“Not even the dead will be safe from the enemy if he wins….”
-W. Benjamin
A multitudinous funeral cortege runs through the streets of El Alto and La Paz. Two coffins are ahead and thousands and thousands of mourners are behind. They are humble people; inhabitants of El Alto, artisans, peasants, neighbours, mothers, indigenous from the provinces of La Paz, Potosí, Cochabamba and Oruro. They have walked with their pain for ten kilometers, and as they walk, workers, merchants, and crying students come out, who persign, applaud, and give water and bread to those who march. The city is paralyzed, and the people of the popular neighbourhoods are in mourning. Yesterday, in the area of Senkata, eight residents were killed with military firearms, more than a hundred were wounded by bullets, thirty-four were killed in the last nine days of the coup d’état in Bolivia.
They have come down from El Alto to demand justice for their dead; they have walked so far so that people can see what is happening, since the gagged media do not speak of the tragedy suffered; they march for hours and hours to tell the world that they are not terrorists or vandals; that they are the people.
Since the day of the coup d’état, all the mobilizations of popular sectors and peasants who came out to defend democracy and respect for the citizen vote were the object of a ferocious smear campaign that overflowed the networks and the media. There was no talk of workers, of neighbours, or of indigenous people. They were “dangerous hordes”, “vandals” who threaten social peace. And when the inhabitants of the brave city of El Alto and the indigenous people and peasants blocked roads, a rabid language seized the coup plotters and media: “terrorists,” “drug traffickers,” “savages,” “criminals,” “drunken mobs,” “looters,” and other adjectives were used to disqualify and criminalize the protest of the underprivileged classes.
Since then, pollera women with children on their backs, school girls who accompany their parents, university students, welders, peasants and ice-cream vendors are the new face of the “dangerous seditious” who want to burn the country. This stigmatization of the rebellious people, particularly if they are Indians, is not new. During the Colony, in the 16th century, Fray Ginés de Sepúlveda compared the Indians to monkeys; the priest Tomás Ortíz called them “beasts”; in the 19th century there was talk of “degenerate races”; and the dictatorships of the 20th century mutated towards the delinquency of the insurrectionist Indian, calling them “subversive”, “seditious”, wanting to endanger property, order and religion.
Now, the traditional middle classes perform a shameful verbal fusion of colonial and counterinsurgency language. Not even their organic intellectuals educated in foreign universities can escape this call for blood and racial prejudice. For them, neighbour marches are meetings of “drunken criminals,” peasants’ roadblocks are acts of “terrorism,” and those killed by the military bullets are settlements of scores between “thugs”. The forced moderation with which all these years the conservative scribes had qualified the empowered Indians, today they rampage like a whirlwind of prejudices, insults and racialized disqualifications.
They had waited a whole decade biting their teeth so as not to spit on the Indians and expose their contempt; and now, protected by bayonets, they do not hesitate to unload all their caste hatred. It is the time of vengeance and they do it in anger. It is as if they want to erase the presence of the Indians who defeated them, which is why they are capable of killing as long as Evo is not a candidate; furthermore, they want to tear their footprint from the memory of the humble classes by murdering, imprisoning, torturing, threatening those who speak their name. That is why they burn the Wiphala that Evo introduced in the institutions of the State; that is why they burn the schools that he had built in the popular neighbourhoods; that is why they applaud and drink to the militarization of the cities. There is no longer room for the dignity and decorum of a class that rolls frantically in the mud of authoritarianism, intolerance and racism.
And it is against this that the humble classes of El Alto and the provinces march. They descend by the thousands, two hundred thousand, three hundred thousand. The number no longer matters. The power they defend is not that of one person or that which Weber theorized as the ability to influence the behavior of another. For the popular classes, the experience of power of these last fourteen years is that of being recognized as equals, of having the right to water, education, work, health care, in conditions similar to the rest of the citizens. The exercise of power for the people won at the polls, more than that of a capacity for command, has been that of a daily corporal experience of being able to look in front of others without having to be ashamed of the colour of the skin or the pollera of the mother; it is to have been taken into account as human beings; it is to be able to sell in the market, to till the land or to exercise authority without any barrier of surname. Hence, although the experience of state power for the subaltern classes – as Gramsci saw it – is, in the first place, the practical construction of their unity as a social block, the way to verbalize and morally understand that power has been the conquest of dignity, namely, their experience of the people as a self-dignified collective body.
