Third World Thematics: A TWQ Journal

ISSN: 2380-2014 (Print) 2379-9978 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rtwt20

Ontological disputes between Indigenous

communities and the state in Bolivia

Cristina Rojas

To cite this article: Cristina Rojas (2018): Ontological disputes between Indigenous
communities and the state in Bolivia, Third World Thematics: A TWQ Journal, DOI:
10.1080/23802014.2018.1533427

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/23802014.2018.1533427

Published online: 31 Oct 2018.

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THIRD WORLD THEMATICS: A TWQ JOURNAL
https://doi.org/10.1080/23802014.2018.1533427

Ontological disputes between Indigenous communities and

the state in Bolivia
Cristina Rojas
Department of Political Science and Institute of Political Economy, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

A broad consensus exists among scholars about the contributions Received 1 February 2018
of culture to both state formation and the legitimation of state rule. Accepted 28 September 2018
Historically, cultural homogeneity became the language of the KEYWORDS
state, couching ways of world making in a discourse of cultural Bolivia
diversity. Focusing on the disputes about territory in Bolivia, this state
article illustrates how the universalisation of modern territorial territory
practises left no part for Indigenous practises of territory-making. indigeneity
Inspired by the work of Marisol de la Cadena, this article argues that pluriverse
the legitimation of state rule is ‘not only’ a cultural effect but is also Indigenous women
associated with the partition of the sensible into a universal nature
and culturally diversified humanity. Despite this, because
Indigenous practises of territory making ‘exceed’ the limit of what
the state recognises as legitimate, they challenge the limits
imposed upon them, undoing the state and pluriversalising society.
Some of these transformations were enshrined in the 2009 Political
Constitution, whose preface reads that Bolivia ‘left the colonial,
republican and neo-liberal state in the past’. Others, including the
call to depatriarchalisation, did not have a place in the Constitution.

Introduction
A broad consensus exists among scholars about the contributions of culture to both
state formation and the legitimation of state rule.1 Historically, cultural homogeneity
became the language of the state, couching ways of world making in a discourse of
cultural diversity. Focusing on the disputes about territory in Bolivia, this article illus-
trates how the universalisation of modern territorial practises left no part for Indigenous
practises of territory-making. Inspired by the work of Marisol de la Cadena, this article
argues that the legitimation of state rule is ‘not only’ a cultural effect, but instead is also
associated with the partition of the sensible into a universal nature and culturally
diversified humanity.2 Despite this, Indigenous practises of territory making ‘exceed’
the limit of what the state recognises as legitimate, and from this excess they challenge
the limits imposed upon them, undoing the state and pluriversalising society. Some of
these transformations were enshrined in the 2009 Political Constitution whose preface
reads that Bolivia ‘left the colonial, republican and neo-liberal state in the past’. Others,
including the call to depatriarchalisation, did not have a place in the Constitution. This
article explores secondary literature in order to see trends in disputes over territory.

CONTACT Cristina Rojas cristina_rojas@carleton.ca

© 2018 Global South Ltd
2 C. ROJAS

The story of the relations between the state and Indigenous communities is told
in five sections relying on secondary literature, especially the work of Aymara
sociologist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui and Zulema Lehm. The first summarises how
the colonial and republican state legitimated its rule by blurring the links between
territory and culture. The second tells the history of how Quechuas and Aymaras
communities living in Bolivia’s highland and Moxos communities living in the low-
land challenged the limits of the state in defence of their existence. The third
narrative tells how the ‘Unity Pact’ (PU),3 formed in 2004 by Indigenous organisa-
tions from the highland and lowland communities, in a ‘cosmopolitical moment’4
interrupted the state’s monopoly on territorial rule and pluriversalised society. The
fourth section focuses on the ways in which President Evo Morales’ government
employs a strategy to reverse ontological gains into cultural differences through
‘ontological containment’. This strategy is detailed in the government’s response to
the 2010 Indigenous opposition to the government project to construct a road that
crossed the Indigenous Territory of the Isiboro-Sécure Park (TIPNIS), located in the
Moxos territory. The paper concludes that ontological politics, understood as nego-
tiations between worlds, have existed since the times of the colonial occupation. The
novelty of the disputes that erupted in the 1990s was the capacity to interrupt the
modern concept of territory and to undo the coloniality of state rule. The outcome
was not guaranteed and its intended and unintended consequences are on the
table.

Colonialism and the universalisation of territorial rule

This section illustrates how the modern understanding of territory has its foundation in
the nature and culture divide. The imperial expansion into the Americas called for a new
universalism to extend European legal claims to territories beyond European
jurisdiction.5 Posing differences in humans as cultural and separate from territory
facilitated this expansion. This quest for a universal legislation appears in the six-
teenth-century theologian and jurist Francisco de Vitoria’s proposal for an international
law encompassing the Spanish and Indigenous worlds.6 Specifically, he argued that
Indians’ use of reason and government made them bound by the jus gentium.7 At the
same time, he declared Spain a universal culture, as it derived from Christian doctrine.
For Vitoria, the human potential of Indigenous people could only be realised if they
adopted, by force if necessary, the ‘universally applicable practises of the Spaniards’.8 An
encompassing legal universality granted Spain the right to intervene and appropriate
Indigenous territories. He concluded that sovereignty, and waging war, was a Spanish
prerogative, and any attempt to prevent Spain’s penetration of Indigenous territories
was an act of war.
Thomas Hobbes’ and Hugo Grotius’ contributions to state formation deepened the
nature-culture divide. The concept of ‘state of nature’ associated progress with the
presence of a culture that dominates nature, as it happened in Europe.9 Subsequently,
the distance from nature justified European’s claim to Indigenous territories and bodies;
those who do not distance and profit from nature were viewed as failing to be human,
and as such, Europe had the right to wage war against them,10 dispossessing them from
their territory.
 THIRD WORLD THEMATICS: A TWQ JOURNAL 3

