Victor Hugo Cardenas and the “indigenous movement”

El Duderino has posted an interesting defense of Victor Hugo Cardenas’ expulsion from the province of Omasuyus.  While I don’t agree with his conclusions, he does present both historical and legal background of the situation to put it in context.  He believes that President Morales is not, and should not, be the central focus here — rather, community leaders who made the decision to oust Cardenas are fully responsible for their own actions. At the same time, he seems to think this event should not be a major concern:

Does the attack, as suggested at Gringo Tambo, evoke a “worrisome trend” in Bolivian politics of violent intimidation of political opponents, making the analogy of Morales to Mugabe less hyperbolic? No. If other incidents like this were to occur, yes. Of course we know that the opposite is not true, MAS politicians have routinely been the subject of physical assault. That said, the government’s rejection of the attack is important to setting a necessary precedent, before a trend emerges. If Morales wanted to exploit the vicitimization of indigenous peoples in Bolivia to suppress political opponents, frankly, far worse would have already been visited upon Cardanes, Costas, Marinkovic, and the rest.

I disagree (Note: I didn’t write the post that he cites here, Kate did).  I think most of us at the GT agree that the comparison to Mugabe was polemical.  We are aware that indigenous communities do not follow the US Bill of Rights nor modernist capitalist ideals of private property, and that ownership in indigenous rural communities must have community consent in order to be recognized.

Nevertheless, democracy needs to accomodate space for political dissent, and this event brings that into question.  Democracy is not just a product but a process.  That process depends on allowing for multiple viewpoints, even when they are unpopular.

And while el Duderino decries the violence again Cardenas and his family, he is also quite clear about this:

Cardenas is a political traitor to the indigenous movement. … Bolivia’s indigenous communities have no reason to tolerate Cardenas‘ pretensions to speak on their behalf and they should not. He ought to be marginalized as a fraud and scam.

I’m not going to argue VHC’s case here, that’s not my purpose.  Instead, I want to argue that there is no single, unified indigenous movement in Bolivia, and never has been.  A brief look at history makes this clear.  Evo Morales has broad-based support from indigenous and non-indigenous people.  Felipe Quispe (another Aymara leader) and Evo Morales, while making strategic alliances, have never really had the same goals.  The Katarista movement had split into multiple factions long before VHC became Goni’s VP. And going back into Bolivia’s history, one can point to multiple incidences where indigenous groups have taken opposite political sides at particular political junctures.

Who is indigenous in Bolivia is a continuum, not a clear-cut category.  Unlike the US (where being Native America is a legal status, problematic in its own way, but clear in the eyes of the state), being indigenous in Bolivia is something that individuals can step out of (by moving, adopting different clothes and new professions — there are numerous ethnographic descriptions of this process) or into (in the case of many urban Aymara who have recently reclaimed indigenous cultural roots).  To imply that there is a single indigenous group, let alone movement, is to ignore the multiple identities, politics, divisions, and sheer diversity of Bolivians.

It is exactly this kind of reductionist argument, that divides Bolivians into neat categories of indigenous/non-indigenous, that we are trying to get away from here at the GT (despite our internal disagreements).  To assume that all indigenous people should agree with each other simply because they are indigenous — and that those who hold minority opinions are “traitors” — is to fail to recognize the Aymara as a diverse group with multiple histories, perspectives, politics, and beliefs.