Chachawarmi

By the time Evo Morales came to power, campesino emphasis on class-based struggle had broadened to recuperate a more indigenous-based identity, including conceptions of women’s roles (Sánchez Echevarría Reference Sánchez Echevarría2015). These revolved around a precolonial gender system known as chachawarmi (in Aymara; qhari-warmi in Quechua) that focuses on complementarity between the genders, with the married couple at the core.

Across Latin America, indigenous systems of gender parallelism were transformed by European conquest and subsequent state-building efforts—with an emphasis on subordinating women to men (Dore and Molyneux Reference Dore and Molyneux2000; Silverblatt Reference Silverblatt1987). Even so, the concept of chachawarmi continues to permeate many Andean highland communities and differs substantially from Western ideas of gender equality (Burman Reference Burman2011; Harris Reference Harris2000). Masculinity and femininity are usually conceived in terms of activities rather than the gender of the body carrying out the activities, which “cannot be captured if the term is translated as ‘man/woman’ or ‘gender equality’” (Maclean Reference Maclean2014, 80). This makes women’s subordination less related to the gendered division of labor than to women’s political and educational exclusion (Arce Cuadros Reference Arce Cuadros2022, 161). In many rural communities, single women are not respected in the same way that those in couples are, giving chachawarmi an outsized social and political influence.

For Sánchez Echevarría (Reference Sánchez Echevarría2015), the Bartolinas embraced chachawarmi as a culturally appropriate lens for understanding gender. It served as part of their resistance to assimilation into modernist, market-oriented individualism, a process that intensified during neoliberalism’s heyday from 1985 to 2005 (Flores Carlos Reference Flores Carlos2009). Both a practical and a strategic tool, chachawarmi provided the Bartolinas legitimacy within the indigenous-identified state, as well as the MAS party, their unions, and their communities (Jáuregui Jinés Reference Jáuregui Jinés2019). The concept was quickly adopted by the MAS government, which considered it more favorable to women than colonial or capitalist gender relations (Mullenax Reference Mullenax2018; Choque Reference Choque2006).

Chachawarmi is “based on a new feminism adjusted to our reality … that is not just focused on gender but on race and class,” according to the sociologist Favio Mayta Chipana (Reference Mayta Chipana2018). His consideration of class, race, and gender as one system resonates with decolonial feminist theories (see Pitts, Ortega, and Medina Reference Pitts, Ortega and Medina2019), as well as with Christina Ewig’s (Reference Ewig2018, 439) research on intersectionality in the Andes that led her to argue that race often holds greater significance for women than gender. This is certainly the case in Bolivia, where after centuries of racial and ethnic subjugation, racial equality consistently trumps gender as a priority for indigenous women (see also de la Cadena Reference de la Cadena, Larson and Harris1995; Canessa Reference Canessa2012).

The Bartolinas’ commitment to chachawarmi also served to distinguish them from urban feminists, whom they identified as white, middle-class, and a product of capitalism, even when they were in the same political party (Montes Reference Montes2011, 28; Arce Cuadros Reference Arce Cuadros2022). Tensions between Bartolinas and feminists were exacerbated by the hundreds of years of indigenous women’s servitude to lighter-skinned women, who often viewed them as clients of their nongovernmental projects rather than as political partners (Arce Cuadros Reference Arce Cuadros2022, 163; Rousseau and Ewig Reference Rousseau and Ewig2017, 426). Except for the feminist anarchist groups Mujeres Creando and Feminismo Comunitario, until recently Bolivian feminism has rarely taken indigenous women into account, in either theoretical or ideological terms (Aillón Reference Aillón2015). Feminists often criticized chachawarmi as granting women no more than symbolic power, and as exercised in only limited local spaces, even if its transformative potential was acknowledged (Arce Cuadros Reference Arce Cuadros2022, 199; Rivera Cusicanqui Reference Rivera Cusicanqui2010, 189).

The mistrust between the Bartolinas and feminists also reflects differences between Western privileging of the individual and indigenous worldviews that emphasize the collective. Feminism is often construed by indigenous women as another Western imposition and one that foments division with indigenous men (Flores Carlos Reference Flores Carlos2009). This mirrors Abu-Lughod’s (Reference Abu-Lughod2002) criticism of Western liberal feminism as guilty of neo-imperialism, where indigenous or local gendered expressions take different forms from those accorded to the liberal self.

