Constructing Indigenous Autonomy in Plurinational Bolivia: Possibilities and Ambiguities

What is the State?

Philip Abrams’s (1988: 61, 63) contention that the state “as a substantial entity separate from society has proved a remarkably elusive object of analysis” and, “like the town and the family, is a spurious object of sociological concern” helps to frame our analysis. Any attempt to analyze the state as a completely autonomous entity outside of and above society will only lead to reification, hindering both a proper analysis and recognition of the possibilities of its transformation. To begin, we must take into account Weber’s (2004: 33) description of the state as “the form of human community that (successfully) lays claim to the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical violence within a particular territory.” However, he also argues that “the state represents a relationship in which people rule over other people. This relationship is based on the legitimate use of force (that is to say, force that is perceived as legitimate)” (34). For Weber the state does not stand apart from society as a set of essential intentions or preferences any more than individuals are units of autonomous consciousness and desire distinct from their material or social world (Mitchell, 1991: 88). Rather, the state is what Poulantzas (2014 [1978]) has described as the material condensation of a relationship of social forces. For Poulantzas, the state should be seen as “a relationship of forces, or more precisely the material condensation of such a relationship among classes and class fractions, such as this is expressed with the State in a necessarily specific form” (128–129). Similarly, following García Linera (2010), the state should be understood as a mechanism for the institutionalization of the political correlation of social forces and a collective and shared moral consensus. In other words, the state is formed and defined through a process of social struggle whereby the social relations of economic and cultural production in a specific place and time are consolidated in a political relationship of domination and subordination.

This does not mean that the state is merely a tool of the dominant class or hegemonic bloc. The contemporary form of the capitalist state is a relatively autonomous entity, meaning that the fractions of social classes and groups that control it are variable while its central functions remain the same. Thus the state or at least parts of the state apparatus may become accessible to the intervention of popular social forces at certain times. Conceptualizing the state simply as an apparatus used to dominate, control, and exploit subordinate groups fails to account for the many apparent contradictions within it. Examples can be seen when different parts of the state apparatus come into conflict. Perhaps the clearest instance is a military coup toppling a democratically elected leader, but in a more subtle manner in contemporary MAS-dominated Bolivia we see these contradictions playing out between competing strategies of state transformation and economic development based on the ideological visions of indigenity and nationalism (Mayorga, 2014; Postero, 2010; Regalsky, 2010). According to Mitchell (1991: 88), “such conflict is an important indication of the permeability of state boundaries because it enables one to trace how wider social differences reproduce themselves with the processes of the state.”

Just as we should abandon the image of the state as a completely autonomous agent issuing orders, we also need to question the notion of resistance as coming from someone or somewhere completely independent of the state. “Political subjects and their modes of resistance are formed . . . within the organizational terrain we call the state, rather than in some wholly exterior social space” (Mitchell, 1991: 93). Thus the demand for indigenous autonomy should be seen not as the pursuit of a space beyond the reach of the state but as a factor in the changing dynamics between social forces. The indigenous organizations that brought Morales and the MAS to power and have demanded indigenous autonomy proposed, according to Garcés (2011: 53),

a state form in which political collectivities—rather than individuals elected, for instance, by political parties—could express agreement and make decisions about the core issues of the state. These positions put into question the idea that the state has unique and absolute sovereignty over its territory and raised the possibility of creating plural forms of self-government (within indigenous peoples’ territories) and co-government (between the indigenous peoples and the plurinational state).

It is precisely this conceptualization that informed and motivated activists in Charagua to mobilize for local autonomy, and AIOC was seen as a viable vehicle for doing so.

