From “territories of difference” to “ethnic governable spaces”?

Shifting
visions of territory and autonomy in the Bolivian Chaco1
Penelope Anthias, University of California, Berkeley

Abstract

Emerging at the intersection of grassroots decolonial struggles and evolving forms of

neoliberal governmentality, Bolivia’s Tierras Comunitarias de Orígen (TCOs) were
framed by utopian visions of ethnodevelopment as well as indigenous aspirations for
“recovering territory”. Yet, in Bolivia’s multi-ethnic and gas-rich Chaco region,
sedimented structures of race and territory, combined with intensifying hydrocarbons
development, have presented enduring obstacles to the legal and material consolidation
of indigenous land rights. Drawing on ethnographic research in the Guaraní TCO Itika
Guasu, this paper examines the emergence of a new indigenous vision of territory and
autonomy, forged in the context of a frustrated land titling process and a decade-long
hydrocarbon conflict. Rather than demanding land rights from a recalcitrant state,
Guaraní leaders in Itika Guasu have come to view legal and financial negotiations with
hydrocarbon companies as an alternative route to territorial recognition and indigenous
self-governance – a vision that has, however, left them increasingly distanced from the
concerns of land-poor communities. Subject to such projects, TCOs begin to look less like
“territories of difference” (Escobar, 2008) and more like the “ethnic governable spaces”
of an emergent petro-state (Watts, 2003). These dynamics illustrate the complex
dilemmas faced by indigenous peoples struggling for territorial control and self-
determination in the context of extractives-based development. As well as revealing the
surprising legacies of multiculturalism’s “territorial turn”, TCO Itika Guasu points to
the complex entanglements between struggles over identity, land rights, and resource
governance in “post-neoliberal” states.

Introduction

On 23rd March 2011, community members from throughout Itika Guasu, a Guaraní
territory located in Bolivia’s remote Chaco region, gathered in the community of
Ñaurenda to celebrate the 22nd anniversary of their organization. Celebrations began with
an evening “cultural event”, where alternating Guaraní music groups accompanied
classes of dancing school children, interspersed with speeches wishing everyone a happy
birthday and a happy future. The atmosphere was surprisingly flat; most of the audience
sat silently through the hours of acts. When at midnight twenty-two fireworks were let off
in celebration, the response was muted. Speakers blasted the usual Spanglish version of
Happy Birthday and the audience was asked to stand and participate, but there was little

1Prepared for delivery at the 2015 Congress of the Latin American Studies Association, San Juan,
Puerto Rico May 27 - 30, 2015

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response. One Guaraní friend contrasted the event nostalgically to the days of Machirope
– a leader of the Guaraní land struggle in the 1990s, killed in a bus accident en route to
La Paz – who had been capable of rousing the audience with his oratory skills and
charisma.
The next morning was spent in preparation for the official parade, speeches and
almuerzo, which had mobilized all the community’s women. Throughout the morning’s
preparations, a rolling announcement prepared by the NGO project “Radio Niskor”2
blared from loudspeakers, informing people of the terms and achievements of the recent
“Agreement of Friendship and Cooperation” between the Guaraní organization,
Asamblea del Pueblo Guaraní Itika Guasu (Guaraní People’s Assembly Itika Guasu -
APG IG), and the Spanish oil company Repsol. In fact, no one seemed to be listening;
those gathered on Ñaurenda’s oka (patio) were more preoccupied with preparations for
the speeches and lunch, or with catching up with friends from other communities, than
they were with the details of an agreement negotiated by an increasingly distant and
unaccountable leadership elite. After peeling a few potatoes, I accompanied some
CERDET técnicos to pick up slaughtered cows and chicha from a nearby community.
When I returned, the speeches had begun. Representatives of the APG IG
leadership, local NGOs, the army, and the municipal, departmental and provincial
government spoke in turn, each giving their personal and political take on the
organization’s 22nd anniversary. Also notable in this staged performance of plurinational
citizenship was the presence of a representative from Repsol, who sat alongside other
speakers and was repeatedly welcomed, although he remained silent. When it came to the
turn of the APG IG President to speak, he told the audience that 2011 was a “special
year” for the Guaraní of Itika Guasu, who had “cause for celebration”. He went on:

On the 29th December, we signed an agreement with Repsol Bolivia SA, which put an end to the
difficult confrontation that we’ve maintained for many years. But we signed without renouncing
any of our rights and gained full legal recognition of our property over the Communal Land of
Origin and of the existence of the APG IG.

