From Kevin Healy, Llamas, Weavings, and Organic Chocolate: Multicultural Grassroots Development in the Andes and Amazon of Bolivia. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2001

Midway through 1781, the altiplano of La Paz and the adjacent regions were the scene of one of the longest and most significant episodes of the indigenous rebellions of l780-82. Approximately, 50,000 Aymara mobilized in the regions of Puno, Larecaja, Omasuyos, Yungas and Pacajes. During almost one year, they surrounded the city of La Paz which at that time was principal center of colonial domination over the Aymara people. There the top Spanish officials and abusive authorities, also landowners, corregidores, and other Spanish that had fled the Tupak Amaru rebellion were residing. (Cardenas l988; 502)

On September 15, l973, a windy day under a cloudless, brilliant blue altiplano sky, about three dozen Aymara men and women from the Katarista movement, a key organization in the burgeoning indigenous rights struggle, hurriedly made their way past the groups of tourists at Tihuanaco, Bolivia's famous archeological site ten miles from Lake Titicaca. They were about to hear an important speech that would become the inspirational credo of Bolivia's reinvigorated pro-indigenous movement.

Tihuanaco was the main ceremonial site of a society which, after the Incas, was South America's largest native state (300 BC to 700 AD). Its powerful agrarian economy revolved around the high-altitude herding of millions of llamas and alpacas and a flourishing agricultural system of large irrigated and solar-heated earthworks known today as raised fields (Kolata l993; Erickson l996). Via these two activities, these people of the high Andes were able to produce more than enough food to feed large urban and rural populations.

The winds of de-colonization blowing throughout the Third World were inspiring the Aymara on this historic day to denounce the continuing internal colonialism found in their country(1). Moving at a brisk pace, the men outfitted in ponchos with stripes and solid colors, hand-woven scarves, and knitted stocking caps, and the women dressed in bowler hats and pastel colored shawls walked past several impressive mounds and down into a sunken courtyard lined with remnants of room-size niches and ten-foot stone sculptures. Reaching the end of the courtyard, they climbed a stairway to gather in front of the Gateway to the Sun, a towering gray stone portal embellished with elaborately carved winged figures. The portal opened eastward, toward the rising sun. Its main icon was Viracocha, the Tihuanaku rain deity, and cryptic inscriptions representing an agricultural-religious calendar based upon movements in the cosmos graced the block of andestite stone.

One Aymara leader moved to the front and for the next twenty minutes or so read aloud from a document called the "Manifesto de Tihuanaco." The document began with a short quote from a speech made by the Inca ex-ruler, Yupanqui, to his Spanish conquerors. "A people that oppresses another people cannot be free.' We, both Aymara and Quechua peasants, similar to other indigenous nationalities of our country, are repeating this same message today."

The Tihuanaco manifesto recalled the importance of indigenous cultural values as a driving force throughout history and attacked the long-standing discrimination that maintained the indigenous as second-class citizens. The document's section on national development offered the following critique:

The political leaders of the dominant minority have striven to create a development process which slavishly imitates a model taken from the context of other nations. This approach emphasizes the materialistic side of progress by equating development with the economic aspects of life. As Indian peasants, we certainly aspire to economic development in our country, yet we insist that it take place within a framework that uses our own cultural values as its point of departure. We do not want to lose our noble virtues through a process of pseudo development. Imported rural schooling, political party activity, and agricultural technical promotion have not produced significant developmental changes in the countryside. We remain convinced that true development will only occur in the countryside and the nation when we ourselves become the authors of our own progress and destiny.

Some of the manifesto's harshest words condemned rural schooling.

It is no secret that the school system fails to reflect our values. Our government ministries have too often copied ideas and methods developed for other societies. The rural school as it now exists is totally alien to our reality, not only in the strange language it uses to impart knowledge to our rural inhabitants, but in its biased presentation of Bolivian history, social ideals, cultural values, and the human worth of social groups.

The Kataristas' Manifesto bore the signatures of representatives from four cultural institutions representing reform-minded schoolteachers, students, peasant leaders, and young Aymara professionals among them members of MINKA, Bolivia's first indigenous NGO (Hurtado l986). Among the young professionals were disaffected employees of SNDC, the national community development service under the control of a military government. When the reading was over, the group applauded, let out an enormous cheer for Aymara solidarity, and then hurriedly dispersed in all directions from this ancient site of power.

Genaro Flores, an Aymara sindicato leader and activist, told me later that the Manifesto was the fruit of a series of clandestine meetings of Aymara activists held in the capital city. Gregorio Iriarte, a Catholic priest and advisor to the group, said that the police state atmosphere created by the Banzer dictatorship compelled them to take the strictest precautions in preparing the document. Repression had been rampant with the killing, imprisonment and torture of many and the blacklisting and exiling of many more activists for democracy. All of the labor groups and political parties had gone underground. Despite the repression, the Manifesto had a broad effect. Iriarte commented that,"Although in the current repressive political environment there was little attention to the Manifesto in the national media, little by little, and with the help of progressive Church parishes, a handful of NGOs, and local sindicatos, it was disseminated to the rural population and even translated into Aymara, Quechua, and Guarani."

By going public with this Manifesto, the Aymara Katarista activists added fuel to the fire of the indigenous resistance to cultural assimilation that had been smoldering within the Bolivian republic for over a hundred years. Bolivia's history is replete with pro-indigenous uprisings and activism designed to protect and even flaunt Bolivia's cultural patrimony. These energetic opposition efforts had included both armed ayllu rebellions and passive resistance such as sit-down strikes, court litigation with colonial titles, and blocking government land inspectors from entering communities (Rivera l984). The national oligarchy's liberal nineteenth century assault on the indigenous communities and ayllus in the name of "privatization" of the country's landholding system and replacing these social institutions with haciendas had fueled widespread campaigns led by traditional Andean authority figures (referred to in the historical literature as "the cacique apoderado movement"). Grassroots mobilization and resistance enabled communities to protect both communal lands and the traditional ayllu structures of local authority (Platt l982a).

Although the many efforts at reversing the liberal assault were unsuccessful, it was not for lack of trying. One Bolivian researcher documented 1,400 minor and major uprisings between l860 and 1950 (Antezana l968). In 1899, when the country was engulfed in a civil war, altiplano and valley Indians led by a charismatic rebel, Zarate Vilca, pragmatically joined what became the winning Liberal political side to advance their agenda of land, labor, and political autonomy rights (Rivera l984, 16; Condarco Morales l965). On one occasion during this conflict, the Aymara and Quechua leaders occupied a mestizo-controlled town and reimposed their ayllu government. In another occupation, they symbolically turned the social order upside down by compelling local mestizo elites to chew coca leaves and don sandals and indigenous dress as a form of reverse assimilation to a native life style (Pearse l975). Yet after the liberal triumph, Zarate and other comrades in arms suffered betrayal and were subsequently assassinated by their former allies.

A newspaper editorial written by hacienda owners in l927 shows the panic and consternation that arose among the landed elites during another period of intensified armed rebellions (Rivera l984).

Recent events demonstrate with evidence that the Indian civilization, if it does not modify its customs, habits, and idiosyncrasies, represents one of the biggest dangers to the future of this country. Anyone who thinks about this a little will have no doubt in agreeing if he considers that the indigenous race represents 80% of the national population. The recent actions suggest that within a few years, if nothing is done, they not only could take over our lands, but everything else as well. And instead of improving civilization, they would plunge Bolivia into a wild, barbaric condition, a veritable state of conquest (Arce l987, 18).

