Llamas, Weavings, and Organic Chocolate: Multicultural Grassroots Development in the Andes and Amazon of Bolivia (review)

Llamas, Weavings, and Organic Chocolate: Multicultural Grassroots Development in the Andes and Amazon of Bolivia, by Kevin Healy (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), xiv + 485 pp.

On 15 September 1973, a group of about three dozen Aymara-speaking men and women gathered at the famous archaeological site of Tiahuanaco about ten miles from Lake Titicaca in Bolivia, where they read a manifesto which was to transform the politics, economics and culture of this small South American country. The framers of the "Tiahuanaco Manifesto," as it was called, were highland Indian school teachers, intellectuals, and rural development workers who formed part of a then underground movement in Bolivia which took its name from the eighteenth century indigenous rebel leader Tupac Katari. Citing a quote from a speech of the former Inca ruler Yupanqui to the Spanish invaders in the sixteenth century, the Tiahuanaco Manifesto began: "'A people that oppresses another people cannot be free.' ¹ We, both Aymara and Quechua peasants, similar to other indigenous nationalities of our country, are repeating this same message today." The Manifesto went on to state that:

The political leaders of the dominant minority have striven to create a development process which slavishly imitates a model taken from the context of other nations. This approach emphasizes the materialistic side of progress by equating development with the economic aspects of life. As Indian peasants, we certainly aspire to economic development in our country, yet we insist that it take place within a framework that uses our own cultural values as its point of departure. ²

Although the Tiahuanaco Manifesto was written and made public at the height of one of Bolivia's most repressive military governments, it set the stage and provided the philosophical framework for the contemporary indigenous movement in Bolivia and in several other Andean countries. In the years following the release of the Manifesto, the Aymara-speaking Kataristas and their Quechua-speaking highland neighbors took over the formerly state-controlled, peasant and labor movements in Bolivia and for the first time asserted the indigenous ethnic and cultural roots of the Bolivian nation. At the same time, new social movements emerged in the eastern lowlands of Bolivia where Amazonian and Chacoan tribal groups--some of them only recently contacted--formed into regional indigenous federations which asserted their rights to their ancestral territories and cultures and some degree of administrative autonomy. Meanwhile, in the urban centers of La Paz and Cochabamba, indigenous intellectuals--many of them trained in Western sciences and professional disciplines--began to rediscover the ancient but still utilized agronomic, botanical, medical and other cultural knowledge of the country's rural indigenous peasantry. As Bolivia, like other Andean countries, turned toward political democracy in the decade of the 1980s, new civil society and community organizations emerged which called for an alternative model of economic development which not only took into account but also built upon the rich cultural traditions and resources of the country.

Kevin Healy, a development sociologist who has spent nearly three decades observing and researching these changes in Bolivia, tells the story of the drama of this movement as seen through the eyes of several grassroots development organizations which he financially assisted as a Project Officer at the Inter-American Foundation in Alexandria, Virginia. The book, which is as much personal and autobiographical as it is sociological in perspective, opens with several chapters describing the essentially "neo-colonial" social structure and development model of Bolivia. National integration in Bolivia, as in so many other Latin American countries with large indigenous populations, has meant the control of the state by a small European-descended elite who framed the trajectory of the nation in terms of Western European identity, values and culture. This "Euro-centric" notion of the "nation" meant that indigenous peoples were always forced to adapt to the values of Bolivia's elite, including...