5
Living the Revolution and Crafting New Identities

This chapter analyzes the character of the revolutionary Cochabamba valley peasants in the mid-twentieth century. Who were these revolutionary peasants and how did they build their ethnic and cultural identities? As discussed in chapter one, the genesis of Cochabamba valley peasants’ collective identity can be traced to the shifting regional political economy of the late eighteenth century, when the haciendas’ economic crises (provoked by the declining silver production in the Potosi mines) fostered the formation of local mercantile networks. Chicha (maize beer) and tocuyo (homespun cotton cloth) produced by domestic peasant industries began circulating locally, allowing the peasantry to gain additional family income over and above their wages from the estates. In the early twentieth century, the crises in the haciendas worsened when the markets around altiplano (highland) tin mines were lost after railways were built and cheaper imported agricultural products made their produce uncompetitive. Simultaneously, however, the tin mining boom allowed peasant-miners to consolidate their economies and acquire plots of land in the valley, which bankrupt landlords had put on the market. By the 1950s piqueros (smallholders) thrived in the Cochabamba valley.1

The Chaco War (1932–35) weighed heavily upon the national and regional political consciousness and diluted the fragile cohesion of the elites. Elements within the elite population of Bolivia embraced modernizing infrastructure and other projects, which often also addressed peasant issues. By the late 1930s, peasant movements arose on the haciendas, demanding the abolition of pongueaje (personal services), and also securing access to land ownership and education. The first peasant unions in the Cochabamba valley emulated miners’ unions. They were organized by the peasants with the help of urban militants from the post-war reformist political parties.2 Before the 1952 revolution, peasants in the valley had not yet established any permanent power network that would allow them to build a sustained and direct political relationship with the state. The generation of leaders who led the pre-revolutionary peasant movement had emerged from post-war political conflicts, placing them in an oppositional position relative to the landlords. From 1952 to 1964—a time period that began when the MNR seized power and ended with the military ouster of the MNR from power—revolutionary processes developed in Bolivia. During the revolutionary period, peasants in the Cochabamba valley were dynamic actors who played a pivotal role when pursuing agrarian and political change in their area. As previously discussed, the Cochabamba valley peasants led a struggle for unionization and political autonomy during this time, which resulted in the consolidation of the peasant movement and the recognition of the peasants as central, self-directed actors within the national political arena.

While they fought for political representation during the revolutionary period, however, the peasantry in the Cochabamba valley also struggled to establish their particular ethnic and cultural identities. Based on their centuries-long experience of territorial mobility and cultural interrelation, the mestizo valley peasants rejected their proscribed colonial Indian identity and assumed instead a campesino (peasant) identity. Campesino identity in the Cochabamba valley—as was also the case in revolutionary Mexico—originated in the physical and discursive interactions of state formation and the lived experiences of rural participants in agrarian reform. The word “campesino” was rarely used in Cochabamba before the 1952 revolution. It was during the period of revolutionary peasant conflict with the landlords and the state that “campesino” became a fundamental word in political discourse, responding to a need to explain the specific social position as peasants by adopting the term themselves into their political lexicon. When people in the valley began calling themselves campesinos, they implied their belonging “to a class-like group of rural folks who worked the land and were locked in an inherently conflictive relationship with large-scale landowners and other dominant social groups.”3

Interviews with peasants who lived through the revolutionary events are examined in this chapter in order to explore their experience of the political culture in revolutionary Cochabamba and Bolivia. Focusing on the interrelations of gender, ethnicity, and class, these interviews allow for interpretation and reconstruction of the local context of power at that time. Peasants’ testimonies illustrate the patriarchal character and strong sexual content of perceived images of authority and power in the rural society. They also exhibit the subtleties of peasant negotiation contesting the top-down application of their colonial Indian identity, and their reclamation of the campesino identity. Peasant discourse in the public sphere of peasant unions and in the private sphere of the chichería (maize beer tavern) opened up the spectrum of ethnic relations linking vecinos (town dwellers) with campesinos (peasants). The existing relationship, based on domination and subordination of the campesinos by vecinos, constituted an axis of contradictions that ignited revolutionary peasant consciousness and the resultant political clashes. Narrations given by those who lived the revolution illustrate a renovated representational image of the “campesino” in the valley of Cochabamba during the revolutionary period. Their testimonies confirm the idea that the revolution had a profound impact upon peasant society, economy, and politics. Peasant accounts, furthermore, allow for a nuanced understanding of the revolution as a cultural process, a process of change that fundamentally transformed both the personalities and subjectivities of those who experienced it.

Authority, Power, and Gender in Peasant Society

Cochabamba landlords had managed to maintain servitude within their haciendas over the years by employing an ethnically-based segregationist system, a system which had endured from the colonial era to the mid-twentieth century.4 When the landed elite, confronted with alternative modernizing projects in the first half of the twentieth century, however, everything began to fall apart. The 1952 revolution initially opened the door for the political participation of peasants, but peasant politics ignited when the hacienda system was dismantled and replaced by a smallholder system. In conjunction with structural changes, peasant subjectivities were also transformed, giving rise to a campesino identity. These atomized valley peasants—who historically found in mestizaje (a process of shifting ethnic identities or mixing cultures) an escape route from elite and state pressures—experimented for the first time with subjective tools that allowed them to articulate a collective identity as campesinos in the process of negotiating their demands with the revolutionary state.

Although the process of campesino identity formation was slow and painful, it ripened in a violent social context, and eventually the idea proved socially substantial as a response to the experiences of those who lived through the depths of cultural and revolutionary processes of change. In an effort to explore the peasants’ revolutionary experiences, open interviews were carried out with men and women from the Valle Alto. The men interviewed were former peasant leaders, chicheros (chicha producers and sellers), and vecinos. The women interviewed were wives of leaders, chicheras, and vecinas. The main purpose of the interviews was to explore discourses generated in the peasant union (public sphere) and in the tavern or chichería (private sphere), as both of these were places where peasants socialized and shared their everyday life experiences during the revolutionary period.

Cochabamba valley peasants’ historical memory remained rooted in the post Chaco War (1932–35) during this era, recalling their fights against the landlords and the pre-revolutionary state. Peasants reiterated the important influence that Chaco War veterans had over their political consciousness, especially in regard to the issue of social injustice. The contact the peasants made with urban politicians and activists during this time further impacted their political consciousness, and they began to conceive of themselves as members of a society composed of citizens with equal rights and duties vis-à-vis the state.5 The social memory of the peasants was imbued with their own struggles to gain and hold these fundamental rights. The mythical time in the peasants’ common past was characteristic of a primordial society, just and balanced, which was held in stark comparison to the injustice of the present.