Aside from carrying out demonstrations and uprisings to maintain indigenous ways of life, the Aymara organized several schools centered upon indigenous cultural values and world views during the first forty years of the twentieth century. Although most were clandestine, Warisata's "escuela-ayllu" was established openly near the shores of Lake Titicaca. Warisata was a unique rural school utilizing the Andean ayllu mechanisms of aynis (forms of reciprocal exchange of goods and labor), minkas (communal work forms), and a Consejo de Amauta (elders council) as modus operandi (Soria l991, 57; Perez l992). The school's founders and participating families heralded it as a "new model" for rural education, but aroused hacienda owners finally succeeded in having it shut down after two successive national governments had barely tolerated it.

The Katarista movement of the l970s and early l980s grew out of this rebellious tradition. Its Aymara urban and rural founders drew their inspiration from two late eighteenth century Indian rebels, Tupak Katari and Bartolina Sisa, leaders of a major anti-colonial insurrection. The rebellion spearheaded by Katari and Sisa, although ultimately put down by Spanish militia, contributed to the final stage of a long democratic historical process which brought a new political order to the communities (Thomson l998). Hereditary ethnic rule in hamlets across the Andes was replaced by a system of rotating leadership and communal assemblies (Rasnakel988)(2). This egalitarian system was established before any comparable "democratization" had taken place in Spain, and at the same time that the American constitution had affirmed citizens' rights to democracy. The Spanish Crown had long relied on ethnic lords to extract tribute from local indigenous communities as linchpins in a highly exploitative system. Fearful of the ethnic mobilization that might give the indigenous peoples a military advantage in future revolts, the colonial authorities took preventive measures such as prohibiting the use of the Andean tunic as part of the daily male costume. After the rebellion, they imposed the Spanish poncho as a way to undermine ethnic unity among its colonized subject populations. This measure had limited success.

In the early l970s, Tupak Katari was only a marginal figure in the public school textbooks. To end this obscurity, the Katarista cadres put his image and revolutionary slogans on wall posters, educational pamphlets, letterheads, and sindicato banners used for anti-colonial marches and meetings, and told his story on Aymara radio shows and in speeches at peasant congresses throughout the country. Monuments went up in his name and a handful of progressive NGOs and Catholic church parishes mimeographed documents outlining the Katarista ethno-nationalist ideology for distribution in rural leadership training programs (Hurtado l986).

Victor Hugo Cardenas, a principal behind-the-scenes author of Katarista's public documents during this decade, told me, "There were about a dozen Aymara Kataristas in our study group reading such things as the original works of Marx and Lenin." Cardenas clarified this position by saying contemporary theorizers and organizers had distorted Marx's views(3). He added their ideas also became enriched by the Andean studies literature (mostly in the fields of anthropology, linguistics, and ethno-history), works by North Americans such as John Murra, various Europeans, and other scholars from places like the Institute of Peruvian Studies and the Institute de Bartolome de Las Casas in Cuzco. Cardenas continued, "Members in our group also translated Andean historical texts from the English and French into Spanish so we could use them more easily. These works helped to sharpen and deepen our critique of the Western-centric development paradigms calling for the disappearance of Indian culture. Both groups from the left and from the right wanted us to commit cultural suicide which, as Kataristas, we vehemently opposed."

The Kataristas' founders included a core of Aymara intellectuals based in the capital city and radicalized by the ethnic discrimination faced there (Hurtado l986; S.Rivera l984; Albo l984a). They were sons and daughters of the revolution of the 1950s whose parents had worked on the feudal estates until the haciendas collapsed in the face of armed peasant militias. Two NGOs had a strong influence on the Kataristas during the l970s: the Instituto de Desarrollo, Investigacion and Educacion Popular Campesino (INDICEP) of Oruro, founded by the Oblate Order from Canada and the La Paz-based Centro de Investigacion y Promocion del Campesinado (CIPCA) founded by the Jesuits. INDICEP assembled a team of sociologists and anthropologists that included the Chilean Veronica Cereceda (see chapter 8) and the influential Argentine philosopher, Rudulfo Kusch, to support them from l968 until the military coup by General Banzer in l971(4). One member of INDICEP's staff was selected as the model for a widely circulated poster of Tupak Katari.

CIPCA, on the other hand, emerged under the Catholic Church's protective wing during the Banzer period. Its influence on and assistance to the Kataristas began later than that of INDICEP and its approach was more cautious. It sponsored a rural promotion and research program in the altiplano and also supported the Kataristas through informal channels with charismatic leaders such as Genaro Flores. CIPCA's inspired work with the Kataristas was led by Xavier Albo, a naturalized Bolivian from Catalonia, ordained Jesuit priest, and a recent doctorate in socio-linguistics and anthropology from Cornell University. Albo quickly threw his career into overdrive to became the country's most prolific intellectual activist in the area of indigenous issues. He was practically a one-man publishing industry at CIPCA during the l970s, and, by the end of the l990s, his resume listed over 270 articles and books on indigenous topics. Using the power of the pen to create evocative social science messages, Albo became a kind of late twentieth century reincarnation of Bartolome de Las Casas, the Spanish priest whose writings to the Spanish Crown in the sixteenth century defended the Indian from the abuses of the colonial regime. Similar to the Canadian priests from Quebec working with INDICEP, Albo's Spanish roots were in the Catalonian region, known for its long political struggle for cultural and linguistic autonomy within the nation-state.

Through the l970s, the Kataristas gained increasing acceptance in the political community as a legitimate mouthpiece for the development concerns and interests of the peasantry. At first, even sympathetic Bolivian officials snubbed the group. In l971, under great influence from the radicalized Bolivian mineworkers, a left-of-center military government held a "popular assembly" and invited every labor and progressive political group in the country except the Kataristas (5). Efforts such as this to marginalize the Kataristas gradually gave way to a grudging respect as politicians came to realize that they needed the Kataristas' participation in their clandestine pro-democratic activities to cultivate peasant constituents. The Kataristas even had to beat back the plan of a military government to resettle on tropical Bolivian soil thousands of white Rhodesians fleeing from the anti-colonial struggles in Mozambique. By the 1978 electoral campaign, the first democratic election in fourteen years, the major political parties were actively wooing both the Katarista-based sindicatos and tiny spin-off Indianist parties to join their political coalitions. During this period of rebuilding democratic institutions in Bolivia, the Kataristas replaced military-appointed bosses with elected Aymara and Quechua leaders and put into place a new democratic sindicato structure in the countryside. They also tenaciously opposed the military's concerted efforts at electoral fraud (Hurtado l986; Alcoreza and Albo l978). These political acts contributed to the restoration of democracy in the Bolivian countryside and gave it an unmistakable indigenous face.

During a brief period of civilian democratic rule in the late l970s, Flores, aided by his advisor Cardenas, rose to the top ranks of the Confederacion Sindical Unica Sindical de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia (CSUTCB), the leading peasant trade union. The CSUTCB was a national network representing Bolivia's small farmers that had been first organized by the MNR to carry out its agrarian reform. After being coopted by the military, the structure broke free from external control under Flores' leadership with the Kataristas. For the first time in its history, it became an autonomous social force, in the hands of its indigenous peasant members and independent of any single political party, national government, or military institution.

