637413

research-article2016
CRS0010.1177/0896920516637413Critical SociologyRavindran

Article

Critical Sociology

From Populist to Institutionalist

2018, Vol. 44(1) 61­–74
© The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/0896920516637413
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Andean Bolivia

Tathagatan Ravindran
Universidad ICESI, Colombia

Abstract
Social movements and acts of protest have played significant roles in charting the path of Bolivian
history. Massive waves of protest against neoliberalism led to the overthrow of two presidents
from office and culminated in the victory of Evo Morales. The stability of the Morales government
stands in stark contrast to the chronic political instability of the neoliberal era. This paper deals
with the paradox of the persistence of acts of protest all over Bolivia and the stability of the
political regime of Evo Morales. The paradox is explained through the use of the distinction
between populist and institutionalist politics made by Ernesto Laclau. Politics in the neoliberal
era was populist, where society was divided into two opposed camps through the construction
of a ‘people’ against the regime. The era after the election of Evo Morales is characterized by
institutionalist politics where each political demand is separately and unevenly absorbed into
the system. The potential of acts of protest to cause political transformations at various levels
depends on their ability to construct a hegemonic chain of equivalence against the system, and
the failure to construct it has frustrated efforts to create a more radical alternative to the current
government.

Keywords
Bolivia, hegemonic politics, populist and institutionalist politics, protests, social movements

Introduction
Social movements have been important actors in the political sphere of Latin American countries. But
nowhere have they been as influential as in Bolivia, where they were the protagonists of social and
political transformation and change in political regime. Besides causing changes in governmental
policies, social movements have induced radical transformations that have percolated deeply into the
cultural politics of everyday life, like the revalorization of indigenous identity.

Corresponding author:
Tathagatan Ravindran, Departamento de Estudios Sociales, Universidad ICESI, Cl. 18 #122-135, Cali, Valle del Cauca,
Colombia.
Email: tathagatan83@gmail.com
62 Critical Sociology 44(1)

Massive mobilizations against neoliberalism shook the country in the early 2000s. They pro-
duced the series of revolutionary moments in the early 2000s that eventually led to a fall of the
neoliberal regime and the election of the first indigenous president, Evo Morales. No other politi-
cian has enjoyed stable electoral support of this degree after the return to democracy.1 However,
despite this fact, acts of protest continue all over Bolivia. In this context, it is important to consider
the following questions: How do we explain the persistence of protests despite the general popular-
ity of the government? What have been the continuities and changes in acts of protest, especially
on the power they wield to get their demands met? When do social movements become successful,
to what extent and under what circumstances?
Apart from an analysis of journalistic reports on various acts of protest, the findings of this study
draw on 22 months of ethnographic research in the city of El Alto. It included participant observa-
tion of acts of protest and 85 semistructured interviews with residents of multiple neighborhoods,
cutting across gender and age differences, many of whom were participants in various protests.

From Neoliberalism to Post-neoliberalism?

Neoliberalism and the struggles against it set the context for Bolivian politics after the return to
representative democracy in 1982 after a series of military dictatorships. From being seen as one
of the greatest success stories of neoliberalism, Bolivia became the ‘insurrectionary frontline’ of
resistance to it (Hylton and Thomson, 2005).
A series of mobilizations against neoliberal policies emerged from the beginning of the 21st
century that forced two presidents out of office and led to the victory of Evo Morales in the 2005
elections. Right from the beginning of his presidency, Morales declared his intentions of doing
away with neoliberalism. Gas was nationalized through a decree in 2006. However, it was a partial
nationalization that only involved an increase in the royalties the gas companies pay for the state.
Nevertheless, it increased state revenues to be spent on social welfare programs. Subsequently,
similar kinds of ‘nationalizations’ were implemented in sectors like electricity, telecommunica-
tions and mines, enabling an increase in public investment and direct cash transfers. This reduced
poverty and inequality significantly. Though it did not put an end to large holdings and challenge
the disproportionate control of the lands of the best quality by agro-industrial firms and big land
owners (latifundistas), land reforms reduced disparities in land ownership (Farthing and Kohl,
2014; Brabazon and Webber, 2014).
Scholars like Postero (2013) and Brabazon and Webber (2014) argue that Bolivian policies are
still neoliberal because there are significant continuities with the earlier neoliberal regime. They
refer to the strengthening of the resource extraction model with the participation of transnational
corporations. However, this critique misses the point that extractivism is not necessarily neoliberal.
The Bolivian government has made significant changes to the form in which extraction of natural
resources is carried out. The state now has a significantly bigger share in the profits generated,
which it has used to increase public investment, especially in social welfare programs. Initial
attempts to diversify the economy and add value to natural gas, iron ore and lithium through indus-
trialization have also started. Policies of the Morales government like obligatory wage hikes,
increase in public investment, nationalizations, increase in taxes for companies involved in the
extraction of hydrocarbons and rejection of free trade pacts stand in contrast to the neoliberal eco-
nomic program that prescribes the reverse: wage deregulation, reduction in public investment,
privatizations, tax cuts for corporations to attract more investment and free trade pacts. Though the
pace of these transformations has been slow, the fact that there has been a turn in these policies
away from the neoliberal model cannot be ignored. In other words, the victory of Morales inaugu-
rated the post-neoliberal era.
Ravindran 63

