Extraction,Revolution,Plurinationalism: Rethinking Extractivism from Bolivia

Revolutionary Narratives, Resource Extraction, and the Plurinational State

How are revolutionary historical narratives both supportive of and supported by resource extraction in Bolivia? Our understanding of historical narration draws on Scott’s Conscripts of Modernity, which examines a shift in narrative form between the two editions of C. L. R. James’s The Black Jacobins (1963 [1938]). Scott argues that the political contexts in which James was writing shaped his historical narratives of the Haitian Revolution. At stake in the 1930s was an assertion of revolutionary nationalism in the face of colonial rule, so James told the story of the Haitian Revolution with a romantic narrative in which good strives to overcome evil, suffering is framed as temporary and justified by future outcomes, and change is driven by heroic individuals. By the early 1960s it was apparent that national revolutions could not cure all the ills of colonialism, and James added several chapters to the second edition of the book that turned its narrative arc into a tragedy. Scott (2004: 131) argues that revolutionary narratives are “out of joint” with the contemporary constraints of postcolonial politics and uses James’s work as an urgent call to think beyond the imperatives of these narratives.

Scott’s argument guides our reflections because revolutionary narratives circulate continuously in Bolivian political spheres, where they are used to both consolidate power and incite political action. Indeed, revolution has been a defining feature of Bolivian history: after winning political independence from Spain in 1825, the country experienced two “revolutions” in the past century, the National Revolution of 1952 and the consolidation in 2009 of the plurinational state, which is often framed as a “democratic cultural revolution” (Nicolas and Quisbert, 2014; Postero, 2017). The National Revolution of 1952 was led by unionized workers and indigenous peasants and resulted in the nationalization of the tin mines, land reform, and universal voting rights (Dunkerley, 1984). The party that took power, the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (Revolutionary Nationalist Movement— MNR), constructed a historical narrative that claimed indigenous heritage and anticolonial struggle as part of a national past (Rivera Cusicanqui, 2003; Sanjinés, 2004).

While the Morales government has shifted this frame by reasserting indigeneity as a national present, Nicolas and Quisbert (2014) show that the two revolutionary narratives have much in common. The ruins of Tiwanaku, which were partly excavated by the MNR to illustrate Bolivia’s glorious precolonial past (Nicolas and Quisbert, 2014: 19), have also been an important site of ritual performance for Morales (Postero, 2017). Both administrations have also made strategic use of the figure of Túpac Katari, an eighteenth-century Aymara leader who laid siege to the city of La Paz for nearly six months before he was captured and quartered by colonial officials in 1781. Although Katari’s life and death have been central to various Bolivian social movements since at least the mid-twentieth century (Serra Iamamoto, 2015), there has recently emerged a “personality cult” in which Katari appears virtually reincarnated in Morales (Nicolas and Quisbert, 2014: 173). In public performance, Morales portrays himself as the main protagonist of a twenty-first-century pachakuti who will bring about the necessary revolutionary transformations to “decolonize” state and society (Postero, 2017). Indeed, Katari’s image has been circulated alongside Evo Morales’s in election campaigns and the promotion of large-scale public works. In the billboard shown in Figure 1, the top left corner advertises the Túpac Katari satellite, and the text to the right of Morales reads “The future is the presence of our past. Your star.” The “star” presumably refers both to the satellite (an apparent astral star) and to the shared figure of Túpac/Evo (the “star” or protagonist of Bolivian history). ³

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Figure 1.