From this respected platform, they promoted Bolivia's pluri-cultural heritage (Aymara, Quechua, Guarani) while opposing national economic and social policies that negatively affected the country's rural poor. To put muscle behind their demands and lodge themselves firmly into the national consciousness, they used a variety of non-violent tactics to bring about collective mobilization in different provinces as well as in the capital city. One of the most impressive non-violent protest actions occurred in l979, when thousands of local sindicatos mobilized to build trenches and roll boulders and other debris over narrow, typically unpaved roadways to bring the sprawling country to a ten-day standstill. Through a negotiated settlement, Flores and others temporarily overturned austerity measures imposed by the International Monetary Fund. When outraged foreign tourists stranded in a cultural site near Lake Titicaca during the prolonged blockade were quoted in the media complaining about losing five days of valuable vacation time, Flores responded that the indigenous people of Bolivia had been waiting 500 years for social change.

Katarista power increased when Flores rose to the top position of the national trade union confederation (the Central Obrero Boliviano COB), which was operating underground in l981 due to military repression. Since the l952 revolution where it had played a key role, the COB was widely known throughout Latin America for its effective labor and political militancy including an uncanny ability to resist military repression. With its mobilization capacity via the highly politicized Bolivian Syndicate Federation of Mineworkers(FSBM), it could shut down Bolivia's State Mining industry, essentially paralyzing the national government's economic lifeblood.

Traditionally a stronghold of the mining working class, it was unheard of that the COB be headed by an Indian peasant rather than a mestizo Marxist miner or professional labor leader. Flores was eventually captured by the police in broad daylight on the streets of La Paz, and though unarmed himself, received a gunshot wound that permanently paralyzed him from the waist down.

Between l982 and l984, when efforts at democratic government resumed, local Kataristas, receiving moral and logistical support from the La Paz-based leader operating from a wheel-chair in a tiny office three blocks from the parliament and presidential palace, staged protest occupations in just about every government office and program that had anything to do with rural development in the altiplano (Healy l986). Flores' main message was: "We were protesting the way past development programs and military dictatorships had excluded our participation and wanted the new democracy to begin rural development anew. The functionaries of these official programs not only had little understanding of life in the countryside, but frequently neither spoke our language nor showed any respect for our cultural practices and traditional way of life. It is no wonder then that the programs were mostly failures " (personal interview 1995)

Katarista cadres staged occupations in the capital city offices of the SNDC, the Ministry of Agriculture and Peasant Affairs, the national wool and alpaca fiber marketing board (INFOL), the Regional Public Development Corporation (CORDEPAZ), and the National Agrarian Reform Agency (INRA) to name just a few. At INRA, they called for the ouster of corrupt employees who for many years had extorted funds from peasants while processing land titles. Katarista lobbying prevented appointments of unqualified and disreputable persons to several high level posts within the Ministry of Agriculture and Peasant Affairs. They staged an occupation to shut down the archeological site of Tihuanaco in a push to oblige the authorities to earmark increased tourist revenues for the surrounding communities rather than the mestizo-controlled town.

Occupations of state agricultural research stations, the repositories of Western scientific knowledge that generated few benefits for communities, forced a transfer of assets from the ministry to other public and private agencies in an attempt to improve local community impact. The occupation of the public development corporation's research station in the altiplano community of Huaycullani -- an action that involved over a hundred sindicato members- was held in concert with protest sit-ins in two separate government offices in La Paz. These joint actions forced shocked authorities to sign over the agricultural machinery, physical infrastructure, and research station lands to the community.

Other Katarista takeovers occurred in three Bolivian government "integrated development projects" financed by the World Bank. These high-profile multimillion dollar rural projects reflected bank president Robert MacNamara's grandiose design to rescue Third World poor by bringing them the best Western technology from the "Green Revolution" (Rich l994). By a wide margin, these programs promised to the most super duper development projects ever organized to benefit Bolivian altiplano communities. As in many past cases, Aymara frustrations stemmed from the lack of participation, tangible benefits, and attention to their culture in a context of public fanfare and governmental promises of plenty. The Ulla Ulla camelid-raising project that had been organized by the World Bank for herding communities in the high Andes east of Lake Titicaca suffered a similar takeover of the facilities. Herders held its administrator, a former hacienda owner, hostage until government officials sat down and listened attentively to their grievances. Unfortunately, in all three cases, government and World Bank officials were too inflexible to accommodate Katarista demands for greater participation and redirection in planned activities, and the projects gradually ground to a halt on a disappointing note.

During the early l980s, the "platforma de lucha" of the trade union CSUTCB reflected the influence of its Katarista leadership. One section called for supporting a "national system of appropriate technology based upon traditional knowledge and the technology of the campesinos and utilization of local resources so as to avoid foreign dependency and the use of inappropriate agricultural inputs that negatively effect the productive capacity of the soil (CSUTCB l984a)." The document also endorsed bilingual schools and literacy programs, and the mounting of a national network of health centers combining Western and indigenous medicine. Another document a year later resulted from a grassroots congress held to rewrite and propose a new agrarian reform with the help of Albo and other advisors. They also focused on the importance of indigenous history and cultural practices and values and establishing new collective land rights claims.

Kataristas used a variety of ethnic symbols such as displaying Andean textiles at their congresses. Indeed, a favorite image of Genaro Flores on CSTUCB pamphlets showed the leader seated behind a table draped with Aymara altiplano awayos (indigenous striped shawls) and flanked on either side by members of Bolivia's most culturally conservative ethnic group, the Quechua-speaking Tarabuquenos in ponchos whose colorful stripes symbolized the rainbow.

While helping to make the Bolivian countryside into a democratic political environment, the Kataristas called into question rampant, negative stereotypes about indigenous society. Although Kataristas showed only minimal interest in environmental concerns, they became Bolivia's first and most powerful voice against the social and economic inequalities and the top-down ethno-centrism of various Western cultural biases in development so heavily promoted by the MNR and the successor military regimes. They brought to the forefront bilingual education and literacy training in native languages, the importance of historic memory for forging Andean, Native American identities ("originarios") and claims to new rights as citizens rather than succumbing to the MNR and military designs (as well as the Bolivian political left) for being simply poor campesinos. By attaining independence from the state, any single political party and the military and a national stage for their pronouncements, they were successful in establishing cultural and political autonomy for the representative voices of the rural masses. Critics have pointed to contradictions in their support of Andean organizational forms (Hahn l996; Gregor Stroebel l996 ), but it must be kept in mind that Katarismo was an influential socio-cultural phenomenon that spilled over to influence many indigenous and non-indigenous activists promoting a wide ranging cultural revitalization agenda. Their vocal and activist presence helped pave the way for an upcoming decade of activism that would begin reshaping both the politics and design of many grassroots development activities.

While the Kataristas staged protest actions to push Aymara and Quechua cultural and socio-economic development agendas, it was not purely coincidental that ethnic minorities in the eastern lowlands of Santa Cruz were beginning to speak out against the homogenizing forces of modernization and uneven economic growth of their region. Sixty-five representatives of the Chiquitanos, Ayoreos, Guarayos, Izocenos, and Ava-Guarani ethnic groups from twenty-five communities sat down in October l982 to hold the "Primer Encuentro de Pueblos Indigenas del Oriente Boliviano" in a barrio in the city of Santa Cruz. In effect, they were taking the first steps as ethnic minorities of tropical eastern Bolivia to challenge and create alternatives to the Western modernization paradigm. Like the Kataristas, they wanted to make the most of rights to free association guaranteed within the country's rejuvenated democracy and call the country's attention to their unresolved grievances. In several ways, though, their priorities differed from those in the highlands. For instance, the national agrarian reform legislation of l953, which did not alter the social structure in their region, referred to them as "jungle groups in a savage condition with a primitive organization". Their farms were surrounded by powerful white and mestizo cattle ranchers, large commercial farmers, agro-businesses, and timber enterprises whose holdings had been bolstered by government and international aid. The region's campesino sindicatos, made up of colonists from the highlands, had offered the local indigenous groups little support. With this l982 meeting, the groups were going public with deeply felt grievances for the first time in modern history.

