Thinking Left in Bolivia: Interview with Alvaro Garcia Linera Linda Farthing, August 3, 2009
Bolivian Vice President Álvaro García Linera first became passionate about politics during the widespread resistance to the Hugo Banzer dictatorship in 1979. Soon after, he left Bolivia to train as a mathematician at Mexico's National Autonomous University, where he was active in the Central American solidarity Movement. Drawn to sociology, he began reading everything he could in an effort to analyze the situation of Bolivia's indigenous majority population from a Marxist perspective. In García Linera's intellectual life, political questions have always been the most important. Upon his return to Bolivia, he became a founding member of the indigenous Marxist guerrilla organization EGTK (Tupac Katari Guerrilla Army), which disbanded when its leadership was captured in the early 1990s. After five years in prison, García Linera joined the sociology department at La Paz's public university. He quickly emerged as one of Bolivia's leading public intellectuals and stayed at the university until 2005, when he became Evo Morales's running mate in the presidential elections. Slender, light-skinned and tall, bundled into a Russian great coat that President Morales brought him back from Moscow, and armed with a cup of coca tea in one hand and the ubiquitous cellphone in the other, García Linera wasted little time in formalities when we sat down to talk recently. Can you describe the differences between what you call Andean-Amazonian capitalism and capitalism in Northern countries? How do you see the link between this kind of capitalism and socialism?...............rest at http://boliviarising.blogspot.com/2009/08/thinking-left-in-bolivia-interview-with.html ________________________________________________ YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. Send list submissions to: [email protected] Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
