Jean-Paul Faguet

Bolivia also had a version of the European and North American left versus right. The problem is that Bolivia never had an industrial revolution.

Bolivia to this day is still a country that is predominantly an agricultural and then also a natural resource exporter, where the working class, the self-identified working class that thinks of itself as a class, like people who vote Labour in the UK, or especially if you go back to the 1950s, 60s and 70s, people who voted Labour in the UK, people who voted Labour

social democrat in Germany, for example, or Holland, or a number of European countries, people who voted for the socialists in France, were a self-identified working class who, in 1950s Britain, for example, spoke with similar accents, wore flat caps, tended to live in similar neighborhoods, dressed in a similar way, had a similar accent, in opposition to people from the right wing, who tended to be richer, who were educated in a different way, who used different clothing and had a different accent.

So this whole complex of things, which is reflecting the key divide in that society, which is, are you a worker or are you an owner of capital or owner of land? So that divide just didn't mean anything in a country like Bolivia, which never had an industrial revolution, didn't have a self-identified working class.

And I stress that Bolivians work really hard and poor Bolivians work really, really hard. But they see themselves as farmers or as Quechua and Aymara speakers, as members of the Ayu or the Maiku if they live in rural Bolivia, or they see themselves as migrants or the children of migrants to the city who might live in peri-urban areas. But they don't see themselves as a working class.

That's just not who they are. And it didn't have, you know, on the right side of that divide, it didn't have a lot of capitalists who own a lot of capital because there's not that much industry in Bolivia. So I'm sorry.

But the society didn't. Exactly. So now... Why was this the case? So I've kind of gone halfway to answering the second question. So let me flip back to the first one. Why was this the case? Well, I think the people who made the revolution in 1952 were the illustrated sons of the upper middle class, the bourgeoisie, not the richest people in the country. The revolution was against them.

But it was sort of middle class professionals and educated people. And so I think there are two things. One is that it was aspirational. What they wanted was a state driven industrialization program that was rapidly going to industrialize the economy and create a working class. So you're going to have capital. The capital was going to be largely in the hands of the state, but that's all right.

And you're going to have a working class. And also because I think they looked around in 1952 and they thought, you know, what is the leading edge of what we want our society to look like? Where do we want to go towards? They looked to the US, Germany, Who were the leading? I guess Western Europe was rebuilding. So all of these countries have left right political systems.

And so it's aspirational. It's like, OK, we're not there yet. It doesn't quite fit now, but hopefully soon if we succeed. You know, so we may as well start with that now. The other thing, of course, is that the real cleavage in Bolivia is ethnic identitarianism.

Because for all the stuff that we were talking about in the first part of this chat, what Bolivia did not have was an industrial revolution. What it did have was 300 years of Spanish colonialism that completely remade the society from its genetic stock outwards. And so the key divide, Bolivia, unlike Colombia, unlike most of South America,

But like Guatemala and to a lesser extent, Ecuador, Bolivia has a large number of indigenous people who self-identify as indigenous people, who look and sound like indigenous people, dress like it. Their first language that they speak at home is a non-European language.

It's typically Quechua or Aymara, those are the dominant two, or Guarani or any of another 30-some much smaller indigenous languages, especially in the Amazon region. And this is roughly, people, there's not a good measurement of this, different censuses have thrown up different numbers, but it's between 55 and 60% of the population, roughly, consider themselves to be indigenous.

Yeah. And in Mexico and in Argentina, Chile, the numbers vary, but they're low single digits. Whereas in Bolivia and in Guatemala, the indigenous people have really endured. Also in the highlands of Peru, but the lowlands of Peru are all, everyone's mixed up. So Colombians are all mixed up in one way or another. It's basically mestizo, some blend of indigenous people.

with Spaniards, and then with some inclusion of blacks, all the slavery in Colombia. In terms of numbers, it was a horrible institution, but in terms of numbers, there were never nearly as many slaves as in the American South, for example. It wasn't that big a deal.

So that's what happened. What happened with the collapse of the political party system is that a couple of institutional struts that had been sustaining the old system were pulled away in the turmoil around the time that Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada was chased out of the country.

Because of these demonstrations, there's a big demonstration in La Paz in particular, where something like 60, 65 people were killed by the police and the armed forces trying to repress the demonstration. And you just, you can't do this in Bolivia. You can actually do this in some countries, but killing 60 people is not acceptable in Bolivia. And the whole society rebels against it.

And so the president had to flee.

And then you got a period of turmoil when you got the rise of Evo Morales So what we all know if you read the popular press About Bolivia is that you know the first indigenous president in the history of Latin America and that's completely true But that's not the story the story is the collapse of the previous elite led left-right system that just did not represent Bolivia and then

largely because of decentralization. And when you created all of these local governments, you got a new class of politician competing for local government jobs, positions that you didn't have before, because before the local governments literally didn't exist. Everything was run out of La Paz.