Post on 24-Jan-2023
Contested territory, entangled landscapes: indigenous land
claims, settler geographies, and natural gas extraction in the
Bolivian Chaco
Throughout the colonized world, the production of national
territory has been predicated on the symbolic erasure and
material dispossession of indigenous populations. Over recent
decades, ethnic movements in Latin America have sought to make
visible and contest these processes by asserting their own
territorial claims and projects – a struggle that has brought
them into complex entanglements with global development
institutions and state law. In Bolivia, under the government of
Evo Morales, indigenous claims for territory have now moved
beyond their initial focus on cartographic recognition and
agrarian rights to foreground demands for autonomous territorial
governance within a newly-imagined “plurinational state”
(Gustafson and Fabricant 2011, Cameron 2013). As such, the very
nature of the Bolivian state is being called into question by
indigenous territorial claims.
1
Yet, indigenous claims for territory do not only wrestle with
the historical space-making projects of the state; they also
overlap and collide with other contemporary territorial projects
and processes enacted at a variety of scales. Following diverse
histories of colonization, indigenous peoples in Bolivia today
share their territories with a variety of non-indigenous actors,
who have their own imaginaries of, and claims to, territory.
Indigenous territories also contain some of Bolivia’s most
valued natural resources, subject to exploitation by
transnational capitalist actors, as well as now by the state.
How has this shaped the progress, outcomes and content of
indigenous territory-making projects? And what does this tell us
about the relationship between sovereignty, territory and
resources in Latin America’s so-called “post-neoliberal” states?
This paper explores these questions through an examination of
one Guaraní group’s struggle to gain legal rights to their
territory, Itika Guasu, located in Bolivia’s gas-rich Chaco
region. I argue that, despite the decolonizing content of early
counter-mapping efforts, Guaraní aspirations for “recovering
2
territory” through the process of Original Communal Land (TCO)
titling have ultimately been frustrated by two competing
territorial projects: the land claims of a local cattle ranching
population, and the territorial demands of hydrocarbon
development in Bolivia’s biggest gas field. The result is a
territory that is fragmented, incomplete and subject to a
protracted conflict over both land titling and hydrocarbon
governance. I argue that these ambivalent outcomes are providing
the basis for new territorial visions and strategies in Itika
Guasu, as the Guaraní leadership seeks to reconcile the
unfulfilled promise of state land titling with the realities of
intensifying hydrocarbon development. These shifting dynamics
demonstrate the articulated and adaptive nature of indigenous
territorial struggles. More broadly, they reveal how sovereignty
continues to be contested and reconfigured “beyond the state”
(Bridge 2013) in contemporary Bolivia, notwithstanding current
discourses of resource nationalism and plurinational
citizenship.
3
The paper is structured as follows. I begin by briefly outlining
why the “production of territory” provides a useful theoretical
framework for considering indigenous land claims. I then give an
overview of early organizing and counter-mapping efforts in
Itika Guasu and the far-reaching territorial aspirations these
processes produced. The next section describes the official TCO
land titling process in Itika Guasu, highlighting how it was
obstructed by a local non-indigenous population, who mobilized
colonial discourses of rights and clientelistic networks of
power in defense of the existing racial-spatial order. I then
examine how these local struggles over TCO titling have
articulated with, and been shaped by, hydrocarbons development
in the Itika Guasu, both prior to and under the Morales
government. The concluding section examines shifting Guaraní
framings of territory in the wake of a recent settlement with an
oil company, as an example of how indigenous TCO territories in
Bolivia are being reframed in the context of multi-scalar
conflicts over the governance of gas. This paper is based on two
years of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Itika Guasu and
Tarija Department in 2008-9 and 2011-12.
4
Indigenous land claims and the production of territory
Work on the “production of territory” has called into question
the naturalized notion of territory as a pre-given, critically
examining how territory is produced and reconfigured by
political-economic forces and other socio-spatial relations
(Lefebvre 1991, Brenner and Elden 2009, Sparke 2005, Wainwright
2008). As Sparke notes, this perspective enables us to read any
geography:
[N]ot just for what it includes, but also for what it overwrites and
covers up in the moment of representing spatially the always already
unfinished historical-geographical processes and power relations of its
spatial production” (Ibid: xiv).
From a postcolonial perspective, this approach can be used to
make visible the erasures and violent dispossession that has
accompanied the territorializing processes of colonialism and
postcolonial nationhood. Indeed, this has been a key task of
postcolonial scholarship, which has revealed how the production
5
of national space has systematically marginalized indigenous
territorialities, obscured the nation-state’s own colonial
origins and been bound up with the production of racialised
identities (Said 1978, Mignolo 2005, Quijano 2007, Wainwright
2008, Radcliffe 2011, Sparke 2005).
The contestation of (post)colonial territory is not, however,
just a scholarly endeavor, but also a political project for
colonized populations, who have engaged in their own efforts to
produce territory. Recent indigenous claims for territory in the
Americas are a case in point. Through a combination of political
mobilization, “counter-mapping” and legal activism, indigenous
movements have called into question the official geographies of
the postcolonial nation-state, and articulated alternative
visions of territory, nation and development. The promise and
inherent ambivalences of these efforts has been the subject of
an extensive literature. While many accounts point to the
empowering effects of indigenous counter-mapping (Nietschmann
1995, Brody 1981, Herlihy and Knapp 2003, Stocks 2003), others
argue that placing indigenous territory within the abstract
6
state space of Cartesian cartography can function to co-opt
plural traditions and histories, displacing the possibility of
alternative territorialities (Wainwright and Bryan, 2009, Sparke
2005, Radcliffe 2011, Blomley 2010). Scholars have also
highlighted the ambivalent relationship between global support
for indigenous territorial rights and neoliberalism (Hale 2011,
Bryan 2012, Anthias and Radcliffe 2013).
Less attention, however, has been paid to how indigenous claims
for territory conflict or articulate in practice with the projects
of other territorial actors – and how they are transformed in
the process. Yet, this is a crucial question if we recognize
territory as “a site for contested processes, projects, and
strategies…a social relation that is produced and transformed
through continual struggle” (Brenner and Elden 2009: 364). In
Moore’s words, territory is not just an expression of the
state’s claim to sovereignty, but something that emerges from
“specific articulations of multiple forms of sovereignty and
hybrid spatialities that coexist in the same geographical
[locality]” (Moore 2005: 223). Indeed, the state and its spatial
7
representations are themselves a site for such struggles
(Sparke, 2005). This complicates the notion of decolonizing
territory as a project that is directed only at the state or
enacted by the state – even when, as in contemporary Bolivia, the
state claims to be aligned with such a project. This is
particularly so given that many territorializing processes in
the contemporary world unfold at a transnational scale. At the
same time, the territories where indigenous peoples live are
often distant from the centers of state power, and subject to
more localized actors and governance projects.
Bolivia’s Original Communal Land (TCO) territories provide a
particularly apt case study for exploring these dynamics, owing
to their multi-ethnic populations and integration in
transnational processes of natural resource exploitation. As
well as raising broader critical questions about the challenges
of decolonizing territory, the struggle for TCOs sheds important
light on conflicting visions of territory, sovereignty and
decolonization at play in contemporary Bolivia. Despite
8
declarations of a “post-multicultural” era (Postero 2007), TCOs
– a legacy of the multicultural 1990s – remain at the heart of
indigenous territory-making projects in Bolivia, and have
emerged as the preferred territorial basis for pursuing
indigenous autonomy (Garcés, 2012; Cameron, 2013) – a project
that is, however, riddled with bureaucratic obstacles and
subject to political opposition by other lowland actors. As the
TIPNIS case illustrates (Chavez et al, 2012), TCOs also remain
key sites of conflict around extractive industry and
infrastructure development under MAS, highlighting the tensions
between state and indigenous resource sovereignty claims. As
such, TCOs provide critical insights into the shifting dynamics
and tensions of the current political conjuncture – dynamics
which I argue must be placed squarely within a postcolonial
reading of territory.
