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Manipulating Cartographies:
Plurinationalism, Autonomy, and
Indigenous Resurgence in Bolivia
Bret Gustafson
Washington University in St. Louis
Abstract
Latin American indigenous movements increasingly speak of plurinationalism in demands for state transformation. The conceptas yet solidified in
legal or territorial ordersexists in tension with disputed meanings of
autonomy, raising questions about indigenous territorial rights, citizenship, and natural resources. Bolivias new constitution elevates both concepts to official status in the context of struggles over natural gas. Following
David Maybury-Lewiss call for rethinking the state, I consider how Bolivians
are rethinking historicities of space to transform cartographies of a plurinational state. Though raising fears of ethnic partitioning, the Guaran
case suggests that hybrid plural and indigenous territorialities are emergent.
[Bolivia, Guaran, indigenous movements, plurinationalism, autonomy,
natural gas, territoriality]
Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 82, No. 4, pp. 9851016, ISSN 0003-549. 2009 by the Institute for Ethnographic
Research (IFER) a part of the George Washington University. All rights reserved.
985
ince 2000, business leaders of the eastern Bolivian city of Santa Cruz,
applauded by media outlets they control, have been organizing violent
assaults on their fellow citizens. These attacks are carried out in the name of
political autonomy for the eponynomous departmenta region rich in
hydrocarbon, agricultural, and mineral resources that seeks more power
from the central government (Map 1).1 Thanks to Youtube, recent events are
easily accessible.2 Young men beat a peasant leader in the city square. Three
youths chase down, whip, and kick a farmer in a roadside gutter. Gangs
attack students accused of betraying Santa Cruz. Assaults also targeted NGOs,
public officials, and civil society leaders deemed supporters of the central
government.3 Distinct from violence associated with criminality in other
Latin American cities, these are politicallyand often ethnic and racially
charged attacks in support of a regional power structure. With support from
segments of the urban middle class, and enjoying de facto immunity from
state prosecution, regional autonomy advocates sought to use violence to
carve out a de facto sovereignty scaled at the departmental level.
The elite regional autonomy agenda unfolded in response to the rise of
indigenous movements and their alliance with rural and urban workers and
progressive middle classes across the country.4 Following the collapse of the
elite-led party system in 2003, a broad-based movement in support of the
nationalization of gas and the rewriting of the 1994 constitution led to the
2005 presidential election of the Aymara coca-farmer Evo Morales. Moraless
party, the MAS (Movement to Socialism), renegotiated contracts with foreign
oil and gas companies and backed the writing of a new constitution.
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BRET GUSTAFSON
national tricolor blurs into the checkerboard wiphala of indigenous movements). The wells on the horizon frame this within a strong stance on sovereign control over oil, and especially natural gas, abundant in the country.
Against the elite regional autonomy agenda described above, Morales
invoked a hybrid indigenist, popular, and (pluri)national project.
In this article, I discuss plurinationalism and the contested meanings
of autonomy as conflicting cultural and political paradigms vying for
the reconfiguration of territorialities and sovereignties in
the Andes. Though particular
to regions with strong indigenous movements (especially
Ecuador and Bolivia), the clash
between these paradigms raises questions about space and
power, citizenship and pluralism, and control over natural
resources. The conjuncture
has echoes world-wide, as the
reformulation (or dismantling)
of the nation-state under
neoliberalism, the unresolved
dilemmas of colonialism, and
the explosion of social movements generate unprecedented (re)territorial(izing) conFIGURE 1: The People [as] Constitutive;
campaign poster for Evo Morales (2005).
flicts over de jure and de facto
sovereignty (Hansen and Stepputat 2006). Bolivia is caught between the partial effects of neoliberal
decentralization and the dismantling of corporatism, the resurgence of
nationalist and indigenous movements, and a transnationally dependent
domestic elite seeking to insulate regional governance against democracy.
