Bolivia

Abstract

Bolivia, like many other countries in the global South and in Latin America, underwent a neoliberal ‘structural adjustment policy’ (SAP) during the 1980s. Thus, Bolivia’s ‘New Economic Policy’ of 1985 dismantled public services and exposed the peasantry and indigenous groups to enhanced capital accumulation by the agri-food oligarchy and transnational corporations. Neoliberal policies reached a peak of unpopularity with the privatization of the state-owned water company Servicio Municipal de Agua Po table y Alcantarillado (SEMAPA), sparking the resulting ‘Cochabamba Water War’. This mobilization combined with massive protests by Bolivia’s largest union of peasants (the rural workers’ union, Confederacion Sindical Unica de Trabajadores Campesinas de Bolivia (CSUTCB)), and a general strike called by the non-rural workers’ union, the Central Obrera Boliviana (COB). Three years of clashes between protesters and the oligarchic state led ultimately to the toppling of two Bolivian presidents. The 2005 election witnessed a clear victory for Evo Morales, the leader of the coca growers’ union. His party, Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS), was closely linked to the emergent indigenous, anti-colonial, and populist social movements that had coalesced in opposition to the neoliberal reforms of the 1990s and beyond. This broad coalition of peasant, indigenous, and worker organizations formed the Pacto de Unidad (Unity Pact) which was essential in Morales’ rise to power and became integrated, to varying degrees, within the new regime (Fabricant, Mobilizing Bolivia’s displaced: indigenous politics and the struggle over land. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 2012; Webber, Revolution against ‘progress’: neo-extractivism, the compensatory state, and the TIPNIS conflict in Bolivia. In Spronk S, Webber J (eds) Crisis and contradiction: marxist perspectives on Latin America in the global economy. Haymarket Books, Chicago, pp 302–333, 2015; McKay et al, J Peasant Stud 41(6):1175–1200, 2014)