In her work on Namiquipa (Mexico), Ana María Alonso describes the importance of the patriarchal image of a primordial society in the northern frontier, where “brave men” struggled against “savages.” The notion of creating a just society in Namiquipa was contrasted with the present, which she characterizes by outlining the peasants’ subordination to the centralizing post-revolutionary state. As Alonso posits: “Although situated in a historical time, however, this past is epic and remote, simultaneously remembered and beyond memory.”6 In contrast to Namiquipa, the mythical time in Cochabamba was contemporary, while the immemorial time, that which is lost in the depths of memory, was the situation of injustice which had oppressed the peasants since before the revolution. As a peasant leader stated: “We have been born slaves since our great-grandfathers. There was not even a hut for us to live in. We lived under the landlord’s yoke.”7

Yet, as explained by another peasant leader, the revolution transformed the dark period of servitude into something new: “The landlords did evil things in their time, [whereas after the revolution] we were in order. [Although actually] not anymore, since everything is in disorder for there is no unity anymore, the peasants don’t pay attention [to their leaders].” This mythical time was located within the moment of apex for the peasant movement’s power and autonomy; a time when the unity of their action and direction, and the power wielded by their leaders, was unquestionable. When peasants compared the mythical time with the “then current” time (in which disorder and the lack of unity predominated), they referred to their previous experience during the era of extreme peasant violence (Champa Guerra), a period which had made them distrustful of their leaders: “Well, people have found a direction. We cannot pay attention to a leader because when we bring him [to power] with the majority, then he leaves, he occupies high posts and makes a lot of money. … But when something important happens, of course, we always unite.”8

The concept of authority has always been, until recently, associated with the patriarch. The patriarch wielded authority both physical and symbolic and rationalized this right by claiming to have received wisdom, accumulated through years of experience and tradition. In the Bolivian revolutionary context, when considering the emergence of campesino identity, “father” and “school” must be considered the two institutional benchmarks propping up social harmony and peace in Cochabamba (see figure 5.1). According to two former peasant leaders, the struggle for education did not end when the revolutionary state assigned their peasant union a budget for the construction of a school and the hiring of teachers, but rather when peasants themselves realized what the school meant.

At first, they recalled, the school was built in an uninhabited area where domestic animals invaded its precincts. As such, they agreed to build a wall and later on their houses around the school and only then, after they had protected it, did they claim that they “have made the school great.” Anyways, they continued, the teachers could not agree and fought among themselves for they did not have someone to lead them: “One wants [to work] and the other one doesn’t and there were fights among them, like without father, that’s how the teachers began to fight among themselves … by going to La Paz, we got them a father [a headmaster] so that this school would be strong. Now with a father the school is respected, for as you do with a father the teachers have to pay attention to the headmaster.”9 As the patriarch’s authoritarian image guaranteed social harmony, however, it also served to legitimize access to land:

Not one leader, not José Rojas nor Miguel Veizaga gave us the land, rather it was our work. Our fathers had worked in Santa Clara convent, we’ve got hold of the work which our fathers went through. For what they suffered, that’s what the land was gained for. … But our fathers weren’t ambitious, they just wanted to get hold of the plot of land where they had worked.10

The significance of authority as in contrast to and different from power is explicit in the previous quote. The father as a symbol of authority legitimates the taking of land, and from an ethical point of view, this action is reasonable, given that it is only carried out on the lands where an ancestor had already laid down a duration of generational occupation and improvement. The union leader’s role is limited to controlling the redistribution of land based on the power that peasants have delegated to him. However, the peasants recognize the leader’s power because land redistribution is fair among peasants and leaders, which means that ancestral authority is equal among the peasant community members. The hacienda colonos (tenants) in the Valle Alto had a leading role at the time of distributing the land, for peasant logic signaled them as the beneficiaries with most rights. As another peasant leader explained: “The former colonos and the leaders got land equally. … The colonos threw us out like lodgers (arrimantes) into the marginal lands, but since the land was for those who had none, we joined the union and after that we too received land titles.”11

These were the foundations of the primordial peasant society, of its mythical time, or as peasants posed it, “of the times of order.” But as the revolutionary state began to centralize power in party bureaus, peasant leaders focused their attention on gaining bureaucratic power and saw their interests as diverging from the interests of their communities. The centrales sindicales campesinas (peasant union centrals) in the countryside—the geographic loci of peasant power—became differentiated from the rural towns that slowly seeped power until there remained only a pale memory of the old landlords’ power. The towns’ public spaces and the chicherías—as the centers of socialization that aimed at amusing local elites—were invaded by the “overweening” peasant leaders. In both public and private social spaces, the peasant leaders showed off their power, not only occupying their sacralized spaces but also linking themselves with the towns’ women, in an attitude seen by the townspeople as a challenge to the traditional, patriarchal social order of the inhabitants of the towns.

The logic behind this sexualization of power originated in the violence landlords used to obtain peasant subordination, which peasant leaders later replicated, using the same tactics to reformulate the power structure around themselves in the countryside. As a peasant described: “The leaders around here devoted themselves to being womanizers, because it really was like that. I asked them why they did that, and they said: ‘Before, the landlords abused our daughters, now we have to abuse their women.’ That’s what they told me.”12 Thus, just as authority was associated with the patriarchal image, power was associated with the symbolic representation of woman. Public displays of women as a symbol of power were further instrumentalized when the distribution of estate lands to former colonos was completed and the conflictive issue became the distribution of marginal lands among other peasant groups.

The leaders changed a lot and got involved with lots of women. Yes, that was brought about by [the fact that] there was land. And so that the leaders would give them land or they were ruined, they made them leave their wives and they made them marry others. There was that interest on the part of the women too; as they [the leaders] had the power to give the women land, the women gave themselves to the leaders as well.13

Although the union leaders’ authoritarian attitude had a decisive influence for diluting the image of the all-powerful landlord as a rural power referent, it also provoked a reaction among members of the next peasant generation, who criticized their predecessors for the methods used to exercise power:

At that time, politics was power for the leaders, power to decide, and they didn’t reckon the consequences. The main leader sometimes changed his wife up to five times, do you understand me? How powerful he is, isn’t he? Because nobody said anything, he left his wife and shacked up with another, with another, and so on. So that got to be a habit, for the man was ignorant, a jerk (huaso), and he bossed [people around] with a revolver. So, he didn’t want to let go of that power and he did whatever he wanted to do.14

Criticism of a leader’s power did not only emerge in the public sphere of the peasant unions, through the rebellious discourse of the new peasant generation, but also in the domestic sphere of the peasant family, because their members experienced the dissolution of the cohesive links of their family. A widow of a peasant leader narrated that she belonged to a smallholder’s family, which before the revolution had managed to purchase some plots of land. Beginning in her youth, and ever since then, she had worked as a market trader (q’atera) selling cooked maize (mote) and fresh cheese (quesillo) in local markets, products which she had obtained from the family plot (see figure 5.2).

We, the daughters, we bought clothes with our work, we earned money with our work, my mother and father didn’t buy clothes for us, even though we were in their power [they lived with the parents]. And so, it was always a good way for us to live with our independent work. … In those days it was all right, it was peaceful, without serving anybody, working for ourselves whether we were men or women. The father or mother as well, if we got married, they gave us cows, with that we set up a house. That’s how we lived in those days, not being at the service of the estate.15

Women usually did not attend school in that era, but illiteracy was not a problem when it came to the widow’s commercial dealings: “In those days it was better to count the money in Quechua language, we knew everything by memory in our heads. … I even beat my husband in counting lots of money. He’d been to school [he was literate], but when we went to sell a cow or something, while he was adding it up, I said to him: ‘It’s this much!”

