1 Introduction
Bolivia has a long history of Indigenous resistance against colonial and state domination. Since the Spanish conquest, Indigenous Peoples have been systematically excluded from political and legal structures, with their customary laws and governance systems marginalised by the colonial and later republican authorities (Albó Reference Albó and Barabas2018). Throughout the twentieth century, Indigenous and peasant movements mobilised to demand land rights, cultural recognition and self-governance. By the early 2000s, these movements had gained unprecedented political influence, culminating in the election of Evo Morales, Bolivia’s first Indigenous president, in 2006. Morales and his party, the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS, Movement for Socialism), emerged from a coalition of Indigenous and leftist organisations that sought to redefine the Bolivian state (Webber Reference Webber2015).
The 2009 Constitution, shaped largely by Indigenous mobilisation, declared Bolivia a plurinational state and formally introduced legal pluralism, recognising Indigenous jurisdiction as part of the national legal framework (Constitution of Bolivia 2009). This marked a historic achievement for Indigenous movements advocating for autonomy. Tensions quickly emerged, however, between those movements and the MAS government, revealing a broader pattern in which Indigenous demands for self-governance and territorial rights were increasingly subordinated to political and economic agendas centred on resource extraction. While MAS initially aligned itself with Indigenous struggles, it gradually prioritised extractivist policies, putting the government at odds with communities resisting projects that threatened their territories. The Isiboro Sécure Indigenous Territory and National Park (TIPNIS) conflict in 2011, when a highway project was approved without prior consultation, became a defining rupture, sparking mass protests and state repression (Delgado Reference Delgado2017; Postero Reference Postero, Merrill and Hoffman2015; Rivera Cusicanqui Reference Rivera Cusicanqui2018), alongside government efforts to weaken key Indigenous organisations (Webber Reference Webber2015).
At the same time, Bolivia’s legal framework continues to constrain Indigenous jurisdiction and limit its effective autonomy. Although the Constitution formally recognises Indigenous legal practices, this recognition is conditioned by institutional and doctrinal limits that require Indigenous jurisdiction to be bounded by ordinary law and state-defined conceptions of fundamental rights, often grounded in legal traditions alien to Indigenous worldviews and norms (Baffero et al. Reference Baffero, Wardak and Williams2024). As a result, constitutional pluralism risks functioning less as a space of equal legal co-existence and more as a system in which Indigenous law is tolerated only insofar as it remains legible to, and subordinated within, state legal frameworks. For these reasons, a number of scholars have argued that legal pluralism in Bolivia reproduces forms of internal colonialism, embedding constraints derived from Global North legalities within a project that purports to institutionalise decolonisation (Bazurco Osorio and Exeni Rodríguez Reference Bazurco Osorio, Exeni Rodríguez, Santos and Exeni Rodríguez2012; Chuquimia Escobar Reference Chuquimia Escobar, Santos and Exeni Rodríguez2012; Ferrazzo and Raizer Reference Ferrazzo and Raizer2020; Mballa and Copa Pabón Reference Mballa and Copa Pabón2020; Ramírez Reference Ramírez and Ledesma Narváez2018, Reference Ramírez2021; Santos Reference Santos, Santos and Exeni Rodríguez2012).
These tensions are starkly illustrated in the ongoing conflict in Zongo, an AymaraFootnote 1 Indigenous territory engaged in a prolonged legal dispute with a mining businessman. Despite multiple Constitutional Court rulings affirming Indigenous jurisdiction over the matter, ordinary courts have repeatedly disregarded these decisions, keeping the case unresolved and exposing the limits of constitutional recognition without enforcement. The Zongo case therefore provides a detailed empirical site for examining how legal pluralism in Bolivia operates in practice. Rather than treating this solely as a descriptive illustration of the gap between ‘law on the books’ and ‘law in action’, the article examines how this gap is actively produced and sustained through institutional practice, with concrete consequences for Indigenous governance.
This article therefore contributes to the literature by examining this largely overlooked case and demonstrating how the non-enforcement of constitutional rulings generates two interrelated consequences: the criminalisation of Indigenous authorities and community members for actions undertaken within a constitutionally recognised jurisdiction, and the juridification of Indigenous governance, as communities are compelled to engage with state legal institutions to contest such proceedings, with cumulative effects of destabilisation and internal fragmentation. Traced empirically through the Zongo case, these dynamics should be understood as case-specific analytical inferences rather than claims of system-wide generalisation. They show how Indigenous autonomy is formally affirmed yet materially constrained, producing outcomes that can be understood as a neocolonial configuration of legal authority.
This article proceeds as follows. Section 2 outlines Bolivia’s constitutional framework of legal pluralism and introduces the institutional weakness of the Constitutional Court, which is central to the argument. Section 3 presents the methodology. Section 4 reconstructs the dispute through its key moments: the expulsion of the mining businessman from Zongo, the criminal proceedings brought against community members, the three Constitutional Court rulings issued to date and the current unresolved situation. Section 5 discusses their implications for debates on the practical effects of legal pluralism in Bolivia.
2 Legal pluralism in Bolivia
Legal pluralism is a contested concept in socio-legal scholarship, but is often used, following Merry’s classic formulation, to refer to the co-existence and interaction of multiple normative and legal orders within the same social field (Forsyth Reference Forsyth2009; Merry Reference Merry1988; Schuppert Reference Schuppert, Kötter, Röder, Schuppert and Wolfrum2015; Swenson Reference Swenson2022; Tamanaha Reference Tamanaha, Kötter, Röder, Schuppert and Wolfrum2015). In Bolivia it is not only an analytical lens but also a constitutional principle: the 2009 Constitution defines the country as a ‘Plurinational […] State’ founded on ‘juridical […] pluralism’ (Constitution of Bolivia 2009, Art. 1), denoting the formal co-existence of multiple jurisdictions within the same legal and political order. This structure is further reinforced by international commitments recognising Indigenous rights, which provide an additional normative foundation for Indigenous autonomy, self-determination and the continued validity of Indigenous legal traditions.
Among the most significant international instruments shaping Bolivia’s plural legal landscape is the International Labour Organisation (ILO) Convention No. 169 on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples (International Labour Organisation 1989), ratified by Bolivia in 1991. This affirms the right of Indigenous Peoples to maintain their customs and legal institutions provided these do not contravene fundamental rights or national laws (Art. 8), and requires states to establish mechanisms for coordination with national legal frameworks (Art. 9). Similarly, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (United Nations 2007), supported by Bolivia, recognises rights to autonomy, self-government and Indigenous legal systems, and affirms the right to resolve internal matters through customary institutions (Arts. 4, 34), subject to international human rights standards (Art. 40).
These commitments informed and reinforced the constitutional transformation introduced in Bolivia in 2009. The Constitution recognises two jurisdictions as hierarchically equal within the state: the Court of Ordinary Jurisdiction (hereafter, Ordinary Jurisdiction) and the Rural Native Indigenous Jurisdiction (hereafter, Indigenous Jurisdiction) (Constitution of Bolivia 2009, Art. 179.II). The former covers matters arising primarily in urban contexts, the latter those within Indigenous communities, particularly in rural and semi-rural settings (Art. 191.II.3). Art. 2 and 8 define Bolivia as a ‘pluralistic society’ and ground Indigenous political, cultural and institutional self-determination, while Art.179.I and Art 179.II establish that Indigenous Jurisdiction forms part of the state’s juridical framework and holds equal status to Ordinary Jurisdiction.