The Guaraní struggle for land and territory in Itika Guasu
The Guaraní, Bolivia’s largest lowland indigenous group,
continue to live primarily within their ancestral lands in the
9
Chaco, a semi-arid but biodiverse plain extending over parts of
Bolivia, Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil. Itika Guasu is the
largest Guaraní territorial claim in Tarija Department, located
in a transitional zone between the sub-Andean valleys and the
Chaco (Figure 1). Although the Guaraní were not defeated
militarily until the 1890s, the next century proved devastating,
as waves of state-backed colonization left them increasingly
dispossessed and marginalized (Albó 1990, Langer 2009). By the
1980s, most Guaraní who remained in Itika Guasu were either
trapped in a system of empatronamiento (debt bondage) on mestizo-
owned haciendas or living a precarious existence on marginal
land.
Guaraní communities in Itika Guasu began to organize in the late
1980s, a process that occurred through articulation with
transnational networks of development actors and a nascent
lowland indigenous movement (Gustafson 2009, Castro 2004). It
was as a result of these early organizing efforts that the space
of “Itika Guasu” (Guaraní: “Big River”, referring to the
Pilcomayo River) emerged. In 1989, these communities formed their
10
own organisation, the Asamblea del Pueblo Guaraní Itika Guasu
(Guaraní People’s Assembly Itika Guasu, APG IG), which quickly
identified land rights as a priority – a precondition for
breaking dependency on the patrones and establishing independent
Guaraní livelihoods (Ibid). Soon afterwards, the APG IG and
their NGO allies embarked on their first efforts to map a
territorial claim, which went on to form part of a national
Guaraní territorial demand (discussed below).
As in other contexts (Wainwright and Bryan, 2009), mapping
territory in Itika Guasu was a power-laden process that involved
a series of concessions to state and settler geographies. In
order to be legible to the state, territory had to be imagined
and claimed as singular, bounded, mappable and located within
abstract state space. Furthermore, as the APG IG worked towards
the elaboration of a formal territorial demand, they made
pragmatic decisions about what to include and exclude from their
territory. As one former NGO Director Mario described:
A first judgment was to remove the cities. For example, Entre Ríos – Why
are we going to go and fight with the residents of Entre Ríos? They took
11
out Entre Ríos. Another judgement was [to take out] the main roads
(interview with author, 3 March, 2011).
The decision was also taken to exclude communities that lay
outside of O’Connor Province, and outside of Tarija Department,
whose boundary forms the northern limit of the TCO (former NGO
employee, interview with author, 4 April, 2011). Similar
processes of deliberation and reduction took place in indigenous
territorial demands throughout Bolivia during the early 1990s
(indigenous rights activist, interview with author, 14 February,
2012). These shrinking territories required new methodologies of
mapping; historical archives and indigenous place names
eventually came to be replaced by a logic of “indigenous spatial
needs” as a means of establishing and justifying indigenous
territorial limits – culminating in the creation of official
Spatial Needs Identification Studies. As Mario described this
shift:
There was a communal notion of ancestral territory which is what came
out at first. But then the [Guaraní] realized that, well, it wasn’t
viable…So, well, first of all they had to change; we can’t aspire to
12
our ancestral territory anymore; instead we have to try for a quantity
of land that’s viable in legal terms, but that at the same time is
enough to be able to live (interview with author, 3 March, 2011).
The fact that both the above quotations are from the accounts
NGO employees is telling, reflecting the protagonism of non-
indigenous actors in mapping territorial claims during the
1990s. Such NGO-indigenous engagements were structured by
asymmetrical power relations and by the uneven geographies of
NGO activism; for example, one former NGO employee claimed that
some Guaraní communities were omitted from the Itika Guasu
territorial claim owing to limited funding available to his then
organization (interview with author, 4 April, 2011).
These ambivalences notwithstanding, early mapping efforts formed
part of a broader social process, which had profound and
decolonizing effects on identities, ethnic power relations and
territorial aspirations in Itika Guasu. As in other experiences
of indigenous counter-mapping (Stocks 2003, Offen 2003), the
construction of a territorial claim provided a locus for a
13
broader project of identity-formation and decolonizing knowledge
(Gustafson 2009). This involved efforts at retelling history in
ways that made visible the Guaraníes’ pre-colonial occupation of
the Chaco, and the violence and dispossession they suffered at
the hands of the republican state. An illustrated educational
booklet produced by the a local NGO in the early 1990s and used
for community mobilisation is illustrative; it charts the
Guaraníes’ arrival in the region in search of the “Land without
Evil”, their long anti-colonial resistance and eventual
domination and subjugation by “the Spanish” who “wanted their
lands to raise cattle”. On another page, a crowd of Guaraní men,
women and children in traditional costume, declare (depicted in
speech bubbles): “500 years of resistance”, “We will recover
again...”, “....territory” “...and power” (CERDET undated).
These local (counter-) narratives of colonization, subjugation
and resurgence drew on, and contributed to, national Guaraní
movement efforts at retelling history, where the 1892 Kuruyuki
Massacre provided a powerful symbol of colonial violence and
anti-colonial resistance in defence of territory (Gustafson
2009: 39-40, 221-9).
14
These processes had a profound effect on Guaraní territorial
imaginaries and aspirations in Itika Guasu, where community
members continue to articulate a historically-grounded vision of
“recovering territory”, seen as the underlying, if elusive,
objective of the TCO claim. Although “transnationally
articulated” – inflected by multicultural discourses of
indigenous rights and ethnodevelopment during the 2990s
(Andolina et al. 2009) – these aspirations are also “locally
understood” (Valdivia 2005), grounded in personal and collective
memories of colonization, enslavement and ethnic resurgence
passed down through oral storytelling traditions. For example,
when asked about the land struggle, older people in Itika Guasu
often begin by relating accounts told by their elders of what
the territory was like prior to the arrival of the karai (non-
Guaraní people). The following passage is illustrative:
Before, ñande.1 They didn’t know any Spanish, they didn’t know any
Spanish; like that they lived peacefully. They looked after their land,
1 Ours/us (Guaraní)
15
up to what is now the crossroads. It was all Guaraní land and the banda2
too; everything – from Ivopeiti to Ivoca, everything, up to Puerto
Margarita. It was all land of the Guaraní, of our grandfathers, you
know. That is, there weren’t any Spanish people. There weren’t…like now
they’re already there, aren’t they? They’re already mixed. Before, it
was pure Guaraní, it was our territory. We made our potrero, they went to
that blue hill [he points], that’s where it was, they went there to
make their potrero…Our grandfathers would walk, before they didn’t
consume sugar or anything; it was pure maize, black beans, pumpkin, our
food was all like that. They would go with the porongo, it’s called; our
grandfathers carried chicha – kaguiye3 they say, don’t they? (Guaraní
community member, interview with author, January 19, 2012)
Here, territory is constructed as a fluid, continuous, Guaraní
space within which ancestors moved freely. The mburuvicha went on
to describe in detail the cultural practices of his ancestors
(los abuelos) and the strategies through which the karai had
displaced and subjugated them, aided by the first agrarian
reform, when “the law appeared – only for the karai; it wasn’t
for the indigenous people…never again could we rescue the land,
we couldn’t rescue the land”. It is this historical memory of
2 the opposite shore of the Pilcomayo river3 Chicha (Spanish), kaguiye (Guaraní) = a fermented maize drink central to the Guaraní diet
16
territorial loss that gives meaning to the TCO for this communal
leader. He described how, in the early days of the TCO claim
“people had the hope of being able to rescue [rescatar]
everything, in order to live peacefully”. However, ultimately
they “continue to have nothing”; the continuing presence of karai
landowners within the territory, and its already fragmented
nature, present seemingly insurmountable obstacles:
As they say, it’s going to be a bit difficult to recover. It’s already
like that: a piece here, a piece there. Everything already…because
before it was…there weren’t any karai… I myself also went to sow, for a
week I went to sow over there…Now I don’t; there’s a landowner there.