In this sense, indigenous demands for autonomy in Charagua and elsewhere are directed not against the state but against a particular historical form of the state in which indigenous Bolivians have been situated in a subaltern position. Through their demands for a constituent assembly to “refound” Bolivia as a plurinational state with indigenous autonomies, indigenous peoples are proposing their own form of state. This represents, as Garcés (2011: 63) points out,

a departure from the classical sense of the struggle against the state, or the struggle to take or capture state power. The issues are which kind of state the people will make and whether and how it might be constructed—whether they can construct an Other kind of state that resolves the historical discrimination and exclusion to which they have been subjected since the creation of the colonial republic.

The relational view of the state and resistance leads us to rethink the division between the state and society and clarify the seemingly contradictory outcomes of achieving indigenous autonomy while possibly seeing autonomous municipalities incorporated into the regulatory state apparatus.

The AIOC and State Transformation in Charagua

In 2009 residents of Charagua passed a referendum with 56 percent of the vote to initiate the process of becoming an autonomous indigenous municipality. In 2015 they passed a second referendum and became the first and to date the only indigenous municipality in Bolivia to fulfill all the requirements of the AIOC process—what Morell i Torra (2015) has aptly christened “the bureaucratic odyssey.” According to 2012 census figures, Charagua’s population is an estimated 32,000. At 74,000 square kilometers Bolivia’s largest municipality, Charagua is divided into six zones, four of them rural (Charagua Norte, Charagua Sur or Parapitiguasu, Alto Isoso, and Bajo Isoso) and two urban (Charagua Pueblo and Charagua Estacion). It is one of the most ethnically and linguistically diverse municipalities in Bolivia, with 67 percent of its population identifying themselves as indigenous. By far the largest group in Charagua is the Guaraní (Ava-Guaraní in the northern foothills and Tupi-Guaraní in the south), but there are also Quechua- and Aymara-speakers who have migrated east to the Chaco region from the western highlands. There is also a minority of whites/mestizos, known locally as karai, who until the late twentieth century dominated the municipality’s political power structure. Mennonites also make up a sizable minority at 20 percent of the population, but despite their increasing economic power and impact on local markets they remain politically isolated because they choose not to vote (Faguet, 2012). ¹

Freedom to make decisions according to their own norms and procedures has been articulated as a foundational element of Guaraní culture (Pifarré, 1989; Saignes, 2007). Resistance in the name of autonomy was common during the colonial and republican periods until it was silenced by the minority white population following the infamous massacre at Kuruyuki in 1892, in which the military intervened and more than 6,000 Guaraní (at that time known as Chiriguanos) were killed. According to Combés (2005b: 224), the massacre marked the end of a long era of indigenous resistance in the area: “Kuruyuki was the final real battle, the last armed struggle against the karai.” However, by the 1960s and 1970s the Guaraní were again organizing and contesting karai hegemony and, particularly with the founding in Charagua of the Asamblea del Pueblo Guaraní (Guaraní Assembly—APG) in February 1987, expressing demands for autonomy.

The APG represents the interests of Bolivia’s Guaraní nation, which is made up of more than 360 communities in the departments of Santa Cruz, Chuquisaca, and Tarija (Anzaldo García and Gutiérrez Galean, 2014: 91). Formally part of the Confederación de Pueblos Indígenas de Bolivia (Confederation of Indigenous Peoples of Bolivia—CIDOB), it was created, according to one of its founding members, “with the objective of expanding and recovering our territory and improving the life conditions of the Guaraní communities. . . . [It] was organized to make the karais respect [the Guaraní people]” (quoted in Albó, 2012: 66). According to Ruben Ortiz, an APG leader from Charagua Norte, autonomy for the Guaraní people signifies self-governance combined with control over territory and economic resources (interview, Charagua, September 6, 2016). The APG played a key role in the configuration in the 1990s of the four rural zones of Charagua as tierras comunitarias de origen (TCOs), which would serve as the territorial foundation for indigenous autonomy. ² In 2009, not long after the new constitution went into effect, these four zones decided to move forward with an AIOC project, and two of them, Charagua Norte and Parapitiguasu, continue to lead the effort today.

