Chapter Five

Ecosocial Struggles of Indigenous Peoples

Indigenous communities have become the center of the struggle for the environment in Latin America. This is true not only because of their local actions in defense of rivers and forests against petroleum and mining multinationals, but also because they propose an alternative way of life to that of neoliberal globalized capitalism. Indigenous peoples in particular may be the ones undertaking these struggles, but they quite often do so in alliance with landless peasants, ecologists, socialists, and Christian communities, with support from unions, left parties, the Pastoral Land Commission, and the Indigenous Pastoral Ministry.

The dynamics of capital require the transformation of all commonly held goods into commodities, which sooner or later leads to destruction of the environment. The petroleum zones of Latin America, abandoned by the multinationals after years of exploitation, are poisoned and destroyed, leaving behind a dismal legacy of illnesses among the inhabitants. It is thus completely understandable that the populations living in the most direct contact with the environment are the first victims of this ecocide and are attempting to oppose the destructive expansion of capital, sometimes successfully.

Indigenous peoples’ resistance, then, has very concrete and immediate motivations—to save forests or water resources—in their battle for survival. However, it also corresponds to a deep antagonism between the cultures, ways of life, spirituality, and values of these communities and the “spirit of capitalism” as Max Weber defined it: the subjection of all activity to profit calculations, profitability as the sole criterion, and the quantification and reification (Versachlichung) of all social relations. There is a sort of “negative affinity” between Indigenous ethics and the spirit of capitalism—the converse of the elective affinity between the Protestant ethic and capitalism, a profound sociocultural opposition. Certainly, there are Indigenous or Métis communities that adapt to the system and try to gain from it. Furthermore, Indigenous struggles involve extremely complex processes, including identity recomposition, transcoding of discourses, and political instrumentalization, all of which deserve to be closely studied. Yet we can clearly see that a continuous series of conflicts characterizes the relations between Indigenous populations and modern capitalist agricultural or mining corporations. This conflict has a long history. It is admirably described in a novel by the anarchist writer B. Traven, The White Rose, which narrates how a large North American oil company seized the lands of a Mexican Indigenous community after murdering its leader.31 However, the conflict has intensified during the last few decades because of both the intensity and the extent of capital’s exploitation of the environment, and also because of the rise of the global justice movement—which took on this struggle—and the Indigenous movements of the continent.

World Social Forum of Belém in the Brazilian Amazon (2009)

Twenty years after Chico Mendes’s murder, the struggle to defend the Amazon forest spread and was organized around the entire global justice movement. Indigenous Latin American movements have often participated in global justice initiatives and in the World Social Forums (WSFs) held in Porto Alegre. A key moment, however, was the WSF held in Belém in the state of Pará—the second-largest city of the Brazilian Amazon, with more than one million inhabitants—in January 2009. For the first time, and as the WSF organizers intended, there was a huge and sudden emergence of Indigenous communities and traditional populations in the global justice movement. Their demands and their diagnosis of the “crisis of Western capitalist civilization” were at the center of all Forum debates. The WSF adopted their slogan in the face of the increasing pace of destruction of the Amazon forest by wood exporters, large landowners raising livestock, and soy and petroleum corporations: “Zero Deforestation Now!”

A general assembly of Indigenous delegates approved an important document, the “Declaration of Indigenous Peoples at the World Social Forum: Appeal from the Indigenous Peoples Facing the Capitalist Crisis of Western Civilization.” This appeal was signed by dozens of peasant, Indigenous, and global justice organizations, mainly from the Americas, at the suggestion of Andean organizations from Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia, countries where the majority of the population is of Amerindian origin. This document breaks with dominant “progressive” responses, which seek to validate and reinforce the role of the state and are based on plans for economic revival. Its aim is to fight against the commodification of life by defending “Mother Earth” and the struggle for collective rights, “living well,” and decolonization—all responses to the crisis of Western capitalist civilization.

