Since 1985, successive Bolivian governments turned it into a laboratory for neoliberal shock therapy. Privatisation of mines, labour casualisation and market deregulation led to a massive fragmentation and dispersal of the militant miner’s movement shattering any real resistance in the urban areas to the plundering of the country’s economy and resources. In the early 1990s, indigenous communities from the east — marching in defence of land and for a new constituent assembly to found a new, inclusive Bolivia — marked a revitalisation of indigenous movements. Many ex-miners and Aymara indigenous people, who in the ’80s sought out a livelihood growing coca following the mine privatisation and drought wave in the west of the country, found new political homes in the powerful cocalero unions.