Características de las contrapartes locales

Moments of rupture, which appear in various forms and go by many names – acts of insubordination, deinstitutionalized revolt, insurrection, and spontaneous rebellion, to                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           Heads of government agencies that have tried to intervene in unethical processes have been summarily dismissed (Daniel Cohenca, former head of IBAMA being a case in point).

name a few – have been alternatively dismissed as reactionary or overemphasized for their revolutionary potential. As an alternative and following recent work in and on Latin American social movements,22 _{in this chapter I have privileged an examination of these}

moments in order to, in the words of Raul Zibechi (2010), “encounter what lies behind and below the established forms,” treating them as “lightening rods” to illuminate the specific issues and concepts that become visible within them. In this last section, I analyze these moments along three different horizons – the issues that they embody, the pre-existing relations that make these moments possible and the political potential that they in turn open or make visible. First, the events recounted above bring into sharp relief the stakes of contemporary political conflict and help us to understand its historical and geographical specificity. As such, these particular struggles have much to tell us about the continuities and discontinuities that the current Neo-extractivist moment in Amazonia has with prior historical periods, about the dynamic relations among territory, ecology, and political subjectivities, and about the overlaps and disjunctures among social movements, political organizations, and government, all of which will be elaborated in turn in the remainder of this dissertation (see chapter summaries below for these specific arguments).

It is not that these issues were fully formed, yet latent or unspoken and in these moments it is as if we shine a light on them in the dark. Rather, within these moments of explicit oppositionality, ongoing tensions and contradictions present within the current socio-political relations are forced to a greater level of intensity. In both of these struggles, we see the argument made explicit that the intensification of extractive industry simply cannot occur in these areas without the destruction of the already-existing form of life                                                                                                                

22 _{See, for example, the Winter 2012 issue the South Atlantic Quarterly on Autonomy and Emancipation in}

there. We see that over the course of the occupations, there is a growing recognition that only making demands on government would be insufficient to meet movement demands. In consequence, there is a shift in the nature of movement objectives from, we might say, those directed primarily outward (that the government might meet), to those directed inward (that the people might develop a strategy to meet themselves). We also see, as discussed above, increasing tensions between older forms of political organization and the new strategies and voices that protagonize these struggles.

Next, we can also read these events as expressions, and intensifications, of ongoing processes and dynamics within the communities that participate in them.23 _{EP Thompson}

(1970, 1971, 1990), James Scott (1976, 1985, 1991), Ranijit Guha (1988, 1997, 1999) and Ana Esther Ceceña (1995, 2012) have all illuminated the existing structures of

organization and the more subtle expressions of resistance hidden in the every day. EP Thompson’s work has taught us that while “riots” may be triggered by specific,

conjuntural events, they are not reducible to those events alone. They have their origin in historical, culturally specific, structural relations of force on the one hand, and, in what he called the crowd’s “moral economy” on the other.24 _{James Scott’s (1990) work has taught}

us to be attentive to the “infrapolitics,” or the daily struggles that are “invisible by design,”                                                                                                                

23 _{Chapters Four and Five will both briefly treat the concept of “community” more substantively, both its}

political history in Amazonia as related to the Catholic Church (Chapter Four), and conflicts and

contradictions among groups that self-identify as communities (Chapter Five). I would like to flag here that I do not mean to present “community” as a unified whole (in fact, one of the primary effects of these conflicts is to exacerbate pre-existing tensions). People engaged in these struggles will often invoke their communities and speak for their communities as communities precisely because of the concept’s vague yet powerful referent to a collective political subject. That does not mean that any particular community representation is not uncontested. (On the complexities of “community” see for example Li 1996; Agrawal and Gibson 1999; Schroeder 1999; M. J. Watts 2004).

24  _{Several scholars have taken up a more substantive analysis and extension of the concept of moral}

economy. For examples see (Scott 1976; Watts 1984; Mallon 1995; Sayer 2004). For a review of all of these authors and a re-theorization of this concept, see Wolford 2005.

of subordinate groups that he argues make such acts of rebellion possible. These everyday, often symbolic, acts of resistance, for Scott, are the infrastructure (e.g., form the basis for) the visible acts of political action that receive more attention. Thus, the conditions of possibility for open rebellion is the accumulation of smaller acts of transgression that slowly shift the relations of force by creating an opening for more confrontational and visible rebellion.25 _{Rebellion is a question of intensity and it is an accumulation of}

negative, transgressive force that leads to a moment of rupture.

