Americas Quarterly

referendum in which both Morales and opposition prefects won popular backing.

But these important events are not mentioned. Instead, the bulk of the August 10 conversation tackles class theory and the role of intellectuals in perpetuating neoliberal ideology and class structure.

Under prodding by the authors, García Linera does discuss his government’s limitations and shortcomings in some of the later conversations. But the prodding seems halfhearted: one gets a clear sense that the authors share their subject’s worldview. For example, García Linera argues that state intervention must “generate wealth, because we need much economic wealth to promote the other modernizations,” but he is not pushed to explain how that differs from the professed goals of previous develop-ment-oriented regimes, which, like the present government, favored state-directed exploitation of hydrocarbon and mining resources.

In that same conversation, García Linera is challenged on the apparent contradiction that the MAS espouses a “bottom-up” approach to politics, yet continues the historical Bolivian tendency to centralize power. When he is reminded that the Right also favored centralized power, he responds that the current government is justified because it has different goals: “recovering state enterprises,” as opposed to neoliberal privatization.

In an era when Bolivian politics is deeply polarized, this book does little to advance the debate needed for the country’s development. Nevertheless, as an intellectual biography of a key player in the nation’s new politics, it makes an important contribution to understanding Bolivia today.

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Miguel Centellas is adjunct professor of Latin American politics at the University of Mississippi. His research focuses on the effects of institutional reform on electoral politics in Bolivia.