geopolitics of the amazon - Álvaro garcía linera

8/13/2019 Geopolitics of the Amazon - lvaro Garca Linera

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The tragic course of history so unfolds that the

counterrevolution can come hand in hand with a faction of its

own builders which, without necessarily advocating it, may as

a consequence of the exacerbation of its corporatist, regional

or sectoral particularism, and without taking into account

the general conguration of overall social forces nationally

and internationally, end up defending the interests of the

conservative forces of the right and undermining their own

revolutionary process. That is precisely what came to happen

with the so-called TIPNIS march.

Landed-Hereditary Power and Capitalist Accumulation

Geopolitics of the Amazon

lvaro Garca LineraVice-President of the Plurinational State of Bolivia

Published by climateandcapitalism.com.

This translation, by Richard Fidler, is licensed under a Creative Commons

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.


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2 Geopolitics of the Amazon

lvaro Garca Linera is one of Latin Americas lead-ing Marxist intellectuals. He is also the Vice-Presidentof Bolivia the co-pilot, as he says, to President Evo

Morales, and an articulate exponent of the governmentspolicies and strategic orientation.

In a recent book-length essay, Geopolitics of the Ama-zon: Landlord Hereditary Power and Capitalist Accumu-lation, published in September 2012, Garca Linera dis-cusses a controversial issue of central importance to thedevelopment process in Latin America, and explains howBolivia is attempting to address the intersection betweeneconomic development and environmental protection.1

The issues he addresses are of great importance not

only in Bolivia but throughout Latin America, and infact in most of the countries of the imperialist periphery.They are especially important to understand in the FirstWorld, where there is an increasing campaign in parts ofthe left to turn against the progressive and anticapitalistgovernments in Latin America on the ground of their al-leged extractivism.

Garca Linera examines the classic Marxist criteria onthe forms of appropriation of nature by humanity. Ex-tractivism, he shows, is not synonymous with underde-

velopment. Rather, it is necessary to use the resourcesgained from primary or export activity controlled by thestate to generate the surpluses that can satisfy the mini-mal conditions of life of Bolivians and to guarantee anintercultural and scientic education that generates a crit-ical mass capable of undertaking and leading the emerg-ing processes of industrialization and economic develop-ment.

A major theme of the book is to refute the allegations inthe opposition media that the TIPNIS highway betweenCochabamba and Beni is intended for the export of Bra-zilian products to the Pacic via Bolivian territory. Theproposed highway was the subject of much controversyand two recent marches by dissident indigenous activ-ists. The book clearly demonstrates that the route is in-tended as part of the national unication of the country.On December 7, 2012, the lawfully mandated consulta(consultation) of the communities directly affected bythe proposed highway project concluded its proceedings.Of the 69 communities in question, 58 participated in theconsulta. Of these, 53 approved the construction of the

highway between Villa Tunari and San Ignacio.Geopolitics of the Amazon has attracted wide atten-

tion throughout Latin America. In a recent review, theeminent Brazilian sociologist Emir Sader says it refutes

each and every one of the allegations of the oppositionin his country and their international spokespersons. Hedescribes it as an essential book, without which it is not

possible to understand the present phase of the Bolivianprocess and the root of the conicts affecting it.2

The book has sparked erce debate in Bolivia itself, in-cluding a lengthy response by Ral Prada Alcoreza, a for-mer comrade of Garca Linera in the Comuna collective.3

There is an extensive literature on these issues nowbeing produced in Latin America. Another example is abook, El desarrollo en cuestin: reexiones desde Amri-ca Latina. It includes articles by some of the authors citedin the debate between Garca Linera and Prada.4

Geopolitics of the Amazon has attracted commentaryin Quebec, including a favourable review by Andr Mal-tais in the widely-readLautjournal.5A compendium ofarticles by the legendary Peruvian Marxist Jos CarlosMaritegui recently published in Quebec also includeswritings by lvaro Garca Linera.6 More of his texts maybe found on-line (Spanish only) on his web site.7

This is my translation of the full text of Geopolitics ofthe Amazon. Garca Lineras footnotes are included aswell as a few of my own, the latter signed Tr. I have

substituted English-language references, where avail-able, for texts cited in the notes.Muchas graciasto Federico Fuentes and Cristina Rojas

for their diligent and critical reviews of my draft transla-tion. I am of course solely responsible for the nal text,published here, which includes some small changes interminology that do not substantially alter the text rstpublished in my blog8 and elsewhere on the web. Andmy thanks as well to Ian Angus for making this translatedtext available in pamphlet form.

Richard Fidler

1. http://www.vicepresidencia.gob.bo/IMG/pdf/libro_nal.pdf

2. http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/elmundo/4-204735-2012-10-03.html

3. http://www.bolpress.com/public/uploads/docs/2012091204_Geopo-litica%20extractivista.pdf

4. http://www.cides.edu.bo/webcides/images/pdf/Desarrollo_en_cues-tion.pdf

5. http://lautjournal.info/default.aspx?page=3&NewsId=4097

6. http://www.prologue.ca/537382-livre-Politique/Indianisme_et_paysan-nerie_en_Amerique_latine.html?&EditeurID=473&tri=1_asc_2_asc&id1Retour=0&pRetour=03_100&page=1

7. http://www.vicepresidencia.gob.bo/spip.php?page=publicaciones

8. http://lifeonleft.blogspot.ca/

Introduction


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Geopolitics of the Amazon 3

Geopolitics of the AmazonLanded-Hereditary Power and Capitalist Accumulation

lvaro Garca Linera

The whole course of the ... revolution ... strikingly conrmed one of Marxs profoundpropositions: revolution progresses by giving rise to a strong and united counter-revolution,i.e., it compels the enemy to resort to more and more extreme measures of defence and in thisway devises ever more powerful means of attack. V.I. Lenin

I want to welcome the initiative taken by Ana EstherCecea, and all the comrades who have commented onher article,1 in opening the debate around the presentpolitical situation in Bolivia. The thoughts of each ofthe participants not only demonstrate the interest in theevents and greater or lesser revolutionary engagementwith them, but also help to shed light on the complexityof the political processes and possible ways to advancethem.

Revolution and counterrevolution

It was Lenin who pointed out that any real revolution-ary process will generate an even greater counterrevolu-tion. This means that any revolution must advance in or-der to consolidate itself, but in doing so it arouses forcesopposed to its advance that block the revolution, which inturn, in order to defend and consolidate itself, will haveto advance further, arousing even greater reactions fromthe conservative forces, and so on indenitely. In Bolivia,

in the last 12 years, we have experienced an ascendingrevolutionary process which, emerging from organizedcivil society as a social movement, has affected and tra-versed the state structure itself, modifying the very nature

of civil society.This is a revolution that is political, cultural and eco-

nomic. Political, because it has revolutionized the socialnature of the state, having enshrined the rights of the in-digenous peoples and given concrete expression to thoserights through the actual occupation of the state admin-istration by the indigenous peoples. We are talking aboutan act of social sovereignty that has made possible theconversion of the indigenous demographic majority intoa state political majority; a modication of the social andclass nature of control and hegemony in the state. This isin fact the most important and signicant transformationin the country since its birth, a country characterized untilvery recently by the exclusion of the indigenous citizenryfrom absolutely all of the decision-making structures ofthe state. But it is also a radical political and cultural rev-olution, because this indigenous imprint on public deci-sion-making as a state power has been the work ofsocialmovementsand organizational methods derived from the

trade-union, communal and plebeian nature of the indig-enous-popular world. That is, the presence of the indige-nous-popular world in the conduct of the state since 2006has been concretely expressed not as a mere individual

Contents

Revolution and counterrevolution ........................................................................................................3The Amazon and hereditary despotic power ........................................................................................ 6

Capitalist subsumption of the Amazon indigenous economy ............................................................ 10The Territorio Indgena Parque Nacional Isiboro-Scure (TIPNIS) .................................................. 12Plurinational State and dismantling of the business-hereditary power .............................................. 16The historic demand for construction of a road to unite the Amazon valleys and plains .................. 17IIRSA: The farce of empty chatter .....................................................................................................19Characteristics of the Villa Tunari-San Ignacio de Moxos highway.................................................. 20Colonialist fallacies ............................................................................................................................ 23Who has the power in the Amazon?...................................................................................................28Once again on so-called extractivism ............................................................................................. 30Glossary of terms and acronyms ........................................................................................................35Endnotes .............................................................................................................................................35


