Why should the 60th anniversary of Bolivia's Revolución Nacional of 9–11 April 1952 matter? Nothing much happened on the day. Some 200 supporters of the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (Revolutionary Nationalist Movement, MNR) celebrated a mass in La Paz's metropolitan cathedral, but the police prevented them from laying a wreath at the monument to Pedro Domingo Murillo. The ‘event’ was quite similar to the 50th anniversary, which by custom and practice should have been a headline affair but was conspicuous by the minimal public presence in La Paz of the MNR, which had led the uprising and presided over the ‘State of 1952’ in government until the coup of November 1964.Footnote 6 In Santa Cruz the MNR's presidential candidate for the 2002 elections, Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, had addressed a crowd of party faithful, but he had little to say about any past further back than 1985, when the MNR had evidently turned its back on 1952 by introducing Decree 21060, a package of sharp neoliberal reforms that seemingly ended an entire era.Footnote 7 Instead, Sánchez de Lozada looked to the future, promising to make ‘Santa Cruz the California of Bolivia’.Footnote 8
By 2012 the position was starker still. The MNR was still formally in existence – in 2006 it even won eight of the 255 seats in the Constituent Assembly – but it was invisible on the street and maintained no website. A Google search lists the party's scattered contemporary pronouncements below its entry in the catalogue of Amsterdam's International Institute of Social History. If there existed a more eloquent marker of the MNR's passage into history, it was surely the fact that Sánchez de Lozada, who beat Evo Morales of the Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement toward Socialism, MAS) in the 2002 poll by a mere 40,000 votes out of 2.8 million, was now an exile in the United States, fighting off a legal case for extradition on the grounds of ‘genocide’ following the killing of 67 demonstrators by the security forces under his presidency in October 2003.
What energy might usefully be expended upon an ideologically turncoat party led by an alleged mass murderer? As the observation by Forrest Hylton above suggests, more than was once the case. Much of it has already been applied analytically by historians, who, at some years' distance from the 2005 electoral triumph of Morales and the MAS, are not just reconsidering the predictable disappointments attendant upon such high initial promise, but also reviewing the comfortable periodisations of the country's political history. It is this perspective – one that finds much to link the contemporary MAS with the ‘historic’ MNR, which had such a protean ideological nature – that makes the 60th anniversary of 1952 different from the 50th.Footnote 9 Now, in the wake of another ‘revolution’ betrayed, passively conducted, adroitly avoided or simply resistant to prognoses from well-mown campuses in the global North, there is emerging a greater appreciation of variegation in the ‘experience of 1952’ which had seemed to have been wholly subsumed or surpassed by neoliberalism in 1985 and by ethnically driven radicalism or Katarismo and coca-grower (cocalero) syndicalism after the popular mobilisations opened by the Water War in 2000.Footnote 10
The Ambiguous Signature of the 1952 Revolution
For James Malloy and Richard Thorn, ‘the Bolivian National Revolution stands alongside the Mexican and Cuban revolutions as one of the most significant events in Latin American history’.Footnote 11 Even H. C. F. Mansilla, the most severe of the revolution's local liberal critics, accepts that 1952 ‘marked an important watershed in Bolivia, separating an epoch of an eminently traditional character from one of clearly conceived modernising objectives’.Footnote 12 Likewise, Laurence Whitehead emphasises the revolution's boldness because ‘its far-reaching social changes affected the national population as a whole … These changes generated a new sense of national identity and gave rise to a qualitatively distinct form of state-building [that] was cumulatively irreversible’.Footnote 13
Those initial changes were largely unplanned by the MNR, which had to respond rapidly to great social pressure for deep and decisive action. The measures were, nevertheless, of a strategic and highly consequential nature: the introduction of universal suffrage; a widespread expropriation of large landed estates in the Andean altiplano and valleys; and the nationalisation of the country's three largest mining companies. Although subject to occasional manipulation and periodic suspension, even before the coup of 1964, the implementation of these policies was at the heart of the State of 1952 and is generally agreed to have endured through to 1985 as the core component of a national political culture.Footnote 14 Six months after the revolution, the rather stunned British ambassador wrote to London: ‘The results this time may prove … permanent. The defeated side – the upper class – may never recover. The landlords, professionals and wealthy whites, who had governed the country since the Spaniards, were greedy, blind and selfish: unable to combine, even in self-defence, their defeat was total; their reign is at an end.’Footnote 15 Three years later Marcel Niedergang reckoned that the Bolivian regime had easily overtaken the social change achieved by the Guatemalan reformists in 1945–54. A full decade after the revolution, James Morris declared, ‘No Indian in Bolivia is subject to those degrading impositions of serfdom and contempt that disgrace Chile and Peru … For me, coming to La Paz from Lima was a relief, a surprise and a pleasure.’Footnote 16
At the 50th anniversary Sánchez de Lozada identified universal suffrage as the most important revolutionary legacy, not least because it was so often overlooked.Footnote 17 Indeed, the simple act of abolishing gender and literacy restrictions on suffrage expanded the electorate from 150,000 in 1951 to just short of a million in 1956. Most importantly, all rural people over the age of 21 joined the political nation. That might, of course, have instantaneously enfranchised a huge counter-revolutionary majority – campesinos constituted three-quarters of the population – but the measure was accompanied by an agrarian reform that distributed some 47 million hectares to over 650,000 beneficiaries over the next 40 years, so that by 1970 half of the population had benefited from it in some form.Footnote 18
A sharper impact was registered abroad by the expropriation of the Patiño, Aramayo and Hochschild mining companies, which together had accounted for a quarter of world tin production and were tightly integrated into global processing, capital and retail markets. This was the ‘Rosca Superstate’ that had long been the MNR's main target – and it was now, on the very eve of the 1952 election in the United States, nationalised (with uncertain compensation) and converted into a public enterprise (the Corporación Minera de Bolivia, COMIBOL) wherein the powerful miners' union, the Federación Sindical de Trabajadores Mineros de Bolivia (Union Federation of Bolivian Mine Workers, FSTMB), exercised de facto workers' control, establishing militias and securing the reinstatement of thousands of employees fired for political and union activities. The FSTMB also formed the core of a new national labour confederation, the Central Obrera Boliviana (Bolivian Workers' Centre, COB), to which the MNR reluctantly ceded cabinet positions and at least the initial semblance of ‘co-government’, which would not be publicly foresworn for five years. More than any other modern revolution, the Bolivian Revolution had a single proletarian sector as its social vanguard.Footnote 19 The miners were to occupy a veritable citadel of radical political imagination, not least through their opposition to the dictatorships after 1964, until 1985, when, a year after Thatcher had curbed their British comrades, they were vanquished as a political force by the neoliberal Decree 21060 in August and the collapse of the international tin market in October.
Extension of voting rights to the majority of the population, land tenure for the mass of the rural poor, and the state's control of the commanding heights of the country's strategic industry were recognised early on as the prime revolutionary gains. However, more recently historians have developed a persuasive research-based case for the revolutionary process being more culturally innovative and distinctive than had previously been recognised.Footnote 20 In addition to the much-vaunted murals of Miguel Alandia and Walter Solón Romero that the military targeted after the coups of 1964 and 1980, the introduction of film (Sánchez de Lozada's personal area of interest), the expansion of popular radio, the development of the musical traditions of the Chaco War (1932–5) and state promotion of the country's literature and archaeological heritage have all been identified as being largely ignored in the historiography up to the 1990s.Footnote 21 According to Michelle Bigheno, ‘While the Chaco War and the 1952 revolution go relatively uncelebrated by official nationalism … they are precisely the events that today significantly mark Bolivian national music.’Footnote 22 This more recent revisionist literature suggests that the MNR was rather less a vehicle for a culturally shallow developmentalism and more a hegemonic enterprise in search of a distinctive socio-cultural voice that the country's foremost social scientist, René Zavaleta Mercado, borrowing from Gramsci, termed ‘national-popular’:
The structural integration of the state of 1952 is based upon the widening of the demographic basis of political consensus … through the introduction into political controversy of the workers in the 1940s and of the peasantry in the 1950s, creating a new spatial conception of the country (although spatial thinking has always been a feature in Bolivian statist reasoning), a new ideology (the ideological field – ideologuema – of revolutionary nationalism), and a new repressive apparatus.Footnote 23
Ranged against these claims for the revolutionary experience are a variety of qualifications, complications and outright criticisms that have long dominated the academic literature and sometimes popular sentiment. Aside from the MNR itself, very few of the political parties making the requisite review of history in their formal presentations to the 2006–8 Constituent Assembly had much to say about 1952, and when they did, they stressed the limited change it produced. Even the MNR bracketed the revolution with the Chaco War as a repudiation of ‘the system of secular privileges’. For the governing MAS, the revolution had proved incapable of industrialising Bolivia, breaking with an export-led model of development or securing the ‘effective participation of indigenous peoples’ through the agrarian reform.Footnote 24 This latter theme was also given prominence by scholars sympathetic to the MAS – according to Hylton and Thomson, ‘The underlying national implications of indigenous struggle today stem … from the inability of the 1952 revolution to resolve the central contradiction of the republican social formation – the cultural, political and economic domination of the indigenous majority.’Footnote 25
In fact, the weaknesses and limitations of the agrarian reform had long been identified from a range of political positions, including that of the MNR, with Sánchez de Lozada introducing major changes to the reform in 1996. The much-publicised 1984 murder of Sánchez de Lozada's brother-in-law on his La Paz dairy farm threw the stark divisions of rural society into the limelight, but careful scholarly research has also shown the reform to have been absent, partisan or actively disruptive across the altiplano.Footnote 26 Despite widely varying analysis as to the policy causes and consequences, there is also a consensus over the inefficiency of COMIBOL, with the progressive drain on the national treasury by a chronically under-capitalised nationalised industry that was unable to compete in world markets whatever the increase in revenue directed to labour, itself riven by sectoral syndicalist disputes beneath a contested rhetoric of political maximalism.Footnote 27 And as early as January 1954, the US embassy in La Paz was calmly registering the threadbare nature of claims for a new competitive party politics, universal suffrage and freedom of the press and reunion: ‘In practice … these freedoms have been held in abeyance. Suppression of activities of other political parties has been indirect rather than overt but nonetheless effective.’Footnote 28 Five decades later, the not unsympathetic Salvador Romero reflected, ‘The revolutionary myth of national construction with the support of the people, based on a strong state and a party that monopolized the correct interpretation of history, was not favourable to democratic consolidation.’Footnote 29 At the same time, La Razón commented on the paradox that in 2002 ‘many of those affected by that revolution continue to hoist the “banderas de abril” as if they were still to be realised in our present day’.Footnote 30
