From Populist to Institutionalist Politics: Political Cultures of Protest in Contemporary Andean Bolivia

Introduction

Social movements have been important actors in the political sphere of Latin American countries. But nowhere have they been as influential as in Bolivia, where they were the protagonists of social and political transformation and change in political regime. Besides causing changes in governmental policies, social movements have induced radical transformations that have percolated deeply into the cultural politics of everyday life, like the revalorization of indigenous identity.

Massive mobilizations against neoliberalism shook the country in the early 2000s. They produced the series of revolutionary moments in the early 2000s that eventually led to a fall of the neoliberal regime and the election of the first indigenous president, Evo Morales. No other politician has enjoyed stable electoral support of this degree after the return to democracy. ¹ However, despite this fact, acts of protest continue all over Bolivia. In this context, it is important to consider the following questions: How do we explain the persistence of protests despite the general popularity of the government? What have been the continuities and changes in acts of protest, especially on the power they wield to get their demands met? When do social movements become successful, to what extent and under what circumstances?

Apart from an analysis of journalistic reports on various acts of protest, the findings of this study draw on 22 months of ethnographic research in the city of El Alto. It included participant observation of acts of protest and 85 semistructured interviews with residents of multiple neighborhoods, cutting across gender and age differences, many of whom were participants in various protests.

From Neoliberalism to Post-neoliberalism?

Neoliberalism and the struggles against it set the context for Bolivian politics after the return to representative democracy in 1982 after a series of military dictatorships. From being seen as one of the greatest success stories of neoliberalism, Bolivia became the ‘insurrectionary frontline’ of resistance to it (Hylton and Thomson, 2005).

A series of mobilizations against neoliberal policies emerged from the beginning of the 21st century that forced two presidents out of office and led to the victory of Evo Morales in the 2005 elections. Right from the beginning of his presidency, Morales declared his intentions of doing away with neoliberalism. Gas was nationalized through a decree in 2006. However, it was a partial nationalization that only involved an increase in the royalties the gas companies pay for the state. Nevertheless, it increased state revenues to be spent on social welfare programs. Subsequently, similar kinds of ‘nationalizations’ were implemented in sectors like electricity, telecommunications and mines, enabling an increase in public investment and direct cash transfers. This reduced poverty and inequality significantly. Though it did not put an end to large holdings and challenge the disproportionate control of the lands of the best quality by agro-industrial firms and big land owners (latifundistas), land reforms reduced disparities in land ownership (Farthing and Kohl, 2014; Brabazon and Webber, 2014).

Scholars like Postero (2013) and Brabazon and Webber (2014) argue that Bolivian policies are still neoliberal because there are significant continuities with the earlier neoliberal regime. They refer to the strengthening of the resource extraction model with the participation of transnational corporations. However, this critique misses the point that extractivism is not necessarily neoliberal. The Bolivian government has made significant changes to the form in which extraction of natural resources is carried out. The state now has a significantly bigger share in the profits generated, which it has used to increase public investment, especially in social welfare programs. Initial attempts to diversify the economy and add value to natural gas, iron ore and lithium through industrialization have also started. Policies of the Morales government like obligatory wage hikes, increase in public investment, nationalizations, increase in taxes for companies involved in the extraction of hydrocarbons and rejection of free trade pacts stand in contrast to the neoliberal economic program that prescribes the reverse: wage deregulation, reduction in public investment, privatizations, tax cuts for corporations to attract more investment and free trade pacts. Though the pace of these transformations has been slow, the fact that there has been a turn in these policies away from the neoliberal model cannot be ignored. In other words, the victory of Morales inaugurated the post-neoliberal era.

Nevertheless, most of the acts of protest in contemporary Bolivia have to do with the legacy of neoliberalism and its continuing structural effects on the lives of the people. In the following section, I analyze some of the major acts of protest in Evo Morales’s Bolivia and explore their place within the narrative of a post-neoliberal Bolivia.

Explaining the Paradox

How do we explain this paradox of the continuity of protests and the continuity of the stability of the political regime? If the cycle of protests in the early 2000s kept weakening the hegemony of the neoliberal regime, leading to its phenomenal defeat and overthrow, why has it not been doing the same to the new political regime?