Indigenous practises of world making, branded by Hobbes as living in a ‘state of

nature’, were represented as ‘brutish’ and ‘nasty’ as a reminder of the permanent threat
that their lives pose to modern existence. This again justified the use of violence to
contain this threat, to the point that John Locke recommended that the Indigenous
people ‘be destroyed as a Lion or a Tiger, one of those wild Savage beasts, with whom
Men can have no Society nor Security’.11
Congruent with the modern partition of the sensible, the Treaty of Westphalia (1648)
granted European states free reign over the non-European territories. The
Independence, which in the Americas took place in the early nineteenth century, put
an end to political domination, but left intact the partition of the sensible, as reflected in
the programmes to assimilate Indigenous communities into the European civilisation in
the nineteenth century,12 and into development13 in the twentieth century. The quest to
homogenise the nation, establish state sovereignty over the territory, and provide the
state with a monopoly over the common good were founded on cultural differences
between humans and their ontological discontinuity from non-humans’.14

The politics of enacting Indigenous worlds

Indigenous communities’ response to state rule vary according to the practises pursued by
the colonial and republican states and the ways communities built their own history before
and during colonial occupation including territory making practises, relations between men
and women, and between them and nature. The section focuses on the relations formed
around two forms of state rule: the ‘pact of reciprocity’ and ‘reduction pact’.

Exceeding the ‘pact of reciprocity’ between Ayllus and the state

For Aymara sociologist Simón Yampara15 the Ayllu is a ‘cosmological house’ where material
and spiritual energies interact. Territory and Ayllus are co-constituted: ‘Ayllu is territory and
territory is part of life’. This view is shared also by Aymara sociologist Silvia Rivera; for her it is
not ‘the jaqi/runa (human being) that decides who owns a territory, but it is the territory that
dictates the status and ownership of families or individuals working the land’.16
The existence of the Ayllu goes back to the Tawantinsuyu era (Inca Empire) where
men and women lived in a dual and bilateral affiliation with a masculine and a feminine
line of descendants and two perspectives (feminine and masculine). Women co-gov-
erned in the different layers of the Ayllus. According to Rivera, this symbolic order, also
projected to nature and the cosmos, was not equal but a ‘precarious, contentious
equilibrium’ broken by the colonial rule.17
During the reforms of Francisco de Toledo (1569–81), the viceroyalty of Peru, that
included today’s Bolivia, created ‘Two Republics’, República de Españoles and República
de Indios (Republic of Spaniards and Republic of Indians). The legislation of the Two
Republics was resisted and used in both colonial and Republican eras, providing an
example of how Indigenous men and women were brought into colonial relations while
also exceeding this legislation.
The events leading to the 1781 ‘most powerful anti-colonial revolution’ in the
Americas, spearheaded by Tupak Amaru, Tupak Katari, and Bartolina Sisa,18 exemplify
the parallel process of colonialism and patriarchalism as well as the differentiated and
4 C. ROJAS

sometimes unexpected effects of the resistance against both forms of domination.

Colonial rule empowered Indigenous male authorities, the caciques that sided with the
colonial administration, intensifying the violence against the population and especially
against women in the communities. At the same time, while the anti-colonial revolution
was ultimately defeated, it also successfully collapsed the authority of the caciques and,
as a result, strengthened the communal power of Ayllus that debilitated the colonial
civilising missions.19
The transition to the Republican state after the Independence in 1825 continued
and deepened the patriarchal and colonial structures as well as the resistance against
them. Tristan Platt contends that the Toledan ‘reciprocity pact’ continued in the
‘tributary pact’ put in place after Independence in 1825 when communities willingly
accepted the payment in exchange for the state’s protection to continue their
existence as Ayllus. Although Ayllus successfully coped with the local demand for
agricultural products, contradicting the generalised view of a backward agriculture
oriented to subsistence, the post-independence governments consciously and blindly-
20
pursued the destruction of Ayllus, as seen in the case of the ‘1874 Disentailment
Law’ that abolished communal property and even forbade the use of the concept of
‘community’.21 Advocates of the abolition of communal property, like Jose Vicente
Dorado, were aware of the differences between the two worlds, as illustrated by
Dorado’s complaint that Indians ‘do not show interest in pursuing civilisation and
willingness to overcome their status of backwardness and ignorance’.22 He added that
Indians lived in ‘another State, indifferent to the events and transformations [affect-
ing] the white race and hindering progress and reforms’.23 Following the dictates of
the colonial state, he aimed ‘to dispossess them from their land in order to gain their
loyalty to the state’.24
Against the dictates of the Disentailment Law, Pedro Zárate Willka and Juan Lero,
acting as a ‘nation within a nation’, asked for the restitution of the usurped communal
lands and the establishment of an autonomous Indian government.25 The uprising was
defeated, and Willka and 31 prisoners were accused of being traitors and executed.
Gabriel Rene Moreno, member of the ruling elite, declared once more the ‘non-place’ of
the Indigenous worlds in a modern Bolivia: ‘The Inca Indians and mestizos have abso-
lutely no place in the gradual evolution of modern society. Sooner or later, in the
struggle for existence, they are doomed to extinction under the reign of the pure or
purified whites’.26
Contradicting this prediction, a new cycle of protests erupted between 1910 and
1930, organised by a network of caciques apoderados who, using both liberal and Two
Republics legislations, blocked the inspections of communal land.27 As V. Soria Choque
argues, ‘Indigenous communities realised that the defence of their land was possible
within the liberal legislation as the notion of juridical equality provided a framework for
the exercise of their rights’.28 But caciques apoderados exceed colonial and republican
legislation:

