Opening

Methods: Introducing Ultimate Consequences

Ultimate Consequences is a quantitative and qualitative database, unique in its depth and completeness of coverage, of all conflict deaths in Bolivia since October 1982, a period of largely elected governments and political dynamism. During the country’s 1977–82 return to democracy, 1985 general strikes, 2000–2005 antineoliberal protest wave, and its political crises in 2006–2008 and 2019–2020, mass disruptive protest proved its ability to remake national politics. Our dataset records information such as individuals’ relation to a specific social movement, protest campaign, cause of death, responsible parties, and location. The database enables visualization and comparative analysis across twelve presidential administrations, four episodes where protesters successfully sought the end of a presidential term, and at least 632 deaths across 219 events.

Much of our recent work involves creating accessible ways for researchers and the public to access this information. We hold to project-wide commitments to making information available bilingually, and to present the data in ways that allow users to see the individuals within patterns of violence.

In addition to these database entries, we have also created brief narrative descriptions of the events involved and/or quote such descriptions directly from sources of reporting. Our iterative research strategy repeatedly seeks and integrates information from human rights reports, scholarly accounts, the Bolivian news media, and a range of other sources. We are currently building a testimonial archive of first-person narratives of these events to document their place in movement history and the impact individual losses entailed.

In a recently published article,¹ we surveyed all 48 events from 1982 to 2021 with three or more deaths. Out of 28 cases of deadly state repression, movements won their demands in 13 cases, achieved partial success in one, and failed in ten. In those 14 successful cases alone, security forces killed at least 136 people in failed bids to quash protests. Many smaller events, with one or two deaths also fit this pattern.

The price of victory

In a number of cases, deadly government repression was almost immediately followed by significant concessions. Essentially nothing can explain these turnarounds except the social reactions to the deaths caused by security forces. This can happen in the smallest cases, such as the 2003 Santa Rosa del Sara protests, where the police and the army attempted to repress demands for local infrastructure improvements. The very next day, the regional government agreed to residents’ demands and to name the highway they would build in honor of slain protester Luis Zelaya Márquez.

We can see similar reversals in the San Julián peasant strike in 1984 (repressed with machine guns by local landowners), the 1985 road blockade at Huayllani, the April 2000 national peasant mobilization, the 2003 pensioner strike, and a 2014 mayoral recall protest in Yapacaní, not to mention the 2003 Gas War, in which 71 people were killed, before President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada was compelled to step down.

But we want to highlight one particular case today.

In 1987, the government faced down coca grower protests against eradication of their crops and issued a public ultimatum for protesters to end their blockades by May 27. Early on the morning of May 28, soldiers attacked the blockade at Parotani, first beating participants then firing live ammunition and tear gas. At least two cocaleros were killed, along with an unidentified female protester and two-month-old child, who was beaten with his mother. A soldier died of an accidental self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Two days later, the government began negotiations with coca grower leaders. Within a week, the government conceded that coca eradication should not be conducted violently, that its scale should be negotiated with coca growers’ unions, and that farmers should receive compensation for their destroyed crops. (A much vexed Reagan administration would push back with demands of its own over the following year.) These five deaths presaged a much larger trail of loss among coca growers, and especially those in the Chapare region. Ultimately, the coca conflict would consume the lives of 98 civilians, and (beginning a decade later) 35 members of the security forces.

As with this single event, this larger pattern of lives lost would be remembered as a collective price for social change. In this quote, Celima Torrico narrates² this loss from the vantage point of women, who “were tear-gassed with their babies, who lost their husbands, who ended up wounded — Caramba, what a struggle!” But “in the final accounting,” she argues, they consolidated a political party and won social equality. “Because [now] we are equal, whether we come from the countryside or the city, we are equal, we are human beings … It has cost a lot … it has cost lives, it has cost blood, above all to bring about a Plurinational State.”

“Compañeras que han entrado a la cárcel, que han sido gasificadas con sus wawas [bebés], que han perdido a sus maridos, que se han quedado heridas, ¡caramba, qué lucha! A veces, parece que no había nada para comer, pero igual, se aguantaba la lucha. Nuestros compañeros del Trópico, hombres y mujeres, en diferentes bloqueos, en diferentes organizaciones, cómo se ha sufrido realmente. “Pero, al final de cuentas, se ha consolidado la organización sindical, el Instrumento Político por la Soberanía de los Pueblos. “Con todo esto, ya pensando lo que se quiere es la igualdad porque somos iguales, seamos del campo, de la ciudad, somos iguales, somos humanos. … Ha costado bastante llegar al proceso de cambio, ha costado vidas, ha costado sangre, sobre todo para llegar a un Estado Plurinacional.”

