Historical Memory

Historical Memory:The Struggle for the Miners' Archive in Bolivia S. Sándor John (bio) In late 2019, Bolivia's first Indigenous president, Evo Morales, was toppled amid a wave of police mutinies and street demonstrations dominated by right-wing opposition leaders and civic associations. The dénouement came on 10 November, when the head of the armed forces – who, like many other officers involved in Morales' ouster, was trained at the US Army's School of the Americas – called on the president to step down. Morales, together with vice-president Álvaro García Linera, took refuge in Mexico. A Christian fundamentalist senator, Jeanine Áñez, proclaimed herself president. Le Monde diplomatique noted that Áñez has "surrounded herself with members of the military," politicians with links to ultra-rightist anti-Indigenous groups, "and big employers' representatives. None of them have been elected to the posts they hold."1 From Washington, President Donald Trump and his secretary of state Mike Pompeo hailed the events as a triumph for democracy. The presidential palace that Áñez took over, as a uniformed soldier helped her don the presidential sash, is called the Palacio Quemado – the "Burnt Palace" – because it was set on fire in an 1875 coup attempt. As of now, counting last November's takeover, Bolivia has had 189 coups. [End Page 99] Bolivia and Historical Memory An in-depth academic history of labour struggles at one of Bolivia's most famous mines is titled The Power of Memory.2 Perhaps nowhere else in the hemisphere is it more vividly apparent than in Bolivia that how history is told is a question of power in the present and that the relation between collective memory and social power is never fixed in time, nor set in stone, or in the pages of books. There, as I kept seeing and learning anew in the course of my research – much of it carried out at the Miners' Archive – history keeps bursting from beneath the cobblestones and into the present. "The Bible has returned to the palace," declared Áñez upon her installation in the Palacio Quemado. The statement harked back to her denunciation, as "Satanic," of the annual celebration of the Aymara New Year, which Morales had launched at the ruins of a pre-Inca site built seven centuries before the Spanish Conquest. For Bolivia's traditional elite, laying claim to the heritage of the conquistadors, and often to direct descent from them, was long a matter of pride. In recent years, more than a few were alarmed when Morales's speeches evoked a different legacy: that of Tupac Katari, the Aymara insurgent who, from his base in El Alto, laid siege to La Paz in 1781 and is said to have declared, before the Spanish authorities had him torn to pieces, "I will return, and I will be millions." As for Simón Bolívar, for whom the country is named, El Libertador's most famous brief for Latin American independence was a polemic over the facts and meaning of history, aimed at overturning Spain's claims to rule legitimately over its colonies.3 After defeating the armies of the Crown, in 1825 he revisited the battlefield of memory, travelling to the city of Potosí to climb the "silver mountain" that had given the vanquished empire so much of its wealth and raison d'être. A century later, as tin – a commodity now central to armaments production and provisioning for soldiers – replaced silver as the basis for Bolivia's economy, miners drawn from Quechua and Aymara villages began to take their place among the most militant working-class sectors in the world. Though still a minority of the population, they spearheaded the Bolivian Revolution of 1952. After a new cycle of coups installed a series of rightist regimes in the 1960s and 1970s, one of Bolivia's most influential intellectuals noted that the proletariat of this plundered and impoverished nation had developed "the best historical sense of any of the continent's working classes."4 The observation [End Page 100] came as new struggles erupted against military dictator Hugo Banzer, another School of the Americas graduate.5 In the 1980s, with neoliberalism sweeping...

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