Nicole Fabricant

Good Living for Whom? Bolivia's Climate Justice Movement and the Limitations of Indigenous Cosmovisions

Climate change has become an important issue in Bolivia as communities across the lowlands and highlands are beginning to feel the direct effects of the ecological crisis. While Evo Morales, the current president of Bolivia, has surfaced as an international superstar for the climate justice movement, behind his public appearances at UN climate conferences are indigenous organizations and social movements who work daily to map out strategies for adaptation and mitigation. This paper analyzes how indigenous climate justice activists in Bolivia mobilize a particular vision of Andean indigeneity, frozen in time and space, to make specific political claims about their rights in relationship to the environment and propose alternative economic structures. Many activists argue that the ecological problems of this century are a direct result of advanced capitalism, which has turned lands, forests, and natural surrounds into commodities. However, their timeless vision of indigeneity, particularly using the imagined ayllu or pre-Columbian land-holding patterns as solutions to climate crisis, poses dangers for the millions of Bolivians who live and work in urban centers.

Performing the ‘wounded Indian’: a new platform of democracy and human rights in Bolivia’s autonomy movement

This article examines Right-wing political performances in the Bolivian Eastern lowlands where regional elites claim to be living under the authoritarian dictatorship of Left-leaning President Evo Morales. We analyse how regional elites advocate for political autonomy through embodied and spectacular performances linked to discourses of indigeneity, human rights and democracy. Right-wing leaders try to legitimise their claims for justice and territorial control by strategically aligning themselves with lowland ‘Indians’ – who are equally wounded by Morales’s plan to run a massive highway though their communities and territories. Through theatrical exhibits in the plaza and a spectacular assembly spotlighting an indigenous representative as an emblematic hero of TIPNIS, regional elites perform a shared history of marginalisation, while simultaneously presenting themselves as ‘saviors’. We argue, however, that there is a dark side to these performances, as they elide long histories of racialised labour and economic injustice in the region.

Symbols in Motion: Katari as Traveling Image in Landless Movement Politics in Bolivia

This case study of the Landless Peasant Movement (MST-Bolivia) looks at the contemporary use and value of the image of Tupac Katari, an anti-colonial hero who led a regional insurgency in 1780. The symbol of Katari as resurrected spirit in political tale-telling and on flags and posters mixes with more contemporary icons of landless peasant politics to serve political and economic purposes: redistributing land and resources to displaced peoples. This essay argues that as this symbol travels through time – from a popular sign of Andean politics to a critical emblem of multiculturalism in the 1990s – it takes on new meanings as indigenous peoples make critical links between ethnic/racial identity, uneven resource distribution, and structural inequality. As people move across geographic space – from MST communities to urban centers, from Santa Cruz to La Paz – their symbols stand against new forms of violence and discrimination and infuse regional spaces with hybrid political identities. However, when an image or symbol, once tethered to concrete demands and embodied performances at a local level, moves across scales and turns into a mere symbol of the state, abstracted from material shifts, it loses its capacity to mobilize.

Moving Beyond the Extractivism Debate, Imagining New Social Economies

Abstract Extractivism today shapes a new hegemonic order that is sutured to global capitalism. What might a long-term mapping of its social and economic consequences reveal?

Bolivia vs. the Billionaires: Limitations of the “Climate Justice Movement” in International Negotiations

