Meanwhile, the authorities, their bosses, came from the peasant communities of Tapacarí. The mayor and five out of the seven councillors were Quechua speakers from the valley part of the province, with two councillors from the Aymara-speaking highland region who also spoke Quechua. Two councillors were women, both of them monolingual in Quechua. Quechua was the language used in official meetings, although all municipal decrees and laws were written in Spanish, drafted by a lawyer. Each councillor had been a peasant union leader working up from community representative through to municipal authority, by first acting as community leaders (dirigentes) and then leaders of their
subcentral, a small group of communities, then central cantonal, leader of their
provincial subdivision and then in most cases central provincial, peasant union leader for the whole municipality. One was a former mayor. The two women councillors had been
central provincial for women, who had their own separate, parallel leadership structure
mirroring that of the men.
It was repeatedly affirmed in interviews with councillors and at peasant union meetings and gatherings in Tapacarí that no individual could be eligible to become a councillor or occupy another authority role without first working to serve their community. The councillors each emphasised, when I talked to them, that they had spent several years working up the hierarchy described above and then sometimes occupying a role in the municipal leadership such as member of the Oversight Committee, or Ombudsman for Child Protection. In a congress for women leaders which I attended in the town of Tapacarí, the subcommittee for organisation agreed that unless an individual had completed a term of service of one year at each level of the organisation, they should not
be allowed to progress further up the hierarchy, and that no one from the province should be supported in a bid for political office unless they had served in all the positions of the peasant union (subcentral, central cantonal, central provincial) and been a member of the MAS-IPSP party for at least five years. In subsequent years, some councillors from other parts of the province were elected under different party banners, or defected.
Peasant union leadership in Tapacarí required dedication and diplomatic skill, as well as a significant outlay of time, with consequent economic losses. From subcentral level upwards, leaders' time was no longer their own and they were expected to attend meetings and training workshops, mediate disputes and advocate for the interests of all the communities in the subcentral when interacting with representatives from the state, NGOs or other external agencies. According to the engineers, they only dealt with the
subcentral leader when contacting a community to arrange an event or project: 'the others
won't talk to you, or even give their names: they will just tell you to go talk to the
subcentral'. Central cantonal representatives have a correspondingly more demanding
job, and the job of central provincial is a serious, prestigious, full-time undertaking. The
central provincial at the time of fieldwork, Don Valentin, described his job as one of
co-ordination between the bases and the leadership of the Political Instrument (i.e. the MAS), but also one of conflict resolution within and between communities. The most difficult conflicts, he said, were over land, because they affected everyone: most of the disputes he was called out for involved arguments over borders between lands. The police in the town of Tapacarí backed this up in interviews, saying that they had very little to do with the resolution of disputes or punishment of offenders in the peasant communities; all this fell to the peasant union organisers. (Indeed, one of the only times I
complained that the people from his village had beaten him up and 'they shouldn't be allowed to do that, I am a dirigente, they should have respect and not hit me.') Although the social organisation in the Aymara-speaking part of the province was centred around the ayllu in addition to the sindicato campesino, Don Valentin affirmed that he was also called on to mediate disputes in the upper reaches of the province in the Aymara-speaking communities, although he himself was from a Quechua-speaking community in canton Tapacarí. Being central provincial, he said, meant you had to spend a lot of time walking from place to place, since he had to visit many communities and had no vehicle in which to do so. Indeed, when he passed through the town of Tapacarí it was often before or after a several-hour walk out to a community where a problem had been reported. The same was true of the women peasant leaders who I knew: they spoke of the need to walk around their area, between communities, and also to travel frequently for meetings in the city with other peasant leaders, training workshops or gatherings of the umbrella union, the Bartolina Sisa Federation of Women Peasants. This work was made complicated, they said, by their duty to take care of livestock (in bilateral descent and gendered agricultural tasks, women generally inherit animals and have the job of animal husbandry, whereas men inherit land and have primary responsibility for crops [see Spedding 1997]) and the jealousy of husbands who did not permit their wives to walk freely from community to community or to travel to the city when necessary: for this reason many women peasant leaders were young and unmarried, had reached agreements with their husbands, or had gotten rid of them.
Although all were from peasant backgrounds, the councillors necessarily had to live in the city for most of the time while carrying out their duty. Most of the councillors described the transition from living in the country to living in the city as difficult, and took the
opportunity when they could to return to their country houses – one in particular was notorious for getting a lift back to his house in the country whenever he could, and asking to be picked up from there on the way to meetings. One of the female councillors had entrusted the care of her two children to her husband while she carried out her duties. The authorities, mayor, councillors, subprefecto and national political representatives were addressed in print and in speech as 'Honorable'. To omit this title was considered extremely rude, but it was often used in conjunction with less formal ways of speech, including use of the intimate 'tú' form in Spanish. As with the title 'Engineer', it was useful in cases of forgetting people's names. However, several of them had nicknames by which they liked to be known, emphasising aspects of their political self-presentation. One was known by all as the General, in reference to his prominent role in confrontations and the organisation of protests – his community had a reputation stretching back several decades for evicting abusive landowners. Another referred to himself as the Campesino, the Peasant, and retained his traditional dress and habitual coca-chewing when in the city – even carrying a green bag of coca with him when playing football. The mayor, in a consciously provocative move, wore tyre-rubber sandals, ujutas, when he went about his duties, a fact which provoked scandal among the residentes tapacareños.