Chapter 7 ‘We are the air, the land, the pampas …’: campesino politics and the other-than-human in highland Bolivia 1970–90

Conceptualising the other-than-human in Latin America

Scholars have noted that unsettled boundaries – or ‘leaky’ distinctions to use Donna Harraway’s term from A Cyborg Manifesto¹⁴ – between the other-than-human and human in Latin America long preoccupied the colonial imaginary.¹⁵ Interactions between humans and animals, and indeed other nonhuman beings have indeed been central to narratives of Latin American histories.¹⁶ The sixteenth-century Spanish Jesuit missionary José de Acosta, for example, extensively chronicled relations between people and animals in South America, noting that the inhabitants of then-Peru ‘worship bears, lions, tigers and snakes to prevent them from harming them’. Acosta was baffled by the ascribing of agency to nonhuman beings by the Indigenous peoples he encountered: ‘They make another offering that is no less absurd, which is to pull out their eyelashes or eyebrows and offer them to the sun, or to the hills, and apachitas (piles of stones which mark sacred, liminal spaces in Andean mountains) to the winds or other things that they fear’.¹⁷

De Acosta’s account reveals how the ritualised offerings practised by Indigenous peoples endowed the other-than-human beings – the hills and the sun – with sentience. It therefore raises the theoretical question of how to relate Indigenous ontologies with geographical conceptualisations of nonhuman agency. Hailstorms, floods and animal-beings perhaps offer a different exercise in conceptualising agency from that of intangible spiritual entities, or earth-beings, such as achachilas (Aymara ancestral mountain spirits). Mario Blaser argues that the tensions between notions of more-than-human agency and Indigeneity can be partially reconciled through a field of enquiry he terms ‘political ontology’, which entails a commitment to the pluriverse or ‘the partially connected unfolding of worlds’.¹⁸ He proposes that envisaging a political space defined by the interaction of multiple ontologies, other-than-human and human, goes some way to collapsing the tensions between geographical posthumanism and Indigenous perspectives on the nonhuman derived from ethnography. Through this chapter I address a connected question; building on Blaser, how do nonhuman beings emerge within an Indigenous-campesino ‘pluriversal’ politics in Latin America?

Spanish colonisation of Bolivia from the outset was bound up with a violent reordering and division of space and territory.¹⁹ The existence of nonhuman agency and natural space is thus an important historical dimension to decolonial struggles in Latin America. I argue that the katarista peasant movement developed a politics of the environment which explicitly recognised the relationship between coloniality and the environment and acknowledged that colonialism had deprived both humans and other-than-humans of agency. In making this point, I engage closely with the rich body of research into animal-human histories, and particularly Philip Howell’s work on ‘ascribed agencies’ in relation to animal history.²⁰ Howell makes the point that the question is not whether nonhuman animals have agency, because they certainly do, but what form this takes in historical scholarship. Ascribed agencies are characterised, for example, as narratives written by humans about named animals.²¹ We might apply this to other-than-human beings more widely. Accordingly, this chapter is about human actors speaking about nonhuman beings in terms which explicitly recognise their agency as historical subjects.

An additional conceptual ballast for this chapter’s arguments derives from the large body of anthropological literature on Indigenous cosmologies in Latin America. In recent decades, the Latin American ethnographic record has been clear on the far-reaching relations between humans and nonhuman beings and has problematised the nature-culture divide embedded in dominant Western epistemologies.²² One focus of this literature has been on how environmental conflicts over extractive projects, which accelerated in the neoliberal era, have given new visibility to Indigenous perspectives on the natural world.²³ There is thus a close link posited between indigeneity and the natural world. These anthropological studies also share parallels with the theories of human–nonhuman relations based on ‘relational’ ontologies arising from a field known as Science and Technology Studies (STS), exemplified in Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory, for example,²⁴ or Isabelle Stengers’s ‘cosmopolitics’.²⁵

However, the perspectives outlined here have not been applied to the past specifically, nor in analysing the ways in which human–animal–landscape relations have changed over time (or not) and formed part of concurrent historical processes. In the Andean case, there has been little attempt by historians to grapple with the question of other-than-human beings and nature as historical actors. These anthropological approaches could allow historians to accommodate nonhumans within historical narratives as actors with agency. From a human-centred historical perspective, engaging with emergent multidisciplinary theories on the nonhuman serves to enrich the human stories under scrutiny by giving full scope to the plethora of relations with nonhumans that mark human life. A question I explore here is, then, the possibility to centre the nonhuman in the discourse and activity of the organised campesino movement in Bolivia. How could this enrich understanding of the trajectory of peasant-Indigenous politics in the region?

To address this, I apply the insights of the anthropological work by Marisol De la Cadena to an historical analysis of the peasant movement between 1970 and 1990 in highland Bolivia. Her work is particularly propitious for the purposes of this study because it is situated at the porous margins of organised peasant politics and highland Peruvian Indigenous worlds. She argues that in positioning nonhuman entities as political actors, ecological struggles waged by Indigenous peoples (such as in mining disputes concerning the sacred mountain Ausangate, Peru) hence have the potential to ‘exceed the notion of politics as usual’.²⁶ ‘In the story I am telling’, De la Cadena explains,

land was ‘not only’ the agricultural ground from where peasants earned a living – it was also the place that tirakuna [people of the ayllu] with runakuna [nonhuman people] were … As the convergence of both, land was the term that allowed the alliance between radically different and partially connected worlds. The world inhabited by leftist politicians was public; the world of the ayllu, composed of humans and other-than-human beings, was not – not – or was only public in translation.²⁷

In other words, terms such as ‘land’ can possess multiple meanings which are deployed in selective ways in the peasant movements’ interactions with the state and other actors. The world of conventional politics is public; in other words, it is official, state-oriented and marked by colonial inheritances. In doing so, De la Cadena’s work complicates approaches to peasant movements which, if seen through a Eurocentric gaze, may find them belonging to a solely material arena, or would find incommensurate the presence of nonhuman political actors such as mountains.

