Is Evo's Bolivia out of neoliberalism?

Artaraz and Calestani (2015) stress that the constitution seems to privilege Aymara culture among the other indigenous ones, and that the new education system is not perceived as facilitating the teaching of the principle of Suma Qamaña in schools: this makes hard to keep indigenous values alive in a population that, even when claims to have indigenous origins at 60%, mostly doesn't live in agrarian communities.

Despite the new Bolivian constitution declares in many of its parts that environment protection is a priority, there are serious pollution problems such as the ones reported by Perreault (2012) regarding the Huanuni Valley, which lands and river are damaged by the works of the mines in the area.


The maintaining of agreements with foreign corporations led Kaup (2010) to define the operation in the field of hydrocarbons as “neoliberal nationalization”; Mun (2015) considers it as a “counter-neoliberalization”; while the general opinion of Petras (2013) is that the Bolivian government is "the most radical conservative regime", which keeps protecting business interests while polemizing with the USA on many aspects. Garcìa Linera (Stefanoni and Svampa, 2007) usually responds to this kinds of critics with the argument that Bolivia can't proceed towards a communist society, which is the horizon of the MAS, in an idealistic way, but rather with a pragmatic approach.

To date, even if MAS won two other general elections in 2009 and 2014 and eastern-bourgeois resistance to accord the main share of hydrocarbons revenues to the central State was defeated, strong social pressures remain in place, as the recent conflict with mine cooperatives show; in these cooperatives, some associates with more shares than others would like to sell the mines to transnational companies, an act that the government would like to impede (Stefanoni, 2016). In the past, conflicts with other social sectors emerged, such as the one over the construction of a highway over the reserve park TIPNIS with some indigenous groups living in it, which caused a split in CONAMAQ and CIDOB between indigenous who do and don’t support government plan. Officially, CONAMAQ and CIDOB are not part of the Unity Pact anymore since 2011 (Farthing and Kohl, 2014).

Garcia Linera (2011), remembering some other conflicts such as the one over the request of a wage hike by school and medical sectors, calls these problems “secondary contradictions in the process of change”. Webber (2016), reminding that such an interpretation closely reminds Maoist concept of “contradictions among the people”, believes that these are instead act of rebellions against the Gramscian passive revolution that MAS is leading.