Mobilizing Bolivia's Displaced: Indigenous Politics and the Struggle over Land

3. AYLLU DEMOCRACY: Indigenous Law and Collective Governance as Territorial Protection

79 c h a pt er t hree Ayllu Democracy Indigenous Law and Collective Governance as Territorial Protection The Yuquises occupation, which is now the community of Pueblos Unidos , is located about fifty kilometers north of a small migrant town called San Pedro, in the fifth section of the department of Santa Cruz. With about 14,644 inhabitants, mostly Andean migrants, San Pedro is one of the most productive zones of Santa Cruz and Bolivia for soya.1 It looks like any other small rural pueblo in the north, dotted with makeshift huts with thatched roofs of motacu branches, small shops and bodegas, and roosters and hens roaming the streets. Kids run through the plazas, barefoot , streaked with mud and crusted with dirt. Many of the residents of Pueblos Unidos did not officially move to the community until the fall of 2007 due to complications with land tenure and title, and many of their meetings and political events continued to take place in the provincial areas where they lived. We spent most of our time observing meetings in the San Pedro municipality since the majority of the Pueblos Unidos community meetings took place in this centralized location. One dirigente (leader) and active member of the Yuquises occupation named Ponciano Sulca became a vital component of the project . Although he was initially skeptical of our interest in the organization , asking if we might be spies for North America or for the Bolivian government, he slowly came to trust us and fold us into his everyday life. Constantly interested in U.S. foreign relations, he would ask questions about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or about increasing levels of poverty in North America, trying to understand a territory, place, and space so radically different from his own. He always offered us a place of rest, food, and great conversation during our frequent treks from Santa Cruz to Guarayos, and he often asked to accompany us in the back of a truck or trailer to his settlement, Pueblos Unidos. Sulca is about five foot four, with sun-streaked brown skin, and always dresses in a ripped T-shirt and a pair of brown cotton pants with unraveling seams. His eyes hang low, deep wrinkles form under his lids, and 80 manufacturing identity and territorializing rights small gray hairs poke up at random on his face, not forming a full mustache or beard. He migrated to the city of Santa Cruz from Potosí in the 1960stofindworkonthesugarcaneplantations.Assugarrapidlygaveway to cotton, however, Sulca searched for other forms of employment and was able to find work as a day laborer building the international airport, Viru Viru, located eighteen kilometers from Plaza 24 de Septiembre. He met his wife, Gregoria Mamani, in Villa Cochabamba, a peripheral neighborhood of Montero. They moved to San Pedro in the 1970s, just as agribusiness accelerated both its economic reach and political influence in the region, and he found weekly work with the transnational corporations that were first establishing themselves there. As soon as Sulca realized that steady employment was available, he built a small house behind the main plaza in San Pedro and started a family . In 2006, when I visited his home, the names of his three grandchildren were written in colorful lettering on the wooden planks. There were a few lawn chairs in the yard, a small, unstable wooden table, and lots of animals—chickens, dogs, including some puppies, and two horses. The kitchen was a makeshift hut with a wood-burning stove. Every day, Sulca cut wood with a huge machete and carried the logs back to the house from the surrounding woods. There was no bathroom, only an outhouse composed of a few planks, with a curtain pieced together from bright Andean blankets serving as a door. Clothes were piled high on the line running from the house to the outhouse. Sulca was never home for long, however. Like other mst organizers, he lived his life in transit—moving from the rural periphery to the city of Santa Cruz to meet with lawyers from cejis, keep inra appointments, and more. He often carried a small briefcase or book bag with critical papers from the Yuquises occupation; he camped out for days in the mas offices in Santa Cruz, then caught up on sleep in the back of a bus or while hitching a ride on an agricultural truck. In his worn and broken sandals, which rubbed against his blistered feet, he...