GEOPOLITICS OF THE AMAZON – Part II

[To see the Table of Contents, click here. A glossary of terms and acronyms appearing in the text will be found here.]

Capitalist subsumption of the Amazon indigenous economy

Finally, in addition to the vertical nature of this despotic power there is a territorial dependency of the regional power structure itself. The major part of the Bolivian Amazon lies in the department of Beni, and the major productive activities in the region today are ranching, timber extraction and chestnut harvesting.

It is estimated that there are 3.5 million head of cattle in Beni, 41% of the national total. The historic markets for this production, which powers the activity of small and medium ranchers and farming communities, are the highlands of La Paz, Oruro and Potosí, and the Cochabamba and Chuquisaca valleys. However, the meat processing chain is not situated in the area where most of the production occurs. Although the cattle are raised in Beni, the final sale and processing are carried out in Santa Cruz. So while a three-year-old calf costs 2,315 Bolivianos (Bs.)[1] in Beni, the same animal is worth Bs. 2,790 in Santa Cruz, and that is where more than 90% of the Beni cattle are processed. Thus the producers in Beni are subordinated to intermediaries who deliver the cattle to Santa Cruz, and in addition to the price of the processed meat, which regulates the market price of the chain of cattle production both downward (to the rancher in Beni) and upward (to the final consumer), they are in the hands of a business stronghold well-known for its right-wing political trajectory. The three largest slaughterhouses in Bolivia are in Santa Cruz: Fridosa, owned by Beltrán de Lazo; Frigor, owned by Monasterio; and the Chiquitano abattoir. These slaughterhouses regulate the price of meat nationally. Thus the major economic activity in the Amazon region, which depends almost exclusively on meat processing, is dependent on a small group of businessmen who not only hold this Beni regional production captive but also fix the prices of cattle on the hoof and of meat for mass consumption by families.

Something similar occurs with the other extractive activities in the Amazon. If you take a close look at the origin of the businessmen, warehousemen or marketing companies in the country, a large number come from Santa Cruz;[2] and the transportation and processing of the products of these activities, and with them the generation of major volumes of added value, are carried on outside of Beni.

On the whole, we are dealing with a business bloc that emerges from big hacienda property and has begun to diversify its productive activities, consolidating itself in the semi-industrial processing of raw materials and livestock from the Amazon. This bourgeoisie, a participant in the despotic-hereditary rationality of the old Amazon power structure, has inherited all of the habits of the landlord class: the abusive relationship with the peasants and indigenous peoples, a violent local authoritarianism, the hereditary link with the state power, and the conservative mentality. In some ways it reminds one of Marx’s comment, in reference to the feudal landlords who became businessmen in 19^th century Germany, that “The mode of living, production and income of these gentlemen [...] gives the lie to their traditional pompous notions.”[3] Irremediably reactionary thanks to their ownership of land, their mode of living and political action, but completely bourgeois in their entrepreneurial economic activity.

This has enabled them to divide their conduct toward the indigenous peoples. When it is matters of land occupancy or the organization of local political life, the landowner despotism is what prevails; the indigenous peoples and peasants are treated as one more accessory of their property, and they unscrupulously impose their opinions on them with no negotiation whatsoever. But when it involves business, as in the purchase of timber, chestnuts, alligator skins or livestock, this bourgeoisie is capable of subordinating its racist prejudices to market logic and establishing mechanisms of market domination through which it has always considered the indigenous peoples as its vassals or inferiors. This mercantile “generosity” has meant that the relations of domination over the indigenous peoples have been reworked and formally subsumed under capitalist development.[4]

The relation between hacienda land ownership and capitalist production in the east and the Bolivian Amazon has led to a specific way of formally subsuming the non-capitalist work of the small peasants and indigenous producers to capitalist relations through the imposition of a specific type of land rent.

The agro-industrial–agrochemical-merchant capitalist nucleus subordinates the non-capitalist agrarian modes of production through the imposition of prices at the time of sowing, harvesting and marketing of the cultivated or harvested products, and through the monopoly of processing (timber, chestnuts) and credit. This applies to soy, sugar, cattle, sunflowers, sorghum, corn, and to timber, chestnuts and alligator hides. To some extent the actual development of Beni, sustained by cattle raising, is limited by the huge transfer of regional rent to the elite that monopolizes the processing of the meat and the fixing of its sale prices on a national level. This is an elite that derives rent from distribution (but not in production) and is thus a landholding class in itself.

Hence it is no surprise that the major separatists have been the agro-industrialists Marinkovic, Monasterios, Matkovic, Costas, Nayar, etc., who still possess huge expanses of land, their wealth derived primarily from this appropriation of the rent of the land, and not so much from the possession of the land — which in reality is unproductive — which is why it was subject to reversion. Generally speaking, there are very few production units of more than 5,000 hectares devoted to agriculture and major cattle-raising lands are scarce as well, given the 5 hectares per head of cattle required by law. The lands are usually for fattening the herds, and their ownership is maintained until roads are built, improved or projected (as in the case of the Lowlands project), after which they are sold parcel by parcel both to small and medium producers and to Mennonites, Brazilians and Russians. That is the process, for example, in the impressive parcelling out of land (50-200 hectares) in the north and east of Santa Cruz (San Julián, Cuatro Cañadas, Montero, etc.).

On the other hand, making the most of the relations and hierarchies of class and nationality, the business-landowner class has integrated the management of the indigenous TCOs into the supplying of raw materials for their industrial activities. A large number of the TCOs in the lowlands sell wood illegally to the lumber companies and the infinite number of sawmills that exist in their interior, generating a market subsumption of these Community Lands to extractivist business activity through the application of various mechanisms of extra-economic coercion that reduce purchase costs and raise business revenues. A significant number of the leaders of the indigenous marches of 2011 and 2012, such as [Fernando] Vargas and [Youci] Fabricano, hold formal indictments for the illegal sale of wood going back years, including the sale of wood from the TIPNIS itself,[5] considered until recently as the “lungs of the world”; lungs now perforated by the illegal extraction of wood and leather, as if by nicotine-induced cancer.

And insofar as the indigenous peoples have not invaded the processes of transformation of raw materials that exist in the large new indigenous territories, the timber, alligators, chestnuts, rubber or fish products continue to be purchased by the lumber mills and landholding businesses at ridiculous prices and under the same “enabling”[6] modalities of the traditional economic and social dependency of the past. The same thing is happening in the growing provision of other means of existence (sugar, salt, flour, clothing, steel tools, gasoline, etc.), that the enabler, hacendado, businessman or merchant provides to them; and, holding the monopoly for the transfer of these products, delivers them to the indigenous peoples for 5 to 10 times more than the market price.

In a short period of time, millions of hectares of the TCOs that are located in a large part of the Amazon are being newly integrated within the mechanisms of seigniorial and hereditary domination by the businessmen-hacendados who use the leaders as intermediaries for the depredation and economic dependency of their communities. We have termed this formal subordination of the TCOs and the parks to the generation of profits for businessmen-hacendados the subsumption of indigenous territories and natural resources to internal capitalist accumulation. And when the TCOs and national parks are subject to the circuits of capitalist accumulation (profit) of foreign companies, we speak of a subsumption of indigenous territoriality and nature to external capitalist accumulation. The Territorio Indígena Parque Nacional Isiboro Sécure is no exception to this situation of formal subsumption of the indigenous economy and of nature to capital accumulation.