Bolivia’s powerful social movements have commanded significant interest from anthropologists and political scientists in recent decades following to the highly successful ‘Indigenous politics’ of the ex-president Evo Morales and his social movement-backed party the Movimiento al Socialismo. Indeed, the rise of Indigenous political movements in Latin America in the 1990s has been closely linked with an environmental agenda.²⁸ In the Morales era (2006–19), ‘buen vivir’ (‘suma qamaña’ in Aymara) or living well in harmony with nature was consolidated as a guiding principle of the decolonising Bolivian state, at least at the discursive level.²⁹ This is exemplified in the promulgation of a 2009 Plurinational Constitution and the 2010 ‘Law of the Rights of Mother Earth’ which enshrined a defence of the rights of Mother Earth, or Pachamama.³⁰ This was achieved after sustained mobilisation by a coalition of Indigenous, campesino and assorted social movements in the cycle of anti-neoliberal protests of 2001–3.³¹

But what were the historical origins of this shift? What are the origins of the peasant movement’s adoption of Indigenous cosmovisions within its political objectives? This chapter addresses this lacuna by tracing back the genealogy of the twenty-first-century ‘Indigenous awakening’ and its ecological dimensions to the 1970s.

Bolivia offers a particularly compelling case study for the emergence of organised left-campesino movements and their articulation of Indigenous ecological ontologies. Agriculture employed approximately 46 per cent of the country’s labour force in 1987.³² The landscapes and topography in which Bolivian peasants worked varied considerably, with the bulk of agricultural production taking place in the central valleys around Cochabamba which are warm and fertile. The Bolivian altiplano meanwhile reaches heights of 4,000 metres and is prone to the adverse effects of floods, droughts, avalanches, frost and hailstorms, which particularly affect the livelihoods of rural communities. The Altiplano and sub-Andean regions together comprise around 40 per cent of Bolivia’s total territory.³³ Natural disasters made agriculture extremely challenging throughout the twentieth century; across the valleys and highlands, soil erosion was a persistent problem.³⁴ The later decades of the twentieth century in particular generated a number of acute challenges for campesinos and other workers in Bolivia.

Throughout this period, the Indigenous-campesino movement in Bolivia was keenly attentive to the natural indicators of climate change occurring in the Andes. This is reflected in the CSUTCB’s debates around the environment in the 1980s which took place in the context of the 1982–4 El Niño, one of the greatest climatological catastrophes in recorded history. The term El Niño (‘the Christ Child’) was originally used by fishermen in northern Peru to refer to the warm ocean current that usually appears around December and lasts for several months, causing a number of changes to fish stocks.³⁵ In 1982 sea levels rose, precipitating a series of subtle but important ecological shifts which effected almost all parts of the world. It was especially devastating in the eastern Pacific and in Peru, Chile, Ecuador and Bolivia, where it caused torrential flooding in coastal areas coupled with severe drought in highland areas. Homes were destroyed and agricultural and fishing production was devastated. In the Bolivian highlands, it resulted in a severe and prolonged drought as well as the melting of glaciers. The loss to the world economy in 1982–3 amounted to over 8 billion dollars, with losses of 241 million dollars in Bolivia.³⁶ Analysing the CSUTCB’s mobilisation around ecological concerns in the 1980s therefore also gives unique insight into how Indigenous-peasant movements in Bolivia reacted to extreme climate oscillations such as the 1982 El Niño before scientific studies had acknowledged its effects.

Origins of the campesino movement and the rise of the CSUTCB

The CSUTCB and related katarista syndicalist tendencies arose from a fractious history of peasant unions in Bolivia which were tied to state-led development initiatives.³⁷ Unions acquired considerable significance in the years following the 1953 agrarian reform, achieved as part of the 1952 National Revolution, steered by the political party Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (National Revolutionary Movement – MNR) and a coalition of miners, peasants and reformist middle classes.³⁸ I will dwell here on agrarian reform because it emerges frequently in CSUTCB discourse, often as a conduit for wider grievances within the peasant movement. Indeed, the first conclusion passed at the Congress of Women Campesinas ‘Bartolina Sisas’ (named after the anticolonial leader and partner of Tupaj Katari) was a condemnation of the minifundisation of land which had occurred as a result of agrarian reform.³⁹ The Aymara leader Tupaj Katari was executed by the Spanish on 15 November 1781 after leading a rebellion against Spanish rule in La Paz and his body was dismembered into four parts and scattered. Kataristas sought to recover histories that ran counter to the homogenising narratives of the Bolivian nation state.⁴⁰ In symbolic terms this was reflected in the recovery of Tupaj Katari as an anticolonial figurehead.

The abiding refrain of the katarista movement was ‘we are not the peasants of 1952’, which underscores Katarismo’s repudiation of what was perceived to be a deficient revolution.⁴¹ The post-revolutionary state was able to install itself in peripheral rural areas (coded as Indigenous) through its control over official peasant unions which impeded the development of autonomous peasant organisations. In a dynamic of incorporation and co-optation, these unions were intended to replace traditional modes of Indigenous organisations such as ayllus, or communities. In areas where unions had existed prior, the dynamics of the post-revolutionary regime changed their structure and purpose and turned them into interlocutors between peasant and state via a rural bureaucracy loyal to the MNR leadership.⁴² State appointed dirigentes controlled the votes of local sindicatos, and ultimately shored up the peasantry as a reliable constituency of the MNR. Peasants were thus freed from domination by hacendados but found themselves controlled by unions as the intermediaries of the post-revolutionary state. In this way, agrarian reform, according to Hurtado,⁴³ for more than twenty years served as the most important instrument of state domination.

