[rad-green] Hatred of the Indian.

*Published in Spanish on CELAG
<https://www.celag.org/el-odio-al-indio/?utm_source=website&utm_medium=home&utm_campaign=articulos>.
English translation by Zoe PC.*


*https://peoplesdispatch.org/2019/11/19/hatred-of-the-indian-by-alvaro-garcia-linera/#
<https://peoplesdispatch.org/2019/11/19/hatred-of-the-indian-by-alvaro-garcia-linera/#>*

*Peoples Dispatch          November 19, 2019*

Hatred of the Indian.

*Racial hatred is the political language of Bolivia's traditional middle
class. **It played a central role in motivating the coup which forced
President Evo Morales out of office and into exile. *

*By Vice-president Álvaro García Linera*

*Indigenous women have been most targeted by the racially-driven violence
during this civic-military coup d'état. Photo: Redfish*

Almost as a nighttime fog, hatred rapidly traverses the neighborhoods of
the traditional urban middle-class of Bolivia. Their eyes fill with anger.
They do not yell, they spit. They do not raise demands, they impose. Their
chants are not of hope of brotherhood. They are of disdain and
discrimination against the Indians. They hop on their motorcycles, get into
their trucks, gather in their fraternities of private universities, and
they go out to hunt the rebellious Indians that dared to take power from
them.

In the case of Santa Cruz, they organize motorized hordes with sticks in
hand to punish the Indians, those that they call ‘*collas’*, who live in
peripheral neighborhoods and in the markets. They chant “the *collas* must
be killed,” and if on the way, they come across a woman wearing a
*pollera* [traditional
skirt worn by Indigenous and mestizo women] they hit her, threaten her and
demand that she leave their territory. In Cochabamba, they organize convoys
to impose their racial supremacy in the southern zone, where the
underprivileged classes live, and charge – as if it were a were a cavalry
contingent – at thousands of defenseless peasant women that march asking
for peace. They carry baseball bats, chains, gas grenades. Some carry
firearms. The woman is their preferred victim. They grab a female mayor of
a peasant population, humiliate her, drag her through the street. They hit
her, urinate on her when she falls to the ground, cut her hair, threaten to
lynch her, and when they realize that they are being filmed, they decide to
throw red paint on her symbolizing what they will do with her blood.

In La Paz, they are suspicious of their employees and do not speak when
they bring food to the table. Deep down, they fear them, but they also look
down on them. Later, when they are on the streets shouting, they insult Evo
and with him, all of these Indians that dared to build intercultural
democracy with equality. When they are many, they tear down the Wiphala,
the Indigenous symbol, they spit on it, they step on it, they cut it, they
burn it. It is a visceral hatred that they unload on this symbol of the
Indians that they wish they could extinguish from the earth along with all
those that are represented by it.

Racial hatred is the political language of this traditional middle class.
Academic titles, trips and faith serve for nothing because in the end, what
is important is purity of ancestry. Deep down, the imagined lineage is
stronger and seems to stick to the spontaneous language of the skin that
hates, of the visceral gestures and of their corrupt morals.

Everything exploded on Sunday [October] 20, when Evo Morales won the
election with 10% more than the runner-up, but no longer with the immense
advantage of before nor with 51% of the votes. It was the sign that the
regressive, huddled forces were waiting for – the timid liberal opposition
candidate, the ultra-conservative political forces, the OAS [Organization
of American States], and the indescribable traditional middle class. Evo
had won again but he no longer had 60% of the electorate. He was weaker and
they had to go after him.The loser did not recognize his defeat. The OAS
spoke of “clean elections” but of a weak victory and asked for a second
round, counseling to go against the constitution that states that if a
candidate wins more than 40% of the votes and has more than 10% over the
runner-up, they are elected. And then the middle class launched its hunt of
the Indians. On the night of Monday, October 21, they burned 5 of the 9
electoral offices, including the ballots. In Santa Cruz, a civic strike
brought together the inhabitants of the central zones of the city,
following which the strike branched out to the residential zones of La Paz
and Cochabamba. And this unleashed terror.

Paramilitary groups began to besiege institutions, burn trade union
offices, set fire to the residences of candidates and political leaders of
the governing party [Movement Towards Socialism]. Even the private home of
the president was looted. In other places, families, including children,
were kidnapped and threatened with being whipped and burned if their
parent, who was a minister or union leader, did not resign. An endless
night of the long knives had been unleashed, and fascism peeked out.

The people’s forces comprising workers, miners, peasants, Indigenous people
and urban dwellers resisted the civic coup and began to retake territorial
control of the cities. But just as the balance of the correlation of forces
was shifting in their favor, the police mutiny occurred.