AT THE MOST RECENT INTERNATIONAL CLIMATE change negotiations in Doha, Qatar, Bolivia’s minister of environment and water, José Antonio Zamora Gutiérrez, played on the famous slogan from the 2000 water wars in Cochabamba and declared, “The climate is not for sale.” In the water wars, a broad range of popular sectors came together to practice civil disobedience in the heart of the city and successfully ejected Aguas del Tunari, a subsidiary of the U.S.-based Bechtel corporation, reasserting the right to public control of this crucial resource. Bolivia’s very recent history of distinct successful “populist movements” allied against the privatization of naturalresources (from water wars in Cochabamba to the gas wars primarily centered in El Alto) paved the way for the election of center-left president Evo Morales and new forms of state making. However, obstacles are daunting for Bolivian climate justice activists: They are up against fossil fuel giants from the Global North intent upon blocking any serious and meaningful progress on reduction of carbon-dioxide emissions, but also the capitalist economy itself, and the dependence on non-renewable resources and extractive industries to fuel a particular way of life in the Global North. One thing is clear: Bolivia will continue to take a radical stance, pointing out the ways in which our global economic and financial system is intimately connected to the destruction of the environment. Zamora Gutiérrez spoke before the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change UNFCCC (COP18) in Doha: “The causes of the climate crisis are directly related to the accumulation and concentration of wealth in a few countries and in small social groups, excessive and wasteful mass consumption, under the belief that having more is living better . . . We will not pay the climate debt of developed countries to developing countries. They, developed countries, must fulfill their responsibility.” Further, he pointed toward how Bolivia has come to the fore of the climate crisis with concrete proposals to strengthen the global climate system. “We have proposed the creation of the Joint Mechanism for Mitigation and Adaptation for integrated and sustainable management of forests, not based on markets, to strengthen community, indigenous and peasant management of forests. . . . We promote consistently the creation of an international mechanism to address loss and damage resulting from natural causes and impacts of climate change in developing countries. Our country will not promote carbon market mechanisms such as REDD.” On the other end of the spectrum are those who have benefited directly from capitalist globalization, including investors in coal, oil, and gas. They rely upon short-term profits from the dirtiest and riskiest forms of exploitation and work tirelessly to make sure that representatives from the Global South do not define international climate policy. While Bolivia has taken a radical stance in international climate change negotiations, proposing alterations to our global political-economic system, the country holds very little power against billion-dollar fossil-fuel giants attempting to paralyze U.S. climate policy and in turn, meaningful multilateral negotiations. U.S. intransigence cliMate JuStice

The Bolivian Climate Justice Movement Mobilizing Indigeneity in Climate Change Negotiations

The Bolivian Platform against Climate Change is a coalition of civil society and social movement organizations working to address the effects of global warming in Bolivia and to influence the global community. Many of the organizations use indigenous philosophy and worldviews to contest normative conceptions of development. A study of the growth of this movement drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in 2010 reveals a complex relationship between state and nonstate actors that has had a striking impact on the global community despite the failure of multilateral climate change negotiations. La Plataforma Boliviana Frente al Cambio Climático es una coalición de organizaciones de la sociedad civil y movimientos sociales trabajando para abordar los efectos del calentamiento global en Bolivia y para influenciar a la comunidad mundial. Muchas de las organizaciones utilizan filosofía y cosmovisiones indígenas para impugnar concepciones normativas de desarrollo. Un estudio del crecimiento de este movimiento basándose en el trabajo de campo etnográfico en 2010 revela una relación compleja entre actores esta-tales y no estatales que ha tenido un impacto sorprendente sobre la comunidad global a pesar del fracaso de las negociaciones multilaterales sobre el cambio climático.

Defending Democracy? Human Rights Discourse in Santa Cruz, Bolivia

H uman rights discourses have made a powerful comeback in Latin America. Although they emerged out of the resistance to the repressive military dictatorships of the 1970s—when leftist student activists and religious figures were “disappeared,” tortured, and killed—they are now being picked up by rightwing organizers in Latin America who claim they are living under similar brutal dictatorships. The region’s left-leaning presidents—Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, Bolivia’s Evo Morales, Ecuador’s Rafael Correa, and Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega— they say, are the 21st-century “dictators” who are attacking democracy and freedom of speech. In the real world, these governments have promoted policies attempting to redistribute wealth and reclaim control over private media, transnational corporations, and mining companies. These policies are affecting powerful conservative interests, and the right wing is responding to defend what it sees as its “human rights.” Human rights discourses, however, are not formed in isolation. At each specific location in Latin America, they acquire distinct cultural, racial, and political characteristics. The human rights backlash in the city of Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia —the heart of the opposition to Morales—is an important test case to explore how broad-based discourses of democracy and rights gain local traction in the Latin American right-wing movement, and how this is fueled by the conservative fear of left-wing state transformations. Santa Cruz de la Sierra is located in the department of Santa Cruz in the eastern Bolivian lowlands. Today the department produces about one third of Bolivian GDP and is an important source of revenue for the country. Much of the city’s new influence and power began growing in the 1950s, when transnational investment in agribusiness and state support for large-scale farmers began to transform the small, dusty pueblo into the country’s agro-industrial capital. However, in this new era under Morales, who came to power in 2005, elites seem to imagine that they built the entire region with their own money, investments, and labor. This regional romanticism fuels their anti-state discourse and their calls for regional “autonomy,” while promoting a neoliberal model of development. The new right-wing fears of “leftist invasions” from the highlands, where Morales’s Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) party is centered, are a result of the region’s political and economic shifts over the last 60 years and the explosion of Big Agribusiness . Although Bolivia’s mines in the highlands were historically the country’s economic backbone, attention turned toward developing the lowland region, with its rich, fertile lands, in the 1950s, when the United States provided millions of aid dollars to stimulate large-scale agro-industrial development in the region and create an entrepreneurial class of capitalist farmers. Sugar production thrived in the 1950s and 1960s, then cotton in the 1970s, and more recently, soy has become the “green gold”—the new hope for regional and national development. Capitalist development and export-oriented industries represented the answer for regional and even urban “progress.” This class of entrepreneurial capitalist farmers was highly successful in convincing even the most disenfranchised in Santa Cruz that progress and advancement were deeply embedded in a transnational agro-industrial model. This economic expansion encouraged massive numbers of highland Indians to migrate to the lowland agricultural regions. Some came as lowwage laborers, while others were attracted to new business opportunities. New hierarchies of race, class, and ethnicity, inherent in this agricultural model, forged conflicts and tensions between the distinct groups of people. U.S.-funded colonization programs encouraged highland Indians— who are often referred to as Collas in opposition By nicole Fabricant

