Movements, Parties and the Making of Indigenous Politics in Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru

While indigenous movements often keep a deliberate distance from the states they perceive as the source of historical oppression, forging connections to political parties tends to be important if indigenous movements seek to effect real policy change in the interest of indigenous peoples. This paper addresses this relationship by studying patterns of cooperation and contestation between indigenous movements and political parties during three recent general elections in Latin America: Bolivia (18 October 2020), Ecuador (7 February 2021) and Peru (11 April 2021). While all three countries have seen increasing indigenous mobilization by grass-roots organizations in recent decades, they can be classified as diverse cases when it comes to the relations between indigenous civil society actors and political parties: In Bolivia, a country that hosts 40% of people identifying as indigenous (census 2012), the MAS, a social movement representing indigenous and rural interests, has itself developed into the main party of government. In Ecuador the share of people who identify as indigenous is much lower (7% according to the 2010 census), yet the indigenous CONAIE association nonetheless managed to set up its own indigenous political party in the 1990s. The party’s indigenous presidential candidate for the 2021 election is now forging a cross-ethnic and cross-class alliance between indigenous rural communities and urban environmentalists. Finally, despite the fact that a quarter of its population identifies as indigenous (census 2017), Peru has so far not seen the rise of a political party deliberately seeking to represent indigenous interests, keeping indigenous mobilization to the realm of civil society. For all elections, we will analyze conventional campaign material (speeches and manifestos) and campaign statements and endorsements scraped from social media accounts (twitter and facebook) of political parties, presidential candidates and indigenous associations. This allows us to assess how parties and presidential candidates appeal to indigenous interests, and how much support—or opposition—they receive from indigenous civil society actors. By comparing the relations between parties and indigenous movements during electoral campaigns in three countries with a different ethnic demography and different trajectories of indigenous mobilization, we hope to contribute novel insights into the conditions under which historically excluded groups seek to influence politics with or without political parties.