Pantallas

Comprehending resource conflicts requires an approach that integrates politico-cultural understandings that entangle ‘meanings of development, citizenship and the nation itself’ (Perreault & Valdivia 2010: 697). As such, understandings of indigeneity have been entangled in debates over the meanings of modernity, development and governance in the TIPNIS conflict. Within this section, I will discuss the framework of ‘development’ as a lens for the MAS to continue a racial legacy in Bolivia. This follows a rentista imaginary in Latin America in which the ‘state appeared as a single agent endowed with the magical power to remake the nation’ through its intimate relation with the exploitation of natural resources (Coronil 1997: 4). Coronil continues by arguing that ‘these rents help establish patterns of internal specialization and external dependence which consolidate the role of third-world nations as what I call nature-exporting societies’ (1997: 7). In this way, the state becomes the agent of modernisation. The nationalisation of the hydrocarbons industry has resulted in the Bolivian state amassing financial reserves of $14 billion, the highest ratio in the world of international reserves to the size of its economy. These developments have even resulted in praise from the World Bank for Morales’ ‘prudent’ macroeconomic policies (Neuman 2014).

Government discourses of development reify a normative epistemology of modernity based on the model of a mono-cultural nation-state. In reference to discursive resistances to mega-dams within the Narmada river valley in central India, Routledge argues that ‘“non- modern”, traditional and indigenous systems of knowledge have been devalued, and portrayed as “unscientific” and “irrational”’ (2003b: 245). In the case of Bolivia, MAS representatives have suggested that inhabitants of the TIPNIS need economic development. This is made evident through a pamphlet TIPNIS: Atrapados en el paraíso (TIPNIS: Trapped in paradise) issued by the government’s Ministry of Communication. The document states that within the TIPNIS families go hungry, children don’t have shoes and that children leave school without passing their exams (Esprella 2012). It finishes by stating that ‘[o]f every one hundred children born in the TIPNIS, 60 die, in full view of journalists, the church and NGOs, to whom it seems [more] important to weaken the government that give an opportunity to those who inhabit the TIPNIS’ (Esprella 2012: 18;

141 author’s translation). Official discourses of the government therefore position the road project as part of the necessary process of development in Bolivia. Pro-road factions and supporters of the MAS adopt this understanding. For example, Figure 3 shows graffiti after a pro-government rally in Cochabamba that reads ‘the road is progress, it is integration’. More recently, announcements by Morales have called to eradicate poverty within the TIPNIS over the next three years (El Deber 2013b). However, this type of discourse strips the lowland indigenous communities of their right to self-determination in decisions over development projects as defined in the 2009 Constitution (Gobierno de Bolivia 2009; Art. 304: II). As such, the state fails to understand questions of poverty and development as anything more than socio-economic needs. In doing so, representatives occlude the question of political claims for self-determination (see Eversole et al 2005).

Figure 3. Graffiti in Cochabamba

Source: Author’s photograph.

The development trope is closely tied to a politics of race and gender. The discourses and practices of government representatives articulate derogatory understandings of the communities of the TIPNIS as backward, uneducated, poor and underdeveloped. This model reinforces development pursuits with the goal of ‘civilising’ indigenous peoples and continues assimilation strategies of past government administrations in Bolivia. Discourse has revolved around the idea that the Amazonian indigenous peoples need to be integrated

142 into modern Bolivia through the road project. On one occasion President Morales suggested to the campesino youth located in and around Polygon 7 to the south of the TIPNIS that, ‘iría a enamorar a las compañeras y convencerlas de que no se opongan’ (I would go to enamor the [Yuracaré] comrades and convince them not to be opposed) to the construction of the road (Página Siete 2011a). This assimilationist rhetoric is extended in the Ministry of Communication’s pamphlet TIPNIS: Trapped in Paradise. The document states that a new campesino population has been produced – the Kollacarés – as a result of the intermixing of the ‘Kollas’ (Andean Bolivians) with the Yuracaré people of the TIPNIS (Esprella 2012). The rhetoric echoes Andrew Canessa’s view that Aymara and Quechua settlers in the Chapare ‘treated them [the lowland indigenous] little differently to the way lowland indians have been treated historically. They spoke of them as “savages” who “didn’t know how to work” and their displacement or engagement as wage laborers for the colonists was seen as a civilizing mission’ (2012a: 20).

