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Landscapes of memory: Katarismo in Bolivia 1960-1990

Thesis · September 2017

DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.25245.67041

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 AMERG099

Landscapes of memory: Katarismo in Bolivia 1960-1990

Candidate number: PYYL5

Submission date: 02.09.2017

Word count: 14, 871

Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of MA in Latin American

Studies, University College London.

Supervisor: Dr. Paulo Drinot

1
ABSTRACT:

Emerging in the late 1960s, Katarismo is considered one of the first movements in

Bolivia to blend ethnic concerns with class-based theories of exploitation. Kataristas

sought to recover histories and epistemologies that transcended the modern Bolivian

nation state even while they adapted their strategies according to its

parameters. However historians have tended to overlook questions around the

environment and the natural world within the Katarista programme. This

dissertation shows that the relationship between nature and indigeneity in the Central

Andes can be fruitfully historicised by examining Katarista discourse on the

environment. It draws on studies of contemporary indigeneities which stress the

complementarity of human and ‘other-than-human’ actors (de la Cadena, 2010: 345), or

mountains, lakes, glaciers, inter alia. It thereby contributes to a burgeoning dialogue

between historians and anthropologists regarding the ways in which the ‘natural world’,

or social constructions of the environment, have been understood and framed as part of

a decolonial programme by indigenous actors. This dissertation posits that the

environment, ecology and nature assumed strategic importance in Katarismo as a way

of making wider contestations against the neoliberal state. Illustrated by the slogan “We

are not the peasants of 52”, it concludes that Katarismo represents a crucial shift in how

indigenous movements in Bolivia articulated struggles around the environment, class

and modernity in the 20th century.

2
Illimani, La Paz, 2017. A sacred mountain. Photo: author’s own.

Chacaltaya, La Paz, 2017. Photo: author’s own.

3
 CONTENTS

List of abbreviations......................................................................................................................6

Introduction .................................................................................................................................. 7

i. Sources

ii. Literature overview

Chapter One: Political landscapes: contextualising Katarismo ...............................................18

i. The 1952 Revolution

ii. Political parties

iii. Vindicating the Peasants’ Union

iv. Cultural projects

Chapter Two: Contested landscapes ...........................................................................................30

i. Nature as animated spirit

ii. Nature as resource

Chapter Three: Intellectual currents and legacies of Katarismo ............................................. 46

i. José Carlos Mariátegui

ii. Subaltern theory

iii. NGOs

Conclusions ................................................................................................................................... 53

Bibliography ................................................................................................................................. 57

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Figure 1. Map of Bolivia. Source: UN Geospatial Information
Section http://www.un.org/Depts/Cartographic/map/profile/
bolivia.pdf

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 LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

CIPCA Centro de Investigación y Promoción del Campesinado

COB Central Obrera Boliviana
CSUTCB Confederación Sindical Unica de Trabajadores Campesinos de
Bolivia
EGTK Ejercito Guerrilla Tupaj Katari
MAS Movimiento al Socialismo
MITKA Movimiento Indio Tupaj Katari
MNR Movimiento Nacional Revolucionario
MRTK Movimiento Revolucionario Tupaj Katari
MRTK-L Movimiento Revolucionario Tupaj Katari - Liberación
ORAT Ofensiva Roja de los Ayllus Tupakaristas
POR Partido Obrera Revolucionario
THOA El Taller de Historia Oral Andina
USAID United States Agency for International Development

6
 INTRODUCTION

For the indigenous movement, the land is sacred. The land, the Mother
Earth, is our life.
—Evo Morales, 2007

Deep inside, everyone wants to be modern.

—Álvaro García Linera, 2007

One of the most striking developments in 21st century Latin American societies has been the

newfound visibility of indigenous peoples. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in the

plurinational state of Bolivia where indigenous peoples constitute the majority of the population

(Yashar, 2005: 152). In 2006 it saw the election of Latin America's first indigenous president, Evo

Morales and his social movement-backed Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS). The President’s vision

of an ‘indigenous’ nation was subsequently codified in the 2009 constitution which declared Bolivia

a communitarian and plurinational state.

The rise of indigenous concerns in the Americas and elsewhere has been closely linked with a

burgeoning environmental agenda (Krech, 2005; Murray Li, 2004). Indigenous peoples are often

assumed to attach critical importance to the environment. In the Andes, anthropologists have

consistently argued that nature is a core facet of Andean cosmovisións, or worldviews (Teijero,

2007; von Barloewen, 1995; inter alia). But in both academic literature and popular consciousness,

this has a tendency to produce essentialised and erroneous perceptions of indigenous peoples as

‘Wardens of the Jungle’ (Descola, 2005: 32).

In the Morales era, ‘buen vivir’ (‘suma kamana’ in Aymara), or living well in harmony with nature,

has become an abiding principle of the Bolivian state. The concept is part of a state-driven narrative

7
on indigenous cosmovisións and is used by the Morales regime within rhetoric and policy on

climate change (Postero, 2013: 110). However, potent and well-publicised contradictions in this

stance have become starkly apparent through the state’s extractivist policies. In 2012 Morales

attempted to build a 300km highway through the Isoboro Sécure National Park and Indigenous

Territory (TIPNIS), which has been a protected indigenous territory and national park since 1990,

and the ancestral homeland of the Moxeño-Trinitario, Yuracaré, and Chimáne peoples. TIPNIS

brought to the fore the tensions in 21st century narratives of indigeneity with their respect for

‘mother earth’ and the realities of the resource extraction model in the Andes (McNeish, 2013). In

2017 after giving the green-light to proposals once again, Morales went on to accuse critics of the

plan of peddling “colonial environmentalism”, suggesting U.S-linked organisations have coopted

indigenous communities in order to undermine Bolivia’s national sovereignty (Collyns, 2017). As

historian Waskar Ari sagely observes, ‘the spirit of nature and issues of land and territory, continues

to be an emblem of decolonisation today’ (2014: 187). The environmental question therefore,

looms at the heart of Latin American decolonisation debates in the 21st century.

Fig. 2. Evo Morales addresses the petrol workers union, August 2017. An
image of Tupaj Katari is in the background. Source: Twitter.

8
In this dissertation I explore the Katarista movement in the period 1960-1990, that is to say, the

political groups and organisations which paid homage to Tupaj Katari either explicitly in their

organisational names or in their political practice. Few studies of Bolivia have attempted to trace

back the genealogy of the 21st century ‘indigenous awakening’ and its attendant environmentalist

agenda beyond the 1990s. Similarly, scholars have largely neglected to historicise the evolving

purpose and importance of ‘nature’ and environment in indigenous social movements. As

environmental historian Shawn Miller argues, ‘History without nature is not only self-serving: it is

inaccurate, shortsighted, and potentially perilous to the human story line.’(2007: 2). I locate

Katarismo as a turning point for the ways in which ecology and nature were articulated by

indigenous-peasant movements as political issues within emergent processes of decolonisation in

late 20th century Bolivia. This dissertation attempts to answer the following question. How was the

concept of ‘nature’ understood by Kataristas in late 20th century Bolivia, and how was this

translated into political praxis?

This dissertation therefore contributes to a burgeoning dialogue between historians and

anthropologists regarding the ways in which the ‘natural world’, or social constructions of the

environment, have been understood and framed as part of a revolutionary programme by indigenous

political groups. I will illuminate the enigmatic positions adopted by the Katarista movement vis-à-

vis the environment and natural world, shedding light on a facet of the movement maligned in

existing scholarship. I argue that the environment, ecology and nature assumed great importance in

Katarista discourse as way of making wider contestations against the neoliberal state, and

modernity more fundamentally. I argue that ultimately environmental traditions and ‘natural

memories’ found reinvention through the revindication of indigeneity promulgated by the

Kataristas.

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Chapter One situates the Katarista movement within the Bolivian political milieu, and outlines its

trajectory alongside wider political trends in Bolivia and the Andes. Chapters One and Two point

out that Katarismo was the first movement in Bolivia to frame the environment as part of an ethnic-

based struggle and to tie it to a specifically decolonial agenda. Chapter Two additionally reveals

how the environment was framed both as a natural resource in political economy terms, and as an

animated force imbued with profound spiritual and cultural resonance. It explores the contradictions

and tensions that this dual meaning produced. It is argued in Chapter Three that the construction of

environmental myth and memory helped Kataristas to to invoke a counter-modernity and to build

on pre-existing decolonial intellectual currents in the Andes. The chapter unpicks intellectual

currents within Katarismo, examining the role of Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui as well

as the influence of non-governmental organisations (NGO) in shaping Katarista environmental

discourse.

i. Sources

In this dissertation I draw primarily on Katarista pamphlets, periodicals and publications published

in the Spanish language. All translations are my own except where otherwise indicated. Also

reviewed are pamphlets from Bolivian political parties including the Trotskyist Partido Obrero

Revolucionario (POR) and the Movimiento Nacional Revolucionario (MNR), selected Bolivian

national newspapers (El Diario, Presencia and Los Tiempos) published between 1960 and 1990, and

published reports from the Bolivian trade union movement and international organisations such as

the World Bank. I also draw on interviews that I conducted in La Paz in July 2017 with academics,

Aymara activists and Katarista thinkers, as well as the plethora of digital materials such as

interviews with Kataristas on Youtube.

10
It must be recognised that it is tricky to gauge the popular reception of the documents assessed here.

As with any political movement, the range of opinions expressed through spoken conversations,

debates at trade union meetings and programmes transmitted on local radio stations, for example,

can only be only partially and indirectly captured. Although Katarismo was a movement arising

from literate protagonists in urban La Paz, it aimed to also reach those who were not; in 1976,

Bolivian adult literacy rates stood at 63% (World Bank, 2017). Although some Kataristas may not

have been able to read the documents analysed here, their contents would have been transmitted

orally. Many of the publications analysed in this dissertation were shipped internationally and

reflect the transnational nature of the debates in which Katarismo participated. The written

discourse from Kataristas hence represents a fraction of the broad Katarista discourse permeating

Bolivia between 1960 and 1990, but it embodies the most outward facing positions within its

thought.

ii. Literature overview

By way of background, in recent years historians of the Andes have increasingly turned their

attention to the long history of indigenous organising in the region, placing the contributions of

indigenous communities at the heart of 19th and 20th century state formation processes. Laura

Gotkowitz in A Revolution for Our Rights: Indigenous Struggles for Land and Justice in Bolivia,

1880-1952 (2008), fluidly charts the long history of rural insurrection over land and civil rights

among Aymara and Quechua-speaking indigenous communities in the Cochabamba region in the

years preceding the Bolivian national revolution of 1952. Providing a picture of, in the author’s

words, ‘the revolution before the revolution’ Gotkowitz reveals that disputes over indigenous rights

were significantly more important in Bolivia’s pre-revolutionary political culture than recognised in

earlier scholarship.

