1

Ethnic Politics and Popular Mobilization in Bolivia

by
Herbert S. Klein
Stanford University
in Christine Hunefeldt and Misha Kokotovic, eds., Power, Culture and Violence in the
Andes (Brighton, UK: Sussex Academic Press, 2009), pp.145-157

The wave of popular political mobilization and violence which has changed the
face of Bolivian politics in the past six years is defined by the emerging political power
of the Aymara and Quechua peoples on a national scale. This major development in
Bolivian political history is not an accidental phenomenon nor is it the natural
progression of political awareness typical of emerging groups within the Latin American
political scene. The forms of their political expression mostly couched in ethnic terms
but dealing with classic national issues and the manner in which they are expressed
often with violence - are due to both traditional Indigenous forms of protest in Bolivia, as
well as profound transformations which the majority Aymara and Quechua peoples have
experienced in the second half of the 20th century. Finally, this recent political
transformation of these peoples would not have been as rapid if the elite had not moved
toward a decentralized state in the decade of the 1990s, which profoundly altered the
power base of national politics and opened the way to the new ethnic politics.
Amerindian communities have not been passive actors in the historical evolution
of Bolivia. The fact that the Aymara peoples survived the Quechua conquest has meant a
sharp self-awareness of these peoples, for both conquered and settlers, which continued
into the period of the Spanish empire. From the conquest on, individual communities or
ayllus have been able to express their political and economic power, in constant conflict
with both their neighbors and their Spanish conquerors. Granted municipal status for
their community governments and noble status for their elite, these peoples throughout
the colonial period were able to use from court cases to open rebellion to protect their
traditional lands and rights. Moreover even within their communities there was a nonending conflict between nobles (kurakas) and elders (jilakatas) over lands, labor and
tribute. The eventual fall of the kuraka (cacique) class by the end of the colonial period
led to the increased power of the community elders and their ayllu governments.1
The overthrow of the imperial order did not change the political awareness of
these rural peasant communities. They continued to pay their tribute and demand control
over their lands and peoples under the new republic and were in constant negotiations
with the non-Indian authorities. Moreover the systematic attacks on their lands from the
1860s onward resulted in their constant mobilizations beyond their communities in an
effort to either buy their lands from the state or to protest with violence attempts to
survey and expropriate their lands. The ex-vinculacin decree of 1874/1880 which
finally deprived the communities of their corporate and legal status only turned these
protests into more violence leading to the massive mobilizations of the Liberal
Revolution of 1899.2 Even the assault on their lands in the period from 1884 to 1920 did

2
not temper their response. Community rebellions were a constant element within even
twentieth century republican life with the most famous of these being the uprising of the
Aymara highland community of Jesus de Machaca in 1921.3 Although land pressure
eased after 1920, there was nevertheless a constant conflict of the remaining independent
communities over their land boundaries and encroachments by the haciendas.4 In the
immediate post-Chaco War era there also emerged the first pan-indigenous consciousness
among elements of the peasant communities which found expression in the first national
peasant congress in 1945, which was held under military-MNR support.
Thus the National Revolution of 1952 found these peasant communities in a
position to mobilize quickly and take full advantage of the collapse of the central
government. The great fear involving the peasants purchase of arms, the burning of
haciendas and the killing of landowners and their mayordomos, which occurred in the
rural areas in the months after April 1952. showed the ability of the peasant communities
to quickly respond to the collapse of central government authority. By 1953 the MNR
leaders reluctantly accepted this fait accompli and carried out an effective Agrarian
Reform granting the communities de facto legal status and recognizing their corporate
form of land tenure. Although the ayllus or community governments were not formally
recognized in the law, except as corporate land owners, the government initially accepted
their arming and designation as formal sindicatos (unions), thus reinforcing traditional
community governments. This along with the granting of voting rights to illiterates
finally provided an effective space for the emergence of the peasants as a constant force
in national politics.
But initially that participation was to be a very passive one as the peasants had
relatively few demands which were aimed at guaranteeing their land ownership and
modernizing their rural communities. At the same time, this majority population support
would be crucial for the minority governments which controlled Bolivia from 1952 to
1982. Thus the collapse of urban middle class support for the MNR after 1952 made the
party dependent on peasant support to survive. In election after election the peasants
voted in block for the governing party. In turn the military regimes which replaced the
MNR also needed this passive peasant support in controlling the mine unions and the
urban middle class parties. This famous tacit peasant-government pact lasted from 19521974 with the Aymara and Quechua peasants willingly providing majority voting support
and even organized protest in recognition of each government civilian or military in
return for support of their own basic demands. These demands included the continued
legalization of their land titles, the provision of community schools, access roads and the
provision of health benefits in what had been very isolated communities. This along with
price supports for their agricultural products guaranteed their continued adherence to the
MNR and its successor military governments. Each government in turn boasted of the
size of its land distributions and guarantees to the peasants. All of this lead the 1952
generation of Amerindian peasants to concentrate on incorporating all the rights and
privileges granted to them and they showed their gratitude to the central government by
voting or protesting in block for whomever was in charge of the central government.

