“Extra! Extra! The criminal has fled! The criminal has fled!” — Paperboy, La Paz, October 17, 2003

“Slave driver / the table has turned / Catch a fire / you’re gonna get burned” — Bob Marley

On October 17, the Day of National Dignity—which commemorates the greatest achievement of socialist martyr Marcelo Quiroga de Santa Cruz: the nationalization of Gulf Oil—Bolivian President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, his family and inner circle (Carlos Sánchez Berzaín, Yerko Kukoc) fled to Miami. In less than a month, they had killed more than 84 civilians, disappeared some 40 people, injured more than 500 and detained an untold number in a desperate effort to maintain power and preserve the neoliberal status quo.

The “gringo,” as Sánchez de Lozada was called, had gone home, and what had been a clever piece of graffiti had become a reality. That evening, truckloads full of miners and Aymara peasants from Oruro and Potosí arrived at the Plaza San Francisco, the symbolic heart of the nation’s capital, to march and to celebrate their triumph, chanting, “Yes we could!” (a parody of Sánchez de Lozada’s campaign slogan) and, “Goni! You bastard! The people have defeated you!” Earlier in San Francisco, Alteños (people from the Aymara city of El Alto, located on the upper rim of La Paz), neighborhood groups from the hillsides of La Paz—along with miners, teachers, students, market women, butchers and bakers, truckers and taxi drivers—staged the largest rally in Bolivian history: estimates run as high as 500,000.

On October 18, when the truckloads of miners and First Nation community peasants ascended from the heart of La Paz and passed El Alto on their way home, thousands lined the streets to cheer them on, provide them with food and water for the trip, and expressed gratitude for the solidarity they had received from the countryside. Altenos, the architects of an eleven-day general strike that isolated La Paz from the rest of the country and provided the motor force for change, knew they had defeated not only “the gringo” and his murderous ministers, but also the US Embassy that had backed them. They knew the Aymara peasant communities of the Lake Titicaca region and the proletarianized Aymara peasants of El Alto could not have done it without the support of the rest of the country’s social movements (listed in descending order of impact): 1) neighborhood associations, butchers, teachers, and market vendors’ trade unionists in La Paz; 2) First Nations community peasants from Sucre and Potosí; 2) the coca growers from El Chapare and the Yungas; 4) the miners from Huanuni, Oruro; 5) the civic movements that paralyzed Cochabamba, Sucre, Potosí, Oruro; 6) intellectuals, human rights leaders, and middle class citizens who entered into hunger strikes on the afternoon of October 15.

Many analysts see the episode as part of a clear pattern established in Ecuador in 1999 and repeated in Argentina and Peru in the new millennium, whereby loose coalitions of popular movements, mobilized against the neoliberal model and the political parties and/or politicians associated with it, overthrow governments without being able to impose an alternative economic model and a new set of political arrangements. While superficially plausible, such comparisons overlook the depth and sources of the insurrectionary tradition in Bolivia and miss the potential significance of the “October Days” for the country’s future.

RADICAL MOMENT

Bolivians are living through what may be the most radical moment of republican history since the National Revolution of 1952, in which Trotskyist-led* tin miners’ militias defeated the Bolvian Army—which rapidly decomposed in the face of urbaninsurrection—while peasant militias took over land and smashed landlord rule in the countryside. At the same time, the National Revolutionary Movement (MNR), opposed to US imperialism and the oligarchic rule of miners-landlords, was led by middle-class intellectuals like Victor Paz Estenssoro (many of them from Cochabamba). The MNR seized control of the insurrectionary movement, either imposing or ratifying a series of structural reforms: land to the tiller and nationalization of the principal tin mines.

The MNR—trapped between US imperial pressure (exercised chiefly through credit mechanisms) and a communist miners’ movement (in the form of Trotskyist and Stalinist* parties) that formed the centre of gravity of the Bolivian Workers’ Central (COB)—fractured into warring factions, diminishing its strength vis-à-vis the miners’ movement and the US government. Thus in 1964, Rene Barrientos became the first military dictator since the revolution, and quickly built a clientelist following in the countryside. He mobilized peasant militias to crush miners’ strikes in what became known as the “military-peasant pact,” which, in spite of the miner-led Popular Aseembly under radical nationalist General Juan Jose Torres (1970-71), lasted through the reactionary dictatorship of General Hugo Banzer Suarez (1971-78).

