Common Ground: Caciques, Artisans, and Radical Intellectuals and the 1927 Chayanta Rebellion

Literature on relations between indigenous movements and the urban Left in Bolivia and Latin America in the 1920s and 1930s generally assumes that a politics of alliance or coalition was precluded by the latter’s modernizing ideology, which, in turn, was undergirded by racist paternalism derived from Victorian pseudo-science. This presentation explores how, in the Chayanta Rebellion in Bolivia in 1927, leaders of indigenous community movements seeking to abolish private property rights in land and establish rural schools built on and strengthened alliances with leaders of the nascent revolutionary Left based in trade unions and political parties, led by artisans and intellectuals, and located in provincial capitals like Sucre, Potosí, and Oruro.

This alliance led to Bolivia’s largest rural insurrection since 1899, with some 10,000 indigenous community members mobilizing across 4 of its 9 departments, as the central government temporarily halted the expropriation of community lands in the southern region, thereby putting local and regional landlord power in check. In the absence of urban uprisings led by indigenous community allies on the revolutionary Left, the Chayanta Rebellion did not succeed, of course, but it nevertheless suggested the outlines of the coalition – composed of labor movement radicals, middle-class intellectuals, and indigenous community peasants – that brought about the National Revolution of 1952. Analyzing judicial records, press reports, and radical pamphlets, this presentation argues that although the official version of events vastly overstated the role of “outside agitators” in fomenting what was labeled Bolivia’s first “communist” uprising, historians have mistakenly discounted the alliance and coalition out which the Chayanta Rebellion grew as a product government propaganda and elite paranoia.