Billboard in the city of Oruro featuring Túpac Katari next to Evo Morales. (Photo Andrea Marston, August 1, 2014)

This revolutionary narrative not only employs imagery but also is materialized by reinvested resource rents. The satellite launched by the MAS government in 2013 was named Túpac Katari and was claimed capable of uniting Bolivia’s citizenry in a more efficient cell phone network. During the 2014 presidential campaign, when Morales won his third term with 61.36 percent of the vote (TSE, 2014), billboards stating “Con Evo Vamos Bien” (“With Evo We’re Doing Well)” were accompanied by billboards announcing the reinvestment of hydrocarbons taxes in a range of development plans, among them Mi Teleférico, the gondola transportation system that links large swaths of La Paz and the neighboring migrant city of El Alto, the Juancito Pinto and Juana Azurduy programs for students and pregnant and lactating mothers, and new soccer fields in nearly every corner of the country (see Figure 2). These uses of resource rent have harnessed significant popular support for the Morales government, allowing it to build the symbolic infrastructure of the MAS’s “process of change” that also justifies state-led resource extraction as key to constructing the plurinational state. It was common for us to hear references by members of local indigenous and mining organizations to “hermano” or “compañero” Evo in relation to new projects, demonstrating the sense of pride and belonging these words generated in a range of plurinational subjects.

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Figure 2.

A new soccer field in the tin-mining town of Llallagua and, behind it, the massive tailing piles from mining that began in the early twentieth century. (Photo Andrea Marston, July 29, 2013)

But Morales’s revolutionary narrative also seeks to silence opposition and debate around resource extraction. Over the past 12 years, critics of Morales’s “process of change” have emerged from both “traditional” opposition sectors such as lowland elites ⁴ and organizations within the MAS’s support base, and much of this opposition has centered around resource extraction. In 2011 members of the lowland Confederación de Pueblos Indígenas de Bolivia (Confederation of Indigenous Peoples of Bolivia— CIDOB) marched to protest the construction of a highway through the Territorio Indígena Parque Nacional Isiboro Sécure (Isiboro Sécure Indigenous Territory and National Park—TIPNIS), a legally titled indigenous territory and national park bordering the departments of Beni and Cochabamba (Fabricant and Postero, 2015; Laing, 2012). While consolidating Bolivia’s national territory, this highway will also facilitate the extraction of natural gas that has been identified within the park (McNeish, 2013). Vice President García Linera’s book Geopolitics of the Amazon (2012) justified the construction of this highway by arguing that Bolivia’s asymmetrical position in the global economy dictates the expansion of resource extraction as necessary in the short term for a transition beyond capitalism in the long term. This implies a great deal of suffering (for a few) in the present in exchange for future happiness (for all Bolivians). The way García Linera connects past, present, and future rests on a notion of redemption in which harm done in the present is justified as necessary for a future horizon of justice (Meister, 2011; Povinelli, 2011).

Such revolutionary narratives generate expectations among government officials, civil society, and political analysts alike about how different social groups should relate to resource extraction and the plurinational state, corralling actors into a spectrum of political stances according to their socioeconomic affiliations. In the following section we consider how such narratives shape expectations that cooperative miners will support resource extraction but object to the redistributive aspects of plurinationalism and that indigenous organizations will celebrate plurinationalism while questioning the socio-environmental impacts of resource extraction. In this sense, both groups are figured as alternately aligned with and antagonistic to the plurinational state. This opposition is reinforced by Morales himself, who commonly labels opposition groups “right-wing” and thus enemies of the plurinational state even when they are organizations that once constituted his support base. But the ways in which mining cooperatives and indigenous organizations engaged with the 2014 Mining Law reveal deep ambivalences toward resource extraction, the state, and even revolutionary political desire.

Alternative Narratives: Mining Cooperatives’ and Indigenous Organizations’ Engagements with the Mining Law

By January 2011, the Bolivian government was drafting new mining legislation with the stated objective of “establishing a structure for the sustainable use and exploitation of mineral resources . . . oriented toward the vivir bien [living well] of all Bolivians” (Anteproyecto de la Nueva Ley Minera, 2011: Art. 1). The proposed law’s objectives were informed by the aims of Bolivia’s National Development Plan, which was intended to guide a “democratic cultural revolution,” to “fully dismantle colonialism and neoliberalism,” and to “construct a multinational and communitarian State that will empower its burgeoning social movements and indigenous peoples” (PND, 2006: Presentación). The Mining Law (No. 535) thus merged natural resource extraction with a revolutionary narrative of radical structural transformation. However, as it grew closer to passage it became clear to many members of mining cooperatives and indigenous organizations that it would create new exclusions for them both.