3
It is clear that these peasants did experience major social and economic change as
a result of their voting support largely caused by major government spending. In 1950,
for example, only 36% of the population spoke Spanish,5 and only 31% were literate.6
Average life expectancy was only 40 years (38 years for men born in that period and 42
years for women).7 With pre-transition high fertility (47 births per 1,000 resident
population or a total fertility rate of 6.8 children) Bolivia also experienced very high
mortality. The Infant Mortality rate was 156 per 1,000 live births, and an estimated one
third of the children died before the age of 5. 8 This traditional pre-modern and pretransition demographic structure of the population meant that Bolivia also had an
extremely young population with the median age of just 19 years.9 An estimated three
quarters of the Amerindian populations were rural and landholding was among the most
unequal on earth, with huge latifundia and numerous minifudias. In the agricultural
census of 1950, farms which were 1,000 hectares or more (6% of all farms) controlled
92% of the lands, with a very high GINI of .95 for landowners showing an extremely
distorted land distribution.10
But with the massive investments of the government in rural areas and peasants
now controlling their own lands and production, this picture began to change
significantly. Not only did peasants keep more of their food production and also receive
higher prices for their products on the open market, but the government largess brought
roads and schools to their villages reducing their costs of production. Though the rural
educational movement started well before the 1952 revolution, the post 1952 period saw
major advances in this crucial area of development. By the census of 1976 Spanish
finally became the dominant language for the first time in Bolivian history, not because
of any migration of foreigners into the country since monolingual speakers of the
language still accounted for only about a third of the total population, but through the rise
of educated bilingual indigenous speakers who now accounted for 67% of the national
population. In the meantime the decline in the number of monolingual speakers of Indian
languages was negatively correlated with the rise in the number of literates.11
At the same time the more systematic delivery of basic health care meant that
average life expectancy was on the increase. Thus by quinquenium of 1975-80 the
average life expectancy had risen to 45 for men and 52 for women an extraordinary
seven years for men and ten for women in just 25 years.12 Finally, there began a major
internal migration of peasants first to new open lands in the eastern lowlands and later
into the expanding urban areas, reducing population density in the highlands and leading
to a more even distribution of both Quechua and Aymara peasants between urban and
rural areas, as well as giving them representation in the eastern lowlands in significant
numbers for the first time. This later migration would be extremely important in also
establishing a new center of peasant production of coca in the Chapare region of the
department of Cochabamba as well as bringing a large highland population into the
department of Santa Cruz.
The access to land titles, to education and health having been somewhat satisfied
by the first generation, a new and younger generation increased their demands for
services from the central government. Indigenous demands now became more

