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A Portrait Of Bolivian Heartbreak
An Associated Press photo by Natasha Pisarenko shows an indigenous Bolivian woman standing amid clouds of tear gas, holding the national flag and at its tip, the Wiphala flag of the nation’s indigenous peoples. Her society is again a victim of history. Its dreams vanished in acrid smoke. The photo’s aesthetic is both human and brimming with intensity.
It is said that sometime in the late 19th century the British ambassador to Bolivia deeply offended local custom by refusing a cup of “chicha,” a local indigenous drink. The diplomat was then made to consume a giant bowl of cocoa and be paraded around on a donkey. In a rage, Queen Victoria promptly grabbed a map and with a giant X marked off the South American nation, declaring that “Bolivia does not exist.”
The same claim has now been issued again by U.S. imperialism and the modern-day Bolivian oligarchy through the overthrow of Evo Morales’s government on Oct. 10. Morales, elected in 2006 as the first indigenous president of a predominantly indigenous nation, shook both the old Bolivian system and the region with his brand of democratic socialism. Even when other Latin American countries governed by the left fell back into the hands of the right-wing, most prominently Brazil with its ascendance to power of proto-fascist forces, Bolivia stubbornly remained not only leftist but a positive symbol of progress. A healthy GDP and the lifting of millions of its Aymara indigenous community into the middle class proved that an alternative to…