The Bolivian case in particularwith the first indigenous president in Latin
American historyalso raises questions about indigenous rights, caught
between the erosion of sovereignty inherited from neoliberalism and the
specter of monocultural authoritarianism tied to resurgent nationalism.
In what follows, I describe plurinationalism by tracing grassroots
indigenous practice, a brief geneaology of the idea in the Andes and
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BRET GUSTAFSON
Bolivia, and the place of indigenous rights in the newly drafted constitution. I make two points. First, I argue that indigenous self-determination
in the paradigm of plurinationalism is being reconceptualized as a
transterritorial articulatory process through which the nation-state itself is
also under transformation. This differs from conventional views of indigenous self-determination as (only) special legal regimes applied to ethnoterritorial enclaves. Second, I suggest that the elite-led departmental or
regional autonomy, which appropriates and transforms debates on collective self-determination rights for marginalized peoples, defines an emergent post-neoliberal strategy to counter indigenous and popular-nationalist projects in Latin America. Autonomy (or autonoma), in this
conservative sense, reflects a global turn toward creation of sub-national
spaces of regional governance that detach production, social exchange,
and citizenship rights (and sovereignty) from the wider national territory
and social body (c.f. Ong 2006, Ferguson 2006). While plurinationalism
represents an attempt to articulate local ideas of peoplehoodwith
regional [and] nationwide ideas about citizenship (Bowen 2000:14),
regional autonomy reflects the paradoxical intensification of localizing
cultural sentiment and citizen rights claims tied to regionally-specific
political-economic, labor, and natural resource formations articulated
with global capitalist circuits. 5 The pursuit of indigenous autonomies is
distinct, offering a competing model of socio-political, legal, and institutional articulations with the national government.
As this issue is dedicated to the work of David Maybury-Lewis, I use his
writings on indigenous rights, ethnic pluralism, and the state to consider
how these issues create dilemmas for indigenous rights advocates and ethnographers grappling with the uncertainties of the (post)neoliberal era.
BRET GUSTAFSON
violences) associated with territorializing models of ethnocultural difference and with hypernationalist states.
BRET GUSTAFSON
even intensified, the persistence of racism and coloniality in everyday discourse and state structure (Gustafson 2002, 2009; Postero 2007). Even this
modest opening to indigenous movements sparked conservative reactions, as elites began to reinscribe regional difference as racialized selfunderstanding, with intellectuals (as in the epigraph) imagining that
interculturalism meant that all Bolivians had ethnic particularity and
indigenous-like autonomy rights. 8
Interculturalism also failed from the elite perspective. It did not contain
indigenous movements, which sought to deepen interculturalism through
grassroots practice. Interculturalism did not succeed in localizing cultures to
become self-regulating entities or communities subject to market discipline.
Rather the juridical and representational vacuum created by neoliberalism
generated indigenous and wider public clamor for more robust national sovereignty. The boom in privatization and transnational extractive activities
brought into relief the inability of indigenous peoples to call on the state to
guarantee minimal rights and the incapacity of elites to retain and redistribute surplus. As evidenced in hydrocarbon and resource conflicts, indigenous
peoples and popular movements came to see themselves as the last bastion
of state sovereignty (de la Fuente 2005, c.f. Sawyer 2004).9
This counterintuitive reversalthe westernizing elites embrace of
ethnoterritorial particularity and the indigenous embrace of national sovereigntyraises dilemmas for analysts and advocates of indigenous
rights. In Latin America, anthropologists are placed in the position of
thinking of how indigenous rights might be reconciled with a resurgent
nationalist agenda, processes conventionally seen as incompatible. This
does not preclude a critical view of the essentialist risks in invocations of
indigeneity (Bowen 2000). Nor does it entail an acritical embrace of
nationalism, given risks of authoritarian exclusions embedded therein. It
does require taking up Maybury-Lewis call to rethinkas do Bolivian
indigenous movementsthe nation-state. To this end, rather than assume
that plurinationalism represents a congealed model (of ethnic autonomy
or ethnic federalism), it is helpful to begin by thinking of itand the new
Bolivian constitutionas already ongoing processes with indeterminate
outcomes shaped by unforeseen contingencies and articulations. In the
sections that follow, I consider these rethinkings through three lenses
onto plurinationalism in emergent practice.
