The Politics of Everyday Life in El Alto, Bolivia’s Aymara City

by Benjamin DanglFacebook

TwitterRedditEmail

Aymara journalist Julio Mamani talks about the politics, rebellions, and future of El Alto, Bolivia’s Aymara city.

 August 23, 2024

Aymara journalist Julio Mamani in El Alto, Bolivia. Photo by Ben Dangl.

In this interview, Mamani talks about this this type of journalism, how the city has changed over the past twenty years since its pivotal role in the uprisings against neoliberalism at the turn of this century. He examines the politics of the city’s neighborhood councils which govern the city’s urban communities at the micro level, and how corporate globalization and politics are changing the social fabric of the Aymara city.

Aymara journalist Julio Mamani and I meet at one of the new aerial cable car stations in El Alto, Bolivia. A cool Andean wind is blowing through the nearby street market as the cable cars hover above our park bench. We have known each other since the early days of the Gas War in Bolivia in 2003, when popular movements ousted a repressive government. Those uprisings in the streets ultimately led to the 2005 election of Bolivian President Evo Morales of the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) party and ushered in a new era in the country’s politics.

Since then, Mamani has continued his work as a journalist, focusing on the everyday lives of this city in the clouds, nestled in high plains at over 13,000 feet. The majority of El Alto’s residents are Aymara Indigenous people, and the city is well known for its massive open air street markets.

Mamani’s journalistic work now emphasizes “the everyday life of alteños, because that’s not talked about. Nobody sees what’s happening down here, what’s going on,” he says, gesturing to the nearby market stalls. “We are in this reality doing a journalistic work.”

In this interview, Mamani talks about this this type of journalism, how the city has changed over the past twenty years since its pivotal role in the uprisings against neoliberalism at the turn of this century. He examines the politics of the city’s neighborhood councils which govern the city’s urban communities at the micro level, and how corporate globalization and politics are changing the social fabric of the Aymara city.

Benjamin Dangl: How do you get into this everyday life to show this other life in El Alto?

Julio Mamani: For example, the coronavirus pandemic taught me that in a way. People were looking for sustenance, they were locked in a quarantine. Generally, people defied the virus to be able to sell at the fairs with their carts, that’s how they managed to survive, by risking their lives every day.

And every day, there were initiatives by people who live off informal trade, and they are discriminated against, especially the peddlers or traveling vendors who don’t have a fixed stand, so they travel through the fairs with their carts. These are all initiatives they have to survive, the way they buy their products from wholesalers, for example, fruits and vegetables, and they take them to the fair, so they have their own income.

Imagine, during the pandemic there was no transport, people had to travel on foot. We’re there, in that reality and in their needs, which are, for example, improving their areas, transport price hikes, and how they manage to buy their tickets.

El Alto street markets are a world in their own, it’s not only the 16 de Julio [market], everyday there are markets where some are selling, others are buying, there is a microeconomy, and alteños have these initiatives outside the political life of leaders, who are a bit disconnected from this. This is the daily life I’m interested in looking at right now.

BD: You’ve worked so many years in El Alto as a journalist, can you give me an example of how the city has changed?

JM: It changed quite a bit. Right now there’s a cable car that gives it a modern look. But also the problem of social media, right? It used to be a novelty to see the internet, now there are many. And you have it in your own phone, you can see the technological advance.

Some avenues have been improved, have been paved, there’s more mobility. El Alto keeps growing and it’s reaching its limits, as it’s been joined to Laja, Achocalla, Pucará, Viacha. It used to be a far away, an isolated area, there was a big distance between the borders of El Alto and Viacha, and now they’re together.

There are more people too, more students. During festivals and holidays you can also see this, more participation of young people.

You can also see the famous buildings of El Alto; a fundamental issue is the identity they’re acquiring. In a city where we could say the identity is Aymara, you can also see a bust of the Statue of Liberty on a building.

We see characters from TV series and social media, like the Transformers. Characters that begin to win spaces in the city. Not only Aymara, now it’s also figures coming from movies and social media, from the symbols of North America.

But one wonders, why do we have the Statue of Liberty on a building, right? But it’s a culture that’s already seen here as a result of globalization; our context doesn’t escape that.

Young people are always in this situation. Since 2010 up to now you’ll see nobody is without a cellphone, using Facebook and TikTok, and all the platforms of communication. So, we can see that El Alto is becoming globalized and breaking its isolation in terms of culture. The [Western] empire has already penetrated culturally.

So, El Alto people talked about the city as isolated, with a purely Aymara identity, now a different identity begins to emerge through globalization. You see it during Christmas too, with the imperial symbol that is Santa Claus. And now during Christmas you see the Grinch.

And in educational institutions characters have also changed, now you see the Avengers, the heroes of the northern empire. This is not a violent entry but a voluntary assimilation. That’s what I can say, in general terms, of what El Alto used to be and what it is now. As I said, young people predominate, and they seem to be globalized so they’re manifesting these identities. The ancestral seems to be relegated to older people. It’s a vertiginous change.

BD: When we first met in the early 2000s, the neighborhood councils in El Alto were very strong. How has that changed? Are these neighborhood groups still strong?

