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01/18/2006:

"John Ross: Evo Morales and the Zapatistas"

Latin America's estimated 60,000,000 indigenous peoples are on the move from Tijuana to Tierra del Fuego, but in dramatically distinct directions.

While Mexico's profoundly Mayan Zapatista Army of National Liberation launches a vehement anti-electoral campaign, dissing the political class, eschewing power, and seeking to build autonomous alliances down below, Evo Morales, a 46 year-old acculturated Quechua Indian farm leader, will take power from the top when he is sworn in as the first Indian president of majority-Indian Bolivia.

Evo, recently snapped wearing his ratty old alpaca sweater during an audience with the King of Spain to the enormous disdain of fashion-conscious diplomats everywhere, has also been photographed whispering in Fidel Castro's ear, leading a "pollera"-wearing (Indian skirt) entourage of women leaders of his "cocalero" (coca-growers) federation through the streets of old Havana, and nuzzling Venezuela's Hugo Chavez before a portrait of Simon Bolivar in Caracas--Chavez, Morales, and Castro have announced the formation of an anti-imperialist alliance that has Washington plotting counter-insurgency strategies.

Having won a smashing (52%) victory in December elections, Evo and his MAS (Movement Towards Socialism) Party prepare to take power in a country that has suffered nearly 200 coup d'etats in its 175-year history.

Although the affable, boyish Morales whose thick black locks appear permanently adorned with confetti these days, has seemingly risen to superstar echelons overnight, it is taken Evo a good decade of hard organizing to reach these lofty heights. In the spring of 2004, this reporter got a week-long look at Bolivia's unlikely new president in interviews with Evo himself; his vice-president, the former Tupac Katari guerrillero Alvarro Garcia; MAS deputies; and leaders of the six coca-growing federations in the Amazon basin region of Chapare, south of Cochabamba where Morales has built a rock-solid base. The thumbnail portrait that emerged was one of a pragmatic and even opportunist politico with a wandering eye and a quick tongue. He energetically bashed the gringos to a gringo reporter, charging the U.S. with "poisoning" Bolivia with transgenic crops and vowing to shut down Washington's embassy for meddling in Bolivian affairs, when he came to power.

Evo Morales is being touted as Latin America's first Indian president since Mexico's Benito Juarez in the mid-1800s but hyperbole seems to be far ahead of the facts here. In fact, Alejandro Toledo in next-door Peru is an acculturated Quechua ("cholo") from Andean Ankash who was captured by the Peace Crops and brainwashed by the World Bank before being repatriated to serve their interests six years ago. Toledo will probably be succeeded by another Indian Ollanta Humala, a nationalist who is close to Chavez and Morales.

In a majority Indian country like Bolivia (between 60 and 85% depending on whose parameters you swallow) being an Indian is no big thing. Bolivians are more apt to identify themselves by their class or occupation--farmer, miner-- than as Aymara, Quechua, or Amazonas.

Evo Morales concedes his own ties to "Indian-ness" are tenuous âo" when I was in Cochabamba, he was relearning Quechua in preparation for the presidential run. The lingua franca of the cocalero movement is Spanish.

A bright kid from the dirt-poor altiplano where the tin mines had all tapped out, Morales moved with his family down to the tropical Chapare in the mid-1970s. Growing coca leaf was the preferred mode of eking out a living for the new arrivals or "colonos." By the early '90s, Evo had risen from sports director of the cocalero federations to a tough energetic leader not afraid to defy the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration's militarized coca eradication programs to uproot the sacred Inca plant. The federation's chief weapon was multiple road blockades paralyzing transit on Bolivia's key east-west highway that often brought them into conflict with the DEA-subsidized Bolivian military.

But the cocaleros' epic struggle has less to do with the Incas than with defending the colonos' hard-won land. Evo Morales's interests have always been more agricultural than cultural. He is an Indian leader of a mestizo-ized campesino movement, the mirror-opposite of the Zapatistas' Subcomandante Marcos, a mestizo mouthpiece for a profoundly Indian army. Despite their differences, Morales recently invited Marcos to his January 22nd inauguration.

"Evo is not an Indian--he's a socialist," observes Aymara peasant leader Felipe Quispe, "El Mallku" (The Condor.) Quispe who has tussled with Morales for years, dreams of restoring Inca glories by building a Tahuantinsuyo, a four nation (Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, and Paraguay) majority-Indian population Andean federation.
counterpunch.org

Subcomandante Marcos is much more than a 'mestizo mouthpiece' for the Zapatistas. He is a savvy intellectual, and comes from among the privileged classes, and thus a troubling leader for an indigenous movement. Other privileged admirers who idealize the Zapatistas either minimize or ignore this. Just a thought to add to the mix...