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BRET GUSTAFSON
repositionings were shaped through inter-ethnic, cross-class, and ruralurban articulations facilitated by NGOs working within the language and
practice of popular nationalism.
This emerging political cartography of indigenous protagonism
unfolded across geographic and institutional spaces and scales. Activist
intellectuals saw these as repositionings of de facto indigenous territorialities from which movements began to establish new regional nodes of
authority and assemble other social and rural organizations in an
associative indigenous network (Garca Linera et al. 2004:356-378,
Gustafson 2004). Indigenous territorialities in practice did not pursue
ethnoterritorial closure through monocultural geographically fixed territorial units. Rather they sought to flexibly rearticulate across space to
counterbalance centers of power like the city of Santa Cruz, contest illegal latifundia or extractive activities, and subvert and invade provincial
power structures. By virtue of their claims on legal rights through the
stateand their resistance to the de facto effects of neoliberal deregulationthey were movements to ground national sovereignty and indigenous self-determination. 10 The net result in Guaran country and elsewhere across the east was an incipient plurinationalism in practice,
through which indigenous peoples turned toward defense of national
sovereignty through horizontal alliances across difference, rather than as
subjects directed in the old leftist idiom of vanguardist struggle. These
processual transformations were mobilized through legal arenas as well
as non-violent tactics like marches, blockades, and hunger strikes. The
effects were seen in the rising elite backlash as struggles reverberated
upward, undermining supralocal power structures that relied on the
reproduction of local hierarchies. 11
This sketch suggests that indigenous self-determination and autonomy
might express itself in ways that build on territorial spaces, yet are not
limited to territorial enclosure. Similarly, most existing cases of indigenous autonomy emerge in multi-ethnic regional formations that combine
territorial spacesin which indigenous peoples maintain a role of leadership and powerand spaces of intercultural political engagement (e.g.
Nash 2001:198-202, Rappaport 2005). As Mexican anthropologist Miguel
Alberto Bartolom argues, no one model guides Latin American indigenous visions, but most contemplate new modes of [inter-ethnic, intercultural] social articulation that are more egalitarian than existing
[ones]. Indigenous autonomy framed thus is not just a question of con998
BRET GUSTAFSON
tainment of indigenous places and bodies, but the decolonizing transformation of the state and non-indigenous society. As Bartolom writes,
echoing Maybury-Lewis: if a multiethnic State really treats itself as a plural society [] it should explore all possible paths in the search for novel
forms of conviviality between culturally distinct groups, rather than, I
might add, simply fencing them off (Bartolom 2005:146).
The concept of intercultural, transterritorial social articulationwithin
and among indigenous peoples and between indigenous and non-indigenous peoplesis central to this vision of indigenous self-determination
and autonomy. This is distinct from liberal notions of individual autonomy
(and the extension of this notion to regional polities as being like indivisible bodies operating like western federalist states). 12 Indigenous
autonomies must be thought of not as seeking the condition of a state
(body) within a state (body), but pursuing transformative, yet eventually
routinized, spaces and processes of social articulation and equality across
multiple territorial scalings. As one Guaran leader told me, autonomy is
about having the possibility of influencing other cultures, who are not
Guaran, it is [as much] about territories of political action as about the
ownership (propiedad) of territoriesautonomy is not simply saying, This
is just for us, and period (see also Camargo Manuel 2005).
frame for imagining indigenous isolationismnor simply claiming dual citizenship in a multinational statebut for positing a new set of relationships between indigenous and other Ecuadoran citizens.