Nevertheless, most of the acts of protest in contemporary Bolivia have to do with the legacy of
neoliberalism and its continuing structural effects on the lives of the people. In the following sec-
tion, I analyze some of the major acts of protest in Evo Morales’s Bolivia and explore their place
within the narrative of a post-neoliberal Bolivia.

Explaining the Paradox

How do we explain this paradox of the continuity of protests and the continuity of the stability of
the political regime? If the cycle of protests in the early 2000s kept weakening the hegemony of the
neoliberal regime, leading to its phenomenal defeat and overthrow, why has it not been doing the
same to the new political regime?
In this context, the distinction between populist and institutionalist politics made by Ernesto
Laclau becomes important. Populist politics, for Laclau, refers to the construction of ‘a people’
through the formation of chains of equivalences between diverse demands. Chains of equivalences
dissolve the particularities of each demand and redefine all of them as demands against the system.
It leads to the construction of a common negative identity based on opposition to a common enemy
and the division of the society into opposed camps. Institutionalist politics, on the other hand,
refers to the process whereby each demand is put forward separately, without altering the existing
consensus, and the regime is able to absorb the demands into the system (Laclau, 2005). While
populist politics is based on the construction of a logic of equivalences (between diverse demands),
institutionalist politics is informed by the logic of difference (between diverse demands) (Howarth
and Griggs, 2008).
The political mobilizations in Andean Bolivia in the neoliberal era from 2000 to 2005 were
populist in nature, and the politics after the election of Evo Morales in 2005 can be characterized
as institutionalist. I argue that oppositional politics can challenge the regime only when it takes on
a populist character and follows the logic of hegemonic politics. This explains how multiple acts
of protest that emerged in the neoliberal era could successfully overthrow the regime while those
in the post-neoliberal era were not able to challenge the hegemony of the ruling party.
I confine my analysis to Andean Bolivia because the eastern part of the country has followed a
distinct political trajectory. The only movement I discuss from the eastern part of the country is the
movement against the construction of a road through the TIPNIS national park. It is included in the
discussion because this movement had participation from some Andean indigenous organizations
too and had important bearings on the way politics in the Andean region unfolded.

Populist Politics
Political mobilizations from 2000 to 2005 in Bolivia can be characterized as populist.2 The year
2000 marked a turning point in the sense that it inaugurated waves of intense protests against neo-
liberal policies. The cycle of protests began in 2000 in Cochabamba against the privatization of
water. Protestors forced the expulsion of the multinational company Betchel that had increased
water charges by 100–300 percent. It was followed by the rebellion in Acchacachi in 2000 by
indigenous highland peasants. In February 2003, a series of mobilizations took place when the
government, succumbing to the pressure of the IMF to reduce the national deficit, proposed a flat
income tax that would push the underprivileged sections of society into greater poverty. In October
2003, protests broke out against the export of gas to the United States through Chile. The protestors
demanded nationalization and domestic industrialization of gas. They also demanded a rejection of
the proposal to extend the NAFTA into all countries of the Americas. This turned into a mass popu-
lar insurrection that led to the overthrow of President Sanchez de Lozada (Hylton and Thomson,
64 Critical Sociology 44(1)