Among the agreement’s achievements he referred to the creation of an “Itika Guasu

Investment Fund”, totaling 14.8 million US dollars, which he described as “part of our
long-term funding strategy, which will permit us to carry forward our own development.
This guarantees our real autonomy and that of our children”.
In this paper, I ask: How can we make sense of this new discourse, and what does
it tell us about the limits – and the legacies – of indigenous land titling in the Bolivian
Chaco? It is argued that this Guaraní vision of hydrocarbon-based territorial autonomy
must be understood as a response to the frustrated aspirations for territorial recognition
and autonomy created by two decades of indigenous mapping and land titling. I further
suggest that this vision is illustrative of indigenous peoples’ growing participation in a
broader regime of “hydrocarbon citizenship” in Bolivia under the Morales government,
where control of gas rents is providing the basis for a range of competing territorial
projects enacted at a variety of scales.

2Radio Niskor is an internet-based radio station run by the NGO Equipo Niskor, which provided legal
advice to the APG IG in their negotiations with Repsol from 2006. See
http://www.radionizkor.org/about.html.

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 The paper begins by briefly summarizing the aspirations, obstacles and outcomes
of the Guaraní territorial claim in Itika Guasu. I argue that early processes of indigenous
mobilization in Itika Guasu created far-reaching aspirations for “recovering territory” – a
notion associated with both material land control and political autonomy – that state-led
TCO titling (1997-2009) has ultimately failed to meet. Not only have sedimented
structures of race and territory precluded a substantive redistribution of property rights,
but state and transnational interests in gas reserves located beneath the territory have
frustrated Guaraní efforts to exercise territorial control. I then examine the shifting
visions of territorial recognition and autonomy that have emerged in Itika Guasu
following the recent agreement with the Repsol, as an example indigenous peoples’
territorially-based experiments in “hydrocarbon citizenship”. I conclude by reflecting on
what these dynamics might tell us about the limits and legacies of indigenous land titling
in resource nationalist or “post neoliberal” states. I ask whether, rather than constituting
“territories of difference” (Escobar, 2008: 6), TCOs could be emerging as “ethnic
governable spaces” through which indigenous peoples activate claims on hydrocarbon
wealth (Watts, 2003), in ways that both challenge, and potentially align with, the political
projects of resource nationalist states.

1. The struggle for “recovering territory” in Itika Guasu

The Guaraní, Bolivia’s largest lowland indigenous group, continue to live primarily
within their ancestral lands in the Chaco, a semi-arid but biodiverse plain extending over
parts of Bolivia, Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil. Itika Guasu is the largest Guaraní
territorial claim in Tarija Department, located in a transitional zone between the sub-
Andean valleys and the Chaco (Figure 1). Although the Guaraní were not defeated
militarily until the 1890s, the next century proved devastating, as waves of state-backed
colonization left them increasingly dispossessed and marginalized (Albó 1990, Langer
2009). By the 1980s, most Guaraní who remained in Itika Guasu were either trapped in a
system of empatronamiento (debt bondage) on mestizo-owned haciendas or living a
precarious existence on marginal land. Guaraní communities in Itika Guasu began to
organize in the late 1980s, a process that occurred in articulation with transnational
networks of development actors and a nascent lowland indigenous movement (Gustafson
2009). In 1989, these communities formed their own organization, the Asamblea del
Pueblo Guaraní Itika Guasu (APG IG), which quickly identified land rights as a
precondition for breaking dependency on the patrones and establishing independent
Guaraní livelihoods. Soon afterwards, the APG IG and their NGO allies embarked on
their first efforts to map a territorial claim.
Mapping territory in Itika Guasu was a power-laden process that involved a series
of concessions to state and settler geographies (Anthias, 2013). These ambivalences
notwithstanding, early mapping efforts formed part of a broader social process, which
had profound and decolonizing effects on identities, ethnic power relations and territorial
aspirations in Itika Guasu. As in other experiences of indigenous countermapping (Stocks
2003, Offen 2003), the construction of a territorial claim provided a locus for a broader
project of identity-formation and decolonizing knowledge (Gustafson 2009). Local
(counter) narratives of colonization, subjugation and resurgence drew on, and contributed