Settler imaginaries and the defence of property
The creation of Original Communal Lands (TCOs) under the 1996
INRA Law emerged from a decade of lowland indigenous
organization, counter-mapping, and national mobilization. It
also responded to pressure on the Bolivian state from the World
Bank, reflecting a global policy convergence around the positive
role of collectively-titled indigenous territories in promoting
17
environmentally sustainable forms of “ethnodevelopment” (Anthias
and Radcliffe 2013). Part of a national APG territorial demand
presented to President Gonzalo “Goni” Sanchez de Lozada
following the 1996 national indigenous March for Land and
Territory, Itika Guasu was among the first TCOs recognised,
gaining official TCO status in 1997. This did not automatically
give the Guaraní rights over the territory, but marked the
beginning of a long and complex land titling process. This
process involves measuring and evaluating all private property
claims within the TCO (“third parties”), who are awarded
property rights provided they can demonstrate productive land
use. The recognition – indeed prioritization – of private land
claims in TCOs resulted from pressure by landowner organizations
during the INRA Law’s elaboration, as well as the neoliberal
vision of Goni’s government (Urioste and Pacheco, 1999). As
such, TCO titling was an ambivalent tool for decolonisation from
the outset, which balanced indigenous claims to ancestral rights
against non-indigenous and statist visions of property and
productive land use. As noted below, this was not the INRA Law’s
18
only limitation – another being the exclusion of indigenous
rights to the subsoil.
This concession to landowner interests did not, however, prevent
the emergence of strong opposition to TCO titling among non-
indigenous residents of TCO Itika Guasu, a combination of cattle
ranchers and small farmers. Even before the official titling
process began, early Guaraní organizing efforts had brought
communities and NGO workers into tense, and sometimes violent,
confrontations with local landowners. As one local NGO Director
described:
There was a strong opposition from the start, from when they elaborated
the demand, since 1993. Because they felt threatened in their situation
of patrón, as owner of the territory and of the people. The first
reaction is that those of us who weren’t from the zone, the
institution, we were going to violate the intimacy of the property of
the third party, so there were many threats. These threats didn’t end
in the process of land titling (interview with author, May 4, 2009).
19
During the course of the SAN-TCO titling process (2000-present),
this opposition took the form of a series of concrete actions to
obstruct legal progress. Organized around two local cattle
ranching organizations, private claimants presented individual
and collective complaints to the National Institute for Agrarian
Reform (Instituto Nacional de Reforma Agraria, INRA) and other
state institutions, presented legal challenges, participated in
national landowner mobilizations, and lobbied departmental
authorities to block the allocation of departmental funds for
TCO titling (own fieldwork). Individuals also used corrupt
practices to influence the results of their properties’ legal
evaluation, such as the lending of cattle and attempts to
sweeten INRA officials with feasts, alcohol or cash payments.
These strategies drew on racialist networks of clientelistic
power and influence – a legacy of the historical confluence of
land ownership and political power in Tarija Department.
Underpinning these actions were a series of interconnected
discourses of rights. Whereas indigenous land claims sought to
contest the state’s production of territory, non-indigenous
20
claimants mobilized colonial and liberal notions of territory,
rights and identity, which emerged from and legitimated historic
processes of colonization and state territorialisation. First,
they sought to contest the TCO titling process by arguing that
land should be awarded to those who used it productively. This
did not, in their view, include the Guaraní; as one local
rancher told me:
They only say “it’s my territory”; they don’t sow, they…don’t have a
hacienda, so I believe that the land should be for people who….you
should give priority to the person who’s going to…fulfill the social
function. So that’s my proposal to INRA Nacional (interview with
author, 1 March, 2011).
By evoking the “social function of property”, a legacy of the
1952 agrarian revolution, this claimant deploys an entrenched
logic of agrarian reform to contest a more recent discourse of
cultural rights. Yet this discourse also has deeper roots. As in
many settler societies, dominant regional identities in Tarija
are constructed around the idea that (criollo or mestizo) settlers
legitimately earned their rights to land through a combination
21
of hard work and enterprise – a discourse that obscures the
violence that underpinned colonization, as well as indigenous
peoples’ profoundly unequal treatment before the law (Razack
2002). This discourse rests on a perpetuation of racialised
colonial stereotypes of the Guaraní as lazy, unproductive and
therefore undeserving of property rights. As one local official
observed:
It seems that this [INRA] law doesn’t have influence, because a cattle-
rancher comes and says “I have so many cows, so I’m going to take [the
land] away from him”; they say, “you don’t have cows…you don’t have
agriculture”. It’s because the same indigenous person five years ago
did nothing; “lazy” is the word. They have the idea that they stay
sitting on their asses and everyone gives them everything. Life’s not
like that – no, one has to work (Interview with author, 25 March,
2009).
What had made these discourses so powerful in the context of the
TCO land titling process is that they are shared by many of the
regional officials responsible for implementing the process. For
example, a former Departmental Director of INRA, who held the
22
post in the crucial years of 1999-2004 (when fieldwork took
place), openly rejected the logic of indigenous ancestral land
rights underpinning the INRA Law, arguing that:
[All] sectors without distinction should be required to use the land…
all should fulfill the social economic function…you can’t justify that
a people have so much unproductive land…it doesn’t serve any purpose,
they’re going to be a threat to society (Interview with author, 15 May,
2009).
Under this Director’s watch, the titling process in Itika Guasu
saw numerous irregularities, including the loss of property
files and the diversion of Danish funds designated for TCO
titling for individual titling processes in Tarija (own
fieldwork).
Private claimants also referred to their greater integration in
local and regional markets as evidence of the moral superiority
of their land claims. As one local rancher complained:
23
Sometimes it hurts…that they take away your land, and you being the
person…who produces, who provides meat here in the village, so [the
titling process] wasn’t good, no. I also expected the Guaraníes to
produce because they’re also human beings and they can produce. They
also have hands, they can produce and sell – they could farm, but no…
they don’t even sell a couple of cows, until now they don’t sell. I
don’t know…to have land for free and not make them raise other…- we say
in local dialect that “you neither eat nor let eat” (Interview with
author, 4 March, 2011).