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Scholarship on Katarismo itself is dominated by two groundbreaking works from the 1980s by

sociologists Silvia Rivera and Javier Hurtado. These were published amid a crisis in the Marxist

historiographical paradigm and at a time when the credibility of the Marxist left was globally

debased. Both works typify therefore, an intellectual stance which sought to move beyond solely a

class based approach to social relations. Rivera’s Oppressed But Not Defeated: Peasant Struggles

Among the Aymara and Quechua in Bolivia, 1900–1980 is a tour-de-force on the Katarista

movement and is cited in most scholarship on Bolivian recent history. It pioneers the notion of ‘long

memory’ and ‘short memory’ as defining features of Katarismo. This long memory takes the form

of the trans-generational memory stretching back to colonial era repression and resistance from

Tupaj Amaru and Tupaj Katari in the 18th century. Conversely, short memory invokes the failure of

the Bolivian revolution of 1952 to achieve drastic social change, or even to fulfil its liberal promises

of reform for the peasantry.

Hurtado’s El Katarismo (1986), based on extensive primary source research, traces the rise of

Katarismo as a political, cultural and syndicalist movement sustained by complex cross-sector

alliances. The work is rich in detail on the institutional development and electoral efforts of

Katarismo. Throughout the 1970s Hurtado, along with fellow scholar Xavier Albó, was involved in

the Centre for Research and Promotion of the Peasantry (CIPCA), a Jesuit funded NGO which

promoted rural development, cultural initiatives and advocated the rights of Aymara and Quechua

speaking peasants.

These two works have come to be taken, not unproblematically, as the official histories of the

movement (Portugal and Macusaya, 2016). Recent years have witnessed the growth of dynamic

new intellectual projects within both academic and grassroots circles in Bolivia which contest these

‘official histories’ of Katarismo written by Rivera and Hurtado et al. This dissertation engages with

12
these recent critiques at a time when few academic projects have done so. These initiatives to some

degree, envision a new role for scholars working on indigenous peoples and encourage critical

enquiry on state-sponsored codes and histories of indigeneity which have evolved with Morales and

the MAS in Bolivia. This developing historiography is reflected in the 2016 work El Indianismo

katarista - Un análisis crítico by Pedro Portugal and Carlos Macusaya. The authors are active in

projects such as Periodico Pukara, a La Paz-based Indianista journal and the contemporary group

Movimiento Indianista Katarista (MINKA). Portugal and Macusaya reject Rivera’s notion of ‘long

memory’ specifically. They lament, ‘one of the most popularised and vulgarised ideas about the

indigenous movements of the Andes has its origin in that book [Rivera’s Oppressed but not

Defeated]: the idea of ‘long memory’, which is very attractive for certain social strata distanced

from the ‘indigenous’.’(2016: 31-32). Tacit condemnation of scholarship on indigeneity arising

from non-indigenous scholars is evident here. They argue that notions of dormant memory are

ahistorical and fail to account for the ways in which younger-generation Kataristas actively

constructed a memory and language of past oppression unassisted by older generations (interview

with Macusaya, 2017).

Portugal and Macusaya also raise the question of the relationship between Indianismo and

Katarismo. Although I concentrate on the latter, there is often overlap between the two. They are

generally considered to be inter-related although operationally distinct movements (Portugal and

Macusaya, 2016: 26). Indianismo, influenced by the works of Fausto Reinaga, places primordial

emphasis on the racial oppression experienced by Indians and asserts an essential difference

between Indian and non-Indian subjects. Portugal and Macusaya conclude, ‘In short, we can say

that Indianismo was a movement and a discourse that centred its criticism and struggle on the

racialised character of the social structure in Bolivia; Meanwhile Katarismo was a movement which

focused on the economic and cultural specificities of the peasantry.’ (2016: 26). The former

approach is reflected in Fausto Reinaga’s Manifesto of the Indian Party of Bolivia, in which he

13
repudiates racial or class-based alliances, declaring, ‘We are oppressed, we are enslaved, as a race.

We are discriminated against as a race. They kill us because we are Indians. Our oppression is

racial; therefore, our Revolution must be racial.’ (1970: 125).

Fig. 2. Hurtado’s El Katarismo was republished and launched with aplomb by Álvaro
García Linera in 2016. But the lack of Katarista representation at the launch event proved
controversial for contemporary Katarista groups. The protest sign reads, ’Presenting “El
Katarismo” without Kataristas’. Source: José Luis Saavedra, 2016.

The provenance of scholarship on Katarismo is often a politically charged topic. Sociologist Jean-

Pierre Lavaud produced Identité Et Politique: Le Courant Tupac Katari En Bolivie (1982) an oft-

cited report outlining the political trajectory of Katarismo. Lavaud downplays the revolutionary

potential of Katarismo, noting that the groups ‘are somewhat regressive, all turning towards a

mythologised past from which they draw energy and assurance.’ (1982: 53). He also makes

intriguing although tentative links between Katarismo and theories expressed by Fanon and Freud,

as well as identifying parallels between Pachamama and ‘Mother Africa’ pan-African ideology.

(1984: 54). The work received (unjustified, I argue) criticism from Rivera. In a footnote in

Oppressed but not Defeated, she scathingly concludes, ‘The ultimate purpose of Lavaud’s article

seems to be that of demystifying the Indian, who in the latest trends of European romanticism
14
appears to have become an idealised solution to the ideological crisis of the younger

generations.’(1987: 133).

As such, themes of historical memory seem to pervade studies of Katarismo. This typifies much of

Bolivian historiography in which the past and the present are understood to animatedly co-exist

(Dangl, 2017; Rivera, 1990; Dunkerley, 2007; inter alia). Much of this arose in the context of the

1980s when the topic of ‘memory’ attracted increasing attention from social scientists. Xavier Albó,

coined the phrase ‘great arc’ as a descriptor for the two centuries connecting the insurrection of

Tupaj Katari with the Kataristas for example (1987) . In the same vein, José Teijeiro’s La rebellion

permanente: crisis de identidad y persistencia etnico-cultural aymara en Bolivia (2007), points to

Aymara insurrection as an historical constant in the colonial and postcolonial eras. Yet the

environment as a tangible embodiment of the past has not been explicitly placed within the

analytical framework of memory in these studies. To address this neglect, in this dissertation I

explore the ways in which the natural landscape acts as socio-spatial repository of memories

surrounding resistance and violence.

Meanwhile at the state and institutional level, much recent scholarship has focused on the Pink

Tide, or left-wing shift, in the Latin American political milieu. IMF sponsored neoliberal policies in

the 1990s and early 2000s triggered a resurgence in social movements across Latin America, and

prompted a flurry of works on indigenous activism and neoliberalism. Of these, this dissertation

draws from Marc Becker (2008), Petras and Veltmeyer (2010), Jeffrey Webber (2010; 2015)

Goodale and Postero (2013) and Deborah Yashar (2005).

In his work Indians and Leftists in the Making of Ecuador’s Modern Indigenous Movements

(2008), Becker contests the claim that the 20th century Ecuadorian Left operated in an

assimilationist model which subjugated ethnicity to class. Becker seeks to bring the category of

15
class ‘back in’ to studies of ethnic movements. He argues compellingly that the so-called ‘new’

indigenous organisations which developed in Ecuador in the 1990s were rooted in older modes of

class-based organisation associated with the traditional Left. As with Gotkowizc, Becker explores

the pluralistic history of indigenous activism, tracing the propinquity which characterised relations

between indigenous groups and leftist organisations in 20th century Ecuador.

In a similar vein, Petras and Veltmeyer enlist a Marxist framework to critique assumptions of class

homogeneity in indigenous movements. In their article ‘A Class Perspective on Social Ecology and

the Indigenous Movement’ (2010) they argue that ‘liberal writers understate the degree of capitalist

penetration, class differentiation and subsequent political polarisation’ within ecological indigenous

movements (2010: 445). The article is an important corrective to studies of Andean social

movements which fail to acknowledge the salience of class divisions within, and between,

indigenous groups in environmental struggles.

Yet while this literature as a whole exposes an often neglected history of indigenous activism in the

Andes, there has been little attention devoted to the concurrent role of the environment as either

actor or object in these struggles. To rectify this gap, this dissertation draws heavily on

anthropological literature concerning non-human agency. The most influential of this body is the

work produced by Marisol de la Cadena on ‘other-than-human beings’, notably Earth-Beings:

Ecologies of Practice Across Andean Worlds (2015), a collaborative work based on decade-long

conversations with Mariano and Nazario Turpo, both indigenous Andean shamans. José Teijero

(2015), Simón Yampara (2011) and Joanna Rappaport (2012) also make invaluable contributions to

this field of scholarship. It is generally agreed that dominant forms of euro-modernity affirm

ontological difference between nature and culture (Escobar, 2010). De la Cadena engages with the

ontological turn in anthropology which posits the existence of different if complementary ‘worlds’,

an idea which has profound decolonial implications. She argues that contemporary indigenous

16
mobilisation in Peru is marked by alliances ‘between radically different and partially connected

worlds’. This involves a juxtaposition of the ‘worlds’ occupied by white-mestizo leftist politicians,

and that of the runakuna, or Quechua campesinos. (2015: 110). De la Cadena’s work thereby opens

up a new analytical framework in which historians can explore nature’s significance beyond ‘natural

resource’ in political movements which mobilise around indigeneity. De la Cadena’s work is a

reminder that ‘earth beings’ should be recognised as actors within historical processes. Adapting de

la Cadena’s approach, a central argument of this dissertation is thus that ‘nature’ was constructed

and understood by Kataristas both as a natural resource in the world of political economy, and as a

component in the Aymara world of socio-spiritual practice. Nature was ergo both an organic cultural

concern and the locus of a discursive strategy for contesting neoliberalism.

Likewise, this dissertation draws on works by postcolonial theorists and political ecologists which

have amply noted the ecological ramifications of colonialism throughout the 20th century. Aimé

Césaire in his famously stinging rebuke of European colonialism notes for example, ‘I am talking

about natural economies that have been disrupted - harmonious and viable economies adapted to the

indigenous population - about food crops destroyed, malnutrition permanently introduced,

agricultural development oriented solely toward the benefit of the metropolitan countries, about the

looting of products, the looting of raw materials.’(1972: 7). Specifically for the Bolivian case, Kevin

A. Young recently produced a 20th century history of government resource-extraction policies in

Bolivia, Blood of the Earth: Resource Nationalism, Revolution, and Empire in Bolivia (2017). This

work makes an important contribution to scholarship probing the intersections of environmental and

social history.