Coca, the drug war, and women’s organizing

The Bartolinas’ growth as a national political force is rooted largely in the semitropical Chapare east of the city of Cochabamba, where the 1980s boom in US demand for cocaine led to exponential growth in internal migration to cultivate coca. Miners who lost jobs due to closures of tin mines in 1985 joined mostly Quechua-speaking peasant farmers from Cochabamba’s valleys who had been impoverished by a severe drought in 1982 and the neoliberal relaxation of agricultural imports after 1985. Across the Americas, the negative impacts of neoliberal reforms fell most heavily on women and indigenous peoples (Hall and Patrinos Reference Hall and Patrinos2005).

Without local state institutions, unions formed, modeled after their highland counterparts and affiliated with the CSUTCB or with the Confederación Sindical de Colonizadores de Bolivia (CSCB), ^{Footnote 8} combining indigenous concepts of reciprocity, mutual dependence, and care for people and place with Western union traditions. The male-dominated unions organized into federations that handled everything from granting land and resolving boundary disputes to building schools and disciplining antisocial behavior (Grisaffi Reference Grisaffi2019, 98). Linked together through the powerful Coordinator of the Six Federations of the Cochabamba Tropics (Coordinadora de las Seis Federaciones del Trópico de Cochabamba), they now number close to a thousand.

Women play a key role in coca cultivation, which takes place close to home, allowing them to combine farmwork with household obligations. While both women and men usually plant, tend, and harvest coca, women dominate coca sales while men do most of the heavy labor, such as clearing land (Alvarado Choque Reference Alvarado Choque2020). Women most often manage reciprocal indigenous labor exchanges (ayni) between people who are frequently tied through bonds of compadrazgo (godparenthood), one of the most significant social relationships in rural Andean society. The resulting high density of ties this produced between women facilitated the creation of the type of social movement networks that have been associated with mutual support, commitment, self-sacrifice, and continuity over time (Krinskey and Crossley Reference Krinsky, Crossley, Krinsky and Crossley2015).

Most of the Chapare coca crop is processed into cocaine. Where growers are involved in the illicit trade, men’s participation is almost always limited to the first rudimentary stage of production, whereas women work as cooks and transport leaf, chemical inputs, or cocaine paste. Wealthier women, most often involved in commerce, sometimes bankroll younger men to operate a cocaine paste workshop, in which they share profits (Grisaffi Reference Grisaffi2022).

The United States responded to the coca boom with a militarized and prohibitionist strategy that sought to criminalize growers. For twenty-five years in Bolivia, the War on Drugs (as the United States called the policy) failed to consistently curb coca cultivation while also generating violence and undermining democratic practices. This policy approach was also highly gendered (Muehlmann Reference Muehlmann2018; Buxton, Margo, and Burger Reference Buxton, Margo and Burger2021): the steep income declines provoked by forced eradication at the end of the 1990s fell most heavily on women—particularly female-headed households—as women are paid less, lack equal access to family income, and have fewer employment possibilities (Gumucio Reference Gumucio2015; see also Bautista-Revelo et al. Reference Bautista-Revelo, Blanca Capacho, Martínez, Pereira and Ramírez2021).

Interdiction and eradication by US-trained and funded police and military units (Unidad Móvil Policial para Áreas Rurales, or UMOPAR, also known as the “Leos”) included sexual violence. In 2005, a female coca grower told us:

Following the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City, Washington policy makers linked the War on Drugs and the War on Terror into a single offensive (Youngers Reference Youngers2003), and indigenous Andeans became targets (Huanca Rodríguez and Vásquez Reference Huanca Rodriguez and Vasquez2022). In 2007, Juana Quispe, a veteran women’s union leader who was charged with terrorism and later became a MAS congresswoman, recounted: “In Chapare they shot at us, they killed us, they humiliated us, they left orphans, they have done everything to us, but they couldn’t beat us—even though we were dying we continued to fight; they put all the leaders in jail, accusing us of terrorism, criminal organization, manufacturing explosive weapons and armed uprising.” ^{Footnote 10}

