From xxxxxx <[email protected]>
Subject Hatred of the Indian
Date November 24, 2019 1:00 AM
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[How did the traditional middle class incubate so much hatred
towards the people, leading them to embrace racialized fascism
centered on the Indian as the enemy? The answer is the rejection of
equality and the fundamentals of a substantial democracy.]
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HATRED OF THE INDIAN  
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Álvaro García Linera
November 19, 2019
Peoples Dispatch
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_ How did the traditional middle class incubate so much hatred
towards the people, leading them to embrace racialized fascism
centered on the Indian as the enemy? The answer is the rejection of
equality and the fundamentals of a substantial democracy. _

Indigenous woman have been most targeted by racially-driven violence
during this civic-military coup d'état., Redfish

 

Almost as a nighttime fog, hatred rapidly traverses the neighborhoods
of the traditional urban middle-class of Bolivia. Their eyes fill with
anger. They do not yell, they spit. They do not raise demands, they
impose. Their chants are not of hope of brotherhood. They are of
disdain and discrimination against the Indians. They hop on their
motorcycles, get into their trucks, gather in their fraternities of
private universities, and they go out to hunt the rebellious Indians
that dared to take power from them.

In the case of Santa Cruz, they organize motorized hordes with sticks
in hand to punish the Indians, those that they call ‘_collas’_,
who live in peripheral neighborhoods and in the markets. They chant
“the _collas_ must be killed,” and if on the way, they come
across a woman wearing a _pollera_ [traditional skirt worn by
Indigenous and mestizo women] they hit her, threaten her and demand
that she leave their territory. In Cochabamba, they organize convoys
to impose their racial supremacy in the southern zone, where the
underprivileged classes live, and charge – as if it were a were a
cavalry contingent – at thousands of defenseless peasant women that
march asking for peace. They carry baseball bats, chains, gas
grenades. Some carry firearms. The woman is their preferred victim.
They grab a female mayor of a peasant population, humiliate her, drag
her through the street. They hit her, urinate on her when she falls to
the ground, cut her hair, threaten to lynch her, and when they realize
that they are being filmed, they decide to throw red paint on her
symbolizing what they will do with her blood.

In La Paz, they are suspicious of their employees and do not speak
when they bring food to the table. Deep down, they fear them, but they
also look down on them. Later, when they are on the streets shouting,
they insult Evo and with him, all of these Indians that dared to build
intercultural democracy with equality. When they are many, they tear
down the Wiphala, the Indigenous symbol, they spit on it, they step on
it, they cut it, they burn it. It is a visceral hatred that they
unload on this symbol of the Indians that they wish they could
extinguish from the earth along with all those that are represented by
it.

Racial hatred is the political language of this traditional middle
class. Academic titles, trips and faith serve for nothing because in
the end, what is important is purity of ancestry. Deep down, the
imagined lineage is stronger and seems to stick to the spontaneous
language of the skin that hates, of the visceral gestures and of their
corrupt morals.

Everything exploded on Sunday [October] 20, when Evo Morales won the
election with 10% more than the runner-up, but no longer with the
immense advantage of before nor with 51% of the votes. It was the sign
that the regressive, huddled forces were waiting for – the timid
liberal opposition candidate, the ultra-conservative political forces,
the OAS [Organization of American States], and the indescribable
traditional middle class. Evo had won again but he no longer had 60%
of the electorate. He was weaker and they had to go after him.The
loser did not recognize his defeat. The OAS spoke of “clean
elections” but of a weak victory and asked for a second round,
counseling to go against the constitution that states that if a
candidate wins more than 40% of the votes and has more than 10% over
the runner-up, they are elected. And then the middle class launched
its hunt of the Indians. On the night of Monday, October 21, they
burned 5 of the 9 electoral offices, including the ballots. In Santa
Cruz, a civic strike brought together the inhabitants of the central
zones of the city, following which the strike branched out to the
residential zones of La Paz and Cochabamba. And this unleashed
terror. 

Paramilitary groups began to besiege institutions, burn trade union
offices, set fire to the residences of candidates and political
leaders of the governing party [Movement Towards Socialism]. Even the
private home of the president was looted. In other places, families,
including children, were kidnapped and threatened with being whipped
and burned if their parent, who was a minister or union leader, did
not resign. An endless night of the long knives had been unleashed,
and fascism peeked out.

The people’s forces comprising workers, miners, peasants, Indigenous
people and urban dwellers resisted the civic coup and began to retake
territorial control of the cities. But just as the balance of the
correlation of forces was shifting in their favor, the police mutiny
occurred.

