In Bolivia, the Legend of Tupac Katari Lives on

On November 10, 2019, Bolivia’s first indigenous president was forced to resign just weeks after securing his fourth term in office. As he exiled himself to Mexico, right-wing Christian politician Jeanine Áñez, whose party won only 4.21% of the vote in the prior election, marched into the Presidential Palace wielding an absurdly large Bible and declared herself interim president of Bolivia. Soldiers roamed the streets of La Paz armed with rifles while fighter jets streaked across the sky. In a country which had suffered under the boot of colonial and neocolonial domination for five centuries, Evo Morales delivered fourteen years of relief. Apparently, that was too much for the capitalist class.

Reactionaries like Áñez had been itching to rip power away from the indigenous majority and place it back in Christian hands long before the October 30 election, but a binding audit of the vote tally by the Organization of American States (OAS) gave them the pretext to oust the popular socialist leader. The OAS, which had been invited to oversee the election by Morales himself, claimed to have discovered irregularities which annulled the results. Morales immediately agreed to hold fresh elections with a new electoral tribunal to oversee the process. It didn’t matter. His main opponent Carlos Mesa, ministers, lawmakers and even some political allies called on him to step down. The pressure reached a climax when the heads of the army and police threw in their hats with the opposition, and minutes later Morales abdicated peacefully, saying he did not want to “see any more families attacked.”

Before the coup d’état, the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) released a statistical analysis of the election returns and tally sheets which found “no evidence that irregularities or fraud affected the official result that gave President Evo Morales a first-round victory.” According to the report, which ran 500 simulations of the election, Morales’ vote count was not only possible, but probable. In addition, Mark Weisbrot, co-director of CEPR, remarked that it was highly unusual and questionable for the OAS to release a press statement questioning the election results without providing any evidence to substantiate its findings. The OAS, which receives 60% of its budget from the United States, has a history of interfering in Latin American elections in favor of Washington’s interests.

The recent scandal in Bolivia, however, is no ordinary political battle. It is no typical story of a country’s fall from democracy to autocracy. It is much more than that. It is a struggle for the narrative of Bolivia’s history. “For more than five hundred years, we have suffered darkness, hatred, racism, discrimination, and individualism, ever since the strange [Spanish] men arrived, telling us that we had to modernize, that we had to civilize ourselves,” said Morales back in 2015, following his reelection. “But to modernize us, to civilize us, first they had to make the indigenous peoples of the world disappear.” He spoke to a crowd in the ancient ruins of the precolonial city of Tiwanaku, as indigenous priests conducted elaborate rituals to prepare him for his third term.

Evo Morales was far from perfect. Critics often point out his government’s nationalization and expansion of extractive industries and bypassing of the proper consultative channels for indigenous communities. He chose to work within the statist framework to embark on a campaign of national development for Bolivia, and this had undeniable social and environmental costs. Nevertheless, the society he led was a quantum leap ahead of the neoliberal hellhole that preceded him. Water privatization in several major cities in 2000 caused such an outrage that the residents of Cochabamba became a legendary model for the international anti-globalization movement after they expelled the transnational corporation Bechtel from their community. In 2003, a scheme to sell off Bolivia’s natural gas to the United States through Chile for scandalously low prices provoked an uprising that toppled then President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada.

Morales rode this wave of popular energy to the presidency in 2005. And when he got there, he made significant strides toward the decolonization of Bolivia’s society, economy and history. He cut extreme poverty in half, redirected revenue from state-run industries into schools, hospitals, and public works programs, and wrote a new constitution which officially established Bolivia as a Plurinational state. The indigenous majority was no longer merely a natural resource to be exploited by the country’s elites; it was an integral part of the fabric of Bolivian society deserving of recognition.

For centuries, indigenous voices in Bolivia were silenced, their histories suppressed, their cultures diluted. In April of 1952, MNR rebels marched into La Paz and overturned the Oppressive Ballivarian regime. The new government sought to modernize Bolivia and lift up its poor through a national revolution. It nationalized the tin mines, implemented some limited land reforms, and expanded workers’ rights. It turned its eyes firmly forward, not backward, however, and thus buried the history that had been violently suppressed for so long. It made indigenous people integrate into the nation by assimilating out of their identities. This entailed replacing indigenous ayllu communities with unions, promoting Spanish language education over indigenous languages, and prohibiting ponchos and other forms of indigenous dress.

Although rural areas were given dramatically more access to public schooling, the curricula excluded indigenous history, traditions and values. Instead, it taught history as a narrative of one nation with a homogenous culture. As indigenous enrollment in universities increased, some students began to uncover their past. Marching in a May Day parade in La Paz in 1971, indigenous activists discarded the photographs of President Torres given to them by the government, and instead stuck a different portrait on their ponchos. The displayed man with sunken, resolute eyes had been resurrected to lead a mass movement in Bolivia. His name was Tupac katari.

Katari was born in the town of Sica Sica in the mid-18th century. A poor Aymara coca and cloth trader, his goal was to deliver Bolivia to indigenous self-rule. On the morning of March 18, 1781, Katari led 40,000 indigenous men and women down from the highlands of El Alto into the Valley of La Paz. They laid siege to the city, cutting off its access to food and water. Occasionally, they made raids into the city with drums, flutes and traditional pututo horns, all the while bombarding it with mortar fire. By July 1, 15,000 of La Paz’s residents had died. Spanish reinforcements finally arrived, and Katari fled back to the highlands with his troops. After several months, the Spanish caught Katari, tied each of his four limbs to the tails of horses, and quartered him alive. His torn body parts were put on display across the region. Just before he died, so the story goes, he promised, “I will return as millions.”

Throughout the 1970s, the symbol of Katari spread across Bolivia. The Kataristas, a movement of indigenous intellectuals and activists, used his name to spark an indigenous resurgence through manifestos, rural organizing, and small publications. They helped found a campesino union that produced indigenous histories through speeches, rallies and political proposals. Starting in the 1980s, Aymara scholars and students revived their histories by collecting oral testimonies from community members, which they used to produce pamphlets, books and radio programs. History was brought back to life, and stories of resistance and pride, such as that of Katari, were mobilized in the contemporary struggle for political, economic and social justice.

Through the end of the 20th century, activists and unions emulated Katari’s methods of resistance to oppose the state. Road blockades were erected and hilltop bonfires lit like it was 1781 again. When Bechtel raised the price of water in Cochabamba in 2000, it expected a docile, subservient community of consumers. It couldn’t have been more wrong. Debris spilled into the streets, and the indigenous resistance fought back against their corporate oppressers just like it did against the Spanish. Only this time, it worked.

With the election of Evo Morales in 2005, it appeared as if Katari’s prophecy had come true. The anti-colonial hero had returned in millions at the voting booths. Morales, despite all of his flaws, did elevate indigenous historians and intellectuals. He magnified their historical consciousness, putting Katari’s name on state-owned planes and literally taking it to space with the country’s first satellite named after him. Now, under the reign of Jeanine Áñez, who couldn’t make it two months in office without calling Bolivia’s indigenous majority “savages,” the country’s future looks grim. Even though Morales is gone, however, Katari is not. Following the indigenous president’s exile, protestors laid telegraph poles and tree trunks across roads outside La Paz. “Evo de nuevo,” read a message written into the ground in front of one blockade. “Bring Evo back.”