The Territorio Indígena Parque Nacional Isiboro Sécure (TIPNIS)

The TIPNIS is an area of the Amazon located on the border between two departments: southern Beni (an entirely Amazon department) and northern Cochabamba (region of valleys). It contains a diversity of ecosystems thanks to its widely varied altitudes, the outstanding ones being the rain forests known as the Bosque Nublado de Ceja, the Bosque Húmedo, the Bosque Pluvial Subandino, the Bosque Húmedo Pedemontano, and the Bosque Húmedo Estacional, and the marshy palm groves, flood plains, and bogs of Cyperáceas as well as a large number of lakes.[7]

For more than a hundred years the determination of the limits between the two departments was the source of numerous regional conflicts, and one of the reasons why Barrientos, the military dictator, issued a Decree (No. 07401, 22 November 1965) declaring a zone situated between the Isiboro and Sécure rivers a National Park (PNIS).[8]

In 1990, in the wake of the indigenous peoples’ march of many lowlands peoples, another decree[9] was issued creating the Territorio Indígena, which was to include the entirety of the national park. Seven years later, on April 25, 1997, the Instituto Nacional de Reforma Agraria (INRA, the agrarian reform institute) issued resolution 000002, which created the legal entity known as the Tierra Comunitaria de Origen (TCO).[10] But because indigenous peasants of the valleys as well as ranchers were present within it, an executive order, the Título Ejecutorial TCO-NAL 000229, was issued in June 2009, during the seneamiento process that recognized 1,091,656 hectares as belonging to the TIPNIS TCO.[11]

The principal inhabitants of the Parque Nacional Territorio Indígena Isiboro-Sécure are the following three indigenous nations:

1. The Moxeña-Trinitaria nation.

It is said that the Moxeño people originate from the Arawak people, who are thought to have developed the great hydraulic culture of the Amazon plains. They are the major population within the TIPNIS, and they engage in agriculture and cattle-raising, in addition to hunting, fishing and gathering. They maintain some links with the market, especially in Trinidad, that are now part of their basic strategy of economic reproduction. They are organized on the basis of the nuclear family.[12]

2. The Tsimán (or Chimán) nation.

This is a people who rebelled against the Jesuit reservations; their present economic structure is based on agriculture, hunting, fishing, gathering and the sale of calves. They also work as labourers for the cattle ranches and the forestry companies.

3. The Yuracaré nation.

This is the oldest nation in the southern Amazon region. The Spanish Jesuits encountered them initially when they ventured into this zone in the late 16^th century.[13] Their present economic activity is centered on agriculture and fishing with regular links to the market. Their organization is centered on the nuclear family.

While all the communities are engaged in agriculture, there are some that apply a pattern of special occupation that involves the settlement, relocation and formation of new communities.[14] According to reports in the 1990s, about 40% of the communities assessed in 1992 had disappeared a decade later. However, in recent years there has been a major consolidation of large communities owing to the dynamic growth of agriculture partially linked to the market. The major products of the indigenous economy are rice, cassava, corn, bananas, cacao and fruit trees.[15]

According to the data in the 1993 First Indigenous Census, Isiboro-Sécure Pilot Area, of the 4,563 inhabitants of the Park 68% were Mojeño, 26% Yuracaré, 4% Tsimán and the remaining 2% of other ethnic origin.[16] The results of the 2001 Population and Housing Census showed a reduction in the indigenous population of the TIPNIS lowlands to 3,991 persons as of that date.[17]

As regards the system of internal organization — on the basis of the nuclear family — of these peoples, the cabildo (a type of community assembly) is the organizational form among the Mojeños; in the case of the Yuracarés and Tsimánes, however, the organization is more flexible, and is oriented around the leaders of the family and communal clans.[18] It was not until 1987 that a supra-communal organization arose, the TIPNIS Subcentral, followed later by another in the southern zone of the Park, the CONISUR. These were the bodies that were most representative of the lowlands indigenous peoples within the TIPNIS.[19]

Apart from these indigenous nations that inhabit the National Park, there are two populations that also live in its interior (one of them is also of indigenous origin, but from the highlands):

4. Aymara-Quechua Andean migrant population.

The presence of Andean indigenous peoples in what is now the southern region of the TIPNIS goes back to pre-colonial times, but it was in the early 20^th century, and particularly from the 1960s on that this increased. Beginning in the 1970s a road was built that extended to the Yuracaré community of Moleto within the National Park.[20] The majority of the inhabitants of Aymara-Quechua origin are organized in community agrarian unions affiliated in turn to centrals and the peasants’ federation. They are agricultural and occupy about 92,000 hectares, or 7% of the total area of the TIPNIS.

5. “Creole” population of Beni.

Within the Park as well there are approximately 25 cattle ranches in a 32,000 hectare area located at the confluence of the Isiboro and Sécure rivers.[21] The local indigenous population is hired from time to time by the hacendados, who control the major flow of business in the local economy.

Along with all the traditional activities that the indigenous communities carry on in the TIPNIS, in recent decades they have expanded into other kinds of intensive economic activities directly linked to the industrial processing market: lumbering and gathering alligator hides.

In the case of the wood industry, the ones involved are the indigenous peoples with rights to the regulated use of the distinct varieties of trees that grow in the TCO, although because this is also a National Park there are legal restrictions on its indiscriminate use; obviously, in the absence of the state these cannot be enforced. According to the reports by the leaders themselves, it is clear that the major portion of the high volumes of the cutting and processing of wood in the TIPNIS is illegal and affects the entire territory.[22] In the recent trips we made there, we could make out roads, tractors, trucks and mobile sawmills within the so-called “nucleus zone” or “virgin zone.” Until a few months ago, there were various forest concessions in the interior. For example, the company ISIGO SRL had a concession of 34,307 hectares near the community of Asunta, and 34,937 hectares in Oromomo. The Huanca Rodríguez company held 24,869 hectares in concessions in the south of the TIPNIS, while another lumber company, SURI SRL, had 40,762 hectares in the same “virgin” nucleus of the National Park.[23]

As if that were not enough, there are various other forest concessions to companies like Cimagro, Hervel, Fátima B, Fátima A and PROINSA,[24] which safely and systematically induce these lowlands indigenous peoples themselves to pillage the forest within the TIPNIS, to supply themselves with wood, so that subsequently they can process and market the developed products in the local and international markets.

Likewise, the hunting of alligators is an activity carried on by the indigenous peoples, but one that is directly linked to business interests. It is estimated that each year 1,500 alligator hides,[25] after being processed, are converted into luxury articles for sale in European markets.

In the north-eastern TIPNIS, at the confluence of the Isiboro and Sécure rivers, three companies — Bolivian Leather, Bolivian Croco, and Sicuana Indígena SRL, responsible for purchasing the alligators captured by the indigenous peoples — process them for later sale.[26] Since there is no state presence in the Park, it is safe to asume that the number of alligator hides exceeds the number officially reported by these companies, making this activity a transaction that is negotiated between indigenous leaders and companies.

Also within the TIPNIS there is an airport for the exclusive use of wealthy foreign tourists, who for $7,600 can enjoy the use of a luxurious private hotel,[27] engage in private fishing and purchase the native handicrafts. Paradoxically, the indigenous peoples never use this airport, and the river has become their sole means of transport, along which it takes seven to ten days to reach a populated centre in which to make their own purchases.

Similarly, within the National Park, aerial photography has detected other clandestine landing strips, possibly linked to various illegal activities, mainly narco-trafficking.

As one can appreciate, while the TCO has allowed the ownership of the land and the use of its resources by the Amazon indigenous peoples, the major resources of the TIPNIS — alligators, forests, cacao — form the lowest and worst paid link in a chain of business procurement, processing and marketing. As in other regions of the Amazon, the work of the indigenous peoples (as providers of raw materials) and the natural wealth of the TIPNIS have been formally subsumed in processes of capitalist production heavily integrated with international markets. Thus the community ownership of the land has also become the lowest link in the corporate chain of value production and capitalist accumulation.

Plurinational State and dismantling of the Business-Patrimonial power

This system of ultra-conservative regional power in the Amazon, constructed over more than a century, has only recently, since 2006, broken down. When the old ruling classes lost control of the national state to the popular indigenous-campesino social movements, the system based on landed estates suffered a mortal blow. The alliance of political power with hacendado landlord and extractivist corporate interests, the material basis of the despotic regime in the Amazon region, was broken, creating a possibility of regional “dual power”: on the one hand the hacendado-business classes, on the other the government structure with power of decision over economic resources and lands, triggering increasing conflict and social struggle throughout the lowlands.

The revolutionary state put an end to the delivery of lands to the property-owning classes, took land away from the latifundistas and turned over a large share of this land to the ownership of indigenous communities and nations. From 1996 to 2005, 5 million hectares were granted to the indigenous peoples of the lowlands; but between 2006 and 2011, these grants amounted to 7.6 million hectares and an additional 1.4 million hectares were expropriated from the hacendados, radically transforming the structure of ownership in the Amazon region. While 20 years ago the medium-sized private companies possessed 39 million hectares, they now have only 4.1 million hectares.[28] However, this structural modification in property relations on the land has not been sufficient to dismantle the despotic hacendado-business power, since there is a need to dismantle the supply and corporate processing mechanisms that are strangling the indigenous peoples’ economy.