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occupation by indigenous and popular representativeswithin the state but as an organic transformation of thestate institutionality itself through the presence of organi-zational structures of the indigenous-popular communityin the decision-making and deliberative structures of the

state. Whereas during the last 100 years the masses builtthe citizenship of rights through their trade unions (andthus we used to speak of a trade-union citizenship),2nowthe takeover of state power by the social movements is atakeover of the state power by the union. And that is whythe election today of authorities of the executive, legis-lative or judicial organs in fact proceeds fundamentallythrough processes of deliberation and the assembly-likestructures of the agrarian unions, the rural communitiesand guild, popular and neighbourhood organizations of

society.And we say economic revolution, because within ashort historical period the structure of ownership of so-cial resources and of their uses has been radically modi-ed. Until seven years ago, Brazil, along with three oilcompanies, controlled 100% of the ownership of hydro-carbons and 30% of the GDP, while the state controlledonly 16%.3But today, the Bolivian state controls 34%4of the GDP and 100% of the ownership of hydrocarbonsthroughout the chain of production. More than 10 mil-lion hectares in the hands of latifundistas, politicians andforeigners have been recovered by the state and handedover to indigenous peoples and peasant communities,putting an end to the latifundist nature of the lowlandsagrarian system. Now that the hydrocarbon, electrical,telecommunications and in part the mining and metal-lurgical industries have been nationalized, the economicsurplus, previously concentrated in a handful of foreignand private rms, goes directly to society through rents,cash transfers, services and productive state investment.In 2011, 1.2% of the GDP5was transferred directly to the

most vulnerable sectors of the country (children, seniorsand pregnant women) through this system of social pro-tection. While in 2005 only 629 million dollars annuallywere invested because the economic surplus went abroad,today the state governed by the social movements investsjust over 5 billion dollars, and with that we have beatenilliteracy;6 in the rural diaspora, the difference betweenrich and poor has been reduced by exactly one half,7while the proportion of the population living in extremepoverty has fallen from 38.2% (2005) to 24.3% (2011).8

But, you will say, obviously the structure of owner-ship of the means of production and public assets haschanged, and the distributional structure of the economicsurplus has been transformed, but the mode of produc-tionhas not been altered. And of course, fundamentally

it has not been altered. How can we expect that a smallcountry that defends itself day after day from the coun-terrevolution, organizes the unication of a profoundlyfragmented and corporate-dominated society, carries outthe most important political revolution in its history, al-

ters the structure of ownership and economic distribution,all within six years yes, within six years can, inisolation, change a mode of production that took morethan 500 years to establish itself and continues to expandeven today? Isnt it intellectually nonsensical to demandthis, in this space of time? And does it not demonstrate amistake of basic historical location? Isnt it more sensibleto discuss what type of tendenciesare being driven for-ward in Bolivia to promote a transformation in the modeof production, in tune with the changes that each of us is

making in other countries with the same objective? Wewill return to this question at the end.Each of the political and economic changes that have

been achieved within the countrys revolutionary processhas directly affected the foreign governments and corpo-rations, capitalists, business people, elites and privilegedsocial classes that have been monopolizing the materialassets of the society, the political resources of the state,and the symbolic assets of social power. The dismantlingof racial whiteness as capital, as a material component (orasset) of the class structure and class domination (socharacteristic of all colonial societies) has smashed notonly a centuries-old racialized imaginary of commandover the indigenous peoples, but has also eroded a prop-erty, an asset that for centuries allowed a small caste toacquire power and legitimacy in the systems of political-cultural command and economic ownership.9This classistdecolonization of society, anchored in the deeper habitusof all social classes, has radically modied the structureof political power and has unambiguously displaced theconstituent dominant classes of the old state. This has led

to the enraged reaction of the old ruling elites seekingto weaken and overthrow the government of PresidentEvo Morales by every means: economic (freeze on bankdeposits, 2006; sabotage of production, 2007-09, foodboycott, 2007-08), political (sabotage in the ConstituentAssembly, 2006-08; referendums in the autonomous re-gions, 2008; presidential recall vote, 2008), and armed(attempted coup, 2008; separatism, 2009).

There has not been any governmental measure in fa-vour of equality, national sovereignty or redistribution of

wealth that has not had a counter-action from the conser-vative forces. And in this inevitablereaction to the revo-lutionary measures it is possible to single out two forms:

Firstly, the one in which the forces displaced fromeconomic and political power act as an organized class


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body with its own spokesmen,slogans and organizational forms.Examples are the energy and foodboycotts launched by factions ofthe foreign and national business

community, acting as an organizedpolitical force through its federa-tions or confederations, in opposi-tion to the government measures.In this case it is relatively easy forthe social movements to gure outthe difference between popularand anti-popular objectives and topolarize the conict; accordinglythe key to confronting the counter-

revolution lies in the reafrmationof popular unity against their classenemies and the use of democrat-ic and revolutionary methods toachieve victory.

Secondly, there is the type ofmeasures in which the reactionaryforces act in a diffused way, indi-rectly, and through popular or mid-dle-class social sectors. In this case,the contradiction does not assumea polarity between popular andanti-popular forces but is containedwithin the popular movement itself,that is, it occurs among the peo-ple as Mao Tse-tung would say,10and the counterrevolutionary forcesare in control, complicating the cor-rect handling of the contradictions.

In that case, the reactionary ac-tion does not have a conservative

class subject, but it channels its expectations and needs,taking advantage of the mobilization of the segment ofthe popular camp itself that, in its attachment to corporat-ist or individualistic perspectives often without real-izing it serves the interests of its own enemies who byand large will end up turning against them. To some ex-tent it is a strategy of colonial mobilization and domina-tion: using the contradictions within the popular bloc toset two factions of the popular forces against each otherfrom within and materially and symbolically establish the

domination of the dominant third party upon the ex-haustion and defeat of one or both of them. This is whathappened in the colonial invasion of the continent. Thatis how colonial domination was consolidated, and howthe republican peace was imposed on the emerging neo-

colonial states. A less euphemistic variant of this logic ofintra-popular confrontation is the one used by the newsmedia, portraying conicts with great drama and mediahysteria in order to mobilize public opinion againstpopular governments.

The tragic course of history so unfolds that the coun-terrevolution can come hand in hand with a faction ofits own builders which, without necessarily advocating it,may as a consequence of the exacerbation of its corporat-

ist, regional or sectoral particularism, and without takinginto account the general conguration of overall socialforces nationally and internationally, end up defendingthe interests of the conservative forces of the right andundermining their own revolutionary process. That is


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precisely what came to happen with the so-called TIP-NIS march.

The Amazon and hereditary despotic power

When one observes Bolivias geography, four regions

can be clearly distinguished: the altiplanicie[high An-dean plateau], which comprises the departments of LaPaz, Oruro, and Potos; the valleys, in Cochabamba, Tari-ja, and Chuquisaca; the Chaco, south of Santa Cruz andeast of Tarija and Chuquisaca; and the immense Amazon,which includes the departments of Pando, Beni, the northof La Paz and Santa Cruz.

One third of Bolivia is Amazon, and it is by far the mostisolated region of the country. Whether through wars orunjust treaties, Bolivia has lost some 750,000 km2 of its

Amazon,11

an area equivalent to more than three timesthat of the department of Beni (213,564 km2). The highestnumber of indigenous nations in Bolivia live in the Ama-zon region, but the population density is low; accordingto the latest Population and Housing Census (2001), lessthen 4% of the total indigenous population of Bolivialives in the lowlands, and in particular in the Amazon.

The heirs of great hydraulic cultures, the indigenousnations of this region were not central to the organiza-tion of domination during the Colonial period, and canbe said to be part of the vague colonial frontier; thus theinstitutions of colonial domination of both lands and la-bour force, which transformed the economy and societyin the lowlands and the altiplano, had only a marginalpresence in the Amazon, which was considered a fron-tier. However, the institution that did take on the job ofrecruitment and elusive discontinuous domination overthe Amazon indigenous nations was the Catholic Church,through the reducciones [conned reservations] of theJesuits and later the Recollets and Franciscans.12The Je-suits managed to capture peoples throughout Chiquitana

(Chiquitanos), Moxos (Moxeos, Trinitarios, Yuracars,etc.), and also in the Chaco, but intermittently betweenwhat is now Bolivia and Paraguay. In 1767, the SpanishCrown expelled the Jesuit missions; by 1830 they werepartially replaced by the Franciscans in their presenceon the Amazon frontier. The reservations were authen-tic artisanal fortresses built to assemble the indigenouspopulation who were hunted down in the jungles, tiedup and then taken to the missions, often to Concepcinor Santiago de Chuiquitos,13and it was there that the in-

digenous souls were moulded and their productive habitsmodied. While the missions were unable to control theAmazon territory, its natural resources or social organiza-tion, they did manage to permanently alter the political,spiritual and economic organization of a great many no-

madic indigenous nations. The missions were preciselythe point of departure for the annulment of the traditionalreligious authorities, the institution of the cabildo, andthe gradual transition to a sedentary lifestyle of the Ama-zon peoples. For example, the Jesuit production schemes

favoured approaches that were almost ascetically capi-talist (they incorporated accounting, registries, reinvest-ment, dimensions, schedules, days, proportions, in vari-ous industries such as agriculture, tile and brick making,ceramics, weaving, cattle raising, etc.). Nor should weforget that the Jesuit reservations were to a large degreeself-sufcient and sold their surpluses.

