Altitude Sickness / Notes on a Trip to Bolivia*
Colectivo Situaciones
from Chtoldelat
1. In its heterogeneity and permanent movement, Bolivia is at the same time
the experience and the fracture of magma. It is there where faces, bodies, and
languages tell stories that challenge those seeking to understand, accompany,
and enjoy. Our trip, in February 2005, was a struggle between this attempt to
understand and the difficulties of adaptation (of which altitude was not the
least of obstacles). It is also a wager on the distinctive outlook opened by
what took place in recent years in Argentina. And this dialogue between processes
of de-institution-construction is vital for both.
2. To arrive in Bolivia is to be surprised at an atmosphere that concentrates
an extreme tension between different elements, a polymorphous dynamic that today
characterizes, in different ways, the syntaxis of the movements and struggles
of a good portion of Latin America. To connect with Bolivia is part of a necessary
and renovated literacy. It looks as though any image let itself be seen and
read. Today the space referred to as “Latin American” appears to
the public through the emergence of so-called “leftist” national
governments. The literacy we propose is one that allows us to have new keys
to read this process. These governments—each in its own way—function
as an extension, interpellation, substitution, subordination, displacement and/or
reorganization of the movements and experiments that strive, in entire regions
of the continent—precisely the hotter and more creative ones—to
unfold a politics from below. This democratic impulse does not thrive without
moments of insurrection, which spatialize and open new terrains, but, evidently,
nor does it emphasize the constructive and innovative dimension of the processes
that have been opened.
3. As with the “piqueteros” in Argentina, in Bolivia the struggles
summon new expressions. The media invent new ways of naming each irruption.
Thus, the aggressiveness displayed by the struggles is immediately called “war
for” (water, coca, gas). These “wars,” however, are not moments
of organization within a designed and consistent strategy over the control of
the apparatus of the state, as it could have been conceived only two decades
ago, althought it is evident that the consequences of these conflicts have a
bearing on a constant politicization and a neutralization and erosion of central
power’s ability to command. The so-called violence in the struggles in
Bolivia is not decided and deployed by traditional revolutionary organizations,
but by communitarian impulses more or less configured as such. This is why the
coexistence of an electoral strategy of indigenous and popular groups along
with harder or hidden resistances is not only highly conflictive but also persistent
and even partially articulable at some moments.
4. Another feeling we have about the construction of this social grammar has
to do with what we could quickly call questions of mobility. The territories
of “war” constitute at the same time the terrain of a settlement
and a recomposition of the large internal migrations. This component of re-territorialization
of population flows has a double dimension. With the process of neoliberal relocalization
of the campesino and mining labour power in the 1980s and '90s a reorganization
of the economic profile of Bolivia took place, decomposing, at the same time,
an experience of modes of struggle and identification achieved after decades
of popular political work. And at the same time, after two decades, it is possible
to perceive the beginning of the weaving of new links from the reviving of elements
of the earlier life (as in the mining neighbourhoods of El Alto) that operates
as a contribution of the unionist tradition to urban struggle, to the invention
that arises from adaptating and creating new modes of linkage and new subjects
of struggle. This reorganization appears, in different ways, with the Aymaras,
the Queshua campesinos, and the Landless Peasants Movement (MST) of Bolivia.
5. In Bolivia, as in many other places, it is not possibile to give up a mixed
regime of understanding. There is not “ONE” explanatory principle
of the audible and visible phenomena. There is an unconcealable social fracture,
of course; but the rigidity that this image presupposes hides the magmatic fluidity
(sometimes hotter and more dynamic toward revolt, other times colder and slower).
The same happens with the old and the new. It seems that certain pinnacles of
classical philosophical thought admit a doctrine according to which the old
is not the oldest, nor is the new the most recent, but rather the old is born
old and the new is so for eternity. The old is not anachronistic and the new
does not admit the logic of fashion and snobbism. The old would be that which
is separated from the ability to create. The new, in contrast, is the ancient
possibility of production. All this to say that in Bolivia there is an ancient
and wide-ranging self-management capacity that is actualized today configuring
networks of everyday life, and, at the same time, it harbours a capacity to
develop struggles without excessively specializing specific and professional
organizations. However, these networks coexist and are regarded, once and again,
as unproductive, patriarchical, and strategistic logics. Both tendencies survive.
6. Another aspect in relation to the aptitudes of the Bolivian resistance movement
is linked with the experiments of constructing what we could call (with all
the objections we have regarding the use of the term “institution”
as a name for this phenomenon) “non-statist institutions of counterpower.”
We are witnessing the instauration of methods of organization, selection, and
production of a limited representativity, exercised by very controlled delegation
and mandate, following the assembly model, with broad and permanent coordinating
bodies. From the FEJUVE (a federation of 500 assemblies from the El Alto area)
to the coordinating committees for the defense of natural resources (which already
consist of levels of self-management of public enterprises) or the Ayllus (productive
communities from the Altiplano) and the extended experiences of community [s1]control
all anticipate modes of appropriation of resources that are outlined in situations
of organization of collective power (potencia)1 very different from the classical
demand for the state ownership of public services. Its non-statist character,
however, does not elude a fundamental ambiguity: as much in its imaginaries
as in its discourses elements of a non-statist sociability mix with the continuance
of a statist horizon.