Here we encounter a common motif – an ‘incomplete revolution’, a characterisation established by James Malloy soon after the MNR's fall: ‘We must conclude that the MNR was, at least in part, a failure; it dismantled the old order, but neither it nor any other group has thus far been able to construct a new political order within which the dream of rapid development can be achieved. It is in this sense that the revolution continues.’Footnote 31 Correspondingly, from Fernando Molina's liberal standpoint, ‘by being an “incomplete revolution” which laid the bases for democratic representation but did not ensure the development of the country, and by failing to overcome the … rent-seeking character of Bolivian society’, 1952 gave rise to two ideological currents: one, liberal, that criticised the state's collectivism but upheld its democratic features, and another which characterised the agrarian reform and universal suffrage and education as ‘insufficient’, viewing economic nationalism as unfulfilled.Footnote 32
René Zavaleta knew that the Bolivian Revolution was far from ‘complete’. Having served as minister of mines in 1964, he later remarked wistfully to Régis Debray, ‘I want steelworks for my country. Among other advantages, it will lead to the birth of a Quechua Proust. Without blast furnaces there can be no Madeleine biscuits.’Footnote 33 At the same time he recognised that such a reverie was set against a greater imagining, that of the idealised ‘French Revolution’, with which not even the lived experience itself could compare. For Zavaleta, the MNR was the ‘poor relation’ of the very oligarchy that it had displaced – and that tag has endured.Footnote 34 For Danilo Paz, such a lineage explains why the MNR could so exuberantly ‘capitalise’ the economy in the 1990s; for Silvia Rivera it underscores an earlier continuity, that which ran from the 1940s into the revolutionary decade.Footnote 35 When asked whether the MAS was pursuing the same policies as the MNR had in the 1950s, Alvaro García Linera replied ‘yes and no’: the policies were essentially the same, but erstwhile implementation by poor members of the elite had been replaced by that of the masses. What was once ‘development’ was now Suma Qamaña – living well.Footnote 36 Víctor Paz Estenssoro (president, 1952–6, 1960–4, 1985–9) would not have appreciated such a linguistic flourish (perhaps the most monoglot of the MNR leadership, he relied on Toribio Salas to translate his speech at the introduction of the agrarian reform in August 1953), but he would have agreed with both Danilo Paz and Silvia Rivera. Invited in 1994 to define the ideology of the MNR in the wake of the neoliberal restructuring of 1985 as well as 1952, he replied,
It is the same as today. In terms of the strategic objectives, at least. The tactical objectives have changed. Changed in terms of the international situation, in terms of the hemispheric position and that of national reality itself, but the great objectives remain just the same. In a phrase I've used many times: ‘to make Bolivia an authentic nation’ – in the sense that she will fulfil her nationhood, with a diversified, not a single-commodity economy, with balanced development between her regions, with solidarity between all the inhabitants of the country. This is the basic nationalist concept of the National Revolution.Footnote 37
By that stage, of course, Paz was a very elderly man and had long since contracted out the tasks of public pronouncements to Sánchez de Lozada, whose speeches were peppered with references to market modernisation. Conversely, his rival for the MNR leadership, Guillermo Bedregal, simply could not, even in the wake of Decree 21060, adjust the familiar motifs of movimientista rhetoric, with the result that such rhetoric was now, in historical as well as literary terms, ‘nonsense’.Footnote 38
Here there may be some convergence between the words and the numbers. Herbert Klein has studied the statistical profile of Bolivia since 1952 closer than any. Three generations after the revolution, life expectancy in the country is comparable with the Latin American average; across a range of indicators, only education and literacy seem to have registered any relatively positive impact. Major social change occurred, but the poor stayed poor.Footnote 39 An equally sympathetic commentator, Susan Eckstein, reluctantly notes that ‘the accomplishments of the Bolivian revolution … are unimpressive when compared with developments in other Latin American countries during the same period … Bolivia's regional standing … more often than not deteriorated.’Footnote 40 Mansilla's opinion, quoted at the top of this article, may amount to rather more than a conservative provocation.
But who, apart from Bolivians, really cared? Even a proponent of the revolution's historic importance such as Laurence Whitehead notes that its impact was entirely eclipsed after 1959 by the Cuban Revolution. On the eve of the tenth anniversary of 1952, the New York Times strained to divert its readers' attentions from Cuba:
It is often forgotten Bolivia is also carrying out a social revolution … The Bolivian revolution has had almost no impact on the rest of Latin America for a variety of reasons. Bolivia is a poor and isolated country; the MNR leaders kept clear of the Communists, and they have done no proselytizing. Moreover, far from being in conflict with the United States, they have been kept going with American aid … The triumph of the 1952 revolution was like a lid suddenly lifted from an explosive brew. The peasants swiftly sprang up as a decisive force, and they have been dominating the urban, middle class intellectual revolutionaries of the MNR party.Footnote 41
This was not entirely accurate. In the first months after the revolution, the MNR sought to spread its message throughout the region and gave prominence to favourable press coverage elsewhere.Footnote 42 However, the triumph of the Cuban Revolution occurred just when the MNR was retrenching after the first, very severe anti-inflationary stabilisation programme of 1957–8, with the COB ideologically and instrumentally divided and all semblance of co-gobierno banished from official statements. Small wonder, perhaps, that President Hernán Siles Zuazo pointedly identified Mexico as ‘nuestra hermana mayor en la Revolución Americana’.Footnote 43
Bolivia, of course, could be said to be the graveyard of the early internationalism of the Cuban Revolution in that Che Guevara died there in 1967 after a notably disorganised guerrilla campaign. In 1966–7 there was certainly sympathy for the strategy of armed struggle on the Bolivian Left, and this had been true in 1959–60. However, it was one thing to be in solidarity with Cuba, and quite another to adopt a distinct and foreign experience as a model for revolutionary change ‘at home’. The polite official distance assumed by Siles and Paz Estenssoro was entirely predictable, but it also chimed with that of COB leader Mario Torres, who in the wake of the Bay of Pigs energetically argued at the 11th FSTMB Congress at the Huanuni mine: ‘Those who believe that the Cuban revolution is more radical than ours, that we ought to copy from abroad without considering the particularities of our national reality, commit a grave error, and this absurd position only serves to strengthen the enemy, who yesterday invaded Cuba and tomorrow could finance a counter-revolution in Bolivia, imposing a fascist dictatorship.’Footnote 44 This was broadly the advice given by Fidel Castro to Evo Morales in 2003, and the proposition lay at the heart of the speech on Cuba given by Harold Dilla in La Paz the previous year.Footnote 45
Of course, Cuba's ‘exceptionalism’ makes it hard to compare Cuba's political experience with that of other countries in the region except almost exclusively through the prism of difference, whereas Alan Knight has shown the mutually illuminating value of contrasting the Bolivian experience with that of Mexico.Footnote 46 After all, Batista had staged a classic right-wing military coup in Cuba just a fortnight before the Bolivian uprising – he refused to recognise the regime in La Paz for over two years – while three months after taking power, the MNR observed the Mexican Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party, PRI) sweep 74 per cent of the popular vote to secure yet another seamless succession of power after two decades in office. Rolando Cordero Campos noted in 2002 that 50 years earlier many Mexicans had become so habituated to political stability that they asked what exactly their revolution now consisted of, and if, perhaps, it had ended.Footnote 47 Closer by, Perón had been a real source of trouble between the MNR and the United States and had behaved as a distinctly fair-weather friend during the party's sexenio in exile (1946–52). Neither did the Argentine Confederación General del Trabajo (General Confederation of Labour, CGT) possess the authority of yore, for April 1952 had effectively trumped October 1945 in the annals of Latin American proletarian mobilisation. The most obvious regional political ally, the Arbenz government in Guatemala, was already looking distinctly vulnerable, although Walter Guevara did make a lightning trip there and to Mexico in the wake of Eisenhower's election in November 1952, despite the fact that Arbenz had legalised the local communist party just as the MNR agreed to pay compensation for the nationalisation of the tin companies. Ñuflo Chávez visited Guatemala as well as Mexico to ‘learn from their mistakes’ with respect to the agrarian reform, and when, in March 1954, the United States sponsored a transparently anti-Guatemalan motion at the Organization of American States, the MNR gave its vote, albeit reluctantly. Three months later, in the wake of the counter-revolutionary overthrow of Arbenz, the COB leader, Juan Lechín, told La Paz factory workers, ‘The events in Guatemala are the most cruel but they also offer lessons for Bolivian workers’; he added later, ‘we are practical revolutionaries, we've never adopted absurd positions, full of romanticism’.Footnote 48
The Differential Codes of Historical Memory
Alan Knight uses the comparison with Mexico to throw light on the Bolivian experience, but he can also compare the historiography of the Mexican Revolution with those in France and Britain. That would be an impossible undertaking for Bolivia. Yet this impossibility lies not in the slightness of national historiography as a whole; on the contrary, the country may be said to ‘punch well above its weight’ in that respect, with regard to university training (especially the Carrera de Historia at the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés, UMSA), and to national associations such as the Academia Nacional de Historia, Coordinadora de Historia and Asociación de Estudios Bolivianos, each with either allied journals or associated edited collections that appear frequently, if irregularly.Footnote 49 Equally, a republic that was far more important as a colony has retained rich archival sources through expert management, sustaining a civic culture with a sharp historical sensibility through sympathetic and creative publishers such as Werner Guttentag's Los Amigos del Libro and José Antonio Quiroga's Plural.Footnote 50
The lack of a specific canon of revolutionary historiography has much more to do with the simple fact that the Bolivian Revolution did not ‘become historical’ until quite recently. Even in 1985, when the ‘event’ of the MNR's neoliberal U-turn was widely thought to have ended the process of the State of 1952, the very preponderance of that ‘historic’ party paradoxically impeded history-writing. However, one can argue that the process had already begun at this point. It can be traced to the years 1978–83, when many of the intellectuals exiled by the Banzer regime returned to contribute to the process of democratisation and often to apply the academic knowledge and skills acquired abroad, only to be driven out again by the García Meza coup of 1980. The exiles were thereby obliged to reflect afresh upon a range of compacted experiences, many of which upset the standard Marxist-Leninist paradigm as much as those of liberal democracy and radical nationalism. The search for locally pertinent and fruitful permutations of these global currents, and a particular concern with their historicity, is fully evident in the trail-blazing collection Bolivia hoy, edited by Zavaleta in Mexico for Siglo XXI and published in the wake of a still undervalued return to constitutional government in October 1982.Footnote 51 Little in that volume was of a markedly original factual nature, but it laid down a set of innovative, sometimes analytically taxing interpretative proposals which could only be taken forward in any significant manner with new empirical research. As a result, the return of the freedom to study, speak and write about the difficulties as well as the achievements of the past coincided quite closely with a new, politically motivated approach to history as well as growing opportunities for postgraduate study abroad.