Their demands were couched in two different kinds of terms: within the community they
referred to the Indian’s moral code and reinterpretations of their oral tradition; but outside
the communities, they were formulated according to Creole standards.29
 THIRD WORLD THEMATICS: A TWQ JOURNAL 5

Once more, but in opposed direction, the defence of the use of the Toledan legislation
in the defence of the territory by the caciques put an emphasis on the masculine aspect
and silenced the territorial practises of women.30
In 1952, the liberal inspired Agrarian Revolution declared the Ayllus archaic, and
converted Indians into campesinos and Ayllus into trade unions.31 The reliance on
unionism to represent the Indians was another form of the project to ‘civilise Indians’,
involving a rejection of Indigenous organisation, which was also considered an obstacle
to the sovereignty of the State.32 The unionisation of Ayllus excluded women from the
public sphere, and unions become masculine and clientelist spaces. Moreover, in several
regions, it was the work of women that allowed male participation in these unions and
politics more generally.33
The enactment of Indigenous existence continued in everyday practises as Ayllus
continued appointing their own authorities alongside union representatives. As Carlos
Mamani and Igidio Naveda explain, Ayllus authorities ‘played a “mask game”: they wear
the trade union mask in their relation with the state and the “real” was used in their
relation with the community’.34
In the 1980s, the notion of multiculturalism that accompanied neo-liberal pro-
grammes pursued the elimination of Indigenous worlds by incorporating Indigenous
people into the market, ‘as merchants of their own cultural heritage, even of their own
tutelary deities’.35
A major endeavour in the worlding of Indigenous communities was the launching of a
regional project of Reconstitution of Ayllus in the 1980s against both trade unionisation
and neo-liberal multi-culturalism; both of these were perceived as ‘the continuation of the
age-old efforts to civilise the colonised Indian masses by the Creole caste’.36
According to Quechua activist and leader of the process, Toribia Lero, the
‘Reconstitution is not a return to the past; it is a lived reality through the making of
stories’.37 The Reconstitution is a regreso a lo propio (coming back to the proper), which
is the opposite of being a strange.38 The retrieval of history formed part of their
Indigenous world making.39 The Reconstitution included the creation of regional orga-
nisations of Ayllus,40 and the recovery of memory in the Taller de History Andina (THOA),
where an alliance of academics and Indigenous authorities collected, circulated, and
disseminated testimonial documents.41

Exceeding the ‘reduction pact’ in Moxos’ communities

Lowland communities’42 relation with the state differed from the state-highland relation.
For one, they were considered the most ‘savage’ among the savages, and their territories
were classified as ‘empty land’ (tierras baldías). Second, they were excluded from state
agreements, including the colonial ‘reciprocal pact’ and the Law of Agrarian Reform of
1953, whose article 129 states that it does not apply to ‘forest Indians’ because of their
savage condition and primitive organisation.43 Indeed, the signing of the INRA (National
Institute of Agrarian Reform) Law44 in 1996 was the first time in history that the Bolivian
state recognised the territorial rights of lowland Indigenous people.45
Contrary to the proclaimed ‘savage condition’, however, lowland communities have
had complex world making practises since pre-colonial times. A Spanish visitor in the
sixteenth century, for instance mentions that the people of Mamore produced ‘great
6 C. ROJAS

