Search for: All records

Bolivian movement leaders often draw attention to their region, city, or sector’s participation in larger collective protests. While this can take the form of showing up in large numbers, they speak with a special reverence for those who lost their lives in protest. This paper considers the cultural meaning and practical import of deaths in protest for Bolivian social movements—and specifically the way that collective groups pay a price for social progress through death—by drawing on our digital archive of over 650 deaths in protest, as well as scholarly and published interviews with movement leaders and participants. First, we consider how movement participants speak of death, loss, and sacrifice, drawing attention to how lives lost are remembered as sacrifices, as a price, and as a form of collective participation in common struggle. Second, we highlight a variety of events in which government intransigence towards a protest was replaced by immediate concessions after one or several deaths. These instances are one way in which death and loss during protest can be emotionally and socially powerful, changing and even inverting prior dynamics.