There was also a racial logic driving the state’s drive to transform rural space and modernise Indigenous peoples. Expanding the reach of the state into the countryside was a way of civilising both the landscape and the Indian populations who lived in it, thereby addressing the widely perceived problem of Indian ‘backwardness’ and rural under-development. Accordingly, the term peasant (campesino) was officially adopted by the architects of the 1952 revolution as part of a homogenising mestizaje vision of Bolivian society which sought to expunge the nation’s Indian elements.⁴⁴ The terms indígena (Indigenous) and indio (Indian) were deemed feudal and pejorative, and so were replaced in state and popular discourse with the ostensibly modern, race-blind label campesino in a process of campesinization. An article published under the alias ‘Huascar’ on 26 July 1953 in national newspaper La Nación declared that ‘agrarian reform is the policy of liquidating the indigenous as indigenous’. Agrarian reform would ‘destroy and eliminate forever the condition of misery, hunger and the condition of a colonial country’. The article went on to claim that it would boost productivity in the countryside, ‘elevating [the Indigenous] to the category of producer and consumer citizen’.⁴⁵ Agrarian reform was thus part of a racial project which aimed to establish a system of agrarian capitalism and transform Indians into rural proletarians within it.

Although the Indian communities of the highlands benefited from the redistribution of land, the devaluation of ayllus and the privileging of individual landownership (which eventually led to excessive smallholding) were perceived to be culturally and economically damaging by peasants. Publications and recordings from CSUTCB general meetings in the 1980s show that agrarian reform continued as a problem for the peasantry, and indeed to this day due to its unequal application.⁴⁶ Its 1983 Political and Syndicalist Thesis states that agrarian reform

culminated a long process of fragmentation of our communitarian organisational forms … our oppressors have advocated by various means a systematic dispossession of our historical identity. They tried to make us forget our true origins and reduce ourselves only to peasants without personality, without history and without identity.⁴⁷

Several speakers at the Third Congress of Peasant Unity in 1987 also raised agrarian reform in the historical context of peasant exploitation. An unnamed speaker criticised agrarian reform as both an attack against the livelihoods and value system of peasants. ‘Agrarian reform legalised dispossession, abuse and discrimination, created more individualised agrarian labour, “minifundised” our plots’, the speaker states. ‘On the other hand, it strengthened new large landowners of the agro-industrial and rancher type in eastern Bolivia, who exploit a mass of sugar cane harvesters [zafreros], cotton pickers, farmers, etc., and are favoured with all kinds of advantages from the state. Agrarian reform has not even reached many areas’.

Agrarian reform was placed in a continuum of colonial exploitation against humans and other-than-humans. The same speaker states, ‘large landowners have continued to exploit Chiquitania, Guarani [eastern lowland regions], etc under a colonial system and methods, plundering and destroying the ecology of the tropical plains’ (emphasis added), undergirding how the expansion of agrarian capitalism was perceived to be environmentally destructive. Another unidentified speaker asked, ‘What happened to agrarian reform? The redistribution of the land was limited, the fundamental problem of improving the living conditions of the peasant, compañeros … was forgotten’. He continues, ‘It is a government in favour of big business, for the large businesses of this country and for the transnationals […] which have plundered this country’s wealth’. He concludes, ‘The peasant problem is a national problem’.

In 1970, katarista Aymara leaders Jenaro Flores Santos and Macabeo Chila were elected to the senior positions in the peasant unions in La Paz and Oruro departments respectively.⁴⁸ Their arrival heralded a rupture with the official status quo. In symbolic terms, they added ‘TK’ to the end of the union name in honour of Tupac Katari.⁴⁹ In June 1979, the Central Obrera Boliviana (Bolivian Workers Central – COB), the national trade union federation, sponsored the First Congress for Peasant Unity in La Paz. The CSUTCB was founded during this congress as the culmination of efforts by katarista peasants to build an autonomous peasant movement. From its founding, it was headed by Secretary General Jenaro Flores, who came from Sicasica, La Paz, the birthplace of Tupaj Katari two centuries earlier. In 1980 he would also run unsuccessfully as presidential candidate with the MRTK. With the COB leadership murdered, in hiding or imprisoned following the coup by Garcia Meza between 17 July 1980 and 19 June 1981, Jenaro Flores became de facto leader of the COB, the first time that an Indigenous-peasant leader had ascended to the leadership.⁵⁰ It cemented the link between the CSUTCB and the broader workers’ movement. In an interview conducted shortly after the coup in 1980, Flores declared, for example, ‘they previously tried to alienate the workers from the peasants … But now there is a close relationship between mining workers and peasants, because ultimately they are also from peasant extraction’.⁵¹

The CSUTCB and campesino ecological ontologies

I will here dwell closely on key passages from CSUTCB and peasant movement discourses on the natural world. Examining how and why the CSUTCB articulated a discourse on the natural world is crucial in understanding the importance of the environment for the Indigenous-peasant movement in Bolivia more widely. As I demonstrate, the CSUTCB’s stance on the environment points to the coalescence of environmental and Indigenous politics within the organised peasant movement in Bolivia in the late twentieth century. In the 1980s this emphasis on ethnic identity became especially pronounced. At the Third Congress of Peasant Unity in 1987, interviews were conducted on tape recorder prior to the main meetings apparently for later dissemination on radio programmes. Javier Condoreno, the executive secretary of the Sole Departamental Federation of Peasant Workers Tupac Katari of La Paz states, ‘we have to become aware today more than ever compañeros, become aware of our own cultural identity as a people, as a nation, as a culture’. He added, ‘[This congress] marks a new historical milestone where nationalities, or oppressed nations, can consider a political thesis … and come together in this Third National Congress’.