During the Social Forum, an international ecosocialist declaration concerning climate change signed by hundreds of people from several countries was distributed to the participants. Following the close of the WSF, an Ecosocialist Conference was held in Belém on February 2, 2009, with the participation of a large delegation of Indigenous people from Peru. It was coordinated by Hugo Blanco, historic leader of peasant and Indigenous struggles in Peru and former member of the Peruvian Constituent Assembly, and Marcos Arana, a priest linked with liberation theology and Indigenous movements—honored in 2004 with the Peruvian National Human Rights Award and suspended by the Church hierarchy because of his sociopolitical commitments. In his presentation, Hugo Blanco recalled that Indigenous communities have fought for several centuries for the same objectives as ecosocialism: specifically, collective agricultural organization and respect for Mother Earth.

The increasingly important place of Indigenous populations and their territories within international organizations, from the local to the global levels, is expressed above all in local struggles that are quite symbolic of the originality of ecological and political processes in Latin America.

Examples of Local Struggles: Peru, 2008–12

There are an impressive number of conflicts listed on the website of the Observatory of Latin American Mining Conflicts (Observatorio de Conflictos Mineros de América Latina, or OCMAL). These conflicts pit Indigenous and peasant communities from Mexico to Tierra del Fuego against various petroleum or mining companies, mainly North American or European multinationals. Two examples from Peru illustrate the dynamics of these types of confrontations. Peru is, like Bolivia and Ecuador, a Latin American country where the majority of the population is of Indigenous origin. However, unlike the other two Andean countries, Indigenous movements have never succeeded in inspiring true political change and forcing recognition of their sociocultural demands. Yet these movements have continued to lead persistent struggles over many years against the multinationals responsible for environmental destruction and the governments that support them. Two recent examples illustrate these conflicts. In June 2008, a confrontation between the government and Indigenous people took place in Bagua, Peru. The communities rose up against the decree of Alan García’s neoliberal government that applied Peru’s free-trade agreement with the United States to authorize petroleum and wood-exporting corporations to exploit the forests of the Andes and the Amazon. The García government fiercely cracked down on the protest by the Interethnic Association for the Development of the Peruvian Rainforest (La Asociación Interétnica de Desarrollo de la Selva Peruana, or AIDESEP, the main organization of Amazon Indigenous communities), which led to many deaths.

In 2011, a change in government occurred with the election of the nationalist candidate Ollanta Humala, who promised to break with his predecessor’s neoliberal policies and submission to multinational interests. He inherited from his predecessor the Conga Project, which allows the mining corporation Yanacocha—owned by the North American multinational Newmont, known for its disturbing past of pollution and contempt for human rights in different countries, in partnership with local companies—to exploit an open-air gold mine. The predictable result of the Conga Project is pollution—or rather poisoning—of rivers, directly threatening the survival of local communities. Little by little, concerned communities mobilized against the project, developing around the slogan “Yes to water, no to gold!” Indigenous and peasant women were at the forefront, organizing demonstrations of tens of thousands of participants behind banners that said “No to Conga!” Indigenous leaders like Blanco and Arana showed solidarity with this struggle and tried to give it international recognition. Faced with protests from the Indigenous communities, which were supported by civil society, Humala’s government chose to respond harshly in 2012 with military repression, killing several demonstrators, imprisoning the mayor of Cajamarca for having supported the local communities, and even (more recently) having Marcos Arana publicly beaten by armed police. Protests took place all over Latin America and also in Europe. OCMAL denounced the assassination of demonstrators and the imprisonment of two human-rights lawyers. This affair illustrates the “neo-extractionist”—and repressive—logic of Peruvian governments of various political persuasions and the stubborn resistance of Indigenous populations.32

The Yasuní National Park Project: Ecuador, 2007–13

One of the most important actions by Indigenous movements and ecologists in Latin America is the Yasuní National Park Project in Ecuador. The park is huge: 9,280 square kilometers of virgin forest. Extraordinarily rich in terms of biodiversity—botanists have calculated that one hectare of this forest contains more species of trees than the entire United States—it is inhabited by Indigenous communities and delimited by three small cities: Ishpingo, Tambococha, and Tiputini (hence the abbreviation ITT to designate the whole area). After drilling in the Yasuní region, various petroleum companies, notably including the Maxus Energy Corporation of Texas, found three large petroleum reserves with an estimated capacity of 850 million barrels. Previous Ecuadoran governments had, in the 1980s and 1990s, granted concessions to the Texaco, but the resistance of Indigenous communities had limited the damage by preventing most of the drilling.