Despite this formal equality, the constitutional architecture also introduced significant constraints on Indigenous Jurisdiction. Art.192.III opened the way for the Ley de Deslinde Jurisdiccional (hereafter, Law on Jurisdictional Delimitations) (Law 073 2010), which restricts Indigenous Jurisdiction through material, territorial, and personal scopes of validity. Materially, it is limited to disputes excluding crimes against humanity, terrorism, crimes against the state, crimes against children, and serious offences such as rape or murder (Law 073 2010, Art. 10.II); territorially and personally, it applies only to acts that take place within, or produce effects within, Indigenous communities, and that involve Indigenous members (Constitution of Bolivia 2009, Art. 191.II.3). Where all three scopes are met, Indigenous Jurisdiction is compulsory and binding upon community members, and its decisions are formally irrevocable by other jurisdictions (Law 073 2010, Art. 12). Two implications follow. First, parties cannot choose between state courts and Indigenous authorities; such cases must be heard by the Indigenous authorities with constitutional competence. Second, decisions issued within Indigenous justice systems cannot be appealed before the Ordinary Jurisdiction, which lacks authority over matters constitutionally defined as Indigenous.
The Constitution further requires that both Indigenous and Ordinary Jurisdiction respect state-imposed standards of human rights and individual rights, including those articulated within international treaties such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (United Nations 1948) (Constitution of Bolivia 2009, Art. 190.II). To guarantee these constitutional protections across all jurisdictions, the Constitution establishes the Tribunal Constitucional Plurinacional (Plurinational Constitutional Court; hereafter, Constitutional Court) (Constitution of Bolivia 2009, Art. 196.I). The Constitutional Court is composed of seven members, at least two of whom must self-identify as Indigenous (Law 027 2010). It has the authority to review decisions taken within the different state jurisdictions where alleged violations of fundamental rights are raised, and its rulings are final and binding across the entire legal system (Law 254 2012).
Bolivia’s constitutional arrangement is also distinctive within Latin America for providing procedures aimed at managing jurisdictional conflict between co-existing legal systems (Botero Reference Botero2009; Fajardo Reference Fajardo2004; García and Cruz Carrillo Reference García and Cruz Carrillo2016; Gutiérrez Reference Gutiérrez2011). Under the Law on Jurisdictional Delimitations, where a crime occurs within an Indigenous community but falls outside one or more of the three criteria, Indigenous authorities must transfer the case to the Ordinary Jurisdiction (Law 073 2010). In parallel, the Constitution provides mechanisms for challenging the actions of Indigenous authorities where constitutional rights are alleged to have been violated: any affected person may file a procedimiento de amparo constitucional (constitutional redress) or an acción de libertad (action for liberty) before a ‘competent judge or court’ (Constitution of Bolivia 2009, Arts. 128–29, author’s translation), and where evidence of a violation is identified the matter must be referred to the Constitutional Court for review (Arts. 125–36). Where an Indigenous norm is found incompatible with constitutional provisions, the Court must propose a culturally sensitive resolution to the conflict (Law 027 2010).
Over time, the Constitutional Court has played a pivotal role in shaping Bolivia’s pluralist legal order by articulating key precedents on the scope of Indigenous Jurisdiction and its relationship with Ordinary Jurisdiction, seeking, at least doctrinally, to substantiate constitutional recognition with interpretive principles capable of addressing the tensions embedded within pluralism in practice. A central example, particularly significant for the Zongo case, is Constitutional Ruling 0874/2014 (Tribunal Constitucional Plurinacional 2014). It prioritised interculturality as an interpretive framework for mediating between human rights discourse and Indigenous rights, and challenged rigid applications of the Law on Jurisdictional Delimitations, including in contexts involving serious crimes, thereby creating doctrinal space for greater flexibility in the interaction between jurisdictions. The ruling exemplifies the Court’s broader attempt to move beyond formal recognition towards a model of pluralism that can meaningfully accommodate Indigenous normative orders.
However, the extent to which constitutional legal pluralism operates as an effective guarantee of Indigenous autonomy depends not only on doctrine, but on the institutional capacity of the Constitutional Court to secure compliance across the wider judicial and administrative apparatus. Although the Court is formally the supreme interpreter of the Constitution and its rulings are binding (Constitution of Bolivia 2009; Law 254 2012), Bolivia’s post-2009 judicial landscape has been marked by persistent concerns over its institutional weakness. These intensified after the introduction of nationwide judicial elections, in which candidates for high judicial office, including those of the Constitutional Court, are pre-selected through a political process before being submitted to popular vote, a design widely debated for its implications for judicial autonomy and political influence (Driscoll and Nelson Reference Driscoll and Nelson2019; International Commission of Jurists 2024). The Court has at times been perceived as deeply entangled in partisan struggles: most notably, despite the 2016 referendum in which 51 per cent of Bolivian voters rejected a reform removing presidential term limits, it enabled Evo Morales to seek a fourth term by interpreting those limits as incompatible with political rights protected under the American Convention on Human Rights (Human Rights Watch 2017; Reuters 2017).
This institutional weakness is compounded by the architecture through which constitutional decisions are implemented, and by the relationship it establishes between the Constitutional Court and the Ordinary Jurisdiction. Although the reasons underpinning the Court’s rulings formally bind all public authorities, courts and private parties, execution of a constitutional resolution falls to the court that first heard the matter, with the Constitutional Court retaining the power to hear complaints of delay or non-compliance, to require the intervention of the public force, to refer officials for disciplinary sanction, to impose progressive fines, and to transmit the file to the Public Prosecutor’s Office for civil or criminal action (Law 254 2012, Arts. 15–18). These powers are nonetheless reactive: they must be activated by the affected party, they operate case by case, and they run through the very institutions they are meant to discipline. Institutional position matters here. The Constitutional Court sits in Sucre, removed from the settings in which its rulings must take effect, whereas the Ordinary Jurisdiction is organised departmentally and its decisions, in the Zongo case, were taken by judges and prosecutors operating within the same departmental field as the mining operation. As Section 4 shows, those local institutions consistently resisted transferring competence, while the Court’s corrective capacity was exercised only intermittently and at a distance.
Crucially for the operation of legal pluralism, this institutional weakness creates the conditions under which constitutional jurisprudence is treated as negotiable in practice. As this article shows, even where the Constitutional Court has issued rulings intended to strengthen Indigenous autonomy and advance an intercultural and decolonial understanding of pluralism, ordinary judges and local officials have not consistently complied with its binding decisions, nor treated them as determinative beyond the immediate proceedings to which they formally apply. It is worth noting that the Court’s pluralist stance in this field cannot simply be read as an expression of government policy. In Zongo, the Court has ruled consistently in favour of Indigenous Jurisdiction, while the executive’s position has been at best ambivalent: successive MAS administrations combined a rhetorical commitment to plurinationalism with an extractivist economic agenda, and although two ministries ordered the closure of the mining operation at issue (Ministerio de Minería y Metalurgia 2012; Ministerio de Medio Ambiente y Agua 2015), neither order was enforced. What the Court affirmed doctrinally, the executive neither contested nor implemented. The Court’s position here is also comparatively low cost, since the dispute concerns a private operator rather than a state development project of the kind that provoked open confrontation in TIPNIS. This raises the central analytical problem that motivates the article: the operation of legal pluralism in Bolivia hinges not only on constitutional design, but on the enforceability of constitutional rulings and the capacity of the Constitutional Court to discipline jurisdictional hierarchy in practice. The next section sets out the methodology through which the case study evidence has been gathered and analysed.
3 Methodology
This article draws on qualitative research conducted in Bolivia across two phases and adopts an interpretive, case-study approach to examine how legal pluralism operates in practice. The methodological strategy combines i. prior research experience on legal pluralism and Indigenous justice in Bolivia, ii. targeted primary data collection with Indigenous authorities directly involved in the Zongo dispute and iii. documentary legal analysis to reconstruct the case history and trace jurisdictional dynamics across institutions.