None of this, of course, closed down the residual antiquarianism practised by a clutch of industrious letrados, from whom Sánchez de Lozada proudly excluded himself.Footnote 52 Neither did it put a conclusive end to the stuttering tradition of MNR anniversarialism. Indeed, in 2002, a lavishly illustrated two-volume commemorative study was published by the MNR thanks to the support of the foundation named after Huáscar Cajías, who himself had written, with studied ambiguity, that the party had ‘introduced order into repressive anarchy … adding to the traditional, primitive and temperamental beatings the advances of modern science.’Footnote 53
Although a practised iconoclast such as Alison Spedding could decry the practice of history as ‘a tool of domination’ and ostensibly delight in the burning of the congressional papers in the riots of February 2003 (eventually saved by the UMSA history students), this was as half-hearted a stance as it was anarchic.Footnote 54 The MNR was indisputably a dominating force when in power – a decade and two elections after the revolution it controlled all the seats in the senate and 80 per cent of those in the lower house, and had suppressed seven falangista ‘revolts’; in the words of the now exiled former foreign minister Walter Guevara, ‘telephones are tapped, mail is opened as a matter of course, the press has learned to be discreet’.Footnote 55 However, the party never succeeded in establishing an authoritative stamp on the historical record after 1952. It certainly had tried to do so from the moment it issued a folio-sized, photograph-laden Album de la Revolución on the second anniversary, edited by José Fellmann Velarde, whose semi-official, three-volume Historia de Bolivia (1968–70) did retain some popular influence in the 1970s. Silvia Rivera depicts this text as seeking to ‘westernise’ the interpretation of Bolivian socio-political development, but she does not show that, outside of circles predisposed to such a message, it was anything more than a rather laboured reference.Footnote 56 Fellmann was an indefatigable polemicist, but his history was really a narrative elaboration on Carlos Montenegro's foundational programme, Nacionalismo y coloniaje (1943). He failed either to impose an enduring high-school curriculum, an outcome likely to be shared by the efforts of the MAS in 2012, or to write the decisive ‘novel of the revolution’. This latter failure was one shared by the more talented Augusto Céspedes, whose trajectory after 1952 was as a placeman and winner of official literary prizes and whose best imaginative writing drew on the Chaco War and preceded the revolution, bearing out the contention of Salvador Romero that the MNR had really conquered public opinion in the sexenio of 1946–52 and had little of substance to add to such a denunciatory platform once in office.Footnote 57
There is some irony in the fact that, albeit in and out of exile and ever on the margins of official recognition, Rivera herself proved more successful than Fellmann in propagating a notion of the Bolivian past both within and beyond the country. This influence came about partly through her chapter in Bolivia hoy, but much more emphatically in Oprimidos pero no vencidos, published the following year. This text of 200 pages elaborated the twentieth-century history of indigenous mobilisation and the development of Katarismo, and its seven-page ‘final reflections’ proposed, almost as a throwaway line, the notion of ‘long-’ and ‘short-memory’ as effective markers for the indigenous ‘moment’ of Tupaj Katari's rising in 1781 and the creole–mestizo State of 1952. Translated into English in 1987 and Japanese in 1998, the book was reissued in a fourth edition in 2003 with a vivid new preface written by the author in the midst of the killings of October.Footnote 58 Its influence was undoubtedly magnified by the simultaneous use of the long- and short-memory motifs by Xavier Albó, whose work on the indigenist movement was also translated into English, and, with a comparable paradox, helped to westernise knowledge of the anti-Western postulates of Katarismo.Footnote 59 Albó uses the term ‘great arc’ to depict this politico-chronological trajectory, within which local historiography has revived the notion of ‘cycles’ (Rivera) and ‘horizons’ (Hylton and Thomson); this reflects the influence of Max Uhle's pre-colonial periodisation, which interspersed phases of state unification with periods (intermedios) of decentralisation.Footnote 60
With memory studies having undergone such sophisticated development in the years since Rivera's book appeared, so simple a dichotomy based on differential chronological depth and ideological antagonism might be thought intellectually unrewarding.Footnote 61 It is certainly Katarista in conjugation and has enjoyed appreciable political success, which puts its interpretative value in a distinct light. At least until the ‘wars’ of the twenty-first century (of water in 2000, and gas in 2003), the memory dyad is as much a hortatory postulate as a historical assertion of some prior ‘metabolisation’ (Zavaleta) of what might be deemed ‘deep’ or ‘utopian’ time. Moreover, Hylton suggests that, while in recent years this might be the positive initiative of indigenous activists, previously it could just as easily have resulted from a ‘great fear’ on the part of creoles. Having worked through some 6,000 documents from the 1899 Federal Revolution, often identified as the peak moment of racial antagonism after 1781, he could find no instance at all of Aymara leaders invoking Tupaj Katari and very few of the use of the pejorative term q'ara for creole-mestizos, but quite a few of Spanish colonial titles.Footnote 62 Likewise, Ximena Soruco has identified creole rhetoric after 1899 about the risks of a race war as the key driver for a racist culture in both the highlands and Santa Cruz.Footnote 63
In the present context we are more interested in ‘short-memory’ and the indigenista critique of 1952. Over the course of almost 30 years this has developed along a variety of lines in both scholarly and popular voices, but at its heart lies the vision depicted by Rivera as she drafted the introduction to the fourth edition of Oprimidos in October 2003: ‘All the liberal promises opened by the Revolution of 1952 – that of the full political participation of the Indians and women, of economic sovereignty and self-sufficiency in basic goods – have been shown to be sleights of hand, laying bare the colonial structures that uphold the Bolivian state.’Footnote 64 This condition had been progressively revealed by a strategic failure: ‘One of the fundamental conditions generated by the Revolution of 1952 was the failure of its project of cultural homogenisation … The Indian was to disappear with mestizaje, education, migration to the urban centres and the division of the communities.’Footnote 65 The failure, however, was not simply that of the MNR. The traditional Left was no less culpable: ‘The idea itself of mestizaje proposed by the MNR – and unquestioned both now and then by the Left – presupposed unilateral conformity with the western values, language and manner of thinking of the creoles, excluding all forms of multiculturalism and multilingualism.’Footnote 66
For Albó, like Rivera, the resistance by Eurocentric leftists took various forms but was probably most acute within the orbit of the union movement, with the Katarista-led Confederación Sindical Única de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia (Trade Union Confederation of Rural Workers of Bolivia, CSUTCB) being denied all but a tokenistic presence within the COB – even after the jornadas of 1979 and the indisputably steadfast leadership of the COB itself by Jenaro Flores, a pioneer of the Katarista movement, under the dictatorship – and being actively rebuffed by the UDP government of 1982–5.Footnote 67 When the MNR had first been in power this offensive on the traditional ayllu had been channelled through the agrarian reform, showcased as a core revolutionary triumph; thereafter it had taken the form of military clientelism (1964–74) under the Pacto Militar-Campesino, the breaking up of which had laid the basis of modern Katarismo.Footnote 68
The picture which emerges, then, is rather complicated, and does not bear out the idea of a subaltern indigenous mass rising up, albeit a little belatedly, to join its urban proletariat ally in a clear-eyed repudiation of conservative dictatorship and liberal economics. Writing specifically about northern Potosí, Rivera, who qualifies its application to Cochabamba, draws out the contradiction:
[For] the ayllus, any act of courtesy or acquiescence to the state was feasible so long as two key elements were not touched: the tributary regime and the ayllu land tenure system … Because of this, as well as the limited significance of behaviour based on ‘individual free will’, the ayllus of northern Potosí adopted an attitude of apparent docility, voting for all officially-backed candidates … With universal suffrage, they remained second-class citizens, in need of mestizo leadership …Footnote 69
A further complication arose when Katarismo had to confront such dilemmas in practical terms on regional and national scales. Generally united from the mid-1970s until 1985, the movement thereafter divided under this stress, with one important faction under Víctor Hugo Cárdenas, vice-president to Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada in 1993–7, adopting an approach of ‘both eyes’ whereby the identity and interests of indigeneity were complemented by the need to engage with the liberal state and capitalist economy. After 2003 that strand was so definitively out of favour that it has not received the serious reappraisal it deserves. Of course, as Albó notes, Cárdenas provided the ‘new MNR’ with ‘an infusion of symbolic capital in altering the image of the country’.Footnote 70 Equally, it could be objected that the constitutional reforms to make Bolivia a ‘pluricultural’ state and the ever-controversial Ley de Participación Popular (Law of Popular Participation, LPP; both 1994), as well as the 1996 Ley INRA agrarian reform, were shallow public relations gestures, if not completely cynical marketing manoeuvres. The polemics readily homed in on such issues because there existed an eminently approachable neatness in the MNR's ‘U-turn’ from developmentalist state to neoliberal restructuring being matched by an opportunistic Katarista mortgaging of the status of indio alzado to become indios permitidos.Footnote 71 Yet, as Rivera shows, Cárdenas was not breaking traditional indigenous ranks in every respect. It was his government that introduced the Tierra Comunitaria de Origen (Native Community Lands, TCO) into the 1996 agrarian reform, and it was Evo Morales, practising a sindicalismo that derives from 1952 (and the LPP), who opposed it, 15 years before the controversy over the road through the TIPNIS national park that he subsequently promoted in the name of development.Footnote 72
Some of the starker early claims of Katarismo have themselves come under criticism, in general with respect to the nature of mestizaje and in particular to the experience of Cochabamba, which has been distinct from that of the altiplano. Since 2005 the whole notion of mestizaje as a paradigm for domination has come under political question, from both those who are suspicious of the promiscuously pious appropriation of indigenista rhetoric and those who simply see it as flawed by monolithic communitarianism.Footnote 73 The much publicised ‘fact’ that over 60 per cent of the Bolivian population is indigenous derives from the 2001 census, which, tellingly, did not ask respondents whether they wished to self-identify as mestizo.Footnote 74 That would appear to be more than a passing omission, given almost universal acceptance of Albó's view that racial and ethnic conflict ‘is the oldest and most enduring conditioning factor for political and social formation in Bolivia. Neither biological mestizaje during the colonial period nor the subsequent period of cultural mestizaje, which after 1952 became the ideological backdrop of Bolivian national identity, has managed to replace it.’Footnote 75 Recent historiography has yielded rich empirical and analytical fruit for both periods, with Rivera's own work, among others, raising important issues about the very integrity of the term itself.Footnote 76 Even if we take Evo Morales as an iconic replacement for the MNR's generic campesino, neither his identity nor his behaviour are relieved of a plethora of contradictions.
