Dignity and Defiance: Stories from Bolivia’s Challenge to Globalization (review)

I remember when I first heard of Jim Shultz and the Democracy Center. It was during the chaos of the Water War in Bolivia’s Cochabamba Valley in late 1999 and early 2000. I was a Ph.D. student who had just returned to the United States from a year of ethnographic fieldwork in a remote region of the norte de Potosí, where I had studied conflict resolution, local forms of political and social governance, and the impact of human rights activism on conceptions of the self, gender relations, and the cargo system of political rotation. As we now know, that was a moment in which neoliberalism in Bolivia had already passed through the apex of the parabolic arc of its history, although from the vantage point of a place like the central plaza in Sacaca in the provincial capital of Alonso de Ibañez, the stirrings in the Cochabamba valley seemed remote indeed.

The images on the television and the descriptions emerging from Bolivia’s national press came as a tremendous shock, first to those students of Bolivia like myself who found themselves removed from the country, but also very quickly to a wider world of antiglobalization activists, who came to see the street protests, standoffs with police, and the formation of citizen action committees as nothing less than the long-awaited beginning of the end of late capitalism. Of course, as it turned out, the Bolivian Water War was not—at least not directly—the beginning of the end of capitalism, not even in Bolivia. But in a way, it was something much more important: it marked the beginning of the end of the country’s ancien régime and it launched the nation into a five-year period of political instability and remarkable innovation that culminated in the unprecedented election of Evo Morales in 2005. It also marked the moment in which Bolivia exploded into the consciousness of politicians, intellectuals, and activists all around the world. This fascination has not yet waned.

For this entire decade Jim Shultz and the other members of the Democracy Center have served as sympathetic and ethically committed observers and participants in Bolivia’s evolving process of social, political, and economic change. In Dignity and Defiance, Shultz and co-editor Melissa Crane Draper collaborate with an intriguing cast of contributors to provide studies of resistance in Bolivia that reveal all the strengths of Shultz’s approach to engaged reportage. Methodologically, the chapters range from the historical and analytical to the ethnographic and testimonial. And, like all edited volumes, the chapters range in quality. Two particularly outstanding and revealing chapters are, from my perspective, Christina Haglund’s reporting on the environmental disaster on the Desaguadero River and its aftermath, and Lily Whitesell’s “Portraits of a Bolivian Exodus,” which tells the still largely unknown story of the thousands of Bolivian exiles from neoliberalism, who left the country for other parts of South America, the United States, and Spain.

Shultz’s chapter on the Water War draws from his earlier writings and reporting, but synthesizes and expands on them to leave us with what is likely his final word on those days when ordinary people in a very poor country took on a behemoth of transnational capital (the Bechtel Corporation) and its allies in government, and won. This chapter, and to a great extent the others in the book, is written in an accessible style that is meant to reach an audience well beyond the academy, and I hope that it does. This is not to say that professional students of Bolivia would not find the volume illuminating. I have already noted with appreciation the chapters by Haglund and Whitesell, and Shultz’s chapter on the Water War, when combined with Oscar Olivera’s Cochabamba: Water Rebellion in Bolivia (2004), offers an invaluable, if not definitive, account of that event and its implications.

The...