3.1 Case context: territorial and institutional background
Zongo is an Aymara Indigenous territory located in Murillo Province, within the Department of La Paz. Contemporary Indigenous governance in Zongo took clearer institutional form following the 1953 agrarian reform, leading to the creation of the Central Agraria de Zongo (hereafter, Zongo Central), which today represents approximately thirty-five Indigenous communities (Movimiento Regional por la Tierra y el Territorio 2016). Governance operates through a hierarchical structure linking local community authorities to Sub Central and Central-level organisations affiliated with broader Indigenous unions (Tribunal Constitucional Plurinacional 2014). Among these communities is Cahua Chico, home to the research participants and a central site of the conflict examined here, as it forms part of the territory affected by the mining operation. Cahua Chico is a small Aymara community whose residents were established in the territory well before the arrival of the mining operation in the 1970s, and whose contemporary form as a titled community dates from the 1953 reform. Livelihoods there combine subsistence agriculture with wage labour, including employment in the scheelite mine developed on community land, so that the same households appear in this case as community members, as former mine workers, and as parties before both jurisdictions. Prior to the escalation of the dispute, as reported by the research participants, Cahua Chico comprised seventy-two members.
3.2 Research phases and field engagement
The first research phase took place in 2018, when the author conducted a multi-method qualitative study on legal pluralism and Aymara Indigenous justice in Bolivia. That research combined semi-structured interviews in La Paz with ethnographic fieldwork in an Aymara Indigenous community not connected to the Zongo case. Although the 2018 study did not directly involve Zongo, it provided foundational contextual knowledge of Bolivia’s plural legal framework, Indigenous justice practices and the institutional relationships between Indigenous authorities and state legal actors. Insights from this phase were key in shaping the analytical lens applied to the Zongo case.
A second phase of engagement occurred in October 2024, when the author, supported by the NGO Progettomondo, organised research dissemination and dialogue activities in La Paz, including engagement events and focus groups bringing together Indigenous representatives, legal practitioners, academics, and public officials. During one of these, two Indigenous representatives from Zongo described their ongoing legal struggles. Following that encounter, the author conducted an in-depth semi-structured interview with Edgar Pérez Clavijo and a subsequent focus group with Fernando Pérez Clavijo, Marcela Quisbert, and Rosalina Magueño, all current or former key authorities within Zongo, who opted to have their names disclosed. The interview (approximately ninety minutes) focused on reconstructing the chronology of the dispute and identifying key institutional interactions; the focus group (approximately 140 minutes) was used to corroborate, clarify and collectively reflect on these events and their consequences for community governance.
3.3 Data sources and triangulation
The article draws on three main sources of evidence, which are analysed in combination to mitigate the limitations of any single source. First, it relies on the primary qualitative data described above. These are not intended to represent the full range of perspectives within or beyond the community, but rather to document a situated account by actors with direct and sustained involvement in the jurisdictional conflict. Conducting the interview and focus group sequentially allowed the author to first establish a detailed timeline of events and then triangulate those findings internally and with the other evidence gathered.
Second, the article draws on limited academic and media coverage of the Zongo case. These sources are used primarily for contextualisation, rather than as primary evidence for the article’s claims. Third, the article undertakes documentary legal analysis to reconstruct the case history and trace jurisdictional decision-making across institutions. These legal documents include:
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i. Constitutional Court rulings, declarations, orders, and resolutions retrieved through official archives and the Court’s online repository;
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ii. community resolutions and internal governance documents shared by Edgar Pérez Clavijo during the interview, such as the 2010 expulsion resolution of Zongo Central (Central Agraria Campesina Sector Zongo 2010); and
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iii. additional written materials relating to the case, including court notifications, institutional communications, departmental-level statements, and reports where available.
Together, these sources enabled triangulation of the timeline of events, verification of key procedural developments, and analysis of how jurisdictional authority was asserted, contested, and ultimately rendered ineffective at the point of implementation.
The decision to build the participant component of the evidence around those four authorities was deliberate rather than incidental. It was shaped, first, by the conditions of access created by active litigation and violence. At the time of fieldwork, the dispute was live: proceedings arising from the 2023 events were pending, community members were in preventive detention and the businessman was subject to precautionary measures. Approaching him, or the workers currently employed at the mine, would have meant soliciting accounts from parties to ongoing criminal proceedings in which the research participants were co-defendants and, in the case of the workers, from people economically dependent on the mining operation who had recently been involved in violent confrontation with the participants’ community. The risk of exposing either group to reprisal, or of prejudicing pending proceedings, could not be responsibly managed within the ethical framework governing the research. Judges and prosecutors, in turn, are bound by duties of reserve in respect of live cases and, as the case record itself documents, had already declined to engage with Zongo’s authorities on the jurisdictional questions at issue.
Two further considerations concern the design of the argument rather than access. The article’s object is not the truth of the underlying allegations between the community and the businessman, and the analysis does not adjudicate that dispute. Rather, it examines the institutional trajectory of the jurisdictional conflict, namely which body asserted competence, on what reasoning, and with what effect. That trajectory is recorded in official documents, and the article’s claims about non-enforcement rest on those documents rather than on participant testimony. Relatedly, the positions of the other parties do enter the analysis, through documentary rather than interview sources: the businessman’s own account appears in his criminal complaints, his amparo petition, and the Court’s summaries of his submissions, and is quoted directly in Section 4; the reasoning of the ordinary judges appears in their own resolutions; and the stance of those within Zongo who aligned with him is preserved in the Murillo Federation resolution and in the withdrawal documents described by participants. The interview and focus group are therefore used for what these sources cannot supply: the sequencing of events as experienced by those subject to prosecution, and the effects of prolonged legal exposure on community governance.
3.4 Data analysis and limitations
The interview and focus group discussions were transcribed and then analysed collectively with the other sources of evidence through iterative reading and thematic coding using NVivo. The analysis proceeded through qualitative case reconstruction of the Zongo dispute as it unfolded between Indigenous authorities, the Constitutional Court, and the Ordinary Jurisdiction, with particular attention to the sequencing of legal proceedings and their institutional effects over time.
Two limitations follow from this design. The first is that the participant accounts are those of authorities directly involved and are therefore partial and positioned; they are accordingly used to establish chronology and to document effects on governance, and are corroborated against documentary evidence wherever they bear on institutional conduct. The second is that the analysis rests on a single, in-depth case. It therefore advances context-specific analytical inferences about how legal pluralism operates in practice in Bolivia, rather than a basis for system-wide generalisation beyond the institutional dynamics identified in Zongo.
4 Results: the Zongo case
The Zongo case is legally significant in Bolivia as a prolonged conflict over jurisdictional authority between Indigenous and Ordinary Jurisdiction, generating multiple Constitutional Court interventions addressing the scope and enforceability of legal pluralism. Over a sixteen-year period, it has produced successive criminal proceedings alongside repeated constitutional rulings affirming Indigenous Jurisdiction, offering an unusually detailed record of how jurisdictional conflicts in Bolivia unfold across institutions. This section reconstructs the key moments of the case and documents how the non-implementation of those rulings has undermined Indigenous legal authority in Zongo.
4.1 The establishment of the mining operation and the businessman’s subsequent expulsion from Zongo Central
The conflict in Zongo has a long and complex history, rooted in sustained tensions between the Indigenous authorities of Zongo Central and a mining businessman, José Oscar Bellota Cornejo. Available accounts indicate that Bellota established a presence in the Zongo region in the 1970s, concentrating his activities in the communities of Cahua Grande and Cahua Chico, areas rich in scheelite. There, he founded the mining company Mauricio Alexander and employed local community members to extract the mineral (Copa Pabón et al. Reference Copa Pabón, Kennemore, Canela, Ruckstuhl, Velásquez Nimatuj, McNeish and Postero2023; Movimiento Regional por la Tierra y el Territorio 2016).