In Bolivia, in 1983 the largely Aymara and Quechua peasant union
CSUTCB reestablished itself as an organization free of government tutelage as the country returned to democracy and invoked plurinationalism
in its Manifesto: We want to be free in a society without exploitation or
oppression organized in a plurinational State that develops our cultures
and our authentic forms of self government (gobierno propio) (Rivera
1984:196). In 1992, the demand returned during the indigenous call for
an Assembly of Nationalities on Columbus Day in La Paz. The effort
floundered, but revealed the emergent popular and (pluri)nationalist flavor that flourished inside movement discourse.
The 1990s saw plurinationalism undergo a hiatus in both countries. In
Bolivia, neoliberal interculturalism redirected indigenous mobilizing as I
described above. In Ecuador, indigenous political missteps and elite resistance weakened the movement. Nonetheless, as neoliberalism wanes and
nationalism waxes, plurinationalism reemerges with more specificity in
proposals for rewriting national constitutions. As voiced by Luis Macas,
past president of Ecuadors CONAIE (Confederation of Indigenous
Nationalities of Ecuador):
[T]he thesis of the Plurinational State implies the recognition of the
self-determination of indigenous peoples and nationalities, understood as the right of these nationalities to choose their own political and juridical system as well as their model of economic, social,
scientific, and cultural development, in a territory geographically
defined within the frame of a new Plurinational Nation.
This sounds like ethnic enclaves, yet Macas went on to argue that natural resources be nationalized and administered by the State and no longer
be in the hands of transnational companies that have wounded (vulnerado)
national sovereignty and the dignity of the peoples where those resources
are found (ALAI 2008a, 2008b). A reading of Bolivias new constitution, as
below, yields a similar stance. In both Ecuador and Bolivia, indigenous peoples concede (theoretically legitimate) claims to absolute resource control,
yet seek in return a decolonized, redistributive sovereignty within which
their relative position is one of equality, rather than marginality.
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Indigenous movement visions of plurinationalism may also be spreading beyond the Andes. In March of 2007, a continental gathering of
indigenous peoples in Iximch (Tecpn), Guatemala called for the refoundation of the Nation-States and the construction of Plurinational States
and intercultural societies by way of Constitutional Assemblies with direct
representation of indigenous peoples and nationalities (Movimientos.org
2007). 13 In 2008, a new pan-indigenous confederation, the Andean
Coordinator of Indigenous Organizations (CAOI), convened a meeting of
organizations from Peru, Ecuador, Chile, Argentina, and Bolivia and
announced (Enlace Indgena 2008):
[T]he decision of Indigenous Peoples of Abya Yala [the Americas] to
reconstruct our Peoples, struggling for inclusion and the construction of Plurinational States and Intercultural Societies, with new
governments that recognize our territories and collective rights and
implement public policies, intercultural and democratic knowledges, and hold for societies the principle of Unity in Diversity
and [seek] the construction of alternative societies based on the proposals of Indigenous Peoples.
The dual invocation of plurinational state and intercultural society
is a crucial signpost of the agenda of social articulation, marking plurinationalism as a dynamic process of transforming relationships, rather than
as a crude territorial or political fixing of ethnic bodies. As a way of
rethinking the state, this presupposes negotiating tensions between a
western-style framework of sovereignty and legitimacy and attempts to
reorder social-territorial inequalities by dismantling racialized spatial and
legal cartographies. Consider for instance, a recent statement by
President Evo Morales in defense of the integrity of the state against the
demands of elite regional autonomists:
I am an enemy of the possibility that four state sectors be drawn and
quartered by way of the constitutional assembly. I am talking about
the armed forces, the national police, education, and health (El
Deber 2007).