In this context, the distinction between populist and institutionalist politics made by Ernesto Laclau becomes important. Populist politics, for Laclau, refers to the construction of ‘a people’ through the formation of chains of equivalences between diverse demands. Chains of equivalences dissolve the particularities of each demand and redefine all of them as demands against the system. It leads to the construction of a common negative identity based on opposition to a common enemy and the division of the society into opposed camps. Institutionalist politics, on the other hand, refers to the process whereby each demand is put forward separately, without altering the existing consensus, and the regime is able to absorb the demands into the system (Laclau, 2005). While populist politics is based on the construction of a logic of equivalences (between diverse demands), institutionalist politics is informed by the logic of difference (between diverse demands) (Howarth and Griggs, 2008).

The political mobilizations in Andean Bolivia in the neoliberal era from 2000 to 2005 were populist in nature, and the politics after the election of Evo Morales in 2005 can be characterized as institutionalist. I argue that oppositional politics can challenge the regime only when it takes on a populist character and follows the logic of hegemonic politics. This explains how multiple acts of protest that emerged in the neoliberal era could successfully overthrow the regime while those in the post-neoliberal era were not able to challenge the hegemony of the ruling party.

I confine my analysis to Andean Bolivia because the eastern part of the country has followed a distinct political trajectory. The only movement I discuss from the eastern part of the country is the movement against the construction of a road through the TIPNIS national park. It is included in the discussion because this movement had participation from some Andean indigenous organizations too and had important bearings on the way politics in the Andean region unfolded.

Populist Politics

Political mobilizations from 2000 to 2005 in Bolivia can be characterized as populist. ² The year 2000 marked a turning point in the sense that it inaugurated waves of intense protests against neoliberal policies. The cycle of protests began in 2000 in Cochabamba against the privatization of water. Protestors forced the expulsion of the multinational company Betchel that had increased water charges by 100–300 percent. It was followed by the rebellion in Acchacachi in 2000 by indigenous highland peasants. In February 2003, a series of mobilizations took place when the government, succumbing to the pressure of the IMF to reduce the national deficit, proposed a flat income tax that would push the underprivileged sections of society into greater poverty. In October 2003, protests broke out against the export of gas to the United States through Chile. The protestors demanded nationalization and domestic industrialization of gas. They also demanded a rejection of the proposal to extend the NAFTA into all countries of the Americas. This turned into a mass popular insurrection that led to the overthrow of President Sanchez de Lozada (Hylton and Thomson, 2005; Kohl and Farthing, 2006; Mamani, 2005). The most important aspect of this era is the formation of a chain of equivalence between diverse demands. Disparate movements and organizations could read each other’s demands as one demand against the system.

Laclau’s framework requires two levels of theoretical analysis: the ontological and the ontic. The ontological level is characterized by a higher level of abstraction and refers to the presuppositions that inform any study of specific phenomena, while the ontic refers to the specific phenomena themselves (Howarth, 2000). In the study of populism, the ontological level of analysis includes the deployment of general and abstract conceptual categories such as the logic of equivalence and logic of difference. The ontic level includes, for instance, an analysis of different forms in which populist chains of equivalances are constructed in each particular case and the organizations and institutions involved in the process. For example, studies have shown how populist processes in Zambia and Hungary are spearheaded by political parties (Palonen, 2009; Larmer and Fraser, 2007) while that of Greece has been marked by the creation of synergies between movements like the Aganaktismenoi and the SYRIZA party over the central issue of fighting austerity policies (Stavrakakis, 2014). The Bolivian experience reveals the possibility of populist processes being marked by multiple movements with diverse sectoral demands uniting against neoliberal economic policies and enduring colonial legacies of the state, and informally coordinating resistance in the absence of a centralized organization.

