Limits to Decolonization

Indigeneity, Territory, and Hydrocarbon Politics in the Bolivian Chaco

Penelope Anthias

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781501714351
• eBook ISBN: 9781501714283
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: Social Sciences

Penelope Anthias's Limits to Decolonization addresses one of the most important issues in contemporary indigenous politics: struggles for territory. Based on the experience of thirty-six Guaraní communities in the Bolivian Chaco, Anthias reveals how two decades of indigenous mapping and land titling have failed to reverse a historical trajectory of indigenous dispossession in the Bolivian lowlands. Through an ethnographic account of the "limits" the Guaraní have encountered over the course of their territorial claim—from state boundaries to landowner opposition to hydrocarbon development—Anthias raises critical questions about the role of maps and land titles in indigenous struggles for self-determination.

Anthias argues that these unresolved territorial claims are shaping the contours of an era of "post-neoliberal" politics in Bolivia. Limits to Decolonization reveals the surprising ways in which indigenous peoples are reframing their territorial projects in the context of this hydrocarbon state and drawing on their experiences of the limits of state recognition. The tensions of Bolivia's "process of change" are revealed, as Limits to Decolonization rethinks current debates on cultural rights, resource politics, and Latin American leftist states. In sum, Anthias reveals the creative and pragmatic ways in which indigenous peoples contest and work within the limits of postcolonial rule in pursuit of their own visions of territorial autonomy.

1

IMAGINING TERRITORY

Contingent Articulations, Uncertain Compromises

First it’s necessary to see the situation in which we lived—empatronados, in a system of slavery, without rights to land, gripped only by the hand of the patrón. It’s from there that our ancestors decided to organize themselves [in the late 1980s], first to consolidate or recover their territory, then to recover their freedom, and finally, to recover their cultural identity.

Guaraní leader from Itika Guasu, April 21, 2009

We contend that there needs to be a new relationship among indigenous peoples, scientists, national governments and international organizations … This relationship should be a contractual one, whereby indigenous peoples are provided with juridical recognition and control over large areas of forest in exchange for a commitment to conserve the ecosystem and protect biodiversity.

Shelton H. Davis and Alaka Wali, Indigenous Territories and Tropical Forest Management in Latin America, 1993

In October 1996, the Bolivian Congress passed Law 1715 of the Servicio Nacional de Reforma Agraria (National Agrarian Reform Service), commonly known as the INRA Law. Alongside a variety of market-led land reform measures, the INRA Law established a new category of agrarian property: tierras comunitarias de origen (native community lands, TCOs). TCOs were defined as

the geographical spaces that constitute the habitat of indigenous and originary peoples and communities, to which they have traditionally had access and where they maintain and develop their own forms of economic, social, and cultural organization in a way that guarantees their survival and development. They are inalienable, indivisible, irreversible, and collective, composed of communities or groups of communities, exempt from seizure and imprescriptible. (Article 41.5)

Indigenous groups across the Bolivian lowlands celebrated the INRA Law as marking the first time in history that the Bolivian state had recognized their territorial rights. Following their second national protest march, which coincided with the law’s elaboration, they presented the government with thirty-three territorial claims. Among them was the territorial claim of Itika Guasu.

This chapter examines the grassroots, national, and global processes that conjoined to produce TCOs as a new geographical imaginary and category of agrarian property in Bolivia. I explore the divergent imaginaries invested in TCOs, the local practices involved in their construction, and the power-infused negotiations that led to their incorporation in Bolivian law. Neither an indigenous category nor a top-down governmental project, TCOs emerged from contingent articulations between processes unfolding across a variety of sites and scales (Tsing 2005).

I begin by describing the historical configurations of race, nation, and territory that underpinned the Guaraní’s dispossession of their ancestral lands. I then move on to the networked relations, insurgent practices, and decolonial imaginaries that undergirded the emergence of a collective land struggle in Itika Guasu. Next, I shift scale to consider the context and rationales for the global “territorial turn”—the emergence of broad support for indigenous land rights among international development institutions during the 1990s. Finally, I examine how these grassroots and global processes conjoined with national dynamics in Bolivia to bring about the creation of TCOs under the 1996 INRA Law.

In tracing these articulated processes, I challenge simplistic accounts of neoliberal governance as a top-down project or coherent rationality of rule. This chapter highlights the agency of diverse actors—including indigenous movements—in shaping national and global policy processes. Nevertheless, I also reveal the constrained circumstances in which indigenous peoples’ struggles for territory emerged. In organizing around a territorial claim, Guaraní communities of Itika Guasu faced threats of violent retaliation from local landowners, as well as the prospect of starvation as independent subsistence farmers. In seeking state recognition of their territories, indigenous organizations entered a field of national politics that was infused by colonial power inequalities and capitalist resource interests. The result was that TCOs fell short of indigenous peoples’ demands for territory in ways that would have important consequences over subsequent decades. TCOs, however, were more than just a legal category. For the Guaraní, they were a vehicle for a broader project of “reclaiming territory”—a project that would continue to push at the limits of state cartography and agrarian law.