René Zavaleta, himself an Orureño and so bestowed with ‘both eyes’ for looking along the altiplano and down the valleys, once noted in a footnote the Janus-like nature of Cochabamba, with its lower valley full of small farms and minifundia and its upper valley still firmly part of the communal culture and political economy, in the post-Columbian development of the central Andes. That note was stimulated by the work of Brooke Larson, whose own researches reach up until the early twentieth century but have also influenced the work of José Gordillo on the post-1952 experience in the Cochabamba valley. Gordillo's interpretation, strongly founded on oral history, raises a key caveat to the regnant Katarista outlook:
Rivera thinks that the revolutionary state (a repository of central power) designs, deploys and executes the policies of the revolution … Our study revises the history of the post-revolutionary campesino movements in the Cochabamba valley that is critical of the state-centred perspective. We argue that the campesinos were dynamic actors in the revolutionary process and that their incorporation in the process … transformed their subjectivity, making them autonomous social and political actors.Footnote 77
Correspondingly, Laura Gotkowitz, in one of the leading revisionist studies of the origins of the revolution, identifies indigenous initiative as being far more important than recognised by earlier scholarship, which she persuasively shows to have masked the impetus of the cochabambino rural mobilisation.Footnote 78 With that ‘hidden history’ now much restored and with a more nuanced knowledge of conditions in the valley throughout the 1950s, it is hard to accept that the urban movimientistas were able simply to impose a hybridising clientelism; it had to be negotiated with powerful forces for whom mestizaje was by no means an alien, identity-effacing phenomenon.
The Limits of Continuity
In August 1984, just a year after they had collaborated on Bolivia hoy, Luis H. Antezana wrote the prologue for the first edition of Silvia Rivera's Oprimidos. Antezana identified ‘long memory’ as constituting the axis of continuity in social struggle, in that it represented an accumulated, agency-driven disarticulation of the creole colonial system. ‘Short memory’, by contrast, being born of the 1952 state, was shared between campesinos and workers and much less stable, particularly now that the state was manifestly in crisis. For Antezana this presaged a change, one that would, in fact, come about in one distinct (liberal) form less than a year after he wrote, and in another (post-Katarista) guise some 20 years later under Evo Morales:
There emerges an image – I say ‘image’ because I find it hard to propose a relevant concept – in which the crisis of the 1952 State would find a popular alternative in the sense that its historical and ideological limits are displaced – broken – in a qualitative and quantitative way, opening up a broader project, driven by the inherent content of the ‘long memory’ of the campesino, with its nucleus being the differential valorisation of the native societies and cultures within Bolivian life as a whole.Footnote 79
Pablo Regalsky, writing at the end of the first MAS administration 25 years later, felt obliged to explain at some length ‘why 2006 is not 1952’. For Regalsky, ‘the MAS … is attempting to balance indigenous demands with those of the dominant and still powerful landowning class in a new configuration of the state’. This was not totally dissimilar to the State of 1952, but neither was it the same, because the outside world had changed so dramatically, even if ‘ethnification underlines the reaffirmation of the commons in the reproduction of the rural indigenous community’.Footnote 80
That tension between continuity and rupture that both writers emphasise lies at the heart of modern Bolivian life. The forces of continuity, or at least of an enduring similarity and comparability, remain palpable. The economic pressures that prompted the MAS to decree an increase in retail oil prices (a gasolinazo) in December 2010 are essentially the same as those that lay behind Banzer's January 1974 reduction of food subsidies, awakening Katarismo, and those that compelled Víctor Paz to raise retail petrol prices in October 1961, causing widespread riots.Footnote 81 The workers of the Manaco shoe factory that began the protests in 1974 were from the same plant as those who triggered the Water War of 2000. The miners of Huanuni, so central to violent readjustment of the revolutionary state in 1958–9, occupied a different universe, but their successors played out a quite similar conflict between goods and labour in the public and private sectors in 2006. When, in 1985, Jeffrey Sachs identified the logical consequence of hyperinflation to be the collapse of the country's fiscal system, he was identifying a particularly acute problem, but the problem itself was little different from those diagnosed by earlier ‘money doctors’, from Kemmerer to Bohan to Eder.Footnote 82
Yet Regalsky is right in more than common sense. The case for continuity can be compelling, but it also readily descends into a teleological mantra. If Evo Morales and the MAS may be characterised as post-Katarista as well as post-MNR, this is precisely because of the experience of change, even if not all the lessons of the past have been recognised or learned. The very hybridity of the government since 2005 can be compared with the uneasy MNR–COB alliance of 1952–6, and the rhetorical reach of the MAS may readily fall within what Antezana terms ‘nacionalismo revolucionario’. Yet 60 years later, it could in no sense be confused, as was the MNR, with either a fascist or a communist repertoire. The recomposition of the ideologuema of 2003 had little to do with that of the 1930s and what some would deem a shared ‘totalitarian’ critique of liberalism.Footnote 83 The MNR looked back to the Chaco War, the MAS to Decree 21060; the syncretism might well be comparably perplexing, but it did not comprise the same elements.
In regional terms the MNR's developmentalism was focused on Santa Cruz, which it promoted with a big new road, continued abundance of subsidies and, amidst some quite rowdy party activism at the ungentle hands of the Sandoval Morón clan, a stream of blandishments to assuage a ‘tropicalist’ frontier temper calibrated to cattle-raising, beauty queens and arriviste kitsch.Footnote 84 Even in 2002 Sánchez de Lozada could celebrate the Revolución Nacional in Santa Cruz through ‘Californisation’.
Little of that applied to or worked for the MAS, which only gained a foothold in the Oriente through the migration of Andean people and which was slow and reluctant to engage with a camba discourse so disingenuously infused with colonialism. In 2008 the Cruceño elite came as close as ever to provoking regional secession on ‘civilisational’ grounds from an Andean Bolivia, and there was sufficient North American involvement in that episode to prompt the expulsion of the US ambassador. One might even suspect that had the 2002 attempted putsch against Chávez in Venezuela not collapsed so ignominiously, something similar could have been essayed against Morales. However, a convincing case has been made that, even before 2005, the Cruceño elite lacked a capacity for hegemony at a national level, and that by cleaving to the predicates of a nación camba it was in some danger of being locked out of even regional political leadership.Footnote 85
In that same vein, the MNR might initially have experienced a tense relationship with Washington, but once the United States had signed a contract to purchase tin, this warmed considerably. The Bolivian government was soon buying full-page advertisements in the New York Times extolling the virtues of Andean trout-fishing, ‘weird music’ and even beauty queens in addition to archaeological riches and the mandatory free economy. The MAS, as we have seen, found it difficult to uphold cordial relations with the North Americans, even though the level of US intromission was of a similar order to that seen in the 1950s and 1960s. The ‘oscillations’ between good times and bad were of a different order and incidence. In 1953, US Ambassador Edward Sparks reported not only that the MNR was not communist but also that the degeneration of the Bolivian economy under the traditional elite made the party's ‘revolutionary and nationalistic attitudes understandable … and it is fortunate that its leadership is not narrowly doctrinaire or sectarian’. By contrast, in March 2006 Ambassador David Greenlee told the State Department that Evo Morales was ‘a leader with strong anti-democratic tendencies; over the years he has been known to bribe, threaten, and even physically intimidate anyone who stood in his way’.Footnote 86
As recent scholarship on US–Bolivian relations in the 1950s and 1960s has shown, the extraordinary asymmetry in power between Washington and La Paz did not simplify or polarise matters, as some easy attitudes assume on the basis of extrapolating wider Cold War or imperialist ‘logics’.Footnote 87 Apart from anything else, the 1952 revolution required a rapid improvement in the quality of the US embassy, and it is no coincidence that Philip Bonsal, appointed to La Paz in March 1957, was on his way to Havana within two years. In key respects the US response to the Bolivian Revolution represented a strategic alternative to that taken to Guatemala beforehand and Cuba thereafter; it certainly avoided the medium- and long-term diplomatic reverses suffered by Washington in those cases. The MNR indubitably played its role in that diplomatic pirouette, partly because it had to, and partly because it had been taught a very severe lesson in the 1940s. Few of these factors applied to the same degree in the first years of the twenty-first century. One would, moreover, have to admit that the quality of the senior diplomats dispatched south by the State Department simply did not match the challenge they faced.
Conclusion: The Limits of Comparison
René Zavaleta sought to capture the national-popular essence of the State of 1952 in a pithy epithet: ‘You belong to one mode of production, and I to another, but neither you nor I are the same after the Battle of Nanawa [July 1933, in the Chaco War]; Nanawa is what you and I share.’Footnote 88 None of the front-line MNR leaders fought at Nanawa, but that is not the point; they were able to carry forward its symbolism. Something similar might be said some 60 years after the revolution: very different social classes and political forces were brought together by the water and gas ‘wars’. While these might lack the bonding longevity of the Chaco War, they certainly constitute a historic watershed, and they already constitute a reformulated ‘short memory’. In October 2003 Evo Morales was actually in Geneva, but the MAS, through its own agency, the errors of its opponents and the force of circumstance, proved capable of amalgamating an alliance out of such experiences. Yet, as Rafael Archondo has shown, the MAS envelops two quite distinct currents: one, nationalist, statist and syndicalist; the other, ethnicist and autonomist (and one might wish to argue the distinctiveness of those supporters of erstwhile ‘populist’ movements led by Carlos Palenque and Max Fernández). Here there are sharp tensions, and often the only mediation seems to reside in the person of Evo Morales.Footnote 89
This is a marked difference with the experience of the MNR, which, while always under the intellectual influence of Víctor Paz Estenssoro, did not always rely upon his personal presence, style or even ideological affinities. With Lechín to the left, Guevara Arze to the right and Siles providing a vitally pragmatic and mobile centre, there was, at least for a while, potential for internal compensation as well as competition. Five years after the establishment of the State of 1952 – the equivalent period between the MAS electoral victory of December 2005 and the gasolinazo of December 2010 – the MNR was starting to exhibit serious internal tensions. But it took several more years and Víctor Paz's insistence upon a second re-election in 1964 fully to destroy party unity and to provoke the military coup that effectively ended civilian rule for 21 years. Evo Morales faces no sharp personal competition, but so also does he lack collaboration. The MAS is manifestly not set to be as sustainable as the MNR (formed in 1941, first in cabinet in 1944), but just as the State of 1952 was not limited to the MNR, so is the ‘Refoundation’ of Bolivia bigger than the MAS, which in turn is not reducible to Evo Morales.
We're going to set up … a government of structural transformation, economically, politically and socially. We will work so that the Bolivian economy will belong to Bolivians and not to three exploiters who live abroad. We will incorporate the campesino into the economy, into national society, so that he ceases to be despised as a serf.
Provisional President Hernán Siles Zuazo, 1952Footnote 1When we took power, 40 per cent of the GDP was in the hands of two foreign companies. After three years we have changed from a beggar-state to a relatively strong state, with the ability to exercise control … This is a power-bloc of campesino and popular-plebeian origin, allied to the middle sectors.
