Politics & Power Quote by Domitila Barrios de Chungara

The line reads like a refusal to be cast as the troublemaker in a story the state wants to control. Barrios de Chungara flips the usual script of “radicalization”: the “road” isn’t a romantic march toward rebellion, it’s an imposed route paved by government abuse. By naming “the very government” as the prime mover, she assigns causality where regimes prefer fog - not “unrest”, not “outside agitators”, but policy, repression, and contempt.

Her repetition of “I only asked” is doing more than sounding reasonable. It’s a rhetorical trap for power. Justice, better education, an end to massacres: these are baseline civic demands, not extremist fantasies. The word “only” sharpens the moral contrast between modest requests and disproportionate state violence. It also signals exhaustion, the familiar fatigue of activists forced to keep proving their humanity to institutions built to deny it.

Invoking the San Juan massacre makes the quote a testimonial with teeth. She’s not debating abstractions; she’s anchoring grievance in a specific wound - the kind a government would rather file away as “security operations”. In Bolivia’s mining communities, where labor organizing and Indigenous working-class life collided with military force, education and justice weren’t separate reforms; they were threats to a political economy that depended on silence.

The subtext is a challenge: if such ordinary demands lead to confrontation, what does that reveal about the state itself? The quote works because it’s plainspoken while indicting an entire system of legitimacy. It turns “order” into the suspect and makes dissent look like self-defense.