History of Northern and Andean Spanish America

The cultural policies of the left-wing government of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela in the new millennium saw a shift back to funding and patronage of the arts after years of defunding and commodification of cultural production. However, despite leading to a renaissance of cultural activity, Chavista cultural policy also retained a modernist rationality that treated cultural production as objects to be classified and quantified. Official cultural policy in Venezuela has historically developed alongside popular-cultural formations that draw on alternative conceptions of culture that stem from everyday life. The official and the everyday have developed in tandem and, sometimes, at cross-purposes. Many scholars look to policies and states as the producers of change, but it is at the level of the everyday that we can see the emerging possibilities that define cultural movements in search of social change.

Evo Morales Ayma was elected president of Bolivia in December 2005, taking office in January 2006. He has since been reelected on two separate occasions, in 2009 and 2014. Like Lula in Brazil, Morales is one of the few Latin American leaders to emerge from truly humble origins, a trait that helps explain his lasting popularity with a largely poor and indigenous voting public. The evolution of the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS), Morales’s party, had its roots in the struggles to resist the United States–inspired “war on drugs” in the late 1990s, yet it managed to broaden the scope of its appeal to involve a range of social movements, both rural and urban, using the defense of natural resources as a leitmotiv to bring together disparate groupings. In government, Morales sought to engineer an abrupt change from neoliberal policies pursued by elite-led civilian administrations since the 1980s, reasserting the role of the state in development, bringing the all-important hydrocarbons industry back into public control, speeding up land reform, introducing a constitution that reasserted indigenous rights, and enacting policies designed to redistribute income and combat poverty.

A polemical figure, Morales has attracted adulation from supporters and bitter criticism from opponents. Scholarship has reflected this polarization. Conservative critics, at one end of the spectrum, have tended to stress the authoritarian features of his government and its disdain for democratic niceties; Marxists at the other end tend to see it as an exercise in pale reformism that has left the power structure in Bolivia largely intact. In between, of course, there are a variety of intermediary positions that draw out both the achievements and limitations that this article seeks to assess.

Agrarian transformations in Andean Peru, subject to larger sociopolitical and economic processes, entailed major material, environmental, and biological changes. The long history of sheep introduction in Andean environments, its specific impact on the central highlands, and the making of an Andean breed of sheep—the oveja Junín—illustrate how such transformations shaped rural Peru as a societal space. Following larger environmental patters in Latin America, sheep became the dominant animal of the upper Andean regions, populating depleted landscapes and refashioning otherwise hostile environments as areas of agrarian productivity. Many of the transformations that occurred during colonial times, particularly the consolidation of the hacienda system and the rise of sheepherding as a form of peonage, served manifold purposes in the transition to the national period. While the 19th-century liberal obliteration of corporate identities and property obscured the legacy of indigenous communities, sheep continued to thrive and set the conditions for the incorporation of the Peruvian countryside into the global world economy. In the 20th century, with the parallel arrival of state and capital governance, transforming sheep and sheepherding from vernacular expressions of livelihood into advanced forms of modern agrarian industrialism merged together scientific and veterinarian knowledge with local understandings, producing the oveja Junín as the ultimate result. As sheepherding modernized based on efficient husbandry, sheep modernity efficiently nurtured rural developmentalism, bringing together communal and capitalist interests in unprecedented ways. The state-sponsored project of granjas comunales devoted to capital-intensive grazing economies reveals how husbandry and modern grazing activities both reinforced and transformed societal organization within indigenous communities, sanctioning existing differences while providing a vocabulary of capital for recasting their internal social relations of production. When the state envisioned the centralization of otherwise profitable communal grazing economies, through the allegedly empowering language of agrarian reform, the cooperativization of land, labor, and animals led to communal, family, and individual disenfranchisement. Indigenous community members, turned into campesinos, sought new battlegrounds for resisting state intromission. Eventually, the very biology of the oveja Junín as an exclusive domain of state and capital became the target of campesino sabotage. As the agrarian reform collapsed and revolution engulfed the countryside, rural livelihoods—sheep included—faced their ultimate demise, often with severe degrees of violence. In this entire trajectory, sheep—and the oveja Junín—ruled the upper regions of the Andes like no political power ever did.

During the pre-Columbian and colonial periods, Andean cosmological understandings shaped indigenous approaches to maternal health. Women typically gave birth at home with the assistance of a midwife (also called a partera or comadrona in Spanish). Birthing and post-partum care relied on local herbal remedies and followed specific social rituals. Women drank teas derived from anise or coca during the labor process, gave birth in a squatting position (toward Mother Earth, or Pachamama), and drank sheep soup after labor to replenish strength and warm the body. Rooms were kept dark because the common perception was that bright light injured newborn babies’ eyes. After labor, families buried or otherwise disposed of the placenta to keep the baby and mother healthy and facilitate lactation, as per Andean tradition.

Changes in maternal health rituals began in the 18th century, as colonial rule became more consolidated. The rise of a distinct medical profession and government interest in population growth gradually shifted responsibility for maternal health from the Catholic Church and charitable organizations to the state. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, the growing power and authority of the state and the medical profession led doctors and urban-based reformers to attempt to change long-standing Andean birthing practices, which they considered archaic and unsanitary. These reforms emerged from a desire to reduce infant mortality rates and to replace traditional healers with medical professionals who were trained, licensed, and regulated by the state. As reformers looked to replace Andean maternal health and healing practices with new scientific understandings of the female body and birthing process, they also worked to discredit and displace midwives’ knowledge and practices. In particular, they encouraged women to give birth in newly constructed hospitals and to seek the guidance of medical professionals, like obstetricians. However, these reforms met with limited success. In the Andes today, midwives still attend to roughly 50 percent of all births, and in some remote areas, the figure is as high as 90 percent. It is also more common today to see the merging of biomedical and ritual practices to increase women’s access to and acceptance of health services and to reduce overall mortality rates.

All of the Andean nations possess oil. Each has a unique historical relationship with petroleum, but there are also similarities between the histories of oil production in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru. First, oil was discovered in the countries at roughly the same time in the late 19th century when oil was gaining in global importance. Second, foreign companies came to control oil reserves in these three countries, with similar outcomes. One such outcome was the development of state oil companies so that the countries could capture more revenues from the oil deposits than they received from foreign companies. Third, many saw oil as a panacea for the region’s many social ills. Failures by oil producers, including the state oil companies, to use the oil to cure those ills has led to persistent social and political conflict. And fourth, but not finally, oil extraction in these countries has caused major struggles between indigenous people and the state since the onset of neoliberal economic schemes in the 1980s and 1990s.

There are many differences as well. The creation of state oil companies in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru occurred in different decades, and therefore, within different global and regional historical contexts. Only one of the countries, Ecuador, is a member of OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries). Bolivia has a stronger presence in regional energy distribution through its large deposits of natural gas. Peru has not turned away from the neoliberal model in the same ways that Bolivia and Ecuador have. Finally, indigenous people have had different levels of success in protecting their lands and cultures from the onslaught of oil production in the Andes. There is no question, however, that oil remains central to the development plans of each country.