After the abandonment of the Jesuit missions and thedecline of the other missions in the 19 thcentury, the re-publican state presence in the Amazon was weak. For

example, it was not until the early 20th

century that theSirion were permanently contacted; the Ayoreos contin-ued to be nomads to a large degree until the Seventies;and it was not until the battle of Kuruyuki (1892) that thecolonial-republican state nally managed to defeat theGuarani, notwithstanding that relations with them dateback to very early in the Colony. Even after the foundingof the Republic, the Brazilians were crossing the borderto capture Indians as slaves, without the state being ableto prevent this activity.

In reality, it was at the end of the 19th century, in therepublican stage (when, through the institution of the ha-cienda, enclave economies were established for the har-vesting of rubber, quinine, Brazil nuts and wood), thata generalized offensive was launched against the indige-nous peoples of the Amazon through the expropriation oftheir territories, their forced recruitment as labourers andthe denitive subjugation of their political and culturalstructures. It is estimated that in the case of rubber alone in the rst peak period (1870-1917), the second (1940-47) and the third (1960-70) some 6,000 persons with

their families14were employed in rubber tapping. In thecourse of all those years, about 80,000 persons were dis-placed throughout the Amazon region, from Santa Cruzto Beni and Pando especially.

In the early 20th century, rubber accounted for upto 15% of state income.15 All of this wealth generatedthrough the harvesting of rubber was the product of therubber tappers, the majority of them indigenous peopleswho were forcibly recruited and trafcked by dozens ofbusinessmen both Bolivians and others of German,

Portuguese, English and Japanese origin:It is common knowledge that the indigenous peoples

were forced to work for meagre pay which in many casessimply went to the sustenance of the rubber tapper but nothis family if he had one. Especially given the exorbitant


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prices of the products they received in return. In othercases, as frequently happens , they were baited with alco-hol to take other advances and articles from the companystore, false pretences being used to bind them to a life-time of exploitation. With the rising debts, the lying pre-

tences would stretch like bubble gum.... And even worse,when the rubber tapper died, his debts were passed on tohis wife or children as an abusive inheritance imposedby the bosses and contractors under the applicable DebtLaw.... In 1914, the newspaper La Voz del Pueblo, com-menting on this malicious pettifogging, reported: Therehave been cases in which indigenous peoples have leftfor the rubber regions and when one died the boss wentback to the deceaseds home village to present the widowwith the imaginary debt, violently taking away the sons

of majority age and, if there was no family, throwing herout of her miserable hovel in payment of what she wasalleged to owe....16

From the second half of the 19thcentury to 1938, therewas a kind of political trial of strength between the ranch-ers, rubber producers and government authorities, on theone hand, and the Franciscans on the other, to get the lat-ter to lend indigenous peoples for production (of rubberin the north, and for harvest and seeding in the south) andto labour in public works. Finally, in 1939 the missionswere secularized, supposedly because of the death of anengineer at the hands of the Siriono. The description ofthis people in Holmbergs classic book17dates from thesecond decade of the 20thcentury, when they were stillnomadic. The Ayoreos engaged in major migrations dur-ing the Chaco War, eeing to the north as a result of thepressures on them in the war.

While the huge territorial expanses subject to the semi-nomadic wanderings of some of the Amazon indigenousnations allowed the existence of family systems of pro-duction and autonomous authority, they could not prevent

the consolidation of the territorial power of the landown-ers, ranchers and private resource extraction rms whichover the last century became established as a real powerin the Amazon. The consolidation of this estate-basedland ownership in the Amazon regional power structureoccurred at a time when the governing mining and lati-

fundistaelites of the highlands were founding so tospeak the extractivist latifundist, and later Amazonranching, enclaves along with the state structure. The re-publican state thereby became a latifundist state and the

private latifundiobecame a regional power of the state,giving rise to the hereditary nature of the state power inthe lowlands. Strictly speaking, the state abdicated itsclass autonomy and became an extension of the fam-ily legacy of the businessmen and latifundistas. Thus,

through ranching and the extraction of rubber and qui-nine, now Brazil nuts, lumber, or simple possession oflands, big landowners and businessmen have over the last150 years consolidated a landholding and hereditary ter-ritorial power structure over all the urban and rural inhab-

itants of the region. The state would delegate regional po-litical power to the landowners, for whom the ownershipof political life would be yet another of the assets of theestate or company; and the state would receive a portionof the rent of the land from the extractivist activity in theAmazon. In the early 20thcentury, this rent accounted for5 to 15% of the state income.

The agrarian structure of Santa Cruz prior to 1952, de-scribed by Nicols Laguna,18is a mould that with slightvariations recurs in the Amazon regions of Beni and Pan-

do, including since 1952:The big landowners (with 20 to 50,000 hectares ormore, only small portions of which were cultivated andon which they generally had no title) were the hacenda-dos, who preferred to call themselves nqueros. Theirhaciendas were not commercial plantations but insteadnearly autonomous and self-sufcient productive units,relatively isolated, in which the use of machinery andimprovement of the land were almost non-existent. Thehacendadoand his family lived on them with their work-ers who remained there throughout the year. The self-suf-ciency of the nca enabled thenqueroto live well andobtain whatever he did not produce with the small incomehe got in exchange for selling his surpluses in the localmarket. Those living and working in the nca were the

jornaleros[labourers] who, in exchange for a house andmeals, and in some cases a wage, were to cultivate the em-ployers lands; in addition, they might work small parcels(no more than a hectare) for themselves. There were also

pequeos propietarios[small proprietors] (with no morethan 20 hectares, generally 8 to 10, of which no more than

5 were cultivated), who were few in number and cultivat-ed the land with their families, seeking self-sufciencyand independence, although normally they performedodd jobs during harvest and seeding. The inquilinos[ten-ants] rented lands (one to three hectares) from the n-queros in exchange for 10 to 20% of their production,cultivating lands that thenquerowas not using in orderto bring in some extra income without too much effort orloss. The tolerados[tolerated ones, or colonizers], thetrue pioneers of the east according to Heath, occupied

lands in the unoccupied strips of the ncas and cultivatedthem until they were evicted. Thenquerosallowed theseoccupations for a time since the toleradoscleared the for-est, planted fruit trees, improved the area and were hiredas jornaleros at harvest and seeding times. Conditions


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had hardly changed since the timeof the prospectors of El Dorado orGran Paitit; the security and pres-tige of thenqueros, whose wealthcounted for little in any other part

of the country, based themselveson ownership of the land and ser-vitude, spending practically theirentire income to maintain the tra-ditional form of life to which theywere accustomed. The land had novalue in commercial terms (whichis why no one took the trouble toacquire legal title) and was non-ne-gotiable in terms of status, security

and self-sufciency.In the Amazon, until fairly re-cently, the employer or hacendadowas the lord of everything withinhis purview, using the violence ofparamilitary forces to occupy landsand impose his law over the sur-rounding peons, indigenous peo-ples and poor peasants.19 To thedegree that power was structuredaround the land and its violent oc-cupation, a conservative employerlogic the most conservativein the country prevailed in theAmazon region. And consistentwith this the hacendados, lumber-men, landlords and their interme-diaries had established, since thebeginning of the republican state, asort of pact with the rulers to exer-cise, through their family and local

networks, a limited state presence in the area; lands, stateresources and impunity had become to a large degree thehereditary form of the state in the Amazon. As such thestate appeared as an extension of the family inuencesof a small hacendado, rubber, rancher and lumber elite,wielding state violence to legitimize and impose theirownership as employers over the population.

This hacendado-patrimonial and paternal power in theAmazon is even now the most conservative and reaction-ary form of regional domination existing in the country

as a whole. In a certain form, the gure of the landlordpersonies the most despotic powers in existence: notonly is he the owner of the land, he is also the one whohires workers and purchases wood from the forest, theprovider of market goods to the remote populations, and

the inuential politician whose family monopolizes pub-lic responsibilities and as such is the provider of publiclands and public favours to a population that is lackingin everything: lands, property, public authority and thestate. So the landlord is not infrequently as well the axisof popular rituals such as the celebration of festivals andweddings or the one who determines whether and whereyour children will be educated. The entire warp and woofof hereditary colonial power converges in the gure ofthe hacendado and his ubiquitous and paternal com-

mand. And while the dispersed indigenous organizationhas maintained its local autonomy at the level of its smalltowns, councils, union centrals and subcentrals, it has notmanaged to convert itself into a leading force at the lo-cal or regional level, much less challenge the hereditary-


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landowner authority and command structure.

In fact, faced with the ongoing hacendado-business en-croachment, the indigenous communities, like the otherpopular classes, had to come to terms with the structureof dominant landowner power in a subordinate and ver-tical manner, to be able to preserve some part of theirterritorial occupation. Hence the very discourse of legiti-mation and regional identication has been until recentlythat issuing from the nucleus of the regional employerspower.