Although it claimed to represent all Indigenous nations of Bolivia, the CSUTCB was dominated by Aymara-speaking peasants of the altiplano with lowland Indigenous groups having an especially negligible presence. This was despite the sustained focus on uniting all Indigenous peoples of Bolivia by emphasising a common experience of colonisation. The CSUTCB declared for example, ‘The Aymara, Quechua, Cambas, Chapacos, Chiquitanos, Canichanas, Itonamas, Cayubabas, Ayoréodes, Guaranis, etc, peasants are the rightful owners of this land. We are the seed from where Bolivia was born but, even today, they treat us as exiles [desterrados] in our own land’.⁵² It is perhaps interesting to note here the CSUTCB’s use of ‘desterrados’ rather than ‘exiliados’ to convey exile. Desterrar has roots in the Latin for land (terra), and therefore conveys a more visceral sense of being separated from earth and land, rather than from the formal boundaries of the state. Ethnographic accounts of rituals practised by Quechua-speaking peasants stress the relations of reciprocity and mutual dependence between peasants and their physical environment. Ethnomusicologist Henry Stobart describes how peasants in Macha, Northern Potosí believe that their crops are sentient and will ‘weep’ (waqay in Quechua) if not cared for properly.⁵³ Meanwhile John McNeish observes how the physical environment acts as a repository of history for the highland Aymara community of Santuario de Quillacas, Oruro.⁵⁴ Mountains, hills and even the weather and seasons were understood to be intimately connected with local people’s daily life and to provide a tangible connection with ancestors. Anthropologist and ex-katarista Simon Yampara characterises the Andean interaction between humans and their natural environment (Jaqi-pachamama) as one of reciprocity; ‘nature’ must receive offerings if it is to provide sustenance to humans. Moreover, humans must constantly be sensitive to their surroundings; forecasting weather, planting crops and harvests rely on the observations of stars, planets, flora and fauna as well as interpreting dreams, reading coca leaves and relations with achachilas (mountain spirits) and Pachamama.⁵⁵

This belief in deep human-agricultural and natural environment interconnections is reflected in the political demands and criticism made by the CSUTCB in the 1980s. The report of the outgoing Executive Committee to the IV Ordinary National Congress 1988–9 contains a section on ‘Tierra – territorio – libertad y poder’ (Land – territory – freedom and power) in which the CSUTCB demands, ‘We want the preservation of the environment of the natural resources of flora and fauna, of the air we breathe, of the forests and jungle, because without them we cannot live’.⁵⁶ In addition, a proposal from the Red Offensive of Tupakatarista Ayllus, (Ofensiva Roja de Ayllus Tupakataristas – ORAT) to the IV Ordinary Congress of the CSUTCB in 1988 (passed by minority) exemplifies the belief in human–nature reciprocity as an integral part of the peasant’s social world. Their proposals include a subsection entitled ‘Pachamama o muerte’ (Pachamama or death) in which the group proclaim,

since before Christ, we have been worshipping the hills, Pukaras, Wak’as, stones, apachitas, in the ceremonial and cosmic places, we are older than Western Christianity. Like our grandparents both in the time of Tiwanakinses [pre-Inca civilisation around Tiwanaku] and the Incas, they made sacrifices with gold and silver, with coloured wool, coca, etc. every year to our Tata Inti (Sun), moon, stars, and the Pachamama, which endure from generation to generation until this day.⁵⁷

Grievances at the volume of food imports in Bolivia emerges as an equally germane issue in the group’s proposals. In emotive rhetoric they lament, ‘unfortunately it is terrible that instead of producing wheat, barley, quinoa, kañawa, beans, rice, maize, cassava, banana, potato, tubers, beans, etc, we are living off the foreigners and waiting for the gringos to send us their rotten leftovers from their rubbish dumps, [so] we are falling into food dependency’. The 1980s was a particularly fraught time for agricultural production in Bolivia. In 1983–4 severe droughts in the highlands and flooding in the lowlands caused so much damage that agricultural output was decimated, meaning substantial amounts of food had to be imported for many years afterwards. These natural disasters are explained by ORAT as symptoms of Pachamama’s wilful anger and vengeance. The group states, ‘the communities that we live in, “MACH’AS” [a communal unit comprising several ayllus], no longer produce crops, the animals die, it no longer rains and day by day we receive the punishments of our Mother Nature with hail, frost and drought. The once fertile Pachamama becomes sterile and no longer gives her produce to us native children as before’.⁵⁸

The statement goes on to imbue acts of agrarian labour with cosmological importance expressed in visions of apocalypse:

Another of the most important points that we must touch is to plough the earth with a cosmic consciousness, and to produce more and more, to accumulate and save that production in the Pirwas [storage barns], because for us, the discriminated and exploited, the most difficult days are coming, that is to say we are on the eve of the awqa-pacha or the pachakuti, that is what the birds, the stones, the rivers, the hills, the rains and the lightning announce to us.