2005; Kohl and Farthing, 2006; Mamani, 2005). The most important aspect of this era is the forma-
tion of a chain of equivalence between diverse demands. Disparate movements and organizations
could read each other’s demands as one demand against the system.
Laclau’s framework requires two levels of theoretical analysis: the ontological and the ontic.
The ontological level is characterized by a higher level of abstraction and refers to the presupposi-
tions that inform any study of specific phenomena, while the ontic refers to the specific phenomena
themselves (Howarth, 2000). In the study of populism, the ontological level of analysis includes
the deployment of general and abstract conceptual categories such as the logic of equivalence and
logic of difference. The ontic level includes, for instance, an analysis of different forms in which
populist chains of equivalances are constructed in each particular case and the organizations and
institutions involved in the process. For example, studies have shown how populist processes in
Zambia and Hungary are spearheaded by political parties (Palonen, 2009; Larmer and Fraser,
2007) while that of Greece has been marked by the creation of synergies between movements like
the Aganaktismenoi and the SYRIZA party over the central issue of fighting austerity policies
(Stavrakakis, 2014). The Bolivian experience reveals the possibility of populist processes being
marked by multiple movements with diverse sectoral demands uniting against neoliberal economic
policies and enduring colonial legacies of the state, and informally coordinating resistance in the
absence of a centralized organization.
The chain of equivalence was created by different movements aligning their demands with
those of others and by staging protests of solidarity. For instance, during the protests in Cochabamba
against the privatization of water in April 2000, Confederación Sindical Única de Trabajadores
Campesinos de Bolivia (CSUTCB), led by Felipe Quispe, and the coca growers, led by Evo
Morales, added a revision of the water laws to their own demands. The former was already mobi-
lizing against the land reform law that enabled big land owners to protect their holdings by paying
minimum taxes and the latter against the government’s policy of eradicating coca. The Trade Union
Federation, Central Obrera Boliviana (COB), called for a general strike, and later school and uni-
versity teachers and university students joined the struggle. The same pattern was repeated later
that year in September (Kohl and Farthing, 2006). When the teachers union started a long march
from the city of Oruro to La Paz, other groups joined the protests in different parts of the country.
When they arrived in La Paz, university students and pensioners joined the march, adding their
own demands. Indigenous peasants in rural La Paz led by Felipe Quispe and the coca growers in
Cochabamba immediately followed suit, blocking major roads. The latter added the demand to
stop the construction of three US-financed military bases in the Cochabamba department. The
temporal alignment of these protests, far from being a mere strategic ploy to exert maximum pres-
sure at one time and push the system to its limits, also manifested a process of the construction of
a chain of equivalence. Though the movements did not form a formal network or apex organiza-
tion, they were able to see other’s struggles as one’s own and all particular struggles as part of one
larger struggle.
The mass rebellion demanding the nationalization of gas in 2003 that finally sealed the fate of
the neoliberal order cannot be reduced to a struggle over gas. It was the explosion of accumulated
anger and frustration against a system. As Ariel Mamani, an Aymara schoolteacher who partici-
pated in those mobilizations told me, ‘The gas issue was just a provocation that lit the fire, the deep
[cause] was racism, discrimination and lack of opportunities’.
Demands for public works, access to water, an economic policy that reduces inequality and
privileges citizens over transnational corporations, nationalization of natural resources, and the
struggle against racial discrimination were linked through the construction of a chain of equiva-
lence against the regime. In that context, each demand overflowed its own particularity and became
redefined as demands against the system.
Ravindran 65

The symbol of the ‘gringo president’ comes to the fore in most people’s memories of that
period,3 and this symbol served the purpose of increasing the populist polarization. It referred to
Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, the Bolivian president who had grown up in the United States, spoke
Spanish with an American English accent, championed neoliberalism and unambiguously sided
with transnational corporations against the interests of Bolivian citizens, especially those of the
indigenous-popular sectors. As he emerged as the supreme symbol of white racism, US imperial-
ism and neoliberal capitalism, the struggle against all the three was constructed as one struggle of
the ‘people’ against the regime. This turned out to be a populist moment par excellence that culmi-
nated in the landslide victory of Evo Morales.

Institutionalist Politics
With the election of Evo Morales, the cycle of indigenous and national popular mobilizations
came to an end. However, that did not lead to an end to protests. This can be attributed to what I
call a political culture of protest in Bolivia. In contrast to the use of the concept of cultures of
protest by scholars such as Kelman (2001), Szabó (1996) and Markham (2014), for whom it refers
to aspects like forms and modes of expression of protest, I use the concept to point to the predomi-
nance of acts of protest as the primary means of political communication between the citizen and
the government. This can be explained by two factors. Firstly, we need to consider the legitimacy
given by the government to social movements. The government calls itself a government of social
movements and also formed a vice-ministry of co-ordination with social movements. A govern-
ment that rode to power on the basis of acts of protest, road blocks and mass demonstrations has
less moral authority to delegitimize acts of protest. Another reason for the existence of a culture
of protest in Bolivia is that the neoliberal era left behind a legacy that converted protest into the
major and at times the only means of political expression. The gap between the people’s aspira-
tions and the state’s priorities in the neoliberal era created a culture where a popular belief emerged
that the state will be deaf to people’s demands unless the latter engage in acts of protest. On the
other hand, the extraordinary frequency of acts of protest and roadblocks has led to a situation in
which government officials do not take any demand seriously unless a road is blocked or a public
office occupied.
Today, there are so many particular demands that are expressed through public protests and
roadblocks that they have turned out to be an everyday phenomenon in Bolivia. However, the
major difference between the neoliberal and the post-neoliberal eras lies in the fact that, in the
latter, the logic of difference predominates. In other words, most of these acts of protest fall
within the category of institutionalist politics. The demands remain within the confines of their
own particularity and do not link up with other demands to form a chain of equivalence against
the system. Writing a history of these acts of protest is beyond the scope of this article. However,
I intend to discuss some cases to convey a sense of the issues raised in those protests and the
social actors involved. I take more examples from the city of El Alto, where I have been doing
intensive ethnographic research since 2010. The city was the center of the massive anti-neolib-
eral rebellion over the question of gas in 2003, the episode that played the most important role
in the downfall of the neoliberal regime. Secondly, El Alto remains one of the strongest support
bases of Evo Morales. However, at the same time, it witnesses acts of protest very frequently.
Therefore a study of El Alto would shed light in a better way on the paradox of the simultaneity
of stable electoral support enjoyed by Evo Morales and the continuance of acts of protest on a
large scale. Moreover, all these factors make it the best space to examine the differences
between the populist politics of the neoliberal era and institutionalist politics that dominate the
era of Morales’s presidency.
66 Critical Sociology 44(1)

