MAS’s economic boasting falls flat with Indigenous peoples who resisted Evo Morales’s development projects
Known as the architect of the Movement Towards Socialism’s (MAS) economic miracle, Luis Arce is the front-runner in this month’s long-awaited Bolivian election. For almost twelve years, Arce was Evo Morales’s Economy and Finance minister. During this time, Bolivia experienced economic growth and stability and a significant reduction of extreme poverty. It comes as no surprise, then, that Arce is running on his economic record.
Unfortunately, behind the MAS candidate’s economic record lies an economic model that violated Indigenous rights and destroyed ecosystems, particularly in the lowlands and the Amazon. As Carlos Arze of Cedla, a Bolivian research institute, points out: “The problem with the MAS economic miracle is how it was achieved: by deepening extractivism and increasing dependency on transnational capital”.
MAS’s extractive capitalist economic model
Undeniably, in the first years of the MAS administration and its “process of change”, the rights of Indigenous peoples and the environment took center stage. In 2009, through its New Political Constitution, Bolivia became a Plurinational state, recognized for the first time 36 indigenous communities, and institutionalized the notion of Vivir Bien (Living Well), among others. Similarly, Bolivia passed the word’s first Mother Earth law. Developed by social movements, the law established “the vision, fundamentals, and objectives of integral development in harmony with Mother Earth for Vivir Bien”.
On the economic front — and in sync with the socio-environmental changes at the time — , Arce laid the foundations for a transition from a neoliberal to a new Bolivian economic model in his new Economic, Social Communitarian, and Productive Model (2011), one that would be based on productive diversification, industrialization, and Vivir Bien philosophy.
Similar to other progressive governments in the region, the MAS’s economic discourse was rapidly put to the test with the commodities boom driven by China in the 2000s. Far from implementing a communitarian and productive model, the MAS’s government focused on promoting an economic model based on greater exploitation and export of mining and hydrocarbon commodities. In this way, the model based on raw materials for exports that characterized Bolivia’s development policy over decades went paradoxically into overdrive during the MAS administration.
Redistribution through extractivism
Hydrocarbon, oil, and natural gas, revenues funded social transfer programs. Renta Dignidad, Juancito Pinto bonus, and Juana Azurduy bonus, among others, benefited the poorest, reducing extreme poverty significantly. However, no public policies were implemented to address the structural causes of poverty or guarantee real conditions of equality for everyone.
Speaking about redistribution through extractivism in ‘progressive’ countries such as Bolivia and its inevitable impacts, Naomi Klein states in her book This Changes Everything: “yes, the wealth is better distributed among the urban poor, but outside the cities, the ways of life of Indigenous peoples and peasants are still being endangered without their consent, and they are still being made landless by ecosystem destruction”.
In this process, territories in the Amazonian lowlands were opened up to road infrastructure, mining, gas exploration, agro-industrial, and energy infrastructure projects, and the arrival of a myriad of actors: from highland colonizers to transnational capital, including Chinese.
Bolivia, the “energy heart of South America”
Making Bolivia the “energy heart of South America” was one of the main objectives of the country’s National Development Plan (2016–2020). Energy experts characterized this energy goal as unrealistic because Bolivia only produces “2.8% of South America’s energy and 0.8% to 0.6% of its electricity”.
Five of the thirty-five hydroelectric dams envisioned in this energy plan were located in protected areas and in the Amazon. And much of the electricity produced would have been exported to neighbor Brazil, satisfying the requirements of energy-intensive industries in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo to the detriment of Bolivian Indigenous and peasant communities and ecosystems.
Indigenous peoples say there was no free, prior, and informed consultation on these projects as required by Bolivia’s Constitution and the International Labor Organization’s Convention 169 on Indigenous people, which Bolivia has ratified.
Resistance
Multiple Indigenous and peasant organizations sprung up in recent years as a result of increasing pressure on their territories: in Guayaramerin, near the Brazil-Bolivia border in northeastern Bolivia, various anti-dam resistance movements have emerged, including the Committee for the defense of the Madeira river basin, an Indigenous and peasant organization.
