Transforming Peasant Politics into Ecological Politics: The CSUTCB in Bolivia, 1979-1990

The emergence in Bolivia in 1979 of the major peasant union confederation, the Confederación Sindical Única de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia (CSUTCB) was integral to the development of an Indigenous politics of the environment in late twentieth-century Bolivia. While the existing literature widely documents the CSUTCB’s focus on class and ethnicity, this paper addresses the organization’s ecological politics. The paper argues that the natural world became the nexus of interactions between the local and the global in Bolivian peasant politics in the late twentieth century. The CSUTCB’s environmental discourse reflected a critique of modernity and the nation-state and exemplifies a turn towards the “indigenization” of debates over resource nationalism.