Given coca’s importance to household finances, growers mobilized to defend the right to cultivate it, utilizing the vocabulary of indigenous rights and national sovereignty that appealed to a Bolivian and increasingly international audience (see Grisaffi Reference Grisaffi2019, 119–123). Against this backdrop of repression, male leaders became more open to women’s unions and actively encouraged women to form their own unions. Like highland indigenous campesino leaders who promoted women’s organizing in the 1980s, they reasoned that UMOPAR would not be as brutal to women protestors as they were to men (Zurita Reference Zurita2005, 89; PACS 2009, 108). Women deploying traditional gender roles to advance their movement’s goals is widely practiced worldwide and meant that Chapare women’s earliest protest activity involved putting their bodies on the line (Arce Cuadros Reference Arce Cuadros2022, 130; Principe Reference Principe2017). The leader Rosena Rodríguez explained: “More than anything, women went first because the men were attacked like animals, for that reason women have always been at the head of the march.” ^{Footnote 11}

Previously, Chapare unions had a position called “female liaison” (as did the Bartolinas within the CSUTCB) (Padilla Poveda Reference Padilla Poveda2014, 128), a role filled mostly by single women or widows (Ramos Salazar Reference Ramos Salazar2013). Most future cocalera leaders began their union careers in this position, but when they married, they often found it difficult to continue. In July 2006, Roxana Argandoña, then a union leader and municipal councillor, described her 1980s union involvement: “Back then they just ignored the women. We weren’t union leaders, no, they just called us ‘secretary for female affairs.’ Nobody paid attention to us. When an important visitor came our job was to cook, to look after them. Back then we were not brave yet. Before they used to say why should women participate in a meeting? … I always used to answer no, I want to have my voice heard too.” ^{Footnote 12}

By the mid-1990s, some cocaleras began articulating both practical and strategic concerns related to gender. ^{Footnote 13} With increasing cogency, they demanded respect at home, in leadership positions, for equitable land titling, and education and literacy (Zabalaga Reference Zabalaga2004, 12). However, while the Chapare women’s federation organizes all women under its wing, the only local sindicatos are those established during initial colonization. Union ledgers we reviewed in 2014 revealed that roughly equal numbers of men and women were registered as members, even though their involvement remained shaped by gender, as the meetings have never been easy for cocaleras. Often with small children underfoot, they cannot concentrate fully on the proceedings; we never witnessed a man arrive with or care for a child at a meeting.

The veteran leader and national senator (2006–2009) Leonilda Zurita added: “When we first started, we were afraid to speak or make proposals because sometimes the men would laugh or make comments among themselves. So often we would be nervous and some of us would even tremble from fear.” ^{Footnote 14} As a result, women largely followed men’s direction, and their resolutions usually mirrored those of the men’s federation, often word for word (Ramos Salazar Reference Ramos Salazar2013, 127). When choosing their leaders, they never lacked men ready to “help them,” very often at the request of the women themselves (Arnold and Spedding Reference Arnold and Spedding2005, 96). Roxana Argandoña clarified: “There was a lot of male chauvinism; they didn’t want to take us into account because women have no value; we are for serving in the kitchen or at home to take care of the children.” ^{Footnote 15}

By January 1995, three women’s federations had formed, duplicating the structure of the male-dominated federation. In March of that year, a special CSUTCB congress met with the participation of the federations to form a political instrument representing campesino electoral interests in elections. Women’s involvement proved a game changer because male cocalero leaders, led by Evo Morales, sought to position themselves as the vanguard of the campesino movement, and they needed cocalera backing to do it (Arce Cuadros Reference Arce Cuadros2022, 76). Apolonia Sánchez recalled: ‘We were obliged to get organized, even if the men did not want us to. Above all our brother Evo said “yes, together with the women we will defend ourselves”’. ^{Footnote 16}