The police had for weeks shown great indolence and ineptitude in
protecting the common people while they were being attacked and
persecuted by fascist groups. But from Friday [November 8], many of
them displayed an extraordinary ability to attack, detain, torture and
kill working-class protesters. When it came to dealing with the
children of the middle class, they apparently did not have the
capacity. But when it came to repressing rebellious Indians, the
deployment, violence and the arrogance was monumental. 

The same happened with the armed forces. During all of our time in
government, we never allowed them to repress civil mobilizations, not
even during the first civic coup d’état in 2008. And now, in the
midst of the convulsion and without us having asked them anything,
they told us that they did not have anti-riot capacities, that they
only had 8 bullets per member and that a presidential decree was
necessary for them to be on the streets in even a protective capacity.
However, they had no hesitation in seeking the resignation of
president Evo, in violation of the constitution. They did whatever was
possible to attempt to kidnap him while he was traveling to and was in
Chapare. And then, when the coup was consolidated, they went to the
streets to shoot thousands of bullets, to militarize the cities and
assassinate peasants. And all of this without any presidential decree.
In order to protect the Indian, they needed a decree. To repress and
kill Indians, it was enough to obey what the racial and classist
hatred decreed. And now, in only 5 days, there are more than 18 dead
and 120 injured with live bullets. Of course, nearly all of them are
Indigenous.

The question we must respond to is, how did the traditional middle
class incubate so much hatred and resentment towards the people,
leading them to embrace racialized fascism centered on the Indian as
the enemy? What did they do to irradiate their class frustrations to
the police and armed forces and become the social base of this process
of becoming fascist, of this state regression and moral degeneration.

The answer is the rejection of equality, which is to say, the
rejection of the fundamentals of a substantial democracy.

The last 14 years of the government of the social movements were
characterized by the process of leveling of the social classes, the
sharp reduction in extreme poverty (from 35% to 15%), the broadening
of rights for all (universal access to healthcare, to education and to
social protection), the Indianization of the State (more than 50% of
functionaries in public administration must be Indigenous, new
national narrative around the Indigenous sector) and the reduction of
economic inequality (the difference of income between the richest and
the poorest fell from 130 to 45). All this meant the systematic
democratization of wealth, access to public goods, opportunities and
state power. The economy has grown from 9 billion dollars to 42
billion dollars, widening the market and internal savings, which has
allowed many people to have their own homes and improve their work
activity.

Thus, in a decade, the percentage of people of the so-called “middle
class” in terms of income, went from 35% to 60%. The largest part of
them came from the working-class and Indigneous sectors. It was
essentially a process of democratization of the social goods through
the construction of material equality. But this inevitably has caused
a rapid devaluation of the economic, educational and political capital
held by the traditional middle class. In the past, a notable last
name, the monopoly over ‘legitimate’ knowledge, and their family
relationships allowed the traditional middle class to access posts in
public administration, obtain loans and bids for projects or
scholarships. Today, the number of people that fight for the same post
or opportunity has not only doubled – reducing the possibilities to
access these goods by half – but, additionally, the
‘up-and-coming’, the new middle class with Indigenous, working
class origins, has a combination of new capital (Indigenous language,
trade union links) of greater value and state recognition to fight for
the available public goods.

As such, it is about a collapse of what was a characteristic of a
colonial society: ethnicity as capital, basically, the imagined
foundation of the historical superiority of the middle class above the
subaltern classes because in Bolivia, social class is only
comprehensible and is visualized under the form of racial hierarchies.
That the sons of this class have been the shock force of the
reactionary insurgency is the violent cry of a new generation that
sees how the inheritance of the last name and skin fades in the face
of the democratization of goods. Although they raise the flag of
democracy that is understood as a vote, in reality, they have risen up
against democracy that is understood as the leveling of social classes
and distribution of wealth. This is why we see the overflowing of
hatred, the outpouring of violence – because racial supremacy is
something that is not rationalized. It lives as a primary impulse of
the body, as a tattoo of the colonial history in the skin. As such,
fascism is not only the expression of a failed radical transformation
of values, but paradoxically in post-colonial societies, the success
of a material democratization.

With this in mind, it is not surprising that while nearly 20
Indigenous people have been shot dead, those that murder them and
order their murder narrate how they are acting to safeguard
democracy. But in reality, they know what they have done is to
protect the privilege of caste and last name.

Racial hatred can only destroy. It is not a horizon for the future. It
is nothing more than a primitive vengeance of a class historically and
morally declining that shows that a coup-supporter is crouched behind
every mediocre liberal.

_Bolivia's Vice-president Álvaro García Linera reflects on the role
of racial hatred in motivating the coup which forced him and President
Evo Morales out of office and into exile_

_Published on CELAG
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English translation by Zoe PC._

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