Vice-President Alvaro García Linera, 2012Footnote 2Fifty years later it is easy to underestimate the boldness and radicalism of the experiment launched in April 1952.
Laurence Whitehead, 2003Footnote 3Whether the issue is natural resources, education and literacy, infrastructural development, or agrarian reform, the MNR reforms at mid-century were more radical and far reaching than anything MAS has accomplished in the twenty-first.
Forrest Hylton, 2011Footnote 4The national revolution of April 1952 was, in essence, unnecessary and superfluous. The modernising effects generated by that process would have happened sooner or later under a regime of the traditional elites.
H. C. F. Mansilla, 2003Footnote 5Why should the 60th anniversary of Bolivia's Revolución Nacional of 9–11 April 1952 matter? Nothing much happened on the day. Some 200 supporters of the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (Revolutionary Nationalist Movement, MNR) celebrated a mass in La Paz's metropolitan cathedral, but the police prevented them from laying a wreath at the monument to Pedro Domingo Murillo. The ‘event’ was quite similar to the 50th anniversary, which by custom and practice should have been a headline affair but was conspicuous by the minimal public presence in La Paz of the MNR, which had led the uprising and presided over the ‘State of 1952’ in government until the coup of November 1964.Footnote 6 In Santa Cruz the MNR's presidential candidate for the 2002 elections, Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, had addressed a crowd of party faithful, but he had little to say about any past further back than 1985, when the MNR had evidently turned its back on 1952 by introducing Decree 21060, a package of sharp neoliberal reforms that seemingly ended an entire era.Footnote 7 Instead, Sánchez de Lozada looked to the future, promising to make ‘Santa Cruz the California of Bolivia’.Footnote 8
By 2012 the position was starker still. The MNR was still formally in existence – in 2006 it even won eight of the 255 seats in the Constituent Assembly – but it was invisible on the street and maintained no website. A Google search lists the party's scattered contemporary pronouncements below its entry in the catalogue of Amsterdam's International Institute of Social History. If there existed a more eloquent marker of the MNR's passage into history, it was surely the fact that Sánchez de Lozada, who beat Evo Morales of the Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement toward Socialism, MAS) in the 2002 poll by a mere 40,000 votes out of 2.8 million, was now an exile in the United States, fighting off a legal case for extradition on the grounds of ‘genocide’ following the killing of 67 demonstrators by the security forces under his presidency in October 2003.
What energy might usefully be expended upon an ideologically turncoat party led by an alleged mass murderer? As the observation by Forrest Hylton above suggests, more than was once the case. Much of it has already been applied analytically by historians, who, at some years' distance from the 2005 electoral triumph of Morales and the MAS, are not just reconsidering the predictable disappointments attendant upon such high initial promise, but also reviewing the comfortable periodisations of the country's political history. It is this perspective – one that finds much to link the contemporary MAS with the ‘historic’ MNR, which had such a protean ideological nature – that makes the 60th anniversary of 1952 different from the 50th.Footnote 9 Now, in the wake of another ‘revolution’ betrayed, passively conducted, adroitly avoided or simply resistant to prognoses from well-mown campuses in the global North, there is emerging a greater appreciation of variegation in the ‘experience of 1952’ which had seemed to have been wholly subsumed or surpassed by neoliberalism in 1985 and by ethnically driven radicalism or Katarismo and coca-grower (cocalero) syndicalism after the popular mobilisations opened by the Water War in 2000.Footnote 10
The Ambiguous Signature of the 1952 Revolution
For James Malloy and Richard Thorn, ‘the Bolivian National Revolution stands alongside the Mexican and Cuban revolutions as one of the most significant events in Latin American history’.Footnote 11 Even H. C. F. Mansilla, the most severe of the revolution's local liberal critics, accepts that 1952 ‘marked an important watershed in Bolivia, separating an epoch of an eminently traditional character from one of clearly conceived modernising objectives’.Footnote 12 Likewise, Laurence Whitehead emphasises the revolution's boldness because ‘its far-reaching social changes affected the national population as a whole … These changes generated a new sense of national identity and gave rise to a qualitatively distinct form of state-building [that] was cumulatively irreversible’.Footnote 13
Those initial changes were largely unplanned by the MNR, which had to respond rapidly to great social pressure for deep and decisive action. The measures were, nevertheless, of a strategic and highly consequential nature: the introduction of universal suffrage; a widespread expropriation of large landed estates in the Andean altiplano and valleys; and the nationalisation of the country's three largest mining companies. Although subject to occasional manipulation and periodic suspension, even before the coup of 1964, the implementation of these policies was at the heart of the State of 1952 and is generally agreed to have endured through to 1985 as the core component of a national political culture.Footnote 14 Six months after the revolution, the rather stunned British ambassador wrote to London: ‘The results this time may prove … permanent. The defeated side – the upper class – may never recover. The landlords, professionals and wealthy whites, who had governed the country since the Spaniards, were greedy, blind and selfish: unable to combine, even in self-defence, their defeat was total; their reign is at an end.’Footnote 15 Three years later Marcel Niedergang reckoned that the Bolivian regime had easily overtaken the social change achieved by the Guatemalan reformists in 1945–54. A full decade after the revolution, James Morris declared, ‘No Indian in Bolivia is subject to those degrading impositions of serfdom and contempt that disgrace Chile and Peru … For me, coming to La Paz from Lima was a relief, a surprise and a pleasure.’Footnote 16
At the 50th anniversary Sánchez de Lozada identified universal suffrage as the most important revolutionary legacy, not least because it was so often overlooked.Footnote 17 Indeed, the simple act of abolishing gender and literacy restrictions on suffrage expanded the electorate from 150,000 in 1951 to just short of a million in 1956. Most importantly, all rural people over the age of 21 joined the political nation. That might, of course, have instantaneously enfranchised a huge counter-revolutionary majority – campesinos constituted three-quarters of the population – but the measure was accompanied by an agrarian reform that distributed some 47 million hectares to over 650,000 beneficiaries over the next 40 years, so that by 1970 half of the population had benefited from it in some form.Footnote 18
A sharper impact was registered abroad by the expropriation of the Patiño, Aramayo and Hochschild mining companies, which together had accounted for a quarter of world tin production and were tightly integrated into global processing, capital and retail markets. This was the ‘Rosca Superstate’ that had long been the MNR's main target – and it was now, on the very eve of the 1952 election in the United States, nationalised (with uncertain compensation) and converted into a public enterprise (the Corporación Minera de Bolivia, COMIBOL) wherein the powerful miners' union, the Federación Sindical de Trabajadores Mineros de Bolivia (Union Federation of Bolivian Mine Workers, FSTMB), exercised de facto workers' control, establishing militias and securing the reinstatement of thousands of employees fired for political and union activities. The FSTMB also formed the core of a new national labour confederation, the Central Obrera Boliviana (Bolivian Workers' Centre, COB), to which the MNR reluctantly ceded cabinet positions and at least the initial semblance of ‘co-government’, which would not be publicly foresworn for five years. More than any other modern revolution, the Bolivian Revolution had a single proletarian sector as its social vanguard.Footnote 19 The miners were to occupy a veritable citadel of radical political imagination, not least through their opposition to the dictatorships after 1964, until 1985, when, a year after Thatcher had curbed their British comrades, they were vanquished as a political force by the neoliberal Decree 21060 in August and the collapse of the international tin market in October.
Extension of voting rights to the majority of the population, land tenure for the mass of the rural poor, and the state's control of the commanding heights of the country's strategic industry were recognised early on as the prime revolutionary gains. However, more recently historians have developed a persuasive research-based case for the revolutionary process being more culturally innovative and distinctive than had previously been recognised.Footnote 20 In addition to the much-vaunted murals of Miguel Alandia and Walter Solón Romero that the military targeted after the coups of 1964 and 1980, the introduction of film (Sánchez de Lozada's personal area of interest), the expansion of popular radio, the development of the musical traditions of the Chaco War (1932–5) and state promotion of the country's literature and archaeological heritage have all been identified as being largely ignored in the historiography up to the 1990s.Footnote 21 According to Michelle Bigheno, ‘While the Chaco War and the 1952 revolution go relatively uncelebrated by official nationalism … they are precisely the events that today significantly mark Bolivian national music.’Footnote 22 This more recent revisionist literature suggests that the MNR was rather less a vehicle for a culturally shallow developmentalism and more a hegemonic enterprise in search of a distinctive socio-cultural voice that the country's foremost social scientist, René Zavaleta Mercado, borrowing from Gramsci, termed ‘national-popular’:
The structural integration of the state of 1952 is based upon the widening of the demographic basis of political consensus … through the introduction into political controversy of the workers in the 1940s and of the peasantry in the 1950s, creating a new spatial conception of the country (although spatial thinking has always been a feature in Bolivian statist reasoning), a new ideology (the ideological field – ideologuema – of revolutionary nationalism), and a new repressive apparatus.Footnote 23
Ranged against these claims for the revolutionary experience are a variety of qualifications, complications and outright criticisms that have long dominated the academic literature and sometimes popular sentiment. Aside from the MNR itself, very few of the political parties making the requisite review of history in their formal presentations to the 2006–8 Constituent Assembly had much to say about 1952, and when they did, they stressed the limited change it produced. Even the MNR bracketed the revolution with the Chaco War as a repudiation of ‘the system of secular privileges’. For the governing MAS, the revolution had proved incapable of industrialising Bolivia, breaking with an export-led model of development or securing the ‘effective participation of indigenous peoples’ through the agrarian reform.Footnote 24 This latter theme was also given prominence by scholars sympathetic to the MAS – according to Hylton and Thomson, ‘The underlying national implications of indigenous struggle today stem … from the inability of the 1952 revolution to resolve the central contradiction of the republican social formation – the cultural, political and economic domination of the indigenous majority.’Footnote 25
In fact, the weaknesses and limitations of the agrarian reform had long been identified from a range of political positions, including that of the MNR, with Sánchez de Lozada introducing major changes to the reform in 1996. The much-publicised 1984 murder of Sánchez de Lozada's brother-in-law on his La Paz dairy farm threw the stark divisions of rural society into the limelight, but careful scholarly research has also shown the reform to have been absent, partisan or actively disruptive across the altiplano.Footnote 26 Despite widely varying analysis as to the policy causes and consequences, there is also a consensus over the inefficiency of COMIBOL, with the progressive drain on the national treasury by a chronically under-capitalised nationalised industry that was unable to compete in world markets whatever the increase in revenue directed to labour, itself riven by sectoral syndicalist disputes beneath a contested rhetoric of political maximalism.Footnote 27 And as early as January 1954, the US embassy in La Paz was calmly registering the threadbare nature of claims for a new competitive party politics, universal suffrage and freedom of the press and reunion: ‘In practice … these freedoms have been held in abeyance. Suppression of activities of other political parties has been indirect rather than overt but nonetheless effective.’Footnote 28 Five decades later, the not unsympathetic Salvador Romero reflected, ‘The revolutionary myth of national construction with the support of the people, based on a strong state and a party that monopolized the correct interpretation of history, was not favourable to democratic consolidation.’Footnote 29 At the same time, La Razón commented on the paradox that in 2002 ‘many of those affected by that revolution continue to hoist the “banderas de abril” as if they were still to be realised in our present day’.Footnote 30