The chain of equivalence was created by different movements aligning their demands with those of others and by staging protests of solidarity. For instance, during the protests in Cochabamba against the privatization of water in April 2000, Confederación Sindical Única de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia (CSUTCB), led by Felipe Quispe, and the coca growers, led by Evo Morales, added a revision of the water laws to their own demands. The former was already mobilizing against the land reform law that enabled big land owners to protect their holdings by paying minimum taxes and the latter against the government’s policy of eradicating coca. The Trade Union Federation, Central Obrera Boliviana (COB), called for a general strike, and later school and university teachers and university students joined the struggle. The same pattern was repeated later that year in September (Kohl and Farthing, 2006). When the teachers union started a long march from the city of Oruro to La Paz, other groups joined the protests in different parts of the country. When they arrived in La Paz, university students and pensioners joined the march, adding their own demands. Indigenous peasants in rural La Paz led by Felipe Quispe and the coca growers in Cochabamba immediately followed suit, blocking major roads. The latter added the demand to stop the construction of three US-financed military bases in the Cochabamba department. The temporal alignment of these protests, far from being a mere strategic ploy to exert maximum pressure at one time and push the system to its limits, also manifested a process of the construction of a chain of equivalence. Though the movements did not form a formal network or apex organization, they were able to see other’s struggles as one’s own and all particular struggles as part of one larger struggle.

The mass rebellion demanding the nationalization of gas in 2003 that finally sealed the fate of the neoliberal order cannot be reduced to a struggle over gas. It was the explosion of accumulated anger and frustration against a system. As Ariel Mamani, an Aymara schoolteacher who participated in those mobilizations told me, ‘The gas issue was just a provocation that lit the fire, the deep [cause] was racism, discrimination and lack of opportunities’.

Demands for public works, access to water, an economic policy that reduces inequality and privileges citizens over transnational corporations, nationalization of natural resources, and the struggle against racial discrimination were linked through the construction of a chain of equivalence against the regime. In that context, each demand overflowed its own particularity and became redefined as demands against the system.

The symbol of the ‘gringo president’ comes to the fore in most people’s memories of that period, ³ and this symbol served the purpose of increasing the populist polarization. It referred to Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, the Bolivian president who had grown up in the United States, spoke Spanish with an American English accent, championed neoliberalism and unambiguously sided with transnational corporations against the interests of Bolivian citizens, especially those of the indigenous-popular sectors. As he emerged as the supreme symbol of white racism, US imperialism and neoliberal capitalism, the struggle against all the three was constructed as one struggle of the ‘people’ against the regime. This turned out to be a populist moment par excellence that culminated in the landslide victory of Evo Morales.

Institutionalist Politics

With the election of Evo Morales, the cycle of indigenous and national popular mobilizations came to an end. However, that did not lead to an end to protests. This can be attributed to what I call a political culture of protest in Bolivia. In contrast to the use of the concept of cultures of protest by scholars such as Kelman (2001), Szabó (1996) and Markham (2014), for whom it refers to aspects like forms and modes of expression of protest, I use the concept to point to the predominance of acts of protest as the primary means of political communication between the citizen and the government. This can be explained by two factors. Firstly, we need to consider the legitimacy given by the government to social movements. The government calls itself a government of social movements and also formed a vice-ministry of co-ordination with social movements. A government that rode to power on the basis of acts of protest, road blocks and mass demonstrations has less moral authority to delegitimize acts of protest. Another reason for the existence of a culture of protest in Bolivia is that the neoliberal era left behind a legacy that converted protest into the major and at times the only means of political expression. The gap between the people’s aspirations and the state’s priorities in the neoliberal era created a culture where a popular belief emerged that the state will be deaf to people’s demands unless the latter engage in acts of protest. On the other hand, the extraordinary frequency of acts of protest and roadblocks has led to a situation in which government officials do not take any demand seriously unless a road is blocked or a public office occupied.

Today, there are so many particular demands that are expressed through public protests and roadblocks that they have turned out to be an everyday phenomenon in Bolivia. However, the major difference between the neoliberal and the post-neoliberal eras lies in the fact that, in the latter, the logic of difference predominates. In other words, most of these acts of protest fall within the category of institutionalist politics. The demands remain within the confines of their own particularity and do not link up with other demands to form a chain of equivalence against the system. Writing a history of these acts of protest is beyond the scope of this article. However, I intend to discuss some cases to convey a sense of the issues raised in those protests and the social actors involved. I take more examples from the city of El Alto, where I have been doing intensive ethnographic research since 2010. The city was the center of the massive anti-neoliberal rebellion over the question of gas in 2003, the episode that played the most important role in the downfall of the neoliberal regime. Secondly, El Alto remains one of the strongest support bases of Evo Morales. However, at the same time, it witnesses acts of protest very frequently. Therefore a study of El Alto would shed light in a better way on the paradox of the simultaneity of stable electoral support enjoyed by Evo Morales and the continuance of acts of protest on a large scale. Moreover, all these factors make it the best space to examine the differences between the populist politics of the neoliberal era and institutionalist politics that dominate the era of Morales’s presidency.

