This piece appeared in the Fall 2024 issue of NACLA's quarterly print magazine, the NACLA Report. Subscribe in print today!
On February 7, 2009, thousands of Bolivians gathered for a ceremony enacting a historic new constitution. As fireworks crackled and wiphala flags flapped behind him, President Evo Morales signed the new charter into effect. “We proclaim the plurinational state, from the city of El Alto, from Bolivia to the world,” he declared. “Que viva a united Bolivia with autonomies! Jallalla sovereign Bolivia!” A sea of voices chanted back: “Que viva! Jallalla!”
For many observers, Bolivia’s new constitution, and a similarly unprecedented one launched in Ecuador one year prior, offered an introduction to the politics of plurinationalism. Yet debates and proposals reflecting the plural nature of Latin American societies had already been unfolding for years in grassroots spaces in the Andes and beyond, and those conversations remain alive today.
A decade and a half after the heyday of the pink tide and the constituent processes in Ecuador and Bolivia, many have reflected on efforts to build plurinational states, particularly in these two countries. Although these landmark constitutions officially recognized the state as plurinational, marginalized Indigenous peoples are disputing the meaning of those words and challenging formal plurinational institutions. For many, the lofty promises of a top-down plurinationalism remain outstanding.
Meanwhile, the impetus to imagine this different plurinational kind of politics has spread across the region. In the Peruvian Amazon, Indigenous peoples are creating autonomous territorial governments, challenging longstanding “one nation” discourses and modes of rule. In Chile, Indigenous movements actively participated in a constituent process that proposed a plurinational charter; although the new constitution did not become a reality, the process showed the influence of Indigenous struggles in prompting a rethinking of nation-state structures. In Argentina, Colombia, and other countries, Indigenous organizations appeal to plurinationalism to articulate their historical demands. Across the region, unions, feminist, environmental, and Afrodescendant groups, and other social movements are creating spaces to deepen demands for different forms of state governance, effectively pluralizing plurinational politics. These efforts also go beyond the state, with proposals such as RUNASUR aimed at internationalizing a plurinational approach.
This issue of the NACLA Report explores how plurinational politics are organized and articulated at the margins of state power. This plurinationalism from below suggests not only that the plurinational state remains an unfinished project, but also that plurinational politics continue to evolve toward new forms of engagement within and between the state and social movements. These community-led alternatives are particularly important at a time when far-right politics, militarization, and war are on the rise and extractive capitalism seeks to appropriate new resources, often in the name of addressing the climate crisis. In the face of such threats against ancestral ways of caring for the land, communities and Indigenous organizations continue to imagine and create forms of peaceful and respectful cohabitation between peoples who share the same territories.
A first set of articles offer an intellectual grounding of plurinationalism. Quechua-Aymara Bolivian scholar Arnold Arnez maps the evolution of Indigenous intellectualism and its contributions to plurinational thought since the 20th century, focusing on revolutionary literature and movements from Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, and Mexico. These thinkers’ promotion of Indigenous autonomy and sovereignty has challenged colonial and neoliberal frameworks and laid the groundwork for contemporary plurinationalism and decolonization.
Other pieces in this realm address how the philosophy has played out in practice. From El Alto, Colectivo Curva takes stock of Bolivia’s plurinational state. Despite the strides enshrined in the 2009 Constitution, colonial systems remain in place. True transformation, the collective argues, will require new Indigenous-led agendas to address neoliberal, racist policies. From the Ecuadorian Andes, sociologist Patricio Carpio Benalcázar explores the Kichwa concept of buen vivir, or sumak kawsay (good living/ living well). Although Ecuador’s 2008 Constitution enshrined buen vivir and the rights of Pachamama, these plurinational ideals have been politically manipulated and not effectively implemented.
Evidently, even when plurinationalism is an established legal fact, many Indigenous communities experience it as a difficult and winding road, rather than a straightforward structural shift. Several articles highlight how plurinationalism is not a monolithic concept or a merely intellectual debate but an on-the-ground reality that is put into practice, rearticulated, and contested. In that vein, Ecuadorian sociologist and political scientist Pablo Ortiz-T. shows how Ecuador’s 2008 Constitution did not lead to a true refoundation of the state. Indigenous justice remains subordinated to ordinary justice, and extractive capitalism continues to take precedence over the constitutional rights of nature and Indigenous peoples. Argentine researcher Andrea Ivanna Gigena looks at how Indigenous women working within the state in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, and Panama navigated discrimination, harassment, and violence while working to secure and safeguard hard-won gains. Despite having diverse trajectories, these women see themselves as “heirs and creators of a collective history” of struggles that led to new rights and recognitions.