4
sophisticated, such as the need for price supports for their products and the provision of
rural credit to purchase farm instruments and fertilizers. The end of the military-peasant
compact occurred under the first Banzer regime in 1974 precisely over the decision of the
government to cut price supports for peasant agricultural products the result was a
violent confrontation between the Army and the Quechua peasants in Cochabamba.
Increasing education and urbanization was also helping to bring forth a third generation
which was emerging by the end of the 20th century. This generation of indigenous
peoples had new concerns based on their substantial increase in education and health and
most importantly on their new urban residence. Many of its leaders emerged out of the
rural educational movement and many were teachers as well as union members and all
were literate in Spanish.
It was these migrations of the Indigenous rural populations away from their
traditional lands and also towards the expanding cities which would set in motion a whole
new era of ethnic politics in Bolivia. These indigenous/mestizos (or cholos) as they
have been called,13 now formed a major component in most of the cities of Bolivia and
had established a beachhead in the city El Alto which had not existed thirty years before
and was founded on empty altiplano lands on the outskirts of the city of La Paz. By the
census of 1992 this predominantly indigenous city had 405,000 persons residing within
its boundaries. This proved to be one of the fastest growing cities in the country, and
between the census of 1992 and that of 2001 it expanded at 4% per annum (to 647,000),
compared to just 1% per annum for La Paz (which now had 790,000). Moreover this was
the city of Bolivia with the most balanced sex ratio, suggesting a massive family
migration as the core of its growth.14 Finally El Alto, was unusual even by Bolivian
standards for becoming the most indigenous major city in Bolivia. It became the new
center of the Aymara peoples, who by the census of 2001 were primarily urban (59%)
and were concentrated (some 80%) in the Department of La Paz. By this date El Alto
alone contained 44% of the 1.4 million Aymaras in the country, and combined with the
urban Aymara of the city of La Paz, these two cities accounted for 52% of all Bolivians
who self identified themselves as Aymara.15 In turn the Aymaras were a fundamental
part of the two cities, representing exactly half of the population 15 years and older in La
Paz and an extraordinary 73% of the population in El Alto.16
Moreover by the census of 2001 the Aymara were not only more urban than the
majority Indigenous Quechuan peoples, but they had already achieved a very significant
reduction in fertility, with their total fertility rate being the lowest of any major Indian
group. They also had a more balanced educational level for men and women than the
Quechua peoples and in turn they had on average one year of schooling more than this
later group (6.8 years as opposed to 5.9 years). In their home department of La Paz,
some 94% of the Aymara men and 78% of the women were now literate.17 Finally life
expectancy had reached extraordinary levels for all Bolivians given their mid 20th century
historic lows. By 2004 life expectancy was 62 years for men and 66 years for women,
meaning that 22 and 24 years of life on average respectively had been added to the life
expectancy of Bolivian men and women since 1950.18 This has been matched by
massive vaccination campaigns, ever increasing health attendance at births (though still

5
low by world standards), and over 90% attendance rates in primary grades for both
indigenous men and women by the first decade of the 21st century.
Finally, there has been a consistent trend toward ethnic identity even as language
changed over time. While more and more Aymara and Quechua have lost their native
languages, or have become bilinguals, the number of persons self-identifying as Aymara
or Quechua have remained the same. In the census of 2001, 67% of the national
population identified themselves as indigenous. Although some scholars have challenged
the validity of this,19 the same ratios have appeared in the household surveys performed
by the government on an annual basis. Thus the first of such studies (MECOVI-199920)
showed that only 66% of those who self-identified as Aymara came from homes were the
language was spoken, while 33% came from homes were Spanish was spoken in their
childhood. The figures for people who identified themselves as Quechuas, was almost
the same (69% and 30% respectively). In the latest and much larger household survey of
2002 (MECOVI, 2002) these figures remain the same: of those who self-identified as
Aymara only some 68% spoke Aymara as children and 30% spoke Spanish. In this case
the self-identified Quechuas, the ratio was identical. Thus the decline of monolinguals,
the rise of bilingualism, and even the loss of language has not affected indigenous selfidentification, rather ethnic identity has remained steady and even appears to be growing.
Moreover even as they increased their education and urban participation, marriage
endogamy among indigenous peoples has remained quite high. Thus the household
surveys from 1999-2002 have shown that only 8% of marriages involved a mixed
indigenous-non-indigenous couple.21
This expanding urbanization and educational sophistication of the increasingly
more ethnically self-aware Aymara and Quechua peoples set the background for their
emergence in national politics with a new active and more aggressive participation than
had been the norm until then. This mobilization is often accompanied by violent protest,
blockades of roads and direct confrontation with the police and military and even massive
invasions of cities. This movement would eventually result in the election of the first
formally recognized Indigenous president in republican history in 2006. This event, is
just the latest in an ongoing indigenous mobilization which has shocked the traditional
elite. It has also had as a fundamental goal the rejection of the very extensive neo-liberal
economic policy which was initiated in Bolivia as early as the mid 1980s in the last Paz
Estenssoro government.
Although this political mobilization would not have occurred without the
urbanization and education of these indigenous groups, above all the very active Aymara
peoples, their very quick takeover of the national government would not have occurred
without fundamental changes both in indigenous ideology caused, as we have suggested,
by a multitude of changes in their social and economic life since 1952, but also by
changes to the national political system which was carried out by the non-indigenous elite
in the decades of the 1990s. Surprisingly the very president who provoked the most
active anti-regime indigenous mobilization and violence in 2003, Gonzalo Snchez de
Losada, was the same person who provided the institutional means for the rise of new
peasant groups to national political power in his first government of 1993-1997.