The proposal of the Indigenous movement was to leave the petroleum in the ground, thereby avoiding 400 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions, in exchange for compensation from the international community. Concretely, the wealthy countries would be responsible for half of the expected receipts, around $3.5 billion over thirteen years. The money would be paid to a fund managed by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and exclusively earmarked for preserving biodiversity and developing renewable energies. Indigenous and ecological movements initially put this project forward, but it was only after Rafael Correa’s election in 2007 that it was to be implemented under the initiative of Alberto Acosta, then minister of mines. The Yasuní project was one of the only initiatives at the international level that actually responded to the urgency of the fight against climate change by offering a measure that is, at the very least, effective: to leave the petroleum in the ground. This measure is much more efficient than the “market for emission allowances” and other “clean development mechanisms” in the Kyoto accords, which have proved to be completely incapable of significantly reducing greenhouse gases.33 In the case of Yasuní Park—as in most Indigenous struggles, particularly in the Amazon region—local communities’ fight to defend their environment from the destructive voraciousness of the fossil-fuel oligarchy has coincided completely with the great ecological cause of the twenty-first century: preventing global warming, one of the greatest threats ever known to human life on the planet.

Countries from the North, which are supposed to be taking measures to restrict emissions of greenhouse gases, were not much interested in Ecuador’s heterodox proposal. A few European countries—Spain, Italy, and Germany—paid a total of three million dollars: a long way to go! Further, some countries—notably Italy and Norway—have canceled $100 million of Ecuador’s external debt.34 Faced with these lukewarm results, Rafael Correa decided in September 2013 to give up the project and open the park to oil corporations. However, large mobilizations by Indigenous peoples, peasants, and ecologists, supported by the left, protested the decision and are calling for a referendum on the issue.

If the wealthy countries have shown such little enthusiasm for the project, it is not only because the project has nothing to do with their preferential “market mechanisms” but also, above all, because they fear the demonstration effect of this initiative. Agreeing to finance Yasuní would be tantamount to opening the door to hundreds of similar projects—projects in complete contradiction with the policies advanced capitalist countries have chosen. This is illustrated quite well by the (non-) choices they have made in the various climate conferences, where the inability of the countries of the North to change direction is obvious. This inability, moreover, has prompted a notable reaction by South American peoples, concretized in the organization of the World People’s Conference on Climate Change in Cochabamba in 2010.

World People’s Conference on Climate Change: Cochabamba, Bolivia, 2010

During the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen (2009), Evo Morales, the Indigenous president of Bolivia, was the only head of government to support the demonstrations occurring in the streets of the Danish capital under the slogan “Change the system, not the climate!”

In response to the failure of the Copenhagen conference, a World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth was convened at Morales’s initiative in the Bolivian city of Cochabamba in April 2010. At the beginning of the 2000s, this city had been the site of victorious struggles against water privatization (the “Water War”). More than twenty thousand delegates participated from all over the world, though the majority came from the Andean countries of Latin America, with a very substantial Indigenous representation. The resolution the conference adopted, which has had considerable international effect, expresses the ecological and anticapitalist ideas of Indigenous movements, even in the terminology it uses. Here are some extracts from this document:

The capitalist system has imposed on us a logic of competition, progress and limitless growth. This regime of production and consumption seeks profit without limits, separating human beings from nature and imposing a logic of domination upon nature, transforming everything into commodities: water, earth, the human genome, ancestral cultures, biodiversity, justice, ethics, the rights of peoples, and life itself.