In the Amazon, then, it is not the indigenous peoples

who have taken control of the territorial power, as oc-curred years ago in the highlands and valleys, where thepeasant unions and communities have performed the roleof indigenous micro-states with a territorial presence,and in reality were the material foundation for the con-

struction of the present Plurina-tional State. In the Amazon region,things occurred in a very differentway. The despotic landowner or-der predominates and neither the

indigenous organizations nor thepeasants or the workers of recentcreation have managed to create anorganizational or discursive coun-ter-power that begins to crack thislanded hereditary system.

A partial modication of thissystem of despotic landownerdomination has been produced bythe NGOs, which have managed

to create a clientelist relationshipwith the indigenous leadership,promoting levels of interregionalorganization like the RegionalesIndgenas or the CIDOB itself.20But to the extent that those levelsof organization, with little contactwith the Amazon indigenous bases,function exclusively with external(NGO) funding, which pays thesalaries of the leaders, in realitythey actually develop as NGOs,reproducing mechanisms of clien-telist cooptation and ideologicaland political subordination to thefunding agencies, most of themEuropean and North American, asin the case of USAID.21

While in the rst world countriesNGOs exist as part of civil society in most cases funded by trans-

national enterprises in the third world, as in the case ofBolivia, various NGOs are not really NON GovernmentalOrganizations but Organizations of Other Governmentson Bolivian territory; they are a replacement for the statein the areas in which the neoliberalism of the past initiatedits exit, encompassing such sectors as education (throughthe attempts at privatization or through the convent col-leges) and health (for example, Prosalud of USAID). TheNGO, as an organization of another government and pos-sessor of nancial resources, denes the subject matter,

the focus, the line of funding, etc. based on the prioritiesof this other government, constituting itself as a foreignpower within the national territory. It could be said thatthe neoliberal system in the periphery has been shapedbetween a state that is reduced in its capacities and its


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power of economic and cultural intervention (throughprivatization and downsizing), NGOs that have replacedit in specic areas (social, cultural, struggle against pov-erty, indigenous peoples, environment, etc.) and a privateforeign economic sector that has been appropriating pub-

lic resources.22In fact, some NGOs in the country have been the vehicle

for introducing a type of colonial environmentalism thatrelegates the indigenous peoples to the role of caretakersof the Amazon jungle (considered extraterritorial prop-erty of foreign governments and corporations23), creatingde factoa new relationship of privatization and alienationof the national parks and Communitarian Lands (TCOs)over which the state itself has lost custody and control.24In this form, whether by means of the hard powerof the

property-owning despotism that controls the processesof intermediation and semi-industrialization of Amazonproducts (lumber, alligators, Brazil nuts, rubber, etc.) orthrough thesoft powerof the NGOs, the indigenous na-tions of the Amazon are being economically dispossessedof the territory and politically subordinated to externaldiscourses and powers. In short, economic and politicalpower in the Amazon is not in the hands of the indig-enous peoples or the state. Power in the Amazon is in thehands, in part, of a landowner-business elite, and in part,of foreign businesses and governments that negotiate thecare of the Amazon jungles in exchange for a reductionin taxes and control of biodiversity through their biotech-nology.

Capitalist subsumption of the Amazon

indigenous economy

Finally, in addition to the vertical nature of this despot-ic power there is a territorial dependency of the regionalpower structure itself. The major part of the Bolivian Am-azon lies in the department of Beni, and the major pro-

ductive activities in the region today are ranching, timberextraction and Brazil nut harvesting.

It is estimated that there are 3.5 million head of cattlein Beni, 41% of the national total. The historic marketsfor this production, which powers the activity of smalland medium ranchers and farming communities, are thehighlands of La Paz, Oruro and Potos, and the Coch-abamba and Chuquisaca valleys. However, the meat pro-cessing chain is not situated in the area where most ofthe production occurs. Although the cattle are raised in

Beni, the nal sale and processing are carried out in SantaCruz. So while a three-year-old calf costs 2,315 Bolivia-nos (Bs.)25in Beni, the same animal is worth Bs. 2,790in Santa Cruz, and that is where more than 90% of theBeni cattle are processed. Thus the producers in Beni are

subordinated to intermediaries who deliver the cattle toSanta Cruz, and in addition to the price of the processedmeat, which regulates the market price of the chain ofcattle production both downward (to the rancher in Beni)and upward (to the nal consumer), they are in the hands

of a business stronghold well-known for its right-wingpolitical trajectory. The three largest slaughterhouses inBolivia are in Santa Cruz: Fridosa, owned by Beltrn deLazo; Frigor, owned by Monasterio; and the Chiquitanoabattoir. These slaughterhouses regulate the price of meatnationally. Thus the major economic activity in the Ama-zon region, which depends almost exclusively on meatprocessing, is dependent on a small group of business-men who not only hold this Beni regional production cap-tive but also x the prices of cattle on the hoof and of

meat for mass consumption by families.Something similar occurs with the other extractiveactivities in the Amazon. If you take a close look at theorigin of the businessmen, warehousemen or marketingcompanies in the country, a large number come fromSanta Cruz;26and the transportation and processing of theproducts of these activities, and with them the generationof major volumes of added value, are carried on outsideof Beni.

On the whole, we are dealing with a business bloc thatemerges from big hacienda property and has begun to di-versify its productive activities, consolidating itself in thesemi-industrial processing of raw materials and livestockfrom the Amazon. This bourgeoisie, a participant in thedespotic-hereditary rationality of the old Amazon powerstructure, has inherited all of the habits of the landlordclass: the abusive relationship with the peasants and in-digenous peoples, a violent local authoritarianism, thehereditary link with the state power, and the conservativementality. In some ways it reminds one of Marxs com-ment, in reference to the feudal landlords who became

businessmen in 19th century Germany, that The modeof living, production and income of these gentlemen [...]gives the lie to their traditional pompous notions.27 Ir-remediably reactionary thanks to their ownership of land,their mode of living and political action, but completelybourgeois in their entrepreneurial economic activity.

This has enabled them to split their conduct towardthe indigenous peoples. When it is matters of land oc-cupancy or the organization of local political life, thelandowner despotism is what prevails; the indigenous

peoples and peasants are treated as one more accessoryof their property, and they unscrupulously impose theiropinions on them with no negotiation whatsoever. Butwhen it involves business, as in the purchase of timber,Brazil nuts, alligator skins or livestock, this bourgeoisie


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is capable of subordinating its racist prejudices to marketlogic and establishing mechanisms of market dominationthrough which it has always considered the indigenouspeoples as its vassals or inferiors. This mercantile gen-erosity has meant that the relations of domination over

the indigenous peoples have been reworked and formallysubsumed under capitalist development.28

The relation between hacienda land ownership andcapitalist production in the east and the Bolivian Ama-zon has led to a specic way of formally subsuming thenon-capitalist work of the small peasants and indigenousproducers to capitalist relations through the imposition ofa specic type of land rent.

The agroindustrialagrochemicalmerchant capitalistnucleus subordinates the non-capitalist agrarian modes of

production through the imposition of prices at the timeof sowing, harvesting and marketing of the cultivated orharvested products, and through the monopoly of pro-cessing (timber, Brazil nuts) and credit. This applies tosoy, sugar, cattle, sunowers, sorghum, corn, and to tim-ber, Brazil nuts and alligator hides. To some extent theactual development of Beni, sustained by cattle raising,is limited by the huge transfer of regional rent to the elitethat monopolizes the processing of the meat and the x-ing of its sale prices on a national level. This is an elitethat derives rent from distribution (but not in production)and is thus a landowner class in itself.

Hence it is no surprise that the major separatists havebeen the agro-industrialists Marinkovic, Monasterios,Matkovic, Costas, Nayar, etc., who still possess huge ex-panses of land, their wealth derived primarily from thisappropriation of the rent of the land, and not so muchfrom the possession of the land which in reality is un-productive which is why it was subject to reversion.Generally speaking, there are very few production unitsof more than 5,000 hectares devoted to agriculture and

major cattle-raising lands are scarce as well, given the5 hectares per head of cattle required by law. The landsare usually for fattening the herds, and their ownershipis maintained until roads are built, improved or project-ed (as in the case of the Lowlands project), after whichthey are sold parcel by parcel both to small and mediumproducers and to Mennonites, Brazilians and Russians.That is the process, for example, in the impressive parcel-ling out of land (50-200 hectares) in the north and east ofSanta Cruz (San Julin, Cuatro Caadas, Montero, etc.).

