Replicate, Facilitate, Disseminate: The Micropolitics of U.S. Democracy Promotion in Bolivia

Abstract

Replicate, Facilitate, Disseminate: The Micropolitics of U.S. Democracy Promotion in Bolivia In the wake of a massive 2003 uprising in El Alto, Bolivia, U.S. democracy assistance programs targeted the city, promising to address Alteños' frustration with democratic institutions and to teach deliberative democratic skills. In this article I examine the position of civic education "replicators." I use this term to describe people from the city of El Alto-many of them young adults-who were trained by U.S. democracy assistance programs to promote renewed and rehabilitated democratic practices among Alteños. I consider what the position of replicators reveals about the governance technologies, aid ideologies, and objectives of U.S. democracypromotion programs. I argue that despite these programs' emphasis on producing subjects who are "governable," replicators are engaged in complex negotiations regarding the form and content of democracy assistance programs, and many continue to enact political practices that donor representatives frequently characterize as outmoded, illiberal, and antidemocratic. Through the experiences of replicators, we learn that liberal democratic concepts, practices, and subjectivities are already mediated and refracted through lived histories and sociopolitical affiliations of the very people tasked with their duplication and spread. Attending to the microdynamics of replication exposes how that repetition itself helps create the conditions under which replicators come to question their endeavors and to articulate understandings of democracy that incorporate practices donors would likely reject. [democracy, foreign aid, political subjectivity, NGOs, Bolivia]In October 2003, thousands of residents of the city of El Alto laid siege to Bolivia's adjacent seat of government, La Paz. Although the flashpoint of the uprising was the export of Bolivia's natural gas supplies, the popular protests expressed a deeper dissatisfaction with neoliberal economic development policies and the state of democratic institutions in the country (Arbona and Kohl 2004;Kohl and Farthing 2006;Lazar 2008). Within days, La Paz was effectively cut off from the rest of the country. 1 Airlines stopped running. Food shortages stripped the markets bare. The conjoined cities ran out of cooking gas and gasoline, and even the wounded and dead had to be wheel-barrowed to makeshift hospitals or morgues. Alteños did not lift the siege until Bolivian President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada fled the country for Miami, Florida, and his vice president, Carlos Mesa, assumed power.

Progress in Bolivia: Declining the United States Influence and the Victories of Evo Morales

“…Democratic governance in Bolivia is more activist, inclusionary, direct, and participatory than that in the USA and the West (Da Silva, 2015, p. 264; Ellison, 2015, pp. 323–324).…”

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“…En los análisis que aquí presentamos, se pretende ir más allá de los estudios realizados con jóvenes alteños en el mismo periodo (Lazar 2010;Ellison 2015) integrando las conexiones entre las agencias y lo político. De este modo, revisaremos tanto la propuesta metodológica, como una pequeña contextualización sociocultural de El Alto.…”