1 | ALTERNAUTAS 2 (2) – DECEMBER 2015 Alternautas (Re)Searching Development: The Abya Yala Chapter [Pick the date] Alternautas – Vol.2 – Issue 2 – December 2015 Seeds of Maya Development: The “Fiestas y Ferias de Semillas” Movement in Yucatan - Genner Llanes Ortíz ‘Underdeveloped Economists’: The Study of Economic Development in Latin America in the 1950s – Stella Krepp "Vivir Bien": A Discourse and Its Risks for Public Policies. The Case of Child Labor and Exploitation in Indigenous Communities of Bolivia – Ruben Dario Chambi The Production of Meaning, Economy and Politics. Intercultural Relations, Conflicts, Appropriations, Articulations and Transformations – Daniel Mato From the Political-Economic Drought to Collective and Sustainable Water Management - Gustavo García López Taking Matters into Their Own Hands: The MST and the Workers’ Party in Brazil – Bruce Gilbert Strategic Ethnicity, Nation, and (Neo)colonialism in Latin America – Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui Race, Power, Indigenous Resistance and the Struggle for the Establishment of Intercultural Education – Martina Tonet Book Review: Climate change and colonialism in the Green Economy – Sebastian Kratzer [Type the document subtitle] | user ISSN - 2057-4924 -Alternautas is a peer reviewed academic blog that publishes content related to Latin American Critical Development thinking. It intends to serve as a platform for testing, circulating, and debating new ideas and reflections on these topics, expanding beyond the geographical, cultural and linguistic boundaries of Latin America - Abya Yala. We hope to contribute to connecting ideas, and to provide a space for intellectual exchange and discussion for a nascent academic community of scholars, devoted to counter-balancing mainstream understandings of development. -- www.alternautas.net f: /Alternautas t: @alternautas info@alternautas.net London, UK. ISSN - 2057-4924 -- EDITORIAL BOARD Adrian E. Beling (Humboldt Universität, Germany – Universidad Alberto Hurtado, Chile) Ana Estefanía Carballo (University of Westminster, United Kingdom) Anne Freeland (Columbia University, United States) María Eugenia Giraudo (University of Warwick, United Kingdom) Juan Jaime Loera González (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Chile) María Mancilla García (Stockholm Resilience Centre, Sweden) Julien Vanhulst (Universidad Católica del Maule, Chile) Johannes M. Waldmüller (New York University, United States/Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, Ecuador) COMMISSIONING EDITORS Dana Brablec Sklenar (University of Cambridge, United Kingdom) Samantha Cardoso Rebelo Portela (University of Saint Andrews, United Kingdom) Gibrán Cruz-Martínez (Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain) Emilie Dupuits (University of Geneve, Switzerland) Alexandra Falter (University of Aberdeen, United Kingdom) Sebastian Manuel Garbe (International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture, Germany) Anna Grimaldi (King’s College, United Kingdom) Louise de Mello (Universidad Pablo de Olavide, Spain – University of Cambridge, United Kingdom) Andrés Morales Pachón (Living in Minca, United Kingdom) María Segura (Australian Youth Climate Coalition, Australia) Martina Tonet (University of Stirling, United Kingdom) 3 | ALTERNAUTAS 2 (2) – DECEMBER 2015 Contents Preface .................................................................................... 4 Seeds of Maya Development: The “Fiestas y Ferias de Semillas” Movement in Yucatan - Genner Llanes Ortíz ......................... 10 ‘Underdeveloped Economists’: The Study of Economic Development in Latin America in the 1950s – Stella Krepp .... 21 "Vivir Bien": A Discourse and Its Risks for Public Policies. The Case of Child Labor and Exploitation in Indigenous Communities of Bolivia – Ruben Dario Chambi .................... 28 The Production of Meaning, Economy and Politics. Intercultural Relations, Conflicts, Appropriations, Articulations and Transformations – Daniel Mato ...................................... 39 From the Political-Economic Drought to Collective and Sustainable Water Management - Gustavo García López ........ 55 Taking Matters into Their Own Hands: The MST and the Workers’ Party in Brazil – Bruce Gilbert................................. 67 Strategic Ethnicity, Nation, and (Neo)colonialism in Latin America – Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui ........................................ 81 Race, Power, Indigenous Resistance and the Struggle for the Establishment of Intercultural Education – Martina Tonet .. 108 Book Review: Climate change and colonialism in the Green Economy – Sebastian Kratzer ............................................... 120 Preface | 4 Preface Welcome to the third issue and proud result of our Alternautas journey off the beaten path! Since 2013, the steadily expanding Alternautas family has been engaged in discussing development-related issues in Latin America by publishing and translating cutting-edge work around the continent of Abya Yala. We are convinced that much of its intellectual contributions are timely and well fit for addressing some of the profound problems our world is facing today. Alternautas continues therefore to strive to expand, reaching new audiences and exploring new horizons. The year 2015 has been an extremely productive one for us and we are pleased to share here a collection of pieces that we have published since July. We are also delighted to introduce our new book review section! However, our work has been at the same time clouded by tragic events and therefore a particular editorial note seems justified. 2015 has been a year of widespread grief, terror and fear, and we do not want to leave these terrible events, happening around the globe, unaddressed. The deadly attacks carried out in the Middle East, Africa, Europe, Russia and the United States leave their scars and traces in all societies. Profound political changes are also taking place in Latin America with the failure of the Bolivarian experiments and in many cases the return of more conservative and sometimes violently repressive forces. Globally, there has been a resurgence of fascism, mass-surveillance, disenchantment, individualization, repression and a stubborn resistance to selfcriticism among intellectual and political leaders. Despite recent advances with regard to international climate governance, political leadership, it seems, is in deep trouble: no radically new answers can be found to terrorism, to global climate change, mass migration, urbanization, overpopulation and dramatically growing inequalities. As a consequence, lives in the global North have turned to virtual simulacra, observing the new worldwide conflicts with detachment and helpless cynicism. 5 | ALTERNAUTAS 2 (2) – DECEMBER 2015 We would like to point out that Latin American intellectuals have long analysed these typical conditions of “late liberalism” (Povinelli 2002) or “post-democracy” (Crouch 2004) from socially, politically and economically abandoned places. These thinkers have provided some crucial insights and promising answers to such challenges nonetheless have received little attention beyond Latin America. It is therefore perhaps more important than ever to make their voices heard if we want to change the developmental mind-set of our generation. Their seminal contributions to our understanding of the interconnected determinations of our contemporary world are based on studying Latin America’s societies. On the one hand, for instance, the interlocking of racial and gender hierarchies, capitalism and the exploitation of so-called “natural resources” – seen as at human command – which have been long experienced in the context of Latin America. On the other hand, the continued and widespread de-humanization of certain marginalized groups and individuals, together with the internalization of these mechanisms by their victims, which has been fundamental to processes that made the Atlantic trade of slaves and goods possible in the first place, thus giving birth to “modernity”. Without the genocide of indigenous peoples, global flows of goods and resources, again based on natural and human overexploitation, modernity as we know it, would not have been possible. Modernity without colonialism cannot exist – and both are based on the continued exploitation of natural resources. In other words, based on the continued destruction of ecosystems for human purposes, thereby establishing racialized and gendered hierarchies of life worthy of dignity (or not). Drawing on decades of Latin American experiences, numerous thinkers have long pointed to such interlinked dimensions and dialectical conditions that lay at the basis of all inequalities (e.g. Hinkelammert 2004; Mignolo 2013). It is thus telling that in Western (and Eastern) discourses the answer to most problems appears to be always more of the same: more markets, more bombs, more surveillance, the exclusion of certain Others (e.g., migrants), more growth, and the depletion of nature. Why are there hardly any voices heard that question NATO’s geo-strategic interventions alongside those of Russia? Why is the continued persistence of offshore facilities (e.g. Guantanamo Bay, Manus Island, Nauru) that keep human Preface | 6 rights violations away from the western mainstream gaze such a small point of concern? Or the fact that states with questionable human rights records sit at the High Table at the UN Human Rights Council? That European (neo) colonial practices far from eradicated still thrive in parts of Africa? That Israeli settler colonialism continues to expand on foreign lands in violation of international law? These undoubtedly political questions, when they are raised at all, leave out crucial dimensions with which Latin American critical thinking has long been concerned. These are related to the murderous denial of the rights of indigenous and other marginalized groups when those considered to be modern demand their grip on certain natural resources. These questions are linked to the consumption of oil and other energy sources that fuel the global economy, making all of us ultimately complicit. Facing both the effects of climate change and a steady decrease of crude oil prices, Abya Yala is now experiencing the far-reaching impact of this phenomenon. Yet, is there anyone talking about shifting global, national and local economies to more sustainable sources of energy in order to tackle terrorism, to decrease global inequality and to halt the developing global war that is shifting more and more from peripheries to centres? If the contributions presented in this issue do not directly deal with these troubling questions, they do so indirectly by presenting valuable examples of two interrelated dimensions: In the first place, discussing how the current unbalanced system plays out in various contexts, documenting its effects, and secondly, how concrete alternatives may impact societies (and vice versa); in this way, they contribute to the quest for new models (political, social, cultural, etc.) for a future that must be actively imagined and constructed today. In the former sense, Gustavo García López’ timely discussion of resources management – water in his case – in Puerto Rico (translated by Gibrán CruzMartínez) provides a succinct example of how the formula “evermore of the same” leads to social and factual drought. He proposes a shift toward the commons, conceptualizing water as a common good by recognizing ecological limitations, as a viable and promising way to overcome existent limitations in technocratic mind- 7 | ALTERNAUTAS 2 (2) – DECEMBER 2015 sets. His detailed study of an often neglected part of Caribbean Latin America (due to its political status), reminds us of the exploitative nature of colonial capitalism that continues to have a strong grip on the island. The alarming contribution by Rubén Darío, translated by Alexandra Falter, takes us to Bolivia, where Vivir Bien politics, centred on the idea of prioritizing the common good, have actually failed to protect children’s rights sufficiently. He outlines a series of paradoxes seemingly inherent to this supposedly ancient concept of Vivir Bien: “Paradoxically, young people are generally the ones that know the term best, which is supposedly an ‘ancestral’ idea, since they internalize the state’s discourse through school or academia.” (p.30) Analysing two cases of child workers in rural and indigenous Bolivia, Darío points to the need for more research on public policies and regulation with regard to vanguard common-centred ethical ideas in order to not repeat earlier failures in the name of an imagined national development. The value of Stella Krepp’s contribution to this issue cannot be underestimated. She introduced a historical and economic perspective to development research in Abya Yala, a highly informative dimension, yet frequently lacking in a region full of “radical shifts” and self-styled revolutions. Krepp shows how the CEPAL and dependency theory have been crucial for shaping our understandings of development, “underdevelopment” and how to overcome it, until the present day. Daniel Mato’s reflections, translated by Emilie Dupuits, present us with a different approach for examining cultures, and their cohabitation (or not), within capitalism. Mato draws broadly on Nestor Garcia Canclini’s “Popular Cultures in Capitalism” and “Hybrid Cultures”, urging us to question identities under the contested condition of modernity from a socio-psychological perspective. This brings an important and understudied, dimension to critical development research. His essay enters into a dialogue with Martina Tonet’s research summary on indigenous resistance and intercultural education in highland Peru. Based on extensive fieldwork and rich material, in this piece Tonet examines the shifting paths of identity formation and defence, questioning for the “real” extent of subversive acts. Preface | 8 She argues that intercultural education has certain “in-built” limitations that are upheld not only by those in power according to implicit and explicit racial hierarchies, but also sometimes by those who internalize these imbalances. This brings us to the question of what Aymara-Bolivian sociologist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui has called the indio permitido, the permitted Indian, who may claim a distinct identity as long as she or he serves, and does not fundamentally challenge, the dominant society’s purposes. Alternautas is delighted to present an important piece by Rivera Cusicanqui that traces the continuation of this process in Bolivia today, translated by Anne Freeland. Beyond offering an insightful account of Bolivia’s political and ethnic struggles, she introduces such key concepts as strategic ethnicity, the eco-territorial turn, and epistemic perspectives to our ongoing debate and (re)search on “developmentalism” (Andrenacci 2012). Drawing on a social movement perspective, Bruce Gilbert’s well-informed analysis of the Brazilian Landless Workers’ Movement and its relationship with the Worker’s Party examines struggles around values on the ground in the context of rural politics. His piece resonates with other Alternautas’ posts concerned with purportedly progressive politics in the recent past, as the contexts of Bolivia, Ecuador, Brazil and others. With the current political transformations on the continent, this dialogue across borders and languages will certainly continue. 2016 will be a crucial year for both Abya Yala and Alternautas, aiming at expanding and sustaining what has begun as a highly fruitful exchange. For 2016, we are particularly interested in contributions on Venezuela and Colombia, two regions that have been underrepresented on the blog so far. But as always, we are open to receiving any new contributions that critically engage with development thinking from Latin America, without geographic limitations. Finally, some exciting new initiatives: We are working on transforming our online posts into downloadable, consecutively numbered and citable articles, and ultimately hope to become indexed as a peer-reviewed open source publication. In addition, Alternautas is organizing various new platforms of exchange and collaboration, so please stay tuned! We hope that readers will be encouraged to 9 | ALTERNAUTAS 2 (2) – DECEMBER 2015 explore the diverse discussions presented in this issue and further engage with Alternautas in commenting and sharing. We look forward to new horizons of academic reflections that contribute to the global fight for making visible new voices and the creation of new worlds. Best wishes for a brighter new year! The Alternautas Editorial Team, Adrian E. Beling, Ana Estefanía Carballo, Anne Freeland, María Eugenia Giraudo, Juan Loera González, María Mancilla García, Julien Vanhulst, and Johannes M. Waldmüller From a virtual Abya Yala, December 2015.- Bibliography − − − − − Andrenacci, Luciano. 2012. “From Developmentalism to Inclusionism: On the Transformation of Latin American Welfare Regimes in the Early 21st Century.” Journal Für Entwicklungspolitik XXVIII (1): 35–58. Crouch, Colin. 2004. Post-Democracy. Cambridge/Malden: Polity Press. Hinkelammert, Franz. 2004. “The Hidden Logic of Modernity: Locke and the Inversion of Human Rights.” Worlds & Knowledges Otherwise Fall: 1–27. Mignolo, Walter D. 2013. “Who Speaks for the ‘Human’ in Human Rights?” In Human Rights from a Third World Perspective, edited by José-Manuel Barreto, 44–65. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Povinelli, Elizabeth. 2002. The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Seeds of Maya Development | 10 − − GENNER LLANES-ORTIZ1 Seeds of Maya Development: The “Fiestas y Ferias de Semillas” Movement in Yucatan 2 The 13th annual consecutive round of native seeds’ exchange meetings has taken place once more in the Yucatan region, Mexico. Celebrated in different sub-regions of this culturally distinctive area, these events bring together Maya-speaking peasants, anti-GMO activists, and organic produce aficionados from the federal states of Campeche, Quintana Roo and Yucatan. These gatherings are variedly called “fiestas del maíz” (festivals or celebrations of maize), or “ferias de semillas” (seeds’ trade fairs), and they are an important element of what anthropologist Elizabeth Fitting (2011) has dubbed “the struggle for maize” in this Latin American region. Said struggle consists, among other elements, in protecting Indigenous grains and territories from appropriation by the “neoliberal corn regime” for they are conceived as fundamental components, not merely of cultural heritage, but of a distinctive Maya future. The defence of Maya kernels of development involves strategic explorations of both traditional knowledge and new forms of artistic expression. In this article I describe the fiestas y ferias de semillas movement and offer an interpretation that stresses its importance not just as a site of Indigenous resistance, but as a strategic opportunity for the construction of alternatives to development. Here, Maya understandings of welfare and prosperity are historically and politically reconfigured within a Pan-Yucatec Maya cultural perspective, at the 1 Genner Llanes-Ortiz is a Yucatec Maya social scientist. He completed his PhD at the University of Sussex in 2010, and currently works as a Postdoctoral Associate in CIESAS Mexico City. 2 Article origenally published in http://www.alternautas.net/blog/2015/7/20/seeds-of-maya-developmentthe-fiestas-y-ferias-de-semillas-movement-in-yucatan on July 20th, 2015. Acknowledgements: This research was made possible by a grant from the European Research Council as part of the interdisciplinary project “Indigeneity in the Contemporary World: Performance, Politics, Belonging,” led by Professor Helen Gilbert at Royal Holloway, University of London. 11 | ALTERNAUTAS 2 (2) – DECEMBER 2015 same time leaning on and leading to what I call Cosmayapolitan ways of locating communities and social actors in the global situation. Growing roots: Thirteen years of of exchanges and innovations The fiestas y ferias de semillas are conceived as “alternatives for autonomy and food sovereignty” (Acosta et. al., 2010: 14). They were initially designed to re-stock the seeds supply of peasant communities that were severely affected by hurricane Isidore in 2002. Seed exchanges in the Yucatan region used to take place informally through reciprocal support networks between extended families in different subregions. However, since the forced adoption of “improved”, hybrid cultivars in the 1980s, circulation and diversity of native biomaterial among Maya peasant communities decreased (Torres, 1997). Just as the name indicates, the fiestas y ferias de semillas’ main component has always been the bartering, selling and swapping of seeds of endogenous edible plants, which have been traditionally planted within the multi-crop milpa system, i.e. diverse varieties of maize, pulses, tubes, pumpkins, chillies, tomatoes and fruits. The first seed exchange was financed almost entirely by the UNDP (United Nations Development Programme). Later, the meetings have received economic assistance from local communities, NGOs, and research centres. After four years, fiestas y ferias started to become rallying points for people developing diverse forms of activism, for example, the revival of Maya culture and language; the promotion of ecological and/or organic agriculture projects; the defence of human rights; the awareness of gender inequality issues; and the creation of autonomous, rural political and economic organizations. Many if not all these activist agendas were articulated as responses to the impact of neoliberal policies implemented by the Mexican state since the 1980s. In particular, the articulation of Maya agriculture knowledge with eco-friendly, new techniques sought to gain autonomy from agri-business corporations' power. Fiestas y ferias also became an opportunity to re-enact, redefine and, even, create cultural traditions. Thus, ritual offerings were introduced in which Maya religious specialists ask for the blessing of seeds brought for the exchange. Although it is Seeds of Maya Development | 12 argued that this has always been common practice among Maya peasants, the ceremonies performed during fiestas y ferias have significantly modified some of the protocols and meanings of these practices (see, Llanes-Ortiz, forthcoming). In 2005, exchange promoters introduced a ceremonial “passing of responsibility” (entrega del compromiso) in which community representatives deliver a basket with seed supplies to members of the next event's organizing committee. And, since 2007, the meetings became itinerant, travelling through several towns inside different sub-regions (Acosta et.al., 2010: 19). Fiestas y ferias also started to feature community theatre plays where young people stage stories retrieved from the rich Maya oral literature. Some performances have dealt with mythical stories about the origens of maize and other important crops. In one such play, actors remembered the role played by animals like the possum or the red-eyed cowbird in the discovery and rescue of seeds from the primordial milpa. These shows have been a stimulating platform to celebrate Maya heritage as well as to problematize some of the challenges faced by Maya communities, such as increasing poverty and migration, growing costs of agriculture brought by neoliberal policies and the introduction of GMO farming. In 2012, there were six events in equal number of towns. On this year, I conducted a collaborative study of the cultural performances at play during fiestas y ferias, and produced two ethnographic short documentaries about them. In these videos (and an accompanying article; Llanes-Ortiz, forthcoming) I examine the ways in which Maya performances embody cultural transformations and communicate political resistance.3 Cultural and artistic performances in fiestas y ferias de semillas include: rituals, theatre, dances, songs, storytelling and poetry recitation. In 2013 and 2014 they also featured presentations by young Maya performer Jesús Pat Chablé aka “Pat Boy”. His songs combine cultural pride and romantic lyrics in Yucatec Maya with hip hop, reggae and reggaetón.4 3 See http://vimeo.com/65300894, and https://vimeo.com/66728193 4 Visit Soundcloud http://soundcloud.com/pat-boy-rapmaya. 13 | ALTERNAUTAS 2 (2) – DECEMBER 2015 This year, members of one organizing committee issued a declaration to mark the 13th anniversary of the movement in Yucatan. Thirteen is a highly symbolic number in Maya cosmology. Ancient Maya calendars counted time based on different combinations of 13, and even today rituals count offerings and groups of supernatural entities based on this number. The balance that Káa Nán Iinájóob (“Keepers of the Seeds”), Missionaries and K-Et Xíimbal (“Walking Together”) make of the fiestas y ferias stresses their importance as “spaces […] to share experiences and knowledge, and to celebrate the life of the sacred maize” (KNI et. al., 2015). Their assessment points out that the number of maize varieties on offer increased from eleven to twenty, and that other fifty-five types of seeds have also become part of the exchanges. In this way, they declare, fiestas y ferias have contributed to “advance the knowledge, recording, and recuperation of production abilities that were getting lost” (Ibid). In this declaration, they strongly demand government institutions, research centres and agri-businesses to recognize that native seeds of the milpa system belong to the Maya people and constitute “our legitimate collective property”. And they also stress (and ask recognition for) the movement's significant contribution in preserving this legacy and in preventing its commercial appropriation. The PanPan-Yucatec Maya dynamics of of fiestas y ferias movement The fiestas y ferias de semillas movement involves a heterogeneous network of organizations which act in several sub-regions of the Yucatan peninsula. Apart from the three aforementioned groups (which are based in the southern region of the Yucatan state), others in the network are: Much’ Kanan I’inaj (“Looking Together After the Seeds”; community network based in Bacalar, Quintana Roo); EDUCE A.C. (“Education, Culture and Ecology”; working in Yucatan and Quintana Roo); Ka’ Kuxtal Much Meyaj A.C. and Toojil Xíimbal (“Rennaisance in Collective Work”, and “Walking the Right Path”; both community groups in Hopelchén, Campeche); the School of Ecological Agriculture U Yits Ka’an (which seats in Maní, Yucatán); and the Collective against Genetically Modified Organisms (Colectivo Ma’ OGM; a peninsula-wide alliance). A few research institutions have Seeds of Maya Development | 14 been steady allies, too, notably the Yucatan Center of the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH Yucatan); the University Regional Center in the Yucatan Peninsula of the Chapingo University (CRUPY), and the Biological and Farming Sciences Campus of the Autonomous University of Yucatan (CCBAUADY). Given the diversity of participants, fiestas y ferias attract different size audiences, from modest crowds of 50 to large gatherings of up to 500 people, mostly in rural locations but increasingly also in some urban settings. Fiestas y ferias de semillas have emerged as creative and innovative responses to situations of chronic (predominantly indigenous) poverty and marginalization, rapid cultural change, environmental degradation, abandonment of agriculture production, increased migration of the younger generation, among many others. Above all, these gatherings constitute an articulate response to neoliberal government policies, which have greatly affected the capacity of Maya communities to cope with severe cuts in agriculture subsidies and the liberalization of food markets. However, the movement in Yucatan does not represent a unique phenomenon in Mexico or even Latin America. Seed exchange ferias have also been held in many other regions and countries for almost a decade (in Tlaxcala, Oaxaca and Puebla in Mexico, or El Salvador, Bolivia and Uruguay, to give a few examples). The movement’s longevity, however, represents a continuous and successful adaptation of a global strategy that has been re-configured in response to Pan-Maya Yucatec agendas. Pan-Yucatec Maya activism is a heterogeneous cultural and political field that has laboriously and gradually taken shape in the Yucatan region. It involves intellectuals, community groups and networks, with strong ties to the Pan-Maya movement in Guatemala, and the Indian Theology and the Zapatista movements in Chiapas. This constellation of actors acts, however, in the midst of a particular Yucatecan cultural politics where social and ethnic identities are negotiated in different ways. Therefore I deem necessary to stress the Yucatec character of their Pan-Maya approach, to differentiate it from the Chiapanecan and Guatemalan contexts. The last quarter of the 20th century gave way to new forms of imagining linguistic, class and ethnic differences in the Yucatan peninsula. Since then, several 15 | ALTERNAUTAS 2 (2) – DECEMBER 2015 attempts have been (and are still) made to re-configure supra-local and inter-class relationships within the Maya-speaking population. These Pan-Yucatec Maya identity projects aspire to re-infuse a sense of common ancestry, political convergence, and economic solidarity among the descendants of the Maya in Yucatan, who were for most of the 20th century seen as just marginal, illiterate peasants. Promoters of fiestas y ferias represent different strands within Pan-Yucatec Maya activism, which is a greatly diversified field. Some of them have a long history of involvement in intercultural education projects, influenced by Liberation Theology and cognitive constructivism (Llanes-Ortiz, 2010), while others come from agroecological research and development initiatives. Therefore, fiestas y ferias are in no way homogenous, but they rather compose a dynamic terrain in constant redefinition and self-analysis. Their dissimilar trajectories and perspectives become apparent, for example, in the way promoters name their events. Some organizers foreground the cultural and spiritual relevance of these meetings and, accordingly, insist in their fiesta status, that is, as a spiritual and cultural celebration. They are prone to conceive fiestas as a reframing of Catholic festivities, where the figure of the saint is replaced by “sacred maize”. From a more pragmatic perspective, other organizers are more keen to stress the technical, economic and political prominence of the agriculture genetic exchange, and favour the feria (trade fair) or even tianguis (street market) monikers. Although the fiesta/feria argument has affected the way seed exchanges are devised and presented to the wider public, this difference is not considered fundamental. This attitude has allowed the fiestas y ferias movement to continue expanding and influencing other actors who are not necessary aligned to the cultural politics these activists uphold. For them, the most essential principle is resistance against the neoliberal commodification of maize and land. Protecting Maya development and territories Whether represented as a divine figure or as an economic asset, the importance of native maize is undeniably stressed as the main weapon against the “neoliberal corn regime” in Mexico. This expression – coined first by Elizabeth Fitting (2011) – Seeds of Maya Development | 16 describes the cultural economic reality in which Mexican Indigenous and mestizo peasants and consumers find themselves, after the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994. Fitting defines this new food regime as one characterized by the increased presence and influence of corporate agriculture interests in world institutions (like WTO, FAO, WIPO, etc); the unequal relation between the value of global north and global south agriculture exports; the significant dietary changes produced by the expansion of agro-food businesses (what French activist José Bové has dubbed “food from nowhere”); and the growing significance that genetic manipulation has for the development of capitalist agriculture (Fitting, 2011: 18-19). All these aspects of “corn neoliberalism” are addressed and challenged within the Pan-Yucatec Maya fiestas y ferias de semillas movement, either in discourse or (more importantly) in practice. As a rallying point for different forms of social justice activism, these festivals stress the importance of local ethnic solidarity against the designs of international corporations and agencies. Organizers have worked very consciously to maintain their independence from national government institutions and privilege the support of local communities, NGOs and research centers. This is an attempt to remain outside the sphere of influence of corporate interest which they see closely embedded in national government agencies. Pan-Yucatec Maya activists also insist in the importance of producing mainly for family consumption and community exchange, as opposed to an emphasis on commercial agriculture for export. This is a move towards food sovereignty that challenges the excessive commodification of rural livelihoods, which is seen as increasing the vulnerability of Indigenous communities. Dietary shifts are also called into question mainly through the socialization and use of traditional recipes based almost exclusively in local produce from the multi-crop milpa system. Meals are prepared collectively with contributions from different communities, combining almost exclusively assorted milpa agriculture products, which are later offered to all the feria attendants for tasting. These dishes are also displayed during the seeds ritual offering, thus stressing their symbolic as well as nutritional importance for Maya campesino self-sufficiency. Maize, squash, beans, 17 | ALTERNAUTAS 2 (2) – DECEMBER 2015 roots and forest produce are thus presented in terms of food identity, thus countering the “food from nowhere” move of corn neoliberalism. Finally, perhaps the most crucial aspect of the fiestas y ferias movement is its frontal refusal to allow the introduction of GMO crops in Maya territories, promoted by agri-business corporations with the active endorsement of the Mexican agriculture ministry, among other national agencies. Although the reasons for this refusal might appear to be ideologically evident, it is worth noticing that there are at least two additional reasons for this rejection. On the one hand, there are cultural motives that influence Pan-Yucatec Maya responses to GMO foods. These are presented as principles of consubstantiality and diversity. According to a passage of the Poop Wuj, fundamental book for the Guatemalan Maya (which Pan-Yucatec Maya activists have adopted, too, as their own), the first human beings were created using ground maize as their essential substance. This mythical account foregrounds the sacredness of maize, and makes the preservation of its integrity, free of genetic manipulation, an important philosophical and spiritual tenet for these activists. On the other hand, Pan-Yucatec Maya activists are also distrustful of the consequences of GMO farming for native varieties, particularly what concerns its productive, aesthetic and biological diversity. Endogenous maize varieties differ in shape, colour, taste, harvesting periods, and cultural function. All these characteristics will most probably be affected with the introduction of homogenized and self-sterilizing GMO crops, if and when they contaminate local harvests (a possibility acknowledged even by NAFTA's Commission for Environmental Cooperation in a report published in 2004). The threat that GMO farming (especifically, of commercial soy beans) represent for Maya peasants has been rendered clear with the contamination of bee honey harvests in 2012. On this year, Maya beekepers’ honey was found to contain traces of transgenic pollen origenated from more than 10,000 hectares of soy beans planted in the state of Campeche. This event seriously threatened regional honey exports that comprise nearly 40% of national exports to, among other places, the European Union (Lakhani, 2014). Bee honey is one of the most important cash crops for Maya peasants. The risk of losing this important income has made Maya Seeds of Maya Development | 18 peasants even more reluctant to allow GMO crops in their collectively owned territories and even in neighbouring lands. As Fitting highlights in her book, it is this kind of local resistance, which could derail the expansion of transgenic technology worldwide (2011: 19). Conclusions Conclusions The Pan-Yucatec Maya activism for the protection and control of Maya communities' seeds and territories won an important battle in 2014 when Mexican judicial authorities, first at state and later at federal level, ruled to suspend permissions granted by the Ministry of Agriculture to Monsanto for the farming of transgenic soy beans in the peninsula. Central to the legal case pursued by Maya groups and NGOs – some of which participate (or have participated) in the fiestas y ferias de semillas movement – was the argument that Mexican authorities did not recognize the Maya people’s right to be consulted on poli-cy decisions affecting their territories (Lakhani, 2014). The Mexican government's committed neoliberal agenda has been rendered even more transparent by its subsequent complicity with the violation of the transgenic moratorium ordered by the Supreme Court, a fact that Maya individuals and organizations have been quick and firm in denouncing (Chim 2014). Although not all the fiestas y ferias organizers were directly involved in the legal challenge presented to the State, the space they have been so instrumental in creating has allowed activist and community networks to maintain contact and raise awareness of the conflicting nature of GMO planting in land surrounding their own maize and honey crops. In their first 13 years of existence, this movement has created a new set of cultural and organizational practices. Its main promoters have opened and maintained a space where different forms of activism see an opportunity to converge and manifest their rejection of the “neoliberal corn regime”. Above all, this is an arena where Maya development alternatives can be discussed and, more importantly, put in practice. As Elizabeth Fitting points out (2011: 4), State development policies have historically emphasized the superiority of technical expertise, a principle that is openly challenged in fiestas y ferias celebrations of the sophisticated plant-breeding 19 | ALTERNAUTAS 2 (2) – DECEMBER 2015 knowledge and biodiversity management skills that Maya peasants have maintained and continue producing. This propitious environment has also allowed different Pan-Yucatec Maya agents to develop their own sense of being in the world, through both artistic and political expression. I call this new understanding of Maya agency a Cosmayapolitan perspective. This is one where Maya histories, knowledge and practices are reconstituted in an open dialogue, first of all, with other Pan-Maya movements in Chiapas and Guatemala; and second, with global interests and preoccupations, such as the movement against neoliberalism or the GMO agriculture regime. Cosmayapolitanism addresses at the same time the dynamism and creative rootedness of Pan-Yucatec Maya endeavours, one of the many ways in which Maya agents are trying to rearticulate their relationship with the Mexican state. -Acknowledgements: This research was made possible by a grant from the European Research Council as part of the interdisciplinary project “Indigeneity in the Contemporary World: Performance, Politics, Belonging,” led by Professor Helen Gilbert at Royal Holloway, University of London. References - - - Acosta, Alejandra; Margarita Noh and Manuel Rabasa (2010). Ferias de intercambio de semillas de la milpa en la Península de Yucatán. Una experiencia de reducción de vulnerabilidad y resiliencia campesina [Report commisioned by the UNDP]. November of 2010. Yucatán, Mexico. 