Abstract
This paper analyzes Indigenous politics in Bolivia, the 2019 coup against President Evo Morales, and the return of the Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement for Socialism, MAS) with the inauguration of Luis Arce in 2020. Drawing on interviews with Indigenous community members in the lowlands of the Bolivian Amazon, this piece theoretically situates Indigenous autonomy struggles within world systems theory and insights from Max Weber’s ‘iron cage’ of institutional isomorphism to argue that political tensions in Bolivian Indigenous communities can be understood within a context of (1) increasingly strained relations between the MAS and civil society organizations; (2) Indigenous-NGO coalition efforts to protect Tierras Comunitarias de Orígen (Native Community Lands) and; (3) the development of competing parallel leadership organizations within Native communities that threaten democratic processes and cohesive responses to extractivism.
In Bolivia, the notion of Indigeneity remains a highly contested political terrain with various actors vying for cultural hegemony. Heterodox Indigenous groups may utilize political or economic opportunities in what geographer Derrick Hindery terms dynamic pragmatism, advocating land sovereignty, territorial autonomy, or greater control over extractive projects by leveraging available resources (2013). Anthropologists Nancy Postero and Nicole Fabricant frame certain ideological struggles between Bolivian Indigenous communities vis-à-vis the Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement for Socialism, MAS) government as claims over Indigeneity, or contestations over the mantle of “good” or “virtuous” Indians (Fabricant and Postero, 2019). At the local level, Indigenous communities may similarly deploy Indigenous cultural capital to assert agency and advance collective grievances when engaging with extractive interests, state, or non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Indigenous communities are far from homogenous and often have deep ideological and political economic divisions. Moreover, Indigeneity remains a highly contested notion with the capacity to be deployed either as a tool of liberation or as an oppressive state legitimation strategy. At the national level, the struggle to obtain hegemony over Indigeneity is a significant discursive exercise in claims-making for the MAS party in general, and Evo Morales in particular, as the first Indigenous Bolivian president for five centuries. As such, framing authentic Indigeneity remains a center of gravity for both the state and grassroots coalitions across the country (Fabricant and Postero, 2019).
Similarly, non-governmental environment and human rights organizations, often from the Global North, utilize Indigenous land sovereignty discourses as a powerful fundraising strategy for development efforts. In some cases, NGOs played an important role in the creation of Tierras Comunitarias de Orígen (Native Community Lands, TCOs) along with anthropologists, cartographers, and state agencies (Anthias and Radcliffe, 2015). TCOs are large tracts of communally held Indigenous territories, similar to Native American Reservations in the United States, whose land title statuses remain in various forms of completion since their inception in 1996 under the neoliberal administration of Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada (Soliz, 2018).
Rapid initial progress in TCO titling occurred early in the Morales administration with the passage of the 2005 Hydrocarbons Law, which established many safeguards for Indigenous peoples around processes of extraction and formally included Bolivia in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. However, on the ground, Indigenous communities in TCOs continue to struggle with the MAS government for a share in hydrocarbon rents and for de facto land sovereignty by securing land titles (Anthias, 2012). The MAS’ utilization of Indigeneity for resource nationalism and peasant colonization within TCOs has generated tensions between highland peasant-Indigenous colonists and Indigenous lowland peoples. Further, NGO-Indigenous alliances and Indigenous-transnational corporate partnerships were disrupted by the MAS, not only in terms of resource rents, but culturally, through the competing worldviews of vivir mejor (living better) and buen vivir (living well), discussed later in this piece. Briefly, buen vivir originates from a Quechua concept sumak kawsay that roughly translates into Spanish as ‘buen vivir’ an affirmative vision for community-centered and ecologically balanced living within natural limits, as opposed to the capitalist worldview of ‘vivir mejor’ that centers individualistic private property rights and wealth accumulation at the expense of others and the natural world (Baltch, 2013).
Diverse and often competing worldviews within TCOs have bifurcated communities broadly between the buen vivir vis-à-vis vivir mejor paradigms and fostered divisions within Indigenous communities across Bolivia. Nowhere has this split become more apparent than in the Territorio Indígena y Parque Nacional Isiboro Sécure (Isiboro Sécure National Park and Indigenous Territory, TIPNIS) over a state-sponsored highway project that threatens to cut through the heart of the nationally beloved roadless national park and TCO. The TIPNIS had been protected since 1990. After the proposed road project was first announced as a priority in 2006 (Hirsch, 2019) protesters were brutally beaten by police, and Morales canceled the project in 2011 (Achtenberg, 2015). The MAS’ decision in 2017 to again move ahead with the project generated massive public backlash from diverse sectors of civil society and within Indigenous communities around the country despite broad opposition. This policy reversal highlights a tension over the complex role that the mobilization of cultural symbolism and resource nationalism plays in the political economy of extractivism and land sovereignty struggles, particularly in Bolivia where a majority identifies as Indigenous (Postero and Tockman, 2020).
