Although it was Cochabamba’s 2000 water war that brought international attention to Bolivia’s antiglobalization struggles, the coca wars began more than a decade earlier. When the U.S. “war on drugs” set its sites on Bolivia, coca growers found themselves fighting for the right to grow the traditional medicinal leaf that is also the most important ingredient in cocaine.

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency found formidable opponents in Bolivia’s cocaleros, many of whom were laid-off miners who had migrated to the Chapare to grow coca to survive. As Dangl writes, “In this way, coca saved people from neoliberalism like a ship in a stormy sea.”

The coca struggle is where current president Evo Morales and his political party, the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) got their start. But it wasn’t until the 2000 water war in Cochabamba defeated a water privatization scheme that Morales and the MAS gained a national profile.

One of the book’s strengths is that Dangl places events and movements in Bolivia in a larger historical and international context. He explains, for example, that the U.S. multinational Bechtel that was the major shareholder in the company contracted to privatize Cochabamba’s water was originally founded to build railroads in the U.S. West with Chinese and prison labor—and has in recent years won billions of dollars in contracts to “rebuild” Iraq.

Dangl shows how the U.S. replaced the “war on communism” with the “war on drugs” and the “war on terror” to justify intervention in Bolivia and the greater region after the fall of the Soviet Union. In Paraguay, for example, claiming that the Triple Border Region, where Bolivia, Brazil, and Paraguay meet, was a base for Islamic terrorist funding, the U.S. has established a military presence that many local campesinos see as a pretext for repression of their land struggles.

The 2003 gas war was Bolivia’s most recent resource war. Refusing to sit by while multinational corporations sold their natural gas out from under them, the Bolivian people once again rose up, this time forcing out two presidents within two years. One older resident of El Alto, where the most intense battles took place, told Dangl:

Everyone in El Alto is organized into some kind of union or community organization. When a problem arises we all get together and organize to fight, protest, and blockade. Individually, we have no power. Together we can do anything.

It seems strange, then, that Dangl concludes: “Much of the revolt [during the gas war], particularly in El Alto, happened without leaders or an organized structure.” He quotes Uruguayan writer Raúl Zibechi who writes:

In fact, it could be argued that if unified, organized structures had existed, not as much social energy would have been unleashed. The key to this overwhelming grassroots mobilization is, without a doubt, the basic self-organization that fills every pore of the society and has made superfluous many forms of representation.

The question of whether neoliberalism has met its match in Bolivia—which Dangl raises at the end of the book—has yet to be answered. As his assessment of the first nine months of the Morales administration demonstrates, progress in that direction depends on whether the social movements use their “capacity to hold the government’s feet to the flames, preventing the application of harmful neoliberal policies.”

Dangl promotes regional economic integration as an alternative to neoliberalism, but larger analysis of the strategies necessary to defeat neoliberalism is largely absent. Offering a vision of the way forward for Bolivia’s social movements, however, does not seem to be Dangl’s aim. As he sees it, “Instead of marching for change, their march is the change.” Dangl paints a rich picture of that march, often by handing the microphone over to those fighting to transform Bolivian reality. In so doing, he makes a crucial contribution to our understanding of Bolivia’s resistance movements at a moment when the country stands at an important crossroads.