As well as symbolizing productive capacity, market integration
serves to link karai land occupation to discourses of regional
development; as one wealthy cattle ranching leader proudly told
me:
The productive agro-pastoral sector here in the province is the main
driver of development. We’re not an industrial provinces, even less so
an industrial department, so everything is sustained by agriculture,
cattle ranching (Interview with author, 6 February, 2012)
Such discourses frame private land claimants as serving the
interests of broader Tarijeño society, implying that indigenous
24
land rights could potentially undermine the reciprocal networks
of production and exchange on which (non-indigenous) society
depends. By linking the defence of private property to broader
processes of social reproduction, non-indigenous claimants
position themselves within a regional project of producing
territory – a project that excludes indigenous peoples. At a
national level, these discourses of economic citizenship were
adapted to stress the importance of cattle ranching to the
nation’s food security; private claimants argued: “We’re
producers and we’re connected to the food security of this
country. So they’re not going to give all the land to the
indigenous peoples while we’re giving food to eat to the whole
country” (interview with author, 4 April, 2011). These
discourses resonate with colonial and republican discourses that
positioned indigenous peoples at the fringes of the nation-
state, framing non-indigenous settlement as a precursor to these
territories’ integration into national development. As such,
they are situated within a historic national project of
producing territory at the Chaco frontier.
25
Second, while Guaraní claims to the TCO rest on their pre-
colonial occupation of the territory, non-indigenous claimants
argued that they had earned ancestral rights through their
ancestors’ contribution to processes of postcolonial nation-
building. As the former President of a local cattle ranching
organisation told me:
My grandfather was an ex-combatant in the Chaco War, he fought in the
Chaco War. He went to war when he was 17 years old…he returned missing
an eye, with a bullet in the lung, which thirty years ago cost him his
life. I, as a grandson, I believe that I also consider myself originario,
don’t you think? That is, beyond the hacienda and when we [acquired it],
I believe that in the end we’re originarios, we’re originarios, we were born
there, even the grandparents were there. So I think we have to begin to
understand this issue there. We are just as much owners of this
territory (Interview with author, 28 April, 2009).
As others have noted (Perreault and Valdivia 2010), the Chaco
War retains a central role in the construction of a national
“imagined community” in Bolivia, where it is popularly depicted
as a heroic struggle in defence of the nation’s hydrocarbons
26
wealth.4 For the descendents of Chaco War veterans, their
ancestors’ sacrifice in this national war effort provides an
important moral basis for their private claims to TCO land. The
Guaraní have an ambivalent positionality within this nationalist
historiography; despite suffering huge losses and displacement,
they are popularly remembered as untrustworthy allies, or even
traitors, within this national war effort – owing largely to
their transnational kinship ties. As one local landowner
reiterated this discourse:
The Tarijeños [and] those from La Paz went to war, but the Guaraníes
declared themselves impartial. They declared themselves impartial, they
didn’t go to war – no Guaraní person went to war…because Paraguay also had
Guaraníes (Interview with author, 6 February, 2012).
The imaginary of land as a prize for sacrifice in battle has a
long genealogy in Bolivia, where since the time of the
Independence Wars ex-combatants have been awarded frontier lands
(and their indigenous inhabitants) as a reward for military
4 As Perreault and Valdivia note, non-Bolivian scholars have challenged this interpretation, identifying the war’s causes as a combination of internal social turmoil and elite incompetence (Klein 1992).
27
service. Indeed, O’Connor Province acquired its unlikely name
when Simon Bolívar awarded this vast area of land to the Irish-
born Independence hero Francis Burdett-O’Connor (Gustafson
2009:101). As such, references to the Chaco War reproduce a
deeply-entrenched discourse that frames private property as a
reward for participation in postcolonial nation-building – a
discourse whose origins lie in the violent colonization of
Indian frontier lands. Once again, the production of national
territory that Guaraní territorial claims seek to contest is
reasserted and defended by a settler population whose identities
and claims are bound up with this history.
Finally, non-indigenous claimants argued that the TCO claim in
Itika Guasu was not a product of Guaraní political agency, but
of intervention by “outsiders”, who were exploiting the Guaraní
for their own economic interests. The following passage from an
interview with a local cattle ranching leader is illustrative:
I want to tell you something in relation to the conflict - and I can
back this up in any debate: these are created conflicts, Penelope.
28
PA: Before the [titling] process, was the relation [between Guaraníes and non-Guaraníes] good?
Before the process, the relation was fine, before the TCO the
relation….there have always been – not only in the Guaraní zone but in
all the country – there were problems between workers and patrones,
there’s always been that. That’s a reality, we’re not going to deny it.
[There was] a certain kind of imposition by some landowners, that’s
true…but what I want to get at is that there are interests and who manages
those interests? It’s the same people who have obtained a lot of
resources – millions and millions of resources from international
cooperation to improve the life of those people [the Guaraní]. And how
have they improved the life of the Guaraníes after more than twenty
years in the zone?
PA: Are you talking about the instituciones de apoyo [i.e. NGOs and similar]?
About some NGOs, some instituciones de apoyo, specifically in O’Connor
Province. That is like an open secret, which one can’t complain about,
because Tarija lacks documentary evidence of many things…but it’s
popular knowledge: many families who are beneficiaries have got rich on
the money that came for them [the Guaraníes] – that’s not fair. So what
suits them? It suits them to have us divided…For me, those to blame for
29
the bad titling, because it was with their resources that they paid for
the land titling (interview with author, 28 April, 2009).
In this passage, a measured acknowledgement of the relations of
empatronamiento that predominated in Itika Guasu prior to ethnic
mobilisation is quickly masked over with the depiction of ethnic
conflict as a product of the self-serving activities of NGOs.
Rather than acknowledging that Guaraní speak from within the
nation, as historically wronged and misrecognised citizens, this
discourse situates their land claims as outside of the nation, a
product of self-serving interventions by foreign-funded NGOs.
Private claimants, on the other hand, are framed not as self-
interested actors but as the defenders of local sovereignty and
social order in the face of these foreign interventions. This
denial of Guaraní political agency is even more explicit in the
following account:
I think they [the NGOs] have trained them [the Guaraní] like that, with
the idea that the land belongs to the indigenous sector. And this is
something I’ve felt and I’ve heard and I’ve seen various times – that
no, the indigenous person has rights/ is right [tiene derecho], the
30
indigenous people are originarios, that they have rights and the terceros
don’t, and some people have transmitted that in the minds of the
indigenous people, but the thing is…it made us [feel] a bit like this:
that they wanted to do us harm. …but they didn’t succeed because at the
end of the day we live in the same terrain and we have to live as a
community, always united (Interview with author, 2 March, 2011)
Once again, the implication is that NGOs – with their discourse
of indigenous rights – unsettled otherwise stable and harmonious
inter-ethnic relations within the territory. This refusal to
recognize the Guaraníes’ political agency, or the historical
grounding of their claims, can be read as a defence of a
racialized citizenship project, from which non-indigenous
settlers have historically benefited and which has been called
into question by the Guaraníes’ TCO claim.
The three discourses described above illustrate how Guaraní
efforts to reclaim territory in Itika Guasu have been contested
by a non-indigenous population, who mobilize in defence of a
racialised vision of territory and citizenship shaped by a
history of frontier settlement, nation-building and agrarian
31
reform. This local resistance to the TCO provides at least part
of the explanation for the ambivalent results of the TCO titling
process in Itika Guasu. In 2012, fifteen years after the TCO’s
establishment, the Guaraní of Itika Guasu have received title to
90,539.9 hectares, 38.4 percent of the total TCO area (see Map
1). This area is discontinuous, interspersed with privately-
titled and unresolved property claims, tends to be the least
productive land in the TCO, and consists largely of areas that
Guaraní communities already occupied prior to 1997. In 2009, the
APG IG demanded a paralysis of the titling process, claiming it
was benefiting third parties more than them, while local cattle
ranching associations are demanding an audit of the entire
titling process (authors’ fieldnotes from local cattle ranchers’
meeting, Entre Ríos town hall, 18 March, 2011).
