforming the fundamental logic of capitalist extraction. A further destabilizing element of the government’s neo-extractive development plan (see chapter 3) was that the sites of extraction are geographically dispersed across the country and are found far from the cities of strong social movements that demanded the nationalization of gas. Indeed, this is one feature of the production of capitalist space for the purpose of surplus extraction: it simultaneously requires and produces a homogeneous whole and differentiated hierarchies formed by fragments of the whole’s parts, with different spatial segments produced to perform 141

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different sociospatial functions (Lefebvre 2009, 188). This contributes, in part, to the popular perception that the fabulous wealth offered by sites of resource extraction—the highwater mark in terms of surplus production/appropriation—is generalizable across the whole of the state’s space. This expectation was particularly pronounced among those who occupy the fragments of space, marked by destitution and degradation. These are members of the subaltern population who act as (seemingly interminable) wells of cheap labor, most of whom made up the social support base of the MAS. Most industrialization projects proposed by the MAS were in capital-intensive sectors located in distant corners of the country away from metropolitan centers. As Ben Kohl and Linda Farthing (2012, 231) contend, this exacerbated “longstanding historical conflicts between Andean and Amazonian societies along indigenous, mestizo, spatial, and social class configurations.” The greater focus on capital-intensive sectors linked to mining and hydrocarbons than on the urban manufacturing sector, which employs many more people, generated discontent among urban working classes. In interviews conducted in 2016 and 2017, they cited the lack of industrialization as one of the main factors behind the continuing informality, precariousness, and lack of quality employment in urban centers in Bolivia.8 Moreover, this development strategy deepened Bolivia’s insertion into the global market as a primary commodity producer. The government’s development plan for redistributing profits from productive sectors into employment sectors oriented the state toward the protection of capital interests above those of the working classes. It amplified the importance of hydrocarbons and mining exports and further exposed the Bolivian economy to the vicissitudes of global commodity prices. The macroeconomic effects of this strategy are visible in Bolivia’s trade balance trends during the years of Morales’s presidency (see figure 5.2). The country was able to run a trade surplus (see the black line) during the commodity bonanza thanks to hydrocarbons exports (gray dotted line). However, the fall in the value of hydrocarbon exports from 2014 onward quickly pushed the economy into a trade (and subsequently balance-of-payments) deficit. Simultaneously, reliance on imports for manufactured goods and machinery and transport equipment—sectors that the MAS governments did not attempt to develop—increased (see gray dashed line), demonstrating the intensification of Bolivia’s insertion into the global market as a producer of primary commodities and their low value-added derivatives. As we can see, the tensions between the divergent imaginaries and 142

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5.3. Government spending by type. Elaborated by the author using INE data.

realities induced by extractivism in places like Bolivia are not insignificant. Mapping onto the production of space, the fraught relationship between the ideological and material products of extraction further destabilizes the pacifying push of passive revolution. However, the MAS government successfully kept in check the potentially explosive contradictions unearthed by extractivism and maintained relative political stability (and popularity) for a decade. In doing so, the conditions for capital accumulation through agribusiness, mining, and hydrocarbons—that is, extractivism (see Gudynas 2012; McKay 2017)—were reestablished and expanded. A salient mechanism mediating the combustible products of extractivism was the construction of infrastructure. INFRASTRUCTURE AND BUILDING THE STATE When governments “sow the oil,” what grows? It seems appropriate that hydrocarbon rents cultivate concrete megastructures towering over the natural landscape or spreading in manmade webs across the land. After all, what better proof that hydrocarbons have brought modernity than “modern” monuments? The infrastructural power wielded by the MAS government was plain for all to see, as Morales’s government set about building roads, bridges, dams, coliseums, and, most notoriously, synthetic football pitches. In a sense, the MAS government used infrastructure as a means to concretize the improvements to Bolivian society promised by/to the social movements demanding the nationalization of gas, with sand, stone, and rock becoming road; water transmuted into electricity; and swathes of Bolivian forest, tundra, and desert 143

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opened up to modern transportation. This helps problematize the prefix “infra”—”meaning beneath, below or within” (Carse 2016, 27)—of the term “infrastructure,” and Susan Leigh Star’s (1999, 380–82) associated assertion that infrastructure is “by definition invisible” and only “becomes visible on breakdown.” Here, as we shall see, infrastructure sits on a spectrum and can appear as a political spectacle or an invisible support for tasks, and anything in between (Larkin 2013, 336). The political role of infrastructure in this case lay precisely in its visibility, in its ability to demonstrate the changes wrought by the political project of the MAS, and particularly the nationalization of hydrocarbons at the beginning of Morales’s tenure. Despite massive increases in productive investment by the MAS government as part of its industrialization attempts outlined in the previous section, the greatest amount of state expenditure was directed toward infrastructure projects. As figure 5.3 shows, infrastructure expenditure by the MAS government was greater than its productive investment throughout the period in power. Whereas the MAS only spent an average 19.6 percent of government expenditure on productive investments between 2006 and 2016, it spent an average 46.2 percent on infrastructure (and only 28.4 percent on social spending). This improved the conditions for natural resource extraction and catalyzed social conflicts with different segments of Bolivian society. Although there was spending on infrastructure projects directed at the Bolivian population in general, such as the new cable car system in La Paz, a significant portion of the total spending was directed toward the transport (railways, highways, and pipelines) and energy infrastructure (electricity networks) needed for megaprojects. In fact, the infrastructure so needed for everyday urban life remained deficient in many places, even as new highways and paved roads accelerated urbanization processes in rural communities across the country (see Horn 2018). This reflected a key facet of the New Development Plan: to construct vital infrastructure needed by the capital-intensive productive/extractive sectors of hydrocarbons and mining in order to increase their production capacity and, in turn, increase the amount of government revenue that could be distributed to employment-creating sectors (Bolivia 2006b, 202). The construction of large-scale extractive infrastructure by the MAS was part of a wider continental infrastructure project led initially by Brazilian capital: the Initiative for the Regional Integration of South America (IIRSA) (Bolivia 2006b, 202; Fontana 2013a, 35; Zibechi 2012; Zimmerer 2015, 320;). The IIRSA, a massive project that shaped investment across South America, aimed to develop transport, including roads, wa144

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5.4. Axes of integration in South America under the Initiative for the Regional Integration of South America (Elaborated from CEDIB 2021).

terways, ports, bioceanic corridors, and railways; energy infrastructure such as hydroelectric dams; and communications (Svampa 2011, 413). The IIRSA, originally funded by the Brazilian Development Bank, was designed to “create the conditions to facilitate transactions and trade across borders [that] would favor productive and commercial activities linked to extensive cattle ranching, large-scale agribusiness, the expan145

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sion of soybean monocultures, and extraction of natural resources more generally in the region” (Garcés 2013, 92). Due to its geographical positioning at the center of the continent, Bolivia was crossed by five of the ten axes of the IIRSA (see figure 5.4). It occupied a key place in the proposed IIRSA developments, and IIRSA’s proponents presented Bolivia as the future “transit country of the subcontinent and central distributor of gas and other energies” (Molina 2005, cited in Zibechi 2012, 220). The IIRSA was part of Brazil’s attempt—driven by the interests of domestic capital—to reorganize the geopolitical region of South America and to expand and connect the markets of the continent, simultaneously consolidating Brazil’s dominant position as regional powerhouse over its neighboring countries, including Bolivia (Zibechi 2012, 220). In Bolivia, the IIRSA agenda was supported and advanced by Morales’s government, which aimed to construct a total of forty-nine megaprojects across the country (Salazar 2015, 276). Following the economic crisis that enveloped the Brazilian economy in 2013, Chinese capital became an increasingly important financier of infrastructure projects in the region. Investments from the Chinese state banks (China Export and Import Bank, Eximbank, and the Chinese Development Bank [CDB]) and the involvement of Chinese firms in development projects became gradually increasingly important to the region’s development plans, and a new package of infrastructure investment deals between China and Bolivia cemented the importance of Chinese companies in the Bolivian economy (Escobar de Pabón, Hurtado Aponte, and Rojas Callejas 2016, 113–14).9 IISRA therefore represented the materialization of capitalist relations in the continent’s interior and the paradoxical concretization of the Bolivian state in remote parts of its territory initially through Brazilian- and more recently Chinese imperialism. As figure 5.4 shows, the IISRA project is more than the roads, bridges, ports, and dams that compose its whole. It represents a remapping and reimagination of the entire continent, scarified and divided neatly into ten axes or corridors (plus two oceanic corridors). When considering the broader socioeconomic and sociopolitical effects that ripple out from infrastructure and the space it produces, we must be careful to look past concrete, metal, and tarmac. We must not fetishize infrastructure as mere objects, for infrastructural power is much more than its material manifestation. IIRSA is not simply neat, scarified corridors; it is necessarily accompanied by new configurations of labor relations and practices, legal frameworks, and property rights (Khalili 2018, 914). ”Whether they are being built or crumbling,” Nikhil Anand, Akhil Gup146

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5.5. Isiboro Sécure National Park and Indigenous Territory communities and the highway route (CEDIB 2011).

ta, and Hannah Appel (2018, 26) write, “infrastructures simultaneously index the achievements and limits, expectations and failures, of modernity.” Infrastructure brings, on the one hand, the promise of progress to life, postulating itself as the concrete handmaiden of modernity; on the other hand, it summons the violence of displacement and removal, in the first instance discursively through surveyors’ reports and cartographers’ maps, and later physically with the barrel of a gun. CONCRETE STRUGGLES AND STRUGGLES OVER CONCRETE Communities that found themselves in the pathways of these gargantuan projects felt the sharp, often hidden edge of infrastructure projects. After all, infrastructure plays a dual role of integrating spaces deeper into the space of the nation-state (as the IIRSA’s given name suggests) and opening up new areas to capitalist relations (Luxemburg 1951, 419), whether communities like it or not. The violence entailed by infrastructure construction begins with erasure, the marking of blank spots on a map and the silencing of protestations. Maps, as Denis Wood (2010, 1) reminds us, act as engines producing social space, social order, and knowledge. In getting to “know” space through a map, space is produced 147

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as hierarchical (most marked by the distinction between seen and unseen), offering a concrete example of Henri Lefebvre’s (1991, 289) famous pronouncement of how “the space of a (social) order is hidden in the order of space” (emphasis in the original). Infrastructure maps are often superimposed onto maps of natural geographical features, with state-of-the-art maps drawn up by the YPFB superimposing its deposits and extractive infrastructure on satellite images. When the United States Geological Survey World Petroleum Assessment visited Bolivia in 2000 to assess its gas reserves, its report contained no reference to the Indigenous territories of the Guaraní under which the gas fields sat, or to the national territory of Bolivia, although it did, rather interestingly, mark the two main centers of regional opposition to Morales, Santa Cruz and Tarija, on its map (Gustafson 2020, 6). “The corporate use of undetailed maps in strategies of expropriation across resource frontiers today,” contends Lisa Tilley (2020, 18), “tells us that the colonial eye in its present form continues to see a ‘blank place’ to be claimed for extraction.” By a sleight of hand, the sociospatial features blocking the possible pathways of infrastructure can be erased. The massive increase in infrastructure construction under the MAS sparked a spate of conflicts resisting new rounds of displacement. The most notable of these clashes was over the construction of the highway through the Territorio Indígena y Parque Nacional Isiboro Sécure (Isiboro Sécure National Park and Indigenous Territory, TIPNIS). The TIPNIS conflict began in August 2011, precipitated by the government’s decision to build a highway from Villa Tunari in the department of Cochabamba north to San Ignacio de Moxos, through the TIPNIS national park (Webber 2012b). The government argued that the road would integrate the region with the rest of the country and “bring development” to its people as part of a larger infrastructure project connecting the Andes and the Amazon (Fontana 2014). Nevertheless, the highway through the TIPNIS—roughly from San Salvador to Isinuta, north to south in figure 5.5—is of little use to most Moxeña, Tsimán, and Yuracaré communities (marked with pink dots along the waterways in the same figure), which are situated along the riverbanks to the east of the highway. Infrastructure in resource enclaves, as Walter Rodney (1982, 205–23) shows for colonized Africa, is designed for the needs of resource extraction—then for the colonizers, now for extractive capital—with any benefits it brings being purely coincidental. Figure 5.5 reveals how the route of the highway was not plotted in order to improve transport networks for communities living within the park, and it is difficult to see how its construction will be of any benefit to the Indigenous people living there. 148

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The government failed to mention, however, a host of other interests in the TIPNIS. From the 1970s onward, Aymara and Quechua farmers—initially known as colonizadores (colonizers), more recently referred to as interculturales (interculturals)—came to the area to cultivate crops, especially coca (McNeish 2013). Their growing territorial expanse is marked by the orange area at the bottom of figure 5.5. The highway through the TIPNIS, argue Fabricant and Postero (2015, 462), will increase the vulnerability of groups granted collective land rights to land grabs by, among others, coca growers. Moreover, to the west of the park are untapped blocks of natural gas—the concession to which was granted to the Spanish multinational Repsol—that would be made accessible by the new highway (McNeish 2013). YBFP maps of the region mark these hydrocarbons concessions as existing on satellite images of empty spaces, making no reference to the TIPNIS or any other protected areas in the country. As well as the “blank spaces” on maps, the TIPNIS conflict also reveals how the government used blank spaces in official transcripts and reports—themselves a result of the silencing of communities in the pathway of infrastructure—in order to push through the project. Initially, the government conducted no prior consultation with the communities that would be affected by the highway, thus closing off the official channels of opposition to the project. When a consultation finally took place, it was ex post facto and its methodology—particularly how representative it was of all communities in the park—proved controversial (SchillingVacaflor 2013). Moreover, protestors who continued to voice opposition to the road were effectively cast aside as enemies of progress and, ultimately, of the Bolivian nation. The most notable examples of this are found in the visceral attacks on oppositional groups by Vice President Álvaro García Linera in two of his books, Tensiones creativas de la revolución (Creative tensions of the revolution, 2011) and La geopolítica de la Amazonia (The geopolitics of the Amazon, 2013). García Linera used essentialized categories of Indigeneity firmly rooted in colonial platitudes—as unruly, uncivilized obstacles to progress in Tensiones creativas, and as pure, innocent peoples in need of state tutelage in Geopolítica—to erase the contemporary politics of Indigenous people facing displacement and dispersal due to infrastructure projects. This political gagging stripped Indigenous people in Bolivia of their principal route to collective justice though claiming collective rights as Indigenous peoples, one of the clearest examples of the exclusionary and violent aspects of the sublimity/ profanity of Morales discussed in chapter 4. Oppositional Indigenous groups were, in effect, silenced by the government through their presen149

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tation as noncontemporaneous, as the MAS assigned them a premodern, and therefore prepolitical, temporal character. The TIPNIS conflict proved to be the rule rather than the exception during the MAS government’s time in power. The proposed hydroelectric dams between the Madidi natural park and the Pilón Lajas reserve on the border of the departments of La Paz and Beni offer further examples of the violence and erasure perpetrated through infrastructure projects under the MAS. The dams were presented as the first step in mediating the effects of depleting hydrocarbon resources and toward the diversification of the Bolivian economy. They represented “the centrepiece” of a multibillion-dollar program to construct dozens of dams in the country, which was proclaimed to have the potential to produce energy for internal consumption and export (Achtenberg 2017). Most of this energy was to be sold to the large markets of neighboring Argentina and Brazil, as the MAS government sought to position Bolivia as a major energy hub in the region. However, as was the case with the highway through the TIPNIS, the plan met with fierce resistance from local communities organized by the Amazon Defence Coordinating Committee, and from local nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), including La Paz-based Fundación Solón, run by the former Bolivian delegate to the UN (2009–2011), Pablo Solón. The Chapete dam would inundate an area larger than the city of La Paz, making it the country’s second-largest lake (Solón 2016), and between them, the dams would displace four thousand people from seventeen communities (Edwards 2017). These people and places were designated as dispensable in the government’s quest for modernity, to be quite literally engulfed by/for the promise of progress. The ecological impact would also be devastating, affecting three thousand-plus different species of flora and fauna in unpredictable ways and possibly releasing methane and toxic gases into the surrounding atmosphere (Achtenberg 2017). The large-scale infrastructure projects undertaken by the MAS government were a continuation of the economic model outlined by the 2006 New Development Plan. They explicitly targeted the requirements of extractive sectors with the goal of expanding the scope of natural resource extraction. Roads, bridges, railways, and pipelines all cut lines through the country toward foreign export markets, while dams create vast blue expanses that engulf everything upstream. The rationale behind this development program was that increased resource rents would also significantly increase the nominal rents captured by the state, which the MAS government could then use to fund its progressive social programs. However, the displacement of communities by infrastructure 150

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construction, coupled with catastrophic environmental and ecological impacts, became an increasing source of social tension under the MAS. Infrastructure projects were a source of major social conflicts from the beginning of the second term of the MAS in 2010 onward, pitting Indigenous groups in the pathway of megaprojects against the government, in effect juxtaposing a spatially situated minority of the country’s population against the future well-being of the rest. Exploring the politics of extractivism and infrastructure during the Morales years illuminates the political and ideological dimensions of apparently economic processes. It reveals that extractivism can produce an affective pull, promising progress, development, and modernity. It also shows that the physical processes of pulling resources out of the ground are violent, destructive, and contentious, and can perpetually spark localized conflicts with the communities in the geographical vicinity. AESTHETICS OF CHANGE, POETICS OF INFRASTRUCTURE Infrastructure illuminates the intersection of the promise of modernity and the politics of dispossession, producing “a sense of belonging, accomplishment, or loss” (Appel, Anand, and Gupta 2018, 26). This is what makes infrastructures good sites for studying the attendant social and political effects that accompany development plans, particularly those based on extractive industries. Infrastructures are also important sites of politics on a more everyday level, where citizens encounter the state and where new political subjectivities, under the right conditions, are forged. After all, water infrastructure was the spark for two of the major social conflicts between movements and the state (in Cochabamba and El Alto, respectively) during the social movement cycle 2000–2005. However, conflicts over the construction of infrastructure projects or the price and quality of infrastructural functions are not the only ways that infrastructure can become a plane of politics. Larkin (2013, 2018) uses “poetic modes” of infrastructure to capture situations in which infrastructure’s form becomes separated from its function. “Infrastructures are the means by which a state proffers . . . representations [of progress and modernity] to its citizens,” Larkin (2013, 335) argues, “and asks them to take those representations as social facts.” The construction of roads and bridges under Evo Morales was important in terms of their function for capital and to improve connectivity between major urban centers. However, they were also accompanied by a spectacle of change: billboards, adorned with the image of Evo Morales, which announced the project and how much money the government had spent. 151

