The Spirit of Revolt: Bolivia's Ongoing Revolutions
Adolfo Gilly

Prologue to Forrest Hylton and Sinclair Thomson, Revolutionary Horizons: Past
and Present in Bolivian Politics (Verso 2007)

In Bolivia in mid-October 2003, a popular insurrection had been going on for
days in El Alto, a city of 800,000 workers, peasants, migrants, and petty
merchants, most of them indigenous. 400 meters below, insurrectionary alteños
[residents of El Alto] controlled the gateway to La Paz and blocked the supply
of fuel to the capital of the republic. Surrounded, the government decided to
break the blockade with a military convoy that opened a path up to the city by
firing on, and killing, dozens of people. This is how it cleared the way for
trucks loaded with gas cisterns to get down to the capital.

Alteños collected their dead, held wakes in their churches and homes, and said,
"Enough!" With the strength of men and women, young and old, they pulled train
cars along the tracks from the station and pushed them off a bridge, so that
many meters below, the cars blocked the highway leading from La Paz to El
Alto-the very route by which the truckloads of soldiers had come to make way
for the gas cisterns. "Enough! No one else gets through here!"

The following day, they started to descend, by the dozens, or perhaps even
hundreds of thousands, to occupy the city of La Paz, while from the other side
of the valley, more unending columns of Indians ascended, with the same goal:
to take the capital and overthrow the murderous creole regime of Gonzalo
Sánchez de Lozada. By then, the middle class in La Paz supported El Alto and
demanded a government ceasefire. The army did not dare to keep killing. The
government fell, and Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada fled to the United States.
The history of this fraction of time that explodes out of quotidian time as a
sort of shift in destiny; the history of this instantaneous time called
revolution, its past, its ancestors, its protagonists, their reasoning and
motives, is the subject of this book by Forrest Hylton and Sinclair Thomson.

They were there, and have spent years studying Bolivia's indigenous revolts and
revolutions.

A classic revolution, at the very beginning of the twenty-first century, has
taken place in Bolivia, a cycle of popular rebellion that began with the "Water
War" in 2000 and culminated in the indigenous insurrections of 2003 and 2005,
which twice seized the capital, and forced early elections in December 2005.
With an absolute majority, and for the first time in Bolivian history, an
Indian leader became president of the republic.

This book boldly and rightly affirms that what happened was a revolution, and
demonstrates it through history, analysis, and chronicle. A revolution, that
which no longer existed, a violent and liberating revolution like all others in
history: here it was again, bringing back the spirit of revolt out of grievance
and out of the past.
* * *

After chronicling the cycle of popular mobilization since 2000 that led to such
an outcome, Hylton and Thomson seek out its roots, premonitions, and precursors
in the long time-spans of history. Bolivia is an Indian country, a place where
two-thirds of the population recognizes and declares itself to be Aymara,
Quechua, Guaraní, or of other indigenous groups governed since Spanish
conquest by a white and mestizo minority. Since the sixteenth century, the
relationship between rulers and ruled, and between dominant and subaltern
groups, has had a specific feature, indelible as skin color. As in the rest of
the colonial universe born in that century, the relationship took the form of
racial subordination.

The first great indigenous insurrection against this domination-which preceded
the Wars of Independence-was led by Tupaj Katari in 1781. Indian armies imposed
a prolonged blockade of La Paz, which was only broken with the arrival of troops
from the distant city of Buenos Aires, capital of the Viceroyalty of Río de la
Plata.

Defeat did not erase the memory for indigenous people, who have known ever since
that they once laid siege to the city of the "señores," nor for the white and
mestizo minority, as successive generations have transmitted until today the
fear-negated, but always living on at the threshold of consciousness-of a new
siege on the city by a limitless dark-skinned population.

In April 1952, a popular insurrection exploded in defense of a presidential
election stolen by the dominant oligarchy. Known as the "April Revolution,"
rebels took the city of La Paz, dispersed the army, overthrew the president,
established a mestizo government that nationalized the mines-the principal
Bolivian industry-decreed an agrarian reform, and had to live for years with
the parallel power of miners', workers', and peasants' unions, their armed
militias, and community radio stations. Of course, miners, workers, and
peasants were Indians, and their indigenous languages were used to debate in
their assemblies and to talk during their celebrations and in their homes.
After a long period of vicissitudes and tenacious resistance, beginning in the
1980s the new power of the neoliberal world reorganized Bolivia, closed the
mines, dismantled trade unions, and dispersed workers and their settlements.
The April Revolution was no more than a historical reference. Order was
re-established. Once again, Indians were put in their place.