For almost two decades after military rule, Bolivian politics had been governed by
three dominant parties, the old MNR, the left MIR and the right ADN, each with long
experience at the national political level and each usually taking a third or less of the
national vote, which after 1982 was now far more divided because of the breakup of a
coherent indigenous rural voting block.22 Along with the changing distribution of
Bolivias indigenous population, the fracturing of the old MNR into new left and right
parties finally provided the peasants with alternatives to their traditional party alliances.
A foretaste of what might occur was the rise in the late 1980s of two populist parties led
by elites which were heavily supported by the urban and rural indigenous/cholo groups
along with the popular classes in general. Both these parties were created just prior to the
1989 election: the most important of which was the CONDEPA (Conciencia de Patria)
party led by the media personality Carlos Palenque with its base of support in La Paz, El
Alto and the Aymara speakers of the altiplano, and the UCD (Unin Cvica Solidarid)
created a year later in 1989 by the beer industrialist Max Fernandez, with strong support
in Santa Cruz. Both did well in the elections of that year but quickly lost ground to
movements directly led by ethnic leaders when both men died.
All now agree that the emergence of the various modern indigenous political
movements began in the late 1960s with the Katarista movement of indigenous
intellectuals and syndical leaders, and the consequent expansion and institutionalization
of the national peasant unionization movement, were key factors in establishing national
indigenous political consciousness. While the various ephemeral Katarista parties did
only moderately well in the subsequent elections, their alliance with the peasant labor
movement proved more enduring. There activities led eventually to the creation of the
most successful and autonomous of the national peasant unions in 1979, the CSUTCB
(Confederacin Sindical Unica de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia), under the
leadership of the Aymara Genaro Flores. Flores and this confederation represented the
emergence of peasants as active and important leaders in the national labor movement
which had previously been controlled by the mine workers. Two early contending
leaders who represented the two alternative approaches in the Katarista movement among
the highland Aymara were both teachers, Vctor Hugo Crdenas Conde (who supported
Flores) and Felipe Quispe who was supported by the early leaders Luciano Tapia and
Constantino Lima who founded MITKA (Movimiento Indio Tupac Katari). Cardenas
and his group eventually allied with the old MNR and he became Vice President in the
first Snchez de Losada government. But MITKA and Quispe took a far more radical
separatist position demanding ethnic autonomy. Although both leaders eventually
declined in importance, they represented the earliest manifestation of ever more radical
and more nationalist indigenous policies, with increasing willingness of their supporters
to use violent confrontations against the state. Whatever their political differences, both
leaders were deeply committed to retaining their ethnic identities in a modern state, be it
in a two Bolivias separatist environment or within a pluri-ethnic republic.23
Although these Aymara radicals were able to mobilize ever increasing levels of
support in their cause, they were often too divided and too tied to their Aymara
communities to extend their power nationally, though they could easily erupt with