Another group of essays discuss the complexities of plurinational projects at the margins of the state. Olivia Arigho Stiles explores how the loss of Indigenous territory in the Bolivian eastern lowlands to peasant farmers of Quechua and Aymara origin calls into question the success of plurinationalism. Moving to the southern reaches of the Bolivian Amazon, Nohely Guzmán details the struggle for autonomy within the Multiethnic Indigenous Territory (TIM), an area home to five Indigenous peoples. Guzmán argues that the communities’ 13-year process to be recognized as autonomous became a “colonizing straitjacket,” raising questions about the feasibility of revolutionary decolonization led by the state.
Also from Bolivia, anarchist feminist María Galindo, in conversation with Julianne Chandler, describes how Mujeres Creando formulated a feminist constitution during the constituent process in response to the exclusion of dissenting voices, including those of Indigenous women, the LGBTQ+ community, the informal sector, and migrants. Galindo concludes that marginalized groups have next to nothing to lose, having gained so little, emphasizing the importance of the ongoing struggle for a more inclusive and pluralistic society.
Although Bolivia and Ecuador feature prominently in this issue as the epicenters of state-led plurinationalism, these debates are also vibrant elsewhere, particularly at the grassroots level. In the Peruvian Amazon, Olivia Bisa, leader of the Autonomous Territorial Government of the Chapra Nation, explains in an interview with Roger Merino and Adriana Castro how Amazonian Indigenous peoples are reclaiming their autonomy, even though the state has failed to recognize their collective political agency. Their quest for self-determination is especially urgent—and challenging— because it questions the expansion of illegal and state-sponsored extractivism.
State margins, then, are also spaces of opportunity for imagining new forms of politics. Turning to Chile, anthropologist Pablo Seward Delaporte analyzes Antofagasta’s migrant settlements as multinational, multiethnic, and multiracial spaces where plurinationalism emerges from below. In the wake of a nationalist and racist backlash, these migrant struggles highlight the formidable challenges that grassroots movements face, as well as the alternatives they offer in the face of the failure of plurinational projects from above. In other cases, plurinationalism is even farther from being incorporated into state institutions. Giovanni Batz shows how, in Guatemala, movements and communities have advanced calls for plurinationalism through a years-long series of Indigenous-led strikes and protests to confront corruption, state-sponsored violence, and extractive capitalism while continuing to struggle every day for buen vivir and liberation.
Finally, an interview by Romina Green Rioja and Nayla Luz Vacarezza with three members of the international feminist network Feministas del Abya Yala sheds light on the historic process that led the National Women’s Encuentro in Argentina to change its name in 2019 to the Plurinational Encuentro of Women, Lesbians, Trans, Travesti, Bisexual, and Nonbinary People. Claudia Korol, Adriana Guzmán Arroyo, and Lolita Chávez Ixcaquic describe how a shared feminist plurinational vision guides their struggle against racism, colonialism, patriarchy, extractivism, and imperialism. For them, plurinationalism functions as a political catalyst to reshape our identities and relationship with the land and society.
Together, these articles show how Indigenous groups, social organizations, communities, and intellectuals are working to build expressions of plurinationalism that resist extractive capitalism and the legacies of colonialism while also combatting entrenched racism, imperialism, sexism, and homophobia. Plurinationalism emerged decades ago as an Indigenous proposition to rethink our political and social relations. As this issue demonstrates, the stewards of this proposal continue to not only envision but also actively generate a new and more inclusive world. In the face of the crisis of liberal democracy and the urgent need for new paradigms to confront climate chaos, the political imaginations of plurinationalism from below offer a vision for a new, more humane, and inclusive future for Abya Yala.
Romina Green Rioja is an assistant professor in Latin American history at Washington and Lee University in Virginia. She researches racial formation in 19th-century Chile and the modern-day feminist movement in Argentina and Chile.
Roger Merino is an associate professor at the Universidad del Pacífico in Lima, Peru. He researches topics related to political ecology, environmental governance, and human rights.
Nayla Luz Vacarezza is an associate researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET) in Argentina. She teaches feminist theory and gender studies at the University of Buenos Aires.
Cover image: Social movements protest the postponement of presidential elections, in El Alto, Bolivia, August 14, 2020. (Marcelo Pérez del Carpio)
