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Abstract
This paper outlines and discusses the contrasting histories of inclusion and contestation associated with the introduction of neoliberal and multicultural policies in Bolivia and Guatemala. In drawing out and discussing the ambiguities of multiculturalism in these countries, the paper aims to validate and further develop Charles Hale's recent thesis of the indio permitido (permitted Indian). Whereas Hale's thesis refers to a project of neoliberal governance and control, I argue that recent events reveal the partial failure of this project. As much as the idea of the indio permitido articulates a critique of the shortcomings and ambiguities of these reforms, it also points to the factors that account for salient innovations in the mass protests that have been taking place in both countries.
Notes
Notes
[1] This paper is based on research carried out by the author as part of the Poverty Politics Project at the Institute of Anthropology, University of Bergen and financed by the Norwegian Research Council (NFR).
[2] Between 1999 and 2002 poverty rose in Bolivia from 62 to 65 per cent, and in some rural areas in the Highlands of the country is estimated to be as high as 82 per cent (Hernani, Citation2002; Landa, Citation2002). The UNDP (2005) reports that in Guatemala 56 per cent of the population live below the national poverty line and 37 per cent live in conditions of extreme poverty.
[3] In Bolivia, 63 per cent according to the National Census (Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas de Bolivia, 2006, p. 157). In Guatemala, 52 per cent of the population are indigenous according to the National Census (Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas de Guatemala, 2002).
[4] In Guatemala and Bolivia, poverty is far more prevalent among indigenous groups than among the rest of the population (see country studies in Hall & Patrinos, 2006).
[5] The word Indian, or indio, has carried with it a highly pejorative connotation throughout Bolivian and Guatemalan colonial and republican histories. However, as a result of indigenous campaigning over the past decade, a more positive meaning has been given to the term in Bolivia. As a result, whilst pejorative meanings continue, Indian identity is often claimed in Bolivia as a source of pride and origin–in much the same way that black has become a symbol of pride amongst British citizens of West-Indian origin.
[6] See Psacharopolous and Patrinos (Citation1994), and Eversole, McNeish, and Cimadamore (2005).
[7] In Latin America we can think here of the marches by indigenous movements in different countries to oppose the celebration of the quincentenary of the discovery of the Americas.
[8] In 1993, President Sánchez de Lozada became the first president in the country (and the continent) to be elected on an openly neoliberal platform. The series of reforms introduced by the Sánchez government became known as Bolivia La Nueva (The New Bolivia). As part of this agenda, the government rethought the now globally accepted neoliberal proposals of streamlining the state and economic liberalization through ‘growth with equity' to produce new policies for decentralization and privatization.
[9] When it was launched Bolivia la Nueva had three key elements: an interventionist approach towards privatization whereby the state retains significant control in a number of privatized companies; together with a type of decentralization (the first of its kind in Latin America) called Popular Participation; and bilingual education reform intended to improve access to opportunities and decision-making for the large numbers of Bolivia's poor and marginalized.
[10] Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers are prepared by governments in consultation with grassroots organizations, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper process encourages the use of qualitative consultative methods to gauge the interests and opinions of social actors or ‘civil society’. In Bolivia these regulations created the basis of a ‘National Dialogue’, whereby the population was to be consulted about national economic policy, the allocation of HIPC resources and public interests in development (Unidad de Análisis de Políticas Sociales y Económicas, 2000).
[11] In 1991 the government had signed the International Labour Organisation's 169 Convention on Indigenous Rights, and in 1993 the National Constitution was changed to recognize the pluri-cultural nature of the country (Van Cott, Citation2000, p. 53).
[12] Movement for Socialism, 20.9 per cent; Pachakuti Indigenous Movement, 6.1 per cent; New Republican Force, nine per cent.
[13] Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales, 2002.
[14] Faced with the escalating civic unrest, Sánchez de Lozada complained in an interview with the BBC that the protesters ‘want to govern from the streets, not from the parliament and within our institutions’.
[15] In theory, the Assembly would create a new democratic space for all sections of the population to express their demands and to take part in constitutional reform.
[16] In 2005 5,338 people were the victims of violent crime in Guatemala, the second highest level of violent crime in Central America (after El Salvador). According to the Guatemalan Agency in Favour of Childhood and Adolescence (NANA), an organization working for the rights of children and adolescents, 525 were below the age of 18 years (see ‘Violence grips young population’, Latinamericapress, 23 February 2006).