Here we encounter a common motif – an ‘incomplete revolution’, a characterisation established by James Malloy soon after the MNR's fall: ‘We must conclude that the MNR was, at least in part, a failure; it dismantled the old order, but neither it nor any other group has thus far been able to construct a new political order within which the dream of rapid development can be achieved. It is in this sense that the revolution continues.’Footnote 31 Correspondingly, from Fernando Molina's liberal standpoint, ‘by being an “incomplete revolution” which laid the bases for democratic representation but did not ensure the development of the country, and by failing to overcome the … rent-seeking character of Bolivian society’, 1952 gave rise to two ideological currents: one, liberal, that criticised the state's collectivism but upheld its democratic features, and another which characterised the agrarian reform and universal suffrage and education as ‘insufficient’, viewing economic nationalism as unfulfilled.Footnote 32
René Zavaleta knew that the Bolivian Revolution was far from ‘complete’. Having served as minister of mines in 1964, he later remarked wistfully to Régis Debray, ‘I want steelworks for my country. Among other advantages, it will lead to the birth of a Quechua Proust. Without blast furnaces there can be no Madeleine biscuits.’Footnote 33 At the same time he recognised that such a reverie was set against a greater imagining, that of the idealised ‘French Revolution’, with which not even the lived experience itself could compare. For Zavaleta, the MNR was the ‘poor relation’ of the very oligarchy that it had displaced – and that tag has endured.Footnote 34 For Danilo Paz, such a lineage explains why the MNR could so exuberantly ‘capitalise’ the economy in the 1990s; for Silvia Rivera it underscores an earlier continuity, that which ran from the 1940s into the revolutionary decade.Footnote 35 When asked whether the MAS was pursuing the same policies as the MNR had in the 1950s, Alvaro García Linera replied ‘yes and no’: the policies were essentially the same, but erstwhile implementation by poor members of the elite had been replaced by that of the masses. What was once ‘development’ was now Suma Qamaña – living well.Footnote 36 Víctor Paz Estenssoro (president, 1952–6, 1960–4, 1985–9) would not have appreciated such a linguistic flourish (perhaps the most monoglot of the MNR leadership, he relied on Toribio Salas to translate his speech at the introduction of the agrarian reform in August 1953), but he would have agreed with both Danilo Paz and Silvia Rivera. Invited in 1994 to define the ideology of the MNR in the wake of the neoliberal restructuring of 1985 as well as 1952, he replied,
It is the same as today. In terms of the strategic objectives, at least. The tactical objectives have changed. Changed in terms of the international situation, in terms of the hemispheric position and that of national reality itself, but the great objectives remain just the same. In a phrase I've used many times: ‘to make Bolivia an authentic nation’ – in the sense that she will fulfil her nationhood, with a diversified, not a single-commodity economy, with balanced development between her regions, with solidarity between all the inhabitants of the country. This is the basic nationalist concept of the National Revolution.Footnote 37
By that stage, of course, Paz was a very elderly man and had long since contracted out the tasks of public pronouncements to Sánchez de Lozada, whose speeches were peppered with references to market modernisation. Conversely, his rival for the MNR leadership, Guillermo Bedregal, simply could not, even in the wake of Decree 21060, adjust the familiar motifs of movimientista rhetoric, with the result that such rhetoric was now, in historical as well as literary terms, ‘nonsense’.Footnote 38
Here there may be some convergence between the words and the numbers. Herbert Klein has studied the statistical profile of Bolivia since 1952 closer than any. Three generations after the revolution, life expectancy in the country is comparable with the Latin American average; across a range of indicators, only education and literacy seem to have registered any relatively positive impact. Major social change occurred, but the poor stayed poor.Footnote 39 An equally sympathetic commentator, Susan Eckstein, reluctantly notes that ‘the accomplishments of the Bolivian revolution … are unimpressive when compared with developments in other Latin American countries during the same period … Bolivia's regional standing … more often than not deteriorated.’Footnote 40 Mansilla's opinion, quoted at the top of this article, may amount to rather more than a conservative provocation.
But who, apart from Bolivians, really cared? Even a proponent of the revolution's historic importance such as Laurence Whitehead notes that its impact was entirely eclipsed after 1959 by the Cuban Revolution. On the eve of the tenth anniversary of 1952, the New York Times strained to divert its readers' attentions from Cuba:
It is often forgotten Bolivia is also carrying out a social revolution … The Bolivian revolution has had almost no impact on the rest of Latin America for a variety of reasons. Bolivia is a poor and isolated country; the MNR leaders kept clear of the Communists, and they have done no proselytizing. Moreover, far from being in conflict with the United States, they have been kept going with American aid … The triumph of the 1952 revolution was like a lid suddenly lifted from an explosive brew. The peasants swiftly sprang up as a decisive force, and they have been dominating the urban, middle class intellectual revolutionaries of the MNR party.Footnote 41
This was not entirely accurate. In the first months after the revolution, the MNR sought to spread its message throughout the region and gave prominence to favourable press coverage elsewhere.Footnote 42 However, the triumph of the Cuban Revolution occurred just when the MNR was retrenching after the first, very severe anti-inflationary stabilisation programme of 1957–8, with the COB ideologically and instrumentally divided and all semblance of co-gobierno banished from official statements. Small wonder, perhaps, that President Hernán Siles Zuazo pointedly identified Mexico as ‘nuestra hermana mayor en la Revolución Americana’.Footnote 43
Bolivia, of course, could be said to be the graveyard of the early internationalism of the Cuban Revolution in that Che Guevara died there in 1967 after a notably disorganised guerrilla campaign. In 1966–7 there was certainly sympathy for the strategy of armed struggle on the Bolivian Left, and this had been true in 1959–60. However, it was one thing to be in solidarity with Cuba, and quite another to adopt a distinct and foreign experience as a model for revolutionary change ‘at home’. The polite official distance assumed by Siles and Paz Estenssoro was entirely predictable, but it also chimed with that of COB leader Mario Torres, who in the wake of the Bay of Pigs energetically argued at the 11th FSTMB Congress at the Huanuni mine: ‘Those who believe that the Cuban revolution is more radical than ours, that we ought to copy from abroad without considering the particularities of our national reality, commit a grave error, and this absurd position only serves to strengthen the enemy, who yesterday invaded Cuba and tomorrow could finance a counter-revolution in Bolivia, imposing a fascist dictatorship.’Footnote 44 This was broadly the advice given by Fidel Castro to Evo Morales in 2003, and the proposition lay at the heart of the speech on Cuba given by Harold Dilla in La Paz the previous year.Footnote 45
Of course, Cuba's ‘exceptionalism’ makes it hard to compare Cuba's political experience with that of other countries in the region except almost exclusively through the prism of difference, whereas Alan Knight has shown the mutually illuminating value of contrasting the Bolivian experience with that of Mexico.Footnote 46 After all, Batista had staged a classic right-wing military coup in Cuba just a fortnight before the Bolivian uprising – he refused to recognise the regime in La Paz for over two years – while three months after taking power, the MNR observed the Mexican Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party, PRI) sweep 74 per cent of the popular vote to secure yet another seamless succession of power after two decades in office. Rolando Cordero Campos noted in 2002 that 50 years earlier many Mexicans had become so habituated to political stability that they asked what exactly their revolution now consisted of, and if, perhaps, it had ended.Footnote 47 Closer by, Perón had been a real source of trouble between the MNR and the United States and had behaved as a distinctly fair-weather friend during the party's sexenio in exile (1946–52). Neither did the Argentine Confederación General del Trabajo (General Confederation of Labour, CGT) possess the authority of yore, for April 1952 had effectively trumped October 1945 in the annals of Latin American proletarian mobilisation. The most obvious regional political ally, the Arbenz government in Guatemala, was already looking distinctly vulnerable, although Walter Guevara did make a lightning trip there and to Mexico in the wake of Eisenhower's election in November 1952, despite the fact that Arbenz had legalised the local communist party just as the MNR agreed to pay compensation for the nationalisation of the tin companies. Ñuflo Chávez visited Guatemala as well as Mexico to ‘learn from their mistakes’ with respect to the agrarian reform, and when, in March 1954, the United States sponsored a transparently anti-Guatemalan motion at the Organization of American States, the MNR gave its vote, albeit reluctantly. Three months later, in the wake of the counter-revolutionary overthrow of Arbenz, the COB leader, Juan Lechín, told La Paz factory workers, ‘The events in Guatemala are the most cruel but they also offer lessons for Bolivian workers’; he added later, ‘we are practical revolutionaries, we've never adopted absurd positions, full of romanticism’.Footnote 48
The Differential Codes of Historical Memory
Alan Knight uses the comparison with Mexico to throw light on the Bolivian experience, but he can also compare the historiography of the Mexican Revolution with those in France and Britain. That would be an impossible undertaking for Bolivia. Yet this impossibility lies not in the slightness of national historiography as a whole; on the contrary, the country may be said to ‘punch well above its weight’ in that respect, with regard to university training (especially the Carrera de Historia at the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés, UMSA), and to national associations such as the Academia Nacional de Historia, Coordinadora de Historia and Asociación de Estudios Bolivianos, each with either allied journals or associated edited collections that appear frequently, if irregularly.Footnote 49 Equally, a republic that was far more important as a colony has retained rich archival sources through expert management, sustaining a civic culture with a sharp historical sensibility through sympathetic and creative publishers such as Werner Guttentag's Los Amigos del Libro and José Antonio Quiroga's Plural.Footnote 50
The lack of a specific canon of revolutionary historiography has much more to do with the simple fact that the Bolivian Revolution did not ‘become historical’ until quite recently. Even in 1985, when the ‘event’ of the MNR's neoliberal U-turn was widely thought to have ended the process of the State of 1952, the very preponderance of that ‘historic’ party paradoxically impeded history-writing. However, one can argue that the process had already begun at this point. It can be traced to the years 1978–83, when many of the intellectuals exiled by the Banzer regime returned to contribute to the process of democratisation and often to apply the academic knowledge and skills acquired abroad, only to be driven out again by the García Meza coup of 1980. The exiles were thereby obliged to reflect afresh upon a range of compacted experiences, many of which upset the standard Marxist-Leninist paradigm as much as those of liberal democracy and radical nationalism. The search for locally pertinent and fruitful permutations of these global currents, and a particular concern with their historicity, is fully evident in the trail-blazing collection Bolivia hoy, edited by Zavaleta in Mexico for Siglo XXI and published in the wake of a still undervalued return to constitutional government in October 1982.Footnote 51 Little in that volume was of a markedly original factual nature, but it laid down a set of innovative, sometimes analytically taxing interpretative proposals which could only be taken forward in any significant manner with new empirical research. As a result, the return of the freedom to study, speak and write about the difficulties as well as the achievements of the past coincided quite closely with a new, politically motivated approach to history as well as growing opportunities for postgraduate study abroad.
