The Revolutionary Traditions of the Andes III: Race, Nation, Soul, Ch'ixi
By the millennium, Andean revolutionary traditions begin to diverge dramatically from each other. The revolutionary impulse's soul can no longer be identified only with right or left, race or nation.
An Interview with Felipe Quispe, the Mallku [December 2005]
By Jorge Bernstein
A major leader of Bolivia’s Indigenous movements explains his way of thinking about politics in Bolivia, the Andes, América, and the world.1
This interview was conducted at the end of last year [2005]. Since then some things have changed in Bolivia. The government now has an origin of popular legitimacy that has not existed in that country in the last decades. However, the dominant economic interests have not been displaced, especially those that rose or consolidated during the neoliberal era that began in the mid-1980s. It was against that regime that throughout the current decade a succession of popular rebellions was unleashed coinciding with the decline of the traditional political leadership. In addition, the military apparatus demonstrated its impotence to crush or stop the revolts. Then the door was opened to what the media called the "progressive alternative,” its incarnation was MAS [Movimiento al Socialismo; Movement for Socialism] under the leadership of Evo Morales, whose strategy was based on carrying out reforms through the existing institutional system. And then, consequently, he rejected the insurrectionary inclinations of the organizations that had been at the head of the rebellions, among them the CSUTCB (Central Sindical Única de los Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia [The United Syndical Center of the Working Campesinos of Bolivia]) led by Felipe Quispe, the “Mallku.” His name is a symbol of rebellion for widespread sectors of the Andean original peoples but also the object of virulent, viscerally racist repudiation by the Bolivian elites. For them he expresses like few others the social demon that they seek to exorcise once and for all. They could not achieve it with repression, now they believe that they will be able to achieve it through a complicated gatopardista game that disarticulates, demobilizes, demoralizes the bases and their structures. While Evo Morales pulls off with his planned reformist swing, encouraging some, disconcerting others, irritating many, launching media gestures, leaders like the Mallku hope to overcome the progressive muddle by affirming themselves on the profound reality of their land.
When I completed the interview that we are publishing now, there were a few days left before the elections that consecrated Evo Morales. The Mallku demonstrated in a previous conversation his total skepticism regarding the institutional path that the MAS was about to undertake, the antithesis of their revolutionary aspirations. We decided by common accord to focus our conversation on some strategic issues without having to stop touching on current affairs.
If we read the speech given by Evo Morales in Tiwanaku, during the ceremony staged the day before his inauguration as president, it will not fail to draw our attention that there is only one Bolivian leader mentioned by name and surname: Felipe Quispe, the Mallku. And he did it to ask him to join his government. The negative reaction of the Indigenous leader was not long in coming. He considers that the “progressive” project of Evo Morales is destined to fail and that in reality it is part of the governance strategy of the dominant elites. These are two diametrically opposed personalities. Evo Morales is a composer, a cultivator of media gestures, of confused political origin and that except in the enthronement of Tiwanaku, he never ran as an Indigenous leader but as a "social" driver or as a "Bolivian politician.” Mallku, on the contrary, is an Indigenous historical leader who has made indigenismo the foundation of his life, his trajectory has no zigzags, he rejects the existing institutional system, he disbelieves the “reformist” whims of Evo Morales and affirms over and over again that the only viable alternative for those from below is revolution. The international media have focused their expectations on the current president, ignoring Mallku. Even the curious mention from Evo Morales in Tiwanaku did not deserve any comment in the media.
Jorge Bernstein (Director of the magazine “Enfoques Críticos,” Buenos Aires)
Enfoques Críticos: About half a century ago the periphery was shaken by a wave of nationalist revolutions. Nasserism in the Arab world, Peronism in Argentina and in Bolivia the nationalist revolution of 1952 whose main leader, [Víctor] Paz Estenssoro, ended up later becoming a neoliberal lord several decades later. In Argentina, Peronism did not make the socialist mutation that some expected in the 60s and 70s but instead a neoliberal reconversion in the 1990s under the leadership of [Carlos] Menem, a similar transformation suffered by the PRI [Partido Revolucionario Institucional; Institutional Revolutionary Party] in Mexico and [Gamal Abdel] Nasser's successors in Egypt. In this context… why did the nationalist revolution fail in Bolivia?
Mallku: First of all, it is necessary to point out that in the Revolution of '52 the main actor was the working class, especially the miners and factory workers, they made that revolution, the former combatants of the Chaco War who were prepared for armed struggle played a decisive role, while we were still tied up in the countryside, chained by the feudalists, the gamonales, the "rosca” (as the most concentrated oligarchy was called at that time). But after the Revolution of '52, approximately since 1953, actions were developed in the communities, the peasants began to kill the bosses, even in some places they put them in the oven, roasted them like pigs. It was then in the face of these uprisings that the MNR (the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement), already in government, was forced to dictate the Agrarian Reform on August 2, 1953. Since that time the Indigenous awakening began, although before that, in the First Indigenous Congress of 1945, the slogan “Lands to the Indian, mines to the State” had been raised, taken up by the leaders of the MNR in 1952, the “doctores” Víctor Paz Estenssoro and Hernán Siles Suazo, and Juan Lechín Oquendo, who led that revolution. But who made their triumph with their weapons?: the workers, but who did they fight for?: for people who later became neoliberal. The workers exerted strong pressure, popular militias appeared in the communities, in the mines, in the cities, the people were armed. Out of fear of these weapons the new government nationalized the mines, dictated the Agrarian Reform, universal suffrage, educational reform and other conquests. However, with the passage of time the revolution failed, the same Paz Estenssoro issued the neoliberal decree 21.660 that devastates the workers, 20 thousand miners were thrown into unemployment, something similar happened with factory workers, temporary contracts were generalized, there was no longer a minimum of security or certain guarantees for the workers. This is how we arrived at the current situation, largely because of Victor Paz Estenssoro and his followers.
