The books discussed in this essay represent different approaches to the study of conflicts over extractive projects. Patricia I. Vásquez from Argentina is an expert on energy and sustainability. She analyses oil-related conflicts with indigenous peoples in the Amazon of Peru, Ecuador and Colombia. Fabiana Li is an anthropologist from the country she studies, Peru. She makes an in-depth analysis of the conflicts around the gold mine of Yanacocha, Cajamarca. Anthony Bebbington and Jeffry Bury have teamed up with a group of geographers like themselves from outside South America – people with a background in anthropology, journalism and activism who have made case studies on mining, oil and gas conflicts in Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador. Despite the focus of these books on the Andean countries, their contributions are of region-wide relevance.
By Barbara Hogenboom
Subterranean
Struggles: New Dynamics of Mining, Oil, and Gas in Latin America, edited by
Anthony Bebbington and Jeffrey Bury. University of Texas Press, 2013.
Unearthing
conflict: Corporate Mining, Activism, and Expertise in Peru, by Fabiana Li.
Duke University Press, 2015.
Oil Sparks in
the Amazon: Local Conflicts, Indigenous Populations, and Natural Resources, by
Patricia I. Vásquez. University of Georgia Press, 2014.
Since the early
2000s, scholarly attention for social dynamics around extractive industries in
Latin American societies has boomed like the sector itself. Next to the
sector’s expansion and renewed political debates on its link to development,
this increased academic interest is explained by the alarming rise of local
conflicts over the extraction of metal minerals, oil and gas. Within this
growing body of publications, the three books under review here are
particularly helpful for understanding the nature and importance of these
contemporary socio environmental struggles. The shift towards what Anthony
Bebbington and Jeffrey Bury have labelled New Extraction had already started in
the 1990s. Projects in the mining and hydrocarbon sector have become increasingly
largescale, using new technologies, more sophisticated engineering and
logistics, more capital, but fewer employees. In the case of new mining, also
known as mega-mining among activists, huge open pits, extensive transport
systems and high-tech treatment facilities (e.g. cyanide leaching in gold
mining) affect large surfaces, including new regions and even countries (e.g.
Ecuador). In the hydrocarbons sector, oil and gas extraction also enters new
territories, in part helped by technological innovation that turns Argentina
and Brazil into prominent energy producers with their respective shale gas and
deep-sea oil reserves.
The books
discussed in this essay represent different approaches to the study of
conflicts over extractive projects. Patricia I. Vásquez from Argentina is an
expert on energy and sustainability. She analyses oil-related conflicts with
indigenous peoples in the Amazon of Peru, Ecuador and Colombia. Fabiana Li is
an anthropologist from the country she studies, Peru. She makes an in-depth
analysis of the conflicts around the gold mine of Yanacocha, Cajamarca. Anthony
Bebbington and Jeffry Bury have teamed up with a group of geographers like
themselves from outside South America – people with a background in
anthropology, journalism and activism who have made case studies on mining, oil
and gas conflicts in Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador. Despite the focus of these
books on the Andean countries, their contributions are of region-wide
relevance.
Conflict
Triggers and Structural Flaws
Patricia I.
Vásquez opens Oil Sparks in the Amazon with the violent clash in 2009 between
indigenous groups and security forces near the town of Bagua in the Peruvian
Amazon. The groups were protesting against legislative changes that facilitate
the sale of lands inhabited by indigenous peoples in order to enable the
extraction of oil, gas and timber. As a significant share of Latin America’s
undeveloped oil and gas reserves lie in the Amazon, indigenous peoples of these
areas have increasingly encountered new projects that are threatening their
territories and livelihoods. Although not all turned out to be as bloody as
Bagua, where over 30 people lost their lives, conflicts over oil have
intensified. Through extensive research including hundreds of interviews,
Vásquez analysed 55 cases of oil-related conflict involving indigenous groups
that took place over two decades (1992-2010) in the Amazon of Colombia, Peru
and Ecuador. Instead of theory building, her analysis is aimed at identifying
policies and interventions that can minimize local conflicts.
