EGTK, Bolivia’s aymara insurgency

I am posting here a rough draft translation of Fabiola Escárzaga’s chapter on the EGTK, primarily for feedback from friends and editors. Please do not share widely if you are not one of the above, because it should be published soon and I don’t want to betray any copywrite issues. Thanks for looking!
EGTK translation

Translator’s note:

The following is a translation of Fabiola Escárzaga’s chapter on Bolivia’s indigenist guerrilla force in the 1990s, the EGTK, of which now ex-vice-president Álvaro García Linera was a principle figure. Readers hoping to consume a pithy analysis of the current situation in Bolivia following Evo’s sudden exit in November of 2019 will be disappointed here. The essay does, however, offer insight into the balance of forces in the andean nation, the principal groups and ideologies that determine its relations of power. While the peasants and indigenous people at the heart of this struggle may seem to have no corollary in contemporary Western politics, their struggle to overcome the stasis of their conferred identity positions and differences produced radical lessons for confronting a reactionary ‘deep state’ and intransigent capitalist forms elsewhere.

The EGTK (Tupac Katari Guerrilla Army) — Bolivia’s Aymaran insurgency

The following is an overview of the struggle of the EGTK during the 1980s and 90s, from its central role in Bolivia’s indigenous resistance to its 2006 integration into the new government of MAS.

Introduction:

The EGTK formed out of a meeting in 1986 between two militant groups that had each separately proposed the creation of an armed organization. One was made up of aymaran and quechuan peasants and the other by young middle-class mestizos and workers. Their shared premise was to combine the proletariat, especially miners, and the indigenous peasantry, Bolivia’s majority population that since the last decade had shown a growing capacity for organization and mobilization. Given their significant overlaps they decided to establish a functional alliance with a clear division of labor for a trial period: the young mestizos would take on urban work, Marxist theory and logistics; the group of aymara and quechua peasants would organize the rural force, inheritors of ancestral rebellions and the National Indigenous Project, in addition to their authority and prestige among aymara and quechua communalists and their presence in the peasant unions. With these resources they set out to develop in Bolivia the worker-peasant alliance envisioned by Lenin.