Flammable Societies

Studies on the Socio-economics of Oil and Gas

John-Andrew McNeish, Owen Logan, John-Andrew McNeish, Owen Logan

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781783714810
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Energiebranche

The impact of the oil and gas industry – paradoxically seen both as a blessing and a curse on socio-economic development – is a question at the heart of the comparative studies in this volume stretching from Northern Europe to the Caucasus, the Gulf of Guinea to Latin America. Britain's transformation under Margaret Thatcher into a supposedly post-industrial society orientated towards consumer sovereignty was paid for with revenues from the North Sea oil industry, an industry conveniently out of sight and out of mind for many. Other case studies include resource struggles in Bolivia, oil money in Venezuela and the Azerbaijani oil boom among many others. Drawing on bottom-up research and theoretical reflection, this book questions the political and scientific basis of current international policy that aims to address the problem of resource management through standard Western models of economic governance, institution building and national sovereignty.

Part 1

Resource Sovereignties

Mario Martinez Choque, trade union veteran of a divided workforce at the tin mines in Huanuni, Bolivia. Photograph by Owen Logan.

2

On Curses and Devils: Resource Wealth and Sovereignty in an Autonomous Tarija, Bolivia

John-Andrew McNeish

When the people of Tarija awoke on 1 June 2009 they discovered that all the roads in and out of their city had been entirely blocked. This was the start of a nine-day protest by a local peasant union organisation¹ demanding an increase in hydrocarbon rent payments by the departmental government – based in the city – to agricultural and rural development in the surrounding area. Following similar mobilisations in 2004 and 2005, when the oil installations of Isayachi and San Alberto were occupied, the departmental government had agreed to create a Solidarity Programme (PROSOL) in which 2 million bolivianos of the regional budget was set aside in order to make direct payments to assist the economic development of peasant families. The new protest focused on the long delay in releasing these funds, and a new demand that was made on the basis of growing departmental oil and gas rents for the triplication of the PROSOL funds in the 2009 departmental budget. In the face of the departmental government’s apparent reluctance to support the provinces, the protesters also proposed that a revision of the departmental budget should lead to a reduction in controls by the departmental government and direct payments to peasant communities.

For the rest of the nine-day blockade over 20 different locations and 30 different routes were guarded. As the days dragged on the mood turned from resignation to frustration and then to anger, insults and violence. Fights were started and following refusals by the departmental government to enter into dialogue with the peasant union the protestors threatened to close national borders, important highways elsewhere in the department were blocked, and the local government offices in the municipalities of Villamontes, Padcaya and Bermejo were occupied by protestors. Reporting on the blockades, local media coverage in Tarija’s newspapers and television channels characterised the rural population as uncouth devils and condemned the peasants’ behaviour as both careless and brutish. The peasants ‘threaten the right of citizens to free passage, and sow violence and grave risk’, stated an editorial of the local El Nacional newspaper. The road blockades were furthermore dismissed as an expression of the dependency of the peasant community and a cynical attempt by the rural population to extract more handouts from the departmental government.

Remembering the widespread civic disruptions that led to Bolivia’s transformation into a pluri-national state between 2000 and 2005,² it is clear that the blockades described above are more typical than remarkable episodes in the country’s recent history. However, whilst ‘stones on the road’ are far from uncommon in Bolivia, it is argued here that studying the background of these events provides some important insights into the dynamics of resources and autonomy in a region of Bolivia that has been little considered in comparison to the more extremist campaigns and actions in neighbouring lowland departments.³ Indeed, as well as pointing to the fractures in local civil society and the dynamics of a departmental power struggle, I argue that the blockades in Tarija in 2009 are important indications of the linkages which exist between the politics of autonomy and the politics of resources in the region. Moreover, it is proposed in this chapter that these linkages point to a broader and more profound reflection on resource politics.

The conflicting economic demands described in the confrontation above are only too clear. However, by developing the history and ethnography of the wider social relations in which these events have taken place, the chapter reveals that political contests in Tarija are driven by more than demands for improvements to incomes and material standards. A fuller account of the historic and social embedding of economic demands demonstrates that the blockades were incited by a combination of factors. Here we discover inescapable desires for more in an economic sense, but also the historical underpinnings of regional social identities, an elusive social contract, and conflicting but not always polarised relationships to land and resources. Whilst this chapter is limited to a regional study, I argue here that the dynamics of resource wealth in Tarija are suggestive of far reaching insights into current confrontations between states and local populations. Not only does it become evident that conflict is not only a question of ‘rent-seeking’, implying a critique of the influential resource curse thesis, but that the politically incendiary nature of resource politics is best understood and addressed by recognising its complex roots in multiple – often overlapping and sometimes contradictory – ideas and claims for resource sovereignty. Drawing on research into the background to the blockade, the chapter suggests that the idea of resource sovereignty effectively brackets together historic grievances, territoriality and the sense of ownership and value that different groups and individuals have in relation to local natural resources.