Using a case study approach based on fieldwork with Indigenous communities in the eastern lowlands, this article explores the growing political divisions within Native communities, representative of national dynamics, to highlight a changing political landscape in TCOs around the country and a significant shift in Indigenous communities making far-right political mobilizing more effective. Bifurcated Indigenous leadership at the community, regional, and national levels also jeopardize the long-term sustainable livelihoods of forest-dependent peoples by weakening collective agency to negotiate and direct extractive development projects. At present, few Indigenous communities in the Bolivian lowlands actively resist all forms of extraction within their territories, often seeking instead to pragmatically benefit from logging, mining, and other industries using available points of leverage, sometimes irrespective of political affiliations. These dynamic circumstances on the ground, within a political economic framework of neoliberal globalization, often generate internal contestations over Indigenous leadership authenticity and land sovereignty, exacerbating human rights struggles.
For example, many Guarayo and Chiquitano community members living on TCOs in the Department of Santa Cruz experience their territories as national sacrifice zones. Water quality is deteriorating, invasive species proliferate, wild animal populations decline, climate change reduces agricultural productivity, wildfires become more severe, and elements of Western modernity continues to further material deprivations and alter traditional subsistence activities, cultural ways, and linguistic continuity (Arigho-Stiles, 2021). This experience of eroding human and environmental conditions brings into focus a theoretical tension experienced at an individual and community level between buen vivir (living well), an Indigenous cosmovision of communities living within ecological limits in opposition to vivir mejor (living better), a capitalist project of individualistic accumulation based on materially rewarded market sensibilities. Buen vivir was an element of Indigenous social movement struggles during the revolutionary period of the 2000s and has since been adopted by the ecological-socialist discourse of the MAS. Although the discourse of buen vivir is widespread in the MAS, development policy results on the ground are often paradoxical and, in some cases, undermine Indigenous liberatory possibilities for the praxis of buen vivir (Alderman, 2021). Given the international geopolitical forces at play, lowland Indigenous community reliance on the TCO framework, while imperfect, remains a primary strategy to counter domestic and international extraction pressures tied to global core-periphery relationships using existing national legal frameworks with ties to international human rights law. For lowland Indigenous peoples, world system pressures are often experienced through the local lens of waves of colonists illegally occupying land on TCOs, or international mining or logging operations taking place depending on fluctuating resource prices.
Tensions between individual versus collectivist modes of existence are at the core of both political economic struggles and ideological contestations over Indigeneity. By documenting these divisions within Native communities, this article attempts to uncover some of the forces that contributed to a weakened civil society terrain that facilitated the 2019 right-wing coup against former President Evo Morales and installed the right-wing politician Jeanine Áñez as Interim President of Bolivia. What conditions led to this constitutional crisis that threatened to return Bolivia to an authoritarian state? Why was the once-celebrated MAS party, popularly elected by broad coalitions of Indigenous social movements across the country, overthrown by a relatively minor political faction of Bolivian society?
Weakening democratic governance processes in Indigenous communities left gaps and political opportunities for extractive interests to suppress decades of environmental conservation efforts and subaltern community goals. Underlying political economic pressures may have similarly spurred the emergence of divisions in Indigenous governance systems and the rise of parallel leadership, often with pro-extractive agendas across the country. Under what conditions did these inter-community divisions occur? In what ways did these conflicts impact the national political landscape and the 2019 coup against the MAS?
To begin to answer some of these questions, this article documents a process, termed parallelism, taking place throughout the country, at multiple scales, within Indigenous communities, which is partly responsible for some of the country’s political unrest. To understand the origins of this phenomena this article analyzes various factors that contributed to the emergence of parallel and organic political groups. Importantly, the terms paralelo (parallel) and orgánico (organic) are terms used by Indigenous leadership who self-describe as organic and refer to their Indigenous opponents as parallel. The crucial distinction between the two groups is that the organic leadership predates the parallel organizational structures that formed around 2010 and were democratically elected by a majority of Indigenous constituents, while the parallel organization’s elections often take place under suspect circumstances without third party oversight.
Useful synonyms for the parallelism phenomena include cooptation or astroturfing by outside forces seeking to influence power structures. Reports of MAS-backed parallel organizations in nearly identical circumstances have taken place in the Consejo Nacional de Ayllus y Markas del Qullasuyu (National Council of Ayllus and Markas of Qullasuyu, CONAMAQ), the highland Indigenous confederation of Quechua and Aymará communities. This phenomenon has precipitated political infighting and effectively reduced territorial sovereignty, and exacerbated environmental injustices as extractive industries are often more able to utilize these political divisions to access resources within Native territories. In recent years, conflicts between parallel leadership organizations in TCO Guarayo have exacerbated social, political, and resource tensions and threaten to unravel the already fragile Indigenous governance structures of the territory. As one development worker explained, “when you mention COPNAG (Central de Organizaciones de los Pueblos Nativos Guarayos), the main Guarayo leadership body, “you have to clarify which COPNAG you are talking about (organic or parallel).”