More broadly, the past two decades have seen a lively and occasionally acrimonious debate unfold

over the meaning and practice of decolonisation in Latin America. Research on the Katarista

movement must be placed in this context of what one could term, ‘contested decolonisation’. In

17
Bolivia, as expressed in the 2009 constitution, ‘decolonisation’ has been central to the political

vision of the state and the term is now omnipresent in Bolivian policymaking and civic society

spheres. While the debate extends far beyond the confines of the academy (and indeed often in

opposition to the academy altogether), key protagonists in the academic scholarship on Latin

American decolonisation are Silvia Rivera, Javier Sanjinés, Walter Mignolo and Aníbal Quijano.

These scholars work from the assumption that there is a mutually constitutive relationship between

colonialism and modernity, a paradigm which social movements and academics in the Global South

uniquely must grapple with. The debate has profound implications for how scholars and activists

understand decolonial movements. The epistemological side of this, as Indian postcolonial theorist

Ashis Nandy expresses neatly, is that ‘The west has not merely produced modern colonialism, it

informs most interpretations of colonialism.’ (1983: 12). A paradox of coloniality, therefore, is that

decolonial movements find themselves compelled to use concepts derived from colonial knowledge

systems to articulate their vision. Chapter Three explores this question and addresses the resonance

of this decolonial scholarship in perspectives on Katarismo.

CHAPTER ONE

POLITICAL LANDSCAPES: CONTEXTUALISING KATARISMO

“…national liberation is necessarily an act of culture.”

Amilcar Cabral, 1970.

‘We the Aymara, Qhechwa, Camba, Chapaco, Chiquitano, Moxo, Tupiguarani and other peasants

are the rightful owners of this land. We are the seed from which Bolivia was born and we are exiles

in our own land. We want to regain our liberty of which we were deprived in 1492, to bring our

culture back into favour and, with our own personality, be subjects and not objects of our history…’

— Declaration of the CSUTCB, 1979

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This chapter outlines the trajectory of the Katarista movement and analyses its interactions with

other sectors of the Bolivian political milieu. It disentangles the syndical, cultural and political

manifestations of Katarismo in order to provide an holistic sense of the movement. Katarismo

emerged tentatively in the late 1960s and is the first movement in Bolivia to blend ethnic concerns

with class-based theories of exploitation, rooted powerfully in traditions of collective organisation

in the Bolivian altiplano. Albó argues the Katarista perspective can be captured in the theory of ‘the

two eyes’ (1991: 311). In this way Katarismo recognised the duality of class exploitation and ethnic

oppression, ‘as peasants, along with all the exploited classes, and as oppressed peoples, along with

all the oppressed nations of the country.’ (Albó, 1991: 313).

Fig.3. Bolivian villagers in 1975. Source: New York Public Library http://
digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/f25299e0-8751-0134-f0dc-00505686a51c

19
But Katarismo was multifarious and far from monolithic. The label offers a capacious umbrella for

syndicalist, nationalist, ethnic and autonomist currents broadly aimed at the revindication of the

Indian, and the end to class-based exploitation and ethnic oppression. In its political manifestations,

from the late 1970s Katarismo can be broadly characterised as having radical and moderate camps.

These diverged in their willingness to operate either ‘within’ or ‘without’ the mestizo-creole

capitalist system, as well as their more fundamental understanding of the relationship between

ethnicity and class in the Indian struggle (Sanjinés, 2002).

Invoking the memory of the 18th century Andean rebel movement led by Tupaj Katari, Kataristas

sought to recover histories and epistemologies that transcended the Bolivian nation state. When

Tupaj Katari was executed by the Spanish authorities on 15 November 1781, his body was

dismembered into four parts and scattered. Oral tradition holds that Katari’s dying words were:

‘Nayawa jiwtxa, nayjarusti waranqa waranqaranakawa kutanıpxa — I die, but I shall return

tomorrow as millions’ (Canessa, 2000: 125). Tupaj Katari’s execution became a mobilising myth,

serving both as a vivid reminder of the brutalities of colonial rule which resonated in the present,

and more intangibly, the fragmentation of Bolivia’s many peoples. His quartered body has hence

become a visceral signifier of (dis)unity. Vice President Álvaro García Linera indeed opined during

the commemoration act of Tupaj Katari’s wife Bartolina Sisa in 2008, “Today, the unity of Bolivia

is the unity of Tupaj Katari’s body… Katari’s body is united, Bolivia’s body is united and

consequently, victory is secured.” (Burman, 2016: 9).

Katarismo arose in the capital city of La Paz among Aymara workers, grassroots intellectuals and

students, most of whom had emigrated from rural areas and felt the loss of their rural origins with

acuity. From the late 1960s, rural migration to La Paz mushroomed. According to the 1976 census,

25% of the La Paz population was made up of Aymara migrants from the altiplano (Rivera, 1983:

139). Its protagonists were radicalised by the racial discrimination they experienced in the city;

20
‘more than anything else, this handful of students created an identity based on their own experience

as peasants and Aymaras in the face of the city’s challenges.’(Albó, 1987: 391). By adopting the

name of Tupaj Katari in the name of Indian liberation in the present, discrimination experienced by

the Aymara could be understood as an historical constant. Through their intellectual projects and

political organising, Kataristas sought to recover histories which were occluded by the hegemonic

state, thereby excavating ‘the nation below the state’ (Sanjinés, 2002: 42).

i. Katarismo and the 1952 Revolution

Katarismo must be understood in part, as a product of disillusionment with the 1952 Bolivian

revolution which transformed the political mis-en-scene of the nation state. The abiding refrain of

the Katarista movement was “We are not the peasants of 1952” which underscores Katarismo’s

departure from these revolutionary years (Albó, 1991: 312). The revolutionary milieu was

dominated by the political party Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (National Revolutionary

Movement —MNR) which governed from 1952 to 1964. Its key policies were the nationalisation of

the lucrative tin mines and the consolidation of the labour movement. The years after the MNR

were followed by marked political volatility; between 1978 and 1982 alone there were three general

elections, six military coups, two of which were violent and a total of thirteen presidents (Albó,

1991: 313).

Crucially the revolution ushered in universal suffrage and thereby created new political

opportunities for subaltern groups, but also generated new inequalities and grievances in the

process. Katarismo emerged in opposition to its homogenising mestizaje nationalism in particular. A

pan-Latin American phenomenon, mestizaje in Bolivia was ‘a cultural discourse whose purpose is

to justify the hegemony of a mestizo-criollo liberal upper class that assumed power at the beginning

21
of the 20th century.’ (Sanjinés, 2002: 39). Under its banner, leaders of the revolution sought to

assimilate the Indian population into the body politic. Rather than claiming distinct ethnic

categorisation as Indians, Bolivia’s indigenous population were to become racially-neutral

campesinos. However for Kataristas, mestizaje negated the powerful validity of Indian identity and

failed to counter the racism that persisted in the post-revolutionary era.

In the economic sphere, an objective in the revolution of vital importance for the peasantry was land

redistribution. In 1953 agrarian reform was passed, returning a modicum of land to campesinos and

ending the historic hegemony of the hacendados, or large landowners. Before land reform, 4%

percent of landowners held 82% of Bolivian land (Rivera (1987: 64). Around 300,000 inhabitants of

the highlands obtained land titles through the 1953 agrarian reform statute (Zimmerer, 1993: 316).

However, ultimately few tangible improvements in the lives of the impoverished peasantry

materialised from agrarian reform. In the 1960s, most peasants were still employed in the rural

subsistence economy, while traditional Andean community structures in the altiplano remained

largely untouched (Rivera, 1987: 151). Most agrarian development benefited Santa Cruz and the

lowlands where large commercial farmers, recipients of 60% of the land awarded through agrarian

reform, expanded crop and livestock production (Zimmerer, 1993: 316). They were assisted by

increasingly flexible credit policies, which small-scale farmers could not easily access. A policy

statement from the VII National Peasant Congress complained for example, ‘Only the cotton, sugar

and livestock entrepreneurs, etc. get credit from the Banco Agricola, benefitting from nearly 80

percent of total credit. A few peasants have received credits that do not even total five

percent.’ (1978, n.p).

Elsewhere in the statement, the bitter frustration at the failure of agrarian reform to address land

inequalities echoes strongly. ‘The 1953 Agrarian Reform did no more than redistribute the land and

even that was of no real benefit to us… The agrarian reform was no gift and we are under no

22
obligation to thank anyone for it.’ (1978, n.p). Moreover peasant liberation was severely curtailed

under the subsequent Barrientos regime (1964-1969) which saw the introduction of the Peasant-

Military Pact, entrenching military power and enabling a series of authoritarian dictatorships

spanning eighteen years. Barrientos displaced the link between the MNR and the peasantry and

instead ensured peasant leaders were bound to the military in a clientelist relationship which

impeded the development of an autonomous peasant movement.

ii. Katarista political parties

The political currents of Katarismo crystallised in two parties, the MRTK (Movimiento

Revolucionario Tupaj Katari) and MITKA (Movimiento Indio Tupaj Katari). As I will argue in

Chapter Two, both groups advanced an environmental agenda across the years 1960-1990, albeit in

differing ways. The MRTK emerged under the leadership of Macabeo Chila and veteran syndicalist

Jenaro Flores, and it adopted a more pragmatic and conciliatory line when it came to partnerships

with other political parties (Rivera, 1987: 136). In the 1978 elections it united with the left coalition

of Hernan Siles Zuazo’s Unidad Democratico Popular (UDP) for example (Albó, 1987: 402). In an

interview published in Collasuyo, a monthly Katarista periodical, Macabeo Chila states that ‘the

MRTK understands that it must work in the aim of a firm alliance between both [peasant and

worker] classes that definitively constitute the great motor of the National Revolution.’ (1978: n.p).

He envisioned MRTK to be ‘the political instrument of the Bolivian peasantry’ to win liberation

from capitalist and imperialist exploitation (1978: n.p).

In contrast, radical Katarismo, sometimes elided with Indianismo, came to fruition under MITKA

which was founded on April 27, 1978 in Pacajes, La Paz (Lavaud, 1982: 10). It was at various

points led by Constantino Lima, Luciano Tapia, Julio Tumiri and Jaime Apaza. MITKA repudiated

alliances with conventional political parties, arguing that none adequately represented the interests

23
of the peasantry, and was far more visceral in its condemnation of the creole Left, or the q’aras

[foreigners]. Anthropologist José Antonio Rocha argues that for MITKA, in contrast with the

MRTK, ‘the left is as bad as the right; Both tendencies belong to the ‘white’ world. In its

conception, Bolivian society is a world divided between whites and Indians, a society in which the

white minority exploits and subjugates the majority of Indians.’ (1992: 260). For example, Katarista

Felipe Quispe Huanca wrote in 1978, ‘The criminal act that the Bolivian Left has committed against

the Indian is to divide it into social classes, without respecting its condition of people [pueblo] or

nation. The Left thinks only of socio-economic improvements, which to the Indian means only

basic palliatives to the true problem of liberation….The political tendencies of Right or Left in

vogue are copies derived from Europe which do not accept that Indianism is the true Left, rather

than this imported Left.’ (1978: 2).

