AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST WORLD ANTHROPOLOGIES Essay The Pluripolitical Effect and the Bolivian Political Crisis Renata Albuquerque Faculdade Cásper Líbero, São Paulo, Brazil This essay is mostly about the political events that started in Bolivia around October 2019. I also take the opportunity to discuss ways to improve the analysis of those recent protests. I present the idea that Bolivia’s plurinational context, a polit- ical and constitutional formula created under Evo Morales’s government, had an unexpected efect that is key to under- standing the country’s political feld and its recent crisis.I call this the pluripolitical efect (Albuquerque 2018, 2019), which I defne as a specifc kind of political relation distinguished by ambiguity, even for those experiences and projects usu- ally characterized as left or right. We fnd this ambiguity in the displacement within the political feld of important pop- ular and Indigenous actors to the opposition, sometimes in alliance with conservative actors, which has hastened wear and tear on the Morales government. The interpretation of the Bolivian Indigenous politi- cal feld will vary depending on perspective—for instance, the Andean experience or the Amazonian one. Indigenous people from the Altiplano, the highlands, and from Tier- ras Bajas, the lowlands, have very diferent ways of engag- ing with the country’s political history and recent events. I am used to thinking about Bolivia from a lowland perspec- tive since I have been working with the Amazonian Indige- nous movement for the past nine years. That matters because most actors within that movement have been very active and organized members of the opposition to Evo Morales’s government. During the frst years of my feldwork in Bolivia, as part of a research project I was conducting for my master’s degree in Latin American studies, I spent a brief stint in La Paz (in 2013). I wanted to understand varying perspectives on the government’s infrastructure project to build a road cross- ing the Isiboro Sécure National Park and Indigenous Terri- tory (TIPNIS). I wanted to learn about perspectives difer- ent from the ones I got to know in the Isiboro Sécure region. I learned from an Andean sociologist who was recently re- moved from his position in an Indigenous congresswoman’s ofce that the main challenge he had experienced in that role was managing the ofcial’s relationship with her own com- munity, the people who elected her. Were they in charge of the ofce, or was she? In several Indigenous communities, people have the power to choose who stays in charge and AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Vol. 000, No. 0, pp. 1–3, ISSN 0002-7294, online ISSN 1548-1433. © 2020 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/aman.13432 who should be replaced. As I learned on the TIPNIS terri- tory, this power can be exercised at any time, and not only as terms of ofce end, as in our democracies. That sociologist in La Paz introduced me to a question that emerged out of the particular political dynamic of the “plurinational state” (as Bolivia is called): could the Indigenous people, following their nations’ rules, interrupt a constitutional mandate? That question stayed with me for years, probably be- cause similar issues could be seen in Bolivia’s national sphere. Who was in charge? Was it Evo and his party or the politi- cal organizations—the social movements and the Indigenous nations that support him and led him to ofce? As some- body who tries to understand Indigenous politics from an ethnographic perspective,I may say that this is Bolivia’s most important challenge as a plurinational state, and it has not been solved yet. Spending years side by side with some of the most activist Indigenous leaders from the TIPNIS territory, I learned that their main objection to Evo Morales was that he would not listen to them. They were not an integral part of the new plurinational state, as they thought they would be. In his government, they could not even decide if they wanted a road crossing their land or not. His government did not seem plural or new to them. Evo Morales was the frst Indigenous president of Bo- livia, a country of an impressive Indigenous presence in terms of demography, culture, and, most recently, the com- position of the political feld. Morales frst came to power in 2006 after winning the 2005 election—in many aspects a re- sult of a series of protests led by Indigenous people, workers, peasants, students, and multiple kinds of activists. It was a popular project built to reconstruct the country,and Morales and his party, Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS, the Move- ment to Socialism), were in charge of it. Over the fourteen years that Morales and the MAS stayed in ofce, much of this popular infuence on the government dwindled. Although Morales kept getting reelected (in 2009 and 2014), he was constantly questioned by diferent sectors, including the old white elite from Santa Cruz, but also Indigenous people (for example, from the TIPNIS). The plurinational formula had an unexpected pluripo- litical efect on the political feld, creating very ambiguous relationships among a great number of social organizations. Since I began my most recent research about the TIPNIS territory and its confictive situation with the government (Albuquerque 2019), I have been trying to explain the many