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In this context, infrastructures assume a political function that far exceeds their stated technical function, as they “address the people who use them, stimulating emotions of hope and pessimism, nostalgia and desire, frustration and anger that constitute promise (and its failure) as an emotive and political force” (Larkin 2018, 176). In the course of Morales’s premiership, infrastructure came to stand as a metonym for the transformation of the country, partly because of the modalities of state formation analyzed in chapter 4, and partly because of the legacies of neoliberalism. Following neoliberal decentralization in Bolivia, demands for infrastructure needed for urban life, such as electricity, running water, and paved roads, were increasingly directed toward the local level. These infrastructures enable life and the reproduction of labor above all else, and they were secondary to infrastructure demanded by capital in the 2006 National Development Plan (McNelly 2020b). These life-affirming infrastructures played a central role in rescaling the politics around extractive-led development. Decentralization placed the onus of reaping the benefits of natural resource extraction on municipal governments, deflecting criticisms about the shortcomings of extractive-led development models onto the local level. In other words, during neoliberalism the responsibility of “sowing the oil[/gas]” through infrastructure was shifted away from national governments and onto municipal authorities. In Bolivia, infrastructure assumed a central role in local politics following the implementation of the Law of Popular Participation (LPP) in 1994. The LPP aimed to “better the quality of life for Bolivian women and men with a more equitable distribution and better administration of public resources” (Bolivia 1994, 7, Art. 1). It divided the country into 311 municipalities and doubled the municipal authorities’ share of the national budget from 10 percent to 20 percent (Ströbele-Gregor 1997, 3). By doing so, it assigned local authorities “complete control over and responsibility for investing in construction and maintenance of health, education, roads, micro-irrigation, and sports facilities” (Kohl 2003, 343). Following the LPP, infrastructure expenditure was the responsibility of local government. The LPP established new civil society actors called Organizaciones Territoriales de Base (Base Territorial Organizations, OTBs) to enable popular participation. OTBs were composed of “peasant communities, Indigenous peoples and juntas vecinales [neighborhood committees] organized according to their customary practices and statutory dispositions” (Bolivia 1994b, 8, Art. 3). OTBs were integrated into the state and awarded new rights and responsibilities through personalidad jurídica 152

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(legal personality) status, in the process becoming the principal routes between the state and civil society taken by public resources (Lazar 2008, 68). They were given input into the use of these resources through the writing of the five-year Plan de Desarrollo Municipal (Municipal Development Plan, PDM) and the Programa de Operaciones Anuales (Annual Operating Program, POA), while also performing important oversight functions as members of the Comité de Vigilancia (Oversight Committee). However, although the LLP invited municipalities to “participate and promote actions related to environmental management, ecological equilibrium, and sustainable development” (Bolivia 1994b, 11, Art. 7), they were excluded from several activities related to these goals, most notably hydrocarbons extraction (Kohl 2002, 465). The LPP carefully ringfenced the infrastructures of extractivism from popular deliberation and only included infrastructures used in social reproduction (as opposed to the reproduction of capital) within its remit. Simultaneously, decentralization transferred fiscal responsibility from the central government to the local authorities (Gill 2000, 49). Despite revenue sharing between the central and municipal governments, small municipalities, unable to adequately fill their budget purse thanks to their small tax bases, found themselves worse off than before because of the increased administrative costs implied by decentralization. Roads, schools, bridges, health clinics, and sports facilities are significant investments for small communities, and the design of the LPP left local authorities charged with the organized abandonment, as well as construction, of infrastructure (Farthing and Kohl 2006, 138).10 Overnight, the LPP positioned infrastructure as the battleground of local politics and as the yardstick to measure political success or failure. This became patently clear when I was doing fieldwork in the cities of El Alto and Santa Cruz in 2016 and 2017. While I did not realize it at the time, nearly all the conversations I had with social movement activists and neighborhood residents about the local mayors were framed in terms of their ability to deliver public works—that is, infrastructure projects. When assessing the municipal government of the then mayor of El Alto, Soledad Chapetón, members of the El Alto Federation of Neighborhood Councils (FEJUVE-El Alto) used public works as a measure of her first year in office: “We are already a year into the mayor’s time in office and projects have been delayed a lot. We are in the month of April, approximately halfway through the mayoral office’s annual budget execution and 0.88 percent of the projects have been completed. After half a year we should be 50 or 40 percent through the execution . . . people are 153

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not stupid, right? People have said we have been given a chance for a year and what has the mayor done?”11 The quotation suggests that the sole role of the mayor of El Alto is to deliver infrastructure projects, and Chapetón’s failure to do so was interpreted as proof of her ineffectiveness and inactivity as the municipality’s leader. Carlos Barrera of the 2003 FEJUVE-El Alto agreed, arguing that the lack of projects reflected the incompetence of the functionaries that made up her team: “Chapetón does not have good professional technicians. They have all changed because there are no rules [when a new mayor comes to office]. All the executive part of the municipal government has changed and capable people that I knew and had worked with were expelled and replaced with others who have no idea what they are doing [no saben dónde están parados]. They cannot do anything, they cannot deliver even one project.”12 Other leaders from the FEJUVE-El Alto expressed a similar sentiment: “This latest administration of mayor Soledad Chapetón has not been a very good administration for us because there are no public works. No large-scale projects have been completed recently like the large ones of the past.”13 Carlos Rojas, another activist central to the 2003 FEJUVE-El Alto, took the intimate connection between the perceived success of Chapetón’s administration with its ability to deliver public works one step further: “There is stagnation. There are no public works, so we are beginning to see a reaction from the population. There are grave problems . . . there are no works, so the new administration of El Alto is going to have many problems.”14 For Rojas, Chapetón’s administration did not have public works because it had problems, and it had problems because it had delivered no public works. In short, Chapetón was considered a political failure as mayor of El Alto because of her record in delivering infrastructure projects. This highlights the importance residents of El Alto placed on the delivery of infrastructure projects. Infrastructure acted both as a bellwether for how an administration was doing, and a possible spark of local conflicts between the FEJUVE-El Alto and the municipal government. In contrast to Chapetón’s political fortunes in the city of El Alto, the mayor of Santa Cruz, Percy Fernandez, enjoyed popular support across the spectrum of the city’s residents—including trade union leaders, municipal officials, neighborhood and market guild leaders—thanks to his standing as an engineer and his ability to deliver projects: “[Percy Fernandez is] very good . . . because he has delivered public works, he has dedicated himself to his work and it is always good to have a mayor who is an engineer. . . . He has put his all into his work, soul, heat, life. . . . Whom 154

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he does or does not work with is down to his intelligence rather than any political agenda.”15 For the residents of Santa Cruz, the series of schools, hospitals, and roads Fernandez’s administration had built demonstrated his political ability. Indeed, his training and previous life as an engineer—that is, as someone involved in building infrastructure—further enhanced his political credibility: “If before there were about three schools, today we have over 150 schools . . . [and] a second-level hospital. As the city is big, we are still missing a series of works, pavements, urban parks, small squares, football pitches. We will always be missing some things, but it has improved substantially. In other words, with this mayor that we have, the city has improved a lot, it has made a lot of progress, in drainage channels . . . it is beneficial that we have this mayor because he is a civil engineer, this is the advantage we have.”16 Daniel Suárez, speaking about the construction of a new market in the urban periphery of Santa Cruz, Plan 3000, also stressed Fernandez’s past as an engineer and, likewise, the previous working life as an architect of his head of council, Angélica Sosa. For Suárez, the fact that both municipal leaders were drawn from professions linked to construction played a part in the assistance the market associations of Plan 3000 received from local government in moving their market: “The municipal government is already doing the asphalt on the other side of the market and later it will start on this side. The rains have stopped us a bit, but we really want to have more influence over the work of the municipal government headed by the engineer Percy Fernández and the head of the municipal council, the architect Angélica Sosa.”17 Suárez repeatedly refers to Fernandez as an engineer, drawing a connection between changes in municipal laws that enabled his associations to advance in the construction of their market, and the mayor and his council head’s expert knowledge as engineer and architect, respectively. The affective pull of engineering and the art of constructing infrastructure were so strong that it led many interviewees to skate over accusations of corruption leveled against Fernandez, as the words of Abad Lino, head of the FEJUVE-Santa Cruz, suggest: “You could say he has planned the city. Beyond the complaints about acts of corruption . . . his management is approved by us.”18 Infrastructure, then, appears in both El Alto and Santa Cruz as the concretization of good or bad municipal governments. The promise of infrastructure operates as a sort of “scalar fix” articulated on the terrain of politics. It protects the national project by deflecting failures onto the local level, rescaling debate over the merits of extractive-led development to discussions over municipal government capacities. Success or failure in producing infrastructural projects is attributed not to the develop155

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ment model (which is assumed to bring modernity) but to the political ability of local leaders, in this case, the municipal leaders of El Alto and Santa Cruz. Not everybody, however, is taken in by this infrastructural approach to politics, and the aesthetics of change do not deceive all: “La Ceja is under renovation. That footbridge [pasarela] built by [the former alteño mayor Edgar] Patana cost a million dollars and it does not take you anywhere. . . . That’s why it is the monument to municipal corruption, right? People believe that development and progress are based on cement, so what do they do? They build infrastructure projects, but they are not putting them in place so that these infrastructures can be used.”19 Antonio Quispe’s astute observation about the character of local infrastructure projects reveals a more general property of infrastructure within capitalism: its political function as the materialization of the promise of progress and development. Infrastructure is built as much for its symbolic significance as for the changes to everyday life enabled by its functions. This may be painfully clear in the case of “poetic modes” of infrastructure, whereby its form becomes detached from its stated functions (as is the case with the footbridge Quispe mentions above). In Bolivia, this promise helps produce an affect toward extractive-led development and its attendant infrastructures, shaping the field of possible futures. In the context of catharsis, this can also contribute to the pacification of movements. Several authors have noted that the LPP acted as a “divide and rule” approach designed to nullify the potency of social movements (e.g., Contartese and Deledicque 2013, 47; Gill 2000, 49). In an interview with me in 2016, the MAS politician Jorge Silva marveled at how successful the LPP was at orienting local leaders and movements away from struggles against the large-scale structural changes catalyzed by neoliberalism to squabbles over funds and projects at the local level that did not have a wide-ranging scope for change.20 The interests of local leaders were aligned with the state through awarding political and economic power via the official channels of the LPP, breeding the conditions in which political patronage and clientelism flourished (Lazar 2008, 68). Juntas vecinales became bureaucratized through the state-designated forms of participation and “replacing the idea of service with the liberal logic of political and financial profit” (Dinerstein 2015, 150–51). The clientelism from which the FEJUVE-El Alto broke free (see chapter 1) was, in large part, due to the wider political effects of the LPP. Moreover, as Comités de Vigilancia could only oversee the distribution of local funds, the ultimate decision-making powers remained with those in local office (and therefore with political parties). Conse156

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quently, local leaders became incorporated into the party system as they sought to better control and influence the flow of resources through the POA, which in the MAS years assisted the modalities of transformism addressed in chapter 2. The logics of patronage that emanated from the LPP continued into the Morales years and this form of local political participation, particularly when oriented toward infrastructure projects, assisted ongoing processes of pacification within passive revolution. There is an important temporal dimension to the pacification produced by infrastructure. The LPP shifted the horizons of change away from longer-term projects seeking to generate structural change to the one- or five-year timeframe of the POA and the PDM. In effect, the time frame of the planning and actualization of projects, which Appel (2018) calls infrastructural time, predominates, erasing other political time frames and the politics that they might engender. The politics of change is framed as only being possible through planning cycles and official state channels, obscuring and erasing other horizons of change that look beyond the state and infrastructure. Even within infrastructural time, there were exclusionary effects. A survey performed by the Secretario Nacional de Participación Popular (National Secretariat of Popular Participation, SNPP) found that while Comités de Vigilancia participated in 80 percent of the long-run (five years) PDM, only 33 percent of committees had a say in the POAs, which allocated financial resources for that year (cited in Farthing and Kohl 2006, 139). In practice, the LPP curtailed popular participation in the two most pressing temporalities: the immediate spending needs for the neighborhood that year and the long-term development projects. In the case of El Alto, a rebel city with a long history of radical self-organization, it is not that infrastructure is used as a justification for deferral of the present. Rather than stretching politics into the indefinite future in the name of development like the large-scale extractive infrastructures, the infrastructure required for everyday urban life and demanded by city residents does the opposite, constricting the temporal horizons of politics to limited one- or five-year cycles. In placing their hopes of improvement in an infrastructural future, residents place themselves in stasis, waiting for the completion of one- or five-year cycles. Coming out of a moment of catharsis, infrastructural time and the promise embodied in infrastructure helped pacify radical movements by containing radical horizons of change. Extractive infrastructures and the infrastructural promise of resource rents may pull in opposite temporal directions, but they work together to eliminate alternative futures imagined beyond extractive-led development. 157

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THE MATERIALITY OF PASSIVE REVOLUTION It is not hard to understand why extractivism and infrastructure were so central to the government of Evo Morales. Nor is it difficult to comprehend the affective pull—collective hopes and dreams raised and dashed—hydrocarbons exert over the Bolivian population. Five hundred years sitting under the shadow of empire—first Spanish, later British, and most recently US (see Grandin, 2007, 2014)—shaped the possibility of development, producing outcomes that diverged wildly from expectations. It is not surprising that the pushback against simple stagist tales of modernity offered up by modernization theory in the post–World War II period was most resounding in Latin America. It is also not surprising that the region spawned magical realism (most notably through the works of literary maestros such as Isabel Allende and Gabriel García Márquez), whereby these stunted hopes and dreams of modernity could finally find form through a quirk of the (sur)real, with the help of the otherworldly. In a sense, much of Latin America still needs to believe in this little bit of magic to help overcome the legacies of colonialism and uneven capitalist development, which still represent significant limitations to the bounds of possibility here. Hydrocarbons appear to offer the promise of social transformation, the political equivalent of the narrative jump and the suspension of belief used so effectively by Allende and García Márquez in their writing. Development appears possible through exetracting gas and using it to transform society into part of the modern world, offering a way to pass along a telos and become “modern.” However, the ways in which hydrocarbon and mineral extraction operate in a global market and world order marked by the power of capital and the imperial power of, in particular, the United States, mean that more often than not this promise turns out to be little more than smoke and mirrors. Part of the problem lies in trying to conciliate the contradictions thrown up by extractivism. For the riches offered by hydrocarbons turn to sand in the blink of an eye: diversifying your economy using hydrocarbon rents—“sowing the oil”—is notoriously difficult; while the perception of plenty breeds suspicion and resentment. Extraction always plays out over existing geographical tensions, and the global dynamics of uneven and combined capitalist development that drive extractivism mean that peripheral states find themselves tossed around like a cork on the high seas. In this context, external factors can appear insurmountable, an observation that lay at the heart of Latin American dependency theory. As many critics of dependency theory have pointed out, domestic 158

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structural conditions and politics, of course, matter, but we must not lose sight of the limiting conditions produced by dependency and the uneven contours of capitalist space. The spatiality of hydrocarbons can act as a destabilizing force, as we see in the comments of social movement actors lamenting the lack of their share in urban Bolivia. Likewise, sacrificing spaces maimed by the extraction process itself for the progress of the country has disastrous ecological effects, displacing communities in the pathways of extractive infrastructures and their toxic afterlives (Nixon 2011). One of the underlying dynamics of passive revolution is the creation of conditions that enable the continuation of capital’s expanded reproduction. In resource-rich countries like Bolivia, this means the prolonged and expanded extraction of hydrocarbons, something that Evo Morales’s government achieved to a tee. Under the MAS, the political physiognomy of extractivism changed, with resource rents increasingly entering state coffers and being redistributed through progressive state policy (Gudynas 2012); however, the underlying essence remained. The MAS government successfully contained and managed the contradictions presented by extractivism through infrastructure (assisted by the cultivation of sublime and profane elements of the president himself discussed in chapter 4). Infrastructure construction erected the spectacle of development, with Morales (like many before him) using concrete roads, dams, and bridges to produce the illusion of “modernity.” However, the temporal conditions confronted by residents of the two cities in which I did research (and much of the country beyond) is not the imagined telos of “development.” Rather, it is shaped by the deferral, degeneration, abandonment, and repurposing of infrastructure. The teleology that shapes the promise of extractive-led development and the planning cycles of local government work together to flatten out the multiple temporalities that emerged from the moment of catharsis between 2000 and 2005. The result is that extractivism and infrastructure—both those needed for extraction and those promised by extractive rents—play an important part in pacification within processes of passive revolution at the peripheries. Looking at the spatiotemporal dimensions of extractivism and infrastructure offers a lens through which to examine the interplay between the economic “base” and political “superstructures.” So often, passive revolution is conceptualized as a resolution to crisis that plays out solely at the superstructural level. My analysis reveals the ways in which the reestablishment of processes of capital accumulation feed back into structural processes, not as exogenous but as endogenous dynamics within passive revolution. 159

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CHAPTER 6

CONTRADICTIONS, CRISIS, AND THE END OF EVO MORALES

In June 2019, I returned to La Paz after two years away from Bolivia. Besides being delighted to see family and friends in the city, I was also excited to see my interlocutors belonging to social organizations. I planned to speak to the four organizations I had worked with during my earlier fieldwork and find a medium and form for my research that was appropriate for each organization. I arrived at the offices of the Movement for Socialism (MAS)–aligned El Alto Federation of Neighborhood Councils (FEJUVE-El Alto) in the Ceja to find that my contacts had left during my absence and the current leadership was not interested in my proposals. The Bolivian Workers’ Center (COB) was even more blunt, stating that the organization had a different political orientation now. My working knowledge of the COB, I was informed, was not only outdated but defunct. They were “with the MAS now,” and from hunting down my old friends in the COB, it appeared that dissidents had been purged in preparation for the national elections later that year. Feeling slightly dejected, I was nevertheless able to present my research findings at the Museum of Ethnography and Folklore (Musef) and at the La Paz Catholic University San Pablo. Central to helping me 160

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disseminate my work were my friends, the anthropologists Pedro Pachaguaya and Aldo Bailey, whom I had met through Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui’s Tambo many years earlier. One of the first things I did when I arrived in La Paz in January 2016 was to play the tarka (wooden flute) in the carnival parade with Pedro. In August 2019, toward the end of my two months in La Paz, Pedro invited me to a neighborhood fiesta. There was the obligatory ch’alla (Aymara blessing ritual), music, dancing, drinking of alcohol, and chewing of coca leaves. In this context, we started discussing Bolivian politics, the state of social organizations, and what we thought might happen in October’s elections. Pedro was frustrated at the lack of critical thinking, of internal critique of the MAS in organizations. Any talk of self-reflection was drowned out in the face of the MAS election campaign. We both lamented the demise of Bolivian intellectual production—one of the far-reaching effects of social movement demobilization and realignment evaluated in chapter 2. Having been at the cutting edge of critical discussions on the alternatives to development, post-neoliberalism, Indigenous autonomy, and legal pluralism, Bolivian intellectual debates—whether in academic or activist circles—had been almost completely reoriented and inserted into the field of formal political disagreements and election cycles. What neither of us had properly grasped in late August was the extent of this political and intellectual morbidity. While neither Pedro nor I saw the intensity of the coming crisis, it was not in itself surprising. The violent rupture of late 2019 did not emerge in a vacuum and it was not spontaneous; it was, following René Zavaleta, a result of the accumulation of history. We can comprehend (if not fully decipher) this moment of crisis by tying together the threads of passive revolution that I have outlined in chapters 1 through 5. The contradictions created by the incorporation of social organizations into the state, by the spatial division and reconciliation, by Caesarism manifested in the sublime/profane dialectic, and by extractive-led development proved to be explosive, a powder keg that was ignited by competing narratives around the October 2019 elections and the days that followed. Examining the interplay between the different dimensions of passive revolution I have identified up to now can help us explicate the limitations of both the government of Evo Morales and passive revolution to rebuild durable peripheral conditions with lasting political legitimacy. THE OCTOBER–NOVEMBER CRISIS Before we turn to the task of drawing together the different threads of passive revolution to analyze the crisis of late 2019, we need to take a 161

