Domitila Chungara has died. ¡Que viva Domitila Chungara!

One of the great heroes of modern Bolivian history passed away early this morning in Cochabamba. Domitila Chungara was 75 years old and died after a long struggle with cancer. I knew people who knew her, and I always hoped to meet her myself. Now, I mourn her. 

The Bolivian government has declared three days of national mourning. Her death follows by a year-and-a-half the death of another great Bolivian, Ana Maria Campero. Both were chosen for inclusion among 1,000PeaceWomen across the globe, and their biographies are included on the project’s website here and here. Together with their 998 compañeras, they were nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Ms. Chungara’s account of her life and struggle was also published as a book, Let Me Speak!,  in 1978.

That she was one of the great heroes is fairly indisputable. But as a passionate student of active nonviolence and movements for social change, to me Doña Domitila was the greatest Bolivian of the late 20^th century. In 1978, she, along with four other women, began a hunger strike that captured the fighting spirit of an entire nation, and brought down one of the longest and most brutal dictatorships in Bolivian history. She inspired everyone from priests and politicians to miners and their children. For me, her life and struggle represent all that is inspiring, hopeful, and noble, as well as maddeningly complicated in Bolivia’s long march toward liberation.

Domitila was a professional political activist. Sometimes, the idea that some miners’ wives started the hunger strike against General Hugo Banzer’s military government suggests a spontaneous act by a small group of women who probably couldn’t have even fathomed what they were beginning. Like Rosa Parks – a long-time activist who was very conscious of what she was doing when she refused to give up her seat on the bus, but who has since been popularly portrayed as an innocent lady with tired feet who somehow inadvertently sparked the U.S. civil rights movement – Domitila represented a large and powerful movement even before her most historic protest.  She had helped to organize the miners’ families’ union and had been actively fighting against Bolivia’s repressive regimes for more than a decade, having butted heads with the Barrientos dictatorship in 1967 when the miners supported Che Guevara’s attempt to start a guerrilla movement in Bolivia and Barrientos had the famous revolutionary killed. She continued to draw inspiration from Che to the end of her life. She, too, was a revolutionary.

The hunger strike the five women began was immediately taken up by a well-known and respected Jesuit priest, Luis Espinal (he would be martyred during the coup of Garcia Meza two years later). Within a couple of weeks, thousands around the country had joined. Bolivians in exile and other activists around the world began to pressure Banzer to hold elections. People took to the streets. The bishops protected the strikers. The military government was hobbled, and elections were called. Democracy was unstable and didn’t last long. Banzer’s ally, Garcia Meza, would lead an even more brutal dictatorship in the early 80s, and more lasting democracy would not be re-established until 1985. But the hunger strike became a beacon. It stood out in a long and tragic history of repression, exploitation, and colonialism as a shining example of the power of the people to demand and effect change.

In 1990, the 36 indigenous nations of Bolivia – from both the highlands and lowlands – joined together for the first time in history and marched from the Amazon jungle city of Trinidad to the Andean high plains capital of La Paz to demand, among other things, a new constitution establishing increased autonomy for their peoples and a government structure that more accurately reflects Bolivia’s diverse, plurinational reality. In 2009, a new constitution doing exactly that was passed by the Bolivian people. Discontent with market-based economic reforms throughout the 1990s came to a head in 2000 with Cochabamba’s famous “Water War.” Social movements in the country were galvanized, and further protests in La Paz culminated with the “Black October” 2003 massacre of citizens protesting a natural gas export scheme in El Alto, the subsequent ouster of president Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, and finally the special elections in 2005 in which Evo Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous president, was elected with a powerful mandate for change. Today, Bolivian citizens struggle to discern how best to continue their popular struggles under a government that touts an agenda for change and claims to represent popular social movements, but has also alienated various of those base groups during its first six years in power.