‘The businessman entered in the 1970s approximately, where, well, the peasants welcomed him with good will and he won their trust. […] So, once he arrived, he began to mine. […] Then, years passed, the peasants themselves, not many, came to work in the [Cahua Chico] community’ (Fernando Pérez Clavijo, extract from focus group; section in square brackets added by author).
Alongside his economic activities, Bellota sought to consolidate his position through participation in local governance. In 1979, he joined the board of authorities of Cahua Grande, and in the 1980s he served there as Secretary of Sport, an authority figure (Movimiento Regional por la Tierra y el Territorio 2016; Pachaguaya and Marcani Reference Pachaguaya and Marcani2016). Over time, however, his relationship with community members and local authorities deteriorated. Research participants recount that Bellota progressively acquired land from residents and employed local miners under conditions they regarded as exploitative, including the absence of social benefits during periods of production and the termination of employment without compensation once productive phases ended:
‘My father retires, and the businessman did not want to pay him his social benefits. […] So that is where the whole conflict of Zongo started. […] All its workers raised in protest, alongside others who had already retired. The businessman had left many people in that situation, without social benefits’ (Edgar Pérez Clavijo, extract from interview).
‘There is even another experience of an old woman, who was taken away a large area of land. At that time, she complained and said, “I was only given an amount which I used to buy a pound of coca leaves.” And the businessman received more than 500 meters of land. Well, that is how he has been taking land from many peasants’ (Fernando Pérez Clavijo, extract from focus group).
Given the situation, many members of Zongo Central began submitting formal complaints to the Zongo Central board of Indigenous authorities, and some communities also began taking independent action against Bellota. The community of Cañaviri reportedly decided to expel him, an episode referenced in Resolution 001/2001 of the Cahua Grande community. In that same resolution, the people of Cahua Grande resolved to expel Bellota as well, accusing him of multiple offences including purchasing land through deceit, mistreating and exploiting workers, and contaminating the local river with chemicals used in mineral processing (Comunidad Agraria Campesina Cahua Grande 2001).
Over time, Zongo Central began sending formal notifications to Bellota, requesting his response to the growing number of complaints and seeking to hear his side of the issue. Bellota repeatedly ignored these invitations, until the third notification:
‘The Indigenous Central notifies the businessman in the first instance to defend himself from the complaints that were presented. And the businessman does not pay attention. […] In the second [instance], in the same way [Zongo Central] notifies him, [but again] he does not pay attention. In the third [instance], they give him an ultimatum so that he has to show up [at the Indigenous conflict resolution process]’ (Edgar Pérez Clavijo, extract from interview; sections in square brackets added by author).
In 2010, Bellota finally agreed to participate in the conflict resolution process. On that day, approximately 200 members of Zongo Central gathered in the Indigenous community of Huaji to attend the proceedings (Tribunal Constitucional Plurinacional 2014). During the session, the Indigenous authorities formally presented the businessman with the accumulated complaints from previous years, which included:
‘Abuses against the two communities, Cahua Grande and Cahua Chico, including the improper use of our mineral, water, and forest resources, contamination of our main river, the exploitation and arbitrary sale of our lands, over 30 years of mining our mineral wealth without any benefit to our sector, and constant abuses against our fellow workers employed in those mines’ (Central Agraria Campesina Sector Zongo 2010, p. 1, author’s translation).
For his part, Bellota was given the opportunity to explain his actions and justify his position. The Movimiento Regional por la Tierra y el Territorio (2016, p. 5) documents his statements during the conflict resolution process, in which he threatened the Indigenous local people with legal repercussions through the Ordinary Jurisdiction:
‘To all the people who are accusing and reporting me, I will take legal action against you because I do not owe anything to anyone, and I also have all my documentation up to date as a mining concessionaire’ (author’s translation).
In the interview, Indigenous authority Edgar Pérez Clavijo recounts that the Indigenous people involved in the conflict resolution process, undeterred by Bellota’s threats, collectively voted to expel him from Zongo Central after administering five whippings as part of their decision:
‘People grabbed the businessman. […] They grabbed all [his] four joints and gave him five whippings’ (Edgar Pérez Clavijo, extract from interview; sections in square brackets added by author).
This version is confirmed in the report published by the Movimiento Regional por la Tierra y el Territorio (2016). The authorities of Zongo Central then ordered the enforcement of the sentence, which had been collectively agreed upon by the thirty-five communities. This included taking control of the mining site located between the communities of Cahua Grande and Cahua Chico. The events were formally documented in the Resolution of Zongo Central and signed by all attending authorities (Central Agraria Campesina Sector Zongo 2010).
4.2 The first two criminal charges against the Indigenous people of Zongo and the establishment of the Zongo Justice Commission
However, Bellota refused to recognise the legitimacy of the resolution of expulsion of the Zongo Central and, later that same year, he initiated two different criminal proceedings. With the first case, Bellota accused the Indigenous people of Zongo of crimes including sabotage, extortion, and illegal occupation of land. The Public Prosecutor assigned to the case, from the Second Criminal Investigation Court of the Department of La Paz, issued Formal Indictment Resolution 17/2010. In 2011 and 2012, the prosecutor expanded the formal charges to include other Indigenous members of Zongo Central (Tribunal Constitucional Plurinacional 2016, 2018).
‘The total reached 24 people who were part of the process. And in this, we received the notification, which was already a form of intimidation against the authorities, the community, and the entire population’ (Edgar Pérez Clavijo, extract from interview).
As discussed later, these charges never resulted in a criminal verdict, as the proceedings were repeatedly delayed. In 2014, following the first Constitutional Court ruling on the jurisdictional conflict, the hearings were suspended. The Court subsequently ruled again in 2016 and 2018: first ordering the suspension of the charges, and later transferring jurisdiction to the Indigenous authorities.
Following these first criminal charges, in 2012, police intercepted three Indigenous individuals reportedly travelling in a minivan carrying ten quintals of scheelite, the mineral extracted from the mine (Pachaguaya and Marcani Reference Pachaguaya and Marcani2016). In the aftermath of this incident, Bellota filed a second criminal case against representatives of Zongo Central who had signed the Zongo Central Resolution (Central Agraria Campesina Sector Zongo 2010) and other community members. They were charged with aggravated robbery, property damage, criminal association, trespassing, threats, and assault. This case proceeded under the Ordinary Jurisdiction through a formal trial.
Prior to the trial, Indigenous representatives of Zongo Central convened in Huaji and, through Resolution 003/2012, reaffirmed the definitive and complete expulsion of Bellota from all communities within Zongo Central (Central Agraria Campesina Sector Zongo 2012). A month later they met again and formally requested that the criminal judge presiding over the case transfer jurisdiction back to the Indigenous Jurisdiction of Zongo Central. However, in 2012 a trial was held in La Paz, during which the judge, through Resolution 429/2012, ordered the preventive detention of two Indigenous authorities and one community member, the same three individuals previously found transporting scheelite (Tribunal Constitucional Plurinacional 2014).
In response, other Indigenous authorities from Zongo Central, through their legal representatives, submitted the two above-mentioned Zongo Central resolutions to the judge in La Paz, formally requesting the transfer of the case to the competent Indigenous Jurisdiction of Zongo Central, as provided by the Law on Jurisdictional Delimitations (Tribunal Constitucional Plurinacional 2014). However, the judge rejected the request, stating:
‘The Law on Jurisdictional Delimitations does not yet have a regulation or decree specifying how such jurisdiction would be transferred, and in the absence of such regulation, this court cannot delegate jurisdiction’ (Tribunal Constitucional Plurinacional 2014, para. I.1, author’s translation).
