I.
BOLIVIA

Source: Yves Materne, ed., The Indian Awakening in Latin America (New York: Friendship Press, 1980, 113-127).

MANIFESTO OF THE QUECHUA AND AYMARA INDIANS

The Quechua Indians constitute by far the Most extensive group of natives on the American subcontinent; they are found in Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador. The less numerous Aymara inhabit the region of Lake Titicaca and are considered to be the founders of the city of Tiahuanacu.

That is precisely where the foIlowing manifesto was drawn up, in July 1973. The continuous deterioration of the economic situation of Bolivia and the periodic hardening of the regime of General Banzer constitute the backdrop for this proclamation.

THE DECLARATION OF TIAHUANACU

"A people that oppresses another people cannot be a free people," the Inca Yupanqui told the Spaniards. We, the Quechua and Aymara peasants, along with those of other indigenous cultures in our country, say the same thing. We feel economically exploited, and culturally and politically oppressed. In Bolivia there has been no integration of cultures but rather a superimposition and domination in which we remained at the lowest and most exploited level of the pyramid. Bolivia has experienced-and still does experience-awful frustrations. One of them, perhaps the greatest, is the lack of real participation by the Quechua and Aymara peasants in the country's economic, political and social life. We believe that unless there is a radical change in this, it will be utterly impossible to achieve national unity and a dynamic and harmonious economic development that fits our real condition and needs.

Bolivia is entering a new stage in its political life, one of whose characteristics is the awakening of peasant self-awareness. As a period of pre-electoral political activity approaches, professional politicians will once again turn to the rural population to seek to win its vote; and once again they will resort to deceit and false promises. The political participation of the peasantry ought to be factual, not fictional. No political party can build up the country by deceiving and exploiting the peasants. We who are the peasants, quite apart from any party commitment, concerned solely with the liberation of our people, want to express in this document the ideas that we consider basic for the economic, political and social life of our country.

Our Culture As a Primary Value

True progress must be based on a culture. It is a people's most basic value. The root of our national frustration has been that the Quechua and Aymara cultures have always been the object of a systematic drive to destroy them. The politicians of the ruling minorities have sought to promote a development based wholly on a slavish imitation of other countries' styles of development, even though our cultural heritage is quite different. Moreover, proceeding from a practical materialism, they have come to believe that progress is derived solely from the economic aspects of life.

Neither our virtues nor our vision of the world and of life has been respected. Neither formal education nor party politics nor technical advancement has brought about any significant change in rural life. Participation of the peasantry in national life has not been achieved because their culture has not been respected and their way of thinking has not been understood. We peasants are convinced that development will take place in the countryside and in the country as a whole only when we become the designers of our own progress and masters of our destiny.

In its methods, its programs and the languge it uses, the rural school is foreign to our cultural reality. It not only seeks to convert the Indian into a kind of undefined, depersonalized mestizo but also promotes his assimilation into Western capitalistic culture. Rural programs are conceived in a framework of individualism, despite the fact that historically we have acted in community. The cooperative system is innately natural for a people which originated mutual-assistance means of production like the ayni, the mink'a, yanapacos and camayos. Private property, political partisanship, individualism, class distinctions, and internal struggles were introduced to us by the colonizers and enhanced during the republican period. Agrarian reform is likewise conceived within this framework.

Economic and political power is the foundation of cultural liberation. We must improve on our past with technology and modernization, but in no way break with the past. All the attempts to "Europize" or "Yankeeize" us through education and politics will simply result in new failures. Any political movement that really wants to liberate the peasant must be organized and programmed with a constant fix on our cultural values. The Indian is noble and just, sober and respectful, hardworking and deeply religious. But all this richness of the Indian soul has never been understood or respected. The political activity of the colonial administration and the republican governments has been highly destructive, causing some of us to assimilate grievous faults of the corrupt and corrupting politicians. They have sought to use us as steps and stairs for satisfying their basest ambitions and passions. We are unwilling to go further on this road of enslavement and depravation. The catastrophic results can be seen by all: the Indians who, because of bad education and self-serving political activity, no longer want to be Indians have adopted the worst faults of other peoples and turned into exploiters of their own brothers and sisters. We extend to them a fraternal call to join us in a movement for recovery of our rights and our culture, and to work together with us in the economic and political liberation of our people.

