The Five Hundred Year Rebellion: Indigenous Movements and the Decolonization of History in Bolivia

252 Pages·5.134 MB·English

by  Benjamin Dangl

The
FIVE HUNDRED YEAR REBELLION
Indigenous Movements and the
Decolonization of History
in Bolivia

BENJAMIN DANGL
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
COB—Bolivian Workers’ Central, Central Obrera Boliviana
CONAMAQ—National Council of Ayllus and Markas of
Qullasuyu, Consejo Nacional de Ayllus y Markas de
Qullasuyo
CSUTCB—Unified Syndical Confederation of Rural Workers
of Bolivia, Confederación Sindical Única de Trabajadores
Campesinos de Bolivia
MAS—Movement Toward Socialism, Movimiento al
Socialismo
MNR—Nationalist Revolutionary Movement, Movimiento
Nacionalista Revolucionario
PMC—Military-Campesino Pact, Pacto Militar-Campesino
THOA—Andean Oral History Workshop, Taller de Historia
Oral Andina
MAP OF BOLIVIA
Map of Bolivia courtesy of the
University of Texas Libraries, The
University of Texas at Austin
INTRODUCTION
The Five Hundred Year Rebellion
The indigenous March for Land and
Territory enters La Paz from El Alto on
September 26, 1996, crossing the
same terrain Túpac Katari’s army
used to seize La Paz in 1781. The
march began among indigenous
communities in the eastern lowlands
of the country and grew in size as it
reached La Paz. Photographer:
Museo Nacional de Etnografía y
Folklore. Courtesy of the Archivo
Central del Museo Nacional de
Etnografía y Folklore.
A caravan of buses, security vehicles, indigenous leaders,
and backpackers with Che Guevara T-shirts wove their way
down a muddy road through farmers’ fields to the
precolonial city of Tiwanaku. Folk music played throughout
the cool day of January 22, 2015, as indigenous priests
conducted complex rituals to prepare Bolivia’s first
indigenous president, Evo Morales, for a third term in
office. His ceremonial inauguration in the ancient city’s
ruins was marked by many layers of symbolic meaning.
“Today is a special day, a historic day reaffirming our
identity,” Morales said in his speech, given in front of an
elaborately carved stone doorway. “For more than five
hundred years, we have suffered darkness, hatred, racism,
discrimination, and individualism, ever since the strange
[Spanish] men arrived, telling us that we had to modernize,
that we had to civilize ourselves. . . . But to modernize us, to
civilize us, first they had to make the indigenous peoples of
the world disappear.”1
Morales had been reelected the previous October with
more than 60 percent of the vote. His popularity
was largely due to his Movement Toward Socialism (MAS)
party’s success in reducing poverty, empowering
marginalized sectors of society, and using funds from state-
run industries for hospitals, schools, and much-needed
public works projects across Bolivia. “I would like to tell
you, sisters and brothers,” Morales continued, “especially
those invited here internationally, what did they used to
say? ‘The Indians, the indigenous people, are only for voting
and not for governing.’ And now the indigenous people, the
unions, we have all demonstrated that we also know how to
govern better than them.”
For most of those in attendance, the event was a time to
reflect on the economic and social progress enjoyed under
the Morales administration and to recognize how far the
country had come in overcoming five hundred years of
subjugation of its indigenous majority since the conquest of
the Americas. “This event is very important for us, for the
Aymara, Quechua, and Guaraní people,” said Ismael Quispe
Ticona, an indigenous leader from La Paz. “[Evo Morales] is
our brother who is in power now after more than five
hundred years of slavery. Therefore, this ceremony has a lot
of importance for us. . . . We consider this a huge
celebration.”2
For critics on the political left, the Tiwanaku event
embodied the contradictions of a president who
championed indigenous rights at the same time that he
silenced and undermined grassroots indigenous dissidents,
and who spoke of respect for Mother Earth while
deepening an extractive economy based on gas and mining
industries. Indeed, the way the MAS used the ruins of
Tiwanaku for political ends, as it had in past inaugurations,
appeared shameful and opportunistic to some critics.3 But
such uses of historical symbols by Morales were part of a
long political tradition in Bolivia. From campesino (rural
worker) and indigenous movements in the 1970s to the
MAS party today, indigenous activists and leftist politicians
have claimed links with indigenous histories of oppression
and resistance to legitimize their demands and guide their
contested processes of decolonization.
When Evo Morales walked through the doors of Tiwanaku
amid smoking incense and the prayers of Andean priests,
for many Bolivians it was a profound moment marking the
third term in office for the country’s first indigenous
president. It was also just another day in a country where
the politics of the present are steeped in the past. The
Morales government typically portrays itself as a political
force that has realized the thwarted dreams of eighteenth- ‐
century indigenous rebel Túpac Katari, who organized an
insurrection against the Spanish in an attempt to reassert
indigenous rule in the Andes. This was underlined in the
recent naming of Bolivia’s first satellite, Túpac Katari (also
known as TKSat 1). The launching of the satellite was
broadcast live in the central Plaza Murillo in La Paz, an
event accompanied by Andean spiritual leaders who
conducted rituals to honor Mother Earth. The government
has also named state-owned planes after Katari. As Bolivian
air force commander Tito Gandarillas told the president at
a celebration marking the official use of a new plane,
“There you have it in front of you, our legendary 727-200
Boeing, that we are going to name Túpac Katari; he has
returned converted into millions [of people] and this
airplane is going to transport millions of Bolivian men and
women, people with few resources.”4 That Katari’s legacy
could be put to use in such a way speaks to the enduring
political capital of the indigenous leader.
Over two hundred years before the Morales government
