Linda Farthing

Bolivia’s Dilemma: Development Confronts the Legacy of Extraction

A s with so much else in south america’s landlocked and impoverished heartland, Bolivia’s natural environment excels in superlatives: It is home to the world’s largest salt flat (Salar de Uyuni in the southwest); the world’s highest navigable lake (Titicaca, straddling the border with Peru); and the second-largest high mountain plateau (the altiplano), after that of Tibet. The result is an often breathtaking landscape of magnificent snow-covered mountains surrounding windswept plateaus and lakes of an almost unimaginable deep blue, high valleys unfolding eastward into dense, vast jungles to the north, and open savannas to the south. Less fortunately for both Bolivia’s environment and its people, the exploitation of the country’s considerable natural resources has also been nearly unparalleled: The country was once home to the Spanish colony’s richest silver and gold mine (Potosí); boasted one of the world’s richest tin mines (Siglo XX); and today has two of the world’s largest silver mines (San Cristóbal and San Bartolomé), an estimated half of world’s lithium reserves (Salar de Uyuni), the future largest iron ore mine (Mutún), and the secondlargest proven gas reserves in South America (after Venezuela’s). It comes as no surprise that Bolivia’s history and environment have been dominated by relentless extraction. Even since the 2006 election of indigenous president Evo Morales and his progressive government, the social pressure to satisfy the country’s immediate economic needs through extractive industries that destroy the natural environment—primarily natural gas, mining, and forestry—remains as strong as ever. Moreover, the 25 Bolivia’s Dilemma: Development Confronts the Legacy of Extraction

Bolivia’S New Wave Of Protest

Abstract As opposed to the vertically integrated discipline of the old union movement, the new social protest is based in sectoral, geographically dispersed coalitions.

The Price Of Success Bolivia’s War Against Drugs and the Poor

Abstract Bolivia’s successful destruction of nearly three-quarters of its coca cultivation has come at the expense of the poorest and least powerful actors in a global commodity chain.

Everything Is Up for Discussion: A 40th Anniversary Conversation With Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui

S ILVIA RIVERA CUSICANQUI IS A BOLIVIAN sociologist, activist, and public intellectual who teaches at the Universidad Mayor de San Andres in La Paz and advises President Evo Morales’s government on coca issues. She cofounded the Workshop on Andean Oral History and has taught throughout the Americas, most recently at the University of Pittsburgh. Her 1982 book, Oppressed but Not Defeated: Peasant Struggles Among the Aymara and Quechua in Bolivia, 1910–1980, is considered a classic in Bolivian studies. On the occasion of NACLA’s 40th anniversary, NACLA contributor Linda Farthing spoke with Rivera Cusicanqui about contemporary Bolivia.