Image Attribute: Oil Blocks in Ecuador / Source: www.dailykos.com
Although the
exploration of oil in Colombia, Peru and Ecuador started in the late 1800s, it
took until the 1970s before Amazon areas became exploited. One major problem
with oil drilling in these remote areas has been the absence of the state and
the weakness of development policies and environmental protection. While some
progress is being made, new socio-environmental conflicts continue to occur as
the oil industry expands its frontiers into indigenous areas and indigenous
groups realize that their cultural survival is at stake while receiving little
in exchange. Despite recent international norms for indigenous peoples’ rights,
huge inequalities remain in income, access to basic services, land ownership,
and effective rights and decision-making power. On the one hand, the conflicts
reflect the feeling among indigenous peoples that ‘they are being once again
excluded from the benefits of economic development enjoyed by the rest of
society’, (p. 3). On the other hand, the ‘conflicts around hydrocarbons also
have become a means for indigenous organizations to assert their broader claims
for a strong role in the political life of the nation and for the recognition
of their cultural distinctiveness’, (p. 50).
Image Attribute: Oil Blocks in Peru / Source: WesternAmazon.Org
The core of
Oil Sparks in the Amazon is focussed on the structural general causes of
oil-related conflicts and the more transitory local conflict triggers. While
the former are difficult to change in the short run, Vásquez argues that the
latter can often be solved through a better understanding of the specific
dynamics and by joint efforts of all the actors involved. While she stresses
the distinction between structural flaws and conflict triggers, her analysis
shows that they are intimately related and sometimes overlap, such as in the
case of the many direct interactions between oil companies and indigenous
peoples in the absence of government services and intermediation (pp. 65-66,
118-123). The overarching structural flaw lies in imperfect governance systems,
especially poor subnational governance and gaps within legal frameworks. Under
decentralization, the central government’s mismanagement of oil revenues was
transferred to subnational governments that suffer even more from incapacity,
arbitrariness, clientelism and corruption. And despite subnational
redistribution of oil revenues, many conflicts occur due to an uneven revenue
allocation between regions and communities. Moreover, while the central state
is basically absent and the development projects of subnational governments do
not satisfy peoples’ needs, local communities are forced to look for help from
the oil company. What follows is a permanent process of negotiation – taking
place within a legal void and under unequal power relations – between
communities asking the company for basic services and the company demanding
community consent in return. Only when this leads to conflict, as often
happens, do state institutions step in as facilitator of company-community
negotiations. Vásquez stresses that affected populations feel abandoned by the
state and that conflict prevention requires constant instead of incidental involvement
of central government authorities.
Image Attribute: Colombian New Exploratory Blocks as per 2011 data
The other main
component of imperfect governance is diffuse and overlapping legislation.
Constitutional notions of ‘national interest’ and the state’s ownership of
subsoil resources clash with the concepts of indigenous rights and indigenous
territories, and most oil-related conflicts involve indigenous land claims. To
evade the weak and arbitrary national legal systems, affected groups have
sought alternative legal routes abroad, especially in inter-American
commissions and courts. Gradually, some domestic legal reforms have been made,
but ‘[t]he fact that important legislation follows violent and sometimes deadly
actions shows the limitations of democratic institutions to provide avenues for
dissent and a general lack of attention to the condition of Indigenous
populations’ (p. 79).
Next to the
unique role of the central state, solving and preventing conflicts is a
responsibility of all actors, Vásquez claims. The four main local triggers or
stressors of oil conflicts are divisions between indigenous organizations,
difficult relations of indigenous organizations with other movements and NGOs,
absent or inefficient institutional mediation (with Peru’s Ombudsman serving as
the exception to the rule), and problems with Corporate Social Responsibility
(CSR) implementation. Vásquez therefore advises strengthening indigenous
movements’ capacity to monitor and negotiate with companies, mapping extractive
areas for participatory decision-making on granting oil concessions, and
designing governmental local development projects in a transparent and
participatory way. Interestingly, while participation is presented here as a
key solution, the book discussed next carries important warnings about some
pitfalls of participatory mechanisms applied in practice.
Mismatch Between Science and Sacred ‘Things’
In Unearthing
Conflict, Fabiana Li looks into the encounters of local communities with mining
companies and governmental institutions in Peru, especially in Cajamarca. The
story starts in the old smelter town of La Oroya, an example of so-called old
mining, where the health-threatening pollution of air and water gave way to
activism since the late 1990s. With the help of national and international
connections, local activists made this pollution visible, and La Oroya became a
wake-up call for Peru on mining risks. In contrast, the gold mine of Yanacocha
in Cajamarca was presented as a break from the past. Starting in the 1990s, the
company Minera Yanacocha promised to use modern technologies and a new model
for environmental management and community relations. Nevertheless, a major
conflict arose with campesino communities about the effects on the quality and
quantity of water. As the area of concession consists of a large network of
open pits within four different water basins, the campesinos depending on the
limited water resources and existing community-build irrigation canals feared
for their livelihoods and became mobilized. Based on extensive local research,
Li offers both a rich inside story of the different actors and interactions in
Cajamarca and a valuable contribution to theory building.
