Defender la vida: Una entrevista con Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar [Defending Life: Interview with Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar]

End of Cycle or Continuity of Bolivia’s Democratic-Cultural Revolution?

“…Instead of promoting social participation and enhancing the direct community and representative participatory democracy of the peasant communities and indigenous peoples, the MAS government intensified extractivism and violently repressed indigenous leaders who opposed ecocidal projects. It was also a misogynist and anticommunal government that dismantled the community networks and their organizations (Salazar Lohman, 2019; Gutiérrez Aguilar, 2019). The same government systematically infringed upon the constitutional order and opted for electoral fraud to remain in power.…”

“…The autonomist left views the state per se as an alienated structure that reproduces social relations of capitalist exploitation. Consequently, it is impossible to achieve social transformation by taking political power, because the function of the state is to discipline and subordinate the population, to neutralize its capacity for insubordination and in this way facilitate the accumulation of capital (Gutiérrez Aguilar, 2019). Thus, whether it is a neoliberal or a progressive government, the defects of power inherent in the state will be reproduced: corruption, enrichment, authoritarianism, repression, etc.…”

“…For this reason, employment of the narrative of a coup d’état in 2018 was a deceitful tactic in which the deposed government tried to obtain international support and hide its conservative turn. According to the autonomists, the claim that a coup d’état had taken place was designed to cover up the extractivist pact between the elites and Bolivian progressivism in order to control people and facilitate their exploitation (Gutiérrez Aguilar, 2019).…”