None of this, of course, closed down the residual antiquarianism practised by a clutch of industrious letrados, from whom Sánchez de Lozada proudly excluded himself.Footnote 52 Neither did it put a conclusive end to the stuttering tradition of MNR anniversarialism. Indeed, in 2002, a lavishly illustrated two-volume commemorative study was published by the MNR thanks to the support of the foundation named after Huáscar Cajías, who himself had written, with studied ambiguity, that the party had ‘introduced order into repressive anarchy … adding to the traditional, primitive and temperamental beatings the advances of modern science.’Footnote 53
Although a practised iconoclast such as Alison Spedding could decry the practice of history as ‘a tool of domination’ and ostensibly delight in the burning of the congressional papers in the riots of February 2003 (eventually saved by the UMSA history students), this was as half-hearted a stance as it was anarchic.Footnote 54 The MNR was indisputably a dominating force when in power – a decade and two elections after the revolution it controlled all the seats in the senate and 80 per cent of those in the lower house, and had suppressed seven falangista ‘revolts’; in the words of the now exiled former foreign minister Walter Guevara, ‘telephones are tapped, mail is opened as a matter of course, the press has learned to be discreet’.Footnote 55 However, the party never succeeded in establishing an authoritative stamp on the historical record after 1952. It certainly had tried to do so from the moment it issued a folio-sized, photograph-laden Album de la Revolución on the second anniversary, edited by José Fellmann Velarde, whose semi-official, three-volume Historia de Bolivia (1968–70) did retain some popular influence in the 1970s. Silvia Rivera depicts this text as seeking to ‘westernise’ the interpretation of Bolivian socio-political development, but she does not show that, outside of circles predisposed to such a message, it was anything more than a rather laboured reference.Footnote 56 Fellmann was an indefatigable polemicist, but his history was really a narrative elaboration on Carlos Montenegro's foundational programme, Nacionalismo y coloniaje (1943). He failed either to impose an enduring high-school curriculum, an outcome likely to be shared by the efforts of the MAS in 2012, or to write the decisive ‘novel of the revolution’. This latter failure was one shared by the more talented Augusto Céspedes, whose trajectory after 1952 was as a placeman and winner of official literary prizes and whose best imaginative writing drew on the Chaco War and preceded the revolution, bearing out the contention of Salvador Romero that the MNR had really conquered public opinion in the sexenio of 1946–52 and had little of substance to add to such a denunciatory platform once in office.Footnote 57
There is some irony in the fact that, albeit in and out of exile and ever on the margins of official recognition, Rivera herself proved more successful than Fellmann in propagating a notion of the Bolivian past both within and beyond the country. This influence came about partly through her chapter in Bolivia hoy, but much more emphatically in Oprimidos pero no vencidos, published the following year. This text of 200 pages elaborated the twentieth-century history of indigenous mobilisation and the development of Katarismo, and its seven-page ‘final reflections’ proposed, almost as a throwaway line, the notion of ‘long-’ and ‘short-memory’ as effective markers for the indigenous ‘moment’ of Tupaj Katari's rising in 1781 and the creole–mestizo State of 1952. Translated into English in 1987 and Japanese in 1998, the book was reissued in a fourth edition in 2003 with a vivid new preface written by the author in the midst of the killings of October.Footnote 58 Its influence was undoubtedly magnified by the simultaneous use of the long- and short-memory motifs by Xavier Albó, whose work on the indigenist movement was also translated into English, and, with a comparable paradox, helped to westernise knowledge of the anti-Western postulates of Katarismo.Footnote 59 Albó uses the term ‘great arc’ to depict this politico-chronological trajectory, within which local historiography has revived the notion of ‘cycles’ (Rivera) and ‘horizons’ (Hylton and Thomson); this reflects the influence of Max Uhle's pre-colonial periodisation, which interspersed phases of state unification with periods (intermedios) of decentralisation.Footnote 60
With memory studies having undergone such sophisticated development in the years since Rivera's book appeared, so simple a dichotomy based on differential chronological depth and ideological antagonism might be thought intellectually unrewarding.Footnote 61 It is certainly Katarista in conjugation and has enjoyed appreciable political success, which puts its interpretative value in a distinct light. At least until the ‘wars’ of the twenty-first century (of water in 2000, and gas in 2003), the memory dyad is as much a hortatory postulate as a historical assertion of some prior ‘metabolisation’ (Zavaleta) of what might be deemed ‘deep’ or ‘utopian’ time. Moreover, Hylton suggests that, while in recent years this might be the positive initiative of indigenous activists, previously it could just as easily have resulted from a ‘great fear’ on the part of creoles. Having worked through some 6,000 documents from the 1899 Federal Revolution, often identified as the peak moment of racial antagonism after 1781, he could find no instance at all of Aymara leaders invoking Tupaj Katari and very few of the use of the pejorative term q'ara for creole-mestizos, but quite a few of Spanish colonial titles.Footnote 62 Likewise, Ximena Soruco has identified creole rhetoric after 1899 about the risks of a race war as the key driver for a racist culture in both the highlands and Santa Cruz.Footnote 63
In the present context we are more interested in ‘short-memory’ and the indigenista critique of 1952. Over the course of almost 30 years this has developed along a variety of lines in both scholarly and popular voices, but at its heart lies the vision depicted by Rivera as she drafted the introduction to the fourth edition of Oprimidos in October 2003: ‘All the liberal promises opened by the Revolution of 1952 – that of the full political participation of the Indians and women, of economic sovereignty and self-sufficiency in basic goods – have been shown to be sleights of hand, laying bare the colonial structures that uphold the Bolivian state.’Footnote 64 This condition had been progressively revealed by a strategic failure: ‘One of the fundamental conditions generated by the Revolution of 1952 was the failure of its project of cultural homogenisation … The Indian was to disappear with mestizaje, education, migration to the urban centres and the division of the communities.’Footnote 65 The failure, however, was not simply that of the MNR. The traditional Left was no less culpable: ‘The idea itself of mestizaje proposed by the MNR – and unquestioned both now and then by the Left – presupposed unilateral conformity with the western values, language and manner of thinking of the creoles, excluding all forms of multiculturalism and multilingualism.’Footnote 66
For Albó, like Rivera, the resistance by Eurocentric leftists took various forms but was probably most acute within the orbit of the union movement, with the Katarista-led Confederación Sindical Única de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia (Trade Union Confederation of Rural Workers of Bolivia, CSUTCB) being denied all but a tokenistic presence within the COB – even after the jornadas of 1979 and the indisputably steadfast leadership of the COB itself by Jenaro Flores, a pioneer of the Katarista movement, under the dictatorship – and being actively rebuffed by the UDP government of 1982–5.Footnote 67 When the MNR had first been in power this offensive on the traditional ayllu had been channelled through the agrarian reform, showcased as a core revolutionary triumph; thereafter it had taken the form of military clientelism (1964–74) under the Pacto Militar-Campesino, the breaking up of which had laid the basis of modern Katarismo.Footnote 68
The picture which emerges, then, is rather complicated, and does not bear out the idea of a subaltern indigenous mass rising up, albeit a little belatedly, to join its urban proletariat ally in a clear-eyed repudiation of conservative dictatorship and liberal economics. Writing specifically about northern Potosí, Rivera, who qualifies its application to Cochabamba, draws out the contradiction:
[For] the ayllus, any act of courtesy or acquiescence to the state was feasible so long as two key elements were not touched: the tributary regime and the ayllu land tenure system … Because of this, as well as the limited significance of behaviour based on ‘individual free will’, the ayllus of northern Potosí adopted an attitude of apparent docility, voting for all officially-backed candidates … With universal suffrage, they remained second-class citizens, in need of mestizo leadership …Footnote 69
A further complication arose when Katarismo had to confront such dilemmas in practical terms on regional and national scales. Generally united from the mid-1970s until 1985, the movement thereafter divided under this stress, with one important faction under Víctor Hugo Cárdenas, vice-president to Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada in 1993–7, adopting an approach of ‘both eyes’ whereby the identity and interests of indigeneity were complemented by the need to engage with the liberal state and capitalist economy. After 2003 that strand was so definitively out of favour that it has not received the serious reappraisal it deserves. Of course, as Albó notes, Cárdenas provided the ‘new MNR’ with ‘an infusion of symbolic capital in altering the image of the country’.Footnote 70 Equally, it could be objected that the constitutional reforms to make Bolivia a ‘pluricultural’ state and the ever-controversial Ley de Participación Popular (Law of Popular Participation, LPP; both 1994), as well as the 1996 Ley INRA agrarian reform, were shallow public relations gestures, if not completely cynical marketing manoeuvres. The polemics readily homed in on such issues because there existed an eminently approachable neatness in the MNR's ‘U-turn’ from developmentalist state to neoliberal restructuring being matched by an opportunistic Katarista mortgaging of the status of indio alzado to become indios permitidos.Footnote 71 Yet, as Rivera shows, Cárdenas was not breaking traditional indigenous ranks in every respect. It was his government that introduced the Tierra Comunitaria de Origen (Native Community Lands, TCO) into the 1996 agrarian reform, and it was Evo Morales, practising a sindicalismo that derives from 1952 (and the LPP), who opposed it, 15 years before the controversy over the road through the TIPNIS national park that he subsequently promoted in the name of development.Footnote 72
Some of the starker early claims of Katarismo have themselves come under criticism, in general with respect to the nature of mestizaje and in particular to the experience of Cochabamba, which has been distinct from that of the altiplano. Since 2005 the whole notion of mestizaje as a paradigm for domination has come under political question, from both those who are suspicious of the promiscuously pious appropriation of indigenista rhetoric and those who simply see it as flawed by monolithic communitarianism.Footnote 73 The much publicised ‘fact’ that over 60 per cent of the Bolivian population is indigenous derives from the 2001 census, which, tellingly, did not ask respondents whether they wished to self-identify as mestizo.Footnote 74 That would appear to be more than a passing omission, given almost universal acceptance of Albó's view that racial and ethnic conflict ‘is the oldest and most enduring conditioning factor for political and social formation in Bolivia. Neither biological mestizaje during the colonial period nor the subsequent period of cultural mestizaje, which after 1952 became the ideological backdrop of Bolivian national identity, has managed to replace it.’Footnote 75 Recent historiography has yielded rich empirical and analytical fruit for both periods, with Rivera's own work, among others, raising important issues about the very integrity of the term itself.Footnote 76 Even if we take Evo Morales as an iconic replacement for the MNR's generic campesino, neither his identity nor his behaviour are relieved of a plethora of contradictions.