quantities of food; worked the soil in a way worth[y] of admiration’.46 David Block
mentions that their knowledge of the life cycle allowed them to catch enormous
quantity of fish and use the forest as a source of plants for medical and healing
purposes. He also notes that women displayed a rich dexterity in ceramics and fashioned
straw mats, baskets, and baby cradles using natural fibres; furthermore, women occu-
pied positions of authority, including as shamans, which was an exceptional situation in
the Amazon.47 Moxeños developed a complex hydraulic system with dams, canals, and
artificial ponds.48 They had a strong relation to territory; gods and spirits inhabited
particular hills or lakes.49 They were described as ‘people of territory’, as compared to
highland people that were called ‘land people’.50
Noting that these communities were seen as ‘societies without a state’, Zulema
Ardaya Lehm contends that this designation is not, in fact, a sign of absence of
civilisation, but rather, speaks to the presence of a system of power embedded in
society.51 According to a Jesuit priest’s description, Moxeños obeyed ‘only after a lot
of begging and supplicating and when they obeyed they did so under the condition
that the command agreed with their feelings’.52
Lehm denominated the relation between Jesuits and Moxos a ‘reduction pact’, as the
later accepted living in settlements in exchange for goods and protection from the
Spaniards.53 Reducciones settled nomadic or semi-nomadic communities into small
towns named cabildos or misiones, similar to the ones existing in Spain. For some
scholars, the pact created a ‘mission culture’ that synthesised Indigenous and
European elements.54 However, a review of the literature allows for the conclusion
that, like Ayllus in relation to the República de Indios’ legislation, the world-making
practises of Moxeños exceeded reducciones. On the one hand, the authority of caciques
continued; on the other, the existence of the lords of the mountains and water persisted
even if marginalised by Catholic beliefs.55
Like in the highland, after Independence, liberal reformers enforced a programme of
modernisation promoting free trade that opened the country to the international
market for tropical products like cinchona bar and rubber.56 The terror system practised
during the ‘rubber boom’ had devastating consequences, as it decimated its population,
submitting them to servitude through debt bondage, destroying their solidarity, and
menacing their existence. Communities resisted by escaping to areas of refuge. The
movement known as Guayocheria, re-named the ‘search for Loma Santa’ (‘land-without-
evil’), searched for ‘society free from colonialism’.57 Their emancipation faced both the
domination of white society and also the power relations within the cabildo, as some
Indigenous authorities recruited Indigenous people to work in the plantations. They
responded by moving away from cabildos and recovering the lost autonomy.58
Indigenous women occupied spaces of leadership in the cabildos, and also in the search
for Loma Santa. In the former, women regulated power relations between political and
spiritual authorities. In the latter, they set the rules of movement, given their responsi-
bility for the reproduction of life. That is, they limited ‘the length of the movement by
considering its social cost as they walked carrying children, and assuming the respon-
sibility for food, which was generally scarce; they remembered the suffering and death
of children and the elderly during more than 100 years of the millenarian movement’.59
The resilience of the Moxeño community is further evident in the mass migration to the
city of Trinidad in 1978 due to a flooding in their region, where they created the Cabildo
 THIRD WORLD THEMATICS: A TWQ JOURNAL 7

Indigenal de Trinidad, combining the structure of reducciones and their communitarian

life world in the urban environment.60 According to Lehm, women carried the memory
of their struggles, as ‘they remember the suffering and death of children and the elderly
during more than 100 years of the millenarian movement’.61
Like in the highland, lowland communities created regional organisations. In 1982,
the Confederation of Indigenous Pueblos of Eastern Bolivia (CIDOB) was created62;
followed by the Assembly of the Guaraní People (APG) in 1987. Also in 1987, the
Central de Cabildos Indígenas Mojeños (CCIM) was born, a main actor in the organisation
of the 1990 march for Territory and Dignity, which is discussed in the next section. In
1989, the First Congress of Indigenous of Beni created the Central de Pueblos Indígenas
del Beni. As Lehm points out, the memories of the search for Loma Santa influenced the
early creation of women’s Indigenous organisations like the Central de Mujeres Indígenas
Mojeñas (1987), and eventually renamed Central de Mujeres Indígenas del Beni.63

‘Cosmopolitical moments’: the ‘Unity Pact’

The events originating in the lowlands in the 1990s successfully debilitated the colonial
and patriarchal partition of the sensible in what de la Cadena name as ‘cosmopolitical
moments’, as they irritate ‘the universal and provincialise nature and culture, thus poten-
tially situating them in political symmetry with what is neither culture nor nature’.64 As this
section suggests, the Indigenous marches in the 1990s,65 and the space created by the PU
that eventually led to the Constitution of 2009, successfully provincialised state colonial
rule but not the patriarchal imagination that also sustains this rule.
The four massive marches from the lowland to the capital, associated with the
movement in search of Loma Santa, facilitated the interruption of the colonial rule as
it was in and through the acts of walking and conversing among equals that they
realised that the concept of territory does not have the same meaning for them and for
the state. The equivocation66 was reflected in the claim that ‘we don’t want land we
want territory’.67 Their demand for territory was related to ‘dignity’, as formulated in the
invitation to the first march in 1990. According to Rivera Cusicanqui, bringing together
‘territory’ and ‘dignity’ connected the political and economic in a concept of territory
which implies ‘productive space, community, self-government, polis: space in which life
is reproduced’ and ‘a cosmocentric and relational conception of the land, one that is
opposed to the anthropocentric, rational, and instrumental conception of space’.68
Roberto Balza’s69 report entitled ‘Indigenous and Territory are One and the Same
Thing’ quoted the definition of territory by an Indigenous community:
[T]he space where each small part, each manifestation of life, each expression of nature is
sacred in the memory and collective experience of each pueblo and is shared in intimate
inter-relation with other living beings respecting their natural evolution as the only guar-
antee of mutual growth.70

The proposed legislation by Indigenous organisations aimed to provincialise state rule

by advocating autonomy and self-governance. Their proposal was consigned in the draft
of the ‘Indigenous Law’, written by CIDOB in 1986, which asked for administrative
autonomy over their ‘natural resources’ as well as the recognition of ‘autonomous
Indigenous territories’.71 The project was presented to the Bolivian Congress on 12
8 C. ROJAS

