When a pandemic intensifies racial terror

Abstract

Bolivian urban spaces witnessed dramatic racialized power struggles in the context of the ouster of the indigenous President Evo Morales in a coup in November 2019 and the current lockdown of the country due to the coronavirus pandemic. Repression of indigenous protests against the usurpation of power by racist extreme right-wing forces led to massacres, forced disappearances and severe human rights violations. Furthermore, the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic intensified the process of racist stigmatization as urban indigenous sectors were vilified as a threat to the lives of white-mestizo middle class citizens. Besides examining the impacts of anti-indigenous structural racism on the vulnerabilities of Bolivian indigenous people in the context of the pandemic outbreak, this article also highlights the forms in which the pandemic is turned into an opportunity by racist political forces to intensify racial stigmatization of indigenous people. By showing the striking continuities between the racial terror inflicted on indigenous people after the usurpation of power by extreme right wing forces in 2019 and the stigmatization of the same social sectors in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak, this article underlines how the abandonment and stigmatization of indigenous people during the pandemic, rather than being an aberration, is yet another manifestation of long term historical processes underlying colonialism, indigenous dispossession, and deracination. In response, indigenous activists produced alternative narratives and policy proposals to counter those of the state and the dominant society, (re)imagining the city in the process. This article examines the implications of these urban spatial struggles in dialog with an interdisciplinary body of literature on racialized urban geographies and the relationship between the biopolitical and the necropolitical.

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