Another critical turning point came with the four-hundred-kilometer Women’s March to La Paz in December 1995, generally supported by male leadership, to demand an end to coca eradication and respect for human rights. Mistreatment and imprisonment by the antidrug police strengthened women’s resolve, and their growing logistics skills boosted organizing (Ramos Salazar Reference Ramos Salazar2013, 116–117, 149). Chapare women steadily developed a sense of purpose beyond domestic and family farm concerns, but at this stage, their focus was almost exclusively on protecting themselves (Zurita Vargas and Draper Reference Zurita Vargas and Draper2003). Juana Quispe told us: “The Chimoré Women’s Federation here organized with three objectives, first, to defend life because the Leos were shooting at us; second, to defend coca, which is the economic sustenance for our family, and finally, to defend territory, because without land we cannot live.” ^{Footnote 17}

Alex Contreras Baspineiro (Reference Contreras Baspineiro1995), who accompanied the march, noted that although women participated fully, they had no role in subsequent negotiations, nor were any topics specific to women ever included in cocalero demands. Nonetheless, for the first time in Bolivia’s history, indigenous women acted as representatives of social movements and negotiated with the government without political parties or male intermediaries. This fundamentally changed how women were perceived politically and opened up the possibility that they could act autonomously, marking a shift from “directed” to “associative” movement (see Molyneux Reference Molyneux2001, 140–162; Arce Cuadros Reference Arce Cuadros2022, 77–78).

From then on, women’s participation became vital to cocalero resistance (Jáuregui Jinés Reference Jáuregui Jinés2019; García Yapur, García Orellana, and Soliz Romero Reference García Yapur, García Orellana and Soliz Romero2014, 278). In 1997, with four local federations then in place, Chapare women formed the regional Coordinating Body of the Federations of Rural Women of the Cochabamba Tropics (Coordinadora Campesina de Mujeres del Trópico de Cochabamba, COCAMTROP), that affiliated with the national Bartolinas.

Women leaders from this period shared certain characteristics, similar to other women’s leaders throughout Bolivia. Ten of the eleven women leaders interviewed by Sandra Ramos Salazar (Reference Ramos Salazar2013, 58) were young, single, and without family obligations. ^{Footnote 18} Five of them remained unmarried and childless for most of their union careers, and the other six had only one or two children at a time when the fertility rate was five children per woman in the Chapare (Arnold and Spedding Reference Arnold and Spedding2005). ^{Footnote 19} They almost all enjoyed support from a male relative, usually their father or brother(s), and those who lacked that support had much shorter union involvement. Our field observations support this finding: female leaders often talked about how the men in their lives felt emasculated and were “jealous” of their success. However, the male-dominated unions had to give up some space for them, precisely because they needed women to achieve their broader goals.

Eight of Ramos’s interviewees wore traditional indigenous dress (pollera), whose wearers routinely suffer racism. Many Chapare women in the 1990s spoke more Quechua than Spanish, which presented another barrier to participation beyond the local level. Apolonia Sánchez explained that most had little formal education which made union involvement vital for developing public-speaking skills, knowledge, and for managing organizations. ^{Footnote 20} She stressed that the union was like a school and a training ground: “I feel proud to be a woman who is from the countryside, who wears the pollera. Maybe I am not a professional, but I have been trained within this organization (the union). I have learned a lot, so I always say all of us are professionals.”

After 1997, female leaders hosted regular programs on the coca union’s radio station (Radio Sovereignty), including on gender-specific issues such as domestic violence, reproductive rights, and female workload, which was vital for organizing and education. According to the women we interviewed, these programs slowly transformed gender relations in the home, as such issues would not normally be discussed openly. Listening to the radio became part of the daily work of building a subaltern counterpublic that empowered women to act (Grisaffi Reference Grisaffi2019, 180–184).

Men frequently accused female leaders of being “loose women” who just wanted to have affairs with male leaders (Zabalaga Reference Zabalaga2004, 16). Two women told Ramos that their partners’ doubts that they were faithful led to physical and psychological abuse, which caused them to abandon their union roles (Ramos Salazar Reference Ramos Salazar2013, 136). Women described how they couldn’t show any “weakness” or emotion because male leaders would interpret it as a sign that they weren’t disciplined or committed enough to lead (Ramos Salazar Reference Ramos Salazar2013, 113), findings that were mirrored in our own research.

