In 1953, Bolivia's indigenous peasantry carried out one of Latin America's most successful agrarian reforms, in which the Spanish feudal system was abolished. In place of the hacienda estates in the highland Yungas region were established rural Aymara communities with a novel form of political economic organization: European syndicalism. Over the next 50 years, this system originally designed for Western labor unions was adapted to meet the exigencies of semi-subsistence livelihoods and turned into functioning structures for rural community government, called sindicatos. As these communal systems lay outside the formal state structure, the rise of sindicalismo also represented the formation of civil society in the Yungas after four centuries of colonialism and elite republicanism.

Coca leaf has been cultivated for a millennium in the Yungas, which is now the primary legal zone to supply Bolivia's domestic markets for medicinal, nutritional, and ceremonial uses of the leaf. Coca has also been targeted for eradication in the U.S. “war on drugs,” sparking fierce resistance by the sindicatos to defend the economic mainstay of Yungas campesinos. The symbolic force of the “sacred leaf” combined with cultural memories of historical Aymara revolutionary heroes have helped to organize the Yungas sindicatos into one of the country's most influential social movements.

This dissertation argues that the methods of sindicato resistance are gleaned from long traditions of democratic governance, drawing on both labor union syndicalism and the ancient Aymara ayllu system. Coca leaf has provided an especially potent impetus for campesino advocacy in the Yungas, placing the sindicatos at the center of civil society efforts to counterbalance the power of the state and international interests. Bolivia's neoliberal political reforms via the Law of Popular Participation of 1994 and the Law of Citizen Groups and Indigenous Peoples of 2004 expanded the range of options for civil society participation in local and national government. These structural changes enhanced the ability of the sindicatos to defend the coca economy and promote new policies for the leaf through democratic political engagement.

Anthropology has only recently become devoted to the ethnographic analysis of democracy, which has deepened the study of the diverse methods, discourses, and structural potentials for democratic organization across historical cultural contexts. This dissertation contributes to this emerging practice by showing not only how Yungas sindicalismo is a viable form of community democracy, but also how its role as a principal civil society actor is helping to strengthen (and hybridize) Bolivia's precarious democratic traditions at the municipal and national levels. With the election of Evo Morales to the presidency in December 2005, it is also clear that agrarian sindicalismo has directly contributed to the rise of the new Left in Bolivia.