The subject of this article is the question of the ethnic-regional cleavages in nowadays Bolivia and how the last Constitution, approved in 2009 could manage it. The challenge of the post-liberal democracies becomes extremely important, as the Constitution approved autonomy for all groups considered “original communities”. Henceforth, indigenous agrarian communities have status of municipalities, and rights to self-government, at least in what concerns the election of traditional officials and the management of natural resources. The ruling party MAS (Movement toward socialism) succeeded to attract wide layers of peasant and urban society. Defending the idea of internal and external decolonization, MAS could amalgamate the labor sectors of society as well as the wide indigenous peasantry, concerned to ethnic demands. The party linked class ideology with ethno-national ones. The Constitution could be regarded as the partial conclusion of a process began in 1953, when the old oligarchies were defeated by a stroke leaded by MNR (Revolutionary National Movement). MNR, composed by middle-class sectors and strengthened by indigenous peasants established the first government which included indigenous societies into the state structures, the rural syndicates. The neo-liberal reforms of the 90’s not only dismantled the national-developing state, but also, created new municipalities, that enclosed peasant communities, which started to demand that they should be governed by indigenous traditional laws symbolizing the end of their oppression and expropriation by white-mestizo elites. This alliance between labor and indigenous sectors displays a new dawn for democratic regimes, or, a return to the state model of 1953?
