"The Fighters and the Nourishers": Histories from Inside the Largest Popular Blockades in Contemporary Bolivia

By Zo Rivera (they/them)

We didn't just cross a border. We negotiated entry. Road stoppages numbered in the dozens—some manned by campesinos with coca leaves in their cheeks, others by rows of Indigenous women elders carrying wooden spears. Our routes became careful choreographies: car to moto, then on foot for kilometers through red dust. You learn humility when you walk what others blockade for justice. 

How we got in was never simple. It was a masterclass in patience, negotiation, and trust. I've never seen anything like the road blockades—over a hundred of them. Some were humble but carried a strong character of resourcefulness and resilience—piles of miscellaneous tree branches and river rocks. Others looked like rebel army outposts. Indigenous women—the backbone of the movement—stirred enormous stock pots of sopa de fideo over open fires. They are the fighters and the nourishers, the ones who sustain the ranks. Meanwhile, the men parked semi-trucks and vans shoulder to shoulder, blocking the entire width of the Pan-Americana, Bolivia's main road. They even felled whole trees to seal it. 

One story I keep coming back to: when we were trying to traverse into the Trópico, we hit a blockade that was truly impassable. No amount of walking or waiting was going to get us through. So we made a deal. The campesino leader there agreed to let us cross—in exchange for an interview with the director of Radio Kawaschun Coca, the largest Indigenous radio station in Bolivia. But this wasn't a transaction. It was an act of comradeship. The director respects the campesino leader for fighting for a future they both believe in: an explicitly anti-imperialist future where Bolivian sovereignty is respected, where the people are free to live as they please without threat of invasion or poverty. They are both Indigenous—the campesino whose hands shape the earth and the director whose voice shapes the airwaves. Both carry the memory of a Bolivia before the coup, when brother Evo walked among them not as a distant president but as a reflection of their own faces in power. They know that empire fractures what the people build together, and so they hold the line—one with machete and coca, the other with microphone and memory. That's how things work there. Everything is relationship, mutual recognition, shared struggle. The same goes for their relationship to the land. 

And what a relationship it is. The Bolivian Indigenous masses stay true to being the true inheritors of the earth; they use her efficiently in all their struggles, and she willingly complies with being used for them. After all, they tend to her so lovingly. The cows and pigs I saw there were the healthiest I've ever seen. People's houses didn't terraform the land; they coexisted with it. Yet, they must fight daily to hold onto their small plots. Their strength to do so comes from something deeper than numbers or tactics. As Leonarda Colque Choque, a Quechua agricultural union leader, told me, "I was born of the left, am of the left, and will die of the left." That absolute will—that indomitable spirit—is what makes them incorruptible. They are not fighting for abstractions. They are fighting because they remember a time when Evo Morales's presidency lifted them out of poverty, when five hundred bolivianos could feed a family for a week, when their children could afford shampoo and makeup. Then the coup came, and everything changed. Mama Jesusa, a grassroots organizer who spends her days traveling between blockades and checking on the people who sleep in the cold and go days without eating, put it even more simply: "The only reason I came back [from living abroad] is because Evo was president and he respected campesinos." 

To understand why they march again and again—from the mountains, the high plains, the Yungas, all the way to the government palace—you have to reach back 245 years. In 1781, the Indigenous nations laid siege not once but twice. Thousands upon thousands left their ayllus and planted themselves on the same ridges where blockades stand today: Ceja, Ballivián, Pampahasi. They organized under their own authorities—Mallkus, Mama T'allas, and Jilaqatas—and demanded self-rule, a new era "when only Indians would reign," in the words of Bartolina Sisa. The battle cry then was ¡Jallalla Túpaj Katari, jallalla Bartolina Sisa! That same cry echoes now in every shouted consigna, every roadblock held against the dawn. Political memory is not nostalgia. It is an organizing principle. These blockades are not simply a response to economic collapse or the rot of one administration. They give voice to a deeper wound: the clash between power structures born of coloniality and the unbroken desire of Indigenous peoples to govern themselves. From the 1781 sieges to Zárate Willka's Indigenous government in Peñas, from the water wars to the gas wars to the fall of Sánchez de Lozada, there runs a continuous thread—the search for political self-determination. What hangs in the balance today is not merely whether Paz resigns. It is the very meaning of sovereignty: whether it remains locked in the hands of elites who invoke the people while ruling over them or whether it flows upward from the organized pueblos themselves. 

That respect—for land, for labor, for the Indigenous way of life—is what the current right-wing Paz government forsook. 

So we carried that respect ourselves as foreign comrades: no photos of faces, no names dropped carelessly, and no missionizing. In Cochabamba—mestizo central in a country with an Indigenous majority—our hotel was a den of spies. Breakfast came with right-wing news, the channel smearing blockades and cherry-picking bought-out campesinos to cry about food shortages that only hurt businesses. My professor, patient and sharp, talked with the staff. One man, son of La Paz miners, believed nationalization was ruin; he said Bolivia's only fortune lay in foreign investors. Others praised the motoqueros—paramilitaries funded by Manfred Reyes Villa, the notoriously corrupt mayor who used to be a bodyguard for dictators—without knowing their work: terrorizing, raping, killing Indigenous women, and tearing down blockades. When my professor explained, one staffer went dumbfounded. "I didn't know they killed people?"

Silence after. The same man's face fell when we slipped that we were heading to the Trópico to support the blockades. 