For many indigenous organizations and their advocates, a central concern was how the law might limit other constitutional rights, particularly the rights to prior consultation and traditional territories. In July 2013 leaders from the highland national indigenous organization Consejo Nacional de Ayllus y Markas del Qullasuyu (National Council of Ayllus and Markas of Qullasuyu—CONAMAQ) held a national mining summit in Achocalla, outside the capital La Paz, to analyze and debate the new law. In addition to identifying contradictions in existing laws that recognize indigenous peoples’ right to prior consultation, the rights of Pachamama (Mother Earth), and the human right to water, participants raised concerns over the exclusion of “communitarian” as a legally recognized form of mining. Although they did not explicitly define “communitarian mining,” several participants described it as cohering with indigenous usos y costumbres (habits and customs) such as rotating access rights and collective upkeep responsibilities. The exclusion of communitarian mining from the law was the result of contradictions within the constitution itself, which recognizes communitarian economies (CPE, 2009: Art. 306, II) but restricts legal mining actors to the “state mining industry, private mining industry, and cooperative societies” (Art. 369). With the constitutional backing of Article 369, the Morales government justified the fact that cooperatives, private industry, and the state company Corporación Minera de Bolivia (Mining Corporation of Bolivia—COMIBOL) would be the only entities directly involved in the writing and revision of the new mining law, despite outcry from some indigenous federations and irrigators’ unions, among others (Pedro Mariobo Moreno, interview, La Paz, July 14, 2014).

For mining cooperatives, the most contentious aspect of the law was a change in Article 151 on mining cooperative contracts. In the bill submitted to the Chamber of Deputies, this article stated that mining cooperatives would be allowed to form partnerships with private companies, but the deputies found this article unconstitutional and reversed it (Paredes, 2014). In response, on March 31, 2014, the president of the Federación Nacional de Cooperativas Mineras (National Federation of Mining Cooperatives—FENCOMIN), Alejandro Santos, called upon all of the nation’s cooperative members—estimates of whom are currently around 120,000 (Mamani, 2018)—to arm themselves with dynamite and shut down major transportation arteries. By the time the protests were lifted nearly a week later, two miners were dead and at least 60 people had been injured in confrontations with police (Paredes, 2014).

After several days of direct dialogue with the country’s president, it looked as if the cooperatives had lost the battle: Law No. 535, passed on May 28, 2014, prohibits mining cooperatives from forming partnerships with private companies. As many observers noted, however, mining cooperatives won a great deal more than they lost in this fight. They maintained their low tax rate and were allowed to form “mixed companies” with private entities as long as they involved COMIBOL (CEDIB, 2014; see also CEDLA, 2014). Following these events, the Bolivian media were flooded with articles about the threat posed by mining cooperatives to national values and coffers. When it was “discovered” that 42 mining cooperatives had already signed contracts with private companies (Imaña, 2014), cooperative members were framed disparagingly as “savage capitalists” willing to sacrifice nature, nation, and even their own bodies to try their luck in the mines (Rada, 2014). In our conversations with indigenous leaders, unionized workers, and middle-class professionals, we found that mining cooperatives were commonly considered a barrier to the kind of socialist and communitarian politics that were envisioned for the plurinational state.

