Rhythms of the Pachakuti: Indigenous Uprising and State Power in Bolivia (New Ecologies for the Twenty-First Century) - Softcover

Gutiérrez Aguilar, Raquel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 082235604X ISBN 13: 9780822356042

Publisher: Duke University Press, 2014

Synopsis

In the indigenous Andean language of Aymara, pachakuti refers to the subversion and transformation of social relations. Between 2000 and 2005, Bolivia was radically transformed by a series of popular indigenous uprisings against the country's neoliberal and antidemocratic policies. In Rhythms of the Pachakuti, Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar documents these mass collective actions, tracing the internal dynamics of such disruptions to consider how motivation and execution incite political change.

"In Rhythms of the Pachakuti we can sense the reverberations of an extraordinary historical process that took place in Bolivia at the start of the twenty-first century. The book is the product of Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar's political engagement in that historical process. . . . Though of Mexican nationality, [she] was intimately involved in Bolivian politics for many years and acquired a quasi-legendary status there as an intense, brilliant activist and radical intellectual. . . . [Her account is] . . . itself a revolutionary document. . . . Rhythms of the Pachakuti deserves to stand as a key text in the international literature of radicalism and emancipatory politics in the new century."—Sinclair Thomson, from the foreword

About this title

About the Author

Raquel Gutierrez Aguilar is Professor of Sociology at the Autonomous University of Puebla.

Sinclair Thomson is Associate Professor of History at New York University.

Stacey Alba D. Skar is Associate Professor of Spanish at Western Connecticut State University.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Rhythms of the Pachakuti

Indigenous Uprising and State Power in Bolivia

By Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar, Stacey Alba D. Skar

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2014 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8223-5604-2

Contents

Foreword: Beyond the Old Order of Things, Sinclair Thomson, 
Preface, 
Acknowledgments, 
Part I. Community Uprisings and Grassroots Democratization, 
Chapter 1. The Coalition for the Defense of Water and Life: The Massive Public Defiance of State Order, 
Chapter 2. Aymara Roadblocks in La Paz: Community as a Mobilizing Force, 
Chapter 3. The Disputed Territories of the Chapare: The Coca Growers' Struggles from 2000 to 2003, 
Part II. From Governmental Collapse to Pachakuti's Suspension, 2003–2005, 
Chapter 4. Insurgent Politics: The Rebellious Year of 2003, 
Chapter 5. Compromises and "Catastrophic Balance": The Confusing Year of 2004, 
Chapter 6. The Growing Tension between Emancipation, Autonomy, Self-Governance, and State Reconstitution in 2005, 
Conclusion: Final Reflections, 
Appendix 1: Methodological Approach, 
Appendix 2: Positions of the Three Most Important Social Voices, 
Notes, 
References, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

The Coalition for the Defense of Water and Life

The Massive Public Defiance of State Order

In this chapter I will present a version of how the event known as the Water War occurred in Bolivia. I will also explain Cochabamba's regional political organization known as the Coalition for the Defense of Water and Life (Coordinadora de la Defensa del Agua y de la Vida), also called La Coordinadora, which is how I will refer to it here. The Water War marks the beginning of the Bolivian people's struggle to regain social agency against the plundering of public resources, and it is a key event in the struggle to recover common property, which exists beyond the state. Therefore, I will begin here.

La Coordinadora and the Water War

La Coordinadora was established on November 12, 1999, in a meeting convened by the Departmental Federation of Irrigation Farmer Organizations (FEDECOR) from Cochabamba. This association's members are locally known as regantes, farmers with irrigation rights. The meeting was held at the headquarters of the Federation of Industrialists of Cochabamba, which includes participation from different professionals and engineers in the region, members of the Bar Association and Engineering Association, as well as environmentalists. Two items brought them together. The first was the scandalous contract that conceded the service of water and sewer systems in the city of Cochabamba and the surrounding area to the Aguas del Tunari consortium, which was a local subsidiary of the Bechtel transnational corporation. The second was the passage of Law 2029 for Water and Sewer. This law established the regulatory framework to seize water systems management from local and municipal control in order to transfer it to private hands and regulate it top-down from a state structure known as the Water Superintendency.

