If Latin America has been the site of the most radical opposition to neoliberal restructuring over the past five years, Bolivia has been its insurrectionary frontline. Popular mobilizations on a broad geographical scale, uniting a wide range of class and ethnic forces, have now brought down two presidents—Sánchez de Lozada in October 2003; Mesa in July 2005—and vetoed the constitutionally prescribed accession of a third, Senate leader Vaca Díez, in July 2005. With elections approaching in December 2005, these forces stand poised to exert a continuing influence on the country’s future political and economic development.

But while Bolivia’s tumultuous protests can be seen in the context of a series of regional challenges to the Washington consensus in South America, in which mass movements have shaken or displaced traditional governing elites in Argentina, Ecuador, Venezuela and Peru, we should avoid treating the crisis simply as a local effect of a predictable transnational phenomenon. We should not take either ‘neoliberalism’ or ‘globalization’ to be an autonomous agent that inevitably generates its own grave-diggers; nor should we assume that the mass uprisings form a single wave, sweeping inexorably from country to country. The protests in Bolivia between 2000 and 2005 have followed their own cycle, which we detail below. But their underlying dynamics can only be understood within the context of the country’s distinctive insurrectionary traditions of the past 200 years; the memory and forgetting of previous revolutionary moments; and the tension-filled connections between indigenous and national-popular political expressions that these have involved.

The current cycle, we will argue, constitutes the third major revolutionary moment in Bolivian history. The first was indigenous. Starting in August of 1780, a regional insurgency in Potosí under the leadership of an Indian commoner called Tomás Katari set off a chain of local movements that have come to be known for the descendant of Inca royalty, José Gabriel Túpak Amaru, who symbolically headed the insurrection in Cuzco. The southern highlands of Oruro and La Paz ignited in early 1781, and Aymara and Quechua troops cleared the countryside of Spanish colonial control. The Aymara peasant commander in La Paz, Túpaj Katari, strangled Spanish forces holding out in the city in the course of a siege that lasted five months. Yet, lacking urban allies, Indian troops never succeeded in taking the city. In late 1781 Katari was drawn and quartered, and Spanish authorities held on to colonial rule until they were definitively overthrown in 1825. For creole elites, as well as Aymara protestors, the sieges of La Paz over the past few years have recalled the great anticolonial insurrection of two centuries ago.

The second great revolution in Bolivia, that of 1952, was also the first national-popular revolution in postwar Latin America. A three-day urban insurrection led by the middle-class National Revolutionary Movement (mnr), and backed by the armed force of Trotskyist (por) tin miners’ militias from the departments of Oruro and Potosí, as well as armed students and factory-workers from La Paz, brought the temporary destruction of the landlord class, the nationalization of the mines, the universal extension of the franchise and an end to oligarchic rule. State firms managed the extraction and export of natural resources, especially minerals and petroleum—a model that lasted, with alternation between mnr dominance in the political sphere and de facto authoritarian military regimes, until the tin-market collapse and neoliberal restructuring of 1985.

Though the memory of 1952–53 seemed obsolete after the revolution’s own frustrations and the imposition of neoliberalism, a new national revolutionary horizon—Bolivia’s third insurrectionary moment—was brought into being through insurgent Aymara initiative at the start of the 21st century. This process recalls the lessons of recent struggles, the vivid memory of more distant ones (1781), and the national-popular demands—especially regarding sovereignty over natural resources—associated with 1952.footnote¹ Generally, Indian and national-popular struggles in Bolivia have followed separate historical tracks, and misapprehension, suspicion, and manipulation have plagued the relations between Indian and progressive mestizo or creole political leaders and intellectuals. However, the infrequent moments of convergence between these struggles have created powerful radical movements and left lasting effects. In the current cycle, the October Days of 2003, which saw the overthrow of Sánchez de Lozada, and the June 2005 insurrection that led to Mesa’s downfall stand out historically as exceptional conjunctures of this kind, combining elements of past Indian and national-popular struggles in novel ways. Rural peasant and urban workers from a range of formal and informal sectors mobilized simultaneously, and were ultimately supported by progressive middle classes.footnote² The common objective was to sweep away an unrepresentative and repressive political regime, establish sovereign control over national resources, and convoke a constitutional assembly to restructure political and economic life. The crystallization of a new ‘national-popular’ bloc suddenly seemed possible.

During those October Days the wiphala, the chequered-rainbow banner of indigenous self-determination, flapped side by side with the tri-coloured Bolivian flag in La Paz’s Plaza San Francisco, as Aymara protesters repudiated neoliberal government in the name of the nation. The mingling of these symbols reflects the degree of overlap between Indian and Bolivian identities, and between Indian and national-popular struggles today. The effects of neoliberalism—above all, the massive population flows from the rural highlands to the cities and the eastern lowlands—might have been expected to break down long-standing ethnic solidarities as well as proletarian traditions; instead, such solidarities have been reconstituted in the swelling slums of El Alto and Cochabamba, and among the incoming rural labourers of the lowland agricultural regions. Many of the demonstrators who occupied the Bolivian capital in October 2003 came from the popular neighbourhood associations of El Alto, a city on the upper rim of La Paz with a population of more than 800,000, larger than La Paz itself, of whom 82 per cent claim indigenous Aymara identity. Others were members of the heavily Aymara hillside neighbourhood associations of Munaypata, Villa Victoria, and Villa Fátima; market-women, belonging to urban guild associations; students and unemployed youth; mine-workers from Huanuni, an enclave south of the city of Oruro; coca growers and peasant settlers from the subtropical Yungas valleys north-east of La Paz; and members of Aymara peasant communities from the high plateau, led by the insurgent district of Achacachi.

Unlike the protests of the 1970s and 1980s, however—when left parties and the still-robust Bolivian Workers’ Central (cob) had united students and intellectuals as well as peasants and workers from urban and mining centres—in 2003, neither the opposition parties nor the trade unions provided comparable political leadership. The turnout of students and professionals from the mestizo and creole middle classes was lower, while the ranks of urban and rural labourers of Aymara descent swelled downtown streets. It was Sánchez de Lozada’s decision to respond to the protests with tanks and open gunfire that triggered a wider insurrection, in which even creoles from middle- and upper middle-class neighbourhoods in La Paz launched hunger strikes and took to the streets and airwaves to demand the president’s resignation.