Mining Cooperatives: Tragic Figures of the Revolutionary State

To understand why mining cooperatives were so adamantly opposed to state involvement and why public reaction to their struggle was so negative, it is important to understand their history. Mining cooperatives are embodied evidence of cyclical collapses within the mining sector and the shortcomings of past attempts to establish a national economy based on resource extraction. They emerged from a long lineage of unruly surplus laborers, most notably k’ajchas, groups of underemployed miners and peasants who stole metal ore as part of a livelihood strategy starting in the seventeenth century (Abercrombie, 1996; Barragán, 2015), and jukus, ore thieves whose numbers exploded following the initiation of the “Triangular Plan” in 1961 (Kohl, Farthing, and Muruchi, 2011: 36). ⁵ The Triangular Plan was designed to “rehabilitate” the flagging COMIBOL while loosening the grip of Bolivia’s communist and Trotskyist mining union leaders through massive worker layoffs (Burke, 1987; Field, 2014; Young, 2017). Unemployed miners turned to jukeo, and the Bolivian government created mining cooperatives to manage the rampant theft (Gall, 1974). Cooperative miners established FENCOMIN as their umbrella organization in 1968, but the organization did not become a serious political force until after 1985, when more than 20,000 COMIBOL miners were laid off following the collapse of the tin market and the introduction of neoliberal austerity policies (Kohl and Farthing, 2006). As thousands of angry miners swelled FENCOMIN’s ranks, the organization absorbed the unions’ political combativeness, if not their ideology.

Mining cooperatives have been a key support base for Morales since he came to power in 2006. During this time, they have also multiplied in response to booming metal prices and favorable government policies such as the creation of a credit agency, constitutional recognition as “not-for-profit” entities subjected to reduced taxation, and loosened restrictions in fiscal reserve areas (Francescone and Díaz, 2013; Poveda Ávila, 2014). Between 2006 and 2017, the number of registered mining cooperatives increased from 911 to 1816, with total membership increasing from 50,000 to 120,000 (Mamani, 2018).

Despite their name, mining “cooperatives” are notoriously uncooperative in structure: although concessions are collectively held, they are subdivided into parajes (areas) that are divided up among individual members, and profits from these areas are not redistributed. Moreover, in many cooperatives members contract nonmembers to work on their behalf (Michard, 2008). Over the past decade, some mining cooperatives have started to develop partnerships with private companies. The most notorious case of such a partnership is the San Bartolomé silver mine, which unites the American company Coeur d’Alène and seven mining cooperatives in the department of Potosí (Francescone, 2014). For Bolivia’s traditional leftists, who are generally steeped in unionism, mining cooperatives represent an obstacle to nationalizing the mining sector or increasing state tax revenue. As Filemón Escobar, who was a prominent union and political leader in the tin mines in the 1970s and 1980s, wrote, “In the almost 10 years of Evo’s government, the cooperatives . . . have become destroyers of the mining industry [and] have turned themselves into the ‘new oligarchy’ of the country’s western region” (Escobar, 2014: 19–20). Here we see the mining cooperatives figured as antagonists of the plurinational project and revolutionary forms of resource extraction—a simplistic interpretation of their attachments to both the state and natural resources.

Since 2011 mining cooperatives have suffered from falling mineral prices, and they have sought aid from the Morales government and investment from private mining companies to offset their financial losses. For example, in the tin-mining town of Llallagua, Potosí, mining cooperatives came close to signing contracts with two companies, one Chinese and one Brazilian, which promised to help the exploit the century-old slag heaps that reportedly contain 18 million tons of low-grade tin (Erbol, June 22, 2016). The Morales government had granted half of these slag heaps to regional cooperatives in 2012 but had not provided them the technical or financial support necessary for exploitation. Roberto Rojas, ⁶ a member of the directorate of the regional mining cooperative federation of Northern Potosí, explained in an interview (Llallagua, February 6, 2016) that Llallagua’s cooperative miners were seeking private investment to overcome these technological hurdles. This was why the new mining law’s restrictions around private-cooperative partnerships had hit them so hard. “No private company wants to make a partnership that involves COMIBOL, it’s too weak!” Rojas said bitterly. “And [private-cooperative partnerships] should be allowed, since the constitution claims to recognize plural, mixed economies. But with the new mining law, we are all screwed.” Rojas went on to say that the state had never been a reliable ally of miners. He pointed to the National Revolution of 1952, arguing that the postrevolutionary government had celebrated (unionized) miners as revolutionary heroes but had betrayed them with the Triangular Plan. After referencing this historical treachery, he continued: “You have seen how we suffer as miners. Right now, we look to the state for support, but we do not trust it. See what has happened? Even compañero Evo has betrayed us with this new mining law. Now we must depend on the state even more because we cannot make partnerships with private companies.”