The police had for weeks shown great indolence and ineptitude in protecting
the common people while they were being attacked and persecuted by fascist
groups. But from Friday [November 8], many of them displayed an
extraordinary ability to attack, detain, torture and kill working-class
protesters. When it came to dealing with the children of the middle class,
they apparently did not have the capacity. But when it came to repressing
rebellious Indians, the deployment, violence and the arrogance was
monumental.

The same happened with the armed forces. During all of our time in
government, we never allowed them to repress civil mobilizations, not even
during the first civic coup d’état in 2008. And now, in the midst of the
convulsion and without us having asked them anything, they told us that
they did not have anti-riot capacities, that they only had 8 bullets per
member and that a presidential decree was necessary for them to be on the
streets in even a protective capacity. However, they had no hesitation in
seeking the resignation of president Evo, in violation of the constitution.
They did whatever was possible to attempt to kidnap him while he was
traveling to and was in Chapare. And then, when the coup was consolidated,
they went to the streets to shoot thousands of bullets, to militarize the
cities and assassinate peasants. And all of this without any presidential
decree. In order to protect the Indian, they needed a decree. To repress
and kill Indians, it was enough to obey what the racial and classist hatred
decreed. And now, in only 5 days, there are more than 18 dead and 120
injured with live bullets. Of course, nearly all of them are Indigenous.

The question we must respond to is, how did the traditional middle class
incubate so much hatred and resentment towards the people, leading them to
embrace racialized fascism centered on the Indian as the enemy? What did
they do to irradiate their class frustrations to the police and armed
forces and become the social base of this process of becoming fascist, of
this state regression and moral degeneration.

The answer is the rejection of equality, which is to say, the rejection of
the fundamentals of a substantial democracy.

The last 14 years of the government of the social movements were
characterized by the process of leveling of the social classes, the sharp
reduction in extreme poverty (from 35% to 15%), the broadening of rights
for all (universal access to healthcare, to education and to social
protection), the Indianization of the State (more than 50% of functionaries
in public administration must be Indigenous, new national narrative around
the Indigenous sector) and the reduction of economic inequality (the
difference of income between the richest and the poorest fell from 130 to
45). All this meant the systematic democratization of wealth, access to
public goods, opportunities and state power. The economy has grown from 9
billion dollars to 42 billion dollars, widening the market and internal
savings, which has allowed many people to have their own homes and improve
their work activity.

Thus, in a decade, the percentage of people of the so-called “middle class”
in terms of income, went from 35% to 60%. The largest part of them came
from the working-class and Indigenous sectors. It was essentially a process
of democratization of the social goods through the construction of material
equality. But this inevitably has caused a rapid devaluation of the
economic, educational and political capital held by the traditional middle
class. In the past, a notable last name, the monopoly over ‘legitimate’
knowledge, and their family relationships allowed the traditional middle
class to access posts in public administration, obtain loans and bids for
projects or scholarships. Today, the number of people that fight for the
same post or opportunity has not only doubled – reducing the possibilities
to access these goods by half – but, additionally, the ‘up-and-coming’, the
new middle class with Indigenous, working class origins, has a combination
of new capital (Indigenous language, trade union links) of greater value
and state recognition to fight for the available public goods.

As such, it is about a collapse of what was a characteristic of a colonial
society: ethnicity as capital, basically, the imagined foundation of the
historical superiority of the middle class above the subaltern classes
because in Bolivia, social class is only comprehensible and is visualized
under the form of racial hierarchies. That the sons of this class have been
the shock force of the reactionary insurgency is the violent cry of a new
generation that sees how the inheritance of the last name and skin fades in
the face of the democratization of goods. Although they raise the flag of
democracy that is understood as a vote, in reality, they have risen up
against democracy that is understood as the leveling of social classes and
distribution of wealth. This is why we see the overflowing of hatred, the
outpouring of violence – because racial supremacy is something that is not
rationalized. It lives as a primary impulse of the body, as a tattoo of the
colonial history in the skin. As such, fascism is not only the expression
of a failed radical transformation of values, but paradoxically in
post-colonial societies, the success of a material democratization.

With this in mind, it is not surprising that while nearly 20 Indigenous
people have been shot dead, those that murder them and order their murder
narrate how they are acting to safeguard democracy. But in reality, they
know what they have done is to protect the privilege of caste and last name.

Racial hatred can only destroy. It is not a horizon for the future. It is
nothing more than a primitive vengeance of a class historically and morally
declining that shows that a coup-supporter is crouched behind every
mediocre liberal.

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