The delegates sat on chairs and benches in an outdoor courtyard enclosed on three sides by red brick office walls. Over the head table hung a map identifying the locations of the ethnic minorities participating in the meeting. The map was of Bolivia but if it had included Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina, it would have shown the wider spatial location of some of these same ethnic groups. At the bottom of the map were the Izocenos and Ava-Guaranies from the family and linguistic tree of the Guarani-speaking Chiriguanos. The Izocenos (population, 5,000) grew corn and raised small animals in a tiny corner of the Gran Chaco, the hot, dry savannas of thorny scrub extending into Paraguay and Argentina. Although the group had lost homeland territory to the expanding white ranchers, they had never lived within the Catholic missions as the Guarayo and Chiquitano participants had. Consequently, they were the only group in this gathering that had maintained a traditional form of self-government (the mburuvicha).

The Ava-Guarani (known historically as the Chiriguanos) (population, 40,000-50,000) subsisted on corn and other crops in the regions' Andean foothills. Their ancestors were among the fiercest opponents to cultural, economic, and political integration during the nineteenth century. Prior to the formation of the Bolivian republic, neither the Incas nor the Europeans had been able to subdue them militarily nor annex their homelands. They were tough adversaries indeed, as proven by their frequent extractions of tribute from white settlers and soldiers, astute political alliances with foes, and a technically advanced form of guerrilla warfare (Langer l990).

Similar to the indigenous peoples of the high valleys and altiplano, the traditional society of the Ava-Guarani began to unravel with the advent of the liberal land policies of the late nineteenth century, which triggered an unprecedented flood of white settlers and cattle onto their homelands. Two related factors altered the then-prevailing balance of power: the construction of strategically placed army forts and the willingness of mission Indians to fight on the side of the whites and mestizos (Langer 1990). After a string of military defeats, an Apiaguaiqui, a traditional Ava-Guarani chief and shaman or "man-god," led an all-out campaign to restore their communal holdings and drive the white invaders away forever. With neither sufficient warriors nor the firepower to succeed, this audacious campaign culminated in the l892 Battle of Kuruyuki, a bloody massacre of approximately 900 Ava-Guarani and a few allied Izocenos. This defeat marked the beginning of the end for Ava-Guarani hegemony in this frontier region. Survivors who attempted escape were persecuted while others were relocated to haciendas and Franciscan missions in the area (Pifarre l989, 396). When the missions disbanded during the twentieth century, Ava-Guarani families carved out small subsistence plots on the edges of the ranches in marginal farming areas, though some pockets of haciendas remained intact even after the l952 land reform programs(6).

Among the groups located in the northern-most section of the map were the Chiquitanos (population, 35,000) and Guarayos (population, 20,000). Hundreds of years earlier, both these tribes had been hunters and gatherers and tiny plot farmers in the dry forests of northern Santa Cruz, but their more recent experiences in Catholic missions had altered their economy (Riester l976; Smith l993, 52).

The contemporary Chiquitanos farmed tiny plots, worked as hired hands on local ranches and commercial farms, and picked fruit and collected honey in the nearby forests and pampas (Riester, l976, 130). They resided in six widely scattered zones and most had abandoned hunting of small game under pressures from timber and cattle operations. The largest cattle rancher in one of their vicinities was a Catholic bishop, a patriarch whose large herd prompted frequent jokes that his vicariate parish resembled a "vacariato" more than a "vicariato," a play on the Spanish word "vaca" signifying cow.

The Guarayos resided in a transition belt between the humid and dry forest areas. Their original habitat - fishing and hunting land, natural pasture, and small areas for farming - had been greatly reduced first by Franciscan missions (1840-1930) and subsequently by invading cattle ranchers and colonists from other regions (Lehm l995). The Guarayos were reputed to be virtuoso violinists during the colonial period and expert craftspeople who produced an array of vibrant artisan wares.

The Ayoreos (population, 3, 000- 4,000) were ex-nomads with only four decades of experience within the structures of modern society. They had been hunting, fishing, and gathering fruits and nuts along a wide swath in the southern Chaco plains until foreign missionaries, both Catholic and Evangelical, persuaded them to join Western society. They subsequently traded in this traditional mixed economy for a sedentary existence on a property obtained by the Protestant missions. This transition to Western ways had the tragic effect of turning them into some of the poorest, most helpless, and pitied ethnic groups of Santa Cruz.

The courtyard in which the Izocenos, Ayoreos, Chiquitanos and Guarayos held their first assembly was that of the Bolivian NGO, Ayuda Para el Campesino Indigena del Oriente Boliviano (APCOB). APCOB's staff of social scientists and engineers had been working since the late l970s to bring about this historic meeting. Its founder, Juergen Riester, a German anthropologist had researched and written En Busca de la Loma Santa, with colleague Bernardo Fischerman, on the tribes of the Amazon and other eastern lowlands of Bolivia in the mid l970s with the goal of enlightening Bolivians about some of their most unknown ethnic groups. In addition to his comprehensive research and activism, Riester had taught anthropology in Peru and listened to stories and reports from Amazonian leaders and activist anthropologists at his apartment in Lima during an era of political ferment. Peru's Amazonian tribes were organizing themselves into modern political organizations for the first time and Riester was able to observe both their problems and important breakthroughs at close range, and to bring these lessons back to Bolivia with him.

During the mid-l970s, while living for an extended period among the Izocenos, Riester had long conversations with Bonifacio Barrientos, a chief elder, and with Victor Vaca, a fairly well-educated younger tribesman, about a possible pan-tribal organization that would unite the indigenous minorities of eastern Bolivia into a common political front. Barrientos had proven credentials, having secured land rights for some of his communities, in l947. He had led a band of thirty "capitanes" and others across the mountain valleys and forested lowlands to the city of Cochabamba where they boarded a truck and traveled the rest of the way to reach their destination: the capital of Bolivia. Although a third of the group died en route, Barrientos and the other survivors succeeded in reaching the presidential palace and bringing back the first collective land titles to the Izoceno communities. Ironically, these titles were annulled by the 1952 land reform which put priority on granting rights to small parcels of land.

Vaca, the presiding officer of the assembly, had been groomed by APCOB to play a key leadership role. In 1978, with the assistance of APCOB staff members, he initiated the first contacts among these far-flung tribes by visiting the Ayoreos. He established a genuine dialogue with them despite their longstanding animosity toward outsiders, based on competition over the Chaco's scarce resources.

APCOB also prepared him for this historic encuentro by sending him to international conferences in Australia and Lima where in this heady international atmosphere the negative overtones that had historically been associated with the term "indigena" in Bolivia were magically transformed into instilling pride. At these meetings, indigenous representatives from across the globe vociferously advocated their long denied cultural rights and identities. Moved by such events and discourse, Vaca returned to Bolivia and solidified his working group of Icoceno activists Abelio Arambiza, Cecilo Gomez, and Dario Nandureza to set in motion an organization-building and ethnic unification process. The "Primer Encuentro" was a most significant step in the long journey underway.