On the other hand, making the most of the relationsand hierarchies of class and nationality, the business-landowner class has integrated the management of theindigenous TCOs into the supplying of raw materials fortheir industrial activities. A large number of the TCOs in

the lowlands sell wood illegally to the lumber companiesand the innite number of sawmills that exist in their in-terior, generating a market subsumption of these Com-munity Lands to extractivist business activity throughthe application of various mechanisms of extra-economic

coercion that reduce purchase costs and raise businessrevenues. A signicant number of the leaders of the in-digenous marches of 2011 and 2012, such as [Fernando]Vargas and [Youci] Fabricano, hold formal indictmentsfor the illegal sale of wood going back years, includingthe sale of wood from the TIPNIS itself,29considered un-til recently as the lungs of the world; lungs now perfo-rated by the illegal extraction of wood and leather, as ifby nicotine-induced cancer.

And insofar as the indigenous peoples have not pen-

etrated the processes of transformation of raw materialsthat exist in the large new indigenous territories, the tim-ber, alligators, Brazil nuts, rubber or sh products con-tinue to be purchased by the lumber mills and landhold-ing businesses at ridiculous prices and under the sameenabling30modalities of the traditional economic andsocial dependency of the past. The same thing is happen-ing in the growing provision of other means of existence(sugar, salt, our, clothing, steel tools, gasoline, etc.), thatthe enabler, hacendado, businessman or merchant pro-vides to them; and, holding the monopoly over the trans-fer of these products, delivers them to the indigenouspeoples for 5 to 10 times more than the market price.

In a short period of time, millions of hectares of theTCOs that are located in a large part of the Amazon arebeing newly integrated within the mechanisms of sei-gniorial and hereditary domination by the businessmen-hacendados who use the leaders as intermediaries forthe depredation and economic dependency of their com-munities. We have termed this formal subordination ofthe TCOs and the parks to the generation of prots for

businessmen-hacendadosthesubsumption of indigenousterritories and natural resources to internal capitalist ac-cumulation. And when the TCOs and national parks aresubject to the circuits of capitalist accumulation (prot)of foreign companies, we speak of a subsumption of in-digenous territoriality and nature to external capitalistaccumulation. The Territorio Indgena Parque NacionalIsiboro Scure is no exception to this situation of formalsubsumption of the indigenous economy and of nature tocapital accumulation.


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The Territorio Indgena Parque Nacional

Isiboro Scure (TIPNIS)

The TIPNIS is an area of the Amazon located on theborder between two departments: southern Beni (an en-tirely Amazon department) and northern Cochabamba

(region of valleys). It contains a diversity of ecosystemsthanks to its widely varied altitudes, the outstanding onesbeing the rain forests known as the Bosque Nublado deCeja, the Bosque Hmedo, the Bosque Pluvial Subandi-no, the Bosque Hmedo Pedemontano, and the BosqueHmedo Estacional, and the marshy palm groves, oodplains, and bogs of Cyperceas as well as a large numberof lakes.31

For more than a hundred years the determination ofthe limits between the two departments was the source

of numerous regional conicts, and one of the reasonswhy Barrientos, the military dictator, issued a Decree(No. 07401, 22 November 1965) declaring a zone situ-ated between the Isiboro and Scure rivers a NationalPark (PNIS).32

In 1990, in the wake of the indigenous peoples marchof many lowlands peoples, another decree33was issuedcreating the Territorio Indgena, which was to include theentirety of the national park. Seven years later, on April25, 1997, the Instituto Nacional de Reforma Agraria(INRA, the agrarian reform institute) issued resolution000002, which created the legal entity known as theTierra Comunitaria de Origen (TCO).34But because in-digenous peasants of the valleys as well as ranchers werepresent within it, an executive order, the Ttulo Ejecuto-rial TCO-NAL 000229, was issued in June 2009, duringtheseneamientoprocess that recognized 1,091,656 hect-ares as belonging to the TIPNIS TCO.35

The principal inhabitants of the Parque Nacional Ter-ritorio Indgena Isiboro-Scure are the following threeindigenous nations:

1.The Moxea-Trinitaria nation.

It is said that the Moxeo people originate from theArawak people, who are thought to have developed thegreat hydraulic culture of the Amazon plains. They arethe major population within the TIPNIS, and they engagein agriculture and cattle-raising, in addition to hunting,shing and gathering. They maintain some links with themarket, especially in Trinidad, that are now part of theirbasic strategy of economic reproduction. They are orga-nized on the basis of the nuclear family.36

2.The Tsimn (or Chimn) nation.This is a people who rebelled against the Jesuit reserva-

tions; their present economic structure is based on agri-culture, hunting, shing, gathering and the sale of calves.They also work as labourers for the cattle ranches and the

forestry companies.3. The Yuracar nation.

This is the oldest nation in the southern Amazon region.The Spanish Jesuits encountered them initially when theyventured into this zone in the late 16th century.37Their

present economic activity is centered on agriculture andshing with regular links to the market. Their organiza-tion is centered on the nuclear family.

While all the communities are engaged in agriculture,there are some that apply a pattern of special occupa-tion that involves the settlement, relocation and forma-tion of new communities.38According to reports in the1990s, about 40% of the communities assessed in 1992had disappeared a decade later. However, in recent yearsthere has been a major consolidation of large communi-

ties owing to the dynamic growth of agriculture partiallylinked to the market. The major products of the indig-enous economy are rice, cassava, corn, bananas, cacaoand fruit trees.39

According to the data in the 1993 First Indigenous Cen-sus, Isiboro-Scure Pilot Area, of the 4,563 inhabitants ofthe Park 68% were Mojeo, 26% Yuracar, 4% Tsimnand the remaining 2% of other ethnic origin.40The re-sults of the 2001 Population and Housing Census showeda reduction in the indigenous population of the TIPNISlowlands to 3,991 persons as of that date.41

As regards the system of internal organization onthe basis of the nuclear family of these peoples, thecabildo (a type of community assembly) is the orga-nizational form among the Mojeos; in the case of theYuracars and Tsimnes, however, the organization ismore exible, and is oriented around the leaders of thefamily and communal clans.42It was not until 1987 thata supra-communal organization arose, the TIPNIS Sub-central, followed later by another in the southern zone ofthe Park, the CONISUR. These were the bodies that were

most representative of the lowlands indigenous peopleswithin the TIPNIS.43

Apart from these indigenous nations that inhabit theNational Park, there are two populations that also live inits interior (one of them is also of indigenous origin, butfrom the highlands):

4.Aymara-Quechua Andean migrant population.

The presence of Andean indigenous peoples in whatis now the southern region of the TIPNIS goes back topre-colonial times, but it was in the early 20th century,

and particularly from the 1960s on that this increased.Beginning in the 1970s a road was built that extended tothe Yuracar community of Moleto within the NationalPark.44The majority of the inhabitants of Aymara-Que-chua origin are organized in community agrarian unions


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afliated in turn to centrals and the peasants federation.They are agricultural and occupy about 92,000 hectares,or 7% of the total area of the TIPNIS.

5.Creole population of Beni.

Within the Park as well there are approximately 25

cattle ranches in a 32,000 hectare area located at theconuence of the Isiboro and Scure rivers.45The localindigenous population is hired from time to time by thehacendados, who control the major ow of business inthe local economy.

Along with all the traditional activities that the indig-enous communities carry on in the TIPNIS, in recent de-cades they have expanded into other kinds of intensiveeconomic activities directly linked to the industrial pro-cessing market: lumbering and gathering alligator hides.

In the case of the wood industry, the ones involved arethe indigenous peoples with rights to the regulated useof the distinct varieties of trees that grow in the TCO,although because this is also a National Park there arelegal restrictions on its indiscriminate use; obviously, inthe absence of the state these cannot be enforced. Accord-ing to the reports by the leaders themselves, it is clear thatthe major portion of the high volumes of the cutting andprocessing of wood in the TIPNIS is illegal and affectsthe entire territory.46 In the recent trips we made there,we could make out roads, tractors, trucks and mobilesawmills within the so-called nucleus zone or virginzone. Until a few months ago, there were various for-est concessions in the interior. For example, the companyISIGO SRL had a concession of 34,307 hectares near thecommunity of Asunta, and 34,937 hectares in Oromomo.The Huanca Rodrguez company held 24,869 hectaresin concessions in the south of the TIPNIS, while anotherlumber company, SURI SRL, had 40,762 hectares in thesame virgin nucleus of the National Park.47

As if that were not enough, there are various other

forest concessions to companies like Cimagro, Hervel,Ftima B, Ftima A and PROINSA,48which safely andsystematically induce these lowlands indigenous peoplesthemselves to pillage the forest within the TIPNIS, tosupply themselves with wood, so that subsequently theycan process and market the developed products in the lo-cal and international markets.

Likewise, the hunting of alligators is an activity car-ried on by the indigenous peoples, but one that is directlylinked to business interests. It is estimated that each year

1,500 alligator hides,49 after being processed, are con-verted into luxury articles for sale in European markets.