Even though these are cooperative miners, the ambivalent relationship of dependence on the state is akin to that described by June Nash (1979) in her study of unionized tin miners. She argued that miners were doubly dependent—both on COMIBOL because of their position as workers and on the global North because of Bolivia’s structural position in the world economy—and that this sense of dependency was in continuous tension with their fight against exploitation. Without COMIBOL as an intermediary, cooperative miners struggle directly with the government, hoping to garner material support such as mining equipment, cars, and new work areas, but never fully trusting their potential benefactor. For example, Alejandro Choque, president of a mining cooperative in Llallagua (interview, Llallagua, June 13, 2016), casts the state as a villain that showed its true colors with the passage of the mining law:

The new mining law is—how do I say this?—it’s mostly aimed at supporting the state mining industry. There are some things in there that helped cooperatives, but mostly it favors the state. It puts more power in the hands of the comunarios [indigenous people], but in the end it’s the state that profits because the state manipulates them. The state is a plunderer.

Choque went on to describe mining cooperatives in Llallagua as the hijos mendigos (beggar children) of the Morales government, while the workers of the nearby state-owned tin mine Huanuni were the hijos mimados (spoiled children). In 2016 Huanuni received US$36 million in government assistance to stay afloat despite falling mineral prices (Correo del Sur, June 25, 2016). By contrast, Choque argued, the cooperative sector operates independently and does not contribute to the national debt. More important, it “provides jobs directly and indirectly”—an oft-repeated refrain of cooperative miners—for anyone who needs money rather than restricting benefits to a salaried core. This narrative shifts the terms of debate around extractivism by challenging assumptions about who should participate and who should benefit.

Cooperatives are often accused of supporting any political party that promises them immediate material gain. Unlike the unionized miners discussed by Nash (1979), cooperative miners are not interested in creating a workers’ state. Rather, they are looking for immediate solutions to their daily struggles. Ideological commitment involves a future-oriented perspective, and Choque and others privilege the availability of jobs in the present over abstract promises of social change in the future. Rather than seeing this position as naturally adversary to plurinationalism, we must ask what type of conceptual reframing it facilitates. After the 1952 National Revolution, Bolivian tin miners were represented as the revolutionary heroes of national modernization narratives. Mining cooperatives, in contrast, can be understood as tragic figures in the sense that their very existence points to the limits of the post-1952 revolutionary state. Speaking from this position, mining cooperatives are less interested in plurinational narratives that frame resource extraction as the economic engine of revolutionary change, of which they are distrustful. Instead, they defy ideologically pure readings of political action offered by certain strains of both the traditional and the indigenous left, insisting that life continues on the margins and despite the contradictions of the plurinational present.

Conamaq: Critical Adversaries of the Neoextractivist State?

While the history of CONAMAQ is radically different from that of the mining cooperatives, their emergence can be similarly understood in relation to the limits of the post-1952 revolutionary state. Following the revolution, citizenship was formally extended to Bolivia’s indigenous population but through a corporatist structure in which access to the state was predicated on their status as peasant laborers rather than a recognition of ethnic or cultural diversity (Albó, 2002; Dunkerley, 1984; Postero, 2007; Rivera Cusicanqui, 1987). By the late 1960s, indigenous intellectuals in the highlands were beginning to question the integration policies of both the 1952 state and the subsequent military government. Their political activism coalesced into the Katarista movement, named after Túpac Katari, which expanded as urban-based Aymara intellectuals called for a revitalization of Aymara culture, language, and sociopolitical organization to challenge the persistence of ethnic and racial marginalization among the majority of the population (Hurtado, 1986; Rivera Cusicanqui, 1987). Leaders relied on the organizational and ideological structure of labor federations to extend their political reach and in 1979 formed what was historically one of Bolivia’s most influential organizations, the Confederación Sindical Única de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia (Unified Federation of Peasant Workers of Bolivia—CSUTCB) (Albó, 2002; Yashar, 2005). Yet by the late 1980s, neoliberal economic restructuring had significantly weakened the Central Obrera Boliviana (Bolivia’s Workers’ Central—COB), leading to a “de-unionization” of state-society relations and provoking some members to seek alternative channels of political mobilization (Powęska, 2013: 150).