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cursory look at what exactly happened—no easy feat given the confusion of this particular moment in Bolivian history. The run-up to the presidential and parliamentary elections on Sunday, October 20, 2019, was tense. Evo Morales ignored the February 2016 plebiscite that rejected his proposal to stand for a fourth term and decided to run anyway, leading many to decry the end of democracy in Bolivia (McNelly 2016a). The referendum of February 21, 2016—known in Bolivia simply as 21F— marked a turning point in the Morales presidency, his first major defeat, and the coalescing of a loose alliance of different social forces (outlined below) around the notion of the defense of democracy. The 21F referendum revealed cracks in the new sociospatial configurations of power explored in chapter 4, a reminder that passive revolution comprises constantly contested processes. The referendum results and the MAS’s subsequent noncompliance with the outcomes of the referendum, argues the sociologist María Teresa Zegada (cited in ANF 2019g), produced a polarized political context. Protests sullied Morales’s election campaign, with the city of Potosí forcing the president to flee in the face of the population’s general ire (Página Siete 2019q). However, when Bolivia went to the ballot box, barely anyone, including Pedro and me, expected the chaos that followed. To avoid a second-round run-off, Morales needed to win above 40 percent of the popular vote and ten percentage points more than his closest rival. In the run-up to the vote, Morales was polling between the high-thirties (according to the polling company CiesMori) and the mid-forties (in the estimates of the pollsters Vía Ciencia) with a lead of 9–10 percent, figures that suggested either a first-round victory or a second-round run-off between him and his closest rival, ex-president Carlos Mesa (Página Siete 2019m, 2019p). On the night of the election, with 83 percent of the preliminary count completed, Morales had captured 44 percent of the vote but was only five points ahead of Mesa. At this point, the rapid transmission of the preliminary count (TREP) inexplicably cut out for twenty-four hours (Díaz-Cuellar 2020, 59), with the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE) giving no fewer than four conflicting explanations.1 In this period of prolonged silence, suspicions grew and disquiet flourished. The MAS and its supporters claimed victory, while its opponents cited this as conclusive evidence of electoral fraud (Gutiérrez 2020, 9). Pandemonium broke out, as electoral offices were burned to the ground in the cities of Potosí and Sucre and counting stations incinerated in Oruru, Potosí, Santa Cruz, and Tarija. External forces in the form of the Organization of American States (OAS) and the hawkish 162

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Republican senator Marco Rubio poured fuel on the fire by proclaiming fraud in the international press without sufficient evidence. TSE officials resigned in the wake of their mixed messaging, and a sense of injustice swelled among swathes of the population. The city of Santa Cruz entered its longest general strike in history, and the cities of La Paz, Oruro, Potosí, and Cochabamba were barricaded. Violent clashes between opposition groups, MAS supporters, and the police punctuated the following two weeks (see Salazar 2020a, 14; Zibechi 2020, 17–18).2 The beginning of the end of Morales became evident on November 8, when the police mutinied—first in the city of Cochabamba and later in cities across the country—and joined the ranks of oppositional protests (Díaz-Cuellar 2020). On the morning of November 10, Morales attempted to restore order by calling new elections, but the die had been cast. The military intervened by reportedly informing Morales of a USD 50,000 price on his head, a threat sufficient to force both Morales and his vice president, Garcia Linera, into hiding in the MAS stronghold of the Chapare before their escape to Mexico a few days later. In the weeks that followed, Bolivia descended into the nadir. A marginal right-wing senator from the lowland department of Beni, Jeanine Áñez, entered the presidential palace on November 13, with neither a clear constitutional route to power nor a legislative quorum (Hylton and Webber 2019).3 Flanked by the head of the Pro-Santa Cruz Committee, Luis Fernando Camacho, and his political ally from Potosí, Marco Pumari, Áñez held the bible aloft as she assumed power. For his part, Camap cho declared Bolivia to be a republic once more and “of Christ” (McNelly 2019a). Retributive violence was doled out in areas considered to be MAS strongholds, and massacres in Senkata, El Alto, and Sacaba, Cochabamba, left scores dead and hundreds injured (Salazar 2020b, 40). By January 2020, Áñez’s government had detained more than one hundred MAS elected representatives (McNelly 2020a). Áñez’s government clung to power for almost a year, repeatedly delaying elections during the global COVID-19 pandemic. Elections were eventually held in October 2020, when the MAS candidate, Luis Arce Catacora, was elected president in the first round, but the tumultuous end to the presidency of Evo Morales points to the potentially explosive character of the contradictions within the processes of passive revolution. Before interrogate how these contradictions played out in the period leading to the crisis of 2019, it is worth briefly discussing how this moment revealed the cracks in the novel sociospatial power configurations forged by passive revolution in the previous period.

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CRACKS IN THE NEW ORDER The crisis of late 2019 was a crisis of the Bolivian state and its democratic organs. However, it ran much deeper than a mere institutional failure. For a brief period, it seemed that one of the lasting legacies of Evo Morales’s government was going to be the irreversible increase in pride about Bolivia’s Indigenous culture and history on the part of most, if not all, sectors of society (see, e.g., Farthing and Kohl 2014; Rivera Cusicanqui 2014). Indeed, when the 2019 election campaign began, all presidential candidates fell over one another to don ponchos and other outfits of the different Indigenous groups in the country. However, in the run-up to October’s vote, it became apparent that old wounds were still festering. Slogans such as “fuera indios” (get out indians) appeared daubed on walls throughout the axis cities of La Paz, Cochabamba, and Santa Cruz (Arigho Stiles 2019b). Violence directed at Indigenous people increased: the director of radio for the Trade Union Confederation of Bolivian Peasant Workers (CSUTCB) was tied to a tree following the interruption of the TREP (Arigho Stiles and Farthing 2019). The well-known mime Wallake was assaulted during the cabildo in La Paz, which took place on Wallake’s turf, the Plaza San Francisco. The street performer was attacked for wearing an outfit made from aguayo (the colorful cloth used by cholitas and Indigenous peoples alike to carry their wares) (Página Siete 2019o), an indication of the racial undercurrents bubbling up to the surface during the crisis. The middle classes’ sense of being threatened by the increasing Indigenous presence in the country—glimpses of which were visible in the racist reaction to the presence of alteños in the Megacenter shopping mall after it first opened (Maclean 2018)—became ever more apparent. The return of demands for federalism also brought with them the shadow of the autonomy protests discussed in chapter 3. Federalists played a central role in the cabildos in Cochabamba, La Paz, and Santa Cruz before the elections (Página Siete 2019l); Camacho invoked memories of over a decade earlier (when Evo Morales was not allowed to deplane from his presidential jet at the zenith of the autonomy battles), declaring the decision of the MAS to close its electoral campaign in Santa Cruz a “provocation” (Página Siete 2019r). The violence that followed the closing of the MAS campaign was spearheaded once again by the UJC, the protofascist protagonist of the violence of 2008 (Lizárraga 2019d). During the police mutiny, which represented one of the final nails in Morales’s coffin, police officers in Santa Cruz ripped the wiphala (Indigenous flag) from their uniforms. The mob that accompanied Áñez to the 164

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presidential palace on November 13 tore down wiphalas from government buildings and burned them. The return of a racist Right pervaded deeper than explicitly racist discourses, statements, and acts. As Gabriela Zamorano Villarreal (2020) underscores, the coalitions claiming to restore democracy advanced a racialized vision of what democracy looks like in Bolivia, scarified of its “wild” or “savage” elements. The pro-democracy movement rested on liberal democratic values drawn from the American and European traditions. This movement was concerned with the principles of term limits, individual rights, and the primacy of the private over the public. This liberal form of democracy was framed by the urban middle classes and elite as incompatible with some aspects of the plurinational state (Farthing and Becker 2021, 29). Indigenous people allied with the MAS were treated as ungovernable, as not understanding how democracy functions, as ultimately uncivilizable, a positioning of Indigenous peoples that reproduced the permitted/nonpermitted “indian” [indio permidio] divide of neoliberal multiculturalism highlighted by the likes of Charles Hale and Silvia Rivera (Hale 2004; Zamorano Villarreal 2020). As much is clear from Camacho’s declaration against the Pachamama,4 which insinuates that Indigenous cosmologies and ways of life are fundamentally incompatible with democracy. His treatment of the wiphala suggests the same, actively encouraging supporters to burn the wiphala in the protests leading to Morales’s exit (Tejeda-Moreno 2019). In short, the crisis of 2019 revealed the contestation around the reformation of the state through “Indigenous” notions of plurinationalism and vivir bien, highlighting the intimate link between race and territory in Bolivia (see Castañón Ballivián 2021).5 The sparks that lit the tinderbox of regionalism in the run-up to the October 2019 elections were the massive forest fires in the Amazon and Chaco regions. Over August and September, dozens of fires laid waste to swathes of the country, burning more than 3.45 million hectares of forest in the Chiquitania (Página Siete 2019c). Under Morales, the rate of deforestation increased massively across the eastern lowlands (McKay 2017)—particularly in Santa Cruz (Página Siete 2019b)—with slash-andburn techniques used by both large-scale landowners and smallholder farmers to clear agricultural land. The regional opposition to the MAS laid the blame for the fires squarely at the feet of coca growers, accusing them of burning down virgin forest indiscriminately (Página Siete 2019i), and blaming Morales for ratifying DS3973 in July 2019, which altered regulations around deforestation (Página Siete 2019e). In doing so, the opposition presented Morales’s social base and the president himself 165

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as reckless and antienvironmental, strengthening links between the environmental movement, sections of the lowland Indigenous movement, and regional opposition to the MAS (Arigho Stiles 2019a). Not for the first time, regional autonomy movements fed into the ecological opposition to Morales (Blanco 2019). The strange overlap between these groups was exemplified by Duston Larsen, the son of Ronald Larsen, and the former Mr. Bolivia we met in chapter 3. After his brief acting career, Duston established San Miguelito Ranch, a jaguar conservation area in the lowlands. In a 2019 interview, he frames his opposition to the productive use of land clause of the INRA designed to break up large latifundia landholdings in terms of deforestation. This clause, Larsen argues, encourages landowners to cut down the forest, juxtaposing deforestation with (limited) efforts in agrarian reform to confront unequal land distribution (Butler 2019). Here, we can see how arguments for protecting the environment also tie together justifications for large landholdings and an implicit assumption that Indigenous groups mismanage the forest. During the cabildo in defense of democracy on October 4, 2019 in Santa Cruz, which reportedly attracted over one million participants (Lizárraga 2019b), the widespread forest fires were tied together with 21F, the “recuperation of democracy” (Página Siete 2019h), and regional opposition to the MAS government (ANF 2019c; ANF and Página Siete 2019, 2019g). The cabildo labeled Morales a murderer for his slow and, some argued, ineffective response to the fires (Lizárraga 2019a). It also reestablished demands for federalism from parts of the lowlands, demands that had lain dormant for almost a decade (Lizárraga 2019b), with the fires revealing the spatial divisions opened by the crisis over a decade earlier. These divisions were never fully healed, merely papered over by the class conciliation between the MAS and the lowland elite. The spatial and scalar contradictions of capitalist development and the formation of the Bolivian state remained. During the October–November 2019 crisis, the agro-industrial elite and urban middle classes began to contest the sociospatial configurations of power that resulted from passive revolution. The appearance of an Indigenous government and plurinational state, which these groups had (begrudgingly) accepted since the defeat of the regional elite in 2008, suddenly lost legitimacy, and the alliance between lowland groups and the MAS that emerged in 2010 broke down. Here I argue that we can understand this loss of legitimacy by examining the contradictions between the different processes contained in passive revolution and how they played out in the context of the 2008 crisis once it manifested in South America from 2013 onward. 166

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IN THE WAKE OF THE 2008 CRISIS The decline in legitimacy for the state forms and configurations of power forged by passive revolution during the years of the MAS government occurred in the context of the end of the commodity supercycle (2002–2013). Natural resource extraction during a period of historically high commodity prices provided the MAS government with the means to pursue redistributive policies while keeping sections of capital happy, with transnational corporations operating in extractive sectors making record profits during this period (Arze 2016). As explained in chapter 5, the New Development Plan (NDP) followed by the government deepened Bolivia’s insertion into the world market as a commodity producer. By 2016, hydrocarbons made up around 50 percent of the value of all exports (despite accounting for less than 15 percent of gross domestic product [GDP]) before other mineral and metal material exports are considered (McNelly 2020b). Moreover, hydrocarbon rents grew from 33 percent of total state revenue in 2001 to 64 percent in 2008 and 65 percent in 2010 (Arze and Gómez 2013). In short, the NDP expanded the conditions of extractivism and reproduced extractive frontiers across the country. The upshot of Bolivia’s position as a primary commodity producer is that it remains dependent on primary commodity extraction for the dynamism of capital accumulation (Mendes Loureiro 2018), and, due to the relatively undiversified nature of its economy and the volatility of global commodity prices, it is comparatively sensitive to developments elsewhere in the global economy. The fall in global commodity prices affected hydrocarbon and mineral-exporting countries across South America and ate away at regional trade surpluses, as the fall in the value of exports eroded trade balances and contributed to growing balance-of-payment deficits across the region (ECLAC 2019b). The end of the commodity boom reduced the fiscal resources available to the government to pursue its redistributive policies and set the state and private capital at loggerheads over declining resource rents. This placed increasing strain on the final two terms of Morales’s presidency, and the October 2019 elections took place against the backdrop of falling commodity prices globally (ECLAC 2019a, 24). Despite running a balance-of-payments surplus until 2014, by 2019, Bolivia’s balance-of-payments deficit was USD 860 million, largely because imports of capital goods (USD 1.9 billion), vehicles and machinery (USD 1.3 billion), and consumables (USD 1.0 billion) continued to outstrip exports of hydrocarbons (USD 2.8 billion) (INE 2020). The sluggish 167

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demand for Bolivian exports (ECLAC 2019a, 47)—itself a consequence of slowing global growth (particularly in the motor of the global economy, China) and the shockwaves emanating from the trade war between China and the US that began in 2017—was accompanied by a drop in foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows, highlighted by a reduction of net FDI flows from a high of USD 1.75 billion in 2013 to USD 344 million in 2018 (ECLAC 2019a). Even more worrisome, natural gas production also declined from 2014 onward, “plunging in the last quarter of 2018 by 24 percent compared to the same period of 2017, a decrease which [had] not been reversed in the first quarter of 2019” (ECLAC 2019a, 46). This suggests that the reduction of hydrocarbon revenue was not only due to external factors linked to global commodity prices and Bolivia’s two biggest export markets (Argentina and Brazil) but also due to technical constraints on domestic production. The lack of technical expertise blighted the MAS government’s attempts to industrialize hydrocarbons (Arze 2014; Farthing and Kohl 2014), with the falling hydrocarbon production leading Argentina to complain that Bolivia was not meeting its contractually obligated export quotas (El Deber 2018). This, coupled with the continued delays to production at Mutún and the failure of several strategic state enterprises—such as Papelbol (paper), Lacteosbol (milk), EBA (food), and Cartonbol (cardboard) (McNelly 2020b)— fed into the perception that the MAS government was not a safe pair of hands with the economy and that, in effect, it had “squandered” a golden opportunity (Farthing 2019). At the end of Morales’s presidency, Bolivia remained dependent on imported goods—whether sold in supermarkets, formal markets, or informal settlement markets—for everyday consumption (Tapia and Chávez 2020), demonstrating his government’s limited success in diversifying economic activity. This state of affairs became politicized in Morales’s later years through debates around contraband and, in particular, the sale of secondhand clothes, giving ammunition to Morales’s opposition in political debates about the country’s economy. As discussed in chapter 5, extractivism and its attendant infrastructures have a complex and contradictory place in processes of passive revolution. Capitalism draws hydrocarbons and mineral wealth into its orbit through extractive processes, simultaneously producing the promise of modernity and sparking socioecological conflicts, pitting different groups in the country against one another and the state. The unevenness of the geographies of extraction means that the promise of modernity offered by hydrocarbons remained tantalizingly out of reach for many Bolivians. Despite being triggers for various social conflicts during its tenure, the Morales government was able to contain the most explosive 168

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effects of these contradictions, in a large part due to the sublimity and profanity of Morales discussed in chapter 4. Nevertheless, in the context of decreasing resource rents to be shared between redistributive programs and company profits, the sense that the promise of extractivism had been frustrated was sharpened, bringing the contradictions of extractive-led development to the fore. This had two important effects: first, it reopened the spatial divisions of the previous period and reignited disputes about the distribution of resources within the country; and second, it shattered the veneer of all boats rising under Morales, and revealed the limited transformation of the urban class structure that had occurred since the reorganization of the class structure in Bolivia (and beyond) during the neoliberal period. Sociospatial Breakdown, Resurgent Regionalism, and the “Lithium Coup” In the context of falling commodity prices, the fragile alliance between Morales and the lowland elites consummated at the 2010 International Fair of Santa Cruz (ExpoCruz) fractured. Although the lowland agricultural bourgeoisie benefited nicely from the politics of agrarian change pursued by Morales’s government (see Castañón 2017; McKay 2018; Wolff 2016), they were not natural allies of the MAS, and diminishing profits produced by agribusiness, mining, and hydrocarbons increasingly turned successive fractions of the capital against Morales. Regional politics and demands of federalism reemerged. However, arguably the most significant regional movement in the run-up to the 2019 elections did not hail from the lowland regions’ home to agro-industry or hydrocarbons, but the department of Potosí. The site of the 2010 civic strike, Potosí is a department that had a complicated relationship with Morales’s government. Being a department where traditional Indigenous communal forms (ayllus) still survived and with strong Indigenous movements, Potosí had initially been one of the bastions of support for the MAS. However, by 2010 there was a sense that, once again, Potosí was being forgotten, and a sense of injustice grew out of the state’s management of fiscal resources and a long memory of extraction (Iamamoto 2015). Potosí was where the Spanish first found silver, later one of the centers of tin mining, and it was the location of the single largest mining operation in the country during Morales’s presidency, the Japanese-operated San Cristobal mine. Yet it remained one of the poorest departments in the country. During this period, the potential wealth offered by a new primary material sparked conflict between the Comité Cívico Potosiño (Potosiño Civic Committee, Comcipo) and the MAS government. Under the largest 169

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salt flats in the world, the famous Salar de Uyuni, lies roughly 30 percent of the world’s known reserves of lithium (Johnson and Palmer 2019), one of the principal production factors of batteries and green technologies needed for a clean energy transition. In December 2018, the MAS government promulgated DS3738 (Bolivia 2018), which created a mixed public–private enterprise YLB Acisa, composed of Yacimientos de Litio Bolivianos (Bolivian Lithium Resources, YLB, the majority 51 percent stakeholder) and the German multinational ACI Systems (the minority 49 percent stakeholder), to industrialize the lithium reserves found in the Uyuni Salt Flats (Página Siete 2019f). DS3738 restated the centrality of the industrialization of primary resources in the development project of the MAS (article 319 of the constitution) and situated the industrialization of lithium in the position of primary importance to the country’s development. However, it also gave the central government control over lithium production and the lion’s share of any fiscal revenues generated by lithium extraction. This created tensions between the departmental and national governments. The conflict reveals the fragilities in the fiscal pact (explored in relation to hydrocarbons in chapter 3) and the persistence of struggles over natural resource wealth at different state levels. On July 17, 2019, Comcipo started protests against the central government, demanding the modification of the 3 percent royalties granted to the departmental government from lithium extraction and the annulment of DS3738 (Agencias 2019; ANF 2019d; Segales 2019c). At a technical level, the dispute revolved around two issues. The first was the contradiction between Law 928 that created YLB as a strategic national enterprise with the sole right to industrialize lithium (Bolivia 2017), and the control given to ACI Systems over the whole chain of the industrialization process (Erbol 2019b). The second issue was Comcipo’s ire at ACI Systems’ claim that the end product was an industrialized product, meaning that YLB Acisa was exempt from taxes on primary resources (Erbol 2019b). As the elections drew nearer, Comcipo upped the ante, entering an indefinite strike on October 7. In response, the MAS tried to win over potosinos (residents of Potosí) by making the city of Potosí the penultimate stop of its electoral campaign there, with disastrous consequences (Chuquimia 2019a; Segales 2019e). On October 16, Morales’s appearance in the city of Potosí sparked violence between protests in “defense” of lithium, MAS militants, and the police. Rather than arriving at a conciliatory accord with Comcipo and the striking residents of Potosí, the day ended acrimoniously, with Morales forced to flee the city in the presidential helicopter (ANF 2019f). 170

