Culture and Political Practice of the Aymara and Quechua in Bolivia

What significance should be attributed to the fact that the former secretary general of the Bolivian peasant confederation and the national union federation, Jenaro Flores, also the founder, chairman, and presidential candidate of the Movimiento Revolucionario Tupac Katari (Tupac Katari Revolutionary Movement-MRTK), during the 1980-1982 dictatorship assumed the office of jilakata, the rural community's highest traditional position? In other words, how is one to explain the fact that a person of distinction involved in so-called modern democratic forms of political participation and national politics participates in the traditionally rooted' Andean political-religious cargo system? Some observers have attempted to interpret this move as a way of masking his political defeat in the internecine struggles within the peasant confederation in the mid-1980s. If this is the case, then his becoming a jilakata can be viewed as the unhappy end of a former hero. He himself sees his move toward the local base as a natural obligation under the prevailing norms of the Aymara as well as an important thrust in developing and securing local structures, since by virtue of his office he has helped to create numerous community projects and programs. Flores, an Aymara from a village near the place of execution of Tupac Katari, the leader of the anticolonial uprising of 1781, helped found the Katarista movement in the early 1970s. This social movement of Aymaraand Quechua-speaking peasants spread very quickly and was the forerunner of the first independent national peasant confederation, the Confederacion Sindical Unica de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia (Unitary Union Confederation of Bolivian Peasant Workers-CSUTCB), established in