Despite previous efforts at networking, most delegates were meeting one another for the first time and had little inkling of APCOB's past and future role. Throughout the meeting, Vaca exhorted them to share reflections among themselves about what it meant to be indigenous peoples in today's world and to "value their native cultural traditions." Since "indio" or "indigena" was about the worst insult heretofore to be said about someone, for many participants the new positive spin on the words, although intriguing, was downright threatening. All through the meeting the Izocenos and APCOB staff pushed the generic term "indigena" as a way of constructing a new identity, to support modern political and developmental activism, and to rally dispersed ethnic minorities toward a common cause. The use of the terms was also a way to distinguish themselves politically from the Kataristas who preferred the term, "originarios" or "first peoples," and thus gain greater political autonomy from the highland peoples who then dominated ethnic politics in the country (7).

Initial confusion and political inexperience caused many delegates to channel their petitions of assistance to APCOB. Oscar Castillo, a Peruvian sociologist on APCOB's staff, cleared up this difficulty. "Instead of APCOB, it's the Bolivian government that should have to satisfy the demands of your communities. Poor people have just as much right to have their interests represented by the state as rich people. Just look at the sugar cane growers and cattle ranchers who have obtained substantial benefits from the national government. The key is a representative organization and a political platform to make your specific needs known to these public officials. APCOB will help primarily to facilitate this organization-building and the follow-up activities in your communities and the city of Santa Cruz."

Over the course of the three days, the delegates focused on bread and butter issues -lack of agricultural credit, the need for land titles and health services, inadequate schooling, low prices for agricultural commodities, and low agricultural wages -issues common to Indian peasant meetings such as this. Yet Vaca and other Izocenos were insistent about the importance of stressing pan-indigenous culture within their emerging agenda. He insisted on hearing representatives of the various groups speak their diverse languages, even if most in attendance did not understand them. Vaca talked about the automatic discrimination found in public offices whenever indigenous languages were spoken and how those same languages could positively transform the learning environment of public schooling in their communities. He also reiterated the value of traditional medicine and the participants' duty to reaffirm its importance while in the presence of public officials.

He spoke harshly about Izocenos' experiences with national integration.

For many years, the governmental authorities looked upon the Izocenos and other Indians as a tremendous burden on the rest of society, and held us responsible for the country's economic backwardness. That image was altered somewhat by the Chaco War when those 'useless, idle Indians' went to the trenches as soldiers and defended a fatherland at war with Paraguay. Because of our service on the battlefield, the government subsequently helped us with some of our problems in relation to abuses by local ranchers and it provided teachers for our public schools, yet private ranches continue to interfere with our lives and livelihood, and whites have run our schools over the past almost 50 years without knowing our language and culture. The educational advancement of our children has suffered greatly from the exclusive use of Spanish (APCOB tape of meeting).

One of the most poignant statements about the cultural costs of integration was expressed in barely intelligible Spanish by an Ayoreo.

We were once a strong community with ample room for hunting and fishing in a large zone of grasslands and thorn forests. As a chief of my people, I led our move to join Western civilization by accepting plans for us worked out by evangelical missionaries. They resettled us on a small ranch-size property which cut us off from our former nomadic way of life. The missionaries promised that we'd receive more enjoyment from life and become greater than other men in the world. That promise did not turn out to be true. In the good old days, I wore the jaguar skin hat of a chief, and this gave me a great feeling of pride and self-importance, especially when clan members would walk up and place feathers of jungle birds on it as a demonstration of their respect for me. My current way of life, by contrast, has made me feel like a child again.

Despite these poignant remarks, many participants were shy about revealing humiliating experiences to a gathering of mostly unfamiliar faces. Yet everyone left determined to revitalize organizations in their communities and to form the basic building blocks of a multi-ethnic, regional organization under the name, Central del Pueblos Indigenas del Oriente Boliviano (CIDOB).

One of the most exciting and best organized federations springing up in CIDOB's wake was the "Asamblea del Pueblo Guarani" representing the Ava-Guarani from the Cordillera province and forging the revival of their traditional mvubirachas organization. While the other ethnic-based affiliates to CIDOB had received training and support from APCOB, the Ava-Guarani had benefitted enormously from the assistance of CIPCA, more known for its work with Aymara Katarista organizations in La Paz. Xavier Albo and his colleagues applied the potent combination of action and research to enable local indigenous leadership and democratic structures to flourish in new ways (Albo l990a; Pifarre l989). CIPCA's efforts contributed to one of the country's best local networks of experimental bilingual schools (Guarani-Spanish). The Asamblea subsequently grew to incorporate Guarani communities from the regions of Chuquisaca and Tarija as well.

CIDOB's affiliates also initiated numerous small-scale socio-economic development projects under APCOB's umbrella-level supervision. Their "social-forestry" projects, for example, caught the attention of national and international environmentalists and foresters interested in halting indiscriminate logging operations. On another front, in the capital city, CIDOB members initiated the legal process to acquire land titles for communities that had yet to receive important benefits from national land reform programs.

During the mid-l980's, CIDOB began a quest for an entirely different concept of land rights than that advanced by the MNR. The new land rights conception was based on the "territory," a term that connoted a collective rather than an individual unit, belonging to a geographically situated ethnic group rather than to an individual family. This term did not simply refer to land, but an ethnic group's right to autonomous self-government and the inherent value of its cosmovision about and collective rights to the flora, fauna, water, soil, forest, and other available natural resources. It implied the utilization of technologies by indigenous communities that conserved rather than destroyed natural resources. In effect, CIDOB was giving the highland-led indigenous social movements in Bolivia the missing environmental dimension and thus adding a new concept that would help create their modern political identity for making demands on the Bolivian state. The term was first adopted at a l984 meeting of COICA, a Pan-Amazonian confederation of indigenous organizations from the entire Amazonian river system - groups from Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Brazil attended along with CIDOB, representing Bolivia. These delegates deliberated long and hard over a suitable term, and according to Richard Smith an activist from OXFAM America who was present at the meeting, the delegates were impressed by the territorial strategies of the Iroquois nation in North America. By embracing this territorial banner, CIDOB was in effect adding a very important environmental dimension to the indigenous social movements in Bolivia.

To advance "territorial rights" as part of an emerging indigenous identity and agenda, CIDOB and APCOB began advocating not only the acquisition of land titles for their constituents but a change in the national laws. They began enlisting sympathetic NGOs, grassroots organizations, the public radio media and environmental organizations, along with social activists from the Catholic Church, to work together through educational seminars, workshops, and educational events.

CIDOB carried its banner of cultural revitalization and territorial rights to the neighboring Beni region. The Izocenos and Guarayos first made contact with the Cabildo Indigenal in the old Jesuit mission town of Trinidad. While impressed with the suprisingly strong ethnic identity of the urban cabildo members, they soon found a different reality in the rural Beni area, where the Mojenos and other ethnic groups were undergoing rapid acculturation to Western ways. To bring these groups aboard, the CIDOB staffers began inviting indigenous leaders to attend their congresses in Santa Cruz where indigenous identity was one of the main topics of discussion and debate. After recruiting some of these leaders from the Beni, they along with NGO's and church-based organizations assisted the emerging federations there when this region was swept up in its own ethnic movement of cultural revitalization in the late l980s.

Although not widely known even within Santa Cruz through most of the l980s and lacking the activist flair of the Kataristas, CIDOB catalyzed tiny, ethnic minorities to work together in the lowlands. CIDOB's supervision and management of small-scale development projects had some serious difficulties due, according to anthropologist Silvia Hirsch, to its tendency to operate with a top-down management style from the regional capital. Nonetheless, CIDOB's growing influence in radio programming and NGO-sponsored workshops and seminars was forging a new and growing agenda in favor of indigenous rights. Other NGOs and grassroots federations quickly followed CIDOB's example.