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After initially hostility toward reversing their plan for lithium (Erbol 2019a), the government eventually abrogated DS3738 after the violence that followed the elections. This cancellation of the contract signed with the German multinational ACI Systems led many on the Left (particularly in the US) to decry this as a lithium coup. In this narrative, the government of Evo Morales is targeted in revenge for closing off transnational capital’s access to lithium (cf. Conese 2019; Higgins 2019; Willis 2019), a framing of the events of October–November that only gained further credence with Elon Musk’s bizarre reference to Bolivia on Twitter in July 2020: “We’ll coup whoever we want! Deal with it” (Prashad and Bejarano 2020). However, as Thea Riofrancos (2019) incisively explained on the same platform some months earlier, this narrative leaves a lot to be desired. Morales followed a state-led industrial program for lithium for almost a decade, and in November 2019 there was a global lithium glut, with some producers scaling back production. Moreover, lithium is not that rare; the purity of Bolivian lithium is lower compared to that of Argentina and Chile and the chemical process patented in Bolivia is less cost-effective than the equivalent processes used by its neighbors. In short, that the coup d’état against Morales was transnational capital’s revenge appears overstated. This does not mean that lithium did not play an important role in the October–November crisis. The disputes between the MAS government and Comcipo were a salient factor in the crisis but absent from the lithium coup narrative, which misses how the dispute over lithium plays out over existing terrains of conflict between different levels of the state over the distribution of resources. Struggles over lithium demonstrated the sociospatial tensions at the heart of the plurinational state and the politics that emanate from these contradictions. As the Comunidad Ciudadana (CC) candidate Daly Santa María stated in her election campaign, “Lithium, like the Chiquitanía [where the forest fires burned], is not the government’s” (cited in Pau 2019). This suggests that struggles over control of the country’s natural resources persisted and that the central government’s sovereignty over its territory and natural resources continued to be disputed within the country. Comcipo’s demands fed into national manifestations organized by the political opposition to the MAS. Following the success of the cabildo in defense of democracy on October 4, in Santa Cruz, the human rights defender and rector of the Public University San Andreas, Waldo Albarracín, called for a similar protest in La Paz on October 10 (Página Siete 2019h). Here, demands for “democracy” were accompanied by demands for the abrogation of DS3738, announced in the press alongside a photo 171

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Table 6.1. Axis cities: Waged and nonwaged employment growth by economic activity Average annual growth 2001–2007

Economic activity

2008–2011

Total

Waged

Nonwaged

Total

Waged

Nonwaged

Total

3.6

5.1

1.6

3.5

2.4

4.7

Mining and hydrocarbons

3.8

–3.2

27.4

0.3

–5.0

24.8

Manufacturing industries

4.6

5.1

4.0

3.1

3.5

2.7

Electricity, gas, and water

3.2

3.2

0

2.3

2.3

0

Construction

5.8

8.2

1.6

10.2

6.2

17.3

Commerce

–3.7

–1.6

–4.5

3.5

5.2

2.8

Transport and Communications

5.7

2.4

10.3

5.7

–2.5

14.8

Financial Services and Business

3.9

3.2

5.4

–1.0

0.1

–2.7

Services

9.1

8.1

13.5

1.9

1.4

4.7

Extractive/primary sector (1)

3.8

–3.2

27.4

0.3

–5.0

24.8

Manufacturing/ secondary sector (2 + 3 + 4)

4.9

6.2

3.4

4.9

4.3

5.5

Services/tertiary sector (5 + 6 + 7 + 8)

3.1

4.9

0.9

3.0

1.8

4.3

Source: Data are taken from Escobar de Pabón, Rojas Callejas, and Arze Vargas (2014, 28).

172

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Table 6.2. Axis cities: Employment by economic activity 2001–2011 (%) Economic activity

2001

2007

2008

2011

Total

100

100

100

100

Mining and hydrocarbons

0.6

0.6

1.0

0.9

Manufacturing industries

17.0

18.0

20.7

20.5

Electricity, gas, and water

0.4

0.2

0.5

0.4

Construction

7.9

9.1

6.4

8.0

Commerce

35.6

28.2

35.0

34.5

Transport and communications

8.0

9.2

9.6

10.4

Financial services and business

7.5

7.7

6.6

5.6

Services

23.0

26.9

20.3

19.7

Extractive/primary sector (1)

0.6

0.6

1.0

0.9

Manufacturing/secondary sector (2 + 3 + 4)

25.3

27.4

27.6

28.9

Services/tertiary sector (5 + 6 + 7 + 8)

74.1

72.0

71.5

70.2

Source: Data are taken from Escobar de Pabón, Rojas Callejas, and Arze Vargas (2014, 25).

Table 6.3. Axis cities: Rate of waged employment by economic activity 2001–2011 (%) Rate of waged employment Economic activity

Var %

2001

2007

2008

2011

2001– 2007

2008– 2011

Total

50.4

57.8

52.7

51.0

7.4

–1.7

Mining and hydrocarbons

90.1

59.2

88.1

75.1

–30.9

–12.9

48.1

Manufacturing industries

50.2

51.8

48.7

1.6

0.6

Electricity, gas, and water

84.0

100.0 100.0 100.0

16.0

0.0

Construction

59.6

68.7

67.9

9.1

–7.6

60.3

Commerce

24.8

28.8

28.1

29.5

4.0

1.4

Transport and communications

63.5

52.2

59.2

46.4

–11.3

–12.8

Financial services and business

65.6

66.7

60.4

62.4

1.1

2.0

Services

69.3

78.2

85.7

84.4

8.9

–1.3

Extractive/primary sector (1)

90.1

59.2

88.1

75.1

–30.9

–12.9

Manufacturing/secondary sector (2 + 3 + 4)

53.6

57.8

53.5

52.6

4.2

–0.9

Services/tertiary sector (5 + 6 + 7 + 8)

50.9

71.5

51.9

50.0

20.6

–1.

Source: Data are taken from Escobar de Pabón, Rojas Callejas, and Arze Vargas (2014, 29). 173

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of Albarracín sitting next to Marco Pumari, head of the Comcipo (Página Siete 2019j). Demands concerning lithium quickly translated into demands for federalism (Página Siete 2019t). This helped opposition to Morales articulate on the regional scale, with civil disobedience and extra-electoral opposition to him organized through the civic committees (see, for example Página Siete 2019u; 2019z). Continued disputes over resources at various state levels were also clear in the cabildo in Tarija in the run-up to the election, with the government’s management of hydrocarbon resources central to the discussions (Segales 2019f). The political geography of resource extraction marked by the uneven distribution of resources and a sense of injustice about how resource wealth is managed and distributed continued to be one of the principal threads leading into the crisis of late 2019, demonstrating the temporary character of the spatial fixes outlined in chapter 3. The compromises made with different regional groups began to fracture at this moment and demands for departmental control of resources were placed firmly back on the table. The Broken Promises of Extractive-Led Development In addition to reinflaming regionalism, falling resource rents as the 2008 crisis manifested in South America also brought limitations to the development model followed by the MAS into sharp relief. The early Morales years were a time of hope and promise, not only with a government of social movements but also a state-led development model that would see all Bolivians benefit from their country’s natural resource wealth. The failure of this promise to be realized in the way many had expected caused some segments of the population to experience a sense of “being forgotten.” Part of this resentment, as I argued in chapter 5, was linked to the continued lack of urban infrastructure. However, this does not tell the whole story. Part of the promise made by the MAS government was economic transformation, particularly in the everyday lives of working-class Bolivians. Looking at the labor market data from the early Morales years illustrates the limited transformations fostered by the NDP. As tables 6.1, 6.2, and 6.3 demonstrate, during the height of the commodity boom, nonwaged employment growth (i.e., informalized forms of work) outstripped waged employment growth across most sectors. Most people continued to be employed in services, commerce, and manufacturing, where the rate of waged employment remained low. The overall rate of waged employment decreased between 2008 and 2011, the period of the commodity boom and apparent plenty. However, some important processes of class 174

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formation within the informal economy would have important political consequences. The recycling of resource rents into the domestic economy through increases in the statutory minimum wage, conditional cash transfer programs, and the Bolivianization of credit sparked processes of class formation within the informal economy itself. Here, in the marketplaces and workshops of places like El Alto, Cochabamba, and Santa Cruz, hidden wage laborers worked (and continue to work) alongside petty commodity producers cloaked in the neoliberal ideology of entrepreneurialism.6 The increased cash circulating through circuits of exchange in the informal economy concentrated in particular places (and in particular hands), enabling a small fraction of the petty bourgeoisie—mainly importers of electronics and vehicles and a small fraction of coca growers (see Tassi et al. 2013)—to accumulate significant capital. Not only did this emergent bourgeoisie disrupt and recast gender, class, and racial stereotypes—as Kate Maclean (2018) shows so incisively in her discussion of the 2009 film Zona Sur—but it also changed the landscape of class politics on which the MAS government was based. The upward aspirations of this emergent class clashed with the established middle-class norms, confrontations that were only intensified in the La Paz–El Alto conurbation by the compression of space by the new cable car system, Mi Teleférico, inaugurated in 2014. Suddenly, the historic privilege that class and race bestowed on a small section of the populace was under threat, as was their access to the small number of professional jobs in the state and the private sector. These processes of class formation intertwined themselves with the changes in wage distribution during the Morales years. The persistence of a large proportion of the population working in the informal economy explains why, even with an impressive formal minimum wage growth of over 100 percent in real terms between 2005 and 2015 (ILO, 2017), the growth in the share of GDP paid in wages was below the regional average (0.15 percent increase over the same period) (ILO 2017). The effect of the rising minimum wage, but not the overall wage share, was to reduce the difference between the minimum and average wages but not to improve employment prospects for the population, which was a particular gripe of the increasingly well-educated middle classes and aspirational workingclass people.7 The lack of formal employment opportunities was one of the principal complaints about the MAS government expressed by Bolivians from all walks of life during my time there in 2016–2017 and 2019. This would have political ramifications in the later years of Morales’s presidency, as these groups scrambled for the few jobs that matched their educational attainment. The emergent middle classes and the working 175

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classes with new professional aspirations formed the basis of the urban opposition to Morales, coalesced around the abstract notion of democracy—understood in its narrowest, liberal representative form (Galindo 2020, 23; Página Siete 2019y). Theoretically, we can think of these different middle-class groups as intermediary classes with frustrated expectations similar to their Brazilian counterparts identified by Armando Boito Jr. (2019) and Ruy Braga (2019a, 2019b). In their work grappling with the rise of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, both Boito and Braga identify frustrated expectations among precarious and informalized urban workers as key political actors who switched allegiances from support of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers’ Party, PT) to the far-right Bolsonaro, a trend we can also identify in the opposition to Morales in 2019. These frustrated intermediary classes were joined in opposition by the upper middle-classes and elite sectors of the Bolivian population, who had always resented being governed by an Indigenous president and now felt threatened by emergent middle-class groups. Within this group, the political distribution of new openings in the expanded state bureaucracy to MAS supporters (rather than candidates with elite educations) caused resentment and a sense that governing for personal gain and corruption was holding the country back and the MAS was to blame for this. These frustrations about the lack of employment opportunities (that were previously guaranteed by class) segued into antidemocratic accusations leveled against Morales following the February referendum. There were other important opposition currents (see McNelly 2021), but these intermediary groups were the largest and arguably most significant. Here, the potentially explosive political character of extractive-led development and the affect produced by natural resource wealth within capitalism become apparent. In 2019, the inability of the MAS to foment industrialization and foster an economy with high-skilled, high-wage jobs for most of the population (an impossible task in a peripheral country like Bolivia) becomes a central political issue. The blame for these failures was placed firmly at the feet of Morales. The question we must ask ourselves is why Morales was not able to contain these political upswells at this moment. CAESARISM’S LIMITS AND THE UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES OF A SUBLIME/PROFANE PRESIDENT Throughout the course of chapters 4 and 5, I underscored how the sublime/profane presentation of Evo Morales enabled the MAS government to contain the destabilizing contradictions of its extraction-led devel176

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opment model and relegitimize the state in its new plurinational guise. I also highlighted how the gains of the MAS became embodied in the figure of the president himself, which made Morales difficult to disentangle from the plurinational state or the project of the proceso de cambio. While presenting Morales as a metonym for the process of change was a successful political strategy until 2016, it unraveled in the aftermath of the reelection referendum. Situating Morales as the sole person responsible for the political and economic changes in the country solidified his popularity and political support during the commodity boom, but it had the opposite effect once the crisis began to manifest in the country. In February 2016, the opposition successfully managed to fuse concerns of the quality of state institutions and debates over forms of democracy in the country together with opposition to Morales’s presidency. To grasp why they were able to do this, we need to return to Morales’s ascent to power (discussed briefly in chapter 4). Morales rose to prominence in national politics through a trade union tradition that is markedly nonliberal in certain instances—the cocalero unions have a notable authoritarian streak. Indeed, as Thomas Grisaffi’s (2019) ethnography on the cocaleros of the Chapare demonstrates, the coca growers’ federations that gave Bolivia Evo Morales operate along the lines of what could be considered a form of authoritarian democracy underpinned by consensus building. Here, decisions are made through direct democracy and enforced by the iron fist of the union, a situation that is at once more democratic and less liberal than the democracy of the Bolivian state (Grisaffi 2013). These aspects of Morales and his associated social organizations—as well as consensual, direct democracy found in the highland Indigenous communities, ayllus—clash violently with the narrow understanding of democracy as liberal, representative democracy (McNelly 2016a). In fact, the suggestions of the Unity Pact during the Constituent Assembly, as discussed in chapter 3, attempted to introduce broader concepts of democracy into the plurinational state and supplant the liberal basis of the republic with notions of participation, inclusion, democracy, and nationalism that drew from the Indigenous experience. Although the MAS diluted many of the Unity Pact’s proposals, they are an indication of the nonliberal (rather than illiberal per se) foundations of the social organization at the base of Morales’s political project. Moreover, the rise of Evo Morales through this union structure and later through the political party structure associated with the cocaleros was not uncontested, and potential leadership rivals—Alejo Véliz, Felipe “El Mallku” Quispe, Filemón Escóbar—were not only defeated when confronted by Morales but also strong-armed out of politics. Organic 177

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leaders were forced in line behind the MAS government, and Morales surrounded himself with “yes” people and invitados who posed no challenge to his leadership. Álvaro García Linera exemplifies the type of people Morales gathered around him—increasingly distant from social organizations, without an “organic” base, and lacking the charisma to win hearts and minds. Even then, if Morales got even a whiff of maneuvers toward leadership—as was the case with the former chancellor David Choquehuanca—the culprits were cut down and left out in the cold.8 In chapters 4 and 5, I noted that the MAS concentrated the gains made during its time in power in the figure of Morales himself, through ritualistic ceremonies distributing state resources and slogans such as “Evo Cumple, Bolivia Cambio” (Evo Fulfills, Bolivia Changes). While the sublime/profane dimensions of Morales contained many of the contradictions thrown up by the extraction-led development agenda of the MAS for a decade, the personification of the proceso de cambio was thrust into reverse following the 21F vote. The flip side of everything good in Bolivia being thanks to Evo was that, for the opposition, all the maladies of the country were also Evo’s fault, from state inefficiencies to economic crisis (Página Siete 2019s).9 The 21F vote coincided with the scandal over the misuse of hydrocarbon funds funneled into the Fondo Indígena (Indigenous Fund). Despite hysterical conjectures of a massive fraud that started and ended with Morales (see, e.g., Ayo 2016; Morales 2015), the biggest issues seemed to be a lack of proper training to leaders and the superimposition of the logic of the capitalist state—with its requirements of receipts (facturas), tax returns, and accounts—onto Indigenous communities, for whom the prerequisites were completely alien.10 The 21F vote and the Fondo Indígena scandal combined to create the sense that Morales was a corrupt dictator and played into the perception, particularly among the middle classes and elite sectors of society, of Morales as a political strongman (caudillo) who was a threat to democracy. As noted in chapter 2, one of the central mechanisms incorporating social organizations into the state was through the creation of parallel organizations and the division of civil society (and, because of the character of passive revolution, layers of the state) into “loyalist” and “dissident” factions (Anria 2016). This, as Santiago Anria (2016) notes, increased the participation of a wider spectrum of Bolivian society and simultaneously made Bolivian democracy less liberal. State bureaucrats are appointed for political reasons and through political channels, a change in state management that vividly contrasts with the technocratic view of state management held dear by (neo)liberals. On top of this, the refounding of the state with the 2009 constitution 178

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also brought with it a new legal edifice that many saw as compromised by its genesis under the MAS. Oppositional “pro-democracy” groups proclaimed the basis of liberal democracy—separation of powers, the rule of law—as threatened by these changes and perceived the executive branch of government to have undue power over the other two branches of government (the judiciary and the legislature) (Chuquimia 2019b; Wolff 2013, 2017). In July 2010, following the approval of the 2009 constitution by popular vote, the MAS government passed five foundational or “organic” laws, whose task was to provide the new juridical, electoral, and democratic edifices of the plurinational state: (1) Organic Plurinational Electoral Law 016; (2) Electoral Regime Law 026; (3) Judicial Organ Law 025; (4) Plurinational Constitutional Tribunal Law 027; and (5) Autonomy and Decentralization Framework Law 031 (Schavelzon 2012).11 Importantly for the events under consideration here, the upshot of this transformation of the country’s legal framework was the replacement of the National Electoral Court (CNE) with the Plurinational Electoral Organ (OEP), composed of the TSE, the Departmental Electoral Tribunals, the Electoral Judges, the Elected Judges, and the Electoral Notaries. From the outset, there was a perception in certain circles that the new plurinational legal framework compromised the separation of powers between the executive and judiciary, and that Morales’s government could effectively lean on the OEP. These foundational laws, essential to putting the legal meat on the constitutional bones, were treated with distrust and distaste by the oppositional groups so vocal during the Constituent Assembly (see chapter 3). The low participation in the 2016 judicial election (50 percent spoiled ballot papers and 17 percent blank ballots) was seen as a manipulation of democracy rather than part of a deeper problem in regard to trying to democratize particular parts of the state (Stefanoni 2017). Following Morales’s narrow defeat in the 21F reelection referendum, the MAS tried several routes to get Morales on the ballot for the 2019 elections. Morales’s isolation from possible leadership contenders prevented any potential presidential candidate from rising through the party ranks. The Plurinational Constitutional Tribunal (TCP) gave Morales a route into the elections, deciding to allow him to run in the 2019 elections based on his “inalienable right” to “elect and be elected” (cited in HispanTV 2017). This undermined public trust in Bolivian democracy, and was not helped by the ineptitude of the TSE and a sense, following the dismissal of fourteen of its functionaries in the run up to the October 2019 elections, that it was controlled by the MAS (Molina 2019).12 The 179

