About the Project
Ultimate Consequences:
A comprehensive database of deaths in Bolivian political conflict during the democratic era, 1982–present
Mass grassroots politics in Bolivia has found highly contentious forms of action that were nonetheless distinct from a conventional military conflict. Its longer history, marked by indigenous uprisings, labor militancy, and frequent military rule has been described in terms of blood, fire, dynamite, and massacres. The social movement traditions that have resulted include proclamations of fearlessness (even protesting high schoolers shout, “Rifle, machine gun, we will not be silenced!”) and vows to carry struggles “until the final consequences.”
The database enumerates individual deaths in Bolivian political conflict since 1982, the end of military rule in the country. It is compiled by a research team based on multiple sources, including media reports, governmental, intergovernmental, and private human rights reports, and use of the research literature on political conflict. The dataset now includes nearly all of the deaths identified by two Permanent Assembly of Human Rights-Bolivia (APDHB) study of deaths from 1988 to 2005 (Navarro Miranda 2006; Llorenti 2009) , and a study of the coca conflict from 1982 to 2005 (Salazar Ortuño 2008). Unlike prior compilations by human rights organizations, however, this database includes a variety of qualitative variables designed to understand how and why the deaths occurred and what policies and patterns underpin them.
We designed the database to both catalog the lethal consequences of participation in social movements and political activism, and to assess responsibility, accountability, and impunity for violent deaths. All deaths are significant as signs of the price that has been paid to seek social change. Some deaths are also significant as elements of repression or violence for which someone might ultimately be held accountable. Rather than begin by asking, “Is this death someone’s fault?,” we are coding each death according to multiple factors that enable us to extract different subsets of the overall database for different purposes. We estimate there were between 580 to 620 deaths associated with Bolivian political conflict from October 1982 until December 2019. As of August 2024, the project had identified 610 to 630 of these deaths. Including the 44 more recent deaths, we have identified 655 to 675 of a projected 685 deaths. The database includes 639 named individuals. The database is maintained as a Google Docs spreadsheet, which can be queried by R scripts, and whose reports can be generated internally or exported for further manual coding. (Bold numbers in this paragraph are updated automatically using R scripts.)
Through this process, we have become familiar with reading multiple and conflicting reports, evaluating official denials (we have created a data column for such denials), collecting narrative accounts, coding what we can based on the information, and signaling remaining questions. One thing that we have learned through this process is that making informed judgements, rather than marking all disputed facts with some kind of asterisk, is absolutely foundational to being able to do comparative work. The scale of the dataset for this period is both large enough to identify significant patterns and small enough (unlike the situation in some other Latin American countries) to permit the construction of a database that includes detailed information about every death. Precisely because its coverage is nearly comprehensive, the database offers a systematic sample of cases for quantitative and/or qualitative analysis, untainted by selection bias. We can say with near certainty that the dataset includes all episodes of political conflict that caused three or more deaths since 1982.
The dataset offers a grounded view on such questions as: What practices and political choices result in some presidencies being far less violent than others? What is the relative importance of different forms of political violence, from repression of protest to guerrilla movements to fratricidal disputes among movements? Which movements have succeeded despite deadly repression? This database will serve as a new tool for social scientists, oral historians, and human rights advocates to use in answering these and other questions.
The situations described in the dataset principally involve the following:
- Deaths from repression or confrontations with security forces during protest
- Deaths from security force incursions into politically active communities that are related to their activism
- Deaths from inter-movement and intra-movement confrontations
- Deaths of all kinds related to guerrilla or paramilitary activity
- Deaths of all kinds related to the conflict over coca growing
- Political assassinations of all kinds, including public officials, political activists, and journalists
- Deaths of social movement participants while in police custody for their activism
- Deaths from the hardships of protests and acts of self-sacrifice such as hunger strikes, long-distance marches etc.
- Acts of suicide as a form of protest
- All deaths related to land conflicts that involve a collective/social movement organization on at least one side.
For each death, we record identifying information about the person who died, the individual or group who caused the death, the place and time of the death, the cause and circumstances of the death, whether the death appears to be deliberate or intended, the geographic location, the death’s connection to social movements and social movement campaigns, sources of information available about the death, types of investigation that have been performed, accountability processes, and relationship to the Bolivian state. Analytical variables used so far include: political assassination (a binary yes/no category); protest domain (aggregating all protest campaigns into a small number of topics such as “labor” and “municipal governance”); and denial (a binary yes/no category indicating whether the perpetrator denied responsibility for the death). In creating database entries, we create brief narrative descriptions of the events involved and/or quote such descriptions directly from sources of reporting. We also are collecting textual segments of reporting and testimonial narrative relevant to each death.
Acknowledgements
The Ultimate Consequences database of lethal events in Bolivian political conflict was produced with the support of Vanderbilt University and a Mellon Digital Humanities Faculty Fellowship, and is currently supported by a National Science Foundation grant (Award #2116778). Opinions and analysis on this website are the sole responsibility of the authors and are not stated on behalf of these institutions.
Chelsey Dyer, Emma Banks, Nathan Frisch have been invaluable participants in the research team for Ultimate Consequences. Mihir Ram and Rachel Montgomery have made significant contributions to coding in the project.