At the national level, the Coordinator for the Defense of Indigenous, Native, Peasant Territories, and Protected Areas (Contiocap) has become one of the major organizations against the construction of megaprojects. Made up mostly of women (95%), this organization brings together more than 30 local resistance groups opposing a myriad of projects, including mega hydroelectric dams in the Amazon.
Local communities on both sides of the Brazil-Bolivia border have mobilized against the construction of the Madeira complex project ever since it was announced. The Madeira complex project is a megaproject promoted by the Brazilian government through the Initiative for the Integration of the Regional Infrastructure of South America (IIRSA), an Initiative to which Bolivia belongs and consists of four dams: the Jirau and Santo Antônio on the Madeira river in Brazilian territory (already built); the Binational Río Madera hydroelectric dam on the Brazil-Bolivia border on the Mamoré River, and the Cachuela hydroelectric dam within Bolivian territory on the Beni river, both yet to be built.
In Guayaramerin, the Committee for the defense of the Madeira River basin resists the construction of the Binational Río Madera and the Cachuela hydroelectric dam projects.
These mega projects have been marked by secrecy. So far, the little information provided to the communities by government officials has been ambiguous, contradictory, or incomplete. Thus, the demand for information about the projects drives the Committee’s resistance efforts.
So far, independent studies show that these mega-dams will destroy two protected areas, and affect the livelihoods of more than 15 Indigenous communities, fruit farmers, and fishers; they will increase deforestation, mercury pollution in the rivers, and create further threats of flooding of even greater proportions than those of 2014. On that year, the region suffered devastating flooding due to seasonal rains, which were aggravated by the Jirau and Santo Antônio hydroelectric dams built downstream in Brazilian territory.
Lidia Antty, a leader of the Committee who was affected by the floods, says the organization has been accused of being against “progress” for not supporting the project. For her, “The people who will be affected don’t want the projects… The people who come from elsewhere are in favor of it because they can leave when the river fills”.
In November 2016, in the Amazonian north of La Paz, Indigenous peoples led a blockade against the Italian firm Geodata as it attempted to conduct a feasibility study ahead of the El Chepete-Bala dam project. After kicking out the company, the communities declared themselves in permanent alert and demanded that their right to free, prior, and informed consultation was respected.
Ruth Alipaz and Alex Villca, both indigenous Uchupiamona from the communities of the rivers Beni, Quiquibey, and Tiuchi are the General Coordinator and spokesperson respectively of Contiocap. They denounce El Bala-Chepete hydroelectric megaprojects for their devastating effects on the territory which encompasses two National Parks (Madidi and Pilón Lajas); including, the displacement of more than 17 Indigenous communities; destruction of biodiversity, archeological sites, and Indigenous-led ecotourism initiatives; and the disappearance of indigenous peoples in voluntary isolation.
Over the years, Villca and Alipaz described diverse tactics used by MAS officials to fracture their organizations: from slandering them; questioning their indigenous identity for having university degrees and being ecotourism entrepreneurs; co-opting their organization by creating parallel ones aligned with the government; to promising infrastructure projects in exchange for support for the projects.
Ruth has spoken at numerous international forums, including the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, to bring attention to these violations, and to demand that the Morales’s government respected the rights of Indigenous peoples to free, prior, and informed consultation.
“Development with death”
In his updated government program, Arce accuses the conservative transitional government led by interim Jeanine Áñez of “re-establishing the old neoliberal model and rejecting the community model that brought economic growth for 14 years”. The reality is that Áñez’s neoliberal economic policies are similar to those of the MAS.
In the early days of her government, Contiocap declared themselves in “permanent alert” and demanded Áñez cancel all agri-business, mining, hydroelectric, gas, and agro-business megaprojects from the Evo Morales era. Yet, Áñez response to their demands largely mirrored MAS’s. She failed to answer their demands, and instead, passed decrees favoring the agro-industrial elite to the detriment of the rights of Indigenous peoples, peasants, and ecosystems.
One year after last year’s presidential election, the MAS is likely to return to power — and so is its extractive capitalist development model. A model that pushed for development in the Amazon, and that as Lidia says: “…it’s development with death”.