While the APG has been the central indigenous mechanism pushing for the project, both Plata (2015) and Albó (2012) emphasize the role played by the state and its functionaries and a number of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in assisting the process. Our fieldwork in 2015 and 2016 in Charagua, as well as in the municipalities of Jesús de Machaca (Department of La Paz) and Totora Marka (Department of Oruro) that are also in the midst of creating independent autonomies, corroborates the point highlighted by Tockman and Cameron (2014: 56–57) that officials in the Ministry of Autonomies and the Vice Ministry of Indigenous Autonomies have worked hard to promote the creation of these administrative units and help those municipalities through the technical details. Additionally, Adolfo Mendoza, an influential and respected former MAS senator, played an important role in forging a MAS/APG alliance in Charagua in favor of the AIOC proposal (Albó, 2012: 141–142). ³ In general, the MAS has played an ambiguous role in the AIOC process in municipalities across the country, at times impeding the construction of indigenous autonomy while at others providing needed support. According to Tockman (2016: 160), the MAS’s wavering support is a consequence of its role as an elected government, its political economic orientation, and the correlation of social forces to which it responds. In the case of Charagua, despite the fact that the AIOC project raises the specter of resistance to the state’s reliance on the extraction of hydrocarbons in the region, the MAS has aligned itself with the APG in support of it as a political tactic to counter the demands for departmental autonomy of the rightist opposition, centered in the city of Santa Cruz (Plata, 2015: 206).

Two of the most important NGOs in the Charagua AIOC process have been the Centro de Investigación y Promoción del Campesinado (Center for Research and Promotion of the Peasantry—CIPCA) and the Centro Arakuaarenda. CIPCA is a nationally based organization with seven regional offices across Bolivia that was founded by three Jesuit priests—Xavier Albó, Luís Alegre, and Francisco Javier Santiago—in 1971. It has played a vital role in supporting indigenous and campesino communities and organizations and their demands. It opened a regional office in Charagua in 1976 with the specific goals of contributing to the defense and consolidation of Guaraní territory and helping to put an end to debt peonage (Albó, 2012: 60). The Centro Arakuaarenda (Space/place of Knowledge), originally a Jesuit institution, was formed to “accompany” the indigenous peoples of Charagua and help combat social inequality between the indigenous and white/mestizo populations in the municipality. Organized as a technical school, it has focused largely on issues of education, agricultural production, land tenure, and autonomy. Marcelo Alberto, the director, pointed out that not only had many of the indigenous community leaders advocating for AIOC passed through the Centro’s education programs but the APG had been founded at a meeting there, showing “how the vision of Guaraní autonomy comes from inside, not from the outside and above like other NGOs” (interview, Charagua, September 9, 2016). Both CIPCA and the Centro Arakuaarenda provided important technical support during the writing and revisions of the AIOC statute and held workshops, meetings, and “spaces of reflection” to debate issues related to AIOC and its implementation.

Inevitably, these linkages between the local community, the state and its functionaries, and NGOs have not been free of tensions and liabilities. While Quisbert (2009: 133) correctly argues that “there can be no doubt that indigenous peoples need a central government that helps to produce the minimum conditions for creating autonomous indigenous institutions,” Tockman and Cameron (2014: 56) say that, except for the Ministry of Autonomies, the MAS-led state has not only failed to support indigenous autonomy but also acted in some instances to undermine it.. This conflict was very much in evidence in a “next steps” planning meeting we attended in October 2015. Local people listened stone-faced to lectures by state officials and NGO representatives on the need to deeply familiarize themselves with the technical details of the statutes and became animated only when the discussion turned to community issues that they perceived as important. In off-the-record conversations, Ministry of Autonomy officials expressed real concern regarding the perceived failure of local people, including those who would soon be making important public policy decisions, to take the statutes seriously. Our conversations with local Guaraní revealed a different set of concerns, among them how to achieve more control over oil companies working in the municipality without losing access to the revenues they received from natural resource extraction and how to ensure a better distribution of public spending. This tension between the focus of government técnicos on the bureaucratic and legal procedures of the AIOC process and that of local community members on local needs has created obstacles in the construction of indigenous autonomy (Quisbert, 2009: 116).