October 1992, but was rejected as Congress viewed their concept of territory as against
the Bolivian Constitution and contrary to the concept of territorial sovereignty.72 Despite
this setback, the government ratified the right to consult formulated in the ILO
Convention, and created several protected territories, including Indigenous Territory of
the Isiboro-Sécure Park (TIPNIS). The Law INRA also employs the concept of land and not
territory to bolster the argument that the Indigenous concept of territory undermines
the unity of the state.73 The Law74 also provides a legal framework for granting
Indigenous people’ collective title to their ancestral territories.
By marching together, communities made ‘themselves of some account’75 and as
speaking subjects. At stake was the right to exist and to be heard, as demanded by one
of the leaders, Ruben Yuco: ‘The government must make the Bolivian people aware that
we exist, that we are humans and that we must share the equality’.76 In the Constitution,
‘Indigenous people emerge as constituent subjects, with the power to define the new
state and the relations between the nations forming the state’.77
The series of marches for territory interrupted as well the modern understanding of
knowledge measured by its distance from nature. Theirs was an ‘embodied thinking’
that emerged from the sense of ‘vulnerability of the body’78 and the violence exerted
over the body as indicated by Jacinto Herrera, trade union leader:

People and their leaders coming from the countryside didn’t know where to start, but the
ideas were born in the communities. People made possible the birth of proposals from their
own needs, from popular actions. These proposals were assembled together by commu-
nities, by union leaders. At the root was the unfairness of the animal treatment given to
campesinos, ignored by authorities and the Constitutional laws. This was the initial demand
for a new Constitution, whose transformation should be carried by Indigeno-campesino
people; they know about poverty, they are the ones to say what is needed for building a
plurinational state.79

Last, but not least important, these mobilisations created ‘connections among hetero-
geneities that remain as such’.80 These connections emerged during the encounter
between Indigenous people from the altiplano, the valleys, the yungas, and the
Amazon lowlands and nature. The encounter, as Rivera Cusicanqui recalls, resembled
the union of the fragmented parts of the dismembered body of Tupaq Amaru II: ‘During
the encounter in La Cumbre natural phenomena manifested as well: a sunny and calm
day was turned unexpectly into dark clouds and stormy weather’. The situation was
perceived as a Pachakuti, a Cosmic return.81
The fourth march (2002) facilitated the formation of the PU and called for a Constituent
Assembly to re-found Bolivia.82 Salvador Schavelzon rightly denominates the PU a ‘cos-
mopolitical encounter’, made of ‘heterogenous connections, a mix of things that in theory
should be apart, hybrids of nature and culture that questioned the modern structure’.83
The Constitution written by the PU envisioned a place where Indigenous people count
and worlds co-exist. The Constitution (Art 30-II) grants Indigenous people the right to their
own world; to free determination and territoriality; to traditional teachings and knowl-
edge, including collective property of their knowledge, science, and learning; to practise
their political, juridical, and economic systems in accord with their world view; to be
consulted via appropriate procedures; to autonomous Indigenous territorial manage-
ment; and to the exclusive use and exploitation of renewable natural resources existing
in their territory without prejudice to the legitimate rights acquired by third parties. The
 THIRD WORLD THEMATICS: A TWQ JOURNAL 9

economy, also declared plural, is tasked with the improvement of the well being of the
population, the quality of life of all Bolivians (Art 306-1) and the protection and promotion
of community economic development (Art 307).
Most important, the proposal for a Pluri-national State substituted the commonality
between nation and state with a ‘Unitary Social State of Pluri-National Communitarian
Law’ (1st Article). The decolonisation of the state did not envisioned the elimination of the
State but called for a ‘restorative state’84 that would guarantee an internal process of
deliberation and the reconstruction of their own history. Art 9 entrusts the state with the
role of decolonisation and social justice as it has the responsibility ‘to construct a just and
harmonious society, built on decolonisation, without discrimination or exploitation’ and
to ‘promote and strengthen rural native Indigenous justice’ (Art 192-III). Moreover, the
State adopts Indigenous ethical principles (Art 8-I) and is made responsible for promoting,
among others, Suma qamaña (living well), ñandereko (live in harmoniously), and ivi maraei
(land without evil). Suma qamaña in Yampara’s words is a ‘paradigm of life’ that means
‘live-together’ (con-vivir) and is centred on the ‘harmonisation of worlds’.85
As in the past, Indigenous struggles silenced women’s practises and their acts of
resistance to colonial and patriarchal power. Although women represented 35.5% of the
members of the Constituent Assembly,86 the Constitution limits their request for gender
equality over the depatriarchalisation of the state and society. The communitarian
feminist Maria Galindo coined the phrase ‘decolonisation is not possible without
depatriarchalisation’87 to address this Constitutional void.