In the north-eastern TIPNIS, at the conuence of theIsiboro and Scure rivers, three companies BolivianLeather, Bolivian Croco, and Sicuana Indgena SRL, re-

sponsible for purchasing the alligators captured by theindigenous peoples process them for later sale.50Sincethere is no state presence in the Park, it is safe to asumethat the number of alligator hides exceeds the number of-cially reported by these companies, making this activity

a transaction that is negotiated between indigenous lead-ers and companies.

Also within the TIPNIS there is an airport for the ex-clusive use of wealthy foreign tourists, who for $7,600can enjoy the use of a luxurious private hotel,51engage inprivate shing and purchase the native handicrafts. Para-doxically, the indigenous peoples never use this airport,and the river has become their sole means of transport,along which it takes seven to ten days to reach a popu-lated centre in which to make their own purchases.

Similarly, within the National Park, aerial photographyhas detected other clandestine landing strips, possiblylinked to various illegal activities, mainly narco-trafck-ing.

As one can appreciate, while the TCO has allowed theownership of the land and the use of its resources by theAmazon indigenous peoples, the major resources of theTIPNIS alligators, forests, cacao form the lowestand worst paid link in a chain of business procurement,processing and marketing. As in other regions of the Am-azon, the work of the indigenous peoples (as providersof raw materials) and the natural wealth of the TIPNIShave been formally subsumed in processes of capitalistproduction heavily integrated with international markets.Thus the community ownership of the land has also be-come the lowest link in the corporate chain of value pro-duction and capitalist accumulation.

Plurinational State and dismantling of the

business-hereditary power

This system of ultra-conservative regional power in the

Amazon, constructed over more than a century, has onlyrecently, since 2006, broken down. When the old rulingclasses lost control of the national state to the popularindigenous-campesino social movements, the systembased on landed estates suffered a mortal blow. The al-liance of political power with hacendado landlord andextractivist corporate interests, the material basis of thedespotic regime in the Amazon region, was broken, cre-ating a possibility of regional dual power: on the onehand the hacendado-business classes, on the other the

government structure with power of decision over eco-nomic resources and lands, triggering increasing conictand social struggle throughout the lowlands.

The revolutionary state put an end to the delivery oflands to the property-owning classes, took land away


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from the latifundistas and turned over a large share ofthis land to the ownership of indigenous communitiesand nations. From 1996 to 2005, 5 million hectares weregranted to the indigenous peoples of the lowlands; butbetween 2006 and 2011, these grants amounted to 7.6

million hectares and an additional 1.4 million hectareswere expropriated from the hacendados, radically trans-forming the structure of ownership in the Amazon region.While 20 years ago the medium-sized private companiespossessed 39 million hectares, they now have only 4.1million hectares.52However, this structural modicationin property relations on the land has not been sufcient todismantle the despotic hacendado-business power, sincethere is a need to dismantle the supply and corporate pro-cessing mechanisms that are strangling the indigenous

peoples economy.Hence the revolutionary government, in addition tomodifying the structure of land-holding, which dissoci-ated the routine of the hacienda from state action, haspromoted state mechanisms of regional governance thatoperate independently of the dominant bloc in the territo-ries, facilitating resources to the municipalities, credit tothe campesinos and investment funds to the indigenouspeoples, and establishing supply rms that regulate theprices previously monopolized by the local employers,providing means of water transportation for peoples liv-ing along the rivers, building public roads (previously theproperty of hacendados), etc. And since the state in thelast ve years has tripled its investments and social ex-penditures, its presence has begun to be felt independent-ly, in the form of rights, cash transfers and redistributionof wealth, whereas in past times the little that the peoplehad was thanks to the favours of the local bosses, thepolitical machine, or the NGOs.

The state has operated independently of the land-owningclasses and that has initiated a process of collapse of the

old conservative managerial order in the Amazon. An in-tense class struggle has begun to unfold, and little by littleit is reconguring the new regional power relationships.The presence of a state detached from the land-holdingclasses, expressed in social rights and with the functionof redistributing the expanding common resources, hasdealt a mortal blow to the hereditary landowner structurein the Amazon, triggering an intense struggle for recon-guration of territorial power in the region. To a certainextent it can be said that since 2006, with the Government

of social movementsand President Evo Morales, a kind ofdemocratic revolution has occurred from below, basedon the initiatives of the campesinos, indigenous peoplesand popular urban sectors, and from above, from thestate, that is now helping to unfetter and deploy the vital

energy of the peoples and popular social classes in a re-gion characterized until quite recently as being the mostconservative in the country, dominated by a regime ofdespotic hacendadopower.

As in any revolutionary process, the state not only

condenses the new correlation of political and economicforces of the emerging society, of the successful socialstruggles, but in addition becomes a material and insti-tutional subject that helps to promote new social mobi-lizations that transform the structures of domination stillpresent in certain regions and spheres of the society. Thepresent role of the Government of social movements inthe Amazon, Chiquitana and Chaco, in which previouslythere existed modes of hereditary domination based onownership of the land, is precisely that: to help clear the

road for the local popular and indigenous forces to deploytheir emancipatory capacities in opposition to the prevail-ing regional powers.

This rising revolution in the regional power relations inthe Amazon, Chiquitana and the Chaco, has unleasheda violent and aggressive counter-revolutionary reaction.In the case of Chiquitana and the Chaco, landlords likeAnderson or Monasterios participated directly in the at-tempted coup dtat of September 2008, when they triedto create a parallel government in the four lowlands de-partments: Pando, Beni (both of them in the Amazon),Santa Cruz and Tarija. And in fact these same actors, incomplicity with outside powers that do not want to loseextraterritorial power in the Amazon, are the ones thatwere behind the recent TIPNIS marches.

The historic demand for construction of a

road to unite the Amazon valleys and plains

But rst let us analyze the history of the demand forconstruction of this highway that would have to passthrough the TIPNIS. Is it true that it is part of a sinister

plan for inter-oceanic corridors that would pillage theforests and suck us into the vortex of the Brazilian em-pire, as the recipe of some NGOs would have it?53

The historical need for a road connecting the Andeanzone with the Amazon region, through what used to becalled the Mountains of the Yuracarees, now the Isi-boro-Scure park, dates back more than 300 years.

In 1763, the Royal Court of Charcas, with the intentionof expelling the Portuguese who were repeatedly invad-ing the left bank of the Itnez river, ordered that a route di-

rectly connecting Cochabamba with Moxos be explored.The objective was initially military in nature, to put anend to the already expansionist attitude of the Portuguesewho were trying to occupy the province of Moxos. Theroute between Cochabamba and Moxos (Beni), without


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passing through Santa Cruz, would allow rapid move-ment of troops against the Portuguese advances.

The Jesuits report that in the early 1700s there had beena road that went from Colomi, the Ajial, descending tothe Mission of Santa Rosa and the Mission of Loreto (in

the province of Moxos). They assert that it took about sixdays to travel along the road bringing in a load of our,wine, baskets of biscuits and other things for the Mo-jos.54Beginning in 1766, a number of expeditions takingthis route as a reference were carried out from Tarata, Co-lomi in the lowlands and from San Ignacio in the plainsof Moxos. In 1781 a secure and stable transit route wasestablished between the regions, which functioned for alittle less than a decade until it was gradually abandonedon the ground that it lessened trade between Santa Cruz

and Moxos and reduced the spiritual attention provided toMoxos by the Bishop of Santa Cruz.55

The strictly geopolitical arguments both for the con-struction of this road and for its rejection call for the clos-est attention. On the one hand there were those who fa-voured a road to join the central Andean region with theimmense and unreachable Amazon region (and preciselyfor that reason the object of external ambition); and onthe other hand there were those who opposed the road inorder to defend the economic and political-spiritual pow-er that the established elites in Santa Cruz exercised overMoxos. These two counterposed readings have returned250 years later in the debate over the highway throughthe TIPNIS, but with new actors.

Between 1790 and 1825, when the independent Repub-lic was established, there were various attempts to ndnew lines of communication between the two regions, al-though none were successful in obtaining the necessaryfunds. In 1825 the Liberator [Antonio Jos de] Sucre or-dered that the settlers in Cochabamba be consulted aboutthe most important measures that the Liberator [Simn]

Bolvar could implement in the regions interest. The re-sponse was the linking of Cochabamba with Moxos.56The result of these decisions is not known, but all indica-tions are that lack of resources and political instabilitystied the strategic outlook for the territorial cohesion ofBolivia. Years later, Bolivia lost about 191,000 km2of theAmazon (War of Acre) from what had been initially partof the independent Republic.