It continues by connecting transcendent social change with a politics of landscape: ‘It is a necessity and an urgency that there must be the return of the last Inca tupak katari for a telluric transformation to our ancestral homeland’. Pachakuti is a well-documented concept in literature on Andean cosmovisions. Pacha refers to earth, time and space, and kuti refers to time or reversal but the concept can acquire different meanings and is often used to refer to a shift in time, revolution or profound upheaval in the cosmos.⁵⁹

By 1985 CSUTCB unity was greatly weakened by a series of internecine struggles over political allegiances, as the frequently combative meetings from around this time attest. At the Third National Congress in 1985, the katarista faction headed by Jenaro Flores clashed with the Movimiento Campesino de Base (MCB) headed by Victor Morales which was more closely aligned to the traditional left and the COB.⁶⁰ At the 1987 Third Congress of Peasant Unity in the city of Cochabamba in 1987, a compañero named Victor Mercado stated optimistically, ‘We believe that this Congress is going to come up with important solutions to lead the way, to seek the definitive liberation of our country. We consider this congress to be important, since it is in a difficult political moment’.⁶¹

From its founding, the CSUTCB was anxious to downplay the class stratification within the ranks of its membership by highlighting the overarching enemy of capitalism for both landless labourers and land-owning peasants. The CSUTCB’s 1983 Political Thesis states defensively, ‘We are far from petty bourgeois because we own plots of land. The land is for us primarily a condition of production and an inheritance from our ancestors, rather than a means of production’. Land is here conceptualised as a spatial and historical entity, rather than purely as an economic resource. In this we might read an attempt by CSUTCB protagonists to expand the parameters of what land signified in the conventional politics of the 1980s; as a resource subject to legally defined ownership and inhabited by human political actors. The CSUTCB statement instead invokes land as a dynamic and contingent space, articulated as representing a ‘condition’ of production, a phrase which makes possible alternative and multiple readings of ‘land’.⁶²

In July 1988, the First Extraordinary Congress of the CSUTCB had been held at the request of different departmental organisations and regional meetings of the peasant union movement. It was intended to revoke the mandate of the National Executive Committee of the CSUTCB elections the previous year, and it was in this congress that Genaro Flores was ousted as leader, heralding the zenith of the katarista domination within the organisation.⁶³ Nonetheless, the katarista emphasis on Indigenous cosmovisions and spiritualistic appeals to the natural world are widely present. As unnamed speaker at the meeting declares, ‘We are aymaras, quechuas, amazónicos, guarani, we are from Bolivia, we are the air, water, we are the land … the pampas’ (emphasis added). He continues, ‘we are the communitarian civilisation, we aymaras, quechuas, amazónicos, guarani. We are campesinos’.⁶⁴ It underscores how grassroots members of the CSUTCB perceived a close connection between Indigenous-peasant identities and the natural world. However, more drastically, in asserting that campesinos do not only work the land for example, but embody it, the speaker’s words suggest that a more profound ontological shift in the CSUTCB was going on. For the CSUTCB grassroots, imperialist exploitation is invoked not only as an economic assault on natural resources, but a historical process which conjures the suffering of the other-than-human. At the CSUTCB general meeting in the city of Potosi, in July 1988, an unnamed speaker urged his compañeros to defend their lands, stating,

We, as natives of these lands of Kollasuyo, have been usurped by people who came to these lands. We are the ones who were born in these lands and these k’aras [foreigners] do not truly reflect this position. And those who came from another place, with another form of reflection, another way of life, impose their ways and customs.

He goes on to make the following remarks: ‘there are two well defined interests; capitalism, although we should say colonialism. And feudalism – to exploit our riches, our lands, our Pachamama’. In his words, ‘we have seen with our eyes them taking away the gold, silver, everything that exists in this country. This Andean country Bolivia, which was formerly Kollasuyo, was a rich country, as well as its inhabitants … [and now] we are beggars’.⁶⁵

Conceptions of Pachamama as both victim and agent became a prevailing theme in the katarista movement more widely in the 1980s. The third issue (February 1986) of ‘Boletín Chitakolla’, a monthly katarista magazine published by the Centro de Formacion e Investigacion sobre las Culturas Indias, included an article entitled ‘Dialectica de la Naturaleza’, which itself was taken from the 1979 book Indianidad y Revolución (Raíz y vigencia de la indianidad) by the Peruvian intellectual Virgilio Roel Pineda. It proclaims how ‘the stars, the clouds, the hills, the seas, the lagoons, the ponds, the rivers, the valleys, the trees, the stones, the condors, the birds, the butterflies, the flowers, in short, everything that belongs to Pachamama maintains a constant and mutual reciprocal influence’.⁶⁶ The extract as a whole explicitly connects the preservation of human and nonhuman life with an anti-imperialist politics. It centres animals not so much as objects, but as agents and active allies in resistance to Western bellicosity. We can see here how categorical distinctions between species, between the natural world and humans, were rendered ambiguous:

As a counterpart to Western aggressiveness, we Indians know that if we do not return what we have taken from the land, that if we do not treat Pachamama well, that if we attack the beautiful animals that are also her beloved children, it will happen that, in her anger, the farming areas will turn into deserts and the animals will disappear. To avoid this immense universal tragedy, today we must stop the criminal hand of the West which is destroying the fields, the llamas, the alpacas and the vicunas, and that in this way will destroy our families, up to the complete annihilation of the entire human race.⁶⁷

Conclusion

This chapter has shown that from the 1980s, the CSUTCB and its katarista affiliates centred Indigenous concepts such as Pachamama, achachilas, w’akas and others within their critiques of colonial capitalism. This is important because it marks a new formulation of ecological ontologies within the peasant movement. It shows that the rise of the CSUTCB represents a crucial departure from the post-revolutionary erasure of Indigenous identities. A close reading of the organisation’s documents reveals that they articulated an Indigenous vision of natural resource management within the parameters of organised labour (that is, the sindicato).

