THE FRONT LINE: Natural-born rebel with a cause to
stir: Felipe
Quispe has been shaking up Bolivia. He tells Paul
Keller of his plans
to become president and 'free' his fellow Indians
Financial Times; Feb 2, 2002
By PAUL KELLER
Felipe Quispe, the spearhead of Bolivia's indigenous
separatist movement,
looks weary. The rebel leader has just driven back
from a political meeting
in the windswept Andean highlands. As a concession to
city life he has
swapped his trade-mark poncho for a llama-patterned
sweater and denim
shirt.
Sitting in his well-organised office in La Paz, he
does not immediately
match my expectations of the fiery Aymaran Indian,
with a "Che" Guevara
aura, who wants to shake Bolivia to its roots and free
his fellow Indians of
"colonial oppression".
But, insists Quispe, that is his mission and that is
why he will run for
president this year. His party, the Pachakuti Indian
Movement (MIP), wants
to put Indians in congress and wrest power from the
elite that has controlled
the land-locked state since independence from Spain.
With little chance of winning in June's elections,
however, the peasant union
leader says he will stir up trouble for the next
government if it neglects the
6m Indians who inhabit "Kollasuyo", the old Inca name
for Bolivia.
Hailed by supporters as El Mall'ku ("the condor"), the
media-savvy Quispe
cannot be brushed aside as an extremist. He speaks for
Andean
highlanders who feel cheated by 15 years of harsh
economic adjustment.
He has numbers on his side, too. Quechua and Aymara
Indians outnumber
those of mixed or European blood by three to one. The
Aymara ruled the
highlands before the Incas arrived.
If any South American country is ripe for revolution
it has to be impoverished
Bolivia. It has had 190 coups since independence in
1825, a startling
statistic that once earned it the title of the world's
most unstable country.
With a recent supporting cast of Nazi asylum-seekers
(Klaus Barbie
included), corrupt military dictators and omnipresent
cocaine barons among
the population, it's easy to see why.
Quispe has done his bit to stir things up. As a leader
in the violent fight
against US-sponsored eradication of coca-leaf (the
base of cocaine), he has
masterminded road blockades that have brought the
country to a standstill
and squeezed concessions from the government. The
58-year-old rebel
leader has threatened a repeat performance if the
peasant farmers' demands
go unheeded.
"The government is oppressing the people. But also
this government is
oppressed by US 'gringo' imperialism," he says. "The
real king is in the
United States. The president does what he is told.
They say 'we don't want
coca - here's bananas instead'. But coca is part of
our culture - it's in
everything. We are anti-colonialist, anti-racist,
anti-imperialist. Until they kill
me I will not change my views."
With his swept-back hair, brooding gaze and
belligerent rhetoric, Quispe is
definitely a rebel with a cause.
But to President Jorge Quiroga's government, he is a
troublemaker. One
opposition leader damned him as a "terrorist",
reminding me that Quispe
was jailed in the early 1990s as a guerilla activist.
For now, Quispe is focused on electioneering. Behind
him in his office in La
Paz hang a rainbow-coloured indigenous flag and
paintings of heroic Indian
peasants. The presence of a bag of coca leaves (for
chewing) adds to the
pungent Andean atmosphere. Outside, people await an
audience with
Mall'ku before he heads to another meeting in the
"Altiplano", the high
plateau above La Paz.
"Bolivia is in crisis, crisis, crisis, from which no
one can save it," he says,
before being interrupted by another phone call. "Only
we can perhaps, when
we take power. We will change the whole model after
the next election. But
while we are ruled by this minority of whites and
Mestizos the crisis will
continue."
As we talk he studies my business card. It emerges he
has little trust in
"gringo" reporters, whom he believes have depicted him
as speaking only for
the Aymara to try to splinter the indigenous movement.
Quispe is backed in his bid for the presidency by the
MIP, which follows the
ideology of the martyred Andean rebel Tupac Katari,
who stood up to
Spanish colonialists two centuries ago.
It is this potent mix of indigenous mythology and
sabre-rattling that makes
Quispe's campaign seductive to disgruntled highland
Indians. He has tapped
the Aymara's taste for resistance and new-found
feelings of pride in
indigenous heritage, which is felt by native groups
from Mexico to
Patagonia.
Up until the middle of the previous century, Bolivian
Indians had little reason
to feel pride. Until President Victor Paz's social
revolution in 1952, they
worked on plantations or in the tin mines owned by the
ruling families. A
country three times the size of the UK was in the
hands of a
white-dominated oligarchy.
In some ways Quispe is in the mould of the
Cuban-Argentine revolutionary,
Ernesto "Che" Guevara, who tried to persuade Bolivian
peasants to revolt,
before he was shot. But Quispe's aim is grander in
scope. He wants to turn
Bolivia into an indigenous nation and build an Indian
brotherhood across the
Andes.
"We want to create an indigenous nation that will
include peoples from all
the indigenous tribes," he says. "Our organisation
works on a national and
international level. I've been invited to Cusco to
meet with Quechua people of
Peru. We are meeting up with other indigenous
organisations in the region."
A pipedream perhaps, but his candidacy for this year's
elections is real
enough. The MIP has said it will form alliances with
other parties that share
its ideology, in a bid to turn the elections into a
dogfight between the
establishment and the indigenous movement.
Quispe's greatest skill, however, lies in garnering
controversy and publicity.
Rumours abounded a year ago that Venezuelan President
Hugo Chavez
secretly met Quispe and lent him support.
Quispe made further headlines for his gleeful reaction
to the September 11
terrorist attacks on the US and his call for a Latin
American rebellion
against "imperialism" after three peasants were shot
by troops in Ecuador in
early 2001.
When I tell Quispe I work for a business newspaper, he
cannot resist giving
me a soundbite on the evils of capitalism. He wants to
re-nationalise
Bolivia's vast natural gas reserves. "Gas comes from
the 'Pacha Mama'
(earth spirit). It has to be returned to us."
However remote a prospect, the thought of Quispe in
power is enough to
give any "colonialist" businessman bad dreams.
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