The right to rebellion is the faculty every people has to protect themselves from tyranny. This right is older than the notion of the modern State or the State of Law.

In the Middle Ages, several scholars (Francisco de Suárez, among others) argued for this right to even include tyranicide. That is to say, theologically, it would be justified to even assassinate the tyrant in order to preserve popular sovereignty.

In modern times, the French Revolution consecrated popular rebellion as a fundamental human right. Thus, in the present and diverse Latin American constitutionalism, the right to rebellion of peoples threatened or affected in their basic rights is incorporated as in the case of Venezuela or Ecuador. In other cases, it appears as the “right to resistance” (in Guatemala, for example).

In political philosophy, the right to rebellion is justified by the sovereignty/power that every people has, as a political subject, to undertake their own destiny. From the legal perspective, rebellion is the faculty that every subjugated people has to preserve or restore their rights that are threatened or violated.

Popular rebellion is necessarily a violent action against a tyrant who usurps or massacres the peoples. In this sense, armed guerrilla action is a constitutive part of the right to rebellion pertaining to oppressed peoples. A subjugated people that forgets or resists their right to armed rebellion is a bastion of slaves.

The recent suggestion or call that Evo Morales made “to organize armed militias in Bolivia” in order to restore rights in the face of the present Dictatorship, discursively fits into the juridical philosophy of the exercise of the right to popular rebellion.

The reaction of the Bolivian Dictatorship and their supporters in the face of the declarations of Morales is consistent with the behaviour of every tyrant. They are convinced that they were sent for some ‘unknown purpose’ to restore/normalize domination in the name of democracy. Moreover, any suggestion or instigation for subordinate peoples to exercise their right to rebellion will be resisted/sanctioned as a sacrilege against their democracy.

Nor is there anything new in the reaction or reception of the traditional middle classes, the corporate media or the analysts who have accommodated to the Dictatorship, towards the violent response of the Bolivian tyranny against the possibility of the popular exercise of the right to rebellion.

The inconclusive histories of the subordinate peoples of Bolivia are paved with great rebellions in defence of their collective rights. Tupac Katari (XVIII Century), Zárate Willka (XIX Century), Revolutión Nacional (XX Century), to mention some. Possibly the “process of change” undertaken on December 18, 2005, until November 10, 2019, was the only democratic (non-violent) uprising. Subaltern Bolivia, for now scourged by the post-coup Dictatorship, should recognize its unfinished histories without much sentiment of guilt.

15/01/2020

(Translated for ALAI by Jordan Bishop)

- Ollantay Itzamná, Latin American Defender of the rights of Mother Earth and Human Rights

https://ollantayitzamna.com/

@JubenalQ