As stated earlier, most of the acts of protest in contemporary Bolivia have to do with the legacy of neoliberalism. Let me turn to some instances of protest during the Morales era. Several acts of protest in contemporary Bolivia have to do with the question of violent crimes. Scholars have pointed to a positive correlation between income disparities and the rise in violent crimes (Carranza, 2006). It is inequality rather than absolute poverty that is linked to a rise in crime. As inequality increased in Bolivia with neoliberalism, the increase in violent crime can be seen as a legacy of the neoliberal period. The crime rate increased by 360 percent from 1990 to 2001 during the era of the neoliberalization of the economy (Goldstein, 2012). Neoliberalism also leads to an increase in individualism, consumer culture, casual and low-paid jobs, the break-up of communitarian systems of support and care (Reiner, 2007) and a culture of suspicion (Goldstein, 2012), all of which, in turn, lead to more crime.

People have mobilized in large numbers on various occasions, raising the issue of insecurity. In March 2012, about 3000 people from the city of El Alto marched to the center of La Paz, raising that issue. The immediate cause was the murder of two journalists. The federation of neighborhood associations called the Federación de Juntas Vecinales (FEJUVE), which led the march, called for introducing death penalty for the muggers. A commission of the protestors went to meet the officials in the Ministry of Justice and present the demand officially. The protestors carried banners with black bands to symbolize mourning, and signboards demanding justice for the slain journalists. The murders became an occasion for the residents of the city to highlight the problem of insecurity in the city and demand adequate response from the state. Greater police presence in the neighborhoods was the major demand. They also exhorted the government to take tough measures against corruption in the police force and judiciary by giving a 30-year prison sentence to corrupt judges and prosecutors who are complicit in organized crime.

In 2010, there was another major popular mobilization against the government’s decision to cancel fuel subsidies, pushing up the price of gasoline by 73 percent and diesel by 82 percent. This was the largest increase in 30 years. This doubled the costs of transportation and food. The whole country erupted in a wave of protests. The COB called for a general strike and 10,000 workers marched from El Alto to the center of La Paz (Bjork-James, 2011). Other indigenous organizations like the Consejo Nacional de Ayllus y Markas del Qullasuyu (CONAMAQ), neighborhood associations in El Alto, and the association of coca farmers in Cochabamba joined the protests. In El Alto, protestors occupied the offices of the regional trade union federation called the Central Obrera Regional (COR) and the FEJUVE when they were suspected as being co-opted by the government. The participation of the key support bases of Evo Morales in the protests along with right-wing opposition groups and parties shook the government. The government tried to contain dissent by measures like freezing utility rates, a 20 percent pay increase for public sector and minimum wage workers and the promise of infrastructure projects in the countryside, but in vain. The movement seemed to develop a populist tendency and had the potential of forming a new chain of equivalence against the regime. There were calls from popular organizations grouped under the coalition La Unión Nacional de Defensores de los Recursos Naturales de Bolivia (UNADERENA) for a total nationalization of gas. They urged the government to get rid of all neoliberal policy measures and move faster towards a post-neoliberal economy. This movement was strong enough to bring down the government. However, this did not happen as Morales withdrew the decree that cancelled the subsidies after five days (Achtenberg, 2012).

