From Exclusion to Inclusion: Bolivia's 2002 Elections

In Bolivia's 2ooz national elections indigenous-movement-based political parties combined to capture 27 per cent of the vote, far surpassing their previous performance and constituting a major improvement in the representation of the country's excluded indigenous majority. Using a social movement theory framework, I attribute this result to five interacting factors: institutional changes that opened the system; the collapse of two competitive parties; the consolidation of indigenous peoples' social movement organisations; the unpopularity of the BanzerQuiroga government and the intense anti-government mobilisations it provoked in 2000; and the ability of the indigenous parties to capitalise on growing nationalist, anti-US public sentiment. Donna Lee Van Cott is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science, University of Tennessee, Knoxville. * The author wishes to thank Willem Assies, Kevin Healy, Jose Antonio Lucero and the anonymous reviewers of this journal for comments on a previous draft, and to acknowledge the receipt of funding from the University of Tennessee Cordell Hull Fund and a UT Professional Development Award, which supported field research in 2oo001 and 2oo2. 1 Movimiento al socialismo, 'Territorio, soberania y vida,' in Opinionesy Andlisis. Elecciones Generales 2002-2007. Propuestas electores (La Paz, 2002), p. 88. 2 'Mallku: "Nuestros ministros serain los Mamani y Yujra",' La Prensa, La Paz, 28 June 2002, p. 8. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.178 on Fri, 05 Aug 2016 05:27:10 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 7 5 2 Donna Lee Van Cott In Bolivia's 30 June 2002 national elections two indigenous peoples'3 parties combined, the Instrumento Politico para la Soberania de los Pueblos (IPSP), running under the borrowed registration of the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS), and the Movimiento Indigena Pachakutik (MIP), won 27 per cent of the vote (see Table i). Despite the fact that 62.05 per cent of the population is indigenous, according to the 200oo census, this was a revolutionary result for the politically under-represented indigenous majority. In previous national elections, the best result for all indigenous parties combined was 4.6 per cent (see Table 2). One of the indigenous parties, the IPSP-MAS, finished second in a fragmented field of i i presidential candidates,4 less than two percentage points behind the winner, former President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada (1993-1997). The IPSPMAS now holds the second majority in both houses of congress and approximately one-third of the seats in the 57-member body are occupied by indigenous representatives with strong links to indigenous and peasant organisations. Previously, no more than ten indigenous persons had sat in congress at one time, and most of these were accountable to traditional political parties.5 In order to accommodate the unprecedented linguistic 3 Social scientists disagree on how to define 'indigenous peoples'. For purposes of clarity, I use the United Nations Sub-commission on the Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities: 'Indigenous communities, peoples and nations are those which, having a historical continuity with pre-invasion and pre-colonial societies that developed on their territories, considered themselves distinct from other sectors of the societies now prevailing in those territories, or parts of them. They form at present non-dominant sectors of society and are determined to preserve, develop and transmit to future generations their ancestral territories, and their ethnic identity, as the basis of their continued existence as peoples, in accordance with their own cultural patterns, social institutions and legal systems'. Study of the Problem of Discrimination Against Indigenous Populations, UN Doc. E/Cn.4/ Sub.z/1986/7Add.4, para. 379 (1986). 4 Bolivia has one of the most fragmented party systems in Latin America, with an average effective number of parties for seats (ENPS) between 1979-1993 of 4. ENPS was 4.7 in 1993. See Scott Mainwaring and Timothy R. Scully (eds.), Building Democratic Institutions: Party Systems in Latin America (Stanford, 1995), p. 30. ENPS was 5.07 in 1997 and 4.82 in 2002 (my calculations based on senate plus chamber of deputies). The effective number of parties for seats is calculated by squaring the proportion of seats each party wins, adding up all of the squares, and dividing one by that number. See Murkuu Laakso and Rein Taagepera, 'Effective Number of Parties. A Measure with Application to Western Europe,' Comparative Political Studies, 12, I979, pp. 3-27. 5 Craig Mauro, 'Bolivia's downtrodden Indian majority gains political voice, clout,' Associated Press, 15 Aug. 2002. Wigberto Rivero Pinto, former director of the Instituto Indigenista Boliviana, and vice minister of campesino and indigenous affairs under BanzerQuiroga also puts the current indigenous deputy total at 50o, based on the criteria (language spoken, customs, and self-identification) used in the 2001 Censo Nacional de Poblaci6n y Vivienda. He distributes these among the parties as: MAS (30), MIP (6), MIR (8), NFR (8), and MNR (i). Rivero, 'Indigenas y Campesinos en las elecciones: el poder de la Bolivia emergente,' unpublished ms., 20zoo03, p. z21. According to Natalia Wray, eight indigenous legislators sat in the previous congress, representing various parties. 'Los cambios en las relaciones politicas entre pueblos indigenas, los estados y las sociedades nacionales en las This content downloaded from 157.55.39.178 on Fri, 05 Aug 2016 05:27:10 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms From Exclusion to Inclusion: Bolivia's 2002 Elections 753 Table i. Results of o June 2oo2 Bolivian Elections 2002 1997 Party % Votes Senators Deputies Seats Seats Movimiento Nacional Revolucionario 22.46 11 36 47 30 Movimiento al Socialismo (IPSP) 20.94 8 27 35 4 Nueva Fuerza Republicana zo0.92 2 25 27 0 Movimiento de la Izquierda Revolucionaria 16.31 5 z6 31 30 Movimiento Indigena Pachakutik 6.09 6 6 0 Unidad Civica de Solidaridad 5.51 5 5 23 Acci6n Democraitica Nacional 3.40 I 4 5 43 Libertad y Justicia 2.7 2 0 0 0 Partido Socialista o.6 I o0 Movimiento Ciudadano para el Cambio o.63 0 0 Condepa 0.37 0 22