Under capitalism, Mother Earth is converted into a source of raw materials, and human beings into consumers and a means of production, into people that are seen as valuable only for what they own, and not for what they are.

Capitalism requires a powerful military industry for its processes of accumulation and imposition of control over territories and natural resources, suppressing the resistance of the peoples. It is an imperialist system of colonization of the planet.

Humanity confronts a great dilemma: to continue on the path of capitalism, depredation, and death, or to choose the path of harmony with nature and respect for life.

It is imperative that we forge a new system that restores harmony with nature and among human beings. And in order for there to be balance with nature, there must first be equity among human beings.

We propose to the peoples of the world the recovery, revalorization, and strengthening of the knowledge, wisdom, and ancestral practices of Indigenous Peoples, which are affirmed in the thought and practices of “Living Well,” recognizing Mother Earth as a living being with which we have an indivisible, interdependent, complementary and spiritual relationship.35

One can criticize the mystical and confused aspect of the concept of “Mother Earth” (Pachamama in the Indigenous languages Aymara and Quechua), as some leftist Latin American intellectuals have done, or point out the impossibility of giving an effective legal expression to the “rights of Mother Earth,” as jurists have done. Yet this would be to lose sight of the essential point: the powerful, radically anti-systemic social dynamic that has crystallized around these slogans.

Among the terms that have appeared in Indigenous discourse over the past few years, the one that seems to have the widest acceptance is kawsay sumak or buen vivir (living well). This is a qualitative conception of the “good life” based on the satisfaction of real social needs and respect for nature as opposed to the capitalist cult of growth, expansion, and “development,” accompanied by the consumer obsession of “always more.” The concepts of the “rights of Mother Earth” and buen vivir rapidly spread not only to Indigenous and ecological currents, but also to the entire global justice movement. Eventually, they were included in the constitutions of Bolivia and Ecuador by the progressive governments of these two countries.

These examples of Indigenous peoples’ struggles, summit meetings, and alternative proposals seem to be promising paths toward a post-petroleum transition and alternative models of development that are lacking more than ever in this period of systemic crisis. However, these advances should not be allowed to hide the contradictions of these movements and, above all, of these governments.

The Contradictions of South American Leftist Governments

Many Latin American countries have left or center-left governments; most—Brazil, Uruguay, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chile, etc.—do not go beyond the limits of social-liberalism, a policy that remains within the limits of neoliberal orthodoxy, favoring the interests of banks, multinationals, and agribusiness but at the same time implementing some redistribution of the rent for the benefit of the most disadvantaged strata. Ecology is not at all a priority for these governments. Their main objective remains capitalist: “growth” and “development.”

The Brazilian government, first under the leadership of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, “Lula,” the head of the Workers’ Party, and now under President Dilma Rousseff of the same party, is a good example of these policies. Marina Silva—a friend of Chico Mendes—resigned in 2008 as Lula’s environmental minister, citing her inability to obtain even a minimum of guarantees for protection of the Amazon forest. Favoring agribusiness—the large capitalist producers of soybeans, cattle, and sugarcane for export—instead of the peasant agriculture, Lula and Dilma have permitted the expansion of environmentally destructive practices on a large scale.

One symbol of the Brazilian government’s harmful choices for the environment and Indigenous populations is the construction of the Belo Monte Dam, which will be the third-largest dam complex in the world. Construction is under way despite thirty years of fierce and extremely well-organized struggles by the traditional populations who live in the Xingu River basin.36 Brazil is also embarking on a dangerous and gigantic project of extracting oil from large reserves found several miles under the sea; there has never been an attempt to drill oil in such a deep site, under the salt level of the seabed. This can easily lead to massive oil spills, much worse than the recent ones in the Gulf of Mexico. Since the area is uninhabited, it is much more difficult to mobilize against this project, which will substantially increase Brazil’s contribution to global warming. Brazilian unions and social movements protested the concession of drilling rights to multinational corporations, but only a handful of ecosocialists challenged the project itself.