In 1832, the French explorer Alcide DOrbigny re-turned to travel these routes from Moxos, passing be-

tween the Isiboro and Scure rivers, that is, the presentNational Park in the lands of the Yuracars, to arrive atCochabamba, leaving some detailed accounts of the ge-ography and inhabitants of the region.57In 1915, settlersin Beni, in a letter to the President of the Republic with

an extensive argument against the abandonment of theregion, again posed the need for construction of the roadbetween Cochabamba and Trinidad. Starting in Colomi,they argued, there is an old road from there to the con-uence of Sesarsisama with the Isiboro, port Sucre, 160

km approximately, or 210 km from Cochabamba. In Mo-leto a wide path has been opened for 25 to 30 km [and]from there to San Lorenzo, a mission town on the Scure,there is no road or path, for a distance of about 125 km,and from Scure to Trinidad [there is] meadowland witha road that is passable in the dry season.58

In 1920, under Decreto Supremo of 2 October 1920,Bautista Saavedra announced the opening of the Co-chabamba to Moxos road under the Regiment of Za-padores.59This regiment was under the command of the

then Colonel Federico Romn, and at the end of 1920 leftTodos Santos in the Chapare, heading for Moleto. Ini-tially they were to cruise along the Eteremasama river,later the Isiboro river, and then, 35 kms north of the river,arrive at Moleto. This part of the journey was not difcultbecause there was a path that was widened. From therethey had to travel along the Ichoa river and later walkapproximately 14 leagues through the midst of the for-est to arrive at the Scure river, in a journey that took 49days. Later they set off toward the north-east and after 20days it was as if a large window had suddenly openedto let the light come pouring in on the tired soldiers;they had arrived at the meadowlands of Moxos. Fromthere they headed to San Lorenzo and later to Trinidad.60Notwithstanding the efforts made, the route did not gofurther and Romn and his Zapadores were later assignedto work on the route that would unite Cochabamba withSanta Cruz.

In 1928, a member of parliament from Beni, in a memo-rable speech, stated: Bolivia has been given the harshestlesson with the lack of attention to the eastern region.

The disaster of Acre, this loss of 191,000 km2, is a severeblow to Bolivia, and the greatest offense to the invita-tions to create works that would bind the nation. Thedeputy then raised the need not only for a road betweenCochabamba and Beni, but also that the railroad that wasto connect Cochabamba with Santa Cruz should also fol-low a route from the Chapare to Beni.61

When the Chaco War erupted, the country as a wholewas called on to defend this territory. In one of the mostself-sacricing mobilizations, troops of young soldiers

recruited in Guayaramern, Riberalta, Cobija and Rur-renabaque were initially deployed to Trinidad and fromthere, going up the Ichilo river, they reached the Chapare,in the port of Gretel, and later Yapacan and Santa Cruz.This column of about 7,000 Beni soldiers, under the com-


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mand of the then general Federico Romn, which wasto defend the country in late 1933 and early 1934, usedrivers and routes previously travelled between Beni andthe Chapare to reach San Carlos, Santa Cruz and later theChaco.62Years later, in 1998, the Yucumo-San Borja-San

Ignacio-Trinidad section was declared fundamental route602 (D.S. 25134); in 2003, the National Highway Serviceincorporated the Villa Tunari-San Ignacio de Moxos high-way as a route complementary to the Fundamental Sys-tem of highways (D.S. 26996); and on 24 October 2003President Mesa enacted Law No. 2530, which establishedauthorization for the Executive Power to seek funding forthe construction and paving of the Cochabamba-Trinidadhighway. Finally, in 2006, a Law of the Republic againestablished the construction of this road as a priority.63

IIRSA: The farce of empty chatter

I have mentioned some of the numerous antecedentsof this highway in order to refute the fallacy that its con-struction is intended as part of the IIRSA plan to subjectour peoples. This highway was proposed as a strategicnecessity to unite the altiplano and the Amazon centuriesbefore the existence of the geopolitics of the IIRSA;and if one has the courage and intellectual honesty to takea careful look at a map of Bolivia, he or she will real-ize that if indeed there is some measure that disrupts thepresent geopolitics of foreign occupation of the Amazon,it is precisely the construction of this road.

The IIRSA Plan was designed to create inter-oceaniccorridors linking eastern Brazil with the Pacic Oceanand the markets of Asia. The Villa Tunari-San Ignacio deMoxos highway does NOT link the main trunk road of thecountry (La Paz-Cochabamba-Santa Cruz) with any Bra-zilian highway or motorway. Trinidad is 338.6 km fromthe Brazilian border yes, 338.6 kms from the highwayclosest to Brazil! No shipment of Brazilian soy or lumber

will reach any port with this highway, the only things thatwill reach Trinidad or Cochabamba are Bolivian personsand products, which at present take two or three days togo from one place to the other, but with the new road willdo this in four hours.

It has been said that the IIRSA Plan subjects entire re-gions to the expansionist plans of the Brazilian economy.What the Villa Tunari-San Ignacio de Moxos highwaywill do is establish the presence of the Bolivian state inthe Amazon where, in its absence, what predominates are

the existing powers, the landlords and lumber companies(many of them foreigners). Up to now, in fact, in the Am-azon border regions the children attend classes and listento the radio in the Portuguese language.

The highway will be like a staple force uniting two re-

gions of the country separated from each other for cen-turies; their dissociation allowed the loss of territoriesa century ago and more recently the substitution for thestate of illegal actors, hacendadosand foreigners. So itinvolves a mechanism for achieving territorial control of

the geography by the state and the establishment of sov-ereignty.

If there is any danger of submission to external powers,it is precisely the absence of a state in the Amazon. In thehighlands, the substitute for this absence was the com-munal-state or trade union-state; that is, by the communalself-organization of society that took on the managementof local community issues, internal political affairs andthe social protection of their members. But in the low-lands, in general, and in the Amazon region in particular,

this absence of the state in terms of rights and protectionhas resulted in the formation of the landowner-despoticpower over the communities and the indigenous peoplesand the subsequent penetration of foreign powers which,on the pretext of protecting the Amazon, the lungs ofthe world, etc., have extended an extraterritorial control via some environmentalist NGOs over the conti-nental Amazon, considered the largest reservoir of waterand biodiversity in the world.

The major enemy of the presence of the protectorstate in the Amazon region at present is the internationalimperial-corporate structure, which has converted envi-ronmental management in the world into the most lucra-tive deal in favour of the industrialized countries of theNorth and the biotechnology companies. Today not eventhe Latin American states have as great a presence in theAmazon as these companies, research institutes of Euro-pean and North American universities, and NGOs fundedby other governments and by those same foreign enter-prises.64

What is paradoxical and shameful is that some envi-

ronmentalist leftists mouth off about the famous IIRSAPlan without understanding that behind their furious re-jection of the state presence they cover for the now un-objectionable presence of foreign governments and com-panies in control of the Amazon. In fact, the real dangerin the Bolivian Amazon regions is not the IIRSA thatexists only in the fevered imagination of the environmen-talists but the actually existing rule of the industrial-ized capitalist countries over the Amazon resources as anenvironmental reserve purchased to compensate for the

destruction of the environment in the North. The cam-ouaged threat is that USAID and the U.S. State De-partment will make us think that the Amazon belongs toeveryone, when in reality what they are saying is thatit belongs to their government and their companies. The


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danger is that state sovereignty will be replaced by theforeign alienation of territorial control in the Amazon,and that the right-wing environmentalist discourse willlegitimate the absence of the state using the argument ofenvironmental protection.

The accusations that the famous Villa Tunari-San Igna-cio de Moxos highway is supposedly part of the IIRSAPlan are ridiculous and intellectually decadent. It was notand never will be! The existing ofcial documentationfor this Integration Plan, published from 2005 to 2010,makes no reference to this highway.65 It refers to sec-tions to complete the highway from Puerto Surez to LaPaz, but in no document is there any mention of entry toMoxos. The map available from the IIRSA is really quiteeloquent about the highways that are of interest to the

organizers of that project, and one will not nd there anyroute from Villa Tunari to Moxos.Where is the famous highway that is going to subject

us to the geopolitics of the IIRSA? Where is the high-way that is intended to hand over the Amazon to foreignagro-export businesses? The Villa Tunari-San Ignaciode Moxos route is not in the IIRSA Plan. Those who dis-parage this revolutionary government, as well as the of-cials of the NGOs opposed to its construction, are wellaware of this. They are all equipped with ofces with in-ternet connections, they know how to read and to inter-pret maps. However, they all yell in unison, on all sides,IIRSA, IIRSA, IIRSA.66

Why are they lying to the people? Why are they mis-leading society with their insults and falsehoods? Whyare they resorting to such deceptive means to make theircase? What class of writers are these people, who formonths have been sounding off and spilling so much inkwith the phantom of the geopolitics of the IIRSA67or ofthe IIRSA highway, when they know that it has neverbeen incorporated in that project? What lies behind this

hysterical discourse based on a lie? At what point doesreason go missing and give way to insults and deliber-ately misleading statements?