As such, TCO Itika Guasu remains fragmented and unfinished, with
no foreseeable resolution on the horizon. This outcome is not
unusual, particularly in the Chaco region (Fundación Tierra
2011). 5 While this situation has been a continuing source of
5 Other authors have also noted the “swiss cheese” effect of third party claims in indigenous TCO territories (Griffiths 2000, Hindery 2013: 213,
32
tension between Chaco indigenous organizations and the Morales
government, it is in land-poor communities that its effects are
keenly felt. Here, in a context of worsening environmental
conditions, people complain of the insufficient quantity and
poor quality of land available for farming, problems accessing
natural resources, and ongoing land conflicts with karai neighbors
([Author reference] PhD dissertation, 2014). The fragmented
status of TCOs also presents an obstacle to the exercise of
autonomous territorial governance, and to the pursuit of formal
indigenous autonomy under the new Autonomies Law (Cameron,
2013). I now move on to consider how these dynamics and outcomes
articulate with a third territorializing process: that of
hydrocarbons development.
Energy landscapes and the erasure of territory
TCO Itika Guasu overlies the mega gas-field Margarita-Huacaya,
widely regarded as containing Bolivia’s most significant gas
reserves (Figure 1). This makes Itika Guasu an important site in
Almaraz 2002).
33
which to explore the articulations between indigenous
territorial struggles and hydrocarbons development – dynamics
that are of wider relevance, given the significant geographical
and temporal overlap between TCO claims and hydrocarbons
development. In 2008, 20 of Bolivia’s 84 TCOs were subject to
contracts for hydrocarbons exploration and exploitation (CEADES
2008). This overlap reflects a second key limitation of the INRA
Law: contrary to indigenous demands for subsoil rights in TCOs,
the subsoil remains sole patrimony of the Bolivian state.6 More
broadly, of course, it reflects the apparent paradox that
recognition of indigenous territorial rights in Bolivia
coincided with a period of intensifying extractive industry
development in indigenous territories, following the neoliberal
reforms of the mid-1980s (Hindery 2013).7 As widely observed,
the extractives frontier has continued to expand under the
Morales government, alongside the state’s increasing role in
6 See Hindery 2013:170, 179, 201 for a discussion of this.7 Some commentators have argued that indigenous land titling provides essential juridical security for capital in the context of extractive industry development (Hale 2006, Bryan 2011), as well as responding to socialand environmental countermovements under neoliberalism (Anthias and Radcliffe, 2013).
34
extraction and in the social distribution of its benefits (Ibid;
Bebbington 2009).
In the discussion that follows, I argue that the racialised
local dynamics of TCO titling have articulated in complex ways
with the reterritorializing processes of hydrocarbon
development, with implications for the meaning and strategies of
the Guaraní land struggle. Here, I make three main arguments.
First, the existence of private property claims within the TCO
enabled a transnational company to evade direct negotiations
with the Guaraní over indigenous rights in the context of
hydrocarbon development, thereby further politicizing a local
conflict over land rights. Second, transnational and state
interests in hydrocarbons have consistently (both prior to and
under the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) government) compounded
local opposition in obstructing the legal progress of the Itika
Guasu TCO claim.8 Third, the Guaraníes’ frustration with TCO
titling, alongside their long struggle to exercise territorial
8 A similar argument is made by Hindery, 2013: see especially pages 117, 202,203.
35
control in the context of hydrocarbon development, have
converged to produce new territorial visions and strategies,
which are illustrative of how TCOs are being reframed and
redeployed in the context of multi-scalar conflicts over
hydrocarbon governance. I begin with some brief reflections on
the imaginative geographies of energy development, in order to
understand why TCO status failed to guarantee the Guaraní
territorial control in the context of hydrocarbons development.
Gavin Bridge describes landscapes of energy extraction as
“portals, worm-holes between these two worlds in which time and
space work differently” (2009: 1). Here, he contrasts the “deep-
time processes” involved in the natural production of oil and
gas with the “above-ground processes” that enable its
distribution, through a “surface world of mobility and change
where (citing Altvater) ‘the quality of space, as well as time,
is… asymptomatically reduced to zero’”. The latter gives rise to
a “rhizomatic structure of branches, links and nodes” (Ibid: 8)
– such as gas pipelines, and other transport and communications
infrastructure – that massively exceed the point of extraction
36
and seek “to overcome all the obstacles that make (space)
distinguishable” (2009: 2). Of course, what actually unfolds
here is not the obliteration of space but its re-territorialization,
oriented towards the rapid transportation of fossil fuels. As
Bridge also notes (2001), such a reterritorialization is
predicated on, and legitimized by, the representation of
resource supply zones as devoid of people and free of conflict,
awaiting the modernizing magic of transnational capital. Echoing
colonial imaginaries of indigenous frontier regions as “empty
lands” awaiting colonization and development, this “post-
industrial resource triumphalism” renders invisible indigenous
territorial claims at the very moment that the stakes involved
are dramatically increased. As TCO Itika Guasu demonstrates,
these discursive and material processes have not gone
unchallenged by indigenous peoples – particularly those already
engaged in historic struggles for territorial recognition.
The Spanish oil company Repsol signed a contract with the
Bolivian state company YPFB for activities in Caipipendi Block
on 14th May 1997, nearly two months after the TCO gained official
37
recognition. Shortly afterwards, the company began its
operations in the Margarita gas field, including the drilling of
four gas wells and the construction of a processing plant,
airstrip and access roads (Anthias 2012). The APG IG were not
initially consulted, or even informed, about these activities;
as one APG IG leader put it:
They entered [the TCO] as if they were entering their house. It was as
if you’re the owner of the house and they pass under your nose, in
other words. They didn’t even present us with the environmental impact
study (Interview with author, April 24, 2009).
In 2003, as the social and environmental impacts of hydrocarbons
development became increasingly evident, the APG IG began to
make demands for recognition of their rights, including to prior
consultation, land use payments and compensation for social and
environmental impacts (APG IG et al. 2006, Perreault 2008). In
articulating these claims, they made reference to the TCO and
its “immobilized” status – which means that all private claims
are subject to legal revision and no land transactions can take
place until the TCO titling process has been completed – through
38
statements such as: “This terrain is property of the TCO, for
which reason they should have consulted, given that it is in a
process of land titling and therefore immobilized” (APG 2007).
Repsol responded by explaining that it had already made land use
agreements with, and payments to, private landowners within the
TCO, whose rights had been legally validated by INRA Tarija. As
a 2006 letter states:
All the contracts made with proprietors of the zone, called third
parties by the indigenous were made following verification of their
property rights, certified by the same National Institute of Agrarian
Reform, so that the air strip, the gas wells, the Margarita plant and
other installations are found in properties that will be titled to the
said third parties (Repsol YPF 2006).