As stated earlier, most of the acts of protest in contemporary Bolivia have to do with the legacy
of neoliberalism. Let me turn to some instances of protest during the Morales era. Several acts of
protest in contemporary Bolivia have to do with the question of violent crimes. Scholars have
pointed to a positive correlation between income disparities and the rise in violent crimes (Carranza,
2006). It is inequality rather than absolute poverty that is linked to a rise in crime. As inequality
increased in Bolivia with neoliberalism, the increase in violent crime can be seen as a legacy of the
neoliberal period. The crime rate increased by 360 percent from 1990 to 2001 during the era of the
neoliberalization of the economy (Goldstein, 2012). Neoliberalism also leads to an increase in
individualism, consumer culture, casual and low-paid jobs, the break-up of communitarian systems
of support and care (Reiner, 2007) and a culture of suspicion (Goldstein, 2012), all of which, in
turn, lead to more crime.
People have mobilized in large numbers on various occasions, raising the issue of insecurity. In
March 2012, about 3000 people from the city of El Alto marched to the center of La Paz, raising
that issue. The immediate cause was the murder of two journalists. The federation of neighborhood
associations called the Federación de Juntas Vecinales (FEJUVE), which led the march, called for
introducing death penalty for the muggers. A commission of the protestors went to meet the offi-
cials in the Ministry of Justice and present the demand officially. The protestors carried banners
with black bands to symbolize mourning, and signboards demanding justice for the slain journal-
ists. The murders became an occasion for the residents of the city to highlight the problem of
insecurity in the city and demand adequate response from the state. Greater police presence in the
neighborhoods was the major demand. They also exhorted the government to take tough measures
against corruption in the police force and judiciary by giving a 30-year prison sentence to corrupt
judges and prosecutors who are complicit in organized crime.
In 2010, there was another major popular mobilization against the government’s decision to
cancel fuel subsidies, pushing up the price of gasoline by 73 percent and diesel by 82 percent. This
was the largest increase in 30 years. This doubled the costs of transportation and food. The whole
country erupted in a wave of protests. The COB called for a general strike and 10,000 workers
marched from El Alto to the center of La Paz (Bjork-James, 2011). Other indigenous organizations
like the Consejo Nacional de Ayllus y Markas del Qullasuyu (CONAMAQ), neighborhood asso-
ciations in El Alto, and the association of coca farmers in Cochabamba joined the protests. In El
Alto, protestors occupied the offices of the regional trade union federation called the Central
Obrera Regional (COR) and the FEJUVE when they were suspected as being co-opted by the gov-
ernment. The participation of the key support bases of Evo Morales in the protests along with right-
wing opposition groups and parties shook the government. The government tried to contain dissent
by measures like freezing utility rates, a 20 percent pay increase for public sector and minimum
wage workers and the promise of infrastructure projects in the countryside, but in vain. The move-
ment seemed to develop a populist tendency and had the potential of forming a new chain of
equivalence against the regime. There were calls from popular organizations grouped under the
coalition La Unión Nacional de Defensores de los Recursos Naturales de Bolivia (UNADERENA)
for a total nationalization of gas. They urged the government to get rid of all neoliberal policy
measures and move faster towards a post-neoliberal economy. This movement was strong enough
to bring down the government. However, this did not happen as Morales withdrew the decree that
cancelled the subsidies after five days (Achtenberg, 2012).
Many other acts of protest in contemporary Bolivia also have to do with the legacy of neoliberal
policies in education, health and transport. There have been constant protests in the city of El Alto
demanding breakfast for schoolchildren, an increase in teacher posts in public schools, improve-
ment in the quality of public hospitals and better public transportation. However, they remain
within the boundaries of institutionalist politics. Sometimes, the state intervenes favorably and at
Ravindran 67