Translating ontology back into culture

Ontological negotiations between worlds are processes without guarantees.88 As this
section demonstrates the Government of Evo Morales has followed a strategy of ‘cultural
reconversion’,89 to reverse ontological gains into cultural differences. As a consequence,
Indigenous organisations are deprived of a place to speak and not recognised as
antagonists in a political negotiation. To illustrate how this is the case, this section
focuses on the conflict between Indigenous communities and the state regarding the
construction of a road crossing the TIPNIS Park located in the Moxos territory—a
construction project that was undertaken without consulting the community. In 2011,
1,000 Indigenous people from the TIPNIS area marched for 65 days to La Paz. The
marches included an important number of women, elders, and children, and received
the support of CIDOB, CONAMAQ, and other social movements. Upon arrival to La Paz,
marchers found massive demonstrations of support, leading President Morales to
negotiate the 16-point agenda proposed by CIDOB and suspending the construction
of the road, declaring TIPNIS an ‘untouchable’ zone.90 Despite the promise to halt the
project, in 2015 the government announced that the road would be built as part of an
agreement with China.91
At the forefront of the state’s strategy was a return to culture as a framing device for
interpreting the Indigenous struggle for territory, and in so doing, an attempt to deny
communities of their world-making practises and speaking capacity. I rely on documents
issued by the Vice-Presidency of the State to demonstrate the reconversion from
ontology to culture. For instance, the government relied on the colonial concept of
the state as representative of the general will:
10 C. ROJAS

The state monopolizes the capacity to represent the general will of a society, the imagina-
tion and the illusion of the collective ego.92

According to Vice President Álvaro García Linera, a Pluri-national State must own a
‘homogenous territoriality’, which means that it has ‘similar rights in every place’.93
Rejecting the right for their existence, he reduces it to a cosmovision that ‘is in the
mind of trendy Indigenous or held by [Indians] with strong links to NGOs [. . .]. In the end,
all want to be modern’.94
For the Vice-President, Indigenous communities are reduced to minority status and
territorial victories are attributed to the state:
The Indigenous popular government has consolidated the long struggle of the people for
land and territory. In the case of the minority Indigenous people of the lowlands, the state has
consolidated millions of hectares of historic territory for many groups with low population
density, but alongside the right to land of a people is the right of the state [. . .] to impose the
greater collective interest of all the people. And that is how we are going to proceed.95

As a response to the TIPNIS mobilisation, García Linera published a book depriving

lowland Indigenous communities of their history and existence. First, he points to the
numeric insignificance of the Indigenous population living in the lowlands, noting that
they comprise ‘less than 4% of the total’.96 Second, he argues that colonisation deprived
them of agency as the Jesuit’s mission ‘moulded the Indigenous souls and modified their
productive habits’.97 It is clear that for García Linera, lowland communities’ lack of
reasoning deprived them of their political space and agency:
In the Amazon, then, it is not the Indigenous peoples who have taken control of the territorial
power, as occurred years ago in the highlands and valleys, where the peasant unions and
communities have a territorial presence in their micro-regions; in reality they were the
material foundation for the construction of the present Plurinational State. In the Amazon
region, things occurred differently. [In the latter] there was predominance of the despotic
landowner and neither the Indigenous organizations, or peasants or workers, created an
organizational or discursive counter-power to crack the hereditary-landowner system.98

The Vice-president openly denied the existence of alternative worlds outside capitalism
as he speaks of a ‘subsumption of Indigenous economy and of nature to capitalist
accumulation’.99
This, however, is not the end of the story. Women’s organisations, including
Indigenous and non-indigenous groups, are breaking the configuration of the percep-
tible that assumes the norm of patriarchal oppression, and that privileges the public
over the domestic while asserting that nature and the reproduction of life do not have a
place in politics.

Conclusion
In Bolivia, ontological politics, understood as negotiations between diverse world-mak-
ing practises, are not new. Since the colonial occupation, Indigenous communities used
colonial legislation to protect the existence of their worlds. This historical analysis of
variations in state rule suggests complex processes of negotiations with intended and
unintended consequences. The anti-colonial mobilisation for self-rule in the eighteenth
century, led by Tupak Amaru, Tupak Katari, and Bartolina Sisa, was defeated with
 THIRD WORLD THEMATICS: A TWQ JOURNAL 11

enormous losses for communities; however, the rebellion also diminished the power of
caciques by increasing the control that communities had over their authorities. As
argued by Rivera Cusicanqui, this democratisation of power allowed them to resist the
attacks from the civilising missions following the 1825 independence.
The negotiations that Indigenous communities pursued to preserve the existence of
Ayllus against the liberal reforms that aimed at dismantling their territorial practises
were also documented, including the cases of the Disentailment Law of 1874, the
Agrarian Reform of 1952, and multiculturalism in the 1980s. The forms of resistance
included the use of colonial and liberal legislation to further their reconstitution after
the 1952 reforms converted Ayllus into trade unions. Ayllus experienced internal
transformations, some with detrimental consequences for their economic self-suffi-
ciency and self-government capacity. Women’s political authority and contribution
were reduced as result of forms of organisation that privilege the masculine structures
of trade unions, prioritise certain forms of territorial struggles over others, and also by
the concentration of power in the public sphere and even programmes of modernisa-
tion carried out by feminist organisations. The comparison between highland and
lowland politics illustrates how becoming a political community emerges from inter-
rupting the order of the perceptible where they do not form part. Lowland commu-
nities became political by engaging in a collective search for a ‘land without evil’
moving away from the state and civilisation.
The Indigenous mobilisations for territory in the 1990s and the alliances forged in the
PU built a ‘cosmopolitical moment’ that successfully broke the configuration of the
perceptible that left no place making their own history. Among the most salient factors
conducive to this moment is the appearance of a collective capacity of enunciation that
was not previously available.
The success of the negotiation with the post-Constitution state was not guaranteed,
as demonstrated 1 year later in the TIPNIS conflict that ignored the equal Indigenous
status, which included the right to be consulted. The outcome, however, is not defini-
tive, as the intended and unintended consequences are on the table. What is new is the
protagonism of Indigenous women pointing to the possibility of a ‘cosmopolitics in
feminine’100 committed to the collective defence of the reproduction of human and
other-than-human beings, and that is definitively not centred in or on the state. This
commitment is reflected in the words of Marqueza Teco,101 president of the Women’s
Organisation from the sub-central TIPNIS: ‘We will not allow the destruction of our
house, the home of our children. If necessary, we TIPNIS women will die in defence of
territory to avoid the abuses of this government’.
Not only in Bolivia but across the Americas Indigenous communities and movements
continue to set into motion strategies that supersede the modern division of the
perceptible based on the separation between nature and culture and the public and
domestic that marginalise the reproduction of life.