As this illustrates, while the TCO was an important reference
point for the APG IG in voicing demands for participation in
hydrocarbons governance, it was not a reference point for
Repsol, which looked for – and, with INRA’s collusion,
effectively created – private property rights in order to gain
39
legal security for its operations. It is important to note that
this constituted a perversion of legal norms of TCO titling,
which stipulate that all private properties within TCO
boundaries are subject to legal revision – and potential
redistribution, if unable to demonstrate productive land use. In
fact, Guaraní informants claim that several of the properties in
question were unused at the time of Repsol’s arrival; indeed, in
at least one case, gas installations were used to justify the
property’s “Economic Social Function” (APG IG et. al 2006).
Ironically, then, while the space-obliterating imaginaries of
energy capital had initially rendered the TCO invisible, at the
point of negotiating land use Repsol sought to re-spatialize its
activities, by focusing on securing the “worm-holes” that
enabled it to access deep-time processes of natural production
(Bridge 2009). The company’s success in imposing this imaginary
is illustrated by the fact that, in 2003, APG IG leaders, the
Director of INRA Tarija and a Repsol engineer carried out an on-
site inspection of the four gas wells, to establish their
precise location and the legal status of land (INRA Report 18
40
June, 2003). This did not satisfy the APG IG, however, who
continued to argue that they had preferential rights to all
property in the TCO, until the titling process was complete. As
such, they called on INRA officials “to explain [to Repsol] the
situation of the land titling process in Itika Guasu, through
which companies should respect the preferential right of the APG
and mitigate environmental impacts” (CERDET 2003).
As this illustrates, despite the discursive construction of
resource producing zones as devoid of people and conflict, the
reterritorializing processes of extraction bring transnational
companies into direct contact and conflict with local
territorial projects. In Itika Guasu, the fact that the
territory was the site of competing land claims had important
consequences, enabling Repsol to negotiate land use without
consulting the Guaraní organisation. For the Guaraní, this
constituted an act of profound symbolic violence, because it
called into question their still precarious project of
reclaiming territory from their former patrones.
41
Furthermore, over time the Guaraní became convinced that
Repsol’s presence in their territory was the real reason for the
continuing lack of progress on consolidating their land rights –
an idea that was repeatedly discussed in assemblies I attended
in Itika Guasu 2008-9. This discourse is often framed with
reference to the Morales government’s dependence on hydrocarbons
extraction as a basis for social redistribution, in ways that
present a powerful critique of the MAS development model. As one
leader put it:
There is a strong interest in Itika Guasu; an interest of the oil company and
the national government - selling, exporting oil. If it doesn’t export this,
the government, this administration of the government, can fall. So, [the
government thinks]: How am I going to attend to a group of 4000 little people,
knowing that these little Guaraní [occupy] 216,000 hectares instead of helping
a gigantic power, the oil company, to generate my income and support the 8
million or 9 million Bolivians? (Interview with author, 24 April, 2009).
In short, extractive industry has colluded with landowner
resistance to obstruct the progress of the Itika Guasu TCO
claim, instead re-inscribing the racialised geography of rights
that the Guaraní sought to challenge. This can be interpreted as
42
a failure not only of the Guaraníes’ project of “recovering
territory” but also of a global development imaginary of
indigenous territories as bounded spaces of ethnic and cultural
difference (Anthias and Radcliffe 2013). Drawing on
International Labour Organization Convention 169, the INRA Law
promised indigenous peoples rights to “the geographical spaces
that constitute [their] habitat…to which they have traditionally
had access and where they maintain and develop their own forms
of economic, social and cultural organisation in a way that
guarantees their survival and development” (Article 41. 5). In
Itika Guasu, this promise of autonomous territorial development
has remained elusive, undermined by racialised power
inequalities and the reterritorializing imperatives of natural
gas extraction.
It is in this context that the APG IG leadership has
increasingly looked beyond state-led land titling to focus its
efforts on producing territory through negotiations over
hydrocarbon governance. The discussion that follows focuses on
how territorial recognition and territorial autonomy have been
43
reframed in the context of recent negotiations between the APG
IG and Repsol.
Producing territory in the age of gas
On 23rd March 2011, community members and leaders from through
Itika Guasu gathered in Ñaurenda, the birthplace of the APG IG,
to celebrate the organization’s 22nd anniversary. Celebrations
began with an evening “cultural event”, where alternating
Guaraní music groups accompanied classes of school children
dancing the rueda (wheel) interspersed with speeches wishing
everyone a happy birthday and a happy future. The atmosphere was
surprisingly flat; most of the audience sat silently through the
hours of acts. When at midnight twenty-two fireworks were let
off in celebration, the response was muted. Speakers blasted the
usual Spanglish version of Happy Birthday and the audience were
asked to stand and participate, but there was little response.
One Guaraní friend contrasted the event nostalgically to the
days of Machirope – a leader of the Guaraní land struggle in the
1990s, killed in a bus accident en route to La Paz – who had
44
been capable of rousing the audience with his oratory skills and
charisma.
The next morning was spent in preparation for the official
parade, official speeches and almuerzo (lunch), which had
mobilized all the community’s women. Throughout the morning’s
preparations, a rolling announcement prepared by “Radio Niskor”9
blared from loudspeakers, informing people of the terms and
achievements of the recent “Agreement of Friendship and
Cooperation between the APG IG and Repsol YPF E&P Bolivia SA”.
In fact, no one seemed to be listening; those gathered on
Ñaurenda’s oka/cancha (patio/football pitch) were more preoccupied
with last-minute preparations for the speeches and lunch, or with
catching up with friends from other communities, than they were
with the details of an agreement negotiated by an increasingly
distant, secretive, and unaccountable leadership elite. After
peeling a few potatoes, I accompanied some CERDET técnicos to pick
up slaughtered cows and chicha from a nearby community.
9 Radio Niskor is an Equipo Niskor internet-based project dedicated to the dissemination of audio documents on human rights, civil liberties and peace. See http://www.radionizkor.org/about.html.
45
When I returned, the speeches had already begun. Representatives
of the APG IG leadership, local NGOs, the army, and the
municipal, departmental and provincial government spoke in turn,
each giving their personal (and political) take on the APG IG’s
22nd anniversary. Also notable in this staged performance of
multicultural/plurinational citizenship was the presence of a
representative from Repsol, who sat alongside other speakers and
was repeatedly welcomed, although he did not speak. When it came
to the turn of the APG IG President to speak, he told the
audience that 2011 was a “special year” for the Guaraní of Itika
Guasu, who had “cause for celebration”. He went on:
On the 29th December, we signed an agreement with Repsol Bolivia SA
which put an end to the difficult confrontation which we’ve maintained
for many years. But we signed without renouncing any of our rights and
gained full legal recognition of our property over the Communal Land of
Origin and of the existence of the APG IG.
This speech could simply be read as an effort to pacify
community members, many of whom had become skeptical of the APG
IG’s opaque negotiations with oil companies – something the
event’s tense atmosphere reflected. Nevertheless, statements
46
such as that quoted above are significant in revealing that
territorial recognition is viewed as a key achievement of the
agreement with Repsol. This interpretation was reproduced by
other APG IG leaders in informal conversations and interviews in
2011.10 By “recognition”, these informants referred to the
production of a written agreement signed by Repsol (overseen by
the APG IG’s legal advisors from Equipo Niskor), in which the
oil company stated that it recognised the APG IG’s ownership of
TCO Itika Guasu, as well as its legal existence and rights under
international law (Equipo Niskor, 2010: 3).
