Like a thick night fog, hatred rages through the neighborhoods of Bolivia’s traditional urban middle classes. Their eyes are brimming with anger. They don’t shout, they spit. They don’t make appeals, they impose their will. Their chants are neither hopeful nor fraternal, but they ring with discrimination and contempt for indios (indigenous Bolivians). They mount their motorcycles and saddle up in their SUVs, band together with their buddies from the fraternities and private universities, and set off hunting for the rebellious indios who dared snatch power from their hands.

In Santa Cruz [a traditional center of the white, conservative, and pro-corporate “civic” opposition to Morales], they organize hordes of 4x4s, armed with clubs to scare the indios who live in the poorest neighborhoods and the markets — those whom they call “collas.” They shout that “you have to kill the collas” — and if they come across a woman in indigenous dress, they beat her, they threaten her, and they tell her to get out. In Cochabamba, they organize convoys to enforce their racial supremacy in the south of the city, home to the poorer classes. They charge like a cavalry unit into the thousands of defenseless peasant women who march for peace.

They carry baseball bats, chains, gas grenades. Some brandish firearms. Women are their favorite victims. They grab the mayor of a rural town, they humiliate her, drag her down the street, hit her, urinate on her. When she falls to the ground, they cut her hair, they threaten to lynch her, and when they realize they are being filmed, they cover her in red paint, a symbol of what they will do with her blood.