Acting Inca: National Belonging in Early Twentieth-Century Bolivia

Conclusion: Inca Play, Aymara Encore

146 conclusion Inca Play, Aymara Encore In Bolivia, the Civil War of 1899 still stands at the crossroads of fierce contemporary political and regional conflicts. The war has occupied a central space in Sucre’s historical narrative for over a century; that city’s historical claim as the first, and previously only, capital of Bolivia has been rekindled in the light of Evo Morales’s presidency and the rewriting of the Bolivian constitution . Sucre’s narrative of 1899 constitutes a constant challenge to Morales’s presidency as well as to La Paz’s claim as the primary capital city. The Aymara leader Zárate Willka may not have become president in 1899, but Morales did in 2005. For some, Morales’s election represents the consolidation of the struggle against neocolonialism that Zárate Willka is often credited with having begun. Sucre’s demands serve as the basis for virulent racism; they challenge national unity and presidential legitimacy. Narratives and counternarratives turn on the question of Aymara participation in the civil war and actively shape current political differences. The film La Guerra Federal, discussed in the introduction, which ties contemporary regional conflict between La Paz and Sucre to the Civil War of 1899, is an excellent example of this ongoing style. The pejorative connotations associated with the term Aymara in the early twentieth century persist, only now the preferred term is masista, designed to insult both Morales’s political party, the Movimiento Al Socialismo (MAS), and the Aymara ethnicity of the current president and many of his supporters. conclusion | 147 A monument in Sucre’s impressive cemetery commemorates twentyseven students who lost their lives during the Civil War of 1899. For the city’s residents, it points to a telling example of Aymara brutality. The statue is made of bronze with a cut-off pillar extending upward. The inscription reads: “A broken pillar. This column symbolizes the order established by the founding fathers[;] it was whole, but the bad Bolivians in 1899 broke it. The country is not complete[;] it is broken.”1 The column is severed but not destroyed, standing as an invitation to establish the former order and bring the capital back to Sucre. The partial column serves as a constant reminder of a situation in need of rectification. Every year, on January 24, students from the main university in Sucre, the Universidad San Francisco Xavier, hold a vigil at the monument and narrate the killing of these martyrs of Ayo Ayo. Commemorating the soldiers as students, the orators contrast Sucre’s fallen soldiers to the “savage Aymara” opponents, thus continuing to racialize and heighten differences between the two groups.2 The Sucre youth are described as young, idealistic students who rushed to defend Sucre’s title as capital. The Aymara soldiers fighting for the Liberal Party, in contrast, are cast in almost animalistic terms; according to one critic of the annual ceremony, the students conducting it depict the Aymara troops as “the Attilas of the altiplano, who ripped out their [the Sucre soldiers’] tongues, dug out their eyes, and finally killed them with axes. In the midst of a Dante-esque scene of mutilated bodies, one could hear the Indians’ guttural sounds, they did not respect the sacred space [the church], and it was as if the saints themselves were crying blood.”3 Civilized valleys, savage highlands: the regional and racial conflicts that consume the country’s contemporary political debates and challenge the current shape of the sovereign Bolivian nation are rooted in the Civil War of 1899. Sucre’s primary political demand has been its restoration as the only capital of Bolivia. During the commemoration of the fallen students, Sucre residents sing the popular refrain “Let’s go, chuiquisaqueños, let’s get the capital! No chuk’uta, damn it, should govern! Potosí is imperial, Oruro is mineral , La Paz is a garbage dump, and Sucre is the capital.”4 The Aymara insurgents’ “usurpation” of the capital has permeated Sucre ’s collective memory. Guides offer tours of the cemetery to guests who come to see the elegant mausoleums and final resting grounds of prominent political leaders. When they arrive at the monument to Sucre’s soldiers killed in the civil war, the guides repeat the pronouncements that university students make during the annual January commemoration. The “unjust transfer” of the executive and legislative branches to La Paz, leaving only the 148 | conclusion judiciary in Sucre...