3
to, national Guaraní movement efforts at retelling history (Gustafson 2009: 39-40, 221-
9).
These processes had a profound effect on Guaraní territorial imaginaries and
aspirations in Itika Guasu. In remote communities of Itika Guasu, community members
continue to articulate a historically grounded vision of “recovering territory”, seen as the
underlying, if elusive, objective of the TCO claim. Although “transnationally articulated”
– inflected by multicultural discourses of indigenous rights and ethnodevelopment
(Andolina et al. 2009) – these aspirations were “locally understood” (Valdivia 2005),
grounded in personal and collective memories of colonization, enslavement and ethnic
resurgence passed down through oral storytelling traditions. When asked about the land
struggle, older people in Itika Guasu often begin by relating accounts told by their elders
of what the territory was like prior to the arrival of the karai (non-Guaraní people). The
following passage is illustrative:

Before, ñande (Guaraní: us/ours). They didn’t know any Spanish; like that they lived peacefully.
They looked after their land, up to what is now the crossroads, it was all Guaraní land…everything
– from Ivopeiti to Ivoca, everything, up to Puerto Margarita. It was all land of the Guaraní, of our
grandfathers, you know. That is, there weren’t any Spanish people. There wasn’t...like now they’re
already there, aren’t they? They’re already mixed. Before, it was pure Guaraní, it was our
territory. We made our potrero, they went to that blue hill [he points], that’s where it was, they
went there to make their potrero...our grandfathers would walk, before they didn’t consume sugar
or anything; it was pure maize, black beans, pumpkin, our food was all like that (Guaraní
community member, interview with author, January 19, 2012)

Here, territory is constructed as a fluid, unbounded, Guaraní space, within which

ancestors moved freely. The mburuvicha went on to describe in detail the cultural
practices of his ancestors (los abuelos) and the strategies through which the karai (non-
Guaraní people) had displaced and subjugated them, aided by the 1952 agrarian reform,
when “the law appeared – only for the karai; it wasn’t for the indigenous people...never
again could we rescue the land, we couldn’t rescue the land”. It is this historical memory
of territorial loss that gives meaning to the TCO territorial claim for this communal
leader, who described how, in the early days of the struggle “people had the hope of
being able to rescue [rescatar] everything, in order to live peacefully”. This vision of
“rescuing” or “recovering territory” envisaged the territorial claim as a step towards
regaining material control of land lost to settlers over the past century, which would in
turn enable the Guaraní to become iyambae (Guaraní: free, without an owner), a notion
associated with uninhibited movement through territory, the restoration of traditional
subsistence livelihoods, and the severing of exploitative labor contracts with karai
landowners. As I will now elaborate, the state-led process of TCO titling has failed to
meet these aspirations.