Men, too, are subject to gossip—during fieldwork we often encountered rumors that male leaders would get drunk, have affairs, attend brothels and spend union cash to do so. This did not appear to have a detrimental impact on a man’s union career; in fact, such a reputation might strengthen it. We observed how attendance at drinking sessions establishes a man’s position, as it is there that relationships are built and deals are brokered. Women either self-excluded from male-dominated spaces or, if they did attend, would generally leave early, lest they face accusations of being “loose.” This was particularly the case for younger female leaders; older married women had more freedom.

For union tasks, male leaders receive a viático, a daily stipend to cover expenses. None of Ramos’s interviewees collected one, a particularly serious constraint given most women’s financial dependence (Zabalaga Reference Zabalaga2004; Ramos Salazar Reference Ramos Salazar2013, 145). Our research revealed that even when they secured union resources, women complained that they got less than what went to men.

Activist cocaleras have always juggled the triple jornada—the triple workday. Not only were they critical to the success of protests, they also cultivated coca for income and cared for their children and households. This is still often seen as the natural order of things. Honorata Díaz, municipal councillor for Villa Tunari (2005–2010), explained: “Women’s work is still the family: raise children, cook and once that is done, then we can leave home and work as union leaders.” ^{Footnote 21} For Remigia Ferrel Vallejos, another union leader: “Being a woman is not easy, being a mother is not easy, sometimes we work at home early in the morning and we don’t have a break. We … work in the chaco [fields] together with the man, we cook and wash dishes, we do everything, we don’t stop, we still must wash clothes too. In the morning we get up and it is the same again.” ^{Footnote 22}

Despite these limitations, the Chapare cocalera organization became a widely emulated model of women peasant organizing, training, and empowerment throughout Bolivia (García Yapur et al. Reference García Yapur, Marizol Soliz Romero, Rosales Rocha and Zeballos Ibáñez2015, 78). Their organizational strength proved crucial to forming the MAS and to indigenous women’s entrance into electoral politics (Jáuregui Jinés Reference Jáuregui Jinés2019).

Cocaleras and Bartolinas

The Bartolinas formed as a result of men’s sense of necessity: to develop a structure within the CSTUCB that reflected gender complementarity (chachawarmi) (Salazar and Broekhoven 1998 quoted in Padilla Poveda Reference Padilla Poveda2014, 130). It represented the first time that a Bolivian union organization decided to create a women’s branch, making the Bartolinas the only women’s organization within the COB. However, from the very beginning, tensions existed between which identity was paramount—as women, as belonging to an ethnic group, or as socioeconomic class—and how to articulate between them (Ticona 2006 quoted in Padilla Poveda Reference Padilla Poveda2014, 113).

The 1990s were a time of transition within the CSUTCB, as the center of struggle and rural social movement power shifted to the cocaleros in the Chapare. This profoundly changed the Bartolinas as well, because the cocalera movement injected energy and determination into the national organization. After participating in forming the political instrument that led to MAS in the late 1990s, cocaleras have been elected to top leadership in the Bartolinas more than representatives from any other region or sector. ^{Footnote 23}

An increasingly important political foothold, which also cracked open the door for indigenous women to enter electoral politics, was state decentralization in 1994, which was implemented alongside multicultural, pluriethnic, and gender-sensitive reforms. The Law of Popular Participation (LPP) founded new municipalities throughout the country, channeling national government funding to rural areas for the first time (Kohl Reference Kohl2003). In the Chapare, all five municipalities have been governed ever since by the coca grower unions—with MAS often taking 100 percent of the vote—in municipalities widely considered among the country’s best managed (Grisaffi Reference Grisaffi2019, 150–151; Kohl Reference Kohl2003).

This change was preceded by three years by another law that proved crucial for rural indigenous women. In 1997, thanks to sustained organizing and lobbying by Bolivia’s increasingly vibrant feminist movement, a quota law passed mandating that women account for 30 percent of political candidates (Montes Reference Montes2011, 223). This victory convinced the Bartolinas to run in the 1999 municipal elections on the MAS ticket. It also increased their contact with feminist nongovernmental organizations, some of which provided training courses and seminars (Jáuregui Jinés Reference Jáuregui Jinés2019, 157). From that point on, the Bartolinas steadily increased the number of municipal councillor posts they held, although they rarely became mayors. The electoral experience and its inequalities facilitated a steady expansion of their awareness of gender injustice (Arce Cuadros Reference Arce Cuadros2022, 84; Jáuregui Jinés Reference Jáuregui Jinés2019).

