World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [26]
Less than two years later, when Augusto was back in La Paz working as a corporate lawyer, he contacted me by e-mail. He explained that he was writing to take back his earlier words. At that very moment, angry indigenous coca peasants were marching on La Paz, protesting the government’s decision to eradicate coca—for Bolivians, a “sacred plant,” widely used in legal, nonaddictive forms; for the U.S.-sponsored antidrug campaign, the source of cocaine. Calling for a constitutional assembly to organize a new “majority-based” government, the peasants had set up road blockades, paralyzing the country’s major cities. Meanwhile, seemingly from nowhere, a powerful Amerindian movement—led by Felipe Quispe, an Aymaran Indian known as Mallku, or the Great Condor in Aymaran—was threatening to take over parts of Bolivia. The worst thing about Mallku’s movement, wrote Augusto, was that it was explicitly antiwhite. “For the first time in our history, an organized Aymara leader is asking those who are not ‘indigenous’ to leave the country. . . . Boredom is easily swept away by the passion I feel for my country and by the intense historical movement we are living in.”
Bolivia’s elites, of which Augusto is one, were stunned by the bitterness and venom of Quispe’s rhetoric. Bolivia’s land “belongs to the Aymara and Quechua Indians and not the whites,” Mallku declared at several points.
1 After negotiations between protesting Amerindian farmers and the cabinet broke down, Quispe shouted at the (white) ministers: “The whites should leave the country. We cannot negotiate the blood of my brothers. Kill me if you are men!”
2 Years before, when asked by a journalist why he was engaging in terrorist activity, Quispe lashed back, “So that my daughter will not have to be your maid.”
Despite a tendency for Westerners to romanticize indigenous leaders—the Financial Times recently described Quispe as a “natural-born rebel with a cause”—Quispe is not an altogether savory character. He was jailed in the 1990s for guerrilla warfare, has been accused of corruption, and may have participated in blowing up electrical infrastructure a few years ago.
3 The Bolivian establishment was thus appalled by the level of Amerindian support, at least in certain rural provinces, for Mallku, who, as one government minister said incredulously, “is encouraging acts of violence” and “operating under a mentality of 400 years ago.”
4 Another view common in Latin America (although not in Bolivia, whose history includes many indigenous insurrections)
5 is that Amerindians, perhaps because of years of exclusion, are apathetic and “fatalistic.” As a Chilean professor put it a few years ago, “They don’t seem to care about politics—they are totally out of the system.”
What Latin American elites are learning is that poor, “apathetic and fatalistic” masses are prime targets for charismatic demagogues. Increasingly, indigenous leaders like Mallku are offering the region’s demoralized majorities a package that is hard to beat: a natural scapegoat (rich, corrupt “whites”) and a sense of pride, ownership, and identity. Sometimes that identity is “Aymara”—the Aymara are a fiercely independent people whose ancestors created architectural marvels many centuries before the Incan conquest; other times, it is “Quechua,” “Mayan,” “Inca,” or just “indio.”
But however charismatic, indigenous leaders like the Great Condor face formidable obstacles, including the entire weight and momentum of Latin American history since the European conquest. The last lines of Augusto’s e-mail to me are revealing. “The political conflict will surely be over by June,” he concluded, “and that would be a wonderful time for you to finally visit Bolivia. Lake Titicaca is especially beautiful then, and we can visit my friend’s vacation house overlooking the water.” Even in the midst of immense turmoil, Augusto was confident that within a few months, things in Bolivia would be “back to normal.