But like all domination with racial roots, nationalist ideology and the shared
symbolism between dominant and subaltern groups was merely a thin, formal
layer, and hegemony a fractured and fragile covering. Underneath lived the
persistent and vast human community of the indigenous, those life-worlds that
filmmaker Jorge Sanjinés called "The Clandestine Nation." Since Tupaj Katari,
and even before, those worlds never ceased to emerge, here and there, to break
up the surface of domination with violent local revolts which were rapidly put
down and punished, but not forgotten.

This nation, negated by the liberal republic, was also nearly invisible for the
republican left, which confused it with Indian positions in economy and
society: peasants, factory workers, miners, petty merchants, artisans. The
republican left did not, therefore, see the ancient place that this nation
occupied in the colonial world and that persisted in the republic: Indians,
people the color of the earth; Aymaras, Quechuas, Guaraníes, Urus, those who,
on the shores of Lake Titicaca, claim to be the most ancient of human beings.
Each time the country today called Bolivia begins to move, the clandestine
nation reappears, or better, makes itself violently visible and audible, as
Edward P. Thompson put it, taking leading places on the stage previously
occupied by noisy politicians, bureaucrats, military men, investors, and their
scribes.

That is how it made itself present in October 2003 when people descended on La
Paz and took it over, unfurling their flags and symbols and putting forth their
bodies, and their dead, as Thomson and Hylton note: "Beginning with Warisata in
September, and spreading to El Alto in October, the mourning of martyrs
provided a time to express grief and fury, to bolster the spirit through ritual
and reflection, and to dedicate ongoing struggle to those who had lost their
lives. The martyrs also provided a new example of indigenous patriotism in
Bolivia, insofar as Aymaras were the ones defending the nation against foreign
control."

Revolutionary Horizons speaks to us of continuities and ruptures in time, of the
cruelty and fragility of internal colonial domination, of centuries-old
dispossession and impious exploitation; of the immaterial inheritance of
memories and experiences; of how the spirit of revolt has been transmitted
across generations through protest, mass clandestinity, and everyday life
amidst discrimination and difference. The inheritors and bearers of Andean
civilization might well say, "Generations come and generations go, but the
earth lasts forever."

The authors put it as follows: "In this book, we approach revolutionary
'horizons' not only as those perspectives of men and women in the past who
looked upon the possibilities of future social transformation. For there is
another sense of the word. At an archeological site, the phased strata of the
earth and the remains of human settlement that are exposed by careful digging
are called 'horizons'. We offer this then as an excavation of Andean
revolution, whose successive layers of historical sedimentation make up the
subsoil, loam, landscape, and vistas for current political struggle in
Bolivia."

Thus the revolution of October 2003 and its aftermath in June 2005 are presented
as the condensation, in two decisive moments, of the previous experiences of
rage, humiliation, and desire: a resounding explosion, an illumination that
lights up an instant, a break in the time of everyday life in which linear
time, circular time, and messianic time whirl and mix together. This temporal
break passes, and does not last, but its resonances and dissonances never die
down. They come to be known as years and lives unfold, Thomson and Hylton tell
us at the end of their book.
* * *

A victorious revolution, like the Bolivian one in October, implies a deep change
in institutions and political leadership, which happened in the presidential
elections of December 2005 and the inaugural ceremony of Indian President Evo
Morales in January 2006. Although connected, the new political leadership and
the revolution that brought it about are two phenomena that differ in
substance.

The new power is a result of the revolution, not its embodiment. In their final
reflections, Hylton and Thomson tackle this crucial question. People do not go
into a revolution on behalf of an image of the society of the future, Leon
Trotsky noted, but because present society has become intolerable. Their revolt
nurtures itself on the image of enslaved ancestors, not the ideal of liberated
descendants, wrote Walter Benjamin.