I came as a colonized African, but on a U.S. passport. We talked often about how our gringo passports were leverage—proof the international community was watching. The pro-U.S. government didn't want to ruffle its overlords' feathers. But we were honest too: Trump's far-right crew couldn't care less. In the US, that kind of clarity—naming empire, standing with blockades, calling a coup a coup—gets you labeled a terrorist, a threat, someone to surveil and silence. But in Bolivia, the same commitment that would make me unwelcome in my own country opened every door. 

The warmth we were welcomed with was nonpareil. Every day we spent in the Trópico, we sat down to lunch with movement leaders—union elders, coca growers, youth leaders—and they let us pick their brains about decades of struggle as casually as if they were telling us the weather. Leonarda Colque Choque, still a young mother and grandmother, welcomed us into her house and fed us sopa de maní while her five-year-old sat on her lap, listening to her mother recount the terror of the 2019 coup as though it were a bedtime story. Mama Jesusa, with her bronze skin and salt-and-pepper braids, rubbed Leonarda's back while she spoke, then pulled out her phone to show us footage of the Sacaba massacre—blood in the streets, mothers wailing—not to traumatize us, but to trust us with the truth. They didn't guard their pain. They offered it like bread. 

And then there was Evo. When I met him, he didn't give a speech. He gave me a mandarin from his farm, cracked a joke about doing a thousand situps, and called us "dear youth." For ninety minutes, he spoke to us not as a former president but as a grandfather in a story circle, his thunderous voice commanding the room while his hands remained humble, open. He told us how Fidel Castro once offered to take care of Chávez's cataracts—and how Evo asked, "What about my people?" That exchange led to 700,000 Bolivians receiving free eye surgery. He told us that the battle now is a battle of ideas, but that we must never forget who the enemy is. And when he invited me to come back, I believed him. They all did. Leonarda, Mama Jesusa, the youth leaders at the Intercultural Center, the women who asked me to help cook chicken on the mountainside, the strangers who called me "sister" and "beautiful" and "beloved youth." They fed us. They trusted us with their dreams and their dead. They want us to come back and help their fight. That kind of trust is not given lightly. It is earned through struggle and returned with the only currency that matters: commitment. 

And so I will commit the following to memory. The color of Bolivia stays with me. Purple corn, orange dust, and skirts layered like rainbows. Everything the city calls "ghetto" or "trashy" was sacred on the land. What I loved most was the fashion of the young mothers in Shinahota and Villa Tunari. Their polleras are pleated and bright, their bowler hats tilted just so,

and their babies wrapped in aguayos as vibrant as fire. They were not dressed for the camera. They were dressed for each other for the march, for the dignity of being undeniable. That is what color means here: not decoration, but declaration. 

And just as the color announces presence, the smell announces memory. Strong and rich near the Intercultural Center in Chimoré—coca leaves, fresh and sharp, hanging in the humid air like a greeting. The building itself was modest from the outside, but inside, it breathed with purpose. Above the entrance, centered like a guardian, hung a painting of Hugo Chávez in his military garb, the Venezuelan and Bolivian flags flanking him on either side—a silent declaration of which hemisphere this ground belonged to. The conference room welcomed us with walls covered in decals: quotes from Evo Morales in bold letters and, beside them, scientific facts about the coca leaf—its vitamins, its alkaloids, and its ancient place in Andean medicine. It felt less like a meeting space and more like a shrine to the possible. That is where our delegation sat with youth leaders, their faces young but their words old as the mountains. Community-controlled production. Only two points of sale in all of Bolivia: La Paz and the Trópico. 

This “communitarian socialism” is not folly nor an accident. It is the fruit of decades of Indigenous resistance against a U.S.-imposed war on drugs that treated the sacred leaf as if it were poison. Under the Morales government, Bolivia "nationalized" its coca policy, distinguishing between the leaf's traditional uses—chewing, tea, and medicine—and the illicit cocaine trade . Registered growers were permitted to cultivate a limited amount. The United States had long conditioned development aid on farmers eradicating their crops first; Bolivia flipped that, front-loading assistance to ensure alternative livelihoods were in place before any eradication . The government expelled U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration officials and faced down international drug regulatory bodies, arguing that the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotics—which classified the coca leaf as a narcotic without scientific basis—was "an error of history" that must be corrected. 

Now contrast that with Rodrigo Paz's vision. Six months into his administration, Bolivia is in "permanent crisis" as his government pursues a neoliberal playbook: privatization of strategic resources, economic liberalization, state reduction, and the suppression of popular movements. Where the MAS government built a mechanism of co-governance with Indigenous and campesino organizations, Paz treats unions and Indigenous groups as "subordinate actors, incapable of understanding the 'technical complexity' of the economic crisis." The old oligarchic logic has returned: that the country must be governed by a "qualified" elite because Indigenous and working-class sectors "do not understand" how the state functions. And where coca growers were once recognized as stewards of ancestral knowledge, they are now criminalized again. The Paz government's structural reforms favor big business and U.S. strategic interests. It is no coincidence that the national blockade demanding Paz's resignation is led by peasants, coca growers, miners, teachers, and neighborhood councils. They know what is at stake: the return of a Bolivia where their land, their labor, and their leaf are once again for sale.

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Zo Rivera (they/them) is a 23-year-old working-class Haitian diasporan a part of Black Alliance for Peace, a Pan-African revolutionary socialist organization. This summer, they joined an international solidarity press delegation to Bolivia (May–June 2026), recording struggles against US imperialism and bringing those lessons home. A devout socialist, their work focuses on expanding anti-imperialist consciousness within proletarianized and racialized communities across the U.S. A passionate educator, they center youth as the torchbearers of movement continuity. Off the books, they're equally devoted to fitness, cooking, horror that haunts the political unconscious, and the wacky noise of underground music.

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