Our History Speaks to Us

Before the Spanish conquest, we were a thousand-year-old people whose good qualities were revealed in a highly socialized environment. The colonizers neither respected nor recognized our culture but rather crushed and subjugated it. National independence did not bring freedom for the Indian; rather, influenced by the principles of "liberalism," it regarded and treated the Indian as a passive element useful only as cannon fodder in the endless wars. For the Indian, the republic has been nothing more than a new expression of the political system of the overlords. Indian liberation in the form of the freedom struggle of Tupac Catari remained bound by chains. The indigenist politics of Belzu briefly awakened hope in the rural masses, but the Indian's life still had to be scratched out amidst shame, exploitation and contempt. Busch and Villarroel tried to overcome this state of affairs but were kept from doing so by the reaction of the national oligarchy. With the April Ninth (1953) Revolution, two great liberating laws were introduced: Agrarian Reform and Universal Suffrage.

Agrarian Reform enabled us Indians to free ourselves from the ominous yoke of the patron (landlord). Regrettably this law did not bring all the benefits that were expected of it, chiefly because it was conceived within too individualistic a framework. Moreover, through the influence of rightist elements that had infiltrated the Nationalist Revolutionary Movement (MNR), Agrarian Reform was not implemented with other laws encouraging investment, modernization and product commercialization.

Universal Suffrage should not have ignored the corporate participation of the Indian communities in political life. It is a lamentable fact also that it often served to excite an excessive appetite for power on the part of our politicians. As a result, Indian suffrage did not effect liberation but rather new forms of deceit and exploitation. The politicians of the old school approached the peasant not to serve him but to make use of him. Some weak-charactered peasants, betraying our people and their history, have managed to introduce such corrupt electioneering practices into our peasant labor movement. With their two-faced behavior and their degrading servility they have stained our good name and our ancestral customs. We must acknowledge it with humility, forgive it generously and learn as much as possible from experience. The most important thing is to return to the road of greatness that our forebears taught us.

Nor do we believe in the preaching of those parties that call themselves leftist but do not accept the peasantry as masters of their own fate. For a political organization to be a means for peasant liberation, it must be created, directed and supported by us, the peasants. Our political organizations must relate to our own values and interests.

The Economy

Even though we peasants produce 78 percent of the gross national product, we receive only 34 percent of the national income. Meanwhile, the 1.7 percent of the people who own and manage the big companies get 21 percent of the national income. Bolivia has one of the lowest per capita incomes of any country in the world, with barely $120 a year per inhabitant, and worse yet, most of us peasants hardly manage to earn $50 a year. In terms of vitamins, our diet is one of the poorest in the world. Our mortality rate remains as high as it was 50 years ago. We have a subsistence economy. We work simply to keep alive, and even this is often more than we can do.

Nevertheless, no one can say that the peasant doesn't work. The agrarian policy of our governments has been abominable. We are abandoned to our own fate. Our country spends more than 20 million dollars to import agricultural products that we ourselves could produce. They prefer to pay money to people overseas rather than to their own peasants. When bank credits have been provided for the rural sector, they have helped only the new landowners and the cotton, sugar cane and cattle barons.

After the government last October decreed a currency devaluation, our miserable economic condition worsened seriously. No one remembered the peasant. City workers, teachers and civil servants received a family allowance and salary 14." The farm worker, the veritable outcast of our society, did not receive even the slightest compensation. For those of us who sell in the retail market, the prices of our farm products remained almost stationary. Our tiny increase did not make up for the 40 percent rise in our transportation costs. While the things we bought (sugar, noodles, rice, farm tools, chemical fertilizer) have risen in price from 30 percent to 80 percent, what we sell has hardly increased at all. On the other hand, prices have been totally decontrolled in the rural sector. Under such decontrol, it is the peasant who always comes out the loser, since he is the weakest. This unjust situation can no longer be continued.

What we propose to overcome it is not a further paternalistic intervention by the government or by persons of good will. We believe that the only solution lies in an authentic organization of the peasantry. We intend to find the balance between the farm products we sell and the things we buy from the city by gathering our forces. We peasants are weak because we are not united, organized or mobilized. The existing provincial and national organizations do not respond suitably to the interests of the peasant population in general.

The Political Parties and the Peasants

In practice the peasants of Bolivia have not really belonged to any political party because none of them has represented the peasants' true interests or drawn its inspiration from their cultural values. We should acknowledge, however, that the MNR has represented the peasants' interests best and most fully by enacting the Agrarian Reform and Universal Suffrage laws. The MNR could have made history by becoming the party by which the peasants were liberated. But this was prevented from happening, chiefly because rightist reactionaries and persons with no social sensitivity infiltrated the ranks of this party and managed to halt the process of our liberation. Neither the MNR nor the Barrientos party nor the traditional leftist parties are peasant parties. If the peasants have voted for them, it was because, they had no other electoral choice. We had no party we could call our own. Those parties capitalized on the peasant vote as a means of attaining and retaining power. For a balance of interests and representation to exist, the peasants must have their own party which will reflect their social, cultural and economic interests. This is the only way we can truly and positively take part in the political process, and the only way to facilitate an authentic and integral rural development. It is a grave mistake to think that Bolivia can progress economically and politically without the direct participation of the peasantry.

