It took the MAS 15 years to pulverize the nation | Al MAS le tomó 15 años pulverizar la nación

Renzo Abruzzese, El Deber:

Divided and fragmented

The conflict that has brought the MAS to the point of its defining division seems to express a historical situation characterized by the progressive structural radicalization of all factors. Fifteen years in which all power strategies involved dividing, fractioning, confronting or destroying have begun to bear fruit; Curiously, its first victim is its own author.​

Until not long ago, I personally thought that the internal fissures of the MAS always reached a stalemate defined by a sense of race that, at the last moment, ended up neutralizing the tensions that confronted them. Today I think that this interpretation is no longer correct, the populist strategy of dividing and polarizing everything has turned against its once monolithic unity and is beginning to give its first structural results.

It is possible to think that by dividing society in all possible ways (between races, between classes, between cultures, between regions, between political visions, between socioeconomic strata, between religious beliefs, between cultural worldviews, between genders, etc. ) masismo would have finally unleashed all the centripetal forces of Bolivian society, forces that in their flight towards disaster are expressed as a progressive accentuation of radicalities of all kinds.

Perhaps when the country functioned under the terms of a unitary republic, and its legal, social and cultural order were part of a common horizon in which everything fit and was articulated under the impulse of capitalist modernity, the need to withdraw into itself and radicalizing yourself in the face of the different other did not constitute a need for survival; today, faced with the failure of the plurinational state project and the division of the nation into 36 nationalities, it seems that the only way to survive is to retreat into your own existence, something that becomes like a attitude in defense of their identity, and consequently, the impression one has is that everything is polarized by radicality. Regions do it to defend themselves from state centralism, cultures to defend themselves from globalizing modernity, institutions to protect their particular historical affiliation, citizens to not disappear in the face of the postulates of an impossible egalitarianism and to achieve a minimum degree of visibility against the overwhelming indifference of the State.

All forms of social coexistence have been polarized. If you are not Indian you are Kara, if you are not white you are mestizo, if you are not proletarian you are bourgeois, if you are not from the right you are from the left, if you are not with me you are against me, if you do not think like me you are wrong. All possible ways to reach a point of tolerance have been reduced to their minimum expression. We are experiencing a moment in which this chaotic dispersion of everything that could consolidate the social fabric and give meaning to the history of which we are part, has lost specificity and falls into the dangerous field of the irreconcilable; There are no longer political adversaries, there are only political enemies, there are no allies, there are circumstantial pacts, there are no longer ideological coincidences, there are temporary agreements, in this way it is also easy to realize that tyranny is read as democracy, authoritarianism as freedom, the Law as a trap and the trap as an artifice in which the most deceitful is considered intelligent.

This is undoubtedly the legacy of masismo. Its masterpiece. It took them 15 years to pulverize the nation, failed in their plurinational attempt and today it is torn between its own funerals, and in its fall takes Bolivia ahead of it, it was very easy for them to destroy it, it will take us a long time to rebuild it.

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