While this may seem reminiscent of precisely the multicultural
forms of recognition that the APG IG has struggled to move
beyond, APG IG leaders nevertheless saw it as important. On the
one hand, this recognition gains meaning in the context of
Repsol’s historic refusal to acknowledge the Guaraníes’
territorial rights (discussed above). On the other hand, it
gains importance in the context of the Bolivian state’s
10 Informal conversations with author recorded in fieldnotes 11 February, 11 April and 27 December, 2011; author interview with APG IG President, 22 September, 2011.
47
continuing failure to fully recognize Guaraní land rights in
Itika Guasu (by completing the titling process). In fact, the
APG IG-Repsol agreement is just one example of how agreements
over extractive industry development in Itika Guasu have come to
stand in for state-sanctioned land title as a symbol of territorial
recognition. An agreement signed with the former departmental
Prefect Mario Cossio in 2010 regarding the construction of a
highway through the TCO, has been heralded by APG IG leaders as
the first time in history that the departmental government had
given “legal recognition that the APG IG is the owner of Itika
Guasu” (informal conversation with author, 11 April, 2011).
Later the same year, a Constitutional Sentence (25th October,
2010) issued by the Plurinational Constitutional Tribunal,
relating to a conflict between the APG IG and the departmental
road-building company, provided such a strong legal endorsement
for the APG IG’s land rights that some APG IG leaders described
it as worth more than a TCO land title (Informal conversation
with author, 23 June, 2011; interview with author, 28 December,
2011). I was even told that: “We’re going to give it to every
48
institution so that they know, so that they too can read it”
(Informal conversation with author, 22 December, 2012).
In this context, the APG IG’s agreement with Repsol YPF is just
one example of how legal and para-legal agreements over
extractive industry – negotiated in regional, national, and
transnational arena – have come to provide an alternative
terrain for the discursive production and recognition of
indigenous territory, beyond the TCO titling process. It is
precisely in light of the Morales government’s continuing
failure to grant the Guaraní legal title to TCO Itika Guasu that
such agreements acquire their meaning. As one APG IG leader told
me:
The ex-governor of Tarija, Mario Cossio, has already recognised
everything, and the company [Repsol] as well has recognised the rights
of the people, but the only one who doesn’t want to recognize [our
rights] is the government…Abroad, in other countries, the APG is
recognised. But the only one who hasn’t recognised us is the government
(informal conversation with author, 22 December, 2012).
49
Actualizing autonomy11
Perhaps more telling still is the way in which territorial
autonomy has been reframed in the wake of the 2010 Friendship
Agreement. As noted above, from the early days of the land
struggle, the TCO has been associated with a struggle for
autonomy, or becoming iyambae (free, without an owner). Initially
grounded in the struggle to break relations of dependency and
exploitation with patrones, autonomy is also associated with
moving freely through territory, and recovering cultural
practices that enabled ancestors to “live well” without reliance
on outside goods and labor markets. The Morales government has
seen the emergence of new tropes for imagining indigenous
autonomy, including the creation of autonomously-governed
indigenous territories (based on TCOs) within a “plurinational
state”.
Without necessarily abandoning the above tropes, in the wake of
the 2010 Friendship Agreement, APG IG leaders have increasingly
come to talk about the Itika Guasu Investment Fund as a route 11 I use the verb “actualize” here in both its English senses: “to make real or concrete” and “to represent or describe accurately”, as well as in the Spanglish sense (actualizar: “to bring up to date”).
50
to, and a symbol of, indigenous autonomy. In his 2011
anniversary speech, the APG IG’s President referred to the Fund
as “part of our long-term funding strategy, which will permit us
to carry forward our own development. This guarantees our real
autonomy and that of our children”. If this speech could be
dismissed as political discourse designed to quell the
skepticism of community members, then informal discussions with
APG IG leaders suggest that it has a deeper resonance for those
involved in the agreement’s negotiation and management.
For example, one day in late 2011, an Itikeño friend, Román, was
telling me about the ongoing process for establishing formal
indigenous (Guaraní) autonomy in one municipality, which he
dismissed as “not real autonomy” owing to the continuing
presence of non-indigenous campesinos in local government.12 When I
12 For a discussion of the limitations of the formal process for establishing indigenous autonomy (as either TCO or indigenous municipality) under the 2009Autonomies Law, see Garcés 2012; Albó and Romero 2009, Cameron 2013. As this informant implies, most lowland indigenous peoples share their municipalitieswith non-indigenous populations, who may not indigenous autonomy in the required municipal referendum and, even if this is won, may demand co-participation in municipal governance. The alternative and preferred route toindigenous autonomies – as TCOs – is inaccessible to most indigenous groups owing to the unfinished status of TCO land titling; the 2009 Constitution states that only “consolidated indigenous territories” – i.e., titled TCOs – can gain autonomy (article 293).
51
asked him “What is real autonomy?” he referred to the agreement
with Repsol, emphasizing that:
We negotiated on our own with the company; now we’re managing the money
on our own; we made our development plan for the next 20 years on our own”
(27 December, 2011, my emphasis).
The fact that the money was from a transnational oil company,
negotiated with the help of foreign lawyers, was unimportant –
for Román “on our own” meant independently of karai-controlled
regional institutions and the MAS government, both of which had
sought to contain the Guaraní quest for territory and autonomy.
Yet, “on our own” also had a deeper significance; it framed the
agreement as another step in the Guaraníes’ struggle to break
relations of dependency with their former patrones; as he went
on:
Before you had to work for the patrón, he would pay you in coca; if the
women wanted to wash the clothes then first they had to grind maize;
you had to work a whole month just to get some sugar for your mate, but
now you are working on your own, you’re doing things yourself.
52
To emphasize the point further, he compared the Fund – the
interest from which would fund APG IG projects – to “a donkey
that you fatten and breed every year”, concluding: “that is
autonomy”. Imagined in such terms, the Investment Fund had
transformed gas – a non-renewable resource whose extraction
requires little direct Guaraní participation – into a
sustainable source of subsistence to be owned, nurtured and
exploited by the Guaraní. This discourse furthermore placed
recent APG IG success in negotiating with extra-territorial
actors over extraction on a continuum with early struggles to
gain independence from local patrones. However, whereas the
latter struggle has been grounded in the quest for material
control of territory – something to be achieved through state-
sanctioned land rights – this new notion of autonomy rests less
on land control than on the APG IG’s ability to capture gas
rents. In this context, APG IG leaders increasingly talk about
indigenous autonomy not as a distant dream – or, alternatively,
as the reward for completing a lengthy state-led administrative
53
process – but as something that has already been achieved. As
another APG IG leader proclaimed in an interview:
We’re already autonomous! Because not we’re not maintaining ourselves
here with [help from] other local institutions, we’re not dependent on
NGOs, on the [regional government] anymore – all those things
(Interview with author, 28 December, 2011).
I do not wish to glorify the APG IG’s agreement with Repsol, the
negotiation of which has illustrated the destructive and
divisive effects of indigenous engagements with extractive
industry (Sawyer 2004). Negotiations leading up to the
agreement have been accompanied by increasing distancing of the
APG IG leadership and Guaraní communities in Itika Guasu. In
2009, the APG IG leadership assumed special decision-making
powers, which has led to an effective end to communal, zonal,
and regional assemblies in Itika Guasu. Having attended frequent
multi-day assemblies in Itika Guasu in 2008-9, I witnessed the
dramatic nature of this decline in popular participation. This
erosion of mechanisms of democratic accountability has generated
54
a lack of trust in the APG IG leadership among communities.