In tandem with the grassroots indigenous movements, radical changes within the country's social sciences were reshaping social theory in such a way as to support the revitalization of the country's diverse cultural patrimony. The best place to view this sequence of change in intellectual focus and related grassroots social commitment is at the Universidad Nacional de San Andres, the country's major public university located in the capital city.

During the l970s, San Andres offered the most extensive course offerings in the social sciences, including courses on theories of social and economic development, within Latin America. During that decade the field of sociology had evolved from a smattering of courses in the law school curriculum to a bona fide university department (facultad). Lagging far behind them, however, was the facultad of anthropology which was not established until the mid-l980s - another obvious sign of neo-colonialism.

With the help of foreign scholars and Bolivian social scientists returning from centers throughout Latin America and Western Europe, especially the University of Louvain in Belgium, the number of sociology courses using Marxian and neo-Marxian theory multiplied within the university curriculum. According to historian Rene Arze, who was a student at that time,

It was an era very much influenced by the Cuban revolution when everyone talked in orthodox Marxian terms of the 'proletariat,' the 'national bourgeoisie,' and the 'theories of labor surplus,' while those interested in, say, the Chaco's indigenous peoples were still seen as a bunch of weirdos, totally out of touch with mainstream intellectual and political thinking. An ethnographic museum in the capital was where these folks which included two anthropologists by the same name of Ramiro Molina usually met to organize seminars and lectures that drew only a small group of people.

The Neo-Marxian dependency school, shaped by theorists such as the German Andre Gunder Frank and the Brazilian sociologist and current president of the country, Fernando Enrique Cardoza, had the greatest appeal for students as a theory for explaining the socio-economic underdevelopment of Bolivia (Barnadas l987). By turning modernization theory inside out, "dependency theory" provided new analytic tools for understanding the growing economic linkages of trade, aid, and investment between Latin American nations and northern industrial countries. For aficionados of dependency theory, it was transplanted Western values, institutions, and technologies for transforming society along capitalist lines that were leading to deepening poverty. Bolivian students, professors and professionals observed the low and falling national earnings for their government from wildly fluctuating mineral prices in Western export markets. They were also critical of the social and economic inequalities between whites, mestizos, and indigenous peoples that widened through economic growth. Dependency theory helped to describe how and why this was happening. While useful corrective lenses, in some respects, neither the Marxist nor the dependency paradigm gave any importance to the positive role of indigenous culture. Gunder Frank went so far as to say that the Indians "lacked culture" (Frank l969,136). Still others argued that Indian culture would disappear through the expansion of market systems (Reed l995).

This national blindspot in social science began to open up as scholarly works in Andean studies (anthropology, ethnohistory, ethnomedicine, rural sociology, socio-linguistics, etc.) proliferated in Peru, Western Europe, and the U.S., and made their way to Bolivia. By the end of the 1970s, their cumulative scholarly output was comparable in quality and quantity to the rich literature of Meso-american studies (Larson l995)(8). For example, historian Brooke Larson pointed out a convergence in the analytical frameworks of rural sociologists, historians, and anthropologists that threw new light on the contribution made by Andean ethnic groups to the colonial market system. Whereas historians previously had depicted the Andean peoples to be fallen race as passive, helpless victims of destructive European invasion, this new genre of research depicted dynamic indigenous peoples who had rebuilt societal institutions through a myriad of grassroots initiatives in different sectors.

One impressive example was the control exercised by Aymara herders in the overland transport by llama caravan of silver bullion from Potosi, across the Andean chain, to the Spanish colony's two main southern export cities (Platt l995; Larson l995). In her description of the indigenous peoples influential, adaptive but self respecting attitude toward their cultures, Larson wrote, "Their native political structures and kin-based and barter reciprocities were used to 'redirect agriculture toward commercial ends: engage in trade and commerce, pursue artisanry and wage labor, mortgage, sell and purchase…(Larson l995;19)

The emergence of these scholarly works and research trends dovetailed with and provided more solid intellectual footing for the Kataristas' emerging agendas. Influential intellectual activists - men such as Cardenas and Albo - used this literature to enhance their conceptions of the role of ethnicity in social mobilization, politics, education and Bolivian rural development.

Within the Bolivian university setting, it was the new and growing sociology faculty, with support from a handful of emerging professional historians, that began transforming the horizon of social analysis, setting into place a fundamentally different view of the role of indigenous culture and ethnicity, and conceiving new analytical frameworks for studying society and history. This intellectual movement was led by Silvia Rivera Cusiqanqui, a young, independent-minded professor and brilliant analyst of national political and social issues. For the daughter of a prominent medical doctor, Rivera was unusual in having a second surname that was indigenous. Cusiqanqui revealed bloodlines of Aymara hereditary chieftains ("caciques") from the La Paz-based aristocracy active during the colonial period. Rivera's growing curiosity about Katarismo and her Aymara roots led her to do field-work in remote altiplano Pacajes province, a hotbed of Katarismo. This exploration of her Andean heritage and a pursuit of scientific tools for dissecting the problems of the countryside took her to Peru where, with the help of Bolivian anthropologist Jorge Dandler, she enrolled in master's degree program in Andean anthropology.

Rivera's personal and professional experiences resulted in a burning commitment to bring awareness of ethnic identity and indigenous culture into the university. She formed a small group of like-minded intellectual, friends such as historian Rene Arze and, together with foreigners such as Frenchmen Thierry Saignes, and Briton Tristan, Platt put together a new journal AVANCES to publish research emerging from the new school of revisionist ethno-history. By the late seventies, Rivera realized that the students most often deemed to be most reticent in the university classes- young Aymara students from urban migrant and rural community social backgrounds- would be the natural and productive allies in building an authentic indigenous focus within higher education. She was soon joined by an Aymara student activist organization named Bartolina Sisa, in honor of Tupak Katari's rebel companion, which had successfully eliminated barriers blocking Aymara students from using the university cafeteria.

Among the first to stand out in this Aymara university group was Tomas Huanca, who had been born in a mud hut near Lake Titicaca where he had lived until he was twenty. He then studied on scholarship at several private Catholic institutions, where his consistent record of educational excellence led to teachers college and a brief career in rural-school teaching- a common path of upward social mobility among Aymara. A yearning for greater intellectual and social challenges led Huanca to enroll in the Sociology faculty where he eventually joined Rivera's quest to bring the university community into touch with indigenous issues. One of his first intellectual contributions was a sparkling thesis showing how MNR cadres had steered the revolutionary process away from indigenous values and organizational practices in communities near Lake Titicaca.

Huanca and Rivera's joint efforts abruptly ended when a l980 military coup forced Rivera into exile in Mexico where she authored the widely read work, Oppressed But Not Defeated: Peasant Struggles among the Aymara and Qhechwa in Bolivia, l900- l980, covering indigenous rebellions against the state. Upon her return to Bolivia with the restoration of democracy in late l982, she and Huanca founded the Andean Oral History Workshop (Taller de Historia Oral Andino) (THOA) which quickly became a magnet for Aymara students wanting to uncover Aymara and Quechua history long shunned by the academic and political establishment. THOA used pathbreaking oral history research methods that enabled young researchers to tap into a rich repository of oral traditions found in the rural altiplano communities (9).

