The Rise of Ethnic Politics in Latin America, by Raúl Madrid (original) (raw)
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Flesken, A. (2010) 'Bolivia's Regional Elections 2010', Ethnopolitics Papers, 2.
Following closely the national elections of December 2009, Bolivia’s regional elections of April 2010 determined two outcomes: On the one hand, they decided the size and strength of the opposition towards current president Evo Morales and his political organization, Movement towards Socialism (MAS). On the other hand, they decided the distribution of power during the implementation of the country’s new constitution. This will establish, amongst other issues, the level of regional, municipal, as well as indigenous autonomy. Here, the plans of the indigenous-based MAS face opposition from the relatively affluent and mainly white and mixed-race region in the eastern lowlands of the country. The election results indicate that the MAS maintained widespread support among Bolivians. It secured the majority of departments and municipalities, yet had to record some losses at the local level. The right-wing opposition won in the departments of the eastern lowlands, which indicates a deepening regional cleavage.
The Indigenous in the Plural in Bolivian Oppositional Politics
Bulletin of Latin American Research, 2005
This article examines how currents of Bolivia's indigenous movement are gravitating to the city and to the centre of national political life, capitalising on popular sentiment against the political status quo, economic privatisation and violations of national sovereignty. The Movement Toward Socialism led by Evo Morales does not promote a separatist ethno-national project; instead, it uses regional, national and international coalition building to equate indigenous with nonindigenous issues through resonant political analogies that frame Bolivia's national crisis of political legitimacy in terms of indigenous rights, while making common cause with diverse urban popular sectors who, if not indigenous, recognise their indigenous cultural heritage as a crucial background to their own struggles against disenfranchisement.
This article examines recent changing dynamics of indigeneity in Bolivia. It argues that despite competing definitions of the indigenous on the basis of attributes as diverse as skin color or vocation, the category is invested with meaning and used as a basis for collective action. Yet, debates surrounding the constitution of 2009 show that clearly defined attributes are necessary for such action to have a lasting effect. Overall, the mobilization has not led to the manifestation of ethnic categories, as observed elsewhere, but to increased contestation. The case suggests a fruitful analytical distinction between attributes, meaning, and action in ethnic dynamics.
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Laura Fano Morrissey traces the rise of indigenous movements in four Andean countries: Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru. By analysing how these movements have formed, she discusses issues of identity and belonging and the role these concepts have played in making indigenous groups a growing force in the continent. She also provides an account of the new constitutions adopted in Bolivia and Ecuador and the innovative traits they have introduced in the political discourse on ethnicity and identity.
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Latin American Politics and Society, 2008
In recent years, important indigenous parties have emerged for the first time in Latin American history. Although some analysts view this development with trepidation, this essay argues that the indigenous parties in Latin America are unlikely to exacerbate ethnic conflict or create the kinds of problems that have been associated with some ethnic parties in other regions. To the contrary, the emergence of major indigenous parties in Latin America may actually help deepen democracy in the region. These parties will certainly improve the representativeness of the party system in the countries where they arise. They should also increase political participation and reduce party system fragmentation and electoral volatility in indigenous areas. They may even increase the acceptance of democracy and reduce political violence in countries with large indigenous populations.
Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, 2020
While Bolivia grabbed global attention at the turn of the new millennium for militant indigenous mobilizations, the second decade of the 21st century witnessed the deepening of conflicts between different indigenous sectors. In addition to provoking heated debates on what it means to be indigenous, this has raised questions on the utility of the concept of indigeneity as it has been understood thus far to analyze the new political dynamics. In response to these processes and the analytical challenges they present, this article maps out the existing currents in Bolivian indigenous politics, their mutual disagreements, the meanings they give to indigeneity, and their impact on the politics of the Morales government and its critics. It argues that there are two distinct indigenous visions with different political agendas and priorities: a ‘revivalist’ current that focuses on the restoration of ancestral cosmovisions and represents the dominant canon, and an ‘expansionist’ current that prioritizes the struggle against structural racism and gives expression to a new tendency in Latin American indigenous politics. The article is based on nearly two years of ethnographic research in the city of El Alto.
2010
The aim of this paper is to explore the possibility of a causal relationship between the presence and relevance of ethnic parties in six Latin American countries (Bolivia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Peru) and the favorable conditions described in various subfields of the literature on collective action, including the structure of political opportunities, the range of collective actions, cognitive frameworks, and the structures of networks of organizations. With this in mind, we conducted a multi-causal qualitative analysis based on specific cases and variables (N = 6), using Boolean logic to systematically simplify the structures of complex data. The objective was to identify the variety of causes that produce a phenomenon, in this case, the presence and success of ethnic parties in Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua but not in Guatemala, Mexico, or Peru.