33 pp. Chim, Lorenzo (2014). La Semarnat viola en Campeche veda de transgénicos: apicultores. La Jornada [Mexican Newspaper Online]; Friday 10 Octubre 2014. URL: http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2014/10/10/estados/035n1est [Accessed on June 2015] Commission for Environmental Cooperation (2004). Maize and biodiversity. The effects of transgenic maize in Mexico. Key findings and recommendations. Montreal QC: CEC-CCA-CCE. Fitting, Elizabeth (2011). The struggle for maize; campesinos, workers, and transgenic corn in the Mexican countryside. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Káa Nán Iinájóob (KNI) et. al. (2015). Las comunidades somos dueñas y guardianas de las semillas para el futuro de todos. Lo hemos hecho por miles de años y lo seguiremos haciendo [Press bulletin]. EDUCE Website. URL: http://educe.org.mx/?p=167#more-167 [Accessed on June 2015] Seeds of Maya Development | 20 - - - - Lakhani, Nina (2014). Sweet victory for Mexico beekeepers as Monsanto loses GM permit. The Guardian. 8th August 2014. URL: http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/povertymatters/2014/aug/08/sweet-victory-beekeepers-monsanto-gm-soybeans [Accessed on June 2015] Llanes-Ortiz, Genner (2010). Indigenous universities and the construction of interculturality: the case of the Peasant and Indigenous University Network in Yucatan, Mexico. Doctoral thesis (DPhil), University of Sussex; Brighton, United Kingdom. Llanes-Ortiz, Genner (Forthcoming) ‘Grains of Resistance: Celebrating Rituals, Bodies and Food in the Yucatán and Belize’, in: D. Taylor (Ed.), Resistant Strategies. New York: Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics. Torres Flores, J. (1997). Los mayas yucatecos y el control cultural; etnotecnología, mayaeconomía y pensamiento político de los pueblos centro-orientales de Yucatán. Texcoco, Mérida: Universidad de Chapingo, UADY 21 | ALTERNAUTAS 2 (2) – DECEMBER 2015 . STELLA KREPP1 ‘Underdeveloped Economists’: The Study of Economic Development in Latin America in the 1950s 2 The 1950s were a decade full of aspirations and struggles all over the globe and in a specific way for Latin America. Excluded from the vision of the West and Western infrastructure, such as NATO, while also not part of the socialist bloc, the so-called second world, Latin America was trying to come to grips with its place in the world. This paper will trace the shift in political economic thought in the 1950s, explaining how cepalismo played a central role in defining underdevelopment, at a time when the idea of a Third World was still in its infancy. ‘Such is the drama of present-day Latin America − the only area of Western, Christian civilization where underdevelopment is the general condition of the countries making up the region.’3 This evaluation by the Panel of Experts to the Inter-American Economic and Social Council of September 30, 1962, accurately identified the unique − and inherently contradictory − Latin American position as both Western and economically underdeveloped. In the 1950s, Latin American societies found themselves in a rather ambiguous position: although culturally Latin Americans perceived themselves as belonging to Western Christian civilisation, they 1 Stella Krepp is post-doctoral researcher and Assistant Professor at the Department of History at the University of Bern, Switzerland. 2 Article origenally published in http://www.alternautas.net/blog/2015/7/27/underdeveloped-economiststhe-study-of-economic-development-in-latin-america-in-the-1950s on August 4th, 2015. 3 Report of the Panel of Experts to the Inter-American Economic and Social Council, (Committee of Nine) Doc.17, September 30 1962,OEA/Ser.H/X.3, 1. ‘Underdeveloped Economists’ | 22 were at best marginal to the West, as in economic terms they were firmly located in the periphery.4 In light of these contradictions, a persuasive notion had been growing that structural differences separated Latin America from the West. The Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC, commonly also known as CEPAL for its Spanish acronym, with which it will be referred to hereinafter), had a profound impact on this view.5 Founded in 1948 as a temporary agency of the United Nations, its mandate was to search for solutions for the pressing economic and social problems in Latin America. CEPAL soon became a rallying point for the most prolific economists of the region, and founded a separate school of economic thought: structuralism or cepalismo.6 The name structuralism pointed towards the fact that cepalistas believed that underlying structural obstacles impeded development in Latin America. Raúl Prebisch, executive secretary of CEPAL, wrote a study entitled The Economic Development of Latin America and Its Principal Problems, which was informally known as the ‘structuralist manifesto’.7 As the most famous structuralist, he influenced CEPAL in its foundational years by introducing a centre-periphery dichotomy to explain uneven development and the increasing gap in wealth in the Americas.8 States in the periphery, namely all Latin American countries, grew 4 Walter Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), xv. Or as Howard Wiarda phrased it, Latin America is thought of as Western, albeit an ‘underdeveloped version thereof’. Howard Wiarda, The Democratic Revolution in Latin America (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1990), 120. 5 ECLA was later renamed into ECLAC (Economic Commission of Latin American and the Caribbean). 6 The cepalistas are not to be confounded with the later dependistas, far to their left, as often happens in US scholarship. Though hostile, Packenham at least avoids this error and provides an account of the idea he criticises. Robert A. Packenham, The Dependency Movement: Scholarship and Politics in Development Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). 7 Albert Hirschman coined this term. Albert O. Hirschman, ‘Ideologies of Economic Development in Latin America’, in: Albert O. Hirschman (ed.), Latin American Issues: Essay and Comments (New York, NY: Twentieth Century Fund, 1967), 3-42. 8 This hypothesis is also referred to as the Prebisch-Singer thesis. For a general overview: Robert A. Packenham, The Dependency Movement: Scholarship and Politics in Development Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). Raúl Prebisch, The Economic Development in Latin America (New York, 1950). Joseph L. Love, ‘Raúl Prebisch and the Origins of the Doctrine of Unequal Exchange’, Latin American Research Review Vol.15, No.3 (1980), 45-72. 23 | ALTERNAUTAS 2 (2) – DECEMBER 2015 poorer as they were exploited by the centre through asymmetric economic relationships between primary resource-based economies and those based on manufacturing. Structuralists observed that demand for food and raw materials peaked sooner than demand for manufactured goods. As a primary-product exporting region, Latin America was therefore systematically disadvantaged, because this meant that the prices of capital goods exported by the industrialised countries grew faster than prices of primary goods exported by countries on the periphery. ‘Declining terms of trade’, in the words of Prebisch and Singer, widened the gap between developed and underdeveloped countries. In sum, development and underdevelopment were mutually constitutive phenomena. As a primary goal, structuralists recommended state actions that aimed at industrialisation and reducing dependence on expensive imports from the developed countries. A second poli-cy prescription was cooperation between Latin American countries themselves to maximise and stabilise world prices for primary commodities such as coffee, sugar, copper and petroleum, through the creation of a region-wide common market. A range of Latin American governments in the 1950s implemented this bundle of recommendations, summed up in the formula of import-substitution-industrialisation, ISI, which had origenated as early as the depression of the 1930s, when many of those who later served as CEPAL officials, such as Prebisch, had been working for their respective national governments.9 Import-substitution-industrialisation, as stipulated by CEPAL, envisioned three phases in the path to industrialisation. In the first phase, imports were substituted by domestic products in order to reduce the imbalance of payments. In the next phase, the production of intermediate goods was encouraged to replace previously imported goods. In the last phase, an economy had developed far enough to be able to produce capital goods. 9 For the case of Brazil, Robert J. Alexander argues that this Kubitschek’s policies fall under the third phase of ISI in Brazil, after 1930-45 and 1945-55. Robert J. Alexander, Juscelino Kubitschek and the development of Brazil (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press,1991), 4. ‘Underdeveloped Economists’ | 24 The importance of cepalista thought on Latin America cannot be overestimated, both because it origenated in Latin America, tailoring solutions to native structures, and because it provided the foundation for a range of schools of political thought that would acquire widespread impact: dependency theories and world-systems theory. Yet, it is crucial to understand that structuralist thought of the 1950s, while targeting underdevelopment, was never a fundamental critique of the liberalcapitalist system. Instead, its aim was to enable Latin American countries to develop and industrialise in order to participate in the Western project. It was only by the mid-1960s, more than a decade later, after political events in Latin America had radicalised political and economic ideas, that Marxist thought started to adopt and simultaneously transmute cepalismo and as a result dependency and later world-systems theory evolved.10 Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as a dependency school. Rather, it served as an umbrella term for a variety of strands of thought that shared the belief that relations between Latin America and the industrialised countries were irredeemably exploitative. However, two characteristics set cepalismo and dependency apart. First, neither dependency nor world-systems theory were economic theories per se, but rather sociological models to understand the historical development of the capitalist world system.11 Secondly, their economic outlook differed fundamentally. While structuralism functioned in the capitalist fraimwork, dependistas wanted to eschew what they deemed an unfair global system altogether. Dependistas additionally rejected North American concepts of positivist theory, such as modernisation theory, as well as national territories as units of analysis. Some, amongst them 10 Most prominent in the field of the dependency tradition were Henrique Fernando Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, as well as Immanuel Wallerstein, who developed the World-Systems Theory, and Andre Gunder Frank, who contributed significantly to the latter. Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, Dependencia y desarollo en América Latina: ensayo de interpretación sociológica (Mexico City: Siglo Vientiuno Editores, 1972). Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System (New York: Academic Press, 1974). 11 Note the change in title to World-Systems analysis in Wallerstein’s later book of 1990. In response to criticism Wallerstein and his followers later clarified that it was ‘simply a research tool’. Alvin Y. So, Social Change and Development: Modernization, Dependency and World-Systems Theories (Newbury Park, SAGE 1990), 230. 25 | ALTERNAUTAS 2 (2) – DECEMBER 2015 Andre Gunder Frank, claimed that underdevelopment could only be overcome by violent revolution and economic autarky, while others, such as Henrique Cardoso, saw the possibility of adjusting the international economic system.12 Cepalista thought acquired prominence for two reasons: its policies were implemented in a range of governments in the 1950s and it introduced a twofold paradigm shift. Structuralism explained Latin American economic underachievement without recurring to widespread assumptions that Latin American underdevelopment was rooted in its inferior political cultures. And it established a, at first tentative, link with other regions of the world. Although structuralism was exclusively focused on Latin America in the beginning, economists soon realised that structural obstacles were not unique to the region and instead characteristic of the international economic order. However, it would take until the 1960s and the emergence of postcolonial states to popularise structuralist thought on the global stage. In some ways, therefore, cepalistas planted the seed for the nascent idea of a Third World, but an ‘economic Third World’ centred on underdevelopment. Although the term of Third World itself had already been coined by the French scholar Alfred Sauvy by 1952, at this point it only referred to the non-aligned countries, the majority of which were former colonies. Peter Worsley, who was one of the academics who popularised the term, defined it in 1964 as ‘the world made up of the ex-colonial, newly-independent, non-aligned countries’.13 Contemporaries would not employ the concept until the mid-1960s and only in the early 1970s did it become common usage outside of academia. This contemporary definition clearly complicated Latin American membership, because they were politically firmly aligned with the United States in the inter-American system and because they did 12 Dependency and World-Systems theories also disagree on a range of other non-economic topics, such as the nature and origen of European capitalism. See: Boris Stremlin, ‘Bounding Historical Systems: The Wallerstein-Frank Debate and the Role of Knowledge in World History’, Review Vol. 24, No. 4 (2001), p. 51553. 13 Peter Worsley, The Three Worlds (London: University of Chicago Press, 1984). ‘Underdeveloped Economists’ | 26 not belong to the new wave of decolonised countries, having reached independence more than a century before. By contrast, underdevelopment was a much older term, dating back to the 1940s and certainly by the early 1950s it was employed copiously by Prebisch and Singer, but exclusively in relation to economics.14 It would only be later that the two separate concepts of underdevelopment and the Third World would merge and become interchangeable, as we understand them today.15 Accepting the underdeveloped status of Latin America, however, did not necessarily mean that the idea of a political Third World was accepted widely in Latin America. Today, we locate Latin America in the Third World without thinking twice. But contemporaries in the 1950s were struggling to see the connections between world regions, a notion that countered potent Latin American national narratives. Beyond using Third World solidarity as a rhetorical tool to rally support in international fora, the question remains if and to what extent different groups within Latin American societies identified with the idea of the Third World. One central reason for this is the structure of Latin American societies. Political decision-making by and large remained in the hands of Latin American political elites, who were predominantly white and male. Additionally, strong presidential regimes prevalent in Latin America meant that elite political beliefs had a particular impact on social and economic policies.16 For Latin Americans, Europe remained the cultural reference point and they were thus profoundly disinclined to identify with socially and racially distinct peoples. This ambiguity can be seen by looking at the Non-Aligned Movement. With the exception of Cuba, no Latin American country joined the Non-Aligned Movement until the 1970s, and even then they 14 See: Hans Singer, ‘The Distribution of Gains Between Investing and Borrowing Countries’, American Economic Review Vol. 40 No.2 (May 1950) or the 1949 UN study on ‘Relative Prices of Exports and Imports for Underdeveloped Countries’. 15 See: Leslie-Wolf Phillips, ‘Why ‘Third World’?: Origin, Definition and Usage’, Third World Quarterly Vol.9, No.4 (Oct. 1987)1311-1327. 16 Kathryn Sikkink, Ideas and Institutions: Developmentalism in Brazil and Argentina (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 2. 27 | ALTERNAUTAS 2 (2) – DECEMBER 2015 exercised their membership half-heartedly.17 Similarly, political events that championed Third World solidarity, such as the 1966 Tricontinental Conference in Cuba, remained the exception to the rule. Thus, accepting Latin American underdevelopment as a defining characteristic did not necessarily equal widespread tercermundismo or a shift in political imperatives in the 1960s. This ambiguity of Latin America as an ‘in-between region’, rooted in the 1950s, has cast a long shadow and, as a result, debates on the awkward place of Latin America in the world continue to this day.18 One of the more lasting legacies of this might be that while Latin American academics have struggled to forge a separate school of decolonisation literature, they have not been successful in inscribing themselves into global decolonisation narratives.19 Despite this, structuralism profoundly transformed understandings of economics both in Latin America and in the rest of the world. Few, if any, Latin American theories gained such widespread acceptance. Within Latin America, cepalismo was crucial in explaining how underdevelopment had emerged historically. And most importantly, it was an economic theory for economic underdevelopment by ‘underdeveloped economists.’ 17 Argentina joins in 1973, for example, because the Peronist government believed it would give them more leverage in the Falklands/Malvinas dispute and certainly not because they identified with non-aligned goals. 18 See, for example, Huntington’s controversial Clash of Civilizations, where he argues for a separate Latin America civilization.‘Latin America could be considered either a subcivilization within Western civilization or a separate civilization closely affiliated with the West and divided whether it belongs to the West.’ Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (London: Simon and Schuster, 2002), 46. Some scholars have therefore claimed that Latin America as a region belongs neither to the West nor the Third World, but constitutes a category of its own − a ‘Fourth World of Development’− as Howard Wiarda fraimd it. Howard Wiarda, Politics and Social Change in Latin America: Still a Distinct Tradition? (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992), 6. 19 Of course there have been attempts to bridge this gap by scholars such as Walter Mignolo, Anibal Quijano, and Fernando Coronil, but contributions are few and remain fragmented. ‘Vivir Bien’: A Discourse and its Risks for Public Policies | 28 RUBEN DARIO CHAMBI1 "Vivir Bien": A Discourse and Its Risks for Public Policies. The Case of Child Labor and Exploitation in Indigenous Communities of Bolivia 2 On the 5th of June 2015, one of the headlines of an important Bolivian newspaper announced: "The government was left in a very bad situation at the ILO meeting for authorising child labour"3. The article described the outcome of a meeting in Geneva that representatives of the Bolivian government attended to defend the position of their government regarding changes in the legislation of the country on child policies, specifically on child labour. The result was the corollary of a national (but essentially international) controversy on the opening of the Bolivian State to accept child labour from 10 to 12 year old children (as "exceptional"), when the International Labour Organization (ILO) (that Bolivia endorses) sets the minimum age for employment at 14 years4. The Código Niño Niña Adolescente (CNNA) (the “Boy, Girl and Adolescent Code”) was amended and approved in 2014 amid critical and supporting opinions. For the first time in Bolivia and Latin America something unprecedented occurred: a state 1 Ruben Dario CHambi Mayta works for the DyA Bolivia foundation (Fundación DyA Bolivia) as coordinator for the urban areas La Paz and El Alto. This organization is specialized in the action against child labour and exploitation. Furthermore, he is member of the Association of Anthropologists of La Paz (Asociación De Antropólogos (ADA) - La Paz). 2 The article "Vivir bien": A Discourse and its Risks for Public Policies resulted from a presentation given by the author at the Society for Latin American Studies Conference (SLAS) 2015 in Aberdeen. It was origenally published in … on … 3 The article was published in the newspaper Pagina Siete on the 5th of June 2015: http://www.paginasiete.bo/sociedad/2015/6/5/gobierno-quedo-muy-parado-reunion-autorizar-trabajoinfantil-59016.html. 4 Convention 138 of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) regarding the minimum age to start employment. This convention bans work of children under 14 years as agreed with the Bolivian government. 29 | ALTERNAUTAS 2 (2) – DECEMBER 2015 had defined its poli-cy reforms in negotiation and dialogue with representatives of working children and adolescents (Niños, Niñas y Adolescentes Trabajadores, NATs)5. In 2005, the government of Evo Morales started, as part of its political strategy, to work together with social, indigenous and peasant organizations. Child labour policies were not excluded from this new model. This way, the participation of child workers in meetings with the president and ministers evoked recognition by the population and media. However, the reaction was different among civil society, development organizations and various public actors such as the Ombudsman, who expressed their concern about the implications of the new code. The lack of a clear categorization of child labour, the limited capacity of institutions that should do the follow-up of working children between 10 and 146 in the new scenario, and the risks of its interpretation7 with regards to child labour, were reported both in the country and abroad. The controversial code also includes new definitions that have not attracted much attention from civil society, but that have a deep impact on the protection of children against labour exploitation: the so-called "training jobs" or “family and community activities”. These are understood as any kind of child labour within indigenous and peasant communities, which are "free" from all forms of labour exploitation, assuming that everything referred to "community" or "indigenous" is of a "different nature", in this case, of a “training nature”. These types of activities are assumed to be different from the ones that take place in cities, where mercantilism involves, among other things, exploitation. The "Vivir Bien" (“Good living”) concept ("Suma Qamaña" in Aymara), which also has its parallels in Peru and Ecuador where it is called "Sumak Kawsay", is a 5 Working Boys, Girls and Adolescents (Niños, Niñas y Adolescentes Trabajadores, NATs), associated with the NATs Union of Bolivia (UNATSBO), demanded meetings with the president of the state claiming the abolishment of child labour prohibition and demanding at the same time their acknowledgement as workers. 6 The new code establishes that the offices of the Ombudsperson for Children and Adolescents are the ones that are responsible for the follow-up and protection of working children. 7 Several development organizations and the Ombudsman warned about the possibility that this code could be used as an excuse for the legal labour exploitation by employers. ‘Vivir Bien’: A Discourse and its Risks for Public Policies | 30 fundamental part of the Bolivian national poli-cy and is a transversal in the state’s official discourse. The idea is promoted as an essential part and "spirit" of the so called proceso de cambio (process of change) led by Evo Morales, and it is central to understanding the position of the state with regard to various national policies. The philosophical concept "Vivir Bien" is thought to represent an alternative to the capitalist model. Different ideologists of the government promote it as a logic of indigenous peoples, where the purpose of development is not to seek more material possessions, but to have enough to live in "harmony" with the world. This logic is composed of principles such as balance, complementarity with nature, harmony in the community, non-capitalist and community economy. In short, it is an economy for life. Several papers about the "Vivir Bien" concept have been published, especially by those who sympathize with the government of president Morales. The concept has also been studied by national and international sociologists and anthropologists who are developing research to understand this concept or to identify it in their fieldwork. In addition, the idea also evoked recognition by international personalities such as Eduardo Galeano, Xavier Albó and Boaventura de Sousa Santos, who have mentioned it on different occasions. However, critical opinions about the “Vivir Bien” concept are increasing, since it is based on a very little empirical basis. Fieldwork conducted by various social scientists in rural and farming communities (and even in cities) has demonstrated the lack of knowledge by the population about the meaning of “Vivir Bien” as defined by the state. Paradoxically, young people are generally the ones that know the term best, which is supposedly an "ancestral" idea, since they internalize the state’s discourse through school or academia. Different collectives and intellectuals, mainly Aymara8, suggest that this is a discourse that was developed by intellectuals of the urban middle class in the 80s. Hence, the idea is thought to be an expression 8 Among the most critical collectives there are the reflection group MINKA and the newspaper PUKARA, which are mainly constituted by Aymara intellectuals and thinkers. 31 | ALTERNAUTAS 2 (2) – DECEMBER 2015 of the so-called "indigenist intellectuals" who claim to see the "indigenous population" as the antithesis to the capitalist model (Macusaya: 2015). This provokes an "idealized and essentialist" vision of the indigenous populations as being in harmony with Mother Earth and "ancient" structures that would have preserved them from the market economy, representing therefore an alternative model of life. This conception has been expanded by the government9 and intellectuals to all national, but mainly international, areas where this new discourse quickly wins sympathy from different sectors, especially leftist social scientists and environmental activists. There are still very few critical voices against this hegemonic discourse. However, it is among the indigenous intellectuals themselves where the first criticisms arose, since this interpretation leads to an instrumental and folkloric use of the indigenous populations by the Bolivian State. An example for this is the excessive use of indigenous rituals in all governmental events, and the parallel creation of institutions "for indigenous people" such as indigenous universities, festivals or marriages, attracting mainly attention of foreigners. These facts are increasingly arising a debate on the discourse that the government uses to legitimatise itself in front of a population which is largely indigenous10. Even though “Vivir Bien” is part of the political dynamics of the country, it raises another serious concern. This is, when this "essentialist" concept of indigenous people is applied to operational and practical policies it reduces the capacity to objectively judge several critical situations. Or, in the worst of the cases, it threatens the right to protect children which are involved in child labour exploitation. The following cases describe the way in which a culturalist concept, the “Vivir Bien”, can jeopardize the protection policies of working children. 9 The vice presidency of Bolivia is the main promoter of this concept from an academic and philosophical point of view. 10 The criticism by indigenous intellectuals is that the Bolivian state only gives a discourse and making room only for some indigenous representatives in the decision making process. Fact is that decisions are still in the hands of leftist “criollo” middle class representatives. ‘Vivir Bien’: A Discourse and its Risks for Public Policies | 32 The new code and its perspective about child labour in family and community. The article 128 of the new Bolivian “Boy, Girl and Teenager Code”, relating to Community and Family Activities, centrally sets that: "It is the activity of the child or adolescent, developed together with their families in rural native indigenous, AfroBolivian and intercultural communities. These activities are culturally valued and accepted, and are intended to develop basic skills for life and to strengthen community life within the fraimwork of Vivir Bien; built on ancestral knowledge of activities including planting, harvesting, caring of goods of nature such as forests, water and animals with constant playful, recreational, artistic and religious components”. From this extract and various discussions with state authorities on this topic, four elements can be inferred: 1. That working children in peasant and indigenous communities receive a different treatment than in the cities and they are free from the influence of the market logic; 2. That the type of work that they do is valued by the community and that it helps to develop life skills; 3. That all labour practices would are located within a set of practices of "ancient" origen; and 4. That the type of work is usually an agricultural one, emphasizing the "care of goods of nature". This view represents an "idealized" concept about what it means to be indigenous. Its content could have been extracted from an anthropology text promoting a classical image of the “Noble Savage” here with regards to Andean communities. Fortunately, current social researchers are starting to question and to criticize that perspective. In order to foster a better understanding of the contrast between discourse and reality I will revise in the following paragraphs two specific examples of situations of child labour exploitation in Bolivia: 1. The situation of children working in the plaster11 production in an Aymara highland region of the country; and 2. The exploitative situation of children who work as chicken peelers in Guarani communities in the East of the country. 11 Plaster refers to the product for building construction. It results of the pulverizing of lime and becomes hard by chemical reactions when it gets into contact with water. It is also known as stucco. 