2. TCO titling, landowner opposition and hydrocarbon development

The Bolivian state recognized indigenous demands for territory in 1996, with the creation
of Communal Lands of Origin (TCOs) under the INRA agrarian reform law, one of
several “neoliberal multicultural” reforms introduced in Bolivia during the 1990s (Hale,
2002; Postero, 2007; Gustafson, 2009). The INRA Law emerged from a two-year

4
national dialogue, which was overseen by the World Bank and accompanied by sustained
mobilization from indigenous peoples and other agrarian sectors (Urioste and Pacheco,
1999). Reflecting the conflicting visions involved in this power-infused policy process,
TCOs fell short of indigenous demands for territory in several respects (Almaraz, 2002;
Paredes and Canedo, 2008). First, pressure from landowner organizations secured
recognition for private properties within TCOs, which are prioritized over indigenous
land rights provided claimants can demonstrate productive land use. Second, TCOs made
no provisions for indigenous autonomy, offering only agrarian rights. Third, contrary to
indigenous peoples’ vision of territory (CIDOB, 1991), TCOs excluded indigenous rights
to the subsoil, which remained patrimony of the Bolivian state. Yet, it was not only these
inherent legal limitations, but also the racially inflected micropolitics and broader
political-economic context of TCO titling in the Chaco that undermined Guaraní hopes of
“recovering territory”. While there is not space here for a detailed discussion of these
dynamics, two crucial influences on the titling process are worth highlighting.
First, the TCO titling process has been systematically obstructed and manipulated
by non-indigenous private land claimants within the TCO, mainly cattle ranchers, who
continue to exercise considerable political power within the regional context. Early
Guaraní organizing efforts during the 1990s had already brought communities and NGO
workers into tense, and sometimes violent, confrontations with local landowners. During
the course of the titling process (1997-2009), this opposition took the form of a series of
concrete actions to obstruct legal progress and influence results. Organized around two
local cattle ranching organizations, private claimants presented individual and collective
complaints to the National Institute for Agrarian Reform (Instituto Nacional de Reforma
Agraria, INRA) and other state institutions, mounted legal challenges, participated in
national landowner mobilizations, and lobbied departmental authorities to block the
allocation of departmental funds for TCO titling. Individuals used corrupt practices to
influence the results of their properties’ legal evaluation, such as the lending of cattle and
attempts to sweeten INRA officials with feasts, alcohol or cash payments. These
strategies drew on racialist networks of clientelistic power and influence – a legacy of the
historical confluence of land ownership and political power in the Chaco. Such actions
were underpinned by racialized discourses of rights that framed the Guaraní as
unproductive, undeserving of land rights, and manipulated by outside interests, while
emphasizing non-indigenous claimants’ greater contribution to regional markets, and to
historic processes of nation-building (notably the 1932-35 Chaco War). Such discourses
were shared by many state officials responsible for implementing the TCO titling
process, many of whom were themselves members of local landowning families.
These racialized micropolitics provide part of the explanation for the ambivalent
results of the TCO titling process in Itika Guasu. To date, the Guaraní have received title
to 90,539.9 hectares, 38.4 percent of the total TCO area (Figure 1). This area is
discontinuous (interspersed with privately-titled and unresolved property claims), tends to
be the least productive land in the TCO, and consists largely of areas Guaraní
communities occupied prior to 1997. In a context of worsening drought conditions,
Guaraní community members routinely complain of the insufficient quantity and poor
quality of land for farming, problems accessing natural resources, and ongoing land
conflicts with non-indigenous neighbors – problems that make it increasingly difficult to
practice the “traditional” subsistence livelihoods envisaged for them by global and

