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""A Revolution for Our Rights" is a major contribution to studies of Andean history and anthropology and to studies of indigenous and popular politics in Latin America as a whole. In this exciting and powerful study, Laura Gotkowitz illuminates modern Indian political engagements in what is today the most indigenous country in the Americas."--Sinclair Thomson, author of "We Alone Will Rule: Native Andean Politics in the Age of Insurgency"

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A REVOLUTION FOR OUR RIGHTS

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Illustrations...........................................................................................................................ixAcknowledgments.........................................................................................................................xiIntroduction............................................................................................................................1CHAPTER ONE The Peculiar Paths of the Liberal Project..................................................................................17CHAPTER TWO Indigenista Statecraft and the Rise of the Caciques Apoderados.............................................................43CHAPTER THREE "In Our Provinces There Is No Justice": Caciques Apoderados and the Crisis of the Liberal Project........................69CHAPTER FOUR The Problem of National Unity: From the Chaco War to the 1938 Constitutional Convention...................................101CHAPTER FIVE The Unruly Countryside: Defending Land, Labor Rights, and Autonomy........................................................131CHAPTER SIX The Unwilling City: Villarroel Populism and the Politics of Mestizaje......................................................164CHAPTER SEVEN "The Disgrace of the Pongo and the Mitani": The 1945 Indigenous Congress and a Law against Servitude.....................192CHAPTER EIGHT "Under the Dominion of the Indian": The 1947 Cycle of Unrest.............................................................233Conclusion and Epilogue: Rethinking the Rural Roots of the 1952 Revolution..............................................................268Notes...................................................................................................................................291Bibliography............................................................................................................................359Index...................................................................................................................................385

Chapter One

Three months after Bolivia's long wars of independence ended in April 1825, the victors convened a general assembly to deliberate the fate of the liberated territory. The forty-eight deputies assembled in Sucre, the nation's new capital, overwhelmingly agreed to proclaim Bolivia an independent state. They made "the Liberator," Simn Bolvar, its first president. Bolivar and his associates viewed the founding of the republic as a fundamental break with colonialism. Once installed in the presidency in August 1825, Bolvar set about applying the force of the law to that break. He announced a rapid succession of decrees on all the most urgent aspects of the country's political and economic organization.

A fundamental subset of the new laws aimed to free Indians from the discrimination of the colonial past. Embracing ideals of liberty and equality, and proclaiming an end to all taxes "degrading to the dignity of citizens," Bolvar ended tribute, the colonial-era head tax imposed on Indian men between the ages of eighteen and fifty. He also abolished the position of the cacique (Spanish term for kuraka or mallku, ethnic lord) and declared Indians owners of the land in their possession. Fiscal and administrative shortcomings quickly derailed Bolvar's liberal dream: just one year after tribute was abolished, his successor, President Jos Antonio de Sucre, reinstated the discriminatory charge. Rather than giving Indians the "dignity of citizens," Bolivia's first generation of liberal statesmen partially revived the "degrading" obligations of the colonial past.

In the 1860s and 1870s, as international demand for Bolivian raw materials surged, a second generation of free-trade liberal reformers took power. They emerged in the wake of the silver-mining industry's recovery, which diminished the state's reliance on income from tribute. Thanks to this revival, mine owners and landed elites pushed through plans to ease free trade, privatize corporate entities, liberalize land and capital markets, and construct an export-oriented railroad network. Inspired by Bolvar's liberalism, the second generation of reformers also sought to eliminate discriminatory legacies of colonial rule: tribute, caste, the cacique, and even the Indian community itself. Although their efforts to eradicate communal landholding ultimately proved unsuccessful, the second wave of reforms would have more enduring, and damaging, effects on Indian communities than those of Bolvar. Most notably, the late-nineteenth-century reform process dramatically reduced the amount of land controlled by communities and exacerbated divisions within them. Inadvertently, it also engendered a new form of indigenous leadership that would wage a national campaign to recover usurped land. Rather than abolishing the Indian community, the reforms unleashed a lengthy struggle over its legal status and the political power of community authorities.

Bolivia's late-nineteenth-century attempt to privatize communal land was hardly unique: it was a hallmark of liberalism throughout much of Latin America. Yet the Bolivian reforms stand out in two ways. First, Bolivia's laws followed an exceptionally aggressive path, for the state intervened directly in one of the region's most brutal privatization campaigns. Second, the reform process initially proved markedly unsuccessful. The first two significant attempts to privatize the land not only resulted in major legal concessions but in wide-scale rebellion. President Melgarejo's attempt to disentail communal property concluded with his overthrow in 1870 and the restoration of usurped land. A decade later, another privatization law sparked legal protests that first extracted from the government provisions for collective tenure and ultimately resulted in the 1899 rebellion for Indian self-rule. These attempts at disentailment also provoked disputes among politicians over the rights of Indians. After the 1870 defeat of Melgarejo, some statesmen acknowledged Indians' contribution to the removal of the dictator and offered a form of gradual citizenship. But this potentially more inclusionary strand of liberalism withered with the 1899 Indian rebellion, which led rival elites to unify around racist images of Indians as a "barbaric" and allegedly antinational force. After 1899, most elite politicians would deem Indians unqualified for citizenship.

The tensions between inclusion and exclusion that marked Bolivia's liberal project were neither simply intrinsic to liberalism nor purely traces of the colonial past. Above all they sprang from a history of conflict over attempts to abolish the Indian community. Late-nineteenth-century ideas about rights, obligations, property, and "race" were shaped and reshaped by what happened on the ground when the government intruded on Indian communities with titles, fees, and survey teams. Although politicians vowed to eliminate communal landholding and the Indian community itself, time and again they had to admit publicly that they could not.

* Melgarejo's 1860s Assault against...