Three sectors were represented there: peasant farmers dependent on irrigation, industrialists, and environmentalists. Each sector had its own history of defending water rights and collective—community and labor—rights, and they had all been critical of liberal state mechanisms for seizing and privatizing resources that had once been public. La Coordinadora was thus established as a space for coordination and struggle. Its purpose was to prevent the seizure of water, understood as a public resource and managed independently by farmers who used it for irrigation, and privatization of the water supply system for the distribution of drinking water, which had always been under municipal control. La Coordinadora also opposed the new legal frameworks that regulated water through concessions granted by a top-down, unmanageable state entity: the Water Superintendency.

Therefore, since its inception, La Coordinadora constituted a space to bring diverse people together. Faced with certain governmental decisions, these people were forced to join forces to defend water, a basic shared necessity. Given that each of the affected sectors suffered the aggression differently, they each understood the threat of Law 2029 and the concession of control and distribution of drinking water in a different way. However, founding La Coordinadora opened up a space for planning par excellence. First, they managed to define as a group the unique way in which each sector was affected by what the government was imposing. Second, they viewed the way that each sector endured this state imposition as nothing more than a particular manifestation of the pervasive aggression directed at all of them and at society in general. From this "basic consensus," La Coordinadora, as a group, managed to develop a way to overcome the aggression it faced. This was La Coordinadora's most important contribution to the legacy of Bolivia's recent struggle.

Let's review briefly La Coordinadora's three sectors and each one's contribution, as this will help us answer who constituted La Coordinadora. I think this question presents a better method for an in-depth understanding of the event's social meaning, rather than the question "what is La Coordinadora"; however, this is not meant to negate the validity of the other approach for studying social reality in certain contexts.

The Irrigators Organized in FEDECOR

La Coordinadora's principal social force, since its inception during the Water War and for several years thereafter, was the peasant irrigators from the four areas that comprise the Department of Cochabamba's interandean valley region.

The irrigators were members of FEDECOR since 1997, belonging to organizations to defend and manage water for irrigation since 1992. They represent the vast majority of men and women in Cochabamba's valleys who live and work within a community framework largely defined by domestic units.

In Cochabamba's valleys there exists a local ancestral knowledge for using, managing, and protecting water. It is based on a complex and varied mosaic of "uses and customs" primarily founded on the autonomy to regulate water usage according to complicated supra-community agreements. Generated in meetings, these agreements are obligatory for anyone who depends on and who has rights to use a common water source. Omar Fernández and Carmen Peredo, important protagonists for the defense of water, affirm the following in relation to "the types of water rights": "The irrigators established various types of water rights, reflected in the different relationships surrounding access to it and its use. In the same way, within each irrigation system, the irrigators have a process of defining and consolidating their water rights over time. Each irrigating family has rights to water, expressed in water 'rotations,' or regular access to water on a predetermined schedule. The requirements are defined based on the characteristics of the rights" (Peredo, Crespo, and Fernández 2001, 12).

Since approximately 1990, the Bolivian State, some NGOs and certain "development assistance" corporations, such as the German GTZ, began an extensive evaluation of the Cochabamba valley's hydraulic resources. They were essentially promoting "projects for the modernization of irrigation systems." These are designed top-down, following a technocratic rationality. Examples of this are the Inter-valley Irrigation Program sponsored by the departmental government and backed with German funding. It planned to consolidate an irrigation system in Totora Kocha, a reservoir-lake in the Cordillera Tiraque mountains. Another was the Laka Laka Irrigation System, whose water source is the Calicanto River (Peredo, Crespo, and Fernández 2001, 14). The farmers from the valley region accepted the construction, expansion, and maintenance of the irrigation systems. However, from the beginning, their particular form of water resource management, based on ancient Andean practices of land and water use under communal control, clashed with modern administrative logic.