JM: It depends very much on the place. The problem of historical processes is that they’re dynamic, and this is manifested in a certain way. It manifested when the Aymara identity was strong, through a struggle that developed from neoliberal times, and the situation has been accumulating. And those powers manifested at certain times, but in the neighborhood councils the leader is a prisoner of his bases, for example, where there is more movement and dynamism is in the more remote areas [outside the center of the city], and they’re mobilized by social basic services.

I work in a water company, and I can see that every day, how neighbors are mobilized. There’s also an economic phenomenon. A plot of land without water is not valued as much as one that does have water. To give you an example, in a neighborhood recently created, a 250 m2 plot is worth $2,200-4,000 USD, when they connect water and sewage, it’s worth $15,000 USD. It’s a difference of $11,000 USD. If there are streets, even more. So that is mobilizing, in fact, those needs add a political and economic dynamism.

The leader in those neighborhoods both has power and doesn’t have power: if he obtains something, he’s welcome. If he doesn’t, there will be pressure and he can be removed. So, he has to make arrangements. The leader is in all that.

We shouldn’t forget that economic conditions, unemployment, means that leadership in El Alto is a job, a way of having an income, and that has impaired this type of organizing; if this happened in the past to a lesser degree, now it’s been increasing.

Now, in terms of bases and neighborhood leaders, we see a divorce. They’re more controlled by their bases, and the test would be to get basic services: water, sewage, gas and road improvement. This means to improve the quality of life and add value to the plots of land.

BD: Regarding El Alto’s rebellions against neoliberalism in the early 2000s, how do see the legacy of those rebellions and demands today?

JM: It’s been almost erased from history books. For us, if you seriously analyze social and historical events of the peoples, we’d say that it has been a fundamental milestone that after twenty years a neoliberal government is kicked out, after many deaths, and a process of change opens up. But almost in no texts is this mentioned. It doesn’t exist.

Bit by bit, the memory is being lost. The young ones have no memory of this. It has been twenty years. How old were the young ones back then? Some were not even born. That memory has been gradually erased. For a part of the political class it’s not convenient that this is remembered because they weren’t the protagonists nor makers of that episode. So, it’s not useful politically for their purpose.

BD: We’ve talked about changes in the last twenty years, how do you see the future of El Alto? What are we going to see as a city in the next twenty years?

JM: It’s already bigger than La Paz, it has more than one million inhabitants according to official data. And La Paz is around 900,000, and El Alto keeps growing fast. The demographic growth won’t be as sharp, though, as it can’t surpass the limits of the [neighboring] municipalities of Viacha, Laja and Pucará, so that’s how far it can go.

It will have to become a metropolis or something to deal with the issue of water and basic services, but especially water. El Alto doesn’t have enough wells; 30-40% of wells are within its jurisdiction, but the rest are in the provinces [outside the city]. In the case of dams, besides Milluni, which doesn’t supply El Alto, they are in other provinces, not in El Alto. So that tells you that it will have to coexist with the municipalities or it won’t be able to keep growing. There will be growth if there are services.

As for the youth, as we discussed before, taking into account some massive events like Halloween or carnivals, you see the problem of identity, and buildings that have drastically changed. The presence of characters from globalization indicate this will be a different generation, it will be more globalized, and it’s a phenomenon we won’t be able to escape. El Alto will be globalized, as you can already see in the cable car, that’s where we really are. The identity might keep being Aymara, but it will be combined and in coexistence with globalization. That’s what I see for the future.

Note: This interview was translated from Spanish to English by Nancy Piñeiro and has been edited for clarity and length.

 

Dr. Benjamin Dangl is a Lecturer of Public Communication and Journalism at the University of Vermont. He has worked as a journalist across Latin America for over two decades covering social movements and politics. Dangl’s most recent books are The Five Hundred Year Rebellion: Indigenous Movements and the Decolonization of History in Bolivia and A World Where Many Worlds Fit.

A New Kind of McCarthyism

by Howard Lisnoff

 August 23, 2024
Facebook

TwitterRedditEmail

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

The label of Leftist has followed me most of my adult life. That’s not only okay with me, but the truth. During the past winter, I began receiving emails from someone I did not know in the area where I live asking that we meet at a local coffee shop. He included an article that he had read that supported Israel over the Palestinians in the Gaza war and also mentioned that one of his wife’s relatives had read some of my articles at CounterPunch, liked them, and also wanted to meet.

I was uncomfortable with the article he sent me, but agreed to meet at some point and that opportunity came in June. We met at a local coffee shop that had recently seen a brouhaha about an employee who was fired, and according to the owners, two of whom were Jewish, the employee would not stop discussing the Gaza war with customers. The issue sounded like an employment/labor issue, but took on added significance when a pro-Palestinian demonstration targeted the business, with some signs noting two of the owners were Jewish. I have heard nothing since that incident.

The coffee shop incident reminded me of how my mother, a staunch antiwar activist during the Vietnam era, would get into heated debates about the war with customers at my parents’ coffee and lunch shop. Looking back I wondered how my parents were not singled out in the small town where we lived because of those debates. I think it may have been because they were accepted in our community with both my father’s and mother’s families having deep roots in our town.