Seating Sovereignty at the Chaco Frontier

It was January 2012 and the midday heat was just beginning to subside in the Guaraní community of Tarairí, nestled in a tight bend of the Pilcomayo River. Sitting on a homemade wooden bench enjoying the shade from the palm-thatched roof of his open-air kitchen, the community’s elderly leader (mburuvicha), Fausto, described the world of his ancestors. He spoke quietly but confidently in broken Spanish with the occasional Guaraní term, his gaze fixed on the horizon, indicating remembered places with a sweep of his weathered arm:

Before, ñande [us/ours]. They didn’t know any Spanish, like that they lived in peace. They took care of their land, from what is now Ivo to the crossroads was all Guaraní land, and the riverbanks, too; everything—up to Ivoca, Ivopeiti, everything, even Puerto Margarita. It was all Guaraní land, land of our grandparents. There weren’t any, say, Spanish people. Before, it was pure Guaraní territory; it was our territory. We made our fields, they went to that blue hill there; there is still a path of our grandparents, who farmed there … And our grandparents walked; they didn’t consume any sugar before, it was pure corn, black beans, pumpkin, all our food was like that. They went with the porongo [a goard recipient for storing chicha], it’s called, our grandparents carried chicha. Kaguiye, they say, don’t they? That was our grandparents’ food. They went to work in the early morning, they went; returned later, they say. They were intelligent, our grandparents. They were handsome, healthy, they knew neither health clinics nor medicine pills … If they got sick, our grandparents would cure themselves. That’s what my grandparents told me. As a young boy I knew my grandparents—one of them was a shaman.

He went on to describe the strategies through which karai (non-Guaraní) settlers entered the territory and dispossessed his grandparents of their lands. This took the form of a story. His grandparents had plentiful land and their own cattle, as well as other animals. Then one day a karai merchant appeared. He brought clothes, cloth, and even hats. “The grandparents before used to wear only a wrap, a piece of cloth, so they were excited to see hats,” he recalled. They exchanged some of their cows for clothes, which the merchant delivered on a return visit, at which time he acquired more cattle. “Like that [the karai merchant] began to have various cows, and made a fence, made his house,” Fausto explained. He described how early settlers like the merchant won the trust of Guaraní communities, telling them, “ ‘I’m going to be your friend, I’ll help you’—like that they advanced until they had a house, they started little by little.” Before long, settlers had occupied much of the territory, and they began to enlist Guaraní people to work for them, looking after their cattle, putting up fences, or harvesting maize. Then came the 1952 agrarian reform, when “the law appeared—only for the karai; it wasn’t for the indigenous people … Never again could we rescue the land; we couldn’t rescue the land.”

Pablo, a younger community member, gave another version of this story. He was raised in Tarairí by his grandmother, and described how she used to make clay pots with mud she collected from the bed of the Salado River. She would take the pots all the way to Chiquiacá in the more fertile southern lands of O’Connor Province to trade them for foodstuffs. One day, a karai cattle rancher appeared and took ownership of the riverside land where she used to collect her mud. It was because of this, Pablo explained, that he and his grandmother left Tarairí when he was still a young boy. They went to live in Ingavi, where they settled “in a high place with no one bothering them.” Then one day when Pablo was fourteen years old, a man from Entre Ríos appeared, claiming to be the owner of the land they lived on. The man informed them that he was going to put cattle on the land and that Pablo and his uncle would work as his cowboys. When his uncle asked to see the man’s “papers,” he was unable to produce any. Shortly afterwards, the man disappeared. Yet others soon appeared in his place; Guaraní dispossession continued, spaces of refuge became scarce, settlers acquired property titles, and Guaraní people eventually found themselves trapped in exploitative labor contracts with the new patrones

During the course of my research, I heard numerous iterations of this story of territorial dispossession. Such accounts drew on personal memory as well as oral history. They described a lost world that ancestors had inhabited prior to karai settlement, the subtle and varied processes through which settlers had gained control of the territory, the regime of debt-bound indigenous labor exploitation this had given rise to, and how parents and grandparents had organized in the late 1980s and 1990s to reclaim territory and free themselves from ties of subordination, dependency, and debt with their karai patrones. Julio, whose family had been violently evicted from the land they lived on when he was still a young boy, emphasized the importance of recovering this history, which was erased from official accounts. “Even today, the Bolivian state doesn’t recognize this oppression,” he complained. “We have an identity that has been trampled on, has been humiliated … It’s important to remember history, so that it doesn’t continue repeating itself and we don’t continue being exploited.”