Hence the revolutionary government, in addition to modifying the structure of land-holding, which dissociated the routine of the hacienda from state action, has promoted state mechanisms of regional governance that operate independently of the dominant bloc in the territories, facilitating resources to the municipalities, credit to the campesinos and investment funds to the indigenous peoples, and establishing supply firms that regulate the prices previously monopolized by the local employers, providing means of water transportation for peoples living along the rivers, building public roads (previously the property of hacendados), etc. And since the state in the last five years has tripled its investments and social expenditures, its presence has begun to be felt independently, in the form of rights, cash transfers and redistribution of wealth, whereas in past times the little that the people had was thanks to the “favours” of the local bosses, the political machine, or the NGOs.

The state has operated independently of the land-owning classes and that has initiated a process of collapse of the old conservative managerial order in the Amazon. An intense class struggle has begun to unfold, and little by little it is reconfiguring the new regional power relationships. The presence of a state detached from the land-holding classes, expressed in social rights and with the function of redistributing the expanding common resources, has dealt a mortal blow to the hacendado-patrimonial structure in the Amazon, triggering an intense struggle for reconfiguration of territorial power in the region. To a certain extent it can be said that since 2006, with the Government of social movements and President Evo Morales, a kind of democratic revolution has occurred from “below,” based on the initiatives of the campesinos, indigenous peoples and popular urban sectors, and from “above,” from the state, that is now helping to unfetter and deploy the vital energy of the peoples and popular social classes in a region characterized until quite recently as being the most conservative in the country, dominated by a regime of despotic hacendado power.

As in any revolutionary process, the state not only condenses the new correlation of political and economic forces of the emerging society, of the successful social struggles, but in addition becomes a material and institutional subject that helps to promote new social mobilizations that transform the structures of domination still present in certain regions and spheres of the society. The present role of the Government of social movements in the Amazon, Chiquitanía and Chaco, in which previously there existed modes of hereditary domination based on ownership of the land, is precisely that: to help clear the road for the local popular and indigenous forces to deploy their emancipatory capacities in opposition to the prevailing regional powers.

This rising revolution in the regional power relations in the Amazon, Chiquitanía and the Chaco, has unleashed a violent and aggressive counter-revolutionary reaction. In the case of Chiquitanía and the Chaco, landlords like Anderson or Monasterios participated directly in the attempted coup d’état of September 2008, when they tried to create a parallel government in the four lowlands departments: Pando, Beni (both of them in the Amazon), Santa Cruz and Tarija. And in fact these same actors, in complicity with outside powers that do not want to lose extraterritorial power in the Amazon, are the ones that were behind the recent TIPNIS marches.

---

[1] The Boliviano (BOB), or Bs, currently trades at approximately 7 to 1 U.S. dollar. – Tr.

[2] For a history of the rubber hacendados-businessmen in the early and mid-20^th century, including Añez Romero, Suárez Arana, Soruco, Franco, Zambrana, Velasco, Justiniano, Landivar Roca, Toledo Suárez, Kreidler, Amelunge, Elsner, El Hage, Durán Ortíz, Roca Ayala, Vaca Diez, Monasterio Da Silva, Bowles Darío Gutiérrez, etc., see Oscar Tonelli Justiniano, El Caucho Ignorado, Editorial El País, Santa Cruz de la Sierra, 2010. According to the author, a major share of these families who settled in the Amazon north to engage in rubber production are native to Santa Cruz.

[3] Karl Marx, “The Trial of the Rhenish District Committee of Democrats,” February 8, 1849, in Marx & Engels Collected Works, Vol. 8, p. 323.

[4] On the concept of formal subsumption and actual subsumption of the work process and production process under capitalism, see Karl Marx, Capital, Book I, Chapter 6. [In English, see also Marx, Capital Vol. I (Vintage edition, 1977), Appendix: “Results of the Immediate Process of Production.” – Tr.]

[5] Qué se esconde detrás del TIPNIS. La Paz, 2012.

[6] “Enabling” (habilito) has to do with the advance in money and cash to initiate an undertaking that, in the case of the lowlands peoples, is converted into an advance on future production or ownership of raw materials that are found in the TCO (wood, chestnuts, rubber, etc.).

[7] Vargas, Cynthya; Molina, Wilder; Molina, Miguel, “El territorio indígena Parque Nacional Isiboro-Sécure (TIPNIS) en un escenario con la carretera San Ignacio de Moxos-Villa Tunari. Análisis de los posibles efectos sociales, ambientales y políticos de la carretera en el TIPNIS.” Project MAPZA-GTZ, 2003.

[8] Decreto-Ley Número 07401, Gaceta de Bolivia.

[9] Decreto Supremo Número 22610, 24 September 1990, Gaceta de Bolivia.

[10] Variously translated in English as “Original Community Land,” “Native Communal Land,” “Traditional Communal Land,” or some other combination of these terms. Often just “TCO” in English. – Tr.

[11] Evaluación Ambiental Estratégica para el Desarrollo Integral y Sustentable del Territorio Indígena Parque Nacional Isiboro Sécure. TIPNIS, Ministerio de Medio Ambiente y Agua, Servicio Nacional de Áreas Protegidas, Cochabamba, July 2011.

[12] Ibid., p. 23.

[13] Hans Van den Berg, En Busca de una Senda Segura. La Comunicación Terrestre y Fluvial entre Cochabamba y Mojos (1765-1825), PLURAL/Universidad Católica de Bolivia, La Paz, 2008.

[14] “Dos concepciones del territorio: indígenas y colonizadores en la zona de colonización del TIPNIS”, in Orozco, Shirley; García Linera, Álvaro; Stefanoni, Pablo. “No somos Juguete de Nadie”. Análisis de la relación de movimientos sociales, recursos naturales, Estado y descentralización. Agruco/COSUDE/NCCR Norte-Sur/Plural, La Paz, 2006.

[15] Evaluación Ambiental Estratégica, op. cit.

[16] Quiroga, María Soledad; Salinas, Elvira, “Áreas protegidas y territorios indígenas en la Amazonía boliviana”, Grupo de Reflexión y Acción sobre el Medio Ambiente, mimeo, La Paz, 1996.

[17] Evaluación Ambiental Estratégica, op. cit.

[18] “Dos concepciones del territorio: indígenas y colonizadores...” op. cit.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Evaluación Ambiental Estratégica... op. cit.

[21] Ibid., p. 29.

[22] Attached to the official web page of the CIDOB, until June of this year, was a denunciation of the illegal sale of a substantial amount of wood in the TIPNIS to logging companies by the leader Marcial Fabricano between 2000 and 2003.

[23] Qué se esconde detrás del TIPNIS, op. cit.

[24] Evaluación Ambiental Estratégica… op. cit. p. 173.

[25] Ibid., p. 170.

[26] Qué se esconde detrás del TIPNIS, op. cit.

[27] Ibid.

[28] INRA, Informe 2012.

GEOPOLITICS OF THE AMAZON – Part I

Bolivian leader replies to critics of the Morales government’s development strategy

Introduction

Álvaro García Linera is one of Latin America’s leading Marxist intellectuals. He is also the Vice-President of Bolivia — the “co-pilot,” as he says, to President Evo Morales, and an articulate exponent of the government’s policies and strategic orientation.

In a recent book-length essay, Geopolitics of the Amazon: Patrimonial-Hacendado Power and Capitalist Accumulation, published in September 2012, García Linera discusses a controversial issue of central importance to the development process in Latin America, and explains how Bolivia is attempting to address the intersection between economic development and environmental protection.

The issues he addresses are of great importance not only in Bolivia but throughout Latin America, and in fact in most of the countries of the imperialist periphery. They are especially important to understand in the “First World,” where there is an increasing campaign in parts of the left to turn against the progressive and anticapitalist governments in Latin America on the ground of their alleged “extractivism.”

García Linera examines the classic Marxist criteria on the forms of appropriation of nature by humanity. “Extractivism,” he shows, is not synonymous with underdevelopment. Rather, it is necessary to use the resources gained from primary or export activity controlled by the state to generate the surpluses that can satisfy the minimal conditions of life of Bolivians and to guarantee an intercultural and scientific education that generates a critical mass capable of assuming and leading the emerging processes of industrialization and economic development.

A major theme of the book is to refute the allegations in the opposition media that the TIPNIS highway between Cochabamba and Beni is intended for the export of Brazilian products to the Pacific via Bolivian territory. The book clearly demonstrates that the route is intended as part of the national unification of the country.

Geopolitics of the Amazon has attracted wide attention throughout Latin America. In a recent review, the eminent Brazilian sociologist Emir Sader says “it refutes each and every one of the allegations of the opposition in his country and their international spokespersons.” He describes it as “an essential book, without which it is not possible to understand the present phase of the Bolivian process and the root of the conflicts affecting it.”