7
violence on the national political scene through blockades of the key cities of La Paz and
El Alto. But in fact it was from an entirely different group of indigenous leaders that a
national movement was eventually forged. Beginning in the mid 1960s, the MNR
government abandoned agricultural development on the highlands and instead promoted
both the evolution of modern agricultural units in the Santa Cruz region and also actively
promoted migration to the previously unsettled eastern Andean lowland regions.
Especially as COMIBOL began to dismiss ever larger numbers of miners, many of them
were encouraged to migrate. The Beni and Chapare regions were favored locations as the
government opened up all weather roads and distributed free lands to these highland
migrants. Given the development of the Chapare region into a world center of coca
production, it was almost inevitable that government repression would follow, and just as
inevitably, political mobilization would occur among the mostly indigenous peasant coca
producers. Taking their syndical organization with them, these small-scale primarily
Quechua farmers,24 were the backbone of Chapare coca production and they organized
themselves politically to oppose the ever increasing government repression, much of its
supported by a very active anti-coca production policy of the US government. From the
1980s onward US pressure to curtail production was met by increasing violence,
culminating in a continuous set of bloody confrontations between the cocaleros and the
US equipped special military forces sent to suppress production in the second Banzer
regime of 1997-2002. Not only did the Chapare farmers organize resistance locally with
constant blockades, and armed opposition, but they also began to seek allies in the
highlands and even on the international scene. A cocalero was elected president of the
CSUTCB in 1996 and by the late 1990s the movement in defense of coca production had
elected several mayors and councilmen and in the last Banzer government they even had
congressional representation by Evo Morales and several other cocaleros. The Oruro
born Aymara Evo Morales had emerged as a syndical leader in 1983 in the Chapare and
with his eventual arrival to Congress as the most voted deputy in 1997, the cocaleros now
had national political representation and their ongoing campaign for national recognition
finally led to their establishing a new political party, MAS party (Movimiento al
Socialismo) in 2000.25
What is interesting about the cocalero movement is that it was based on primarily
Quechua indigenous groups who formed its core, but was from the beginning forced to
take both a multi-ethnic, national and international approach to defend its position.
Given the pervasive US involvement in the suppression of Chapare coca production, even
to the point of providing military support, the cocalero movement was forced to think in
the broadest organizational and intellectual terms to defend its position. All this meant a
deep commitment to traditional Bolivian values, defense of historic usage of coca, and a
basic rejection of US intervention in national affairs. 26 The cocaleros and their leaders
created strong alliances with all groups beyond their traditional lowland base of support.
Thus the MAS supporters took lessons of the potentiality of a populist approach from the
CONDAPO experience and they also actively supported the water war of 2000 in
Cochabamba. From the early 1990s they took a position against NAFTA and all free
trade pacts with the United States and made a determined effort to expand their base
beyond Bolivias peasant unions and their national confederation. They created active
alliances with Ecuadorian and Chilean Indian and other pan-Indigenous groups

8
throughout the Americas, with Morales being a tireless international advocate in
numerous trips abroad. Moreover they rejected the more parochial approach of the more
intransigent isolationist position represented by Quispe and his altiplano followers, and
sought an inclusive popular base of support in all the cities. It was thus inevitable that
whatever the individual origins of the differing Andean blockades from 2003-2005, that
MAS would support all of them just as these mass demonstrations moved more and more
beyond local politics and began articulating national and international positions on
natural resource control, and Bolivias relations with Chile and the United States, themes
long espoused by MAS. 27
The decision of Snchez de Losada to promote decentralization of the Bolivian
state for the first time in republican history was the last major factor which explains the
rapid rise of indigenous groups to national power. Tied to his neo-liberal economic
reforms and the dismantling of the last state enterprises, these political reforms were seen
as providing social justice for an economy that was being opened up to world market
conditions as never before. Moreover the loss of the far left to the MNR after the
creation of the UDP under Siles in the early 1980s, and then the further erosion of their
even moderate left support due to their adoption of the Washington consensus after 1985,
meant that the incorporation of moderate Katarismo and its vision of a pluri-cultural
society provided the MNR elite with a new theme for mass appeal. Thus, especially as
the Sanchez de Losada government adopted ever more radical free market reforms, the
appeal of decentralization was offered as a counterweight to liberalism in the economic
arena and a means of providing basic political participation and social services at the
local level as never before in Bolivian history. In 1994 his government passed the Ley de
Participacion Popular which created over three hundred new municipal governments
which now directly and automatically received funding from the national treasury on a
fixed tax income sharing formula, while the subsequent law of Administrative
Decentralization a year later also guaranteed the creation of legal local vigilance
committees to oversee the local municipal regimes then being elected. It also recognized
peasant communities, indigenous communities and neighborhood organizations as
organizaciones territoriales de base, or OTBs, and various ayllus leaders such as the
jilakatas as legal representatives of these territorial base organizations which in turn
elected or selected these vigilance committees who oversaw elected officials. So
profound were these changes that in the 1995 it was estimated that 437 of the municipal
councilmen elected in that years voting were peasants or indigenous peoples. Moreover
by the beginning of the new century, municipal governments accounted for
approximately 40% of the total public investment program and for approximately 60% of
all social investments in Bolivia. 28
There were also important legal and symbolic changes in the rights of indigenous
communities. In 1994 the reigning 1967 Constitution was reformed and it was now
declared that not only was Bolivia [a] free, independent, sovereign country, but that it
is also was multiethnic and pluricultural - the first time this was formally recognized in
republican history. The traditional ayllus, their governments and unions were also
formally recognized for the first time since 1874. An entire section (Titulo III) of the
revised constitution not only declared that the State recognizes the legal personality of

