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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