Prominent among those who struggle for change and liberation while harshly and publicly criticizing the Morales government today is Oscar Olivera, the most visible leader of the 2000 water revolt in Cochabamba. The Water War is well documented, including this segment from the Canadian documentary, The Corporation. But I think the legacy of Domitila Chungara is best summarized in the simple words, and in the tears, of Oscar Olivera in the clip below, beginning at 16:06:

Domitila and her companions – women, mothers, wives, union activists, from a poor, indigenous, mining community – truly spoke for the masses, and the masses took up their cry. They united the people, and the people could not be divided.

As much as I admire Domitila Chungara, and draw inspiration from her life, I think her historic legacy will prove to be a complicated one, particularly inasmuch as she represented successful nonviolent action for social change. I never had a chance to ask her, but I think it’s fair to assume that Chungara herself was not a pacifist. She founded a movement later in life named for her longtime hero, Che Guevara – a historic figure inextricably bound to the idea of armed struggle. And the movements to which Domitila Chungara was so important in Bolivia are, to this day, loathe to even consider, explicitly, the merits of a nonviolent movement as such.

Pacifism is a bit of a dirty word here. What’s strange is that the same people who so quickly reject the idea of nonviolence have often shown great ability at employing it, Domitila’s hunger strike being the prime example. Bolivian social movements are enamored of the romantic notion of armed struggle, and cling fiercely to the assertion that it is their right to choose it. But they rarely do choose it. In fact, Bolivia is a remarkably nonviolent country, and while Che’s guerrilla movement quickly fizzled here, most great successes in Bolivian liberation struggles have come through classic nonviolent means: marches, strikes, fasts, symbolic occupations, etc. Despite this rich history of nonviolent struggle, any proposal explicitly calling for nonviolent tends to be understood as the imposition of a foreign concept aimed at pacifying groups who seek justice, and ultimately at maintaining the status quo.   

The problem with this disconnect is that the vast potential for creative and effective action for justice contained within a moment like the 1978 hunger strike has never been fully realized in Bolivia.  Because people insist on peppering their mostly nonviolent movements with little, even symbolic acts of violence – throwing rocks at police, hitting people with sticks if they cross a road blockade – or clinging to the hypothetical need and justifications for armed struggle, I have found them largely unwilling to have a serious conversation about how to better utilize the nonviolent methods at their disposal – even methods that have resulted in their greatest victories.  Hunger strikes, road blocks, general strikes, and marches have become such easy, common, knee-jerk reactions to any discontent – during certain seasons they are literally daily occurrences in La Paz – that they are undertaken without any of the reflection or strategic planning necessary to make them work.  I have talked to anyone who would listen – including the Vice President – about Gene Sharp and the merits of nonviolence apart from principled pacifism, but my raving has mostly fallen on deaf ears. Bolivia, I’ve often thought, is a country full of some of the world’s greatest pacifists, ashamed to admit they aren’t simply the world’s worst guerrilleros.

There are exceptions. The Water War was one of the most powerful, uplifting, liberating events I’ve ever experienced. There, the timing was right, the organizers were dynamic and savvy, and the people were truly united. But for every Water War, there are hundreds of other protests that make little sense to anyone. Recently, I was unable to get home from work because the road to my neighborhood was blocked by people from another neighborhood demanding the mayor fix their sewers. I asked some of the women in the most diplomatic way I possibly could why they had chosen that particular tactic. “I would love to be able to fix your sewer, truly. But I can’t. It’s impossible. And yet my wife is sick at home with two little boys, and you won’t let me go there and be with them. The mayor, who can help you, is two kilometers away in his comfortable office and isn’t affected at all by this. How is messing up the lives of all your neighbors helping you get the sewer fixed? Why don’t you go blockade city hall?” They answered with an old saying in Spanish, that the baby who doesn’t cry doesn’t get milk. I said, “Yes, but the baby cries to his mother, the one with the milk. He doesn’t go next door and wake up the neighbors, because he knows they can’t help him.” They looked at me blankly, confused, and then said it was their right and they had to block the road because they really needed their sewer fixed. The oxygen depleted air in the high Andes can be dizzying, but nothing in Bolivia gets your head spinning like the circles you’re forced to run when attempting to reason with a protester. (Okay, almost nothing: attempting to reason with Bolivian government bureaucrats is worse.)