Until the late nineteenth century, the Bolivian Chaco—or Chiriguanía— remained an uncolonized frontier of the newly independent Bolivian republic.1 Having seen centuries of intermittent warfare over the previous three centuries, the Chaco lands continued to be a site of shifting interethnic and intraethnic alliances, making state control of them impossible.2 Early Jesuit efforts to missionize the Chiriguanos (Guaraní) had largely failed, and although the Franciscans had more success (Langer 2009), the Guaraní had largely regained their independence by the mid-nineteenth century, following the chaos of the Independence Wars. Subjecting the Guaraní to the “civilizing” liberal property reforms inflicted on Quechua and Aymara highlanders (Platt 1984) was unthinkable. In fact, Franciscan records suggest that karai settlers were paying forms of land tax (usually in cattle) to the Guaraní during this period.

By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the Guaraní had suffered a series of decisive military defeats by Bolivian forces, paving the way for a century of dispossession and racialized subjugation.3 The 1892 Kuruyuki Massacre is widely seen as marking an effective end of Guaraní anticolonial resistance (Albó 1990: 21; Gustafson 2009: 33–38). The battle took place after a young Guaraní prophet named Apiaguaiki Tüpa gathered Guaraní followers from throughout the region in Kuruyuki, northeast of Itika Guasu, provoking suspicion and fear among the karai. Although the Guaraní claimed they had merely gathered to perform religious rites, the rape and murder of a Guaraní woman by a karai official provoked them to launch an attack on the Santa Rosa mission. Republican forces pushed them back to Kuruyuki then launched a counterattack, killing eight thousand Guaraní men and boys. In the weeks that followed, the remaining Guaraní fighters were hunted down in their villages, and women and children were captured for distribution among “Christian” settlers. Tüpa, who had managed to escape to the hills, was captured and subjected to gruesome treatment: he was impaled (sodomized) on a long pike, killed, displayed for twenty-four hours in the plaza of Monteagudo, then drawn, quartered, and burned. The indiscriminate killing, hunting down, and enslavement of Guaraní women, men, and children, and the brutal and emasculating tortures enacted on their leader’s body, illustrate how the creation of the Chaco as a karai, Christian, and Bolivian territory was materially and symbolically predicated on the violent subjugation of its indigenous inhabitants.

The Kuruyuki Massacre was just one milestone in a gradual process of domination and territorial dispossession.4 Settlement of the Chaco was initially driven by an expanding cattle ranching economy during the late eighteenth century, when the closure of the Pacific trading route during the Pacific War enabled cattle ranchers in Tarija to supply the booming mining economy of Potosí with a range of products. The commercial boom in beef production drew ranchers from other parts of Bolivia, who claimed large areas of indigenous territory, forcing the Guaraní into more marginal lands. The Bolivian state actively promoted frontier settlement, selling off vast tracts of “idle” Chaco lands at rock-bottom prices to any non-indigenous person who promised to settle there,5 and funding the construction of forts and military outposts near large haciendas. Such policies were underpinned by an imaginary of the Chaco as a savage and mythical land, the conquest of which bound up with the advance of European civilization (Bowman 1915).6 With a shrinking land base on which to sustain themselves, many Guaraní left the Bolivian Chaco to work on sugar cane plantations in Argentina, sought refuge in missions,7 or resigned themselves to working on mestizo-owned haciendas.

While Itika Guasu fits within this broader narrative of state territorialization, it also has its own specific history of colonization. Formal legal appropriation of most of these lands occurred shortly after Bolivian independence (1825), when Simón Bolívar awarded them to the Irish-born independence hero Francis Burdett O’Connor (from whom O’Connor Province acquired its name) as a reward for military sacrifice. While Guaraní men were required to contribute annual (unpaid) agricultural labor, work in nearby salt and limestone quarries, and open up roads for their absentee landlord “old man O’Connor,”8 this initially limited the presence of other karai settlers in the territory. This was to change from the 1930s, however, as a c...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Note on Pseudonyms
• Introduction
• 1. Imagining Territory: Contingent Articulations, Uncertain Compromises
• 2. Mapping Territory: The Limits of Postcolonial Geography
• 3. Titling Territory: Race, Space, and Law at an Indigenous Frontier
• 4. Inhabiting Territory: Land and Livelihoods in Tarairí
• 5. Extractive Encounters: Struggles over Land and Gas
• 6. Governable Spaces: Territory and Autonomy in a Hydrocarbon State
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Glossary
• References
• Index