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#BoliviaElections When David Choquehuanca was invited to join Morales' cabinet in Jan 2006, he had to give up his ticket to the World Social Forum in Caracas and make a shift to the other side of the line dividing movement and state.
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Fearing “I would be just one more piece of that system,” he pledged to himself to “be there without being there.” Convinced he wouldn’t last in the job, he started off aloof: “The first year I had no desire to know anything,—‘For what?,’ I would say—I rebelled.”
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But then, he threw himself into presiding over Bolivia’s international diplomacy. His ministry made Bolivia well-known at the UN, sent him to present spiritual ideas of Vivir Bien and Mother Earth in international fora, and kept an open door to the grassroots left.
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He put radical Aymara anthropologist Esteban Ticona in charge of the Diplomatic Academy, churning out a diverse corps of future diplomats.
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At the UN, Bolivia helped secure the 2007 passage of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, made April 22 into Mother Earth, launched annual dialogues on harmony with nature (harmonywithnatureun.org/chronology/), and passed a 2010 resolution on the human right to water.
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Bolivian diplomats worked with transnational environmental, indigenous, and other grassroots movements and mobilized Bolivians by the hundreds and sometimes thousands into the privileged world of international diplomacy.
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More on David Choquehuanca's unique brand of grassroots, plurinational diplomacy here… woborders.blog/2020/10/21/david-choquehuanca-grassroots-diplomacy/