Today, reading the various accounts in the newspapers of Domitila Chungara’s incredible victory over General Banzer, it occurs to me just how exhilarating those days must have been. I remember how I felt after the Water War – the overwhelming sense of possibility that came with seeing a people come together and refuse to stand down, facing their adversaries with dignity, courage, and the audacity to believe that they could run their own lives better than any repressive, outside power ever would. For the first time, I see the constant parade of marchers, strikers, and fasters who have taken to the streets of Bolivia since the 1978 hunger strike as an endlessly repeating attempt to recapture that moment of hope and empowerment. And, like the picture of Chungara in the paper today, throughout it all the image of Che Guevara hovers in the background, offering false promises, whispering in the people’s ear, trying to convince them that liberation can be bought through coercion, than violence really can be a tool for the weak. Forty-five years after his death, Che still hasn’t convinced more than a handful of Bolivians to actually take up arms. But he has planted a seed of doubt, and as a result, they’ve often squandered the gift the miners’ wives gave them, the seeds of a generational commitment to creative nonviolence, in hopes that they might one day exchange it for the magic beans of Guevarian revolution.

Domitila herself may never have realized quite how perfectly her struggle epitomized the struggle people everywhere who unite and cooperate to create a more just and inclusive society. She herself was inspired by Che Guevara. But the fact is, she did not fight his fight. Five miners’ wives never could have. She fought her own fight, a fight that melded ends and means, a fight in which she personified the moral message she aimed to communicate, a fight even an army could not match.  And in so doing, Domitila Chungara achieved what Che Guevara never did in Bolivia: her fight became the people’s fight, and the people triumphed.

As critical as I can be of certain tendencies within Bolivia’s social movements, that’s only because I love this country and I want to see it achieve perfection. I want to see justice and peace established more quickly and more universally that they have been thus far. But one of the things I love about Bolivians is their audacious fighting spirit. I love it when a people who are so often plagued by a kind of national inferiority complex and the burden of being told for 500 years that they are worthless nobodies find it within themselves to stand up and demand to be treated with dignity and respect. Bolivians often do just that.

Being born an indigenous woman in the high-plains mining communities of Bolivia is about as rough as a person can have it.  Domitila Chungara was given every reason a person can imagine for thinking she was worthless and meant to suffer. And suffer she did – hardships and tragedies I shudder to even imagine. Yet Doña Domitila refused to let her oppressors define her. She refused to bow. She worked and fought with fierce grace, she stood up to her enemies and she inspired a nation to join her. Despite staggering challenges and myriad frustrations, I am ultimately hopeful that Bolivians will continue to work toward achieving their fullest potential, as a country and as individuals. My hope springs in no small measure from the life and witness of Domitila Chungara.

POSTSCRIPT: I received an email from Maryknoll Sister Mary Aulson, who has been here in Bolivia throughout the years discussed above, and was in Santa Cruz working on human rights, Catholics together with Mennonites and Methodists, when Domitila's hunger strike swept the country. Sr. Mary points out that, along with "Lucho" Espinal, his fellow Jesuit, Xaviér Albó, was also a part of the original group of hunger strikers, and is, as she says, "still en la lucha!"  I managed to find a better photo than the one I had originally posted - the b/w shot you see above is of the hunger strikers at the bishops' offices in La Paz. And a correction: I believe it was actually late 1977, but Banzer called elections for '78. In the photo, Domitila is on the far left of those leaning against the wall. Xaviér Albó is in the middle with the beard, and the later-martyred Luis Espinal is second from the right. Settled in for the long fast, they look rather cozy, but it is a photo of a group of people risking violent death. Indeed, there were attempts by soldiers to come and take the strikers out, but the archbishop stopped them. Heroes, all.