In addition to ordering the detention of the three Indigenous individuals, the judge scheduled a trial and imposed precautionary measures on twenty-nine other members of Zongo Central (Pachaguaya and Marcani Reference Pachaguaya and Marcani2016). Following their imprisonment, many of those facing trial began withdrawing their complaints against the businessman:
‘The other [Indigenous] members have a talk directly with the businessman where [he] makes them desist. They say that they regret it, that they are not going to bother [anymore]. […] They all get scared, because they did not have the resources to be able to defend themselves before the prosecutor’s office’ (Edgar Pérez Clavijo, extract from interview; section in square brackets added by author).
‘Some reconciled with the businessman for fear of continuing to be prosecuted. […] They signed a withdrawal document. And they have also made enemies of us; I, as a former authority, indeed, all the brothers and sisters of Zongo, have found ourselves divided, because they have, in effect, betrayed the region’ (Fernando Pérez Clavijo, extract from focus group).
In 2013, some authorities within the Murillo Federation, of which Zongo Central forms part, publicly sided with the businessman, portraying him as an ‘honourable professional who brought progress to the community’ (Resolution FSUTIOC-PM, in Pachaguaya and Marcani Reference Pachaguaya and Marcani2016, p. 14, author’s translation). After the trial, those in Zongo who still wished to challenge the businessman realised that the only viable path was to engage with the state legal system:
‘We [decided that we] will fight [the businessman] through ordinary justice, we will organise ourselves. The Indigenous Central called a general assembly, where it indicated that we create our own judges, our own justice authorities, to be able to confront the businessman’ (Edgar Pérez Clavijo, extract from interview; section in square brackets added by author).
As noted by Pachaguaya and Marcani (Reference Pachaguaya and Marcani2016), it was at this point that the people of Zongo decided to establish a justice commission (henceforth, the Zongo Justice Commission) to pursue legal action directly before the Constitutional Court. In 2013, the Zongo Justice Commission submitted an official request to the Departmental Tribunal in La Paz to transfer jurisdiction away from the Ordinary Jurisdiction. The President of that Tribunal rejected the request, arguing that ‘Penal jurisdiction is inalienable and non-delegable’ (Tribunal Constitucional Plurinacional 2014, para. I.2). In response, the Commission bypassed the Departmental Tribunal and travelled directly to Sucre to present the case before the Constitutional Court:
‘So we go directly to Sucre, because here, in the prosecutor’s office, they do not pay attention to us, they do not give us our recognition as Indigenous judges. […] There we presented for the first time the entire case’ (Edgar Pérez Clavijo, extract from interview).
4.3 The first constitutional ruling on the Zongo Case
Hence, the Indigenous people of Zongo, facing prosecution and incarceration by the ordinary courts, decided to bring their case directly to the Constitutional Court (Tribunal Constitucional Plurinacional 2016). In response, the Admission Commission of the Constitutional Court, through Constitutional Order 0221/2013-CA, formally acknowledged the jurisdictional conflict and ordered both jurisdictions to suspend all proceedings until a final decision was reached (Tribunal Constitucional Plurinacional 2013a).
Subsequently, the Constitutional Court issued Declaration 0006/2013, a landmark declaration that upheld the Zongo Central’s decision to expel and evict the mining businessman from their territory (Tribunal Constitucional Plurinacional 2013a). While this declaration did not explicitly resolve the jurisdictional dispute, it affirmed that expulsion, as a sanction, is constitutional and aligns with ILO Convention 169, stating that ‘the expulsion […] enjoys the same constitutional dignity as the sanctions imposed by ordinary justice’ (III.7.3.i, author’s translation). Notably, Declaration 0006/2013 did not mention nor directly address the physical punishment, whipping, that the Indigenous people of Zongo had inflicted on the businessman before expelling him.
A year later, the Constitutional Court issued Ruling 0874/2014, the first in the nation’s history to resolve a jurisdictional conflict between Indigenous and Ordinary Jurisdiction (Tribunal Constitucional Plurinacional 2014). In line with Declaration 0006/2013, the Court reaffirmed that Zongo Central’s decisions carry equal legal weight within the Plurinational State and must be respected by other jurisdictions. It upheld the decision to expel the businessman and ordered the First Criminal Judge of El Alto to recuse and transfer the case files to the Zongo authorities, affirming their competence to hear and resolve the issues underlying the criminal proceedings. As with Declaration 0006/2013, it did not address the whippings inflicted during the 2010 Zongo Central resolution. It also instructed Zongo Central and the Ordinary Jurisdiction to engage in dialogue with the businessman to restore harmony, with the Indigenous Jurisdiction required to report back within three months.
This ruling was a legal milestone for three key reasons. First, it explicitly ruled in favour of Indigenous Jurisdiction, practically limiting the authority of the Ordinary Jurisdiction and affirming Indigenous justice as an equal justice system. Second, it expanded the interpretation of the Law on Jurisdictional Delimitations. Regarding personal validity, the businessman was not considered a member of any Zongo Central community; to address this, the Court referred to Declaration 006/2012 (Tribunal Constitucional Plurinacional 2012) and Ruling 0026/2013 (Tribunal Constitucional Plurinacional 2013b), which allow Indigenous Jurisdiction to be exercised over non-members who voluntarily submit to its authority, such as by purchasing land and residing within Indigenous ancestral territories:
‘Thus, the Indigenous Jurisdiction extends to and validates decisions regarding acts carried out by individuals who are not members of the Indigenous native peasant people but have taken place within their territory, affecting the people and property of the community by “third parties”, “outsiders”, or non-Indigenous individuals’ (Tribunal Constitucional Plurinacional 2014, para. III.3, author’s translation).
Additionally, the Constitutional Court argued that, under the Constitution, Indigenous Peoples’ right to self-determination includes deciding which matters fall within their jurisdiction, regardless of how state law categorises the severity of the case (i.e. material validity). On this basis, the Constitutional Court affirmed that Indigenous authorities should retain competence over all cases they have historically resolved. Imposing external restrictions, it emphasised, would violate both constitutional principles and international legal instruments such as ILO Convention 169 and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which protect Indigenous Jurisdiction without limiting it by subject matter or the seriousness of the dispute:
‘The Indigenous Jurisdiction, in convergence with personal and territorial validity, has the authority to hear and resolve the matters and issues that they have always resolved and deem relevant, regardless of whether these are considered minor or serious, criminal or civil, under state law’ (Tribunal Constitucional Plurinacional 2014, III.3, author’s translation).
Third, Ruling 0874/2014 took a significant step in reshaping the constitutional limits of Indigenous Jurisdiction. Drawing on Ruling 0037/2013 (Tribunal Constitucional Plurinacional 2013c), the Constitutional Court affirmed that allegations of human rights violations arising within Indigenous Jurisdiction must be assessed through an intercultural and flexible interpretative approach, avoiding rigid or homogenising applications of the law:
‘It must be understood that fundamental and human rights should be interpreted interculturally. This means that the universal perspective contained in the International Human Rights Covenants must take into account the worldviews, knowledge, and practices that collectively contribute to the civilisational construction of each Indigenous native peasant nation and people’ (Tribunal Constitucional Plurinacional 2014, III.3, author’s translation).
Following Constitutional Ruling 0874/2014, during a trial in La Paz in 2014, the incarcerated Indigenous individuals were released (Pachaguaya and Marcani Reference Pachaguaya and Marcani2016). However, as the research participants mentioned, the mining businessman did not stop there and continued his attempts to reclaim the mine.
4.4 The second constitutional ruling on the Zongo Case
Following Ruling 0874/2014, the businessman filed a complaint to the Constitutional Court in 2015 alleging non-compliance. He claimed that Indigenous authorities had failed to resolve the case within the mandated three-month period and had neither engaged with him nor responded to his communications, and that although the detainees had been released, no explicit ruling justified this, thereby undermining legal certainty. He requested that jurisdictional records be transferred to the First Criminal Judge of El Alto to pursue the case through Ordinary Jurisdiction (Tribunal Constitucional Plurinacional 2015). Later that year, however, the Constitutional Court issued Auto Constitucional (Constitutional Order) 0015/2015-O, a mechanism designed to pause proceedings where potential constitutional violations warrant review, concluding that Indigenous authorities had acted within their jurisdiction and in conformity with constitutional standards, and that the claim of non-compliance was unfounded (Tribunal Constitucional Plurinacional 2015).
