The making of an interethnic coalition: urban and rural anarchists in La Paz, Bolivia, 1946–1947

The 1947 upheavals on haciendas outside La Paz, Bolivia, were facilitated by an interethnic coalition between indigenous peasants and urban anarchists, most of whom were mestizos and cholos (thus ‘non-indigenous’ by official definition). Three sets of factors were essential to this alliance. First, the urbanites’ own politics – their libertarian socialist vision, their attentiveness to both ‘ethnic’ and ‘class’ demands, and their organizational federalism – proved particularly conducive to coalition-building. Second, prior autonomous mobilization outside the city had created local leaders and networks which would form the rural bases for the coalition, and which would also help redefine the anarchist left starting in 1946. Finally, a series of coalition brokers bridged traditional divides of language, ethnicity, and geography. These three factors allowed anarchist organizers to exploit a limited political opening that appeared in 1945–1946. This account qualifies common dismissals of the Latin American left as mestizo-dominated and class-reductionist while also illuminating the process through which the alliance developed.