Mining, logging, and agro-industrial sectors progressed rapidly under Evo who, despite anti-corporate rhetoric, facilitated multinational corporate investments, granted GMO soy cultivation, and supported the largest flows of foreign direct investment in over 40 years (CEIC, 2020), speeding the destruction of Amazonian deforestation and impeding Indigenous land rights. These executive decisions exacerbated political divisions, particularly within the context of state narratives of “resource nationalism” (Kohl and Farthing, 2012) and vis-à-vis Indigenous social movement struggles for autonomy, sovereignty, and the erosion of legal protections of Native lands in recent years (McNeish, 2013).
Indigenous community divisions also occur within a global context first theorized by Immanuel Wallerstein, and other world-systems theorists, to better understand the changing power relations between core, periphery, and semi-periphery countries in a capitalist world-economy with origins in the 16th Century (Wallerstein, 2015). The underlying drivers of the global economy reward individualistic wealth accumulation, often at the expense of communal resources and collective autonomy. Raw materials often flow to core or semi-periphery nations, while manufactured goods are imported in a limited capacity to periphery nations resulting in pauperization in the long durée for economically poorer nations. These international dynamics particularly impact subaltern peoples on the margins not only through labor made cheap but also through cooptation, compromise, and a process characterized by social scientist Verónica Gago as “neoliberalism from below” where elite interests become the common interests, even within marginalized communities, as the internal logic of the world system self-replicates at various class strata (2017). This article also analyzes the MAS party’s transition from revolution to reform using a theoretical framework drawn from the work of Max Weber. This framework was later expanded by sociologists Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell with respect to the pressures bureaucratic systems exert against fundamental change, encouraging what Weber called the iron cage or what DiMaggio and Powell term institutional isomorphism, that is, the tendency for homogenization and conformity of state structures within a capitalist system (1983).
The Iron Cage Of The World System
Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell’s 1983 article, “The Iron Cage Revisited” expands on the canonic work of Max Weber to assert that the modern face of bureaucracy not only stifles alternatives through efficiency and rationalization, but fosters organizational homogenization, because of individual efforts to deal with uncertainty. This homogenization process is termed by the authors as: institutional isomorphism and forces “one unit in a population to resemble other units that face the same environmental conditions” (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983: 149). The authors form three basic hypotheses that contribute to this homogenization of organizations by: (1) the level of dependence between one organization and another; (2) the centralization of an organization’s resource supply; and (3) the level of uncertainty (1983: 154). In a political context, after a party has obtained state authority, that organization is disciplined and molded by other existing organizations, available resources, and risk. Applied to the Bolivian context, the social movement-based MAS party was quickly transformed from a revolutionary enterprise to a party of reform and compromise through the durable institutional isomorphic momentum present in the state apparatus. This change took place under rational institutionally mandated paths toward capital accumulation within the world system that remain fundamentally at odds with the original redistributive goals of the initial Pink Tide movement across Latin America.
DiMaggio and Powell’s Weberian analysis of bureaucracy in a capitalist world system, as identified by Immanuel Wallerstein (2019), helps us better understand the MAS’ shifting relationship from social movement driven politics to a professional-managerial approach to governance. This shift fostered civil unrest from diverse sectors of the population and facilitated the opportunistic coup of the far-right U.S.-backed Áñez government. Indigenous leaders from Guarayo and Chiquitano communities in the Department of Santa Cruz began to observe changes in Indigenous governance over the tenure of the MAS. One well-respected Chiquitano leader, and former mayor of a town in the Chiquitania, mentioned that his former mayoral office now serves as the headquarters of a rival, MAS-backed Indigenous group. While he remains politically active, he has been largely excluded from political office in recent years after distancing himself from the MAS.
The Chiquitano leader provided a powerful allegory to capture the changing relationship between the Chiquitano community and the MAS government by recounting George Orwell’s famous line in Animal Farm: “all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others,” interpreted as a metaphor for institutional isomorphism and the replication of systems of oppression by the initial forces of liberation by rewarding rational, individualistic behaviors over group solidarity. The general sentiment of many lowland Indigenous community members on the perceived betrayal of the MAS centers on several primary grievances. First, no meaningful movement on TCO land titling has been made to prevent mining, logging, colonization, and other forms of territorial degradation. Second, the MAS government’s crackdown on NGOs that support Indigenous organizations is seen as a direct attack on Indigenous institutions. Third, the perception that parallel Indigenous leadership is funded, directly or indirectly, by the MAS government to undermine community organizing around collective issues on a local level is particularly egregious.
