Open Veins Revisited: The New Extractivism in Latin America,Part 2

This second issue on the current boom in extractivism reverberating throughout Latin America expands the discussion of the economic, social, and political impacts of expanded extractivism and the perpetuation of Latin America’s status as a source of raw materials for industries located elsewhere that was developed in the first collection of articles on this topic (LAP 45 [5]) . Reflecting the wide range of topics related to extractivism, certain themes from the first issue find a home here, ranging from national policy making to indigenous and women’s rights and environmental justice.

The changing shape of economic relations brought about by the extractivist boom is explored in this issue through the intersection of regulation, sovereignty, and capitalist accumulation, the centrality of financialization, and the dynamics of state-to-state investment as opposed to private capital. Drawing on Marx’s concepts of ground-rent and primitive accumulation and Agamben’s conceptualization of sovereignty, Anthony Pahnke in “Sovereignty and Capitalist Accumulation in Brazil’s Primary Sector” highlights and analyzes how the deployment of sovereignty by the Brazilian state has impacted foreign investment. He finds that government initiatives and regulations from 2002 to 2016 that were designed to curb foreign ventures have in fact encouraged international investors to engage in creative approaches to ensure capitalist accumulation by manipulating legislation to their advantage.

The historical role of the state in stimulating extractivism to promote national development is explored by Matthew Himley in “Extractivist Geographies: Mining and Development in Late-Nineteenth- and Early-Twentieth-Century Peru.” His research highlights the importance of foregrounding the uneven, variegated, and discontinuous spatial characteristics of resource extraction in different settings. He shows that, because of the spatial concentration of mining and a surge in foreign investment, state efforts to promote mining enterprises through investment in exploration and railroad infrastructure failed to meet the development expectations of the country’s elites. Rather, the process intensified Peru’s incorporation into the global economy. Bringing attention to the “long-run unevenness” inherent in extraction within global commodity frontiers rather than only at the national level helps us, in Himley’s view, to comprehend world environmental history as well as the current politics of resource extractivism. This focus on the longue durée of environmental history contributes an enriching dimension to the more contemporary pieces in the issue.

The challenges of linking extractivism to national development are considered in the contemporary context by Alfredo Macías Vázquez and Jorge García-Arias in “Financialization, Institutional Reform, and Structural Change in the Bolivian Boom (2006–2014).” They argue that to understand why the tripling of state revenues in Bolivia, which are largely derived from extractivism, has not generated structural economic transformation, it is critical to understand the worldwide expansion of finance’s economic role, known as financialization. They demonstrate how financialization has become a structural feature of Latin American economies, playing a major role in limiting governments’ development options. They argue that although the Bolivian government has broken with classical extractivism, institutional reforms originating in debt relief initiatives sponsored by international organizations have limited the government’s ability to direct hydrocarbon revenues toward structural change. Without addressing the influence of financialization, they contend, Bolivia and other Latin American governments will continue to be constrained in diversifying their economies.

The state development policy of Evo Morales’s government in Bolivia is further explored by Jeppe Krommes-Ravnsmed in ‘The Frustrated Nationalization of Hydrocarbons in Bolivia.” He argues that the Morales government’s so-called 2006 nationalization was merely discursive and has accelerated accumulation by dispossession, environmental destruction, and the recolonization of indigenous territories. Bolivia’s increased dependence on multinational hydrocarbons companies is, according to Krommes-Ravnsmed, related to several dialectically connected factors. These include the contracts that the Morales government signed in 2006 with the multinationals, which have permitted them to maintain a dominant position in the sector; the challenges the Bolivian government has faced in developing new natural gas reserves to both maintain current export levels and satisfy internal demand; the daunting degree of dependence on hydrocarbons taxes to cover public expenditures, given the lack of significant success in diversifying the economy; and finally what Krommes-Ravnsmed calls the “degeneration” of the MAS political apparatus. He concludes that the result is a government without political or discursive coherence that focuses on masking its policies in revolutionary rhetoric while causing grave environmental and social problems in rural lands and territories.

This focus on the political and economic trade-offs involved in the formulation of state policy are continued in Anthony Bebbington, Benjamin Fash, and John Rogan’s article “Socio-environmental Conflict, Political Settlements, and the Governance of Extractivism: A Cross-Border Comparison, El Salvador and Honduras.” The authors explore the forces behind the mining moratoria adopted in Honduras and El Salvador during the mid-2000s and how their paths diverged after these policies were adopted. By 2017 El Salvador had legislated the world’s first prohibition on all mineral extraction, while in Honduras mining was proliferating rapidly. They argue that crucial to these different outcomes were national political settlements in each country and describe how different actors behaved in ways that allowed them to exploit gaps and changes in these settlements.