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ex-chair of the CNE, Gonzalo Lema, came out and publicly attacked the TSE, decrying it as a “‘lazy, weak’ entity ‘with zero credibility, whose actions were under constant suspicion and mistrust’” (cited in Layme 2019b). EU election observers expressed worries over the TSE the week before the elections (Página Siete 2019y). Fuel was thrown on the fire by opposition politicians such as the Unidad Democrática (Democratic Unity, UD) senator, María Elva Pincker, who declared: “Once more we denounce that not one of us Bolivians believes in the TSE. . . . I am sure that now they are going to start getting rid of everybody and replacing them with people who serve the MAS” (cited in Página Siete 2019). “Will [Morales] be open to losing [the elections]? Will he be open to losing democratically?” mused a fellow UD senator Edwin Rodríguez (cited in ANF, 2019g), “these are the questions that we Bolivians should be asking.” The Unidad Nacional (UN) leader, Samuel Dorría Medina, after falling short (yet again) in his presidential bid, declared a vote for Mesa to be a vote to “save democracy” (Segales 2019a). Mesa himself closed his election campaign, proclaiming to throngs of supporters in front of the San Francisco cathedral: “We are here to defend democracy. We are here to construct democracy. We are here to win elections and we are going to win thanks to the strength of Bolivia’s democratic spirit” (Página Siete 2019x). In the run-up to October’s elections, tales of the shortcomings of the electoral system circulated around the country (see, e.g., ANF 2019a; Layme 2019a, 2019d; Segales 2019c), accompanied by rumors that the dead were still registered to vote (Página Siete 2019d). The assault on the country’s democratic organs was such that the head of the TSE was forced to ask for public trust in the electoral system (Layme 2019c). By the end of September 2019, “the phantasma of electoral fraud had been planted in the public perception,” with a poll revealing that 68 percent of respondents thought there would be fraud (Chávez V. 2019). In the face of what they considered inadequate preparation and provisions against electoral fraud, the newly reconstituted Comité Nacional de Defensa de la Democracia (National Committee in Defense of Democracy, CONADE) announced an indefinite strike on October 10, 2019 (ANF 2019b). At the cabildo on October 10 in La Paz, Albarracín called for the “nonrecognition of the official count through ‘civil disobedience’ in the case of possible fraud” (Lizárraga 2019b; see also Página Siete 2019w). During the week leading up to the October 20 vote, candidates lined up to question Bolivia’s democratic organs and warn against possible fraud by the MAS. The La Paz mayor, Luis Revilla, questioned the de180

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cision of the TSE only to allow one company, ViaCienca, to conduct the quick count (Página Siete 2019ac). The Bolivia Dice No candidates, Óscar Ortiz and Shirley Franco, denounced irregularities in the preparations for the election (Página Siete 2019aa). As in the period before the 21F vote, denouncements of planning for fraud and doctoring ballot papers appeared on social media and in the press (Página Siete 2019ab). And Carlos Mesa, Morales’s main electoral rival, met with the Organization of American States (OAS) to express doubts about the transparency of the elections the day before the vote (Erbol 2019c). Such was the intensity of the attack on the TSE that, just two days before the elections, it admitted to international observers that it lacked public credibility and trustworthiness (Layme 2019e). The rumors that swirled and attacked the TSE meant that the outcome of fraud was, in the eyes of many, preordained. And there were certainly many irregularities and failures in the voting system. Bolivia is, after all, still Bolivia—that is, a colonized country with weak institutions and a young liberal democracy. Yet, as Jonas Wolff (2020), a scholar who has worked extensively on democracy and democratic systems notes, evidence of intentional manipulation in the 2019 elections is hard to come by. However, when the quick-count system, the TREP, was inexplicably halted on the night of October 20, segments of the Bolivian society felt they had all the proof they needed. Electoral offices across several department capitals were burned. The OAS did its best to fan the flames of the crisis, stating that they thought fraud had taken place (OAS 2019c), initially with no evidence, then later with an error-ridden statistical analysis (OAS 2019b) (Johnson and Rosnick 2020; Orinoco Tribune 2020).13 When the OAS finally published its report on the elections, which claimed to have found “intentional manipulation” (OAS 2019a), the evidence, as Wolff (2020, 174–75) notes, was less clear and more contested, and certainly did not support claims of “massive fraud.” Although the opposition presented Morales and the MAS as a threat to democracy throughout its premiership (see, for example, chapter 3),14 the social fury at the perceived antidemocratic outcomes of 21F intensified the politicization of the issue of “democracy” and helped knot together a broad-based (largely) urban coalition, which rallied around the slogan “Bolivia said no” (Bolivia dijo no).15 The sublime and profane presentation of Morales collapsed under the weight of its contradictions: a deity unable to deliver and, worse still, corrupt because of his origins as a coca grower, Indigenous peasant, and union leader. As public sentiment against the democratic organs in the country intensified, the suspected electoral fraud by the MAS in October’s elections became a foregone 181

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conclusion, the flowering of seeds of doubt planted during fifteen years of public accusations against the MAS. Morales’s constitutional maneuvers to get on the electoral ballot and his refusal to abide by the results of 21F signaled imminent fraud to the organizers and attendees of the cabildo. This line of reasoning can be most clearly seen in the La Paz cabildo, where the assembly agreed not to vote for illegal candidates and to defend “any manifestation of electoral fraud” (Página Siete 2019n). It was thus in the days before rather than after the election that electoral fraud became a social fact in the eyes of the broad-based “pro-democracy” coalition and the regional opposition to Morales. TRANSFORMISM AND INCOMPLETE PACIFICATION The social movements that formed the base of Morales’s government were notably absent in the days running up to the 2019 elections. It is here that the pacifying effects of processes of passive revolution and the ebbs and flows of transformism come into sharp focus. Throughout the crisis, the MAS had a hard core of supporters who came out in support of Morales and, in many cases, fought fire with fire. In 2019, the social base of the MAS continued to be the peasant organizations of the Andean highlands (Altiplano) and the semitropical valleys of Cochabamba, the CSUTCB, and the Six Federations of the Tropics of Cochabamba, respectively,16 as well as the Confederación Sindical de Comunidades Interculturales de Bolivia (Bolivian Trade Union Confederation of Intercultural Communities, CSCIB, formerly Confederación Sindical de los Colonizadores de Bolivia [Bolivian Trade Union Confederation of Colonizers, CSCB]). These organizations, which represent peasants and rural proletarian laborers, had an organic relationship with the MAS and, therefore, they all turned out to vote for and defend it on the streets (McNelly 2020c).17 MAS-aligned groups were responsible for some of the violence in the periods preceding the 2020 elections and during its fallout (Díaz-Cuellar 2020). However, as a detailed analysis of deaths in the country during protests by Carwil Bjork-James (2020) demonstrates, the violence inflicted by the MAS differed qualitatively from what followed. Despite continued support from these groups and sustained support from a variety of sectors across the social spectrum over many years, by 2019 the MAS had burned many of its bridges with many former social organization allies. Although the MAS government addressed many of the demands of social movements in a technical manner and elevated their leaders to positions of power, processes of incorporation also suc182

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cessfully pacified movements, drastically reducing their transformative potential. Social movements progressively became driven by top-down directives and oriented toward secondary roles as supporters of the government, losing the ability to respond to their bases and to represent their constituents in the process (see chapter 2). By late 2019, social organizations had become empty shells with little to no internal democracy or self-critique, transforming from dynamic engines pushing for social change to ossified structures, rubber stamps at the foot of official documents with little social content.18 Numbers at MAS public meetings were augmented by public functionaries apparently strong-armed or paid to don the blue and white of the party (Layme 2019d; Página Siete 2019a, 2019v), a far cry from the organic social base that characterized Morales’s initial years in power. Power struggles between the parallel FEJUVE-El Alto organizations and accusations of selling senator and deputy candidacies in the run-up to the October 2019 elections demonstrate how far the organization had fallen—from an organ of popular transformative struggle to a route into state politics (Segales 2019d). The extent of the morbidity of MAS-aligned social organizations became apparent during the crisis when the MAS called for mass protests in its defense of Morales in the run-up to his exit on November 10, and nobody answered. Symptomatic of the weakness of social organizations aligned with the MAS were the actions of the COB during this period, which flip-flopped around without any semblance of political spine. Having called for Morales to step down on November 10, in the face of extreme violence a week later it suggested that this was a massive mistake. Following this fatal indecision, the COB was virtually absent from the political scene for the rest of the crisis, only reappearing six months later. The protests following the coup d’état against Morales were reminiscent of the impuestazo of 2003 outlined in chapter 1: leaderless, not coordinated by social movements, and impossible to read through the polarizing logic of for or against Morales. Disorganized masses in El Alto marched through the city and down into the bowl of La Paz, with some declaring a “civil war.” Although the media initially reported that these declarations were part of the defense of Morales by the social movement Ponchos Rojos (Infobae 2019), many of the participants in these protests in El Alto were more concerned with the threats made toward Indigenous people outlined above, mobilized by the fear of what might follow Evo (or what might happen if he were to return) (Copa Pabón 2019). The mass mobilizations in El Alto before and after the massacre in Senkata on November 15 were struggles to reclaim the dignity of alteños, to defend their right to be Indigenous, to follow their usos y 183

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costumbres, and to mourn their dead (Farthing and Becker 2021). The massive protests in the city lacked political direction and did not have the organizational support structures to maintain pressure and topple the Áñez government. Nevertheless, they did have enough power to inefluence the narrative of national politics. Following these initial disorganized protests, the Áñez government cracked down on Indigenous and working-class social movements. Ironically, one of the consequences of this was the loosening of the viselike grip of the MAS on movements and a recoupling of the institutional structures of social organizations to the masses in movements. This is not to say that the connection between the MAS and social movements was broken—far from it—social movements regained legitimacy in the eyes of their bases and were able to respond more sensitively to the needs of their constituents. The upshot was that social movements that had been unable to prevent the rise of Áñez to power were, six months later, a rearticulated political force. After the government announced further delays to elections set for September 6, MAS-aligned social movements headed by a re-formed Unity Pact and the COB sprang into action (Los Tiempos 2020). The COB recovered some of its strength following its impotence during the coup against Morales and spearheaded marches against the Áñez government in six departments on July 15 (Aguilar 2020), and again on July 28, when it led a march from Senkata, the site of the massacre of November 2019 in El Alto, to the city’s central zone, La Ceja (Página Siete 2020a). Faced with the prospect of further delays to election dates, the Unity Pact and the COB organized a national blockade that was sustained for twelve days between August 2 and August 14 (Página Siete 2020e). While not all groups responded to the COB’s call to action, citing concerns over the continuing pandemic and the economic situation (Mamani 2020), and the criminalization of movement leaders (Página Siete 2020b), social movements mounted enough political pressure on the government to prevent the delay of elections beyond October 18. The conflicts were ostensibly about the date of the elections, but they revealed the widespread discontent with Áñez and helped solidify a coalition of social forces capable of pushing for the return of an elected government (Página Siete 2020d). In the words of Juan Carlos Huarachi, the executive secretary of the COB, “the people [were] asking [the Áñez governcment to] respect democracy, respect health care, respect education, and respect our dignity” (Página Siete 2020c). After almost a year, it was this pushback against Áñez that enabled the MAS to return to power, as Moerales’s former finance minister, Luis Arce Catacora, assumed office. 184

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In the crisis of 2019, the extent of the demobilization of social movements became apparent, demonstrating the pacification of the more radical social forces. These movements were, however, not dead, and social movements did manage to rearticulate to force the Áñez government from power through a popular vote. The moment of crisis in 2019 was strong enough to delegitimize the sociospatial configurations of power established by the prior moment of passive revolution but not to rupture with them. The popular upswell contained the embryonic seeds of catharsis, but it cannot be described as a moment of “definite political action” with the potential to shatter the hegemony of the ruling classes and their political economy. If anything, the crisis of 2019 was a struggle over the appearance assumed by the restoration/revolution dialectic—a squabble over the appearance, not the substance, of Bolivia’s social formation. That is not to say that a new moment of catharsis is impossible, merely that it did not materialize at this moment. PACIFICATION, EXPLOSIVE TENDENCIES, AND CRISIS After almost a decade of relative stability, the tinderbox was lit in 2019. It must be said that passive revolution in Bolivia was very effective at both reestablishing the conditions of capital accumulation through extractivism and pacifying the more radical social movement elements of the prior period. Morales’s government oversaw a transformation in the appearance of the Bolivian social formation. Passive revolution produced new sociospatial configurations of power undergirded by new foundational political principles—such as plurinationalism and vivir bien—drawn from Indigenous movements and growing Indigenous participation at all levels of society and the state administration. It also restored and expanded extractivism by drilling for gas, mining metals and minerals, and establishing monocrop cultivation. However, the processes of passive revolution that produced the conditions under which these changes to happen were potentially explosive, and the manifestation of the 2008 crisis in Bolivia further intensified the contradictions that underpinned passive revolution. Falling commodity prices from 2014 onward and a growing balance-of-payment deficit placed increasing pressure on the state’s fiscal politics, with the productive and infrastructural expenditure outlined in chapter 5 coming under growing scrutiny. The MAS government’s failure to successfully industrialize key sectors, together with several high-profile bankruptcies of state firms, fed a public sentiment that the MAS had mismanaged the economy. Formal employment opportunities did 185

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materialize to match the growing number of university graduates, and the aspirational working classes were pitted against the middle classes, who saw their position of social privilege as under threat. The result was growing resentment toward the MAS from both groups, which undermined some of the urban working-class support it had enjoyed during its first two terms in power. Falling fiscal resources also reignited disputes between different levels of the state and different social groups over the control of resource rents. In particular, the relationship between departmental and national governments, and the fiscal pact that determined how state resources were distributed and spent became central political issues yet again. Nowhere was this more evident than in Potosí, where the industrialization of lithium undertaken by the MAS confronted the Comcipo. Although it is improbable that the coup d’état mounted against Morales was driven by foreign lithium interests, the mineral so central to emergent battery technology did play an important role in repoliticizing the distribution of resources across the country and different levels of the state. The forest fires poured further fuel on the flames of regionalism. The perception that Morales was to blame for changing government regulations around deforestation, coupled with the sense that lowland forests had been sacrificed in the name of the MAS development project, helped build coalitions between urban environmentalists, regional opponents of the MAS, and Indigenous groups. Sadly, this resurgent regionalism was also accompanied by the reemergence of racist slogans painted across the main Bolivian cities and racially motivated violence against Indigenous people. This fall in popular support was exacerbated by the medium-term impacts of social organization incorporation, which had transformed dynamic organizations pushing for social change into moribund entities sitting at the bottom of the party structure. Devoid of movement, these organizations ceased to have an organic base and lost their ability to mobilize. This was felt unevenly across the country, with rural organizations—particularly in the Chapare where the coca unions still organized quotidian life—maintaining their support for the government to a greater extent than urban organization and the COB, which effectively ceased to function as the representative of even the formalized working classes in the run-up to the 2019 crisis. However, pacification is never complete, and disorganized masses did resist the right-wing government of Áñez from the outset, demonstrating the infeasibility of a complete restoration of the old political order. These disorganized masses fed into social movement structures over a six-month period to guarantee elec186

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tions in October 2020, but they did not represent revolutionary forces comparable to those from the previous period. The conjuncture, for one, was different, with all the pink tide allies of Morales’s initial years out of government. In late 2019, Morales was relatively isolated, and the Mexican president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, was his lone regional ally in power. There were signs during 2020, however, that a new cycle with nascent revolutionary potential was forming. The deepening of the 2008 crisis across Latin America was accompanied by an upswell in political movements from Argentina to Colombia, Chile to Ecuador, against the International Monetary Fund, against austerity, and against the wider crisis of social reproduction faced by much of the Latin American population. The feminist movement was a key protagonist in these latest political battles, tying together the rights to a decent life, the city, and social services with reproductive and sexual rights, fostering a radical anticapitalist agenda in the process (Gago, Malo, and Cavallero, 2020). This has the potential to transform the cartography of regional politics in the future and establish different ways of doing politics. Exactly what this will look like remains unclear because opportunities to create alternative futures only take shape, like the dawn of a new day, once the darkest part of the night has passed.

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THEORETICAL AND POLITICAL REFLECTIONS ON PASSIVE REVOLUTION

If chapter 6 was, in a sense, the conclusion of the Bolivian case, this chapter reflects on the theoretical implications of the analysis presented during the course of the book. I have separated passive revolution into different interwoven threads, which allows me to explore three of its interconnected dimensions: (1) the pacification of radical forces pushing for social change; (2) the destruction and (re)construction of space and spatial scales; and (3) the reconfiguration of time. By considering each thread of passive revolution separately, I have illuminated some central characteristics of its dynamics. First, I demonstrated that the multiple different processes comprising passive revolution are always ongoing and in need of renewal. A corollary of this is that the pacifying processes contained in passive revolution cannot continue to be reproduced under all circumstances. Pacification is the result of historically contingent processes and is itself contested, the subject of ongoing class struggle. Second, this approach to passive revolution underscored the contradictions that lie at the heart of passive revolution itself. Social movement incorporation, spatial and scalar fixes, state formation, and the material processes reasserting capital accumulation are in constant tension with 188

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one another, and although at times they can be mutually reinforcing, at other times they unravel, reversing the pacifying outcomes that lie at passive revolution’s core. This offers hope to future movements pushing for radical change. It shows that the seemingly monolithic structural responses of capitalism to crises and challenges to its hegemonic political forms can be resisted and, ultimately, defeated. PACIFICATION, PASSIVE REVOLUTION, AND PROCESSES OF RESUBJECTIFICATION The story told in Now We Are in Power started from a moment of crisis in the late 1990s. Chapter 1 traced how localized resistance to neoliberal government policies—namely, the privatization of water in the cities of Cochabamba and El Alto and the exportation of natural gas via Chile to the world market—coalesced into nationwide protests demanding change. The beginning of my tale told how cross-class coalitions were gradually built and social movement activists began joining the dots between the degradation of state services, access to basic necessities such as water, the quality of employment and rapid explosion of cities, and the general dynamics of privatization, informalization, financialization, and commodification underpinning the neoliberal age of capitalism. This, I argued, helped build nationwide coalitions around specific demands (particularly the nationalization of gas and a Constituent Assembly) that acted as lightning rods for social struggles. In the cauldron of social movement activity between 2000 and 2005, the horizons of political change that acted as a compass for movements surpassed the colonial state and capitalism. This marked a move from economic corporatism in defense of sectoral interests to an ethical-political moment that challenged the hegemony of the configurations of Bolivian society and the state under neoliberalism. It was, in short, a moment of catharsis. It was out of this pressure cooker that Evo Morales emerged, riding the wave of radical sentiment to the presidential palace in January 2006. His new government reflected this, with several government ministers drawn from the ranks of social movement leaders. For many Bolivians, Morales and his government were overseeing a moment of historic change, and for the first time since the implementation of neoliberalism in 1985 (at the very least), a Bolivian government was representing the interests of its people. The Movement for Socialism (MAS) was qualitatively different from the neoliberal governments that came before, and many social movement leaders and activists were more than happy to be co-opted by the MAS and included in this new government of social movements. The absorption of movement leaders into the state was ac189

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companied by the opening of new official channels between social movements and the state. This had contradictory effects on social movements, with the inertial logic of the state aligning the practices and relations of social movements, in some instances creating movements that were little more than empty shells. Moreover, where social movements were particularly resistant to their incorporation, these official channels worked to create parallel pro-government organizations and give social movements the appearance of being divided along party lines. The demands of movements included not just the election of one of their ranks as head of the Bolivian state. The long history of colonial and republican rule in Bolivia led movements to radical horizons beyond the state (Gutiérrez 2014; Hylton and Thomson 2007). Morales worked quickly to direct movement demands into state channels, implementing the nationalization of gas and convening a Constituent Assembly during his first two years in power. The outcomes of these processes were undoubtedly progressive, improving the state’s finances and increasing the political inclusion and representation of the diverse historically subordinated parts of Bolivian society. They were not, however, the radical proposals that emerged from social movement struggles, and the technocratic implementation of demands left movements without their main mobilizing frames. These were the demobilizing tendencies discussed at the heart of chapter 2, which mapped the gradual change in the relationship between the MAS and social movements over the course of the first two terms of Morales’s presidency. While social movements were powerful enough to go on the offensive and push for political change during Morales’s first term, the loss of mobilizing frames, coupled with the threat of the lowland autonomy movement, had transformed these progressive social movements into defenders of Morales and his MAS government by the time the new constitution was ratified in January 2009. During its first term, the MAS was forced to make technocratic concessions to social movements, which by dint of their mobilizing power were able to shape (if not completely control) the political agenda of the MAS. By its second term, the demobilization of social movements was such that the MAS was able to manage movements through informal contestation regimes, whereby movements only had a de facto veto on policies they did not like. This was more than a superficial transformation and entailed the resubjectification of social movements. The radical political subjectivities produced by the period of social protest (2000–2005) were warped, both by the logic of state administration as leaders become state bureaucrats or MAS politicians and by the subordination of movements to the 190

