On June 8, in Cochabamba, Bolivia’s ‘city of eternal spring’, national and Latin American activists and intellectuals met to discuss a left-wing, anarchist, and environmentalist indigenous critique of president Evo Morales’ left-of-centre popular-indigenous government.
At the Encounter in Times of Fragmentation, Bolivian activists talked of being betrayed. The popular rebellion against neoliberal economic inequality and post-colonial racial discrimination, which brought the Morales-headed MAS[i] coalition to power, had been co-opted and fragmented in the name of governability and economic growth. The hope of autonomy and community self-determination had remained largely unfulfilled. Activists, the majority of whom were indigenous women, discussed how to regain their political autonomy and powers of self-determination, and thereby recover the possibility of the future they had imagined.