Bolivia, the poorest country in South America, is the center of a three-year-old indigenous insurrection that has twice routed multinational corporations and nearly achieved the rarest of political successes, election of an openly Indian president in the Americas.

The cause of native people today is widely considered "lost" to genocide or assimilation, except perhaps as a spiritual legacy, an exotic consumer market and isolated moments of resistance. This common understanding not only ignores the phenomenon of tribal people from Iraq to South Asia who are still resisting but is blind to the "mountain chain of indigenous uprisings in reaction to US neoliberalism in Latin America, the most radical thing that has appeared in thirty years," as described to me by the respected Bolivian intellectual Alvaro Garcia Linera.

What began with the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas in 1994 has surfaced in Ecuador, Guatemala and especially Bolivia, where, Garcia says, almost one-fifth of the population, or 1.5 million Indians, live in autonomous communities where official government structures have virtually faded away. "There is no other country where leaders of the left and the anticorporate movements are Indian," Garcia, a former guerrilla and political prisoner, notes. "The Indians here have always been carriers of water but never in charge of social movements." They are not attempting to turn back the historical clock but are becoming "postmodern" and "postnational" bearers of an alternative narrative of the country. Bolivia is now the focal point, he believes, because of its large indigenous majority and the prospect that "the option for exercising power has become real."

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