Rhythms of the Pachakuti: Indigenous Uprising and State Power in Bolivia

This gripping book monitors the surge of popular mobilizations that disrupted Bolivia's neoliberal regime and opened the way for Evo Morales's ascent to power in the tumultuous years between 2000 and 2005. Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar, a Mexican mathematician involved in Left politics there, traveled to Bolivia in the mid-1980s, where she plunged into the sizzling culture of revolutionary and neoindigenist politics in La Paz. According to Sinclair Thomson's elegant and insightful foreword, Gutiérrez Aguilar “acquired a quasi-legendary status there as an intense, brilliant activist and radical intellectual” whose solidarity networks extended into Central America's concurrent liberation struggles (p. ix). As veteran activist and friendly critic of Bolivia's popular movements, the author exudes a sense of passion and urgency as she tries to wrest the larger historical and ideological meanings from Bolivia's most recent cycle of political rupture and transformation. Part political memoir, part social analysis, this hybrid text offers the...