Felipe Quispe: The Other
by Annie Murphy
Felipe Quispe is punctual. Rumors about Quispe, whose roles have included farmer, activist, guerrilla, and currently, radical indigenous candidate for Bolivia’s presidency, do not refer to manners; if anything the myth implies an old coot who may not arrive at all. But on the last Saturday of November Quispe says he’ll be at his party headquarters at five a.m. On the hour he drives up in a truck with his eldest daughter, Rosario.
He struggles in the dark with keys to the building the government gave his party, the Indigenous Pachakuti Movement (MIP) in 2001. In Bolivia MIP is the other, traditional indigenous party, overshadowed by the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS), a popular party of indigenous peoples, farmers, workers, and intellectuals.
The day before Quispe spoke of the long process MIP undertook to gain not just the building, but basic subsidies like a single tractor for agricultural collectives.
“We’re obligated to mobilize, to ask for change. The baby that doesn’t cry doesn’t get fed.?But the one who cries, that’s the baby who gets to eat,” he said regarding the role of the MIP in political demonstrations, several of which mobilized hundreds of thousands of people and shut down the city of La Paz in 2003 and 2005, ousting two presidents.
Quispe abandons the keys and jumps a railing to the basement with surprising fleetness for a man of sixty three. Minutes later the front door opens and he loads the truck with posters, pocket calendars, and hand made white flags marked with the red MIP sun, and covers them with tarps against spring rain.
Quispe chooses back streets and avoids the main highway altogether, emerging forty minutes later in El Alto, the city above La Paz where much of the urban indigenous population lives in a sprawling ghetto of mud, stone, and bleached brick tenements.
“Look at this,” he says to no one in particular. The city is half lit, hung in fog, and milling with people beginning the day. Potholes the size of wading pools divide principle roads. Quispe steers around not only the holes, but dogs delicately sniffing for trash amongst women washing clothes in the water collected there. This is a sharp relief cut by the quotidian of a seventy percent poverty rate.
“Bolivia is an abstract fiction,” Quispe said the day before. He doesn’t see the possibility of real cohesion or justice under the current state. “We speak of the free self-determination of indigenous peoples because we’re already nation. All of this is other, extraneous, foreign,” he said. He often refers to Kollasuyo, the pre-colonial indigenous nation based not on individuals or capitalism, but on community. Quispe’s MIP, however, is not a throwback to antiquity; it seeks a modern incorporation of that indigenous society.
“They say that the Spanish arrived here, in this spot, in 1580. It became an enormous plantation of Gonzalo Pizarro, the brother of Francisco. Since then we haven’t advanced in anything,” he said. “There isn’t potable water. We drink from the river like animals, ingesting pollutants and microbes. There isn’t assistance from the central government because we aren’t counted. We are like birds. We exist without knowing our numbers.”
Quispe, like many indigenous Bolivians disputes the official count of sixty-two percent, arguing the government census could not and does not reach a significant population including homeless and rural families. And much of Quispe’s constituency resides in the country, the high plains of the altiplano that surround La Paz. This is why he’s up before dawn and driving to the shores of Lake Titicaca several weeks before the December 18 elections. Quispe has a rally at ten o’clock in Huanaco Maya. But the first stop will be his hometown, a settlement of seventy people in Omasuyo province.
It’s a collection of tin-roofed houses and terraced plots on a wooded hill a stone’s throw from the lake and only several hours from La Paz. Certainly people in Omasuyo lack as much financially as in El Alto; no one has plumbing and families often live in a single room. But they’ve land, and most of all, a traditional community. This hardly resembles the urban getting-by many indigenous Altenos must concede to.
Quispe parks at his youngest son’s house. Rosario boils thin, sweet coffee while a group of men gathers to install a radio antenna Quispe brought from La Paz. Felipe and Rosario have been speaking Spanish for politeness, but now turn to the indigenous Aymara language while the men cut poles for a tower.
Across the road the lake is slate blue like the sea, illuminated by a violet sky and green fields that run nearly to the shore. Women in aprons pole dinghies ten or twenty yards to cut water grasses that they throw in huge piles and lash to the sides of Andean mules. They slap the creatures’ rumps and send them back to town like ambulatory haystacks. Other women herd sheep with strings tied to their ankles while some teenage boys play soccer on a field before the church. Then Quispe yells that it’s time to go; the receiver blew a fuse, so the radio will wait.
The truck has become a bus. Seven girls climb into the bed, and six men join us in the cab. Quispe conducts his followers around the shores of the lake, switching between Aymara to discuss local politics with the men, two of whom are MIP congressional candidates, and Spanish to discuss painting walls with the MIP slogan.