In addition, because the AIOC project represents a social struggle with multiple cultural, ideological, and material implications, there was also outright opposition to it (see Albó, 2012; Combés, 2005a; Plata, 2015). The opposition was largely composed of the karai population living in Charagua Pueblo and organized as Verdad y Democracia Social (Truth and Social Democracy—Verdes) and linked with the conservative Comité Cívico de Charagua (Charagua Civic Committee), supported by then-governor of Santa Cruz, Rubén Costas. There was also opposition from a significant part of the Aymara and Quechua populations in Charagua Estación. Making up roughly 7–10 percent of the municipality’s population, Aymara- and Quechua-speakers began to migrate into the area in significant numbers in the 1950s, mainly from Chuquisaca and Potosí (Albó, 2012: 92). They established rural communities as part of a 1970s government-sponsored agricultural development scheme called the Abapó-Ozozog Program, an attempt to alleviate highland poverty and overcrowding by enticing peasants to migrate to the sparsely populated eastern lowlands. These migrants also formed urban communities in Charagua Pueblo and Charagua Estación. Though some of these urban dwellers have maintained small parcels of land and cattle, most are now involved in commerce and transportation (Albó, 2012: 74–75). In the 2009 referendum 61 percent of Charagua Estación residents voted against indigenous autonomy out of concern that it would favor the Guaraní (Albó, 2012: 126).

After the 2009 referendum, a constituent assembly was formed to draft a statute outlining the institutional organization of the AIOC and its relationship with the state. While it was initially organized in such a way as to provide representation for the various areas that make up Charagua, representatives of Charagua Pueblo did not participate and those from Charagua Estación did so only intermittently. René Gómez, president of the constituent assembly, argues that the karai opted not to participate because they did not want to confer legitimacy on a new order that they no longer dominated (interview, Charagua, October 15, 2015). The absence of representatives from Charagua Pueblo, combined with the only partial representation of Aymara and Quechua populations and the self-exclusion of the Mennonites, meant that “the composition of the assembly did not reflect the diversity of social actors” in the municipality (Plata, 2015: 212). However, the absence of these local social forces in the writing of the statute and their continuous opposition to it was insufficient to stop it.

Plata (2015: 210) concludes that the two main arguments against it were that it would “take away the right of the citizenry to a universal vote” and that it “would break the unity, harmony, and social peace" that Charagua had enjoyed for over 100 years. This characterization of the past century is of course contrary to the dominant understanding of it among the Guaraní, who feel that their interests and values have been rendered moot by the impositions of outsiders. Another argument, put forward by larger landholders, was that the creation of the AIOC would lead to the expropriation of private lands. AIOC advocates sought to assure landowners that this would not occur, and the statute includes respect for both communal and individual landholdings.

Informal conversations among karai middle-class professionals and business owners often revealed the concern that indigenous autonomy would be undermined by the lack of public policy experience among those who aspired to assume power within the new AIOC government. An employee of International Save the Children expressed skepticism regarding the use of funds administered to date, citing allegations of incompetence, corruption, and nepotism, but either could not or would not substantiate his claims with specific examples (interview, Charagua, October 17, 2015). Nevertheless, according to Ambrosio Choquindi, the head of Alto Isoso, despite the inability of the opposition to present a persuasive alternative project it was really the unity of the Guaraní populations under the leadership of the APG that had allowed the AIOC to become a reality (interview, Charagua, September 6, 2016).

