Pablo Stefanoni, La Paz
Government officials and planners have long seen El Alto as a "problem city" — a hotbed of political protest, indigenous people's resistance and autonomous grassroots organisation.
El Alto — located 4000 metres above sea level and just 12 kilometres from the capital, La Paz — has grown from a shanty-town suburb of La Paz into the country's third largest city, with 700,000 inhabitants, 90% of whom identify themselves as "indigenous" according to government surveys.
According to Silvia Escobar de Pabon, from the Centre of Labour and Rural Development Studies in La Paz, 60% of El Alto's population lives below the poverty line and 50% of these are "indigento", which means their income is less than US$1 per day.
The rapid growth in El Alto's population has not been accompanied by a growth in basic public services. Only 30% of homes have basic sewage facilities and education, and health facilities are precarious at best.
The city has been the destination for waves of internal migrants seeking work around La Paz. Many of these were miners who lost their jobs when Bolivia shut down loss-making state-owned tin mines in 1985. Others are Aymara and Quechua Indians forced off their lands by the crisis in traditional small-scale farming. Many of them come from rural areas with strong traditions of local self-organisation, such as the Aymara from the Omasuyos region, where local villagers expelled police, local judges and mayors in 2000 and established their own authorities.
All of these migrants make up a world of young unemployed people, irregular workers and informal traders who are subject to the pauperisation and social exclusion that has resulted from the neoliberal economic "reforms" that have been carried out since the 1980s at the behest of the Washington-based International Monetary Fund and its local political allies.
The gas warriors
Six months after the "gas war" — the massive popular uprising that frustrated the Bolivian government's plans to export natural gas through Chile and led to the overthrow of President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada last October — the echoes of the ferocious military repression of 2003 still ring loudly in El Alto.
More than 80 protesters were killed and 400 were wounded by police and army bullets in "Black October" — most of them inhabitants of El Alto, which was the centre of the protests that ended with the resignation of US-educated Lozada, and his undignified escape by helicopter and airplane to the United States, "his country" according to the protesters on the streets of La Paz.
The indefinite strike and mobilisation that marked the end of Lozada's rule was organised by El Alto's Federation of Neighbourhood Organisations and the Central Obrera Regional (COR) labour federation. El Alto was the mainstay of the movement that sought to "recuperate gas for the Bolivians".
The struggle for the defence of Bolivia's previously nationalised natural gas resources — most of which were sold off in the 1980s to foreign oil firms such as the British-Dutch Shell and Enron — has galvanised a series of social groups affected by the neoliberal "reforms".
The resistance — known as the "water war" — against the sale to the giant US Bechtel construction company of local water supplies in the city of Cochabamba that broke out in April 2000, the mobilisations against the forced eradication of coca plants in the Chapare region since the mid 1980s, and the gas war last year have put in check the ability of the government to introduce further "pro-market reforms" that worsen the already precarious living conditions of Bolivia's working people.
With shouts of "El Alto on its feet, never on its knees!", and "Civil war now!", the city's inhabitants served notice last October on an establishment that has systematically excluded the indigenous majority from the political and economic life of the country. As Roberto De la Cruz, a union leader from El Alto says, "while the Gringo — as Sanchez de Lozada is known — wanted to sell off the gas, the peasants were cooking with animal shit. That's why they reacted."
Underneath the political world of Bolivia's white and mestizo elite, which has for years pretended that it lives in a "modern" country, the strong community traditions of the indigenous population have allowed it to gain an unprecedented weight in political life and call into question the stability of the capitalist-dominated "liberal democratic" political system. As a sign of this, two indigenous leaders coming from peasant organisations — Evo Morales and Felipe Quispe — have become among the most supported candidates in recent parliamentary elections and have formed new movements that enjoy growing support among the population.
Neighbourhood self-government
The chronic lack of basic services in El Alto has generated social movements which operate with the logic of what sociologist Alvaro Garcia Linera calls "the politics of vital necessities". For decades, El Alto has been experimenting with local community organisations that have taken their inspiration from previously existing peasant organisations in the rural villages.
The rural tradition of territorial self-organisation has led to a pattern of neighbourhood self-government in El Alto, with the local committees dealing with everything from asphalting streets, supervising education and health services, and judging and sentencing petty delinquents to politically mobilising people on national issues such as the gas question.
Like the peasant unions, the neighbourhood committees reflect a hybrid form of organisation half-way between the traditional Indian community known as the ayllu and a trade union, in which decisions are taken in general assemblies by direct vote. These traditions have allowed El Alto's inhabitants to create a new pattern of collective organising in an urban space that is described by most middle-class commentators as "dirty and disordered" or "chaotic". Some sociologists have referred to this new pattern as "a city with a rural mindset".
"The majority of people in El Alto maintain some land in their communities and go there to work in the sowing and harvest periods", says Francisco Balboa, an indigenous leader in the neighbourhood of Villa Ingenio.
The maintenance of ties with rural communities has allowed the inhabitants of El Alto to survive during periods of political conflict and move to establish a virtual blockade of La Paz, which rests in a circular valley below El Alto. This has led to the formation of a semi-secret "Aymara military organisation", that organises road blocks and other actions that are central to the protest movement.
In March, during the celebrations of the 19th anniversary of El Alto's formal foundation as a city, groups of young people from the Ventilla neighbourhood — who refer to themselves as "gas warriors" — paraded menacingly in front of the country's new president, Carlos Mesa. They wore red berets and carried wooden rifles, apparently copying the style of dress favoured by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Mexico's Zapatista rebels.
Leaders such as Roberto De La Cruz warn of "the mother of all battles" if Mesa continues with the economic policies of his predecessor.
Spectre of Aymara uprising
In the imagination of the capital's elite, the tactic of encirclement raises the spectre of the Aymara uprising of Tupac Katari, who besieged La Paz in 1781 before being captured and executed by the Spanish colonialists.
"During the gas war, in the middle of the civic strike, we were getting supplies of potatoes, rice, pasta and also volunteers from the Los Andes and Omasuyos provinces", says Balboa.
These wider networks of solidarity, based on family ties, place of origin and ethnicity, have allowed the formation of an urban-rural Aymara identity, capable of a strong political projection.
Roberto De la Cruz says: "As the majority of El Alto's population is Aymara, it was easy to make contact with the peasants and involve them in the movement (against the export of gas). The parents are in the rural communities and their children are in the city."
In any case, regardless of the immediate political ups and downs, the idea that the population of El Alto can at any moment "come down" to La Paz seems to be here to stay as a warning to the elite. As the journalist Rafael Archondo says, these urban Indians have little to do with the postcard images of cultural archaeology which "freeze them in time", and are true social and political actors of the 21st century.
Aymara leader Felipe Quispe comments ironically, "We are no longer servants, we are Indians of the post-modern era, even though some find that difficult to understand".
In the last few weeks, many trade unions and social movements, answering a call by national labour federation leader Jaime Solares, have started protests and blockades against Mesa's government because Mesa's July 18 referendum on the future of the country's hydrocarbon resources will not ask voters if they favour the nationalisation of these resources — the key demand raised in the October rebellion.
From Green Left Weekly, June 23, 2004.
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