The Indigenous Awakening and the Decline of the Bourgeois Country
EC: But it was in the 80s that the MNR showed its neoliberal mutation, as happened shortly after with Peronism in Argentina, and it was at that time that an opposite process developed, a new phenomenon in Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, the surprising awakening of the deep Andean population, of the original peoples ... something began to emerge that breaks with the classic model of nationalist popular revolutions or reforms. What are the causes of the phenomenon? What is your relationship with the failure of nationalism, for example the one led by the MNR in Bolivia?.
Mallku: The MNR was born around 1942 in Viacha, its founders were Paz Estenssoro, Juan Lechín Oquendo, Hernán Siles Suazo.
EC: Linked to the Argentine nationalists, isn't that right?
Mallku: That's right, they had relations with the GOU [Grupo de Oficiales Unidos; United Officers’ Group], with Juan Domingo Perón, with the PRI of Mexico, and with similar expressions from other countries. Anyway, at the beginning the MNR flag was very "red” but with the passage of time it was losing color, it became more pink, almost white, now it is neoliberal. In 1964 the MNR was in pieces, Paz Estenssoro had to organize a “nationalist” popular political front in 1971, little by little he was returning to the government, he set up a front with the Bolivian Socialist Falange [Falange Socialista Boliviana] (an extreme right party) supporting Hugo Banzer Suarez (former military dictator) and after a while he returned to power. But already fully identified with neoliberalism, he began raising the slogan “Bolivia does not die” and finally occupies the leadership of the Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada movement that is then delivered to the private hands of state-owned companies such as ENTEL, Comibol (Corporación Minera Boliviana), YPFB (Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales Bolivianos), Lloyd Aereo Boliviano, ENFE (Empresa Nacional de Ferrocarriles del Estado). Meanwhile, at the end of the 80s, we organized the “red ayllus” (grassroots peasant organizations). At that time there were the Communist Party of Bolivia, the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party, the Socialist Party and other parties that confronted us because according to them we were extreme ultras, we talked about armed struggle. And in the ‘90s we went public with our own name and surname, we carried out revolutionary actions inscribed in a stage of propagandizing our acronym... at that time the left was absent. Then I was in prison between 1992 and 1997, and in 1998 I assumed the leadership of the CSUTCB (Confederación Sindical Única de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia [United Syndical Federation of Working Campesinos of Bolivia]), then we already began to develop our “actions,” the blockades. There were two positions in the CSUTCB, on the one hand there were the "alejistas” (for the leader Alejo Veliz), who intended to lead the CSUTCB, and on the other the group of Evo Morales, who did not want to make blockades, did not want to take a radical position... he maintained that with marches and hunger strikes we could obtain our demands. In 1999 the congress of the workers' center (the COB, Central Obrera Boliviana) was held and the division took place. They stayed in the Central Obrera and the peasants who had brought about 200 delegates had to withdraw, since that time the Workers' Central had been faltering. We made an important mobilization in April 2000, we did not achieve anything but in September we went out again and achieved some demands. They gave us this headquarters (where the CSUTCB is now installed), we made a qualitative leap, we became the reference of the Indigenous peoples. Now other Indigenous peoples in Mexico, Ecuador, Chile are organized, some are carrying out armed struggle, there are also Indigenous organizations in Paraguay, Brazil, Panama, recently an International Congress of Indigenous Peoples was held in Mexico, I was there personally. The following resolution was adopted: in the countries where we are in the majority we have to take power by any means, either by the “democratic” way or by the armed way. What are the countries with an Indigenous majority?, five: Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia. In countries where we are a minority, we have to ally ourselves with workers' organizations, with parties of the revolutionary left. As long as there is a poor person, the class struggle will not stop. We are the enemy of the gringos, unfortunately the left has lost strength after the fall of the Soviet Union, although new movements have appeared that are fighting in many places. We are not limited to the struggle for wages or for control of the government, we want the land, the territory, for the gringos that is very dangerous. At present we work the land but we do not own the subsoil, and there is gas, oil, minerals such as gold, silver, zinc, mineral waters, medicinal. We don't own the environment, we have to take it back, it used to be ours. It was the birds, the plants, the air… Our approach is "dangerous" for transnationals, for the gringos, that's why they look at us indigenous people with magnifying glasses. We have to respond to this by internationalizing the Indigenous Indianism originating in Latin America, from Alaska to Patagonia, from the Brazilian Amazon to the Peruvian coasts.
Islam, Mariátegui, Native Peoples
EC: I propose to broaden the view even further, for example by including the Islamic peoples, which extend from Mauritania in the Atlantic Ocean to the Philippines in the Pacific, which there are about 1300 million people of. These peoples are currently experiencing a cultural awakening whose focus is on the so-called ”political Islam" that Westerners usually call Muslim fundamentalism. It is in this area that American aggression reaches its highest point in planetary terms, especially in Iraq and Afghanistan, which are subjected to a terrible genocide, but where the United States is heading towards a gigantic defeat. Do you find links, parallels, between the awakening of the native peoples of America and that of the Islamic peoples? In both cases, the rejection of the individualistic, profit-centered culture typical of Western civilization, opposed to the solidary, communal roots of these peripheral peoples, is evident. A cultural rupture that emerges after the failure of nationalist (in some cases with “socialist” pretensions) or neocolonial modernizing experiences developed after the Second World War. Although in the space of Muslim peoples there were also ideological attempts to unite socialism and Islam in the past, such as the one led by [Mirsaid] Sultan-Galiev, a Tatar communist who participated as a leader in the Russian Revolution and integrated the first Soviet governments. According to [Ahmed] Ben Bella (who considers himself a disciple of Sultan-Galiev) the ideological influence of the latter was enormous in the East (even on Chinese revolutionaries) and still endures. Almost at the same time, the figure of [José Carlos] Mariátegui appeared in Latin América, who sought to root socialism in the cultures of the original peoples.
