In the political history of Bolivia, each regime has tried to legitimize its power through the construction of a historical account that justifies its existence. However, the Movement to Socialism (MAS) has led this practice to an unprecedented radicalization: its vision of the past of 2006 backward, as if the subsequent twenty years had been suspended in a kind of historical limbo. In this narrative, everything that happened between 2006 and 2025 – a time of its prolonged management – is erased or reduced to personal episodes without historical relevance. What would be government memory for others, for the MAS it is an uncomfortable vacuum that prefers to bury.
This way of manipulating time not only responds to a legitimation strategy, but also constitutes a deliberate exercise of symbolic violence. By altering the temporal scales, the most builds a mythical chronology that positions it as the origin and destination of the national project. In that line, history is not told as a plural succession of collective experiences, but as a straight line that goes from Túpac Katari to Evo Morales, avoiding all complexity, contradiction or defeat.
The Republican landmarks that have marked the Bolivian future – Independence, the Chaco War, the 1952 revolution, the democratic transition of 1982, or the liberal cycle from 1985 to 2005 – are reinterpreted under a Manichaean prism or simply ignored. Thus, the 52 revolution is reduced to an expression of “internal colonialism”, military dictatorships are diluted in false continuity with democracy and the democratic recovery process initiated in 1982 is erased from the official story. Democracy are them (sic).
But the most revealing is how everything that challenged the MAS from within the cycle that ruled: the protests over the Tipnis, the 21F referendum, the 2019 citizen uprising, or the massive complaint of institutional corruption, is excluded from the historical registration. These facts, far from constituting historical milestones, are treated as minor incidents, devoid of collective sense. When they refer to the “past” they are at some point between 1825 and 2005, never in that 10% of the national history they controlled from power. The story, for the MAS, only happens when they star.
In this context, disputing the most official chronology becomes an urgent task. Not to deny the social advances achieved, but to question the claim of totality that the most wanted to impose as national history. Only a historical memory that recognizes both struggles and fractures, both emancipation and authoritarianism, can serve as a basis for a plural, inclusive and critical democracy.