The book has sparked fierce debate in Bolivia itself, including a lengthy response by Raúl Prada Alcoreza, a former comrade of García Linera in the Comuna collective.

There is an extensive literature on these issues now being produced in Latin America. Another example is a book, El desarrollo en cuestión: reflexiones desde América Latina. It includes articles by some of the authors cited in the debate between García Linera and Prada.

Geopolitics of the Amazon has attracted commentary in Quebec, including a favourable review by André Maltais in the widely-read L’aut’journal. A compendium of articles by the legendary Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui recently published in Quebec also includes writings by Álvaro García Linera. More of his texts may be found on-line (Spanish only) on his web site.

Starting in today’s post, I am publishing my translation of the full text of Geopolitics of the Amazon. Because of its length (more than 25,000 words), I will publish it in five consecutive posts in coming days. To see the Table of Contents, click here. A glossary of terms and acronyms appearing in the text will be found here.

García Linera’s footnotes are included as well as a few of my own, the latter signed “Tr.” I have substituted English-language references, where available, for texts cited in the notes.

Muchas gracias to Federico Fuentes and Cristina Rojas for their diligent and critical reviews of my draft translation. I am of course solely responsible for the final text, published here.

– Richard Fidler

* * *

Geopolitics of the Amazon

Patrimonial-Hacendado power and capitalist accumulation

The whole course of the ... revolution ... strikingly confirmed one of Marx’s profound propositions: revolution progresses by giving rise to a strong and united counter-revolution, i.e., it compels the enemy to resort to more and more extreme measures of defence and in this way devises ever more powerful means of attack.

V.I. Lenin[1]

I want to welcome the initiative taken by Ana Esther Ceceña, and all the comrades who have commented on her article,[2] in opening the debate around the present political situation in Bolivia. The thoughts of each of the participants not only demonstrate the interest and greater or lesser revolutionary engagement with the events, but also help to shed light on the complexity of the political processes and possible ways to advance them.

Revolution and counterrevolution

It was Lenin who pointed out that any real revolutionary process will generate an even greater counterrevolution. This means that any revolution must advance in order to consolidate itself, but in doing so it arouses forces opposed to its advance that block the revolution, which in turn, in order to defend and consolidate itself, will have to advance further, arousing even greater reactions from the conservative forces, and so on indefinitely. In Bolivia, in the last 12 years, we have experienced an ascending revolutionary process which, emerging from organized civil society as a social movement, has affected and traversed the state structure itself, modifying the very nature of civil society.

This is a revolution that is political, cultural and economic. Political, because it has revolutionized the social nature of the state, having enshrined the rights of the indigenous peoples and given concrete expression to those rights through the actual occupation by the indigenous peoples of the state administration. We are talking about an act of social sovereignty that has made possible the conversion of the indigenous demographic majority into a state political majority; a modification of the social and class nature of control and hegemony in the state. This is in fact the most important and significant transformation in the country since its birth, a country characterized until very recently by the exclusion of the indigenous citizenry from absolutely all of the decision-making structures of the state. But it is also a radical political and cultural revolution, because this indigenous imprint on public decision-making as a state power has been the work of social movements and organizational methods derived from the trade-union, communal and plebeian nature of the indigenous-popular world. That is, the presence of the indigenous-popular world in the conduct of the state since 2006 has been concretely expressed not as a mere individual occupation by indigenous and popular representatives within the state but as an organic transformation of the state institutionality itself through the presence of organizational structures of the indigenous-popular community in the decision-making and deliberative structures of the state. Whereas during the last 100 years the masses built the citizenship of rights through their trade unions (and thus we used to speak of a trade-union citizenship),[3] now the takeover of state power by the social movements is a takeover of the state power by the union. And that is why the election today of authorities of the executive, legislative or judicial organs in fact proceeds fundamentally through processes of deliberation and the assembly-like structures of the agrarian unions, the rural communities and guild, popular and neighbourhood organizations of the society.

And we say economic revolution, because within a short historical period the structure of ownership of social resources and of their uses has been radically modified. Until seven years ago, Brazil, along with three oil companies, controlled 100% of the ownership of hydrocarbons and 30% of the GDP, while the state controlled only 16%.[4] But today, the Bolivian state controls 34%[5] of the GDP and 100% of the ownership of hydrocarbons throughout the chain of production. More than 10 million hectares in the hands of latifundistas, politicians and foreigners have been recovered by the state and handed over to indigenous peoples and peasant communities, putting an end to the latifundist nature of the lowlands agrarian system. Now that the hydrocarbon, electrical, telecommunications and in part the mining and metallurgical industries have been nationalized, the economic surplus, previously concentrated in a handful of foreign and private firms, goes directly to society through rents, cash transfers, services and productive state investment. In 2011, 1.2% of the GDP[6] was transferred directly to the most vulnerable sectors of the country (children, seniors and pregnant women) through this system of social protection. While in 2005 only 629 million dollars annually were invested because the economic surplus went abroad, today the state governed by the social movements invests just over 5 billion dollars, and with that we have beaten illiteracy;[7] in the rural diaspora, the difference between rich and poor has been reduced by exactly one half,[8] while the proportion of the population living in extreme poverty has fallen from 38.2% (2005) to 24.3% (2011).[9]

But, you will say, “obviously the structure of ownership of the means of production and public assets has changed, and the distributional structure of the economic surplus has been transformed, but the mode of production has not been altered.” And of course, fundamentally it has not been altered. How can we expect that a small country that defends itself day after day from the counterrevolution, organizes the unification of a profoundly fragmented and corporate-dominated society, carries out the most important political revolution in its history, alters the structure of ownership and economic distribution, all within six years — yes, within six years — can, in isolation, change a mode of production that took more than 500 years to establish itself and continues to expand even today? Isn’t it intellectually nonsensical to demand this, in this space of time? And does it not demonstrate a mistake of basic historical location? Isn’t it more sensible to discuss what type of tendencies are being driven forward in Bolivia to promote a transformation in the mode of production, in tune with the changes that each of us is making in other countries with the same objective? We will return to this question at the end.

Each of the political and economic changes that have been achieved within the country’s revolutionary process has directly affected the foreign governments and corporations, capitalists, business people, elites and privileged social classes that have been monopolizing the material assets of the society, the political resources of the state, and the symbolic assets of social power. The dismantling of racial whiteness as capital, as a material component (or “asset”) of the class structure and class domination (so characteristic of all colonial societies) has smashed not only a centuries-old racialized imaginary of command over the indigenous peoples, but has also eroded a property, an “asset” that for centuries allowed a small caste to acquire power and legitimacy in the systems of political-cultural command and economic ownership.[10] This classist decolonization of society, anchored in the deeper habitus of all social classes, has radically modified the structure of political power and has unambiguously displaced the constituent dominant classes of the old state. This has led to the enraged reaction of the old ruling elites seeking to weaken and overthrow the government of President Evo Morales by every means: economic (freeze on bank deposits, 2006; sabotage of production, 2007-09, food boycott, 2007-08), political (sabotage in the Constituent Assembly, 2006-08; referendums in the autonomous regions, 2008; presidential recall vote, 2008), and armed (attempted coup, 2008; separatism, 2009).

There has not been any governmental measure in favour of equality, national sovereignty or redistribution of wealth that has not had a counter-action from the conservative forces. And in this inevitable reaction to the revolutionary measures it is possible to single out two forms:

First, the one in which the forces displaced from economic and political power act as an organized class body with its own spokesmen, slogans and organizational forms. Examples are the energy and food boycotts launched by factions of the foreign and national business community, acting as an organized political force through its federations or confederations, in opposition to the government measures. In this case it is relatively easy for the social movements to figure out the difference between popular and anti-popular objectives and to polarize the conflict; accordingly the key to confronting the counterrevolution lies in the reaffirmation of popular unity against their class enemies and the use of democratic and revolutionary methods to achieve victory.

Secondly, there is the type of measures in which the reactionary forces act in a diffused way, indirectly, and through popular or middle-class social sectors. In this case, the contradiction does not assume a polarity between popular and anti-popular forces but is contained within the popular movement itself, that is, it occurs “among the people” as Mao Tse-tung would say,[11] and the counterrevolutionary forces are in control, complicating the correct handling of the contradictions.

