Indigenous politics in Bolivia's Evo era: clientelism, llunkerio, and the problem of stigma.(Report)

Publication: Urban Anthropology & Studies of Cultural Systems & World Economic Development

Publication Date: 22-SEP-07

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"The inferior man is a human animal. Through inheritance his mentality is possessed of the condensed instinctive tendencies that constitute the 'soul of the species.' His ineptitude for imitation impedes him in adapting to the social medium in which he lives. His personality does not develop to a contemporary level, as he lives beneath the morality of the dominant cultures, and in many cases, outside of legality."

Jose Ingenieros, EL HOMBRE MEDIOCRE

"In every man there is the possibility of his being--or, to be more exact, of his becoming once again--another man."

Octavio Paz, THE LABYRINTH OF SOLITUDE

In a recent public forum concerned with Bolivia's surprising withdrawal from the World Bank-sanctioned international process for the arbitration of investment disputes, Pablo Solon (a well-known non-indigenous economist, social movement activist, and current charge d'affaires for trade with Bolivia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs) offered a now standard remark about the country's president, Evo Morales: "Bolivia," he prefaced his comments, "is at a key moment. For the first time in its republican history, we have a president that comes from the indigenous sector, who is the majority." (1) Solon's remark (framing a discussion of Bolivia's efforts to get out from under the agenda of global financial institutions in terms of the country's indigenous turn) is a typical formulation expressed by the current Morales and MAS (Movement Toward Socialism) administration. In fact, among both supporters and detractors, the Morales presidency has been widely understood as a watershed event and historical crossroads for Bolivia, and perhaps for Latin America and the Global South.

This crossroads is most often represented by the Morales administration's turn away from a strictly neoliberal policy, rejection of the "politics as usual" limited to elite decision-making, restoration of national sovereignty against the imposed pressures of economic globalization, and greater attention to the political needs, recognition, and participation of Bolivia's indigenous and popular majority. Evo, as he prefers to be called, has been regularly feted, internationally as well as domestically, for his indigenous Aymara ancestry, taken to literally epitomize and politically represent the empowerment of Bolivia's long-suffering indigenous peoples (see inter alia, Albo 2006; Albro 2006a; Canessa 2006; Postero 2007a). Given the goal of indigenous participation, we are to understand, the very nature of political representation will be different than it was before, including the ways elected officials get elected, perform their duties, and are held accountable to their mostly indigenous constituencies.

Since the Revolution of 1952, the most characteristic political participation of primarily indigenous "peasants" (campesinos) had been as a rural power base for successive regional and national leaders (see Dandler 1983; Dunkerley 1987; Gordillo 2000). They were valuable mostly when elites needed to manufacture popular voting blocs. In multiple national elections, "runas on trucks," (2) as my counterparts in Quillacollo called them, (3) were routinely transported in from the countryside to vote en masse as a way to maintain successive populist governments in power. Indigenous leaders often served as vassals and as valuable clients to national Bolivian politicians. If important, their participation was almost entirely at the bottom of a vertical national system of political patronage. Seldom power brokers or policy architects, indigenous people were occasional beneficiaries of state promises, and more rarely of state largesse.

Local politicos with whom I worked in the urban Quillacollo of the 1990s, and who also made a point to emphasize their indigenous descent, often voiced an intention to "break with the vertical politics of the past." They linked the rejection of post-1952 patronage politics with the embrace of an indigenous identity in a fashion consistent with the call for indigenous autonomy so basic to the efforts of Bolivia's indigenous movements from the 1970s through the 1990s (e. g., Rivera 1984; Ticona 2000). The rejection of elite (and now international) patronage has complemented the goal of political autonomy as linked cornerstones of indigenous political projects in Bolivia for a long time. (4)

Breaking with vertical politics is also part of the promise of the Evo era on the national level, and Quillacollo is a municipality which is now dominated by MAS politics. The success of the MAS, however, has been achieved significantly through the construction of new indigenous-popular coalitions, presented as alternatives to the status quo of traditional patronage. As I have argued elsewhere (Albro 2005a; 2006a), through its effective coalition-building, the MAS has expanded the possibilities of indigenous inclusiveness, and has made indigenous priorities more central to national governance. But the strategy of coalitions also has had the effect of making the strict borders of indigenous identity harder to locate and to patrol for indigenous activists. This creates a potential problem: If it is less clear where indigenous identity begins and ends, then a political project of autonomy becomes harder to bring into focus.

Here I consider how people discuss patron-client relations in Quillacollo. I examine in detail the lexicon of clientage as a fundamental dimension of political coalition-building in this provincial capital. I am particularly concerned with the stigma attached to regular accusations of llunk'u (Quechua: flatterer), who people understand to be a problematic, bad, or even dangerous client. As I develop here, llunk'us are almost always men and stigmatized for their transgressive behavior. Understood to be indigenous clients who embrace the upwardly mobile sensibilities of non-indigenous patrons, the charge of llunk'u amounts to the accusation of breaking faith with indigenous identity as a well-defined categorical location, a location underwriting the goal of political autonomy historically at the heart of indigenous activism in Bolivia and throughout the hemisphere.