Some countries, however, like Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador, have attempted to break with neoliberal policies and have confronted the interests of the oligarchy and multinationals. All these anti-imperialist and anti-oligarchic governments recognize the importance of ecological challenges and are disposed to take measures to safeguard the environment. However, all three of their governmental budgets remain totally dependent on returns from fossil fuels (gas and petroleum), the fuels responsible for climate change. The Venezuelan government has hardly examined this issue; the absence of a sizeable or organized Indigenous population at the sites of exploitation is one of the reasons for this lack. Certainly, by prohibiting industrial fishing—which destroys all marine fauna—to the benefit of small-scale fishing, the Chavez government took an important ecological measure. However, the exploitation of petroleum, which includes all its “dirtiest” forms, continues without interruption, and there are few efforts to develop alternative energies.

In the two Andean countries, Bolivia and Ecuador, debate around the alternatives of “neo-extractionism or environment” lies at the heart of social and political confrontations. In Bolivia, Evo Morales’s commitment to the struggle against climate change and in defense of Mother Earth does not always correspond with the concrete practices of the Bolivian government, which is attached to a development strategy in which gas production and mining activities occupy an important place. Recently, a project to construct a highway that would cross a large area of virgin forest provoked energetic protests from local Indigenous communities, leading to the (temporary) suspension of the project. Vice President Álvaro García Linera, who in his youth spent years in jail for fighting in the Indigenous Tupak Katari guerilla movement, branded the protesting communities enemies of progress and national development, manipulated by NGOs at the service of foreign interests.

The Ecuadorian example shows how easily such progressive governments can sacrifice the environment in the interest of oil profits. By abandoning the Yasuní project and opening the forest for the multinational fossil-fuel oligarchy, Rafael Correa illustrates the limitations of these governments from the viewpoint of a coherent ecosocial agenda, their tendency to favor short-range gains, and their submission to the imperative of “growth” at any price.

It is reasonable for ecosocialists and anticapitalists to support these governments, whatever their limits and contradictions, against their right-wing, oligarchic, and pro-imperialist enemies, but this can only be critical support, considering how far these experiences are from an effective socialist and ecological perspective. Surely, it would be unrealistic to ask the governments of Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador to immediately stop oil (or gas) production, since this is, at the moment, the main source for financing their significant social programs. But they could take some partial initiatives concerning specific areas, such as the Yasuní Park project, in order to set a positive example for other parts of the world on how to fight climate change by leaving the fossil energies under the soil and putting pressure on the rich countries of the North, with the demand of indemnities for the unexploited oil.

These, alongside other socioecological measures—scrapping GMOs, agrotoxics, water-polluting mines, forest devastation, and so on—will take place only if there is sufficient pressure from autonomous social movements and public opinion on the leftist governments. Indigenous communities can play a decisive role here if they are able to keep their autonomy, refuse to subordinate themselves to the governments, however progressive and anti-imperialist, and supersede a purely local perspective to develop a broad, systemic, anticapitalist, ecosocial agenda. The Cochabamba conference of 2010, despite its limits, shows that this is possible. Building large coalitions with peasant movements, labor unions, youth networks, ecologists, feminists, ecosocialists, and others is also key to Indigenous communities’ efficacy. Of course, there is no guarantee that they will succeed, but they represent the hope of an alternative road for Latin America.

Conclusion

Indigenous communities are at the forefront of efforts to defend virgin forests, rivers, and the general environment against powerful adversaries: fossil-fuel multinationals, mining corporations, and agribusiness companies. In addition, the cultures, ways of life, and languages of Indigenous peoples have marked the discourse and culture of social and ecological movements, Social Forums, and global justice networks in Latin America. Finally, governments that claim to be leftist in countries with large Indigenous populations have taken on, to a certain extent, Indigenous ecological discourse, yet they continue to practice an “extractionist” model of development.