Later that same year, the businessman filed a third criminal complaint against the Indigenous authorities of Zongo Central, accusing them of arson. The resolution of dismissal upheld the decision in favour of the Indigenous authorities, ordering the case to be archived with no legal consequences for the Indigenous people of Zongo (Tribunal Constitucional Plurinacional 2016). In 2016, the Constitutional Court also issued Auto Constitucional (Constitutional Order) 0212/2016-CA to resolve the jurisdictional conflict arising from the first criminal proceedings initiated in 2010, which by then had not progressed and remained under consideration at the Second Criminal Investigation Court of La Paz. Recognising the conflict, the Court ordered the suspension of those proceedings (Tribunal Constitucional Plurinacional 2016).
Following Constitutional Order 0212/2016-CA, the Constitutional Court issued Constitutional Ruling 0036/2018 in 2018, marking the second ruling on the Zongo Case. The ruling addressed the jurisdictional conflict arising from the businessman’s initial criminal complaint filed in 2010 (Tribunal Constitucional Plurinacional 2018). The issuance of this ruling, four years after the first, was necessary because, in practice, the earlier ruling was not being treated as having generalisable or precedential force across related proceedings arising from the same underlying dispute. As Indigenous authority Marcela Quisbert noted:
‘Ordinary Jurisdiction works by subject matter, […] it treats each matter separately, every small issue becomes a new case, and they are not interested in the constitutional rulings that are issued in our favour. […] So, that is why there was that new ruling, and now there are other rulings’ (Marcela Quisbert, extract from focus group).
Despite the Constitutional Court’s clear directive, legal actions were in fact still being pursued within the Ordinary Jurisdiction against the Indigenous people of Zongo:
‘We went to the [criminal court of La Paz] with all the decisions [of the Constitutional Court], but they did not pay attention. We told them to respect the Law on Jurisdictional Delimitations: we have equal authority, so they should stay out of it. But […] they did not give us the go-ahead, while the businessman proceeded with the criminal complaints’ (Edgar Pérez Clavijo, extract from interview; sections in square brackets added by author).
Ruling 0036/2018 was particularly significant because the proceedings initiated in 2010 had been expanded by the same prosecutor in La Paz to include other members of Zongo Central (Tribunal Constitucional Plurinacional 2018). As in Ruling 0874/2014, the Court affirmed the competence of the Indigenous authorities of Zongo Central to hear and resolve the issues underlying those proceedings, and explicitly synthesised key elements of Declaration 0006/2013 and Ruling 0874/2014. In doing so, it consolidated a stronger line of precedent in support of Indigenous Jurisdiction, possibly to deter further jurisdictional overreach by ordinary courts.
Following Ruling 0036/2018, the Zongo Justice Commission issued Resolution 001/2019, outlining directives to resolve the ongoing conflicts (Concejo JIOC Zongo 2019). It noted that some communities in Zongo had yet to enforce the 2010 Resolution of Zongo Central (Central Agraria Campesina Sector Zongo 2010) and Resolution 003/2012 (Central Agraria Campesina Sector Zongo 2012), which reaffirmed the businessman’s expulsion, and urged compliance. It also advised the Ordinary Jurisdiction to respect Indigenous Jurisdiction and release all Indigenous authorities and community members facing prosecution arising from the conflicts since 2010, emphasising that they should not be criminalised for exercising their jurisdictional rights.
4.5 The third constitutional ruling on the Zongo Case
Despite the Constitutional Court ruling twice in favour of Indigenous Jurisdiction and ordering the cessation of all criminal proceedings involving members of Zongo Central and the businessman, the conflict persisted. In 2019, following Resolution 001/2019 (Concejo JIOC Zongo 2019), the businessman filed a fourth formal complaint with the Public Prosecutor in El Alto, accusing fifteen Indigenous individuals of trespassing at the mine in Cahua Grande and Cahua Chico, and alleging that they had forcibly removed workers while armed with firearms, dynamite, and sticks, intending to illegally exploit minerals and occupy the mine (Ministerio Público 2019). According to the four research participants, this brought the total number of individuals facing legal proceedings to thirty-eight, including them.
That same year, the businessman also filed an acción de amparo constitucional (constitutional redress) with the Constitutional Court, asserting that he had lived in Cahua Grande since 1975, had been a community member since 1979 and had served as Secretary of Sport in 1983 while managing the mining concession. He sought to annul Resolution 001/2019 (Concejo JIOC Zongo 2019), claiming it violated his rights to due process, defence, access to justice, and work. The Fourth Constitutional Chamber of the Departmental Court of Justice of La Paz ruled in Resolution 117/2020 that his claim was not viable, stating that Resolution 001/2019 was final under Bolivia’s Constitution (Tribunal Departamental de Justicia de La Paz 2020).
In 2021, the Constitutional Court issued its third ruling on the Zongo Case, Ruling 0595/2021-S4 (Tribunal Constitucional Plurinacional 2021), as part of a review of Resolution 117/2020. The Court upheld the 2020 resolution, once again denying the businessman’s request to annul Resolution 001/2019 (Concejo JIOC Zongo 2019). Like Ruling 0036/2018, this formally strengthened the legal precedent in favour of Indigenous Jurisdiction and reinforced constitutional protections for Indigenous autonomy and rights (Tribunal Constitucional Plurinacional 2021).
‘We go to Sucre. Back to Sucre. Where are we failing? We are going to speak with the president of the Constitutional Court. […] They tell us: “It cannot be that they do not comply with our rulings. We are in vain working as those in the department of La Paz do not enforce [our rulings].” So, what is the proper channel we can follow to ensure compliance?’ (Edgar Pérez Clavijo, extract from interview; section in square brackets added by author).
Importantly, this third ruling did not address the issues arising from the fourth set of criminal proceedings. Nonetheless, following it, the Fourth Constitutional Chamber of the Departmental Court of Justice of La Paz issued Constitutional Resolution 262/2021 (Tribunal Departamental de Justicia de La Paz 2021), suspending all procedural deadlines and halting the fourth investigative process against the Indigenous authorities of Zongo Central. Edgar Pérez Clavijo recalls that the authorities of Zongo Central then disseminated the decision to various institutions, including the prosecutor’s office, ministries, the court, the police, human rights organisations, and the ombudsman:
‘And what do they tell us […]? “Enforce what is written here: you are the judges”; that is what they tell us […]. “You are the judges, this has to be respected, it is in your hands. Go in, and take your territory.”’ (Edgar Pérez Clavijo, extract from interview).
4.6 From the third constitutional ruling to the present day in Zongo
Despite these favourable rulings and positive feedback, no institution in fact provided practical assistance. In response, over the following months, some Indigenous people in Zongo sought to reclaim their territories by visiting the communities of Cahua Grande and Cahua Chico, acting in accordance with their internal regulations. As Edgar Pérez Clavijo, the then General Secretary of Cahua Chico, explained, a resolution had been issued to convene community work:
‘I indicated the weekend of community work, to clean the access road to our community’ (Edgar Pérez Clavijo, extract from interview).
‘The residents of Cahua Chico go to the community, following the request for community work. Why was that request enacted? Because the Constitutional rulings granted us the right over our territory’ (Fernando Pérez Clavijo, extract from focus group).