Mallku: We admire the anti-imperialist struggle of the Islamic peoples, like the one in Iraq, who are confronting the Empire, which never imagined suffering so many setbacks, failure after failure. They are being beaten better than in Vietnam. I have a military background, I know how the gringos work, if ten soldiers die they say one has died, if 100 die they say ten died, from this perspective it is certain that the Americans have many casualties. The behavior of the Iraqi people is an example for all anti-imperialist revolutionaries. We have to look at ourselves in them, as in a mirror, we would like to have relationships, learn from them because we know very well that sooner or later the gringos are going to intervene and the people have to prepare. Years ago José Mariátegui wrote the “Seven [Interpretive] Essays [on Peruvian Reality]” that I read in prison. He tried to Indianize Marxism, it was a valuable contribution that is still in the minds of the indigenistas, the Natives. If the revolutionary movements of Peru had followed Mariátegui I think they might have achieved important successes. On the other hand, some turned towards Maoism, it was an aberration. I know Mao through books, but a plant that you brought from China or from the Soviet Union, you could not plant it successfully here, it did not thrive. We had to change a lot to reach the mobilizations that were unleashed from the year 2000. We had worked since the 1970s and when we arrived at the union leadership it only remained for us to reactivate the cells that we had organized in the communities, still those cells live in some cases they are old cadres. Now we are trying to inject their rebelliousness into the new generation so that they can continue their revolutionary vocation.
The Third Specter
EC: I propose the following reflection: the first "specter of communism" appeared in the nineteenth century, it traveled Europe, it had a European head and body, it was succeeded by a second "communist ghost“ in the twentieth century, it traveled the entire planet, a good part of its body was peripheral but it still had a Western head… is it possible that in the twenty-first century a ”communism" with a peripheral head and body appears?.
Mallku: In our universities the first thing they give us are square pills that come from outside. You are obliged to read [Niccòlo] Machiavelli, if your professor is liberal you must read Adam Smith, [David] Ricardo, [Jean-Jacques] Rosseau, Voltaire and others, if your professor is leftist then he gives you [Karl] Marx's pills, the three volumes [of Capital], for example. I was a soldier in 1964, and a senior non-commissioned officer surnamed Torres, I don't remember his name anymore, a terrible anti-communist, handed me a card stating that Marx was an atheist, that he didn't believe in anything… at the barracks they taught us that the communists were going to take away our wives, our children, our little piece of land, they were going to change our clothes for another made with “gangocho” (plastic burlap bag). Consequently we had to reject the Communist Party, but without realizing it these military men were “working” on me so that I would become a revolutionary. As soon as I left the barracks I went to buy the three volumes of Marx's “Capital,” I read them although I didn't understand much. I also bought the “Manifesto of the Communist Party.” I ended up militating in the National Liberation Army [Ejército de Liberación Nacional] from the late 1960s to the late 1970s. You are right when you talk about these "specters,” the revolutionary movement that is moving on this earth has always had something of the West, of Europe… maybe in the future we will function totally with our own brain based on our communitarian ideals, following the example of our ancestors when people were prepared to live as equals, in equal living conditions, when it was forbidden to go hungry, to dress with patches, to walk dirty, to be lazy. When everyone was working.
At the time of the colony, the bayeta (rustic cloth) was taken from here to Castile where it was dyed and returned to us… why not think about the model of the community ayllu taken to Europe and returned under the name of Marxism?.
Political Changes in Latin América
EC: I would now take the reflection to the current situation. The awakening of the native peoples and other peripheral peoples could be seen as the counterpart of the crisis of the Empire that drags a public debt of 8 trillion dollars, a total debt (State plus more private companies) of 38 trillion dollars, that is, higher than the Gross World Product. The Americans are finding it increasingly difficult to control Latin América, the colonial governance of the region is deteriorating, they could not tame Cuba, Venezuela broke in and now they are worried about what could happen in Bolivia, where there has been a succession of popular rebellions. Then come the elections of December 18th (2005), I personally don't know very well if these elections have been the consequence of the popular rebellions in a positive sense or if in reality they are just a way to divert those rebellions towards the institutional path, seeking that way to sink them into the swamp of the system. There is a strong controversy about it. Now, after the electoral victory of Evo Morales, what is going to happen in the Bolivian crisis? Will it deepen, will there be a truce?
Mallku: First of all, it is necessary to note that the North American Empire is deeply rooted in Latin America. One of its presidents said that if Bolivia or Peru were lost, they would begin to cease to be an Empire. So now they are in a situation of danger. Presidents with certain anti-imperialist characteristics have appeared in the region. I would not say that [Hugo] Chavez is a radical anti-imperialist, in any way, because he has two speeches, with one hand he negotiates, for example he imports transgenic soybeans and with the other hand he bashes imperialism. Neither is the president of Brazil [Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva], even if he is a former worker, he is another neoliberal. Let's have Tabaré Vasquez now… and so we can evaluate president by president and they will continue just like knights of the gringos. In Bolivia everything is controlled by the gringos, it's like in colonial times, the king was in Spain and the viceroys in different places, the same is now: the king is in the United States… because the directives come from there. I remember that on August 19, 1992 I was captured by the "Bolivian state,” I suffered many tortures, the next day at four in the morning I was sitting in front of a group of people and suddenly the phone rings and the one who was interrogating me answers the call and they answer that they are calling from the United States and that they wanted to talk to an officer who was sitting there, they pass the phone to him and he says that if they had already captured me: “Last night we captured him here this.” He looked at me and realized that he was listening to the conversation, then he made me leave. Through this communication the American intelligence was informed that I had been captured. In another case, when we were discussing the issue of GMOs [Genetically Modified Organisms] with a Bolivian minister, the phone suddenly rang. It was a call from the United States where they told the minister that they were not going to let up on that issue, that he could agree on anything else: delivery of tractors, wage increases, social subsidies, etc., but that this issue (GMOs) was taboo. Another example: the National Electoral Court and its computer system are directly connected to the United States. Next Sunday is the elections (we reiterate, this interview was conducted a few days before the elections of December 18, 2005) and Evo Morales may “win.” So now you're asking me, what's going to happen? The workers, the poor people, those of us who have suffered repression want the real (not fictitious) nationalization of hydrocarbons and other natural resources, that is our will, that is why we have mobilized. These elections are the result of the mobilizations, they have not given us anything, now we have a temporary government and from next Sunday we will have another one and if Evo Morales wins, that will be a disaster. Sometimes the enemy of the Indian is the Indian himself, any “mistake” he makes will be tremendous no matter how small it is because he will not be able to correct it. In the past we have had an indigenous vice president, [Víctor] Hugo Cárdenas, who served neoliberalism well. Today people hate him, hate him, spit on him, urinate on him when he goes to the countryside. What is Evo Morales going to do for the people? Very little. In this country, all the political parties of the right have always been political-military, they have two arms, they fight with a "democratic" arm, framed in their own laws, but they have another spleen, the military one. When the “democratic” arm fails, the coup d'état usually comes. Both arms are at the service of the bourgeoisie, capitalism, imperialism, they administer the petty interests of the United States, that's how clear it is. But does Evo Morales have his armed wing? No, he has nothing, because these armed forces respond to the interests of the transnationals.