In that case, the reactionary action does not have a conservative class subject, but it channels its expectations and needs, taking advantage of the mobilization of the segment of the popular camp itself that, in its attachment to corporatist or individualistic perspectives — often without realizing it — serves the interests of its own enemies who by and large will end up turning against them. To some extent it is a strategy of colonial mobilization and domination: using the contradictions within the popular bloc to set two factions of the popular forces against each other from within and materially and symbolically establish the domination of the “dominant third party” upon the exhaustion and defeat of one or both of them. This is what happened in the colonial invasion of the continent. That is how colonial domination was consolidated, and how the republican peace was imposed on the emerging neocolonial states. A less euphemistic variant of this logic of intra-popular confrontation is the one used by the news media, portraying conflicts with great drama and media hysteria in order to mobilize “public opinion” against popular governments.

The tragic course of history so unfolds that the counterrevolution can come hand in hand with a faction of its own builders which, without necessarily advocating it, may as a consequence of the exacerbation of its corporatist, regional or sectoral particularism, and without taking into account the general configuration of overall social forces nationally and internationally, end up defending the interests of the conservative forces of the right and undermining its own revolutionary process. That is precisely what came to happen with the so-called “TIPNIS march.”

The Amazon and patrimonial despotic power

When one observes Bolivia’s geography, four regions can be clearly distinguished: the altiplanicie [high plateau], which comprises the departments of La Paz, Oruro, and Potosí; the valleys, in Cochabamba, Tarija, and Chuquisaca; the Chaco, south of Santa Cruz and east of Tarija and Chuquisaca; and the immense Amazon, which includes the departments of Pando, Beni, the north of La Paz and Santa Cruz.

One third of Bolivia is Amazon, and it is by far the most isolated region of the country. Whether through wars or unjust treaties, Bolivia has lost some 750,000 km² of its Amazon,[12] an area equivalent to more than three times that of the department of Beni (213,564 km²). The highest number of indigenous nations in Bolivia live in the Amazon region, but the population density is low; according to the latest Population and Housing Census (2001), less then 4% of the total indigenous population of Bolivia lives in the lowlands, and in particular in the Amazon.

The heirs of great hydraulic cultures, the indigenous nations of this region were not central to the organization of domination during the Colonial period, and can be said to be part of the vague colonial frontier; thus the institutions of colonial domination of both lands and labour force, which transformed the economy and society in the lowlands and the altiplano, had only a marginal presence in the Amazon, which was considered a “frontier.” However, the institution that did take on the job of recruitment and elusive discontinuous domination over the Amazon indigenous nations was the Catholic Church, through the “reducciones” [confined reservations] of the Jesuits and later the Recollets and Franciscans.[13] The Jesuits managed to capture peoples throughout Chiquitanía (Chiquitanos), Moxos (Moxeños, Trinitarios, Yuracarés, etc.), and also in the Chaco, but intermittently between what is now Bolivia and Paraguay. In 1767, the Spanish Crown expelled the Jesuit missions; by 1830 they were partially replaced by the Franciscans in their presence on the Amazon frontier. The reservations were authentic artisanal fortresses built to assemble the indigenous population who were hunted down in the jungles, “tied up and then taken to the missions, often to Concepción or Santiago de Chuiquitos,”[14] and it was there that the indigenous souls were moulded and their productive habits modified. While the missions were unable to control the Amazon territory, its natural resources or social organization, they did manage to permanently alter the political, spiritual and economic organization of a great many nomadic indigenous nations. The missions were precisely the point of departure for the annulment of the traditional religious authorities, the institution of the cabildo, and the gradual transition to a sedentary lifestyle of the Amazon peoples. For example, the Jesuit production schemes favoured approaches that were almost ascetically capitalist (they incorporated accounting, registries, reinvestment, dimensions, schedules, days, proportions, in various industries such as agriculture, tile and brick making, ceramics, weaving, cattle raising, etc.). Nor should we forget that the Jesuit reservations were to a large degree self-sufficient and sold their surpluses.

After the abandonment of the Jesuit missions and the decline of the other missions in the 19^th century, the republican state presence in the Amazon was weak. For example, it was not until the early 20^th century that the Sirionó were permanently contacted; the Ayoreos continued to be nomads to a large degree until the Seventies; and it was not until the battle of Kuruyuki (1892) that the colonial-republican state finally managed to “defeat” the Guarani, notwithstanding that relations with them date back to very early in the Colony. Even after the founding of the Republic, the Brazilians were crossing the border to capture Indians as slaves, without the state being able to prevent this activity.

In reality, it was at the end of the 19^th century, in the republican stage (when, through the institution of the hacienda, enclave economies were established for the harvesting of rubber, quinine, chestnuts and wood), that a generalized offensive was launched against the indigenous peoples of the Amazon through the expropriation of their territories, their forced recruitment as labourers and the definitive subjugation of their political and cultural structures. It is estimated that in the case of rubber alone — in the first peak period (1870-1917), the second (1940-47) and the third (1960-70) — some 6,000 persons with their families[15] were employed in rubber tapping. In the course of all those years, about 80,000 persons were displaced throughout the Amazon region, from Santa Cruz to Beni and Pando especially.

In the early 20^th century, rubber accounted for up to 15% of state income.[16] All of this wealth generated through the harvesting of rubber was the product of the rubber tappers, the majority of them indigenous peoples who were forcibly recruited and trafficked by dozens of businessmen — both Bolivians and others of German, Portuguese, English and Japanese origin:

“It is common knowledge that the indigenous peoples were forced to work for meagre pay which in many cases simply went to the sustenance of the rubber tapper but not his family if he had one. Especially given the exorbitant prices of the products they received in return. In other cases, as frequently happens , they were baited with alcohol to take other advances and articles from the company store, false pretences being used to bind them to a lifetime of exploitation. With the rising debts, the lying pretences would stretch like bubble gum.... And even worse, when the rubber tapper died, his debts were passed on to his wife or children as an abusive inheritance imposed by the bosses and contractors under the applicable Debt Law.... In 1914, the newspaper La Voz del Pueblo, commenting on this malicious pettifogging, reported: ‘There have been cases in which indigenous peoples have left for the rubber regions and when one died the boss went back to the deceased’s home village to present the widow with the imaginary debt, violently taking away the sons of majority age and, if there was no family, throwing her out of her miserable hovel in payment of what she was alleged to owe.’...”[17]

From the second half of the 19^th century to 1938, there was a kind of political trial of strength between the ranchers, rubber producers and government authorities, on the one hand, and the Franciscans on the other, to get the latter to “lend” indigenous peoples for production (of rubber in the north, and for harvest and seeding in the south) and to work in public works. Finally, in 1939 the missions were secularized, supposedly because of the death of an engineer at the hands of the Siriono. The description of this people in Holmberg’s classic book[18] dates from the second decade of the 20^th century, when they were still nomadic. The Ayoreos engaged in major migrations during the Chaco War, fleeing to the north as a result of the pressures on them in the war.

While the huge territorial expanses subject to the semi-nomadic wanderings of some of the Amazon indigenous nations allowed the existence of family systems of production and autonomous authority, they could not prevent the consolidation of the territorial power of the landowners, ranchers and private resource extraction firms which over the last century became established as a real power in the Amazon. The consolidation of this estate-based land ownership in the Amazon regional power structure occurred at a time when the governing mining and latifundista elites of the highlands were founding — so to speak — the extractivist latifundist, and later Amazon ranching, enclaves along with the state structure. The republican state thereby became a latifundist state and the private latifundio became a regional power of the state, giving rise to the hereditary nature of the state power in the lowlands. Strictly speaking, the state abdicated its class “autonomy” and became an extension of the family legacy of the businessmen and latifundistas. Thus, through ranching and the extraction of rubber and quinine, now chestnuts, lumber, or simple possession of lands, big landowners and businessmen have over the last 150 years consolidated a landholding and hereditary territorial power structure over all the urban and rural inhabitants of the region. The state would delegate regional political power to the landowners, for whom the ownership of political life would be yet another of “the assets” of the estate or company; and the state would receive a portion of the rent of the land from the extractivist activity in the Amazon. In the early 20^th century, this rent accounted for 5 to 15% of the state income.

The agrarian structure of Santa Cruz prior to 1952, described by Nicolás Laguna,[19] is a mould that with slight variations recurs in the Amazon regions of Beni and Pando, including since 1952:

“The big landowners (between 20 and 50,000 hectares or more, only small portions of which were cultivated and on which they generally had no title) were the hacendados, who preferred to call themselves finqueros. Their haciendas were not commercial plantations but instead nearly autonomous and self-sufficient productive units, relatively isolated, in which the use of machinery and improvement of the land were almost non-existent. The hacendado and his family lived on them with their workers who remained there throughout the year. The self-sufficiency of the finca enabled the finquero to live well and obtain whatever he did not produce with the small income he got in exchange for selling his surpluses in the local market. Those living and working in the finca were the jornaleros [labourers] who, in exchange for a house and meals, and in some cases a wage, were to cultivate the employer’s lands; in addition, they might work small parcels (no more than a hectare) for themselves. There were also pequeños propietarios [small proprietors] (no more than 20 hectares, generally 8 to 10, of which no more than 5 were cultivated), who were few in number and cultivated the land with their families, seeking self-sufficiency and independence, although normally they performed odd jobs during harvest and seeding. The inquilinos [tenants] rented lands (one to three hectares) from the finqueros in exchange for 10 to 20% of their production, cultivating lands that the finquero was not using in order to bring in some extra income without too much effort or loss. The tolerados [“tolerated ones,” or colonizers], the true pioneers of the east according to Heath, occupied lands in the unoccupied strips of the fincas and cultivated them until they were evicted. The finqueros allowed these occupations for a time since the tolerados cleared the forest, planted fruit trees, improved the area and were hired as jornaleros at harvest and seeding times. Conditions had hardly changed since the time of the prospectors of El Dorado or Gran Paitití; the security and prestige of the finqueros, whose wealth counted for little in any other part of the country, based themselves on ownership of the land and servitude, spending practically their entire income to maintain the traditional form of life to which they were accustomed. The land had no value in commercial terms (which is why no one took the trouble to acquire legal title) and was non-negotiable in terms of status, security and self-sufficiency.”

In the Amazon, until fairly recently, the employer or hacendado was the lord of everything within his purview, using the violence of paramilitary forces to occupy lands and impose his law over the surrounding peons, indigenous peoples and poor peasants.[20] To the degree that power was structured around the land and its violent occupation, a conservative employer logic — the most conservative in the country — prevailed in the Amazon region. And consistent with this the hacendados, lumbermen, landlords and their intermediaries had established, since the beginning of the republican state, a sort of pact with the rulers to exercise, through their family and local networks, a limited state presence in the area; lands, state resources and impunity had become to a large degree the hereditary form of the state in the Amazon. As such the state appeared as an extension of the family influences of a small hacendado, rubber, rancher and lumber elite, wielding state violence to legitimize and impose their ownership as employers over the population.

This patrimonial-hacendado power in the Amazon is even now the most conservative and reactionary form of regional domination existing in the country as a whole. In a certain form, the figure of the landlord personifies the most despotic powers in existence: not only is he the owner of the land, he is also the one who hires workers and purchases wood from the forest, the provider of market goods to the remote populations, and the influential politician whose family monopolizes public responsibilities and as such is the provider of public lands and public favours to a population that is lacking in everything: lands, property, public authority and the state. So the landlord is not infrequently as well the axis of popular rituals such as the celebration of festivals and weddings or the one who determines whether and where your children will be educated. The entire warp and woof of hereditary colonial power converges in the figure of the hacendado and his ubiquitous and paternal command. And while the dispersed indigenous organization has maintained its local autonomy at the level of its small towns, councils, union centrals and subcentrals, it has not managed to convert itself into a leading force at the local or regional level, much less challenge the hereditary-landowner authority and command structure.

In fact, faced with the ongoing hacendado-corporate encroachment, the indigenous communities, in order to be able to preserve some part of their territorial occupation, have had to come to terms with the structure of dominant landowner power in a subordinate and vertical manner, as do the other popular classes. Hence the very discourse of legitimation and regional identification has been until recently that issuing from the nucleus of the regional employers’ power.

In the Amazon, then, it is not the indigenous peoples who have taken control of the territorial power, as occurred years ago in the highlands and valleys, where the peasant unions and communities have performed the role of indigenous micro-states with a territorial presence, and in reality were the material foundation for the construction of the present Plurinational State. In the Amazon region, things occurred in a very different way. The despotic landowner order predominates and neither the indigenous organizations nor the peasants or the workers of recent creation have managed to create an organizational or discursive counter-power that begins to crack this hereditary-landowner system.

A partial modification of this system of despotic landowner domination has been produced by the NGOs, which have managed to create a clientelist relationship with the indigenous leadership, promoting levels of interregional organization like the Regionales Indígenas or the CIDOB itself.[21] But to the extent that those levels of organization, with little contact with the Amazon indigenous bases, function exclusively with external (NGO) funding, which pays the salaries of the leaders, in reality they actually develop as NGOs, reproducing mechanisms of clientelist cooptation and ideological and political subordination to the funding agencies, most of them European and North American, as in the case of USAID.[22]

While in the first world countries NGOs exist as part of civil society — in most cases funded by transnational enterprises — in the third world, as in the case of Bolivia, various NGOs are not really NON Governmental Organizations but Organizations of Other Governments on Bolivian territory; they are a replacement for the state in the areas in which the neoliberalism of the past initiated its exit, encompassing such sectors as education (through the attempts at privatization or through the convent colleges) and health (for example, Prosalud of USAID). The NGO, as an organization of another government and possessor of financial resources, defines the subject matter, the focus, the line of funding, etc. based on the priorities of this other government, constituting itself as a foreign power within the national territory. It could be said that the neoliberal system in the periphery has been shaped between a state that is reduced in its capacities and its power of economic and cultural intervention (through privatization and downsizing), NGOs that have replaced it in specific areas (social, cultural, struggle against poverty, indigenous peoples, environment, etc.) and a private foreign economic sector that has been appropriating public resources.[23]

In fact, some NGOs in the country have been the vehicle for introducing a type of colonial environmentalism that relegates the indigenous peoples to the role of caretakers of the Amazon jungle (considered extraterritorial property of foreign governments and corporations[24]), creating de facto a new relationship of privatization and alienation of the national parks and Communitarian Lands (TCOs) over which the state itself has lost custody and control.[25] In this form, whether by means of the hard power of the property-owning despotism that controls the processes of intermediation and semi-industrialization of Amazon products (lumber, alligators, chestnuts, rubber, etc.) or through the soft power of the NGOs, the indigenous nations of the Amazon are being economically dispossessed of the territory and politically subordinated to external discourses and powers. In short, economic and political power in the Amazon is not in the hands of the indigenous peoples or the state. Power in the Amazon is in the hands, in part, of a landowner-business elite, and in part, of foreign businesses and governments that negotiate the care of the Amazon jungles in exchange for a reduction in taxes and control of biodiversity through their biotechnology.

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[1] “Lessons of the Moscow Uprising,” Complete Works, Volume 11, p. 172. [Note by editor: “Lenin cites the proposition put forward by Marx in his Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850 (see Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Vol. I, Moscow, 1958, p. 139).”] – Tr.

[2] “Debates que tejen emancipaciones,” by Ana Esther Ceceña, published in Rebelión (26/05/2012). Available at: www.rebelion.org/noticia.php?id=150260.

[3] “For the workers, mainly miners and industrial workers, for at least 50 years (1940-1990) the union was the organizing network of class identity and accumulation of experience as a class... the assimilation of class experience came exclusively through the union, and that, in the last analysis, was all the workers had with which to confront life, repression and death. The union was the sole enduring place in which to experience the ups and downs of collective existence; it was the sole ongoing network of support, friendship and solidarity, and the authentic place in which to assert themselves as a collective body. What the workers did in history from 1940 to 1990 was done as trade unionists; the union was the instrument of their struggle, in which they made a revolution (and that is no small thing), they won rights, they won healthcare and housing, they protected their families, they buried their dead. Hence its durability and pre-eminence in the construction of working-class memory....” – Álvaro García Linera, “Sindicato, multitud y comunidad. Movimientos sociales y formas de autonomía política en Bolivia,” in Tiempos de rebelión, Comuna y Muela del Diablo, La Paz, 2001.

[4] Public enterprises 1% and Public administration 15%. (UDAPE)

[5] Public enterprises 19% and Public administration 15%. (UDAPE)

[6] UDAPE, Informe 2011.

[7] In 2006, 823,256 of the country’s inhabitants were illiterate, but by 2008, thanks to the “Yo, sí puedo” Literacy Program, 824,101 people had been taught to read and write, and Bolivia was that year named a “Territory Free of Illiteracy.” In 2009 it started up the National Post-Literacy Program.

[8] In 2005, the richest 10% of the population earned 30 times more than the poorest 10%, while in 2009, the richest 10% earned only 15 times more than the poorest 10%. (UDAPE and INE)

[9] UDAPE, Informe 2011.

[10] On the concept of ethnicity, in this case “racial whiteness” as a form of capital and of the material components of the class structure in colonial societies, see Álvaro García Linera, “Espacio social y estructuras simbólicas. Clase, etnicidad y estructuras simbólicas en la obra de P. Bourdieu,” in Bourdieu Leído desde el Sur, Alianza Francesa/Instituto Goethe/Universidad de la Cordillera/Plural editores, La Paz, 2000.

[11] “Two types of social contradictions — those between ourselves and the enemy and those among the people themselves — confront us. The two are totally different in their nature.... In the conditions prevailing in China today, the contradictions among the people comprise the contradictions within the working class, the contradictions within the peasantry, the contradictions within the intelligentsia, the contradictions between the working class and the peasantry, the contradictions between the workers and peasants on the one hand and the intellectuals on the other, the contradictions between the working class and other sections of the working people on the one hand and the national bourgeoisie on the other, the contradictions within the national bourgeoisie, and so on.... The contradictions between the enemy and us are antagonistic contradictions. Within the ranks of the people, the contradictions among the working people are non-antagonistic...” On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People, Speech delivered by Mao Tse-tung, February 27, 1957.

[12] To Brazil, by treaties (1867) and by the Acre War (1903), 490,430 km²; and to Peru, by diplomatic treaties (1909), 250,000 km².

[13] The purpose of the missions was to shield the indigenous peoples from “the dangers of turning into beasts” and to “improve them, that is, to humanize them through education as a first step toward their Christianization”: José de Acosta, “De procuranda indorum salute I”, quoted in Fran Helm, La Misión Católica durante los siglos XVI-XVII: contexto y texto; UCB/Verbo Divino/Editorial Guadalupe, Bolivia, 2002. In the case of the Jesuit missions, the objective of having control of the spiritual authority was combined with guaranteeing a stable economic base that would secure the maintenance of the catechumen [religious pupils] and avoid their dispersion. See F. Armas Asin, Editor; La invención del Catolicismo en América. Los procesos de evangelización, siglos XVI-XVIII, Universidad Mayor de San Marcos, Perú, 2009. Also, Jonathan Wright, Los jesuitas.Una historia de los soldados de Dios, Debate, España, 2005. On the presence of the Jesuits in Chiquitos and Moxos, see Javier Baptista, “Las Misiones de los Jesuitas en Bolivia: Mojos y Chiquitos,” in Manuel Marzal and Luis Bacigalupo Editores, Los Jesuitas y la Modernidad en Iberoamérica. 1549-1773, IFEA/Universidad del Pacífico/Fondo Editorial de la Pontificia Universidad Católica, Peru, 2007. On the Franciscans, see Padre Fray Bernardino Izaguirre, Historia de las misiones franciscanas, 12 volumes, 1619-1921, Lima, 1922.

[14] Alcide D’Orbigny, “Viaje a la América Meridional”, Volume IV, PLURAL/IFEA/IRD/Embassy of France in Bolivia, La Paz, 2002.

[15] Oscar Tonelli Justiniano, El Caucho Ignorado, Premio Nacional “Serrano” 2009 de Investigación en Historia, Editorial El País, Santa Cruz de la Sierra, 2010.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Ibid., p. 112.

[18] Allan R. Holmberg, Nomads Of The Long Bow: The Siriono Of Eastern Bolivia, American Museum, 1969.

[19] “La burguesía cruceña. Concentración y centralización de capital y organización corporativa empresarial en el departamento de Santa Cruz (1988-2005)”. Draft thesis of Nicolás Laguna, Sociology, Universidad Mayor de San Andrés (UMSA), pp. 47-48.

[20] The borders of the haciendas were often defined in gunfights using hired thugs.

[21] CIDOB since its birth has depended on direct funding from international cooperation through NGOs. Thus the NGO APCOB (Apoyo para el Campesino Indígena del Oriente Boliviano) received money from USAID and the Ford Foundation through the NGO Culture Survival in the 1980s for the creation of the CIDOB, as did other indigenous organizations in Peru and Ecuador: Cultural Survival, Final Report, “Strengthening pluralism: a combined human rights/grass roots development program for Indians of Latin America and the Caribbean Basin,” 1987. In the 1990s, the director of IBIS-DINAMARCA said they supported the creation of CONAMAQ under the ethnic model of the CIDOB because they needed an organization of that type in order to be able to work cooperatively. Likewise, the CSUTCB was identified as a class organization with a discourse from the Seventies, with which they could not work. And in an OXFAM document we can read: “The ayllu is a form of Andean organisation [that maintains] principles... opposed to the peasant unions, which are organisational forms imposed on the ayllus [...].” Quoted in Andolina, Robert; Radcliffe, Sarah; Laurie, Nina, Development and culture: Transnational identity making in Bolivia, Political Geography 24 (2005) 678, at p. 695.

[22] The process of delimitation of TCOs and “social control” of the subsequent saneamiento process after 1996 was for the most part financed by the Danish bilateral cooperation organization DANIDA. From 2005 to 2009 this agency invested more than $13.36 million, of which $2.4 million was assigned to a technical project of the CIDOB, the Centro de Planificación Territorial Indígena (CPTI). In the highlands, the same scheme was applied with the NGO ISALP, which received $700,000 during the same period. Other NGOs like CEJIS and AVSF receive similar funding in the framework of other components of European assistance. U.S. funding did not participate directly in supporting the TCO but did in many wooded areas in the context of the BOLFOR project and the individualized pruning in areas of coca leaf cultivation, in collaboration with the European Union. (Source: Ministry of Foreign Relations, DANIDA 2004, Component 2: Saneamiento y titulación de tierras comunitarias de origen, Document Ref. No. 104, Bol.808.200, DANIDA).

[23] That is the project promoted for the poorest countries of the world by the World Bank and the IMF, supported by the United States and the European Union. It ensures that dependency is sustained, sovereignty is minimized or nullified and the transnationals appropriate the wealth of the world.

[24] This relationship between some environmental NGOs, the protection of parks, and the mechanisms of transnationalized capitalist accumulation, we will see a bit later.

[25] The process of saneamiento performed by the INRA was financed almost exclusively with foreign funds until 2008. The European cooperation agencies (of Denmark, Holland and the EU) undertook to pay 36% and USAID 23% of the costs in the planned areas (2008). The rest was distributed among agencies of the UN, multilateral funds, private interests and the Bolivian state. These proportions began to change in 2009, with the access of the applicants in communitarian lands to the resources of the IDH and an increase of funding from the TGN beginning in 2008, which among other things allowed the securitization of various applications by highland TCOs that had been rejected by external funding sources notwithstanding a formal application. (Sources: SIG database of the Deputy Ministry of Lands concerning INRA planning, 2008. Unidad de Planificación del INRA, 2011.)

Pipeline politics — Can popular protest stop the tar sands leviathan?

Petroleum giant Enbridge Inc. has taken huge strides in recent weeks to complete its plan to transport tar sands oil to eastern Canada and from there to foreign markets.

Already assured of support from the Harper government, the company is rapidly lining up further backing from provincial politicians and industry players, including a key trade union. And it is fast-tracking the regulatory approval process.

Enbridge’s project entails reversing the flow of an existing pipeline circuit across southern Ontario to Montréal, Quebec and from there through New England states to Portland, Maine. At present imported oil is carried from Portland to Sarnia, Ontario, where existing refineries already process dirty tar sands oil piped from Alberta. Enbridge also plans to increase the pipeline’s capacity from 240,000 barrels per day to 300,000 bpd.

The Enbridge project is of vital importance for Big Oil and its major clients. Imported oil now costs $20 to $30 per barrel more at the world price than Canadian-produced oil. And with massive investments in tar sands operations, the petroleum giants urgently need to gain access to new markets. They face the prospect of declining demand and prices in the United States, the current destination for almost 100 percent of Canada’s oil exports. And plans to build new pipelines to the west coast, from where the oil would be shipped through hazardous coastal waters to Asia, have encountered powerful opposition from communities throughout British Columbia, led by First Nations communities directly in the path of the pipelines.

Enbridge’s eastern pipeline reversal project, originally called “Trailblazer,” aroused widespread opposition from environmental groups in both the U.S. and Canada when it was initiated in 2008. It was officially abandoned in 2009, the company citing “a lack of commercial support.” However, Enbridge then broke Trailblazer into phases, and on July 27 of this year, the National Energy Board of Canada approved Enbridge’s Phase I application to reverse the flow of its Line 9 pipeline between Sarnia and Westover, Ontario, near Toronto. A separate application is being prepared for the Montréal-Portland phase. And on November 29, Enbridge filed for approval of the Westover-Montréal Phase II. Like the successful application for Phase I, Phase II will no doubt be approved under section 58 of the National Energy Board Act, which exempts the company from the more rigorous environmental and infrastructure standards for new pipelines.

The Line 9 Reversal Phase I hearings established the probable pattern for any subsequent consultations of affected communities on the other phases. As Dave Vasey reported in rabble.ca, September 11, “To date, First Nation communities have not been properly consulted and community meetings by Enbridge have not been held on reservations.

“Enbridge claims Line 9 has 'no significant impact to Aboriginal communities' in its internal assessment, though Line 9 [runs] literally across the street from Amjiwnaang First Nation and runs directly through the Haldimand Tract. Indeed, the Haudenosaunee Development Institute, Aamijiwnaang First Nation and Onieda Nation all submitted concerns to Enbridge and the National Energy Board (NEB) about the project.”

They were ignored by the Board. At a recent Toronto teach-in, First Nations leaders from these and other communities related their concerns about the devastation already suffered by their communities from existing refineries and pipelines. A video of their reports can be viewed here.

The NEB’s July 27 approval of the Phase I reversal came “almost two years to the date after the infamous Enbridge Kalamazoo spill of 20,000 barrels of tar sands dilbit [diluted bitumen] in Michigan,” Dave Vasey notes. “Forebodingly, Enbridge spilled 1000 barrels in Wisconsin the same day as Line 9’s approval. Between 1999 and 2010 Enbridge had 804 spills that dumped 161,000 barrels of oil onto lands and into water.”

Enbridge is not the only company threatening to pipe tar sands oil to Eastern Canada. Enbridge competitor TransCanada Pipeline, which built the existing base Keystone system that delivers Alberta oil to Illinois and Oklahoma, has announced that it is considering conversion of part of its cross-Canada natural gas mainline to carrying the dirty tar sands oil.

These projects give the green light to more and more tar sands expansion, and greater reliance on fossil fuel exploitation. Canada already ranks seventh in the world in oil production. The Harper government’s commitment to tar sands exploitation is notorious; it hopes production levels will double over the next decade. And it has been busy removing any potential obstacles to these plans. A key step was taken earlier this year with the adoption of Bill C-38, a massive budget implementation bill that included 150 pages of changes in environmental regulations, all designed to weaken environmental protections and limit public participation in environmental reviews.

None of the federal parties calls for phasing out tar sands operations. The Greens, with one MP, party leader Elizabeth May, have produced a useful “Comprehensive Guide to the Alberta Oil Sands,” but the party calls only for a moratorium on further expansion. The official opposition NDP has a similar position, on paper, but also calls for massive expansion in refining and petrochemical manufacturing in Canada. NDP leader Thomas Mulcair attracted much attention this year when he noted the effect of Canada’s energy exports in boosting the value of the Canadian dollar and undermining manufacturing exports (the so-called “Dutch disease”). But Mulcair has signed on to proposals for piping Alberta oil to eastern Canada; in a speech to the Canadian Club of Toronto in September, he said shipping western oil to eastern Canada is a “pro-business, common sense solution” that will create jobs and boost the country’s energy security. And he later told reporters he would not speak against tar sands expansion.

The Ontario Liberal government is onside as well. The province’s Finance minister, Dwight Duncan, told a Calgary business audience September 27 that his government unequivocally backed the oil sands industry. Not surprising, given the alliance of eastern finance with Alberta oil that has replaced the Montréal-Toronto axis with the Toronto-Calgary axis as the business backbone of the country.

In fact, shipping Alberta tar sands products to Eastern Canada is now being posed as a major “national unity” project. This was evident at the meeting of provincial and territorial first ministers in Halifax in late November. Quebec premier Pauline Marois (who had reversed her previous opposition to attending such meetings) met with Alberta premier Alison Redford and announced that her Parti Québécois government will establish a joint working group with the Alberta government to study the possible use of Quebec refineries receiving crude oil from the tar sands. This involves not just Alberta and Quebec alone, said Manitoba’s NDP premier Greg Selinger. “It’s part of a national strategy.”

Only a week earlier, the PQ government’s Environment minister, Daniel Breton, had publicly questioned the role of the federal NEB in authorizing the Enbridge pipeline reversal project: “What the Albertans want to do with their oil, bring it onto our territory without our consent... we’ll have to look at that.” Within days, the Montréal daily La Presse and the Quebec Liberal party opposition were attacking Breton, in unison, among other things for a series of alleged misdemeanours they had dug up from his past, such as a speeding offense, unpaid rents, cheating on unemployment insurance, etc. — some going back 25 years or more! Also riling his critics was a statement by Breton, just days after the September 4 election, praising “the political will of Russia and Venezuela in regard to the nationalization of key sectors of economic development.”

La Presse is owned by Groupe Gesca, a subsidiary of Power Corporation. The latter is also a major shareholder in the French oil company Total, which has invested billions of dollars in the Alberta tar sands. On November 29 — the same day Enbridge filed its Phase II application with the NEB — Breton was forced out of the Quebec cabinet. “Pure coincidence,” said an Enbridge spokesman.

Marois’ agreement with Redford has dismayed environmentalists who had been encouraged by her government’s earlier announcement of a moratorium on shale gas exploration in the St. Lawrence valley, and its decision to close Quebec’s sole nuclear power plant and end asbestos mining in the province. A typical statement was that of Marie-Claude Lemieux, Quebec director of the World Wildlife Fund: “In the absence of a pan-Canadian energy policy that would reduce our dependence on fossil energies, we ask the Quebec government to demonstrate extreme prudence in regard to pipeline projects on our territory. These projects will lock us even further into an economy based on petroleum, and run counter to Quebec’s greenhouse gas reduction objectives and the climate reality of our planet.”

A common demand is that the government implement a PQ election pledge to have Quebec’s environmental review agency, the BAPE,[1] conduct a full study of the province’s oil and gas industry. During his short mandate as environment minister, Daniel Breton had fired the top officials in the BAPE, known for their Liberal sympathies, and replaced them with more environment-friendly individuals. (In fact, the media campaign against Breton began when he visited the BAPE offices and warned them he would be keeping a close watch on their proceedings.[2])

Despite its initial shale gas decision, the PQ government has since reaffirmed the party’s support for hydrocarbon exploration and development in Quebec. It is currently involved in tripartite negotiations with Ottawa and Newfoundland seeking jurisdiction over drilling rights in the extensive Gulf of St. Lawrence hydrocarbon deposits. It has left the door open to continued shale gas exploration on Anticosti Island and in the Gaspé Peninsula.

In fact, some former leaders of the PQ have a very cosy relationship with Big Oil. Former Premier Lucien Bouchard is the chief lobbyist for the shale gas interests in Quebec. André Boisclair, former Quebec environment minister and PQ leader from 2005 to 2007, is a strategic consultant with clients that include Calgary natural gas producer Questerre Energy. He has just been appointed the Quebec government’s delegate-general in New York City.

It is not hard to explain Marois’ interest in obtaining crude oil from Western Canada. At present, Montréal has only one functioning oil refinery. Two years ago Shell stopped refining crude petroleum at its east-end refinery, which is now being dismantled. Five hundred workers lost their jobs, and Montréal lost $3 million in property tax revenues. The remaining refinery is owned by Suncor, a Calgary-based company that bought Petro-Canada in 2009 for $17 billion. Both Shell and Suncor have complained loudly that Eastern dependence on relatively expensive foreign oil does not produce sufficient profits.

On December 3, Suncor announced plans to spend $55 million to “prepare the Montréal refinery to receive Western crude.” Local politicians greeted the announcement, as did the union representing Suncor’s organized workers, a local of the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union (CEP). The CEP also represents many workers in the Alberta tar sands. As I have reported earlier, the CEP advocates a Canadian nationalist strategy of fighting to keep oil industry jobs in Canada and promoting “Canadian energy security.” It calls for increasing bitumen upgrading and refining capacity in Canada. All of which is consistent with support of the Enbridge project, notwithstanding the union’s professed concern with “environmental sustainability.”

December 8, 2012

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[1] Bureau d’audiences publiques en environnement (BAPE).

[2] The BAPE is not a quasi-judicial tribunal with decision-making powers. It is purely investigative and consultative, and simply advises the minister.