Like all social movements, Indigenous movements in the Andes have a particular temporality, with almost invisible organization-building phases, a relatively civil presentation of demands to the state and the general public, and moments of more militant mobilization. The longer time frame generally consists of forming regional and national organizations in the 1970s and 1980s, presenting demands in the late 1980s, and nationwide mobilizations in the 1990s. Only Chile is an exception, given constant persecution from the Pinochet dictatorship until 1990. The 1990s are often considered the moment that indigenous movements appeared in the region. Starting in 1990, significant mobilizations paralyzed important parts of Ecuador and Bolivia and at least some regions of Colombia, Peru, and Chile. They produced substantial conquests, ranging from the official recognition of the existence of indigenous populations to new or renewed development agencies for indigenous peoples or semiautonomous educational structures. However, indigenous movements lost ground in most countries during the first decade of the 2000s. Footnote 1 The progressive governments in Bolivia between 2006 and 2019 and Ecuador between 2007 and 2017 had a demobilizing effect through the openness they showed in the beginning toward indigenous issues, including central demands in Ecuador’s 2008 Constitution and Bolivia’s 2009 Constitution. The indigenous movements focused more on their relationship with the state and the implementation of the new formal rights than on open pressure through mobilizations. With this, academic interest in the indigenous movements in the Andes declined. After the first years of the 2010s, only a few works on them were published, and most still focused on the glorious 1990s and hardly on the relatively quiet times that followed. This is also why the classical works published in the late 1990s and early 2000s remained highly influential and mostly undebated. Those years of academic stagnation only ended with the resurgence of indigenous movements in 2019.
In the first days of October 2019, a nationwide uprising soon led by the indigenous movement affected Ecuador. At the end of October 2019, the protests against the reelection of Bolivia’s President Morales turned violent, and the military forced him to renounce and leave the country in November amid protests and counterprotests, the latter especially dominated by indigenous organizations. The anti-neoliberal protests in Chile, especially in October and November 2019, were not as such indigenous. However, social movement organizations of the Mapuche were present and increasingly visible. All this was only the starting point for protests until the lockdowns due to COVID-19 came into effect months later. And they inspired later protests, like the indigenous uprising of June 2022 in Ecuador.
A series of recent books promise to renew the academic reflection on indigenous movements in the Andes. The books revisit central aspects of those movements, including factors relevant to the mobilizations of 2019 and 2022. Yet the renewal is only partial: most authors were part of earlier debates on those movements. Lupien has been working on the topic since the mid-2010s, Herrera Revelo has published on the indigenous movement in Ecuador since the early 2000s, and Bretón is even part of the influential classics of around 2000. The contributions in Simbaña, Rodríguez Caguana, and Martínez Abarca are by historical and contemporary leaders of the indigenous movement in Ecuador and academics close to the movement. Only Fackler and Held are new to the field—unsurprisingly so, as their books result from dissertations. The selection of books obeyed the mandate of actuality; all were published after 2020. The mixture of language (three in Spanish, two in German, and one in English), the academic embeddedness of the authors or editors (one North American, three European, and two Ecuadorian), and the form of the books (two dissertation conversions, two monographs, and two compilations) is therefore rather diverse. Footnote 2
Indigenous movements and indigenous populations
A particularity of indigenous movements compared to other social movements is their clearly defined population of origin. The fact that they are ethnic movements makes it more necessary than in other cases to adequately understand how indigenous communities in the different countries developed over time and their main problems today. This is especially relevant in the case of Fackler, who embeds his treatment of the process of building up autonomous structures by the Guaraní in the Bolivian Amazon in a much broader historical context. Following Gabbert, he understands ethnicity as a post hoc construction. With this, the Guaraní nation is understandable as a nation only because of a politicization process that started in the 1970s. The very name Guaraní for the people it refers to today was diffused only in the 1980s. Likewise, central events like the massacre of Kuruyuki of 1892—which marked the end of the historical Guaraní nation—and main ideas like the “land without evil” started to be framed as a relevant part of the history of the Guaraní only during this relatively recent process. Fackler highlights the role played by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in this process and the lack of engagement by the Bolivian state. Thus, he points out that “nation” in the Bolivian case does not imply the existence of common structures: it is not a “nation” in the European sense. This conception goes well with his somewhat ethnographic approach that focuses on how the people who are now the Guaraní “really” live.