The oral history method was combined this work with research in a history archive in La Paz, which contained the judicial records of land disputes. The first of its kind in the capital city, the archive had been set up in the early l970s and partly administered by an Aymara history student, Roberto Choque. Choque became Bolivia's first professionally trained Aymara historian despite the institutional barriers in his path. The biggest disadvantage was his difficulty with spoken Spanish given his rural monolingual family background. As historian Rene Arze points out, "Native Aymara speakers have the same problem Germans have in speaking Spanish. The two languages don't match well." Yet despite Choque's personal struggles he became an actor in changing the contours of his discipline within the university and went on to publish important works. Within Bolivian universities, history had been the domain of amateur historians together with professionals from the fields of law and politics, who were apt to confine indigenous peoples to their footnotes (10). Choque's organization of the first archive for students and scholars in La Paz was essential for recovering a broader perspective. THOA was one of the first university groups to take advantage of this resource for probing Bolivia's hidden past.

One of the most intriguing stories brought to light by THOA's innovative research was a non-violent ayllu movement of the l920s led by an illiterate Aymara authority, Santos Marka Thola of Pacajes province, who defended indigenous collective land rights by using colonial documents from the Spanish Crown to argue before government offices and the courts. This activism eventually got him a jail term as an "Indian Subversive." Despite this confinement, his communications continued uninterrupted, with a large ayllu network of some 400 communities maintaining a permanent state of non-violent mobilization. THOA turned this academic narrative into a dramatic story broadcast to Aymara-speaking radio listeners in hundreds of altiplano communities. Similar to the previously mentioned Tupak Katari movement story, the Santos Marka Thola story climbed to the top of the popularity charts of rural radio programming in the altiplano towns and hamlets.

THOA's rising profile in the academic community was due not only to its unconventional Andean themes and methodologies but also to the off-beat "intercultural" events sponsored by the organization. Aymara was spoken along with Spanish for the first time at public university events and on occasion the indigenous rural social etiquette of acullicu, a communal sharing of coca leaves for solidarity and friendship, took place in lieu of serving wine. The likes of Victor Hugo Cardenas, linguist Juan de Dios Yapita, sociologists Esteban Ticona and Ramon Conde among others stepped into the public spotlight here as prominent members of an emerging Aymara intelligentsia.

Simultaneously, THOA's dynamic publications program was reaching out to a broader readership(11). THOA was not only adding to the academic literature but creating bilingual texts that a decade later would be in school libraries across the country - among the first fruits of the new bilingual education reform law.

THOA's activity received complementary support in l984 from a new local publishing house called Historia Social Boliviana (HISBOL). The aim of HISBOL was to translate the work of French, English, German, United States and Peruvian scholars of Andean affairs into inexpensive, pocket-size Spanish books for distribution in Bolivia. HISBOL's publication program kept expanding and by the end of the decade, the shelves of its La Paz bookstore adjacent to the university were crammed with books on such topics as native organizations, crops, pastures, medicines, textile art, and technology, etc.

HISBOL's Peruvian founder, Javier Medina, was trained as a philosopher in Europe and first learned about Andean community life while a young boy on a hacienda administered by his father. Having observed the boom in Andean studies in Peru during the l970s, and finding little of it reaching Bolivian bookshelves, he set out to rectify this situation on his own .

HISBOL's books were devoured by a growing readership. Albo continued to churn out publication after publication on the country's new ethno-politics and many other related topics in history, political sociology, and socio-linguistics through the publishing program of CIPCA, the Jesuit NGO that employed him. A series of multi-disciplinary congresses of "Estudios Bolivianos" began taking place during the l980s, highlighting the work of a number of new "Andeanists" working with NGO programs in rural development and research. HISBOL and Medina offered a holistic, indigenous-based view of rural development in the Andes by emphasizing that native cultural pluralism was part of the same landscape as the bio-diversity of plants and animals in both mountain and the jungle environments.

Having funded a sizeable number of these projects, I was delighted by the contributions of these two intellectual institutions, THOA and HISBOL, particularly since colleagues at the IAF had at first doubted the practical and social utility and the wisdom of providing these funds. These emerging Andean and Amazonian perspectives contrasted with the development theories of both the modernization and dependency schools (and other political economy theory as well) that had overlooked the positive role indigenous culture without throwing out the important concepts of political economy and social class.

In addition to the paradigm shifts in the Bolivian social sciences, winds blowing from abroad during the last half of the l980s and early l990s further accelerated the process of cultural revitalization. One of these currents arose in relation to the environmentalist crisis in the Amazon region. The devastation of the rain forest focused international attention on the intermingled issues of cultural pluralism, economic justice, and the proper management of natural resources. The outcry of environmentalists brought heightened interest and respect among many NGO and grassroots organizations for indigenous knowledge and cultural practices. Bolivian environmental organizations sprouted. Also new international organizations enthusiastically stepped into this context with funds for conservation of bio-diversity, wildlife, and soil. The environmental emphasis also had effects in Bolivian universities where courses such as range land ecology and agro-ecology eventually gained a legitimate place. Some institutions working on environmental issues related to bio-reserves and national parks began consulting with the native peoples. Suddenly many international environmental organizations with money to spend on technical assistance, studies, and training for small as well as large projects began setting up programs in Bolivia and exploring ways, both successful and unsuccessful, to work with Indians and save the environment.

The spreading environmental consciousness led to public appreciation for Bolivians who had long celebrated the country's many contributions to the world's biodiversity yet had received only minimal government financing, recognition, and other support. This group included a deceased botanist by the name of Martin Cardenas and scientists such as Armando Cardozo, often referred to as the "lonely llama herder" for his single-minded devotion to his country's camelids; Gilberto Hinojosa, who championed the cause of tarhui; and Humberto Gandarillas who emphasized a greater appreciation for the livestock, crops, and other resources native to the Andes.

Perhaps the best example of this lonely crusader bucking the establishment to celebrate native resources was Humberto Alcerreca whose pioneering work led to greater recognition for the altiplano's native pastures. During four years of agronomy studies in Cochabamba in the early l970s, he remembered hearing only once about a native pasture from the altiplano--a reference to "ichu" a kind of bunch grass with little nutritional value. He told me that

Upon graduation, my first job was at an altiplano research station, yet I quickly discovered that the modern technological package I had learned in my department was useless under these conditions. My boss sent me to conduct field trials with North American alfalfa grasses at 4,000 meters above sea level near the Andean ranges close to the Pacajes province near the Chilean border. I watched in horror as one variety after another failed to survive the climate and then my boss blamed the results on my field research skills. I finally began inquiring among the resident herders about what they used and learned the names of different grasses of this locality in Aymara.

Alcerreca received encouragement in his inquiry from an unusual scientist by the name of Carl Parker, who was an authority on native pastures from the Great Basin area of the American West who was with the Utah State University program in Bolivia. Alcerreca was thrilled to find a distinguished scientist as kindred spirit and told me that,

Suddenly, my eyes were seeing a totally different world and I was realizing how little I knew about the natural resources, traditional technologies and agrarian history of my own country. I found some literature in Peru about Andean native grasses and related historical and anthropological topics on agriculture and pastoralism as little had been published on the former in Bolivia. It then dawned on me that it was none other than these native pastures that provided middle-class Bolivians like myself living at high altitudes with our daily requirements of meat, cheese and milk, and that such natural resources dated back thousands of years in contrast to the alfalfa varieties being brought to Bolivia which had only a century or so of history.

Alcerreca proceeded to select native altiplano grasses as a thesis topic, making his academic committee most unhappy. Parker certainly helped in giving this first Bolivian study of native grasses some muchneeded academic legitimacy. Then at Utah State University Alcerreca avidly pursued this academic interest in the field of range-land ecology and related subjects. Upon returning to a job at the Patacamaya research station in Bolivia, he assembled over the next few years the country's first herbarium of this kind, amounting to 3,000 species of native grasses. His supervisor and foreign aid and national government technicians were vociferous in their complaints about this conservation work at the experiment station. Fortunately, Germans organizing similar collections at a recently founded Institute of Ecology in La Paz gave these plants a permanent home.