The widow’s problems began when she married a landless peasant and her father had to put them into service on an estate. She stopped working for herself, and was dedicated to looking after her family, while at the same time working as a servant (mitani) on the estate (see figure 5.3): “With the service on the estate we became fools, I wasn’t a market trader anymore and just attended the estate.” After the revolution, her husband obtained a plot as a former tenant and they both worked together on their new property, but the man dedicated himself to unionism and their lives definitely changed:

Ever since he became a leader during the agrarian reform, everything came to a stop. He just went around [as a leader], the work in the house didn’t go anywhere either. He didn’t want to save anymore, rather he wanted to make me poorer. I suffered a lot in those days, after the agrarian reform happened, he got into bad ways … he just ran after women. My children worked with me, he went around, he arrived [home], he asked me for money and when I didn’t give him any, he beat me, he got money out of me by force.16

Revolutionary violence infiltrated peasant homes, producing great family imbalances; violence was exacerbated by chicha consumption, which became a common habit among the valley population. As the same peasant widow continued explaining: “Men were always drinking wherever they were, wherever they went. We women in our houses, and men always off anywhere drinking.” Drunkenness unhinged marital relations in many homes, but even worse were the arms and ammunition stored at the houses of peasant leaders. Every weekend social festival often ended with leaders brandishing their weapons to restore order during moments of crowd euphoria, and this, in turn, lead to running battles. “During the Champa Guerra there were guns here in my house. My husband even went after me with those guns, it was awful, I was more like an enemy, hiding away, I just lived hidden away.”17

The violence perpetrated by peasant leaders created an association of perceived perversion of values, which alienated the leaders from the peasant population. In the end, the peasants obeyed the union leaders due to fear, similar to their old relationship with landlords and curacas: “[After the agrarian reform] the leaders totally changed, they all became like landlords, in those days they behaved like that ... they lifted up their heads, as if they were landowners.”18 Urban politicians made use of this perception of the leaders of peasant unions by producing and disseminating symbolic representations of the cacique campesino (peasant boss), through different media, characterizing him as a brutal leader that oppressed peasants as they had been oppressed by the previous landlords. The negative images of and stories about the peasant leaders were useful to political opponents, who could easily argue against initiatives that came from the grassroots peasants. Revolutionary regional literature exploited the representation of the “brutal” valley peasant leader and identified with the “taras” (defects) of the mestizo, in the hopes of restoring the idyllic image of the pre-revolutionary Indian. The two most notable writers in the literary movement to characterize union leaders this way was Nestor Taboada, who wrote short stories and Jesus Lara, who wrote novels. Lara politicized his narratives by representing the power of the mestizo valley leaders as connected to and derived from the MNR. According to Lara, it was not the perverted mestizo boss but the pristine Indian with his ancestral virtues who should be the future rural leader in Cochabamba. As a member of the Communist Party, Lara’s ideal image of a rural leader was a militant peasant who was obedient to the policies of the communist left.19

In contrast, the discourse surrounding women living in the rural towns was embedded in sexuality as well as ethnic differentiation. The image of the powerful peasant boss awoke unsettling feelings in the minds of urban women, who associated their power with perceptions of arrogance and strength, letting loose fears and anxieties. A town woman narrated the visit of the Ucureña peasant leader, José Rojas, to the town of Cliza, when he was the minister of peasant affairs: “He came in his car with his hat and his overcoat, and the doctor who worked with me in the public assistance centre went up to him and said: ‘Dear José (Josesito), how are you?’ I don’t know why, but it really made me angry. People went up to him to suck up to him.”20

The traditional rural hierarchy, marked by a paternalistic relationship with the townspeople holding power over the peasants, ceased to have any meaning when the peasants organized themselves into armed and militant unions, led by powerful leaders. The town’s political brokers lost influence and were harassed by peasant leaders. It was a complete inversion of traditional power relations that, no doubt, influenced the perceptions of the valley population on gender and sexuality. A schoolmistress from Cliza, for instance, married to a former pre-revolutionary state official, displayed two different perceptions of the peasant leader’s image depending on whether her story was situated in the private or the public sphere. In the first case, her relationship to peasant power was a result of the need to intercede for her husband’s life, as he was being pursued by Ucureña’s militia to render account for the abuses he had committed when he was Cliza’s intendente municipal (municipal director).

A group of Ucureña peasants went by my door. One of them said: ‘Don’t pay attention to her [don’t greet her], her husband is sick, he’s on the point of death.’ My co-godparents and godchildren were with them, they had the order not to speak to me or greet me. I went to speak to José Rojas to tell him that my husband was innocent, so that he could order his troops not to go after him. ‘Nothing holds my troops back, because when he was the director, your husband did a lot of bad things.’ He said to me. [Some days later] it was José Rojas’ birthday. He was in his room, in bed, covered in flowers, ponchos, scarves, and sheep [as presents]. ‘Just come on in,’ one of his bodyguards said to me. ‘What is he going to do to you? Just say hello to him.’ I’m not going to say hello; I’m just going to see him! ‘Don José, how are you doing? How are you?’ I said to him. ‘Very well, Mrs. Angelina.’ He answered in Quechua. ‘Have you forgotten what I asked you?’ I said to him. ‘Don’t make me remember that anymore!’ he replied.21

Her memory recalls the bucolic scene, the exotic image of the peasant leader at the height of his power. It is a vivid image still intact and alive in her memory. The fear that his power provokes on her does not hide her disdain for the peasant, nor does it diminish her interest in staring at the dominant leader. She is not interested in greeting authority, but cannot resist contemplating power.

These intimate manifestations of power, however, are absent from her discourse when the same woman enters the public sphere and goes on to describe her political experience with peasant power.

From one moment to another I heard that José Rojas aimed to become Cliza’s mayor. Cliza’s townspeople didn’t sit there with their arms folded, but a lot of Cliceños were in favor of Rojas. They went to Ucureña even though they were decent people! What was that Indian going to do in the town hall! I was nominated as Cliza mayor’s candidate by those of the town and those of the countryside. They asked me to be mayor, but I wasn’t going to go and get drunk with the peasants. I refused because I could not leave my other post [schoolmistress] and here they’re used to mistreatment. They made the town hall treasurer buy chicha and pickles. The peasants were abusive, they followed the mayor to the chichería and then he had to pay for their drinks.22

The woman recalls the narrow limits that framed female participation in revolutionary politics (see figure 5.4). She expresses her frustration by despising the source of José Rojas’ political power, and her descriptions of him are colored by denigratory ethnic allusions. Consequently, she was convinced that Indians could not occupy urban spaces in society. What did she consider to be the role of Miguel Veizaga, who, as the rival of José Rojas, led Cliza’s vecinos in their struggle against the Ucureña peasants? “Miguel Veizaga just defended Cliza’s municipality. He was not interested in being mayor. He stood up [to Rojas] defending the town, because Veizaga was acholado (citified). Rojas was not an educated man, he was mean.”23

The cholo or urban Indian ethnic category denoted a higher rung on the ladder of social hierarchy and was associated with the archetype of the town’s artisan and manual workers. Miguel Veizaga was as much a peasant as José Rojas, and both were literate. However, the fact that Veizaga had defied Rojas’ peasant power, and had done so in the name of the town of Cliza, lifted him into a superior social category. Yet this characterization of Veizaga in comparison to Rojas required a generous twisting of reality, as a Cliza’s retired army sergeant claimed: “José Rojas was a natural-born peasant. Miguel Veizaga was a peasant too, but he was educated, he wasn’t so ignorant. Rojas didn’t even know how to read and write; he was totally ignorant.”24

Chicha and Peasant Violence

Physical and symbolic violence had always mediated Cochabamba’s social hierarchy and factional relationships, in both pre-revolutionary and revolutionary times. The struggle of the peasant unions to expel landlords from their estates and take possession of the land was successful, yet this did not mean that peasant power was consolidated solely in rural areas. The defeated remnants of pre-revolutionary power groups had concentrated themselves in rural towns, looking to rebuild their old domination networks over the peasantry. The populist discourse of the MNR provided an ideal cultural context for the vecinos to regain some of their lost political influence. The vecinos proceeded to make use of their advantageous position, by producing a rhetoric that exalted the position of town dwellers as natural leaders, which was explained as right and meet because of the “inherent” ignorance of the peasants (they lacked modern education, which the vecinos possessed).