Two articles here focus on a topic highlighted in our introduction to the first issue: China’s growing and complex relationship to resource extractivism in Latin America and the consequences of this emergent economic and political force in the region. Javier Vadell identifies seven specific modalities that characterize the types of economic relationships that China has developed broadly across the Global South and particularly in Latin America in “China in Latin America: South-South Cooperation with Chinese Characteristics.” He is particularly interested in how the geographic expansion of China and the intensification of its business relationships with the Global South have evolved over time and how the drop in commodity prices in 2014 influenced these relationships. He questions to what extent there is an emulation of the “Chinese model” in the development strategies of countries of the Global South as they seek to replace the neoliberal Washington Consensus. He concludes that while China presented a positive alternative in the face of the 2001 financial crisis, its relationships with Latin American governments are increasingly complex and contradictory. Nonetheless, he argues that the exchange is based on political principles of South-South cooperation, that is, with China committed to not imposing political conditionalities or development models in its international assistance and to mutual respect, equality, and joint benefits, all of which stands in contrast to Western assistance models.

Emma Miriam To and Rodrigo Acuña draw out the complexities of this relationship in “China and Venezuela: South-South Cooperation or Rearticulated Dependency?” They describe how the economic connections between China and Venezuela have grown by leaps and bounds beyond trade into a model involving joint ventures and investments in nonresource sectors. While To and Acuña argue that China respects Venezuelan sovereignty in ways that the United States and Europe never have and that trade and investment agreements with China are more equitable, they note that this does not mean that the “Washington Consensus” has been replaced by the “Beijing Consensus,” particularly given the politically dominant role that the United States retains in the Americas. They point out that state-to-state agreements between Caracas and Beijing diverge from the previous private-sector-to-private-sector contracts in terms of the sharing of intellectual property, but they see no break from the past in joint ventures and labor relations. Their research indicates that while politically the Sino-Venezuelan relationship is based on cooperation, the economic relationship, with the increased role of Chinese companies as major players in the oligopolistic oil market, echoes many of the long-term structural problems Venezuela has faced since the discovery of oil. To and Acuña conclude that the economic conduct of Chinese companies in Venezuela does not differ markedly from that of U.S. or European capital.

Other topics addressed in the first issue that are expanded upon in this one are the relationships between indigenous and social movements and extractivism and the ways that extractivism affects women differently from men. Andrea Marston and Amy Kennemore focus on the relationship of Bolivian cooperative miners and sectors of the indigenous movement with Evo Morales’s MAS government in “Extraction, Revolution, Plurinationalism: Rethinking Extractivism from Bolivia.” They draw on fieldwork conducted in highland communities to explore how “revolutionary narratives” sustain resource extraction. In their reading, the state as the chief driver of the plurinational and decolonized era (as established by the 2009 Constitution) has constructed a narrative around plurinationalism that justifies state-led resource extraction while downplaying the realities and views of communities that confront the impacts of extraction on a daily basis. They discuss the new Mining Law of 2014 and the way both cooperative miners and indigenous-identified rural groups developed discourses that challenged the state’s revolutionary narrative even as they were controlled by the limits it set. Indigenous peoples are caught between the need to balance their short-term needs for work against ongoing sustainability for their communities and secosystems. Marston and Kennemore describe how these contradictory needs and desires—increased income versus protecting the local environment—often clash when the challenges of extractivism are confronted.

The complexities of this divergence in opinion over extractivism within communities are explored by Michael Dougherty in his article “How Does Development Mean? Attitudes toward Mining and the Social Meaning of Development in Guatemala.” He uses the concept of social meanings of development as an analytic platform to examine the motivations and decision making among mining host-community residents. Dougherty explains how community members oriented toward economic development and who trust state institutions tend to support mining while those who associate development with environmental protection, public health, religious faith, or self-determination are likely to oppose it. His focus on individual rather than group decision making highlights the complex ways that extractivist projects can divide communities, exacerbate differences, and affect decisions reached at the community level.

