In recent years, several Andean nations have implemented reforms addressing the educational and social marginalization of Indigenous populations. Bilingual-intercultural education plays a prominent role in these reforms, and national bureaucracies have arisen around the goals of linguistic standardization and development of Indigenous language curriculum materials. Language policies have focused mainly on adapting Indigenous languages to forms and functions associated with non-Indigenous institutions, like the school. There is scant attention to Indigenous language styles and genres, or to what these reveal about cultural diversity. Language policies based on a conception of language as code, rather than as cultural practice, leave intact most social and cultural mechanisms by which minority-language speakers are denied access to social resources. The political emphasis on symbolic gestures that leave traditional linguistic hierarchies untouched, and on the use of Indigenous languages to uncritically acculturate students into non-Indigenous regimes of knowledge, fail to address most of the real barriers to Indigenous people's political empowerment. If bilingual-intercultural education is to become a reality in the Andes, educators must work the hyphen between "bilingual" and "intercultural" in a much more serious way, examining how cultural domination operates in the realm of language and devising, together with Indigenous actors, policies that address that domination, in the school and elsewhere. (Author/SV)