The wiphala is a flag with no center, no charge, and no right way up that a stranger could identify: forty-nine squares in seven colors, arranged so that one color runs corner to corner and the rest cascade around it. It is square, which already sets it apart from nearly every national flag, and it belongs to no single state. It is the emblem of the Indigenous peoples of the Andes, the Aymara and Quechua above all, flown from southern Colombia to northern Argentina. In Bolivia it is something more: since 2009, a symbol of the state itself, with the same legal standing as the national tricolor, and consequently the most fought-over piece of cloth in the country.
A grid of seven colors
The canonical wiphala is a 7x7 patchwork. The seven colors of the rainbow, red, orange, yellow, white, green, blue, and violet, run in diagonal rows, and the color occupying the long diagonal defines the flag. White on the diagonal makes the wiphala of Qullasuyu, the southern quarter of Tawantinsuyu, the four-part Inca realm, which covered the Aymara-speaking altiplano of modern Bolivia. Red marks Chinchaysuyu to the north, green Antisuyu to the east, and yellow Kuntisuyu to the west. The Qullasuyu version is the one written into Bolivian law and the one most people mean by "the wiphala."
The color meanings in circulation come from the Aymara activist tradition: red for the earth and the Andean people; orange for society and culture; yellow for energy; white for time and change; green for the land's natural wealth; blue for the cosmos; violet for Andean self-government. The rainbow itself, kurmi in Aymara, carries weight in Andean cosmology, and the word wiphala is usually glossed simply as flag or banner in Aymara.
An argued-over past
How old is it? Partisans have claimed the wiphala is thousands of years old; skeptics call it an invention of the 1970s. The evidence sits somewhere in between. Stepped and checkered square motifs in wiphala-like arrangements appear in pre-Columbian Andean material, including textiles associated with Tiwanaku, the altiplano civilization that peaked before 1000 CE. But there is no chronicle description or archaeological example of a 7x7 rainbow banner, and the Peruvian historian María Rostworowski, the leading twentieth-century scholar of the Incas, put it bluntly: the Incas did not have that flag.
What is well documented is the modern career. The wiphala in its current standardized form spread with Katarismo, the Aymara political movement of the 1970s named for Túpac Katari, who besieged La Paz in the great Indigenous rising of 1781. Katarista intellectuals and unions took the grid of squares as the emblem of an Indigenous nation that predated and outlasted the republic, and by the 1990s the wiphala was general across the Andes: raised in the 1990 Ecuadorian Indigenous uprising, carried by coca growers' unions in the Chapare, flown by Mapuche and Quechua organizations far beyond Bolivia. Whether or not the Incas flew it, several million people now do, which is the kind of fact vexillology ultimately runs on.
Bolivia's second flag
Evo Morales, an Aymara coca growers' leader, became Bolivia's first Indigenous president in 2006, in a country where most people identify as Indigenous and where power had run through a European-descended minority since the conquest. The refounding project that followed renamed the republic the Plurinational State of Bolivia, and its 2009 constitution wrote the wiphala into Article 6, which lists the state's symbols: the red, yellow, and green tricolor, the anthem, the coat of arms, the wiphala, the rosette, and the kantuta and patujú flowers.
Supreme Decree 0241 of 5 August 2009 turned the listing into protocol. The wiphala of Qullasuyu flies beside the tricolor on government buildings, at schools and public institutions, and on the uniforms of the police and armed forces, positioned to the left of the tricolor. For supporters this was overdue recognition that the state had two roots. For opponents, concentrated in the mestizo and lowland east, it was the flag of one party and one ethnic project imposed on all. Santa Cruz, the center of opposition to Morales, kept its own green and white flag pointedly prominent.
Burned and defended
The argument turned physical in November 2019. Morales resigned amid protests and military pressure after a disputed election, and in the vacuum that followed, opponents celebrated by burning wiphalas, and police units were filmed cutting the wiphala patch from their uniforms. To Aymara Bolivia the message landed as a repudiation of Indigenous citizenship itself. Within days, huge marches came down from El Alto chanting "la wiphala se respeta," the wiphala is respected, and police commanders publicly apologized.
The interim government of Jeanine Áñez, whatever its sympathies, did not touch the flag's legal status, and the MAS party's return to power in the 2020 election put the question to rest institutionally. The wiphala still flies on the Palacio Quemado and every public school in Bolivia, and it still means different things to different Bolivians, which is roughly what Article 6 guaranteed when it gave one country two flags. Outside Bolivia it remains stateless and ubiquitous: at Indigenous mobilizations in Ecuador and Peru, at Mapuche marches in Chile, and on hillsides and murals across the Andes, forty-nine squares asserting that the region's oldest nations are still here.
References
[1] Constitution of the Plurinational State of Bolivia (2009), Article 6, Section II. English translation at Constitute Project. https://www.constituteproject.org/constitution/Bolivia_2009
[2] Decreto Supremo No. 0241 (5 August 2009), regulating the symbols of the Plurinational State of Bolivia.
[3] Wikipedia, "Wiphala." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiphala
[4] Flags of the World (FOTW), "Wiphala: Dual state flag of Bolivia." https://www.crwflags.com/fotw/flags/bo_w.html
[5] Remezcla, "In Bolivia, the National Flag and the Indigenous Wiphala Become Symbols of Division" (2019). https://remezcla.com/features/culture/bolivia-national-flag-indigenous-wiphala-symbols-division/
[6] María Rostworowski, interviews and writings on Inca state symbols; see also her Historia del Tahuantinsuyu (IEP, 1988).