9
the comunidades indgenas but also that of their peasant associations and of the
sindicatos campesinos and unequivocally guarantees the existence of the propiedades
comunarias, but the rights of local ayllus and comunidades indigenas their rights to local
traditional laws and customs. There was also the official acceptance of bilingual
education and eventually the creation of a semi-corporatist political system of alternative
political parties. The government now decreed that Agrupaciones Cuidadanos and
Pueblos Indigenas could become legal political parties. These very important structural
decisions were both a counterweight offered by the elite to the full adoption by the
governments of the 1980s and 1990s of the Washington consensus and a total
dismantling of the state economy, as well as a response to the growing demands for
autonomy on the part of the various indigenous groups.
All of these changes, along with a profound shift of patronage to local
municipalities, would destroy the traditional political system and wipe out several of the
major national parties. This was clearly seen in the election of 2002, which resulted in
the rise of a multiplicity of local and regional parties, the fracturing of the old national
parties and the emergence of the new indigenous based party, and the ability of the new
MAS party under Evo Morales to obtain an impressive 20% of the vote. The subsequent
blockades which began in early 2003 with that of the butane gas factory in El Alto
ushered in a long period of violent confrontations everywhere in Bolivia, but especially in
La Paz, which spearheaded by Aymara groups, both from rural areas as well as El Alto,
brought down two presidents- Snchez de Losada and Carlos Mesa in the space of just
two years. 29 This confrontation also convinced the entire national population that it had
to vote for MAS and Evo Morales in the election of 2005. Thus within just six years
from its foundation the MAS party moved from 20% of the national vote in 2002 to 54%
in 2006 the first majority party to rule Bolivia since the earliest days of the MNR.
These elections saw the destruction of the ADN and the severe reduction of the MIR and
MNR as viable political parties, and the emergence of numerous locally based political
movements, many of them constructions out of the pieces of the old political entities.
Thus in many ways the arrival of a populist party to power in 2006, with major
indigenous elements and an indigenous president, is the evolution of forces unleashed by
the National Revolution of 1952, but which required virtually a half century of economic,
social and political change to come to fruition. Had it not been for the decentralization of
the traditional state apparatus, the ascension of these groups in the past few years would
not have occurred with such rapidity. Equally had it not been for the systematic attack on
the Chapare cocaleros by the United States government, a unified indigenous movement
might not have emerged with such a national base and with such political sophistication
in so short a period of time. Finally, all of these developments were based on the
tremendous changes in education and urbanization of the previously isolated and
marginalized rural indigenous peoples.

10
NOTES
1

Recent works which stress the political evolution of community governments in the late
colonial period include Sinclair Thomson. We alone will rule: Native Andean Politics in
the Age of Insurgency (Madison : University of Wisconsin Press, 2002) and Sergio
Serulnikov. Subverting colonial authority: Challenges to Spanish rule in eighteenthcentury southern Andes (Durham : Duke University Press, 2003)
2

The classic study of this massive Indian mobilization and violence is by Ramiro
Condarco Morales, Zarete, el Temible Willka, historia de la revolucin indigena de
1899 (La Paz: Talleres Graficos Bolivianos, 1966)
3

The major study of this event is by Roberto Choque Canqui and Esteban Ticona Alejo,
Jess de Machaqa: La marka rebelde: 2, Sublevacin y massacre de 1921 (La Paz:
CIPCA y CEDOIN, 1996).
4

See Herbert S. Klein, Haciendas and Ayllus: Rural Society in the Bolivian Andes in the
18th and 19th centuries (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), chapter 6.
5

Bolivia, Direccin General de Estadistica y Cenos, Censo demografico 1950 (La Paz,
1955), p.102 cuadro 33
6

Censo demografico 1950 (La Paz, 1955), p.112 cuadro 37

CELADE, Boletn Demogrfico No.67 ( enero del 2001), Bolivia, Cuadro 1.

