I have a very serious problem with my knees, they say it's pride. I am proud, indeed, to be a woman, and also somehow to have remained silent all this time, because the motherland has given me this accident. Just on the 23rd I fell while planting seeds with my daughter in Cochabamba, and that provided me with the instruction that there was a need for a certain policy of silence.
I have felt excessive discursive saturation. I admire the internet from afar, but I love face-to-face communication, that's why I've preferred to come here and not do it from my seat, because I can see eyes, I can feel vibes, I can even feel anger against me. All this helps me to be myself, to humiliate myself, to be gentle and not arrogant. This juncture has taught us a great lesson against triumphalism.
I don't believe in the two hypotheses which have been handled. The triumphalism that with the fall of Evo we have regained democracy seems to me to be an excess, an analysis that is getting out of focus. There is a long way to go to recover democracy, there is a lack of ant's work, an acknowledgement of how doña Ena Taborga in Rositas, the comrades of Tariquía, the comrades of the TIPNIS (Indigenous Territory and Isiboro-Sécure National Park), doña Marquesa, doña Cecilia, all the fighters, what they are up to. Some of them have even been candidates, but we still need to take charge of those realities in which democracy is still a very distant goal, because they are still managed by unions captured by misogyny, by all kinds of interests that approach with dangerous intentions. There are also people who have put up their bodies, who have fought, and yet when it comes to appearing in public spaces they have been deprived of the word, as has been the case of Tariquía.
That is why I believe that this is a very good, positive forum to begin to discuss what we mean by democracy and by being an Indian or a native. The second mistaken hypothesis, which seems to me to be extremely dangerous, is that of the coup d'état, which simply wants to legitimize, in its entirety, with packaging and everything, wrapped in cellophane, the entire government of Evo Morales in its moments of greatest degradation. All that degradation, legitimizing it with the idea of the coup d'état is criminal, and therefore one must think how this degradation was begun.
When I entered here an hour ago, I gave two people a photocopy of the November 2 newspaper. I want to point out that a guy named Juan Ramón Quintana on November 2 was announcing the Vietnamization of the country, what he has been doing for years, which is indoctrination, which is putting indigenous people into the networks of the military mafias, as has happened with many communities. Hugo Moldiz, who has worked with the so-called Red Ponchos... I knew other Red Ponchos, I knew brothers and sisters who went as a family to the hill to perform a ritual before entering a battle. Those are the Red Ponchos I knew. What Hugo Moldiz did on January 22, 2006 is to bring a uniformed and, absolutely armed, troops.
It makes us believe that we are facing a revolutionary Cuban-style government, but we are fighting for the leftist nostalgia of a group of males that are not only the macho Camachos, but are also the leftist machos, misogynists, who treat us like cannon fodder and hook fodder to create their networks of perversion of the popular sectors.
I remember very well when the military had a great orgy with the COB (Bolivian Workers Center), with women, in order to have influence in their order of destinies. We have not been able to realize that this was systematic, that it has lasted for years. That's why this character and all his network of military men who include the man controlling the cable cars. I am a witness of the political use of the cable cars, of having handed out cards for them to go down and massacre and destroy the pumakataris.
All this is part of a tenebrous network that includes the director of the ANH (National Agency of Hydrocarbons), intimate of Quintana. What is the ANH doing in the fires? Giving away small gas stoves. That shameful thing that is accompanied by a defense of the fires is uniting struggles of women, ecological struggles, of young people, of old women like me who are worried about the future and the water that their granddaughters and their granddaughters' daughters are going to consume.
I am very saddened because Evo has left, but the hope of a pluricultural Bolivia has not left, the hope that the wiphala will represent us in its different variants has not left, the hope of ending racism has not left. We must remain in the anti-racist trench, and we must continue to join forces in order to be able to articulate a feeling of recovering democracy on a day-to-day basis. I am very sorry for what has happened, I have no sense of triumph.
I understand that religion is not only Camacho, it is the anger against the generalized drunkenness that has been the sindicate work of these Quintana and these militaries who go places with cans of alcohol. That's what hurts me, it's the same mechanism that the colonizers used in the 17th century, disarming communities by putting cans of alcohol in them. Also the landowners and businessmen who wanted to get rid of the agrarian reform, like Ponce Sanginés, put a can of alcohol and had a whole hacienda of folkloric Indians to be able to show in museums.
We have to understand why people are reacting in this reactionary way. They are fed up with a kind of misogynistic union policy that treats people like a herd. The women of Totora, who have been the ones who fought for indigenous autonomy, have been defeated by their own husbands and their own people who have set them up in the trap of the referendum.
It is very sad what has happened, comrades, and the triumphalism- that we have recovered democracy from the moment Evo boarded an airplane has seemed to me a banality and an impressive poverty, but the defeatism that here there is a coup d'état and that everything has been lost is false. It is to think that the MAS is the only thing we have as a possibility of the inter-ethnic, of the plural, of the pluricultural. Why is there a gay minister and some ladies who defend him supposedly from lesbianism, are we going to believe that there is an intercultural democracy and amplitude and anti-homophobia? No, those are the symbolic uses.
I am with the wiphala and I know that there are many kinds of wiphala, there is not only one. We know ancient wiphalas, they had other very different colors. That plurality is what we have to recover, sisters, and also the possibility of twinning between women and natives. I have cried to see the mistreatment of women wearing pollera in the name of democracy, I have cried to see very young people mistreated saying that they are Indians. The Indian and the native we have inside hurts us a lot. It depends a lot on us to free her and make her happy, capable of speaking several languages, of having a figure of theoretical thought. That's Indian for me.
I feel half defeated, but also with a lot of hope. We have put a lot of the body through this process and we have been hurt by the degradation at the hands of those militia trained in the School of the Americas. They have a lot to lose, they lost 30 Chinese barges, but they have all the lithium. That's what they want to loot.
Please, let this parliament create a space in which we can articulate a unity against those dark forces that begin with the IIRSA (Initiative for the Integration of South American Regional Infrastructure) and also the Chinese, Russian, Venezuelan capitals and all that mafia that is the main enemy that is still alive and kicking and that is arming people, mentalities. Let's take care of ourselves a lot, but let's also be aware that we can't incur in a joy that the Indian has finally left. That for me is very painful.
Participation of Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui in the Parliament of Women in Peace, held in La Paz, Bolivia, on November 12, 2019
English translation from the transcript which originally appears here: