Bret Gustafson

New Languages of the State: Indigenous Resurgence and the Politics of Knowledge in Bolivia

During the mid-1990s, a bilingual intercultural education initiative was launched to promote the introduction of indigenous languages alongside Spanish in public elementary schools in Bolivia’s indigenous regions. Bret Gustafson spent fourteen years studying and working in southeastern Bolivia with the Guarani, who were at the vanguard of the movement for bilingual education. Drawing on his collaborative work with indigenous organizations and bilingual-education activists as well as more traditional ethnographic research, Gustafson traces two decades of indigenous resurgence and education politics in Bolivia, from the 1980s through the election of Evo Morales in 2005. Bilingual education was a component of education reform linked to foreign-aid development mandates, and foreign aid workers figure in New Languages of the State , as do teachers and their unions, transnational intellectual networks, and assertive indigenous political and intellectual movements across the Andes. Gustafson shows that bilingual education is an issue that extends far beyond the classroom. Public schools are at the center of a broader battle over territory, power, and knowledge as indigenous movements across Latin America actively defend their languages and knowledge systems. In attempting to decolonize nation-states, the indigenous movements are challenging deep-rooted colonial racism and neoliberal reforms intended to mold public education to serve the market. Meanwhile, market reformers nominally embrace cultural pluralism while implementing political and economic policies that exacerbate inequality. Juxtaposing Guarani life, language, and activism with intimate portraits of reform politics among academics, bureaucrats, and others in and beyond La Paz, Gustafson illuminates the issues, strategic dilemmas, and imperfect alliances behind bilingual intercultural education.

Manipulating Cartographies: Plurinationalism, Autonomy, and Indigenous Resurgence in Bolivia

Latin American indigenous movements increasingly speak of “plurinationalism” in demands for state transformation. The concept—as yet solidified in legal or territorial orders—exists in tension with disputed meanings of “autonomy,” raising questions about indigenous territorial rights, citizenship, and natural resources. Bolivia’s new constitution elevates both concepts to official status in the context of struggles over natural gas. Following David Maybury-Lewis’s call for rethinking the state, I consider how Bolivians are rethinking historicities of space to transform cartographies of a “plurinational state.” Though raising fears of ethnic partitioning, the Guaraní case suggests that hybrid plural and indigenous territorialities are emergent.

By Means Legal and Otherwise: The Bolivian Right Regroups

A lmost two years into evo morales’s tenure as president of Bolivia, he and his party, the MAS, face difficult challenges. In pursuing its “democratic and cultural revolution,” as the MAS (Movimiento al Socialismo, or Movement Toward Socialism) calls its program, the party is grappling with its own missteps and with tensions between the indigenist, leftist, and nationalist wings of the movement. Meanwhile, the right-wing opposition seeks to frustrate the MAS agenda to the point of failure, since it cannot be defeated outright. Though weakened by its collapse in 2003, the right is regrouping through a two-pronged strategy of promoting a regionalist vision of departmental “autonomy” and rebuilding a national party apparatus. Branko Marinkovic and Jorge “Tuto” Quiroga are two exemplars of this new strategy. Marinkovic hails from Santa Cruz, Bolivia’s wealthy eastern city and the capital of the department of the same name. His parents arrived there from Croatia in the 1950s, just in time for an agrarian boom fueled by Bolivian state funds and U.S. aid dollars. Silvo Marinkovic, Branko’s late father, founded IOL S.A., now the largest domestically owned exporter of soy and sunflower oil. With soy-related industries second only to hydrocarbons in export importance, Marinkovic is a major player among the business elite. He led the private businessmen’s chamber of Santa 0 By Means Legal and Otherwise: The Bolivian Right Regroups

Amid Gas, Where Is the Revolution?

THE POLITICAL VICTORIES OF ANTI-NEOLIBERAL movements and regimes have opened a new chapter in Latin American history, yet the embrace of extractive industries has generated deep paradoxes for those committed to addressing inequality and the crisis of nature. Leaders and movements speak of revolutions—Venezuela’s “Bolivarian” revolution, Bolivia’s “democratic and cultural” revolution, and Ecuador’s “citizens’ revolution”—and governments have indeed taken steps to address inequality in housing, education, health, employment, and social welfare. Yet, like their conservative neighbors, leftleaning governments are entangled in Latin America’s renewed dependence on natural-resource extraction. As explored by Anthony Bebbington in the NACLA Report of September 2009, this new “progressive” extractivism is much like old extractivism— destroying the environment, generating intense social conflict, and eroding indigenous and citizen rights. Despite the use of resource rents for certain redistributive policies, it is not as yet clear whether these governments cliMate JuStice

Moving Beyond the Extractivism Debate, Imagining New Social Economies

Abstract Extractivism today shapes a new hegemonic order that is sutured to global capitalism. What might a long-term mapping of its social and economic consequences reveal?

