This event is a hybrid and bilingual English-Spanish (In-Person + Webinar) and presented by the Latin American Studies program at UC San Diego.

For this webinar, speakers are invited to share reflections from contributions to the recently published book, Crisis política en Bolivia, 2019-2020, along with different experiences and efforts to center a plurality of critical voices in academic analysis and journalism. Vladimir Díaz-Cuellar, co-editor and contributor, will share insights on process of putting together different perspectives on a very sensitive issue such as the crisis, and how editors navigated the political, editorial and research components in a volume that included academic and non-academic perspectives. His chapter, “A Near 360-Degree Turn” examines the political processes that unfolded after the crisis, focusing on the rise and fall of the right-wing interim government between November 2019 and the MAS’s return to power the following year. His analysis sheds important insights into the contingencies around political swings that are vital for understanding more recent tensions underlying the resurrected MAS party that now governs Bolivia.

Dawn Maríe Paley’s chapter, entitled “Limits of Plurality” analyzes coverage of the political crisis in the independent media in the United States to draw attention to other horizons of possibility and struggle among Indigenous feminist and other autonomous communities and caution against narrow “coup/fraud” debates that actively work to silence them towards party ends. Paley will also share reflections from recent coverage in Bolivia for Ojalá, Mexico-based digital weekly dedicated to covering popular, feminist and communitarian movements from “Tijuana to Tierra del Fuego” launched this past March.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Crisis política en Bolivia, 2019-2020 is an edited volume that presents a series of interpretations of the dramatic political events around the October 2019 elections that led to the resignation of the country’s first president of Indigenous descent, Evo Morales. The book gathers political essays and research articles from different perspectives, complementary in some cases and opposing in others, in effort to dialogue about the tragic events that unfolded during the crisis. Contributors include well-known researchers and public figures as well as new from different regions of the country. Taken together, the different chapters offer a more complex, nuanced understanding of the political crisis that avoids uncritically reproducing polarizing discourses.

The book Crisis política en Bolivia, 2019-2020 was sponsored by Rosa Luxemburg Foundation and Plural editors and originally published in Spanish last fall, with an English translation forthcoming. (A .pdf of the Spanish version will be sent to participants who register ahead of the event. Anyone interested in a copy of the English version can be added to a mailing list for information about its release).

Dawn Marie Paley is a Mexico-based journalist and the author of Drug War Capitalism (AK Press 2014) and Guerra neoliberal: Desaparición y búsqueda en el norte de México (Libertad Bajo Palabra 2020). After nearly 15 years of independent journalism, Paley joined a small team in Mexico to launch the digital media outlet Ojalá, where she currently serves as editor. Ojalá features original contributions and translations in English and Spanish and was launched this past March (learn more and sign up for newsletter updates HERE)

Vladimir Díaz Cuéllar is a PhD candidate in Geography and Political Economy (Carleton university, Canada). He has carried out research on the Bolivian mining industry which has been published in academic journals and for the general public in the country and abroad, and is co-editor of Currently, he is studying the relationship between the economic transformations the country has undergone (urbanization and industrialization) and certain biochemical and physical changes (greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation and eutrophication).