other times they fulfill the demands partially. For instance, though they did not agree to the demand
of the death penalty for muggers, they took some steps to control crime in the city of El Alto by
installing CCTV cameras in the central parts of the city (Ministerio de Gobierno, Bolivia, 2013).
When the federation of parents associations in El Alto protested, demanding teaching posts for
computer science in public schools, the government did not accede to that demand but decided to
train the other teachers in the school to teach the subject (Pagina Siete, 2014). In some cases, vari-
ous popular sectors mobilize against each other. For example, when the minibus owners block
roads in one part of the city demanding a hike in bus fares, residents organized by the neighbor-
hood associations stage another roadblock against the minibus owners in another part of the city.
In such cases, the government generally tries to strike a balance between opposing forces.
After the victory of Evo Morales, demands like the ones described above were disarticulated
from the major grievances of the people in the neoliberal era: poverty, increasing inequality and
racism. It is widely believed by the popular sectors that the government has delivered on these
fronts. Elsewhere, I have argued that the reduction of poverty and inequality, and initiatives against
racial discrimination like the law against racism, are seen very positively by the majority of people
in El Alto (Ravindran, 2015). The latter also refer to indigenous people occupying positions of
power in the government like never before in history as a major accomplishment of the first indig-
enous president. In that context, demands like those for better infrastructure, public utilities and
educational opportunities that were articulated with the struggles against racism and neoliberal
capitalism in the neoliberal era got increasingly disarticulated from the same after the election of
Evo Morales. In other words, the demands that earlier used to overflow their own particularity and
assume the character of a general struggle against the system now remain within their particulari-
ties. Despite the fact that many of the issues that trigger these protests have to do with the slow pace
of moving beyond neoliberalism, the significant though limited efforts of the government to chal-
lenge neoliberalism have created an image of the Morales government as an anti-neoliberal force
that is radically different from the previous governments. This discourages, if not prevents, the
reading of these struggles as part of a larger struggle against a neoliberal system.
Most of these demands were unevenly absorbed into the system. However, when the system
fails to absorb most of the demands and when that happens consistently, the system comes under
pressure and the demands turn into floating signifiers that can be articulated with other elements to
form a new chain of equivalence against the existing system (Laclau, 2005). That would signal the
beginning of a populist political process. One reason why that did not happen in places like El Alto
is that the chain of equivalence between all indigenous-popular sectors that was constructed during
the neoliberal era is not yet dead. It remains dormant in the form of a united opposition to the ‘tra-
ditional neoliberal parties’ that represent the oligarchy, as people constantly talk of preventing a
return of the right-wing parties to power. For instance, during a public screening of documentaries
on the 2003 rebellion on the footpaths of El Alto, an old man came up to me and started sharing his
experiences of participation in that rebellion. He then said:

Now the same forces that killed the people … the MNR, ADN [major parties of the neoliberal era] want to
return to power [the presidential elections were only a few months away]. We should stop them, otherwise
the same things will happen.

I regularly came across such statements in interviews and informal conversations with the people
of El Alto during my ethnographic fieldwork. Before the election of Evo Morales as president, the
logic of equivalence against the oligarchy was more prominent as the right wing was in power.
However, after Morales’s election victory in 2005, the indigenous-popular sectors in most parts of
Andean Bolivia feel that a relatively favorable government is in power4 and therefore the logic of
68 Critical Sociology 44(1)

equivalence fades into the background as something that becomes legible only when the threat of
the rightist opposition returning to power is invoked.
Laclau (2005) argues that rival chains of equivalences that exist in a discursive field at one point
of time try to incorporate the same elements into them. The Bolivian experience reveals another
possibility not considered by him – of the enduring influence of a dormant chain of equivalence
even in times in which the logic of difference predominates. The dormant populist chain of equiva-
lence and the collective memories of struggle evoked by it also hinder the formation of a new chain
of equivalence against the regime.
Nevertheless, a moment emerged in Bolivia when it seemed that new chains of equivalences
that could challenge the existing system were possible. Now, I turn to that moment. There were two
major struggles that laid the background for that moment, the struggle against the construction of
a highway across the TIPNIS national park and the struggle over pensions led by the COB.

The TIPNIS Conflict

The Bolivian government had a plan to build a highway that would cut through the Territorio
Indígena y Parque Nacional Isiboro Secure (TIPNIS), a protected area inhabited by about 12,000
indigenous people. The indigenous inhabitants opposed the construction of the highway, arguing
that it would lead to further deforestation and occupation of the land on which they hunt and gather,
by the highland peasants, mainly the coca growers (Laing, 2015; Fabricant and Postero, 2015). In
2011, Confederación de Pueblos Indígenas de Bolivia (CIDOB), the federation of lowland indig-
enous people and the CONAMAQ, a highland indigenous organization, started a march from the
city of Trinidad to La Paz, in opposition to the project. Buckling under pressure, the government
reversed its decision and decided that the highway would not pass through TIPNIS. In an unex-
pected twist, another group of indigenous people living in the southern part of the TIPNIS belong-
ing to the organization Consejo Indígena del Sur (CONISUR) marched to La Paz demanding that
the road be constructed. The government turned down the earlier law and decided to hold a process
of consultation with the communities. The consultation process was completed in which the major-
ity of communities decided in favor of the road. However, several community leaders continue to
organize against the project, criticizing the process of consultation, which they argue was based on
the distribution of liquor, giving away of gifts and lack of respect for indigenous norms of decision-
making (Torrez, 2013, personal communication). They also opposed the inclusion of communities
of coca cultivators who had settled in the park in the consultation process (Muñoz, 2013).