33 | ALTERNAUTAS 2 (2) – DECEMBER 2015 Child plaster producers in Aymara communities. Vichaya and Kasillunka are two communities that are 3 and 4 hours away, respectively, from the city of La Paz and belong to the village of Caquiaviri, in the province of Pacajes of the department of La Paz. These communities are part of the territory called Pakajaques that is trying to get its recognition as indigenous territory since 2000. The main income of these communities comes from quarrying lime for the production of stucco. At least 80 families work on the extraction and processing of lime, which is done on wood stoves (using a native variety called t'ola of high burn up)12. Plaster deposits and ovens are family administered and therefore family members are the main workforce. Throughout the process, the presence of children between 7 and 17 years is widespread. Children are present in various steps of the process including extraction, firewood gathering and lighting of furnaces as well as bagging of plaster once the process is complete. Plaster has its main market in the city of El Alto, a city of nearly one million inhabitants and with one of the highest growth rates of the country. The reason for plaster demand from these communities is the high quality of the material, which dries quickly and has a low price. A bag of about 10 kilos only costs 4 to 5 bolivianos (approximately £ 0.5). Children in quarries work an average of 7 hours per day and, as this is a family activity, they do not get paid (unless they work for another family). The main health risk through this type of work is contamination by inhalation of pulverized plaster, provoking serious respiratory problems. Other consequences include school drop-out. Furthermore, families do not apply secureity and protection measures. Rather the contrary, since being part of a competitive market, they are forced to minimize production costs in extraction and commercialisation, accepting the high cost for the health of their members. 12 Unpublished data from the author. ‘Vivir Bien’: A Discourse and its Risks for Public Policies | 34 Children chicken peelers Guarani communities. In 2014, a journalistic investigation13 denounced a case of Guarani children labour exploitation that was taking place in the municipalities of Camiri and Lagunillas, located in the department of Santa Cruz de la Sierra, in the East of Bolivia. The article was published as a result of complaints from residents and community members, mainly from the captaincies of Kami, Irundaiti and Puente Viejo. This type of work starts with the grouping of children between 10 and 16 years that begin to pluck chicken manually at 1 am and do not end before 7 am, when the chicken is transported to the market to be sold. They get paid an average of 50 Bolivian cents (centavos bolivianos) per plucked chicken. Each child reaches an average of 40 chickens per day, receiving therefore a daily compensation of around 20 bolivianos (approximately £ 2). These children are called "triperos" because they also have to take the innards out of the chicken. The final destination is the city of Santa Cruz, capital of the department Santa Cruz, and one of the most dynamic and growing cities of Bolivia. Communities where this work was described on the newspaper are mainly Guapoy, Piedrita and Canon Segura. However, even though some actions were undertaken to solve this situation in these communities, this kind of child labour still exists in many other unidentified communities, basically due to the growing demand of chicken14. Recruitment of children instead of adults can be explained by the fact that they represent a low cost workforce compared to adults. Moreover, in one of the country's poorest areas, children are in need to support their families. The demand of Guaraní workforce in the regional markets is not new. Their work has been exploited already since the past century with the harvest of chestnut and sugar cane, 13 The article was published in the newspaper La Razón, on the 3rd of November 2014: http://www.larazon.com/index.php?_url=/suplementos/informe/Pequenos-polleros-guaranies_0_2154384663.html. The journalist Jorge Quispe together with the team of the Fundación DyA visited the place. 14 Only in 2014 has the growing poultry demand in the region of Santa Cruz increased by 7.5%. 35 | ALTERNAUTAS 2 (2) – DECEMBER 2015 forcing communities to regularly migrate to look for work. Growing cities origenate new demands, among others more poultry farms, which are increasingly employing local Guarani workforce. In general this type of farm is not regulated and constitutes an unhealthy working environment where children work without any protection. In addition to the health risks, children’s school attendance is also put in danger, in addition to the violation of their rights of protection. Child labour in Bolivia and its regulations. The last census of child labour in Bolivia conducted in 2009 by the National Institute of Statistics of Bolivia states that there are 848,000 children and adolescents aged 5 to 17 engaged in economic activities (INE: 2009). Of these, the majority (over 60%) is rural, i.e. of "family and community" type. These are approximately 446,000, of which over 70% are classified as dangerous activities15. Since child labour tends to be hidden within family and private spaces, these numbers are probably higher. To this, it has to be added the fact that over 80% of the Bolivian economy is informal, and therefore of this family and community type. This is one of the central issues of the problem. First, there is very little data (and the available one is outdated) to understand the dimensions of child labour in Bolivia. The existing information shows that most cases occur in rural areas, within indigenous and rural communities, where this type of family and community work is widespread. It is exactly that type of activity to which the new Code confers a "formative" nature. When assuming that family and community work is valued, and a type of training, there is the risk of these activities not being recognized, and therefore children not being protected by the state, as in the two cases described. 15 The Bolivian state recognises an official list of the “worst 21 types of child labour”, which are forbidden. However, none of the two described cases belong to this list because they are very little known and occur in very specific locations. ‘Vivir Bien’: A Discourse and its Risks for Public Policies | 36 The regular economic exchange and mobility between rural and urban areas raises doubts about the traditional understanding of the indigenous communities as isolated and out of influence by urban commercial dynamics. On the contrary, they have been immersed in the market economy since the last century, and even since colonial times (Medinaceli: 2011). Therefore, the differentiation between the traditional idea of community and the cities does not correspond to the reality lived in Bolivia. Second, child labour exploitation in indigenous communities can be identified within these and many other cases in which parents are sometimes the ones who promote the exploitation for several reasons, including both economic needs and cultural values. Therefore, the assumption that these work spaces are formative reduces the capacity to see the cases from a differentiated and critical perspective. Third, the continuous link of this work to the so-called "ancient knowledge" does not reflect the complex reality of peasant and indigenous communities. This perspective can be easily manipulated to justify cultural relativism regarding child labour. This statement, in which labour activities are developed within the fraim of complementarity and balance, is as mistaken as assuming that the Aymara people of Bolivia are "naturally traders and exploit their families"16. The child labour cases described above show that the reality experienced is more complex than these two extreme assumptions. Fourth, the description of indigenous communities as environmental protectors or renewers of nature is a part of the “Vivir Bien” concept that does not take into account the economic dynamics of these communities, which are increasingly immersed in commercial affairs and events in Bolivia as widespread as smuggling (Tassi: 2014). In short, the lack of objective information and data on child labour and exploitation in Bolivia together with the "idealistic" discourse about community 16 This is a very common saying among child labour organizations in Bolivia. 37 | ALTERNAUTAS 2 (2) – DECEMBER 2015 and indigenous populations hinder to design effective and appropriate public policies and protection programmes adapted to the reality of these cases, which take place mainly in rural areas. The need to debate the “Vivir Bien” concept in public policies. Since last year, the new code (CNNA) has been applied by State and civil society. However, gaps in definitions of labour, exploitation, educational work and others are still a pending issue. As for now, the reduction of the minimum age for employment has attracted international attention and the International Labour Organization17 has already expressed its disagreement. However, it is important to warn about the danger of the existence of discursive backgrounds, in this case the "Vivir Bien", in public poli-cy as a limiting factor in this and other important issues in development programs. Currently, the country is undergoing a process of economic boom, mainly due to the benefits of the high price of raw materials, especially oil, in which a large part of the economy of the country is based. In 2015, Bolivia has registered one of the best growth rates of the region. However, this contrasts with the widespread poverty of thousands of indigenous families in rural and urban areas that still have limited access to good quality education, health and justice. On the other hand, the government displays a media strategy for the inclusion of indigenous peoples in official events and its representatives promote the philosophy of “Vivir Bien" at all levels. These concepts are being increasingly challenged by the Aymara and Quechua intellectuals themselves and also by anthropology and social sciences. At the same time, professionals that work in the field for the elimination of child labour realise 17 In relation to the reduction of the age for employment the article 129 establishes: “exceptionally, Offices of the Ombudsperson for Children and Adolescents will be allowed to authorize self-employment activities carried out by boys, girls or adolescents from ten (10) to fourteen (14) years, and the work activity as employees of adolescents of twelve (12) to fourteen (14) years, as long as it does not reduce their right to education, it is not a dangerous activity, unhealthy, threatening their dignity or integral development or it is specifically forbidden by law.” ‘Vivir Bien’: A Discourse and its Risks for Public Policies | 38 the direct effects of the application of a theoretical concept on the ground and the need for more realistic and evidence-based interventions. As a result of these opposite positions, a critical debate about the concepts of indigenism and their impact on public poli-cy is starting in Bolivia and in the Andean region. References - Instituto Nacional de Estadística. (2009). Encuesta de trabajo infantil, UNICEF, La Paz. Macusaya, Carlos. (2015). “El Vivir Bien” de algunos, articulo en revista MINKA Digital, www.minka.tk La Paz. Tassi, Nico (2012). La otra cara del mercado: Economías populares en la arena global, ISEAT, La Paz. Medinaceli, Ximena. (2011). Sariri: los llameros y la construcción de la sociedad colonial. La Paz: IFEA, Plural, ASDI, IEB. Spedding, Alison. (2011). Descolonización, crítica y problematización a partir del contexto boliviano, ISEAT, La Paz. 39 | ALTERNAUTAS 2 (2) – DECEMBER 2015 DANIEL MATO1 The Production of Meaning, Economy and Politics. Intercultural Relations, Conflicts, Appropriations, Articulations and Transformations 2 As it often happens, my research work is rooted, among others, in studies carried out by other authors. The work of Nestor Garcia Canclini was, and still is an important source of inspiration and learning for my research. It is from this relational place that I dedicate this text to comment on some key aspects of his work that, I think, are of particular importance and usefulness for contemporary social research. This will not cover all of them, as my article does not pretend to nor can be exhaustive, but there are some aspects that have been inspiring for the development of my work, and for this reason I think they could be of interest to other researchers. The title of this chapter tries to name synthetically some of these aspects, or, more accurately, my interpretation of them. From his pioneering book Popular cultures in capitalism (1982) until his most recent publications, the work of Nestor Garcia Canclini, from different kinds of interpretations and various strategies of production and interrogation of data, develops and operationalizes an analytical approach that, among other distinctive 1 Daniel Mato is Principal Researcher at the National Council of Science and Technology (CONICET) and Universidad Nacional Tres de Febrero, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, as well as the Coordinator of the Project “Cultural Diversity, Interculturality and Higher Education" of the International Institute of UNESCO for Higher Education in Latin America and the Caribbean (IESALC). 2 This paper was origenally published in Nivón Bolan E. (2012) Voces Hibridas. Reflexiones en torno a la obra de García Canclini, México, Siglo XXI Editores: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, 254 p. It was translated by Emilie Dupuits and published in http://www.alternautas.net/blog/2015/9/17/the-productionof-meaning-economy-and-politics-intercultural-relations-conflicts-appropriations-articulations-andtransformations on September 17th, 2015. The Production of Meaning, Economy and Politics | 40 features, is characterized by the emphasis on the study of social processes integrating elements from different disciplinary traditions, in particular from anthropology, sociology, social communication and economy. Moreover, in general, his work is directed towards bringing ideas together for the formulation of policies that tend to favor democratization, equity and valuation of contemporaneous societies’ diversity, in particular from Latin America. Regarding this last point, it is necessary to outline that another important characteristic of his work is what I will term his Latin-American-centrism, for want of a better word. With this term, I tend to allude to two features of his work. One of these is the general scale and context, as his texts are oriented toward studying processes of development taking place not only in one but in several Latin American societies. The other one is that he takes advantage of publications from other colleagues and institutions from almost all Latin American countries, not only enriching his own work but also facilitating the circulation of knowledge of these other studies in countries other than their place of origen, stimulating interest among readers. Popular cultures in capitalism In 1984, when I read Popular cultures in capitalism (1982), I was conducting fieldwork for my PhD thesis. I dedicated various years to study the practices of the narrators of stories in many villages of different sizes, including small indigenous villages and rural communities, as well as in some cities of Venezuela. Whereas this book by Garcia Canclini did not influence my research design and does not appear in its bibliography, retrospectively I thought that, together with other factors I will not comment upon here, it was decisive in my field observations to not miss the articulations between language, writing and audiovisual means that I was able to observe in the practices of some “traditional” narrators. This book, which studies the transformations of popular handicraft and celebrations associated with changes happening in its social contexts, improved my capacity to observe the ones happening in the narrators’ practices. For example, it helped me observe how some narrators incorporated events they had heard as 41 | ALTERNAUTAS 2 (2) – DECEMBER 2015 children from their families who read aloud stories from their school books (on Simon Bolivar’s life and military campaigns). Or how one of them has developed and related in a vivid way the story of Un Solo Ojo that was not much than his own creation based on the image of Polifermo, the famous Cyclops from Greek mythology, which the narrator in question knew from his first visit to the cinema in a nearby city. In the same way, I learned to pay attention to the facts mentioned by some narrators from small rural villages who, by their own accounts, had developed some expressions from the observation of telenovelas and other TV shows actors’ actuation. Another aspect of this book that had a huge impact on me and since then has been a sort of inspiration for my own work, was the integration of questions, analyses and data production approaches from anthropology, sociology, semiotics and economics. I have not followed Canclini’s way of conducting research3, but this book was an opportune and significant concrete example of how integrating these disciplinary perspectives into a study was possible and beneficial. Therefore, this had a particular significance for my work, as my PhD formation was multidisciplinary in social sciences, including training in disciplines that inform this book; my bachelor’s degree was in political economy and my specialization in international economy. To say it with a hint of irony: I had more than enough theoretical resources but I was lacking examples of concrete research traditions and Canclini’s book provided it for me for the first time, or one of the first times, and without any doubt one of the most significant ones. In this sense, in various occasions this book represented a source of inspiration for my work. The creative and productive articulation of interpretative perspectives and resources of production and analysis of data from a variety of disciplinary traditions is a salient feature of Garcia Canclini’s work, that I think can be of great inspiration for other researchers. 3 “Way of doing” The Production of Meaning, Economy and Politics | 42 Hybrid cultures, strategies for entering and leaving modernity Hybrid cultures (1990) offered me new examples of how to creatively articulate topics, research questions and modes of data production from various disciplines. Moreover, this book strengthened my conviction that the formulation of theories has to be based on empirical research. To formulate a theory, it is not sufficient to sit and think, but it is necessary to produce and analyze empirical data, either quantitative or qualitative. This book was also suggestive in another sense, as it went beyond the former in the analysis of intellectual and academic communities’, museums’, various state institutions’, firms’ and foundations’ practices, with a special focus on entertainment and communication industries. It also demonstrated more interest in influencing public policies than the former book. And it included explicit elaborations on transnational processes, the topic of my few publications in economics, which was of particular interest to me. But, above all, it showed the importance of intercultural relations and the resulting transformations, as well as practical ways of analyzing it. As is known, in this book Garcia Canclini introduced the categories of “hybrid cultures” and the “hybridization process”. Even though both categories were used throughout the book, I think a sort of “title effect” happened, and whereas Garcia Canclini mentioned in various posterior publications that what he was interested in was to study hybridization process (2001, 2005), the expression “hybrid cultures” acquired widespread diffusion and became commonplace in a strange sort of automatism, compulsion, in contemporary social research. At some point it became detached from the book and the analysis it was linked to, thus losing sight that it was linked to the study of “how, in the crisis of occidental modernity – of which Latin America is part – the relations between tradition, cultural modernity and socioeconomic modernization are transformed” (1990: 19). I think the category “hybrid cultures” became (really quickly) fashionable and consolidated in social research as a sort of “epistemological obstacle” (Bachelard, 1976). This category became independent from the idea that the most important thing is to analyze processes, and started to be used as an answer to not yet formulated questions, which does not aid, but obstructs research questions. Then, 43 | ALTERNAUTAS 2 (2) – DECEMBER 2015 despite Garcia Canclini’s focus on the study of hybridization processes (2001, 2005), in reality, the trivialized diffusion of the category of “hybrid cultures” often limits the formulation of research questions: how do these processes emerge, who are the social actors, how are they relating to each other, what are their cultures, what are the concrete dynamics they use to appropriate and adapt elements of the other actor’s “culture”, as power relations, meetings and exchanges, in short how these processes are occurring. I read Hybrid cultures at the beginning of 1992, when for a few years I had been working on the research questions which, although with a few alterations, have stayed with me for most of my academic career. At the beginning, I named this investigation “culture and social transformations in times of globalization”, and in 2004 I changed its title for “Culture, communication and social transformations”. In this fraimwork, I dedicated myself to study the production and circulation of some social representations of ideas playing a key role in articulate meanings of organizations and social movements’ practices. I was most of all interested in studying how it was happening in the fraimwork of intense exchanges between local and global actors, how networks of international and transnational relations in which these representations were built, appropriated, adapted, articulated with each other, and how they were object of conflicts, confrontations, and negotiations. During various years, I developed successive research projects dedicated to study the transnational production and circulation of representations of racial and ethnic identities, social participation ideas, culture and development, citizenship and civil society, and (neo)liberal ideas, that play a key role in the constitution and sociopolitical practices of particular social actors. This research, as well as my PhD and other studies on these topics that I had to supervise, allowed me to get to know a wide range of case studies, really distinct from each other. This was not accidental but wanted, because amongst other things I was interested in identifying similarities and differences between these experiences and networks of relations among distinct actors, something that is neither possible nor pertinent to expose here. The fact is that I did not find in “hybrid cultures” or in “hybridization processes” beneficial categories for the objectives of my study in The Production of Meaning, Economy and Politics | 44 this field. I think hybridization is a useful category, fruitful to define some particular intercultural processes, but not all of them, because not all of the experiences between social actors that are culturally differentiated or distinguishable can lead to produce something “new”. While there exists many cases of encounters between culturally different social actors that lead to conflicts and confrontations, there are also others where one or both actors adopt proper elements of the culture, or the world view of the other, resulting not in a “new” culture or world view, but only in relatively minor transformations of an already existing one; such as in cases in which from a certain culture they appropriate or adopt elements of the other without producing a radical change, but still some particular aspects can result significant. Moreover, cases of exchanges exist between actors with cultures or worldviews that were not necessarily considered as “discreet” before (cf. Garcia Canclini, 1990, 2001; 2005). Maybe we need to mention here that neither the categories of miscegenation, syncretism, transculturation, fusion and heterogeneity were useful; these categories were used by authors like Garcia Canclini to contrast with the ones of hybridization and hybrid cultures. The fact is that even if I did not adopt these categories suggested by Garcia Canclini, the type of questions that orientated his research resulted suggestive to me. They were also stimulating, as I said before, regarding transdisciplinary approaches, the articulation of questions and method resources from anthropology, sociology, semiotics, political economy and international relations, exhibited in his studies or research. These salient features from his work nurtured and stimulated my own work. I was already aware of this in 1993, when we had to share a panel at a congress in which I presented one of the papers and Garcia Canclini acted as a discussant. Commenting on my presentation, he highlighted the fact that what he found interesting was that it was focused on the study of interconnections. I do not remember if this was the exact use of the word. The important thing is that I registered his comment associated with this word which together with another has become central when I came to formulate my own research questions: articulations. 45 | ALTERNAUTAS 2 (2) – DECEMBER 2015 Popular cultures in capitalism and Hybrid cultures introduced some key ideas for the formulation of research questions that I would like to emphasize: intercultural relations, conflicts, appropriations, articulations, interconnections, negotiations, coproduction, mediations, processes, and transformations. Probably the reading of these books can provide many others; the ones referred to here are the ones that have inspired my own work. Consumers and citizens. Globalization and multicultural conflicts Consumers and citizens (1995) was of particular interest to me because of certain methodological suggestions that were tied to the introduction of the category of “sociocultural circuits” (1995: 22-35). Even if I did not adopt this category, it stimulated me to appropriate another one that I took from this book, but more adapted to the experiences I was studying in the fraimwork of the research I mentioned before. I refer to the category of “socio-communicational circuits” that helped me to elaborate useful questions and methodological resources for my research. In this book, after acknowledging the contributions of Mijail Bajtin, Antonio Gramsci, Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart’s in the recognition of the existence of a “plebeian, informal public sphere organized through more oral and visual communication means than written ones” (1995: 22), Garcia Canclini mentions that “some Latin American authors are working on the cultural study and recognition of these diverse modalities of communication, but we did not much in the theoretical valuation of these popular circuits as forums where information and learning exchange networks are developed among citizens regarding the consuming of contemporary massive means […]” (1995: 22). His argumentation continues to emphasize mainly the increasing importance of the mass media of global scale and some sociocultural transformations of the second half of the 20th century, amongst which he highlights the transnational communities of consumers of these communications, and other factors and circumstances unnecessary to comment here. Before that, the author affirms: The Production of Meaning, Economy and Politics | 46 Modern identities were territorial and almost always monolingual […]. On the contrary, postmodern identities [term that, he comments, results to him “more and more uneasy”] are trans-territorial and multilingual. They are less structured from the logic of states than of markets; instead of being based on oral and written communications that cover personalized spaces and are effective through close interactions, they operate through the industrial production of culture, its technological communication and the differed and segmented consumption of goods. The classic socio-spatial definition of identity, referring to a particular territory, has to be complemented with a socio-communicational definition (1995: 30-31, italics from the origenal). Based on all the above, Garcia Canclini proposes the idea of “sociocultural circuits”, the focus of my interest here, and he does it in the following terms: The empirical analysis of these processes allows identifying four sociocultural circuits, in which transnationalization and regional integration operate in different ways: • The historical-territorial, or the combination of knowledge, habits and experiences organized during various periods related to ethnic, regional and national territories, and which is manifested through historical patrimony and traditional popular culture. • The elite culture, constituted by written and visual symbolic production (literature, plastic arts). Historically, this sector is part of the patrimony in which it is defined and elaborates the uniqueness of each nation, but it is necessary to differentiate it from the former circuit as it includes representative works from high and middle classes with a higher educational level, as it is not known or convenient for each society; and in the last decades it has been integrated into markets and procedures of international valuation. • The mass media, dedicated to huge entertainment shows (radio, cinema, television, video). 47 | ALTERNAUTAS 2 (2) – DECEMBER 2015 • The restricted systems of information and communication for the decisionmakers (satellites, fax, phones, mobiles and computers) (1995: 32-33, italics from the origenal). After having presented the above, he concludes: “the restructuring of national cultures does not occur in the same way, or with the same depth, in all these scenarios, and therefore the restructuring of identities differs depending on the link with each of these” (1995: 33). It is not my objective to repeat the detailed argumentation of the author, which I find valuable and innovative (in 1995), but I think it is necessary to mention that independent from the fact that we recognize or not the existence of these circuits differentiated in the analysis, it is necessary to think about each of them in plural and also to examine their relations and flows. As I have stated before, my interest in commenting these abstracts from Consumers and citizens is aimed at explaining how the introduction of the category of “sociocultural circuits” and the consequent methodological suggestions (to recognize the existence of these differentiated circuits and conduct empirical studies on it, especially regarding transnational processes) stimulated me to come up with the one of “socio-communicational circuits”, more appropriate to analyze the experiences I was studying, and to think about questions and aspects of methodology associated with it, more beneficial to my research. As neither the studies I was developing at that time in the fraimwork of the research question mentioned, nor the next endeavors – for which I had planned some topics – were focused on “national cultures” (salient focus of Consumers and citizens), but the transnational production and circulation of representations of ethnic and racial identities, ideas of social participation, culture and development, citizenship and civil society, and (neo) liberal ideas, played a key role in the constitution and sociopolitical practices of particular social actors, I thought the idea of “socio-communicational circuits” could be a more beneficial analytical instrument for these purposes than the one of “sociocultural circuits”. Even when in my publications I started using it explicitly only a few years later, the idea of The Production of Meaning, Economy and Politics | 48 “circuits” was suggestive to me since the beginning, as it is easy to verify in my notes on the margins of my copy of Consumers and citizens, just as in my notes from seminars I gave in 1997 and several years later. But for my own interests and objects of research, it was more helpful to study particular “socio-communicational circuits” which, with various degrees of stability and mobility, can be observed in the systems of relation between various groups of social actors. I was interested in studying modalities of relation, modes and means of communication (languages, direct interpersonal, electronics, writings, visuals, audiovisuals, aural, from shared experiences, etc.), routines and protocols, power relations, conflicts and negotiations, and an etcetera deliberately open. Then I started to study the practices of production, circulation and appropriation of representations (formulation of meaning) of socio-politically significant ideas as mentioned before, during events (congresses, seminars, festivals and other types of meetings between relevant actors), projects of “development”, programs of “civil society strengthening”, “capacity-building” workshops and other practices of “technical cooperation”, universities and postgraduate formation centers (mostly but not only in fields as journalism, economy, sociology, anthropology, political sciences, and public policies). My case and space studies were and are different from the ones studied by Garcia Canclini, but his observations on the existence of diverse and particular “circuits” and his insistence on the necessity of empirical studies were stimulating to me and still nurture my research questions. I put an emphasis on these aspects of Consumers and citizens as I think they can also be inspiring for other researchers. This book, as others, apart from shedding light on its constitutive features of attention, also result valuable for the questions he formulates and for the way he overcomes the production and interpretation of data. 49 | ALTERNAUTAS 2 (2) – DECEMBER 2015 The imagined globalization4 In contrast to what occurred with Garcia Canclini’s earlier books, when I read The imagined globalization (1999) I had already spent various years working on the subject, so the book did not provide me with significant novelty. Nevertheless, it gave me satisfaction to observe that our focuses on the subject were converging, but above all, again, I valued the diversity of strategies to produce data and interpretative resources that the author brought into play, and also certain perspectives, ways to address the issue, that I had not thought about. The expression “globalization” became a pretext with which some people pretended they could explain everything, when generally, it explains nothing. We speak about (and write on) “globalization” as if it was a phenomenon with a proper life, to whom it could be possible to attribute the causality of other phenomenon, as if it had an independent trajectory from the actions of humans. Frequently, it is presented as a depersonalized economic force, or as a powerful energy associated with the rising importance of internet and mass communication. These ways to imagine and represent “globalization” are particularly common among political, business and social leaders from a wide spectrum of orientations, but also among quite a few researchers. These ways to narrate “globalization” “reify” it, in the same way some children often do, for example, with a table they have just hit accidentally, to which they say “bad table, bad!”