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Evo
Morales and the Phallic Decolonization of the Bolivian
State
por María Galindo
Traducción: April Howard |
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The Law of Convocation to the Constitutional Assembly:
Society didnıt propose a change of government.
In Bolivia there are hundreds
of thousands of Evos, in each public high school, on each
neighborhood soccer team, in each little workers union, from the
taxi drivers to the ice cream vendors. There are intuitive
Evos, with beautifully dark complexions, casual and unorthodox
in terms of cultural identity. They are Evos as modern as they
are indigenous but, above all audacious in their use of words
and careless and macho in sex and love. They use ponchos,
suits or sports jackets and they choose their clothes with the
liberty that patriarchal societies prohibit women, and above all
those that are called indigenousı and who, for that reason,
have to carry their cultural identity on their hips and backs,
undrawing their curves in the use of masculine mandates.
This Evo whose face is an immediate and magical social mirror
did not receive just a presidential mandate in the past
elections, he received a historic mandate that, moreover,
consisted of the nationalization of the hydrocarbons and the
sentencing of Sanchez de Losada, in the convocation of a
constitutional assembly that would permit the redesign of the
Bolivian political system. An assembly that was past of an
agenda installed by the social movements and not the political
parties, an assembly that marked Bolivian societyıs need not for
a change of government, but instead for a historic meeting at
which to redesign the bases that had created crisis together
with the neoliberal model.
Due to that clear responsibility and his indigenousı condition,
the hope existed that Evo would convoke an assembly that was
open to all possible forms of participation.
However, though the Law of Convocation created by the government
of Evo Morales, with the direct responsibility of Alvaro García
Linera, promulgates a law that:
- Restitutes the legitimacy of the political parties defeated by
the revolt in October of 2003, including those that committed
genocide against the people of El Alto.
- Closes all possibility of
direct representation of social movements, which has obligated
many movements to seek out alliances with MAS in order to be
able to propose candidacies or opt to stay out of the assembly
and therefore the socio-political discussion that this has
unleashed in Bolivian society.
- Ratifies the technocratic
neoliberal criteria of representation of women as a biological
quota within political parties, with the addition of the
othernessı which inhibits all form of alliance between women by
needing to alternate each woman with a man.
- Leaves out the important
sector of neoliberal exilesı who are a migrant population in
countries like Argentina, Brazil, U.S. and Spain. This
population has grown steeply in past years and now constitutes a
quarter of the economic support of our society.
- Closes the character of the constitutional assembly to session
during a year in a framework that addresses powers already
constituted, with which the assembly converts itself into a mere
constitutional reform.
With this exclusion and weakening of social movements, Evo
Morales and his indigenist-leftist government has the security
of obtaining an absolute majority within the assembly. This
permits him to co-opt social sectors like clients of the party,
to carry out a plebecite in place of assembly elections and to
rewrite the text of the constitution from a place of executive
power. So the project plans to annihilate spaces of dissidence
and political autonomy in respect to the party of the government.
With this assembly then, we witness the silencing of the social
movements in our society. We also witness a re-accommodation
of the social movements from the role of being the forces of the
veto and the Bolivian social mobilization, to being the cheap
clients of a liberal state. They are left to be rats tricked by
state power. It isnıt the silencing of the bullet, and it isnıt
the silencing of censure, but rather a cynical exclusion. A
silencing as could only come from one of oursı (in quotes): an
ex prisoner who took up arms, like Alvaro García Linera and an
indigenous union member, like Evo. In this way, the assembly
converts itself in the scenario for the substitution of liberal
representative democracy that we defeated in the streets,
hundreds of thousands ,without leaders or parties, in unheard of
mobilizations, to substitute this for a mono-partied democracy
that offers us MAS as an alternative without alternative. In
this way, the magic Evo, the Evo who wakes up identities, can
convert himself into an identitive antidote that inaugurates a
regime closed around its leaders.
I donıt want to campaign for a candidate, I want to vomit:ı
The electoral campaign.
It is not casual chance that the most conservative sectors
have taken enthusiastically to the electoral campaign as a
chance to make ridiculous reparations that will allow them to
prolong their agonizing mediocrity by displaying gargantuan
portraits of themselves which are unmistakable invitations to
vomiting.
Other sectors that are taking advantage of the occasion are the
great proliferation of Churches and Evangelical sects. They
have presented their own candidates, thanks to thousands and
thousands of their faithful, to defend their interests in the
assembly and, like all churches, to go on eating the pieces of
social life.
The military, which today enjoys important attributes in
the present constitution, and which is not disposed to lose even
the obligatory military service with which it installs in our
youth its model of chauvinist virility, have also proposed their
own candidates, borrowed and rented in all of their varieties. They
range from pro-government to the extreme right, all coinciding
in defense of their corporate interests.
Even the Catholic Church, using its intuitive instincts
for the accumulation of power, has suffered an unexpected love-affair
with MAS in order to put the brakes on the process toward a
Secular State. Their campaign is characterized by efforts to
delay, restrain, and confuse the processes of political
recreation that a society as dynamic as Bolivia had proposed.