I conclude that the decolonial politics of the katarista-campesino movement in Bolivia dislodged dominant epistemologies to introduce new actors – animals, mountains, plants, glaciers – into the political arena. Further still, we can see these new actors can be thought of as shaping the CSUTCB’s demands, of showing up within their words and political articulations. Embedded within the CSUTCB’s critiques of imperialism and internal colonisation was a recognition that ecological destruction was connected with modes of domination, both epistemological and material. But by referring to the agency of nonhuman actors such as mountains, Pachamama for example, the CSUTCB went further in crafting pathways for the entry of the nonhuman into the realm of the political, paving the way for the later state-driven decolonisation attempts of the Morales era. This ultimately suggests that the rise of the ‘other than human’ as political actor formed the crux of a decolonial and anti-neoliberal politics of contestation in late twentieth-century Bolivia.

Notes

1. 1. Dipesh Chaakrabarty, The climate of history in a planetary age. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2021, 8.

2. 2. Xavier Albó, ‘El retorno del indio’, Revista Andina 9, no. 2 (1991), 299–366; James Malloy & Richard Thorn, Beyond the revolution: Bolivia since 1952. Pittsburgh, PA, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1971; Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Oppressed but not defeated: peasant struggles among the Aymara and Quechua in Bolivia, 1900–1980. Geneva, UNRISD, 1987; Javier Hurtado, El katarismo. La Paz, Hisbol, 1986; Rafael Archondo, ‘Comunidad y divergencia de miradas en el katarismo’, Umbrales 7 (2000), 120–32; Nicomedes Sejas Terrazas, Katarismo y descolonizacion. La emergencia democratica del indio. Bolivia, Imprenta Stigma, 2014; José Antonio Lucero, ‘Fanon in the Andes: Fausto Reinaga, indianismo, and the black Atlantic’, International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies 1, no. 1 (2000); Donna Van Cott, Radical democracy in the Andes. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press; 2009; Susan Eckstein, ‘Transformation of a “revolution from below”. Bolivia and international capital’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 25, no. 1 (1983), 105–35.

3. 3. Carlos Macusaya Cruz, ‘Indianismo y katarismo en el siglo XX: apuntes históricos’. In: Pedro Canales Tapia (ed.) El pensamiento y la lucha: los pueblos indígenas en América Latina: organización y discusiones con trascendencia. La Paz, Ariadna Ediciones, 2018; Fernando Calderon & Jorge Dandler (eds.), Bolivia: la fuerza histórica del campesinado. Cochabamba, CERES, 1984.

4. 4. Primary sources include CSUTCB-1980: Entrevista a Jenaro Flores, órgano informativo en el exterior. Año1, no. 1 octubre. CSUTCB-1987: III Congreso de Unidad Campesina, Confederación Sindical Única de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia, MUSEF, La Paz, Digital audio recording. CSUTCB-1988a: I ampliado de la Confederación Sindical Única de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia, MUSEF, La Paz. Digital audio recording. SUTCB-1988b: I Congreso Extraordinario de la Confederación Sindical Única de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia, MUSEF, La Paz, Digital audio recording. CSUTCB-1989a: 1er Ampliado nacional de la Confederación Sindical Única de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia. MUSEF, La Paz, Digital audio recording. CSUTCB-1989b: Informe del Comite Ejecutivo saliente al IV Congreso Nacional Ordinario de la CSUTCB, CEDOIN, Bolivia. CSUTCB-1992: 4to Congreso Confederación Sindical Única de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia, MUSEF, La Paz. Digital audio recording. El Diario de La Paz (January–May 1973) (British Library), Katarismo (after the first edition it is called El Katarismo) 1985–6. Archivo y Biblioteca Nacionales de Bolivia, Sucre. La Nación, 1953, Selected issues in Walter Guevara Arce Collection. Los Tiempos (Cochabamba) January–December 1968 (British Library), Presencia (La Paz) Selected editions 1978–January 1980 (Biblioteca Municipal de La Paz); Manifiesto de Tiahuanaco. La Paz. 30 de Julio de 1973 – retrieved from the James Dunkerley special collection at Institute of Latin American Studies (London).

5. 5. Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, ‘Luchas campesinas contemporáneas en Bolivia: el movimiento “katarista”: 1970–1980’. In: Rene Zavaleta (ed.) Bolivia hoy. Mexico, Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1983, 136.

6. 6. James Dunkerley, Rebellion in the veins: political struggle in Bolivia, 1952–1982. London, Verso, 1984, 215.

7. 7. Jean-Pierre Lavaud, Identité et politique : le courant Tupaj Katari en Bolivie. Document de travail No. 24. France, CREDAL/ERSIPAL, 1982, 10.

8. 8. Radoslaw Powęska, Indigenous movements and building the plurinational state in Bolivia: organisation and identity in the trajectory of the CSUTCB and CONAMAQ. Warsaw, Centre for Latin American Studies, 2013.

9. 9. Rafi Youatt, ‘Personhood and the rights of nature: the new subjects of contemporary Earth politics’, International Political Sociology 11, no. 1 (2017), 39–54.

10. 10. Erica Fudge, ‘A left-handed blow: writing the history of animals’. In: Nigel Rothfels (ed.) Representing animals. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2003, 3–18; Dorothee Brantz, Beastly natures: animals, humans, and the study of history. Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press, 2010.