Concerns of
local residents over the ways in which water and land would be transformed were
quickly countered by the company with environmental studies, water monitoring
programmes, technical parameters and risk assessments. In the course of what Li
stresses was a scientization of the conflict, engineers were hired to study the
complaints of canal users, discrediting the latter’s perception of risks as not
scientific. Both the company and state institutions constantly attempted to
shift the attention away from social, ethical and political concerns by
focussing on scientific studies, technological solutions and environmental
impact. Yet the local perception of Cerro Quilish as a sacred mountain
challenged this scientization. Many locals believed that this mountain near a
newly planned mining pit is home to an aquifer as well as an Apu (a god). In
their view, it is not a mountain or a resource, but a living entity. Companies
and politicians alike were surprised by the novelty of other-than-human
elements becoming central to the debate. As Li explains, in their transformation
of mountains and lagoons, modern mining brought ‘things’ to the forefront of
protests and politics in Peru. At the same time, the latent ‘indigeneity’ of
the campesino community became politically significant as a result of the
contestation against the plan to mine Cerro Quilish. In fact, the appellation
Apu had not even been used by people of Cajamarca before the conflict, but as
it had a better resonance, nationally and internationally, it was adopted by
outsiders and journalists and then cultivated by local activists. Li correctly
reminds us that neither local stories nor scientific narratives are fixed. They
are transformed by interactions and contexts, which in turn transform them.
Interestingly, the expanding perception of Cerro Quilish as an Apu posed a
serious problem to the company and government that were used to justifying the
new mine by pointing at the economic and utilitarian value. As Li argues, ‘the
fact that Quilish was an Apu …’ – which I would say is not so much a fact but a
result of the political dynamics and acts of framing that Li herself has
demonstrated – ‘… made it incommensurable, in the sense it was irreducible to
gold or other forms of material benefits’ (p. 122).
The analysis
of the interactions between campesinos, the company and the government with
regard to irrigation canals brings Li to her interesting idea of contested
equivalences. The term equivalence ‘refers to forms of expertise and technical
tools used to make things quantifiable and comparable’ (p. 23-24) and the
negotiation process over what counts as authoritative knowledge. To the
campesino canal users, water quantity and quality mean different things than to
the engineers hired to study and solve the issues raised by the users. However,
their kind of knowledge usually does not count as legitimate, unless confirmed
by scientific studies. The engineers hired by the company hold a ‘logic of
equivalence’ in which water from a natural source is interchangeable with water
from a treatment plant. In addition, in their eyes the effects of mining on the
canals can simply be compensated with payments, temporary jobs and local
projects. By looking at such equivalences, we see more clearly how in corporate
and governmental approaches to solving conflicts many tensions remain beneath
the surface, despite increased transparency. Although canal users were involved
in the resolving water conflicts, the company’s compensation scheme for damages
to the canal disrupted the system of water distribution established among canal
users and created new tensions in the communities and even families.
Scientific
logic also dominated in the making of an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA).
After the participatory mapping of the terrain, the EIA would supposedly have
turned into an objective source of scientific knowledge. However, the company
itself is responsible for the legally required EIA – clearly an example of a
self-regulatory regime – that is then shaped by a company logic whereby mining
effects are considered as manageable risks for which technological and
mitigation plans are put in place. EIAs do include several issues previously
raised by activists in other mining conflicts, but companies ultimately define
them. Increasingly, activism becomes focussed on producing scientific
counterarguments against company-led assessments, and all parties in a conflict
start to rely more on technical expertise and language, although anti-mining
arguments of local groups are still easily dismissed as ‘belief’ or ‘politics’.
The EIA’s participatory process creates collaborative relationships among the
company, state institutions, NGOs and communities, but it also marks the space
for opposition. Some activists have therefore refused to participate in order
to not be accused of complicity in the final document and risks. This action,
however, has its downsides as it can be viewed as undemocratic. Recent
criminalization of protest by the state reflects this trend of
institutionalization of ‘acceptable’ participation mechanisms.