The modernizing transformations that the Bolivian revolution triggered—in contrast to state-induced changes that occurred during the first half of the twentieth century in other Latin American countries—energized the peasant grassroots movement, fostering a new generation of union leaders. These were the peasant leaders who contested the state’s attempt to centralize power, and instead proposed bottom-up, alternative projects in hopes of redefining the revolutionary power structure. The first confrontation between the peasants and the revolutionary state came about when the “agrarian revolution” and the “agrarian reform” projects clashed, as described in chapter two. State centered interpretations described this situation as a political fight between the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (Nationalist Revolutionary Movement, MNR) and the Partido Obrero Revolucionario (Revolutionary Workers’ Party, POR), a view that demonstrates how authors and scholars at the time underestimated peasant political autonomy.25 When confronting the state, however, peasant leaders also struggled to defend the internal cohesion of peasant communities. Once estate lands had been seized, peasants believed their citizenship rights had already been earned and legitimized. This contradiction of interests was not an easy problem to solve given the surrounding political context of MNR initiated political sectarianism and the MNR’s dissemination and use of rhetoric propping up ethnic segregation, a rhetorical device inherited from the Bolivian liberal past.

The peasants’ social memory put the burden of peasant violence on the union leaders’ shoulders, through their claim that the Champa Guerra between Cliza and Ucureña was caused by the personal ambitions of peasant leaders alone. There were only a few peasants who drew the connection between violence and the divergent, oppositional political positions within the MNR regime. As a peasant leader stated:

During Víctor Paz’s first term [1952–56], peasants supported him a hundred percent [for] they had opened their eyes, it was a freedom they had never seen before … in the second administration, that of Hernán Siles [1956–60], we were a bit weaker by then because Siles was more inclined to the oligarchy. … Siles himself cleverly allowed the division between Cliza and Ucureña.26

The peasant’s individual memories of their experience of violence and abuse during the Champa Guerra remained heavy in their minds and colored their discourse. For example, peasants identified, in anger, those who had led during the Champa Guerra: “They made us fight like the owners of fighting cocks, forcibly like in the ring. We called them [the leaders] cock-owners (galleros), because they made us fight forcibly like the cock-owners.” Peasants also explained away their participation in that war by claiming they had only fought because of coercion: “[If you did not obey] they got you out of your house even if you were in bed with your wife. If you didn’t go out to the line [of battle] they killed you like a dog. That’s what those damned leaders were like.”27 Peasants tried to separate their personal responsibility for the war and their part in it from the consequences of their actions: “We didn’t get angry [among peasants]. We were angry at night, we only fought at night, in day time we talked to those who were enemies. [The people from Cliza] paid attention to their leader Veizaga and we here [Ucureña] paid attention to José Rojas. That’s the only reason why there were fights, our leaders made us fight like that for stupid things.”28

In the eyes of higher-ranking peasant leaders, peasant society had fallen into anarchy after the estate lands were expropriated, and this was the sole cause of the violence. They said that, when the peasants saw that they were free of landlord control and could make use of their time and their surpluses, dedicated themselves to the habit of chicha drinking, and union discipline slacked. The state retreated on promises of support for rural development projects and preferred to provide support to urban politicians looking to centralize power in the cities. Thus, peasant leaders’ authority was questioned from both sides, and their situation became precarious despite their apparent power. As peasant leader Miguel Veizaga declared:

In a meeting at the peasant center, I complained that the peasants didn’t want to work in groups, collectively, because a lot of them were lazy, drunken, they liked festivals, because there was no discipline anymore and they’ve entered into complete anarchy, where they didn’t respect their leaders anymore … the union leaders charged ten pesos as a fine to those who didn’t turn up to meetings and with that money they sent out for chicha.29

Although many interviewees were themselves peasant union leaders, they referred to “the leaders” when discussing the era of violence, artificially creating the image of a different “other” to whom they assigned the defects of the cause and with whom they contrasted peasant virtues. Only those who were high-level leaders assumed their role and justified it, thus personifying a discourse of positive against negative values that located them as historical subjects and also legitimately within a hierarchy of status and power.

The chichería, the private sphere of peasant socialization, was a social space centered around the drinking of chicha (see figure 5.5). The drinking of chicha was an act that “proposes a relationship between a collectivity and the extra-social world,”30 and this social institution, as a place of exchange, community and drunkenness, must be considered when one searches for the context from which peasant violence arose. The chichería was the space where political alliances were negotiated between power groups that were related through clientelism. As Dwight Heath posits it:

Alcoholic drinks have a value comparable to dividends in this system of ‘social credit’ because they are appreciated, but not prohibitively expensive, they are infinitely dividable, they are laden with symbolic associations, apart from their economic value, and they are frequently consumed in rituals of commensality, where they increase the prestige of those who give and the gratitude of those who receive.31

The chichería became the theater where the peasants’ debut in the political arena was acted out, and it became the revolutionary peasants’ main political, social, and cultural center after the power relations between town and countryside had flipped.

The peasants came to this chichería before there was separation [between Cliza and Ucureña]. We [the townspeople] lived a lot with the peasants from Ucureña … since we had no land, we used to go [to Ucureña] and we had potato and maize sown and for that they used to come here to get drunk, for as long as they liked … but after that everything was a lot of boozing. The peasants didn’t work in agriculture and much less we from the town [of Cliza], they didn’t let us. Meetings here, meetings there, meetings all over the place, that’s what their business was.32

Chicha consumption reached higher levels than ever before during the revolutionary era, awakening the interests of regional authorities who yearned to reimpose a production tax—a tax that had been halted due to peasant resistance. Historically, taxes on chicha production favored Cochabamba city’s municipality and university. The peasants refused to pay it, because, they argued, the tax financed urban development in the capital and the education of the children of the regional elite.33 From the peasants’ point of view, the split between the union leadership of Cliza and Ucureña originated in the attempt to reimpose the chicha tax. José Rojas wanted the tax to be collected by the peasants, while Miguel Veizaga headed the rejection movement, backed up by Cliza’s chicha-sellers and producers.

José Rojas had gotten into company with the beer producers [in Punata] … so he began to collect, he sent someone called Demetrio Torrico from Punata to Cliza, that guy got the chicha tax contract, from then on, Rojas began to fight with Veizaga … we [Cliza] didn’t want to pay the chicha tax any more. Why? Because we were making it and we were paying the tax with our labor. And, José Rojas wanted to have the peasants collect as well.34

Veizaga not only refused to pay the tax to the tax collector imposed by Rojas, but also rejected the idea that peasants should collect it. Instead, Veizaga argued that the tax should be collected by their own union and that Cliza’s municipality ought to control the money involved. Ucureña leaders polarized these arguments, for they claimed to be the poor peasants’—who were in favor of the taxes—defenders, whereas the Cliza leaders defended the rich chicha sellers’ interests.