As I suggest here, the problem of stigma is largely generated by the unitary assumption of indigenous identity that underwrites the accusation of llunk'u, an assumption leaving little room for recognition of the coalitional relationships so important to the MAS's political project. This analysis, then, pursues how an explicitly cultural politics of indigenous empowerment remains in tension (and even at odds) with the coalition-driven sources of indigenous political power in contemporary Bolivia. To this end, I examine entrenched symbol talk about gender in Bolivia, as applied to stigmatized popular masculinity in the mode of llunk'u, as a type of cultural account of clientelistic political relationships, which I understand to be a deeply problematic legacy of indigenous politics inherited by Evo and the MAS.

Of the Patron and Personality

Quillacollo, as a provincial capital, is a town where only a few decades earlier people would have interacted primarily in the terms of such then prevailing distinctions as between the urban gente decente (town dwelling mestizos) and rural campesinos (small scale farmers), expressed through well-defined roles and expectations of patronage and clientage. If moral valuations of the supposed relationships between these terms continue both to circulate and inform local discourse, the ongoing dissolution of traditional boundaries between city and country, indio and mestizo, the popular or the elite, Spanish and Quechua, has also dislocated any presumption of a transparent ease of interpersonal reference in such terms.

Nevertheless, verbalized judgments and criticisms of others often seem to rely on the presumption of a traditional classificatory hierarchy. This includes a public priority in peoples' talk given to the possession and projection of a unitary masculine "personality" (personalidad), largely as built up from a definite recognizable formacion (upbringing or education), and as distinct from the corrupt sensibilities of the llunk'u. Via different yet formally comparable appeals to a clarity of self-definition, the cult of well-defined personality rhetorically locates its formacion in various status-defining social institutions of urban elite social life and composing the privileges of patronage relations, including those of family name, fatherhood, school, church, and political party, statuses which have been increasingly displaced as constituting social life in Quillacollo since the years following the 1952 Revolution.

Personality is also often used in public reference to the continuity of such collective identities as distinctively regional culture, thought to be under severe duress recently, given substantial in-migration. This "regional personality" is identified with signature features of local qhochala culture (5) and spectacularlized as a folkloric object. It is referred to in public speeches, conversation, and journalism as a patrimonial inheritance, that is, a kind of birthright of sons from their fathers. So-called "patrimony" (patrimonio), as something "inherited from our parents [padres]" (Zelada 2001), is a part of the lexicon establishing the commensurability of cultural tradition with social origins. As an important and essential wellspring of public male identity ultimately enshrined in the patria (the fatherland), one's patrimony is also projected as a personality writ large.

How do people talk about having personality? Take this complaint by a town mayor commenting on one of his rivals:

The problem as well is that [his rival] is the fruit of a sort of manipulation. I dare say that he does not have a defined personality ... His derring do, his audacity, make him come out with certain views which aren't the fruit of knowledge.

This is an indirect way of asserting the indigenous heritage of the subject. And here we find a similar statement from another local politician reflecting on the popular political style suspiciously associated with politica criolla (mixed politics):

This is an example of the fragility of the personality. There is no formacion, no transparent behavior. They are devices to gain notoriety ... But they've lost their effectiveness and don't gain credibility. There is no affinity, either through tradition, or through family, or by their ideology.

As they are excoriated, this fragility and lack of a well-defined personality serve as an implicit explanation of llunk'us. The "audacity" of llunk'u artists is also described as sundered from that which typically provides formacion, most notably, tradition, family, or political ideology, all of which express what sociologists like to call ascribed status. The llunk'u, goes the reasoning, is defined by the absence of a basis in a well-defined identity.

The trilogy of values mentioned in the previous quote rehearses those of the erstwhile vecindario, the town-dwelling pre-1952 elite, where at least heuristically clear cut distinctions could be publicly indulged. At the same time it is also clear that those lacking formacion (that is, the stable shape of a public self) are also imagined to lack moral definition, and so, to fall victim to moral uncertainty. Yet even as those lacking in personality are singled out as practitioners of llunkerio, they are also victims of manipulation. Llunk'us do not enjoy the fruits of positively ascribed status, but are instead entangled in the activities of llunkerio.

The notion of formacion, as synonymous with such terms as preparacion, certainly carries assumptions of status. Difficult to translate into English, formacion might be employed to refer to a "proper" upbringing as a child in a well-known local family counting itself as part of a provincial elite (a meaning that would have been much more likely several decades ago). But it is also routinely used to refer to advertised signs of education, such as a degree (and the right to the title licenciado). At the same time, formacion is the term of choice when leftists explain their working mastery of a Marxist doctrine, or their time served in a political career with one party...

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