By the early 2000s, the Bartolinas had spread in a patchwork throughout the country, centered in much of La Paz department and all of Cochabamba (García Linera, Chávez León, and Costas Monje Reference García Linera, Chávez León and Costas Monje2010, 540). Continued growth, driven in no small part by cocalera leadership and MAS government literacy and rural education programs, pushed its membership to 1.7 million rural women by 2014 (García Yapur, García Orellana, and Soliz Romero Reference García Yapur, García Orellana and Soliz Romero2014, 221). Now the country’s largest and most important women’s organization, despite significant language and cultural differences, the Bartolinas is also one of the largest, strongest, and oldest indigenous women’s organizations in Latin America (Román Arnez Reference Román Arnez2008, 32; FAO n.d.).

In November 2004, the Bartolinas joined four other indigenous organizations to create the Unity Pact of Indigenous peoples that became the most loyal pillar of the MAS party. After winning the 2005 elections, four indigenous women were made ministers—something unprecedented in Bolivia (Delgado Reference Delgado2010). According to Melissa Buice (Reference Buice2013, 168), this reflects how state features are “critical influences on indigenous women’s policy outcomes,” as Rousseau and Ewig (Reference Rousseau and Ewig2017) found in comparing advances in indigenous women’s rights between Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia. Without the MAS in government and the party reliant on indigenous votes to remain in power, the Bartolinas could never have achieved what they did.

In 2008, after thirty years of debate over the question of autonomy from the CSUTCB, the Bartolinas became organizationally independent and equal organizationally, forming their own confederation (CNMCIOB “BS”) (Condo quoted in Poveda Padilla Reference Padilla Poveda2014, 129–131). Their Strategic Development Plan for 2006 to 2010 set out their position: “Dependence on other confederations, such as the CSUTCB was not a good strategy, it implied depending on it to be able to organize the defense of rights, which in general was only for men and women could not raise gender specific demands.” ^{Footnote 24}

Feminists and Bartolinas: Gender parity in action

Rousseau and Ewig (Reference Rousseau and Ewig2017, 426) and Arce Cuadros (Reference Arce Cuadros2022, 26) contend that indigenous women’s political empowerment can advance only when the indigenous movement is strong and women’s position in that movement is robust. We suggest that another factor is also at play. A growing feminist movement proved critical through its gender parity initiatives in 1997 and 2006–2007, curiously repeating the pattern of Bolivian middle- and upper-class women who fought for women’s voting rights beginning in 1929 (Aillón Reference Aillón2015). However, the 1929 initiative specified that voting rights should only be granted to literate women, effectively excluding indigenous women who were then denied all access to formal education. Almost a hundred years later, that history created a negative backdrop to efforts at collaboration between indigenous women and upper-middle-class white or mestiza women (Aillón Reference Aillón2015).

An example of these tensions is contention over abortion (Dibbits and Pabón Reference Dibbits and Pabón2012). The Bartolinas oppose it vehemently, arguing that feminist demands for abortion rights are a veiled threat of ethnocide and that abortion has a negative effect on communities (Deere and León Reference Deere and León2002). This attitude prevails even though abortions are Bolivia’s third leading cause of maternal death, and even higher among indigenous women, with most abortions occurring in rural areas (UNICEF n.d.). ^{Footnote 25}

A critical moment for advancing indigenous women’s political representation arose during the 2006–2007 Constituent Assembly, whose president was the Chapare cocalera, municipal councillor, and national Bartolinas executive Silvia Lazarte. The assembly was the most diverse decision-making body in Bolivian history, with more indigenous and women’s participation than ever before.

While the Bartolinas initially distanced themselves from the feminist coalition (Movimiento de Mujeres Presentes en la Historia, MMPH) that they had previously participated in, their platform prioritized women’s rights. They demanded gender equity in land titling, small business support for rural women, sanctions against domestic violence, and rights to education and health services. Faced with substantial resistance to this agenda from indigenous men, the Bartolinas made common cause with feminists, largely convinced by cocalera and Bartolinas leader Leonilda Zurita, who argued that gender parity was consistent with chachawarmi. However, they maintained their fierce opposition to abortion (Htun and Ossa Reference Htun and Ossa2013, 11).