Despite the difficulties and social conflicts involved in the process, the AIOC statute was approved on September 20, 2015, with 53 percent of the vote, ⁴ with an official date for the transition of January 8, 2017. The organization of power under AIOC is based on the territorial organization of the municipality. The four zones correspond to the original TCOs, Alto and Bajo Isoso (1,705,000 acres), Charagua Norte (239,800 acres), and Parapitiguasu (286,000 acres), and the decision-making model has three levels: communal (families), zonal, and interzonal. According to Plata (2015: 224), the principal innovation of the new institutional system of self-government is the creation of the Ñemboati Reta, the mechanism of collective decision making. Charagua’s Ñemboati Reta will have two representatives (one man and one woman) from each of the six zones and one from each of the municipality’s three inhabited national parks (Kaaiya del Gran Chaco, Otuquis, and Ñembi Guasu). Each of the zones is free to elect its representatives according to its own norms and procedures, which means that leaders in the rural zones and the parks will be chosen through their own usos y costumbres while the secret ballot will be used in the two urban zones. The Ñemboati Reta is explicitly designed to be deliberative rather than ratifying the decisions of any municipal government.

What makes Charagua’s AIOC institutional setup different from that of other indigenous communities (in the Altiplano, for example) is that there is no ultimate authority in the form of a rotating mallku or cacique or even a rotation of power between different socio-territorial units. The AIOC statute replaces the accumulation of power in one person (for instance, a mayor) with a decentralization that attempts to represent the diversity of the municipality. Article 47 stipulates that the executive function, the Tëtarembiokuai Reta, will be decentralized to the six zones with a coordinator that rotates among them and, as Magaly Gutiérrez, a longtime CIPCA administrator and current Ministry of Autonomies official, points out, has no decision-making power. It can only ratify and implement the decisions of the Ñemboati Reta (interview, Charagua, September 9, 2016).

How the indigenous justice system in Charagua will function according to local norms and procedures is unclear. Plata speculates that at least part of the reason for the brevity of the articles on the subject is that the process is so complex and diverse. Furthermore, he argues that indigenous justice is articulated in oral rather than written form (2015: 229, 235; interview, La Paz, September 30, 2015). However, according to René Gómez, president of the assembly that drafted the AIOC statute, care was taken to avoid applying indigenous norms of justice in ways that could offend non-Guaraní members of the community. In particular, he argued that, despite the fears of some Charagueños that Guaraní law would be imposed upon them, this is not to be the case (interview, Charagua, October 15, 2015). Within the four Guaraní zones the determination of guilt and sanctions is expected to follow local customs in terms of organization (an assembly will determine if the infraction is too complicated to be settled by the community’s secretary of justice in the community). Francisco Arrendondo, a comunero from Capigwazwti, explained that, in most cases, infractions will be dealt with locally, but in cases where the infraction is serious they will pass the case on to the state system. According to Arrendondo, indigenous justice seeks to be restorative to the victim of the crime, the perpetrator, and the community (interview, Charagua, October 16, 2015). This contrasts sharply with the state system, which is seen by many indigenous people with whom we spoke as problematic because of its punitive nature. The relationship between the two forms of justice will become clear only through practice.

Finally, Charagua has major hydrocarbons deposits that are currently being exploited by private companies under contract with the MAS government. Since 2006 hydrocarbons-producing municipalities have been receiving a quarter of the direct hydrocarbons tax, and this has significantly increased revenue for the municipal government. However, in the eyes of some Charagueños, this increased material wealth comes at the expense of environmental damage and the loss of control over local decision making, given that decisions on natural gas extraction have been made without respecting the constitutional right of prior and informed consultation, not to mention the more rigorous international norm of prior and informed consent. Differences of opinion regarding the way AIOC will deal with this question have created divisions within and among the various populations in Charagua. How hard the newly formed AIOC presses for changes in this relationship to the petroleum companies and the MAS government over the structure of hydrocarbons extraction will undoubtedly be an important part of the way indigenous autonomy unfolds in Charagua.