Many other acts of protest in contemporary Bolivia also have to do with the legacy of neoliberal policies in education, health and transport. There have been constant protests in the city of El Alto demanding breakfast for schoolchildren, an increase in teacher posts in public schools, improvement in the quality of public hospitals and better public transportation. However, they remain within the boundaries of institutionalist politics. Sometimes, the state intervenes favorably and at other times they fulfill the demands partially. For instance, though they did not agree to the demand of the death penalty for muggers, they took some steps to control crime in the city of El Alto by installing CCTV cameras in the central parts of the city (Ministerio de Gobierno, Bolivia, 2013). When the federation of parents associations in El Alto protested, demanding teaching posts for computer science in public schools, the government did not accede to that demand but decided to train the other teachers in the school to teach the subject (Pagina Siete, 2014). In some cases, various popular sectors mobilize against each other. For example, when the minibus owners block roads in one part of the city demanding a hike in bus fares, residents organized by the neighborhood associations stage another roadblock against the minibus owners in another part of the city. In such cases, the government generally tries to strike a balance between opposing forces.

After the victory of Evo Morales, demands like the ones described above were disarticulated from the major grievances of the people in the neoliberal era: poverty, increasing inequality and racism. It is widely believed by the popular sectors that the government has delivered on these fronts. Elsewhere, I have argued that the reduction of poverty and inequality, and initiatives against racial discrimination like the law against racism, are seen very positively by the majority of people in El Alto (Ravindran, 2015). The latter also refer to indigenous people occupying positions of power in the government like never before in history as a major accomplishment of the first indigenous president. In that context, demands like those for better infrastructure, public utilities and educational opportunities that were articulated with the struggles against racism and neoliberal capitalism in the neoliberal era got increasingly disarticulated from the same after the election of Evo Morales. In other words, the demands that earlier used to overflow their own particularity and assume the character of a general struggle against the system now remain within their particularities. Despite the fact that many of the issues that trigger these protests have to do with the slow pace of moving beyond neoliberalism, the significant though limited efforts of the government to challenge neoliberalism have created an image of the Morales government as an anti-neoliberal force that is radically different from the previous governments. This discourages, if not prevents, the reading of these struggles as part of a larger struggle against a neoliberal system.

Most of these demands were unevenly absorbed into the system. However, when the system fails to absorb most of the demands and when that happens consistently, the system comes under pressure and the demands turn into floating signifiers that can be articulated with other elements to form a new chain of equivalence against the existing system (Laclau, 2005). That would signal the beginning of a populist political process. One reason why that did not happen in places like El Alto is that the chain of equivalence between all indigenous-popular sectors that was constructed during the neoliberal era is not yet dead. It remains dormant in the form of a united opposition to the ‘traditional neoliberal parties’ that represent the oligarchy, as people constantly talk of preventing a return of the right-wing parties to power. For instance, during a public screening of documentaries on the 2003 rebellion on the footpaths of El Alto, an old man came up to me and started sharing his experiences of participation in that rebellion. He then said:

Now the same forces that killed the people … the MNR, ADN [major parties of the neoliberal era] want to return to power [the presidential elections were only a few months away]. We should stop them, otherwise the same things will happen.

I regularly came across such statements in interviews and informal conversations with the people of El Alto during my ethnographic fieldwork. Before the election of Evo Morales as president, the logic of equivalence against the oligarchy was more prominent as the right wing was in power. However, after Morales’s election victory in 2005, the indigenous-popular sectors in most parts of Andean Bolivia feel that a relatively favorable government is in power ⁴ and therefore the logic of equivalence fades into the background as something that becomes legible only when the threat of the rightist opposition returning to power is invoked.

Laclau (2005) argues that rival chains of equivalences that exist in a discursive field at one point of time try to incorporate the same elements into them. The Bolivian experience reveals another possibility not considered by him – of the enduring influence of a dormant chain of equivalence even in times in which the logic of difference predominates. The dormant populist chain of equivalence and the collective memories of struggle evoked by it also hinder the formation of a new chain of equivalence against the regime.

Nevertheless, a moment emerged in Bolivia when it seemed that new chains of equivalences that could challenge the existing system were possible. Now, I turn to that moment. There were two major struggles that laid the background for that moment, the struggle against the construction of a highway across the TIPNIS national park and the struggle over pensions led by the COB.