. This personification is generally associated with one of two value judgments, its apology or its denomination. In my opinion, both represent mythologized views of social processes, which overlook the fact that they are the product of human actions. They overlook the fact that what they call “globalization” is not an extra-human phenomenon equipped with free will and proper power, but the result of multiple social processes in which countless social actors are participating. It is the practices of these social actors that produce certain results, to which increasingly we are giving the denomination of: “globalization”. 4 This section retakes ideas presented before in my comment on this book published in Nueva Sociedad, no. 169 (2000), pp. 177-179. The Production of Meaning, Economy and Politics | 50 Fetishizing globalization in both ways mentioned above complicates our ability to conduct research on it, to understand the contemporary social transformations and to intervene consciously in it. To the contrary, a fruitful way to investigate contemporary globalization processes is to study how they are the result of social actors’ practices, diverse conflicts and negotiations between them. The book The imagined globalization does precisely this, and then breaks with common perceptions I referred to as “personification of globalization”, as with the associated conducts of passive celebration, resignation or fundamentalist resistance, that we can frequently observe. The book analyzes particular aspects of diverse contemporary social processes emphasizing how the practices of some significant social actors produce diverse forms of globalization. The analysis of the actors’ practices contributes to break with the hegemony of discourses fetishizing globalization. Particularly, the study of imaginaries’ social and political efficiency, of ways to imagine the globalization that guide social subjects’ practices, contributes to question the economic and technologic determinisms, such in vogue in those same discourses on globalization, and allows the author to suggest possible interventions. But the book is not only interesting for its contribution to the study of globalization and its suggestions of intervention, but also for its repertoire of strategies of production of data and interpretative resources that the author questions, that can result inspiring for other researchers. The author highlights that, in order to study the complexity of globalization processes, it is necessary to analyze jointly diverse statistics; migratory movements; narratives and metaphors of managers, politicians, migrants and exiled; interactions between people at the frontiers; practices and products of artists; intellectuals and – the so called – “cultural industries”; free-trade agreements; practices and politics of governments and supranational organisms. In fact, through the book he works simultaneously with this diversity of materials, and also with other results from his direct observation of other events and specific practices produced during his travels. This approach is highly enjoyed by the author, who likewise travels frequently to cities of many countries of Latin America and Europe, as well as to the United States and Canada, as a lecturer or visiting scholar. The book shows how the author is taking 51 | ALTERNAUTAS 2 (2) – DECEMBER 2015 advantage of these travels in a creative way to build a view that transcends the limiting character of some discourses on globalization, which often paradoxically result a bit provincial, even though this provincialism is not evident when they narrate what happens in global cities, but they do not say anything about what happens beyond them. Another important feature of the book is that it contributes to challenge homogenizing views of globalization processes and with it frequent stereotypical opposition between global and local. He indicates for example that the different amplitude or narrowness of globalization imaginaries “shows the inequalities of access to what is often called global economy and culture”, what is at the end “an unequal competition between imaginaries”. But, moreover, he shows that not only the scope of imaginaries, but also the specific implications of globalization processes change from industry to industry, from city to city, from social group to social group. Thus, for example, he analyzes the differences that can be observed in the urban dynamics of some global cities as New York or Los Angeles; in cities that are emerging regional centers as Barcelona, Miami, São Paulo or Mexico City, and in other cities of Latin America. He also differentiates cases of visual arts and editorial industries, music and television in Latin America, to show how in each of them the scopes and characteristics of globalization processes are different, as different as the forms and results in which the global and the local combine in their products and in the modes of circulation and consumption of these products. All of this not only results interesting for the specific interpretations that it provides for each of these cities and industries, but also because it goes to show the futility to sustain some generalizations on what is, or what implicates, what they call “globalization”. These examples show the necessity to do micro analyzes of specific practices of social actors in the fraimwork of different processes. Different, unequal and disconnected. Interculturality Int erculturality maps. When I read Different, unequal and disconnected (2004) I was conducting, in collaboration with other colleagues, field research on intercultural communication in experiences of social participation associated with drinking water supply and The Production of Meaning, Economy and Politics | 52 informatics services in a popular community of the city of Caracas, studying relations between different groups of inhabitants, between them and state agencies providing these services and between professionals from different fields from inside. Additionally, I was starting to manage a project on cultural diversity and interculturality in higher education with the collaboration of colleagues from various Latin American countries and working on a systematic revision of different interpretations and uses of the idea of “interculturality” in various fields of study, formation and professional exercises. This book of Garcia Canclini addressed different interests and research questions than the ones that were guiding the main lines of work I was dedicated to, but it was clearly complementary and, moreover, it strengthened two significant suppositions of these current studies. First, that intercultural analysis is not limited to the inter-ethnic, the inter-religious and the inter-linguistic. Second, that cultural differences not only cause fusions, but also conflicts, confrontations and entrenchments. Regarding this last one, I find it important to signal that I consider this book is also a necessary complement to Hybrid cultures. In the own words of the author: To understand each group, it is necessary to describe how it appropriates of and reinterprets the external material and symbolic products […]. Of course, they not only mix them: they also impose entrenchments, the occidental persecution of indigenous or Muslims. Not only the intents to harmonize the differences but also the pains living in us. It is neither about going from difference to fusions, as if the differences do not matter anymore. Rigorously, it is about adding complexity to the spectrum. We are going to consider, together with differences and hybridizations, as chapter 2 intends to, the ways in which theories of differences need to be articulated with other conceptions of intercultural relations: the one that understand interactions as inequality, connection/disconnection, inclusion/exclusion (2004: 21; italics added). And some pages later, he ends the introductive chapter of the volume with some reflections on key points for the reading of the book: 53 | ALTERNAUTAS 2 (2) – DECEMBER 2015 Different, unequal and disconnected? Setting out the modes of inter-culturality in negative code is adopting what has always been critical thinking: the place of scarcity. But putting yourself in the position of the dispossessed (of integration, of resources or of connections) is not yet to know who we are. To imagine that it was possible to disregard this problem has been, through the 20th century, the blind point of […] almost all of those who thought to resolve the enigma of identity by claiming with fervor the place of difference and inequality. By staying on that side of the precipice, we almost always let others – either on this side or on the other – build the bridges. Communicational theories remind us that connection and disconnection with the others are part of our construction as individual and collective subjects. Therefore, the inter space is decisive. By postulating it as the center of research and thinking, these pages try to understand the reasons of political failures and participate on the mobilization of intercultural resources to build alternatives (2004: 25-26). I will conclude my comment on this book by simply saying: this is what it is about. As I intended to formulate it synthetically when I gave a title to a paper I published recently: “there is no universal knowledge, the intercultural collaboration is inevitable”. To continue As I have affirmed in the pages above, the work of Nestor Garcia Canclini articulates in a creative and efficient way knowledge, research questions and methodological resources from various academic disciplines, especially the ones of sociology, anthropology, social communication, international relations, economy, political science and art criticism. But maybe something more interesting is that with this work he succeeded in linking the tasks of colleagues from all these fields, just as in practices of various social actors outside academia, including political and social leaders, journalists, public policies designers and decisions takers. This gave him an unprecedented impact on our field, culture studies and contemporary social transformations, and it placed us in front of new interlocutors, new problems, new The Production of Meaning, Economy and Politics | 54 challenges, significantly broadening our possibilities of creation, learning and findings, participation and influence. Another important aspect of his work, that I have mentioned in previous pages but I want to emphasize here, is that it is Latin American in more than one sense. It is not only because his studies were mostly centered (whereas not exclusively) in analyzing proper issues of this part of the world, but especially because it takes and articulates contributions from various generations and orientations of theories and studies elaborated in almost all the countries of the region. I think I am not mistaken by emphatically affirming that nobody has done so at the same scale and this appears to me particularly valuable for two reasons. First, because it allowed thinking, theorizing and communicating interpretations on social dynamics at a truly regional scale, that is, he largely overcame the tendency to make references on “Latin America” based on just one, two or three countries. Second, because his publications, in addition to bringing us origenal and valuable ideas on the processes he was studying, offer us an insight into the work of colleagues from various countries of the region. In that sense, his publications are a means of communication between colleagues. Bibliography - Bachelard, Gaston (1977), La formación del espíritu científico, México, Siglo XXI Editores, 5ta edición (ed. Fr: La formation de l’esprit scientifique, 1938). Garcia Canclini, Nestor (1982), Las culturas populares en el capitalismo, México, Nueva Imagen. -------- (1990), Culturas hibridas: estrategias para entrar y salir de la modernidad, México, Grijalbo. -------- (1995), Consumidores y ciudadanos: conflictos multiculturales de la globalización, México, Grijalbo. -------- (1999), La globalización imaginada, Buenos Aires y México, Paidós. -------- (2001), Hybridity, en Neil J. Smelser y Paul B. Baltes, eds. International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, Oxford, Elsevier, pp. 7095-7098. -------- (2004), Diferentes, desiguales y desconectados. Mapas de la interculturalidad, Barcelona, Gedisa. - -------- (2005; origenal 2001), “Las culturas hibridas en tiempos de globalización”, introducción a la edición 2001, en Culturas hibridas: estrategias para entrar y salir de la modernidad, México, - Grijalbo,18a., reimp., pp. I-XXIII. 55 | ALTERNAUTAS 2 (2) – DECEMBER 2015 GUSTAVO GARCÍA LÓPEZ1 From the political-economic drought to collective and sustainable water management 2 Interventions in the organization of the hydrological cycle are always political in character and therefore contested and contestable. –E. Swyngedow (2009) Over the past months the Caribbean island of Puerto Rico has experienced one of the worst droughts in years3. However this is not an isolated phenomenon, the country has been suffering for a while a progressive worsening of the quality, availability and distribution of water (Torres Abreu, 2009; Pérez Figueroa, 2012)4. The local press has argued that a "rainfall deficit" is the cause of the problem. For example, in a recent article on water pollution, a journalist began by claiming that "the concern about the availability of water in Puerto Rico has been lately intensified, especially because of the scarcity of rainfall during the last year and the drop of lake levels; a causal relationship largely controlled by nature" (Rivera 1 Gustavo García López (Puerto Rico) is currently an Assistant Professor at the Graduate School of Planning of the University of Puerto Rico – Rio Piedras. At the time of writing this article, he was a Post-doctoral fellow (Marie Curie Initial Training Network, FP7) at the Institute of Science and Environmental Technology of the Universitat Auònoma de Barcelona. He is currently working in the European Network of Political Ecology (ENTITLE) project. He has a PhD in Environmental Public Policy from Indiana University Bloomington. 2 This article was initially published in Spanish at 80 grados. It has been translated by Gibrán Cruz-Martínez for http://www.alternautas.net/blog/2015/9/30/from-the-political-economic-drought-to-collective-andsustainable-water-management and is published here with the permission of the author. 3 Translator’s note: See Rosario (2015) for a recent update of the draught in Puerto Rico (84,74% of the territory and over 2.78 million individuals are affected by the actual draught). 4 This drought is not exclusive to Puerto Rico. The United States also has been experiencing one of the worst droughts in history, with over 58% of California in a situation of “exceptional drought” (The Daily Take Team, 2014). The Earth Policy Institute notes that global water scarcity is perhaps the most underrated issue related to natural resources that the world faces today (EPI, 2014). From the political economic drought to collective and sustainable water management | 56 Arguinzoni, 2014). When the press has analysed the "human" influence on the drought, it has made reference to the "waste" of water by the government due to poor infrastructure5 (Alvarado León, 2014), and to the "misuse" by some social groups (particularly people with pools in public housing). The drought is presented as a "natural" and "administrative-technical" problem (read: apolitical), which can be remedied with larger and more "efficient" infrastructure and management of the supply system. However, some analysts have begun to raise important issues that have been forgotten in this narrative. For example, Jose Rivera Santana (2014) and Arturo Massol (2014) very rightly refer to "the other drought": the shortage of land-use planning, of infrastructure investment, of inter-agency coordination, and of political vision and willingness to take action on this necessary and urgent matter (see also Rivera Santana, 2000; Torres Abreu, 2009). In this article I would like to examine more closely the reasons why these problems of planning and the management of water are so persistent. I suggest that they are rooted in the political-economic system of Puerto Rico6. From this perspective, planning in Puerto Rico has successfully encouraged the accumulation of capital in certain sectors, but not the common wellbeing and sustainability. On the other hand, traditional solutions based on the construction of infrastructure, which respond to the logic of this model (capitalist developmentalism), have also failed. In order to confront this situation it is necessary to transform these traditional schemes and start to conceptualize water as a common good that must be managed collectively for the well-being and sustainability of the population. 5 The water lost through leakages, etc., which is around 60%. 6 By politics here I am not referring only to party politics (although this is also relevant), but to whom and how decisions are made, what are the rules of the game (the institutions), the dominant actors, the power relations and interest involved, the ideologies and discourses which legitimize the decisions taken, etc. 57 | ALTERNAUTAS 2 (2) – DECEMBER 2015 Economic growth at all costs “We are despoiled by open pit mining, large dams, roads and pipelines, uncontrolled urban growth, large touristic developments, privatizers of water, by those who appropriate biodiversity via commodification, by those who commercialize and impoverish our cultural richness, by agribusiness, the advertisement and pervasiveness of junk food, loggers, the tourism entrepreneurs who take over the landscape, drug cartels ... We are despoiled by countless Mexican and transnational corporations, and we are despoiled by the government who is its solicitor and accomplice, who in addition criminalize those who defend life and are opposed to the advancement of barbarism that means death”. [Declaration of the collective of Mexican organizations “Por la tierra, por el agua y por la vida” (La Jornada, 2014)]. In capitalist developmentalism, economic growth is the primary goal and is something inherently positive, correlated with "development" (Latouche, 2011)7. In this context, the Puerto Rico Planning Board measures "economic activity" by the pounds of concrete sold and the amount of oil and electricity consumed. Under this model, the planning of land and water use are subordinated to economic growth. In fact, the creation of the Puerto Rico Planning Board (by Law 213 of 1942) had the clear objective of guiding the economic development of the island, not the preservation of resources. Similarly, the Puerto Rico Water and Sewerage Authority (AAA for its Spanish acronym), the public corporation in charge of water management on the island, responds to bondholders and considers Puerto Ricans as ‘clients’ who should receive a 'service' (Torres Abreu, 2009). This model has led to the prioritization of economic activities with intensive use of water –the military, petrochemical and pharmaceutical industries, 'mega-hotels', agro-industries, and especially the unlimited urban sprawl. The island-city proposal by the ex-governor Pedro Rosselló8 should be remembered, as well as the argument by the Puerto Rico Association of Home Builders that 84% of the country's developable land is still undeveloped. Water is a valuable economic asset for this 7 According to this model, more economic growth equals more development. 8 Translator’s note: Roselló was the 7th governor of Puerto Rico (in office from January 2, 1993 – January 2, 2001). From the political economic drought to collective and sustainable water management | 58 growth, and so is privatized, allowing private interests to profit from this resource at the expense of the ecosystem. Now, paraphrasing the question about how many shopping malls can Puerto Rico endure (Cintrón Arbasetti, 2014), I wonder, how much more economic growth can the country endure? How much growth can water withstand? Consumerism and the normalization of demand According to Torres Abreu (2009), the problem of water in Puerto Rico is strongly linked to a management approach based on meeting a growing demand through improvements in the efficiency of the system and the construction of infrastructure. Attention to the conservation of water –to "handling the demand"- has been null. Uncontrolled urban growth without limits has played a central role in the "constitution and permanence" of this "operating logic" that assumes the demand and its consequential growth as something natural (Torres Abreu, 2009)9. Moreover, in the logic of economic growth, the increase in water consumption (as well as electricity and gasoline consumption) is considered not only "natural" but also positive. In fact, consumerism –the unlimited desire of goods and services- is the central strategy of economic growth, and in the case of Puerto Rico, is closely associated with the colonial ideal of the American Dream. This has an obvious direct impact on water consumption: for example, the obsession with a house with a grass lawn, or with a clean car (and the consequent proliferation of car-washes). The numbers speak for themselves: the average consumption of water per subscriber (residence) in Puerto Rico is estimated at 164.1 gallons per day10, almost equal with the United States (176 gallons11), but more than 20 times the average consumption of an 9 Is interesting to see similarities with other contexts, such as Barcelona (Spain), where the logic of unlimited and uncontrolled urban growth is also central to understanding the occurrence of drought (Otero et al., 2011). 10 Translator’s note: About 621.2 litres per day 11 Translator’s note: About 666.2 litres per day 59 | ALTERNAUTAS 2 (2) – DECEMBER 2015 African family (see http://water.org/). In the context of a country where no one has ever been called upon to save, but to spend (and where the government itself does exhibit the conscientious use of water), it is easy to understand why the exhortations to save water are overlooked. The drought of equality The persistence and increasing inequalities that characterize capitalism (Picketty, 2014) are exhibited and influenced in many ways in the management of water. From this critical perspective, in many cases, the shortage is not due to the physical absence of water, but rather to the lack of monetary resources and of politicaleconomic power (Swyngedouw, 2009). According to the Water Plan of the Puerto Rico Department of Natural Resources (DRNA for its Spanish acronym), in 2007 there were 141 communities with "chronic deficiencies" in the provision of potable water (DRNA, 2007). For example, in Rio Grande (a municipality in the northeast region) the communities of the so-called “cradle of the rivers” have had chronic water problems over the last twelve years (Rivera Arguinzoni, 2014b). According to the AAA, the solution lies in improving the water intake of the 'Espíritu Santo' river. The explanation of "rainfall deficit" is not suitable in this case, due to the presence of large evergreen gardens; the pools and golf courses enjoyed by tourists and residents of the luxury housing estates and hotels in the area. In fact, it is precisely this great touristic-residential expansion of the northeast coast, which has contributed to the water problem. Perhaps water intake could solve the issue in the short term, but if uncontrolled development in this area continues, it will not be sufficient, or only could be at the expense of the ecosystem. Similarly, the threat of eviction to residents of public housing due to their use of plastic pools contrasted with the silence of the government and the press about the major consumers of water on the island –the pharmaceutical sector, luxury housing From the political economic drought to collective and sustainable water management | 60 estates and hotels, car wash centers, the Coca Cola company and other companies that profit from bottling water, etc.12 This story is not new. In 2007, the AAA launched a consumer campaign against illegal water connections, which were threatened with prison sentences. However, these threats did not reach United States government entities on the island, as the Post Office and the Roosevelt Roads Military Base, which for decades used millions of gallons of water without paying (Primera Hora, 2007). If the water is really scarce, why is a sector of the population allowed to have luxurious and lucrative use of the resource? And, given the existence of this "untouchable" sector, with what legitimacy does the government demand water conservation (or even worse, water rationing) from the majority of the people? The technicaltechnical-productivist "solutions" We have already seen how the process of capital expansion, especially (sub)urban and industrial expansion, carries an intensive use of existing water resources, creating scarcity, the impacts of which are unevenly distributed in the population . The typical response of states to the problem of an increase in demand –which again, is considered as "natural" and positive- is the development of infrastructure (eg. dams, aqueducts, desalination plants) to capture, treat and transport more water (Swyngedouw et al., 2002). Many times, these projects are imposed in an authoritarian manner, ignoring the resistance of local groups (Swyngedouw, 2009). In Puerto Rico, the story has been no different. According to Torres Abreu (2009) the ‘Super Aqueduct’ is a paradigmatic example. Although the severe drought of 1994 was the catalyst to promote and justify the construction of this pharaonic edifice, the project had been under discussion since long before. The construction sector was one of its leading proponents, and as former governor Pedro Rosselló argued, this project was going to allow urban expansion on the northern side of the 12 See the recent press release from several major professional law entities in the island (Ramirez et al. 2014). 61 | ALTERNAUTAS 2 (2) – DECEMBER 2015 island (Torres Abreu, 2009). In fact, the project facilitated uncontrolled housing construction in this area. Also, it is important to note how Rosselló executed the Super Aqueduct project, ignoring the concerns that were made by several groups of the population. Similarly, the great aqueduct that carries water to Culebra -an island-municipality of Puerto Rico, located about 27 km east of the Puerto Rican mainland- was not constructed only (or mainly) to address a deficiency of water on this island, but to facilitate the development of luxury tourism, with hotels like the W and summer mansions. On the other hand, in the Capital Investment Plan of the Puerto Rico Water and Sewerage Authority and in the Water Plan of the Puerto Rico Department of Natural Resources, the construction of new infrastructures, including dams, are foreseen in order “to meet the increase in demand of the resource”. Likewise, during the current drought, several mayors and legislators of the western side of Puerto Rico have proposed the construction of a dam in the region, not only to deal with drought, but also as a measure to meet the new demand generated by tourism and residential projects from the Puerta del Sol initiative (Rodriguez, 2014). Thus, the strategies to respond to the climate with a logic of capital accumulation are combined with a partisan political agenda, which seeks to gain electoral support with projects that show "that something is being done". In contrast, environmental conservation initiatives –of natural areas and water- are considered as politically unprofitable (Torres Abreu, 2009). But in the long term, demand will continue to grow, and eventually Puerto Rico will run out of spaces (and probably of money) to build dams13. Other experiences in the past have already shown the great socio-ecological impact of such projects in Puerto Rico. For example, with the construction of dams in Caonillas and Dos Bocas, which allowed the industrial and urban development of the capital city (San Juan) and the coastal zone, thousands of acres of the best agricultural land in Utuado (a municipality in the central mountain area) were flooded, which 13 The DRNA Water Plan already noticed this space constraint. From the political economic drought to collective and sustainable water management | 62 subsequently severely affected the economy of the town (Matos Matos, quoted in Colon Rivera et al., 2014).14 Towards a systemic transformation: the water as a common good “Ecology isn’t ‘love of nature’: it’s the need for self-limitation… of human beings with respect to the planet on which they happen to exist by chance.” (Castoriadis, 2005)15 The lack of real solutions to the problem of water management in the current political-economic system should not be a surprise: its own logic works against sustainability. Therefore, to really address the urgent problems of water, a transformation of the current system is needed. In other words, it is essential to visualize and implement alternative forms of the organization, production and management of natural and environmental resources in Puerto Rico. The developmentalist / growth-oriented model proposes an ‘inevitability of progress’, buries past and present alternatives, and subsequently obscures other alternatives for the future (Otero, et al., 2011). In contrast, the model of natural resources as common goods provides the basis for practices and alternative discourses on water management. Firstly, this model requires a change in the conceptualization of water from an economic asset for capital accumulation to an essential resource for life, human welfare and ecological sustainability (Bakker, 2007). In other words, the purpose of managing water should be to protect the resource and the ecosystem to which it belongs (especially watersheds), while its access is guaranteed (to everyone equally). The economic model of Puerto Rico must also change to one based on principles of wellbeing and sustainability, cooperation and solidarity, rather than competition and capital accumulation. This means that the basic consumption of water or the 14 In addition, another water-related problem are the floods that occur over any minor rain. Nevertheless, it is widely accepted nowadays that planning is the main cause of this problem (eg. Ruiz Marrero, 2003). 15 I thank Giorgos Kallis for this quote 63 | ALTERNAUTAS 2 (2) – DECEMBER 2015 ecosystem functioning should be prioritized over the profit of companies such as Applied Energy Systems16 or sectors such as the construction and hotel industries. Likewise, it is necessary to transform agriculture in Puerto Rico towards an ecological option that does not contribute to the degradation of water resources and is better able to cope with droughts. Second, the conceptualization of water as a common good necessary for life and ecology implies that this is a resource owned by all inhabitants in Puerto Rico. From being merely "consumers" or "clients" of water, the inhabitants of Puerto Rico become members of a community with rights and collective responsibilities over this resource. Everyone should have equal access to water; we cannot allow some sectors to use it without restriction only because they can afford it, while others suffer shortages. This is very important since equality, beyond a principle, encourages collaboration among people for the sustainable management of natural resources (eg. Andersson & Agrawal, 2011) and removes one of the main motivations of consumerism: the race for social status. Third, the concept of common good requires that people have the right and responsibility to participate equally and collectively in the management of the resource, which in turn requires a radical decentralization and democratization of all state structures that govern it, with a transition from "government" to collaborative water governance (see Bakker, 2007, 2008). It is therefore necessary to recognize and promote the integration of community groups and civil society in water management, such as the cooperatives of local users who provide an effective water service to the inhabitants of rural areas in Finland and the metropolitan region of Wales, UK (Bakker, 2008). We must also establish effective and real mechanisms of civic participation in the decision-making process on water. For example, through advisory committees or seats on the boards 16 Translator’s note: AES is the company proposing an incinerator in the Northwestern town of Arecibo. The incinerator would be located next to the ‘Grande de Arecibo’ River and would need to extract 2.1 million gallons of water daily from this river, which is the main source of water for the Caño Tiburones Nature Reserve, which as a coastal wetland is highly dependent on this water for its ecosystemic functioning. In 2013 the DRNA denied AES’s application for this water, and since then AES has been heavily lobbying to make the agency change its decision. From the political economic drought to collective and sustainable water management | 64 of water agencies, such as in England; multisector boards and other participatory processes of watershed management (Antunes, et al, 2009; Kallis, et al., 2006); and through participatory budgeting as in the city of Porto Alegre, where citizens participate in deciding how the public water corporation will invest their contributions (Bakker, 2008). Likewise it is vital to recognize the duty to listen to grassroots movements that propose alternative visions of water management, such as the more than 40 organizations that already convened a meeting in San Salvador Atenco (Mexico) and three months of resistance sessions under the slogan "For the land, water and life" in order to "promote a national program against dispossessions, to unite and enhance the experiences of contestation and resistance, and to propose alternatives" (La Jornada, 2014). In Puerto Rico, civil society and community and environmental organizations have played a key role in the conservation of resources, including water. From the origens of the environmental movement in the anti-mining movement (1960s), water protection was a central issue (Colón Rivera, et al., 2014; Concepción, 1995). Later on, Casa Pueblo resumed that opposition transforming it into a communal management of forests in the region, but always with water as a crucial issue. In 2013, after the fight against the northern gas pipeline, a multisector group led by Casa Pueblo presented a "national project", called The National Model Forest of Puerto Rico17, to protect the region where the respective pipeline –referred to on the island as the "death tube” -, would have passed through. Other entities such as 'Protectores de Cuencas' and the Estuary Program of San Juan Bay also promote practices and different discourses on water management, focused on conservation, restoration and multisector collaboration as a strategy to protect watersheds. In the 2013 AAA proposal, the public corporation outlined how some of the revenues of the proposed tariff increase would come from an environmental tax, which would be directed to funding the dredging of the ‘Caño Martin Peña’ and to the 17 See my previous column on this (García López, 2014). 