New Aymara-Bolivian Vice-President Victor Hugo Cardenas sends brief
message on August 6, 1993
"After 500 years of colonial silence, and after a hundred and sixty eight
years of republican era exclusion we speak up to tell the truth.
We are living a new "Qhanatatawi", a new democratic dawn where city and
countryside, mines, valleys, yungas, lowlands, moxenos and chaqueno bolivians
are capable of unity in order to overcome centuries of poverty and misery,
marginalization and neglect.
We have lived through a history of permanent struggle for freedom and justice,
for a pluricultural and multi-ethnic democracy. Today we arrive to a new
"Pachakuti" time of fundamental change: bolivians, united, start to
transform those five hundred years of exclusion and neglect.
Today we all are building, overcoming exclusion and internally strengthening
ourselves. Democracy in a multiethnic, pluricultural and multilingual nation
must be multiethnic, pluricultural and multilingual.
We must root ourselves in our history and pluricultural reality, and develop
our own historical matrix, and assimilate the best of other cultures and
civilizations.
Together with Bolivia's Constitution and the Plan for All, four principles
taken from Originary Nations will lead our work for the next four years:
"ama sua (do not steal), ama llulla (do not lie), ama k"ella (do not be lazy),
and ama llunk'u (do not be flattering)". These four principles are well known
by Bolivians. They know them.
Lets digest the best of our history, let's learn from our mistakes, but lets
be proud of our identities and lets take the way towards a future with less
inequalities and economic, social, political, cultural and ethnic injustices.
Because only going backwards we can go forward.
Thank you
Victor Hugo Cardenas, a linguist and university professor, the first Indigenous
Vice-President of Aymara origin in Bolivia, repeated his inaugural message
in Quechua, Aymara, Guarani, and Spanish.