Ten years ago in the issue celebrating the 50^th anniversary of the journal Tareas, Adolfo Gilly examined Bolivian reality in a way that is still valid at the present time. We’ll take advantage of this space to reproduce some extracts concerning the racial war that the sister country is going through.

“According to the vice President Álvaro García Linera (in 2006), what is now happening is “a broadening of the elite sector, a broadening of rights and a redistribution of wealth. This, in Bolivia, is a revolution”.

According to Gilly, “what is happening is something much deeper and goes beyond the elites, politics and the economy. It is challenging the very foundations of the historical domination of these elites, old and new”. It comes from way below, is moved by a very ancient anger, and it will not be detained by the massacres of the fascist gangs.”

The massacre of Pando, more than twenty years ago, with more than 30 campesinos assassinated in cold blood by the hit men of the white minority, announced their plans. “Bolivia knows very well what is at stake: the power of the white minority is not negotiable, their lands are not to be taken, their right of despotic command resides in the colour of their skin, not in the citizens’ vote. The white minority is not willing to ‘broaden’ this despotic right in any way, and is supported, moreover, by sectors of poor whites whose only ‘property’ is the colour of their skin that separates them from the Indians.  Much less are they willing to redistribute property or wealth.”

“The Bolivian right, the old and not so old elites, the masters and lords of lands and lives - said Gilly - were defeated by the immense popular and indigenous revolt that began with the war over water in 2000, reached a peak with the rebellion of El Alto in 2003 and led to the accession of Evo Morales to the Presidency in January 2006".

This minority knows very well that these are not mere “democratic openings” but a revolution that questions their power and their privileges, the “hereditary tradition” of their despotic command. A revolution is one of those culminating moments in which the insurgent movement of the people touches the very foundations of domination, it seeks to destroy it and to break through the dividing line of this domination.

This is not the line that separates governors and the governed, a political matter, but that which separates the dominant from the subaltern. The classical name of social revolution refers to the subverting of this social domination, which is not only political or economic.

This dividing line is clear and deep in Bolivia. It is not only class domination, that does exist. It is above all racial domination that took shape since the Colony and was confirmed in the oligarchic Republic as from 1825.

“In this domination - says Gilly - to be a citizen with full rights means being white or an assimilated mestizo. To accede to being a citizen, an Indian must cease to be an Indian and identify and be recognized as white. (They must) break with their concrete historical community, that of the Aymaras or Quechuas, the Guarani or another of the many Bolivian indigenous communities. (Then they can) enter as a recently arrived subordinate into the abstract community of citizens of the Republic”.

This force also comes from the hereditary tradition of the dominated and subaltern who rise up to conquer all the rights that this racial Republic denies or limits them: dignity or respect, spaces of freedom and organization, natural resources of their land, education, health care. This is not just a new political or economic order.  It is a question of what, in the Bolivian context, would constitute a new social order. Hence the bestial violence of the reactions of the privileged minorities and their hired assassins.

(The Indian majorities) “have been able to see live and in full colour the threat of a return of the past. They will not allow that. They have enough experience and organization to know how to respond to violence with violence if those who govern them, from whom they expect but also demand it, do not stop and chastise the criminals, the only sensible and effective outcome that could come emerge from the negotiations in the present relation between the forces in confrontation”. (Source: Adolfo Gilly, 2010, “Racism, domination and revolution in Bolivia” Tareas, No. 134).

05/12/2019

(Translated for ALAI by Jordan Bishop)

- Marco A. Gandásegui, Jr., is Professor of Sociology with the University of Panama and Researcher associated with the Centro de Estudios Latinoamericanos Justo Arosemena (CELA)