The Bartolinas growing political maturity was evident through their effective alliance with Bolivian feminists, even though men initially accused them of trying to divide the indigenous movement (Jáuregui Jinés, Reference Jáuregui Jinés2019, 113). Their persistence convinced the Unity Pact to include their proposals alongside those on race and class (Flores Carlos Reference Flores Carlos2009, 81). Demonstrating a newfound independence, indigenous women initiated many of the new constitution’s intersectional clauses, shaped by their understanding of chachawarmi (Rousseau Reference Rousseau2011b; Jáuregui Jinés Reference Jáuregui Jinés2019, 104). Jáuregui Jinés (Reference Jáuregui Jinés2019) contends that for the first time they saw with three eyes—race, class, and gender. While still largely associative in relation to men’s campesino unions, they were moving closer to becoming an independent actor.

Bolivia’s 2009 constitution is one of the most advanced in women’s rights in the world, granting civil and gender rights, social equity, and equality with men. “The Constitution changed a great deal, raising consciousness of women’s rights among many women for the first time,” explained Freddy Condo, a longtime adviser to the Bartolinas. ^{Footnote 26} Rousseau (Reference Rousseau2011a) considers it as ushering in a significant change because it marks the beginning of a greater government emphasis on gender equality.

By 2010, the Bartolinas held ten Legislative Assembly seats, a leap forward from 2005, when they won three (Jáuregui Jinés Reference Jáuregui Jinés2019, 146). The Legislative Assembly achieved gender parity in 2014, one of the world’s highest rates of women’s representation (Farthing, Reference Farthing2015). This continued in 2019, with women winning 46 percent of the House and 56 percent of the Senate (IDEA 2021). Between 2015 and 2020, 25 percent of legislators were Bartolinas, but few held leadership positions in government (Sánchez, Pereira Álvarez, and Quisbert Carvajal Reference Sánchez, Nelly Pereira Álvarez and Quisbert Carvajal2019).

A principal reason given by MAS party leadership for this exclusion was that the low educational levels of most indigenous women (and often indigenous men as well) precluded leadership roles for them. The MAS increasingly utilized this argument on lack of “expert knowledge” to “invite” candidates—well educated and therefore almost exclusively middle class or above—both into the legislature and into the administration, a move that occasionally was supported by the Bartolinas themselves, who worried they weren’t ready for the responsibility (Jáuregui Jinés Reference Jáuregui Jinés2019, 139; Sánchez, Pereira Álvarez, and Quisbert Carvajal Reference Sánchez, Nelly Pereira Álvarez and Quisbert Carvajal2019, 143). Nonetheless, women’s rights progressed: in 2012, the MAS party adopted gender parity and by 2014, 45 percent of the party’s leadership were women, a higher percentage than any other political party (Sánchez, Pereira Álvarez, and Quisbert Carvajal Reference Sánchez, Nelly Pereira Álvarez and Quisbert Carvajal2019).

At the municipal level by 2015, women councillors had more than doubled their seats from 2004 (Domínguez and Pacheco Reference Domínguez and Pacheco2018). Gender parity is achieved via the suplente (or alternate) system, with candidates voted in as a pair: one man and one woman who switch halfway through the term (see Grisaffi Reference Grisaffi2019, 165). This alternancia, or shared office, in rural areas draws on indigenous traditions of rotating leadership. However, in practice, women are often pressured to give up their positions sooner than required. “Councillors have had their house set on fire, their children assaulted, and been physically attacked, all so that they’ll resign early,” according to Jessy López, the director of the Association of Female Councillors of Bolivia. “We frequently have participation, but no real representation, because women follow men’s lead as they have been taught to do since childhood,” she continued (Farthing Reference Farthing2016). This situation has largely been ignored by the MAS, which has tended to characterize such strife as personal disagreements (Arce Cuadros Reference Arce Cuadros2022, 246).