5
national proponents of indigenous land rights.
These local dynamics have articulated with a second key factor that has
profoundly shaped the progress and results of TCO titling in Itika Guasu: hydrocarbon
development. TCO Itika Guasu overlies Bolivia’s largest gas field, Margarita-Huacaya
(Figure 1), which has been developed by the Spanish oil company Repsol since 1997.3
From 2000-2003, the company drilled four gas wells and constructed a processing plant,
several airstrips, and a network of access roads and gas pipelines. The APG IG were not
initially consulted, or even informed, about these activities; as one APG IG leader put it:
“They entered [the TCO] as if they were entering their house. It was as if you’re the
owner of the house and they pass under your nose” (Interview with author, April 24
2009). When the APG IG began to make demands for recognition of their rights,
including to prior consultation, land use payments, and compensation for social and
environmental impacts, Repsol responded by explaining that it had made land use
agreements with private landowners within the TCO, whose rights had been legally
validated by the National Institute of Agrarian Reform (INRA)’s regional office. This
legal validation – which provided Repsol with legal security for its operations and
allowed the company to evade consultation with the APG IG – violated the legal norms
of TCO titling, which stipulate that all private property claims within TCO boundaries are
subject to legal revision. Official documentation reveals that several of the properties in
question did not meet legal criteria for productive land use and should have been
reallocated to the Guaraní as TCO land.4 In one case, infrastructure built by Repsol was
used as evidence of productive land use, legitimizing the claimant’s rights to an otherwise
unproductive property.
Not only did Repsol’s presence in the TCO influence the outcomes of TCO land
titling in specific properties (those containing its infrastructure), but, over time, the
Guaraní became convinced that Repsol’s presence in their territory was the underlying
reason for the lack of progress on TCO titling in general. As one APG IG leader put it,
articulating a discourse that was widespread in Itika Guasu by the time of my fieldwork
(2008-2012): “The State already had clearly identified which TCOs had big reserves of
natural resources, and that has been the bottleneck reason why they haven’t wanted to
accelerate with the land titling” (interview with author, April 24 2009). As this indicates,
the election of Evo Morales as Bolivia’s President in December 2005 did not put an end
to these collusions between transnational, state and private landowning interests in the
Chaco. The TCO titling process in Itika Guasu has remained paralyzed, while the
Guaraníes’ appeals for government support in their ongoing conflict with Repsol have fallen
on deaf ears. Indeed, leading members of the MAS government have accused the APG IG of
being “the single biggest threat to Bolivia’s energy development”, and have dismissed their
claims to consultation and compensation as chantaje (blackmail) (interviews with author,
Entre Ríos, 22/4/09 and 24/4/09; Erbol, 2011). The Guaraní of Itika Guasu have thus

3 The Spanish oil company Repsol signed a mixed-risk contract with the Bolivian state company
YPFB for activities in Caipipendi Block (which includes the Margarita gas field) on 14th May 1997,
nearly two months after the TCO gained official recognition.
4 According to documentation from INRA’s 2000 fieldwork, the two properties containing gas wells
X-3 and X-4 were due to face reductions. Guaraní community members claim that neither these
properties nor those of gas well X-2 and the airstrip are used productively, since their owners live in
Tarija city.

6
witnessed first hand how the promise of a “plurinational state” has been undermined by
state dependence on gas reserves located beneath indigenous territories.
In June 2009, the APG IG wrote to the Land Ministry formally demanding the
indefinite suspension of the TCO land titling process – a demand motivated in part by
concern that the process would serve to consolidate private properties within the area of
the Margarita gas field, thus weakening their claims to participation in hydrocarbon
governance. This decision marks the ultimate failure of the “legal-cartographic strategy”
(Wainwright and Bryan, 2009) for resolving the Guaraní territorial claim in Itika Guasu,
and signals how this claim has become inextricably imbricated in a broader conflict over
the governance of hydrocarbons development.
I now turn to examine in more detail how this frustrated promise of territory has
informed the emergence of a new vision of territory and autonomy among the APG IG
leadership, following the 2010 agreement with the oil company Repsol.5 My discussion
focuses on how territorial recognition and autonomy have been reframed beyond the
arena of state land titling and on the terrain of “hydrocarbon citizenship”. I then examine
the tensions this vision has produced in Itika Guasu, and its ultimate displacement by a
state-aligned – but still hydrocarbon-based - vision of indigenous territorial development.
As I reveal, the TCO maintains a central role in both these iterations of indigenous
hydrocarbon citizenship, despite becoming increasingly distant from its multicultural
origins, and more similar to other emergent “governable spaces” of the Bolivian petro-
state.