Notes
1. Corrigan and Sayer, The Great Arch was especially influential by asserting that state forma-
tion is a “cultural revolution.” Moreover, the state is an effect of symbolic practices. Mitchell,
“The Limits of the State.”
12 C. ROJAS

2. de la Cadena, “Uncommoning,” 4. In this statement, de la Cadena refers to Ranciѐre’s

concept of the partition of the sensible and Latour’s modern constitution. The form is
defined as the order that defines when certain activities are visible and others are invisible;
when speech is understood as discourse and another as noise. Ranciѐre, Disagreements, 29;
and Latour, We Have Never Been, 99.
3. The Unity Pact (Pacto de Unidad) was formed in 2004 by five Indigenous-Campesino organiza-
tions: CIDOB (Confederación de Pueblos Indígenas de Bolivia); CONAMAQ (Consejo Nacional de
Ayllus y Markas del Qullasuyu); CSUTCB (Confederación Sindical Única de Trabajadores
Campesinos de Bolivia); FNMCB-BS (Federación Nacional de Mujeres Campesinas de Bolivia
“Bartolina Sisa”); and CSCB (Confederación Sindical de Colonizadores de Bolivia; later named
CSCIB, Confederación Sindical de Comunidades Interculturales de Bolivia).
4. de la Cadena, Earth Beings, 279.
5. Pagden, “Human Rights, Natural Rights,” 178.
6. The analysis of Vitoria is relayed in Anghie, “Francisco De Vitoria.”
7. Or “law of nations” is a customary law thought to be held in common by all gentes (“people”
or “nations”). Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_gentium.
8. Anghie, “Francisco De Vitoria,” 327.
9. Pagden, “Human Rights, Natural Rights.”
10. Ibid., 183.
11. Quoted in Pagden, “Human Rights, Natural Rights.”
12. I have illustrated the violence of this regime of representation for the ninteenth-century
Colombia. Rojas, Civilization and Violence.
13. Escobar, Encountering Development.
14. Blaser and de la Cadena, “Uncommoning,” 186.
15. Yampara El Ayllu y La Territorialidad, 67.
16. Rivera Cusincanqui, “Estudio Introductorio,” 29.
17. Rivera, Gestión Pública, 9.
18. Thomson, Sinclair. “We Alone Will Rule . . ..”
19. Rivera, Gestión Pública, 16.
20. Platt, Estado Boliviano Y Ayllu, 126–7.
21. Soria Choque, Educación Indígena, 42.
22. Quoted in Irurozqui, “Las Paradojas De La Tributación,” 720–1.
23. Ibid., 721.
24. Ibid., 723.
25. Rivera Cusicanqui, “Oppressed but Not Defeated,” 15–6.
26. Quoted in ibid., 17–8.
27. Gotkowits, A Revolution for Our Rights, 35; and Rivera Cusicanqui, “Oppressed but Not
Defeated,” 26.
28. Soria Choque, Educación Indígena, 60.
29. Rivera Cusicanqui, “Oppressed but Not Defeated,” 34.
30. Rivera Cusicanqui, Violencias (Re)Encubiertas, 208–9.
31. Rivera Cusicanqui, “Oppressed,” 93.
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid., 11.
34. Mamani and Naveda, Reconstitución Del Ayllu, 39.
35. Rivera Cusicanqui, “Strategic Ethnicity, Nation and Neo(Colonialism),” 2.
36. Rivera Cusicanqui, “Oppressed but Not Defeated,” 101.
37. Lero Quispe and Gutiérrez Saique, Reconstitución Del Ayllu.
38. Choque and Mamani, “Reconstitución Del Ayllu,” 217–8.
39. Huanca Salles, “Reconstitución Del Ayllu,” 29; and Rivera Cusicanqui, “Oppressed but Not
Defeated.”
40. In 1983, the Federación de Ayllus del Sur de Oruro (FASOR) was created; in 1993, the
Federación de Ayllus Originarios Indígenas del Norte de Potosí (FAOINP) was established.
 THIRD WORLD THEMATICS: A TWQ JOURNAL 13