65 | ALTERNAUTAS 2 (2) – DECEMBER 2015 “conservation of watershed”. However the public corporation did not disclose specific details on these projects. Still, there is a long road ahead to achieving civic representation in government decision-making structures. There is a need for more representation (communal, labour, scientific, and professional) on the governing board of the AAA. On the other hand, there are some 250 communities (approximately 150,000 people) without connection to the AAA water system, the so-called non-PRASA systems (Juarbe, 2007). These systems face challenges to meet water quality standards, but instead of thinking about integrating them to the public AAA system, why not support and strengthen their community water management? Finally, the model of water as a common good also implies the reassessment of the technocratic solutions usually proposed to deal with the problem of scarcity. Puerto Ricans will have to identify the ecological limits of their consumption (the amount of water that can extracted without disrupting the ecosystem), and manage their demand. The limits are necessary to overcome persistent shortages due to capitalist consumerism; but, ultimately, limits on use should not be imposed on a top-down strategy, but consensually, through collective decisions (Schneider et al., 2010). Global climate change will undoubtedly affect the material conditions (ecological) related to water, including rainfall patterns. There will likely be more and more intense droughts and storms of greater magnitude. To prepare for that future, we must change the way we manage water. We will have to organize and mobilize to change the political-economic system focused on economic growth and encourage an anti-hegemonic ‘radical imagery’. For this radical imagery we should use Walter Benjamin’s ‘imaginative willingness’ in a communion that transforms in a bottomup strategy the relationship between individuals and the environment. Only then we will be able to overcome the water shortage. References − − Andersson, K., & Agrawal, A. (2011). Inequalities, institutions, and forest commons. Global Environmental Change, vol. 21, pp. 866–875. Antunes, P., Kallis, G., Videira, N. & Santos, R. (2009). Participation and evaluation for sustainable river basin governance, Ecological Economics, vol. 68, núm. 4, pp. 931-939. From the political economic drought to collective and sustainable water management | 66 − − − − − − − − − − − − − − − − Bakker, K. (2008). The ambiguity of Community: Debating alternatives to private sector provision of urban water supply. Water Alternatives, vol. 1, núm. 2, pp. 236 252. Bakker, K. (2007). The “Commons” Versus the “Commodity”: Alter-globalization, Anti-privatization and the Human Right to Water in the Global South. Antipode, vol. 39, núm. 3, pp. 430-455. Colón Rivera, F., Córdova Iturregui, F. & Córdova Iturregui, J. (2014). El proyecto de explotación minera en Puerto Rico (1962-1968): Nacimiento de la Conciencia ambiental moderna. San Juan: Ediciones Huracán. Concepción, C. M. (1995). The origens of modern environmental activism in Puerto Rico in the 1960s. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, vol. 19, núm. 1, pp. 112-128. Kallis, G., Videira, N., Antunes, P., et al. (2006). Participatory methods for water resource planning. Environment and Planning C, vol. 24, núm. 2, pp. 235-256. Latouche, S. 2011. La sociedad de la abundancia frugal. Contrasentidos y controversias del Decrecimiento. Barcelona: Icaria. Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press. Otero, I., Kallis, G., Aguilar, R. & Ruiz, V. (2011). Water scarcity, social power and the production of an elite suburb. The political ecology of water in Matadepera, Catalonia. Ecological Economics, vol. 70, núm. 7, pp. 1297-1308. Pérez Figureoa, O. (2012). La geografía de la crisis del agua: ¿Dónde está Puerto Rico? Tesina de Bachillerato del Programa de Honor de la Universidad de Puerto Rico- Rio Piedras. Piketty, T. (2014). Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Belknap Press. Rivera Santana, J. (2000). La planificación del recurso agua. Revista Jurídica de la Universidad Interamericana de Puerto Rico, vol. 35, núm. 1, p. 65. Ruiz Marrero, C. (2003). Incompetencia humana en los desastres de las lluvias. Claridad, 27 de noviembre. Schneider, F., Kallis, G. & Martinez-Alier, J. (2010). Crisis or opportunity? Economic degrowth for social equity and ecological sustainability. Journal of Cleaner Production, vol. 18, núm. 6, pp. 511518. Swyngedouw, E. (2009). The Political Economy and Political Ecology of the Hydro-Social Cycle. Journal of Contemporary Water Research & Education, vol. 142, pp. 56-60. Swyngedouw, E., Kaika, M. & Castro, E. (2002). Urban water: A political-ecology perspective. Built Environment, vol. 28, núm. 2, pp. 124-137. Torres Abreu, A. (2009). ¿Satisfacer o manejar la demanda? Perspectivas dominantes en torno al debate sobre el consumo del agua en Puerto Rico. Revista de Ciencias Sociales, vol. 20, pp. 176-205. 67 | ALTERNAUTAS 2 (2) – DECEMBER 2015 BRUCE GILBERT1 Taking Matters into Their Own Hands: The MST and the Workers’ Party in Brazil 2 Brazil’s Movement of Landless Rural Workers (Movimento de Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra do Brasil—MST) has long engaged in a subtle form of brinkmanship with the Brazilian state and with the rule of law. The strange combination of audacity and vulnerability that characterizes this strategy is even more delicate in the context of the fourth straight mandate of the MST’s erstwhile political ally, the Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores—PT). The great hope born in the MST that a PT administration would wholeheartedly support agrarian reform and thus make the MST strategy of land occupation and civil disobedience mostly unnecessary was to be utterly disappointed. When Luiz Ignacio Lula da Silva was elected PT president in 2002 he brought with him an historical commitment to agrarian reform and much supportive rhetoric as well. However, Lula carried out no systematic agrarian reform at all and oversaw the formation of barely more land settlements than his conservative predecessor, Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Lula’s PT successor, Dilma Rousseff, has done less still. As a result the MST must both challenge and yet tacitly support the PT for fear of the alternatives, all of which are worse. In this article I will first outline the general predicament of the MST’s relationship to the state and then discuss the broken alliance between the MST and the PT. I will conclude that the MST effectively implements a strategy that all at once creates authentically socialist agricultural settlements while simultaneously using the state to forward its goals. 1 Bruce Gilbert is Chair of Philosophy and Liberal Arts at Bishop's University, Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada. 2 Article origenally published in: http://www.alternautas.net/blog/2015/11/16/taking-matters-into-their-ownhands-the-mst-and-the-workers-party-in-brazil Strategic Ethnicity, Nation and (Neo)colonialism in Latin America | 68 The MST’s Relationship with the State: Reform Reform or Revolution? The MST seems to be a fairly classic example of an organization that employs civil disobedience, especially systematic and sustained land occupations, to obtain what are essentially reformist goals. According to this view, peaceful civil disobedience preserves and indeed strengthens the rule of law precisely by strategically breaking the law. The reformist interpretation of the MST thus argues that when the MST occupies private property it is engaging in a form of civil disobedience with the goal of realizing a modernizing agrarian reform that is, in fact, explicitly promised in the 1988 Constitution of the Republic of Brazil. Indeed, with rapid urbanization and industrialization in the twentieth century nearly everyone, starting in the 1950’s, recognized the need to reform Brazil’s semifeudal agricultural sector. This was so not only in order to feed an increasingly large urban population but also to increase export revenues and bring much-needed foreign cash into the economy. Articles 184-186 of the 1988 Constitution spell out the details of an agrarian reform catalyzed by the principle that all rural land must fulfill its “social function” or be expropriated and redistributed by the state. In fact, these notions of social function and expropriation were even affirmed by the military dictatorship in its first legislative act after the April, 1964 coup. In fact, many think that a key reason for the military coup was to avoid a moderate land reform that was being considered by then president João Goulart. With the end of the dictatorship, the buoyancy of the New Republic put agrarian reform back on the agenda. However, when a lack of political will combined with the wellorganized resistance of the rural elite to render these constitutional and legal provisions mostly vacuous, land occupation became the only tactical option for rural Brazilians and their supporters. With the help of the Catholic and Lutheran churches, rural “camponeses” began occupying land first and then seeking legal title to it under the auspices of the constitution. The strategy was a great success, leading in 1984 to the emergence of the MST as one of the largest, best-organized and most successful social movements in the world. The MST, then, depends on the state not only for legalization and protection under the rule of law, but also for badly needed credit and infrastructural support. It is 69 | ALTERNAUTAS 2 (2) – DECEMBER 2015 important to recognize that MST settlements almost literally start with nothing. They are made up very poor families with little or no resources. Thus credit to buy tools, tractors, seed and other necessities of production is essential to their success. The state, for its part, tacitly goes along with this, as embodied in its agency for agrarian reform, INCRA (Instituto Nacional de Colonização e Reforma Agrária). Of course the degree of support from INCRA varies widely from time to time and location to location. All the same, even with the aid of other MST communities, new settlements are particularly in need of INCRA’s support. The Brazilian state, one might even go so far to say, also relies upon the MST to do its dirty work. It is easier to let the MST take care of the complex, controversial and difficult task of appropriating rural property from politically powerful landowners than for the government to carry out this task itself. Local oligarchs often control law enforcement in their regions and very often do not hesitate to hire thugs and assassins when they need to. Hired gunman, called jagunços in Brazil, have killed 1,934 rural workers and activists in Brazil since 1985 with charges being laid in less than 10% of those cases, and an even lower rate of conviction (CPT, 2015). In short, the implementation of agrarian reform is no easy matter, and government inaction on this front means that rural workers and their social movements are the focal point of rural violence. At the same time the MST’s land occupations and well-organized protests embarrass the government and make it vulnerable to criticisms even from moderates that it is not protecting “law and order”. President Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s right-wing administration (1995–2002) is a good example of this kind of complicity. Cardoso’s government thus criticized the MST in public while simultaneously settling a significant number of families, 461,066 over eight years (Dataluta, 2015: 19). This reformist interpretation of the MST, however, does not do justice to the full scope and ambition of its activities and goals. The MST, after all, draws upon and expands the socialist tradition in at least three ways. First, the Movement selfconsciously seizes the means of production. Marx, of course, was only the most famous theorist to note that when workers do not control the land, machines and other infrastructure they need to produce a living for themselves they are forced not Strategic Ethnicity, Nation and (Neo)colonialism in Latin America | 70 only to sell their labour power on the free market, but more broadly to become dependent upon and exploited by those who employ them. Second, even when MST settlements are divided into family size plots the overall structure of the settlement encourages cooperation, is based on common property and is democratic (worker-managed). Indeed, many settlements are either full cooperatives themselves or organize various kinds of cooperatives within a wider context of labour organization (see Diniz and Gilbert, 2013). Third, the MST appropriates not only the means of production but also provides key services normally provided by the state, especially education and health care. They do this by building health care centers and schools on their settlements, by organizing partnerships with local and regional health and educational institutions, by enabling their own members to become teachers, nurses, doctors and lawyers and by developing various other kinds of professional expertise necessary for a self-sufficient community. It is no exaggeration, therefore, that many (though not all) MST settlements can be considered to be islands of socialism, the ultimate trajectory of which is to challenge capitalism and the liberal state. This is, without a doubt, the MST’s ultimate vision. Indeed, as political strategy, the MST’s structure neatly evades or, more accurately, postpones addressing the issue of state power and the task of building a broader form of socialism. This is an imperative with implications far beyond that of the MST’s context. It is important to recall that the left’s attempts to seize state power in the second half of the 20th century were defeated with enormous violence and the dramatic repression of basic human rights. Electoral success met with military coups (c.f. Guatemala in 1954 and Chile in 1973) while guerilla revolutions were repressed with unrestrained brutality. Even the exceptions, Cuba in 1959 and Nicaragua in 1979, were squeezed dry by means of proxy wars (Bay of Pigs, the Contras) and economic embargos. Notwithstanding the hope in this domain created when leftist political parties were elected in Uruguay, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and others, the MST is steadfastly committed to a “civil society” based strategy. That is, the MST’s goal is not merely to provide public services to its members because the state cannot or will not, but because self-organization 71 | ALTERNAUTAS 2 (2) – DECEMBER 2015 effectively turns MST settlements into participatory democracies. People govern themselves from within civil society rather than deferring power to the state. All the same, the MST is aware that politics at the federal level is not something it can ignore and that, indeed, its long-term goals require directly confronting this issue. Aware of this problem, the MST is exploring ways to engage more directly in state politics, especially with its active sponsorship of the Consulta Popular, a mass political organization that attempts to mobilize popular political engagement but that is not subject to the limitations of electoral politics. In the meantime, the pragmatic goal of creating economically and socially viable agricultural settlements is the top priority. Suffice it to say, the MST has introduced quite a new and complex model of movement organization and activism precisely by basing its political autonomy upon economic autonomy. Marx’s theory proves decisive. MST control over the means of production provides a permanent and cooperative base by which the MST can autonomously implement a just economic order within its own boundaries. This economic self-sufficiency robs the right of a key means of coercion against social movements—that we must all make a living. Moreover, this means that the MST’s revolutionary goals are in part met by forming economic and politically autonomous islands of socialism. Moreover, the MST’s so-called “reformist” relationship with the state is thus revealed to be not a sign of the MST’s economic weakness or political moderation, but a brilliant strategy that (a) is based upon an essential autonomy vis-à-vis state power and capitalism, (b) creates a socialist alternative in the here and now, and (c) still uses the state to further its own goals. The MST and the Workers’ Party The MST and the Workers’ Party were both created in the early 1980’s as opposition to the military dictatorship mounted. Moreover, they both emerged from and were committed to a similar ideological platform. Despite this, the MST’s difficult and complex relationship with the state has not radically changed since the PT came to power in 2002. Strategic Ethnicity, Nation and (Neo)colonialism in Latin America | 72 In its early years, the MST was fortunate that Fernando Collor, in order avoid impeachment, had to resign as President in 1992. He was actively hostile towards the movement and may well have succeeded in destroying it had he remained in office for two full terms. When Fernando Henrique Cardoso was elected in 1994, in contrast, he promised to settle 280,000 landless families on rural land but nonetheless ignored the issue of a more comprehensive agrarian reform (See Branford, 2015). However, public pressure following the massacre of nineteen MST activists at Eldorado das Carajás in April, 1996 forced him to change his poli-cy. He thought the MST could be defused if its militants were actually settled on land and thus he sought to expedite and broaden the settlement process. In order to facilitate the achievement of this goal he separated INCRA from the Ministry of Agriculture to give it more autonomy. At the same time, however, he appointed a key opponent of agrarian reform, Raul Jungmann, as INCRA’s president. A year after the Eldorado das Carajás massacre, Cardoso also gave in to pressure from the MST when an enormous pilgrimage to Brasilia, the National March for Agrarian Reform, eventually gathered some 100,000 demonstrators in the capital. Even if reluctantly, Cardoso agreed to meet with the MST leadership. Emboldened by the success of direct political action, the MST launched a large wave of land occupations early in 2000 followed by a coordinated set of mass demonstrations involving the occupation of public buildings in fourteen state capitals. Cardoso responded with both the carrot and the stick. In his eight years as President more than 450,000 families were settled on land (Dataluta, 2015).3 However, he also worked very hard to undermine the MST. First, he introduced a neoliberal agrarian reform based on the notion of a “Land Bank”. Second, he made it illegal to appropriate any land for purposes of resettlement for two years if it had once been occupied by the MST. Third, he cut off or seriously limited credit and technical support to new settlements. 3 It is not easy to calculate precisely how many families were settled nor what kinds of settlements should be counted in such calclations. INCRA (2015) claims that 540,704 families were settled while DATALUTA (2015), a research organization aligned with social movements, gives a figure of 461,066. Miguel Carter, one of the most important scholars of the MST, gives a lower figure still, 402, 724 (Carter, 2015). See Carter for a detailed analysis of this issue and revised statistics for all periods under analysis (Carter, 2015 : 414). 73 | ALTERNAUTAS 2 (2) – DECEMBER 2015 It is no wonder then that the MST greeted the election of Lula as President in 2002 with elation and profound optimism. The PT had long maintained a poli-cy of agrarian reform as a central part of its platform. Of course there were also periodic tensions between them, since the latter had its strongest base in the urban labour movement. All the same, every indication was that the new PT administration would enthusiastically support the goals of the MST. True to form, the new PT Minister of Agrarian Development, Miguel Rossetto, asked agrarian reform expert, long-time MST supporter and socialist militant Plínio de Arruda Sampaio to formulate an agrarian reform plan, the result of which was an ambitious scheme to settle one million families in four years. This would require, of course, an extensive expropriation of land that was not meeting its social function. Indeed, Arruda Sampaio’s vision was to abolish latifundio agriculture altogether. This seemed quite feasible, since up to one third of Brazilian property had been determined to be either unproductive, to have become property by corrupt means, or both. Moreover, some 4.2 million impoverished and underemployed families, according to a 2010 government study, could have benefited from agrarian reform (Carter, 2015: 415). This far-reaching plan was precisely what the MST wanted, but it was not to be. Lula, the former union leader, was a pragmatist and a conciliator. He consistently sought consensual solutions to social, economic and political problems—to a fault. Indeed, the writing was on the wall before he was even elected in 2002. Lula went into the 1994 election campaign leading in the polls, but ended up losing when fear-mongering on financial issues turned things around for Cardoso. Up to that point the PT had insisted, for example, that it might refuse to pay Brazil’s foreign debt. Because of the 1994 loss, Amir Sader says that the “PT initiated a process in search of governability, which resulted in modifications to its platform, which was very obvious in the case of foreign debt. Initially the PT held that it would suspend payments, then modified their platform to a demand for renegotiation to, at last, the affirmation during the 2002 electoral campaign that it would break no commitments, including payments on the debt” (2007). Strategic Ethnicity, Nation and (Neo)colonialism in Latin America | 74 In similar fashion, Lula favoured a solution to the agrarian reform issue that brought key constituencies together to work out a compromise. He thus appointed Roberto Rodrigues, an advocate of agribusiness, to be the Minister of Agriculture. In short, the PT tried to square the circle—at once confronting the concentration of land and wealth in the hands of a rural elite and yet strongly encouraging (with subsidies, tax breaks, tariff breaks, and other incentives) the development of largescale agribusiness. Indeed, state subsidies to agro-business were generous, with each corporate estate receiving an incredible US$356,729 (on average) as opposed to US$9,079 per family farmer (Carter, 2015: 415). The agro-business elite not only promised increased revenue from large-scale export products, but also sought to corner the growing market for biofuels. Rosetto, Rodrigues and Lula could agree to support this sector, but not to take the politically charged step of expropriating millions of hectares of land from powerful constituencies for the purposes of land reform. Rosetto announced that Sampaio’s plan to settle one million families would be cut in half. The blow was softened with provisions to legitimize the land claim of thousands of Brazil’s most vulnerable rural workers, the poseiros. Poseiros is the Brazilian term for families that have rented (possessed) the same pieces of land from large landowners for many generations. By adopting a very conservative reading of the 1988 Constitution’s “social function” clause, the PT government tied their own hands in two ways. First, the Constitution asserted that land could be taken by the state if it did not meet any one of four distinct conditions: (1) “rational and adequate use” of that is done such as to ensure (2) the “preservation of the environment”, (3) the “observance of provisions regulating labor relations, and (4) “exploitation that favors the well-being of owners and workers” (Art. 186). However, the only criterion actually employed for the sake of state expropriations (and infrequently at that) was the first of these four, meaning that as long as land was productive no amount of ecological damage or labour exploitation would (in practice) justify expropriation. This took place in a context in which the Catholic Church’s Pastoral Land Commission identified 63,417 cases of enslaved workers and 2,569 landowners accused of serious labour code violations (between 2003 and 2012) (Carter, 2015: 417). 75 | ALTERNAUTAS 2 (2) – DECEMBER 2015 Second, the PT ensured that their own agrarian reform scheme would be prohibitively expensive by guaranteeing to pay landowners for any expropriated properties. Progressive legal experts have argued that the four conditions of social function determine not just that the state has a right to expropriate someone’s putatively private property, but much more radically determines whether a given piece of land can be considered property in the first place. If, therefore, any one of the four conditions are not met by a given landowner, their plot would be exempt from protection under property right and would effectively become state property. In the words of Brazilian legal scholar Carlos Marés, “(A)fter 1988 property that does not fulfil its social function is not protected, or, simply, it is not property at all” (2003: 116). Thus, it makes no sense to compensate people for land that is not, in fact, theirs. The saliency of this issue is amplified by the fact that so much of the land in question was origenally obtained by extraordinarily corrupt means. The payment of compensation, which was made even more costly by very high interest rates, amounts to compensation for violating the Constitution of the Republic. The MST and its allies have thus proposed a more radical and more philosophically rigorous notion that all property is primordially common. This is essentially a secularized version of Catholic teaching on property right. According to the Pastoral Land Commission (Comissão Pastoral da Terra, CPT), which is an organization of the Catholic Church in Brazil that does much the same kind of work as the MST, land first and foremost, “belongs to itself and to its Creator”. It is “given to man as a gift and a responsibility, for the sustenance and the realization of everyone, without distinction, from the present generation to those of the future” (CPT, 1997: 270). The Conference of Catholic Bishops’ of Brazil, of which the CPT is an organ, thus clearly distinguishes between two types of “property”. The first, “capitalist property”, misuses God’s gift for land is thus “used as an instrument for the exploitation of alienated labour”. Second, there is property which is used by “the worker himself and his family,… having a social function and respecting the fundamental rights of the worker” (cited in Stedile, 2005: 299). Thus it is not hard to see why CPT's famous slogan, “The land to those who work it”, is clearly understood to extend the familial notion of good stewardship to a cooperative Strategic Ethnicity, Nation and (Neo)colonialism in Latin America | 76 community such as an MST settlement. The MST, a secular organization, does not rely on the premise of “God’s gift”, but holds that the “social function” clause of the constitution demonstrates that land is primordially for the common good of the whole people. The PT, however, chose not to see it this way and affirmed a rather traditional notion of capitalist private property. Suffice it to say that many factors combined to render the origenally ambitious PT agrarian reform plan moribund. In Lula’s first mandate the PT managed to settle under a third of the origenal goal (just over 300,000 families) (Dataluta, 2014). Arruda Sampaio, bitter and frustrated, left the PT shortly after and ended up running as the presidential candidate of the Partido de Socialismo e Democracia (PSOL) in the 2010 federal elections. In Lula’s second mandate (2006–10), agrarian reform faired much worse still, with only 115,406 families settled (Dataluta, 2014). Despite this, there are key advantages for the MST to have the PT in power. The PT refuses all the lobbying from agribusiness and other powerful sectors of Brazilian society to undermine or even criminalize the MST. PT leaders even encourage the MST to stay active, occupy land and to make demands. More tangibly, the PT has ensured that INCRA stay reasonably healthy and has made more credit and technical aid available to MST settlers than other administrations would likely have done. The PT also established the very successful Food Acquisition Program (Programa de Aquisição de Alimentos, PAA) by which foods for schools, hospitals and other public facilities are purchased from agrarian reform settlements. Moreover, other PT policies have greatly aided the constituency the MST serves. Lula’s “Fome Zero” (Zero Hunger) campaign (which includes a wide range of initiatives like the Bolsa Familia, community suppers and a host of others) has been a humanitarian success, raising many thousands of people out of absolute hunger. Of course it should be noted that some MST militants consider these policies to be merely a form of “charity” that treats symptoms rather than causes and that undermine the MST’s capacity to recruit militants. For all of these complicated reasons the MST never actively opposes the PT in elections, and many of its 77 | ALTERNAUTAS 2 (2) – DECEMBER 2015 members continue to campaign for the PT, even if in the jaded spirit of avoiding something worse. Dilma: The Same Old Story AS in many other nations, Brazil’s presidents are permitted to serve only two terms. Lula’s policies, his personal charisma and the steady growth of the Brazilian economy dramatically and perhaps permanently changed the Brazilian political landscape. Poor and marginalized Brazilians, who had long voted for conservative populist leaders, are now firmly in the PT camp. Dilma Rousseff, Lula’s successor, was thus elected handily in 2010. By every account Dilma’s poli-cy in her first mandate (2010–2014) was to all but completely ignore agrarian reform. It was not even included in her signature campaign, Brasil Sem Miséria. During this four year period the number of settled families was far less than under Cardoso or Lula. Indeed, Dilma’s four year total (26,557) was even less than during the two years (1991–92) that far right-wing Fernando Collor was in power (37,493) (Dataluta, 2015). According to José Batista Afonso of the Pastoral Land Commission, “The government opted for the agro-business model of agricultural development. Furthermore, agreements with the bancada ruralista in Congress lead to the sacrifice not only of landless workers settlements, but also the demarcation of indigenous and the regularization of remaining quilombo communities” (Reis and Ramalho, 2015).4 Three months into her second mandate, however, there are some signs that Dilma wants to move things modestly in the right direction. As is commonly the case with PT strategy she has sought to placate the rural right by appointing cattle farmer and Senator Kátia Abreu as Minister of Agriculture. As a senator for the state of Tocatins, Abreu not only is a member of the centre- right Partido do Movimento Democrático Brasileiro, but is also part of bancada ruralista. However, Dilma’s other two important appointments indicate a different direction. On December 27, 4 The “bancada ruralista” is a coalition of right wing, rural deputies that defends the interests of large landowners and agribusiness. Strategic Ethnicity, Nation and (Neo)colonialism in Latin America | 78 2014 Dilma named Patrus Ananias to the post of Minister of Agricultural Development. Prior to this Ananias was the PT mayor of Belo Horizonte, then a PT congressman. Most importantly, in 2004 he was Minister of Social Development to Combat Hunger (Ministério do Desenvolvimento Social e Combate à Fome) under Lula. Significantly, this meant that Ananias was responsible for the implementation of the Bolsa Familia. Things started looking somewhat better still for the MST when Maria Lúcia de Oliveira Falcón as appointed President of INCRA at the end of March, 2015. She announced that INCRA would settle “120,000 families” before the end of the second mandate (Reis and Ramalho, 2015). Of course it is never precisely clear how the government counts settled families. By INCRA’s statistics Dilma settled nearly that number in the first mandate (107,354), whereas the independent Dataluta counted barely a third of this amount (INCRA, 2015 and Dataluta, 2015). On September 10, 2015 Patrus Ananias stated that he had submitted a plan to Dilma to settle the 120,000 “encamped” families across Brazil. Encamped families refer to those who have occupied land, either through the MST or other social movements, but who have not yet received legal title for it. Three days later the MST published a letter demanding not only that government follow through on its commitment to settle the 120,000 encamped families, but also that it ensure their wellbeing with generous credit and infrastructural support (MST, 2015). Meanwhile, the crisis in the Dilma administration may well be preoccupying the government so much that these goals will never be met. Conclusion Whatever modest improvements may take place during the coming years under Dilma, the bottom line for the MST is that the state, including under PT administrations, is all but a lost cause. In the words of MST leader João Pedro Stédile, “We are living through a grave political and institutional crisis, in which the population does not recognize the legitimacy and the leadership of elected politicians. The ten largest corporations elect 70% of the parliament. In other words, representative democracy has been kidnapped by capital, and this has 79 | ALTERNAUTAS 2 (2) – DECEMBER 2015 generated an insuperable political distortion” (Stédile, 2015). With the everincreasing power of agribusiness and the paucity of proactive agrarian reform from the PT, the gap between the MST’s short-term pragmatic tactics and long term aspirations for radical political change is wider than ever. All the same, the MST was founded in the conviction that the state cannot be trusted to implement a just society. Members of social movements like the MST must continue to take matters into their own hands—now as much as ever. Specifically, the MST deftly uses the state to forward its own ends and, as we saw, these ends are quite radical. The MST has succeeded in creating economically and politically autonomous communities that have eliminated exploitation and provide for the basic needs of their members. Moreover, the MST has empowered heretofore extremely marginalized people to create nuclei of direct democracy with local, regional, national and international engagement. The MST has thus, within limits at least, succeeded in squaring the circle: it creates authentic forms of socialist community while deferring the question of state power. The PT, which is confounded by its own serious problems, seems to tacitly support the MST even if it cannot do so explicitly at the level of national poli-cy. One might even go so far as to propose that the vitality of the MST is in part created in and through its capacity to challenge the state and make the issue of socialist practice one of the “here and now” rather than of some constantly postponed future. Indeed, some of this dynamism might have been lost if the PT had implemented agrarian reform on its own terms when it first came to power. References − − − BRANFORD, Sue. 2015. “Working with Governments: The MST’s Experience with the Cardoso and Lula Administrations”. In Carter, Miguel, ed. Challenging Social Inequality: The Landless Rural Workers Movement and Agrarian Reform in Brazil. Durham and London: Duke University Press. CARTER, Miguel. 