We, the Mujeres Creando [Women Creating], are street
agitators, autonomous, self-summoned to all of life. We are
women who have questioned representative democracy and the
vision of equality proposed by the gender technocracy. We have
proposed a candidacy, and so with our queerness, are entering a
terrain that is a farce of representation. Our almost tiny
candidacy has entered through a crack in the law, in the
institution and the system, like rainwater that filters itself
by simultaneously seeking and creating leaks. A crack in the
roof of the houses, of the Palace and the institutions from
where we let our dissidence leak.
To say that women are a political subject that for centuries was
denied the right to speak, with which they emptied us of our own
contents whether with arguments of complementariness, of
submission, of exclusion or inclusion. In the end, all women
come to the same end, women are ahistorical, apolitical and
invisible. And all social pacts are pacts are made between
categories of men according to the culture they pertain to,
their skin color, the social class they pertain to or the
ideology they subscribe to. And this social pact signifies a
convivial pact regarding the interests of categories of men
about hegemonic projects in which some are above others.
Today in Bolivia, Indigenism and Leftism repeat themselves and
find themselves next to neoliberalism in the same phallic,
patriarchal posture, a posture that ratifies the confusion
between social projects and powerı projects, the control of
society, the submission of the other,ı as the only interest
around which history and politics should revolve.
Iım not native, Iım originalı:
The colonial character versus the patriarchal character of
the Bolivian State
As feminists we want to be neither underneath nor on top of
anyone. That is why we will not find our own place in this
process. As quasi undesirable tenants of the candidacy that we
postulate, we use this space to affirm that the decolonization
of the State is not possible without its depatriarcalization.
We affirm that the social pactı rests on a sexual contract that
has expropriated from women the sovereignty over our own bodies.
And that this is a phenomenon of all political systems, of all
ideologies and all cultures. A renovation of this social pact
that does not question the sexual contract that sustains it can
only reiterate forms of colonial and patriarchal submission at
the same time. And looking at supposedlyı original cultures is
not the mechanism that will permit us to decolonize our society,
nor make it fuller, more livable or freer.
The demand for the original cultureı as pure, as the culture
that will build the nation, the project of power and then
nationalism will only drive us to the patriarchal and colonial
renovation of power, where power simply exercises power with a
mere change of actors.
A sample of this today is the andinocentrismı with which one
expects to reinterpret Bolivian society. Our society is not a
society of pure, original, indigenous people versus undesirable
mestizo white-oids. It is much more complex than that; ours is
a society of disobediences and cultural mutations in which the
technological revolution is sugar to the soul of all kids who,
thanks to piracy, conquer it in their quotidian chatting and
navigating with the world. It is a society like all societies
of the world where we as social actors also construct culture
and thus we can talk about youth culture, about an urban
culture, about this, that and the other culture, about a
culture of queers and a culture of the street and the street
venders and who culturally transform the meaning of the street
and public space, for example.
We are not obedient originalsı and for that reason and because
we put in question cultural mandates, starting with clothing and
ending with pleasures. Due to and thanks to this disobedience
which makes us happy, we propose a decolonizing and
depatriarchalizing societal project that has the rise of
nationalisms as a principal question.
They want to substitute the project of the united Nation State
for a project of autonomous plurinationalisms in order to open
an eternal struggle for land, for resources, for power and
control. We want to be neither on top nor underneath and so we
challenge this project with our body and our skin, sensitive and
open to sin.
The only fight you lose is the fight you abandonı:
The strategy of concrete proposals.
We have also developed a handful of concrete proposals that
matter to us because they are born of our daily life:
Our Father if you are in heaven liberate us from the power of
the Church:
Today the Bolivian State has an official religion, which is
Catholicism. Freedom of worship is guaranteed but the secular
character of social matters is not. In this way the Church has
confabulated with State Power in everything. We have religion
class in all public schools, the Church exercises a mountain of
non ecclesiastical activities, and worst, we have inherited the
Judeo-Christian concept of family in our constitution and in all
judicial law.
That is why to propose a secular State is to recuperate an hour
of class time in schools from religion and to put it, for
example, to the service of a secular sexual education, and to
our right to know our bodies through school and the classroom.
Beyond that, our proposal separates the concept of family from
the patriarchal Judeo-Christian vision, reconceptualizing the
family, honoring all the complex forms that this has in our
society. This opens the doors the recognition of all forms of
free unionı that occur beyond the state, these pretty and
unusual forms that make freedom possible in love and in the
construction of affectionate and supportive coexistence. Of
course this includes couples made of men and women, community
unions, houses of mothers and daughters, sons, grandmothers,
aunts, uncles, until complexity widens it without impositions,
without models and, above all, without imposing suffering nor
shortages, nor absences who have the right to grow and live in
sympathy and liberty.
