Since a military group overthrew Estenssoro in 1964, successive military coup d’états took place until the 80s, creating a period of severe repression and persecution of workers and Indigenous movements. The Bolivian Workers Union (COB) was founded, and in 1979, the CSUTCB (Confederación Sindical Única de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia) formed from the merger of several peasant unions. These unions were fundamental in overthrowing the military dictatorships. In 1985, Paz Estenssoro returned to power, and under the guidance of Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada started the neoliberal period hand-in-hand with the IMF. Repression was organised now by elected governments instead of the military. In this period, poverty increased enormously, salaries went down and the country was unable to pay its external debt. At the same time, the once strong mining unions that were dominant along with the COB, were weakened as the mines started to be privatised and closed down. Thousands of miners were forced to migrate south, and many became coca growers. Until 1988, there were around 20,800 miners unemployed only from COMIBOL (state-owned mining company) that were forced to migrate with their families. Furthermore, the COB failed to include peasants within its leadership and a series of ruptures within the CSUTCB lasted until early 2000. The ‘war on drugs’ financed by the US led to both a cultural clash and an armed conflict over coca leaf production. Coca is seen both as ‘dangerous’, being the key ingredient in cocaine, which therefore must be eradicated, and at the same time a sacred and traditional plant in Andean cultures. The violent processes of forced coca eradication confronted with popular opposition, meant intense militarisation, tortures and killings of coca growers, especially in the area of Chapare, in the East, where many ex-miners and peasants were left, again, without livelihoods. The coca leaf was transformed into a symbol of resistance against Washington interventions. Over time, the coca growers’ movement, led by a young Evo Morales, came to offer the only vibrant national-popular resistance to the dominance of neoliberalism. It was in 1999 that the ‘Movimiento al Socialismo’ (MAS) party was created as a ‘political tool for the peoples’ sovereignty’. MAS generated different dynamics within the Bolivian left by creating a party that is theoretically accountable to social movements as opposed to the traditional left that subsumes everything to party priorities. By developing clear ‘anti-imperialist’ and ‘anti-neoliberal’ platforms, MAS established a ‘social movement-political party’ for the first time in Bolivian history. MAS is therefore both completely unlike other parties yet also striven by tensions between its two identities. After the harsh neoliberalism of the 1990s, social resistance turned to Cochabamba. The whole city, fuelled by peasants, workers, urban families and coca growers rose up in 2000 and took the streets to prevent the privatisation of water (see box iii). A coalition formed in 1999 called the ‘Coordinadora del Agua y la Vida’ or Co-ordinator of Water and Life, was a key organizational instrument for action that brought together peoples from rural areas, urban movements and combined different economic and political sectors. Under the slogan ‘The Water is ours, damn it!’ the city, airport and main roads were taken over by the peoples with blockades, assemblies for information and discussion, neighbourhood actions, barricades, strikes and constant street occupations. The ‘water war’, as this struggle would later be known, proved to be the beginning of a radical change in the history of Bolivia.
20