In an interview with Luciano Tapia published in Boletín Chitakolla, a Katarista monthly periodical

edited by Pedro Portugal, the founder and leader of MITKA is asked whether it is necessary to form

political groups to advance Indian rights, or whether peasant unions such as the Confederacion

Sindical Unica de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia (CSUTCB) could be a useful vehicle. Tapia

was a former miner and agricultural worker who at the time of the interview was sixty two years

old. He replies, ‘I think that trade unionism as a political alternative is not the right way. However, I

do not discount the union as an instrument of struggle, if we consider that there is a capitalist

system that has to raise the claims of the exploited as a class. But the reality of the Indian People is

not only a reality of social class, it can not be confused with that single dimension’(1986: 5). Tapia

falls short of repudiating class struggle altogether, but couches his arguments in the language of

transcendent ethnic nationhood. He states, ‘We are first of all a concrete people, a Nation,

[within…] the State of Qullasuyu [Bolivia] with the name of Inka Atawallpa. We have not stopped

building our nation, with a thousand-year-old history and rights that date back to many civilisations.

Our claim goes beyond a simple class struggle.” (1986: 5).

24
Later in 1985 another of the more moderate factions, Movimiento Revolucionario Tupaj Katari de

Liberación (MRTKL) formed as an off-shoot of the MRTK. Meanwhile, occupying the more

militant end of the spectrum lay the rebel groups Ofensiva Roja de los Ayllus Tupakataristas

(ORAT). Yet despite this seemingly disparate array of Katarista tendencies, in many ways the

differences between the groups were more apparent than real. Lavaud concludes for example that

all the Katarista elements ‘have in common the wish to exalt certain parts of history obscured or

trivialised by official historiography. They highlight the achievements and heroic actions of the

Indian resistance to Spanish colonisation, and magnify traits of the pre-Columbian era.’ (1982: 13).

In an opinion piece published in the run-up to the 1978 elections, MITKA leader Isidoro Copa Cayo

states that ‘the other Tupaj Katarist movements, if they are such, are flesh of our flesh and blood of

our blood. The differences between us are not substantial and refer to tactics or strategy of struggle

and to emphasise different positions. Indeed the many Kataristas movements reflects the sense of

pluralism that animates our thinking and political action.’ (Presencia, 1978: n.p). The viscerality of

these linkages is conveyed in Copa Cayo’s bodily metaphor, [son carne de nuestra carne y sangre

de nuestra sangre]. Meanwhile in the same year, an article in the Mink’a/MRTK periodical

Collasuyo states that although ‘the Katarista movement must unify definitively …public opinion

considers the division [between MITKA and MRTK] circumstantial and…logical because the

Aymaras, Quechuas and others that make up the 80% of the population used not to have any

political base, while 20% of dominant caste had 50 parties and political fractions.’ (1978: 8).

Clearly for both the MRTK and MITKA, pluralism was a logical and relatively unproblematic result

of strategic differences.

25
 iii. Katarismo and the vindication of the Peasants’ Union

Fig. 4. Speakers at the First National Congress of the CSUTCB, 1979.

Source: Javier Hurtado, El Katarismo, 1986.

The syndicalist expression of Katarismo was arguably its most enduring and successful. It heralded

a turning point in efforts to forge an autonomous peasant trade union structure, undermining the

government sponsored apparatus of the Military-Peasant Pact. At the Potosí Peasant Congress in

August 1971, Katarista penetration of the peasant movement led to the appointment of Jenaro

Flores as the highest leader of the Confederación Nacional de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia

(National Confederation of Peasant Workers of Bolivia - CNTCB). Infiltrating this syndical

structure allowed Kataristas to make propitious links with other labour sectors. Katarista

representatives in the CNTCB attended the miners’ congress at Corocoro and assisted the infamous

miners’ strike of June 1976, which earned them immense support although also incurred

imprisonment and exile for many Katarista leaders under the military dictatorship of Banzer

(Rivera, 1987: 125).

26
The syndicalist strengths of Katarismo are epitomised in the ascent of its new peasants union in

1979, the Confederación Sindical Única de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia (Single Trade

Union Confederation of Peasant Workers of Bolivia - CSUTCB). The organisation arose out of the

First Congress for Peasant Unity in La Paz in 1979 which was sponsored by the Central Obrera

Boliviana (COB), the main trade union body. It was the product of dissatisfaction with the formerly

dominant CNTCB which had suffered an irreparable dent to its legitimacy following its handling of

the 1974 massacre of Quechua peasants in Cochabamba who had been demanding higher prices for

agricultural products (Korovkin, 2006). At the CNTCB congress in 1978, most of its departmental

federations voted to adopt the Katarista programme and the union dissolved into the CSUTCB.

Kataristas thus emerged as a crucial force in the radicalisation of peasant politics that took place in

the 1970s.

Fig. 5. Booklet from the CSUTCB, 1980. Source: Senate

House Special Collections.

Under the Kataristas, the CSUTCB served as a forum to debate proposals about peasant labour as

well as the Bolivian state and society more broadly. In 1983 the political manifesto of the CSUTCB

included the declaration, ‘We the current leaders, refuse to accept and will never accept class

reductionist ideas which transform us to the status of mere “peasants”. Nor do we accept ethnic

reductionism which transforms our struggle into a confrontation between “Indians and “whites”.
27
(1983: n.p). In 1984, under the leadership of the Kataristas the CSUTCB presented a draft Agrarian

Fundamental Law that contained the embryo of a new plurinational state model (Albó, 1991: 303).

This trend was propelled by groups such as MITKA, which had consistently pointed out the

colonial dimensions of the nation state model and its erasure of ethnic pluralism. In 1978, MITKA

electoral candidate Isidoro Copo Cayo declared ‘there is no such Bolivian Nation. This is a fiction

and an aspiration that the oppressive elites try to forge through national integration based on the

disintegration of native nations.’ (Presencia, 1978: n.p).

A synthesis of these Katarista currents — political, cultural and syndical — can be discerned in the

Tiahuanaco Manifesto. It was written in 1973 and symbolically unveiled at Tiahuanaco, the pre-

Columbian archeological site near La Paz. In essence, the Manifesto is a syncretic rallying cry on

behalf of Bolivia’s peasantry. It calls for their emancipation and freedom from exploitation, and

condemns foreign and internal colonialism, economic under-development, corruption within the

peasant movement and governing class, and defective rural education policies, among other evils.

The product of a coalition of grassroots organisations, the document’s signatories are the National

Association of Peasant Teachers, The Peasant Students Association of Bolivia, the Túpac Katari

Peasant Centre, MINK’A and the Puma Aymara Defence Union. On 23 January 1974, one year after

the manifesto was unveiled, over one hundred Indian campesinos protesting against price increases

and food shortages under the Banzer regime were massacred by the army. The president went on to

prohibit all leftist political parties and curtail trade union activities. In these years the Manifesto was

used by Kataristas clandestinely organising at the local level to inspire and train cadre.

A preoccupation with ‘development’ is a defining feature of the Manifesto and indeed the Katarista

movement more widely. The Manifesto proclaims, ‘We peasants want economic development, but it

must come from our own values. We do not want to give up our noble ancestral integrity in favour

of pseudo-development. We believe that the false "developmentalism" imported from abroad is not

28
genuine and does not respect our deep values.’ (1973: n.p). T he Manifesto does not eschew a

materialist analysis of social relations, but nor does it consign culture to the superstructure. It states,

‘Economic and political power are the basis of cultural liberation. We must incorporate new

technology and modernise while not breaking with our past.’ (1973: n.p).

In his interview in Boletín Chitakolla, Luciano Tapia reflects, ‘The Aymara-Quechua people are not

only victims of Anglo-Saxon or Latin-American colonialist oppression. We suffer an oppression

from outside and an oppression from within which is the reality of our people.’(1986: 6) Here Tapia

refers to the processes of internal colonisation that informs the Katarista programme of social

change. Internal colonisation in Latin America historically involved the supplanting of colonial

elites with postcolonial elites in the new Republics of Latin America. Indigenous populations

remained subjugated under the relationships of domination that remained. Yet it also points to a

more fundamental Katarista awareness of internalised colonialism, or the psychological condition

of inferiority generated in colonised peoples through systems of racial and social domination. It is

an argument which echoes the postcolonial scholarship of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks

(1952) and subaltern studies works such as Ashis Nandy’s The Intimate Enemy (1983) for example.

iv. Katarismo as a cultural project

In a rupture with class-based analyses dominant on the Bolivia left in the post-revolutionary era,

Kataristas asserted a new political role for culture in the peasant movement. As will be argued in

Chapter Two, this was intricately connected with a discourse on the environment. Rivera affirms

that within Katarismo ‘the cultural dimension and the political dimension appear …relatively

undifferentiated’ (1983: 143). This was particularly evident in the growth of urban-based cultural

centres such as the El Taller de Historia Oral Andina (THOA - Andean Oral History Workshop)

founded in 1983 by a group of Aymara students under the direction of Silvia Rivera who met at the

29
Universidad Mayor de San Andrés (UMSA) in La Paz. THOA produced books, and radio programs

on hitherto sidelined stories of indigenous resistance. It was a radical activist-intellectual project

aiming to recover native epistemological roots and challenge the erasure of indigenous peoples

from the Bolivia national imaginary. In later years, the September 1985 edition of Boletín

Chitakolla announced the creation of a cultural centre in La Paz named ‘Qullasuyo’. Its general

objectives are listed as revitalising the Aymara-Quechua music and dance among young people and

promoting the spread of cultural projects among Aymara-Quechua immigrants to urban centres

(1985: 3).

Fig. 6. ‘To rescue our culture is to make it an instrument for the liberation of
the Bolivian people’. Illustration in Los Campesinos Opinan, 1978. Source:
Bodleian Libraries.

Prior to this, in the late 1960s, a group of Aymara students formed a study group known as the

Movimiento Noviembre 15 (Movement of 15 November) in which the ideas of Indianista writer

Fausto Reinaga were debated. On May 27 1969 Aymara residents in La Paz created the Centre for

the Coordination and Promotion of the Peasantry - MINK’A, which became a legal entity in 1971

(Collasuyo, 1978:3. Hurtado, 1984: 38). MINK’A promoted education and cultural activities for

both rural and urban indigenous peoples, as well as disseminating radio programmes in the Aymara

30
language. These cultural initiatives reveal that Katarismo was movement in which culture and

politics were mutually reinforcing influences.