Reading Bolivia in the U.S. Press

I f one reads the mainstream u.s. press to understand recent events in Bolivia, the following composite story emerges: Bolivia is a deeply divided and fractured country of profound cleavages, bitter fragmentation, and civil conflict, most of which can be attributed to the country’s president, Evo Morales, elected in late 2005. A member of the Aymara ethnic group and Bolivia’s first indigenous president, Morales is trying to give Indians a bigger role in government and a greater share of the economic pie. This has exacerbated tensions between Indians and the light-skinned descendants of the Spanish elite and inflamed regional tensions between the free-marketoriented east and the socialist tendencies of western Bolivia. Furthermore, Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez is Morales’s major ally, financial backer, and mentor. As Venezuelan cash pours into Bolivia, Morales hands out much of it himself. Eschewing business attire for jeans and the colorfully woven ponchos of his Aymara tribe, he flies to remote outposts—sometimes on a Venezuelan helicopter—to satisfy requests. Morales’s club-wielding supporters, many of whom are from El Alto, an indigenous shantytown on the rim of the city of La Paz, have often clashed with the celebrating autonomy backers of the light-skinned east. With the help of Chávez, Morales has created an armed indigenous militia that resembles Chávez’s Bolivarian circles. Even though Morales was democratically elected, he has weakened democracy, and his confrontational approach threatens social and political stability. For example, Morales created a constituent assembly that sought to impose radical reforms on the country by enshrining them in a new constitution. When the assembly violently fell apart, with the opposition abstaining from a final vote, Morales held a rump session in which he hurriedly tried to pass his constitutional reforms. Meanwhile, in May three departments in Bolivia’s eastern zone held a referendum in which voters overwhelmingly (85%) approved measures calling for greater political autonomy from the central government, in an American-style bid for greater states’ rights. I base this composite story on a close reading of 53 articles dealing with Bolivia published between January 2007 and May 2008 by the Associated Press, the Los Angeles Times, The Miami Herald, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Washington Times. The composite reflects recurring dis tortions in mainstream journalistic writing on Bolivia, distortions that came into sharp relief in May, when the elites in the country’s eastern departments sponsored their so-called autonomy referendum. The composite offers a few outright falsehoods, like the “indigenous militias,” but beyond inaccuracy, U.S. reporting misrepresents historical processes, MAS policies, and the significance of ethnic differences, while framing events in a narrative template that reflects external perceptions (and fears) of change rather than Bolivian reality. We can see this most clearly by focusing on two salient trends in the reporting: (1) the personalization of Morales as the representative of Bolivia’s transformation backed by social movements and (2) the misrepresentation of both the new BolivReading Bolivia in the U.S. Press

Oppressed no more?: Indigenous language regimentation in plurinational Bolivia

Abstract Indigenous language regimentation in Bolivia is traced through historical legal documents and contemporary transformations. While state language policy is often fragmented and improvisational, non-state linguistic activist networks have taken an increasingly significant role in shaping state policy. Under the government of Evo Morales, explicit state measures to preserve and develop Indigenous languages are discussed as incipient shifts toward a more decolonizing mode of language regimentation. It remains to be seen whether the new state position will lay the groundwork for robust language revitalization at the level of Indigenous language communities.

Guerrilla Auditors: The Politics of Transparency in Neoliberal Paraguay by Kregg Hetherington (review)

Gillingham’s chapter on elections reveals that even though fraud was widespread elsewhere, many municipal primary (intra-PRI) elections were genuinely contested (if slowly undermined) by the spread of “competitive authoritarianism” in the 1950s. While politically expedient, “pregnant” urns, multiple voting, and violent seizure of polling places delegitimized the PRI, relatively honest local elections were sometimes tolerated by the postrevolutionary state. Gillingham gives readers a detailed, technical, yet highly accessible account of throwing elections, making his chapter required reading for scholars of Mexico’s ruling party.