Petroleum companies and cosmopolitical practices in Mapuche´s territory - Presentation on SALSA Conference (original) (raw)

Seeking common ground. Petroleum and Indigenous Peoples in Ecquador's Amazon

Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development, 1998

Marcb 1994. Sitting side by side around a conference table, Indian leaders, oilmen, and environmental advocates talked well into the night. They discussed native land claims, health care, and the lack of adequate schools throughout the Oriente, Ecuador's Amazon region. At midnight they reached a decision: They would pursue a dialogue to resolve tbe issues surrounding Pu:co's proposed development of the Villano oJ field. Located deep within LheOriente, in a region of Pastaza province Imown as Block 10, tl~e Villano field had become a baltleoround in the often difficult and contentious relationship between Arco and Ecuador's indigenous Indian communities. This agreement represented a major turning point. A few years eariier, the Organization of Indigenous Peoples of Pastaza (OPIP), one of Ecuador's most powerful Indian federations, had demanded a IS-year moratorium all. all petroleum exploration in Pastaza province. Yet ,that night in Plano, OPIP representatives promised to work with Axeo. This alticle outlines the process by whid~that agreement was reached and where it has led since 1994, assessing what larger lessons Axeo's unique experience holds for hydrocarbon companies worl"ing to buJd relationships witb indigenous peoples elsewhere. To build such relationships in Ecuador, the com

Negotiating Place: Petroleum Extraction in the Ecuadorian Amazon

Through careful analysis of ethnographic field research conducted during the summer of 2012, combined with previous literature published on the Napo region of Amazonian Ecuador, I explore the dichotomy observed between a local Kichwa community’s necessity for work and desire to gain employment with an invasive petroleum company, and the desire to maintain and preserve the Amazonian jungle environment for the sake of agriculture, budding ecotourism initiatives, and community member’s health. A long history of entrance and exit of extraction companies, all seeking “liquid gold”, has expedited a transformation from local subsistence agriculture to wage-paying labor and economic struggle as exchange prices for garden produce depreciate and few wage-paying jobs are offered to local community members by the present oil company. In the context of industrialization, globalization, and the deregulation of Ecuador’s mineral resource economy, the Kichwa community of Venecia-Derecha is experiencing rapid and drastic changes in regards to economic subsistence and political organization, among many other aspects of daily life, as control and availability of local resources is consistently reduced. Ecotourism has been introduced in nearby communities as a successful yet seasonal alternative to working for the oil company, which also allows for preservation of local territory. However, as the current oil company seeks crude oil reserves, an influx of coastal and Andean Ecuadorian workers flood the closest city, Tena, and further complicate the nature of human traffic through Kichwa and surrounding communities. The dynamic of all of these forces come together to complicate the notion of “evil oil corporation” versus indigenous community as local Kichwa adapt to a changing economic, political, and social atmosphere.

Rituals for dispossession. Indigenous Peoples, oil and negotiations in the Peruvian Northern Amazon basin

For more than 40 years hydrocarbons activities have degraded the indigenous habitat in the Pastaza, Corrientes, El Tigre and Marañon river basins in the Peruvian northern Amazonia. Negotiations between indigenous peoples and the state have been going on for more than twenty years with unfortunately scarce results. From the perspectives of Global Justice theory and Legal and Political Anthropology, in this article I contend that negotiations on oil contamination of indigenous land and water sources may be better understood as political rituals that maintain indigenous peoples in a liminal state, while their main concerns on global justice are usually dismissed.

Anthias_Contested territory, entangled landscapes: Indigenous land claims, settler geographies and natural gas extraction in the Bolivian Chaco

Throughout the colonized world, the production of national territory has been predicated on the symbolic erasure and material dispossession of indigenous populations. Over recent decades, ethnic movements in Latin America have sought to make visible and contest these processes by asserting their own territorial claims and projects -a struggle that has brought them into complex entanglements with global development institutions and state law. In Bolivia, under the government of Evo Morales, indigenous claims for territory have now moved beyond their initial focus on cartographic recognition and agrarian rights to foreground demands for autonomous territorial governance within a newly-imagined "plurinational state" Fabricant 2011, Cameron 2013). As such, the very nature of the Bolivian state is being called into question by indigenous territorial claims.