Crisis and Revolution
EC: That is to say that Evo Morales would be totally powerless in the face of the crisis and real power. In Latin America, the so-called reformists or “progressives” maintain that what is in crisis is “neoliberalism,” but others consider that it is not the crisis of neoliberalism but something deeper, capitalism. My question is the following: are we facing the crisis of neoliberal policies or rather is the whole history of Bolivia as a bourgeois country what is in crisis?.
Mallku: The first liberal who came to these lands was Simón Bolívar, influenced by the ideas of the French Revolution. Since that time and up to the present we have gone from liberalism to neoliberalism. These are many years, one hundred and eighty years. In that period the liberal-neoliberal system has worn out, it doesn't give anything more. A new society is necessary, a socialist society, a communitarian society, but for that we need an organization that leads us to the seizure of power. Then if we want to change the system a revolution will be necessary. That has nothing to do with the projected Constituent Assembly… that's going to be a mental masturbation.
We have to see things clearly. In 1532 the Spaniards arrived in Cajamarca. Of course these gentlemen did not come empty-handed, they did not come bringing flowers but weapons… gunpowder, arquebuses, horses, swords, Bibles, “private initiative,” diseases, vices, defects. And then they expanded in our land, they crushed us, they took away our power the hard way, with the force of arms. In 1825 Simón Bolívar and Antonio José de Sucre did not arrive with flowers either. They had to kill their grandparents, their Spanish parents, settlers and owners of the mines and the laws, to republicanize us, Bolivianize us. Other republics emerged around us such as Peru, Ecuador, Argentina. More than a hundred years later, in 1952, the movimientistas (of the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement) did not arrive with flowers either. They also had to liquidate their grandparents, they even lost their own estates; Walter Guevara had his hacienda in Ayo Payo, Víctor Paz Estenssoro had his in Tarija, Hernán Siles Suazo in Yungas. They executed their nationalist revolutionary plan. I think that another revolution is coming, we are waiting for that. It is a process with many trials but I know that this rebellion, this revolution is going to be carried out and from there we will be able to make the changes concrete, establish a modern, socialist system, where there are neither rich nor poor and we live in conditions of equality.
EC: You have talked about socialism, communitarianism. How would you describe that society, to be built with the revolution?
Mallku: The revolutionaries who have overthrown the old system say that that is easy and that the difficult thing is to build on the ruins of the old system…
EC: Fidel Castro usually says something like that.
Mallku: I know that we can overturn this old system that oppresses us, exploits us and even discriminates against us racially, but in order to be able to build, there has to be a new “amauta” as we say in our culture.
EC: How does one define it?
Mallku: As a new intellectual, a new brain... maybe they’re already out there, they’re a child playing, or maybe they’re in his mother's womb or maybe they’re already a youth. We old people have fought until now, although we still have strength, many revolutionaries are waiting... there has to be a total, definitive change, without rich or poor. At that moment the marches, the blockades, the strikes will end… if I am here with “abarcas” (leather sandals) and you too, if we all consume evenly, why are we going to fight? But if I'm going to earn more money than you, then they're going to tell me that I get too much money, they'll demand equality. In this country a few gentlemen, a small oligarchic minority manages us, they are our eternal rulers, from generation to generation, they are the owners of the factories, the mines, the banks, the laws, the state powers, the army, the police, meanwhile the working masses are exploited, accumulate diseases, are ignorant, lack education, roads, drinking water... We lack everything, to put an end to that we need a revolution.
JB: Would you say that the “new amauta” would be the ”New Man" that Che Guevara was talking about?
Mallku: Exactly, more or less similar to that. Surely Che read some passage from the chroniclers of our past, such as the one that says “the Inka King is going to return.” There is an expression of Tupac Katari: “I will return and I will be millions.” I think we are going to return as millions. In the rebellion of 2003 I admired the people who invaded the streets, but not much could be done, we had no leaders.
EC: It was the outburst of those from below.
Mallku: That's right. But we lacked that new mentor, who could provide a direction, a guide to the revolt. But they will appear in the future rebellions, they will be the Pachakuti, the Khachauru, in Quechua they call them Jatundí, that is our myth, that is the objective.
La Paz, December 13, 2005
Felipe Quispe: Autobiography
“I was born in Ajllata, Omasuyos Province, on August 22, 1942. My original community was taken away by the landowners and the ancestors were subjected to the brutal relations of slavery and exploitation by the feudal bosses.
As one more of the natives in the exclusion zone I studied only the first years and I had to move to Santiago de Huata to get up to 6th Basic, as I was the youngest son. My parents could not help me to continue studying. I was one more victim of the white school system where the Spanish language is imposed with beatings, sit-ins, torture; where speaking in Aymara is prohibited and the Andean hat, the llucho, is ridiculed. In an interview published by the newspaper ”Los Tiempos" of Bolivia, I related that the teacher took off our lluchus (the Andean hats hand-knitted with precious effort and a good for those who have nothing) when we could not sing the national anthem in good Spanish and burned them without caring about the crying of the Indigenous children.
