Bolivia is Burning

Bolivia is burning again, like it burned before, and the flames will not die soon. Their president, elected by a razor thin margin, has resigned and flown to Miami. Democracy hangs by a thread. There are big issues at work there, fights at high levels over globalization and free market reforms. But if you want to understand Bolivia’s unrest, just look at the pictures.

Look at the old president and the new; look at their white skin. Look at the 15 members of the new cabinet. They are no different. Look at the protestors: the miners, the coca growers, the poor and hungry. See their faces: dark and wrinkled. They have different brows, different cheeks. They are the color of the earth in Bolivia.

There are simple truths at work in Bolivia, and though there are exceptions (there are always exceptions), in acknowledging those truths we come to understand why they’re painful. The white people in Bolivia are rich. They are not all white like we think of white. Their skin is not palely freckled like an Irishman or ruddy red like a Norwegian. They are people the color of beach sand, descended from the Spanish who came 500 years ago and engorged themselves and their empire on Potosí’s silver. They hold the money and the power and control of the military, and their money and power has been handed down and will be handed down so long as they survive.

The Indian people of Bolivia are not rich. They do not live in the moneyed neighborhoods of La Paz. They are subsistence farmers and coca growers and miners. They are the present and they are the protesters. For Quechua and the Aymara people, the natives of Bolivia, their identity is bound tightly in race or non-race (non-whiteness).

Bolivia’s natives are not ignorant of their oppression, or that it comes largely at the hands of the white ruling class. Protesters now see the current natural gas battle as another attempt by the ruling class to rob Bolivia’s native people of their resources, and they have brought the government to its knees in their outrage.

“Globalization is just another name for submission and domination,” protesting miner Nicanor Apaza, 46, was quoted as saying in The New York Times. “We’ve had to live with that here for 500 years, and now we want to be our own masters.”

It seems wrong to think of these people and these issues, these complicating levels of class struggle and economics, in just racial terms. And it is wrong, in the sense that these people are not wholly defined and owned by the color of their skin. But it’s right to acknowledge the realities of many Latin American societies, because the racism and nationalism and class elitism are so interwoven parts of the same oppressive tapestry.

I spent some time recently in Chile. The rich and the powerful there are European descendants, of course—they were Spanish and German and now Chilean. It’s interesting to me that when you want to really insult someone in Chile, you call them a “Peruano,” or resident of Peru. The insult’s sting comes not just from base nationalism, but a level of racism as well. The Peruvians in Chile are not the rich or the powerful or the white, but the indigenous women who come to serve as maids in upper class Chilean households. With this understanding of who “Peruvians” are to white Chileans, it is implicitly understood among their group why such a name would be so insulting.

A Chilean man living in the countryside once sought to explain the differences between Chilean and Peruvian people to me. He searched for some way to bottle up their grand conflict, to explain why Peru was just different than Chile. (Peru, like Bolivia, has a much larger percentage of indigenous population than Chile.) Finally, he hit upon his key point.

“Peruvians,” he told me, “are lazy by nature.”

And to him among others, it’s as simple as that. Nobody but the Americans in the room flinched. Nobody else thought there was anything strange about summing up a whole people so cuttingly. In too many Latin American countries, the stark realities are these: the whites hold the money and power, the whites look down on the darker people, the battles of class are also battles of race. Shouldn’t this sound familiar?

Editorial boards at the Miami Herald, the Washington Times and, Monday, The Crimson as well have beseeched the United States government to take a role in righting Bolivia’s sinking government. They want to see foreign attention brought to bear on Bolivia’s domestic problems. But if there’s anything we should have learned here in America, it’s that a civil society cannot band together, cannot hold peace, when it is so caustically divided by race and racially dictated class barriers.

Bolivia’s new government must address their true divisions themselves. The new president, Carlos Mesa, has taken one positive step in appointing an Indian cabinet minister to handle “ethnic affairs.” But Bolivia’s race problem is not something that can be so reduced and cordoned off. It must be addressed head-on. Policy concessions about the International Monetary Fund or exports to the United States will only serve to temporarily quell the fires that light La Paz and El Alto tonight. Until there is an open and public dialogue between indigenous Bolivians and those of European heritage, until Bolivian Indians have an investment in their own governing, those fires will only smolder until the next uprising. And Bolivia will burn again.

Lucas Tate ’05-’06 is a government concentrator in Lowell House. His column appears on alternate Wednesdays.