The discourse is also gendered as it portrays the lowland indigenous women as objects to be dominated by highland migrants. For Bertha Vejarano, the President of the Ninth March, the suggestion of racial and cultural integration by Evo Morales is one of cultural ethnocide in which ‘the essence of the indigenous movement will lose its own culture’73 (personal interview, 15 May 2012). Tapia states that ‘[t]he idea of the lowlands as a space of colonisation corresponds to the lack of recognition of the existence of other peoples and their territories’ and that this is a form of ‘ethnocentrism’ and ‘structural racism’ of the MAS (2012: 271; author’s translation). Similarly, Bautista (2012) has claimed that the Bolivian state enacts a new form of internal colonialism in which congenital racism pervades and is rationalised through a discourse of ‘modernity’ and ‘progress’. Bautista states, in reference to the TIPNIS conflict, that the concept of development ‘is [made] possible only by the superior-inferior dichotomy that is, in turn, a sophisticated way to cover up the previous racist classification between civilised and barbaric [people]’ (2011b: n. pag.; author’s translation). Following Agamben’s (1998) notion of the exception of ‘bare life’, it is clear that the indigenous bodies of the TIPNIS are marked (or excluded) from the status of political subjecthood through the violence of ‘development’ agendas. I contend that this is a form of what Quijano calls a ‘coloniality of power’ where the production of race is a ‘basic factor in the problem of nation-states and nationality’ (2000: 229).74

73 _{‘esa esencia del movimiento indígena va a ir perdiéndose su propia cultura’.}

74 _{Burman (2009) points out the concept of ‘internal colonialism’ had little resonance for indigenous peoples}

143 The lowland indigenous movement countered these discourses through articulations of alternative understandings of development and territory. As Routledge argues ‘[d]iscursive resistance, like its material counterpart, acts as a political disruption in the unanimity implied by state discourses regarding development’ (2003b: 260). Counter-discourses did not reject development per se but sought the acknowledgement of place-based understandings defined within indigenous territories. Many indigenous peoples and communities actively seek development (see Bebbington 1993). This can be observed in the platform of demands of the Ninth March that included calls for the construction and implementation of community development models according to the vision and self- determination of the indigenous, the recognition of community organisations as actors in the mineral and hydrocarbon sectors and the right for communities to benefit from the revenues created from extractive industries (see Table 2 in chapter VI). These demands are legitimised through the 2009 Constitution, which recognises the right to ‘la economía plural’ (the plural economy) including communitarian visions (Gobierno de Bolivia 2009; Art. 306). The movement demands financial and political autonomy from the state regarding decisions over economic development. The framing of indigenous grievances was also mediated through practices of resistance. For example, on the Eighth March a popular campaign slogan was ‘TIPNIS si, carretera no’ (TIPNIS yes, road no). Later, on the Ninth March this was reworked to ‘Carretera si, pero no por el TIPNIS’ (Road yes, but not through the TIPNIS). This re-articulated message was the product of encounters with government supporters who subverted the motto to mean that the indigenous were against roads, modernity, progress and development.

Further, the lowland indigenous movement counteracted discourses of progress through promoting evidence that suggests that modern development programmes can be detrimental to the lives of indigenous peoples. Bertha Vejarano stated in an interview that ‘[w]hen you have roads here, equally we don’t have basic services, we don’t have electricity, we don’t have water, we don’t have good attention to the subject of education, we don’t have good health’75

(personal interview, 15 May 2012). This disturbance of the positive assumptions of development is important since the MAS administration has constructed a number of highways throughout Bolivia in order to integrate the country and was therefore ‘nothing “internal”’ to the asymmetric power relations between Aymara peoples and q’aras [white people]’ (2009: 128). However, I argue that the term can be used more meaningfully in the recent period of Bolivian politics as the MAS ‘indigenous’ Party now subordinate other indigenous groups that are part of the new ‘Plurinational State of Bolivia’.