The book by Held is more aware of the possibly problematic outcomes of highlighting the constructedness of ethnicity in deeply colonial countries—and a profoundly colonial academy. Instead of dwelling on essentialist projections, he focuses on the relevant prehistory of the conflict, namely the immigration of mestizo people of the highlands since the 1950s, who would turn to growing coca and form influential worker unions starting in the 1970s. He manages to describe the process of organization in the Territorio Indígena y Parque Nacional Isiboro-Sécure (TIPNIS) without putting into doubt the ethnic self-descriptions of the peoples involved.
The book by Bretón is the longest and most detailed in this regard. He, too, abstains from ethnohistory and emphasizes the semifeudal hacienda system and the effects of the Ecuadorian land reform of 1964 and 1973 on indigenous communities, especially in Chimborazo and Cotopaxi, in the highlands, and how church agencies and NGOs influenced the formation of indigenous organizations that started with peasant-related ideas and moved in the late 1990s to rather ethnic ideas. Footnote 3 This makes him question the relationship between the indigenous organizations and the indigenous populations, mainly given the inequality produced by the organizing process and the associated unequal access to funding and the particular role of NGOs and church actors in the communities he researched. While the second part of this argument has problematic aspects—he protests in the later parts of the book against the reception of his works as a simplistic rejection of any NGO activity, typical for the followers of Rafael Correa—the first part is understudied: the control of local and regional organizations by specific communities has led in more than one case to the exclusion of other communities and did translate into a politically motivated allocation of projects.
The three authors tend to see indigenous populations as victims without agency. For all three, there is the persistent danger of external actors that seduce indigenous peoples with promises that are foreign to them—those promises may be Western-style development, ethnic liberation, communist revolution, or some form of autonomy that allows for greater degrees of freedom. This is, by the way, a topic that goes back many decades in political thought in the region—and one that is embedded in the culturalist racism typical during much of the twentieth century in the Andes. Footnote 4 This criticism is elaborated further in the last part of this review.
The other three books take a different path: for both Lupien and Herrera Revelo, the focus is on indigenous organizations, not indigenous populations. In particular, Lupien’s concept of indigenous civil society allows us to disentangle the relationship between the indigenous movement and the indigenous populations. If there is an indigenous civil society, then the indigenous organizations can represent indigenous populations or not—just like civil societies do with society as such. There are different interests, organizations with different strategies, and leaders with different ideas that can be successful sometimes and fail at other times. This approach connects better with understanding indigenous movements as social movements: their forms of organization depend not on their ethnogenesis or specific historical events but on mobilization strategies and perceived improvements. This also explains better why organizations and discourses constantly change. While Lupien focuses on local and regional organizations, Herrera Revelo focuses on nationwide organizations and their political strategies. For Herrera Revelo, the question of the representation of indigenous populations in the organizations of the indigenous movement in Ecuador is answered by the mobilization capacity that the indigenous movement undoubtedly has. However, it is mainly the indigenous leaders and academics in Simbaña, Rodríguez Caguana, and Martínez Abarca who clarify what indigenous agency looks like. In the different contributions, the successes and failures of the movement are discussed but never the characteristics of the nationalities and peoples they represent. Those indigenous intellectuals show clearly that the ethnographic view of indigenous peoples as passive others who seek to be represented does not allow for understanding them as political actors with their own agency. Footnote 5
Indigenous movements and the state
The indigenous leaders and academics in Simbaña, Rodríguez Caguana, and Martínez Abarca are also quite clear on the relationship between indigenous movements and the state. All authors agree that the indigenous movement emerged as a response to the absence of the state in the indigenous communities and its uninational and racist formation. In particular, the contributions by Cartuche Vacacela and Pacari describe the conquest of territorial autonomies and indigenous institutions within the state structure since the late 1980s as a result of indigenous struggles—and the end of those autonomies during the government of Correa as a weakness of the movement. Herrera Revelo concentrates on mobilizations and alliances to pressure the state and highlights the demobilizing effect of some conquests, namely, the indigenous-led institutions within the state that have focused on intercultural education, indigenous health, and development for indigenous communities in Ecuador since the late 1980s. This went hand in hand with a persisting conflict related to landownership, water, and natural resources, leading to several important mobilizations, especially since 2000. His book also discusses the electoral performance of the indigenous party Pachakutik since 2017 and why it could not play a relevant role in the parliament. For Bretón, the state influences the development of the indigenous movement in Ecuador mainly through its absence. The logic of administration of populations, defined by Andrés Guerrero, highlights the role of nonstate actors in controlling indigenous populations. The management of indigenous populations through the hacienda until the 1970s and 1980s was replaced with forms of self-management heavily depending on nonstate actors. This is why Bretón focuses less on the relationship between indigenous organizations and the state than on their relationship with different NGOs and the Catholic Church.