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MAS as movement demands were articulated and implemented through state managerialism. In the School of Political Formation (SPF), MAS activists wrestled with these ongoing processes of resubjectification in discussions and debates over a loss of political consciousness by grassroots leaders and movements failing to play their part in the government of social movements. This was encapsulated, on the one hand, by complaints made by SPF participants about leaders losing their political consciousness and, on the other hand, by the repositioning of alteños as objects rather than subjects of political change. The pacification of social movements was compounded by the processes of Caesarism tracked in chapter 4. Morales emerged as the solution to the catastrophic equilibrium of the period 2000–2005. The cultivation of Morales as a political figure through a sublime/profane persona allowed him to displace social movements as the perceived agents of change. Morales’s Indigeneity helped him maintain a close relationship with movements and continue to hold an affective pull for many Indigenous peasants and working-class people. Simultaneously, Morales became solely responsible for progressive changes and positive developments in the country. This concentrated the gains of MAS—the progressive appearance of passive revolution’s outcomes—in the figure of Morales himself, tying progressive change to a single (fallible) man, undermining the durability of these changes. Progressive policies became dependent on Morales’s legacy, making him vulnerable to attacks from a rejuvenated right-wing opposition and the success of progressive programs and policies contingent on the behavior of Morales himself. Following this thread of the book’s story, pacification through processes of passive revolution appears not as a strategic question but as a subjective one (Modonesi 2019, 95). Raúl Burgos’s (2014, 248) observation that passive revolution is “endured by subjects that in principle should protagonize it, and directed by those who should oppose it” comes sharply into focus. At the heart of passive revolution is a pushback against catharsis, against the creation of political subjects who understand themselves vis-à-vis struggle, which I have called social movements throughout the book. Social movements emerge from processes of subjectification—a movement from spontaneous to active political action through social struggle—and so cannot simply be co-opted as they are. Leaders need to be transformed, horizons shifted from alternative futures to viable policy goals that can be achieved through the capitalist state, and the role of movements adjusted from contestation to support. Transformism is not merely demobilization but resubjectification, captured by the move from militants of the Gas War to protectors of the proceso de cambio in El Alto 191

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outlined at the end of chapter 2. This entails nothing less than the reestablishment of subalternity—the “subjective condition of subordination in the context of capitalist domination” (Modonesi 2014, 9)—which in turn implies the loss of autonomous political action by social movements and the communities from which they emerged. Standing alone, this strand of the argument builds upon the recent work of Latin American Gramscians (particularly Massimo Modonesi), adding historical weight to their theoretical claims about passive revolution. However, by adding considerations of space and time into the mix I am able to further extend their arguments, drawing links between the political processes of passive revolution and how they play out in the material world. THE DESTRUCTION AND (RE)CONSTRUCTION OF SPACE AND SPATIAL SCALES One of the principal theoretical implications of the book’s analysis is the centrality of the production of space and scale in processes of passive revolution. Moments of both catharsis and transformism must be conceptualized as sociospatial processes in order to adequately grapple with the dynamics and limitations of processes of passive revolution in particular contexts. The neoliberal period in Bolivia was a time when the reorganization of the country’s social fabric was etched into space, as peasants were driven off the land by the opening of agricultural markets to foreign competition, and miners, having been tossed out of their encampments by the thousands, were forced to build new homes in the peri-urban spaces of the country’s rapidly expanding cities (Gill 2000; Postero 2007; Webber 2012a). Not only did neoliberalism radically alter the relationship between the urban and the rural and transform Bolivia’s political economy, it also reconfigured the political landscape of the country. The radicalism of the miners fed into the neighborhood councils of cities like El Alto and Cochabamba, as well as the cocalero unions in the tropical valleys of the department of Cochabamba. Neoliberalism’s deleterious effects on people’s livelihoods and the radical transformation it enforced on people’s everyday lives politicized the very spaces it had created: the newly urbanized areas, initially of Cochabamba in the Water War of April 2000, and later of the burgeoning city of El Alto during the two Gas Wars of 2003 and 2005. Here, as explained in chapter 1, city residents forged new territorial movements to struggle against neoliberalism and in support of social, economic, and political alternatives. In the moment of catharsis between the years 2000 and 2005, space became both politicized and itself a political tool, as the former president Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada found out to his cost. The El Alto Federation 192

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of Neighborhood Councils (FEJUVE-El Alto) provoked the deep-seated fears of the paceño elite by blocking the entrances and exits to La Paz through dense communal networks, which Pablo Mamani (2005, 2006) calls microgobiernos barriales (neighborhood microgovernments). This evoked collective memories of the historic siege of La Paz by the Aymara rebel Túpak Katari, whose blockade of the city of La Paz in the late eighteenth century left lasting scars on the psyche of the city’s elite. Part of passive revolution’s pacifying tendencies derives from closing these spaces of radical potential, either by absorbing them into the spaces of the state or by producing new spaces and scales of social antagonism. Simultaneously, during the Water and Gas Wars of 2000–2005, Aymara activists in El Alto and the Altiplano beyond—most notably Felipe “El Mallku” Quispe—were busy dividing the country in two, between the Aymara Qullasuyu and the lowland valleys and tropical rainforests. As analyzed in chapter 3, this narrative was seized on and inverted by the lowland elite, who became increasingly agitated by the radical working class and Indigenous coalition of social movements pushing for change centered in the city of El Alto and the rural areas of the departments of Cochabamba and La Paz. When Evo Morales came to power in 2006, political opposition to his government was articulated on a regional scale around the space of the lowland region known as the Media Luna. While this opposition was driven in part by squabbles over fiscal policies targeting hydrocarbons and the proposed land reform, it politicized ethnic divisions, as Luis Tapia (2011) incisively shows, before tracing these divisions in space. While this configuration of spatialized conflict broke in 2008 with the Porvenir massacre, the uneasy alliance between sections of the Bolivian elite and representatives of capital, and the MAS government continued to sit on rocky ground, and these spatial divides, as is clear in chapter 6, reemerged following the 21F reelection referendum in 2016. Approaching passive revolution from a sociospatial perspective shines new light on its intrinsically unstable and incomplete character. Under the MAS, the sociospatial dynamics that initially divided Bolivia in two and later consolidated alliances between the government and sectors of capital, outlined in chapter 3, undermined the processes of social movement incorporation and pacification explored in chapter 2. At the heart of the tensions between these different aspects of passive revolution is the sociospatial dynamic of concentration/diffusion. On the one hand, this was central to political processes of incorporation and resubjectification. The incorporation of social movements into the political project of the MAS was uneven, with movements from Morales’s heartlands in 193

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the Chapare and the radical movements from El Alto and the Altiplano benefiting disproportionately. Over time, as the potential for independent political activity in the city of El Alto diminished, the representation of the city’s social movements also declined. This fostered a sense that certain places were “being forgotten,” while the gains of the proceso de cambio were being enjoyed elsewhere. On the other hand, the political project of the MAS is undergirded by a political economy centered on natural gas extraction. The uneven geographies of extractivism concentrate the violence inherent in extractive processes in communities in the pathway of natural resource sinks and extractive infrastructure, and disperse extractive rents through the state and its redistributive processes. While this gives passive revolution in pink tide cases a progressive veneer, it also breeds suspicion that those in other places benefited more. The perception that the yields of the proceso de cambio were being reaped elsewhere in the country destabilized the pacifying processes in passive revolution, leading to fragile political stability. Passive revolution, which unfurled over the terrain of uneven development in the country, remained incapable of addressing the root of this unevenness and, in certain instances, ended up further intensifying spatial difference as it produced new sociospatial configurations of political power. TEMPORAL RECONFIGURATIONS Throughout Now We Are in Power, I have brought to the fore the importance of temporalities in processes of passive revolution. In Latin America, processes of colonialization and subsequent incorporation into capitalism produced heterogeneous social forms marked by the uneven development of capitalist relations. One way to conceptualize this heterogeneity is through time, and in particular, the ways in which the abstract time required for capital accumulation—empty, mathematical time detached from human activity and measured by a clock—is established through concrete time, meaning the repeated completion of daily tasks on an aggregate, societal level. In general, capitalism is characterized by the contradictory establishment of abstract time through concrete time, which Walter Benjamin (1973) and others (e.g., Makki 2015; Malm, 2015; Thompson, 1967) have since called historic time. It is in and through historic time that processes of passive revolution unfold, with capitalist temporal tensions shaping and molding their dynamics in particular geohistoric moments. Latin American societies came to be composed of multiple modes of production that overlapped and coexisted, creating abigarrada social formations marked by multiple temporalities. In the Andes, socioterrito194

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rial units called ayllus are based on the inseparability of humans and nature and cyclical/simultaneous conceptions of time (Favela 2015). In the lowlands, other nomadic Indigenous groups moved through space with the seasons, producing yet another distinct sociotemporal regime (Tapia 2019). First colonialism and then capitalism have reshaped Indigenous communities, but they have not eliminated these other spatiotemporal practices and relations. The different temporalities and spatialities produced by Indigenous usos y costumbres (customary practices) mean that the types of space and temporality the capitalist state attempted to implement appeared completely alien from the rest of society. This is what René Zavaleta (2008) was gesturing toward with his formulation of the “apparent state.” In most historical periods, the way in which the different parts of Bolivian society fit together is not immediately obvious, making social science research here challenging to say the least. Through the moment of catharsis, however, the disparate and contradictory parts of Bolivia’s abigarrada social formation came to share a common time—that of politics. The Aymara nationalism found itself connected to the racist regionalism of the Media Luna, and Indigenous and working-class movements found common ground and built national coalitions around the nationalization of gas and the refounding of the state through a Constituent Assembly. When Morales assumed the presidency in 2006, he rebuilt state hegemony around these two pillars of social movement demands, with the effect of incorporating and demobilizing social organizations in the process, as I demonstrated in chapter 2. This incorporation of social movement demands had an important consequence: the time of politics was displaced by a re-formed state time, which once again became hegemonic. This new state time incorporated elements forged in the crucible of social struggle during the shared time of politics, particularly demands around the nationalization of gas, which had the perverse effect of locking in the state time as teleological. The hydrocarbon-led development model of the MAS—a somewhat bastardized version of one of the central social movement demands, but a form of social movement demands nonetheless—proclaimed the promise of modernity, of progress, and of a pathway to betterment led by Evo Morales. Nonetheless, it was not the only temporality reestablished by processes of passive revolution. The neo-extractive development model pursued by the MAS was underpinned by infrastructures that embodied the promise of modernity offered by extractivism. The construction of these infrastructures was halting, with the harsh topology of the Andes and the extreme conditions of the lowland tropics delaying construction and degrading “completed” infrastructure projects, leading to the degenera195

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tion, abandonment, and repurposing of infrastructure. Together, these temporalities worked to displace the shared time of politics—a central part of the pacification drive at the heart of passive revolution—and reinforce the abigarramiento of Bolivia’s social formation. However, the result of this displacement was a temporal dissidence and a contradiction between the promised teleological modernity of extractive-led development and the messy reality of extractive processes and the infrastructures on which they depend. To put it another way, the abstract time required by hydrocarbon extraction that formed the basis for its promises of progress and modernity was established through the concrete time of infrastructure projects. Adding this dimension to the passive revolution framework helps illuminate how passive revolution is not simply a “superstructural process.” The reestablishment of the conditions for capital accumulation—passive revolution’s structural function within capitalism—also has an impact the pacification of movements through their resubjectification. The progressive appearance of passive revolution in Bolivia, characterized by a class compromise between the MAS and sections of capital, enabled the redistribution of hydrocarbon rents and the emergence of new intraclass configurations. A new petty bourgeoisie linked to commerce and expanded domestic consumption grew out of informal markets in places like El Alto, while growing numbers of working-class and Indigenous people entered universities. These intermediary groups expected the teleology promised by abstract time and grew increasingly frustrated by the delays, stasis, and decay that can characterize concrete time. This is not the only way to think through the dialectical interplay between the economic and political in passive revolution, but it is a productive one. It begins to add considerations of production into the passive revolution framework. Despite an innovative and nuanced approach to pacification through resubjectification, Modonesi’s reworking of Gramsci focuses almost exclusively on the terrain of politics, leaving aside questions over how the production and accumulation of capital operate within processes of passive revolution. He is far from alone, and much of the scholarship examining the Latin American pink tide through this lens suffers from the same oversight (see, for example, Colección Germinal-Prociencia 2019; Ouviña and Thwaites Rey 2018). By bringing the dimension of time into my approach to passive revolution, I have underscored how the economic and political dimensions of passive revolution (and capitalism more generally) are co-constitutive, and how changes on superstructural levels cannot be understood by exploring how this has affected the economic base (and vice versa). This largely overlooked aspect 196

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of passive revolution needs to be explored further, and I hope my initial contributions open pathways to future research on the articulation of the economic and political within passive revolution. PASSIVE REVOLUTION AS INCOMPLETE, CONTESTED, AND CONTRADICTORY A central argument I have developed throughout this book is the contradictory and halting character of passive revolution. The different elements of passive revolution discussed above are by no means linear and are in constant need of renewal. Moreover, they are, in a sense, diachronic, and do not (always) work in tandem. This offers hope to political projects pursuing radical change and looking beyond the current (post) colonial and capitalist configuration of the world. It signals that the revolutionary forces from below are not facing an infallible enemy, and that the outcome of passive revolution is far from a foregone conclusion. This means that processes of passive revolution are themselves terrains of struggle that do not denote unstoppable, teleological processes. A major part of the political importance of conceptualizing passive revolution as contradictory and incomplete is that it opens spaces for renewed autonomous action from below. Due to pacification through resubjectification, the movements and actors of social struggle, along with their practices and repertoires of struggles, will be distinct from those that initiated catharsis. This does not, however, mean that there are no practices for autonomous political activity within and beyond passive revolution. One just has to look at the landscape of Latin American politics at the time of writing to catch a glimpse of what I mean. Following the end of the pink tide, anti-neoliberal social movements reemerged, fighting hikes in public transit fares in Chile and International Monetary Fund debt restructuring in Ecuador. The potential expansion of extractive frontiers that move away from fossil fuels toward metal and mineral intensive green technologies intensified environmental and Indigenous movements across the region, from Argentina to Ecuador and Colombia. Of all these emergent Left currents, I would argue the most vibrant and promising is the feminist movement. International strikes of women, lesbians, and transgender people from 2017 onward marked a new wave of decolonial and anticapitalist struggles in Latin America (and beyond). The multiplicity of these struggles, their geographical scope and, importantly, their shared grammar, argue Verónica Gago, Marta Malo, and Lucí Cavallero (2020, 9), effectively created concrete practices and relations working toward undoing the marketized, financialized logic of neoliberalism. For these authors, such movements 197

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have the potential to produce a new internationalism (starting with reimagining Latin America as Abya Ayala, an Indigenous notion of what makes up the continent) that is sensitive to the sociedades abigarradas of the continent and their various spatialities (captured in Latin American debates over territoriality). Vitally, these movements won important concrete victories in the period following the pink tide, particularly the legalization of abortion in Argentina in 2020 (Centenera and Rivas Molina 2020) and, more recently, in Mexico (Morán Breña and Barragán 2021). Feminist movements in Latin America also have the potential to tackle violence in a way never managed by pink tide governments. While neoliberal policies stripping back public services and the lack of employment opportunities in big cities and postwar zones in Central America were key factors in the rise of violence in the 1980s and 1990s, violence remained stubbornly high across the region despite left-wing policies tackling socioeconomic factors. Alarmingly, forty-two of the fifty most violent cities in the world are located in Latin America, with Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and Venezuela all featuring prominently on this list (World Population Review 2019). In other words, there appears to be little correlation between levels of violence and the ideological slant of the government. The militarization of Rio de Janeiro through the Favela Pacification Program in 2008 epitomizes the difficulties violence presents for the Left. The program was an attempt to tackle the widespread violence that had plagued the city for decades. It was not implemented by the Workers’ Party (PT), but by the conservative mayor, Sérgio Cabral, elected on a “tough on crime” ticket (Fahlberg and Vicino 2016). Indeed, the Right has successfully made security and crime (along with corruption) its domain, as the election of Jair Bolsonaro demonstrates, with putative measures against the poor its chosen policy mechanism to fight crime. Protests by feminist groups against femicides and the ubiquitous violence against women in the region have placed violence on the political agenda from a radical perspective. The shared experience of violence suffered by women across the region has helped build the internationalism underscored by Gago, Malo, and Cavallero (2020). By centering patriarchy as a key axis of domination and oppression, the most recent wave of critical feminist thought has been able to grapple with and build concrete practices against the violence that seems to seep from the pores of Latin American society (Carosio 2017). A good example of the power of this movement is the performative protest, “Un violador en tu camino” (A rapist in your path), written and presented by the Chilean feminist collective, Las Tesis (The Thesis).1 Initially performed in November 198

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2019 by Las Tesis in the city of Valparaíso, it spread across the world and was presented in countries across Latin America, reaching as far as Paris and London (Pais 2019). Un violador en tu camino is significant as it connects the dots between the everyday forms of violence experienced by women, sexist attitudes, and cultures of victim blaming so present in Latin American society with the complicity of the state, particularly its judicial arm, in reproducing the conditions under which violence occurs. The feminist movement has thus focused on the issue of violence and demanded a response that consists not simply of increased securitization and militarization. The movement has offered potential pathways toward tackling one of the major social issues faced by Latin American societies, which has so far proved to be a particular weakness of progressive administrations. It has successfully opened autonomous spaces of political action and spurred a cross-continental social movement. Much of the feminist movement has emerged from the contradictions of previous processes of passive revolution. Its political subjectivities are new, as are its tactics and strategies. It demonstrates that hope for a different world beyond capitalism is still alive and well. And it reveals the continued fallibility of capitalist hegemony and the processes of passive revolution across the continent. The feminist movement in the region today is a sign that, following the famous pronouncement of the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, Mexico, ¡La lucha sigue! (The struggle continues!).