Here the indigenous president defends the monopoly over violence
(the army and the police) and the mechanisms of biopower (schooling and
1001
public health), both at the center of (a very western) vision of the state
and governmentality. Yet the phrase drawn and quartered, (descuartizado) invokes a particular national body, that of the indigenous rebel Tupak
Katari who waged an anticolonial rebellion against the Spaniards during
1780 and 1781. Katari was ultimately captured, drawn and quartered,
pulled apart by draft horses. In the republican narrative of the nation,
this spectacular execution stands as a reminder to unruly Indians who
challenge coloniality, since traditional nationalism excluded Indians as
Indians from full citizenship, treating them as subjects needing control
and racial improvement (Sanjins 2004). Moraless usage of drawn and
quartered subverts this metaphor of racialized bodies and bio-evolutionary temporality, reframing the nation as an insurrectionary anti-colonial
historical subject and nation-building as a geographically rooted unfinished insurrectionary history. To be sure, Tupak Katari was Aymaraand
maleleaving ample room for new racisms and exclusions. Yet Katari and
other martyrs of indigenous and popular struggle are rarely invoked as
singular bodies, but are listed in enunciations of pantheons of martyrs
representative of collective subjects and territorialized histories, along
with heroes like Bartolina Sisa (Kataris wife), the Guaran leader
Apiaguaiki Tpa, Amazonian leaders, contemporary rebels like Zrate
Willka, mestizos, and even Che Guevara. 14 Descuartizamiento also
appears in nationalist discourse to describe external threats to Bolivian
resources and territory, linking colonialism to imperialism (Orgaz
2005:19, 107). In this emergent narrative, a space of potentiality rather
than ideological closure, the apical progress of the pluri-nation is not
reached through racial improvement and mestizaje nor by inverting race
and power relations in a new ethnonationalism, but through the articulation of multiple histories and geographies of decolonizing struggle.
Another set of plurinational rethinkings recasts the powerful
metaphorical and practical relationship between maps, mapping, and
nation-building. Raul Prada (2007), a non-indigenous philosopher and
MAS constitutional assembly delegate, writes of plurinationalism as an
emergent process to articulate and change heterogeneous territorial and
sociological formations into a new national landscape. In his language of
analysis, as a language of political practice, mapping is a way of thinking
about (reordering) power. Inspired by Gramscian, Foucaultian and
Deleuzian terminologies, Prada views the game of hegemony not simply in the old revolutionary term of capturing the centralized state, but
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through reordering power from the ground-up. This requires understanding the current historical moment as an illusorily static instantaneous
temporary map, a manipulable cartography of forces. Yet cartography is
not a literal reference to map-making (which is in fact sometimes part of
pro-indigenous activism). Rather cartographic practices are imagined as
political and intellectual practices that should work at mapping institutions in [a] state of deterioriation; changing institutional maps and
[seeking] a new territorial ordering; transforming the economic map of
the country; reordering the entirety of the geography of properties, latifundias, communities, and cooperatives; and pursuing communitarian
interweaving [with] an expansive map of social networks (Prada 2007). In
short, the plurinational project requires not fixing indigeneity within
existing geopolitical lines, but decolonizing territory as a prerequisite for
constituting plurinationalism from the ground up.
As with the rethinking of bodies in allegorical and historical, rather
than biological and evolutionary terms, this unsettling of the national
space subverts existing sub-national jurisdictions (i.e. departments,
provinces, etc.) enshrined in political imaginaries through the multi-colored logo map (Anderson 1983:172-174). Traditional nationalist cartographies and contemporary (ostensibly liberal) regional elites seek to
defend and naturalize these divisions (i.e. those of Map 1) by linking them
to the corporal integrity of regional criollo bodies and families and a
regionalist paradigm of race. These elite positions argue that the plurinational project seeks to dismember territories (distinct from drawing and
quartering); exhibits a kind of mental dysfunctionality; or would be
akin to children (rural provinces or indigenous regions) questioning the
authority of fathers (the departmental centers). 15
Although plurinationalism facilitates alliances between indigenous and
progressive sectors of society, in neither Bolivia nor Ecuador is plurinationalism wholeheartedly embraced by the nationalist left. In Ecuador,
indigenous organizations still mobilize despite the election of a putatively pro-indigenous president in 2007. Ecuadors new constitution leaves
much to be desired in the way of indigenous rights. In Bolivia, though
often ascribed to Evo Morales, plurinationalism emerged out of the
indigenous organizations and came to the agenda of the MAS party only
very recently (Pacto de Unidad 2006, Mayorga 2007). Indigenous peoples,
including the Guaran, mobilized to defend the insertion of indigenous
autonomies into the new constitution against opposition from within
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oil-rich Zulia state; in Loreto, Peru, autonomy has been spoken of in a context where Amazonian indigenous peoples recently suffered the violence
of the state in their struggle against regional elites and oil companies; in
Guatemala, autonomy also circulates amidst other discourses of elite control. This transnational autonomy discourse is energized by real and virtual networks linking nodes of European, Latin American, and North
American liberal and libertarian think tanks. 17
In Bolivia, this new autonomy seeks to fracture indigenous-popularnational unity by driving a wedge between indigenous peoples and
between the popular urban-rural articulation that sustains nationalist
agendas. Against national indigenous unity, departmental autonomists
suggest that their indigenous peoples (our ethnicities) are in a relation of harmonic mestizaje with the dominant Cruceo criollo ethnicity,
a move that has support of some indigenous leadership (Lowrey 2006).