Battling such institutional obstacles only increased his determination. He subsequently added a doctoral degree in the same field and became Bolivia's leading authority and advocate on this topic during the decade of the l980s. He spread this ecological consciousness to a new generation of university students through twenty-four thesis projects. Many of these students were of rural Aymara descent attending the new agronomy faculty in La Paz and went on to carry this specialized knowledge about the altiplano into many non-governmental as well as public development programs and agencies. During the l990s, the Red de Pastizales (a network of native pasture advocates among public and NGO agencies) signaled a new degree of appreciation for these long overlooked cultural resources.

Media fanfare over the Columbus Quincentenary in the late l980s and early l990s created a tremendous reservoir of sympathy for native peoples and respect for their many contributions to the modern world. This change in public opinion helped to discredit "assimilationist" policies.

The several year build-up to the year of the quincentenary inspired UNITAS, Bolivia's largest and most prestigious NGO network, to sponsor three seminars on "Multi-cultural Reality and Its Challenge to NGOs" to share this emerging indigenous perspective. UNITAS was an umbrella organization representing dozens of organizations from different regions of the country. Many of the UNITAS member organizations were led by persons that had heavily identified with the mineworkers as the main force for radical social and political change only to watch this initiative evaporate with the dismissal of 22,000 mineworkers (out of a total of 25,000) from their jobs under the l985 structural adjustment plan. UNITAS was now looking to the countryside for new labor movement leadership and finding it in the indigenous causes. The document produced at the conclusion of the seminar stated that,

Rural development activities undertaken in Bolivia often operate within a framework that is out of sync with the logic and traditions of the local population. This frequently leads to numerous barriers and conflicts blocking community participation and producing questionable social and economic development results in projects. This situation gives rise to a kind of 'pact of minimal common interests' between development practitioners and the community for transplanting an inappropriate Western model to a specific rural locality. This prevailing approach to development negates building close ties between the two projects groups and making adjustments in plans and institutional methods to fit the goals, logic, institutions, and traditions of the native inhabitants (UNITAS l991, 14).

Aymara and Quechua representatives together with Izocenos, Guarayos, and Tupi-Guaranies from CIDOB voiced their concerns in these interchanges between the NGO representatives. Evelio Arambiza, an Izoceno, made a memorable remark when he said,

By speaking of 'pueblos indigenas' and 'territory', political parties and even some NGOs said we were out of the political game, outside Bolivian reality, that we were trying to hold back the march of history. We would spend much time criticizing these intellectuals because they're great copiers: we import noodles, we import wheat flour and we also import ideology, because we don't analyze the contributions of our organized indigenous peoples, with their own models of development, organization, nation-state, economy, education and health"(UNITAS l991, 76).

Many others spoke in the same spirit and advocated moving beyond ethnicity to the more empowering and politically charged term of "nationalities." The legal recognition of traditional indigenous authorities and their organizations of ayllus, cabildos, and communidades, became more deeply appreciated in these events for their long history in action, much longer than the Bolivian state itself.

Outside of Bolivia, indigenous issues were becoming hot subjects in multi-lateral and bilateral financial agencies which had begun bringing indigenous representatives and their pressing development issues to their plush boardroom. During the l990s, the Inter-American Development Bank(IDB) eschewed its earlier integrationist outlook to oversee the creation of a "Peoples Indigenous Fund," spearheaded by a Bolivian president and headquartered in La Paz, for brokering international financial resources for projects administered by indigenous organizations throughout the hemisphere (12).

The World Bank also joined other multilaterals in this pro-indigenous chorus. During the l980s, it hired several anthropologists, one of whom was Shelton Davis, founder of the Anthropology Resource Center, one of the most prominent activist organizations in the United States working on South American indigenous issues. It inaugurated a small program aiming to benefit indigenous federations. As a result of this new focus, Bolivian indigenous leaders began jetting back and forth to World Bank headquarters for consultations, and participating in special World Bank management training workshops held in Latin America. In the late l990s, the World Bank launched a kind of "affirmative action" program in Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia by targeting "indigenous peoples" in their loan documents which also referred to ethnic discrimination toward indigenous peoples as a key barrier to indigenous development. This later analysis was also major reversal from earlier l960's proposition which viewed indigenous culture as a main development problem. In Bolivia, the preliminary planning document of the World Bank loan dubbed this new program "development with identity," endorsing the "values, norms, and technologies that the indigenous peoples themselves have been constructing through their own civilizations..." (World Bank l998)(13).

USAID is another major donor agency that switched gears during the l990s to take a more explicit indigenous-resource stance in financing agricultural development and environmental projects in Bolivia. By the mid-l990s, USAID had financed the largest ecological park ever established in Bolivia, a park stretching across the Chaco. The Izocenos, who were given major responsibilities in this environmental protection scheme, were to govern the project through their traditional community institutions, the mbubiricha. together with a new local development foundation. Meanwhile back in the Western highlands, USAID was busy funding the expansion of quinoa exports and the repopulation of prairies with llamas.

The UN's Food and Agriculture Organization launched a program to enhance worldwide food production supporting the thousands of obscure edible plant species and animals that had been ignored in earlier programs (Washington Post l993), and as mentioned, the U.S. National Science Council in l989 released a new publication making the case for the importance of underutilized Andean native crops.

The International Labor Organization (ILO) had long ago abandoned its l950s "integrationist" approach. Much earlier than the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, or USAID in embracing this focus, it had become a worldwide advocate for the constitutional rights of tribal and native peoples (Brysk 1994, 34). In 1991 the ILO replaced the l954 Convention emphasizing cultural integrationism with the "Revised Convention 169," obtaining signatures from eighty national governments, including Bolivia. All signatories agreed "to recognize the aspirations of indigenous peoples to assume control of their own institutions, way of life and economic development and to maintain and fortify their identities, languages, and religions within the nation states in which they live" (ILO l991, 5). This Convention also called for the adoption of special measures to protect the persons, institutions, property, work, culture, and environments enabling peoples so that they would benefit fully from their human rights and fundamental liberties without obstacles or discrimination. It obligated the national governments to protect their collective rights and integrity as "peoples." One of its main movers and shakers was Bolivian anthropologist Jorge Dandler who in his official capacity enthusiastically carried these concepts to indigenous peoples as well as the national governments throughout the hemisphere. In l993 the UN General Assembly declared the official "UN Year of Indigenous Peoples", and then in l995 made this into a "Decade of Culture" to be celebrated. And in l992, the Nobel Peace Prize went to a Guatemalen indigenous woman, Rigoberta Menchu- another important sign of the growing worldwide respect for indigenous peoples.

While none of the forementioned agencies apologized for their past oversights, ignorance and prejudices toward indigenous peoples, Pope John Paul II in l993 conducted such moral hand-wringing in a speech at Santa Domingo and in l998 a Canadian minister of education apologized publicly to his country's native peoples for past government having earlier compulsory re-education programs aiming to suppress their cultural identities. To top these reversals, the King of Spain traveled to Bolivia to meet with the Izocenos and Ava-Guarani and sign a peace treaty with them to bring symbolic closure to a conflict in which the Spaniards had been held to a standstill and had never formally ended. Clearly, on many fronts a new day was dawning, bringing some new found respect to indigenous peoples in Bolivian and throughout the Americas.