CHAPTER TWO

CONTESTED LANDSCAPES

‘True development is based on culture.’

Manifesto de Tiahuanaco, 1973

‘For whom do the polluted waters, the animal species cornered to extinction, the barren land, the
dirty air, vote for? Where do we place the ballot of a dying world?’
Zapatista communique, 2016

This chapter analyses the role Katarista environmental discourse played in the movement’s

decolonial political project. I argue that over the period 1960-1990, ‘nature’ was constructed in the

Katarista imaginary both as an economic resource, and as an animated socio-spatial landscape. It is

evident that Kataristas were acutely aware of the ecological facets of imperialism, and the

environment’s importance within indigenous identities abstractly. But as Joni Adamson cautions,

‘indigenous knowledges should never be romanticised as somehow “authentically” linking

particular ethnic groups to “Nature.”’ (Westling, ed., 2014: 175). Kataristas drew on traditional

knowledges surrounding the environment but they also strategically adapted them to make wider

contestations against state, class and capital.

This chapter derives its analytical framework from the arguments made by de la Cadena vis-à-vis

contemporary indigenous mobilisation in the Quechua-speaking community of Pacchanta in

highland Peru. As mentioned, de la Cadena posits the existence of ‘alternative worlds’, or

ontological distinctions between indigenous and non-indigenous experiences (2015). She argues

31
that these ‘indigenous worlds’ are disavowed by the Peruvian nation state, and that indigenous

peoples in Peru are defined by fundamental alterity (2015).

This is not to argue that Katarista attitudes towards the environment, ipso facto, mirror those of the

Quechua campesinos in de la Cadena’s ethnographic study. Rather, de la Cadena offers an analytical

framework for understanding the ways in which indigenous-ecological politics frequently operate

on more than one ontological level. She exposes how claims around ‘earth beings’ such as the

mountain Ausangate can discursively slip into those for natural resources depending on the ‘world’

with which one is engaging. De la Cadena explains, ‘In the story I am telling, 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 beings] 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’ (de la Cadena, 2015: 110).

Likewise with the Kataristas, landscape was profoundly political but in ontologically different

ways. In earlier discourse from the 1970s, the emphasis is more overtly on nature as resource,

expressed in language comprehensible to the creole left and other non-indigenous potential allies.

But from the early 1980s, Kataristas increasingly proposed that (neo)colonial modes of exploitation

compelled a common cause between humans and nature in a more spiritual sense. Indeed as Victor

Flores Aiquile, a Katarista union leader from Cochabamba put it, “Throughout the last 500 years

we peasants have been stepped on by the wealthy, the mestizos, and the Spaniards; the trees and

animals similarly have been abused and are being extinguished, and thus we share much suffering

along with the environment.” (Zimmerer, 1993 :323) Invoking the exploitation of natural resources

in the language of conventional politics on the one hand offered an easily digestible metaphor for

Indian exploitation within Katarista discourse. But the elision of human suffering with

32
environmental suffering also departed from the merely symbolic or rhetorical level. This chapter

explores Katarista discourse on the environment firstly as resource, and secondly as animated spirit

in order to establish the inter-connections that developed between them.

i. Nature as animated spirit

From 1960-1990 the Katarista movement participated in an evolving, transnational dialogue on the

ecological dimensions of indigeneity. Nature was understood both as resource and as a site of ethno-

cultural memory. Aymara people and Andean inhabitants more generally, have long been

considered by anthropologists to share profound and far-reaching relations with the natural world.

As José Teijero argues, ‘For the Aymara, nature is part of themselves, that is, the communion

between nature and man becomes the synthesis of life’ (2007:122). Inge Bolin meanwhile

highlights the role of animism, noting ‘the Andean people …believe that, like animals and people,

all elements of nature live, feel, and breathe. Pachamama, the Apus, lakes, rocks, springs, and

animate and inanimate beings — all aspects of nature need food and drink, love and

consideration’ (2010: 43). Constantin von Barloewen invokes temporality, noting that in Inca times

‘Notions of the sacred stood side by side with the development of agriculture: the earth was situated

at the midpoint of indio cosmology and could not be summarily subjugated or technologically

exploited.’ (1995: 65). Rather than being civilisers of nature, in the western tradition, human beings

were in fact, part of nature itself, as one facet of a wider and inter-connected cosmos.

Elsewhere, anthro-linguistic approaches to the Andes have pointed out that in Quechua and

Aymara languages there exists no single term for the zoological category of ‘animal’ (Dransart,

2013: 3). Clear-cut divides between humans and animals, or indeed other natural beings such as

trees and plants, do not possess resonance in Andean cosmovisións therefore. Nature instead, in

33
these anthropological readings, is a site of multiple but connected communities comprising human

and other-than-human (Adamson, 2014: 176).

In studies more explicitly linked to historical memory, cultural historian Carolyn Dean points out

how natural objects provided outlets for Inca people’s interaction with what they considered to be

sacred beings. ‘Mountains, rivers, lakes, boulders, outcrops, caves, and springs were (and still are)

kratophanic. They were sacred places where humans encountered and interacted with powerful

numina.’ (2015: 8). Writing on the Paez of the Colombian Andes, historical anthropologist Joanna

Rappaport has used the concept of ‘sacred geographies’ to capture the spiritual import of nature for

this indigenous community. She asserts, ‘The people of Tierradentro have encoded their history of

struggle in their sacred geography, so that past meets present in the very terrain on which they live,

farm and walk. Memory has built upon memory, connecting events of the distant past, the more

recent past and the present in the topography of Tierradentro (2012: 8).

Over the period 1960-1990, Katarista discourse shifted from a preoccupation with control of natural

resources, to one which additionally stressed spiritual and cosmological facets of the natural world.

This is reflected in the articles and excerpts appearing in the Katarista press. The February 1986 of

Boletín Chitakolla edition features an excerpt from a Peruvian work entitled Raiz y Vigencia de la

Indianidad (Origins and Validity of Indian ideology) by Virgilio Roel, published in 1980. The

excerpt reads: ‘That is why the stars, clouds, hills, seas, lagoons, rivers, valleys, trees, stones,

condors, birds, butterflies, flowers, in short, everything which belongs to Pachamama, maintains a

constant and mutual reciprocal influence’ (1986: 3).

It goes on to offer an anti-imperialist reading of the ecological disasters that afflict the countryside.

‘As a counterpart to Western aggression, we Indians know that if we do not return what we have

taken from the land, if we do not treat Pachamama with respect, that if we attack the beautiful

34
animals which are also her beloved children, it will mean that in her anger, the farming areas will

turn into deserts and the animals will disappear.’ (1986: 3) This depicts Pachamama, or the Andean

holistic Earth Mother concept, as a wilful life-force with agency. It invokes ideas of reciprocity that

are considered core components of Andean cosmovisións. Antipathy to imperialist power relations

is evident in the reference to ‘Western aggression’, although this does not derive from a steadfastly

economic critique of European hegemony. Nature is instead invoked as site suffused with spiritual

and cultural meaning.

Meanwhile in a pamphlet, the MRTK proclaims ‘And the message of our leader Tupaj Katari

continues to resonate in our valleys, ravines and mountains.’ (1981: 3). Similarly, in an earlier

article published on 23 May 1978 in the national daily newspaper Presencia, Isidoro Copa Cayo, a

Quechua-speaker from Potosí and a MITKA electoral candidate outlines the objectives of the party

and advocates ‘Life in communion with nature as a mode of civilisation and culture’ (1978: np). He

goes on, ‘[MITKA] emerges as a historical political response, as the shout of a wounded social

body, as a cry of an oppressed people, like a voice crying in the altiplano, valleys and

plains…’ (1978: np). For both MITKA and the MRTK, the natural world is invoked as the carrier of

Tupaj Katari’s spirit. The social memory of past struggles finds form and significance in the natural

surroundings of the Andes, with the landscape maintaining the continuity between pre-colonial and

post-colonial conditions.

That Kataristas presented ecology and agriculture as arenas of decolonisation is evident in

Collasuyo (arsusipxanani), a monthly magazine produced in La Paz by MINK’A. The June 1978

edition runs a feature, ‘Proyecto ‘Anallajchi’ en marca’, on proposals to intensively farm llamas and

alpacas in Bolivia. It explains;

35
 ‘the total transfer of technology will not be considered [in the proposals],

but rather the re-evaluation of the ancestral technique which has allowed

the survival of the roaming camelid outside the boundaries of legal

protection…. in colonial times and in the republic [llamas and alpacas]

were only used for the transfer of minerals, and today, the white-mestizo

contemptuously considers its meat of little importance, fit only for the

consumption of the Indian’ (1978: 7).

The proposal to farm llamas and alpacas, can be understood therefore, as part of a broader Katarista

philosophy which asserts self-pride in indigenous agricultural traditions and seeks to award them

value in the present.

Similarly, the MRTK places great emphasis on the ayllu as a political and economic model with

links to past and present Andean society. A pamphlet from the MRTK declares, ‘The community

practice for example subsists in numerous aillus [ayllus] of Kollasuyo (today Bolivia). Its persisting

practice is the umbilical cord that connects us with our historical past.’ (1981: 3). Ayllus are not

political assemblages along the lines of the nature-culture divide in the Western political tradition

(Escobar, 2010). Yampara instead points out that ‘To speak of ‘economy’, in addition to being a

borrowed and inappropriate concept practiced by other cultures … does not explain the communal

sense and development of the ayllu’ (1992: 143). Ayllus instead are structured in part around the

environment and the spirits and life-forces contained within nature, including humans. By invoking

the ayllu, the MRTK was hence advocating a political structure that encompasses both humans and

natural world in reciprocity.

The belief in human-nature reciprocity as an integral part of the peasant’s social world is further

reflected in the spate of discussions around Pachamama which took place in the peasant movement

at the behest of Kataristas in the late 1980s. Proposals from the group Ofensiva Roja de los Ayllus
36
Tupakataristas (ORAT), to the Fourth Regular Congress of the CSUTCB in Tarija, September 1989

included a sub-section entitled ‘Pachamama or Death’. Led by veteran guerrillero Felipe ‘El

Mallku’ Quispe, ORAT was a more marginal and militant Katarista group, comprising an

assortment of mestizo intellectuals including the current Vice President Álvaro García Linera,

indigenous peasants and urban workers. Its armed wing was the Ejercito Guerillero Tupac Katari,

(Tupac Katari Guerrilla Army — EGTK) whose adherents became known as ‘egetecos’ (García

Linera, 2014: 6).