Protests over Pensions

In May 2013, the COB called for protests against the government, demanding an increase in pen-
sions for public sector employees to make it equivalent to 100 percent of their last salaries.
According to the existing law, they were paid 70 percent. This struggle over pensions can be seen
as the continuation of various struggles by the COB during the Morales presidency demanding
nationalizations of more mines and increases in salaries by a greater rate than what the govern-
ment had offered. The protestors, comprising mine workers, factory workers, employees in the
public health sector and teachers, resorted to actions like the blocking of highways connecting
major departments and cities, destruction of bridges with dynamite and blocking entry to interna-
tional airports. For weeks, the administrative capital city La Paz was engulfed in protests and
roadblocks, and there were frequent clashes between the miners, armed with dynamite, and the
police. The movement came to an end after the government announced an increase less than what
was demanded by the COB.
Ravindran 69

Failure of Non-hegemonic Politics

After these two major protests, there were possibilities that the political sectors that had a radical
critique of the government would form a chain of equivalence against the system, pushing it in a
more radical direction. The reason for these two protests setting the background for such a moment
to emerge was that, unlike the other cases discussed above, they raised profound ideological ques-
tions on the direction and pace of the process of change. This was enabled by the fact that they were
organized by the COB and CIDOB, two organizations that have a glorious history of political
struggles in Bolivia. In that context, calls were made for unity between the COB and the two indig-
enous organizations that were against the government: the CONAMAQ and the CIDOB (Protesta,
2012a). In November 2012, various radical indigenous and left organizations got together in the
city of La Paz to plan the construction of a political alternative to the MAS government. The people
who attended the meeting included representatives of the CIDOB, Partido Socialista (PS),
Movimiento Sin Tierra (MST), La Protesta, Frente de Maestros Rurales Pachakuti, and some
neighborhood association leaders of El Alto. They called for the establishment of a ‘Revolutionary
Alternative of the People’ and laid out a political proposal that included 100 percent nationalization
of natural resources, expropriation of transnational corporations without compensation, radical
land reforms that would eliminate the latifundistas as a class, and defense of autonomous indige-
nous territories like the TIPNIS (Protesta, 2012b). However, these efforts did not take off. Later,
the COB formed a political instrument of workers called the Worker’s Party.
After a year of conflict, the COB gave up the idea of building their own party and became an
official ally of the government. The revelation of the impossibility of the success of the Worker’s
Party prompted the COB to form an alliance with the MAS to prevent a return of the neoliberal right.
In the Labor Day celebrations of 2014, Morales marched with the COB leaders to the presidential
palace to observe Labor Day. From the balcony of the presidential palace, Morales signed the law that
increased wages and salaries for both public and private sector employees and ceremoniously offered
the file to Juan Carlos Trujillo, the leader of the COB. The radical indigenous organizations took a
different route and sealed an alliance with the right-wing parties. A leader of the TIPNIS struggle,
Pedro Nuni, declared his support for Ruben Costas in the presidential elections (La Razon, 20
November 2013), despite the fact that the latter represents the latifundista class, the major historical
enemy of the lowland indigenous people. Another leader of the TIPNIS struggle, Fernando Vargas,
became a candidate of the Green Party. However, the issues raised in his political campaign were a
repetition of those of the right-wing oligarchy, like absence of rule of law and democracy, protection
of private property and private investments, and autonomy for departmental governments. The latter
has been a demand of the oligarchic elites in the eastern departments to be able to negotiate with
transnational capital independently of the central government and prevent land reforms. Another
proposal of Fernando Vargas was to give state protection to big landowners instead of implementing
land reforms (Vargas, 2014). The CONAMAQ, the highland indigenous organization opposing the
government, allied with Samuel Doria Medina, the neoliberal politician who became infamous
among the popular sectors of Bolivia for his record of privatizing many public sector companies
when he was the Minister of Planning in the neoliberal government of Jaime Paz Zamora. Moreover
the CIDOB and the CONAMAQ had split after the TIPNIS struggle, with one group in each organi-
zation supporting the government and the other continuing to oppose the government.
The important question that arises in this context is: why were the oppositional forces unable to
form a new chain of equivalence against the government and turn the process of change in Bolivia
in a more radical direction? I argue that it is because of the inability of organizations like the COB
and the CIDOB to create a hegemonic alliance with the other popular sectors who were also
engaged in acts of protest.
70 Critical Sociology 44(1)