That is why the pollera woman and the worker cry when fascism burns the Wiphala, when Evo is expelled, when they are prevented from entering the cities. They cry because they are tearing apart the symbolic and real body of their unity and their social power. And when they carry their dead before them in the midst of thousands of black crests and funeral cavalry boleros, they do so to ask the wealthy classes to respect their dead, those dead who are the ultimate threshold where the living, whatever their class or social condition, must stop their orgy of blood and hatred, in order to venerate the virtue of life.
But the response of the coup plotters is atrocious, immoral, Dantesque. They shoot tear gas, fire bullets, move their tanks and the coffins remain on the ground, wrapped in a cloud of gases escorted by people who kneel down and risk suffocation before abandoning them.
“They don’t even respect the dead,” the people shout. It is not a protest sentence, it is a historic sentence. The same sentence pronounced by the parents of today’s assailants, when another military coup in the fateful November 1979 targeted from U.S. Mustang planes the mourners who prayed and made offerings to deceased relatives on the day of the dead or “all saints”. The adventurers of the military coup at that time, after their ephemeral drunkenness of victory, were abandoned in the sewers of history, a place where today’s coup plotters will surely be soon. The dead cannot be aggrieved with impunity, because they are part of the basic principles regulating the fate of the living in the culture of the people.
The brutality of the coup plotters today elicits the fear of the people, but it has opened the doors to widespread resentment. The sutures with which the secular class, regional and racial cracks had been closed have exploded in the air, leaving bloody social wounds. Today there is hatred everywhere, one against the other. The traditional middle classes would like to see Evo’s corpse dragged through the streets, like that of former President Villarroel in 1946. The plebeian classes would like to see the rich surrounded in their neighbourhoods suffering from hunger due to the lack of food. A new war of races nests in the spirit of a country torn apart by the felony of a class that found in the colonial prejudice of superiority the defense of its privileges.
As we have already said, the fascization of the traditional middle class is the conservative response to its social decadence as a result of the devaluation of its aptitudes, capital, opportunities and legitimate knowledge in the face of the “invasion” of a new middle class of popular and indigenous origin with more effective repertoires of social ascent in the Indianized State of the last decade. It is not that they have had a depreciation of their patrimony – which in fact increased passively due to the generalized economic expansion of the country – but of their opportunities and social commitments of greater social ascent taking advantage of the exponential growth of national wealth.
But this has not restricted a relevant fact of the structures of social classes and of the processes of political hegemony: the state irradiation of the middle classes. Strictly speaking, the State is, in its regularity, the monopoly of a society’s common sense. While political power is by far the belief and conviction of some of each other’s power, it is in a way also a kind of intersubjective sensation. It is the dense world of deep narratives with state effect. The “public opinion”, that is, the narratives, symbols and senses of understanding of legitimacy that struggle to realign political common sense, is largely concentrated by the traditional middle classes by disposition of time, resources and labor specialization.
In Bolivia, the social rise of new indigenous-popular middle classes has been accompanied by new narratives and senses of reality but not solid enough to radiate or counteract the racialization of conservative class discourse and support a new predominant “public opinion”. The traditional middle classes have experience in the discursive formations and historical sediments of the dominant common sense, which has allowed them to expand fragments of their way of seeing the world beyond the class boundary, even into parts of the new middle classes and popular sectors. In fact, the new middle class, rather than a social class with mobilized public existence, is a statistical class, not yet a class with state irradiation.
Hence the dramatic ways in which the indigenous-popular forces try to stage and narrate their resistance. It is a question of other ways of constructing public opinion and articulating the common sense that radiates to other social sectors, but as a result of the force of the coup d’état, now subalternized, fragmented.
Meanwhile, fascism rides like a maddened rider inside the walls of the classic middle-class neighbourhoods. There, culture and reason have been eradicated, without dissimulation, by prejudice and revenge. And it seems that only the stupor resulting from a new social outburst or the economic debacle looming on the horizon, the product of so much hatred and destruction, will be able to fracture such irrationality spit out as discourse.
Translation by Internationalist 360º