This creates convenient enemies within the region: the Andean migrant or
disloyal local indigenes who support the plurinationalist agenda.
Deploying an idiom of ethnic cleansing unprecedented in Bolivia, rightwing autonomists speak of Quechua and Aymara migrants in eastern
Bolivia as ethnic cysts and hostile ethnics (Muoz Garca 2002). It has
been a short step to suggest that in eastern Bolivia the countrys president
is illegitimate (by virtue of Evo Morales Andean identity), and regional
leaders have boisterously threatened to deny the president pisada (the
right to step onto regional territory). The privileging of the city as the
center of citizenshipand the rescaling of colonial idioms of rurality and
indigeneity as subject spaces and bodiesweakens urban-rural alliances.
The threat of undesirable bodies, the delegitimization of national sovereignty based on ethnic origins, and an apical model of city-centric citizenship that replicates colonial spatiality, all fuel calls for civil disobedience
and the ethnicized violence I described abovetactical procedures in
pursuit of a de facto sovereignty (Hansen and Stepputat 2006).
References to indigenous rights in the (extralegal) departmental autonomy statute of the right are illustrative. The first article on indigenous
rights reads:
Article 161. Recognition
In agreement with the ILO Convention 169 and the UN Declaration on
Indigenous Peoples, the cruceo people [of Santa Cruz] recognizes
with pride its majoritarian mestizo racial condition and to that meas1008
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BRET GUSTAFSON
POSTSCRIPT
As this article went to press, another round of right-wing violence led to assaults by
paramilitary gangs on the Guaran in the south in April, 2008 and the killing of more
than a dozen peasant and indigenous farmers in the northern Amazonian Pando on
September 11, 2008. These killings sparked national and international outrage against
the right-wing autonomist opposition, forcing them to give their tacit support to call a
referendum on the new plurinational constitution, held in January of 2009. The constitution was approved, and as above, tactically re-appropriates autonomy discourse
into its legal framework, weakening elite usages of the term. Bolivia now faces legal
and political struggles described above, while confronting resource extraction, stubborn inequalities, and a still powerful neoliberal agenda.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This article is based on fieldwork in southeastern Bolivia in 2005-2006 and 2008-2009
carried out with support from Washington University in St. Louis. It has had incarnations
in conferences at Duke University, Syracuse University, Northwestern University,
Washington University, and the 2007 American Anthropological Association meetings.
For feedback and facilitation of exchanges, I thank Robert Albro, Jason Cross, Arturo
Escobar, Niki Fabricant, Mara Elena Garca, Shane Greene, Joshua Kirshner, Mabel
Moraa, Andrew Orta, Tom Perrault, Joanne Rappaport, and Thea Riofrancos. A special
thanks to Bjrn Sletto and Daniel Goldstein for insightful commentary, Efran Tinta of
Fundacin Tierra for TCO shape files, and Fernando Garcs for comments on the Pact of
1011
Unity. I borrow manipulating cartographies from Prada (2007). I appreciate the comments of the editor and reviewers of AQ, and thank Jay Levi for spearheading this effort.