At the same time, due to Cochabamba's urban growth, the authorities sought a corresponding expansion of the water supply for urban use. Their intended use for the water, which is very scarce in the region, sparked conflict between various levels of government bureaucrats and agrarian users of water sources in the nearby valleys. Omar Fernández explains it as follows:

We irrigators did not have a formal organization. Well, you could say that there were informal organizations, but they were not even part of the peasant union. They existed with their own uses and customs, with their own distribution, etc. But they had not managed to come together. So, I was with the irrigators from Tiquipaya, and we asked ourselves: why can't we work together? Besides, laws started appearing since about 1985, and we noticed that those laws were beginning to affect us. For that and other reasons, we joined forces. Another strong motivation to come together has been that the city of Cochabamba has planned to drill wells in our communities to take water to Cochabamba, drinkable water, and this has also caused the overexploitation of underground water sources, leading to environmental damage. In many of our communities, the first thing that has happened is that they have lost their natural springs. For us, the springs are the water's eyes emerging from the land. There were irrigation systems flowing from those springs as well. But with what they have done making wells, those water's eyes have dried up and the humidity has also dropped.... That was the first impact on us. (Qtd. in Ceceña 2002, 52)

Regarding the organization of FEDECOR, Omar Fernández suggests the following: "After the Agrarian Reform (1953), the peasants' water usage respected the Andean systems of 'mitas and suyus.' Relationships of reciprocity and fairness were widespread, including communitarian work in the reservoirs or for improving irrigation systems defined according to mitas or suyus. This process generated organizations of irrigators who work under an organic structure; the community assembly is the final authority. They were autonomous and followed a path toward consolidation, finally arriving at a matrix organization: the Departmental Federation of Irrigation Farmer Organizations (FEDECOR)" (Peredo, Crespo, and Fernández 2001, 18).

Primarily an agrarian water management organization, FEDECOR had dedicated eight years between 1992 and 2000 to reconstructing ancient communitarian practices for water management. It also provided information about these practices, simultaneously giving them "legal existence" and a modern "name": the Irrigators' Federation, with legal status. In its statutes, agreed upon in 1997, FEDECOR established itself as "the matrix organization for all the systems and irrigation organizations in the Cochabamba valleys whose principal purpose is the integral management of water resources through uses and customs." According to Carmen Peredo, this means "respect for natural authorities, for the communitarian way of solving problems of access to water or to improving its infrastructure, respect for water rights and distribution" (Peredo, Crespo, and Fernández 2001, 57). Therefore, at least since 1997, which is three years before the Water War, FEDECOR had become an official voice in the departmental and national government for questions and problems related to water, hydraulic projects, irrigation systems, and the like. Moreover, since that time, two important FEDECOR leaders, Omar Fernández and Carmen Peredo, were systematically studying the traditional system of water usage. Omar Fernández presented "The Relationship between Land and Water in Tiquipaya's Peasant Economy" as his thesis for graduation at the Universidad Mayor de San Simón (UMSS), the regional public institution of higher education. In 2000 Peredo also presented a law thesis at UMSS titled "Rules Proposal for the Applicability of Law 2066 Based on Uses and Customs." In other words, by the year 2000, FEDECOR had already accumulated extensive organizational and investigative efforts.

Furthermore, the irrigators also led at least three great mobilizations in the period immediately prior to the Water War:

1. On August 21, 1998, with a gathering of nearly twenty thousand irrigators, and coinciding with a coca farmers' protest that included Evo Morales's participation, the irrigators presented Cochabamba's parliament with a legal proposal for regulating water according to its uses and customs.

2. At the end of 1998, the so-called Well War occurred when inhabitants of the central valley refused to allow the Municipal Service for Drinking Water Company (SEMAPA) to drill a series of deep wells, which opened a space for negotiation.