[17] Guatemala had suffered the longest internal armed conflict in Central America. Ending in 1996, over 200,000 people were brutally murdered during the 36-year war that began with a US-backed military coup of a democratically elected government of President Jacobo Arbenz. At the height of the counter-insurgency in the late 1970s and early 1980s, approximately one million people were internally displaced and hundreds of thousands fled the country from a population numbering a little over eight million at the time. The Peace Accords were signed by all parties in 1996.
[18] Aimed at discussing different issues (e.g. education reform, land reform, municipal reform, labour reform, etc.).
[19] Including the Department of Sololá where I conducted the bulk of my research in Guatemala in 2005.
[20] The Central American variant of the larger and parallel US-led drive for the creation of a Free Trade Agreement of the Americas.
[21] This registry's work will start with a national land survey that, when completed, will formally delineate the ownership of all properties. Without their participation, such a plan is seen by indigenous and peasant organizations as dangerous because it will confirm the current property system and undermine the ability of rural workers to make future land claims.
[22] The protests ended with the government's dispatch of approximately 2,000 troops to the area, the death of one protestor and the wounding of tens of other protestors. See ‘Bloquen ruta para evitar paso de cilindro’, La Prensa Libre, 4 December 2004.
[23] According to local witnesses, the Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca, the political party representing interests of the earlier left-wing guerrilla, reputedly sanctioned local people if they did not take part in the protests.
[24] One of the biggest effects of the mine will be the increased competition for water. According to the Guatemala environmental organization Madre Selva, the Marlin Project, by its own estimates, will use 250,000 litres of water per hour, a massive consumption rate that threatens to deprive local subsistence farmers of water they need to survive. Also alarming is the vast amount of cyanide used by the mining process to extract gold and silver and the inevitability that some of this poison leaks in to the local environment and local ground water, posing long-term health risks to local residents (White, Citation2005).
[25] On 30 March 2006 all traffic in Guatemala City and traffic crossing into Mexico from the main routes across the Northern border was once again stopped for hours by demonstrations co-organized by the Coordinadora of Peasant and Indigenous Organizations and the National Peasant Organisation Coordination.
[26] Prensa Libre, 4 February 2001, p. 2.
[27] Gaviria and Pages (Citation1999), and Londoño and Guerrero (Citation1999).
[28] See ‘Violence grips young population’, Latinamericapress, 23 February 2006.
[29] Cardona, cited in Siglo Veintiuno, 3 March 2001, p. 4.
[30] This is certainly similar to the recent argument made by Rodgers (Citation2007) in interpreting the rise of urban violence in Guatemala.
[31] As Hale describes in his own work (2006b, p. 270), Rivera Cusicanqui applied this term to talk about how governments are using cultural rights to divide and domesticate indigenous movements. The use of the word indio is meant to suggest the aggregate effect of these measures; that is, the perpetuation of the subordination the term traditionally connotes.
[32] That is, the National Dialogues in Bolivia and the Guatemalan post-Peace Accord Commissions.
[33] In this movement the ‘spirit of the tribe never disappears, even in those societies that have advanced further along the path of civilization. In Bolivia, they complain that the companies want to steal their natural gas. They see themselves as victims of injustice, based on the argument that they have been and are the victims of imperialism, white people, the colonizers, and companies that want to steal their natural resources. Such demands are incompatible with civilization and development and in the short- or long-term drag us into barbarism. If we want to achieve development, we must choose civilization and morality, and we must resolutely fight these outbreaks of collectivism’ (Mario Vargas Llosa, El Universo, 11 November 2003).
[34] In 1976 34 per cent of the Bolivian population was monolingual in Spanish, rising to 42 per cent in 1992 and 47 per cent in 2001 (60 per cent in urban areas).
[35] As well as being previously tested in Bolivia, Constituent Assemblies have also previously been created in South Africa, Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela.
[36] The Bolivian government has recently signed a trade agreement with Venezuela and Cuba, the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA). Available at http://www.alternativabolivariana.org/index.php
[37] Norway has recently initiated official talks on technical and development assistance to the Bolivian oil industry with the Morales government.
[38] There are, however, now signs that this fragmentation may have a chance of disappearing. In the run up to elections in Guatemala in September, the Winaq (humanity) indigenous movement led by Rigoberta Menchú has entered into an agreement with the left-wing Encuentro por Guatemala political party in order to form a common political platform.
[39] Indeed, as the government of Evo Morales takes steps to favor indigenous interests, it runs the risk of losing the broad political platform that was so crucial for its electoral success and possibly for its future institutional stability.
[40] Evo Morales has recently offered electoral advice to Rigoberta Menchú's Winaq movement.