Of the many studies of Bolivia’s popular uprisings of 2000–2005, Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar’s participatory-observer account stands out. In addition to furnishing an innovative framework for understanding the “rhythms” of social struggle during those years, the book grapples with some of the tensions and dilemmas common to diverse emancipatory struggles. This translation of the 2008 original (with a helpful new foreword by Sinclair Thomson) makes the analysis available to English readers.
Gutiérrez Aguilar’s first objective is to illuminate the “interior horizon” of the forces that mobilized during this period (xx). She sees two common threads: an anticapitalist quest to recover collective resource wealth and an anti-authoritarian struggle to replace the state with participatory decision-making structures. These two impulses were central to the successful campaign against water privatization in Cochabamba in 2000; the Aymara protests over water, land, and coca cultivation rights starting that same year; Chapare coca farmers’ resistance to forced...