The quarrel came from that foolishness. Even in some of those disputes, one of the leaders who helped the chicheros [of Cliza], Román Casilla, who was my friend, I hit him because he defended the beer-sellers: ‘We won’t put an end to exploitation that way, we have to go together, don’t divide [the peasant movement]. Are you going to defend the chicheros or the exploited people?’ That’s what I said to him.35

Ucureña’s position on taxes, however, weakened its leadership role in the countryside because taxes on chicha production did not only affect the large producers but also the peasants’ family economy, which for a long time had relied on home brewing as a source of extra income. Moreover, brewing chicha at home and redistributing it at festivals was a reciprocal obligation amongst peasants that renewed community links during religious festivals.36 Hence taxing chicha production was a crucial issue when peasants negotiated power with the state:

In the Champa Guerra, tax-collectors came to the countryside. I was the sponsor of Our Lord of Toco feast, of the diablada (the devils’ dance), and they made me pay as well. That’s why I rebelled: ‘I’m not going to pay! I’m not making beer to sell it but for the festival.’ They even wanted to take a garment from me as a guarantee, so the bell was rung, we threw all tax-collectors out and we took away the women’s skirts they had seized and I don’t know what other things as guaranties that they had taken off from people. From that time, we rebelled.37

Cliza leaders had, in fact, promoted the organization of a beer-sellers’ union to help Cliza confront the power of Ucureña, thus the Cliza leaders had involuntarily contradicted the basic principle of patriarchal authority ruling peasant society. As the majority of the chicha sellers were women, peasants immediately identified the newly created beer-sellers’ union as a women’s union, despite all its leaders being men: “That women’s union had hardly been set up [in Cliza], there it was, there was fury … women, a women’s union, well, they’d set up a women’s union, that couldn’t be solved. So, when Miguel [Veizaga] put a stop [to José Rojas], all the leaders from Ucureña came to the meeting [in Cliza].”38 Although peasant women were not banned from directly participating in the peasant union’s leadership or even attending the union’s meetings, they did not involve themselves in politics because the patriarchal character of peasant society was so ingrained in that era. Women in the main cities of Bolivia, however, had participated in politics by organizing their unions since the early twentieth century.39

To understand the fracture at the highest echelons of peasant leadership in the Valle Alto and the consequent outbreak of violence, it is necessary to approach the issue from several different angles. The fracture was not only due to the MNR’s political factionalism but also because of the peasant leaders’ bureaucratization and the grassroots lack of union discipline, all framed in a context of alcohol consumption and abuse. Alcohol consumption, according to Thierry Saignes, “opens a space of discussion or criticism of the established forms of authority and hierarchy,”40 becoming a channel for protesting the established order and a way for inverting social values until they are turned upside down. But what happens when people drink in a world that the revolution has already turned upside down? That was the case in Cochabamba. Valley peasants who resisted the power of the union leaders, emboldened by their drunkenness, challenged them in the public and the private spheres, and provoked violent reactions from leaders attempting to re-establish their authority. Peasant leaders’ drunkenness, in turn, allowed them to hold on to their precarious power, thus inflaming the conditions of extreme violence within peasant society.

Peasant violence had a different character in the 1950s compared to the 1960s. In the 1950s, crimes generally happened in taverns or in peasants’ households when people contested the authority of union bosses. Exchanges of bullets followed, which restored union authority. The result usually involved wounded and occasionally dead peasants.41 Afterwards, peasant leaders imposed themselves upon the authority of both the police and on judicial figures, intimidating them to block legal actions through symbolic rather than real violence (displays of armed force, liberation of prisoners, threats, et cetera), but without necessarily inflicting physical damage.42 The violence of the 1960s, in contrast, worsened amid the political tension in the countryside, and crimes began to take place in public areas (streets, squares, the countryside) with destructive results in terms of human lives. Union leaders entered into a spiral of murders and vendettas, and they took up for themselves the role of thugs, ordering personal assaults on their political enemies and commanding peasant patrols. All of this, in concert, sowed terror in the countryside. In both decades, alcohol abuse was a norm, statements from witnesses invariably assert that violence started after several hours or even days of heavy drinking. What was different in the 1960s, however, was that judicial trials became a parody. The regime had, in effect, totally subordinated the justice system, as authorities always ended up protecting criminals in exchange for political favors or deals.43

Ethnicity and Territoriality in the Valleys

Historiography invariably indicates that the Cochabamba valley population faced an early and accelerated process of ethnic and cultural mestizaje. Explanations for these phenomena are various, ranging a gambit of demographic, sociological, economic, and cultural sources. Although a common factor remains, the distinction was made between the valley mestizo and the altiplano Indian.44 This interpretive trend extends throughout the historiography of the 1952 revolution, by asserting that liberal principles influenced the political elite that had led the revolution. As discussed in the introduction of the book, this trend of development concluded that the price for integrating citizens into the nation was the creation of a mestizo culture, a culture that transformed the ethnic differences that had existed during the colonial and republican periods.

Paradoxically, the mestizo’s privileged place in academic and political rhetoric did not occupy a similarly important place in the regional elites’ discourse, or in the peasants’ rhetoric. A mestizo solution for the agrarian reform, for instance, was only proposed by a small elite faction, while no faction of peasants fully identified themselves with a mestizo project of any kind, as argued in chapter two. Notwithstanding this, the social memory of the valley peasants explored their ethnic identity by digging into the relationships of domination and subordination that had linked the peasantry to the pre-revolutionary landlords and town dwellers:

The only ones who gave us that name of Indians were the landlords. The landlords called to us ‘Indian hicks’ (indios laris). They brought that name, no one else brought it apart from them. Because they had more strength (power), because they had more value [wealth], they had everything to eat, they had good clothes, that’s why they called the peasant an Indian.45

By using class terms, peasants emphasized that the chief differences separating them from the town dwelling “other” were power and wealth, which had always been employed together to the landlords’ and vecinos’ advantage, in efforts to subordinate peasants. The essential difference between the city and the countryside was the possession of media-based means to define and reinforce the notion of ethnic difference based upon a geographical criterion:

Those rich folks who lived in the city called the man an Indio and the woman an India. That’s what they called us because they owned their houses and everything, that’s what they said to us. Of course, for them there was justice, but if we had said something to them, oh! The soldier came right then and punished us.46

The resistance to identifying themselves as Indians is not a coincidental happening employed in efforts to build a campesino identity. Rather, the Indian identity is perceived of as the result of a historical misunderstanding that the landlords had imposed to subjugate the peasants. From the peasants’ point of view, there was no deep-rooted historical experience that linked them to the possession of communal territories and, thus, the Indian identity simply lacked any historical meaning whatsoever. They perceived that the revolutionary state had done no more than restore order when it identified them as campesinos and when it handed to them the land that they had always worked on.

Before, the landlords treated us as Indians. But now we’re peasants because we’re conscious people, we’re not like before. That’s why we struggled in the peasant congress at Santivañez [June 1953]. ‘We’re not Indians, Indians are from India,’ we said. ‘We’re proud of being peasants, so we’re peasants.’ From that moment on things have changed, we’re not Indians anymore.47

The negotiations pursued by Cochabamba peasants with the state aimed at framing peasant social identity within a framework of the revolutionary order, and the MNR’s plan to implement indigenista policies helped them in doing so. During this period of Latin American history this sort of approach was fashionable, many countries instituted policies similar to the above described MNR indigenista policies.48 The fact that peasant identity, at that historical moment, was a functional aspect central to the state’s goal of integrating Indians into the national identity in no way meant that the transition from Indian to peasant was a non-violent process. On the contrary, everyday social relations were impregnated with violent feelings and attitudes, which often defined peasants’ and vecinos’ places and roles in the power hierarchy that emerged after the revolution.