I worked on the land in the community of Ajllata, near the warrior village of Achacachi, and became a peasant leader.
In 1971, when I was occupying the general secretariat of the union of my community, the military coup took place that initiated the bloody dictatorship of the son of the School of the Americas: Hugo Banzer. The death and persecution that the Indigenous people experienced during the Banzer dictatorship was horrific. I had to escape to Santa Cruz, where I was a salaried peasant until 1977.
In 1978 I returned to the city of La Paz and founded the Tupac Katari Indigenous Movement [Movimiento Indígena Tupac Katari] (MITKA), and I was its permanent secretary until 1980 when I was again persecuted by the narcogolpista Luis García Meza. I had to leave for Peru, then I went to Mexico, in 1983 to Guatemala and later to El Salvador, where I was able to live part of the history of that country. In 1983 I returned to Bolivia and in 1984 I was elected as a leader of the Federación Sindical de Trabajadores Campesinos de La Paz and founded the “Ayllus Rojos” movement, the political arm of the grassroots peasant organizations.
In 1988, the "Red Ayllus" presented themselves at the Congress of the Confederación Sindical Unica de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia (CSUTCB) in Potosí with a thesis that proposed a revolutionary path. In the face of centuries of ethnocide and systematic genocide by the white-mestizo state: armed struggle.
The Tupac Katari Guerrilla Army [Ejército Guerrillero Tupac Katari] (EGTK) was formed in 1990 and disbanded in 1992. I was arrested on August 19, 1992 during the government of Jaime Paz Zamora, in the city of El Alto. Interviewed by a fierce and famous journalist, Amalia Pando, I left her speechless when I replied to her aggressive recriminations of the reason for the violence: “So that my daughter is not your employee.”
They called me Mallku (Condor symbolizing the highest communal authority in Aymara), and that's how everyone has known me since that time. I remained in the San Pedro prison until July 17, 1997, when the peasants of the Province of Omasuyos surrounded the prison demanding my freedom. During this period in prison I graduated with a bachelor's degree and started studying history at the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés de La Paz.
A year after my release, at a Unity Congress held on November 28, 1998, I was elected Executive Secretary of the highest peasant organization in Bolivia: the Confederación Sindical Única de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia (CSUTCB). In April 2000, I was arrested and confined to San Joaquín for calling for the first national road blockade demanding the social claims of the Indigenous peoples. In September 2000, a series of national protests began, with tragic victimizations, deaths and injuries among the Aymara and Quechua. The massacres of Parotani, Colomi and Huarina aroused the indignation of the Indigenous, who left the cities without food as a protest. Then, for the first time, a voice was raised to make history, it was my voice speaking for the entire Aymara and Quechua Nation. I shouted the truth of Apartheid in the astonished faces of the representatives of the white-mestizo government: “I am not afraid of being imprisoned again because now I am happy to be the guide of my racial brothers.”
When I was appointed Executive Secretary of the CSUTCB I was aware that I was not only a trade union leader but a representative of the Indigenous nation. That's why I made it clear that I could speak to the current ruler (at that time Banzer), from president to president, from authority to authority. Then the press mocked me. An Indian authority? They laughed. In September 2000, in conditions where the racists couldn't laugh anymore, I publicly insisted on a meeting with Banzer where I would talk to him from president to president and invite him to Indigenous territory where they were preparing a carpet, flowers and perfumes.
On November 14, 2000, before a crowd of 60,000 souls, I founded in the town of Peñas, once the place where Tupac Katari had been dismembered in 1782, the Pachakuti Indigenous Movement [Movimiento Indígena Pachakuti] (MIP) as a political and ideological instrument of the Indigenous nations of Bolivia.
On April 21, 2001 I was ratified again as the Executive Secretary of the CSUTCB.
I am the father of 7 children: Eusebio, Rosario, Patricia, Justina, Dominga, Juan Santos and Felipe. I married Vicenta Mamani. I have completed my studies of the History degree at the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés.
In the history of white-mestizo Bolivia, the exploitation, genocide and ethnocide committed to this day on the flesh of the Natives remains unmentionable. Their highest leaders have died in horrendous ways, burned alive, dismembered, beaten to death. Tortured horribly. History hidden. A veiled history of Indigenous peoples. That's why the white people were afraid when we did the roadblock. They remember the ”Siege of La Paz," a historical event staged in 1781 by Indigenous warriors commanded by Tupac Katari who, after the Spaniards massacred their communities, left the city without food for months. Tupac Katari was quartered by the Spaniards, his head was exposed in pillory and his limbs were sown throughout the great Qollasuyu. Despite his death, Katari returns more and more strongly within his rebellious children under the slogan “I will return and I will be millions."
Ethnocacerism as a Doctrine
By Sandro Jara Coa
A basic explanation of the ethnocacerist movement’s ethics and politics. The movement originally emerged from the indigenista tendency of the Peruvian military-sponsored sections of the ronderos during the 1980-2000 internal conflict.2
We cannot analyze the political, social and economic reality of our country without mentioning ethnocacerism as a contesting political movement, existing in response to an exploitative and traitorous neoliberal system that follows the designs of the predatory government in Washington.
It is in this social and economic political context that Ethnocacerism was born as a political doctrine characterized by an ethnic nationalism that evokes the power and the identity of both the Inka Empire and the nationalism of the Peruvian Armed Forces in the republican era. The first pillar of ethnocacerism is the vindication of the copper race (Indigenous American), which will eventually return to rule over this country of deep contradictions.
The second pillar of ethnocacerism is nationalism, and it therefore has as a representative symbol of the movement the hero of La Breña, Andrés Avelino Cáceres, “the Brujo of the Andes” who led the resistance of the Peruvian Army in the mountains during the Chilean invasion in the War of the Pacific (1879-1883).