The limitations of this framework are that it supposes that there is a structure of domination, and subordinate subjects who reject or resist that structure. It lacks an analysis of the production of subjects (as Thompson certainly would have argued for). Guha on the other hand, highlights the fact that there is a creative or productive element to the

subaltern domain located, he argues, in autonomous spaces for the construction of resistance and rebellion. Ana Esther Ceceña (2012) engages all of these authors to argue that it is not only intentionally resistant practice but rather the daily strategies of survival, the practices and exchanges of everyday life, and also spaces of struggle from which “the new world springs.” (118).

Within the episodes outlined above, we can see that the very existence of these moments and spaces of rebellion – temporary spaces outside of the rhythms of daily life – at Renascer and São Pedro were only possible because they were based in the dense networks of existing relationships and the ongoing practices of community life. The 1200 people who arrived at São Pedro with almost no resources, could create an encampment that could feed, house, entertain, guard, negotiate, and, in fact, re-forge themselves as a                                                                                                                

movement. Similarly, the small crew on the banks of the Tamuataí could erect a village that was a microcosm of a 150,000 hectare reserve with little more than fishing lines, hammocks, farina and some wood-cutting tools, because of the existing social relations that provide the capacity to self-organize. The near seamless establishment of these encampments demonstrates that the organization and relations crafted through the functioning of daily life is what I would call another form of pre-figurative

“infrastructure” (a la Scott) that creates the conditions of possibility for such acts of insubordination. In Chapter Four, we will further explore the way these forms of organization is a key element (what I will call there production of “convention”) in processes of territorialization.

Finally, while these events are made possible by ongoing relationships and social organization, the changes that we see within the demands and strategies of the people engaged in or inspired by these events is evidence that they open new horizons of struggle. They are key spaces of political subject formation. The occupations on the beach at São Pedro or on the banks of the Uruará disrupted the rhythms of daily life, creating time and space to reflect on conflict itself, forcing actors on both sides to act, and as a result, analyze and adjust the strategic and tactical objectives of resistance. The adrenaline of conflict, the euphoria of victory, however temporary, along with the daily practices of community life within a temporarily constituted community on the beach at São Pedro, or on the banks of the Uruará, as well as the stories of these places and events that traveled throughout the region, galvanized hundreds, if not thousands, of people to participate in both of these movements after the dispersal of the camps.

The value of these spaces and events is not simply catharsis, but also the opportunity for innovation that is based in forms of struggle. For several weeks and months, at both of these encampments, residents of the region organized themselves into a temporary community and different forms of organization supplanted and exceeded the organizational and territorial categories of the state (e.g., traditional and indigenous people became a movement for life, people inside and outside of the reserve became a movement in defense of its territory). The traditional political organizing structures and hierarchies were sidelined or adapted (namely the community presidents, religious leaders, and union representatives were not prominent). Most significantly the sindicatos

(unions), at the center of “grassroots: mobilization for decades, played no central role and in some ways played an antagonistic role to these rebellions. Instead, the non-

institutionalized organization that exists within communities formed the basis for the organization of the occupations themselves.

An element of spontaneity became a strategy for intervening in the status quo. Such acts of resistance must be unanticipated if they are not to be crushed by loggers or law enforcement, or discouraged or obstructed by social mediators and NGOs whose own position within the relations of force is such that they discourage any act of open conflict. The people at São Pedro, for example, turned their participation in the union’s symbolic action into an act of concrete oppositionality using resources – both the organizing that had been done, and the literal resources such as gasoline and food – from the Rural Workers’ Union and NGOs to initiate a mobilization that was only ever allowed to occur in the first place because it was pre-coded as symbolic, as not truly adversarial, and as existing within the field of state politics. From this position, they were able to build the

momentum to force a rupture with the given order, from which the new possibilities of a current and future politics became visible, both to those directly involved in these events and to their spectators.

While the title “born in fire” refers to the literal fact that the act of setting fire to loggers’ barges was a galvanizing moment for both the struggle for Renascer (an event that had happened several years prior to the ones described above) and for Gleba Nova Olinda, it is not meant to suggest that this particular tactic is necessarily central to these struggles. Rather, to argue that these movements are “born in fire” is to suggest that the categories and actors of political change are not pre-given, but rather that struggle is central to the formation of political subjects and their territories of resistance, as will be further elaborated in subsequent chapters.