The political movement that brought Evo Morales to power incorporated a latent conflict between highland and lowland Indigenous communities. The lowland nations are intent on recuperating their ancestral territories, which had been appropriated by families of European extraction or, more recently, allocated to timber companies as long-term forest concessions. The promise of recovering these lands was the reason lowland Indigenous groups overwhelmingly supported Evo Morales in 2005. In contrast, highland Indigenous groups believe they have a constitutional right – as Bolivian citizens – to settle unoccupied public lands, particularly the forest concessions that were rescinded in the early days of the Morales’ administration. The highland and lowland Indigenous groups are competing for the same land. This conflict is manifest in the evolving self-identity of the Andean migrants, who for decades referred to themselves as colonizadores. Since about 2000, however, they have self-identified as interculturales, a term that recognises their status as Indigenous people who have left their ancestral homeland. They are politically powerful, in part because they maintain familial and commercial ties with a large population of urban migrants, but also because they have organised militant syndicates skilled in the tactics of economic blockade. They exercise their electoral power by demanding that INRA, which is controlled by the central government, distribute land via settlement associations affiliated with the Confederación Sindical de Comunidades Interculturales Originarios de Bolivia (CSCIOB) or the Confederación Sindical Única de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia (CSUTCB). The alliance among the highland and lowland Indigenous groups was fractured in…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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