Forgetting the Revolution and Remembering the War: Memory and Violence in Highland Bolivia

Preface

The events that led to the inauguration of Evo Morales as President of Bolivia in January 2006 were heralded by journalists (foreign and national), academics and the President himself as nothing less than a revolution, to be compared to the indigenous uprising of 1781, Independence in 1825 and the Bolivian Revolution of 1952. I shall leave it to others to debate whether this is genuinely a revolution,¹ but certainly agree with James Dunkerley that is it is widely perceived as being one.² Whether or not recent events hark back to the eighteenth-century revolt of Tupak Katari, the primary reference is undoubtedly 1952, when miners and peasants overthrew the government, nationalized the mines and enacted a far-reaching agrarian reform. The election of Morales, hailed as the first indigenous president, can be seen as completing that mid twentieth-century overthrow of white oligarchic rule and its unfinished business. It also raises questions about how that Revolution is remembered.

The mid-century events loom large for politicians, journalists and historians in their understanding of Bolivian history; as James Dunkerley has noted, they form a watershed where the ‘before’ of monolingual indian peasants ruled by feudal oligarchs is contrasted with the ‘after’ of a modern, increasingly mestizo and much more urban nation. That the Revolution may not have the same significance for ordinary Bolivians is rarely considered. In this paper I examine what the people of the Aymara village of Pocobaya remember – and forget – about the 1952 Bolivian Revolution; and how not only the fact but the very process of memory and amnesia is key to their understanding of who they are today.

1952 and All that

According to a conventional chronology based on historical record, the Thana ‘war’ began in 1951 when Pocobaya was destroyed and its inhabitants made refugees. In 1952, while the people of Pocobaya were still living dispersed in neighbouring communities, the Bolivian Revolution broke out causing the violent overthrow of the landowners. In 1953 the Agrarian Reform was declared, restricting large-scale landownership and returning land to the peasants who worked it. Pocobayeños then returned and rebuilt their community.

Fig. 1.

Qhosimani: mountains lapped by mist. Photo: Andrew Canessa, Qhosimani, 2007.

Fig. 2.

Pocobaya cemetery with Mt. Illampu in the background. Photo: Andrew Canessa, Pocobaya, 2007.

Oral accounts of these events differ from the above, however, most notably on the position of the Bolivian Revolution in the middle of the sequences of events. Here are the facts that most local people agree on. Many years ago, when indians still lived as serfs, there was a war in the mountains of Larecaja between two Aymara-speaking hacienda communities, Pocobaya and Thana. These communities were owned by two landowners, hacendados, related by marriage. The war centred on a disputed stretch of land called Salapata. Men in uniform walked up the mountain with guns to Pocobaya; crops were destroyed; houses looted and burned; livestock stolen. People died. People fled. Pocobaya was destroyed. Its people hid in caves or dispersed among neighbouring communities. Three years later the people of Pocobaya returned; they retook their lands as well as Salapata. The Agrarian Reform confirmed that Salapata belonged to Pocobaya and, moreover, it ultimately deprived the landowners, the hacendados, of title to any land in Pocobaya.

These are the bare facts of the event. But they are, in themselves, uninteresting (and the elision of the Revolution in oral accounts unintelligible) because what is missing is the ideological context which makes them comprehensible; the ‘why’ questions, the understanding of motives, and the politics of what was happening. As Alessandro Portelli notes, facts and representations do not exist independently of each other: ‘Representations work on facts and claim to be facts; facts are recognized and organized according to representations; facts and representations both converge on the subjectivity of human beings and are dressed in their language’.³ What happened is inseparable from why it happened and what meaning it has today if only because if...