75 _{‘cuando tiene las carreteras acá igual no tenemos los servicios básicos, no tenemos luz no tenemos agua no}

144 offer opportunities for economic development. Hence, making visible the poverty along certain highways within Bolivia often caused by the displacement of indigenous peoples, deforestation and water contamination has become an important way to counteract the popular imaginaries of ‘development’. For instance, some urban activists published photographs of destitute families and children living alongside the newly built roads on social media sites such as Facebook. Some representatives of the indigenous movement have also argued that development cannot be defined economically. For instance, Bertha Vejarano suggests that the indigenous peoples are:

[..] so poor, so humble. But they coexist with nature, they live on the meat of the mountain, of the fish in the rivers, of the collection of fruit, of wood, of natural medicine that you have inside the territories, so the territories are very rich, and they cannot tell us we [are] not.76 (personal interview, 15 May 2012)

These imaginaries of alternative forms of development are echoed within the discourses of urban activists. Marielle Cauthin, an investigator and journalist of indigenous rights, argued that:

You don’t need to have a car, a house, anything, it is only having your clothing and preserving your language, your customs, your territory. This is a wealth that has no value and the government should encourage this type of vision of development.77 (personal interview, 05 February)

Counter-discourses therefore become part of a strategy in furthering indigenous demands for territory, autonomy and self-determination when pitted against the extended arm of the state under the guise of development agendas. The Bolivian writer and philosopher Rafael Bautista has argued that ‘modernity’ is equal to ‘domination’ and that ‘“modern wealth”, “development” and “progress”, are only possible in terms of domination’ (2012: 177-178; author’s translation). To this extent, it is clear that the MAS is ruling under a state of hegemony that is questioned by some sectors of society, including many of the lowland indigenous peoples. Rather, the Morales administration is sustaining a structural split between an Aymara elite and an Amazonian subaltern that fails to integrate the plural

76 _{‘[…] ellos son tan pobres tan humildes pero conviven con la naturaleza, ellos viven de la carne del monte}

del pescado en los ríos de la recolección de la fruta de la madera de medicinas naturales que tiene adentro de los territorios, entonces los territorios son bien ricos, y no pueden decirnos que nosotros no’.

77 _{‘no necesita tener un auto, una casa, nada, es solamente teniendo su vestimenta y preservar su idioma, sus}

costumbres, su territorio eso ya es una riqueza que no tiene valor, y el gobierno debía fomentar, ese tipo de visión del desarrollo’.

145 epistemologies of Bolivian citizens into the consciousness of the central state. The lowland indigenous movement, who engage in a contest for hegemony surrounding development ideologies, fundamentally challenges this.

Government representatives have countered this by manipulating essentialist indigenous identities to refute claims to greater autonomy and self-determination. Ley No. 180 described the TIPNIS as an ‘intangible’ (untouchable) zone, which would prohibit even inhabitants of the park from using its natural resources. As such, members of CIDOB viewed the law as a modest victory that on the one hand would cancel the road project but on the other would mean that community development initiatives already operational within the TIPNIS, such as cacao production and caiman hunting, would be suspended. Furthermore, García Linera has countered claims of the TIPNIS being an unspoilt territory or ‘pulmón del mundo’ (lungs of the world) because of allegations of illegal timber sales by representatives of the park, such as President of the TIPNIS Sub-Central Fernando Vargas and ex-President of CIDOB Marcial Fabricano. García Linera thus argues that the TIPNIS is ‘a lung pierced by the illegal extraction of wood and leather, a lung with cancer from nicotine’ (García Linera 2012: 35; author’s translation). The idealisation of lowland indigenous peoples as living in harmonious balance with nature can therefore limit the pursuit of wider political objectives. This is a contradictory strategy by the government considering that the Vice-President has also argued for the road by stating that it will actually only cross through 16.7 percent of virgin territory within the core ‘untouchable’ zone (García Linera 2012). Indeed, some of the land concessions granted to hydrocarbon enterprises by the current government fall within the Core Zone of the TIPNIS.

To conclude, it is clear that discursive articulations of development paradigms were part of the struggle of power within the TIPNIS conflict. This echoes Escobar’s understandings of coloniality as part of two parallel processes: ‘the systematic suppression of subordinated cultures and knowledges […] by a dominant modernity’ and ‘the necessary emergence, in the very encounter, of particular knowledges shaped by this experience that have at least the potential to become sites of articulation of alternative projects and of enabling a pluriverse of sociocultural configurations’ (2008: 12). Therefore, I agree with Blaser’s (2010) conclusion in his ethnographic study of the Yshiro peoples of the Chaco that calls for an understanding of multiple worlds or realities through the ‘pluriverse’ that recognises alternative forms of modernity. In many ways, debates surrounding the governance of natural resources are fundamental to the TIPNIS conflict as they feed into questions over

146 whether indigenous peoples should have the jurisdiction to exploit and govern resources located on their lands, or whether notions of national sovereignty mean that natural resources should be held under the jurisdiction of the state.