The Mallku Will Live on in the Anti-colonial Struggle

By Carlos Aznarez on January 20, 2021

El Mallku, photo: El Foro

Felipe Quispe, who was nicknamed El Mallku by those from below, has died. That is, “spirit of the mountains” or “the lord of great heights”.

One of the most powerful leaders of rebellious Bolivia, a country where there is no shortage of examples of men and women who have fought against colonialism and it’s predatory and slave-like practices, has departed.

An internationalist revolutionary, Quispe gave his wisdom in the ranks of the FMLN in El Salvador and the Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP) in Guatemala.  In Bolivia in the 1980s he founded the political organization Ayllus Rojos and was a leader of the Federation of Peasant Workers. An Aymara guerrilla who honored the legacy of his ancestors, he proclaimed the path of armed struggle so that the indigenous masses could achieve the government that had been permanently denied to them by the white minority. In 1990 he took up arms with other peasants in the ranks of the Tupac Katari Guerrilla Army. This insurgent patriotism was unsuccessful and cost El Mallku five years in prison.

He never gave up fighting for the poorest of his people. As one of the top leaders of the Labor Confederation of Peasant Workers of Bolivia, as a member of the Indigenous Movement Pachakuti or as an ordinary combatant, he never stopped practicing direct action or organizing the necessary response to both military dictatorships and right-wing governments. He hated the new colonizers and those who courted them, and in this he was implacable with those who infiltrated the popular ranks with the poison of teachings and practices that had little to do with rescuing the wisdom of Pachamama.

During Evo’s term in office, he was a harsh critic of certain movements that he characterized as reformist, placing the accent of his anger, as was the case with Comandante Chato Peredo, on the administration of, among others, his former Katarista guerrilla comrade, Alvaro García Linera.

El Mallku was and always will be a kind of Indian Che, who never turned his back on the fight and who proved to all and sundry, during the last civic-police-military dictatorship of Añez and his henchmen that the fight is won by fighting. That is why, with his good number of years behind him, he did not hesitate to take to the streets to organize the people’s barricades and to give encouragement to those who produced the new uprisings. Proclaimed Commander by the Ponchos Rojos, he traveled the country stirring up the struggle and confronting the timid and timid politicians, who took refuge in pseudo-progressive elite circles. From that insubordinate class position, he proclaimed that it was time for those who had been resisting for more than 500 years, his blood brothers and the brave women of the pollera, to govern. He would have preferred to storm the heavens by advancing towards the government with the insurrectionary people and not by the electoral route, but nevertheless, he did not withhold his support for the pairing of Lucho Arce and his brother David Choquehuanca.

Now, when everything indicated that he could take over the government of La Paz in the next sub-national elections, the terrible death came out to confront him, but as the elders of the Aymara nation say, they will not be able to defeat his ideas or bury his legacy, which, entangled in the many colors of the Wiphala, will be picked up by others, so that no one will try to twist what this integral revolutionary, whom the new generations will remember as El Mallku, had so much trouble sowing.

Source: teleSUR, translation, Resumen Latinoamericano, North America bureau