When telling this story in Sacaba, I attempted to make clear my opposition to the drug war by emphasizing that we students had cheered along vigorously with the protesters in Quechua, “Long live coca [Kausachun coca]!” And when the protesters shouted, “Die, Yankees [Wañuchun yanquis]!” I narrated to my always-rapt audience, we students echoed “Wañuchun yanquis!” before realizing what the Quechua words meant. I mimicked our embarrassment once we understood. This story was a hit. It always elicited shouts of laughter and a clamor to tell the story of “wañuchun gringuitos [die, little gringos]” once more.
When close friends in Choro requested this story time after time for an appreciative audience of their relatives and neighbors, they were giving me the opportunity to demonstrate my support for the coca growers’ unions, to which many of them belonged. At the same time, the ridiculous picture of twenty college students haplessly condemning ourselves in Quechua provided an opportunity for my friends to poke fun at an intrusive foreign power and express their anger at U.S. meddling in Bolivia. The U.S. government had created an area of intense violence in the Chapare and directly curtailed Chapareños’ possibilities for upward mobility while also deliberately protecting the wealth of the United States at the expense of Bolivians, many Bolivians believed.
These mixed sentiments—of admiration of the United States as a symbol of economic power to which Bolivians aspired for themselves as a nation and as individuals, and frustration at the continual squelching of these aspirations by foreign powers such as the United States—are common among Bolivians of many social classes but are particularly emblematic of new middle classes. The next chapter traces the origins of Sacaba’s middle class through historical shifts that provided opportunities for upward mobility and challenges to this mobility. I examine this cohort in the context of the Third World, Bolivia, and the regional space of Cochabamba.
Chapter 1
The Formation of a New Middle Class
Marisol, a Sacaba pharmacist, provides one example of the difficulties the MAS government faced in convincing most Bolivians to identify themselves as indigenous members of the working or campesino (peasant) classes. In August 2009, four years after Evo was elected president, Marisol was thirty-three years old. She had opened her pharmacy five years before in Sacaba’s busy provincial town plaza after becoming the first person in her family to go to college. Marisol wore her straight, jet-black hair long, in the style of many working-class women in Bolivia’s cities and provincial towns, and she was always immaculately groomed. The three large glass cases in which she displayed her medicines for sale were kept shining and dust free, no easy feat given Sacaba’s year-round wind and dust. Despite her fastidious cleaning, however, business was often slow; Sacaba was filled with competing pharmacies. Furthermore, the stalls of local street vendors—a key element of the informal economy that had sustained the majority of Bolivians since the beginning of free-market reforms nearly twenty-five years before—had gradually expanded to fill the street in front of the pharmacy. The pharmacy entrance was now almost hidden by rows of stalls selling school supplies, bootleg DVDs, and baby clothes. On most days when we chatted, Marisol and I faced only occasional interruptions by customers seeking a pregnancy test or aspirin.
On this particular day in 2009, as Marisol sniffled through a winter cold, she explained vehemently to me that she strongly opposed the Morales government’s promise to redistribute large landowners’ vacant property to landless campesinos. She did not believe the MAS government’s contention that the vast inequality of land tenure in Bolivia was caused by prior military governments’ illegal gifts of millions of acres of land to already wealthy families. Instead, she asserted, those landowners who owned hundreds of thousands of acres must have earned them through hard work and sacrifice, as her parents had earned a modest ten acres when she was a baby by moving from the drought-stricken central Bolivian countryside to settle a tropical homestead in eastern Bolivia. About the large landowners’ potential losses in Evo’s proposed land reform, she maintained,
What this government wants to do is take control of this land … and give it to other people…. That’s not good…. The campesinos are supporting him [Evo] blindly, but in the future, these laws will affect them [prejudicially], too…. Those people who have large landholdings, it’s not right [to take their land away] because they have perhaps bought it with their sacrifice or inherited it from a relative. What he [Evo] says is that they have stolen it from other people during previous governments. But to me, this doesn’t seem true. I believe that Evo just wants to make them appear bad, those he calls … what’s that term he uses? “Capitalists”?
Marisol asserted that the Bolivian superelite had gained their land lawfully and that campesinos had been duped. Campesinos were “blindly” supporting land reform even though they could suffer by having their tiny holdings confiscated in the future. Her characterization of land inequality as resulting from the hard work of the superwealthy contrasted with a barrage of scholarly studies that showed Bolivia’s land inequality rising dramatically during the previous forty years directly owing to government handouts of land and agricultural subsidies to the very rich (e.g., Prudencio Bohrt 1991; Gill 1987; Fabricant 2012). By 1984, 3.9 percent of landowners had come to own 91 percent of agricultural land through such government favoritism (Weisbrot and Sandoval 2008:2), and no land redistribution had taken place since. Marisol also disagreed with the assertion by social movements and the Morales government that Bolivia’s extreme inequality represented a moral wrong that required a remedy by the government.
Marisol instead narrated Bolivia’s history through the framework of her own family’s experience of modest upward mobility. Her parents had taken advantage of a 1960s-era government program for small-scale farmers from western and central Bolivia to receive free land and tools if they moved to the tropical lowlands to grow soy, cotton, sugar, and peanuts. It was through their hard work, Marisol and her father had told me, that her parents had built up prosperity measured proudly by their ownership of a mechanized tractor and enough disposable income to send her to the university. She and her parents had worked hard so that she would not share their self-identification as a campesina who spoke the indigenous language, Quechua, but rather as a middle-class professional. And they had succeeded: she was a pharmacist married to an agronomist who was also among the first from his rural community to earn a college degree.
Marisol’s views coincided closely with the statements of Bolivia’s tiny, light-skinned, superwealthy class. Kiko Aguilera, one of Bolivia’s wealthiest men, owner of thousands of acres of tropical ranch land and leader of an elite right-wing political opposition movement, declared in 2006 soon after Evo’s election: “I’ve worked hard for everything that I own…. We haven’t stolen anything from anyone. We worked for our land with the sweat of our brow. We won’t return it to anyone. Death, first!” (quoted in Leidel 2006).
Yet as Marisol reaffirmed her middle-class status by distinguishing herself from campesinos she also complained about her own lack of resources: the dearth of clients in her pharmacy, the difficulty of living for several years with her husband and daughter in a small rented room while they saved money to build their own home, and the challenge of taking care of her six-year-old daughter with little help while running her own business.
Why