Communication and coordination between different levels of the
APG IG leadership has also deteriorated in the context of the
centralization of decision-making power with a small leadership
elite; as one communal leader complained:
There’s no coordination with the communal leaders, the zonal leaders…
[the APG IG Directorate] continue negotiating with the companies,
continue fighting with them. But we…they’re only there…they’re sitting
there, and they don’t remember us (APG IG communal leader, interview
with author, 6 January, 2012).
This lack of communication and accountability has fuelled rumors
of corruption and fiscal mismanagement by the Entre Rios-based
leadership following the agreement with Repsol. Tensions have
been exacerbated by introduction of salaries to APG IG leaders
following the agreement. These tensions have also played out
within communities, where some APG IG community-level
representatives – including the father of my host family – have
begun to receive occasional and unpredictable handouts. The fact
that the creation of such unregulated “salaries” followed the
55
sudden dismissal of the APG IG’s widely-respected accountant in
2009 served to fuel speculation about fiscal mismanagement among
communities, NGOs and other Guaraní capitanías.
Neither am I suggesting that hydrocarbons development has
produced a universal, collectively-shared shift in the meaning
of the land struggle in Itika Guasu; rather, there is evidence
of a growing disjuncture between the way territory is framed by
the APG IG leadership (and other actors involved in the
hydrocarbon conflict) and how it is understood by Guaraní
communities. If TCO titling had already revealed the gap between
the state’s legal-cartographic production of indigenous
territory and community members’ visions of “recovering
territory” (discussed above), then hydrocarbon negotiations
constitute another parallel arena within which territory has
come to be understood and struggled over.
Nevertheless, these examples serve to illustrate that, if
indigenous territory-making projects often conflict with those
of extractive industry, then they are also transformed by these
56
engagements. This cannot simply be dismissed as an abandonment
of “indigenous values” in favor of material interests. Rather,
the pursuit of territorial recognition and control in a context
of extractive industry development gives rise to diverse
strategies, which challenge essentialist notions of indigenous
peoples as traditional, non-market actors (McNeish 2012). Of
course, such choices are not made in conditions of indigenous
peoples’ choosing; ; if indigenous leadership demands often
articulate “more of a desire for participation and protagonism
than outright rejection and confrontation of extractive
interests” (Ibid: 54), then it is worth noting that indigenous
peoples are often unable to prevent extraction in their
territories, making “participation and protagonism” often the
only viable option.
It is worth noting that the APG IG is not alone in seeking to
gain access to a share of gas rents as a means to implement
their visions for indigenous territorial governance. In December
2011, the CCGT proposed the creation of a Departmental
Indigenous Fund consisting of 15% of Tarija’s gas rents to fund
57
the implementation of Territorial Management Plans in TCOs
(fieldnotes, 2/2/12). This proposal replicates at a departmental
level – and seeks to provide an indigenous-controlled
alternative to – the state-managed national Indigenous Fund
(discussed above), which receives a fixed share of national
Direct Hydrocarbon Tax – rents generated largely by gas
operations in indigenous territories of Tarija. At a national
level, too, the governance of hydrocarbons is coming to play an
increasingly important, if little-acknowledged, role in
indigenous visions of autonomy. For example, during an interview
in Camiri in February 2012, the APG’s national Autonomies
Officer told me about a proposal for the creation of a national
Guaraní oil company to conduct extraction within Guaraní
territories, which, he argued, could provide the “economic base”
for an autonomous “Guaraní nation”.
These visions of gas-rents funded indigenous autonomy must be
placed in a context in which indigenous peoples have, under the
2009 Constitution and Autonomies Law, seen their demands for
formal indigenous autonomy “domesticated” (Garcés, 2011) into a
58
form of “autonomy without resources” (Cameron, 2013), which
remains unachievable in many territories (see footnote 12). They
must also be placed in a national context in which political
actors at a variety of scales are increasingly framing gas rents
control as a basis for their territorial projects and
sovereignty claims (Gustafson and Fabricant, 2011). Both
provincial and departmental autonomy movements in Tarija have
mobilized historic “resource grievances” to claim local control
of gas rents as the basis for elite-led (and profoundly racist
and conservative) political projects (Bebbington and Humphreys
Bebbington, 2011). Such subnational projects replicate the MAS
government’s own construction of citizenship and nation, wherein
state control of Bolivia’s gas wealth is framed as the basis for
popular sovereignty and decolonizing development (Perreault and
Valdivia, 2010). The case of Itika Guasu suggests that
indigenous peoples are emerging as active participants in this
new regime of hydrocarbon citizenship and that TCOs – for all
their limitations – may provide an important territorial basis
for such engagements.
59
Conclusion
Whereas existing accounts of indigenous territorial claims have
tended to focus on the power or pitfalls of counter-mapping,
this paper has looked beyond these debates to highlight how
indigenous territorial claims are conditioned and transformed by
other territorial projects enacted at a variety of scales.
Exploring this question in the Bolivian context highlights the
continuing challenges facing indigenous projects for
decolonisation under the Morales government. On the one hand,
the full implementation of indigenous land rights continues to
be obstructed by colonial discourses, geographies and power
relations, which reflect a violent history of frontier
settlement, nation-building and exclusionary agrarian reform in
the lowlands. On the other hand, I have shown how indigenous
claims to land rights and territorial control continue to be
subjugated to the territorial and temporal demands of extractive
industry development, now framed as the basis for social
redistribution and state-led decolonisation.
60
As Repsol’s activities in Itika Guasu demonstrate, capitalist
production of abstract space and requirements for legal security
sit awkwardly with indigenous territorial imaginaries and
claims, which seek territorial control as well as recognition.
Thus, if TCOs were envisaged as governable spaces – embedded in
processes of neoliberal territorial ordering ([Author reference]
and Radcliffe 2013) – in practice they emerged as spaces of
conflict and contestation over resource sovereignty and rights.
These conflicts make visible the contradictory tendencies of
neoliberal and “post-neoliberal” development models, both of
which have promised indigenous peoples “territory” while
aggressively pursuing extractive industry development in their
lands. In both cases, this janus-faced agenda has been
accompanied, and facilitated, by a failure to unsettle colonial
geographies of rights – represented in this case by the legal
and in-practice protections afforded to non-indigenous private
property claims in indigenous territories. From the Guaraníes’
perspective, recent dealings between Repsol, INRA and local
cattle ranchers represent the latest episode in a long history
61
of collusions between settlers, the state and capitalist
interests in the Chaco.
Yet, the Guaraní have not merely been passive victims of these
processes. Rather, I have described how they have continuously
sought to exercise agency in defence of their own territorial
project. This project has not remained static, however; rather,
APG IG visions and strategies for producing territory have
shifted, in the context of a failed land titling process, a
decade of hydrocarbon negotiations, and a new era of national
resource politics. These shifts are not necessarily positive. It
is also important to note that, although they are framed in
defiant opposition to the MAS government, regional elites and
karai landowners, they are certainly not a challenge to
capitalist resource extraction. Yet, what these ambivalent
developments do demonstrate is that multicultural framings of
indigenous territories – as bounded, static, and defensive
spaces – are inadequate to make sense of the contingent,
adaptive and politically charged nature of indigenous
territorial struggles. Such struggles are framed not only by
62
long histories of colonial dispossession but also by the
contemporary processes within which indigenous peoples find
themselves entangled.
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