ORAT’s proposals state that, ‘The reasons that compel us to present this document are to make it

known to all the brothers and sisters of our race, who come from the brown Pachamama, that we

cultivate and till our lands in the highlands, valleys, tropics and in the east from sun to sun, our

foreheads dripping with sweat for Mother Nature…’ [emphasis added] (1989: n.p). The reference to

‘brown [morena] Pachamama’ asserts a critique of ‘whiteness’ as a hegemon in the Global South.

The year before, a report from the CSUTCB congress held in Potosí in July 1988 similarly included

the statement, ‘We cultivate with all our dedication and care [esmero] for Pachamama, from dawn

until dusk to subsidise and maintain the production of our agricultural produce…’ (1988, n.p). For

ORAT, ‘these q'aras [foreigners] of different ideological currents inherited from European invaders,

have only come to mutilate, trample, loot and desecrate the riches of our beloved

Pachamama.’ (1989: n.p). The gender connotations in this rhetoric are marked. Historical

colonialism is invoked not solely through the lens of capitalist exploitation, but as a spiritual assault

on the earth and its ecological integrity. Moreover, it implies that the extraction of natural resources

from the earth is analogous to the sexual violence inflicted through historical European conquest.

Extraction of resources by neocolonial elites thereby replicates the same patterns of assault

experienced five centuries earlier. This serves to blur the distinction between human, (or

specifically, the feminine) and environmental experiences, and further underpins the role the natural

world plays as a repository of memory and violence.

37
This colonial memory is further reflected when then proposals state, ‘Since before Christ, we

worshiped the hills, pukaras, wak'as, stones, apachites, in ceremonial and cosmic places. We are

older than Western Christianity. Like our grandparents both in the time of Tiwanakinses and in the

Incanate, the sacrifices made with gold and silver, coloured wool, coca etc, every year to our Tata

Inti (Sun), moon, stars, and the Pachamama endure from generation to generation to the present

day.’ (1989: n.p). Spirituality is inextricably tied to place, with the natural world representing the

locus of precolonial spiritual practice. The hills and ‘cosmic places’ form vessels of memory, as a

source of tangible continuity between colonial past and present.

Fig. 7. Report from the Regional Congress of Tupaj

Katari Peasant Workers, Cochabamba, 1978.
Source: Senate House Special Collections.

38
As such, one of the group’s aims was, ‘To revive our cosmic religion, prayers from the hills and

ceremonial centres, our cosmic Pachamama, and the sun, the moon, the stars, the w’akas, the

achachilas, the illas, etc.’ (1989: n.p). In Andean cosmovisións, achachilas are spirits linked with

geographic entities such as hills, caves, rivers, lakes, etc, which according to Aymara belief, are

animated and watch over people (Teijero, 1997: 85). However if the achachilas are not presented

with ritual offerings, or ch'allas, they may become irate and inflict storms or other natural disasters

on humans. (Teijero, 1997: 87).

Yet in a somewhat different realm, 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.’ (1989: n.p). The 1980s was a particularly fraught time for agricultural production in

Bolivia. According to a USAID report, in 1983 severe droughts in the highlands and flooding in the

lowlands caused so much damage that agricultural output fell by 23% in 1983, meaning substantial

amounts of food had to be imported for many years afterwards (1986: 5). 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.’ (1989: n.p)

On the face of it, this might appear to be a de-political normative argument. Rather than making

structural critiques, for example at the lack of state support for small-scale agriculture and the

state’s neoliberal retrenchment policies, natural calamity is attributed to the non-human, and

39
therefore ostensibly non-political sphere. However, in actual fact, I argue this is reflective of

Katarista attempts to transform nature, or Pachamama, into a contentious political terrain in itself.

By invoking Pachamama, ORAT is adopting a language of ecological spirituality that allows it to

criticise ‘not only’ (de la Cadena, 2015) the lack of material assistance for peasants, but the contours

of the modern state which disentangles land from its spiritual dimensions and other-than-human

agencies. Katarismo thereby is departing from a western episteme and contesting hegemonic

approaches to agricultural policy which omit the Aymara cosmovisión. This argument echoes de la

Cadena’s ‘partially connected worlds’ thesis (2015) as well as Bolivian sociologist Fernando

Calderón’s theory of mixed temporalities, that is to say, the notion that Latin America is defined by

a coexistence of modern, pre-modern and postmodern conditions (1995: 55). Calderón argues that

colonialism has not been experienced in a linear fashion in Andean societies; elements of

precolonial social formations overlap with the new. This produces societies in which ‘the

coexistence of faded or residual identities with strong emergent ones’ is a defining feature

(Calderón, 1995: 59) In this way, it can be seen that Kataristas were contesting the exploitation

associated with modernity by invoking their lived experience of Pachamama as a symbol of the

pre-modern.

ii. Nature as resource

Natural resources have a long and contentious history in Latin America, and especially so in

Bolivia. Since the colonial era, land and resource use has been structured around race in Latin

American societies (Galeano, 1973). In Bolivia, under colonial rule, ayllus were dismantled and

Indians were compelled to work in the silver mines (Fabricant, 2012: 3). This was a highly lucrative

enterprise; between 1556 and 1783, 41,000 metric tons of silver were mined from Cerro Rico in

Potosí (Fabricant, 2012 : 27). The Spanish colonial project was hence based on sustained natural

resource extraction squeezed from the coerced labour of Indian populations.

40
I argue that in Katarista discourse, debates over natural resources reflected broader visions about

how the economy and society should be arranged. Claims to natural resources and discursive

appeals to restore the highland ayllus are used to make wider claims for rights and justice in the

post-revolutionary, neoliberal era. It marked the first time that a self-consciously ‘indigenous’ vision

of natural resources, and the natural world more broadly, was articulated at the political level. In

this way, Katarismo represented a major shift from the ethno-assimilationist nationalism of the

MNR revolutionary era.

Consistent throughout Katarista political discourse is resentment at the perceived absence of rural

development rooted in the needs and wishes of the peasants themselves. The economic exploitation

of the peasantry is tied up with lack of control over natural resources and means of production in the

rural setting. Nature represents therefore a profoundly contested terrain of political economy. At a

CSUTCB congress, ORAT laments for example, ‘We small farmers do not have any kind of

economic aid, we are practically excluded from national life and seen as simple beasts of burden,

treated as foreigners in our ancestral soil … we are unable to develop a coherent agricultural policy

nor modernise or mechanise our fields …’(1989: n.p). Likewise Macabeo Avila, a leader of the

MRTK, believed that development policies did little to remedy the overarching problem of capitalist

penetration in rural areas. ‘Backwardness and misery is another problem that can not be overcome

with the development policy of so-called de-naturalised and Fascistic nationalists; happiness and

prosperity can not be achieved through stopgap measures [remiendos], but through a total change of

the system of capitalist exploitation by another system of community character.’ (Collasuyo, 1978:

4).

The neoliberal policies developed under successive dictatorial regimes in the 1970s and 1980s

fuelled the peasantry’s grievances over privatisation of natural resources. In 1972, President Hugo

41
Banzer passed the General Law of Hydrocarbons. The law outlined that ‘hydrocarbon deposits,

regardless of the physical state in which they may exist or appear, are of the direct, inalienable and

imprescriptible domain of the state.’ (1972: Article 1). A report from the Departmental Congress of

Tupaj Katari Peasant Workers held in Cochabamba in May 1978 expresses for example, ‘In the face

of the permanent privatisation of the riches and natural resources of this country, the peasants of

Cochabamba believe in the uncompromising defence of these riches and resources.’(1978: n.p). At

the IV Ordinary Congress of the CSUTCB, held a decade later, an identical concern is iterated, with

‘defending the land against any attempt to privatise’ stated as a key objective (1988 :9). The report

contains a section on the Commission on Natural Resources and Land Tenure in which it declares

‘We want the preservation of the environment, the natural resources of flora and fauna, the air we

breathe, the forests and the rainforests, because without them we can not live’ (1988: 12).

Moreover in 1982, conclusions and resolutions from the Fifth National Peasant annual general

meeting in La Paz included the statement, ‘We ratify our repudiation of the “Military Peasant Pact”

because it is an instrument of political control and official manipulation which divides the peasant

family and allows the use of deadly pesticides in the countryside,’ —my emphasis added (Rivera,

1987: 183). The issue of pesticides is here as importantly ‘political’ as the state picture, while the

political challenge to the Military Peasant Pact sits seamlessly alongside concerns of a more

resolutely practical, even parochial, nature.

It is clear that the exploitation of Indian labour under capitalism, for the MRTK is tied up with the

exploitation of natural resources. In an interview published in June 1978 in Collasuyo, Macabeo

Avila explains, ‘Discrimination, either social or racial exists, but it exists as a pejorative means of

exploitation and pillaging of our natural wealth. Consequently for the MRTK, there is no mere

discrimination by discrimination, but as a phenomenon of humiliation wielded by the dominant

circles of the financial oligarchy relative to the capitalist system of exploitation.’ (Collasuyo, 1978:

42
4). Here, the erosion of natural wealth, or natural resources, is understood to fall under the same

colonial architecture as racial oppression. Avila goes on to express frustration with the existing

state of land ownership and the cooption of the peasantry, professing ‘The problem is that land that

was once communal, today, due to agrarian reform has passed into feudal ownership and has

neutralised the combative spirit of the peasantry by turning them into private owners of pathetically

small plots that are subjugated under the minifundio which is propped up by the legal system

…’ (Collasuyo, 1978: 4).

Even within MITKA, a more Indianista and less class struggle-driven organisation, the issue of land

distribution was profoundly salient. In an interview, Luciano Tapia explains, ‘The agrarian

revolution is one of the main approaches of MITKA but for us, agrarian revolution is not

‘AGROPODER’, it is not 're-distribution of agrarian reform'. For us, the agrarian revolution is a

political project.’(Boletín Chitakolla, 1986: 4) ‘AGROPODER’ (Agropower) was an MNR strategy

to aid exports and agricultural development launched in 1985 and concentrated in the Santa Cruz

region. Victor Paz Estenssoro had been elected in July 1985 on the back of a free market

programme with austerity measures and was highly lauded by international institutions. In a World

Bank report from 1986 for example, the AGROPODER programme was described as ‘the only

feasible economic route open to Bolivia for the future’(1986: 4). The report advocates the

development of Santa Cruz soybean exports, which would require a drastic expansion of the

transport network around Santa Cruz. This in turn, would likely reduce the sphere of influence of La

Paz, the locus of the tin mines, a sector which historically was powerfully unionised. Indeed in 1980

strikes by tin workers caused a loss of $30 million in export earnings (CIA: 1980: 12).

