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OUTLAWED

Duke University Press

Contents

Acknowledgments............................................................................1Chapter 1 SECURITY, RIGHTS, AND THE LAW IN EVO'S BOLIVIA...................................35Chapter 2 GETTING ENGAGED: Reflections on an Activist Anthropology.........................77Chapter 3 THE PHANTOM STATE: Law and Ordering on the Urban Margins.........................121Chapter 4 EXORCISING GHOSTS: Managing Insecurity in Uspha Uspha............................167Chapter 5 COMMUNITY JUSTICE AND THE CREATIVE IMAGINATION...................................203Chapter 6 INHUMAN RIGHTS? Violence at the Nexus of Rights and Security.....................239Chapter 7 AN UNCERTAIN ANTHROPOLOGY........................................................257Notes......................................................................................281References.................................................................................305

Chapter One

The law is like a snake: its bite is worse for those who must go barefoot. —LOCAL SAYING

On Sunday, January 25, 2009, Bolivians voted to approve a new constitution for the country. The Nueva Constitución Política del Estado (New Political Constitution of the State) was endorsed by 60 percent of the voting public, which President Evo Morales interpreted as a strong mandate for what had been his administration's signature objective since his election in December 2005. For Evo (as he is popularly known) and his supporters in the Movement toward Socialism (the Movimiento a Socialismo, or MAS), the new constitution represented the formal reversal of centuries of institutionalized oppression and discrimination against Bolivia's "original indigenous peasant" peoples, who compose the majority of the national population, and a significant step toward the goal of "refounding" the Bolivian "plurination" (Morales 2011). For Evo's opponents, both in the Bolivian highlands and in the lowland media luna region, the new constitution was another blow to their prestige and power in the nation, a frightening and unworkable tangle of articles that threatened to limit the size of individual landholdings, change the legal definition of property to allow for communal ownership of land, limit the autonomy of regional governments, and give the federal government more control over the nation's natural gas reserves. Evo's political antagonists (including many observers in the United States) cited the constitution's allocation of increased power to the state as more evidence of the president's demagoguery; such critics frequently referred to the controversial president of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, as an example of the extremes toward which Evo was tending. Evo's supporters, viewing him as their ally and kinsman, pointed to the constitutional guarantee of rights for Bolivia's indigenous peoples as evidence of his progressive leadership and proof that, after centuries of discrimination and marginalization, there was now room for them in the national configuration.

Among its most important and controversial propositions, the new Bolivian constitution marked the formal recognition of justicia comunitaria (community justice) by the Bolivian state. According to the stipulations laid down in this document, "the nations and original indigenous peasant communities (las naciones y pueblos indíena originario campesinos) will exercise their jurisdictional functions through their authorities, and will apply their own principles, cultural values, norms and procedures" in implementing community justice (Nueva Constitución Política del Estado 2008, 45). Within their "indigenous jurisdictions," local authorities would have the right to resolve their own conflicts and disputes according to an indigenous legal tradition, which would apply to other members of those nations or communities. Formal state law would exist parallel to this indigenous justice, but the constitution prescribed that the state had the obligation to "promote and reinforce" original indigenous peasant justice, and to make itself available to indigenous authorities should they desire the intervention of state judicial instruments (Nueva Constitución Política del Estado 2008, 45).

The formal recognition of community justice by the Bolivian state exemplified the profound changes that the country experienced following the election of Evo Morales in 2005 (he was reelected in 2009). For centuries indigenous peoples of Bolivia had been denied any sort of voice within national politics. Now they found in Evo an advocate in the Palacio Quemado (the Bolivian White House), a self-identifying indigena who actively promoted the agenda of expanding indigenous rights and representation in the country, while valorizing indigenous cultures and traditions and giving them formal legal recognition. With Morales in power, struggles that formerly took place in the nation's streets moved to its courts and legislature, as the law itself was transformed to reflect the ruling party's ideology and objectives. The community justice provisions in the new constitution represented an official acknowledgment of Bolivia as legally plural: the constitution put indigenous usos y costumbres (us ages and customs) on an equal footing with national law and required the latter to recognize the legitimacy of the former, creating spaces within the national territory where state law might be discretionary and contested, rather than hegemonic. Even as the constitution co-opted indigenous tradition through recognition, this was still a remarkable move, running contrary to five hundred years of history in which indigenous Latin Americans had been subordinated within a national racial hierarchy, and their beliefs and customs denigrated within national society.

Despite its rather heroic implications, the promotion of community justice and, more generally, the valorization of original indigenous peasant peoples and customs within national law and national ideology was a project fraught with contradictions. As this book explores, even as rural traditions of community justice have been elevated to national prominence, vast numbers of indigenous peoples living on the margins of Bolivia's cities remain without any legal protections whatsoever. In these so-called barrios marginales (marginal neighborhoods), no system of law —neither state nor indigenous—operates to provide support or recourse to the residents, and few authorities—neither official nor traditional— exist to administer justice. In these marginal urban spaces (particularly in Cochabamba, Bolivia's fourth largest city), vigilante or "self-help" practices of apprehending and punishing suspected criminals have emerged as a frequent response to crime, as some barrio residents take the law into their own hands to administer a locally understood form of collective "justice." The indigenous residents of the barrios are, in various ways, outlawed— they live outside the protections of state law, yet they are multiply subjected to its constraints; they must do without the law's benefits, but they are criminalized as illegal occupants of urban space and perpetrators of mob justice. The experience and consequences of this precarious position— of being outlawed—is a principal...