Given that the language of autonomy, and some of the criticism of the MAS, have been coopted by the political right, lowland Indigenous leaders must also be wary of being used as political pawns in a strategic game where they are only minor actors, albeit with significant land holdings. To enter national and international politics carries significant risks for Indigenous leaders. However, the danger to refrain from participating is even greater. Another young Indigenous leader described the situation in TCO Guarayo territory, to the west of the Chiquitania:
There are no government organizations that help us, all are bought by the MAS-affiliated municipality! There is no work on the TCO with about 80% unemployment. The 20% that work on the TCO, work in healthcare, the schools, or odd jobs. Even the loggers only work for part of the year. Only the ministry of health allows children under 5 years to get vaccinations. People die sometimes, because they cannot get treatment for preventable problems (interview, Urubicha, April 24, 2017).
Political scientist Jeffery Webber’s 2017 book The Last Day of Oppression, and the First Day of the Same: Politics and Economics of the New Latin American Left offers a scathing critique of the MAS government. He finds fault with the MAS for prioritizing elite interests over the Indigenous base that brought Morales to power, as well as for its reformist nature. Webber identifies the MAS government’s political economic system as reconstituted neoliberalism, in which the state continues to pursue general policies of economic austerity, low levels of inflation, and a host of other extractivist resource models directed by private multinational corporate interests (2013). The MAS initially succeeded in maintaining a hegemonic framing of Bolivian Indigeneity to international observers, overcoming the internal contradictions between competing Indigenous perspectives under what anthropologist Nancy Postero terms Indigenous nationalism (2010: 1). This hegemony legitimated Morales’ ability to speak for all Indigenous people and justify extraction for national development. This was particularly true in the mining sector with cooperatives working in tandem with the state to form resource regimes (Marston and Perreault, 2016: 1).
However, organic lowland Indigenous leadership and their constituents reported feeling a sense of deep betrayal against the MAS government after many years of advocacy and pan-Indigenous solidarity. This sense of resentment erupted in collective grievances against the TIPNIS project after the MAS rapidly greenlighted a huge highway project through the heart of a doubly protected TIPNIS National Park and Indigenous territory to allow extractive mining, logging interests, and highland coca farmer land colonization. A Guarayo Cacique (traditional religious leader) explains how similar extraction dynamics occurring in the TIPNIS evolved in the nearby Guarayo territory and the ways that parallel leadership is impacting collective resistance to state accumulation by dispossession:
The authorities used to guard the park during the 1980s. The traditional church organized to support efforts for the TCOs. Legally, it’s our land. No one person can own it. No one can sell it. But now the young leaders are selling it. The youth do not respect the older generations. There are at least fifteen mines in the Guarayo TCO. But they are on the other side of the Lagoon de Corazon. The owners of the mines are Brazilian, Chinese, and Bolivian. They pay off the authorities (interview, Ascensión de Guarayos, April 28, 2017).
Indigenous leaders also reported parallel groups worked within Indigenous territories on illegal logging operations and drug trafficking across the lowlands (Mendoza, 2019; La Razon, 2019). One Guarayo leader related his experience with illegal activities on Native lands:
The colonists come in, and they come in with money, and drugs. Colombians and Bolivians, to grow coca as part of the drug trade. This has just started. They come in at night. They do not live in the communities. For right now, there is no violence between the community and the drug traffickers. Just violence between and among the traffickers themselves. They also use small planes in the forest, and they are growing in numbers (interview, Urubicha, April 27, 2017).
There was the perception among many lowland Indigenous peoples, and allied NGO workers, that the political split between organic and parallel organizations was not only due to internal ideological cleavages, but also the result of the MAS government’s support for rival parallel organizations. Urban planner Emily Achtenberg reported on a similar factional split within the Indigenous federation CONAMAQ, the highland Indigenous people’s federation. One example provided was when approximately 300 members of a pro-MAS parallel group forcefully seized the headquarters of the democratically elected CONAMAQ leaders while police looked the other way (Achtenberg, 2014). There have been numerous clashes between the two groups resulting in injuries (Ágreda, 2019) and roadblocks (El Deber, 2016; Latin American News, 2022).
Importantly, Evo remained head of the cocalero unions even while serving as president. Cocaleros are mercantilist within a capitalist economy of former highland Indigenous-peasant workers, whose social organization and life-projects remain fundamentally at odds with the subsistence ways of many lowland Indigenous communities, illustrating a political economic rift between many highlands and lowlands Indigenous peoples. The Andean-Amazonian capitalism of the MAS was a core element of the peasant-miner unions turned Indigenous cocaleros.
