The Wiphala

This is the Parliament Buildings in La Paz and that flag on the right is the Wiphala, the flag of the indigenous resistance.
Here is how David Choquehuanca, Bolivía´s new foreign affairs minister, described the symbol to me in an interview:
"What we want is simply to live well, which is not equal to living better. For us, robbing is not living well. Not to work is not living well. To exploit is not to live well. To attack nature is not to live well. Possibly attacking nature will allow you to live better or exploiting might allow you to live better but we don’t want to live better. We want to live well. And in (reprentative) democracy, the word submit exists, for example, the minority has to submit to the majority. But submission is not to live well. And that’ s why we make our decisions by consensus and not by democracy. In our communities we make our decisions through consensus. And to arrive at consensus, we have a process that includes up to five stages to arrive at an equilibrium that does not exclude anybody. And for that reason we use the Wiphala, made out of little squares. The little squares say that all of us are the same size. That nobody is either superior or inferior. And more than that, it says that all of us have to participate. A Wiphala cannot be without even one little square. And in addition, its square - that means that we are looking for a society that’s balanced and equal. For example the national flag of Bolivia; its sides are not all the same length so it represents the society of inequality. Conventional flags like the Bolvian flag are like that with sides of different lengths. For us that represents inequality, a society of inequality. . The Wiphala demands of us that we keep our promises. The Wiphala is a code. It says to us that we must keep our promises.