Indigenous Peoples and the New Extraction: From Territorial Rights to Hydrocarbon Citizenship in the Bolivian Chaco

A growing body of literature examines how the rise of “neo-extractivist” states in Latin America is reconfiguring the relationship between resources, nation, territory, and citizenship. However, the implications for indigenous territorial projects remain underexplored. This paper draws on ethnographic research in the Bolivian Chaco to examine the ways in which indigenous territorial projects are becoming implicated in and being reimagined amidst the spatializing struggles of a hydrocarbon state. The tension between indigenous peoples’ desire for inclusion in a hydrocarbon-based national development project and their experiences of dispossession by an expanding hydrocarbon frontier has given rise to competing modes of “hydrocarbon citizenship” in the Guaraní territory Itika Guasu, where a vision of corporate-sponsored indigenous autonomy is pitted against new forms of state-funded development patronage. These dynamics challenge both resistance narratives and resource-curse theories, revealing that resources act as conduits for deeper postcolonial struggles over territory, sovereignty, and citizenship.

Divided We Fall: Oil Exploitation, Conservation, and Indigenous Organizing in the Amazon Basin

This article explores the failures of the current development paradigm through the case study of the Madre de Dios region of the Peruvian Amazon. I examine the complex relationships between the indigenous communities, the Federación Nativa de Madre de Dios y Afluentes (FENAMAD) that represents them, and the Peruvian Government in the southeastern region of the Amazon, to argue that the State’s conservationist discourse limits the indigenous organization’s struggle against oil extraction, preventing it from effectively representing the needs of the communities it claims to represent. Based on analysis of personal interviews with community members, published statements from FENAMAD, and legal complaints against Hunt Oil, this paper suggests that the divisions between these stakeholders are directly impeding progress towards defining and acting upon shared regional goals. I compare the desirable futures as defined by the Native Community Shintuya, FENAMAD, and the State to conclude that contrary to the federation’s stance, the community sees oil as a potential opportunity for community growth. Through examination of the current strategies of indigenous umbrella organizations and other actors in the face of natural resource extraction, my case study reveals the challenges confronting indigenous communities in their struggles to define their own development and suggests strategies for moving forward toward desirable futures.

Imaginaries of development through extraction: The 'History of Bolivian Petroleum' and the present view of the future. 2018. Geoforum

A B S T R A C T This article offers a reading of the ideas expressed in Walter Solón Romero Gonzales' mural, the 'History of Bolivian Petroleum' from 1956, and juxtaposes these ideas to the current public discourse that emerges from speeches of high officials and from policy documents of President Evo Morales' government. The objective is to investigate the understanding of the role natural resources vis-à-vis development in Bolivia at these two points in time and show the striking resonance between ideas depicted in the mural more than half a century ago and ideas expressed in contemporary official discourses. These ideas concern the foundational elements of a development model that envisions a central role for natural resources, and especially hydrocarbons, in the development of the country. The elements of this model, that include a prominent role of the state in the extraction of natural resources, expansive social policies, strategies to diversify the economy, neatly overlap with the central tenets of the neoextractivist model. It transpires that the novelty of neoextractivism can be fundamentally questioned. This model also provides the rationale justifying the promotion of extractive activities 'at all costs' in Bolivia and beyond. However, history has shown that it produces fantasies of development rather than actual development.

Navigating shifting waters: Subjectivity, oil extraction, and Urarina territorial strategies in the Peruvian Amazon

Geoforum, 2023

This paper examines the relationships between extractive infrastructure, changing territorial strategies, and contemporary processes of subject formation among the Urarina, an indigenous people in the Peruvian Amazon. We first introduce the uneven and combined character of oil extraction in the Loreto region in north-eastern Peru, and how its racialised spatial contradictions are expressed in the ethnopolitical field that gives political form to regional extractive operations. The paper goes on to analyse the case of the Urarina people in the Chambira river basin, their particular place in the geography of extraction, and the case of the community of Nueva Union. We examine contemporary processes of subject formation in the community, which combine radical transformations in the role of money, territorial strategies, use and valuation of the environment, and changes in political structure, in non-linear ways. The paper closes by examining how the case of the community of Nueva Union sheds light on broader dynamics of subject formation, localised relations to the environment, and extraction as they play out in contemporary indigenous Amazonia.