CONAMAQ emerged as a challenge to the Westernized union structure of the CSUTCB, emphasizing an explicit project of “reconstituting” the ayllu, a collective form of indigenous sociopolitical and territorial organization historically prominent in the highland region, as its central form of governance (THOA, 1995). Officially formed in 1997, the organization was largely composed of Quechua- and Aymara-speaking communities in the rural highland departments of La Paz and Oruro, which had maintained their traditional organizational structures through the colonial and republican periods (Rivera Cusicanqui, 1987). Yet the resurgence of ayllu-based governance was also facilitated by a particular juncture in the 1990s characterized by ethnic revitalization projects and neoliberal multicultural reforms, often supported by domestic activist networks and international NGO development funding (Alvizuri, 2009: 190; Postero, 2007; Powęska, 2013: 186). By the 2000s CONAMAQ was one of Bolivia’s most influential national-level indigenous organizations, along with the lowland indigenous federation CIDOB. The two federations also formed part of the unity pact that brought together Bolivia’s main social organizations to participate in the constituent assembly that drafted the state’s new plurinational framework from 2006 to 2008 (Postero, 2017; Schavelzon, 2013). However, only a few months after Morales’s inauguration in 2006, CONAMAQ publicly declared him an “enemy of the indigenous movement” for limiting its participation in the constituent assembly and gradually hardened its stance toward the government’s extractivist development model (Burman, 2014). In 2011, following the TIPNIS conflict, CONAMAQ officially withdrew from the unity pact and formed an alliance with CIDOB in direct opposition to the Morales government (Los Tiempos, May 26, 2011).

In this context, the national mining summit in Achocalla can be understood as part of the schism that had long been growing between CONAMAQ and Morales’s government. During the two-day meeting, participants not only analyzed contradictions in the proposed law but also reflected on its implications for indigenous self-determination. They discussed how other legislation, such as Law No. 367, which was passed in 2013 to control mine seizures and could be used to subject antimining activists to criminal prosecution, might put a damper on protest and undermine indigenous peoples’ ability to demand control over their lands. The year before, CONAMAQ had been involved in a public campaign denouncing the prosecution of one of its former leaders, Cancio Rojas, following a conflict between communities in the highland region of Mallku Khota and the Canadian mining company South American Silver (see Los Tiempos, May 26, 2012), and participants at the mining summit were concerned that Law No. 367 would enable more such prosecutions. In the last section we analyzed how the MAS government frames opposition to resource extraction as antagonistic to the plurinational state; here we see how this framing manifests itself in legislation and discourages antimining protest.

However, discussions at the summit also challenged the assumption that indigenous peoples should be protesting against mining. As one participant noted, “Brothers and sisters, with much respect for all of the proposals discussed here today, I want to say that one has to remember that it is our brothers, our fathers, cousins, sons who work in the mines. What will happen to them if we demand that the [mining] companies in our communities leave?” After acknowledging the embeddedness of mining in indigenous communities, this commentator went on to observe that substantive opposition to the Morales government would also imply running the risk of being cut off from much-needed financial support.

Tata Mallku Félix Becerra, then leader of CONAMAQ, suggested that, rather than being a threat to indigenous autonomy, mining might enable economic independence from the state:

Why are we poor? In our territory, what weaknesses do we have? We have government, but have we been able to manage our resources? No! This is my concern about Túpac Katari. . . . [He] fought for the defense of territory, for our resources. That’s why the Spanish quartered him. . . . How long are we willing to suffer? I don’t want to suffer anymore; I want to be part of the resources we have.