We sat across from each other in the coffee shop. It seemed to me that our conversation was congenial. The person who had originally contacted me was accompanied by his wife and we spoke about our shared experiences during the Vietnam antiwar era and our experiences with protest during those years. I have not received any communication from the person who originally contacted me, and it seems that my discussion of the arrest I had from the Vietnam era must have hit a sour note. I don’t know who may have become uncomfortable with our discussion, but it was obvious that discomfort was there, although I will never learn what actually happened.

The end of communications reminded me of my experiences in a suburban school district in the late 1980s, when I noted my objections to being asked by a school principal to lead the school in the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance during the school’s Flag Day commemoration. The principal ranted at me when I noted that I don’t recite the Pledge, and haven’t since the Vietnam War era. I mentioned that only a few miles from the school’s location was a ghetto that was marked by poverty and racism. The principal began harassing me and I filed a labor grievance with my union and the fallout was significant. People who I considered friends or acquaintances supported the principal following the incident. All the teachers in that school and support staff signed a greeting card in support of the principal before the labor grievance hearing. When I asked an acquaintance who was a member of the school’s support staff why she hadn’t sent me a greeting card as the labor hearing neared, she commented: “What do you think, that I’m nuts?”

Although the Left has been often tossed in the dustbin of history in recent decades in the US, or at least until the Gaza and Ukraine wars and perhaps the Occupy Wall Street movement, the same or similar narratives take place as did during the Vietnam era and beyond. There is so little space for countering the right-wing juggernaut of the military-industrial complex and a global economy that has left so many on the sidelines of history and the environment in shambles. When protest does reach the street level, as it did and does during the protests against the genocide in Gaza, protesters are often beaten by militarized police.

Howard Lisnoff is a freelance writer. He is the author of Against the Wall: Memoir of a Vietnam-Era War Resister (2017).

Health Care for All Should be an Election Issue

by Sonali Kolhatkar

 August 23, 2024

RedditEmail

Photograph Source: Molly Adams – CC BY 2.0

All it took for Olympian Ariana Ramsey to call herself a “universal free health care advocate” was — unsurprisingly — a taste of free health care.

The bronze-medalist rugby player, who represented the U.S. at the 2024 Paris games, posted Tik Tok videos of herself getting care at the Olympic Village.

“The fact that I’m actually so excited to be getting free dental…!” she said incredulously, unable to finish her sentence. “This is going to be my new fight for action — free health care in America — period.” While in Paris, Ramsey got a pap smear, eye exam, and eyeglasses all free of charge — and said she was “truly amazed” that such a thing was possible.

Ramsey was so impressed that she asked the people of France if she could be adopted into their nation so she could continue getting free care. Such a request, even if tongue-in-cheek, by a person representing the U.S. ought to embarrass politicians.

A majority of Americans report feeling dissatisfied with their access to health care. Millions turn to crowdfunding campaigns to ask family, friends, and random strangers to help them pay for unexpected care.

But ahead of the 2024 presidential race, neither of the two major party nominees has offered a pathway for a universal, publicly funded health care system.

Donald Trump has offered little detail on his current health plan, although he’s linked to a group seeking to gut Medicare. His first presidential term was marked by a failed attempt to overturn the Affordable Care Act, a desire to cut Medicaid, and the appointment of Supreme Court justices who overturned the federal right to an abortion.

Needless to say, these changes only make a deeply flawed system worse.

On the other hand, Kamala Harris, who previously co-sponsored Senator Bernie Sanders’s single payer bill in 2019, will reportedly avoid promoting the plan this year. Nor has Harris adopted the more modest idea she endorsed in 2019: a publicly funded health plan that people could opt into, known as the “public option.”

Instead, Harris has chosen to campaign on tinkering around the edges of our complicated patchwork system by lowering a handful of prescription drug prices for Medicare recipients.

While it is an incredible achievement on the part of the Biden-Harris administration to regulate drug prices for the first time in decades, the changes are modest. They’re limited to only 10 drugs this year (with more drugs to be regulated each year) and only apply to people already enrolled in Medicare.

A better step forward would be to expand on the government-provided health care we already have for certain populations: veterans (through the Veterans Affairs system), people over the age of 65 (though Medicare), and very low-income peoplemaking poverty-level wages (through Medicaid).

Simply expanding Medicare to all would cover everyone else — and save taxpayers trillions relative to buying for-profit insurance.

Harris still has time to back health care for all, but it will take a massive public push from below. In spite of the enormous amount of pro-corporate propaganda against universal health care, a majority of Americans have historically supported single payer healthcare. A May 2024 Data for Progress poll found that two-thirds of Americans support expanding Medicare to all.

Ramsey went viral for her endearing enthusiasm over a right that a majority of people in wealthy nations take for granted. “America needs to do better with their healthcare system,” she rightly said. “There’s no reason why an American girl should be so amazed by free health care.”

Sonali Kolhatkar is the founder, host and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV (Dish Network, DirecTV, Roku) and Pacifica stations KPFK, KPFA, and affiliates.