A farce of empty chatter. That is the naked truth aboutthe infamous campaign that seeks to associate the VillaTunari-Moxos highway with the IIRSA. And falling forit are many gullible people in various parts of the worldwho, more on the alert for the disqualifying adjectivethan for the truth, have been caught up in a dark schemeof tricks and camouage. Sun Tzu68 recommended that

we beat the drums to the left in order to attack on theright; and here, concerning the highway to Moxos, awhole rightist coalition has accused the Government ofsubmitting to corporate and foreign requirements whenin reality they are the ones who, with their lies, end up be-

ing the most servile defenders of the business, hacendadoand imperial interests precisely the ones opposed tonationalization of the Amazon territory.

Very well, but does that mean we do not need to pro-tect the environment? Of course we need to do that! Our

Constitution says so and we have enacted extraordinarilyadvanced laws along those lines. The Government as awhole is concerned with balancing the need for genera-tion of wealth in order to redistribute it, with the obli-gation to preserve the procreative nucleus of the naturalbasis of the planet. But that is a decision and a task ofOUR state, of our legislation, of our Government and ofour public state policies. The Amazon is ours, it belongsto Bolivians, not to North Americans or Europeans, norto the companies or NGOs that claim to be teaching us

to protect it. If they want to protect the environment, letthem do so with THEIR forests, rivers and hills, and notmeddle in how we decide to care for our own natural sur-roundings.

After all, if the European companies and the U.S. gov-ernment are so concerned about the environment and theconservation of the worlds forests, why do they not stopconsuming wood and drastically reduce their auto in-dustry and all types of production that emit CO

2into the

environment? Why not stop importing minerals whoseproduction contaminates the natural environment? Whynot stop importing foods whose production promotesdeforestation of millions of hectares of jungle? If theywere to close those markets we would drastically reducedeforestation and global warming, and there would be noneed to blame the poor countries, as they are now doing,to make them shoulder the burden.

Are we Bolivians having problems with the protectionof Mother Earth? Probably. But those are difculties thatwe ourselves will know how to resolve; we will neveraccept the principle of shared sovereignty in any piece

of Bolivian territory. Whoever at this point is opposed tothe presence of the state in the Amazon is in fact defend-ing the presence in it of the United States. There is noin-between position: that is the dilemma in which the fateof control over the Amazon region is being played out inBolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia and Brazil.

Characteristics of the Villa Tunari-San

Ignacio de Moxos highway

Now let us look at the characteristics of this highway.

First, it is 306 km long, and will allow the areas inhabit-ants to reduce the travel time from the plains to the An-dean valleys by 90%. The existing southern end, 103 km,is unpaved. The existing northern section, 143 km, is alsounpaved. This means that only 60 of the 306 km, less than


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19% of the total, does not yet existas a highway section.

But we should add that 116 kmof the highway would have tocross through the Isiboro Scure

park,6956.6 km of which now existas a passable road, and 42.6 km asa passage for cattle; that is, withinthe TIPNIS there now exists asan unpaved road 85% of the totallength that is to be constructed. Sowe are talking about an extensionthrough the forest that requiresopening barely 16.7 km to unitethe Amazon with the valley.

As the reader will appreciate,the Villa Tunari-San Ignacio deMoxos highway is not going todestroy a virgin forest, becausewithin the Parque Nacional 85%of this stretch of highway alreadyexists; and if we take into accountthe width of the highway, the totalnumber of hectares of forest thatwould be affected is 200. Also, inorder not to affect the core of thePark and the mobility of the liv-ing creatures within it, the plan isto build an ecological highway inthis 16.7 km section (the gradientcould be raised or in some casesthe highway could run under-ground).

In President Evos recent tripswith reporters from various media,they have veried that to go from the Chapare to Mox-

os the only viable route is the one that goes through thecentre of the Parque Isiboro-Scure, since on the rightside and beyond it we have countless lakes, bogs, per-manently ooded areas, ravines and rivers that continu-ally change their course, which makes a stable route fortravel technically impossible. And on the left side, thereis a steep mountainous area, equally or more unstablethan what there is in the stony area in the present Coch-abamba-Santa Cruz highway.70The natural setting is suchthat the only viable and natural route for travel between

the valleys and the Amazon plains is the one that crossesthrough the TIPNIS. And in fact that is the route that wasused by the Yuracar indigenous nation, the Jesuits andall the settlers who over the last 400 years sought to unitethe two regions.

Of course we all want to protect the environment, andthere are numerous examples in the world of highwaysthat cross through natural parks without destroying thehabitat: the Parque Braulio Carrillo in Costa Rica, theParque de Proteccin Alto Mayo in Peru, the Parque Na-cional Los Cuchumatanes in Guatemala, Tahoe Nation-al Forest and Yellowstone National Park in the UnitedStates, the Naturpark Homert in Germany, the ParqueNaturel Rgional du Vercors in France, and many more.

Some people, resorting to the classic racist and crimi-nalizing arguments, point out that the damage to the TIP-NIS is not the physical construction itself, but the use that

the highlands Quechua-Aymara indigenous-peasants aregoing to make of the highway. They argue that the parkwill be invaded by peasants who will clear the forestand grow coca for narcotrafcking. We have been hear-


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ing those prejudices voiced by the U.S. government andthe DEA [Drug Enforcement Administration], in order toexpel peasants in years gone by, as well as by the land-holding elites of the lowlands as a means of discourseof cohesion and conservative regional legitimation in op-

position to the presence of indigenous peoples from thehighlands. But that the same arguments are used by someenvironmentalists or pseudo-leftists denotes an irrepa-rable intellectual poverty. Three linked fallacies can bedistinguished in this prejudice, and we will now list them.

Colonialist fallacies

Therst fallacyis the argument that with the highwaythe coca leaf producers will invade the TIPNIS. There is atthis point no type of coercive measure that prevents them

entering the Park using the roads that already exist withinit; however, they are not doing so.Moreover, the unions of coca pro-ducers were the very ones that in1990 dened with the governmenta red line within the TIPNIS thatthey voluntarily agreed not to cross.Since then, any compaero whocrosses that line, instead of count-ing on the support of his union andfederation, is liable to be removedfrom where he is living by the lawenforcement agencies, as has hap-pened in recent months. Compli-ance with this demarcation is nowthe responsibility of the coca leafproducers themselves, and not theresult of any public force or lawthat prevents them from approach-ing.

The highway is not going to be

the launching point for any sup-posed cocalero invasion; nor hasany such invasion occurred evenwith the existing sections, becausethis is a Park and a territory of in-digenous collective ownership, andit is the coca leaf producers them-selves who as an organization havedecided to respect this collectiveproperty. But in addition, the illegal

production of coca leaf indepen-dently of the agreements of the pro-ducer federations with the Moralesgovernment is not located alongthe edges of the highways, for then

it would be eradicated immediately. The illegal cultiva-tion occurs precisely beyond the reach of control by thestate and the federations, in areas where there are no roadsor pathways. It is precisely because of the illegal natureof this production (outside the areas dened by agreement

between the peasant federations and the government) thatit occurs where law enforcement by the state or theunions cannot go, that is, precisely where there are noroads, paths or public control. If there is anything that thepresence of a highway in the Park will promote, it is thedeparture of the illegal crops, including the production ofcoca paste, the base for cocaine, which throughout theseyears has been detected in areas of the TIPNIS in whichthere are no roads or a state presence.71Furthermore, inhis recent message to the people of Bolivia on August

6, 2012, President Evo Morales announced the creation


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of a Regimiento Ecolgico [Ecological Regiment (of theArmed Forces)], whose mission will be to protect the na-tional parks and prevent any type of illegal occupation bypeasants in the TIPNIS.72

Thesecond fallacy, with even more reactionary impli-

cations than the rst, is the one that seeks to articiallyoppose lowlands indigenous peoples to lowlands andhighlands campesinos. The rst, remote from markets,are good people who contemplate nature, while the sec-ond are illegal predators, bad people, merchants and de-stroyers of nature. This cartoon dualism was for decadesused by the Amazon and eastern hacendados to erect abarrier wall around their latifundios against the presenceand migration of the indigenous peasants from the high-lands. At its height, this anti-peasant xenophobia went so

far as to consider instituting a passport requirement forAymara and Quechua seeking to enter Santa Cruz.73Thisregionalist landlord ideology has been taken up again bythe environmentalists in the debate over the TIPNIS, tocreate a hostile atmosphere toward the highlands indig-enous-peasant movement and in particular in opposi-tion to the coca leaf producers. This xenophobia goes tosuch limits that it unashamedly defends a type of ethnicinbreeding, considering it a crime if Yuracars marryQuechuas or Aymaras. Basically, this is the colonial fal-lacy of the construction of pure races, now put in post-modern language.

But this second colonial fallacy, moreover, is wovenaround the separation of good indigenous living in aTierra Comunitaria from bad peasants who hold indi-vidual family property. Let us look at this.

Colonial domination involved the looting of lands, con-trol of labour itself, but above all control of the collectiveidentities of the dominated society, which are the s

geopolitics of the amazon - Álvaro garcía linera

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