With this question Becerra shifted the narrative framing for debates the following day, which centered on the viability of community-controlled mining as an economic alternative for ayllus rich in mineral resources. In this model, indigenous communities would be the sole administrators of mining and ore processing and, through ayllu-based structures, would reinvest profits in other community-led productive industries. Participants’ responses to Becerra’s proposal highlighted a series of concerns, particularly over the potential for mining to heighten local conflict within indigenous communities. They also grappled with how community-controlled mining would fit within Bolivia’s plurinational framework. They were concerned not only with the lack of constitutional recognition of communitarian mining but also with how they might openly advocate for mining while also claiming rights to protection from the negative impacts of resource extraction.

Becerra, however, pushed participants to think beyond such double binds. In response to their concerns, he stated:

They [public commentators] will tell you, “If you form a cooperative, you will lose your identity, your habits and customs. . . . But as indigenous peoples exploiting their own resources, they [indigenous miners] are the owners, they follow the rules of their leaders. And each of them has beer, food, money. . . . They have sufficient resources. This is the path to self-determination.

He would later explain that the inspiration for communitarian mining came from a small community in the department of La Paz that owned the legal rights to mine as a cooperative but did so “respecting the usos y costumbres” (interview, La Paz, June 15, 2016). For him, this example offered a concrete proposal that could respond to one of the most significant barriers to the strengthening of indigenous governance— the lack of economic resources.

Of course, implementing communitarian mining in Bolivia would be a difficult task, especially considering the range of dilemmas raised by the mining summit’s participants and the barriers of the new Mining Law. In his own assessment of the task at hand, Becerra emphasized the “permanent hard work” that would be required to analyze and implement proposals to mitigate the tensions around the environmental and sociopolitical impacts of resource extraction. As his interventions in the summit suggest, this might also imply moving away from the narratives that have traditionally animated the indigenous movement in Bolivia to consider a plurality of expectations and concerns around resource extraction.

Conclusion

In this article we have taken up David Scott’s (2004) call to rethink the value of revolutionary narratives in the (post)colonial present by exploring the ways resource extraction both supports and is supported by revolutionary narratives in plurinational Bolivia. As Kohl and Farthing (2012) have detailed, the MAS government has faced a major challenge as it has attempted to implement its revolutionary aspirations in the years since Morales’s initial election: how to provide promised material support to Bolivia’s citizens without relying on resource extraction. To manage the tensions of this position, the Morales government has articulated a revolutionary narrative of plurinationalism that justifies state-led resource extraction while playing down the experiences, expressions, and proposals of other groups already navigating the everyday dilemmas that extraction entails. We have discussed how engagements with the 2014 Mining Law (No. 535) by mining cooperatives and CONAMAQ incited alternative narratives that strained against the state’s revolutionary line even as they were disciplined by it. While cooperative miners demanded the right to continue mining independently from the state and in collaboration with private companies, CONAMAQ attempted to theorize a form of mining that would support indigenous political and economic autonomy. These groups articulated alternative narratives of resource extraction that leaned away from the Morales government and state-led mining, but neither group was able to fully implement its vision.

More recently, three major events have marked a distinctively tragic shift in historical readings of Bolivia’s plurinational revolution. Just as C. L. R. James added chapters to The Black Jacobins to shift the narrative arc, we discuss these events to show how tragically complicated the Bolivian panorama has become.

First, in 2014, a division emerged within CONAMAQ, with one group of leaders opposing the MAS and another group remaining loyal to Morales. The latter group, which some anti-MAS activists now refer to as “CONA-MAS,” staged a violent takeover of the organization’s headquarters. The former group, the “organic” CONAMAQ that still claims to represent indigenous highlanders, now lacks formal recognition and has been largely cut off from government funding. CONAMAQ also lost public support following a 2015 corruption scandal surrounding the Fondo de Desarrollo para los Pueblos Indigenas Originarios y Comunidades Campesinas (Fund for the Development of Indigenous Originaries and Campesino Communities—FONDIOC), established in 2005 to channel a percentage of hydrocarbons taxes to indigenous and peasant organizations’ development projects (see Ayo, 2016). Several leaders from these organizations have since been imprisoned with charges of misusing FONDIOC money, including CONAMAQ’s Félix Becerra in December 2015. While the details remain unclear, some analysts have speculated that his arrest represents political persecution of indigenous leaders who have openly criticized the Morales government (see Gómez Vela, 2017).