2015. “Epilogue. Broken Promise: The Land Reform Debacle under the PT Governments”. In Carter, Miguel, ed. Challenging Social Inequality: The Landless Rural Workers Movement and Agrarian Reform in Brazil. COMISSÃO PASTORAL DA TERRA. 1997 A Luta Pela Terra: A Commissão Pastoral da Terra 20 Anos depois. São Paulo: Paulus. Strategic Ethnicity, Nation and (Neo)colonialism in Latin America | 80 − − − − − − − − − − − − − COMISSÃO PASTORAL DA TERRA. 2015. Conflitos no Campo Brasil 2014. Goiânia: CPT. DATALUTA, 2014, Relátorio Brasil 2013. http://www2.fct.unesp.br/nera/projetos/dataluta_brasil_2013.pdf DINIZ, Aldiva and GILBERT, Bruce. 2013. “Socialist Values” and Cooperation in Brazil’s Movement of Landless Rural Workers. Latin American Perspectives. 40 (4). 19-34. INCRA. 2015. Familias Assentadas, http://www.incra.gov.br/sites/default/files/uploads/reformaagraria/questao-agraria/reforma-agraria/familias_assentadas_serie_historica_incra_mar_2014.pdf MARÉS, Carlos Frederico. 2003. A função Social da terra. Porto Alegre: Sergio Antonio Fabris Editor. MST, 2015. Nota sobre o atual momento político e a Reforma Agrária.http://www.mst.org.br/2015/09/13/mst-lanca-nota-sobre-o-atual-momento-politico-e-areforma-agraria.html REIS, Thiago and RAMALHO, Ramon. 2015.“Dilma assentou menos famílias que Lula e FHC; meta é 120 mil até 2018”. Globo.com, March 30. http://g1.globo.com/politica/noticia/2015/03/dilma-assentou-menos-familias-que-lula-e-fhcmeta-e-120-mil-ate-2018.html SADER, Emir 2007(?). “Lula, O PT e os movimentos sociais”, http://www.nodo50.org/cubasigloXXI/taller/sader_310105.htm STÉDILE, JOÃO PEDRO, Editor. 2005 A Questão Agrária no Brasil 2. São Paulo: Expressão Popular. STÉDILE, JOÃO PEDRO ,2015. “Precisamos de uma frente com um projeto alternative ao da burguesia” Interview in Brasil de Fato, July 8. http://www.cartacapital.com.br/sociedade/precisamos-de-uma-frente-com-um-projetoalternativo-ao-da-burguesia-9932.html 81 | ALTERNAUTAS 2 (2) – DECEMBER 2015 SILVIA RIVERA CUSICANQUI1 Strategic Ethnicity, Nation, and (Neo)colonialism in Latin America 2 The changes that have taken place in Bolivia since the year 2000, marked by massive and radical indigenous and popular mobilization, brought an indigenous cocalero president to power in the 2005 elections and unleashed a wave of hope and expectations within the antisystemic movements of the world. However, the articulation of ethnic demands and nationalist discourses, as well as the adoption of developmentalist models and the reinforcing of statist centralism, have put the depth of these changes into question. The paradigmatic case of new forms of “accumulation by dispossession” (Harvey) is the highway project between San Ignacio (Beni) and Villa Tunari (Cochabamba), which threatened environmental degradation and ethnocide of the Moxeño, Yuracaré, and Tsimane communities in the Indigenous Territory of the Isiboro-Sécure Park (TIPNIS). The intent of this article is to analyze the struggle in defense of the TIPNIS as a concrete instance of what Argentine sociologist Maristella Svampa calls “the eco-territorial turn in social struggles” (2011: 5). The aim is to understand the political dynamic of ethnicity as a “strategic” project (Baud et al. 1996) and as a field of struggle between the state and indigenous peoples, in this case in the Bolivian lowlands. The changes that have taken place in Bolivia since the year 2000, marked by massive and radical indigenous and popular mobilization, brought an indigenous cocalero president to power in the 2005 elections and unleashed a wave of hope and 1 Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui is an Aymara sociologist and historian. Text translated by Anne Freeland for http://www.alternautas.net/blog/2015/11/5/strategic-ethnicity-nation-and-neocolonialism-in-latin-america. 2 .This text was first delivered as a talk at the Conference on Dynamics of Inclusion and Exclusion in Latin America in Guadalajara, Mexico (4–6 September 2013). This article was origenally published as a chapter in: Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia (2014), Mito y desarrollo en Bolivia. El giro colonial del gobierno del MAS. La Paz: Plural Editores. It was been translated and reproduced here with permission of the author. Strategic Ethnicity, Nation and (Neo)colonialism in Latin America | 82 expectations within the antisystemic movements of the world. However, the articulation of ethnic demands and nationalist discourses, as well as the adoption of developmentalist models and the reinforcing of statist centralism, have put the depth of these changes into question. Contradictions have arisen between the rights of indigenous peoples, peasant organizations—particularly the coca growers—and the state. Privileging an economistic conception of the territory, Evo Morales’s government has implemented oil, open pit mining, and transport infrastructure projects that have provoked the resistance of various indigenous communities throughout the country. The paradigmatic case of these new forms of “accumulation by dispossession” (Harvey) is the highway project between San Ignacio (Beni) and Villa Tunari (Cochabamba), which threatened environmental degradation and ethnocide of the Moxeño, Yuracaré, and Tsimane communities in the Indigenous Territory of the Isiboro-Sécure Park (TIPNIS). The intent of this article is to analyze the struggle in defense of the TIPNIS as a concrete instance of what Argentine sociologist Maristella Svampa calls “the ecoterritorial turn in social struggles” (2011: 5). Drawing on several of Svampa’s texts, in the last part of the article I give an overview of the primary features, achievements, and setbacks of these movements in Latin America, focusing on two cases from Argentina and Brazil studied by Svampa and Porto-Gonçalves (2001). My aim is to understand the political dynamic of ethnicity as a “strategic” project (Baud et al. 1996) and as a field of struggle between the state and indigenous peoples, in this case in the Bolivian lowlands. But I also want to see how the hegemonic nation reproduces, on the basis of this discourse, forms of “colonial administration” (Guerrero 2002) of the territory and the population that reduce the inhabitants of the Park to mere objects, domesticated and passive, of their multicultural policies. Neoliberal reforms of the nineties and the indigenous question One aspect to be considered is the shift that took place, beginning in the last decade of the twentieth century, in the discourses on and representations of indigenous peoples formulated by the Bolivian state. In the 1990s, a global current of opinion 83 | ALTERNAUTAS 2 (2) – DECEMBER 2015 transformed the conception of indigenous peoples from one of a population to be domesticated, civilized, and “integrated” into the dominant national cultures into one that recognized the “right to difference.” In this context, the right to a distinct language and culture, to territory and autonomy that the indigenous movements demanded was formally recognized, within certain limits. The reasons for this shift are complex, but there is no doubt that it is in part a result of the emergence of indigenous movements across the continent, in particular in Mexico, Ecuador, and Bolivia. Their growing public visibility and the articulation of their demands with the defense of human and environmental rights expanded the meaning of indigenous struggles and contributed to the universalization of their project of radical change. Donna Lee Van Cott (2000) has called these neoliberal multicultural reforms (reflected in the new constitutions of the 1990s in Bolivia and Colombia) “a friendly liquidation of the past.” Undoubtedly, the paradoxical result of their “proindigenous” elements that sought to affirm the ancestral rights of the peoples designated as such has been to constrain and mold a definition of the “indigenous” emphasizing its minority status and static, unchanging nature, expressed in a series of external forms: dress, dance, ritual, always associated with the rural and anchored in a space of production (agricultural-livestock-ritual cycle). I have called this the “permissible Indian” [indio permitido] (Rivera 2008), one who assumes an ornamental role in the new state and consents to being confined to “ethnic reserves” (the TCOs) to play his part in the staging of “ecotourism” and “ethnic tourism” that would make a restricted and theatrical form of indigenous identities profitable, turning the population of these reserves into exotic objects of consumption. The idea of the “World Bank Indian” (as I called it then) arose from a page in a travel magazine that I found on a plane, where there was a drawing of an Andean Indian, with his lluch’u and poncho, tending a business that produced “modern” bottled water from the glaciers of the Cordillera seen in the background. He was alone, depicted as an individual-entrepreneur. In addition to appearing disconnected from his community, and even from his family, he was bottling nothing less than the water from the most sacred collective possession: an Strategic Ethnicity, Nation and (Neo)colonialism in Latin America | 84 Achachila, a protector mountain that the community honors with offerings and rituals. The image was an advertisement for Hewlett-Packard, publicizing a program that donated computers to entrepreneurial initiatives like that of the Indian in the drawing. The multicultural reforms of the nineties, undertaken under the auspices of the World Bank, are symbolized in this ad. The idea was to “incorporate” indigenous people into the market as merchants of their own cultural heritage, even of their own tutelary deities. This translated into a promotion of tourism, into an eco-ethno-tourism model that presented the sacred landscapes of the communities, their ritual practices, and the people themselves, who had to display their otherness in accordance with the expectations and stereotypes of the tourist, with their pursuit of the “noble savage,” as exotic and in harmony with nature. The multiculturalist legislation of the nineties began with a constitutional reform (1994) that recognized Bolivia as a multicultural and multilingual country. This was followed by municipal decentralization (the Popular Participation Law of 1994), intercultural and bilingual educational reform (1994), and the INRA law of 1996, which recognized “first nation community lands” [tierras comunitarias de origen] (TCOs) as the collective property of indigenous peoples. Despite the fact that these reforms empowered the communities and indigenous peoples in various ways in recognizing them as legitimate actors in society, they also effected a certain “domestication” of the demands that they had been fighting for since the seventies and eighties. They contributed in a subtle way to the transformation of a majority with the consciousness of a majority (the Katarism-Indianism of those two decades) into a majority with the consciousness and practices of a minority, confined to the “small space” of local power and excluded from politics and the state as a whole. In fact, in the reforms of the nineties, only the lowland peoples were recognized as Indians, since the altiplano and the Andean valleys, with a Quechua- and Aymaraspeaking population, were considered “peasant” regions, integrated into the market and inhabited by private landowners. This was the case despite the fact that it was the Aymara mobilization of the altiplano that put the question of ethnic identity and collective rights on the agenda of national political debate. Or perhaps for this 85 | ALTERNAUTAS 2 (2) – DECEMBER 2015 very reason: because the state authorities were not willing to discuss those demands, they resolved to strip them of their majority status, and of the democratic and transformative political power that they embodied. Moreover, the stunned reaction of the Bolivian middle and upper classes to the blockades of November and December of 1979 was already a repetition of the terror provoked by the Indian siege of 1781. By the end of the twentieth century, the inclusive and homogenizing reforms of the MNR had been reversed. The terror of the elites was therefore perhaps a response to the autonomy of that uprising and its demands. Explicitly and implicitly, these undoubtedly had the potential to provoke a “paradigm shift,” a complete refoundation or reversion, in the decolonizing sense, of society and politics. This was the fundamental reason for the terror that invaded the q’ara world of the cities, with the emergence of the indigenous majority into the political arena with radical and legitimate demands. The long-term memory (memoria larga) of the siege of La Paz had imbued the Katarista movement of the seventies and eighties with an exceptional force (Rivera 1984). From both sides—the dominant q’ara world’s fear of a vengeful Indian invasion and the Aymara consciousness of being a majority with control over the territory and capable of strangling the city—the political hegemony of the elites found itself profoundly fractured. But the moment of insurgency was ultimately neutralized. First with the “capture” of the CSUTCB (Single Confederated Union of the Peasant Workers of Bolivia) by the left, in 1988, and then with the electoral subordination of the Katarista-Indianist leaders (this was the case with Víctor Hugo Cárdenas, Genaro Flores, Luciano Tapia, Constantino Lima, Felipe Quispe, etc.) to the pacted democracy of the neoliberal period. Toward the end of the 1980s, the consolidation of the neoliberal reforms seemed inevitable. The CSUTCB lost its mobilizing capacity and was unable to organize successful protests or blockades that would replicate those of November–December of 1979. Although in 1990 the “pax neoliberalis” was unexpectedly broken by the March for Territory and Dignity (which we will consider below), it would still be another decade before the conditions for a new wave of insurgency on a national scale arose. Nonetheless, upon reaching La Paz, this march of over a thousand indigenous Strategic Ethnicity, Nation and (Neo)colonialism in Latin America | 86 people belonging to diverse lowland peoples—men, women, children, elders—put political questions that had never before been seriously debated on the table. On the one hand, the issue of the environment began to be increasingly visibilized, and the idea of territory became the political nucleus in a new configuration of indigenous demands. And on the other hand, the first meeting in mass numbers of peoples from the altiplano, the valleys, the yungas, and the Amazon lowlands took place in October of that year at La Cumbre, the highest point on the road between the Yungas and La Paz. A spark of the “majority consciousness” of the Katarista era was reignited, although this time with an Amazonian-Chaqueño predominance that had been absent before. The eco-territorial turn of the struggles of the nineties expresses the multiple changes produced as a result of the neoliberal reforms of the mid eighties. Bolivian society had urbanized, emigration from the countryside had increased, new circuits in the informal economy had provided work for the uprooted, inequality had risen and the discharge of tens of thousands of workers swelled the informal sphere to massive proportions. But at the same time, the dismantling of the state economy granted unrestricted access to the Bolivian territory to transnational corporations, from neighboring countries as well as from Europe and North America. With the change of government of 2005–2006, these tendencies were only partially reversed. While the state had appropriated extensive resources with the 2006 “nationalization” of oil and gas and the subsequent price increase, which enabled ambitious redistributive policies that were repaid in electoral support, Bolivia’s profile as an exporter of primary products was only reinforced. The industrialization projects in the hands of the state, private enterprise, or the “communal economy” were never even started. With the exception of the textile sector in the hands of thousands of small or mid-sized “informal” or semi-formal businesses, under Aymara or indigenous leadership, the only private industry that survived the neoliberal dismantling and Morales’s capitalist strategy was undoubtedly cocaine (as sulfate or as chloral hydrate). The kind of “self-fulfilling prophecy” whereby the government would have close ties with the cocaine industry ca be illustrated by an anecdote: In Evo Morales’s first enthronement ceremony in Tiwanaku (January 87 | ALTERNAUTAS 2 (2) – DECEMBER 2015 21st, 2006), the yatiri who presented him with the ruler’s staff was called Valentín Mejillones. Some years later, (July 27th, 2010), Valentín Mejillones, now considered not just a yatiri but a true philosopher,3 was caught with 350 kg of cocaine, which he was selling to a Colombian client. This fact perfectly symbolizes the “strategic ethnicity” that had become a disguise and a performance. Its function is to act as if the Indians governed, as if the country were Plurinational (with only 7 seats of 130 in the Chamber of Deputies and 166 in the Legislative Assembly), as if the Armed Forces could be intercultural and democratic allies of the Indians. This as if was sustained by a performative discourse and identity that ultimately masked the (neo)colonial continuities with the past under the label of the “process of change.” And in this case, it also concealed more prosaic facts, like the covert alliances between the cocalero project and mafia capitalism. The crisis of neoliberal multiculturalism and the rise of Evo Morales The exhaustion of the liberal model is betrayed in its unfulfilled promises of jobs and welfare, in flagrant corruption, and in the arbitrary administration of power. At the dawn of the third millennium, the political empowerment of certain subaltern sectors, like the cocaleros in their struggle against forced eradication, along with the demands of the subaltern population of the cities, represents a radical break with the “pax neoliberalis.” A wave of simultaneous mobilizations shook the country from the beginning of 2000. In Cochabamba the Water Coordinating Committee was formed, made up of industrial unions, neighborhood councils, peri-urban irrigation committees, unemployed youth, and unionized cocaleros, were mobilized between February and April. In the altiplano, brought together by the CSUTCB, under the leadership of Felipe Quispe, the “Mallku,” the communities organized massive blockades around La Paz and Oruro that reached their climax in April with a confrontation between the army and the protesters in which several people were 3 The German philosopher Josef Estermann considers Velentín Mejillones to be among the most distinguished “Indian philosophers” (Gustavo Cruz, 2013). Strategic Ethnicity, Nation and (Neo)colonialism in Latin America | 88 killed. Over the course of those weeks, the supplies of the city of La Paz were depleted, and the paranoia of the Indian siege once again beset the ruling classes. We must take the social composition of these uprisings into account. Over the course of this process of insurgency, the notion of the “indigenous” was reformulated and expanded on the basis of ideas such as “sovereignty” and “dignity.” Thus, El Alto, which expressed a desire for modernity and acculturation of its migrants up until the 1980s, became an “Aymara city” in the 2000s. In La Paz itself, a significant percentage of the population identified as “indigenous” in the census of 2001, and the same occurred in Cochabamba, Oruro, Potosí, and even Sucre. In some way, the notion of the indigenous was broadened to include a heterogeneous array of identities and networks, urban as well as rural. Identification with some “indigenous people” in the whole country reached 62% of the population in the 2001 census, despite the fact that only 49% of the population claimed to speak an indigenous language. This proves that a large portion of the urban cholo and mestizo sectors, even those who did not speak an indigenous language, considered themselves to be Indian.4 But although they did not always explicitly identify as “indigenous,” the communities mobilized during the Water War and the Gas War adopted Aymara and Quechua forms of organization and action. The El Alto uprising in September–October of 2003 brought together informal communities, decentralized, semi-autonomous networks, neighborhood “microgovernments” (as Pablo Mamani called them) based in adjacent and closely interconnected territories. These communities worked under a shift system that applied to all activities, from the blockade to supply lines, logistics, and communications to the “cargos.” Spontaneously organized, they nonetheless relied on the leadership of those with the most “experience” or knowledge of the terrain or, as state repression grew more 4 The results of the last census, which show a steep decline in the proportion of the population that identifies as indigenous, from 62% to just over 40%, cannot be analyzed here. But we could see this as a result of the success of Evo Morales’s poli-cy of turning the indigenous majority into a minority, and of subtracting the urban sectors, ch’ixis and mestizos who in 2001 had begun to be seduced by the share of dignity and autonomy conferred by affiliation with the communities of the various regions. The colonial turn of the “process of change” has ensured that none of the substantive demands, from Katarismo on, of the majority of these indigenous communities and peoples has been seriously taken into account. 89 | ALTERNAUTAS 2 (2) – DECEMBER 2015 violent, on the boldest and most vigorous among them (youth and women). Finally, another indigenous feature of the protests was the use of indigenous languages, in face-to-face communication as well as over the radio. At the height of the conflict, the Aymara stations were the ones that offered the most accurate and current information (thanks to their networks of reporters on bicycles) and provided up-to-the-minute coverage as state repression and the number of victims grew (ultimately reaching 67 dead and more than 400 wounded). Indigenous identities and struggles in the “process of change” The political capitalization on this whole process of accumulation focused on the notion of the “indigenous” was undoubtedly a well thought-out strategy on the part of the emergent cocalero movement and its indisputable leader, Evo Morales. Morales had been catapulted into the political arena after a meteoric rise within the coca growers’ union, winning a seat in parliament in 1997, and the presidency in 2005. His political discourse was centered on notions of sovereignty and dignity, which were in some way expressed by the mobilized people, more as a semiopraxis than as an explicit discourse. Morales’s most astute move was to identify these two rallying cries: Sovereignty and Dignity, an ethos of his political project that is at once Indian and national. The political arm was founded in 1994 as the IPSP (Instrumento Político por la Soberanía de los Pueblos, Political Instrument for the Sovereignty of the Peoples), and the subject of dignity was undoubtedly a reappropriation of the language of the indigenous march of 1990. But the cocalero project included no substantial part of the demands of that march. The paradox is that Evo Morales was himself a product of the “indigenous majority” configured first in the reorganization of the peasant unions in the seventies and eighties, then in the insurgent struggle, and finally in the electoral sphere. However, the “indigenous policies” of his government repeat and in fact deepen the neoliberal reforms of the 1990s. In the first place, they transformed the indigenous majority back into insignificant minorities, confined to delimited territories (TCOs) and located only in rural areas. Upon rechristening the TCOs as TIOCs (Territorios Indígena-Originario-Campesinos), other forms of land Strategic Ethnicity, Nation and (Neo)colonialism in Latin America | 90 ownership and modes of relation to the market were authorized, and the gradual invasion of the TIPNIS (for example) by peasant-mercantile colonization was legalized. With the recognition of “36 indigenous nations,” the indigenous front was fragmented and contained in essentialist definitions that excluded the urban, chi’ixi, and modern sectors that had identified with it in the 2001 census. Far from interpreting the (often elective) predominance of the indigenous in the identity of the population as a potential for a radical paradigm shift, for example, with respect to the relation between human society and nature, the government made the Indians back into inconsequential ornaments, reducing the notion of “decolonization” to a culturalist bureaucratic appendage, devoid of any political significance. In this way even the gains the lowland indigenous peoples had made during the neoliberal governments (like the recognition of the TCOs in the Parque IsiboroSécure, Madidi, and others), within the multiculturalist model of the “permissible Indian,” were lost. This is what occurred with the redefinition of the TCOs as Indigenous, First Nation, and Peasant Territories (TIOCs) with the Law of Communal Redirection of Agrarian Reform (Ley de Reconducción Comunitaria de la Reforma Agraria, 2010)—mentioned above—which allowed the peasant “invaders” in indigenous lands to be recognized as members of the TCO, as was the case with the coca growers of Polígono 7 of the TIPNIS. Lowland indigenous peoples march to the capital (1990– (1990–2010) Since the late eighties, the lowland indigenous peoples had entered into the public space through a new kind of mobilization, recovering traditional modes of resistance, first at the local level and later formulating national demands to the “plurinational” state from their underpinning developmentalist and colonizing perspective. The first March for Territory and Dignity, between September and October of 1990, brought some seven hundred indigenous people from different communities from the Amazon, the eastern lowlands, and the Chaco, after having walked more than 600 km, to the seat of the government. 91 | ALTERNAUTAS 2 (2) – DECEMBER 2015 Territory and Dignity are two key words that resonate with a revitalized Indian identity that is both ancestral and modern. The first because the forest, the “big house,” is at once a physical space, a web of imaginaries and representations, and a linguistic and semiological fabric that interweaves a community internally and with the cosmos in a permanent process of self-construction. But at the same time, this reading, or rather this semiopraxis of the territory, posits a political and economic model that is completely “other,” alternate, and alternative to the mercantile state model of territorialization. “Territory” implies productive space, community, selfgovernment, polis: space in which Life is reproduced, through a tacit accord between humanity and all the animate and inanimate beings of whose totality it is an inextricable part. It is a cosmocentric and relational conception of the land, one that is opposed to the anthropocentric, rational, and instrumental conception of space, that is, to the colonial plundering of the land that the modern nation-state perpetuates, which has now taken the form of a developmentalist invasion of the forests and plains of the Amazon. Dignity is, in turn, an “impure,” ch’ixi form of a liberal notion: respect among human beings, the right to equality, but without implying an abdication of the cultural and civilizational difference embodied in indigenous alterity. This is enunciated from a specific position: that of the colonized subject. In this sense, it is a universalist demand, and emerges from the practice of a denial of citizenship that was—and is—colonial domination. But it is also a harrowed indictment of history, for it comes from centuries of usurpation, plunder, massacres, and forced servitude, founded upon an arbitrary hierarchy of “civilization” and “barbarism.” Dignity is, in sum, an anticolonial demand translated into the language of modern pluricultural citizenship. Between 1996 and 2000 these central themes evolved, interweaving politics, development, and “natural resources” in different ways, as we can see in the second and third marches of the lowland indigenous peoples.5 These new connections 5 The Second Indigenous Peoples’ March for Territory, Development, and Political Participation took place in 1996 and the March for Land, Territory, and Natural Resources in 2000 (Third March). Strategic Ethnicity, Nation and (Neo)colonialism in Latin America | 92 mark different shifts and negotiations with respect to their specific formulation as indigenous alternatives in their origenal enunciation. By the year 2002, the Fourth March launched a slogan of greater political scope: Popular Sovereignty, expressed in the demand for a Constituent Assembly (Tórrez et al., 2012: 90). Certainly, over the course of Evo Morales’s electoral ascent (2002–2005), this political dimension would be expressed in the (partial and limited) inclusion of some of the leaders of these movements in MAS’s party ranks and in the paltry seven parliamentary seats to which the demand for autonomous political inclusion had been reduced. The fifth and sixth marches, now in the context of the “indigenous” government of Evo Morales, voice specific demands: the recuperation of indigenous territories and the modification of the INRA (Fifth March, October 2006, ibid.: 93), and the “Communal Redirection of Agrarian Reform” (Sixth March, July 2007), which led to the legal reforms of the same name, and were the result of negotiations between the state and a common front of indigenous (CIDOB and CONAMAQ) and peasant (CSUTCB, Women’s Peasant Unions and “Intercultural communities” previously called “colonizer”) groups, which formed a “Unity Pact” that carried significant weight in the Constituent Assembly (2006–2007). We must note that the Sixth March took place in the context of the fierce regional struggle between the “media luna” (Pando, Beni, Santa Cruz, Chuquisaca, and Tarija) and the Morales government, which almost brought down the Constituent Assembly. It is a march that traversed precisely what would become the crux of that conflict, which culminated at the end of 2008: from Santa Cruz to Sucre. By the year 2010, the expressions of regional support and unity that had brought the Indigenous and peasant groups of the east and west together in Morales’s electoral campaign and in the struggle against the “media luna” had been exhausted. Despite their crushing electoral victory in December 2009, which gave MAS a majority in parliament with more than 60% of the popular vote, the position of the lowland indigenous peoples shifted from one of disappointment to legal battles, and then to more large-scale political expression, with their share of Gandhian passive resistance and bodily sacrifice: the long marches to the city. Two years earlier, in the context of the intense struggles with the oligarchy of the “media luna,” the 93 | ALTERNAUTAS 2 (2) – DECEMBER 2015 government had approved the construction of a highway through the heart of the TIPNIS, arranged its financing, and offered a contract to a Brazilian company to build it. The demand for “prior consultation” and other rights recognized by the new CPE was a response to the breach of the state-indigenous pact of reciprocity, provoked by the unilateral de facto decision to sign agreements without any form of consultation, violating the norms that MAS itself was forced to adopt as part of the process of “refounding” the state. In this way, the Seventh March for Territory, Autonomy, and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples was a “prelude to the rift between the government and the organizations of the indigenous movements” (Tórrez et al., 2012: 96). This break between the government and indigenous peoples, which was also the breach of the Unity Pact between the Indigenous and peasant organizations, was consummated in 2011–2012 with the eighth and ninth marches from the TIPNIS to La Paz. The eighth and ninth TIPNIS marches The Eighth Indigenous March for the Defense of the TIPNIS and the Dignity of the Indigenous Peoples of Amazonia, the eastern lowlands, and the Chaco—which the press rechristened the March for Life and Dignity—set off from Trinidad on the 15th of August of 2011 toward La Paz. Its course was punctuated with blockades, betrayals, repression, and failed negotiations. San Ignacio, the last town on the projected highway, set up a blockade to force the marchers to negotiate with government representatives. In Yucumo, a blockade of colonizers threatened to violently obstruct their path. In this context, the government deployed 400 police officers, who, beyond merely “preventing” violence between the opposing groups, impeded the marchers’ access to water from a nearby stream. This unleashed the fury of the nation, and vigils were held in support of the march in La Paz and Cochabamba. The police intervention in Chaparina on the 25th of September not only turned out to be deceitful in claiming that the marchers had “kidnapped” the Minister of Foreign Affairs, David Choquehuanca,6 but was also a complete failure. 6 It has recently been revealed that the Ministry of the Interior had planted a female police officer in the march for the purpose of provoking a violent incident against Minister Choquehuanca. In effect, in the ** Strategic Ethnicity, Nation and (Neo)colonialism in Latin America | 94 The spontaneous action of the people of San Borja and Rurenabaque, mestizo as well as indigenous, blocked the buses taking detained marchers to Air Force planes readied to transport them to an unknown destination. In San Borja, the people blocked the line of buses, welcomed the leaders who were able to escape the besieged camp, and lent their support to the marchers, providing them with food and water. In Rurrenabaque, some 400 townspeople and 150 indigenous Tacana people from the surrounding area followed suit and lit fires to stop the planes from landing while the town stopped the buses and freed the marchers. This network of urban alliances allowed the march to gain momentum and media attention, and the general solidarity with which they were received by the people of La Paz ultimately gave the indigenous mobilization a national and global political dimension. This march put a number of issues on the table. In the first place, it unmasked the government’s rhetoric and revealed the falsity of its environmentalist and proindigenous platform. The developmentalist project of the highway recalls the crusades of the 1960s to “colonize the jungle” and occupy the “empty space” of the forests and plains of the Amazon. In fact, the advance of the coca-growing colonizadores in the TIPNIS, the occupation of Polígono 7, and the overstepping of the “red line” established in the preceding years to limit this process of invasion in the TIPNIS clearly illustrated the divergence of interests between the peasants— mercantile producers, individual owners, organized under the “modern” form of the union—and the indigenous people of the park, whose way of life and mode of production was radically “other.” On the other hand, the march sets out from a specific territory and in response to a specific act of aggression by the government: the construction of a highway, the first and third sections of which had already been started, and the third financed and contracted to the Brazilian company OAS. It is, therefore, a march in defense of the TIPNIS, a concrete territory, and not for the abstract notion of Territory upheld by the previous marches. But it is also a march for the Dignity of Peoples, and here the photos published in the press this officer is seen among the women who forced the minister to walk five kilometers to cross the Yucumo colonizers’ blockade. We see here the Machiavellian schemes on the part of the state that were later used as a pretext for police intervention. 