CELADE, Boletn demogrfico [amrica latina:tablas de mortalidad 1950-2025], No.

74 (Julio 2004), cuadro 13, p. 47
9

INE, Cuadro N 2.01.18: Bolivia: Indicadores demograficos por sexo segun

Quinquenios, 1950-2050, and Cuadro N 2.01.19: Bolivia: Indicadores demograficos
segun quinquenios, 1950-2050, both found at http://www.ine.gov.bo/ and in the
Anuario Estadistica
10

Some 72% of the economically active population had rural occupations. Direccin
General de Estadistica y Cenos, Censo demografico 1950 (La Paz, 1955), pp.231ff cuadro 69; and the overall rural population represented 74% of the national population.
INE, Bolivia: Poblacin por Censos segn Departamento, rea Geogrfica y Sexo,
Censos de 1950 - 1976 -1992 2001, Cuadro N 2.01.11, found at
http://www.ine.gov.bo/. The land tenure data is found in Source: INE, I Censo
Agropecuario 1950 (La Paz, 1985), pp.23-24
11

INE, Bolivia: Caractersticas Sociodemogrficas de la Poblacin Indgena (La Paz,

2003), p. 64, cuadro 11. By the census of 1976 literacy stood at 79% for the entire
population, and was at 90% for those 20 years or younger. INE, Resultados del Censo
Nacional de Poblacion y Vivienda 1976, vol 10, cuadro P 7 pp. 52ff

11

12

CELADE, Boletn Demogrfico No.67 ( enero del 2001), Bolivia, Cuadro 1.

13

This is a term used to describe essentially indigenous peoples both through language
and self identity, who have an urban residence. See Patricia Espinoza Revollo, Social
stratification in Bolivia, (Human Development Note 2/06, La Paz: PNUD, 2006), p.9.
14

INE, Indicadores Sociodemogrficos por Ciudades Capitales, Censos de 1992-2001 y

Zonas Censales, Censo 2001 (La Paz, 2004), cuadro 2.
15

Ramiro Molina Barrios, et.al, Los pueblos indgenas de Bolivia:diagnstico

sociodemogrfico a partir del censo del 2001 (CELADE, Santiago de Chile, 2005),
cuadro IV.6, p.47; and data generated from the 2001 census at
http://www.ine.gov.bo/beyond
16

These figures are based on using the self identification and age tables for the two cities,
with an estimator of one half for the total population age category 10-19 to obtain the 1519 age grouping for use with the self-identification data; generated from the census 2001
data in www.ine.gov.bo/beyond.
17

Molina, Los pueblos indigenasdel censo 2001, tables V.30 & V.19, pp.88, 75.

18

INE, Estatisticas Nacionales, 2004 (La Paz, 6 de agosto 2005), p. 2

19

Ral Madrid argues that if cholo or mestizo was used for self-identification that the
level of indigenous would drop. But his findings are not supported by the MECOVI
survey data. Thus in 2002, of those who spoke an Indian language as children, some
76% still identified themselves in later life as indigenous (and this same high level is
found in the 1999 survey), which are far higher ratios that he has found in an alternative
USAID 2002 survey. See Ral Madrid, Politics, Social Class and Indigenous Identity in
Bolivia, Paper presented at Janey Conference on Diversity and Disadvantage in Latin
America, the New School April 15, 2005.
20

These are UN sponsored household surveys called Mejoramiento de las Encuestas y

Medicin de Condiciones de Vida, or just Encuestas y mediacion de condicion de vida
and are available in SPSS format at www.ine.gov.bo/mecovi/
21

Alejandro F. Mercado, Jorge Leitn and Fernando Rios, El Mercado matrimonial: Un

nexo entre la movilidad social y el Mercado laboral,(La Paz: Instituto de Investigaciones
Socio-Econmicas, Universidad Catlica Boliviam Septiembre, 2004), p. 13
22

For a recent survey of this period in national history see Herbert S. Klein, A Concise
History of Bolivia (New York; Cambridge University Press, 2003), chapter 9.