Its ideological pillars are the reaffirmation of the Andean identity, the nationalization of Peruvian industry, the legalization of coca cultivation along with a relentless fight against drug trafficking. It understands Peru as a bilingual country (where Quechua and Spanish are co-official) and has as a reference the Government of General Juan Velasco Alvarado (1968-1977), the promoter of the Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces.
In a recent interview given by Major Antauro Humala, he points out the parameters of ethnocacerism as an ideology that seeks to vindicate the copper-colored ethnic groups, specifically the population conglomerate of Quechua-Aymara descent, taking them as hegemonic in the political-cultural field. This implies concretizing the construction of a ”Second Republic“ under ethnic guidelines, whose State rather than representing the superficial or ”fake" country represents the genuine or deep country.
These are the political objectives. As for the ideological, ethnocacerism is framed within a higher category that we will call "ethnonationalism" in which the ethnocultural fact is put before the class factor (class struggle): Manco Cápac before Karl Marx and Adam Smith. Specifically, because it has emanated from the barracks — during the crudest days of the Dirty War—as a response to the military “pentagonization” that applied the formulas of the Far West and Vietnam against the mass of our populations.
The term “ethnocacerism" arises from the binomial composed of ”ethnicity“ and ”cáceres.” The first one claims mestizaje, the cultural guiding axis of ”all the bloods“ in the expression of the Sovereign State; and the second term (”Hunting“) because in the republican chronicle, the campaign of the heroism of Breña led by ”tayta" [Andrés Avelino] Cáceres.
It is following that genuine path, acting as a reserve militia insurgent against the pro-foreign Creole state in Locumba as well as in Andahuaylas, as a way of the “trooper and popular militarism” in opposition against a corrupt, surrendering, and exploitative system.
The Potosí Principle Reversed: Another Look at the Totality (Fragment)
By Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui
An Andean vision of the revolutionary process written by an important Aymara historian. Written to accompany the international exhibition Principio Potosí, curated by Alice Creischer, Max Hinderer and andreas Seikmann, organized by the Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid, May 12 to September 6, 2010), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin, October 7, 2010 to January 3, 2011) and the Museo Nacional de Arte y Museo Nacional de Etnografía y Folclore (La Paz, February to May 2011). Originally published in a chapter of Principio Potosí Reverso (Rivera y El Colectivo, 2010).3
When we proposed to approach the Potosí Principle as a concrete historical totality, located in the Southern hemisphere, we first had to place the colonial paintings selected for the sample on a kind of macroscale map, which traced the ordering routes of that space from the middle horizon to the discovery, in April 1545, of a very high-grade silver vein in Potoxsi, a wak'a or cult site to which the mit'ayos of the Inka came from Porco.
We have resorted to a textile-spatial metaphor, marked by the ritual function of the kipus and the horizon of its power to structure the Andean space on its state horizon. The structuring function of the kipus and the thakhis survives the colonial invasion and re-articulates the territories-spaces of the Andes around new axes or nodes of power: the churches and the patron saints, in a complex and variegated ritual plot.
But it is the experience of that rituality in the present that gives intuitive strength to our desire for reconstitution. It is the feeling of the presence of the mountains, listening to the voices of the landscape, the substrates of memory that speak to us from their summits, the eyes of lakes and water or from their multiple apachitas and paths. Thakhi is a polysemic Aymara word that marks the itinerary of libations, dances and songs on the routes that connect the wak'as with the centers of power of the successive historical horizons of significance and territorialization. The Church and Money, new colonial wak'as, are thus inscribed in a dense and laboriously constructed semantic fabric, connecting distant spaces in a Pan-Andean framework that reactualizes gestures, motives and practices of meaning, which decipher and penetrate through the cracks of colonial violence, rearticulating the unhinged, joining forces to patch up the “network of holes” into which the cosmos was transformed for the people of the Andes.
The paintings and churches that mark the itinerary of our gaze are inscribed in this space. A new modern centralization—that of the museum—functions as a powerful deterritorializing force of its meanings.
The trace of his spatial inscription—the pilgrimages, commemorations and devotions—has been lost; the paintings hang in the void, decontextualized. Paradoxically, the act of expropriation survives, the colonial emblem of its banking accumulation, the circulation of the Andean Baroque as a spectacle and as a commodity of high symbolic and monetary value. The illegal trade in works stolen from chapels and churches is one of the most lucrative items on the contemporary global market. The capitalist circuits of art and the state appropriation of communal patrimonies are nourished by the fissures of the republican states, by their privatization in the hands of the descendants of the encomenderos, heirs of the principle and mechanics of internal colonialism, internalized at the core of the entire structure of domination. We will deal with that patriarchal and totalizing dimension in the part on the right: the white and masculine face of this book.
Its left, dark and feminine face runs inside the lived space of the Andean geography in the cycle of festivals that mark milestones in time/space (pacha). There the images are re-inscribed in the context of the communities of devotees who worship them and dance in their honor; they are inserted into networks of significance that connect them with the dead ancestors, with the water cycles, with the apachitas and celestial phenomena. Also with the cycles of money and the pulsations of the market, with the emblems and new forms of property and power that came from Europe and that today are rebelling in the ch'enko of these insubordinate societies.
The devotions are not specifically professed to the paintings, but to the inspirations they represent. The Virgins and the Saints take root in the Andean cosmos and associate with the contradictory energies of each place, in a palimpsest that discovers diverse horizons of meaning throughout each annual cycle. From the materiality of plaster or oil painting, the holy image is at once singular, multifaceted and multiple. It is not an epiphenomenon of a single, abstract deity. Virgins and saints harbor differences and peculiar connections, meanings and mythical stories brought together, transformed and re-read. The territorial plot is finally inscribed in the bodies, in the ways of drinking, dancing and sharing food and bed. In the way each one feels the powerful force of the sacred in their flesh and in the surrounding space. Carabuco, Caquiaviri, Chuchulaya and Guaqui in the circumlacustrine highlands and San Pedro and El Tata Gran Poder in two nodal cities of this space are the churches/wak'a that articulate our route. The symbolic tasks of the images involve disputes, transfers and refoundations. The cities and their vast transnational diasporas are routes that lead the Urbandinos and cholos qhechumaras to expand their cults and enthrone their saints and virgins in remote confines of the world system.