The intersection between a pink-tide government’s economic development plans, gender, and indigenous rights in the face of expanding extractivism is considered in Ivette Vallejo, Cristina Cielo, and Fernando García’s article “Ethnicity, Gender, and Oil: Comparative Dynamics in the Ecuadorian Amazon.” Alianza PAIS under the leadership of Rafael Correa sought to escape neoliberalism and develop a new economy in the Amazon through improved infrastructure and services, as well as through the elimination of poverty by improved redistribution of increased oil revenues. Vallejos, Cielos, and García argue that, in fact, this state-driven project exacerbated gender hierarchies and territorial dispossession. They base their argument on research on the political ecologies of two regions, one in the central Amazon, where new oil blocks in Sapara indigenous territory were licensed in 2016 to a Chinese company, and the other in the northern Amazon, where the state-owned PetroAmazonas has extracted oil since the 1970s in the Kichwa community of Playas de Cuyabeno. Their research shows that the differing experiences of extractivism are the result of “place-based processes emerging from historically shaped gendered and ethnic identities that are now articulated with oil contexts and the capitalization of nature.” These differences are intimately shaped by the length of time the extractive industry has been operating and the nature of the community involved. They argue that the extraction of fossil resources tends to undervalue women’s realm of social reproduction, which, in these indigenous communities, is closely tied to culture and the natural environment. They focus on how women reconfigure their ethnic and gender identities in relation to the oil companies and the state and to the male leadership in control of their communities and organizations and discuss how and why women resist or adjust to surges in demand for oil.

Amalia Leguizamón continues this focus on gender dynamics with her article “The Gendered Dimensions of Resource Extractivism in Argentina’s Soy Boom.” She argues that analyzing the gendered dimensions of resource extractivism is critical in grasping the complex social processes that generate and perpetuate environmental injustice and analyzes these across three facets: institutional, individual, and interactional. She draws on Risman (2004) to identify six causal mechanisms that function either to produce and reproduce inequality and injustice or to challenge it. Comprehending the interplay between gendered resistances and environmental degradation is fundamental for Leguizamón in conceiving and articulating possibilities that can overcome social inequality and build opportunities for societal transformation.

The ways that everyday resistance to extractivism draws on different subjectivities in political, strategic, discursive, and textual terms are explored by Castriela Hernández Reyes in “Black Women’ Struggles against Extractivism, Land Dispossession, and Marginalization in Colombia.” From the perspective of black/decolonial feminism, Hernández Reyes studies the first national Mobilization for the Care of Life and Ancestral Territories, led by 40 black women from the northern Department of Cauca in 2014. She explores how these women used emotions and collective affections as catalysts to express and perform their lived experience and as driving forces that highlighted both black people’s exclusion and their resistance. She argues that a more radical analysis of black women’s historicity, subjectivities, and struggles contributes to an understanding of how experience-based epistemologies work to challenge hegemonic forms of knowledge production.

Together these articles speak to the intricacies of resource extraction and its impacts in Latin America and highlight the need for more study of the nuanced ways in which cases play out differently in different contexts. They also illustrate the key role of the state. The extractivist agendas of even left-leaning states tied to financial capital can exacerbate some of the deep preexisting inequities in communities.

While many of the articles here paint a grim picture, there are some signs of hope as well. For example, Pahnke point outs that the state’s use of sovereign power in facilitating extractivism could be reoriented to protect collective rather than private property and thus serve an anticapitalist project such as redistributing state-owned land to unemployed workers. Bebbington, Fash, and Rogan’s article on achieving the mining moratorium in El Salvador and Honduras shows that under the right circumstances and with an unwavering commitment, environmental protection in Latin America is not impossible. The achievement in El Salvador highlights the importance of strategic thinking by activists both within and outside the state apparatus. Questions of just transitions are surfacing in other parts of Latin America as well. Puerto Rico in the wake of the ecological disaster of Hurricane Maria in 2017 seems to offer some hope of distinct communities’ coming together under the banner of a “just recovery” (Yeampierre and Klein, 2017).

At this moment of the rise of alt-right populism from the United States to Brazil, as engaged scholars we need to focus on the committed work of activists across the region. From Francia Márquez, who led a 2014 women’s march to Bogotá culminating in government intervention to block illegal miners, to the late-2018 recognition of indigenous rights to prior consultation in Block 192, the most important oil field in Peru, and the recent People’s Trial against the State and Mining Companies in Oaxaca in southern Mexico, activists in the region are at the forefront of resistance. They need our collective support to stem the tide of destruction brought by recent extractivism and to develop alternatives that will build a just transition away from fossil fuels and unsustainable and unequal economic models.