The text by Fackler is undoubtedly the one that most focuses on the relationship between the indigenous population and the state. However, instead of reflecting on the role of autonomy for indigenous movements, autonomy means, for him, exclusively federalist-style autonomous structures within the broader framework of the state. Just for comparison, the word autonomy is mentioned fifty-seven times in Simbaña, Rodríguez Caguana, and Martínez Abarca; fifty-two times in Lupien; and forty-three times in Bretón—always in relation to demands and practices of the indigenous organizations. Fackler’s book is the history of attempts to reach the legal status of autonomy in a Guaraní region in Bolivia. He traces how different actors fight for or against autonomy status with a mixture of general history and ethnographic descriptions. With this, Fackler inserts his text in an emerging field of studies on how the rights related to plurinationality as defined in the Bolivian constitution of 2009 and the Ecuadorian one of 2008 are put into practice—unsurprisingly, not well. However, he fails to make this connection obvious and ignores other studies in this field, for instance, the relevant Ecuadorian counterpart by Cabrero. Footnote 6 A general problem of the studies in this field is their use of a formal legalistic perspective that ignores the legal reality: written laws are considered more relevant than they tend to be in the Latin American context, and actual legal practice is considered only in exceptional cases. Held, with his related study, conceptualizes the Bolivian state not as an independent entity but as related to changing governments. Therefore, the TIPNIS conflict is understood as a conflict between local indigenous actors and the Morales administration and its affiliates. The state appears in this conception not as a fixed reality but as a project subject to changes and struggles. The conflict changes how the state works and with whom it cooperates. Footnote 7 This allows us to understand how the TIPNIS conflict was a breaking point that moved the Morales government away from indigenous topics. Footnote 8
Lupien introduces an innovative perspective that might help avoid the shortcomings of some of the other texts in discussing the relationship between the indigenous movement and the state. His concept of multiscalar positioning is a fascinating tool to understand how indigenous organizations can, at the same time, collaborate with the state in particular projects and, at the local level, work with nonstate actors with a completely different concept of society and economy, all while engaging in social media campaigns that may be critical of those actors. Footnote 9 The apparent contradiction of the alliances is not contradictory but rather an elaborate strategy to gain access to resources and increase the mobilization potential of the organization in question.
Indigenous movements as social movements
The third transversal aspect of all the books under review is their treatment of indigenous movements as social movements. Held is the author closest to social movement theory, with a framework based on classics such as David Snow, Robert Benford, and Bert Klandermans. His approach combines framing with the opposition between an alliance system of different actors that defend the land rights of local indigenous communities and a conflict system that challenges those rights, promising deep insights into the development of social movements in the Bolivian TIPNIS region. However, his limitation to interviews with individual leaders and his almost complete neglect of social movement organizations and their discourse leads to a conception of social movements as composed of charismatic leaders who rely on their ability to mobilize otherwise apolitical masses. For example, the famous March for Territory and Life in 1990 appears as an enterprise organized by four individuals. This approach runs the danger of misunderstanding the internal dynamics of the indigenous organizations. While a charismatic leader can play a central role, without a persistent structure and an engaged base, a repetition of mobilizations or ongoing organization processes would be highly improbable.
The book by Lupien is also well informed by social movement theory, prioritizing resource mobilization, political opportunities, and identity. He focuses on the “Indigenous civil society in Ecuador, Bolivia, and Chile in the latter half of the 2010s” (3) and how the strategies of the indigenous civil society organizations went from disruptive to civic participation and back since the 1990s. Autonomy and autogestión in the different territories Footnote 10 of the organizations in question are thus an integral part of their strategic development at different times. As indigenous organizations are the central actors in his conception, an adaptation to the structures of the state and nonstate actors to become “readable” (25) is in no form a co-optation as it would appear to Bretón, Fackler, and Held. This, together with the concept of multiscalar positioning, makes Lupien the most innovative book in this selection regarding the possibility of understanding indigenous movements as social movements.