[The townspeople] called us Indians, hacienda q’ara huasas (hacienda servants with naked backs). ‘Chay q’ara huasas yayugamuskanku’ (those servants have come to town), they said to us. ‘If these get to know [to be educated] they won’t respect us, they don’t have to know.’ That’s how they opposed our education. They didn’t call us cholo, they called us ‘useless Indians.’ The landlords said we weren’t people, that we could only work if they kicked us, punched us, and beat us. ‘These asses are animals.’ That’s how they treated us. … Those who were from the town were citified (acholados). It was our turn to be cholos after the revolution. Between ourselves we said: ‘He’s a cholo now.’ Almost since 1953 we were refining ourselves because we were orienting ourselves with the school.49

Education represented a route that allowed the peasants to rise from the bottom of social hierarchies and to wipe out the Indian identity that had always subordinated them. When the traditional hierarchy based on vecino domination and peasant subordination evaporated during the revolutionary period, the new social structure and hierarchy that emerged placed vecinos and peasants in tense confrontational positions, each vying for power in what was essentially a vacuum.

The first wave of violence in the l950s displaced the former landlords and they moved into Cochabamba city. In the rural towns, however, old groups of intermediaries remained powerful, alongside emergent artisan groups. Both of these groups were backed by the MNR’s right-wing faction, as that faction wanted to be able to counter the power being gathered by the peasant unions, and saw an ability in both these groups to do just that. The second wave of violence in the 1960s was marked by the confrontation between the divergent interests of vecinos and campesinos, and by that time each group was allied with a different faction(s) of the regime, which elevated the intensity of the struggle to the level of a local civil war. In geographical terms, there were two spatial referents linked to the emergent revolutionary campesino and vecino identities: the Ucureña hamlet in the countryside for the campesinos and the town of Cliza for the vecinos. As a peasant leader explained:

Q’aras were all the landlords who lived in the city. Behind their backs the Ucureña peasants said: ‘Those q’aras have come [to the countryside]’. On the other hand, to their faces they said: ‘Dear child (niñituy)’. Talking like that they pled and humiliated themselves kissing their hands and feet.50

The same Ucureña peasants, however, looked down on the rural town dwellers, reducing the differences which separated them: “We called the vecinos [of Cliza] ‘little q’aras’ (q’arillos) and they called us peasants. ‘I don’t know who’s coming to visit the countryside, it must be some q’arillo.’ Talking like that, we looked at them.”51

Cliza dwellers employed a loaded and negative discursive process to establish differences between themselves and the Ucureña peasants. As a peasant leader from Ucureña recalled: “Those from Cliza called us [from Ucureña] huanuqollus (those who collect animal dung), because time before that was how we toasted [cooked]. We collected dung (guano) and on the following day we lit the fire and stripping the maize off the cobs we toasted it.”52 The pejorative terms used to identify the Ucureños indicated the extreme conditions of poverty they lived in under the old estate regime and shows the depth of the efforts the townspeople made to differentiate themselves from them. After the revolution, however, when Ucureña peasants held great political power, Cliza dwellers modified their discursive approach to be based upon ethnic differentiation. Although the Cliza town dwellers acknowledged the power that the Ucureños had acquired, the vecinos vastly underestimated the capacity of the Ucureños to use it.

The image of the cacique sindical (union boss) was an urban creation, for the vecinos observed with disdain how the revolution had elevated those miserable peasants to a higher social level. “They called those from around here [Ucureña] ‘bosses’, they called us ‘red jackets’ (wilasacos), we were the ‘wilis’. I don’t know what they meant to say with wilasacos, but those from Cliza called us that.”53 In fact, Wilasaco (red or bloody jacket) was Paulino Quispe’s nickname. Quispe was a notable peasant leader from Achacachi, in the altiplano of La Paz. He became famous for his belligerent attitude towards the town dwellers of the area, and he terrorized them as head of militia group.54 As a peasant leader from Cliza recalled: “They [from Ucureña] were better armed than us [from Cliza], but they didn’t know how to handle their weapons, they didn’t know how to command their troops, they went [into battle] like animals and after that they didn’t know how to protect themselves, and that’s why they died.”55

Cliza dwellers who were artisans, civil servants, and intermediaries adamantly rejected any possibility of bearing Indian ancestry, thus drawing imaginary frontiers between social and geographical territories separated by specialized productive functions. The countryside was the territory of agricultural laborers, a place of traditions but also of backwardness, of ignorance; it was the natural location for the Indian. The town was the territory of independent manual workers and public employees. It was the locale of progress and knowledge; there should be no Indians in a modern town. Vecinos referred to themselves as “decent people,” although they always avoided identifying themselves with any specific ethnic category. They were not Indians, nor did they identify themselves as whites, mestizos, or cholos in their everyday discourse.

The term ‘peasant’ was born through all those people who went to work in the fields, in agriculture, due to illiteracy. The man of the fields, the man who wore sandals and his costume of a carrying cloth (aguayo), homespun cloth, the weavings they themselves produced, they were called ‘Indians.’ The man from the highlands (puna), the man from the country, he was called ‘peasant.’ Now, well, we called him ‘Indian’ if we wanted to distinguish the race.56

Bolivian racist, liberal discourse kept its vigor well into the mid-twentieth century, when the 1952 revolution transformed power relations. This change allowed subordinated people to forcibly oppose the prevalent racialized rhetoric. As a town dweller and former nurse from Cliza explained: “‘lndioyoy miercoles!’ (Filthy Indian). That’s how they bawled at them. ‘Imataj indio?’ (Who’s an Indian?). ‘Mana indiochu!’ (Not an Indian). ‘I’m a peasant, miss! Now we’re all just one (we’re all equal).’ That’s how they answered.”57 According to this interviewee, vecinos believed that “the Indian was the last person after the dog” and, thus, their spirits were exalted by the presence of campesinos in the town, for it was perceived as a transgression of the natural geographic limits for each race. Another vecino and chichero from Cliza recalled: “At that time the peasants were up in arms and no-one said anything to them. So, the peasantry from over there [from Ucureña] also took up positions in the municipality, in the subprefecture, in the directorship (intendencia). It was all occupied! Occupied by peasants!”58 Vecinos did not interpret these striking new conceptualizations of position, occupation, the transgression of the normative social order and the flipped power dynamic of the defined territories as the result of the previous power imbalance between the city and country. Instead, vecinos simply rejected the reconfiguration of order, while they took up the revolution as a historic event, at the same time they minimized its social outcome. They laid the whole burden of “disorder” at the feet of the peasant leaders and militiamen, accusing them of spreading and encouraging revolutionary social anarchy.

