The state monopoly of political life. Interview with Luis Tapia on the becoming of the Plurinational State

Abstract

Almost a decade and a half after Evo Morales came to the presidency, the Bolivian political landscape is substantially different from the climate of social effervescence experienced between 2000 and 2005—a moment that opened a historical period of transformation that made possible the electoral victory of the Movement for Socialism (MAS), although the possibilities, desires and intentions raised in the struggle went beyond that victory and sought a substantial change in the state of things. The process of configuring the political command of what is now called the “Plurinational State” contains two central dimensions that condition the particularity of the new state synthesis and the ways in which domination operates within it. On the one hand, the weakened and decomposed situation of popular social organizations, as a result of internal processes but fundamentally of a policy induced by the government to disarticulate and/or subordinate these political structures. On the other hand—and thanks to the former—the way in which the central government established alliances with old and new sectors of the country’s ruling classes and of transnational capital, which made it possible to relaunch a renewed political command around the interests of those sectors. This interview with Luis Tapia, conducted in September 2018 in La Paz, examines various facets of the development of this configuration of the Bolivian political process in recent years.