According to democratically elected Guarayo leaders in Central de Pueblos Nativos Guarayos (Central Organization of Native Guarayos Peoples, COPNAG) the organic governing body, parallel organizations began to form in TCO Guarayo, and across the country, around 2009 when Evo won his second term in office. This was a time when, according to political scientist Jeffery Webber, the MAS transitioned from a revolutionary movement to a reformist party (2011). The roots of the breakdown can also be traced to changes within the Unity Pact (Pacto de Unidad), the most important left-Indigenous alliance in the Bolivian Constitutional Assembly. Amidst the national debate over the controversial TIPNIS road project, the Unity Pact balkanized and realigned in 2011 after the Confederación de Pueblos Indígenas del Oriente Boliviano (Confederation of Indigenous Peoples of the Bolivian East, CIDOB). The most important coalition of lowland groups, and its highland counterpart CONAMAQ, formally left the Pact. After CIDOB’s departure, the MAS allegedly focused on undermining lowland Indigenous groups and encouraged government loyalists to form splinter factions aligned with the state (Delgado, 2017). According to critics this organizational split between organic and parallel groups, “reflect(s) a deliberate strategy by the Morales government to intervene and undermine the organization’s organic leadership” (Achtenberg, 2014). One notable example of the government’s crackdown is demonstrated by the state accusation that CIDOB was functioning as fraccionalistas (dividers) and colluding with the Santa Cruz elite and leftist NGOs (Webber 2015).
Indigenous Responses To World System Pressures
What are alternate explanations for divided Indigenous leadership and why are Native territories continuing to struggle under the MAS? The Bolivian anthropologist Walter Arteaga argues that parallelism can also occur after a dependent relationship forms between the state and Indigenous communities that require the government to meet certain basic needs of these marginalized constituents (2015). If the MAS voids this social contract by failing to provide sufficient support, the local tacit acceptance of legitimacy begins to erode, forming divisions within groups. From the beginning, the notion of TCOs was developed under neoliberal regimes with the help of NGOs who believed that communally held territories were the common denominator for Native peoples’ survival. However, the late anthropologist Wendy Townsend, who lived and worked in Bolivia for over 20 years as an anthropologist, biologist, and Indigenous ally noted:
The idea of TCOs was an outside vision to make Indigenous communities into territories that are communally managed. Indigenous peoples are more concerned with their families as the main denominator, not the village (interview, Santa Cruz, April 25, 2017).
Townsend viewed parallel leadership formation as the result of existing ideological differences within communities that preceded TCOs as semi-autonomous spaces that never functioned homogeneously. This insight speaks to the dangers of top-down western development policy initiatives that often attempt to overlay outside value systems onto complex Indigenous landscapes in a flawed ethno-environmental fix. Further, after TCOs were formed, Indigenous democratic institutions were particularly vulnerable to the coercive pressures of extractivist interests, and outside NGOs due to economic impoverishment and the ongoing structural violence of white supremacist legacies that had largely relegated Native Bolivians to second class citizens.
From a world systems perspective, the power of global capital to influence modern state building efforts within Pink Tide countries remains significant, particularly given colonial forms of raw materials extraction between periphery, semi-periphery, and core nations. Bolivia’s top export destinations include Brazil ($1.41B), Argentina ($1.24B), South Korea ($574M), India ($552M), and the U.S. ($542M). Bolivia’s top import origins are China ($1.93B), Brazil ($1.52B), Chile ($999M), the U.S. ($706M), and Argentina ($698M), (OEC, 2017). Raw material exports expanded under Morales, as did the importation of manufactured goods. Worse, the complexity of the economy decreased under the MAS leaving Bolivia with increasing national debts. The Prebisch-Singer hypothesis asserts a country ought to work towards producing manufactured goods at home to avoid underdevelopment and overcome neo-colonial unequal exchange systems. This hypothesis, prominent in both dependency theory and world systems theory, serve as a key metric to empirically evaluate the relative levels of a state’s position in the global economy (Schmidt and Tally, 2018). Wealth inequality, technological change, unequal exchange, and ecological crisis have accelerated under processes of neoliberal globalization. While dependency theory and other meta-narratives have various weaknesses in fully explaining unequal development trajectories, these theories nonetheless have broad explanatory power of core-periphery relations.
This transnational momentum is likely to remain irrespective of short-term changes in state formation. Thus, the MAS faces political economic realities of the world system and remains dependent on allowing transnational corporations and local elites to exploit TCOs to avoid an economic recession, irrespective of domestic laws and the new 2009 constitution. Prior to the MAS, NGO-Indigenous coalitions were forced to occupy the state’s role in protecting human rights and the environment. Yet, as funding sources for these NGOs, primarily from Europe, dried up under Morales, Indigenous organizations like COPNAG in TCO Guarayo precipitated pragmatic alliances with forces on the Santa Cruz right, whose discourses of autonomy mirrored those of lowland Indigenous peoples – albeit for diametrically different reasons.
Formations of weak right-Indigenous alliances throughout the lowlands provided a layer of legitimation for the 2019 coup in the national and international press. For example, a New York Times piece ten days before Evo’s ousting framed the coup in popular resistance terms stating, “as anger against Mr. Morales has swelled, many in the opposition have shifted from calling for a runoff between the president and his main challenger, Carlos Mesa, to demanding the ouster of Mr. Morales, who has been in office since 2006” (Machicao and Londono, 2019). In an interview with the author, a Guarayo leader explained her community’s unusual alliance with the right wing Cruceños, in this case Rubén Armando Costas Aguilera, the current Governor of the Department of Santa Cruz and former President of the Comite Civico de Santa Cruz (Santa Cruz Civic Committee), a right-wing paramilitary organization that played a role in an assassination attempt of President Morales in 2008 and in the 2019 coup (BBC, 2010; Hetland, 2019).