In 2023, members of Zongo Central travelled to Cahua Chico. Upon arrival, however, they were violently attacked. Other Indigenous people in Zongo, working as miners and reportedly led by the businessman’s son, assaulted them with machetes, metal rods, and shotguns. The attackers explicitly warned them not to enter the community and struck them with sticks and rifle butts. Participants described the attackers as local people who had been drawn into the conflict through fear, economic vulnerability, and dependence on the businessman’s resources:
‘Unfortunately, he [the businessman] relies on local people. He intimidates them […]. And because people are in need, there are no other sources of income, some have many children to support, they end up going along with it. […] What has “justice” achieved? There are only more of us against us’ (Rosalina Magueño, extract from focus group; section in square brackets added by author).
‘So that they can have work, he brings in people from Zongo as well. […] To those people, to those families, this businessman took their land. […] There must have been about ten members who were against the businessman […] but to avoid persecution, they turned around and allied themselves with him. So now those who started the problem are allied with him, with the businessman. […] There was a fight among us’ (Fernando Pérez Clavijo, extract from focus group).
In the course of the attack, several houses in Cahua Chico were set on fire. Shortly afterwards, the police raided the area, using tear gas and arresting nine Indigenous people associated with the research participants’ group. These were charged, tortured, and subsequently sent to prison under preventive detention (Opinión 2023). The remaining members of the group managed to escape and took refuge in the mountains, watching the destruction unfold from a distance (Flores v. Bellota 2024). As the participants recounted:
‘They blew up the bridge [connecting the mine to the community] with dynamites. They went over to the community, they burned our houses. They really wanted to make us disappear, [to make] the community [disappear]. We had to escape to the mountains’ (Edgar Pérez Clavijo, extract from interview; sections in square brackets added by author).
‘Why? Because the constitutional court had to decide again, because we were asking that the case be reviewed again. And what did they want to do at this time? They wanted to make Cahua Chico disappear […] so that we would stop talking’ (Rosalina Magueño, extract from focus group).
Following these events, the Zongo Justice Commission issued a formal request to the Ordinary Jurisdiction, asking it to file another jurisdictional conflict before the Constitutional Court regarding the fourth criminal proceedings initiated against them by the businessman, which was later expanded to include the 2023 events. The request also called for the case to be transferred to the Indigenous Jurisdiction. In the document, the Commission stressed that the Ordinary Jurisdiction had issued a preventive detention order against several Indigenous authorities, an action they sought to overturn through this appeal (Concejo JIOC Zongo 2024).
In 2024, the Constitutional Court issued Constitutional Order 0307/2024-CA (Tribunal Constitucional Plurinacional 2024) to address the jurisdictional conflict between the Indigenous Jurisdiction of Zongo Central and the Ordinary Jurisdiction relating to the latest criminal charges. Through this order, the Court formally admitted the jurisdictional conflict and referred the case to the competent chamber for determination. Pending that decision, it ordered the suspension of the criminal proceedings arising from the 2023 events until the jurisdictional dispute is resolved.
‘This ordered them to leave us again, and the businessman to cease his persecution against us. And since then [the whole thing] has frozen. […] This is just a brief measure to halt the criminal proceedings against all [Indigenous] authorities. […] But this is still just a painkiller. […] We are going to be filled with rulings, and they will never be fulfilled’ (Edgar Pérez Clavijo, extract from interview; sections in square brackets added by author).
‘And now, we still need a ruling to arrive from Sucre. We are in that step, surviving’ (Marcela Quisbert, extract from focus group).
An additional ruling on the fourth criminal proceedings, initiated in 2019 and later expanded to include the 2023 events, would constitute the Court’s fourth ruling on the same underlying jurisdictional conflict, excluding the various declarations, orders, and resolutions cited above. After more than sixteen years of litigation, research participants report that over forty Indigenous people from Zongo have faced criminal charges linked to the dispute, several resulting in periods of incarceration. At the time of writing, the businessman is under house arrest in connection with the 2023 events (Flores v. Bellota 2024). Nevertheless, his mining company continues to operate as a co-operative in Cahua Grande and Cahua Chico under his and his son’s control, despite long-standing allegations of environmental harm, the absence of an official licence, and prior ministerial orders requiring its closure (Ministerio de Minería y Metalurgia 2012; Ministerio de Medio Ambiente y Agua 2015).
The cumulative effects of this protracted conflict have been profound. Zongo Central has fragmented into three separate centrals (Marcela Quisbert, in Quisbert Reference Quisbert2024), and the viability of Cahua Chico itself is now under serious threat, with its population dramatically reduced from the original seventy-two members.
‘My community [was] made up of 72 community members. […] Right now, in the community, since the last event, many members have left. Today we are 20 [members]. But we continue… This is what we are really dealing with. […] Many families [involved in the process] have broken apart, meaning they have ended up separated’ (Edgar Pérez Clavijo, extract from interview; sections in square brackets added by author).
Taken together, these findings document a pattern in which repeated constitutional recognition of Indigenous Jurisdiction co-exists with sustained criminal prosecution and the progressive destabilisation of Indigenous governance and community life. The following discussion examines how these outcomes are produced and what they reveal about the operation of legal pluralism in practice in Bolivia.
5 Discussion
Drawing on the Zongo case, this article demonstrates that the Constitutional Court’s formally pluralist rulings recognising Indigenous self-determination fail not at the level of constitutional design, but at the level of enforcement. While its jurisprudence has repeatedly affirmed the authority of Indigenous Jurisdiction in the dispute, the persistent lack of implementation has shaped how legal pluralism operates in practice. Rather than enabling genuine legal co-existence between Indigenous and Ordinary Jurisdiction, the non-enforcement of binding constitutional decisions has undermined Indigenous legal authority, not through isolated acts of non-compliance, but through an institutional practice in which constitutional authority is rendered negotiable.
The need for multiple Constitutional Court interventions reflects not the existence of distinct jurisdictional controversies, but the procedural fragmentation through which ordinary criminal proceedings were initiated and processed. As detailed in Section 4, the conflict has generated three constitutional rulings (2014, 2018, 2021), multiple orders, declarations and resolutions and a further pending decision, all arising from the same underlying events. Each new case reproduced the same jurisdictional conflict despite prior constitutional resolution, requiring Indigenous authorities to reactivate constitutional review. Constitutional adjudication thus remained episodic and case-bound, while ordinary criminal processes continued to unfold in parallel.
This article does not argue that Bolivia’s constitutional design of legal pluralism is itself the source of the harms observed in Zongo. Rather, it shows that the Constitutional Court’s limited capacity to secure compliance across the judicial system allows constitutional recognition to be hollowed out in practice. This institutional condition produces two interrelated effects: the systematic subjection of Indigenous authorities and community members to repeated criminal proceedings, extending in several cases to incarceration (here conceptualised as criminalisation); and a sustained need to engage with Ordinary Jurisdiction in order to contest those proceedings, generating adaptive transformations in governance practices (here conceptualised as juridification) with cumulative destabilising effects. Together, these processes reveal how legal pluralism, when selectively enforced, reproduces relations of domination best understood as neocolonial.
5.1 The criminalisation of Indigenous authority
The first key consequence of the failure to enforce Constitutional Court rulings in the Zongo case is the systematic criminalisation of Indigenous authorities and community members. As documented in Section 4, following the 2010 expulsion of the businessman, at least four separate criminal proceedings were initiated, involving more than forty Indigenous individuals. These proceedings included charges such as sabotage, aggravated robbery, trespassing, and arson, and resulted in multiple forms of coercive intervention, including precautionary measures, preventive detention, and imprisonment.
This pattern persists despite repeated constitutional rulings affirming that the underlying dispute falls within Indigenous Jurisdiction. The contradiction is therefore not interpretive but institutional: Indigenous authorities are constitutionally recognised as competent to resolve the dispute, but they remain subject to criminal sanction for exercising that authority. As participants’ accounts indicate, the continuation of proceedings within Ordinary Jurisdiction occurred even when constitutional rulings were presented directly before courts, which nonetheless refused to suspend or transfer cases.