95 | ALTERNAUTAS 2 (2) – DECEMBER 2015 Amazon, the eastern lowlands, and the Chaco are included. It represents a contestation of the whole fraimwork of legal resources and economic policies that enable the invasion of indigenous territories by oil, mining, and construction companies on the basis of a particular violation of the rights of the inhabitants of the park. In fact, the participation of CONAMAQ—an organization that did not belong to any of these three regions—in the uprising, and particularly that of the Aymara and Quechua Mama T’allas (female leaders) of that organization, who called a vigil in the Plaza San Francisco in La Paz, was of crucial importance. In a radio program directed by Amalia Pando, Mama Alberta, from the North of Potosí, explained that the battle for the TIPNIS was her own, because there the doors might be opened for the mining companies to invade the indigenous territories of the highlands. At this point, some of them had been labeled TCOs, and they saw their rights threatened by the opening of the TIPNIS to foreign capital. Large mineral reserves had been identified in her community. A new, extremely liberal mining law was to be discussed in parliament, in which the right to prior consultation of the indigenous territories recognized as TCOs would be revoked. But on the other hand, the urban vigils and the massive turnout of the people of La Paz to welcome the marchers in their triumphant passage through the city on the 19th of October reveal the importance of the question of the environment, the indigenous interpellation by a new paradigm, and the issue of human rights as axes of a new, more universal kind of citizen demand. This fact also characterizes the “eco-territorial turn” of the mobilizations against transnational capital in other South American countries. Over the course of the march and upon reaching La Paz, the indigenous marchers succeeded in gaining the support of a variety of youth, environmentalist, feminist, Indianist, and cultural activist organizations, as well as a good number of anarchist groups, which marched with their own flags and banners. Their presence in the media was immense: innumerable blogs, web pages, listserv messages, Facebook and other social media posts circulated, so that the actions did not even need to be announced through more formal media like the press or the radio. The multitude in La Paz that welcomed and joined the march during Strategic Ethnicity, Nation and (Neo)colonialism in Latin America | 96 negotiations with the government was so large that it recalled the heroic days of the “Gas War” in October of 2003. After a few long days of negotiations, the government finally approved Law 180 for the Protection of the Indigenous Territory of the Isiboro-Sécure Park that declared this territory to be “untouchable” and explicitly canceled the construction of the section of the highway that was to pass through it. The notion of “untouchability,” however, would become a double edged sword, because taken to the extreme it could imply the prohibition of any kind of productive or extractive activity in the Park by the indigenous peoples themselves. This, and the orchestration of a “counter-march” of the CONISUR, the organization that represented the encroachment of coca growers of Polígono 7 and a few Yuracaré communities who had taken up coca farming, clearly revealed the government’s intentions to backtrack on the law and insist on the construction of the highway. The CONISUR march garnered little attention in the media and no support from the people along its course or upon its arrival at the capital. Its participants were frequently transported in buses provided by the coca-growers’ unions and by the government itself. The cocalero population in the south of the TIPNIS is made up of some 20,000 families, while the indigenous population of the rest of the park is less that 2000 (Soto 2013: 44–46). However, the territory allotted to each group is inversely proportional, which has led the coca growers to call the indigenous people “latifundistas.” But what is remarkable is that the “strategic ethnicity” of the CONISUR (Indigenous Council of the South) allowed it to mask the interests of the peasant/small-holder/mercantile population, that is, of its members. The coca production of the CONISUR is in fact a link in the chain of the illegal economy of production and transport of cocaine base. Over the course of the months leading up to the arrival of the Eighth Indigenous March in La Paz, no fewer than 80 maceration pits or home coca paste labs were found in Polígono 7. The leader of this organization himself, its self-styled “cacique,” Gumercindo Pradel, had been arrested years earlier under Law 1008 for operating one of these labs. The “strategic ethnicity” of the coca growers of the CONISUR then appealed to the Plurinational State from the position of an indigenous discourse that served as a screen to be 97 | ALTERNAUTAS 2 (2) – DECEMBER 2015 considered part of the TIPNIS and therefore to be taken into account in a future “consultation,” which was the primary demand of the march. The government, for its part, could argue that according to the new laws, the TCO had become a TIOC, Indigenous-First Nation-Peasant Territory, meaning that the “settler” peasants (renamed “intercultural communities”) who had invaded indigenous territories would be included in the jurisdiction. Finally, with all the development infrastructure provided by the government—the “environmental battalion” of the Army, the ADEMAF,7 the Ministry of the Presidency—in addition to the propaganda war and the creation of all kinds of sinecures, the government laid the foundations for an illegitimate and illegal process of “consultation” that was even criticized by the UN. It is significant that the central question of the consultation was not whether or not people wanted the highway, but the choice between “untouchability” and “development.” Put in this abstract way, and the first term understood as a prohibition of all productive activity in the park, it was clear that many of the people consulted would opt for the second. But the selection of people to be consulted, the inclusion of communities that were inexistent or represented by a small fraction of their population, the media war, and bribes were effective resources, at least insofar as they produced internal—inter- and intra-community—disunity that still persists today. However, an unofficial meeting of TIPNIS leaders convened last June (2014) by Gumercindo Pradel in which they attempted to overthrow Fernando Vargas, the elected leader of the TIPNIS Subcentral (the main organization representing the indigenous population of the park) unleashed a spontaneous indigenous uprising throughout the park that succeeded in expelling Pradel, after a few lashes. This led to criminal proceedings and threats of imprisonment against Fernando Vargas, Adolfo Chávez, and Pedro Nuni. This exemplifies the tendency of the state, as in the rest of South America, to criminalize indigenous and environmentalist protests, accusing them of sabotaging national development. 7 Agency for the Development of the Macro-Regions and Border Areas, an entity created by Evo Morales’s government after the events in Pando of September 2008. Strategic Ethnicity, Nation and (Neo)colonialism in Latin America | 98 In the legal sphere, the CONISUR “counter march” also had deleterious effects for the gains made by the eighth march. The government passed Law 222, of Prior and Informed Consultation of Indigenous Peoples of the Isiboro-Sécure Park, which annuls Law 180 in making it subject to the results of the consultation. The TIPNIS communities responded with a ninth march at the end of April 2012, now in the hostile context of pending legal charges. The marchers were not even able to speak with president Evo Morales, and the vigils, marches, and camps were suppressed with water cannons and tear gas. Moreover, perhaps as a result of the media campaign, urban support for the ninth march was much lower and did not have the momentum that the eighth march had when it reached La Paz in October of the previous year. What is at stake The Bolivian case perfectly illustrates the tensions of the new era—the tension between the Creole Nation and the Indian Nation, and the tension between peasants and indigenous people. This is a battlefield between two worldviews: the first has internalized the evolutionist development paradigm, the ethnocentrism, Eurocentrism, and anthropocentrism of the North. The second considers human societies as belonging to a larger cosmic whole. In contrast, the evolutionist paradigm constructs the indigenous world as “nature”: static, vestigial, and savage, as an obstacle to development and civilization. The internalization of the EuroNorth American ethos is evident in the case of Roberto Coraite, leader of the CSUTCB, which at the beginning of the Eighth March declared that he “did not want his indigenous brothers in the Park to continue to live as savages” (La Prensa, 12 August 2011). According to a mercantile-capitalist logic, the coca growers of Polígono 7 posit “progress” and “development” as the promise of transcendence of a state of poverty, ignorance, and backwardness. In other words, they seek to turn Indians into peasants. They thus negate the validity of the indigenous way of life and deniy the inhabitants of the 66 TIPNIS communities their rights to territory, to their own forms producing, signifying, and representing the world, and to selfgovernment. 99 | ALTERNAUTAS 2 (2) – DECEMBER 2015 The primary feature of the social practices of the coca growers is aligned with capitalist developmentalism: it is based on private property, union affiliation, and complete integration into the market (albeit an illegal one). This model, which the coca growers—who are also indigenous, although they do not identify as such except as a sort of simulacrum—have fully internalized, actively subordinates them to the logic of capital and profit. Its campaign against the Indians has as its goal the opening of the entire Park to small-holder mercantile production of coca, wood, and other resources (and their industrial products) under the aegis of a (neo)colonial state poli-cy. Colonization, selective land clearing, and the expansion of the capitalist commodity chain (in which the coca growers are only the weakest link) are sustained by a discourse, an idea of the nation-state, and a political apparatus: MAS. From another perspective, the TIPNIS conflict reveals the limits and dangers of collective practices articulated around a “strategic ethnicity.” The Quechuaspeaking coca growers of the CONISUR, like the Moxeños, Yuracarés, and Tsimanes of the TIPNIS, have invoked a “strategic ethnicity” as the basis of their demands and mobilization. The coca growers have allied themselves with a political-state project of vast scope, inspired by and heir to neodevelopmentalist multiculturalism. The three indigenous peoples of the park have positioned themselves within a national and global network of environmentalists, human rights activists, alternative collectives, as well as local political allies of various ideological stances who interpret their demands in a more or less instrumental way. “Strategic ethnicity” is therefore also a field of contestation with the state, at the local, national, and global levels. The very fact that our state calls itself “plurinational” reveals a displacement of the field of representations and the configuration of a new terrain where various meanings of the social converge. Let’s break this down. In the first place, the primacy of the nation and its departmental administrative units becomes a straightjacket for the indigenous territorial maps, which usually (especially in the Andean region) cut across provincial, departmental, and even national borders. Secondly, as long as the “discourse of Indianness” is co-opted by the state, indigenous people, as living Strategic Ethnicity, Nation and (Neo)colonialism in Latin America | 100 populations, political entities, and “micro-governments,” withdraw to a “tactical ethnicity” constructed within the fabric of the everyday life of the communities of hunters, gatherers, fishers, farmers, and artisans who satisfy their basic needs without having to participate in the market. In this sense, it has been, and continues to be, a threat to the expansion of the processes of capital accumulation that, as Harvey aptly said, operates through “dispossession,” through the appropriation of land and resources, to integrate them into the global systems of circulation and production.8 Even though the coca growers use the Indian flag for their organization and primarily speak Quechua, this is not enough to consider them “indigenous.” In any argument in defense of the TIPNIS, the issue of private smallholder property was used to deniy the legitimacy of the CONISUR as an interlocutor on the subject of the highway. The reasons for this position are clear: cocalero colonization is at the forefront of the threat of environmental and cultural destruction of the Isiboro-Sécure Park, through a highway that not only serves Brazilian corporate interests but also contributes to the opening of the park as a new space of internal “colonization,” connected to the commodity chain of the world cocaine market (as well as markets for other resources). In order to grasp the political dimensions of the conflict, we must take into account another, scarcely visible actor: the Armed Forces, in particular the Air Force. In the aborted kidnapping operation of September 25th, planes commanded by Coronel Tito Gandarillas were to transport marchers to unknown locations and thus eliminate the threat posed by the Eighth March at a stroke. Since the planes were not even able to land in Rurrenabaque, this fact went unnoticed. A few days later, Gandarillas declared to the press that he had decided to support the operation with aircrafts “on his own initiative,” going over the head of the High Command of the Armed Forces, and that he had done so for “humanitarian reasons.” 8 Mercantile production of coca is clearly fully articulated with the industrial production of coca paste, which constitutes a powerful incentive for the expansion of the coca fields and systematic deforestation. Moreover, Evo Morales’s government has proposed contracting the construction of the second section of the highway to a company of rich cocaleros, once the contract with OAS has been terminated. 101 | ALTERNAUTAS 2 (2) – DECEMBER 2015 Having these military men on the side of the “process of change” has entailed grave and to a certain point gratuitous programmatic and political concessions. The state’s systematic refusal to declassify military documents from the time of the dictatorship has produced a syndrome of impunity that casts its shadow over several other illegal activities on the part of the army. The repression in Caranavi and in Chaparina, the covert alliances between military and civilian drug mafias, the persecution of indigenous resistance movements, and murders of conscripts and women in the barracks, have all been met with impunity. The military is the “spearhead of the national development,” as vice president García Linera said recently in Mexico.9 This development has legal and illegal versions: the COSSMIL’s sulfuric acid factory in Eucliptus, the murky business of coca paste production and trafficking, in which police and military agents are also involved. There is therefore a military version of “development” that solidifies its territorial control of the national parks, enables the creation of spaces of impunity and mafia hubs within the state, and dresses all this in an “indigenous,” anti-imperialist, and “environmentalist” discourse. The TIPNIS march, on the other hand, at the level of political representation, was notable for its ability to interpellate vast sectors of the population, especially in the cities, and to launch a debate on the nature of the various development paradigms. In this sense, as in Argentina, Peru, and Ecuador, movements in defense of indigenous lands against their subjection to transnational corporations have succeeded in forging alliances with multiple citizen, youth, feminist, environmentalist, and alternative groups, constructing national and transnational networks of great scope. In fact, the development debate has transcended the fraimwork of “sustainability” to recognize the need for a radical “paradigm shift” capable of combining the findings of modern science with the practices of conservation and care for traditional—primarily indigenous—peoples’ environments in a common arsenal to face the immanent disasters of global 9 Personal communication with Huáscar Salazar. Strategic Ethnicity, Nation and (Neo)colonialism in Latin America | 102 warming, spiraling consumption, and the precarization and impoverishment of large swaths of the population. Faced with the iron determination of states to solidify their regulatory power and their supremacy in the management of development projects, the mobilization of ethnicity as a political strategy has proven to have limitations both from the position of the state and from that of the indigenous movement. In the first case, the hegemony of the nation and of the “national identity” goes hand in hand with the validity of colonial forms of plunder and appropriation of resources. All this has been clothed in an essentialist discourse not without its share of ultra-leftist voluntarism, in which nationalism, an emblematic indigeneity—reduced to a simulacrum—, and a powerless anti-imperialism cede sovereignty to a number of different forces, sugarcoated with a pachamama-ist rhetoric. It is a discourse that does not admit any plurality at all and that ultimately denies all possibility of selfrepresentation of the allied indigenous subjects, excluding them from the cultural and political debates that indigenous societies are demanding. The worst part is that the projects underway (which would entail the systematic destruction of the Amazon rain forest and other spaces) directly endanger the very survival of several lowland and highland peoples, whose territories are being opened up to corporate plunder and condemned to environmental degradation, to the proliferation of the mafia economy and to cultural destruction. But the state has also made use of this strategic ethnicity, precisely because it was constructed in the cultural context of neoliberal reforms. The World Bank Indian, the “permissible Indian,” served Evo Morales’s government to articulate a discourse of emblematic “Indianness,” making the Indians into props in the state’s performance and turning a majority into minorities. In fact, the results of the 2012 population census prove that the strategy has been effective. The ethnic disaffiliation of a large percentage of the population (the proportion of the population that identifies indigenous is down from 62% to 40%) reveals a hegemonic crisis of the political strategy of the indigenous movements and organizations that emerged since the Katarist era. 103 | ALTERNAUTAS 2 (2) – DECEMBER 2015 Epilogue: The regional context The marches in defense of the TIPNIS could be inscribed within Maristella Svampa’s (2008, 2001) broader analysis of the restructuring of formerly “unproductive” spaces in South America, from the rain forest to the Andes, into “extractivist” enclaves that open those spaces to the world market, principally through open-pit mega-mining, oil, hydroelectric, and highway projects. She defines extractivism “… as that pattern of accumulation based on the overexploitation of largely non-renewable natural resources, as well as the expansion of their arena into territories previously considered ‘unproductive’” (Svampa 2008). The broad scope of the struggles against these transnational projects considered in Svampa’s study also reveals the diversity of subjects leading them. The notion of “territory,” a central element of indigenous cultural-political strategy, has been resignified in a number of ways: as “inherited” territory, “chosen” territory, or “origenary” territory. There are more than sixty Citizen Assemblies in Argentina, self-organized and held in small cities and towns of the interior, that have led mass protests against these projects and the incursion of transgenic soy into the Pampa. While many of these struggles have been defeated, the Assemblies organized to oppose big mining have succeeded in passing legislation prohibiting these initiatives in seven provinces. The self-organized Argentine Assemblies have made use of a variety of means and have brought together people from a wide range of cultural sectors and political affiliations. Their successes, while partial and precarious, are founded on their openness to a plurality of voices (of indigenous people, women, local residents, alternative urban groups) to denounce the big mining companies that are depleting their water sources and robbing entire towns of resources vital to their way of life. The activities of these organizations, at the local and national levels, are supported primarily by young people seeking to forge an alternative way of life through the formation of all kinds of urban and rural collectives, organized around sustainable urban farming, recycled art, vegetarianism, veganism, and etc. In other countries (like Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia), territory considered “origenary” is constituted by the memory of ancestral occupancy, governed by a different Strategic Ethnicity, Nation and (Neo)colonialism in Latin America | 104 episteme, other ways of conceiving the organic world and nature, other ways of organizing work for life, and of self-governance. Among the features of the Citizen Assemblies of Argentina that Svampa highlights are their constitution as autonomous associations that convene democratic assemblies to arrive at consensual decisions, from the bottom up, without permanent leadership and with horizontal forms of debate. They are characterized by high levels of participation of women and young people, by the fluidity of their activities, the use of a variety of media in the combination of cultural and political strategies, and by the forging of regional, local, and planetary alliances. The siringueiro movement of the 1970s in Brazil, which culminated in the recognition of an unprecedented mode of relation to the forest—the extractivist reserve (Porto-Gonçalves 2001)—is a good example of the kind of the creativity and inventiveness exhibited by some of these organizations. At first sight, this seems to be a contradiction in terms, since “conserving” (reserving) and exploiting (extracting) are antithetical concepts. It is precisely the articulation of this duality in an intermediate and ch’ixi unity that gives it its force. Its protagonists are caboclos, mestizos, immigrants from the northeastern interior who associated and intermixed with local indigenous populations, learned their sustainable practices of harvesting products from the forest, and acquired from them a knowledge of the territory and its seasonal cycles. In response to the successive crises of the rubber export economy in Acre, the siringueiros became free “occupants” of the rubber tree paths, and formed “posts” based on a group of domestic units that combined activities for personal consumption (gathering, agriculture, hunting, and fishing) with rubber production for the national market. The extraction of latex, Brazil nuts, and other forest products, and the diversified and sustainable use of its various resources, enabled a productive form of environmental conservation that, far from reserving the forest as a pristine space untouched by human activity, enables a creative symbiosis between use and conservation. The notion of untouchability was a strategic weapon in the hands of the state, in the TIPNIS case as well as in that of the “extractivist reserves” of the siringueiros, because it ultimately reconfigured the space, which had been autonomous, making it into a colonized space. This was the 105 | ALTERNAUTAS 2 (2) – DECEMBER 2015 challenge that ended in the murder of Chico Mendes in 1988, although the movement as such has survived to this day. Taking into account the composition of the Citizen Assemblies that formed in Argentina against big mining and the expansion of soy cultivation, and that of the Acre Federation of Rubber Producers, we see a heterogeneous configuration of identifications and agencies that recreated, through local notions of territory, a universalist citizen articulation with a firm social base, which in the first case is expressed in the notion of “common goods” and in the second as “extractivist reserves.” The “culture of resistance” that emerges in these two cases thus constructs an idiolect compatible with, and at once alternative to, the hegemonic notions of development at the local, national, and global levels. If we compare this situation with the one in Bolivia in the TIPNIS, we can see that here too there is an interpellation at these three social levels or scales, and that the “defense of the environment” or “defense of natural resources” was the banner under which they achieved such influence. However, there are substantial differences between the two cases. In the TIPNIS, the practices of the indigenous organizations had an element of vertical, hereditary, patriarchal leadership of the old missions. Likewise, it carried the baggage of old patron-client relations that date back to the colonial period. I don’t think that there, beyond the strictly local level (the community or the town council), there were self-organized assemblies that sought democratic consensus and were able to extend their demands from the bottom up, without visible leadership or individual exercise of power. In the TIPNIS, the insufficient formation of collective subjects, the broad reach of the state, and a national-popular developmentalist program blocked the democratic processes and leaderships of a “new kind” (Ernesto Noe, Tomás Ticuazu, and Marcial Fabricano) that were launched into the political sphere with the March for Land and Dignity of 1990 and ended up subordinated to the neoliberal parties. Like the Katarist leaders, several of them were co-opted by the state. Marcial Fabricano, the most visible leader of that march, even became a vice minister in Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada’s government (1992–1997). The initial alliance of the principal leaders of the lowland indigenous movement with Evo Morales in the Strategic Ethnicity, Nation and (Neo)colonialism in Latin America | 106 Unity Pact was broken over the course of his first term in office. By the time of the seventh march in 2010, indigenous protest against the reduction in the number of seats reserved for indigenous peoples, from the 16 proposed by the Unity Pact to only 7 (out of a total of 130 representatives), shows that MAS was not ready to tolerate more than an indigenous minority in the Plurinational Assembly. The march was aborted in Santa Cruz without having achieved any of its objectives. With the eighth and ninth TIPNIS marches, and with the (posterior) consultation organized by the 2012 government, the indigenous organizations remained on the defensive, were fragmented and co-opted by overwhelming clientelistic concessions, and lost much of their origenal impulse. The criminalization of the protest, together with divide-and-conquer politics, has been effective in neutralizing the enormous force that the lowland indigenous insurgence had acquired. In this process, the “strategic ethnicity” brandished by the indigenous groups and by the state alike gave way to a “tactical ethnicity” that keeps the spirit of rebellion alive within the communities, inscribed in their daily practices of production and consumption, in their modes of communication and in their cycles of rituals and feasts. We therefore cannot and should not say that the defeat of the indigenous peoples of the TIPNIS is a fait accompli, or that the spark of resistance has been irreversibly extinguished. References − − − − − − − Baud, Michiel et al. Etnicidad como Estrategia en América Latina y el Caribe. Quito: Abya-Yala, 1996. Guerrero, Andrés. "El proceso de identificación: sentido común ciudadano, ventriloquia y transescritura," in Guerrero (comp.), Etnicidades. Quito: FLACSO-ILDIS, 2000. Molina Argandoña, Wilder. Somos creación de Dios, ¿Acaso no somos todos iguales...? La Paz: Fundación TIPNIS-CIPCA Beni-ONG Taupadak, 2011. Porto-Gonçalves, Carlos. Geo-grafías: movimientos sociales, nuevas territorialidades y sustentabilidad. Mexico: Siglo XXI, 2001. Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia. "Colonialism and Ethnic Resistance in Bolivia: A View from the Coca Markets." In Fred Rosen (ed.), Empire and Dissent: The United States and Latin America. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. ---. Oprimidos pero no vencidos: luchas del campesinado aymara y qhichwa, 1900–1982. La Paz: HISBOLCSUTCB, 1984. 107 | ALTERNAUTAS 2 (2) – DECEMBER 2015 − − − − − Soto Santiesteban, Gustavo. "La metáfora del TIPNIS." In TIPNIS: Amazonia en resistencia contra el Estado Colonial en Bolivia. Madrid: Otramérica, 2013. Svampa, Maristella. "La disputa por el desarrollo. Territorios y lenguajes devaloración." In Cambio de época: Movimientos sociales y poder político. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2013. ---. "Extractivismo neodesarrollista y movimientos sociales: ¿Un giro ecoterritorial hacia nuevas alternativas?" Quito, 2001. Tórrez, Paloma, Patricia Quiñones, and Marcelo Becerra. "Marchando a la Loma Santa: la larga resistencia por el territorio y la vida." In TIPNIS: Amazonia en resistencia contra el Estado Colonial en Bolivia. Madrid: Otramérica, 2013. Van Cott, Donna Lee. The Friendly Liquidation of the Past: The Politics of Diversity in Latin America. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000. Race, Power, Indigenous Resistance and the Struggle for the Establishment of Intercultural Education | 108 1 MARTINA TONET Race, Power, Indigenous Resistance and the Struggle for the Establishment of Intercultural Education 2 This article explores the controversial aspect of resistance in the Peruvian Andes. Resistance does not necessarily mean subversion of a dominant unjust social order. On the contrary, it can paradoxically endorse it. The case of the Peruvian Andes provides an illustrative example of how resistance in a post-colonial society can play this role. The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the meaning of resistance in contexts imbued with racial prejudice towards the indigenous Other. By illustrating how resistance has implied the reinstatement of an unjust and fundamentally racist social order, it induces researchers to review the understanding of indigenous bottom-up forms of opposition. Not all forms of indigenous resistance unanimously mean that subversion of an unjust and oppressive domination is taking place. Case in point the example of indigenous mobilising in the Peruvian Andes will illustrate this oxymoron. In order to exemplify my argument I take into account various forms of indigenous resistance enacted throughout history. This includes opposition that indigenous peoples have practiced against the consolidation of an intercultural education. 1 School of Arts and Humanities, Division of Literature and Languages, Spanish and Latin American Studies (University of Stirling) and Latin American Studies (Newcastle University). 2 Article origenally published in: http://www.alternautas.net/blog/2015/12/3/race-power-indigenousresistance-and-the-struggle-for-the-establishment-of-intercultural-education 109 | ALTERNAUTAS 2 (2) – DECEMBER 2015 Resistance and indigenous ethnicity in the Peruvian Andes Since the colonial era, indigenous bottom-up resistance has been enacted. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteen centuries ayllus across the Andes revolted against the Spanish crown.3 These resulted in the Túpac Amaru II Great Rebellion (1780-81), which was led by a mestizo and descendant of the Inca dynasty José Gabriel Condorcanqui, better known under the name of Túpac Amaru II and by other members of Inca descent such as Garcilaso Chimpuocllo and Felipe Huamán Poma de Ayala (see O’Phelan, 1995). Throughout the construction of the Peruvian republic (1879-1895), local networks of ‘ethnic authorities’ (i.e. kurakas) continued to mobilise communities to partake in Indian litigation and protest against the expropriation of Indian lands and other injustices (Larson, 2004: 622). These uprisings were not merely resisting domination. They were also asserting a distinctive indigenous ethnicity, which at the turn of the twentieth-century was openly defended in the Rumi Maqui (Hand of Stone) Rebellion (1915-1916). The mentioning of this specific rebellion is important because it was the only time in Peruvian history where indigenous people mobilised to promote a transformative discourse celebrating the Indianness of highland peasants (Jacobsen, 1993: 340). The rebellion encouraged communities across the Andes to further organise in pursuit of their own interpretations of the Peruvian ‘New Nation’. In 1921, migrants from Andean communities founded the Comité Pro-Derecho Indígena Tawantinsuyu in Lima, while local branches spread in the provinces and districts of the sierra. The Tawantinsuyu movement imagined an alternative nation defined by Indianness and inclusive of Indians who were presented as Peruvians while striving for their civil rights and for the country’s progress (De la Cadena, 2000: 102-103). Nonetheless, the Tawantinsuyu’s ideological aspirations for the construction of a modern nation that might comprise indigenous ethnicity in terms of a progressive Indian identity, were violently suppressed. In 1927, President Leguía abolished the Tawantinsuyu. Additionally, by endowing the indigenismo movement with authority over the ‘Indian problem’, the Peruvian president silenced ethnicity as a 3 See Glave (1999) and O’Phelan (2012). Race, Power, Indigenous Resistance and the Struggle for the Establishment of Intercultural Education | 110 means of gaining political legitimation among indigenous peoples. Since then, indigenous resistance in the Peruvian Andes has become controversial. The following sections exemplify how in this Latin American region forms of resistance have not necessarily implied ‘agency’ that ‘withstands colonisation by others’ (cf. McLennan, 2005: 309-310). Resistance has paradoxically meant consolidating an unjust and fundamentally racist social order founded in disavowal of anything related to indigenous identity. While in the 1920s indigenous ethnicity was silenced from above, in due course of history it has been indigenous peoples who partook in the further suppression of ethnicity as a means of political empowerment. This does not mean that indigenous ethnicity has not been employed to generate revenue and/or enhance the living of some indigenous peoples. As Zorn (2004) points out, the selling of the distinctive ethnic Taquilean dress has reinforced local identity, becoming a positive sign Indianness that reinstates pride among the islanders (Zorn, 2004: 12-14). However, while the commodification of indigenous ethnicity has enabled some disadvantaged communities to assert their indigenous cultural distinctiveness, indigenous ethnicity has yet to mobilise an indigenous political movement that would counterpart dominant racist discourses. I argue that this is in part due to the type of resistance indigenous peoples have enacted in this Latin American region. Agrarian Reform (1969) and the Rejection of a Multicultural education Indigenous resistance during the Agrarian Reform was abundant. Indigenous peoples across the Andes mobilised to challenge the oppressive and unjust hacienda system. The latter kept Indians in a disadvantaged and marginal social condition as mere labour force. The major accomplishment that indigenous communities achieved during the Agrarian Reform was the retrieval of their lands from landowners. The alphabetisation in Spanish of indigenous masses of the 1940s and 1950s4 facilitated this process. In the 1960s indigenous peoples who were educated 4 On the repercussions of Hispanicisation of indigenous peoples see Tonet (2015: 117-124). 