The urban political environment during this period became so toxic that it verged on collective hysteria. Town dwellers awaited the moment of an always “imminent” invasion by peasant militias, which would sweep away every vestige of civilization from the town. As a retired army sergeant from Cliza stated:

Yes, [the peasants] did it in Cliza [they invaded it], they did the same again in Tarata, in Punata, all over the Valle Alto. Not satisfied with that they came to Cochabamba city, because they had threatened to do it so many times. They came as far as Angostura to tear down the dam to flood the city of Cochabamba. So, there were previous offences, they wanted to do away with the whole world. It was too much!59

The revolution had, the vecinos could easily see, brought the campesino from the countryside into the rural towns. This was not necessarily a destructive process but rather an outgrowth of the greater economic capacity campesinos now possessed, which allowed them the ability to purchase houses in towns. As a chichero from Cliza explained:

The peasants of Ucureña are in the town of Cliza now because they have money. Those of Ana Rancho, of Khochi, all of them dripping with money now because all the harvest they have is theirs, no one takes it off them anymore. Right now, they’re coming in bit by bit into the town of Cliza; meanwhile, the people of Cliza are going to Cochabamba and they’re the ones who buy [houses in the city].60

The memory of vecinos nostalgically recalled the times when, from their urban bastions, they had controlled rural society and subordinated the peasantry. After the revolution, they no longer possessed any functional power “lever” to manipulate their surrounding social context towards their own interests: “Nowadays there are many educated and professional people in the countryside, it’s another kind of life now. It’s very rare for people to dedicate themselves to agriculture, it’s only those who haven’t been able to get out, who haven’t been able to move up. Now even the Indian girls (cholitas) can’t be conquered, for instance, to bring them here as a maid. ‘I am never going to serve!’ That’s what they tell you.”61 From this vecino’s perspective, the world had turned upside down.

Campesino Political Experience in Cochabamba

When Cochabamba peasants recalled the revolutionary past, they invariably weighed up the scope of the transformation of their personalities as the protagonists of a violent process of social change. Comparing the conditions that they lived through before and after the revolution, and recalling the violent acts that were generated in its duration, was a painful but also gratifying experience for them. It was painful because they all felt sorrow when returning to the past, but gratifying because they were conscious that their actions had established the conditions of their present life. In other words, they considered themselves active agents in the making of their own history.

Although they valued their political autonomy and clung to their campesino identity, they also realized that, paradoxically, the modernizing transformations they struggled for were one and the same with those that were currently undermining the basic foundations of peasant society.62 This did not, however, diminish the peasant’s confidence, which was largely derived from their belief that they had acted intelligently and correctly in their effort to solve their own political problems. In doing so, however, they had to confront the centralizing efforts of the revolutionary state and the paternalistic schemes of the military. Thus, the claim that the initiative for pacifying the Champa Guerra came from the peasants themselves, and not from the politicians nor the military, is indeed impressive.

Neither the army nor anybody else intervened in the [Champa Guerra] pacification. The peasant leaders from all around here gathered together and those who volunteered did the pacification. It happened with hugs, they danced to band music. That was how Huasacalle united with Ucureña. … We peasants said: ‘We’re not going to fight and we’re never going to believe anybody ever again, because they made us fight like fools.’ After that one lot retreated and the other lot retreated as well.63

This perspective led the peasants to supply a subsidiary contingent to the Bolivian armed forces and General René Barrientos as part of the peasant-military pact (April 1964), which put an end to the peasant war in the Valle Alto, as discussed in chapter four.

General Barrientos pacified us, but that was for all of us. He pacified us all, because he called us to Cochabamba, he didn’t come here. The peasant leaders, all of us went to Cochabamba, he had us hug each other there. But that was when we had already talked [we had already made peace], after that he came to Ucureña and there he pacified us all.64

The peasants’ interpretation of their own political initiatives often opposed the idea that the peasantry—despite the political and military power they might have held—always reacted, whether actively or passively, in subordination to external forces that manipulated them.65 From the perspective of many peasants, this alleged subordination was diluted by their awareness that powerful forces existed beforehand, against which they struggled to build the space for their own political action, although the results were not always as advantageous as they might have wished. In each historical moment, the past peasant experience of struggles with external forces allowed them to understand not only where the limits of power and subordination were located but also to construct a value system that could challenge the existing power structure.

This is precisely what James Scott labeled as the “moral economy” of the peasantry. That is to say, the moments of defiance of or deference to the powers which oppress them are carefully assessed and this guided the future action of the peasants, for peasants were familiar with the rigors of state repression. Thus, whether in moments of upheaval or political tranquility, their strategies for facing power were almost always veiled by an aura of submission and humility that allowed them to negotiate political spaces in moments when social tension had reached its limit.66 Therefore, when a peasant was asked why they had not confronted the revolutionary state directly, he replied with a laugh:

What could we say? We can’t say anything [to those in power]. For example, if I’m in power and you’re small [weak], you have to respect the one who’s in power, because he’s a [big] person. We can’t say [a word]. We can’t even talk, because he knows and he has the power. He can have us taken [arrested], to have us punished. People just talked for themselves.67

This reverence for power, or the peasants’ pragmatic attitude towards the powerful, should not be seen as an incapacity of peasants to negotiate in the political arena. On the contrary, this reverential attitude responds to what James Scott calls the “hidden transcripts” of peasant political action.68 In other words, the peasant’s discourse was not formulated for the entire comprehension of the state, landlords, or politicians. Rather, it was the other way around, because these were languages that power does not entirely comprehend but which enclose the oppressed fantasies about the moment of vengeance to come against the powerful. In reality, these hidden languages form the foundation of a permanent subversive attitude that stores up pride in the oppressed group and allows them to maintain a latent resistance to the everyday humiliations that power imposed on them through the exercise of political power.

From this point of view, the Champa Guerra had a crucial effect on the peasantry when the time came to consolidate peasant political identity, through the state and other powerful groups within Bolivian society during the revolutionary period. The unleashing of peasant militia power by the state allowed peasants to find a privileged place for themselves in the struggle for a new balance of power, thus strengthening the peasants’ self-esteem when bargaining with different power groups. As explained by a peasant militia commander:

Not even the army could stop us. When Colonel Cirilo Flores was the commander [of the army], he arrived with a platoon of soldiers and me with a platoon of peasant militiamen. He gave the order [to his troops] and I gave the order [to my militia]. But we never let them take the arms off us. ‘That is enough,’ we said one day. ‘Let Ucureña hand their arms over first of all and we [Cliza] will be prepared to hand our arms over afterward.’69

The Cochabamba peasants’ war during the revolution can be interpreted as a political ritual that ultimately unfurled peasant power symbols before the national society, cementing the foundations of a campesino identity in Bolivia. For this reason, peasants believed that—despite the legacy of violence the Champa Guerra left behind—it was part of a constructive process that shaped their social character and added a central element to their collective identity.

The revolution served us a great deal; it was a total change. A lot of people say that we peasants just settled for getting the land. No! The land was already ours by right. … If it hadn’t been for this revolution, we wouldn’t have had the Champa Guerra, or anything. Today we would still be going on just the same under the boots of the landlords. This is an experience, now we know how to argue, now we’ve learnt … so now we know for ourselves without them saying anything to us. We ourselves make out the documents now and we give them out to public opinion, now we don’t need any little lawyer (abogadillo) to do them … this is the second revolution in the world, because the first one was in Mexico, where the peasants rose up, the second one was in Bolivia.70

The symbolism used by peasants to affirm their political identity, relative to regional and national power groups, also held great importance when the time came to define their alliances and pacts. When recalling General Barrientos, for instance, peasants always highlighted the importance of personal face-to-face relationships, as these allowed the display of symbolic acts and rituals which legitimated the relationship between authority and subordination. During Víctor Paz’s second presidential term (1960–64), he centralized his activities in La Paz and only sporadically visited the Cochabamba Valle Alto. In contrast, General René Barrientos was in the valley quite often: “When he came to the valley, General Barrientos began to dance with peasant girls there, with everyone. While doctor [Víctor Paz] never danced with peasant girls, he never went to the countryside. General Barrientos took advantage of that and just made a coup [d’état].”71 General Barrientos was one of the politicians who best understood this facet of peasant character. He made successful use of it when political tension erupted in Cochabamba because of the right wing of the MNR’s push to centralize power in their hands, and the left wing’s ambition to seize power by any means possible. These political attitudes were detrimental for the peasant movement, as both the right- and left-wing factions attempted to relegate the new status of the peasants and also manipulate them to their advantage. At the peak of the Champa Guerra, General Barrientos traveled throughout the valley towns addressing peasants in their local Quechua language. This memory vividly survived in the peasants’ minds and was associated with sincere friendship symbology: “He [Barrientos] left his tears to the peasants. He talked to the peasants weeping. He wept when advising us: ‘Don’t do that [don’t fight] between brothers. We’re brothers, let’s not do that among us.’ He left his tears, he cried.”72 Contrary to right-wing authoritarianism or left-wing pragmatism, General Barrientos used shared symbology that immediately connected him to the peasants and therefore elevated him to a position of legitimate authority in the eyes of the peasants.

