‘We aren’t the peasants of the seventies’ — Indianism and Ethnic Mobilization in Bolivia

Abstract

In December 2005 the Aymaran Indian Evo Morales, at the head of the Movimiento al Socialismo party (Movement Toward Socialism or MAS), won the Bolivian presidential elections with 53.74 per cent of the valid votes. That in Latin America a native Indian should attain presidential office with a pro-Indian programme of government constitutes a striking novelty; that he should do so with the massive, nationwide support of white and mixed-blood voters as well as Indians is amazing. This chapter attempts, albeit very schematically, to identify the factors responsible for the success of the indigenous movement in Bolivia; to explain why it was Morales’s MAS rather than Felipe Quispe’s Movimiento Indígena Pachakuti (Indigenous Pachakuti Movement, MIP) that gained the ascendancy within this movement; and to do so by reference to interpretational aspects of the indigenous discourse that have generally not been remarked on but which throw new light on previous accounts.