Finally, on 22 March 1997, Consejo de Ayllus and Markas del Qullasuyu (CONAMAQ) was
created.
41. Choque and Mamani, “Reconstitución Del Ayllu.”
42. In Bolivia, the lowland is divided in three regions: Chaco, Eastern Santa Cruz, and the
Amazonía, which has two departments, Pando and Beni, where Mojos inhabit. Mojeños
are the third major Indigenous group from the Amazonía, with a population of 80,000
Indigenous.
43. Government of Bolivia, “Bolivia: Reforma Agraria.”
44. National Institute of Agrarian Reform (Instituto Nacional de Reforma Agraria), the agency
responsible for land titling.
45. Anthias, Reclaiming Territory.
46. Quoted in Block, “In Search of El Dorado,” 88.
47. Ibid.; Lehm, Milenarismo Y Movimientos Sociales; Lehm, “El Saber Y El Poder”; and van Nalen,
Indigenous Agency in the Amazon.
48. Porto-Gonçalves, “De Saberes Y Territorios,” 11. They are considered nomads and the Inca
Empire did not reside in the Amazonia, and the presence of Imperial Spain was very weak.
49. van Nalen, Indigenous Agency in the Amazon, 13.
50. Clastres, Investigaciones En Antropología Política.
51. Lehm, “El Saber Y El Poder,” 438.
52. Lehm, Milenarismo y Movimientos Sociales, 22.
53. Ibid. Jesuit Missions arrived in the 1670s and remained until 1767, when they were expelled
from the country.
54. Lehm, Milenarismo y Movimientos Sociales, 33.
55. Block, “In Search of El Dorado,” 291–2.
56. van Nalen, Indigenous Agency in the Amzon, 58.
57. Lehm, Milenarismo y Movimientos Sociales, 96.
58. Lehm, “El Saber Y El Poder,” 405–6.
59. Ibid., 406–7.
60. Lehm, Milenarismo y Movimientos Sociales, 99.
61. Lehm, “El Saber Y El Poder,” 406–7.
62. Renamed Confederación de Pueblos Indígenas de Bolivia.
63. Lehm, “El Saber Y El Poder,” 424.
64. See note 4 above.
65. The marches were: March for Territory and Dignity (1990) organised by the Central de
Cabildos Indígenas Mojeños; March for Territory, Political Participation and Development
(1996); March for Land, Territory and Natural Resources (2000); March for Popular
Sovereignty, Territory and Natural Resources (2002).
66. Viveiros de Castro, “Perspectival Anthropology.”
67. Quoted in Porto-Gonçalves, “De Saberes y Territorios,” 33.
68. Rivera Cusicanqui, “Strategic Ethnicit, Nation, and (Neo)Colonialism,” 7.
69. Balza, Tierra, Territorio Y Territorialidad Indigena, 68.
70. Ibid.
71. Balza, Tierra, Territorio Y Territorialidad Indigena, 38.
72. Guzman, Saneamiento de La Tierra, 19.
73. INRA is the Law of the Institute of Agrarian Reform that stablishes new criteria for accessing
land. Balza, Tierra, Territorio Y Territorialidad Indigena, 43.
74. TCOs conceived for lowlands were extended in 2004 to Ayllus.
75. Rancière, Disagreements, 27.
76. Rubén Yuco, September 1990, italics added, and quoted in Lehm, Milenarismo y
Movimientos Sociales, 127.
77. Yrigoyen Fajardo, “El Horizonte Del Constitutionalismo,” 149.
78. Icaza, Global Politics, 39.
79. Jacinto Herrera, quoted in Garcés, El Pacto de Unidad, 43.
80. de la Cadena, Earth Beings, 283.
14 C. ROJAS

81. Rivera Cusicanqui, Violencias (Re)Encubiertas En Bolivia, 62.

82. Once Evo Morales became president (2006) he issued a special decree forming the
Constituent Assembly.
83. Schavelzon, “El Pacto De Unidad,” 247–8.
84. Segato, “Que cada pueblo teja los hilos de su historia,” 369.
85. Yampara Huarachi, “Cosmovivencia Andina,” 13–4.
86. Albó, “Datos de una encuesta;” Segato, “Patriarchy from marging,” 607.
87. Galindo, No se Puede Descolonizar.
88. De la Cadena, “Indigenous Cosmopolitics,” 362.
89. Pratt, “The Traffic in Meaning,” 32.
90. Achtenberg, “Bolivia: Tipnis Road On.” For a detailed recount of the TIPNIS march see
Antonio, “Para Que No Se.”
91. “El Gobierno Hara La.”
92. García Linera, “El Estado Plurinacional.”
93. García Linera, Topología del Estado.
94. Svampa and Stefanoni, “Entrevista a Álvaro García Linera.”
95. Interview published in le Monde Diplomatique, 11 September 2009. Quoted in Cannesa,
“Conflict, Claim and Contradiction,” 21–2.
96. García Linera, “Geopolitics of the Amazon.”
97. Ibid., 7.
98. Ibid., 10.
99. Ibid., 18.
100. Segato, “From Margin to Center.”
101. Teco, “Marquesa Teco: Las mujeres del TIPNIS.”

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for providing valuable comments; Marisol de la
Cadena and Toribia Lero for our conversations; and my research assistants, Vladimir Díaz and
Maggie FitzGerald.

Funding
This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada under
Grant 435-2017-0871.

Notes on contributor
Cristina Rojas is a professor of Political Science and director of the Institute of Political Economy at
Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. She is doing research on territorial negotiations between
Indigenous communities and the state and on Indigenous women’s collective commitment to care
and the reproduction of life in Bolivia. Her latest work has been published in the journals
International Political Sociology, Globalizations, Third World Quarterly, and Global Social Policy.

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