The two books by—in their majority—Ecuadorian authors favor a historical approach to the indigenous movement. Herrera Revelo and the contributions in Simbaña, Rodríguez Caguana, and Martínez Abarca understand the indigenous movement as “rooted in the histories of popular struggles.” Footnote 11 Notably, the texts by Almeida and Becker (in Simbaña, Rodríguez Caguana, and Martínez Abarca), two veterans in working with and on the indigenous movement in Ecuador, give an excellent historical overview—albeit with some minor errors. While Almeida details the organizational and discursive development of the indigenous movement since the 1970s, Becker focuses on the uprisings of the 1990s. The other contributions explain the 1990 uprising (Simbaña), the political project of CONAIE (Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador), that is, the document that develops the central demands of the most prominent organization of the indigenous movement in Ecuador (Karakras), or the shift from a focus on the state toward a focus on community organization (Cartuche Vacacela). Herrera Revelo tells the history of the indigenous movement through its organizations and their relationship to other social movements, the state, and nonstate actors. Like other authors in this selection, he describes the shift of focus of the movement from the national state to the communities as the strategic answer to an unresponsive government. The resulting “political siege” (82) consisted of demanding the actual implementation of formal rights but marginalizing the earlier proposals for radical alternatives. This is especially visible in the loss of importance of the concept of plurinationality, a longtime demand of the indigenous movement that, in 2008, was formally recognized in the constitution but practically not applied in Ecuador.
Bretón follows a similar historical approach, with the difference being that he focuses not on the national level but on the local and regional one. His ethnographically inspired history of local organization processes helps to understand the changes in rural indigenous communities during the twentieth century. His focus on the often-ignored smaller levels of indigenous organization complements the studies that work exclusively with national indigenous organizations. While this allows us to grasp better the relationship between the leaders and their bases, something also debated by Held and Lupien, the fact that the higher levels are explicitly ignored results problematic—national organizations appearing wholly removed from everyday reality in the communities. Lupien’s insistence on the “trabajo en territorio (community work within a territory)” (69) of the national organizations could have helped to avoid creating the controversial appearance of national organizations without local legitimation.
Of all the books reviewed, only Fackler does not seem to have a conception of indigenous political action. He argues throughout his book that the political structures—both the internal forms of self-administration and the forms of indigenous jurisdiction—are not organic and are prone to corruption and abuse. For him, the indigenous peoples “are often groups that do not yet have community structures and identities” (87). The Guaraní appear uninterested in political autonomy and are led mainly by external actors, even against their objective interests.
This general interest in understanding indigenous movements as social movements translates into interesting observations on the uprisings of October 2019 in Ecuador, Bolivia, and Chile. Lupien even added another phase of research to include those events. He treats them as “the first nationwide Indigenous uprising of the social media age” (92) and a moment of increased visibility of indigenous movements in all three countries. While Fackler completely ignores the events of October 2019 in Bolivia, his book gives some insights into the conflicts behind them. On the contrary, Held provides a general overview of the events and connects them to the actors involved in the TIPNIS conflict. Simbaña, Rodríguez Caguana, and Martínez Abarca mention the uprising of October 2019 only in the preface—understandable as all texts were written earlier. Bretón includes some comments on October in the preface and the notes to the other chapters of his book. Footnote 12 It is especially Herrera Revelo who gives more insight into the protests of October 2019 in Ecuador. In the last chapter of his book, he includes a detailed review of the negotiations between the indigenous movement and the state and the role of the indigenous political party Pachakutik.
How does an indigenous movement work?