Second, conflicts between the Morales government and mining cooperatives have become increasingly confrontational. In August 2016, disagreements surfaced in response to government proposals to modify the 2013 Law of Cooperatives (Law No. 356) to allow unionization within cooperatives. Although opposition to this modification was led by a subset of mining cooperative leaders, their protests quickly snowballed into a series of demands that demonstrated just how dissatisfied cooperative miners have become across the board (El Deber, August 13, 2016). The miners’ protest took a dark turn on August 25 when, in response to the deaths of three cooperative miners from police gunfire, a group of cooperative miners murdered the deputy minister of internal affairs, Rodolfo Illanes, who had been taken hostage as he attempted to establish dialogue between the cooperative sector and the government. Fifty-nine cooperative miners were immediately imprisoned (Peñaranda Pinto, 2016), and on September 1 the government issued five decrees that broke the cooperative-MAS alliance, declaring Illanes a national “hero” in defense of Bolivia’s natural resources (Cambio, August 26, 2016).

Third, on February 21 2016, a majority of Bolivians voted no in a referendum to change the constitutional term limits of the presidency, which would have allowed Morales to run for a fourth term in 2019 (BBC Mundo, February 24, 2016). However, in December 2017 the Plurinational Constitutional Tribunal ruled that Morales could run again indefinitely, reversing the referendum decision (BBC Mundo, November 27, 2017). This decision underscores the fact that, despite growing clashes between civil society organizations and the MAS government, ⁷ a viable alternative to the current administration has yet to emerge. Who could replace Evo?

Paralleling Scott’s concern in Conscripts of Modernity, we suggest that the revolutionary narratives around plurinationalism that justify state-led resource extraction are “out of joint” with the world they are describing and normatively aim to construct (Scott, 2004: 2). Scott argues for the value of tragic narratives by describing how, in the second edition of The Black Jacobins the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint L’Ouverture is caught between the need to demand freedom from colonial oppression and the inability to give voice to that freedom outside of colonial categories. By showing Toussaint L’Ouverture’s impossible double bind, James revealed him to be a “conscript” rather than a “volunteer” of modernity. Scott reads James’s shift to the tragic as “nothing less than a provocation” to take seriously the different stakes, dilemmas, and aspirations of the present that influence the way postcolonial scholars draw from the past to shape future imaginaries (30).

Indeed, the endurance of resource extraction in Bolivia has been inseparable from revolutionary narratives, as subsoil resources have motivated political struggle and financed postrevolutionary states in both 1952 and 2009 (Kohl and Farthing, 2012: 225). We look to the tragic because, like Toussaint L’Ouverture, groups like FENCOMIN and CONAMAQ are caught in complicated political double binds. The primary commitment of cooperative miners and their peones, laboring underground and frequently dying before they are old enough to receive their pensions, is to secure their daily earnings. The potential for economic redistribution of the “communitarian mining” pursued by indigenous people is likely counterbalanced by the impact of mining on indigenous land, water, and bodies. The aspirations of both of these groups are tragic in that they are caught between their immediate needs and long-term sustainability. They neither wholeheartedly embrace nor reject mining; rather, their engagements with the Mining Law illustrate how they take “both, and” positions when confronting the challenges of extractivism. Moving away from revolution as the sole measure of political transformation, they reject the imperative to choose between economic development and socioenvironmental rights. Taking their demands seriously implies dwelling in the ambivalence of the present and remaining alert to everyday political negotiations. The state revolutionary narrative of plurinationalism is only one of many, and the multiplicity of narratives contains more than one possible future.