René Zavaleta, himself an Orureño and so bestowed with ‘both eyes’ for looking along the altiplano and down the valleys, once noted in a footnote the Janus-like nature of Cochabamba, with its lower valley full of small farms and minifundia and its upper valley still firmly part of the communal culture and political economy, in the post-Columbian development of the central Andes. That note was stimulated by the work of Brooke Larson, whose own researches reach up until the early twentieth century but have also influenced the work of José Gordillo on the post-1952 experience in the Cochabamba valley. Gordillo's interpretation, strongly founded on oral history, raises a key caveat to the regnant Katarista outlook:
Rivera thinks that the revolutionary state (a repository of central power) designs, deploys and executes the policies of the revolution … Our study revises the history of the post-revolutionary campesino movements in the Cochabamba valley that is critical of the state-centred perspective. We argue that the campesinos were dynamic actors in the revolutionary process and that their incorporation in the process … transformed their subjectivity, making them autonomous social and political actors.Footnote 77
Correspondingly, Laura Gotkowitz, in one of the leading revisionist studies of the origins of the revolution, identifies indigenous initiative as being far more important than recognised by earlier scholarship, which she persuasively shows to have masked the impetus of the cochabambino rural mobilisation.Footnote 78 With that ‘hidden history’ now much restored and with a more nuanced knowledge of conditions in the valley throughout the 1950s, it is hard to accept that the urban movimientistas were able simply to impose a hybridising clientelism; it had to be negotiated with powerful forces for whom mestizaje was by no means an alien, identity-effacing phenomenon.
The Limits of Continuity
In August 1984, just a year after they had collaborated on Bolivia hoy, Luis H. Antezana wrote the prologue for the first edition of Silvia Rivera's Oprimidos. Antezana identified ‘long memory’ as constituting the axis of continuity in social struggle, in that it represented an accumulated, agency-driven disarticulation of the creole colonial system. ‘Short memory’, by contrast, being born of the 1952 state, was shared between campesinos and workers and much less stable, particularly now that the state was manifestly in crisis. For Antezana this presaged a change, one that would, in fact, come about in one distinct (liberal) form less than a year after he wrote, and in another (post-Katarista) guise some 20 years later under Evo Morales:
There emerges an image – I say ‘image’ because I find it hard to propose a relevant concept – in which the crisis of the 1952 State would find a popular alternative in the sense that its historical and ideological limits are displaced – broken – in a qualitative and quantitative way, opening up a broader project, driven by the inherent content of the ‘long memory’ of the campesino, with its nucleus being the differential valorisation of the native societies and cultures within Bolivian life as a whole.Footnote 79
Pablo Regalsky, writing at the end of the first MAS administration 25 years later, felt obliged to explain at some length ‘why 2006 is not 1952’. For Regalsky, ‘the MAS … is attempting to balance indigenous demands with those of the dominant and still powerful landowning class in a new configuration of the state’. This was not totally dissimilar to the State of 1952, but neither was it the same, because the outside world had changed so dramatically, even if ‘ethnification underlines the reaffirmation of the commons in the reproduction of the rural indigenous community’.Footnote 80
That tension between continuity and rupture that both writers emphasise lies at the heart of modern Bolivian life. The forces of continuity, or at least of an enduring similarity and comparability, remain palpable. The economic pressures that prompted the MAS to decree an increase in retail oil prices (a gasolinazo) in December 2010 are essentially the same as those that lay behind Banzer's January 1974 reduction of food subsidies, awakening Katarismo, and those that compelled Víctor Paz to raise retail petrol prices in October 1961, causing widespread riots.Footnote 81 The workers of the Manaco shoe factory that began the protests in 1974 were from the same plant as those who triggered the Water War of 2000. The miners of Huanuni, so central to violent readjustment of the revolutionary state in 1958–9, occupied a different universe, but their successors played out a quite similar conflict between goods and labour in the public and private sectors in 2006. When, in 1985, Jeffrey Sachs identified the logical consequence of hyperinflation to be the collapse of the country's fiscal system, he was identifying a particularly acute problem, but the problem itself was little different from those diagnosed by earlier ‘money doctors’, from Kemmerer to Bohan to Eder.Footnote 82
Yet Regalsky is right in more than common sense. The case for continuity can be compelling, but it also readily descends into a teleological mantra. If Evo Morales and the MAS may be characterised as post-Katarista as well as post-MNR, this is precisely because of the experience of change, even if not all the lessons of the past have been recognised or learned. The very hybridity of the government since 2005 can be compared with the uneasy MNR–COB alliance of 1952–6, and the rhetorical reach of the MAS may readily fall within what Antezana terms ‘nacionalismo revolucionario’. Yet 60 years later, it could in no sense be confused, as was the MNR, with either a fascist or a communist repertoire. The recomposition of the ideologuema of 2003 had little to do with that of the 1930s and what some would deem a shared ‘totalitarian’ critique of liberalism.Footnote 83 The MNR looked back to the Chaco War, the MAS to Decree 21060; the syncretism might well be comparably perplexing, but it did not comprise the same elements.
In regional terms the MNR's developmentalism was focused on Santa Cruz, which it promoted with a big new road, continued abundance of subsidies and, amidst some quite rowdy party activism at the ungentle hands of the Sandoval Morón clan, a stream of blandishments to assuage a ‘tropicalist’ frontier temper calibrated to cattle-raising, beauty queens and arriviste kitsch.Footnote 84 Even in 2002 Sánchez de Lozada could celebrate the Revolución Nacional in Santa Cruz through ‘Californisation’.
Little of that applied to or worked for the MAS, which only gained a foothold in the Oriente through the migration of Andean people and which was slow and reluctant to engage with a camba discourse so disingenuously infused with colonialism. In 2008 the Cruceño elite came as close as ever to provoking regional secession on ‘civilisational’ grounds from an Andean Bolivia, and there was sufficient North American involvement in that episode to prompt the expulsion of the US ambassador. One might even suspect that had the 2002 attempted putsch against Chávez in Venezuela not collapsed so ignominiously, something similar could have been essayed against Morales. However, a convincing case has been made that, even before 2005, the Cruceño elite lacked a capacity for hegemony at a national level, and that by cleaving to the predicates of a nación camba it was in some danger of being locked out of even regional political leadership.Footnote 85
In that same vein, the MNR might initially have experienced a tense relationship with Washington, but once the United States had signed a contract to purchase tin, this warmed considerably. The Bolivian government was soon buying full-page advertisements in the New York Times extolling the virtues of Andean trout-fishing, ‘weird music’ and even beauty queens in addition to archaeological riches and the mandatory free economy. The MAS, as we have seen, found it difficult to uphold cordial relations with the North Americans, even though the level of US intromission was of a similar order to that seen in the 1950s and 1960s. The ‘oscillations’ between good times and bad were of a different order and incidence. In 1953, US Ambassador Edward Sparks reported not only that the MNR was not communist but also that the degeneration of the Bolivian economy under the traditional elite made the party's ‘revolutionary and nationalistic attitudes understandable … and it is fortunate that its leadership is not narrowly doctrinaire or sectarian’. By contrast, in March 2006 Ambassador David Greenlee told the State Department that Evo Morales was ‘a leader with strong anti-democratic tendencies; over the years he has been known to bribe, threaten, and even physically intimidate anyone who stood in his way’.Footnote 86
As recent scholarship on US–Bolivian relations in the 1950s and 1960s has shown, the extraordinary asymmetry in power between Washington and La Paz did not simplify or polarise matters, as some easy attitudes assume on the basis of extrapolating wider Cold War or imperialist ‘logics’.Footnote 87 Apart from anything else, the 1952 revolution required a rapid improvement in the quality of the US embassy, and it is no coincidence that Philip Bonsal, appointed to La Paz in March 1957, was on his way to Havana within two years. In key respects the US response to the Bolivian Revolution represented a strategic alternative to that taken to Guatemala beforehand and Cuba thereafter; it certainly avoided the medium- and long-term diplomatic reverses suffered by Washington in those cases. The MNR indubitably played its role in that diplomatic pirouette, partly because it had to, and partly because it had been taught a very severe lesson in the 1940s. Few of these factors applied to the same degree in the first years of the twenty-first century. One would, moreover, have to admit that the quality of the senior diplomats dispatched south by the State Department simply did not match the challenge they faced.
Conclusion: The Limits of Comparison
René Zavaleta sought to capture the national-popular essence of the State of 1952 in a pithy epithet: ‘You belong to one mode of production, and I to another, but neither you nor I are the same after the Battle of Nanawa [July 1933, in the Chaco War]; Nanawa is what you and I share.’Footnote 88 None of the front-line MNR leaders fought at Nanawa, but that is not the point; they were able to carry forward its symbolism. Something similar might be said some 60 years after the revolution: very different social classes and political forces were brought together by the water and gas ‘wars’. While these might lack the bonding longevity of the Chaco War, they certainly constitute a historic watershed, and they already constitute a reformulated ‘short memory’. In October 2003 Evo Morales was actually in Geneva, but the MAS, through its own agency, the errors of its opponents and the force of circumstance, proved capable of amalgamating an alliance out of such experiences. Yet, as Rafael Archondo has shown, the MAS envelops two quite distinct currents: one, nationalist, statist and syndicalist; the other, ethnicist and autonomist (and one might wish to argue the distinctiveness of those supporters of erstwhile ‘populist’ movements led by Carlos Palenque and Max Fernández). Here there are sharp tensions, and often the only mediation seems to reside in the person of Evo Morales.Footnote 89
This is a marked difference with the experience of the MNR, which, while always under the intellectual influence of Víctor Paz Estenssoro, did not always rely upon his personal presence, style or even ideological affinities. With Lechín to the left, Guevara Arze to the right and Siles providing a vitally pragmatic and mobile centre, there was, at least for a while, potential for internal compensation as well as competition. Five years after the establishment of the State of 1952 – the equivalent period between the MAS electoral victory of December 2005 and the gasolinazo of December 2010 – the MNR was starting to exhibit serious internal tensions. But it took several more years and Víctor Paz's insistence upon a second re-election in 1964 fully to destroy party unity and to provoke the military coup that effectively ended civilian rule for 21 years. Evo Morales faces no sharp personal competition, but so also does he lack collaboration. The MAS is manifestly not set to be as sustainable as the MNR (formed in 1941, first in cabinet in 1944), but just as the State of 1952 was not limited to the MNR, so is the ‘Refoundation’ of Bolivia bigger than the MAS, which in turn is not reducible to Evo Morales.