Sacrificed lives as participation

This claim of collective participation of a group, movement, or region can have important political value, especially within the broad grassroots left coalition that brought the MAS to power in the 2005 elections.

“Ya en la época critica del 2000 al 2003 … uno de los primeros comités cívicos que ha apoyado ese paro indefinido ha sido precisamente del Potosí en 2003. Así mismo, hemos estado presentes entre las víctimas como Potosinos de ese entonces, de esos gobiernos. Cuando en Sucre se pretendía asumir, o pretendía el presidente de la cámara de senadores o diputados a asumir la presidencia, han habido cooperativistas Potosinos que han ido a Sucre, y lamentablemente uno ha fallecido en estos enfrentamientos con la policía. Entonces, así Potosí ha estado apoyando, ha estado ayudando a este proceso. Y va a seguir.³

Here we see a quote from Potosí Civic Committee leader Celestino Condori in 2010. Condori’s organization had recently led a 19-day general strike and department-wide blockade campaign demanding greater investment in the impoverished region. Condori notes the region’s early and enthusiastic participation in protests, and then said, “As well, we were also present as Potosinos among the victims of those times, and from those governments.” He recalls the moment when a right-wing senate president nearly came to power, but was blockaded by protester. “It had been the Potosino mining cooperative members who went to Sucre, and lamentably one of them died in those confrontations with police. So, in that way Potosí was supporting, was helping this process. And it will keep doing so.”

Changing meanings

It was in the same vein that CONAMAQ leaders remembered the loss of Facundo Barcaya. Barcaya was killed in February 2002 when security forces opened fire, reportedly with machine guns, on protests in Challapata that were part of a national protest wave demanding, among other things, the reversal of Evo Morales’ expulsion from the National Congress. CONAMAQ’s leader Elías Quellca praised Barcaya in 2009,⁴ saying we remember him as a true Apu Mallku, the highest traditional leadership position in the organization, and recognized his life as given to ensure that power “will not be in the hands of the necktied doctors” who have long ruled the country, but now “our own effective presence as native peoples of this land.”

“En esa patriótica jornada, fueron victimados los compañeros Facundo Barcaya y Eusebia Cisneros, a quienes ahora los recordamos como verdaderos Apu Mallkus [_líderes tradicionales_], de nuestras naciones originarias.” El poder “ya no estará en manos de los doctores encorbatados de siempre, porque tendremos la presencia efectiva nuestra, de los originarios de esta tierra; será un Congreso que acoja a todas las clases sociales de nuestro país, y resuelva sus problemas con equidad.”

But as relations soured with the MAS government, a bitterness crept into the memories within CONAMAQ. Its 2011 protests were rebuffed and the organization was divided into pro- and anti-government factions in 2012. Here, outspoken independent leader Juana Calle remembers Barcaya’s death in a different frame: “Since Evo Morales was our brother, was an Indian … CONAMAQ rose up and blockaded, its Jach’a Carangas suyu mobilized in Challapata, where the police intervened, and we had a death. In that way CONAMAQ supported Evo Morales, but we didn’t then know that the objective was to destroy us.”⁵

“Como Evo Morales era nuestro hermano, era un indio; por eso también, luego de la asamblea constituyente, conamaq se ha levantado, ha bloqueado, el suyuJach’a Carangas se ha movilizado en Challapata nos han intervenido la policía, hemos tenido un muerto, ha sido Facundo Barcaya, de esa forma conamaq ha apoyado a Evo Morales, pero no sabíamos que el objetivo era destruirnos. … “Desde ahí nos hemos debilitado, el mas nos ha perforado, el conamaq estaba fortalecido, un suyu era toda la base, no como ahora. … Desde ese momento nos han empezado a cortar los proyectos, totalmente se ha cortado, ya no había financiamiento para hacer reuniones, ni talleres, nos han cortado desde el gobierno.”

Conclusions

We’ve used this talk to put some examples on the table, to show how deaths in protest are wrapped in the language of blood, full of meaning and symbolism, how this blood is understood to have collective ownership in communities and organizations, and how the shedding of that blood constitutes a form of political participation in shared nationwide struggles. Like other symbolic gifts, this exchange of blood founds and unites communities, it undergirds relationships, and mandates moral bonds of reciprocity. As alliances solidify, victories are won, and promises are kept, the memory of the founding gift of someone’s life deepens and acquires greater meaning. Yet when alliances break and promises are betrayed, the meanings of this blood change, and the moral force of the alliance is spoken of, not as a form of unity, but as an emotionally powerful critique.

We hope that this talk illustrates the power of combining systematic data collection with qualitative research and look forward to sharing our data with other researchers and the public in the years to come.