Ambiguities of AIOC

In what ways might state-sanctioned and state-administered processes of constructing indigenous autonomy transform and “domesticate” indigenous demands for self-governance “into a state reform that deepens the mechanisms of indigenous participation in the state but does so through their subordination, without changing the structures of the state itself” (Garcés, 2011: 164)? This question is particularly important given the expansion of urban union structures into the countryside after the 1952 revolution (Albó, 1987; Dunkerley, 1984; Hurtado, 2016 [1986]; Rivera, 1987; 1990) and the multicultural reforms of the 1990s (Garcés, 2011; Kohl and Farthing, 2006). While each of these processes opened up avenues for increased democratic participation in politics by previously excluded groups, both sought to control that participation.

After the 1952 revolution the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (Revolutionary Nationalist Movement—MNR) sought to turn indigenous people into peasants through the 1953 agrarian reform, the creation of the Ministry of Peasant Affairs, and the organization of communities into rural unions. In many areas, especially where haciendas had not existed and/or had failed to stamp out traditional communal organizations such as the North of Potosi, the unions were basically grafted onto existing indigenous social structures (Platt, 2016 [1982]; Rivera, 1990). In others, such as parts of La Paz and the valleys of Cochabamba, where the expansion of haciendas had resulted in fragmentation of traditional communal organization, the union structures took hold more easily. Rural peoples had organized in the highlands and valleys well before the MNR triumph in 1952, as Laura Gotkowitz (2007) points out, and played an important role in bringing about the revolution. They were, according to Gotkowitz, “the revolution before the revolution” (2007: 5). But she also notes that after the revolution “the MNR and other outside organizers played a fundamental part in the formation of rural unions and militias: the party’s agents were sent virtually everywhere after 1952” (2007: 274–275). MNR involvement in their expansion served to arrange communities in a top-down, corporativist fashion.

In the eastern part of the country, the agrarian reform failed to alter the social relations of production but rather deepened the inequality of land distribution and agriculture, which remained essentially semifeudal. While it is commonly thought that the 1953 reform was not applied in the East, a number of scholars have shown that it had important impacts there despite the fact that it was implemented differently. Urioste and Kay (2005), for example, demonstrate that it promoted a new structure of large estates (latifundios) and created a new rural elite sector in the eastern lowlands. Valdivia (2010) argues that the reform in the East laid the foundation for the development of agro-industrial capitalism from the 1970s to the present.

The MNR state attempted to “modernize” the countryside by transforming the existing systems of land tenure and relations of production. It also sought to incorporate the indigenous peasantry into the relations of the state but in a manner that made it legible. Thus, instead of maintaining the various systems of communal land tenure and modes of production that had structured the Andean countryside prior to the hacienda system, the MNR sought to reorganize these communities into a hierarchical and corporativist structure of rural unions that were similar across communities. While the unions certainly addressed the grievances of the rural populations under hacienda domination, they were also an expression of the cultural hegemony of the mestizo elite and were conceived as a means of transforming and overcoming the indigenous society’s forms of social organization (Rivera, 1990: 105, 111). This reorganization made it easier for the state to interact with the communities and implement agrarian reform, but at the same time it increased the state’s ability to direct and govern.

Similarly, the multicultural reforms of the 1990s in Bolivia, as elsewhere in Latin America, were an attempt to appease indigenous peoples’ demands for recognition of their territorial and cultural rights, importantly bypassing issues of economic redistribution. The 1993 Plan de Todos was a package of constitutional reforms that recognized the multiethnic and pluricultural character of Bolivian society and codified certain rights of indigenous peoples, but, as Kohl and Farthing (2006) point out, the implementation of the reforms was both contradictory and limited in practice. For instance, while the 1996 agrarian reform law laid out certain restrictions in order to protect indigenous territories, it also sought to create an “efficient” land market through increased titling and land tax reform. Thus, while it opened the way for indigenous communities to apply for communally owned landholdings (TCOs), it was limited in practice. On the one hand, titling was complex, costly, bureaucratic, and slow. During the first 10 years of the reform process, for example, only 11.7 percent of the land subject to the reform (106,751,722 hectares) was actually titled, 14.9 percent of it was in process, and 73.3 percent had not even been surveyed (Colque, Tinta, and Sanjinés, 2016: 154). On the other hand, the TCOs excluded rights to subsoil resources, and this had important implications for mining concessions and oil exploration (Assies, 2006: 595). Overall, according to Kohl and Farthing (2006: 93), agrarian reform “shifted the balance from privileging the social value of land . . . to privileging the importance of individual property rights mediated through the market.”