The TIPNIS Conflict

The Bolivian government had a plan to build a highway that would cut through the Territorio Indígena y Parque Nacional Isiboro Secure (TIPNIS), a protected area inhabited by about 12,000 indigenous people. The indigenous inhabitants opposed the construction of the highway, arguing that it would lead to further deforestation and occupation of the land on which they hunt and gather, by the highland peasants, mainly the coca growers (Laing, 2015; Fabricant and Postero, 2015). In 2011, Confederación de Pueblos Indígenas de Bolivia (CIDOB), the federation of lowland indigenous people and the CONAMAQ, a highland indigenous organization, started a march from the city of Trinidad to La Paz, in opposition to the project. Buckling under pressure, the government reversed its decision and decided that the highway would not pass through TIPNIS. In an unexpected twist, another group of indigenous people living in the southern part of the TIPNIS belonging to the organization Consejo Indígena del Sur (CONISUR) marched to La Paz demanding that the road be constructed. The government turned down the earlier law and decided to hold a process of consultation with the communities. The consultation process was completed in which the majority of communities decided in favor of the road. However, several community leaders continue to organize against the project, criticizing the process of consultation, which they argue was based on the distribution of liquor, giving away of gifts and lack of respect for indigenous norms of decision-making (Torrez, 2013, personal communication). They also opposed the inclusion of communities of coca cultivators who had settled in the park in the consultation process (Muñoz, 2013).

Protests over Pensions

In May 2013, the COB called for protests against the government, demanding an increase in pensions for public sector employees to make it equivalent to 100 percent of their last salaries. According to the existing law, they were paid 70 percent. This struggle over pensions can be seen as the continuation of various struggles by the COB during the Morales presidency demanding nationalizations of more mines and increases in salaries by a greater rate than what the government had offered. The protestors, comprising mine workers, factory workers, employees in the public health sector and teachers, resorted to actions like the blocking of highways connecting major departments and cities, destruction of bridges with dynamite and blocking entry to international airports. For weeks, the administrative capital city La Paz was engulfed in protests and roadblocks, and there were frequent clashes between the miners, armed with dynamite, and the police. The movement came to an end after the government announced an increase less than what was demanded by the COB.

Failure of Non-hegemonic Politics

After these two major protests, there were possibilities that the political sectors that had a radical critique of the government would form a chain of equivalence against the system, pushing it in a more radical direction. The reason for these two protests setting the background for such a moment to emerge was that, unlike the other cases discussed above, they raised profound ideological questions on the direction and pace of the process of change. This was enabled by the fact that they were organized by the COB and CIDOB, two organizations that have a glorious history of political struggles in Bolivia. In that context, calls were made for unity between the COB and the two indigenous organizations that were against the government: the CONAMAQ and the CIDOB (Protesta, 2012a). In November 2012, various radical indigenous and left organizations got together in the city of La Paz to plan the construction of a political alternative to the MAS government. The people who attended the meeting included representatives of the CIDOB, Partido Socialista (PS), Movimiento Sin Tierra (MST), La Protesta, Frente de Maestros Rurales Pachakuti, and some neighborhood association leaders of El Alto. They called for the establishment of a ‘Revolutionary Alternative of the People’ and laid out a political proposal that included 100 percent nationalization of natural resources, expropriation of transnational corporations without compensation, radical land reforms that would eliminate the latifundistas as a class, and defense of autonomous indigenous territories like the TIPNIS (Protesta, 2012b). However, these efforts did not take off. Later, the COB formed a political instrument of workers called the Worker’s Party.

After a year of conflict, the COB gave up the idea of building their own party and became an official ally of the government. The revelation of the impossibility of the success of the Worker’s Party prompted the COB to form an alliance with the MAS to prevent a return of the neoliberal right. In the Labor Day celebrations of 2014, Morales marched with the COB leaders to the presidential palace to observe Labor Day. From the balcony of the presidential palace, Morales signed the law that increased wages and salaries for both public and private sector employees and ceremoniously offered the file to Juan Carlos Trujillo, the leader of the COB. The radical indigenous organizations took a different route and sealed an alliance with the right-wing parties. A leader of the TIPNIS struggle, Pedro Nuni, declared his support for Ruben Costas in the presidential elections (La Razon, 20 November 2013), despite the fact that the latter represents the latifundista class, the major historical enemy of the lowland indigenous people. Another leader of the TIPNIS struggle, Fernando Vargas, became a candidate of the Green Party. However, the issues raised in his political campaign were a repetition of those of the right-wing oligarchy, like absence of rule of law and democracy, protection of private property and private investments, and autonomy for departmental governments. The latter has been a demand of the oligarchic elites in the eastern departments to be able to negotiate with transnational capital independently of the central government and prevent land reforms. Another proposal of Fernando Vargas was to give state protection to big landowners instead of implementing land reforms (Vargas, 2014). The CONAMAQ, the highland indigenous organization opposing the government, allied with Samuel Doria Medina, the neoliberal politician who became infamous among the popular sectors of Bolivia for his record of privatizing many public sector companies when he was the Minister of Planning in the neoliberal government of Jaime Paz Zamora. Moreover the CIDOB and the CONAMAQ had split after the TIPNIS struggle, with one group in each organization supporting the government and the other continuing to oppose the government.