11. 11. Bronwen Douglas, ‘In the event: indigenous countersigns and the ethnohistory of voyaging’. In: Margaret Jolly, Serge Tcherkézoff & Darrell Tryon (eds.) Oceanic encounters; exchange, desire, violence. Canberra, Australian National University Press, 2009, 175–98.

12. 12. Diogo de Carvalho Cabral & André Vasques Vital, ‘Multispecies emergent textualities: writing and reading in ecologies of selves’, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (2021), isab024.

13. 13. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: postcolonial thought and historical difference. Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2000. See also, Felipe Quispe, Tupaj Katari vive y vuelve, carajo. La Paz, Aruwiyiri, 1990; Fabiola Escarzaga, ‘Comunidad indígena y revolución en Bolivia: el pensamiento indianista-katarista de Fausto Reinaga & Felipe Quispe’, Politica y Cultura 37 (2012), 185–210; Esteban Ticona, Memoria, política y antropología en los Andes bolivianos. Historia oral y saberes locales. Cochabamba, AGRUCO-UMSA, 2002; and ‘Foreword’ to Javier Hurtado, El Katarismo. 2nd edn, La Paz, CIS, 1986.

14. 14. Donna Haraway, ‘A cyborg manifesto: science, technology, and socialist feminism in the late twentieth century’. In: Simians, cyborgs and women: the reinvention of nature. New York, Routledge, 1991, 149–81.

15. 15. Georgina Dopico Black, ‘The ban and the bull: cultural studies, animal studies, and Spain’, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 11, nos. 3–4 (2010), 235–49; see also Martha Few & Zeb Tortorici (eds.), Centering animals in Latin American history. Durham, NC, Duke University Press. 2013.

16. 16. Germán Vergara,’Bestiario latinoamericano: los animales en la historiografía de América Latina’, História, Ciências, Saúde – Manguinhos 28, supl. 1 (2021), 187–208.

17. 17. José de Acosta, Jane E. Mangan & Frances Lopez-Morillas, Natural and moral history of the Indies. Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2002, 262.

18. 18. Mario Blaser, ‘Ontology and indigeneity: on the political ontology of heterogeneous assemblages’, Cultural Geographies 21, no. 1 (2014), 49–58.

19. 19. Rossana Barragán & Florencia Durán, ‘Tras las huellas de la historia’. In: Collana. Conflicto por la tierra en el altiplano. 1st edn. La Paz, Fundación Tierra, 2003, 26–36, pp. 26–8; see also Sinclair Thomson, We alone will rule: native Andean politics in the age of insurgency. Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 2003; Forrest Hylton & Sinclair Thompson, Revolutionary horizons: past and present in Bolivian politics. New York, Verso, 2007.

20. 20. Hilda Kean & Philip Howell (eds.), The Routledge companion to animal–human history. 1st edn. London, Routledge, 2019, 202.

21. 21. Kean & Howell, 2019, 210.

22. 22. Eduardo Viveiros De Castro, ‘Cosmological deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism’, The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4, no. 3 (1998), 469–88; Philippe Descola, Beyond nature and culture. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2005; Arturo Escobar, Territories of difference: place, movements, life, redes. Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2008; Penelope Dransart (ed.), Living beings: perspectives on interspecies engagements. London, Bloomsbury, 2013; Marisol De la Cadena, ‘Indigenous cosmopolitics in the Andes: conceptual reflexions beyond Politics as usual’, Cultural Anthropology 25, no. 2 (2010), 334–70; and Earth beings: ecologies of practice across Andean worlds. Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2015.

23. 23. Escobar, 2008.

24. 24. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the social: an introduction to actor-network-theory. ACLS Humanities E-Book. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005.

25. 25. Isabelle Stengers, Cosmopolitics. Trans. Robert Bononno. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2010.

26. 26. De la Cadena, 2010, 334.

27. 27. De La Cadena, 2010, 110–11.

28. 28. Tania Murray Li, ‘Environment, indigeneity and transnationalism’. In: Richard Peet & Michael Watts (eds.) Liberation ecologies: environment, development, social movements. 2nd edn. London, Routledge, 2004, 309–37; Joni Adamson, ‘Environmental Justice, Cosmopolitics, and Climate Change’. In: Louise Wrestling (ed.) The Cambridge companion to literature and the environment. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2013, 169–83.

29. 29. Kepa Artaraz & Melania Calestani, ‘Suma qamaña in Bolivia’, Latin American Perspectives 42, no. 5 (2015), 216–33.

30. 30. Nancy Postero, The indigenous state: race, politics, and performance in plurinational Bolivia. Berkeley, University of California Press, 2017.

31. 31. Deborah Yashar, Contesting citizenship in Latin America: the rise of indigenous movements and the post liberal challenge. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007; From movements to parties: the evolution of ethnic politics. New York, Cambridge University Press, 2017; Jeffrey Webber, From rebellion to reform in Bolivia: class struggle, indigenous liberation and the politics of Evo Morales. Chicago, Haymarket Books, 2011.

32. 32. Rex A. Hudson & Dennis M. Hanratty (eds.), Bolivia: a country study. Washington, GPO for the Library of Congress, 1989.

33. 33. Estrategia Internacional para la Reducción de Desastres. Chapter 8, Fenómeno El Niño. Introducción general y descripción del fenómeno en Bolivia, no. 134, https://www.eird.org/estrategias/pdf/spa/ doc12863/ doc12863-9.pdf; Lorenzo Huertas Vallejos, Diluvios andinos a través de las fuentes documentales. Lima, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 2001.