The report concedes that, ‘The adoption of an agricultural export strategy is likely to have

significant implications for the economic and political center of gravity of Bolivia.’ (1986: 5). It

muses over whether the government will ‘take a long, cool statesmanlike look at the strategy’ and

43
adopt it in the face of popular disapproval (1986: 5). The report exposes the degree to the

geopolitics of agriculture assumed great significance in Bolivia in the 1980s, with international

institutions becoming increasingly invested in the agricultural policy direction of Bolivia.

Expansion into the Santa Cruz department was part of wider strategies from neoliberal international

organisations in collaboration with the Estenssoro regime, to weaken the political influence of La

Paz, a Katarista and CSUTCB stronghold. Naturally, this generated new difficulties for the

Katarista movement, which found itself increasingly required to respond to an international

dialogue on natural resources and development.

Indeed, there is ample evidence to suggest that ‘modernity’ in farming techniques became an

overwhelming concern in Bolivia from the 1970s. In 1976, an Annual Report of Work on Peasant

Development Courses, an initiative from Tomás Frías Autonomous University to promote the

modernisation of agriculture in highland Potosí, concluded cheerfully that ‘More than 1,200 peasant

leaders have been trained in agricultural education in the different targeted zones, and [the project]

has successfully brought modern technology to peasant communities and production centres’ (1976:

20). The report goes on to say that there was ‘Interest in, and requests by all the communities

assisted through the courses for the continuous provision of: seeds, pesticides, breeding animals and

other materials of a modern technical nature, such as agricultural machinery equipment (1976: 20).’

Interestingly the report suggests there was enthusiasm for pesticides, contrary to the hostility of the

Fifth Peasant’s Annual Meeting towards them in 1982. Indeed, many photographs from the report

depict campesinos wielding chemical sprays. This might suggest that the peasantry experienced the

state, and modernity itself, in part as a series of negotiations; material offerings could be reclaimed

in some ways, and rejected in others. It also serves as a reminder that within the peasantry,

Katarista or otherwise, political strategies and perspectives frequently diverged.

44
 Fig. 8. Agriculture courses in Potosí, 1976.
Source: Senate House Special Collections.

Fig. 9. Rabbit breeding workshop in Potosí. 1976. Source: Senate House

Special Collections.

In a 1993 article, U.S geographer Karl Zimmerer offers an intriguing study of social discourses on

soil erosion in Cochabamba. Zimmerer’s findings were based on observation and interviews

conducted with Katarista campesinos in the agricultural regions of Cochabamba. Zimmerer cites

figures showing that 64 percent of the land surface in Cochabamba was eroded, with annual soil
45
erosion varying between 50 and 150 tonnes per hectare (1993: 313). At national level, up to 41% of

the countryside in Bolivia suffered from moderate or extreme soil erosion (Zimmerer,1993: 313).

Accordingly, from the 1970s soil erosion was identified by Bolivian campesinos as well as foreign

non-governmental organisations (NGOs) as an alarming national problem. Zimmerer argues that

divergent political perspectives on soil erosion arose from three sectors; governmental and NGOs,

peasant communities and rural trade unions. (1993: 317). Both foreign NGOs and Bolivian

development agencies ascribed soil erosion to the failure of campesinos to adopt ‘modern’ farming

techniques, and to a belief in peasant backwardness more generally. But for the peasants, Zimmerer

observes that wrath from supernatural deities and failure to complete reciprocity rituals to

Pachamama, are named by campesinos from both older and younger generations, as the causes of

increasing soil erosion. Zimmerer argues that Katarista peasant unions skirted around the issue of

soil erosion in their political programme because its cause could not be neatly blamed on extra-local

political actors such as multinationals or neo-imperialist powers. This was a common tactic in

Katarismo. For example, in a booklet entitled Los Campesinos Opinan, the authors identified U.S.

military action as factor in climate change experienced by Bolivian peasants, declaring, ‘in the last

years North American technology (atomic bomb, capsule launch) has caused changes in the climate,

further increasing bad weather.’ (1978: 6).

In contrast, soil erosion was considered by both peasants and development organisations, as

attributable in different ways to the peasants’ own actions. As much is evident in the report from IV

Congress of the CSUTCB in 1988 which includes a suspiciously small section on the issue and

phrases the solution in terms of improving campesino education. The authors state, 'We urgently

demand awareness, through an education programme, to curb this disaster [of soil erosion].’ Soil

erosion therefore did not sit comfortably within the Katarista critique of ecological imperialism.

Ecological problems were routinely used to augment broader critiques of imperialism and

46
exploitation. Soil erosion’s omission from widespread discussion in the CSUTCB hence reflects the

degree to which agroecological issues were highly politicised in Katarismo.

CHAPTER THREE

INTELLECTUAL CURRENTS AND LEGACIES OF KATARISMO

‘INDIANS OF BOLIVIA, the Wiphala and the Pututu call to us from the top of the Illimani to come
together in struggle. They tell us that our hour of LIBERATION has come.’

—Fausto Reinaga, The Indian Revolution (1969)

This chapter explores the intellectual currents which shaped Katarista discourse. It places

Katarismo in a context of late Cold War debates on subaltern theory, (post)modernity and

indigeneity in the Americas. It highlights how the movement contributed to a pan-American

discourse on environmentalism and indigeneity which gained global traction from the 1970s.

i. Mariátegui and Romantic Marxism

It is amply acknowledged that the writings of Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui (1894-1930)

have a noticeable influence in 20th century Bolivian radical tendencies (Webber, 2017). Labelled a

‘Romantic’ Marxist (Lowy, 1998), Mariátegui was a heterodox figure in the Marxist wing of the

indigenista movement in Peru which flourished in the 1920s. In 1928 he was a founder and general

secretary of the Peruvian Socialist Party, which later became the Communist Party. In his magnum

opus Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality (1928) he made crucial contributions to the

theory of uneven and combined development of capitalism in ‘peripheral’ countries and tailored

Marxist theory to the Latin American reality. Although Mariátegui did not claim indigeneity

himself, I argue that of crucial importance for the Kataristas decades later was Mariátegui’s

47
invocation of the Indian as a revolutionary subject as well as his pioneering embrace of ‘mystical’

rhetoric.

The avant-garde magazine Amauta, which he edited between 1920 and 1930 (the title translates as

teacher in Quechua), frequently contained articles with telluric references to Andean landscapes

and Indians, as well as trenchant critiques of land ownership iniquities in Peru. The presence of

large but marginal indigenous populations which did not fit neatly into European-derived social

categories had long presented a theoretical conundrum for Latin American Marxists. Mariátegui

argued that the socio-economic improvement of Peru could not be extricated from improvement in

the conditions of its indigenous populations. In a 1924 essay he centres the Indian in the discourse

of Peruvian development, lamenting, ‘by postponing the solution of the Indian problem, the

republic has postponed the realisation of its dreams of progress. A policy that is truly national in

scope cannot dispense with the Indian; it cannot ignore the Indian. The Indian is the foundation of

our nationality in formation.’ (Vanden and Becker, 2011: 141). In this way, the Indian was

identified as a potentially disruptive social force that could form the antidote to European-derived

capitalist modernity. Rather than being a marginal demographic, Mariátegui locates Indians at the

very centre of the revolution yet to come.

Similarly to the Kataristas, Mariátegui drew on a long history of indigenous social practice to

evoke a counter-hegemonic Andean tradition. In a thesis to the Latin American Conference of

Communist Parties in Buenos Aires in June 1929, he writes, ‘The [Indian] "communities," which

have demonstrated truly astonishing capacities of resistance and persistence under the harshest

oppression, represent a natural factor of socialisation of the land. The native has deep-rooted habits

of cooperation…’ (Vanden and Becker, 2011: 323). He aimed to vindicate indigenous traditions,

stating ’We believe that of the "backward" populations there is none so much as the indigenous

population of Incan origin that presents such favourable conditions for primitive agrarian

48
communism.’(Vanden and Becker, 2011: 323). This asserted to an international audience the

revolutionary value of Andean communitarian traditions embedded within collective peasant

memory. As outlined in Chapter Two, vindication of peasant collectivism is replicated in Katarista

discourse on land and natural resource ownership.

Similarly, the natural world, as for the Kataristas, forms a crucial node within Mariátegui’s rhetoric

of Indian liberation. I argue that in Mariátegui’s work, the natural environment is ‘indigenised’, that

is to say, it becomes a site in which the revolutionary potential of the Indian is incubated. This was a

vision that was re-interpreted within Katarismo. Cultural theorist Jorge Coronado asserts that for

Mariátegui, ‘the image of Andean nature and the indio himself are inseparable.’ (2009: 44).

Mariátegui frequently depicts the Andean highlands as a mystical space of utopian revolutionary

potentialities. This is reflected for example, in the statement, ‘The highlands awaken gestating hope.

A race unanimous in resignation and renunciation no longer inhabits it. A strange gust of wind

blows through the highland village and fields. The “new indios” appear: here the teacher, the

agitator, there the farmhand, the shepherd, they who are no longer the same ones as

before’ (Coronado, 2009: 48). Coronado points out that ‘the Indio is thus made the repository of

those elements - tradition, nature, a communal ethos - that are most oppositional and most

threatening to an effacing neocolonial ideology’ (2009: 44). Indigenous social practices such as the

ayllu therefore presented a practical basis through which to contest European capitalist paradigms

and construct an Andean counter-modernity. While Mariátegui did not claim indigeneity himself,

his theoretical contributions to the question of Marxism in agrarian societies is strongly reflected in

Katarista positions on the environment, land and class struggle. Reading Mariátegui through this

lens reveals that Kataristas were responding to a longer radical tradition that established profound

common cause between indigenous peoples and the natural world.

49
 ii. Subaltern theory

Katarismo was, and remains, tightly bound to evolving scripts on decolonisation. This became

perhaps all the more important as radical Katarismo entered its nadir in the 1990s. Although Víctor

Hugo Cárdenas from the MRTK-L was elected as the first indigenous Vice-President of Bolivia in

1993, his alliance with Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, who in later years would violently suppress

popular protest in the Gas Wars, signalled a Katarista capitulation to neoliberalism.

The Katarista situation in many ways typified developments across Latin America. Although the

continent was undergoing democratisation in the aftermath of authoritarian regimes, its

revolutionary movements were in retreat. Peru was reeling from the atrocities of the Maoist

guerrilla group Sendero Luminoso (as well as attendant brutality by state military forces), the

Sandinistas lost control of the Nicaraguan state in 1990 and the Cuban revolutionary project was

imperilled by the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. It was in this climate that the postmodernist

Latin American Subaltern Studies Group arose, inspired by the South Asian Subaltern Studies

group.

A key concept which emerged from the group’s intellectual orbit was ‘coloniality of power’, a term

introduced by Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano (2000; 2007). The concept describes how

modernity and colonialism are mutually constitutive forces. Coloniality exists as a system of power

established under formal colonialism and its enduring socio-racial classifications. Coloniality as a

cultural condition, is therefore analytically distinct from colonialism as a political arrangement.