We used to go to his house with machine guns as his guards. How many times did we shoot! Barrientos was a gentleman, he called us to his birthday parties, or he would call us to a meeting any day. The chicha was there in cut-off drums, from here to there or back again, in the order we entered his house in he passed us the beer with his own hands. General Barrientos was a gentleman!73

General René Barrientos’ skillful communication strategy, however, became a road towards authoritarian paternalism, which was used by the military to control the peasant movement, and which eventually degenerated into a sort of pork-barrel politics (prebendalismo) that corrupted the peasants’ leading cadres.

He brought us together in the meetings and told us: ‘You’ll never find anyone like me. I’m getting myself spat on by the rich, really bad, they’re spitting shamefully in my face, those q’aras (city dwellers). Soldier! On the side of the peasants! Indian race! That’s what they say to me.’ He advised us as if we were his sons: ‘Why do you get angry with each other? It’s not good to get angry. We have to be one [united]. If you are divided and something bad happens to me, that’ll be it! You won’t exist anymore and you won’t find anyone like me.’ And when he was advising all that to us, the tragedy[accident] happened in Arque.74

Many peasants still believe that General Barrientos’ death, when his helicopter crashed in Arque on 27 April 1969, was not an accident but an assassination plotted by anti-peasant sectors.75 Nevertheless, the peasant-military pact of 1964 provoked a generational conflict within the peasant cadres, for old guard members disliked military presence in the valley: “‘It is a revolution within the revolution.’ General Barrientos used to say to get in with the peasants. But that wasn’t his purpose, his tactic was to get rid of unionism. He had his youths (lloqallas) ready and it was all set up. He had to become dictator, that was his aim.”76 Meanwhile, younger leaders blamed General Barrientos’ failure on the fact that he surrounded himself with old-guard leaders and did not leave room for the new generation: “Barrientos had the idea of forming new leaders, but he didn’t manage it. So, what did he do? He hired the same ones; he was surrounded by the same [old guard leaders].”77

The generation of older peasant leaders—those who rose under the hacienda system that had kept them in ignorance—was challenged by the new generation of peasants who managed to study and educate themselves and left the countryside (see figure 5.6). The children of the old generation asked them: what did the peasants fight for? The common answer was that they struggled for their rights, although the result they finally obtained was that of perpetuating poverty in the rural areas of Bolivia. However, as a summation of the older revolutionary generation’s state of mind:

I am as I should be. Bit by bit among peasants we’ve become closer. For example, he’s my friend, he’s my friend too. ‘How are you, Don Mario?’ They ask me. ‘How are you, mates?’ I answer. ‘Have a drink.’ They invite me in the tavern. I invite them as well and we hug each other. There’s no problem, we ourselves have realized (de por sí nos hemos orientado).78

The revolutionary violence is now buried in the past, but it still survives in the minds of Bolivian peasants as a reminder of the heavy price they were forced to pay to consolidate their campesino identity and to keep their political autonomy intact.

Conclusion

The Cochabamba peasants’ political experience was forged in the heat of their struggles with the landlords, which were exacerbated after the Chaco War (1932–35). Peasants’ efforts to integrate themselves into a national project and seek citizenship were backed up by factions of the local elite, who joined the post-war political parties opposing the liberal regime. Supported initially by external agents, peasants fought to organize their unions and demand their civil rights. The 1952 national revolution encouraged unionization and promoted the wider presence of peasants in the political arena. In the late 1950s, violence that combined political, ethnic, and economic issues broke out in the valley of Cochabamba, and the Champa Guerra (1959–64) started. The MNR’s internal political divisions, the city versus country opposition, and the increased consumption of chicha during the revolutionary period inflamed peasant politics and promoted armed confrontations between the Cliza and Ucureña peasant militias. The military intervened in the conflict, paving the way for state control of peasants and their unions and fostering a coup that ended the revolutionary process in 1964.

The revolutionary process transformed peasant identity and subjectivity, thus developing a new political culture in the Cochabamba valley. The everyday life experience of revolutionary valley peasants reaffirmed the truth of their patriarchal perceptions of authority and the related conceptualization of power as associated with female subordination. During the revolutionary period, a process of ethnogenesis took place that linked ethnicity to the territorial origin of people. The town dwellers reclaimed their vecino identity by rejecting ethnic links with the despised Indians, who lived in the countryside. Although avoiding mentioning a white or mestizo ethnic identity, vecinos drew a line of separation between themselves and rural dwellers by emphasizing their daily economic activity as traders, artisans, professionals, or state officials. To develop such skills, vecinos argued, required fluent use of the Spanish language. This identified vecinos in contrast to Indians, who were Quechua speaking agriculturalists that were mainly illiterate.

Rural dwellers, for their part, rejected the colonial identity of Indian and instead they proclaimed their campesino identity. In terms of both ethnicity and class, valley peasants fought to find their own positive differential characteristics to establish distance between themselves and vecinos. They named the vecinos q’aras (white or mestizo people living in the towns), who were different from them just because they were wealthier. However, they argued, campesinos possessed their own private land and were more educated now than they ever had been before the revolution, therefore, they were not Indians anymore and instead they were citizens with the same rights and duties as vecinos. When campesinos moved into the towns, they transformed themselves into cholos (citified Indians). From their point of view, the word cholo was not pejorative, in sharp contrast to vecinos who abhorred the “cholification” of the peasantry and vilified rural migrants arriving to the cities.

The word “campesino” (peasant) was barely used in the pre-revolutionary era and it was finally accepted only after violent political struggles between rural and town dwellers during the revolutionary era. The Champa Guerra was the catalyst event that consolidated the campesino identity in Bolivian society. The display of peasant militias’ power and the violent confrontations they endured amongst their factions finally convinced vecinos that campesinos had exceeded the town dwellers’ traditional power. After the Champa Guerra, it became evident that campesinos were fully autonomous actors competing for power in the political arena. The struggles of valley peasants for education, land property, unionization, and political autonomy paid off and campesinos were by and large successful in fulfilling their aims. But the road to social advancement took a heavy toll. The Champa Guerra left the campesinos exhausted and their leaders discredited in the view of the grassroots peasant organizations. At this point in time, the military cleverly filled the void of authority in the valley peasant society by manipulating the paternalistic projection of General Réne Barrientos, who pacified the peasantry as part of his seizure of power. The old generation of peasant leaders that had emerged with the revolution gave way to a new generation of leaders who were born within the context of the Cold War and the military dictatorship in Bolivia. Campesinos during the post-revolutionary era faced different challenges, for political power had returned to the cities. How did they reconfigure their political agenda? This is a fascinating query but beyond the scope of this work.