Finally, Li
stresses the importance of keeping an open mind in the study of mining
conflicts as they involve a mix of groups with different interests, views and
demands, with shifting alliances and antagonisms. A local community does not
have a common identity and new identities are produced in the context of social
mobilization and interactions with the company and the government. Mining
activities and company compensation repeatedly caused shifts in the social
relations of community members, when, for example, some campesinos gave up
farming and started small businesses, with varying success. As people are
affected differently over time by the problems and opportunities posed by a
mine, we should not think of stakeholders as fixed categories. Likewise, the
relations between community members and the company are often ambiguous and can
sometimes produce unexpected collaborations between the two.
Struggles over the Subsoil
Subterranean
Struggles is a recent contribution to the substantial ‘library’ of English and
Spanish publications on extractive industries, conflict and development in the
Andes that Anthony Bebbington and his group of collaborators and students have
produced. This edited volume aims to contribute to the political ecology of the
subsoil, which according to Bebbington and Bury, must be central to
understanding Latin America’s transformations and its shifting geopolitical
insertions. Geographically the focus is Andean, with seven of the eleven
chapters presenting case studies from Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru. Discussing
each case study is beyond the scope of the essay, so I will look into some of
the book’s overarching lessons from the general chapters (1, 2, 10 and 11). By
and large, they confirm and generalize findings of the books by Vásquez and Li.
Subterranean
Struggles argues for the importance of looking at struggles over the
transformation of landscapes. These struggles usually start with enclosure of
the subsoil for extractive activities, which gives way to the commodification
and politicization of certain parts of the landscape. It is then often followed
by struggles over access to the extractable reserve as well as the other
resources that are going to be affected by the extractive process and related
economic activities. In a particularly strong contribution, Chapter 10 presents
the results of a project on a range of Andean local conflicts around various large
extractive projects, including the mining, oil and gas sectors in highland and
lowland areas. This project evidences that the recent round of extraction has
produced nothing less than a remapping of the Andes: national landscapes are
reordered according to the visions of resource-led growth of the government and
the strategies of extractive companies. The granting of new concessions creates
overlaps in land use and governance practices (and also among different
state-led projects), and produces uncertainties for local populations. In all
cases, local people worry about the potential or actual loss of water and land,
and of being dispossessed of a way of life and an ability to control space.
Bebbington,
Bury and colleagues warn, like Li, of the risk of simplifying and romanticising
the struggle, and falling into the normative trap when studying local conflicts
over extractive projects. Apart from subaltern groups trying to resist state
and company plans, much more is going on, including struggles within
communities and social movements. In most cases a multitude of groups and
organizations is involved, operating in shifting alliances. And small-scale
entrepreneurs and farmers, who are not necessarily marginalized and certainly
not anti-capitalist, often lead mobilization, while the alternatives envisioned
in their struggles are largely modern and pragmatic. While full opposition to
projects is becoming more frequent, especially in Peru, most struggles are
reformist, involving demands for better planning of projects, including
territorial planning. The authors point out that next to dispossession, extractive
projects also produce some opportunities, such as jobs, community development
projects by companies, and especially more public sector funding due to the
taxes and royalties paid by companies. Evidently, even such opportunities may
contribute to conflict as they are often disappointing (e.g. employment) or
create new inequalities (e.g. geographical unbalanced public expenditures).
Simultaneously, part of the subterranean struggles is about complex and buried
identities. Moreover, most case-studies reveal that part of the subterranean
struggles is also about complex and buried identities. In effect, the book
concludes that it is difficult to create a single analytical framework that
fully captures the diversity of actors, motives and (inter-)actions driving
these struggles.
With respect
to the role of the state, Subterranean Struggles coincides with many points
made by Vásquez. The centrality of the state is presented as a key element of
subsoil ecologies, linked to sovereignty and nation. The central state as the
owner of the subsoil is pivotal in the control over and access to reserves on
metals, oil and gas. Among its many strategies of dispossession, there is
violence as well as discourses and framing. An example of the latter is the
common presentation of natural resource extraction as the ‘natural route’ to
development. This is often accompanied by legislative strategies, such as the
use of presidential powers to declare large extractive projects to be in the
national interest. The authors also mention the emergence of national
development models based on the extractive sector as a motor for growth that
generates social programmes and thereby the legitimacy of the government.
However, no mention is made of the rise of new left regimes or the differences
between progressive and conservative governments’ strategies (implicitly the authors seem to argue that development models
based on the extractive sector is a region-wide trend across the political
spectrum). Nor do they refer to Latin American debates on the development model
and conceptualizations like neoextractivism or the Commodity Consensus by
authors such as Eduardo Gudynas, Alberto Acosta and Maristella Svampa, who are
missing from the bibliography.