Remembering Benjamin Kohl

T O ALL wHO KNEw HIM, THE NEwS Of BENjAMIN Kohl’s passing came as a shock. The man who filled a room with laughter, vivacity, and passion was suddenly gone and the appalling irony was obvious: Benjamin Kohl led with his heart and it was his heart that failed him long before his time at the age of 59. Ben was one of these rare intellectuals whose body of writing and activism were joined by deep political conviction. Ben’s intellectual work focused on the political economy of development, urban studies, neoliberalism, and resistance. He spent the last nine years working in Bolivia on questions of social and political change. Ben’s personal history—growing up in St. Louis, Missouri, attending public schools, and later working as an auto mechanic and elevator engineer—shaped his intellectual commitment to understand race and class inequality. It was only in his forties that he pursued an academic career. There are very few people indeed, who move from this kind of background to becoming full university professor. He never lost the skill of working with his hands and, more importantly, could never be accused of living in an ivory tower. His gregarious personality and deep sensitivity allowed him to connect to people from very different backgrounds. Keenly aware of the day-to-day practical issues, as well as the imposing structural ones facing working people, he nurtured and deepened these social ties over the years, connecting friends living in the South and North around issues of justice. This combination of fierce intellectualism and deep connection to community informed his politics and academic life. Ben and his wife, Linda Farthing, have together built a truly transnational activist community, with communal ties between Bolivia and the United States. They have worked to bring indigenous organizers to universities and organizations in the United States and built forums in Bolivia for political interaction and conversations across what has historically felt like an impassable geographic divide. Theirs was an extraordinary partnership in many ways, equally politically engaged with a shared passion, in particular, for Bolivia, and often writing together on a range of publications such as Impasse in Bolivia (Zed Books, 2006) which quickly became the key text for understanding Bolivia’s neoliberal transformations. Linda and Ben spent many months and years in Bolivia since the 1980s and their welcoming home was a center for scholars and activists and where, in fact, many of us met. It is impossible to do justice to his body of work and life’s commitments in a short essay. Ben Kohl was one of the leading Bolivianistas: his most recent book From the Mines to the Streets: A Bolivian Activist’s Life (University of Texas, 2011), also co-authored with Linda, traces the life history of indigenous activist Félix Muruchi. The text develops a narrative rich in data and insight about Muruchi’s organizing in the mines and then against neoliberal regimes. Perhaps, most importantly, it offers moving and timely analysis of the political and economic history of Bolivia and the vulnerability of activists who place their bodies on the line. They have organized a book tour this Fall with Muruchi across the northeast coast. This trip will give Félix the opportunity to share some of the struggles of indigenous peoples and activists in the South, while also connecting with activists in the North around issues of inequality and disenfranchisement in U.S. cities. Finally, some of Ben’s most recent scholarship looks at social movement strategies in Bolivia: thinking about the role collective memory plays in creating class consciousness and solidarity. Forthcoming in 2014 (Texas) is yet another book, entitled Evo’s Bolivia: Continuity and Change, coauthored with Linda on Bolivia. takiNg Note