In relation to the general debate on Andean indigenous movements of the past twenty years, the reviewed texts invite a few reflections. Scholars working on indigenous movements should ask themselves how to engage with those problems. The role of political ideas put forward by indigenous movements and their organizational structure seem to pose particular challenges for some researchers. The clearest example in the reviewed texts is the political concept of indigenous nation (Bolivia) or nationality (Ecuador). This concept can be traced back in the region to the 1930s but developed particular relevance since the 1970s, connected to international indigenous conferences and the Barbados group (Almeida in Simbaña, Rodríguez Caguana, and Martínez Abarca). If Fackler agrees with Gabbert and others (not mentioned by name) that there is no such thing as national institutions of the indigenous groups, he explicitly rejects indigenous agency and invisibilizes decades of political struggle, delegitimizing indigenous movements as such. At least implicitly, Bretón goes in the same direction with his constant warnings of the negative influence of NGOs on indigenous communities. Considering the general position of indigenous organizations in the region, can this still be regarded as a solidaristic critique? Or is it instead a form of delegitimization that never will enter the debates of the indigenous organizations, simply destroying their reputation to the academic public and, thus, state and nonstate actors that inform themselves through academic expertise? The supposed breach between national leadership and the bases goes in the same direction: should academics turn a blind eye to organizational dysfunctions? Should they contextualize those dysfunctions in the broader history of racism, exclusion, and poverty? Or instead, should they attempt to openly show that attempts to self-empower lead only to corruption?
The ahistorical reception of the different indigenous movements is striking in most books. Even when they include lengthy ethnohistories like Fackler and Held do, most focus on the previous few years and only highlight relevant studies published between 2000 and 2010. Earlier debates are largely ignored, including influential texts from the late 1970s and early 1980s that might explain continuities and innovations over a longer time frame. Footnote 13 This also includes the systematic ignorance of colonialism and coloniality: Latin American societies tend to be treated just like European countries, leaving out the particular history of exclusion and discrimination of indigenous peoples. This ahistorical approach turns, on occasion, into academic arrogance. Beyond the rejection of political concepts of the indigenous movements, like in the case of Fackler and his teachers, the usage of “Indianism” to designate the political ideas of the indigenous movements borders on ignorance. When Bretón and Figueroa Romero (in Simbaña, Rodríguez Caguana, and Martínez Abarca) call the indigenous movement in Ecuador Indianist, they deliberately erase an essential phase of continental debates between indigenous organizations. Indianism is, in fact, a radically ethnicist ideology put forward since the 1970s by several groups in Bolivia and Peru, the best known being the Kataristas, Footnote 14 that proposes to reestablish the Inka realm or even earlier indigenous states. Most indigenous movements explicitly reject Indianism, most notably the Ecuadorian CONAIE. Footnote 15 This also calls attention to the complete absence of references to Katarism in Bolivia in the reviewed books. It almost seems as if there were no relevant indigenous organization before Evo Morales—even if both Fackler and Held make clear that the platform of Morales is not primarily indigenous. The competition between Felipe Quispe and Morales until the early 2000s and the co-optation of influential Katarista leaders by the MAS (Movimiento al Socialismo) is ignored.
It is puzzling to see in the books reviewed the absence of indigenous intellectuals beyond organization leaders. While all point out the relevance of well-educated indigenous leaders, and Bretón and Herrera Revelo even include reflections on the role of the organic intellectual within the indigenous movement, indigenous academics are entirely ignored. Footnote 16 Also, the most relevant products of movement intellectuals, the manifestos, and other publications by the different organizations are only systematically used in Simbaña, Rodríguez Caguana, and Martínez Abarca and Herrera Revelo. Instead, an anthropological focus on indigenous movements seems to predominate. It tends to depoliticize them, treating them as mere movements of indigenous peoples who are unable to demand anything beyond their direct needs. Fackler is particularly notorious in this aspect.
All those general shortcomings connect to the predominance of studies from the late 1990s and early 2000s, which not only provide the books reviewed here with historical information but also seem to guide contemporary research, at least to some degree. While Lupien can integrate the classics without losing his innovative stance, Held and Fackler fall at least in part prey to some of their problematic interpretations. The state-centered conceptions of the classics, with their Eurocentric understanding of politics as based on political parties in an arena that conceptually resembles the United States or Europe, still are influential. Footnote 17 The particularities of the state, political parties, the public sphere, and so on in the Andes are still not sufficiently examined. This is, at least in part, due to a lack of academic exchange: all three languages of the reviewed books seem to constitute academic universes that only in exceptional cases exchange ideas.
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