Recent and
future trends of new extraction lead to regional transformation, Bebbington and
Bury conclude. Increasingly large-scale extraction enabled by new technologies
and financial capital coincides with large-scale infrastructure projects
(especially IIRSA) that open new regions and countries for extractive
industries. The culmination into a process of regional transformation is not
coincidental. It was already imagined and planned by all kinds of actors:
companies, consultants, governments, financial capital and regional organizations.
In addition, the transformation is a result of new trends, especially a
redirection of export flows and incoming capital with the rise of the economies
like China, Brazil and India, but also a higher pace of economic activities and
higher market volatility. As these new geographies of extraction produce new
scales of uncertainties and risk, the scale of struggles over the subsoil is
likely to grow. Although the social mobilization of the past few years has
given way to more public debate over new projects, more CSR efforts of
companies, and the adaptation of some projects, overall the authors come to the
conclusion that the struggles over extractive activities have hardly affected
the region’s large-scale transformation.
A final word –
for now
For the near
future, the end of a cycle of steepening demand for oil, gas and metals will
lower the growth of extractive operations in Latin America, but the struggles
are likely to continue. Among the reasons are the many vested interests of
powerful corporate and state actors and the fact that previous protests have
placed the problems of large-scale extraction under the spotlight. The new
ideas, identities, strategies and institutional arrangements that have been
developed over the past ten to fifteen years will partly run their own course,
even if the growth rate of new projects slows down. Next to the numerous local
struggles on which this essay has focussed, there are the national and regional
discussions about the current development model in which the extractive sector
occupies a central position. The possibilities and challenges of this model
have been widely discussed in political and policy circles in the past few
years, including the UNASUR, CELAC and ECLAC, but they have generally stressed
the benefits and potential for future development. In recent academic
publications, however, there is strong criticism about this model, ranging from
warnings about the negative economic and social effects of reprimarization and
deindustrialization (such as shown for Argentina by Giarracca and Teubal,
2013), the tension between an economic model of extractivism and a political
model that aims to respect cultural and
ethnic plurality (for instance Bolivia’s combination of an extractivist export
model with plurinationalism, see Radhuber, 2014), and the unviability of a
development strategy that can be seen as a new form of imperialism (as claimed
by Veltmeyer and Petras, 2014).
Furthermore,
the books discussed here point out that the governance of resource extraction,
or environmental governance, in Latin America is and remains a key issue for
social and political debate as well as academic inquiry. For scholars there
remain many steps to be taken in unravelling the complexity of governance, with
the various multi-actor and cross-scale interactions and formal and informal
practices and institutions to be taken into account, including their
ambiguities. The ambiguous relations of local indigenous and campesino groups
with state institutions illustrate this complexity well: on the one hand, local
groups often demand a state that instead of being virtually absent will reduce
uncertainty, guard against dispossession, and take back powers of governance
delegated to companies. On the other hand, some struggles are about a fear of
losing political authority over a certain space or (in case of indigenous
groups) loss of relative autonomy, which may be caused by the power of a
company, but equally by more control of the state when it responds to conflicts
with new policies, institutions and interventions.
About The
Author:
Barbara Hogenboom is Associate Professor of Political Science at the Centre for Latin
American Research and Documentation (CEDLA), University of Amsterdam, and
managing editor of ERLACS. She coordinated the ENGOV project on environmental
governance and coedited Gobernanza ambiental en América Latina (with Fabio de
Castro and Michiel Baud, 2015, CLACSO).
References:
Giarracca, N., & Teubal, M. (orgs) (2014).
Actividades extractivas en expansión: ¿Reprimarización de la economía
argentina? Buenos Aires: Editorial Antropofagia.
Radhuber, I. (2014). Recursos
naturales y finanzas públicas: La base material del Estado plurinacional de
Bolivia. La Paz: Plural & Oxfam.
Veltmeyer, H., & Petras, J. (Eds.)
(2014). The New Extractivism: A post-neoliberal development model or
imperialism of the twenty-first century? London: Zed Books.
________________________
Publication Detail:
http://doi.org/10.18352/erlacs.10110
© Barbara Hogenboom.
Open Access review essay distributed under the terms of
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/.
European Review of
Latin American and Caribbean Studies
Revista Europea de
Estudios Latinoamericanos y del Caribe
ERLACS is published by CEDLA – Centre for Latin American Research and
Documentation / Centro de Estudios y Documentación Latinoamericanos, Amsterdam;
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