A young woman offers a lit cigarette and tells me it will help with the sting of teargas rapidly engulfing us. It is 21 November 2019 and we have raced uphill from Plaza San Francisco in central La Paz, where a funeral march for 10 protesters murdered by soldiers has been broken up by the arrival of military police. It is the first weeks of the short-lived dictatorship of the conservative president Jeanine Áñez, who is branded an ‘asesina’ – murderer – in the crumpled pamphlets which litter the streets.
Turbulence and instability have characterized Bolivian political history since the arrival of Spanish colonists in the 16th century. Bolivia became independent in 1825 amid the wave of insurgencies which swept Latin America during this period. But the Indigenous majority continued to face racialized exploitation and land theft from the Spanish-descended elite.