Evo does not visit the small communities in the lowlands. Just the main town in our area [Ascención de Guarayos]. He does not go to the communities like the one we visited today where everyone has Chagas disease. They don’t have any water [but] Evo says there is enough water. But they need money to dig the wells, or they won’t have the water. Evo only knows the city, not the countryside - especially the highlands. At least Costas goes to the communities. He has drilled wells and built bridges. Because of this, people respect him (interview, Charagua, April 26, 2017).
Under these inherently Faustian circumstances some lowland Indigenous communities decided to form tenuous alliances with the right for limited development purposes as a rebuke to the centralized governance of the MAS. This peculiar Indigenous-right alliance can perhaps be understood as both an example of dynamic pragmatism and as an avoidable outcome of place-based Indigenous social movements that have witnessed international human rights support wane in recent years and chosen to make instrumental choices within a limited political terrain with few alliances among international democratic civil society organizations.
This tension, between earlier revolutionary social movement struggles for purity and later pragmatic bureaucratic reforms, remains a theoretical rift between some parts of civil society and has generated much of the resentment against the MAS among lowland communities. Are we to view the contradictions between MAS’ progressive rhetoric and business-as-usual actions as the result of global core-periphery power relations beyond the state’s control, or as conscious self-serving decisions to prioritize political expediency over long term democracy? To what degree is Law 071, Ley de Derechos de la Madre Tierra (the Mother Earth Law) granting rights to nature being implemented in the new 2009 Constitution of Bolivia? The United Nations Declarations on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Article 32, states that:
States shall consult and cooperate in good faith with the indigenous peoples concerned through their own representative institutions in order to obtain their free and informed consent prior to the approval of any project affecting their lands or territories and other resources, particularly in connection with the development, utilization or exploitation of mineral, water or other resources (UNDRIP, 2007: 12).
Articles 6 and 7 of the International Labour Organization Convention 169 similarly support Indigenous rights to free, prior, and informed consent (ILO, 1989). In accordance with international law, Article 304 of the 2009 Bolivian Constitution grants: “Rural native Indigenous autonomies the following exclusive authorities. . .To participate in, develop and execute the mechanisms of prior, free and informed consultations related to the application of legislative, executive and administrative measures that affect them” (Bolivian Constitution, 2009). However, ambiguity exists over what exactly this process should look like (Anaya, 2005). To what degree is consultation, prior to development, taking place? Guarayo community members report low levels of consultation prior to extraction, despite growing negative impacts to water and natural resources from extraction. A current Guarayo leader reflects on the worsening situation:
The campesinos receive millions of dollars to sell and buy TCO lands. The mercury from mining has been bad for fish and fishing. The miners are Brazilian or outside colonists with private companies. Other [Indigenous], delegates allow it to happen. Also, some mines are outside the TCO but affect the TCO from upstream (interview, Urubicha, April 27, 2017).
Although these communities technically own the land, subsoil resources, including oil and gas reserves, remain the property of the government. In some cases, when state redistribution does not occur, factions of Indigenous communities broker deals directly with multinational corporations for access to hydrocarbon rents (Anthias, 2018). Members of the parallel Guarayo leadership support illegal logging operations and land sales without community consultation (Moreno, 2017; Ágreda, 2022). The highest profile conflict in recent years concerning land rights in Bolivia, as well as international and domestic consultation laws, lies in the TIPNIS. At the time of writing, a state-sponsored highway project is being constructed through the center of the roadless area to connect the town of Villa Tunari to San Ignacio de Moxos (Fabricant and Postero, 2019). The route threatens the Yuracaré, Tsimané, and Mojeño-Trinitario peoples through ecosystem degradation from logging, mining, coca growing, and hydrocarbons extraction. Projections suggest that if completed, the road would lead to 65% park deforestation within 18 years (Sanchez-Lopez, 2015), impact regional flora and fauna (Reyes-García, Fernández-Llamazares, Bauchet, and Godoy, 2020), and jeopardize the viability of Indigenous territorial sovereignty laws across Bolivia (Webber, 2012; McNeish, 2013). Along with well-publicized Ecuadorian state-sponsored hydrocarbons extraction in Yasuni National Park (Watts, 2018), the TIPNIS conflict has made international news as a bellwether for Indigenous land rights and environmental conservation in Latin America (Flores, 2015).