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NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1. Subcomandante Marcos is the masked face and principal ideologue of the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, Mexico. The Zapatista rebellion against neoliberalism and the Mexican state started on January 1, 1994, the day when the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed. 2. Translations in this book are the author’s unless otherwise stated. 3. There is some disagreement about the exact number of Indigenous peoples, and the categories and methodology of the Bolivian census are disputed (see Albó 2013; Farthing and Becker 2021, 3; Schavelzon 2013). However, this should not detract from the importance of the Indigenous nations within Bolivia. 4. The mita was the “pre-Columbian corvee labor system [that the Peruvian viceroy Franscisco Toledo decided to use] to extract forced labor for the mines of Potosí” (Klein 2011, 39). The mita required Indigenous adult males to provide one-year of service working in the mines every six years. 5. “Sucrenses” are people from Sucre. 6. Latifundias are large agricultural estates that employed a mixture of wage and bonded labor in their production processes. They were initially established under colonial rule but persisted long into the twentieth (and some would argue twenty-first) century. 7. For an excellent overview of ECLAC’s contribution, see Leiva (2008a). 201

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8. This separation of economic base and superstructure can be traced to a particular reading of Marx’s (1977a) research agenda laid out in the infamous 1859 Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. For an excellent foil to such perspectives, see Sayer (1987). 9. In this sense, these rereadings of Gramsci in Latin America were also influenced by the post-Marxism of Ernesto Laclau and his partner Chantal Mouffe. See, in particular, Laclau and Mouffe (1985). 10. Given that crises are immanent to capitalism, it follows logically that the maintenance of capitalist class rule through passive revolutions is also immanent to capitalism. However, as Hesketh (2017) underscores, not every crisis provokes a passive revolution in response and passive revolutions assume distinct features in different geographic spaces and historical moments. 11. Zavaleta developed the notions of civilization and societal forms in order to categorize and make legible the abigarrado social context in Bolivia. Civilizational forms, explains Tapia (2016, 19–24), are determined by different articulations of historical time and its relationship to the transformation of nature. So, for example, agrarian civilizations, which produce and reproduce natural resources beyond the capacity of nature, are determined by natural cycles and the seasons; industrial civilizations are marked by the acceleration of time and the straightening of cycles into linear time advancing forward into the future; and nomadic civilizations are characterized by cycles moving actors in space (Thomson 2019, 90). Societal forms, however, are “determined by the mode of articulation between the mode of production, type of societal structures, forms of government and types of organizations and cultures” (Tapia 2016, 21). Some examples of societal forms given by Zavaleta are communitarian societies, which have collective landownership, communitarian assemblies and rotation of leadership posts; patrimonial societies, characterized by concentrated private property, relations of servitude and naturalized hierarchies; and modern societies that consist of private property, elimination of servitude, institutionalized politics, and the apparent separation of the economic and the political. 12. For more information on the history of US intervention in Latin America, see Gill (2004) and Grandin (2005, 2007). CHAPTER 1: BLACK OCTOBER

1. Carlos Rojas, a member of the FEJUVE-El Alto 2003, interview, El Alto, May 11, 2016. 2. Jorge Villca, a leader in the FEJUVE-El Alto, interview, El Alto, April 21, 2016. 3. Julian, a leader of District 2 in the FEJUVE-El Alto, interview, El Alto, April 18, 2016.

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4. Alteño is the name given to residents of the city of El Alto. Black October is also sometimes called the first Gas War. 5. See Thomson (2002) for an excellent account of the Great Andean Civil War. Hylton and Thomson (2007, 8) underscore how this rebellion has been important in forging an insurgent memory for Indigenous social movements. This memory does not stretch back directly to the event in a linear fashion, but was marked by ruptures and disjunctures, as well as moments of recovery, the most notable of which happened in the 1980s under the Taller de Historia Oral Andina (Oral Andean History Workshop, THOA). See Iamamoto (2015), Powęska (2013), and Stephenson (2002). 6. Another notable exception is the classic work of Ramiro Condarco Morales (1983). In many accounts of Bolivian history, the agency of Indigenous people was absent for a long time. 7. For good accounts of Katarismo, see Albó (1987), Hurtado (2016), Hylton and Thomson (2007), and Thomson et al. (2018). 8. On the privatization of YPFB, see Kohl (2004) and McGuigan (2007). 9. We must be careful not to overplay this interdependence of rural and urban, which became an assumed characteristic of the city even while, as recent CEDLA research shows, this dynamic started to change (see Escóbar de Pabón, Hurtado Aponte, and Rojas Callejas 2015). 10. Abraham D. Mansilla, a student activist during the formation of UPEA and later an Aymara scholar, interview, La Paz, September 25, 2016. 11. Hylton and Thomson (2005, 51–52), Ichuta (2008, 139), and Webber (2012a, 179) share this assessment. 12. Carlos Rojas, May 11, 2016; Jorge Villca, April 21, 2016; Lucho Zapata, a leader in the FEJUVE-El Alto, interview, El Alto, April 26, 2016. 13. Lucho Zapata, April 26, 2016. 14. Jorge Villca, April 21, 2016. 15. See also Tapia (2009, 97–106). 16. The three parties that predominated during the neoliberal period in Bolivia were the ADN, MIR, and MNR. 17. Abraham D. Mansilla, September 25, 2016. 18. Abraham D. Mansilla, September 25, 2016. 19. Abraham D. Mansilla, September 25, 2016. 20. The anthropologist Robert Albro (2000, 40) characterizes prebendalismo as “practices of electoral gift giving . . . rooted in much older established cultural expectations . . . between patrón and peón.” 21. Lucho Zapata, April 4, 2016. 22. Luis Flores Mendoza, member of the FEJUVE-El Alto 2003, interview, El Alto, April 26, 2016.

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23. Marco Llanos, youth activist during October 2003, interview, La Paz, April 12, 2016. 24. See Iamamoto (2015) for a detailed discussion on the importance of the memory of the War of the Pacific in the Gas War. 25. Carlos Rojas, May 11, 2016. 26. Carlos Barrera, member of the FEJUVE-El Alto 2003, interview, La Paz, May 10, 2016. 27. See also Linsalata (2010) and Zibechi (2010). 28. Marco Llanos, youth activist during October 2003, interview, La Paz, April 12, 2016. 29. Marco Llanos, April 12, 2016. 30. Marco Llanos, April 12, 2016. 31. Marco Llanos, April 12, 2016; and Jorge Villca, April 21, 2016. 32. Hermógenes Chambi, FEJUVE-El Alto leader, interview, El Alto, April 18, 2016. CHAPTER 2: BUILDING THE GOVERNMENT OF SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

1. The proceso de cambio is one of the names the MAS gave its political project. 2. Introductory remarks, SPF, El Alto, June 7, 2016. 3. “Cholet” is the principal neo-Andean architectural building found in and around the city of El Alto. The word is a playful combination of the terms “chalet” and “cholo,” an in-between racial category used to describe urban Indigenous people in many Andean cities (see Weismantel 2001). 4. For analysis on 21F, see chapter 6. 5. Anria (2015, 86) frames pegas as positions in the government that are exchanged for organizational loyalty. 6. The colonizers are highland peasants encouraged to move to the agricultural frontiers in the eastern lowlands from the 1950s onward. 7. Jorge Silva, municipal city councilor, La Paz, interview, La Paz, September 26, 2016. 8. See chapter 5 for more detail on the emergence of the MAS as a political instrument/party. 9. Author’s fieldnotes. La Razón (2008f) reported that “at least 20 percent of the Ministry of Health was co-opted by the MAS” in 2008. It also revealed that the MAS divvied up roles in the National Congress between different social sectors, and that both the cocaleros from the Chapare and those from the Yungas had their vice-ministers. 10. Participant question, School of Political Formation, El Alto, September 28, 2016. 204

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11. This phrase was even used by Evo Morales in his famous speech Mandé obebeciendo al pueblo (I will lead by obeying): “Some said in the session when they voted for my expulsion: ‘We must end radical unionism.’ Ahora nos toca to say to ourselves: ‘We must end radical neoliberalism, brothers and sisters’” (cited in Svampa and Stefanoni 2007, 236–37). 12. Juan de la Cruz Villca, ex-leader, CSUTCB/COB, and MAS functionary, interview, La Paz, April 6, 2016. Also see Arias Duran (2013) and García, García, and Romero (2014). 13. Jorge Viaña, political theorist, interview, La Paz, October 31, 2016. 14. I am not arguing that this means these movements did not have radical horizons pushing for social transformations and that they were principally movements demanding social incorporation, as Rossi (2017) contends for the Argentinian case. These demands envisioned a radical reorganization of both the Bolivian state and society, but as we shall see below, they were stripped of their radical potential during their implementation by the MAS government through the preexisting institutions of the state. 15. I return to this in chapter 5 to explore why this is the case. 16. Julian, president of District 2, FEJUVE-EL Alto, April 18, 2016. 17. Benigno Siñani, executive secretary, rebellious FEJUVE-EL Alto, October 19, 2016. 18. Cecilia Blanco Romero, MAS School of Political Formation, interview, El Alto, July 15, 2016. 19. Christian Esebes, MAS School of Political Formation, interview, El Alto, July 15, 2016. 20. The Unity Pact comprised CONAMAQ, CIDOB, the CSUTSB, Las Bartolinas, the women’s wing of the CSUTSB, the colonist settlers’ union, the landless peasants movement, the Assembly of the Guaraní People, the Block of Indigenous and Peasant Organizations of the Northern Amazon, and the Salaried Workers’ Union of Santa Cruz (Garcés 2011, 49). 21. New oppositional forces would emerge in the next phase of Morales’s presidency (see below). 22. Many participants of the School of Political Formation expressed this concern. Author’s fieldnotes. 23. Oscar Vega, political theorist, interview, La Paz, August 7, 2019. 24. Modonesi emphasizes subalternity as a means to capture the construction of political subjects under conditions of hegemony through the dialectic rather than the dichotomy of subordination/resistance. This is one of his central contributions to debates about passive revolution. See, in particular, Modonesi (2013, 2014, 2019). 25. For Modonesi’s full argument on the subalternity, antagonism, and autonomy triad, see Modonesi (2014). 205

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26. The reelection referendum is analyzed in detail in chapter 6. 27. Many MAS supporters thought that the referendum was only lost because of lies spread through social media. On the eve of the referendum, allegations surfaced that President Morales had an illegitimate child with a woman accused of corruption, Gabriela Zapata (McNelly 2016a). For MASistas, these accusations were pure fiction invented by the opposition to win the referendum. While both sides have undoubtedly not been truthful, the veracity of these facts is unimportant for my line of argumentation here. What matters is that this galvanized the MAS to try to change its media and communication strategy. 28. As I was nearly always the only foreign guest, I was often ushered into these prime seats. As a foreign observer (and white or q’ara at that), however, I was not permitted to speak to or ask questions of the presenters. This was a right reserved for the MAS militants, many of whom had never before been to a public lecture of this nature. 29. “Hermano” is an address associated with the peasant unions and Indigenous social movements, whereas “compañero” (comrade) is a legacy of various Marxist and socialist traditions, particularly of the miners, and their influence on the labor movement. Most migrants to El Alto in the 1980s were either peasants forced off their land by the 1982–1983 El Niño-La Niña weather event coupled with the commodification of agriculture or relocated miners after the start of neoliberalism in 1985 (see McNelly 2019c). 30. These positions were held by these individuals at the time of the SPF in the second half of 2016. 31. The most notable of these sessions was one that focused on the corruption of Samuel Dorria Media, leader of the opposition party UN, during his time as minister of planning in the Left Revolutionary Movement government (1991–1993). 32. Agenda 2025 is the development plan that replaced the 2006 New Development Plan in 2013 (see Bolivia 2013). 33. Participant question, SPF, El Alto, June 30, 2016. 34. Participant question, SPF, El Alto, June 28, 2016. 35. See Mancilla (2016) for an account of corruption in state–social movement relations in El Alto. 36. Arturo Quispe, June 2, 2016; José Antonio Moreno Villegas, FEJUVE-La Paz, interview, La Paz, May 30, 2016. 37. Introductory remarks, SPF, El Alto, June 7, 2016. 38. Introductory remarks, SPF, El Alto, June 7, 2016. 39. Participant question, SPF, El Alto, June 7, 2016. 40. In May 2016 the state textiles factory run by Enatex was closed, reducing the size of the workforce by nine hundred people (Cuiza 2016). Many inside the labor movement argued that the move mirrored the dismissals under neolib206

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eral governments (Erbol 2016), and the COB mounted three general strikes of twenty-four, forty-eight, and seventy-two hours, but to little avail. 41. Introductory remarks, SPF, El Alto, June 7, 2016. 42. Participant question, SPF, El Alto, June 28, 2016. National Democratic Action (ADN), the Left Revolutionary Movement (MIR), and the Nationalist Revolutionary Movement (MNR) are the three neoliberal political parties (discussed in chapter 1) that lost legitimacy during the 1990s. 43. Participant question, SPF, El Alto, June 28, 2016. 44. Satisfaction with Morales remained above 50 percent until the reelection referendum in February 2016. After the referendum his popularity dipped, but this does not discount his sustained popular support from 2006 to 2016, despite the Isiboro Sécure National Park and Indigenous Territory (TIPNIS) crisis and the gasolinazo outlined in chapter 5. 45. For the best accounts on the role of military interventions in Bolivia during the twentieth century, see Dunkerley (1980, 1984). 46. Participant question, SPF, El Alto, June 28, 2016. CHAPTER 3: THE AUTONOMY MOVEMENT, TWO BOLIVIAS, AND THE SPATIALITY OF PASSIVE REVOLUTION

1. Santa Cruz is the most populous and politically important of the Media Luna departments. 2. “Cruceños” are people from the department of Santa Cruz. 3. “Camba,” a term thought to have originated from the Guaraní word for “friend,” was first used to describe peasants and was synonymous with the peons tied to large haciendas through debt. Over time, the term came to encompass both peasants and landowners from the eastern part of the country (Stearman 1985, 20). 4. This perspective is exemplified in the words of the PODEMOS deputy Wálter Arrazola (cited in La Razón 2008e), which stated: “The Constitution is the most antidemocratic [constitution] there is. It is a racist, fascist, and reactionary project and the statutes are truly revolutionary processes.” 5. In 2008 BOB 7 was approximately equivalent to USD 1. 6. However, the government argued that the combined total of voters who did not vote, spoiled their ballot papers, or left their ballots blank exceeded 50 percent of registered voters. 7. While autonomy activists collected 103,000 signatures, more than the 8 percent of the cruceño electorate stipulated in Law 2769 outlining the legal norms around referenda, this referendum was not called by Congress, the only entity legally entitled to do so. Thus, it was refused authorization by the National Electoral Court (La Razón 2008c), and the Organization of American States (OAS) expressed concern that the referendum could provoke violence in 207

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the country (La Razón 2008h). However, opposition leaders, including the expresidents Carlos Mesa, Tuto Quiroga, and Eduardo Veltzé and the ex–vice president Víctor Hugo Cárdenas, questioned the validity of the CNE’s objections and expressed concern over what they saw as the undermining of Bolivia’s democratic institutions (La Razón 2008d). 8. Herein lies a central contradiction of the autonomy movement: the Nación Camba (in particular) highlights its difference from the east of the country and distinction as a separate nation from Bolivia as they also simultaneously argue that their Bolivia is the one (true?) Bolivia. Thanks to Aiko Ikemura Amaral for highlighting this particular tension. 9. Only months before, Fernández spoke of the autonomy referendum as a “beautiful celebration of democracy” and juxtaposed this presentation of the autonomy movement as the torchbearers of democracy with the apparent violence and totalitarianism of the MAS government (see Corz 2008). 10. In his study of the myths driving the autonomy movement, Wilfredo Plata (2008) highlights how the massacre of Indigenous people (particularly the Guaraní) during the foundation of Santa Cruz and its formative years is erased from cruceño versions of history. 11. During the violence in September, government employees, along with those of nongovernmental organizations working with Indigenous groups and Indigenous leaders based in the city all took refuge in Plan 3000, as it was the only place they felt safe when confronted by the racist mob unleashed by the autonomy movement (Zibechi 2009). 12. Tarijeños are people from Tarija. 13. For an excellent investigation into the relationship between hydrocarbon extraction and Indigenous communities in the Chaco region, Tarija, see Anthias (2018). 14. By 2006, 70 percent of national territory had still not been incorporated into the INRA registration process and land redistribution was virtually nonexistent (Colque, Tinta, and Sanjinés 2016, 89). 15. Saneamiento was the process of “provision of clear title to land through proper measurement” laid out in the INRA Law (Valdivia 2010, 73). 16. New oppositional forces would emerge in the next phase of Morales’s presidency in the wake of the conflict over the construction of a highway through a natural park (see below). 17. The six transnational firms are DuPont, Monsanto, Syngenta, Dow, Bayer, and BASF. The four grain giants are Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), Bunge, Cargill, and Louis Dreyfus. 18. Julian, leader, District 2, FEJUVE-El Alto, interview, El Alto, April 18, 2016.

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19. In Plan 3000, the principal social organization consisted of the nineteen market associations of the Rotonda commercial area. 20. Enrique Gonzalo Aro, Executive secretary, Association 24 de mayo (19 associations of the Rotonda), April 4, 2017. 21. Daniel Suárez, president of the Market Guild Association Copacabana, Rotonda Plan 3000, and president of the Unique Departmental Federation of the Market Guilds of Santa Cruz, April 6, 2017. 22. Benigno Siñani, executive secretary of the rebellious FEJUVE-El Alto, interview, El Alto, October 19, 2016. 23. Participant question, SPF, El Alto, September 29, 2016. 24. For an excellent study of the historical roots of the 2010 civic strike in Potosí, see Iamamoto (2015). 25. Daniel Suárez, April 6, 2017. 26. Enrique Gonzalo Aro, April 4, 2017. 27. Participant question, SPF, El Alto, October 6, 2016. 28. Benigno Siñani, October 19, 2016. 29. James Dunkerley is better than most at capturing the stormy character of Bolivian history. See, in particular, Dunkerley (1984, 2007a). CHAPTER 4: THE INDIGENOUS APOSTLE

1. I would like to thank Aiko Ikemura Amaral for highlighting the importance of the museum for understanding Morales as a president. 2. Tiwanaku is the archaeological remains of the pre-Incan Tiahuanaco civilization, the fragments of which later became the Aymara kingdoms of the Altiplano. See Klein (1992) for more detail. 3. See Rivera Cusicanqui (2010) and Thomson (2002) for more detail on the Great Andean Civil War and the legacies of Túpak Katari. 4. A cursory look at the Guardian’s Measuring Populism project illustrates my point here. See https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/nov/20/meas uring-populism-how-guardian-charted-rise-methodology. 5. Thanks to Joe Sammut for highlighting these distinctions so incisively. 6. A “caudillo” is the term used to describe a strong, charismatic leader in Latin America. 7. This spontaneity is the basis for Modonesi’s (2014, 20–23) rereading of subalternity under conditions of hegemony. 8. García, García, and Romero (2014, 204) argue in their account of the formation of the MAS that the INRA law was key to understanding the radicalization of the CSUTCB, which was formed to fight for ‘the land and territories of the indigenous-originary peoples.’ 9. Enrique Gonzalo Aro, April 4, 2017.

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10. Christian Zeballos, president, Association Flor de May la Única, February 2, 2017. 11. His presentation as a man of the people was also knotted together with a machista heteronormativity. I do not address the gendered and sexualized dimensions of the politics surrounding Morales, but for incisive interventions, see Canessa (2012); Marston and Kennemore (2019); Postero (2017); and Rivera Cusicanqui (2015). 12. I would argue that this perspective changed significantly following the reelection referendum of February 2016. I address this directly in chapter 6. 13. Jose Luis Alvarez Beltrán, POR, and executive secretary, Trade Union Federation of Teachers of La Paz, March 8, 2016. 14. I found this perspective repeated by supporters and critics of the government alike. 15. The School of the Americas, which was based in Panama until the mid1980s, trained soldiers responsible for war crimes across the region between 1963 and 2000 (see Gill 2004). It has arguably been one of the principal vectors of US imperialism in Latin America. 16. There is an important lesson here for revolutionary movements. If the state is not transformed along with (or, more accurately, through the alteration of) the practices and procedures of the state and its administrators, the possibilities for radical change are limited. 17. Antonia Rodríguez, ex-minister for the productive economy, MAS, July 20, 2016. 18. Jorge Silva, municipal city councilor for La Paz, September 26, 2016. 19. Guido Mitma, executive secretary, COB, October 5, 2016. 20. Mariana Pensalla, Plante, June 30, 2016. 21. Following Jamaica Kincaid (1988) and Fernando Coronil (2019, 284–85), I use “small” not to denote geographical size but to capture colonial projections subordinating places in the global South and positioning them as peripheral. 22. These processes have understandably attracted a lot of attention from scholars. See in particular: Albó 2015; Augsburger and Haber 2018; Cameron 2013; Farthing and Kohl 2014; Postero 2017; Tockman 2017; and Tockman, Cameron, and Plata 2015. 23. Valerio Ayaviri Lazaro, executive secretary, Trade Union Confederation of Construction Workers, July 7, 2016. 24. Enrique Gonzalo Alba, April 4, 2017. 25. The MAS came to power with only twelve out of the twenty-seven seats in the Senate. Moreover, most of the sitting judges had been appointed by Sánchez de Lozada and his MNR party (Farthing and Kohl 2014, 35).