Finally, I thank both David and Pia Maybury-Lewis for their inspiration and affection.
ENDNOTES
1
Bolivia is divided into nine departments, each subdivided into provinces and municipalities.
By indigenous I refer to those who identify with one of Bolivias 36 Amerindian ethnolinguistic identities, 57% of the population according to the 1992 census. The largest are
the Quechua (2.3 million), Aymara (1.2 million), and Guaran (70,000) (Gustafson 2009).
As Comaroff and Comaroff write (2001:13), autonomy in this sense suggests on the one
hand a [d]econtextualization, the distantiation from place and its sociomoral pressures [which] is an autonomic impulse of capitalism at the millennium, and on the
other, given the dependence of capital on natural resource extraction and city-centered security and processing apparatuses, a hyper-contextualizing cultural project
that mobilizes parochial sentiments and middle-class anxieties and vulnerabilities in
defense of regional space (ibid:12).
The United States, New Zealand, Canada, and Australia voted against it. In November
of 2007, the Bolivian congress endorsed the declaration as law.
In everyday Bolivian discourse, razas (races) are spoken of in ethnic and regional
terms. A colonial paradigm of race (arranging bodies on an evolutionary scale from
whites to Indians and Blacks) is crosscut by regional paradigms of race, in which different criollo-mestizo (non-indigenous) and indigenous subjects are deemed to also possess distinct biosocial characteristics (beauty, laziness, stinginess, etc.) defined less by
skin color than by naturalized (in relation to the land) and regionalized histories of
colonialism. During corporatist rule, regional identities were mobilized in prebendal
battles for patronage, such that state jobs were reserved for those in their place of origin (invoking regional specificity), while generally excluding indigeneities (invoking
colonial racism). Indigenous resurgence is dismantling the colonial racial paradigm,
while an elite defensive tactic involves retrenchment of regionalist categories of race
and mestizaje, effectively rescaling coloniality to departmental levels. On Santa Cruz
particular imaginings of race, see Lowrey (2006) and Gustafson (2006).
The Inter-American Human Rights Commission also observed this neoliberal vacuum
of judicial recourse for native peoples (OAS 2007:255-256).
10
I thank Alfredo Rada, Marcelo Arandia, and Fernando Garcs for contributions to this
understanding.
11
This modified Foucaultian rethinking of power that worked through a ground-up dismantling of colonialism is explicit in plurinationalist intellectual tracts (see Prada
2007).
12
Smith-Morris (2006) offers a critique of the deployment of autonomy as individual
choice vs. autonomy as indigenous self-determination in a Native (North) American
1012
BRET GUSTAFSON
context. See also Sawyer (2004), who describes the tension between liberal claims to
legal equality and plurinationalist visions in Ecuador.
14
Manifestos from continental meetings in Teotihuacn, Mexico (2000) and Quito (2004)
did not invoke plurinationalism other than in reference to Ecuador.
14
The convocation for the 2005 national decolonization of education congress showed a
map of Bolivia as a mosaic of indigenous and non-indigenous faces framed by drawings of
insurrectionary heroes with the iconic profile of Che Guevara at the center.
15
16
There is another autonomy trajectory with a Marxian, rather than a Liberal genealogy
(c.f. Lotringer and Marazzi 2007 [1980]). Some rightist autonomists describe themselves
as having leftist genealogies (S. Antelo, personal communication). Yet beyond the invocation of civil disobedience and appropriation of popular movement tactics, there is little
in the way of left in Bolivias urban-centered departmental autonomy project.
17
Including the Liberal Network for Latin America (RELIAL) and European and American
think-tanks such as Cato, the Heritage Foundation, Friedrich Naumann Stiftung,
Manhattan Institute, and the Atlas Foundation.
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