The important question that arises in this context is: why were the oppositional forces unable to form a new chain of equivalence against the government and turn the process of change in Bolivia in a more radical direction? I argue that it is because of the inability of organizations like the COB and the CIDOB to create a hegemonic alliance with the other popular sectors who were also engaged in acts of protest.

According to Gramsci (1988), hegemony refers to leadership within a class alliance. The material basis of hegemony is constituted through reforms or compromises in which the leadership of the class is maintained, but in which other classes also have certain demands met. In other words, hegemonic relations are relations that alter the identity of the classes entering into the alliance, including that of the hegemonizing class.

The formation of hegemony, according to Laclau and Mouffe, is through the process of articulation which they define as ‘any practice establishing a relation among elements such that their identity is modified as a result of the articulatory practice’ (1985: 105). A social group becomes hegemonic when it succeeds in articulating its interests with that of other social groups. This entails incorporating demands of the latter into its political project.

The electoral success of Evo Morales can be attributed to the successful construction of a chain of equivalence between various movements and demands. Though he had not led the struggles over water or gas, his background as the leader of the coca cultivators and his image of being the most hated politician to the US embassy helped him hegemonize other movements. His own constituency, the coca growing peasants and, in a broader sense, the highland indigenous peasants represented by organizations like the CSUTCB, functioned as the hegemonizing force that hegemonized other sectors like the lowland indigenous groups, urban indigenous people, workers’ unions and so on.

Most movements and acts of protest during the presidency of Evo Morales could not challenge its hegemony. For instance, the protests of the COB could have projected a more radical alternative if they had followed the logic of hegemonic politics. However, they stuck to sectoral demands with which other sections of society could not identify. Rather than frame the issue in terms of radicalizing the process of change through measures like a total nationalization and industrialization of natural resources, land reforms, and increasing the pace of moving towards a post-neoliberal future, which would have also taken on board their sectoral demands, the discourse of the COB remained focused on the question of wage and pension increases for workers in the formal sector. Rather than take demands of other social sectors into consideration, they mainly confined themselves to a single demand. By doing the former, they could have projected their struggle for increased wages and pensions as part of a larger struggle to radicalize the process of change in Bolivia and moving faster towards a post-neoliberal future. Their focus on wage and pension increases for formal sector workers alienated their informal sector counterparts who formed the majority of the workforce. The government was able to easily turn this against the COB. During the days of the conflict, Evo Morales increased the Renta Dignidad, the old age pension his government had instituted for senior citizens who don’t receive any other pension, by 50 Bs (Agencia de Noticias BPA, 2013a). The position of the government was that if the COB’s demands were met, it would eat into the funds required to pay the Renta Dignidad for the people who do not have any kind of old age pension.