Graffiti seems to be the primary campaign tool of MIP. All day Quispe will carefully scan towns for the Pachakuti red sun, pointing to walls that should be painted, shaking his head at lost opportunities for propaganda. This is a grassroots campaign. Neither Quispe nor his small group of supporters—he is projected to receive less than five percent of the vote—have money to finance parties or commercials or corps of campaigners. This is why they rely on flags and paint, why they have no chance of winning, and why they campaign anyway.
“We have to participate,” said Quispe. He would prefer indigenous autonomy, but says that for now MIP has no choice but to work within the political framework to gain support. “We also want to be the government, make laws, run the country.?We aren’t here only to take orders.”
Town leaders are waiting in the main plaza of Huanaco Maya. A high school band plays flute and drums; people shout to Quispe and cover his dark hair in confetti and flower petals. It begins to rain. Quispe sits before a desk laid for him with coca leaves; like many Bolivians, he believes that coca cultivation should be decriminalized because indigenous communities do not, traditionally, process it into cocaine. They regard the leaf as sacred. He chews a handful then launches into discussion.
Because of the rain the rally is later held inside the church. People stand close and smell of wet wool while Quispe makes a speech in Aymara about Kollasuyo, then calls out names of community members for various posts. These people will ready the town for elections. Most positions are related to painting graffiti.
After the meeting the town reassembles at the local soccer field. The girls from the back of the truck shuck off jogging pants and shawls to reveal red jerseys, and the local indigenous women, called polleras after their traditional gathered skirts, strip down to eyelet petticoats, and put on cleats and sky blue shirts. This is how Quispe campaigns. He drives, he speaks, and then there is a soccer match.
No one yells. While the women run across the field, people bring sandwiches and juice and settle on the ground to watch attentively but quietly. There is only occasional laughter when someone makes a hack pass or grand fall, a slight hum from the corner where the men have convened to watch, drink beer, and continue their conversations, and the sound of rain.
That indigenous communities have distinct ways of navigating Bolivian culture is clear not only in the hush of pollera soccer, but in mobilizations to assert sovereignty over land, water, and gas. Quispe and MIP were important organizers of the most recent protest in June 2005 which rallied over 500,000 people in La Paz to demand full nationalization of hydrocarbons and pressed then-president Carlos Mesa into resigning office. Quispe says that even protest draws from tradition.
“We use the mita system,” he said. “The Inca mita called on young people from eighteen to thirty and assembled them to do a turn of work, while the elders cared for their communities. So, for many protests in the morning two or three communities represent and take to the streets and protest until the following day. They confront the army—they can die if need be—and the next day another community takes the post.”
“We have three types of mobilization,” he said. “In the first, the Flea, we bite and retreat, bite and retreat, and only at night. But when you get to the level of a national mobilization, as in 2003 and 2005, you use the Ants.?People form lines—80,000, 90,000—and march. And finally, occasionally, there are the Hornets, an attack. You attack the palace, the property, the homes of the wealthy; whatever to take control.
It is here the MIP line becomes vaguely menacing. When asked about the rumor that if he doesn’t win, which indubitably he will not, MIP supporters may take to arms, Quispe acts deliberately ambiguous in the manner of Hollywood gangsters. In his dimly lit Miraflores office he sits with Rosario, who acts as secretary and confidant, and two visitors from indigenous communities in Peru. He leans back at his desk and cracks open pistachios with his thumbs.
“There’s aforementioned war,” he says. “And there’s war of surprise. The former doesn’t kill enemies. I can’t say right now what kind of action we will take, but I also can’t say we’re not going to take to the streets in December.” He stares and masticates slowly, and one can’t help but think this is, if anything, a performance of the Quispe myth.
In the political arena Quispe is regarded as but a provocative trifle. Now all eyes are on Evo Morales, the MAS candidate, also an indigenous Aymara, but raised in the semitropical Chapare, and whose populist/socialist anthem claims a broader audience. Morales glories in the political scene Quispe claims to disdain. Quispe, for that matter, claims to disdain Evo and his party.
“MAS is the worst enemy of the indigenous peoples’ movement,” said Quispe, with conviction founded years ago in the Tupac Katari Indigenous Guerrilla Army (EGTK), in which Quispe served alongside Morales’s running mate, Alvaro Garcia Linera.
“We met in 1984.?He arrived like any boy in short pants, with shoes that cost a hundred dollars,” said Quispe of Garcia Linera.?Both men were in jail at the same time; Quispe says, “We left jail and promised to continue fighting together. We began to hold meetings at five in the morning, to discuss strategy.”
