Decades Lost and Won: Indigenous Movements and Multicultural Neoliberalism in the Andes

Abstract

Many scholars have demonstrated that the causal relationship between the “losing” and “winning” decades can be understood in terms of the opportunities and threats that came with crisis and reform. Deborah Yashar (1997) offers a clear and influential statement of this view:

In contemporary Latin American indigenous movements, the political liberalization of the 1980s provided the macropolitical opportunity for organizing … But the incentive to organize as Indians lay in state reformsthat left Indians politically marginalized as individual citizens, disempowered as corporatist peasant actors, and confronted with a challenge to local, political, and material autonomy. The capacity to organize, however, has depended on transcommunity networks previously constructed by the state and other social actors. (31)¹

Even this bare-bones summary of her argument reveals that indigenous movements do not arise simply in response to economic pressures. Indeed, Yashar (1997, 2005) emphasizes that it was the combination of political liberalization, the pressure of state reforms, and the existence of rural networks that explain the coincidence of “lost” and “won” decades. Thus, neoliberalism is no simple or single “cause” of indigenous mobilization.