A revolution means that nothing goes back to being what it was before in the
spirits of the living and their relations with each other. It also pays homage
to the dead, rescues the memory and the trials and tribulations of humiliated
ancestors, and renovates the symbolic universe. That is why a revolution has
repercussions in place and in times yet to come. But its duration is short. And
if, when it manages to triumph, a revolution engenders a new political
leadership, the insurrection is neither embodied by nor prolonged in it, and
the break in time closes: "mais il est bien court le temps des cerises." What
then follows concerns a subsequent time, even as the new leadership continues
to affirm, "I am the revolution."

It is important to debate and assess the composition and subsequent changes in
political leadership that arise out of a revolution. But to subsume its
analysis and its meaning in this fashion is to lose one's way and to enter into
a shadow play. This is frequently done by those who, without suspecting it, have
themselves become shadows of real life, which goes on elsewhere, far from them.
The history of revolutions is usually treated in terms of the consolidation of a
new order. In other words, revolution is a necessary prelude to the new order.
This is not the way this book considers the third Bolivian revolution, which
inaugurated the twenty-first century on the altiplano.

Thomson and Hylton concede the importance of the Movement Toward Socialism
(MAS), headed by Evo Morales, as a channel and political instrument for the
popular insurrection, in which social movements played the leading role. They
note, "Morales and MAS tail-ended, rather than led, the insurrection of 2003
and 2005. [But] in the electoral arena, Morales and MAS have served as the only
effective vehicle for national articulation of the heterogeneous movements."
Nevertheless, they continue, this does not authorize the leadership to uphold
that in the future indigenous sectors do not need representation as Indians (in
the Constitutional Assembly, for example), on the grounds that "they have
already received representation - through MAS." Instead of continuing to
resist, the official argument runs, these sectors "need to locate themselves in
this new time of occupying structures of power."

Both historians go against such an argument: "Whatever their intent, such
statements de-authorized, marginalized, and silenced indigenous demands. It was
a new example of the condescension that has plagued Indian-Left relations
historically and that has pushed indigenous activists into more radically
autonomous positions." An indigenous president is not enough to turn the
clandestine nation into the Republic.

It is necessary, of course, to understand the inelastic limits that those who
govern run into, whether it be the ferocious resistance of the classes that
have been displaced from power, and their political and economic
representatives, foreign as well as domestic; or the steel cage in which the
new global neoliberal order encloses possibilities of action, along with the
imminent presence of its powerful material base-the Pentagon, the military
force of the United States; or the material limits of scarcity, national
isolation, and poverty.

In the words of the authors, "There are consequences of the present whose force
will be difficult to obstruct or reverse in the near future. And yet, if
history has shown that revolutionary moments leave an indelible mark on the
future, it has shown that internal colonialism and class hierarchies are
durable structures as well."

But for this very reason, the popular movements that gave rise to the new
configuration of state power cannot lose themselves in it. They must maintain
not indifference or neutrality, but rather their autonomy and independence.
* * *

We need to treat the history of revolutions as the history of those unique
moments in which the forgotten, the oppressed, the humiliated-those who make
the world with their hands, bodies, and minds-rise up and suspend the time of
contempt to inaugurate a new time; moments, unforgettable whether long or
short, of revelation of their own being, their own intelligence, and their own
inheritance, which is that of all human beings.

"Not man or men but the struggling, oppressed class itself is the depository of
historical knowledge. In Marx it appears as the last enslaved class, the
avenger that completes the task of liberation in the name of generations of the
downtrodden," wrote Walter Benjamin in his "Theses on the Philosophy of
History." There, the spirit of revolt survives and burns in secret, in diverse
times and places.

Those moments in which that spirit comes to light and stirs like gale winds,
those breaks in time whose duration should be multiplied by their intensity,
can later be suspended and converted into memory and the past. But they also
become lived experience and, as a result, ongoing reverberations into all the
possible futures of those who lived through those moments as a people.
These are the themes of this exceptional book, which is the work of two
historians who have followed and lived Bolivian life. Revolutionary Horizons is
a chronicle, a history, and an archaeology of indigenous insurgency on the
Andean high plains, and, at the same time, a mature fruit of study, experience,
and reflection.

A longtime participant-observer of Latin American revolution, Adolfo Gilly is a
professor of history at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM)
and the author of numerous books on history and politics, including the classic
The Mexican Revolution: A People's History (New Press, 2006 [1971]).