launched a satellite bearing his name, the Aymara
indigenous rebel Katari led a 109-day siege of La Paz that
rattled Spanish colonial rule. Katari’s revolt was part of an
indigenous insurrection across the Andes launched in 1780
from Cuzco and Potosí, and spread by Katari to La Paz in
March 1781. The essential demand of the revolts led by
Tomás Katari (no relation) in Potosí, Túpac Amaru in Cuzco,
and Túpac Katari in La Paz was that governance of the
region be placed back into indigenous hands.
An Aymara commoner born in the town of Sica Sica
roughly thirty years before the 1781 siege, Túpac Katari
lived in the community of Ayo-Ayo, spoke only the Aymara
language, and was one of the many itinerant coca and cloth
traders in the region.5 His birth name was Julián Apaza, but
he took on the name Túpac Katari to tie his legitimacy as a
leader to the rebels in Cuzco and Potosí. Accounts from the
era describe Katari as a poor man who was not necessarily
handsome, “but his eyes,” one scribe reported, “though
small and sunken, along with his movements demonstrated
the greatest astuteness [viveza] and resolution; of slightly
whiter color than most of the Indians from this region.”6
Bartolina Sisa, Katari’s wife and close ally during the
rebellion, said that her husband’s goal was to establish
indigenous self-rule. She explained that Katari inspired
troops with the promise that “they would be left as the
ultimate owners of this place, and of its wealth.” Rebels, she
said, fought for a time in which “they alone would rule.”7
On March 13, 1781, the residents of La Paz awoke to an
assault of roughly forty thousand indigenous men and
women entering the valley from the surrounding high
plains of El Alto. The rebels planned to seize the city, cutting
it off from its main access and trade routes. The
geographical setting lent itself to this strategy, as El Alto,
where the rebels were based, is located along the rim of the
deep valley that is home to La Paz, making it easy to cut the
city off from the highlands.8 The siege was held from
various points, and Katari’s army descended to make
regular assaults and incursions against the Spanish in La
Paz. Water sources were cut off by the rebels, and a lack of
food forced city residents to eat mules, dogs, and cats.9
Katari presided over his insurrection from the heights of El
Alto, surveying the city below from a busy encampment out
of which messengers, soldiers, and spies came and went.
Staged to inspire fear among the Spanish in the valley, this
hive of constant activity was the logistical and symbolic
heart of the siege. Each morning, Katari’s troops descended
into La Paz, barraging the city with drums, mortar fire,
flutes, and traditional pututo horns made of conches or cow
horns.10
By the end of the siege, fifteen thousand people, roughly a
third of the city’s population, had died. On July 1, Spanish
reinforcements arrived in the city. As the army approached,
Katari ordered his forces to retreat.11 He fled to the nearby
town of Peñas and then to Achacachi to reorganize the
resistance, but was captured. On November 14 in Peñas,
Katari’s limbs were tied to the tails of four horses and he
was quartered alive. To inspire fear among his followers,
the Spanish put his separated limbs on display throughout
the region. The dismemberment of Katari represented the
destruction and death of the rebellion, morbidly displaying
the power of the Spanish over the defeated rebels. Katari’s
head was exhibited in La Paz’s main plaza, near Quilliquilli,
where the rebel leader had hung his own enemies from the
gallows.12
It is widely understood that moments before his
execution, Katari promised, “I will return as millions.”13
Indeed, though his dream of overthrowing the Spanish and
gaining indigenous self-rule was crushed, during the
hundreds of years that have passed since his execution, this
martyr and his struggle have been taken up as symbols of
indigenous resistance by countless movement participants,
activist-scholars, and union leaders in Bolivia. Activists have
erected Katari statues, his name and portrait have graced
placards and the titles of campesino unions, and his legacy
has fueled dozens of indigenous ideologies, manifestos, and
political parties. Katari’s street barricade strategies have
been taken up again by twenty-first-century rebels, and the
satellite named after him circles the globe.
Katari’s symbolism travels well. In April 2000, the specter
of Katari returned in the form of a series of Aymara-led
protests against water privatization and neoliberal policies.
The protests involved road blockades that cut off La Paz
from the rest of the country.14 Marxa Chávez, an Aymara
sociologist with rural roots, became involved in the
uprising. She said that activists took turns maintaining the
barricades and established vigils along the highways to
signal when locals, visitors, and the military were arriving.
The very act of blockading roads to strangle La Paz recalled
Katari’s struggle. “The blockade is a form of remembering
the siege,” Chávez explained. The movement’s organization
of road blockades utilized practical knowledge that had
been “transmitted basically by oral memory.”15 For example,
“there was a form of convening people in the Túpac Katari
uprising which was to light bonfires in the hills so that other
communities would see them, and it was a symbol of alert.”
In the blockades of 2000, activists used the same style of
fires to summon people. “That’s why hundreds of people
later arrived in [the highland town of] Achacachi to face off
with the military, because they had seen the smoke.” She
placed the origins of the technique in the “unwritten
memory in the communities.”16 Three years later, another
siege would rock La Paz, this time led by the same highland
communities and spreading to El Alto. For weeks on end,
Aymara activists maintained barricades surrounding La Paz
to protest government repression and a plan to privatize
and export Bolivian gas. The protests ousted the neo liberal
president Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada and ushered in a
new phase of grassroots organizing and leftist politics that