Outside of the central Andes, indigenous parties have had little success. Parties based in the indigenous movement have emerged in a number of nations, but none of these parties have won more than three percent of the national vote.

What explains the poor performance of indigenous parties elsewhere in Latin America? Why have these parties failed to catch on in the manner of the MAS and Pachakutik?

This chapter examines the performance of indigenous parties in Guatemala, Colombia, Venezuela, and Nicaragua: the four Latin American countries with the largest and best-known indigenous parties outside of the central Andes. It contends that institutional factors cannot explain the meager results of indigenous parties in these countries because the institutional environment in three of these four countries was relatively favorable to such parties. As we shall see, in the 1990s Colombia and Venezuela reserved seats in the national legislature for indigenous people, and Nicaragua created an autonomous region in an area of the country with a large population of indigenous people and Afro-Latinos.

It is almost an axiom of politics that ethnicity shapes political participation. In most countries, individuals join political parties, evaluate policies, and vote based in part on their ethnic identification. Political parties, meanwhile, choose candidates, forge alliances, design platforms, and employ certain types of rhetoric and symbols in efforts to attract voters of particular ethnicities.

Latin American countries were traditionally the exception to this rule. Not only were there no important ethnic parties in Latin America, but the dominant non-ethnic parties largely avoided ethnic themes in their campaigns and platforms. Latin American citizens, meanwhile, generally did not vote along ethnic lines. Indigenous people, for example, often split their votes among various parties or voted in ways that were indistinguishable from the rest of the population (Birnir and Van Cott 2007; Madrid 2005a, 2005c; Van Cott 2005).

The Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS), an indigenous party founded in the mid-1990s, has dominated Bolivian politics in recent years. The MAS has won every single election held in Bolivia since 2004 by a large margin. In the 2009 general elections, for example, the MAS and its leader, Evo Morales, captured sixty-four percent of the valid votes, almost forty percentage points ahead of its closest rival. The MAS currently controls not only the presidency of Bolivia, but approximately two-thirds of the seats in the legislature, and many important departmental and municipal offices as well. The traditional parties, meanwhile, have crumbled and the political opposition is in disarray.

The MAS’s rise to dominance is surprising given that indigenous parties had traditionally fared poorly in Bolivia. A number of indigenous parties emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but none of these parties won more than a small fraction of the vote. The MAS initially gave little indication that it would enjoy any more success than previous indigenous parties. Indeed, it won only three percent of the vote in the initial elections in which it competed. In the 2002 general elections, however, the MAS finished a close second, and it has won every election held in Bolivia since.

Peru, like Bolivia and Ecuador, has some of the key ingredients necessary for the success of indigenous parties. Specifically, it has a large politically and economically marginalized indigenous population with only weak attachments to the existing political parties. This population, along with some other sectors of the electorate, has expressed considerable dissatisfaction with the traditional political parties and their economic policies in the last decade or so, and thus we might expect it to be attracted to a party that combines ethnic and populist appeals. Peru also has a long tradition of mestizaje, which has blurred ethnic boundaries and reduced ethnic polarization, thus making it feasible for an indigenous party to win support across ethnic lines.

Surprisingly, however, no major indigenous party has emerged in Peru. As we shall see, a large number of regional parties based in local indigenous or peasant organizations have competed successfully in local elections. None of these parties has been able to translate their local successes to the national level, however.