The persistence of criminalisation is closely tied to the procedural structure documented in the findings. Because criminal proceedings are initiated and processed as separate cases, jurisdictional questions are repeatedly reopened, allowing Ordinary Jurisdiction actors to continue exercising penal authority despite prior constitutional determinations. This is visible in the expansion of the initial 2010 case to additional defendants, the new complaints of 2015 and 2019, and the continuation of proceedings after the 2023 events. The cumulative effect is not a single instance of non-compliance but a sustained pattern of legal exposure, in which criminal law functions as a means through which Ordinary Jurisdiction reasserts authority.
What emerges from the Zongo case is thus not the absence of legal pluralism, but its selective implementation. Constitutional protections exist and are repeatedly affirmed, however, their non-enforcement allows Indigenous Jurisdiction to be transformed into a site of legal vulnerability. In this sense, the exercise of constitutionally recognised authority becomes a basis for prosecution, revealing how enforcement failure can invert the protective function of pluralist recognition.
5.2 Juridification and the destabilisation of Indigenous governance
The second major consequence of enforcement failure in the Zongo case is the juridification of Indigenous governance. Juridification is understood here not as the mere presence of law, nor as a voluntary process of institutional modernisation, but as a coercive transformation of governance structures and practices produced by sustained exposure to state legal intervention (Kirsch Reference Kirsch, Eckert, Donahoe, Strümpell and Biner2012; Sieder Reference Sieder, Foblets, Goodale, Sapignoli and Zenker2020).
Following the initiation of criminal proceedings in 2010, Indigenous authorities were drawn into sustained engagement with Ordinary Jurisdiction, evident in the establishment of the Zongo Justice Commission in 2013 to coordinate legal action before the Constitutional Court and interface with state institutions. As described in Section 4, while strategically necessary, this marked a significant shift in governance practices: authority became concentrated in legal representatives and procedural specialists, and decision-making was redirected away from collective Indigenous forums towards external judicial arenas. Juridification did not strengthen Indigenous autonomy; it embedded Indigenous governance within institutional logics privileging ordinary law, proceduralism, and individual liability, a dynamic reinforced over time by repeated travel to La Paz and Sucre, successive jurisdictional challenges, and reliance on legal representatives.
The destabilising effects of this shift are also empirically documented. Destabilisation is understood here as the erosion and reconfiguration of collective governance capacity under sustained legal pressure, including declining participation, weakened authority, and reduced ability to sustain collectively agreed decisions. Fragmentation refers to the breakdown of organisational cohesion and the division of previously unified structures into smaller, at times competing, units. In Zongo both emerge from the cumulative social effects of prolonged criminal proceedings. As documented in the findings, legal action generated intimidation, resource strain and fear, leading some members to withdraw complaints, renounce collective decisions or align with the businessman, and by 2023 the conflict had escalated into direct violence between Indigenous groups. Zongo Central has since fragmented into three separate centrals, while the population of Cahua Chico has declined from seventy-two to around twenty members, with families separated and participation in collective governance reduced. These outcomes are directly traceable to the prolonged legal conflict and the conditions under which it has unfolded.
Juridification in this context should therefore not be understood as institutional strengthening or voluntary legal adaptation. Rather, it emerges as a constrained and defensive response to sustained legal exposure. While engagement with state law was necessary to contest criminalisation, it simultaneously contributed to the destabilisation of governance practices and to the fragmentation of community structures documented in the case.
5.3 Neocolonialism: enforcement failure as a mode of domination
Taken together, the dynamics of criminalisation and juridification identified in the Zongo case demonstrate how legal pluralism in Bolivia can operate, in practice, as a form of neocolonial domination. Neocolonialism, as used here, denotes not the formal denial of Indigenous rights or a deficiency in constitutional design, but a mode of governance in which Indigenous autonomy is affirmed in constitutional text and judicial discourse while being systematically neutralised in practice through institutional routines that preserve the de facto supremacy of Ordinary Jurisdiction. That supremacy is not neutral. The Ordinary Jurisdiction descends from Spanish colonial administration and republican codification, and operates through categories, procedures, and conceptions of individual liability. Its practical primacy therefore reinscribes precisely the hierarchy the Constitution set out to abolish.
The findings illustrate this configuration with particular clarity. Following the prosecutions of Indigenous authorities and the refusal of the Ordinary Jurisdiction to relinquish competence, the Constitutional Court issued a series of landmark decisions between 2013 and 2024. These did not merely uphold the primacy of Indigenous Jurisdiction in the dispute, but they explicitly sought to advance the decolonisation of justice through an intercultural interpretation of rights designed to recalibrate jurisdictional hierarchies, and represent doctrinally among the most ambitious judicial efforts to give practical meaning to Bolivia’s constitutional commitment to legal pluralism.
However, the Zongo case demonstrates that these doctrinal advances remain largely symbolic in the absence of effective enforcement. Ordinary Jurisdiction actors repeatedly refused to comply with binding constitutional rulings, continued criminal prosecutions, and asserted the inalienability of penal jurisdiction. This persistent non-compliance is not merely abstract institutional fragility, but a concrete mechanism through which Ordinary Jurisdiction reasserts dominance over Indigenous governance while formally maintaining a pluralist constitutional framework, rendering constitutional authority negotiable, episodic, and confined to individual case files. That dynamic is reinforced by the political economy of the case, in which mining activity persists despite constitutional rulings and prior administrative orders.
The Zongo case therefore illuminates how enforcement failure transforms pluralist recognition into a mechanism of governance that contains rather than enables Indigenous autonomy. Indigenous self-determination is not formally revoked; it is rendered precarious, episodic, and conditional. Neocolonial domination here operates not through overt exclusion, but through the structured gap between constitutional recognition and institutional practice.
6 Conclusion
The Zongo case demonstrates that a key challenge facing Bolivia’s pluralist legal order lies in the institutional weakness of the Constitutional Court. Although the Bolivian Constitution formally recognises Indigenous Jurisdiction and the Constitutional Court has repeatedly affirmed its authority in the Zongo dispute, these rulings have lacked the enforcement capacity necessary to stabilise jurisdictional boundaries in practice. As a result, constitutional recognition has remained vulnerable to being neutralised through Ordinary Jurisdiction.
The analysis shows that this enforcement gap produces two interrelated consequences. First, it enables the continued criminalisation of Indigenous authorities and community members for actions undertaken within their constitutionally recognised jurisdiction. Second, it compels Indigenous communities to engage defensively with Ordinary Jurisdiction, generating processes of juridification that reconfigure governance practices and destabilise collective authority from within. Together, these dynamics reveal how legal pluralism, when selectively enforced, operates as a mode of neocolonial governance: Indigenous autonomy is affirmed in law, yet rendered precarious, conditional, and repeatedly contestable in practice.
Crucially, the problem identified in Zongo is not simply that constitutional rulings are ignored, but that constitutional authority is rendered episodic and case bound. The repeated need for constitutional intervention reflects an institutional practice in which rulings are not generalised across related proceedings, allowing jurisdictional conflict and criminal exposure to be continually reproduced. For the Court’s jurisprudence on decolonisation and intercultural justice to have transformative effect, doctrinal recognition must be complemented by institutional mechanisms capable of enforcing and generalising its rulings across the judicial system. Absent these, Indigenous Jurisdiction will remain formally recognised yet substantively subordinate to Ordinary Jurisdiction, and constitutional pluralism will continue to function as a mode of neocolonial governance.
Competing interests
The author declares that he has no known financial conflicts of interest or personal relationships that could have influenced the work presented in this paper.
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