Che and Evo are the same Irresponsible Fathers:
Society has expropriated maternity from women, it values and
protects reproduction at the same time it imposes maternity as a
reason for living for women. However, it subordinates maternity
to the existence of a father who gives it legitimacy. While the
women give life, the fathers have the power to grant social
space, and so convert the act of giving life into a secondary
act. That is what invents the concept of the single mother, to
whom society grants the burden of condemnation in some cases, in
others the burden of the fate of the abandoned mother. Mothersı
recuperation of their maternity is a cultural theme, but it also
addresses the legal act of the paternal last name, which in our
society is the first [of the two last names], the one that
counts and, at the same time, is a mechanism of recognition or
ignorance that every man has regarding his sons and daughters. That
is why we propose maternal filiation, which is to say that boys
and girls should carry the last name of their mothers first. This
recuperates the place of the mothers, where women change from
being objects of reproduction to subjects of maternity. It also
recuperates the daughtersı place in the family, a place that all
statistics show us is not valued in comparison to their
brothersı.
This act also will have consequences in all family jurisprudence,
in so much as what is called patria-potestad, which is a concept
of patriarchal authority over sons and daughters.
Sovereignty in my country and in my body:
They have also expropriated from us, the women, the right to
make decisions about our bodies, and this is presented in legal
rulings in various situations, one of them is the penalization
of abortion. The recuperation of womenıs sovereignty over their
bodies is a wider concept than the mere depenalization of
abortion. This is why we consider it fundamental to insert
within the special constitiutional regimes, one that concretely
carries the title of womenıs constitutional regime.ı This has
to do with a chapter that would permit all of those fundamental
rights to be concentrated and, as the principal of all rights, a
womanıs right to make decisions regarding her body.
Every political party is a weapon loaded with blood, machismo
and corruption:
We propose to break the monopoly that the political parties have
in respect to political representation though the aperture of
the exercise of direct representation of all forms of social
representation that exist in Bolivian society. In respect to
the representation of women, for us it is fundamental to
challenge the quotas that were introduced during the neoliberal
period and ratified by the Indigenist-Left. This quota converts
the political representation of women into a biological quota,
empty of content, in which any woman, due to her biological
condition of being female, is representative of all women in a
situation of non-ideological representation. This quota has
been moreover reinforced in its non-ideologization though the
concept of alternity, alternity that has as effect the negation
of the political alliance between women. Both are mechanisms
that deny women political autonomy, which is to say, the sense
of organizing from themselves, outside of political parties and
mixed organizations.
Long live the deserters, the so-called cowards and all youth who
object to the use of weapons
These days military service is obligatory for men, and the
gender technocracy has motivated the creation of voluntary
military service for women, giving power to one of the densest
nuclei of patriarchal culture in our society. Military service
in Bolivia has constituted itself as the school of macho
virility and the mechanism for the acquisition of manliness. That
is why the young men who come back from military service acquire
authority in their communities and are celebrated for it.
Conscientious objection is the door that allows the value of the
use of weapons and the very existence of an army in society to
be questioned. It is a fundamental right for all young men to
be able to object to this sense of virility and the possibility
of substituting this service for social service allows us to
repropose to young men the logic of service to society and the
place and sense of masculinity.ı
Give the Constitutional Assembly back to society, opening
deliberative spaces from the Assembly itself
The Assembly is crossed by a series of themes that are axes for
Bolivian society. It is a historic irresponsibility to leave
it in hands of the political parties that, moreover, have filled
the majority of the lists with characters that in many cases do
not even correspond to social sectors. There are all kinds of
candidates fulfilling even marital quotas, like that of the
Mayor of the city of La Paz´s wife.
In other cases, the candidates are making proposals that have
nothing to do with the constitutional scenario because, if they
are elected, they will simply respond to postures that will be
cut up into other spaces. ON the other hand, the complexity of
the themes converts itself into a species of mosaic that is
impossible to assemble from a single perspective. This is why
we consider that the scenario of the assembly raises, above all,
a methodological challenge that can gather together the
knowledge and visions of the actors and protagonists of each
theme.
This is why it is urgent that, once the elections take place,
departmental, regional and thematic pre-constitutional
assemblies are opened by social actors. We have posed to
ourselves the proposition of convoking a pre-constitutional
assembly of women as a complex political subject.
BECAUSE WOMEN ARE NOT A BIOLOGICAL QUOTA,
NOR A RIB OF ADAMıS,
EVE TO THE CONSITUTIONAL ASSEMBLY.
We, the Mujeres Creando, have a self-managed house that is
located at:
2060, calle 20 de octubre
Between Apiazu and J.J. Perez, Tel. 2413764, La Paz, Bolivia.
Our house is named Virgen de los deseosı [Virgen of Desires]
There you will find:
A market, a dining room, lodging, an audiovisual hall,
classrooms for workshops,
Solidarity, feminist culture in all its forms
And a universe of Indians, bitches and lesbians,
Restless assemblies and sisterhoods.
Our website is:
www.mujerescreando.com
www.mujerescreando.org
Our email is:
mujerescreando@alamo.entelnet.bo
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