Conflicto social y reterritorialización. Miradas cruzadas sobre movimientos rurales y regionalistas en Bolivia

Since the crisis of October 2003, better known as the “Gas War”, the Bolivian political system has been shaken by two movements: the rural peasant-indigenous, movement embodied by the coca-growers leader and current president Evo Morales, and the regionalist movement led by the elites of the Eastern departments. Relying upon two researches on conflict and new political configurations in Bolivia since Morales’ election, this article analyzes the multiple political and organizational expressions generated by new forms of territoriality. The latter were the result of the social demands and the regulatory and institutional reforms implemented over the last decade. From these empirical grounded and analytical perspectives, both regionalist movements and peasant-indigenous movements –often considered diametrically opposed and even mutually reactive phenomena– appear as the result of parallel and interwoven processes of territorial reconfiguration, within a broader framework marked by the distancing from traditional national and party politics and a return to the local, where a new link between identities and territories has been gaining new importance and strength.