Early Examples of Indigenous Self-Governance

In contemporary indigenous discourses, demands for the revival of indigenous self-governance are widespread. Among Andean movements, many activists have emphasized the importance of the revitalization of Kollasuyo and ayullus. In the 1970s, Aymara scholar Fausto Reinaga (2001 [1970]: 304), for example, wrote:

What does the Indian have to do to become the owner of the land?

To become a state. To become a Nation.

What does this mean?

It means that…the Indian state has to replace the white-mestizo Bolivian state…Kollasuyo belongs to the Indian, and Bolivia is Kollasuyo. The Indian starts to exercise his right to recapture (reconquista) his nation and his state…Kollasuyu is his; and has to be his. [my translation]

Comprising the present-day Bolivian highlands, Kollasuyo was one of the four provinces of the Inca state of Tawantinsuyu (Klein 2003: 17). Despite the conquest of the Aymara by the Inca state and the territorial spread of Quechua groups, the Aymara retained command over their own languages and large parts of their social, economic, and political systems as the region of Kollasuyo (ibid.: 17). Historical evidence of Aymara nations (naciones) exists from the late twelfth century onwards. By the time of the arrival of the Incas, there were at least seven major Aymara nations in the Andean highlands (Klein 2003: 13–4).

Although contemporary Bolivian indigenous discourses often represent Tawantinsuyo as the ideal of indigenous civilization, historical evidence shows that to a large extent it was also based on conquest and patterns of colonization. Canessa, for example, has written that “tens of thousands of people regularly moved hundreds of miles to pay tribute in mines or cities, or to colonise on behalf of the state” (2000: 118).

Historically, each Aymara nation was spatially and politically divided into two complementary parts that were divided into yet another dual social and territorial arrangement: ayullus. These territorial units of Aymara self-governance were geographically and socially divided into upper regions inhabited by Aymara nobilities and lower regions assigned to lay-members of the ayullu (for more details, see, Klein 2003: 14–5). Each ayullu had territory in different ecological zones along the Andean mountain range that produced different crops and food staples (Murra 1978, 2001[1956]). Furthermore, there existed an elaborate system of economic exchange and reciprocity between them (ibid.).

This ecologically and economically vibrant system was maintained through an exchange of marriage, kinship, and shared labor obligations (mita) (Klein 2006: 13–6). Inside the ayullus, political authority was rotational among male-female pairs (tata-mama-jilaqata) (Yampara 2001: 69). This kind of social organization can be perceived as an early example of “community-based participatory politics” (Vanden and Prevost 2012: 183). While in today’s indigenous discourses, ayullus are often represented as synonymous with reciprocal,

complementary and harmonious community life, historical evidence, however, shows that despite such factors as kinship ties, low social stratification, and common rights to land, class structures and governing hierarchies did exist during the eras of both Aymara nations and the Inca state. Regional chiefs and ayullu leaders had access to private property and they extracted labor force outside ayullu structures. (Klein 2003.)

The Spaniards (following the model of Inca rule) opted for a system of indirect rule (encomienda) that maintained as much as possible of traditional ayullu structures and governing mechanisms through the mediation of local indigenous leaders in order to control the abundant indigenous labor force and to save royal costs (Klein 2003: 33–4).

Similar forms of indirect colonial rule over colonized peoples have occurred elsewhere (for first accounts of indirect rule, see Lugard 1922). This enabled ayullus to maintain a certain amount of territorial control and self-determination (Albó 2008: 23). To answer to the severe decline of the indigenous population, an increasing need for labor in silver mining, and the rise of a local Spanish elite, Viceroy Toledo initiated a process of reducciones:

the redistribution of fertile lands to large estates (haciendas) and regrouping ayullus into comunidades originarias, that is, indigenous communities with larger permanent settlements and clearly assigned lands that were easier to govern and tax directly (Klein 2003;

Postero 2007). This standardized spatial organization and new taxation system through species, rather than goods, effectively forced the indigenous peoples of the highlands to integrate into the market economy (Klein 2003). It also marked the start of a long series of land reforms that effectively destroyed ayullu territories (Andersson 1999: 7).

