Flags and Broken Promises in the Plurinational State of Bolivia

TRANSLATED FROM SPANISH BY MARÍA VIGNAU LORÍA

For a long time, we wanted to publish a sharp yet nuanced text on the instrumentalization of Indigenous identities by the Bolivian State. We are happy to propose such a text today through the carefully articulated words of Magali Vienca Copa Pabón. She describes such an instrumentalization through the politics at work behind the association of Bolivia’s “plurinational” administration with the whipala, while refusing to consider the State as a monolithic entity, rather than a battleground.

Like fog gathering at the foot of the Andes, the path we took to get here is obscure and we feel easily lost. The same thing happens with words: we write “Plurinational State” in constitutions and laws without knowing the trajectories that forged them, nor the people who named them, and we forget to ask ourselves why.

In Bolivia, it was the 1983 political thesis of the most important Indigenous campesino organization, now known as the Confederación Sindical Única de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia (Single Trade Union Confederation of Campesino Workers of Bolivia), that mentioned the idea of plurinationality. This socio-political manifesto declares the unity of all those exploited and excluded by internal colonialism and demands profound changes consistent with the plurinational political composition of Bolivian society, made up of nations and peoples with their own histories and political, economic, legal, and social forms. Decades later, this unity of the Indigenous campesino movement allowed for the emergence of an agenda that included reclaiming natural resources from transnational corporations and holding the 2006-2008 Constitutional Assembly, whose culmination, and end of cycle, was the promulgation of the 2009 Bolivian Constitution.

This convergence of social forces and constitutional changes rattled institutions, organizations, and agents, and the old certainties that forged “the homeland” were shaken. Among them was the incorporation of the whipala as a national symbol. The Indigenous flag began to circulate in the 1960s in various political and social movements, is now flown in the main organs of State power, alongside the three-color flag (red, yellow, and green).

The presence of the whipala is the result of a process driven by the Indianist and Katarist movements in the 1960s to 1980s, in particular Germán Choque Condori (1955-2021), who revitalized it as the flag of the peoples of Quyllasuyu in his books.

This conceptual regeneration came at a time when Indianism was emerging, with Fausto Reinaga (1906-1994) as its main ideologue, who proposed the thesis of the “Two Bolivias”: a formal Bolivia, made up of a white and mestizo minority, and an informal Bolivia, made up of Indios who were excluded and subjected to not only economic but also political servitude. Fausto Reinaga opposed State Indigenism. This policy, which emerged from the 1940 Pátzcuaro Congress, sought to integrate Indigenous people through miscegenation and cultural institutions. Reinaga argued that this supposed “integration” was in fact a mechanism that denied them their status as political subjects precisely by uprooting them from their identity.

In this context, the whipala stands as a symbol of protest that can be found in the historical resistance of campesino and Indigenous organizations, among which I highlight the proclamation of the first Aymara candidate for the presidency, Luciano Tapia, by an authentically Indigenous political party called the Túpac Katari Indian Movement (MITKA) in 1978, as well as various social struggles such as the Water War in Cochabamba in 2000 and the Gas War in 2003, when the flag was waved alongside the Bolivian one as symbols of the other Bolivia.

The presence of the whipala in the Constitution as a national symbol is a consequence of the resistance to the State. The flag flies in a checkered pattern with its seven rainbow colors, vindicating an unpayable historical debt. Its presence seals an act of commitments and promises of a vindication that is not merely symbolic.

Why is it important to talk about the whipala? This symbol clearly explains the dual function of including Indigenous elements in the constitution of the State. On the one hand, the cultural recognition and social inclusion, as a collective subject of rights, of excluded sectors such as the Aymara, Quechua, Guaraní, and other Bolivian Nations; and on the other, the dispossession and exaction of their political power, their ideological and social autonomy in a radical sense, to deploy new forms of domination and control. I remember an informal conversation with Indianist Abraham Delgado around 2012, who told me that the use of the whipala as a national symbol was tantamount to disguising the old colonial state. The idea of covert colonialism under the whipala alerted me to both the social risks and the impact of its institutionalization. This was even more so when, in many events, it was used primarily as a party insignia by the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS), Evo Morales’s former party, losing its foundational rebellious character.

What does everyday life look like in a Plurinational State? ///
In the past, when an Aymara or Quechua person entered the courts, the scene was reminiscent of Kafka: they would stand before the guardian of the door of the Law, remove their hat several times in a gesture of supplication, and wait indefinitely to be attended to. Today, that gatekeeper waves a whipala and may wear Indigenous clothing, but the powerlessness persists; the faces and symbols have changed, but not the gate.