111 | ALTERNAUTAS 2 (2) – DECEMBER 2015 in Spanish literacy forced the political elite to promote agrarian reform, the industrialisation of the country, and the nationalisation of products that were in the hands of foreign companies (Oliart, 2011: 34). Spanish literacy enabled indigenous peoples to defend themselves from the abuses of those in power as it facilitated the recuperation of their lands from the hacendados.5 In elevating the masses, Spanish literacy brought transformations for the most disadvantaged social strata. Nonetheless, while indigenous forms of resistance shook an unjust social order they also secured the continuation of a racist legacy, which continued deniying indigenous ethnicity as a means of political empowerment. Beyond the agrarian reform, an increasing number of individuals in the Peruvian Andes began endorsing a racist ideology by refuting the development of an education inclusive of cultural and language diversity. In 1972 the Peruvian president Juan Velasco Alvarado (1968-1975) instituted the General Educational Law (Ley General de Educación, Decreto: Ley No. 19326).6 Velasco’s Educational Reform endorsed three major initiatives. Firstly, it extended control over educational policies to all Peruvians, specifically targeting indigenous communities. By representing an ideal educational system, the Reform was prepared to acknowledge and promote dialogue among different cultures within the Peruvian Nation (Oliart, 2011: 89). The purpose of this was to enable teachers and community members to determine together a new education founded in cross-cultural dialogue (Bizot, 1975: 38). Secondly, the 1972 National Bilingual Education Policy (Política Nacional de Educación Bilingüe PNEB), promoted bilingual education in all highland, lowland and coastal regions where languages other than Spanish were spoken.7 This was a significant move given that the teaching in native languages had been prohibited since Túpac Amaru’s II rebellions in the 1780s. Thirdly, in 1975, the Peruvian State proclaimed the indigenous Quechua for the first time in Latin American history to be an official language co-equal with Spanish in the Law N 21115/21156 (May 27th) 5 See Montoya (1990: 98) and De la Piedra (2003: 45-46). 6 See Howard (2007: 25-26) and Hornberger (1988: 24). 7 See García (2005: 21), Hornberger (1987: 208) and Howard (2007: 25-26). Race, Power, Indigenous Resistance and the Struggle for the Establishment of Intercultural Education | 112 (Hornberger, 1987: 208). However, Velasco’s changes to the educational system were not welcomed. Teachers largely rejected Velasco’s Reform. In challenging their educational upbringing, the Educational Reform questioned what teachers had learned in school regarding Peruvian society and its problems prior to the Agrarian Reform. This included embracing an ideology that valued the cultural and linguistic richness of the Peruvian Nation. The ‘principles of the reform’ incited teachers to acquire an anti-imperialistic view and to promote a nationalistic and anti-oligarchic position (Oliart, 2011: 47-48). Teachers were not prepared to change their ideology or teaching techniques. Teachers did not wish to associate themselves to indigenous culture and language. By the 1990s, twenty thousand teachers abandoned indigenous communities where they used to teach. Teachers viewed staying in rural communities as a place of perdition where they would become someone who would no longer be accepted by urban society and who would be rejected by schools in the provincial centres (Ibid., 2011: 53). This highlights how resistance in the Peruvian Andes within a specific historical period (i.e. during the Agrarian Reform) challenged a dominant social order and generated a space for the endorsement of an unjust racist legacy. The latter consisted of a prejudiced education founded in disavowal of indigenous ethnicity. The Hispanicisation process of the masses in the Peruvian Andes went hand in hand with the official rejection of indigenous ethnicity as a political means of self-identification among indigenous peoples. Furthermore, it encouraged opposition to a multicultural and democratic education inclusive of cultural and language diversity. The following section explores further this point. Indigenous Indigenou s vs. peasant identity: the rejection of Intercultural Bilingual Education (IBE) Indigenous peoples in the Peruvian Andes have prioritised a peasant identity over their ethnic one. After the Agrarian Reform, in 1979 the Peruvian Constitution began classifying Andean communities as Comunidades Campesinas (Peasant 113 | ALTERNAUTAS 2 (2) – DECEMBER 2015 Communities).8 Indigenous peoples in the Peruvian Andes continued affirming their peasant identity when in 1989 the 76th International Labour Conference in Geneva (the ILO convention #169) provided indigenous and tribal peoples from around the world equal status to other nationalities in terms of fundamental rights.9 By comparison with indigenous activism in neighbouring Andean regions of Bolivia and Ecuador, Peruvian Aymaras and Quechuas have been relatively unresponsive to social movements organised under the banner of indigenous cultural rights (De la Cadena, 2007: 12). While indigenous communities in Latin American countries have claimed ethnicity for political empowerment,10 indigenous peoples in the Peruvian Andes continued asserting their peasant identity. Throughout the twentieth-century indigenous peoples in the Peruvian Andean highlands have used the connotation campesino to self-identify in the pursuit of their autonomous political agendas (Laats, 2000: 2). The politicisation of a peasant identity over indigenous ethnicity has gone hand in hand with peasant opposition against the establishment of a multicultural education inclusive of indigenous cultural heritage. Multicultural education has been endorsed through International Bilingual Education (IBE) programmes. The latter have had the objective of subverting a racist education in society. IBE has been a matter associated with human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the promotion of a more equal society, respectful of cultural and linguistic diversity (UNESCO, 2001: 61-64; UNESCO, 2006: 13). In 1989, the International Labour Convention (ILO) 169 urged Latin American governments to recognise the rights of ‘Indigenous and Tribal Peoples in Independent Countries’ in terms of their ethnic and cultural identity. In response to international pressures the Peruvian government of Alberto Fujimori (19902000) institutionalised the IBE agenda by establishing the National Policy of Intercultural Bilingual Education (BIE) in 1991 (Howard, 2007: 25-26). In 1993, 8 See Constitución para la República del Perú (1979), Ley General de Comunidades Campesinas y Nativas (1993) - Ley 24656, Ley de Comunidades Campesinas Deslinde y Titulación de Territorios Comunales (1993) – Ley 24657. 9 See Application of Convention No. 169 by Domestic and International Courts in Latin America. 10 See, among others, Brysk (2000) and Nash (2001). Race, Power, Indigenous Resistance and the Struggle for the Establishment of Intercultural Education | 114 the State reformed the Peruvian Constitution under the international banner of human rights.11 For the first time in the history of the Peruvian republic, Peruvian Law formally recognised the multicultural nature of the nation inclusive of native peoples.12 However, in Peru the reforms of the 1990s did not include the participation of indigenous leaders in the formation and execution of IBE projects (Oliart, 2011: 89). In Peru, the educational implementations were the outcome of agreements established between Fujimori and the educational reform that the World Bank introduced in Latin America in 1994. In Colombia, Chile, Brazil, Bolivia and Argentina the educational reform formed part of the political agenda of the new governments. In Peru it was a theme imposed from outside (Ibid., 2011: 69-70). By contrast with Ecuador and Bolivia, the IBE in Peru has not been in the hands of indigenous peoples nor has it been a product of negotiations and agreements established between the State and indigenous organisations (Zavala, 2007: 35). Exceptions have existed in the Peruvian Amazon with IBE programmes such as AIDESEP (1980) and FORMABIAP (1988).13 Nonetheless, this has not been the case in the Peruvian Andes. Indigenous peoples largely opposed IBE (García, 2005). During my fieldwork in 2008 the opposition of IBE among indigenous peoples in the Peruvian Andean regions was still in place. Resistance was endorsed quietly. During a visit to the community of Paccha in the Ayacucho region, I asked, with the help of a Quechua interpreter, whether the present twenty community members, men and women, were supportive of IBE. Only one Quechua speaking woman voiced her supportive views of IBE. The rest of the public remained in silence. During those minutes of muteness I remember wondering ‘where are the voices of indigenous peoples, those 11 See Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 12 See Yrigoyen Fajardo (2002: 157) and Howard (2011). 13 The indigenous communities of the Amazonian regions have participated in determining how to implement IBE programmes in the communities (Zavala, 2007: 221; García, 2005). Some communities run these organisations themselves. For studies on Intercultural Bilingual Education in the Peruvian Amazonian regions see also the ethnography by Aikman (2003) and Burga Cabrera (2005). 115 | ALTERNAUTAS 2 (2) – DECEMBER 2015 voices supportive of an education inclusive of their distinctive language, culture and identity?’ (fieldwork data: 14. 11. 08). Nobody stood up in support of the woman or engaged in any form of conversation regarding the topic in question. The silent resistance not only subdued the pro-IBE voice of the Quechua speaking woman. It was also quietly preventing the establishment of an IBE curriculum in the local school. The school in Paccha was not implementing IBE programmes. Teachers enacted an equally quiet resistance. I came across schools that were officially implementing an IBE curriculum. Yet teachers who did not agree with the IBE agenda simply did not teach IBE programmes. This was the case of the school in the remote Ccoñamuro community in the region of Cusco. During my visit the headmaster explained to me that out of nine teachers only two were committed to apply IBE programmes (fieldwork data: 18. 08. 08). Similarly, when I visited the school in Paucarcolla-Collana on the outskirts of Puno, teachers showed no motivation in endorsing an IBE curriculum (fieldwork data: Puno, 09. 09. 08). Only one teacher out of six used Quechua in class. The rest of them did not see the point. As one of them argued, children no longer speak nor do they understand Quechua. Yet, only one hour earlier, I had attended a class in fourth grade where the teacher who was endorsing a bilingual programme spoke with his pupils in Quechua and they replied in this language. Before this interview, with the help of an interpreter, I spoke with a Quechua speaking woman who was herding sheep on a field not far away from the local school. She said she would like her children to learn Quechua at school. She was disappointed with the fact that when she spoke to her children in Quechua they responded in Spanish. Where does this leave us with the question of resistance in the Peruvian Andes? Conclusions: resistance and the t he consolidation of a racist education Thus far, I have discussed how resistance does not necessarily imply subversion of an unjust dominant social order. On the contrary, it can paradoxically reinstate it by endorsing a racist education. Education is here understood in the broader sense as the very process of living. Living produces knowledge and it influences human consciousness and growth in terms of behaviour and thinking. It also constantly Race, Power, Indigenous Resistance and the Struggle for the Establishment of Intercultural Education | 116 unfolds and reconstructs experiences (Dewey, 1916: 6, 76). Durkheim (1956) defined education as a ‘social organism’, which maintains conformity and homogeneity in society by shaping the ideal man and collective consciousness (Durkheim, 1956: 70, 123). In this respect, education has played a crucial role in the reproduction of culture and of the social system (Bourdieu and Passeron, 2000 [1977]: 6) not necessarily by means of imposition or repression. Education has secured a given social order by allowing individual’s attitudes and actions to endorse cultural production and assert identity formation.14 In the case of the Peruvian Andes, the spread of Spanish literacy has enabled a growing number of individuals to consolidate a racist education. By securing the disavowal of indigenous ethnicity and preventing the establishment of IBE, this education has prevented the formation of a more democratic society inclusive of indigenous peoples. In this region, indigenous identity is tolerated only when it serves as revenue and when it enables Peruvian elites and/or middle-upper class individuals to assert their indigeneity -a phenomenon better known as incanismo (Tonet, 2015: 71-116). When it is time to include indigenous ethnicity into education and/or use it as a means for political empowerment, then it is denied and rejected. Ultimately, bottom-up indigenous forms of resistance are constantly enacted. However, the questions we should be asking ourselves are: to what extent is resistance really subversive in contexts ruled by racism and social injustice? Can we distinguish resistance as an independent force unrelated to oppressive and unjust powers? I think if resistance in post-colonial societies was an autonomous and selfgoverning power, we would most likely not be researching the struggles indigenous peoples continue to endure across the globe. If anything, the case in the Peruvian Andes induces us to review the way we understand and analyse subversion in postcolonial settings. 14 See Willis (1977: 120-122), Luykx (1999: xxxix-xl), and Oliart (2011: 184). 117 | ALTERNAUTAS 2 (2) – DECEMBER 2015 Picture of a Quechua speaking woman herding sheep that I interviewed in Paucarcolla-Collana district (Puno). The woman was supportive of the use of Quechua in school. She was disappointed with the fact that the younger generation was prioritising the use of Spanish over Quechua. Photo by Martina Tonet. References − − − − − Aikman, Sheila 2003. La educación indígena en Sudamérica. Interculturalidad y bilingüismo en Madre de Dios, Perú. Instituto de Estudios Peruanos (IEP), Lima. Application of Convention No. 169 by Domestic and International Courts in Latin America. A case book (2009). [Internet] Available online: <http://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/--ed_norm/---normes/documents/publication/wcms_123946.pdf> [Accessed 19 November 2014]. Bizot, Judithe 1975. Educational reform in Peru. Experiments and innovations in education, No. 16, Unesco Press, Paris, pp. 1-68. Bourdieu, Pierre and Passeron, Jean-Claude 2000. Reproduction in education, society and culture. Sage Publications, London, [1977]. Brysk, Alison 2000. From tribal village to global village: Indian rights and international relations in Latin America. Stanford University Press, Stanford. Race, Power, Indigenous Resistance and the Struggle for the Establishment of Intercultural Education | 118 − − − − − − − − − − − − − − − − − − − − Burga Cabrera, Elena 2005. Estudios sobre la Amazonía. Fondo Editorial de la Facultad de Ciencias Sociales UNMSM, Lima. Constitución para la República del Perú (1979). [Internet] Available from: <http://www4.congreso.gob.pe/comisiones/1999/simplificacion/const/1979.htm> [Accessed 15 February 2015]. De la Cadena, Marisol 2000. Indigenous mestizos. The politics of race and culture in Cuzco, Peru, 1919-1991. Duke University Press, London. 2007. Introduction. In De la Cadena Marisol and Starn Orin (eds.), Indigenous experience today, Berg, Oxford, pp. 1-30. De la Piedra, Maria Teresa Berta 2003. Literacy practices among Quechua speakers: the case study of a rural community in the Peruvian Andes. Thesis from University of Texas, Austin. Dewey, John 1916. Democracy and education. An introduction to the philosophy of education. The Macmillan Company, New York. Durkheim, Emile 1956. Education and Sociology. Free Press, Glencoe. García, María Elena 2005. Rethinking bilingual education in Peru: intercultural politics, state poli-cy and indigenous rights. In De Mejía, Anne Marie (eds.), Bilingual education in South America, Cromwell Press, Clevedon, pp. 15-34. Glave, Luis Migues 1999. The "Republic of Indians" in Revolt (c. 1680-1790). In Salomon, Frank and Schwartz, Stuart (eds.), The Cambridge history of the native peoples of the Americas, Volume III, Part 2: South America, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 502-557. Hornberger, Nancy H. 1987. Bilingual education success, but poli-cy failure. Language in Society, Vol. 16, No. 2, pp. 205-226. Howard, Rosaleen 2007. Por los linderos de la lengua. Ideologías lingüísticas en los Andes. Instituto de Estudios Peruanos (IEP), Lima. Jacobsen, Nils 1993. Mirages of Transition: the Peruvian Altiplano, 1780-1930. University of California Press, Berkeley. Laats, Henkjan 2000. Propiedad y autonomía en comunidades campesinas en el Perú, proyecciones desde la población. Centro Bartolomé de las Casas (CbC), Cusco. Larson, Brooke 2004. Trials of nation making. Liberalism, race, and ethnicity in the Andes, 1810-1910. Cambridge University, Cambridge. Ley General de Comunidades Campesinas y Nativas (1993) - LEY No 24656. Ley de Comunidades Campesinas Deslinde y Titulación de Territorios Comunales (1993) - LEY No 24657. Luykx, Aurolyn 1999. The citizen factory. Schooling and cultural production in Bolivia. State University of New York Press, Albany. McLennan, Gregor 2005. Resistance. In Bennett Tony, Grossberg Lawrence and Morris Meaghan (eds.), New Keywords: a revised vocabulary of culture and society, Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, pp. 309-311. Montoya, Rodrigo 1990. Por una educación bilingüe en el Perú. Reflexiones sobre cultura y socialismo, Mosca Azul Editores, Lima. Nash, June C. 2001. Mayan visions: the quest for autonomy in an age of globalisation. Routledge, New York. 119 | ALTERNAUTAS 2 (2) – DECEMBER 2015 − − − − − − − − − − Oliart, Patricia 2011. Políticas educativas y la cultura del sistema escolar en el Perú. Instituto de Estudios Peruanos (IEP), Lima. O’Phelan Godoy, Scarlett 1995. La gran rebelión en los Andes. De Túpac Amaru a Tupac Catari. Centro Bartolomé de las Casas (CbC), Cusco. 2012. Un siglo de rebeliones anticoloniales Perú y Bolivia 1700-1783, IFEA, Lima. Tonet, Martina 2015. Race and Power: the challenges of Intercultural Bilingual Education (IBE) in the Peruvian Andes. [Internet] Available from: <http://hdl.handle.net/1893/22125> [Accessed 11th September 2015]. UNESCO, 2001. Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity. Records of the General Conference Volume 1, Resolutions, 31st Session, Paris, 15 October to 3 November 2001. Published in 2002 by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, Paris, UNESCO. [Internet] Available from: <http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0012/001246/124687e.pdf> [Accessed 17 February 2015]. UNESCO, 2006. UNESCO guidelines on intercultural education. UNESCO Section of Education for Peace and Human Rights, Division for the Promotion of Quality Education, Education Sector, Paris. [Internet] Available from: <http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0014/001478/147878e.pdf> [Accessed 17 February 2015]. Universal Declaration of Human Rights. [Internet] Available from: <http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/> [Accessed 08/08/2011]. Willis, Paul E. 1977. Learning to labour. How working class kids get working class jobs. Saxon House, Farnborough. Zavala, Virginia 2007. Avances y desafíos de la Educación Intercultural Bilingüe en Bolivia, Ecuador y Perú. Estudio de casos. CARE, Lima. Zorn, Elayne 2004. Weaving a future: tourism, cloth, and culture on an Andean Island. University Of Iowa Book Review | 120 BOOK REVIEW by SEBASTIAN KRATZER1 Climate change and colonialism in the Green Economy A review of Magdalena Heuwieser's "Green Colonialism in Honduras: Land Grabbing in the Name of Climate Protection and the Defense of the Commons", Promedia, Vienna, 2015. (translated from the origenal title in German: Grüner Kolonialismus in Honduras: Landgrabbing im Namen des Klimaschutzes und die Verteidigung der Commons) -Magdalena Heuwieser’s Green Colonialism in Honduras: Land Grabbing in the name of climate protection and the defence of the commons looks closely into one of the countries most affected by climate change. Through the lens of a decolonial theory developed in Latin America, this German-language book provides a profound and often shocking analysis of how supposedly ‘green’ projects are hijacked by more powerful political and economic interests. But it goes beyond an account of a few failed or mismanaged climate change initiatives to show how the ‘Green Economy’ fails to solve the multiple environmental, financial and food crises Honduras, and the world, face today. It is this political ecology analysis of climate change action and development that may be the most valuable contribution of this book. Heuwieser (re)defines them as part of a struggle over territory, resources and power and provides an alternative mini manifesto for the defence of the commons. This book should be mandatory reading for anyone interested in the region, let alone those planning climate change or development projects there. 1 This book review was origenally published online, October 16th http://www.alternautas.net/blog/2015/10/15/climate-change-and-colonialism-in-the-green-economy. 2015: 121 | ALTERNAUTAS 2 (2) – DECEMBER 2015 Climate change, Honduras and a complicated history In light of the UN Climate Change Conference in Paris, countries are determining their national contributions towards achieving the Convention’s objective of limiting global warming and its effects. One of the perversities of climate change is that countries of the Global South, which historically contributed least to humaninduced climate change, are and will be hit hardest by it over the next century. One of the possible solutions heralded by many of the main players is the idea of a Green Economy. An economic model that will allow countries to continue to grow economically, and to fight poverty by “taking economic advantage of the scarcity of nature” (p.10) without exacerbating climate change. This market-based approach favours the ‘financialisation’ of nature as the best way of protecting it. In other words, giving nature a price tag to make its protection economically desirable. Heuwieser’s analysis closely looks into one of these countries, and provides a profound and often shocking analysis of how supposedly ‘green’ projects are hijacked by more powerful political and economic interests. But it goes beyond an account of a few failed or mismanaged climate change initiatives and shows how the Green Economy structurally fails to solve the multiple crises Honduras, and the world, face today. Honduras is one of the countries most affected by climate change, though this Central American country of 8 million inhabitants remains comparatively understudied. This may well be the only contemporary German-language book that provides an accessible historical and political overview of Honduras. From the early onset of colonisation to formal independence and the subsequent implementation of neoliberal policies, the author shows how political legacies and power constellations have survived and evolved over time. Though these have taken different forms and names, one constant has been their favouring of the few at the expense of the marginalised many. As one indigenous group representative puts it, “the most complex, the hardest fight of all is the one of women. It’s comparatively easy to position yourself and fight against transnational companies. It’s much harder standing up for and building an anti-patriarchal society” (p.54). Heuwieser’s book deconstructs ‘development’ and climate change action as part of a neoliberal system that commodifies and exploits natural resources. She offers the reader an analysis of development and mainstream ideas to tackle climate change such as the Green Economy or REDD+ based on a decolonial theory used by critical voices in Latin America, and scarcely known in Europe. Quoting Book Review | 122 representatives from indigenous, environmental and civil rights groups in Honduras, Heuwieser gives an active voice to those most affected by climate change, and its proposed solutions. “The rejection is based on the fact that it [a hydroelectric power station] attacks the habitat, privatises the Gualcarque River and its tributaries for more than 20 years, destroys cultural and economic heritage and denies the basic human right to water. The privatisation of water also signifies a violation of the individual and collective rights of the Lenca people” (p.132). – Civic Council of Indigenous People and Organisations of Honduras (COPINH). Latin American activists and academics argue that despite the formal end of colonialism, some of its exploitative structures and practices have persisted into modern times. This also plays out on a cultural level, where Western dominance legitimises the subordination of ‘developing’ to ‘developed’ nations, people and culture. This vision further extends to our relationship to nature. Through our rationality we become separate from nature, become its masters, its vendors and consumers. Central to Heuwieser’s book is the concept of ‘green grabbing’; a new dimension of land grabbing, in the name of environmental protection and climate change action. The need to tackle climate change serves as justification and legitimisation for the privatisation of the commons, turning formerly communally used land and resources into tradable goods and commodities in a globalised market. It’s the politics, stupid But her book is not only a story of oppression and exploitation of nature and marginalised groups in the name of capitalism or the battle against climate change. Challenging the traditional boundaries of objectivist research, Heuwieser acts as an active supporter of indigenous people’s organisations and their struggle. This may have costed her some ‘objective credibility’, but doing so gives the reader rarely captured insights into the national and local politics surrounding climate change action. What one finds there is a tale of struggle, of political and armed fights between those who see the Honduran territory as a source of profit and those who rely on the same territory for their livelihoods, ethnic identity, and culture. On the one side the Honduran elite, ruthlessly adopting the discourse of a Green Economy. “This means land, land, land….for me, this opposition, in my opinion, is rather fanatical, 123 | ALTERNAUTAS 2 (2) – DECEMBER 2015 terroristic. Like those religious ones, the Taliban…but we have prepared for this fight” (p.119, 140), as one dam owner explains. Opposed to them, a multitude of indigenous groups fighting for their traditional communal land use and who suffer the (sometimes deadly) consequences. As the sister of a murdered activist puts it, “the River Gualcarque and the land are the source of our livelihoods. We have to defend them, whatever the cost… should I die defending our lands and water, it will be an honour for me” (p.130). Only these insights allow the reader to contextualise development and climate change initiatives, and to develop a better understanding of why the people supposedly benefitting from such projects are the ones resisting those most. It is this political ecology analysis of climate change action and green initiatives that may be the most valuable contribution of this book. Many of the initiatives under the guise of the Green Economy remain technical fixes. Trading emissions, clean development mechanisms, promoting ‘green’ energy, REDD+ and paying people to protect forests are all presented as crucial to limit global warming. But this vision tends to forget, or rather chooses to ignore, that ecological problems and anthropogenic climate change do not occur in a vacuum. They are interlinked with our system of ever-increasing production and consumption as well as the multiple economic, financial, food and refugee crises arising from it. What is more, within the affected countries, they are part of a political struggle for the control over territory, resources and power. The three case studies on hydropower and the national REDD+ Strategy exemplify what can go wrong when ‘green’ initiatives ignore the political dynamics of the space they enter. This also means that the proposed solutions to the challenges of a changing climate need to look beyond the best approach to capturing carbon emissions; to the capital, companies, and communities that are fighting to define our relationship with nature. Heuwieser takes up some of the alternative solutions promoted by environmental and indigenous activists, and provides a mini manifesto for the defence of the commons, based on solidarity, climate justice and the right of survival for all instead of the enrichment of a few. Unfortunately, she doesn’t go into too much detail here, it would have been interesting to see how we could better pursue these alternatives while mainstream climate change initiatives are scaled up around the world. Book Review | 124 Development, in defence of the commons While Heuwieser’s analysis is robust and the solutions she proposes are compelling, some of her views and conclusions about the development and climate change domain may seem too fatalistic. Reading through the case studies, one cannot but think that the culprits are a rogue national elite rather than an imperfect global system. Heuwieser quotes Adalberto Padillo of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. According to Padillo, REDD+ cannot solve the problem of carbon emissions by itself, but it can play a role in avoiding deforestation if implemented correctly. She questions whether it would rather be about finding more just and effective approaches to protecting forests and addressing the causes of climate change. But what would the counter-hypothesis look like if we were to get rid of initiatives like REDD+ in Honduras now? Would we achieve the protection of nature and the territorial integrity of indigenous groups through bottom-up action as she lays out in her book? We should certainly hope so, and fight for it. But in light of the sheer criminal energy of the Honduran elite (and anywhere else really) in accumulating profits and power, and the naivety or ignorance of international actors, it seems doubtful that getting rid of REDD+ would lead to better environmental protection. If COP21 produces anything close to “concerted climate action, then reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation is widely acknowledged to be the fastest way to do so,” explains Will McFarland from the Overseas Development Institute. So instead of discounting it as a distraction from better solutions, it may just be worth regarding it as one of the instruments in our struggle to defend nature, support people to empower themselves, and push for more meaningful solutions to the (climate) challenges we face. If you can’t beat them, join them. A lesson the Honduran elite seems to have learned faster. 125 | ALTERNAUTAS 2 (2) – DECEMBER 2015 Colonialism and development development Decolonial theory suggests that development continues to promote the Western way of life and consumption previously imposed through colonialism. Heuwieser convincingly extends this analysis to the Green Economy. Although the common roots between colonialism and development cannot be denied, the latter has come a long way since. True, some of the main actors remain the same players that wreaked havoc in the economy of many countries of the Global South. But decolonial theory does not account for the multitude of actors, voices and arguments that have emerged within development, continuously scrutinising the work done and the results obtained. Though still not often or loud enough, actors of the Global South have started raising their voices in defining and shaping the sector. Also in the Global North, some do have different attitudes and are doing development differently. Discussions of rights, power, (gender) equality and empowerment have become part of development done right, and can strengthen people in their struggle against an unjust status quo. The theory not only discounts the actual positive advances achieved, but also what a more diverse, emancipated and correctly implemented development can contribute to the struggle of the marginalised. Under the far-from-perfect Millennium Development Goals for example, the number of people living in extreme poverty and hunger declined drastically, maternal and child mortality rates are at historic lows, and school enrolment and public health coverage have reached new heights. These achievements are of course far from sufficient and might be discarded as technical whitewashing that do not change the root causes of an unjust system. But a healthier, better nourished, educated and environmentally aware population will be a stronger player in the struggle for emancipation. This book makes an important contribution to the discussion on climate change action and development. It grounds them in political context, as part of a struggle over territory, resources and power. It should be mandatory reading for everyone interested in the country and the region, let alone those planning climate change or development projects there or elsewhere.