34. 34. For discussion of katarista discourses on soil erosion see Karl Zimmer, ‘Soil erosion and social (dis)courses in Cochabamba, Bolivia: perceiving the nature of the environmental degradation’, Economic Geography 69, no. 3, Environment and Development, Part I, 312–27.

35. 35. Cesar Caviedes, ‘El Nino 1982–83’, Geographical Review 74, no. 3 (1984), 267–90.

36. 36. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Reports to the nation on our changing planet. El Niño and climate prediction, University Corporation for Atmospheric Research/National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 1994, 145.

37. 37. Pedro Mollinedo Portugal & Carlos Cruz Macusaya, El indianismo katarista: un análisis crítico. La Paz, Fundación Friedrich Ebert, 2016; Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, ‘Pensamiento político indígena, II: “Indianismo y Katarismo”’ [interview with katarista Constantino Lima], https://youtube.com/watch?v= 7bN1EwKTx3Q.

38. 38. James Dunkerley, Rebellion in the Veins: political struggle in Bolivia, 1952–1982. London, Verso, 1984.

39. 39. Collasuyo, 1978, 6; Uri Mendelberg, ‘The impact of the Bolivian agrarian reform on class formation’, Latin American Perspectives 12, no. 3 (1985), 45–58.

40. 40. Javier Sajinés, ‘Mestizaje upside down: subaltern knowledges and the known’, Nepantla: Views from South 3, no. 1, 2002, 42.

41. 41. Albó, 1991, 312; for the international context, Richard Patch, ‘Bolivia US assistance in a revolutionary setting’. In: Richard Adams, Oscar Lewis & John Gillin (eds.) Social change in Latin America today. New York, Random House, 1960, 108–68.

42. 42. James Kohl, ‘The Cliza and Ucureña War: syndical violence and national revolution in Bolivia’, The Hispanic American Historical Review 62, no. 4 (1982), 607–28; Yashar, 2005, 159.

43. 43. Hurtado, 1986, 222.

44. 44. Rivera Cusicanqui, 1987.

45. 45. La Nación, 1953: n.p.

46. 46. Willem Assies, ‘Land tenure legislation in a pluri-cultural and multi-ethnic society: the case of Bolivia’, The Journal of Peasant Studies 33, no. 4 (2006), 569–611.

47. 47. CSUTCB, 1983. In: Carlos Toranzo Roca (ed.) Crisis del sindicalismo en Bolivia. La Paz, FLACSO- ILDIS, 1987, 226.

48. 48. Cusicanqui Rivera, 1987, 112.

49. 49. Xavier Albó, ‘From MNRistas to Kataristas to Katari’. In: Steve Stern (ed.) Resistance, rebellion, and consciousness in the Andean peasant world: eighteenth to twentieth centuries. Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1987, 392; José Teijeiro. La rebellion permanente; crisis de identidad y persistencia etnico-cultural aymara en Bolivia. La Paz, PIEB, 2007 ; Fabiola Escárzaga & Raquel Gutiérrez (eds.), Movimiento indígena en América Latina: resistencia y proyecto alternativo. Mexico, Gobierno de la Ciudad de México-Casa Juan Pablos-BUAP-UNAM-UACM, 2005.

50. 50. Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, ‘Luchas campesinas contemporáneas en Bolivia: el movimiento katarista: 1970–1980’. In: Rene Zavaleta Mercado (ed.) Bolivia hoy. México, Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1983, 129–68, p. 163.

51. 51. CSUTCB-1980, 2.

52. 52. CSUTCB-1983, 1.

53. 53. Henry Stobart, Music and the poetics of production in the Bolivian Andes. Aldershot, Ashgate, 2006, 27. For other oral stories, see Waskar Ari, Earth politics, religion, decolonization and Bolivia’s indigenous intellectuals. Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2014.

54. 54. John-Andrew McNeish, ‘Globalisation and the reinvention of Andean tradition: the politics of community and ethnicity in highland Bolivia’, The Journal of Peasant Studies 29, nos. 3–4 (2002), 228–69; Verushka Alvizuri, La construcción de la aymaridad. Una historia de la etnicidad en Bolivia (1952–2006). Santa Cruz, Editorial El País, 2009.

55. 55. Hans Van den Berg & Norbert Schiffers (eds.), La cosmovision Aymara. La Paz, Hisbol, 1992, 156–60.

56. 56. CSUTB-1989b, 29.

57. 57. CSUTCB-1989b, 31.

58. 58. CSUTCB-1989b.

59. 59. Rivera Cusicanqui, ‘Pachakuti: the historical horizons of internal colonialism’, which NACLA published as ‘Aymara Past, Aymara Future’, NACLA 25, no. 3, http://www.web.ca/~bthomson/ degrowth/pachakuti_cusicanqui_1991.pdf.

60. 60. Albó, ‘La búsqueda desde adentro. Caleidoscopio de auto-imágenes em el debate bolivano’, Boletín de Antropología Americana 30, no. 51 (1994), 51–66, p. 60.

61. 61. CSUTCB-1987.

62. 62. De la Cadena, 2015.

63. 63. Ricardo Calla, José Enrique Pinelo & Miguel Urioste, CSUTCB. Debate sobre documentos politicos y asamblea de nacionalidades. La Paz, CEDLA, 1989.

64. 64. CSUTCB-1988a.

65. 65. CSUTCB-1988a.

66. 66. Boletín Chitakolla, Selected editions, Archivo y Biblioteca Nacionales de Bolivia, Sucre; Senate House Special Collections, London (James Dunkerley Collection), 1986, 4.

67. 67. Boletín Chitakolla, 1986, 4.

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