In each locality, imaginary lines (siqis) depart from the churches towards the summits and chapels of their surroundings. A set of enveloping semantic layers unfolds from this central seed, which is dressed in overlapping materiality. In its Baroque columns and arches you can see the imprint of Indigenous carvers who give ways to figure their cross-dressed deities. The four corners of the square are oriented according to a larger design, which the ritual cycle transcribes in the dancing bodies, in the cult images and in the brotherhoods and ayllus articulated in the marka. We observe its east, its north, its west, its south. We look at the marks in the landscape that surrounds it; the wak'as and greater achachilas that surround it. The roads get lost in the pampas and connect the square with places of worship and with mountains that are not visible, but that every inhabitant has presence, metaphorically and experientially. In the square the dances take place, the partialities and ayllus are interwoven in a game of oppositions and alliances that renew the contentious dynamics of local societies, and that each dancing couple reactualizes in the loving tinku of dance.
A work of millennia has built these sacred territories, which since the sixteenth century have been violated, fragmented and drastically reorganized. The vertical logic of articulation between the highlands, valleys, yungas and the Pacific coast has been imprisoned in successive colonial borders: between towns, provinces, departments and republics. The current smuggling routes, between the Andean territory of Bolivia and its neighbors Peru, Chile and Argentina, evoke this fabric that has often been constituted and reconstituted. A vital layer of the palimpsest continues to organize the territoriality and subjectivity of the Andean people since the sixteenth century: the internal market of Potosí and its substrate of symbolic and material meanings. The siqis, apachitas, thakhis, achachilas and wak'as who preceded it form the visual and imaginary plot of our tour through some of the colonial paintings of the Principio Potosí exhibition.
Baroque ch'ixi
At the festival of Santiago de Guaqui, on July 25, 2009, hundreds of dancers arrived, grouped in eight groups of Morenada, from various parts of the altiplano and even from other countries. The main assistant of the festival, Edgar Limachi, arrived with his wife from the Charrúa neighborhood of Buenos Aires, where he runs a successful textile company that employs many subsidiary workshops. His factory, together with the network of microenterprises that he articulates, hires hundreds of countrymen from the province as piece-rate day laborers. It also gives work to many godchildren and landlords from other localities. It is said that the Limachi family spent fifty thousand dollars in that week of excesses, intense pilgrimages and dancing tours. People did not sleep all night, not only because of their alcoholic enthusiasm, but because of the material impossibility of getting accommodation.
The collective delirium caught fire together with the immense cane frames, those with the fireworks that visually warmed up that exalted day of intense and penetrating cold. A lot of people woke up around campfires, with a cursed ch'akhi. When the first lights of dawn broke, they cured the body with a refreshing cooking of herbs that the women sold in the square. Soon another round of libations with beer began, in preparation for the Mass. At dawn, some families had burned offering tables made by the yatiris, ritualists of the region who are devotees of Lightning. The audience, which in the sunlight had looked with respect at the spectacle of the Morenada troupes, also became, during the night, a motley and dancing crowd. The crowd had been unleashed in loving energies, in fights and in fisticuffs.
All this led to a change of atmosphere: the devotional face of the celebration came out. The emotional harmony of the night made the amuyt'awi resound: the whisper of conjugal, personal and communal languages told what to do, what to ask, what to contradict to claim. The fights and bloody events of the party were perceived as so many other signs, messages from the earth, manifestations of its whims and demands. It is said that the blood spilled on those days because of fights or accidents is an offering to the Tata Santiago/Illapa, the Lightning-Wak’a that comes down from heaven and sinks to earth. It is said that under the Church there is a wak'a-lagoon, in which golden ducks swim. There are two serpents coiled in its towers, and they support the Church and root it to the earth. These snakes are a kind of charm. If someone makes them return to life, the upside-down world will be turned upside down, the reversals of history will be born.
The associate couple of the second pairing is also the owner of a company in the textile sector, but is engaged in large-scale smuggling of fabrics produced in one of the thousands of workshops in an industrial neighborhood in Beijing. The Morenada Central adopted a matraca with the stereotypical figure of the "Chinese" as their emblem, in tribute to its successful “oriental connection” that has allowed them to spend more than thirty thousand dollars to celebrate Tata Santiago. They hired a famous villera cumbia ensemble, which has achieved success in Buenos Aires with its lyrics that speak of the hardships and sufferings of emigration but also of its successes and ventures.
What does all this imply in terms of meanings and resignifications of the Potosí Principle? Can we settle for the dualistic and Manichean image that opposes a mercantile and capitalist west to a South-east of backward—or rebellious—Indians, who resist inertially from their “natural" economy, or erupt spasmodically in cries of pain and vindictive violence? On the opposite pole of reasoning: can we say that we are witnessing the formation of a new globalized, homogeneous citizenship, a kind of transnational mestizaje that would make “hybridity” and indeterminacy its main strength?
We have opposed the idea of the ch'ixi (variegated, spotted) to that of hybridity, in the understanding that the scenario described reveals an active recombination of opposing worlds and contradictory signifiers, which forms a fabric at the very border of those antagonistic poles. The vitality of this recombinatory process widens this border, turns it into a plot and an intermediate fabric, taypi: arena of antagonisms and seductions. These are the border spaces where the ch'ixi performativity of the festival emerges. The notion of Church/Wak'a is affirmed in this contentious and reverberating duality, which sometimes leads to the explosive moment of rebellion and always runs the risk of succumbing to the self-imposed violence of recolonization.
Of Trinities and Demons
The four suyus of the Inka Empire can be thought of as the quadrants of a diagonal cross. But their relations were not framed as territories and maps, nor were they surrounded by borders: “...as in Spain the ancients divided the whole of it by provinces, so these Indians, to count those that were in such a large land, understood it by their ways," comments [Pedro de] Cieza de León ([1550] 2005: 240). This chronicler, a converted Jew who arrived with the first conquerors, describes the songs of the Indies in this way:
"Being deceived by the devil, they worshipped various gods, as all the gentiles did. They use a manner of romances or songs, with which they are left with memory of their events, without their being forgotten, although they lack lyrics" (Ibid: 259).