Following the emergence of a radical Aymara trade union federation (the Unified Syndical Confederation of Peasant Workers of Bolivia - CSUTCB) out of clandestinity in 1979—at the heart of the rebirth of the COB—dictatorship gave way to a democratically elected, center-left coalition government that was to complete the “incomplete revolution” in a socialist direction, with the added ingredient of self-determination for First Nations’ peasant communities.

Instead, with tin prices declining precipitously and inflation running at 24,000 percent, the Democratic and Popular Unity (UDP) buried the popular hopes of national sovereignty that had been rekindled by Marcelo Quiroga de Santa Cruz among others. In 1985, Victor Paz Estenssoro, president in 1952 and again in 1985, dismantled dependent state capitalism, calling on a young, American-educated technocrat—Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada—to implement full-blown neoliberalism, codified in Supreme Decree 21060. The mines were privatized and 20,000 miners were “relocalized” (a euphemism for firing and displacement). The Aymara peasant trade union federation fell into decline; the coca gorwers’ movement of peasant colonizers in the eastern lowlands of the Chapare—led principally by ex-miners—began to form just as the US govermnment, under George W. Bush, began to ratchet up the intensity of the “war on drugs in the Andes.” The leading political parties—MNR, Left Revolutionary Movement (MIR), Consciousness of the Fatherland (CONDEPA), Civic Solidarity Union (UCS)—enjoyed a near-monopoly on political legitimacy that was to last until the elections of 2002, in which the coca growers, the Aymara peasants and proletarianized workers won 42 seats in congress, and in which the coca growers’ leader, Evo Morales and his anti-imperial, anti-neoliberal party, Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) lost the presidential elections by less than 1.5 percent.

REVOLUTIONARY PROCESS

The new national revolutionary process, whose outcome remains uncertain, demands national sovereignty over natural resources, an end to multinational domination, and political autonomy for First Nations communities (many of them known as ayllus or confederations). The relation of the State to economy and society will change. The era of the MNR has ended, and with it the neoliberal political-economic system installed with state terror in 1985-86, but what comes next is impossible to predict. Though neither Evo Morales nor Felipe Quispe (leader of the CSUTCB and the Aymara political party, Pachakuti Indigenous Movement, MIP) led the “October Days”—their leadership being notable for its absence—the emergence of a determining force on the edge of La Paz means that the future will be defined in two Constituent Assemblies: one in Parliament, and the other in the streets, in neighborhoods, in trade unions, in First Nations’ peasant communities, among miners, coca growers, teachers, students, and, perhaps, even middle-class intellectuals and personalities.

Led by the proletarianized Aymara peasantry of El Alto, Aymara peasant communities of the western highlands; reinforced by the Quechua-speaking Indian peasant communities of the southern highlands and valleys, as well as the Quechua-speaking mestizo coca growers’ and colonizers of the eastern lowlands; the urban middle classes of La Paz, Cochabamba, Santa Cruz, Tarija and Oruro took to the streets and the airwaves—they were the drop that spilled the cup.

What began as the most important highland Aymara uprising in Bolivia since the Federal War of 1899 became, in a matter of days, a nationwide, non-violent insurrection—a national revolutionary march. Unlike the national revolution of 1952, which brought current President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada’s MNR to power on the back of insurgent miners’ and peasants’ militias, the new revolution holds out the possibility that the colonial contradiction that has structured the Bolivian republic—the economic exploitation, political domination and racist oppression of the Indian peasant and proletarianized majority—will finally be resolved.

It is necessary to emphasize that the new nationalism is anything but an atavistic reaction against neoliberal imperialism. If, at the macro-level of the state and public policy, the new revolution recognizes the demands for popular sovereignty and self-government, and the forms of trade union and community organization from which those demands arise, it will be a world-historical first that will have repercussions throughout Latin America, Africa, India and Southeast Asia. In spite of the darkness of colonialist terror that has descended on the new millennium, the poorest, most indigenous and most geographically isolated country of the South American continent may well provide a beacon of light to the rest of the world.

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*Trotskyist refers to socialist followers of the exiled (and in 1940 murdered) rdaical Russian dissident Leon Trotsky. Trotskyists tended to oppose the bureaucracy that had taken power in Russia in the late 1920s under Joseph Stalin.