In the Bolivian state, elements declared to be plurinational, such as culture, Indigenous justice, and certain intercultural public policies, coexist alongside other elements that remain unchanged: the armed forces, bureaucracies that distribute resources, urban public spaces, the financial system, companies, and private spheres. Thus, plurinationality is reduced to “differentiated” enclaves, especially those spaces authorized or recognized as such by the State, while the rest of the state apparatus continues to reproduce a colonial logic. Similarly, there have been changes in the names of institutions and the creation of “specialized” units.

I experienced this as an official of the Plurinational Constitutional Court (2012-2014), brought by the presence of Indigenous magistrates elected by popular vote. As two parallel spaces, the Court had an Indigenous chamber and a decolonization unit in charge of Indigenous and plurinational inclusion, while the rest of the space, the courts, chambers, and tribunals revealed an administrative routine where said Indigenous dimension disappeared and the usual bureaucratic logic persisted.

The Indio is included as long as their self-determination does not alter the geography, governance, or institutional design of the old State and, of course, as long as they do not stray from institutional control or the policies defined at the central government’s level. The image of an Indigenous State proved ideal for legitimizing anti-Indigenous policies that reduced the autonomous exercise of peoples and nations, generating a social base that for the most part did not oppose the State’s extractivist policies.

Although Bolivia recognized Mother Earth as a subject of rights, the economic policy continues to engage in practices of dispossession. The mega-road project in the Isiboro Secure Indigenous Territory and National Park (TIPNIS) and oil exploration and exploitation activities in the protected area of Tariquia are some examples of the extractivist matrix of the Plurinational State, in the hands of agribusiness and transnational corporations. However, there is also small-scale extractivism in the highlands, which takes the form of illegal mining activity. The discharge of acid waste and heavy metals into rivers such as the Milluni, Katari, Pallina, and the Titicaca basin, documented in academic and journalistic research, shows how cooperative mining activity, combined with weak oversight, degrades the vital ecosystems on which communities depend. Thus, the very place where Mother Earth is conceived as a subject of rights is precisely where she is abused.

The Plurinational State as a field of dispute ///
Almost two decades after the Plurinational State was established, with its unfulfilled promises and contradictions, the picture has become more confusing. On the one hand, we have right-wing political parties vying for power in the run-up to the national elections in August 2025, whose programs aim to erase the plurinational formula from the Constitution, including the whipala. Let us recall the political crisis of 2019 after the resignation of Evo Morales and the controversial inauguration of Jeanine Añez, when police officers tore the whipala from their uniforms, asserting that in Bolivia there are not “two Bolivias” but only one. This act polarized society, racializing politics. On the other hand, we have the left-wing parties that defend the “Indigenous State” as political capital, without an agenda or real roots in the reality of the Indigenous people they claim to defend and represent. For example, the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS), which achieved unquestionable party hegemony between 2006 and 2014, ended up divided into several parties, each one seeking to gain power through an Indigenous discourse without real social support. Thus, these social and Indigenous movements are now fragmented and going through an internal crisis that will surely lead to a slow process of recomposition.

A question emerges in the midst of this political curtain: how should we think about the Plurinational State?

The tensions, disputes, and social pressures that marked the gestation of the Plurinational State show that its construction was, and continues to be, the result of troubled relations between peoples and organized sectors and the State. Bolivian historian Rosana Barragán called it a “pact-forging State,” pointing out that, far from imposing itself unilaterally, the State has had to negotiate, slow down, modify, or reverse policies in the face of pressure from communities, guilds, unions, and organized regions since the founding of the Republic in 1825. From this perspective, another cycle began after the approval of the Constitution: the plurality of spaces, dichotomies, and hierarchies are in constant symbolic and institutional dispute.

This dispute is the field where identity is constructed in contact with its limits. When Indigenous peoples confront the frameworks of the Plurinational State, they resort to their own institutions, councils, and assemblies, updating their norms, procedures, and representations. In this way, they construct their own sense of plurinationality, wave the rebellious whipalas, and force the State to back down and modify its institutions through a series of incremental agreements.

Indianism reinforces this idea on the cover of the third edition of La revolución india (2007), chosen by Hilda Reinaga, an Indianist thinker. Instead of an Indio with a rifle and a pututo (seashell horn), she placed an India woman weaving red wool. Hilda said in several interviews that the act of weaving, as well as the color of the skein, symbolize that the revolution is in the hands of India women. My perspective is that the image of the man points to explosive and rapid change, while that of the weaver points to a slow process. For Aymara women, weaving means that the pace of change is different; women prepare revolutions in advance, sustain them, and care for them, and in this step-by-step process, new institutions are solidified. That is why practices shaped by common sense and ideology reveal that the real changes can be found in the threads and in the patient hands of the female and male actors of a State that operates from the contradictory ramifications of local, informal, and fragmented power in the other Bolivia. ■