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23

Good reviews of these developments are found in Esteban Ticona Alejo, Organizacin
y liderazgo aymara, La experiencia indgena en la politica boliviana 1979-1996 (La Paz:
AGRUCO y Universidad de la Cordillera, 2000); Rafael Archondo, Comunidad y
divergencia de miradas en el Kararismo,, Revista Umbrales (La Paz: CIDES-UMSA),
No.7 (Julio 2000), pp. 120-147; and Ramiro Grey Molina, Ethnic Politics in Bolivia:
Harmony of Inequalities, 1900-2000, found at
http://hdr.undp.org/docs/events/global_forum/2005/papers/George_Gray_Molina.pdf
24

In the census of 2001, some 72 % of all adults some 15 years of age and older in the
Chapare region identified themselves as Quechua, with another 4% claiming Aymara
identity and only 21% declaring themselves non-indigenous. Generated from the census
2001 data in www.ine.gov.bo/beyond.
25

The standard survey of the development of the sindicatos of the Chapare region, which
date from the initial settlements in the 1960s, and become nationally active in the 1980s
as a response to the coca eradication program, is Kevin Healy, Political Ascent of
Bolivias Peasant Coca Leaf Producers,Journal of Interamerican Studies and World
Affairs, 33:1 (Spring, 1991),pp.87-121; also see Deborah J. Yashar, Contesting
Citizenship in Latin America: The Rise of Indigenous Movements and the Postliberal
Challenge (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 185.
26

As Evo Morales has recently reflected in a speech he gave in the Chapare town of
Shinahota (...)Ahora me he dado cuenta que no nos hemos equivocado. Estamos en ese
cambio en ese proceso de verdad, cambiar nuestra Bolivia y la lucha, la defensa de la
hoja de coca regional nacionalmente nos ha hecho despertar, la lucha y por la defensa de
los recursos naturales ha creado mayor conciencia a nivel nacional e internacional La
Jornada 28 Mayo 2006.
27

A good survey of their early years and the ideology of the MAS leadership is found in
Robert Albro, The Indigenous in the Plural in Bolivian Oppositional Politics,Bulletin
of Latin American Research. 24:4 (2005) 433-53; and in Healy, Political Ascent
28

There is a large literature on these reforms. See for example: Merlee S. Grindle,
Audacious Reforms: Institutional Invention and Democracy in Latin America (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), chapter 5; the several studies of George Gray
Molina The Offspring of 1952: Poverty, Exclusion and the Promise of Popular
Participation,in Merlee Grindle and Pilar Domingo, eds., Proclaiming Revolution:
Bolivia in Comparative Perspective (Boston: ILAS & DRCLAS, Harvard University
Press. 2003), pp. 345-363 and his Popular Participation, Social Service Delivery and
Poverty Reduction 1994-2000, presented at the conference on Citizen Participation in
the Context of Fiscal Decentralization: Best Practices in Municipal Administration,
Tokyo and Kobe, Japan, 2-6 September 2002; as well as Miriam Seemann, The Bolivian
Decentralization Process and the Role of Municipal Associations, HWWA Discussion
Paper No. 271 Hamburgisches Welt-Wirtschafts-Archiv (HWWA) Hamburg Institute of
International Economics 2004; and Carmen Medeiros, Civilizing the Popular? The Law

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of Popular Participation and the Design of a New Civil Society in 1990s Bolivia,
Critique of Anthropology Vol 21:4(2001), pp. 401425 among others.
29

It is interesting to note that the radical Felipe Quispe who was jailed in the mid 1990s
for armed revolutionary activities, was elected head of the CSUTCB in 1999 and this
brought him into alliance with the Chapare cocaleros and represented the rise of the more
radical wing of Katarismo to dominance in national politics. See Archondo, Comunidad
y divergencia de miradas en el Kararismo, pp.126-127.