Moreover, coloniality extends into the epistemological realm through the production of knowledge.

In The Darker Side of Modernity (2011), Mignolo outlines how a core matrix of colonial power is

the subjugation of indigenous knowledges, which are frequently non-literate ways of

communicating and producing knowledge such as folklore and myth. This decolonial scholarship

50
echoes the Foucauldian theory of ‘subjugated knowledges’, or ways of knowing that western

modernity categorises as ‘naive knowledges, hierarchically inferior knowledges, knowledges that

are below the required level of erudition or scientificity.’ (Foucault, 1997: 7).

These ideas possess particular pertinence in relation to Katarismo as movement, which, in part, was

an epistemological project which aimed to recover subaltern knowledges marginalised by the state

(Sanjinés, 2002; Rivera, 2012). Regarding ‘lettered knowledge’, as Isodoro Copo Cayo, the MITKA

leader stated, ‘In our [pre-Columbian] culture there are no books, (Bible, Koran, Vedas, Capital),

there is no letter, because what is important is life.’ (1978, n.p). Meanwhile, the CSTUCB

demanded, ‘We want to regain our liberty of which we were deprived in 1492, to bring our culture

back into favour and, with our own personality, be subjects and not objects of our history…’(1979:

n.p). The emphasis here is on de-privileging dominant temporalities; 1492 does not herald the

arrival of Spanish ‘civilisation’ but rather, the cultural annihilation of indigenous peoples.

Indeed one could go further and posit that Quijano’s coloniality of power paradigm can be used to

unpick why the politics of the environment gained traction with the Kataristas. The relationship

between colonialism and the environment has been well documented. Beinart and Hughes coined

the concept of ‘commodity frontier’ for example, to describe the allure of overseas raw materials in

the European imperial imaginary (2007: 2). As has been outlined in Chapter Two, this relationship

was explicitly recognised by the Kataristas. Colonialism had deprived the environment and nature

of agency, and served to invalidate the non-material relationships between humans and the natural

world in which they lived. It can be seen therefore, that the Latin American Subaltern Studies

group excavated new intellectual pathways which allow historians to situate Katarismo in a broader

global framework of ecological decolonisation led by subaltern actors.

51
 ii.NGOs

In the 1970s and 1980s increased attention was focused on indigenous peoples at international

policymaking levels. In 1984, Amazonian indigenous organisations formed the Coordinadora de las

Organizaciones Indígenas de la Cuenca Amazónica (COICA; Coordinating Body for the

Indigenous People's Organisation of the Amazon) to mobilise around territorial, cultural, economic,

and political rights, in alliance with environmental groups. In Mexico, the National Council of

Indigenous Peoples was formed in 1975 and in Guatemala, the Council of Maya Organisations in

the late 1980s. The movement also stretched globally. In 1977 the United Nations convened a

conference on discrimination against indigenous people in the Americas. That this climate

generated new interest in international dialogue from indigenous groups such as the Kataristas is

reflected in the June 1978 issue of Collasuyo which ran an extended feature on ‘The Indian

Movement and the West’ (1978: 6). It includes interviews and reports on the mobilisation efforts of

indigenous peoples across the Americas, from Mexico to Argentina on a country-by-country basis.

The transnational potential of Katarista organising are also hinted at in Luciano Tapia’s 1986

interview in which he states, ‘I believe that there is at present a conscience in all oppressed peoples:

an awareness of the struggle for liberation. There are differences according to the realities

themselves, but the common goal is the liberation of oppression.’(Boletín Chitakolla, 1986: 4).

Oppression is here understood as neither confined to a particular indigenous group in Bolivia nor to

a specific class.

In 1989 the first International Labour Organisation (ILO) Convention No. 169 concerning

Indigenous and Tribal Peoples was drawn up. It states that, ‘The rights of the peoples concerned to

the natural resources pertaining to their lands shall be specially safeguarded. These rights include

the right of these peoples to participate in the use, management and conservation of these

resources.’ (1989: Article 15). This created opportunities for groups to mobilise in opposition to the

government under the ‘indigenous’ banner. In 1990 for example indigenous groups in the Bolivian

52
lowlands organised a mass demonstration for ‘Territory and Dignity’, marching from the Amazon to

La Paz. Likewise, the rise of green parties across the world, as well as the priority given to

‘sustainable development’ meant the emergence of new policy infrastructures which increasingly

valorised ‘indigenous’ communities. Albó argues that ‘it is more due to these considerations than to

the rights of the peoples who own the territory that the indigenous groups, especially the

silvicultural ones, have begun to be taken into account by projects of international institutions such

as the United Nations or the World Bank.’ (1991: 303).

Closely related to this trend is the proliferation of NGOs in Bolivia and the Global South more

broadly throughout the 1980s. Prior to 1980 there were 100 NGOs in Bolivia; by 1992 there were at

least 500 (Petras, 1997: n.p). Esteban Ticona locates the proliferation of NGOs from the 1970s as a

turning point in how discourse on the environment was formulated in Bolivian society. He argues

that;

‘The re-evaluation of Aymara and Quechua cosmovisións by NGOs such as

CIPCA and other similar ones, opened the margins to allow thinking in another

ways. Above all, the relationship between the ayllus and the communities with

nature, or Pachamama, was reconnected. To see mother earth as a living,

intelligent, creator of life and with feelings, was the background to recognising

the civilising experience of the Andean ayllu’ (2017: 117).

Other scholars have noted that the ayllu was an ethno-cultural concept enthusiastically championed

by NGOs operating in Bolivia (Coronado, 2009: 163. Fabricant, 2012: 30). This opened up avenues

for administrative and material assistance for indigenous communities recovering their perceived

‘lost’ ayllu heritage. But James Petras is more acerbic, arguing that ‘of the tens of millions allocated

to the NGOs, only 15 to 20 percent reached the poor. The rest was siphoned off to pay

administrative costs and professional salaries. The Bolivian NGOs functioned as appendages of the

53
state and served to consolidate its power … The NGOs, with their big budgets, exploited vulnerable

groups and were able to convince some leaders of the opposition that they could benefit from

working with the government.’ (1997: n.p). It is hence clear that the rise of NGOs drastically altered

the political terrain in which Kataristas operated. The agenda of NGOs made it strategically useful

for Kataristas to emphasise the natural world as a vital component of their ethnic identity, as

opposed to class struggle.

CONCLUSIONS

This dissertation has shown that the environment assumed greater prominence and salience within

Katarista discourse than has been hitherto recognised by scholarship. This study of Katarista

environmental discourse underlines the importance of the environment as an arena of contest in

decolonisation struggles in Latin America and beyond. Understanding the role the environment

played in Katarismo has profound implications for the study of indigenous social movements across

the Americas. Katarismo was one of the first political movements in 20th century Bolivia, and

indeed Latin America, to mobilise explicitly around ethnic oppression as well as class exploitation.

Kataristas advanced ideas around indigeneity from their own self-consciously indigenous

perspective, rooted in the protagonists’ lived experience of discrimination. As a lettered movement

which engaged in theoretical and practical political struggle, Katarismo offers a rare lens through

which historians can understand the unfolding politics of indigeneity in the Andes from the

perspective of indigenous peoples themselves. Katarismo thus constituted a rupture with earlier

20th century Andean indigenista projects which advocated Indian emancipation but from non-

indigenous and often elite sectors.

In this dissertation I have concluded that arguments around the natural world in Katarismo were

used to make broader arguments about the economic and political arrangement of the Bolivian state,

54
and the geopolitical dynamics of modernity. A close reading of Katarista discourse reveals a

sustained engagement with environmental ideas. It is argued here that this was reflected in two key

frames; nature as resource and nature as animated socio-spatial repository. Both discourses reflected

the twin importance of the natural world to the Kataristas as peasants, and as indigenous peoples, or

in class and ethnic terms respectively. As part of this, Kataristas drew on organic beliefs regarding

the natural world, or what I call ‘landscapes of memory’. These spiritual notions surrounding

Pachamama, ayllus and human-nature reciprocity were rooted in longstanding Aymara worldviews

transmitted over generations. They hence cannot be considered purely ‘invented

traditions’ (Hobsbawm, 1983).

But crucially, the ways in which this environmental concern was expressed by the Kataristas

evolved over time and responded to changing political imperatives. Cultural identities, as Stuart

Hall reflects, ‘come from somewhere, have histories. But far from being eternally fixed in some

essentialised past, they are subject to the continuous ‘play’ of history, culture and

power’ (1990:225). In short, it was not a static discourse and new discursive scripts on

environmental questions were actively constructed and negotiated in response to structural shifts

including the rise of neoliberal state policies and the proliferation of NGOs and international bodies

with an ‘indigenous’ ecological agenda. In particular, the increasing interest in the environment

from international organisations made it strategically useful to invoke the natural world and to

emphasise its role in Aymara belief systems. But invoking ecological spiritualism also provided a

discursive framework in which the contours of the state, and modernity itself could be challenged

from a decolonial perspective. It is apparent that because the environment was depicted by

Kataristas in terms of indigenous belief systems — Pachamama, achachilas, w’akas, etc — it

became bound up with more fundamental narratives around indigeneity. Environmental traditions

and ‘natural memories’ thus found reinvention through the revindication of indigeneity promulgated

by the Kataristas. Katarismo’s legacies are sharply apparent therefore, in the environmental

55
rhetoric of Bolivia’s first indigenous President, Evo Morales and it is argued in this dissertation that

a genealogical link must be drawn between the two. This dissertation has shown that Kataristas

opened a discursive space in Bolivian politics in which the environment could serve as a vehicle for

other contestations around nation, state and class. As such, it raises wider historiographical

questions about the relationship between environmentalism and indigeneity which extend far

beyond the Central Andes.

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 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary sources

Newspapers and periodicals [archival locations in brackets]

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• MINK’A et al. Manifiesto de Tiahuanaco. 30 de Julio de 1973. La Paz. James Dunkerley
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Interviews

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• Wilmer Machaca Leandro Jichha. Entrevista a Felipe Quispe por Carlos de Mesa - año 2000. 8
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• Fig. 3. Saavedra, José Luis. 2016. Presenting “El Katarismo” without Kataristas. Image
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• Fig 4. The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography
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• Fig. 5. Retrieved from Hurtado, Javier. 1986. El Katarismo. Speakers at the First National
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• Fig. 8. Los Campesinos Opinan, 1978. ‘To rescue our culture is to make it an instrument for the
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• Fig. 9. Annual Report of Work on Peasant Development Courses, 1976. Agriculture courses in
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• Fig. 10. Annual Report of Work on Peasant Development Courses, 1976. Rabbit breeding
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