Despite legislation for free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC), the state initiated the controversial road project and failed to participate in good faith consultation efforts. When nonviolent protests erupted, the police reacted with violence (Delgado, 2017). In 2012, several months after the road project was halted amidst a national outcry opposing police brutality against protesters, the government passed a consultation law and surveyed TIPNIS communities reporting that a majority (80%) were in favor of the road. However, independent observers, including human rights groups and the Catholic Church, conducted their own survey finding that the state bribed communities with outboard motors and other prized items, and failed to provide accurate information to residents about the possible impacts of the road (Achtenberg, 2012; Hope, 2016).
When the author visited the TIPNIS and conducted interviews and site visits, the MAS-affiliated communities along the river that were supportive of the road seemed to receive preferential treatment from the state while those opposed to the project were overlooked. The TIPNIS conflict is only the tip of the iceberg, with similar dynamics of contention prevalent throughout the country. This is part of a rich tradition of organized struggle for sustainable livelihoods in hydrocarbon rich reserves such as the Chaco region (Bebbington and Bebbington, 2010), productive cattle and agricultural lands in the Departments of Santa Cruz, Beni, and Pando (FAO, 2019), and in the vast Chiquitania, the largest tropical dry forest in South America (Bryant, Nielsen, and Tangley, 1997).
According to researchers Anne Larson, Peter Cronkleton, and Juan Pulhin, COPNAG was formed in the 1990s as a regional Indigenous leadership organization within TCO Guarayo to advocate for all the local Guarayos and assist in the TCO land titling process by pressuring the state to acknowledge claims for greater territory and function as an intermediary between the Indigenous communities and the government. Although the organization originally asked for 2.2 million hectares of TCO lands, the amount was later reduced to 1.3 million hectares after a state-sponsored needs assessment (Larson, Cronkleton, and Pulhin, 2015). Still, this remains a large territory for a young and institutionally limited organization to administer with little resources and long distances between small villages.
There are regionally unique reasons for why parallel leadership groups are forming across the country with little academic literature on the phenomenon. Theorists including Rousseau and Hudon argue that parallelism can sometimes benefit marginalized groups via the formation of parallel groups within Bolivian Indigenous women’s movements that became instrumental in granting women access into national politics (2017). Patrice McSherry discusses parallelism within the context of military and covert operations within Latin America and argues that at the state level parallel groups are “an instrument to accomplish secretly what could not be accomplished legally or politically” (2005: 21).
McSherry notes that although parallel organizations, such as paramilitary death squads, are a useful means for authoritarian governments to consolidate power using terror, these groups pose a risk to the state because of their high level of independence: “by involving themselves in crime, drug trafficking, and other illicit operations to become self-financing, parallel groups can avoid accountability to their original masters” (2005: 22). Indeed, within TCO Guarayo, there are documented cases of the parallel organization participating in illegal land sales to colonists and other activities (Moreno, 2017).
Established Guarayo leaders expressed concern over the parallel group’s illegal land sales, mining concessions to Chinese firms, and alleged involvement in drug trafficking, placing communities at risk of increased violence and environmental contamination. The parallel organizations also compete for increasingly scarce resources from NGOs threatened by state crackdowns. Why did rival leadership factions form? How has this crisis of local leadership impacted Indigenous territoriality? One Guarayo leader describes the politics in his community:
People that were once loyal to the original causes are now divided because of corruption, drugs, and illegal land sales. The development organizations that fund projects in the TCOs create competition over resources. People start thinking individualistically about themselves. The NGOs are trying to help but it creates conflicts in the TCO communities. Even some of the older generations of leaders have become individualistic, selling out resources for personal gain. Many leaders are shifting from rural to urban living and there is a growing disconnect between the land and people because the leaders must work with the government. Also, many leaders must take second jobs to earn a living in addition to doing their political jobs (interview, Urubicha, April 29, 2017).
This description outlines a common occurrence where Indigenous leaders often go unpaid for service to their communities and are often forced to live in ethnically segregated slums. The experience of urban poverty can also be a factor in contributing to individualism and parallelism. Many leaders are teachers, farmers, or laborers who perform their leadership role as a community service position, often at great sacrifice to their own lives and those of their families. Ideological and economic pressures contribute to parallelism. Many leaders rely on NGOs to fund their viáticos, basic expenses associated with travel, including daily stipends for the cost of participation in indigenous meetings. These payments are essential for leaders to organize because they often cannot afford even the bus ride to a meeting (Postero, 2007: 177)
How have social and ecological conditions changed for lowland Indigenous peoples under the MAS government and what possible impacts is bifurcated leadership having on community resiliency and collective agency?
There are extremely high rates of unemployment in Guarayo communities that precipitate rural to urban push forces propelling Guarayo to migrate to Santa Cruz and other cities for temporary work to send remissions and earn livelihoods within modernity. Divisions within Indigenous leadership, in conjunction with state crackdowns on NGOs, are intricately connected. Municipal governments receive money from state coffers for administration, however, according to the organic COPNAG leadership, no part of these federal funds is redistributed to the group. Importantly, before the creation of COPNAG, resource use was handled at the community level. Leaders are elected through a general assembly of all Indigenous communities in the province, although the TCO spans three municipalities where only one has an Indigenous majority.