According to Gramsci (1988), hegemony refers to leadership within a class alliance. The mate-
rial basis of hegemony is constituted through reforms or compromises in which the leadership of
the class is maintained, but in which other classes also have certain demands met. In other words,
hegemonic relations are relations that alter the identity of the classes entering into the alliance,
including that of the hegemonizing class.
The formation of hegemony, according to Laclau and Mouffe, is through the process of articula-
tion which they define as ‘any practice establishing a relation among elements such that their
identity is modified as a result of the articulatory practice’ (1985: 105). A social group becomes
hegemonic when it succeeds in articulating its interests with that of other social groups. This entails
incorporating demands of the latter into its political project.
The electoral success of Evo Morales can be attributed to the successful construction of a chain of
equivalence between various movements and demands. Though he had not led the struggles over
water or gas, his background as the leader of the coca cultivators and his image of being the most
hated politician to the US embassy helped him hegemonize other movements. His own constituency,
the coca growing peasants and, in a broader sense, the highland indigenous peasants represented by
organizations like the CSUTCB, functioned as the hegemonizing force that hegemonized other sec-
tors like the lowland indigenous groups, urban indigenous people, workers’ unions and so on.
Most movements and acts of protest during the presidency of Evo Morales could not challenge
its hegemony. For instance, the protests of the COB could have projected a more radical alternative
if they had followed the logic of hegemonic politics. However, they stuck to sectoral demands with
which other sections of society could not identify. Rather than frame the issue in terms of radical-
izing the process of change through measures like a total nationalization and industrialization of
natural resources, land reforms, and increasing the pace of moving towards a post-neoliberal future,
which would have also taken on board their sectoral demands, the discourse of the COB remained
focused on the question of wage and pension increases for workers in the formal sector. Rather than
take demands of other social sectors into consideration, they mainly confined themselves to a sin-
gle demand. By doing the former, they could have projected their struggle for increased wages and
pensions as part of a larger struggle to radicalize the process of change in Bolivia and moving faster
towards a post-neoliberal future. Their focus on wage and pension increases for formal sector
workers alienated their informal sector counterparts who formed the majority of the workforce.
The government was able to easily turn this against the COB. During the days of the conflict, Evo
Morales increased the Renta Dignidad, the old age pension his government had instituted for sen-
ior citizens who don’t receive any other pension, by 50 Bs (Agencia de Noticias BPA, 2013a). The
position of the government was that if the COB’s demands were met, it would eat into the funds
required to pay the Renta Dignidad for the people who do not have any kind of old age pension.
The vice minister for decolonization, Felix Cardenas, in a meeting on decolonization and
racism,5 argued that the strike of the COB was a direct challenge to the campesinos (peasants)
who only get the Renta Dignidad as pension. He added that if the demand for 100 percent pen-
sions for workers was met, it would increase the already huge difference between the pensions
of the public sector workers and the poor peasants. Giving a historical background of the COB,
he accused them of always believing in the vanguardist role of the proletariat vis-à-vis the peas-
ants. The COB had historically seen the proletariat as the vanguard of the revolution and the
peasants as a not-always-reliable ally; a segment of the petty bourgeoisie. There are many docu-
mented experiences of discriminatory treatment the peasants had encountered from the mine
worker leaders. The discrimination was also racial in the sense that in the racialized power
structure of the Andean region, the urbanized and semi-urbanized workers in the mines and
factories occupied a superior position in relation to the peasants who lived in rural communi-
ties. The peasants were seen as more Indian for being in the countryside and speaking less
Ravindran 71