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26. The expanded use of supreme (presidential) decrees is an outward sign of this tendency. 27. Christian Estebes, July 15, 2016. CHAPTER 5: EXTRACTIVISM, INFRASTRUCTURE, AND THE SPATIOTEMPORAL DIMENSIONS OF PASSIVE REVOLUTION

1. Aurelio Ambrocio Muruchi, lawyer and CONAMAQ activist, June 18, 2016. 2. “Surplus” here is understood from an accounting perspective rather than as the more theoretical Marxist concept. 3. Ana Verónica Ramos Morales, speaking at the MAS School of Political Formation in El Alto, October 6, 2016. 4. See Arze (2014, 2016) and Farthing and Kohl (2014) for detailed accounts of some of the shortcomings of MAS industrialization projects. 5. Celestino Vacaflor, secretary of conflicts, COD-Santa Cruz, interview, Santa Cruz, February 14, 2017. 6. Ramón Vither Peñas, executive secretary, Trade Union Federation of the Eastern Railway Workers, interview, Santa Cruz, March 29, 2017. 7. Hugo Luis Torres Quispe, executive secretary, COD-La Paz,interview, La Paz, June 24, 2016. 8. Benjamin Cáreces, Confederación de las Juntas Vecinales (Confederation of Neighborhood Councils, CONALJUVE) leader, interview, La Paz, June 3, 2016; Luis Flores Mendoza, member of the FEJUVE-El Alto, 2003, interview, El Alto, April 26, 2016; and Guido Mitma, executive secretary of the COB, interview, La Paz, October 5, 2016. 9. Chinese companies were contracted by the MAS government to implement projects worth USD 2 billion, the equivalent of 6 percent of the country’s total gross domestic product. This figure rose to USD 9.5 billion when the loan tied to the contracting of Chinese firms from Eximbank to Bolivia is included (Escobar de Pabón, Hurtado Aponte, and Rojas Callejas 2016, 114). 10. For example, César Guzmán, of the Juntas Escolares El Alto, noted that despite the emphasis on education, in practice the LPP provided the municipal of El Alto with scant resources to build much needed new schools. César Guzmán, leader of Juntas Escolares de El Alto, interview, El Alto, July 21, 2016. 11. Anonymous, District 12, FEJUVE-El Alto, April 18, 2016. 12. Carlos Barrera, activist, FEJUVE-El Alto, 2003, May 10, 2016. 13. Julian, District 2, FEJUVE-El Alto, April 18, 2016. 14. Carlos Alberto Rojas Chambilla, activist, FEJUVE-El Alto, 2003, May 11, 2016.

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15. Carlos Diez, president, Social Social Organization for Social Control, Santa Cruz, March 22, 2017. 16. Abad Lino Arteaga, president, FEJUVE-Santa Cruz, March 8, 2017. 17. Daniel Suarez, president, Market Guild Association Copacabana, Rotonda Plan 3000, and president of the Unique Departmental Federation of the Market Guilds of Santa Cruz, April 6, 2017. 18. Abad Lino Arteaga, president, FEJUVE-Santa Cruz, March 8, 2017. 19. Antonio Quispe, public functionary, La Paz Town Hall, June 2, 2016. 20. Jorge Silva, municipal city councilor for La Paz, interview, La Paz, September 26, 2016. CHAPTER 6: CONTRADICTIONS, CRISIS, AND THE END OF EVO MORALES

1. These explanations were: “(1) that they didn’t want to superimpose the quick-count on the official count, which had already been initiated; (2) that there was an alert regarding a cybernetic attack so it was shut down for security purposes; (3) that they always shut it down at around 80% of the quick-count; and (4) that they did not have 17% of the votes because rural areas did not have sufficient internet access to send corresponding photos of the ballots” (Hylton and Webber 2019). 2. For the best account of the timeline of social struggles during this period, see Díaz-Cuellar (2020). 3. The exact course of events between November 10 and 13 remains unclear, but it suffices to say that there is still much we do not know about Áñez’s rise to power. 4. Pachamama is the earth deity worshiped by the Indigenous peoples of the Andes. This deity became synonymous with the Virgin Mary as Andean cosmovisions were synchronized with the Catholicism of the conquistadores (see Harris 2000). 5. Plurinationalism and vivir bien (which roughly translated as living well) were concepts pushed by social movements initially before becoming incorporated into the political project of the MAS. For detailed accounts of the genesis of and debates on these concepts, see Farah H and Vasapollo (2011), Schavelzon (2015), and Wanderley (2017). 6. For a theoretical discussion around forms of labor and class in the informal economy, see Breman (2013, 2015), Coraggio (2007), Lebowitz (2003), and Wanderley (2016). 7. My point about employment opportunities needs qualification, as the size of the state bureaucracy did increase threefold under Morales (Soruco 2015). However, these posts were often assigned by political means, favoring MAS-affiliated social organizations and prominent MAS supporters. 212

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8. Choquehuanca left his role in 2017 to “work with the bases” and “build support for the president” (Toro 2017), but many considered this a political move to cut Choquehuanca down a peg or two. Post-Morales, he returned to the upper echelons of the party as the vice president of Luis Arce’s government. 9. One just has to look at the televised debate between presidential candidates in October 2020 to see how pervasive this idea became during the 2019 crisis. All the ills in the country were, it seemed, due to fourteen years of MAS government and nothing to do with the crisis that had swept the region, the country’s subordinate insertion into the global economy as a primary commodity producer, and the internal structural constraints due to the legacies of a colonial and rentier state. 10. There were several phantom projects, but the overall the Fondo Indígena was more stymied by capacity and errors than by deliberate manipulation and fraud. 11. I would like to thank Jorge Viaña for highlighting the importance of these five laws in an interview in La Paz, October 31, 2016. 12. The Página Siete journalist Beatriz Layme (2019e) reported that almost forty functionaries had left the TSE by the end of September 2019. 13. See Wolff (2020) for an excellent discussion on the nuances of the debate between the OAS and the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). 14. The “traditional” middle classes, as Fernando Molina (2019) rightly underscores, never accepted Morales. For them, he was an indio (the racist language mobilized against Morales) and did not respect the markers of social privilege (college degrees from prestigious US universities, for example). 15. This is in reference to the rejection of the government’s proposal to allow Morales to run again as president in the 2016 Referendum. 16. The Six Federations of the Tropics of Cochabamba are an important part of the CSUTCB, but distinguishing between the two here gives a better idea of the scope of the two organizations. 17. This organic relationship with the MAS is only with these sectors and does not extend, as Eduardo Silva (2018) claims, to all social organizations. 18. Oscar Vega, political theorist, interview, La Paz, August 7, 2019. CONCLUSION: THEORETICAL AND POLITICAL REFLECTIONS ON PASSIVE REVOLUTION

1. Las Tesis refers to the way the collective draws upon and brings to life particular feminist theories. In the case of “Un violador en tu camino,” Las Tesis draws upon the work of the feminist anthropologist Rita Segato.

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LIST OF INTERVIEWS

Most interviews lasted between twenty minutes and an hour, although a few were shorter and a few longer. With a couple of exceptions, they were recorded, transcribed, and analyzed using NVivo. Abithe Montaños, Jaime. Executive secretary, Trade Union Federation of Factory Workers of Santa Cruz (FSTF), March 6, 2017. Alvarez Beltrán, Jose Luis. POR and executive secretary, Trade Union Federation of Teachers of La Paz, March 8, 2016. Ambrocio Muruchi, Aurelio. Lawyer and National Confederation of Ayllus and Markas of Qullasuyu (CONAMAQ) activist, June 18, 2016. Anonymous. District 12, El Alto Federation of Neighborhood Councils (FEJUVE-El Alto), April 18, 2016. Anonymous. District 8, FEJUVE-El Alto, April 18, 2016. Anonymous. Treasurer, Transport Trade Union Line 53, Santa Cruz, April 19, 2017. Anonymous. President of District 8, Santa Cruz, February 4, 2017. Antelo Cortez, Elvaldo. Representative of Eastern Railway Workers, Trade Union Commission of the Departmental Workers’ Center (COD)-Santa Cruz, March 24, 2017. 215

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Arce Vargas, Carlos. Social investigator, Center for Latin American Research and Documentation (CEDLA), May 4, 2016. Ascarga Barranca, Saul. Executive secretary, Departmental Trade Union Federation of Teachers of Santa Cruz, April 20, 2017. Ayaviri Lazaro, Valerio. Executive secretary, Trade Union Confederation of Construction Workers, July 7, 2016. Barrera, Carlos. Activist, FEJUVE-El Alto, 2003, May 10, 2016. Blanco Romero, Cecilia. Movement for Socialism (MAS) School of Political Formation, El Alto, July 15, 2016 Bonilthe Mendoza, Patrocinio. Professor; and Alberto Lopez. Market Guild Association 21 de Julio, Abasto Market, March 13, 2017. Bustillos Sánchez, Marco. Executive secretary, Mixed Transport Trade Union Litoral, December 5, 2016. Cabezas Morales, Maria Antonieta. Secretary of cooperatives, COD-Santa Cruz, March 23, 2017. Cabezas Valencia, Víctor. General secretary, Trade Union Confederation of the Interculturals of Bolivia (CSIOB, formerly the Colonizers), March 15, 2016. Cabrera Chura, Dionicio. National leader, Trade Union Confederation of Bolivian Peasant Workers (CSUTCB), March 17, 2016. Cáceres, Benjamín. Executive secretary, Confederation of Neighborhood Councils (CONALJUVE), June 3, 2016. Calla, Ricardo. Academic, University of the Cordillera, April 6, 2016. Cardoza Gambón, Orlando, and Juan Carlos Bernal. Leader and secretary of conflicts, respectively, Transport Trade Union Federation 16 de Noviembre, Santa Cruz, April 20, 2017. Celiz Solano, Víctor Hugo. Submayor of District 8 (Plan 3000), Santa Cruz, April 6, 2017. Chambi, Hermógenes. District 7, FEJUVE-El Alto, April 18, 2016. Chávez, Marxa. Sociologist and feminist activist, La Paz, August 26, 2019. Condori Ramirez, Sebastian. Secretary of communications, Regional Workers’ Center (COR)-El Alto, November 15, 2016. Cruz Villca, Juan de la. Ex-leader, CSUTCB/Bolivian Workers’ Center (COB), and MAS technocrat, April 6, 2016. Diez, Carlos, Raúl Vanegas Thergas, and Nicothes Chuve Gauzaze. President, leader of District 15, and leader of District 7, respectively, March 22, 2017. Diez, Carlos. President, Social Organization for Social Control, Santa Cruz, March 8, 2017. Escalera, Juan. President, Association18 de Marzo, Plan 3000, January 30, 2017. Escobar, Filemón. Ex-trade-union leader and MAS founder, April 3, 2016. 216

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Esebes, Christian. MAS School of Political Formation, El Alto, June 6, 2016. Esebes, Christian. MAS School of Political Formation, El Alto, July 15, 2016. Fernandes Flores, Vicente. Activist, FEJUVE-El Alto, 2003, May 31, 2016. Flores Mendoza, Luis. Activist, FEJUVE-El Alto, 2003, April 26, 2016. Flores Tobar, Jorge. National leader, People with Disabilities movement, May 19, 2016. Flores, Gumercindo. Investigator and technocrat, El Alto Town Hall, May 4, 2016. Gallego, Maximo. National leader, CONAMAQ-orgánico, March 10, 2016. Galtherdo, Chrisanta (“the Chapaka”). General secretary, Trade Union of Municipal Workers, March 28, 2017. Garces, Fernando. Social investigator, Center for Social Research (CIS), April 19, 2016. Gil Mamani, Paulino. Executive secretary, FEJUVE-El Alto Concuta, June 3, 2016. Gonzales Athenes, Lucio. Former national leader, COB, March 15, 2016. Gonzalo Aro, Enrique. Executive secretary, Association 24 de mayo (19 associations of the Rotonda), April 4, 2017. Gónzalez, Natavidad. Plante, June 30, 2016. Gutierrez Luna, Orlando. Executive secretary, Trade Union Federation of Bolivian Mine Workers (FSTMB), June 28, 2016. Guzmán Mendoza, Juan. General secretary, Trade Union Confederation of Guilds, Artisans, Retail Merchants, and Suppliers of Estado Plurinacional of Bolivia, December 17, 2016. Gúzman, César. Local leader, Juntas Escolares, July 21, 2016. Huanca Quispe, Raúl, and Fernando Alcoba. Secretary of relations and general secretary, respectively, Trade Union Federation of Construction Workers of Santa Cruz, March 22, 2017. José. Federation of Factory Workers, La Paz/ENATEX worker, June 3, 2016. Julian and Alepo. District 2, FEJUVE-El Alto, April 18, 2016. Juro, Juan Arturo. National leader, CSIOB, March 14, 2016. Lara Lara, Javier. National leader, CONAMAQ-orgánico, March 10, 2016. Lino Arteaga, Abad. President, FEJUVE-Santa Cruz, March 8, 2017. Llanos, Marcos. Local youth activist, FEJUVE, 2003, April 12, 2016. Magro Aperti, Rubén. General secretary, Transport Trade Union Andres Ibañez, April 5, 2017. Maldonado Jarandilla, Mauricio Lucio. Trade Union of the La Paz Mayoral Office, March 7, 2016. Mancilla, Rodolfo. National leader, Trade Union Confederation of Guilds, Artisans, Retail Merchants, and Suppliers of Estado Plurinacional of Bolivia, December 13, 2016. 217

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LIST OF INTERVIEWS

Mansilla, Abraham D. Author and Public University of El Alto (UPEA) activist, September 25, 2016. Mercado, Isaias. Secretary of social laws, COD-Santa Cruz, February 14, 2017. Mérida Calsina, Julio. Ex-leader, Trade Union Confederation of Drivers of Bolivia, December 7, 2016. Mitma, Guido. Executive secretary, COB, October 5, 2016. Montenegro Lijeron, Alberto. Ex-leader of District 8, Santa Cruz, February 4, 2017. Morales Alvarez, Manuel. Constituent Assembly participant and independent scholar, March 30, 2016. Moreno Villegas, José Antonio. FEJUVE-La Paz, May 30, 2016. Muruchi, Félix. Academic, UPEA, ex-FEJUVE-El Alto leader, April 18, 2016. Navas, Edwin. Secretary of conflicts, Mixed Transport Trade Union Eduardo Avaroa, November 22, 2016. Nino, Benigno. Executive secretary, Transport Union Arco Iris, November 14, 2016. Ormachea, José Manuel. “Bolivia Dice No” campaign, March 8, 2016. Paniagua Revollo, Socimo. General secretary, COD Santa Cruz, February 17, 2017. Patiño Gómez, Julio. Executive secretary, Trade Union Confederation of Guilds, Artisans, Retail Merchants, and Suppliers of Estado Plurinacional of Bolivia, December 19, 2016. Patón Agramont, Andres. Secretary of relations, Transport Trade Union Federation of La Paz, December 1, 2016. Pensalla, Marina. Plante, June 30, 2016. Quiroga, Maximo. General secretary, Trade Union Federation of Electrical and Lighting Engineers, June 23, 2016. Quispe Ontojo, Freddy Francisco. General secretary, Unique Trade Union Central Unica of Urban Transport Passengers, La Paz, December 5, 2016. Quispe, Antonio. Technocrat, La Paz Town Hall, June 2, 2016. Ramiro. Neighbor, Neighborhood Council Barrio Minero, Plan 3000, February 2, 2017. Ramos Chino, Alfonso. FEJUVE-El Alto, April 18, 2016. Ramos, Antonio. N/A, June 23, 2016. Renán Cabezas, Ignacio. Secretary of transport, FEJUVE-El Alto, April 20, 2016. Rodrigez Magner, Ernesto. Leader, Transport Union Trans Viacha, October 19, 2016. Rodriguez, Antonia. Ex-minister for the productive economy, MAS, July 20, 2016. Rojas Chambilla, Carlos Alberto. Activist, FEJUVE-El Alto, 2003, May 11, 2016.

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LIST OF INTERVIEWS

Rueda Gutierrez, Steven Abel. President, Neighborhood Council Barrio Minero, Plan 3000, February 4, 2017. Salazar Cellea, Esteban. Leader, National Health Fund (CNS) Workers, March 30, 2017. Salazar, Huáscar. Sociologist, Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), June 5, 2017 (via Skype). Severiche Brosque, Antonio, and Jorge Márquez. Executive secretary and ex-leader, respectively, Trade Union Confederation of Railway Workers, July 5, 2016. Silva, Jorge. Municipal city councilor for La Paz, September 26, 2016. Siñani, Benigno. Executive secretary, rebellious FEJUVE-EL Alto, October 19, 2016. Suarez, Daniel. President, Market Guild Association Copacabana, Rotonda Plan 3000, and president of the Unique Departmental Federation of the Market Guilds of Santa Cruz, April 6, 2017. Tarqui Baltazar, Paulino. Leader, Trade Union of University Workers of UPEA, July 13, 2016. Tassi, Nico. Anthropologist, CIS, May 11, 2016. Terrazas Rivero, Aldo R. General secretary, Transport Trade Union Santa Cruz, April 18, 2017. Thera Valdivia, Gonzalo. National leader, Trade Union Confederation of Guilds, Artisans, Retail Merchants, and Suppliers of Estado Plurinacional of Bolivia, December 17, 2016. Theura Marca, José Luis. COD-La Paz, June 24, 2016. Torres Quispe, Hugo Luis. Executive secretary, Departmental Workers’ Center, COD)-La Paz, June 24, 2016. Urzagasti Saldías, Ernesto. Architect and urban planner, April 8, 2017. Vaca Añez, Rómulo. Author, poet and resident, Plan3000, March 20, 2017. Vacaflor, Celestino. Secretary of conflicts, COD-Santa Cruz, February 14, 2017. Vargas, Lisbeth. Chicheña and ex-MASista, May 9, 2016. Vasquéz, Alex. National leader, People with Disabilities movement, May 19, 2016. Vega, Oscar. Political theorist, interview, La Paz, August 7, 2019. Viaña, Jorge. Ex-director and political theorist, CIS, October 31, 2016. Villanueva Rance, Amaru. Director, CIS, September 30, 2016. Villca, Jorge. Leader, FEJUVE-El Alto, April 21, 2016. Vilthe Valdez, Boris. Trade Union Federation of Health Workers (FENSEGURAL), July 26, 2016. Vither Peñas, Ramón. Executive secretary, Trade Union Federation of the Eastern Railway Workers, March 29, 2017.

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Wanderley, Fernanda. Academic, Universidad Mayor de San Andrés Postgrado en Ciencias del Desarrollo (Higher University San Andrés Postgraduate Center in Development Studies, CIDES-UMSA), March 9, 2016. Zapata, Lucho. Ex-general secretary, FEJUVE-El Alto, April 26, 2016. Zeballos, Christian. President, Association Flor de Mayo la Única, Plan 3000, February 2, 2017. Zorrilthe Zegarro, Eliana Isabel. National leader, CNS, July 6, 2016.

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INDEX

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