7. Of course the political, social, linguistic and economic elites operate upon
the ambivalence that runs through the popular networks. The strategy with which
this bloc confronts the present crisis of domination is plural and includes
aspects from the direct dispute over rent and the extractive productive profile
to the autonomization of strategic regions and the appeal to international tribunals
to condition the capacities of Bolivian sovereignty (Aguas de Illimani-Suez
Lyonnaise de Aux and Aguas de Tunari-Bechtel); to the nomination of new candidates
from the right to the preparation of paramilitary groups to confront the campesinos
that seize land; to the “contention” by the neighboring countries
(Argentina and Brazil) to the regional preparation of the United States in order
to be able to place a material-military limit to an eventual outburst of social
unrest. (The concern of the U.S. military apparatus about what is going on in
Bolivia seems to retroactively confirm Che Guevara’s intuition with respect
to its geostrategic potential in the heart of South America.)
8. The depth of the revolution that is developing in Bolivia can be assessed
by the importance of what it brings to bear: a) The affirmation of a new complex
popular subject that aspires to its full right to speak politics, which questions
the structure of hierarchies that organize society and upon which the state
finds support; b) the recomposition of communitary forms of life and their correlates
in modes of struggle; c) the antagonism with the transnational structure of
the colonial state. In any of the possible variants, however, a principle of
organization develops which totally or partially questions the regime of autonomy
of a sphere of politics and reconsiders the terms of a popular democracy. Because
of the complexity of the process no linear vision can be sustained without problems.
9. In short: in Bolivia there is a social creativity that is alive, althought
it is also possible to say that it is—paradoxically—“in crisis.”
In Bolivia the problems of counterpower are concentrated and highly developed,
but still this is not an “exhaustive sampling.” Moreover, it is
possible that, in regard to many of the aspects inside the movements that cause
“crisis,” there are in Chiapas, but also in some other movements
in Argentina and the rest of the continent, more advanced experiments.
Bolivia implies a certain contraction of general problems, which it displays
with a certain accentuation, but it represents neither the heart nor the sole
point where the essence of the process unfolds. We could not say that Latin
America’s counterpower is at stake in Bolivia, but we could say, perhaps,
that “without Bolivia” we miss the general grammar of the struggles
of present day Latin America. And in this grammar we perceive that it is essential
to link the experience and elaboration of two poles so similar and yet so different:
the movements in Bolivia and the Zapatista experience in Mexico. After trying
out a series of strategies of construction that encompass from the constitution
of a voice and an imaginary of their own to the creation of free municipalities
and autonomous regions (Juntas of Good Government), Zapatismo feels they have
arrived at a limit of their experience and as such are calling for the constitution
of a new broad political strategy (Sixth Declaration of the EZLN). As much in
Bolivia as in Mexico, the radical movements have to articulate their civilizatory
perspectives and the construction of their autonomies to certain tactics in
order to confront the dynamics that disperse them. Both Bolivia and Mexico are
torn today over the nature of possible progressive governments that might result
from the next elections. In both countries there is a counterpower that attempts
to position itself in relation to what is coming, but in addition both had some
time to watch, in Argentina and in Brazil (two different cases), the functioning
of a complex relation between three terms: democratic governments with progressive
aspirations, neoliberal conditions of existence, and the life of movements.
Translated by Nate Holdren and Sebastian Touza
Situaciones is the name of an ongoing militant research around which our collective
is organized. We have been working together for more than five years, and we
do it, fundamentally, in workshops in which we think along with experiments
of the new radicality. Among others, we have participated in co-research with
the group H.I.J.O.S. and Mesa de Escrache Popular, the Campesino Movement of
Santiago del Estero (MOCASE), the Movement of Unemployed Workers (MTD) of Solano,
with experiments in alternative education, such as the Educational Community
Creciendo Juntos (Growing Together) and the Universidad Trashumante (Transhumant
University), with counterinformation collectives, such as lavaca, and art collectives,
such as the Grupo de Arte Callejero (Street Art Group), and with people from
this country and other regions. Since we came together we elaborated an autonomous
press, in order to publish and disseminate the expressions of this work. This
has grown to become a militant-press which we call Tinta Limon ediciones (www.tintalimonediciones.org).
* This is an excerpt from a longer piece that will be published soon in the
book Mal de altura (Buenos Aires: Tinta Limon Ediciones, 2005).
1 In Spanish there are two words corresponding to the English word ‘power’:
potencia and poder. Potencia refers to power as capacity – the power to
act, power in the sense of ‘empower’. Poder refers to constituted
power in institutions, in the sense of ‘the powers that be’ or ‘state
power’. –Tr.