Nobody has the way out, but we must look for it

Lecture by Álvaro García Linera at the ceremony for the awarding of the diploma of Doctor Honoris Causa at the Universidad Nacional de La Rioja (Argentina)

Abstract

Foreword by Fabian Calderón (UNLaR)

We conceive the facts of social, institutional, academic and political life as dynamic, situated, feeling-thinking and committed processes with our personal and collective views. The presence and closeness of our Latin American perspective allows us to experience, with deep joy and pleasure, listening to the thoughts and ideas of someone we admire and celebrate: Dr. Álvaro García Lineras. Allalla!

It is admiration for the great teacher, educator, researcher, maker, intellectual and manager of policies in the construction of welfare for his people of Bolivia and for all America. His anti-colonial, anti-imperialist thinking is linked in a revolutionary praxis, the feeling of the original peoples who recovered voices and visibilities of an institutional task.

Recovering the Bolivian people and their peasant, indigenous and mining organizations, from a situated epistemology, is a great epic and materialization of a theory that makes neoliberalism uncomfortable.

When he affirms, "nobody has the way out, but we have to look for it" it is the most heartfelt and challenging provocation of a true doer, a revolutionary of words. Inviting us to organize ourselves as peoples and collectives to confront what neoliberalism is always ready to take away from us and hand it over to the market.

From the social sciences, and specifically from Social Work, we recognize his great trajectory, knowledge, reflections and practices expressed in his vast and fruitful theoretical production. This strengthens us in our professional practice, in a meaningful life, where we become empowered subjects, ready to build a profession that accompanies suffering subjects, crossed by structural and conjunctural crises. Also traversed by the problems that originate in the social economic matrix that is always restrictive, that never ends up being a distributive practice for the whole of society and that alters social peace, since it builds discourses and selective practices from the hegemonic power apparatuses.

With Álvaro as our banner, we are encouraged to think about the consolidation of the Patria Grande, the integration of peoples and the strengthening of a situated thought and epistemic construction. To dialogue with our problems in our federal homeland of men and women and collectives of diversities that dare to challenge AN ORDER permanently instituted to fragment.

His vision as a manager in the public issue synthesizes the pains that still remain, the shame of structural problems that are pending resolution, complex debts to be settled and that always - in his thinking and institutional praxis - appear as answers. They become "That utopia that at times approaches us and sometimes drastically moves away from us".

His presence and sharpness of his analysis make him a lighthouse, a living and hopeful flame that gathers a multiplicity of little fires (Galeano, 2000) ready to join the emancipating bonfire of the peoples.

Its permanent invitation to feel part of a committed, defiant socialism, ready to fight the battles in an increasingly individualistic, unequal, inequitable and unjust capitalist world, to design the construction of the Pluricultural State.

The "fight, win, fall and get up" works in the academic world and in the popular sectors, as a clear didactic and hopeful message to build a creative knowledge, our own, ours, regional, essential for those who love and seek the common good of our people, institutions and public universities.

 Now and always, Álvaro Presente.