3. Finally, on November 4, 1999, roads were blocked for twenty-four hours in the area around Vinto and toward Sacaba. The army intervened militarily in the roadblock, meeting with resistance from the irrigators. Specifically after that roadblock on November 4 and the repression that followed, La Coordinadora was founded on the twelfth of that same month. (Interview with Omar Fernández in Ceceña 2002, 58–60)

The Cochabamba Federation of Factory Workers

While the irrigation farmers constituted the principal force behind La Coordinadora in terms of organization, capacity for mobilization, and knowledge of the water issue, Oscar Olivera and the Cochabamba Federation of Factory Workers (FTFC)—known simply as the Factory Workers (Los Fabriles)—contributed their own resources. This included contacts with the press and intellectual media, their ability to present problems publicly, and their widespread moral authority.

The FTFC, affiliated with the General Confederation of Factory Workers of Bolivia and the Workers' Central of the Department of Cochabamba, and incorporated as such into the Bolivian Workers' Central, was an anomaly within Bolivia's classic union framework at the end of the twentieth century. As in all parts of the world, neoliberal reforms inflicted a systematic attack on labor rights that dramatically weakened traditional union structures (see Gutiérrez Aguilar 1998; García Linera 1999). However, in Cochabamba, a small-scale organization had received increasing attention at least since 1997. This was the FTFC and in particular their executive secretary Oscar Olivera.

Several years prior to 2000, Oscar Olivera began a process of visualizing, organizing, and denouncing precarious work, the so-called labor flexibilization and the anomalous forms of subcontracting that are common in a large number of work centers. Above all, this made it possible for him to erode the liberal discourse of "modernization" and "progress" associated with neoliberal reforms and the sudden loss of collective bargaining and labor rights. Based on a network of efforts with intellectuals and youth, the FTFCcreated the Group of Work and Support for Cochabamba Factory Workers, which was dedicated to studying and systematizing work conditions in the region's factories and shops. Olivera, for his part as a union leader, invited the press to make "surprise visits" to shops and factories where serious violations to workers' rights had been documented. In this way he denounced the most extraordinary abuses. All these efforts aimed at exploring labor conditions under the neoliberal order gave Olivera insight into the concrete forms of family, artisan, and organized labor in small shops. These three forms of labor constituted the majority of the workforce in the region at a time when factories were being drained by layoffs and irregular contracting, which, for that very reason, caused the union structures to lose their bargaining power with the state.

Throughout 1998 and 1999, Olivera held regular press conferences on the deplorable working conditions faced by the population, publically denouncing the worst labor rights violations. These press conferences made him a critical, known, and credible expert on "the effects" of neoliberalism in Bolivia. At the same time, they afforded the factory workers a much more precise understanding of what was happening in society in general, such as the plundering and looting that took a toll on the entire population in various ways.

Furthermore, for three decades the FTFC controlled certain material resources, which were put at the disposal of the mobilized population during the Water War. They included a union headquarters in the city's main plaza, where La Coordinadora would work for years; a factory workers' sport complex, where various open meetings took place in an actual stadium; and another group of properties that were put at the disposal of different sectors of the population—whether they were unionized factory workers or not—who were fighting in the struggle to defend water. This fact, occurring from the year 2000 onward, marked true innovation in union behavior, as it went against general procedures for workers who, following labor-union standards, only utilize assets at their disposal to defend their own members. TheFTFC opened its spaces so that the "simple and hard-working" population as a whole, with or without a formal contract, affiliated with a union or not, could have access to them. Oscar Olivera affirms the following:

Organically, the working class has been completely debilitated in many parts of the world—and particularly in Latin America. There are fewer and fewer workers organized in labor unions. More than an organic participation of factory workers going out into the street and blocking roads to protest along with other sectors, our contribution has been as a reference.... The Coalition for the Defense of Water and Life is an organization that is a kind of citizen's union. It brings together various social sectors, both from the city as well as from rural areas. It differs from traditional unions because, although it is similar to a traditional labor union, it is more expansive to include the entire society. (Ceceña 2002, 68; emphasis added)

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 082235604X
• ISBN 13: 9780822356042
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336