Feminist autonomy and rebellion in Bolivia

Digital art by @Pazconadie for Ojalá.

Opinion • Angélica Becerra Brito & Claudia López Pardo • August 29, 2025 • Leer en castellano

The uprising led by Bolivian women and feminists over the past decade has emerged out of the various layers and facets of the crisis impacting the country.

The August 17 elections, which shattered previous political polarization between an increasingly fractured Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) and the traditional right, forced a runoff between two political forces with the same neoliberal background.

In this context, in which overlapping crises are deepening and patriarchal war is moving beyond the halls of congress, we took some time to reflect on feminist uprisings in Bolivia, in dialogue with Verónica Gago and Raquel Gutiérrez.

The common thread running through our organizing is that of autonomous practices. With that in mind, we will explore reappropriation as a means of mobilizing specific struggles and forms of resistance, from Cochabamba and Santa Cruz, in a context marked by a hostility that normalizes fascist political practices in everyday life.

Bolivian feminisms are not waves or tides, rather they are rivers and curichis (swamps) that come together to rage against sexist violence, the patriarchal judicial system, conservatism, patronage systems, and government manipulation. We seek to move beyond a way of thinking that puts its main focus on the state, and displace it as the gravitational center of our politics.

Strength, autonomy, reappropriation

Reappropriation is the most important word for how we describe building independent power.

For many decades, institutional feminists managed agendas for urban women with a limited approach based either on a “citizen” model or by placing us in positions to make demands, and doing so in a society with multiple, structural issues. This sectoralization of women is something autonomous feminisms question, based on common principles we have developed through our history of struggle.

Between 2016 and 2017, feminists from Mexico and the south launched a political movement against femicide, giving rise to independent organizing across several territories. In Bolivia, our demonstrations started with the chant “we’ve had enough” and led to the reappropriation of historical dates like March 8 (8M), International Women’s Day, and November 25 (25N), the day that marks the fight against gender-based violence.

The streets became a meeting place for resistance, gatherings, and open assemblies, where sharp insights, political discourse, and strategies rooted in everyday life and the reality of each individual were shared.

Unlike in traditional leftist organizing, these shared spaces allowed us to practice dissent, listening, and innovative forms of working and being together.

The collectives that are born out of these spaces are diverse, underground, and constantly evolving, with slogans that change every year. 

In years past, autonomous feminists from Santa Cruz pronounced their desire for “Territories liberated from fascism and patriarchy.” And this year, in Cochabamba, we marched behind a banner that read “Look out, fascists! Kocha is feminist.”

This collection of desires will become rivers eventually. In such currents, defiant and creative moves against institutions of patriarchal injustice are conceived. Fury burns brightly, and rage becomes a living body that fights police complicity.

A crucial sign of the times is the collaborative action between autonomous feminisms and movements led by queer folks and gender dissidents. LGBTQIA+ issues are overflowing and building diverse alliances. 

The inclusion of non-heteropatriarchal lesbian and trans politics in autonomous struggle challenges the institutional framework of the NGO world and questions compulsory heterosexuality in a conservative society like Bolivia.

Feminism vs. patriarchal violence 

In Cochabamba, 2017 and 2018 were years of imagination, of gathering creative and organizational strength that bloomed into concrete results. This organizational experience stemmed from the efforts of underground feminism, which is rooted in previous autonomous movements.

In 2019, the slogan “We are not afraid, we are fire” highlighted injustices and the long road ahead in politicizing the struggle against violence. That year, Bolivia would be rocked by thunderous discord caused by the political crisis and the war between patriarchal forces, represented by Evo Morales and an ultra-aggressive, conservative right wing.

That political crisis was the groundwork for autonomous feminism in Cochabamba. Our efforts focused on condemning the encroachment of fascism in 2019 and 2020.

Affirming an autonomous position protected our movement from manipulation by leftists who were reeling as they tried to regain control of the state. Our position is clear: women's bodies will not be used as trenches in patriarchal war. 

From 2021 to 2023, the focus of our struggle shifted to the institutions perpetuating patriarchal injustice. Broadening demands for justice among women and feminists is vital to the struggle. 

The Cochabamba movement's extensive efforts to escape division seek to connect how economic crisis does more than worsen living conditions, because it also deepens gender violence, and in doing so, serves to dismantle everyday communalism.

In 2024, our debates were resumed in the slogan “Women and rebellious gender dissidents against the precaritization of life.”

Today, a disciplinary counteroffensive seeks to erode everything we have transformed over years of feminist mobilizations. After months of threats in 2025, an anti-feminist backlash has taken shape, targeting two young women and charging them with “ property damage” for speaking out about Palestine. 

Fascist rhetoric attacks women and our capacity for rebellion—and the strategy of criminalization against us requires censorship and persecution.

Sow struggle, reap fury

In Santa Cruz, the gang rape of an 18-year-old girl by five well-connected young men in 2018 sparked unprecedented forms of feminist organizing later that year. Feminist and autonomous groups rose up against the patriarchal pact, at attempts to discipline us, and against the war on women.

Anger with the “rape squad” caught fire. Our feminisms took to the streets, that vital public space that masculine logic has tried to take away from us. We reject machismo camba (typical of the Santa Cruz region), which is rooted in violent cultural practices, and we reject extractivism sustained by economic and patronage systems.

When we look back over the banners and manifestos we’ve produced over the last 10 years, we see a cycle of feminist resurgence. The rebellious fabric, continually reknitting itself, makes sense to us in an increasingly fascistized Santa Cruz.

This period prepared us for the fires that would be lit months later. Burnings connected to extractivism revealed an ecocidal development model in Santa Cruz, one based on dispossession and plunder and promoted by the progressive government together with powerful elites. 

Naming the war

As autonomous feminists, we consider extractivist policies implemented in Bolivia to be akin to warfare. We understand, in dialogue with Silvia Federici, that war is not only waged with bombs and armies, but also through dispossession that destroys human and non-human life.

Patriarchal war has been expressed through municipal powerbrokers' forces and male elites who use violent rhetoric, enabling the expansion of fascist practices and deepening conservatism and territorial control. The general elections earlier this month are part of a battle between men who approach politics as a battlefield.

For the time being, we can see new pacts and agreements emerging between politicians vying for power, all of them obeying the same neoliberal agenda. Economic restructuring, increased extractivism, and more debt are likely to be produced out of this moment.

As daily life becomes more precarious, the end of the so-called “progressive era” in Bolivia means we must urgently revisit the debate on the centrality of the state. How can we protect feminist and autonomous strength from being captured within a logic of war?

As we put the self-defense strategies we’ve learned into action, we’ll stay vigilant in protecting our communities and territories from the neoliberal offensive that will come alongside advancing fascism.