The point of examining these two instances is not to claim that some “traditional,” untouched sphere of indigenous relations external to the rest of Bolivian society was opened up by a “modern,” universalizing state attempting to implement a new capitalist market logic but to highlight how reforms that, at least theoretically, present the possibility of radical social transformation may in fact extend the rationalities of government.

Is an analogous process occurring in the case of AIOC in plurinational Bolivia? It is fruitful to think about the construction of indigenous autonomies as at least potentially one element of what Mouffe (2008) has termed “hegemony through neutralization” and defined as “a situation where demands which challenge the hegemonic order are recuperated by the existing system by satisfying them in a way that neutralizes their subversive potential.” The rural unionization of the MNR, the multicultural reforms of the 1990s, and the construction of indigenous autonomy under the MAS are certainly different projects. The former two were largely top-down processes in response to indigenous and campesino agitation, whereas the demand for indigenous autonomy emanated from the grassroots of indigenous communities. As Zavaleta Mercado notes, “It is one thing when [people] themselves break the feudal yoke through their own collective impulse and quite another when they are let go through a vertical act, that is to say, by something that does not come from themselves. Exogenetic freedom produces only formal freedom” (quoted in Garcés, 2011: 46).

Scholars have observed that the process of writing the autonomy statutes in the 11 municipalities pursuing autonomy across Bolivia has relied heavily on the technical capabilities and know-how of government bureaucrats, lawyers, and consultants (Tockman and Cameron, 2014; Tockman, Cameron, and Plata, 2015). This reliance on técnicos, in addition to the overarching legal framework structuring the autonomy process, may well limit the transformative potential of indigenous autonomies and predispose them to function as little more than modestly reformed municipalities (what some critics of the process call “municipios con poncho”). We therefore need to be cognizant of the ways in which projects of state transformation and decolonization that envision promoting indigenous decision-making power at the local level may ultimately expand the reach and power of the state by making autonomous indigenous communities more susceptible to the “rationalities of government.” Perhaps, as Hale (2011: 189) has argued in relation to Central America, indigenous autonomy as a path toward radical social and political change in Bolivia is increasingly becoming entangled in the very structures of dominance it originally attempted to resist.

Conclusion

This article outlines both the possibilities and the ambiguities of constructing officially sanctioned indigenous autonomies in contemporary Bolivia. We have argued that indigenous autonomy is essential for the realization of a plurinational state. The construction of indigenous autonomies opens up the possibility of a radical transformation of the Bolivian state and society, which was a driving factor in the 2000–2005 period of social upheaval that brought Evo Morales and the MAS to power. Through the process of creating an AIOC, Charagueños are creating new material, ideological, and institutional structures that have the possibility of transforming the historical social and political relations of exploitation and exclusion that have maintained the indigenous majority population in a subaltern position. However, indigenous autonomy is not outside of the state but intimately connected to a relational view of the state as an important site of an ongoing struggle of social forces with differing notions of the relationship between the state apparatus and society. Although radical autonomy demands were expressed by some actors involved in the 2000–2005 insurrectionary period, the project that emerged out of the constitutional convention and subsequent enabling legislation only allowed for the possibility of creating new expressions of relative autonomy. A relational view of the state helps us understand the seemingly contradictory outcomes of achieving indigenous autonomy while at the same time facilitating the incorporation of autonomous indigenous municipalities into the regulatory apparatus of the state.