The project is online at ultimateconsequences.github.io. Our primary work of 2025 is bringing the cited narrative accounts online, along with some of the testimonies and primary sources.

The Ultimate Consequences database was developed with support from Vanderbilt University and a Mellon Digital Humanities Faculty Fellowship, and is currently supported by a National Science Foundation grant (Award #2116778) and a Scaling Success grant from Vanderbilt. Chelsey Dyer and Nathan Frisch have been esteemed members of the research team.

Abstract

Political violence in Bolivia has taken a variety of forms over four decades since the 1982 restoration of democracy. This paper surveys the impact of deadly violence across the racially stratified geography of Bolivia, a largely Indigenous and increasingly urban country over the period in question. Drawing on Ultimate Consequences, a new, comprehensive dataset of deaths in political conflict and social movement activity, we show how distinct domains of protest have had differing ethnoracial profiles.

Broadly, we periodize our data into four political eras defined by two broad ideological alignments: the political left (UDP and MAS) and the political right (the neoliberal period and the 2019–2020 interim government), with the two most expansive periods being the 1985–2005 neoliberal era and the nearly two-decade rule of the MAS. During the neoliberal period, state security forces were the predominant source of political violence, while during the MAS era violence among civilian movements accounted for the majority of recorded deaths. By stratifying these deaths by arena of conflict (such as economic governance, partisan politics, the coca conflict, interethnic struggles, and mining, to name five leading areas), we highlight clear patterns in both the character of deadly violence and the ethnic and geographical makeup of its victims.

This presentation also introduces Ultimate Consequences, a digital archive that documents nearly seven hundred lives lost in political conflict and social movement activity in Bolivia since 1982. The archive interweaves a rigorously coded database of individuals and events, interactive maps, narratives, and a corpus of historical documents. It enables comparative analysis across twelve presidential administrations, four episodes where protesters successfully sought the end of a presidential term, and over 200 protest events in 17 domains of conflict.

Resumen

Dividimos nuestros datos en cuatro épocas políticas definidas por dos grandes alineamientos ideológicos: la izquierda política (UDP y MAS) y la derecha política (el período neoliberal y el gobierno interino de 2019-2020), siendo los dos períodos más extensos la era neoliberal de 1985-2005 y los casi veinte años de gobierno del MAS. Durante el período neoliberal, las fuerzas de seguridad del Estado fueron la principal fuente de violencia política, mientras que durante la era del MAS la violencia entre grupos sociales opuestos representó la mayoría (¿pluralidad?) de las muertes registradas. Al estratificar estas muertes por ámbito de conflicto (como la gobernanza económica, la política partidista, el conflicto de la coca, las luchas interétnicas y la minería, por citar cinco áreas principales), ponemos de relieve patrones claros tanto en el carácter de la violencia letal como en la composición étnica y geográfica de sus víctimas.

Esta presentación también presenta Últimas Consecuencias, un archivo digital que documenta las casi setecientas vidas perdidas en conflictos políticos y actividades de movimientos sociales en Bolivia desde 1982. El archivo entrelaza una base de datos rigurosamente codificada de personas y acontecimientos, mapas interactivos, narrativas y un corpus de documentos históricos. Permite realizar un análisis comparativo a lo largo de doce administraciones presidenciales, cuatro episodios en los que los manifestantes lograron el fin de un mandato presidencial y más de 200 actos de protesta en 17 ámbitos de conflicto.

Conference details here.

Slides

Video of presentation

The recorded presentation session is online here.

Abstract

This paper explores how extractive industries and technologies bring the abstract consumptive power of the global economy into contact with the material landscape. I analyze this process of material extraction and financial abstraction by focusing on two open-pit mining projects, the Sumitomo Corporation’s San Cristóbal mine, currently the largest in Bolivia, and Bear Creek Mining’s fruitless Santa Ana mine, which was blocked by protests in Peru in 2011.

The global demand for precious metals has to be operationalized through a series of schema that operate at the levels of engineering, property ownership, territorial governance, national “investment climate,” and capital mobilization. At each level of the process, there is an effort to streamline and routinize the process, and to offer the underlying precious minerals for sale within containers that bear successively less trace of the material realities of the minerals, their extraction, and its impact on the environment. Neoliberal investment policies standardized many of these schemas, making them equally accessible to any foreign direct investor, and ultimately to both Sumitomo and Bear Creek. If Sumitomo’s San Cristobal mine fulfilled neoliberal planners’ vision of attracting foreign direct investment, Bear Creek’s arbitration case represented an attempt to hack the same system and claim the profits it guaranteed without building a mine at all. By packaging mining prospects into accessible investment vehicles for liquid capital, the process of optimization, intensification, and financial abstraction widens mining’s impact on the land, ecology, and society.