Spanish. The miners could achieve a certain degree of limited upward racial mobility by adopt-
ing white cultural traits like speaking Spanish, moving from the countryside to the towns and
getting better formal education (mining centers had better schools). Cardenas portrayed the
COB as anti-indigenous and racist and a force creating impediments to the government’s agenda
of decolonization. Most of the indigenous organizations adhered to the government’s position
because the COB leaders did not go beyond making sectoral demands. In other words, the non-
hegemonic nature of their political strategy led to their defeat. The demands that emerged from
other sections of society did not articulate with them. Though the COB had supported the march
for TIPNIS, they were not able to form any durable anti-systemic alliance with the indigenous
organizations opposed to the government like the CIDOB and the CONAMAQ.
Morales called the social organizations that supported his government to march to the capital to
counter the protestors. An assembly of the Confederación Nacional de Organizaciones por el Cambio
(Conalcam), composed of indigenous peasant organizations that supported the government, was held in
La Paz (La Razon, 24 May 2013). There were clashes between the workers of the COB and the peasant
organizations when the latter tried to lift a roadblock made by the former in the town of Llallagua
(Agencia de Noticias BPA, 2013b). The government was thus able to maintain its hegemonic grip on the
indigenous-popular classes and prevented a rearticulation of those forces against the regime.
Another possible line of argument could be that the radical critics of the government themselves
have sharp ideological differences that make a united opposition to the MAS government impossi-
ble. The critics of the Morales government fall into two broad categories: the indigenous liberation-
ist and the radical Marxist. The indigenous liberationists that include organizations like the CIDOB
and the CONAMAQ hold on to a post-developmental perspective and criticize the increased reli-
ance of the government on extractivist ventures that are ecologically destructive and also trample
upon the ancestral territorial rights of indigenous communities. On the other hand, the radical
Marxist critics call for a complete nationalization and industrialization of all natural resources.
Radical sectors in the COB and traditional left organizations like the Partido Obrero Revolucionario
(POR) hold on to this perspective. In that sense, their position is not in conformity with the post-
developmental vision. Though both are critical of the government’s extractivist policies and the
export of primary products, the focus of the critique is different. While the post-developmentalists
take an ecologist position and prefer a solution based on limited economic growth and harmony with
nature, the radical Marxists lay emphasis on domestic industrialization of the primary products
rather than an abandonment of extractive activities for a post-developmentalist solution.
It may seem that the Marxist and post-developmentalist forces opposed to the government can
never come together because their goals are too different to be compatible. Nevertheless, history is
replete with examples of articulation of political ideologies that were historically in conflict. The
articulation between British traditional conservatism and neoliberalism during the Thacherist era
(Smith, 1994), the articulation between fascism and neo-socialism in interwar France (Bastow,
2000) and the emergence of alliances between environmentalists and the old left6 since the 1990s
are some of the examples. The fact that the diverse groups that were opposed to the MAS and
wanted to push the process of change in a more radical direction could arrive at some minimum
common ground was evidenced in the some of the meetings referred to above. In other words,
those forces were not able to create a political alternative, not for any inherent incompatibility, but
for a failure to construct new hegemonic (re)articulations.

Conclusion
It remains ironic that many of the same people who brought the current government into power by
engaging in protest actions against the neoliberal regime have to resort to similar acts to get their
72 Critical Sociology 44(1)

voices heard. This can be attributed to the enduring character of the bureaucratic state apparatus
and also the cultures of clientelism and paternalism that plagues the government’s democratic
potential. As a consequence, a political culture of protest emerges where the latter becomes the
dominant if not the only mode of political expression.
The Bolivian experience also offers valuable insights into the impacts these protest movements
can have on social transformation at various levels. The most important thing it reveals is that the
potentiality of any act of protest to cause political transformations and the degree and pace of those
transformations depend to a large extent on their ability to construct chains of equivalences against
the existing regime through hegemonic articulations. The successful construction of a chain of equiv-
alence between various demands during the neoliberal era led to the fall of the neoliberal regime and
the victory of Evo Morales. The possibility of a more radical alternative to the politics of the current
government was not realized due to the non-hegemonic nature of the politics of organizations opposed
to the government like the COB. In other words, there is no alternative to hegemonic politics.

Acknowledgements
I thank Charles Hale, Arturo Escobar, Alper Yagci and the two anonymous reviewers of Critical Sociology
for comments on an earlier version of this article.

Funding
This article is part of a larger research project and the field work for it was funded by grants from the National
Science Foundation and the Wenner Gren Foundation.

Notes
1. After the return to electoral democracy after decades of military dictatorships, none of the presidential
candidates could win an election with more than one-third of the popular vote. Evo Morales won the
2005 elections with 53.7 percent of the popular vote and won the subsequent elections with greater mar-
gins of 64.2 percent and 61.3 percent respectively.
2. This argument was initially made by Collins (2014). This article advances the argument by exploring the
concrete forms and patterns in which the populist political process unfolded in Bolivia.
3. Source of information: Ethnographic fieldwork in El Alto
4. As I elaborate in Ravindran (2015), the government is seen as favorable by the majority of people from
the indigenous-popular sectors. However, there are pockets of resistance to Evo Morales everywhere,
even in the countryside. Some of them are the communities affected by cooperative mining organized by
the Consejo Nacional de Ayllus y Markas del Qullasuyu (The National Council of Ayllus and Markas of
Qullasuyu).
5. The meeting was part of a series of events organized to observe the week against racism and discrimina-
tion. It was held on 20 May 2013 in Hotel Presidente in La Paz. I attended the meeting.
6. This includes alliances between moderate social democratic parties like the Social Democratic Party and
the Green Party in Germany and the Plural Left coalition that governed France from 2012 to 2014 as well
as alliances between radical leftists and environmentalists like the Green Left Party of the Netherlands,
Unity List-Red Greens of Denmark, the Nordic Green Left Alliance and the Left Ecology Freedom Party
of Italy.

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