The Inca state, nor the Spanish colonial rule, were able to fully colonize the vast Bolivian lowlands (Klein 2003: 20). It was left to the Jesuit and Franciscan missions to organize the scarce and scattered semi-nomadic hunters and gatherers into fixed communities (reducciones). While these communities were relatively self-governing and autonomous from the state, it was the Church that functioned as a para-state entity: it utilized indigenous labor, provided evangelization and religious schooling, and imposed new authority structures called cabildos – systems that still function in many lowlands indigenous communities today and are considered indigenous forms of organization (Yashar 2005: 195, 205). Gustafson (2009) describes the autonomous arrangements of lowlands Guaraní peoples during the colonial and republican periods as ‘subservient autonomy’: traditional leaders entitled as captains served as labor contractors and intermediaries between indigenous communities, missionaries, and hacienda owners, thereby transforming the social structures of the Guaraní into hierarchical structures of indirect rule.

In addition to the ayullus and reducciones, a third group resembling today’s peasantry emerged in Quechua-speaking valleys, especially in the area of Cochabamba. Given the dislocation of ayullus into communities, social organization started to change and the number of originarios – a term used by the Crown to refer to original community members

who had community land rights as well as tax and mita obligations – to diminish. The number of indigenous peoples (called forasteros, or ‘foreigners’) who had no access to lands and no tax and mita obligations increased, becoming an itinerant underprivileged group who either sold their labor to large Spanish haciendas or performed free labor within communities in return for a piece of land. (Klein 2003: 48–9.) By the late colonial period, the majority of indigenous community organizations in Cochabamba had been replaced by landless laborers (colonos) on Spanish haciendas who gradually became an important class of small-scale farmers (ibid.: 61). With time, the peasantry began to be treated as tax- and rent-paying individuals with access to capitalist markets and individual land ownership, while indigenous groups were treated as collectivities whose relation to land was innate and culturally defined. Given today’s distinctions in Bolivia between originarios of the highlands, indígenas of the lowlands, and peasants, it is important to note that these divisions are not “natural” but deriving from historical structures of longue durée.

Initially, new republican governments depended on Indian head tax which is why they regularly renewed the commitment to support indigenous communities’ corporate land holdings and self-governing authority structures (Klein 2003: 105). Yet, as elsewhere in Latin America, liberal ideas started to take over from the mid-nineteenth century, with increasing amounts of foreign capital pouring into the country. Control of lands and territories by local communities contravened liberal notions of individual rights and property, and the capacity to sell land (Albó 2008: 24). Consequently, the Disentailment Law (Ley de Exvinculación) was promulgated in 1874 to privatize collective lands and to commoditize them (Mendieta 2008: 58–61). As a result, “ancient communities were fragmented as haciendas ‘captured’ the land and labour of entire communities” (Qayum 2002: 297). This marked the start of ongoing battles between liberal and communalist ideas in Bolivia that continues even today (Programa de las Naciones Unidas para el Desarrollo 2007: 95).

The rapid liberalization of the economy, the creation of the mining export industry, and the massive expansion of the hacienda system initiated a wave of indigenous uprisings.

With the aim of (re-)gaining indigenous self-governing arrangements, these conflicts erupted periodically from the late-nineteenth century until the nationalist revolution in 1952. They included a movement called Apoderados Generales which consisted of highlands indigenous authorities who, from the 1880s, fought against the Ley de Exvinculación (Ticona 2003). Initially aligned with the Liberals, there was a massive indigenous uprising during the 1899 conflict under the leadership of Zarate Willka, who aimed to seize back the lands of indigenous communities (Condarco 1983; Mendieta 2008). With the rapid emergence of socialist ideas in the 1920s and 1930s, indigenous political fights started to mingle with left-wing political thinking. One of the first examples of combining indigenous and Marxist ideologies among Bolivian intellectuals was the work of Tristan

Marof, a founder of the Trotskyite worker’s party POR (Partido Obrero Revolucionario), who had been greatly influenced by the thinking of Peruvian José Carlos Mariategui.

He combined indigenous demands that lands be returned to indigenous communities by the haciendas with workers’ demands that the mining sector be retrieved from the private sector and returned to the hands of the state. The first indigenous congress was held in 1945 with the specific aims of demanding land reform, rural education, and the elimination of forced labor (ponguaje). (Klein 2003: 184–5.)