Serving as a councillor puts additional pressures on women, as the cocalera and former vice president of the Villa Tunari Municipal Council, Ruth Sejas Charca, explained in 2019: “Now, we alternate between men and women so as to achieve gender parity, but the reality is that we women have more work, because beside the unions and municipalities, we have to take care of our families everyday needs.” ^{Footnote 27}

Women remain largely absent in municipal leadership: of Bolivia’s 339 mayors, most of them rural, only 8 percent were women in 2018 (ONU Mujeres Reference Mujeres2018, 6). In 2021, the cocalera and Bartolinas activist Segundina Orellana became the first woman mayor in the Chapare’s largest municipality, Villa Tunari. However, she is one of only two women among a total of forty-seven Cochabamba department mayors (Revollo Reference Revollo2021). Female mayors face sexist abuse. Comments made on the cocalero Facebook page Radio Kawsachun Coca about Shinahota’s former mayor Matilde Campos reveal open misogyny. User comments include: “everyday this whale gets fatter.” ^{Footnote 28}

In 2006, the Aymara sociologist María Eugenia Choque argued that within the public sphere, rural indigenous women’s participation remained 80 percent symbolic and only 20 percent in consequential decision-making (Choque Reference Choque2006). Ten years later, Sandra Ramos Salazar (Reference Ramos Salazar2016) found in interviews in rural La Paz, where both the Bartolinas and the CSUTCB got their start, that “men as well as women frequently consider women’s ‘participation’ in the union ‘unnecessary,’” attitudes that reflect those in the Chapare fifteen to twenty years earlier and that to some degree had been overcome. ^{Footnote 29} This appeared to be a perpetuation of what Calla, Huanto, and Sarsuri (Reference Calla, Huanto and Sarsuri2006) found in rural La Paz in 2006: women were considered in the same category as children and therefore needed men’s help in any form of political participation. Nicole Fabricant (Reference Fabricant2012) observed similar dynamics in the landless movement, made up largely of highland immigrants, in eastern Bolivia.

A setback and resurgence: The 2019 coup and its aftermath

After the Bartolinas presented a depatriarchization plan in October 2018, the leadership told the anthropologist Charlotta Widmark (Reference Widmark2019, 37) that they saw themselves as in a stronger position than ever. However, in November 2019, following disputed elections, a coup forced the MAS party’s Evo Morales into exile and replaced him with a hard-right interim administration led by Jeanine Áñez. The resulting unrest (which included the Bartolinas) led to military repression that resulted in thirty-five deaths, including eleven coca growers (Farthing and Becker Reference Farthing and Becker2021). Much of the racist ire that surged during the coup and its aftermath was directed toward indigenous women: a market vendor recalled that after the coup, “motorbikes drove by and hit us” (Farthing and Becker Reference Farthing and Becker2021, 144). Anyone associated with MAS was persecuted, which combined with the COVID-19 pandemic, represented a significant pushback against indigenous and women’s rights.

A year later in 2020, a reconstituted Unity Pact (which included the Bartolinas) asserted renewed independence from MAS and had joined with urban social movements to force new elections, which brought Luis Arce, Evo’s minister of finance and MAS militant, to power. His more technocratic government diminished the influence coca growers had wielded under Morales, in part by replacing coca union leaders with his own supporters in government jobs. This included Alieta Ortiz, a former radio station reporter who complained that she was blacklisted from working as a government “communicator” because she was from the Chapare. ^{Footnote 30} Cocalera influence also dropped in the Bartolinas—no coca grower has headed the national indigenous women’s organization since 2017, the longest period since 1999. ^{Footnote 31}

The move to select leaders from regions beyond the Chapare reflects a continuing increase in political maturity among Bolivia’s indigenous women nationally. This was patently evident by 2023, when Bartolinas leadership declared a “frontal fight against machismo which is the source of violence and violation of our rights” (CNMCIOB “BS” 2023). They were actively working on social and economic projects, particularly favoring small producers; presenting proposals for extended laws against feminicide, infanticide, and rape; and insisting on 50 percent quotas for governors and mayors. Nonetheless, splits in the Bartolinas (and other Unity Pact organizations) between pro-Morales and pro-Arce factions threaten to stymie future advances in indigenous women’s rights (Molina Reference Molina2023).