The vice minister for decolonization, Felix Cardenas, in a meeting on decolonization and racism, ⁵ argued that the strike of the COB was a direct challenge to the campesinos (peasants) who only get the Renta Dignidad as pension. He added that if the demand for 100 percent pensions for workers was met, it would increase the already huge difference between the pensions of the public sector workers and the poor peasants. Giving a historical background of the COB, he accused them of always believing in the vanguardist role of the proletariat vis-à-vis the peasants. The COB had historically seen the proletariat as the vanguard of the revolution and the peasants as a not-always-reliable ally; a segment of the petty bourgeoisie. There are many documented experiences of discriminatory treatment the peasants had encountered from the mine worker leaders. The discrimination was also racial in the sense that in the racialized power structure of the Andean region, the urbanized and semi-urbanized workers in the mines and factories occupied a superior position in relation to the peasants who lived in rural communities. The peasants were seen as more Indian for being in the countryside and speaking less Spanish. The miners could achieve a certain degree of limited upward racial mobility by adopting white cultural traits like speaking Spanish, moving from the countryside to the towns and getting better formal education (mining centers had better schools). Cardenas portrayed the COB as anti-indigenous and racist and a force creating impediments to the government’s agenda of decolonization. Most of the indigenous organizations adhered to the government’s position because the COB leaders did not go beyond making sectoral demands. In other words, the non-hegemonic nature of their political strategy led to their defeat. The demands that emerged from other sections of society did not articulate with them. Though the COB had supported the march for TIPNIS, they were not able to form any durable anti-systemic alliance with the indigenous organizations opposed to the government like the CIDOB and the CONAMAQ.

Morales called the social organizations that supported his government to march to the capital to counter the protestors. An assembly of the Confederación Nacional de Organizaciones por el Cambio (Conalcam), composed of indigenous peasant organizations that supported the government, was held in La Paz (La Razon, 24 May 2013). There were clashes between the workers of the COB and the peasant organizations when the latter tried to lift a roadblock made by the former in the town of Llallagua (Agencia de Noticias BPA, 2013b). The government was thus able to maintain its hegemonic grip on the indigenous-popular classes and prevented a rearticulation of those forces against the regime.

Another possible line of argument could be that the radical critics of the government themselves have sharp ideological differences that make a united opposition to the MAS government impossible. The critics of the Morales government fall into two broad categories: the indigenous liberationist and the radical Marxist. The indigenous liberationists that include organizations like the CIDOB and the CONAMAQ hold on to a post-developmental perspective and criticize the increased reliance of the government on extractivist ventures that are ecologically destructive and also trample upon the ancestral territorial rights of indigenous communities. On the other hand, the radical Marxist critics call for a complete nationalization and industrialization of all natural resources. Radical sectors in the COB and traditional left organizations like the Partido Obrero Revolucionario (POR) hold on to this perspective. In that sense, their position is not in conformity with the post-developmental vision. Though both are critical of the government’s extractivist policies and the export of primary products, the focus of the critique is different. While the post-developmentalists take an ecologist position and prefer a solution based on limited economic growth and harmony with nature, the radical Marxists lay emphasis on domestic industrialization of the primary products rather than an abandonment of extractive activities for a post-developmentalist solution.

It may seem that the Marxist and post-developmentalist forces opposed to the government can never come together because their goals are too different to be compatible. Nevertheless, history is replete with examples of articulation of political ideologies that were historically in conflict. The articulation between British traditional conservatism and neoliberalism during the Thacherist era (Smith, 1994), the articulation between fascism and neo-socialism in interwar France (Bastow, 2000) and the emergence of alliances between environmentalists and the old left ⁶ since the 1990s are some of the examples. The fact that the diverse groups that were opposed to the MAS and wanted to push the process of change in a more radical direction could arrive at some minimum common ground was evidenced in the some of the meetings referred to above. In other words, those forces were not able to create a political alternative, not for any inherent incompatibility, but for a failure to construct new hegemonic (re)articulations.

Conclusion

It remains ironic that many of the same people who brought the current government into power by engaging in protest actions against the neoliberal regime have to resort to similar acts to get their voices heard. This can be attributed to the enduring character of the bureaucratic state apparatus and also the cultures of clientelism and paternalism that plagues the government’s democratic potential. As a consequence, a political culture of protest emerges where the latter becomes the dominant if not the only mode of political expression.

The Bolivian experience also offers valuable insights into the impacts these protest movements can have on social transformation at various levels. The most important thing it reveals is that the potentiality of any act of protest to cause political transformations and the degree and pace of those transformations depend to a large extent on their ability to construct chains of equivalences against the existing regime through hegemonic articulations. The successful construction of a chain of equivalence between various demands during the neoliberal era led to the fall of the neoliberal regime and the victory of Evo Morales. The possibility of a more radical alternative to the politics of the current government was not realized due to the non-hegemonic nature of the politics of organizations opposed to the government like the COB. In other words, there is no alternative to hegemonic politics.