Quispe says that in spite of their agreement, Garcia Linera “always had one foot in MIP and the other in MAS;” that Garcia Linera urged him to join MAS, but Quispe wouldn’t have it. “I said no because we’ve had social pacts; we’ve signed and hugged, but Evo always left; he always had ambitions to move on, to be somewhere better,” he said. “I soon learned that Garcia Linera was Evo’s running mate. For me, it was like a betrayal.”
Other narrators tell it differently, that Quispe wanted to be Morales’s running mate but MAS didn’t think him the right match; that Quispe’s idealistic anecdote is only a diatribe.
Either way Quispe supporters—without exception everyone at the rally in Huanaco Maya—distrust Morales’ malleable politics, evidenced by the MAS stance on nationalization. Earlier in the campaign both Felipe Quispe and Evo Morales supported a total nationalization of Bolivia’s hydrocarbons; the nation has natural gas resources second only to Venezuela’s in Latin America, yet ties with Haiti for poorest country in the region. Morales was a vocal force in the June 2005 protests. Recently, however, Morales has taken a more moderate tack; he now speaks of renegotiating contracts instead of a radical appropriation of foreign companies.
Patricia Maya Quispe Quispe, a member of the MIP soccer team, like most Quispe supporters backs—after Quispe, of course—Tuto Quiroga.. The choice of Quiroga perplexes, as he is not only a member of the white elite, but a businessman who served a term as part of Hugo Banzer’s neoliberal presidency. Quispe Quispe explains it in terms of known versus unknown evils.
“If Don Felipe can’t win, God grant that he can, we hope for Tuto Quiroga. At least the people have seen him in office before and have an idea of how he’d govern, that at least things won’t be any worse,” she said. Quispe Quispe is in her early twenties and, like the other players, works and studies in El Alto.
After the polleras win 4-0 each team sits on a blanket for lunch. Older women have piled chuno, a bland boiled root high in the center and they bring?tin bowls of fish from Lake Titicaca cooked whole. The Quispe team eats with their hands, makes jokes about the loss, and resolves to practice. They finish quickly and follow Quispe who has finally convened his hours-long consultation and stands at the truck, clearly ready to go.
Quispe is tired but the team is not. The girls wrap Pachakuti flags around their hair, sit in the bed of the truck, sing, and toss posters to pedestrians the entire drive back to La Paz. Quispe still speaks about graffiti, but wearily. “The day is still young, we can get paint and make some this evening,” he says. “Hell, I’ll go out and paint.”
They stop to tie rocks to banners and throw them over telephone wires. Strung up against a monochrome altiplano sky, the homely flags look less defiant and more like the white handkerchiefs raised by losing parties. At that moment the day has the feel of a person changing light bulbs while the derelict house falls down around their ears.
Quispe, who has been pleasant, even jocular, broods. “Speak,” he says sullenly, though he half answers questions (“How many times have you been married?” “Various times.” “How many is various?” “I don’t know; ten, twenty, forty, I don’t know.”) or pretends not to hear.
But as the group passes through towns people see the Pachakuti flags and wave down the truck to greet Quispe and exchange news. They stick their heads through the window, clasp Quispe’s hand, and exclaim “Don Felipe!” with affection and relish. Some even hoot. Quispe quits his dark mood. He warms, listens, gives words of encouragement, and drives on, always with a friendly suggestion to paint more graffiti.
The day before he’d explained that he didn’t want to be a candidate, that he didn’t want the MIP to even participate in elections. “But this mass of people didn’t have a direction.?Everyone needs a guide; people need to orient themselves,” he said.
Perhaps it was another piece of the Quispe myth. Perhaps Felipe Quispe does revel in the political limelight, secretly, and his humility is rhetoric. But Quispe clearly speaks to a population that identifies with tradition and the rural altiplano, and for whom the sweeping socialism of Morales and Quiroga’s neoliberalism are abstract and worth little. It’s a population that without Quispe would lack a leader and upon him they’ve hand painted very basic hopes, all of which refer to the survival of traditional communities.
Quispe will not win the presidency. He won’t even make a stong show. The goal is not victory, but process and presence. As he says, “We have to convert this indigenous movement into a political tool.”
In El Alto he abruptly remembers another errand, makes a goodbye, and drives away through the mud. At five hundred meters above La Paz, the highest capital in the world, El Alto is cold enough hurt the lungs. It’s impossible to walk without stepping in waste water and refuse, to move without getting jostled, or to think in the dirge of vendors and supplication. And it all seems more desperate when El Alto is juxtaposed with the communities on Lake Titicaca. One can’t help but wonder if Quispe, for his professed political naivete, had an errand.