Song and path are in qhechumara paired heteronyms: takiy-thakhi. They allude to a sonorous territoriality, which moves through space-time. The thakhis of memory evoke the imaginary lines called "ceques" (siqis), which were described by Barnabas Cobo. These unique visual formations were paths of libations and rites that started from each ceremonial center and led, through radial lines, to a network of wak'as, seat of the memory of the mythical ancestors. Shrines erected by humans, the wak'as could also be signs sprouted from the earth, snowy peaks, places touched by lightning, water eyes, rocks of strange shapes. In the warrior society—the awqa pacha, which preceded the Inkas—the wak'as assumed a political and corporate face.
With this qhipnayra look at the density of language and space, we want to understand the imaginary of colonization as a self-fulfilling prophecy, in which the violence of conquest was formulated in terms of a symbolic dispute. Both societies faced the challenge of transmuting geography into some form of the intelligible. The one understood their task as that of dominating and extirpating. The other understood it as a gesture of restitution and reconstitution. The ones brought syncretic cults already long ago tied to the letter of the divine word and to the scholasticism of a patriarchal God. The other traveled through the colonial and postcolonial centuries walking, dancing and producing life on that semantic density inscribed in the landscape, in the cosmos, in the pacha. In the akapacha of the neoliberal present and in the midst of the ”theology of the total market" one can still discover the senses and traces of this primordial tinku and read the plot of the intermediate, contentious and stained space that would have arisen from this encounter/combat. The songs and paths of the present reveal the deep threads of that palimpsest. Successive layers and state, colonial and (post)colonial patches are reflected in the clothes of each Devil or Dancing Moreno. In the variegated and confusing space of today's city, the symbolic stem cells, the combinatorial logic that underlies our linguistic and bodily practices, have not been erased.
The authorities, masculine and feminine, in the current Andean communities are called mallkus and t'allas. Their own body seems to replicate the sacred configuration of the landscape: mallku is the name of the revered peaks, t'alla that of the fertile, food-giving pampas. Its metonymy is the central square of the town: the t’alla mayor, the floor that holds the collective dance. The tower of the church is the mallku, with its bells and all. Mallku is also the name of the condor, sacred bird of the summits. It was reactivated by the communal authorities of the entire altiplano, in the Indigenous siege of the years 2000-2003 and is the alias of its most famous leader [Felipe Quispe]. This mobilization, like that of [Túpac] Amaru-[Túpac] Katari in the eighteenth century, culminated in a siege of the centers of power that almost broke the territorial control of the Bolivian state. The motley Indigenous polis resurfaced and sought to become a decolonizing state order, although the old battle between reason and senti-thought ended up turning such a purpose into a mere statement.
With this experience, lived and thought in the flesh for more than twenty years, we launched ourselves to draw an intellectual thakhi that does not succumb to the truculence and horror of the emptiness of the Spanish Baroque. But neither should it make concessions to that irresistible disorder of postmodern cultural squares, which deterritorialize and surround with emptiness that which they do not understand. Our absence wants to be a presence that helps us to think backwards: from the jayamara to the qhipnayra through the amuyt'awi.
This is the space of the Qullasuyu, above is the south and below is the north. In the center, in the lower/left quadrant, the greater wak'a Titiqaqa and its sacred lake circuit. Mythical origin of the founding ancestors of the Inka state, this immense water hole is the center to which the wak’as of Guaqui, Caquiaviri, Carabuco and Chuchulaya converge. The aquatic axis forms an intermediate space, at the same time a transcultural and colonial taypi brand, articulating the mercantile routes between Qusqu and Potosí, through the roads/kipus that knotted coca with silver. The new commercial language made it possible to reactivate one of the oldest associations in mediation with the sacred: the entheogenic intake and the mineral illa, the ways of going back and forth from colonial oppression.
As in any journey, the structure of time is also expressed in this geography: its cycles and alternations between one state and another. In effect, a calendar is constructed, which is at the same time an order of traversed spaces and successive or overlapping ritual cycles.
The colonial pachakuti of the sixteenth century brought to these lands the new world of the uprooted subject. The Andean people deployed an immense labor, productive and hermeneutic, to domesticate and root the foreign gods, their coins and symbols, in a permanent autopoiesis of their own communal condition. In hiding, under the cover of the night, in the privacy of the room or the suburban neighborhood, in the shrines and churches of the imposed Catholicism, the silenced wak'as come back to life. The social frameworks of memory, the polysemy of a few agglutinating languages and the inscription of the sacred in the materiality of the landscape form the basic matter of a transformative practice that has allowed us to return the gaze through the centuries.
The ancient coins minted in Potosí were called makukina when they were used for trading, and phaxsima or phaxsimama (moon mother) when they were the object of rites for the fertility of money. The lightning was the violence of the conquering sword but also the free gold of heavenly generosity. The rites, dances and songs of the festivities to the patron saints form a ch'ixi space, which widens the boundaries of the medium as a civilizing textile. The icon object of devotions embodies a gesture of semiotic subversion against the totalizing principle of colonial domination. It is not a pure icon, nor a talisman: it is the wide garment woven by the palimpsest of a collective historical praxis.
Jorge Bernstein and Felipe Quispe, “Entrevista a Felipe Quispe, el Mallku,” Espai Marx, April 18, 2006, https://espai-marx.net/?p=421.
Sandro Jara Coa, “Etnocacerismo como doctrina,” Antauro, no. 1, Edición Especial (December 2016), Calameo.
Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, “Principio Potosí Reverso. Otra mirada de la totalidad (fragmento) [2010],” in Sociología de la imagen: Miaradas ch’ixi desde la historia andina, by Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui (Buenos Aires, Argentina: Tinta Limón, 2015), pp. 221–231.