The peasants have been a passive force because others have always wanted it that way. They are, politically, what the politicians have wanted them to be: a stepping stone for the ambitions of the latter. The peasantry will become an active force only when it is permitted to act in an independent way. In the present economic, political and cultural structure of our country, the peasant's real participation in political life is impossible because this way is closed to him. The nation's armed forces, which are basically made up of peasants, should also reflect this in their culture and modes of thought.

Peasant Labor Organizations

Although the peasant labor movement, at its roots and in many of its provincial organizations, is structured with authentic peasant representation, it has often been used at the state and national levels to foster interests that were totally foreign to our community. All of the faults of urban party politics have been introduced into the rural areas by false leaders who have claimed to represent the peasants. They were, and still are, the corrupters of our Aymara and Quechua peoples while our government authorities watch what is occurring with kindly indifference. It is they who have brought to the rural areas divisiveness, the politicizing of community life, nepotism, economic and moral corruption, personal ambition for power, hate between brothers, a false kind of personal leadership, and non-representative political action. But perhaps nothing has caused us so much harm as paternalism, which has led us to innocently expect solutions from outside and from above. The development of our country and especially its rural sector will have to be done by us, the peasants. They have wanted to treat us politically like children; governments and poor public leaders have tried to bestow upon us as "gifts" or "charity" what was really owed to us in the name of justice.

The fact that our wayward peasant leaders have given the title of "Lideres Campesinos" to all of the recent presidents of our republic is a blot on our shining Incan history. The best thing that the governments and political parties can do for the peasants is to allow us to elect our own leaders freely and democratically and to work out our own socioeconomic policy that is rooted in our own culture.

Both past and present experience shows that when the peasants of the Andean highlands are free to choose their hilacatas, hilancos and other local authorities, they do it in a most democratic way, acting with extreme correctness and showing respect for each other's views. The present internal struggles among the peasants are always a reflection of outsiders' ambitions for power.

Education in the Rural Areas  

We see in rural education two very serious problems. The first has to do with the content of the educational programs; the second, the inadequacy of the teaching methods.

It is no secret to anyone that the rural school system is not based on our cultural values. The programs have been developed in government departments on the basis of ideas and methods imported from abroad. Rural education is a new and more subtle form of domination and annihilation. The rural normal schools are nothing but a system for brainwashing future country teachers. Both in what is taught and in those who teach, the teaching is devoid of roots. It is unrelated to our life, not only in its language but also in the history, the heroes, the ideals and the values that it presents.

As far as its practical organization is concerned, the rural school is a kind of national disaster. The national educational budget is inadequate; it is also poorly distributed, with much more going to the city than to the rural sector. Even now, 51 percent of the rural children cannot attend school simply because their communities have no schools. The rural population not only lacks schoolrooms but also books, chalkboards, children's desks, teaching materials and, most of all, teachers who really love our oppressed people.

We could go on pointing to all the other aspects of rural life to show how it unfolds under terribly miserable conditions, utterly neglected by the public authorities. The rural revolution is unfinished business that demands action. But in acting we must again hold high the banners and noble ideals of Tupac Catari, Bartolina Sisa, Willca Zarate and others. Our starting point must be our own people.

In our legendary highlands, there are no programs for infrastructure, no highways, no electricity, no hospitals-there is no progress. Transportation facilities are inadequate, systems for commerce are antiquated, technical training is almost nonexistent. In the rural areas there are too many normal schools but no technical schools. Practically everything still remains to be done. We do not ask that it be done for us; we only ask that we be allowed to do it. We would not conclude this document-which is definitely intended to be the charter for a strong, independent peasant movement-without asking the press, radio, and all the institutions that sincerely desire the advancement of the peasant population to encourage this lofty desire of ours to struggle for the true progress of our people and of the whole Bolivian nation.

The miners, factory workers, construction laborers, transport employees and the impoverished middle classes are all our brothers and sisters, victims of the same exploitation under other forms, descendants of the same race and united in the same ideals for struggle and liberation. Only by working together will we attain the greatness of our country.

We also ask the Catholic Church-the church of the great majority of the peasant population-as well as other evangelical churches to work with us toward this great ideal of the liberation of our Aymara and Quechua people. We want to live out our values to the fullest extent without failing in the slightest to appreciate the cultural richness of other peoples.

(Signed): Mink'a Center for Peasant Coordination and Advancement Tupac Catari Peasant Center Association of Peasant Students of Bolivia

National Association of Peasant Teachers

*On October 27, 1972, the Bolivian peso was devalued by two thirds. (trans.)