The Decline of Pluri-National States Policy in Latin America

Raul Zibechi
Uruguayan sociologist, writer and journalist, editor of the Uruguayan weekly magazine Brecha

The proposal of pluri-nationality, which promotes the construction of a pluri-national State, enjoyed broad support to resolve the asymmetries between the Nation-State and the original nationalities and peoples. However, this current is in sharp decline, while the other current that crosses the peoples calling for change, the autonomist, continues its slow but steady growth.

The proposal was born in the 1980s at the hands of peasant-indigenous organizations from Bolivia and Ecuador, in the midst of the struggles that showed how the State violently contained the demands and mobilizations of the original peoples. The formula “Pluri-national State” was considered sufficient to resolve these problems and was adopted in the constitutions of Ecuador (2008) and Bolivia (2009).

However, until now it has not been adopted by most of the peoples who are claiming territory and organize themselves to recover those living spaces. The decline of this policy stems from two processes: the growing weakness of the States in the face of capital, and the concrete experience in the two countries mentioned above, where there was no sign of the slightest "re-foundation" of the State, showing in the facts that they are colonial and patriarchal constructions.

The central problem is that pluri-nationality implies that it is the State that recognizes that there are different indigenous nationalities and cultures that inhabit the same territory. The proposals to walk towards an administration of justice according to the ways of the original peoples never worked and it is not possible that they will in the future, since the logic of the Nation-State continues to be dominant.

Not to mention the armed and police forces, the hard core of the state apparatus, where the logic of the peoples has never had the slightest root. For 13 years in Bolivia and 10 in Ecuador, when Evo Morales and Rafael Correa governed, no substantial progress was made in what was promised to be the “re-foundation” of the State. That is why the question arises: is it possible to re-found a colonial and patriarchal institution?

The Bolivians María Galindo and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui agreed a year ago that “if the armed forces are not dissolved, there will be no pluri-national State” (https://bit.ly/3qjnzGy). It was just a name change, they say, without any change in the structures of political, economic and symbolic power.

Right now, the issue of pluri-nationality is being debated by sectors of the Mapuche peoples in Chile and the Aymara peoples in Bolivia.

The first Meeting of Intellectuals of the Aymara Nation, held at the Public University of El Alto last July, concluded that the Political Constitution of the State, which has been in force since 2009, “is an instrument of the colonial State, which does not precisely respond to reality and the interests of the Aymaras” (https://bit.ly/3RtGavB).

The declaration of the meeting assures that the objective is the reconstruction of the Aymara nation and of the original nations, under the principle of federalism and their own political system, based on the communities (ayllus) and the regions (markas and suyos), "without the intervention of the precepts of the institutionalized democracy of the State”.

Felipe Quispe militated in this current, and was at the forefront of the peasant-indigenous mobilization during the coup-established regime of Jeannine Áñez, which made possible the calling of elections won by the Movement for Socialism. He also has the sympathy of the Bolivian Vice-President David Choquehuanca, who supported the meeting of the Aymara intellectuals.

In Chile, the spokesman for the Arauco Malleco Coordination (CAM), Héctor Llaitul, a prisoner of the Chilean State, pointed out during the inauguration at a community center in Peñalolén (Santiago), on June 10, that “in the last 30 year I have never seen even a single Mapuche banner calling for pluri-nationality”, and reaffirmed that the demands are always based on territory (https://bit.ly/3D6IhRS).

In an open letter from the CAM, dated August 8, it is stated that “pluri-nationality, as a proposal for the Mapuche cause, turns out to be a measure empty of territorial force and with no prospect of change, since it is rather an academic invention of an elite that seeks spaces and quotas of power without taking into consideration the reality of injustices or the real needs of our people” (https://bit.ly/3D0UCqr).

One of the reasons that leads to reject the creation of a pluri-national State, and insist on territorial recovery, is that “the conditions of big capital and colonialism that have operated to dispossess us of our territory, have deepened in recent decades”. A reality that operates throughout the Latin American region.

I think we are at the twilight of the project of pluri-national states. Experience has shown that they are more of the same, just a way of patching up delegitimized institutions, but always without touching their hard core.