The state’s laws, under the usos y costumbres (traditional uses and practices) statute gives ambiguous authority for TCOs to manage resource use. COPNAG was originally conceived to act on behalf of Guarayos people and to administer forest management plans within the Guarayos TCO. However, as land competition increased, particularly in the 1970s, outside interests, mainly cattle, timber, colonists, and transnational corporate agricultural sectors, began moving in to access land and forest resources. As external capitalist economic pressures, increased land privatization and enclosure accelerated, these outside forces generated internal tensions within communities contributing in part to the phenomena of parallelism.
A splinter COPNAG surfaced when allegations of corruption were revealed over illegal land deals in regional newspapers. In the year 2001, there were 44 fraudulent land sales where COPNAG members were implicated (Lopez, 2004). The crisis of legitimacy incited calls for a new election and in 2007 a female president was elected. The original leaders who participated in the scandal, allegedly using false land titles in the TCO, left their positions and formed the parallel COPNAG. These parallel leaders are acknowledged as the legitimate leadership organization by the right-wing Department of Santa Cruz government and the Pro Comité Cívico (Santa Cruz Civic Committee) that represents regional elite agriculture, cattle, and oil interests (Fabricant and Postero, 2013).
These right-wing groups once waged major efforts to secede from Bolivia under Morales but have more recently pushed for greater departmental rights from the central government using a rhetoric of autonomy rather than succession. These organizations continue legitimating the parallel COPNAG who serve their regional interests vis-a-vis the state by furthering access to land and resources, and encouraging discord within a divided TCO Guarayo (Larson, Cronkleton, and Pulhin 2015).
Conclusion
Accumulation by dispossession, a term coined by the geographer David Harvey, is rapidly taking place across Bolivia as Indigenous ancestral lands are alienated by colonial settlements, extractive agribusiness, environmental injustices, and the remains of a tattered patchwork of large estates that still lie in the hands of wealthy Mestizo families, a reminder of the unfinished legacy of agrarian reforms across Latin America. The legal model of Native Community Lands was formed under neoliberal arrangements in the 1990s. The 2009 Bolivian constitution, which guarantees the rights of nature and Indigenous peoples’ right to informed consent, has thus far been insufficient in terms of stopping state-sanctioned development projects (such as the TIPNIS highway), agribusiness expansion across the eastern lowlands, and nontraditional forms of hydrocarbons extraction, including hydraulic fracturing (fracking) (Mamani, 2020).
The MAS reformist strategy of concessions to international markets, within a resource extraction-based world system, is predictable given institutional isomorphism of state bureaucratic structures and the professional managerial class networks that force even radical social movements into Weber’s iron cage through rational pressures. Neoliberal modernity often forces Faustian decisions between personal enrichment or community empowerment. Political economic pressures and extractive interests play a role in determining life chances and foster pragmatic decisions for subaltern peoples as the logic of the system rewards selling out for short term gain at the expense of community empowerment. As the first Pink Tide hit its high-water mark and receded amidst the gravity of world system pressures to conform to global political economic paradigms, MAS party officials were similarly forced to choose pragmatism over purity, reform over revolution.
Despite significant anti-poverty programs and modest levels of hydrocarbon nationalization, core-periphery relationships, precipitated by decades of neoliberal reforms, eroded Bolivian state society, reduced tariffs, and precipitated cheap imports that collapsed local markets. The successful, albeit brief, 2019 coup against Morales by forces on the right threatened to roll back the modest, yet significant, human rights and environmental victories of the MAS. The successful democratic election and landslide victory of President Luis Arce of the MAS party in 2020 signaled a sharp public rejection of the 2019 coup across broad swaths of civil society, and against conservative senator Jeanine Añez and the forces of the Social Democratic party of the political right. This represents an important opportunity to examine why the coup occurred and the steps needed to build broad coalitions that can deliver on earlier radical visions of greater equity, substantive democracy, and sustainable models of development for the most marginalized Indigenous populations. This can be done under the framework buen vivir, a community-oriented, ecological cosmovision that is culturally relevant nationwide.
While many complex challenges were present prior to parallel Indigenous group formations, this internal crisis of leadership has exacerbated eroding conditions within communities across the lowlands. These political divisions represent regional trends that impact effective Indigenous resistance to extractivist threats to ecosystem integrity and cultural continuity on ancestral lands. These rifts also threaten the long-term integrity of Native Community Lands where collective Indigenous autonomies have the capacity to develop. At base, the struggle for buen vivir in Bolivia and the development of an alternative political economy relationship with both nature and community, remains crucial for international efforts to rebuild the global house of civilization under different architectural principles.
Footnotes
Evan N. Shenkin is an Assistant Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology (SOAN) at Linfield University in McMinnville, Oregon, USA. He has researched development projects in Nicaragua and works with Indigenous communities in the eastern lowlands of the Bolivian Amazon.