REGIONAL SOCIAL IDENTITY AND TERRITORIALISM

Tarija is one of nine departments in Bolivia and is located on the country’s border with Argentina and Paraguay. It is Bolivia’s smallest department, with a territorial extension of 37.623 km². The department is constituted by two topographical zones: the Chaco (13.208 km²) and the Andean zone (20.833 km²). In the Chaco – a sparsely populated, hot and semi-arid lowland region – productive land is largely dedicated to extensive livestock raising and national nature reserves. In the national census of 2001, 80 per cent of the population in Tarija identified themselves as non-indigenous⁴ making it the department with one of the smallest indigenous populations in the country.⁵ According to the same census, 51 per cent of the population in the department live in poverty: 86.6 per cent in the rural area, and 30.5 per cent in the urban area.

Whilst social divisions in Tarija are partially a product of natural and ethnic divisions, historical memory and economic experiences have also played an important role in defining the social character of the department. Basic ethnic categories were defined early on in the region’s colonial history, in which new spatial and racial orders were produced and imposed through processes of expansion and conquest. It is in this period, and not the current day, that nascent notions of Tarijeño frontiers, and hence autonomy, were created. Here there is both the start of the difficult negotiation of regional power in relation to the colonial state, and the formation of clear social divisions based on a combination of racial typologies and political realities. In their military confrontation with the indigenous population (i.e. the now extinct Churumata and Tomatas peoples of the central Valley, and the Guaraní of the sub-Andean valleys and the Chaco) the Spanish settlers not only encountered a natural frontier, but constructed a social ‘frontier’ to be conquered and tamed.⁶ With conquest the positioning of the indigenous population became fixed in the eyes of the ruling Spanish elites: they were vassals, workers and ‘other’. The colonial system constructed a system of political control and economic production based on forts and encomienda estates, where private contracts were formed between the state and private individuals to rule these spaces for the crown. Luis Fuentes y Vargas, the founder of the city of Tarija in 1574 (then San Bernardo de la Frontera de Tarija) was granted rights of ‘greater justice’ by the Viceroy Don Francisco de Toledo. This was in essence a feudal contract for political control, including the ownership of lands, rights over the indigenous population and usufruct rights for the entire territory. The criollo descendents of the Spanish also become the inheritors of a notion of the ownership of space and of the social divisions engendered in it. Indeed, these notions are carried through into the present day – even recognising the processes of mestizaje (ethnic mixing) and legal changes with regards to citizenship rights produced in the course of key events in national history (the wars of independence, formation of the republic of Bolivia, the nationalist revolution of 1952, ratification of ILO 169 in 1992, etc.). The divisions between city and countryside, central valley and Chaco, capital and province, chaqueño and chapaco that are used today still echo colonial spatial and racial logics.⁷

To a significant extent the persistence of these categories into the present relates to the continuance of agriculture as a fundamental part of the departmental economy, in which the categories of landowner and peasant remain in use. In contrast to Santa Cruz, the development of the agricultural industry in Tarija has largely taken place without the assistance of the central government. Until the 1990s Tarija was, as one informant⁸ described it, ‘an island surrounded by mountains’, and the economy in the department remained largely closed. The first asphalted road between Tarija and the border with Argentina was built in 1997. As a result, the elites in the department have formed closer relations with Buenos Aires than with La Paz. The divide between the central valley and the Chaco has also persisted under these conditions. Distant from the control of the departmental authorities and the state institutions of law and order, the land-owning elites were able to ignore developments in human rights and exploit indigenous resources and labour without limitation. Whilst ethnic distinctions and the traditional economy have been protected by physical isolation, this does not however mean that Tarijeño society remained entirely static and closed. Lying at the junction of high mountain, valley and subtropical lowland environments, Tarija has always been a waypoint for population movement.⁹ Indeed, for the purposes of this chapter it is important to note two major regional events in near memory that ruptured what had long been the features of a near ‘feudal’ order.

The introduction of structural adjustment policies in the mid 1980s to control Bolivia’s hyperinflation and restructure the economy along the lines of neoliberal new public management caused mines in the highlands of the country to be either closed or privatised. It is estimated that 60,000 miners were laid off as a direct result of these changes, and that between 20,000 and 30,000 families arrived in Tarija in the 1980s in search of work and new opportunities. As Miguel Castro Arce¹⁰ described their arrival in an interview:

These people arrived ready loaded with another social imaginary, unionised and organised ideologically. And all of this formation they had previously used to confront the state they now used to organise themselves and better their conditions of life. They started to petition and put pressure on the municipal and departmental governments. In return they were largely rejected by the townspeople here, being seen as collas (highlanders), morenas (dark skinned), and so were forced to form new neighbourhoods in the periphery of the city. Here they came into contact with the local peasant and indigenous community. There was a natural connection of ‘skin’ between these groups. Now the Tarijeño peasants feel more identification with the poor colla than with the Tarijeño elite. In this way a new social and political basis was formed in Tarija. (13 February 2009)

Congruent with this new sense of organisational radicalism, the other major force for change has been the rising importance of the hydrocarbon industry in the department. The first oil well in Bolivia was drilled in Tarija in 1928, and serious production began after the takeover of the operations of North American-owned Standard Oil and the introduction of the first nationalisation process following the conclusion of the Chaco War (1932–35).¹¹ With the foundation of the national oil company, Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales Bolivianos (YPFB), Bol...