3. Shifting visions of territory and autonomy in Itika Guasu

Reframing Recognition

I began this paper with a description of the APG IG’s President’s 2011 Anniversary
speech, in which he declared that the recent “Friendship Agreement” with Repsol had
given the Guaraní of Itika Guasu “full legal recognition of our property over the
Communal Land of Origin and of the existence of the APG IG”. This speech could
simply be read as an effort to pacify community members, many of whom had become
skeptical of the APG IG’s opaque negotiations with oil companies. Yet, informal
engagements with the APG IG leadership in 2011-12 suggested that many of them
viewed territorial recognition as a key achievement of the agreement with Repsol. By
“recognition”, they referred to the production of a written agreement signed by Repsol
(overseen by the APG IG’s legal advisors from Equipo Niskor), in which the oil company
stated that it recognized the APG IG’s ownership of TCO Itika Guasu, as well as its legal
existence and rights under international law (Equipo Niskor, 2010: 3). As Cesar put it
during a five-hour discussion in Tarija in April 2011, repeating what had become akin to
a mantra for the APG IG leadership: “They don’t recognize you if you don’t have a

5 This agreement followed four years of intense negotiations (2006-2010) between Repsol’s head
office and the APG IG leadership, advised by lawyers from the Europe-based human rights NGO
Equipo Niskor. These transnational negotiations constituted a scaling up of the Itika Guasu
hydrocarbon conflict, which initially involved local Chaco NGOs, the APG IG, and Repsol’s
subcontractor Maxus.

7
written document”. While this may seem reminiscent of precisely the limited
multicultural forms of recognition that had marked the TCO titling process, then Cesar
insisted that such written statements were politically, as well as symbolically, important:
“Once [private or state companies] recognize that you’re the owner of this iwi (Guaraní:
territory), then we can discuss [anything else - implicitly consultation, compensation or
benefit-sharing]”.
The agreement with Repsol is just one example of how agreements over
extractive industry development in Itika Guasu have come to stand in for state-sanctioned
land title as a symbol of territorial recognition. An agreement signed with the former
Departmental Prefect in 2010 regarding the construction of a highway through the TCO,
was heralded as the first time in history that the departmental government had (in Cesar’s
words) given “legal recognition that the APG IG is the owner of Itika Guasu”. Later that
year, a Constitutional Sentence (25th October, 2010) issued by the Plurinational
Constitutional Tribunal, relating to a conflict between the APG IG and the departmental
road-building company (and involving an oil company), provided such a strong legal
endorsement for the APG IG’s land rights that leaders heralded it as worth more than a
TCO land title.6 As the APG IG’s Vice President proudly told me in 2011: “We’re going
to give it to every institution so that they know, so that they too can read it” (interview
with author, Entre Ríos, 28th December). Such agreements – negotiated in regional,
national, and transnational arenas – provide an alternative terrain for the discursive
production and recognition of indigenous territory, beyond the TCO titling process. Yet,
it is in light of the state’s failure to legally consolidate Guaraní land rights that such
agreements acquire their meaning. As Cesar put it:

The ex-governor of Tarija, Mario Cossio, has already recognized everything, and the company
[Repsol] as well has recognized the rights of the people, but the only one who doesn’t want to
recognize [our rights] is the government...Abroad, in other countries, the APG is recognized. But
the only one who hasn’t recognized us is the government.

The growing importance of hydrocarbon negotiations as a discursive terrain for realizing

historically grounded claims for territorial recognition is indicative of the displacement of
a regime of multicultural rights by one of “hydrocarbon citizenship”, in which citizenship
claims are articulated in relation to conflicts over hydrocarbon governance.

Achieving autonomy?

Perhaps even more telling is the way in which territorial autonomy has been reframed in
the wake of the 2010 Friendship Agreement. As noted above, from the early days of the

6 This dispute erupted when Tarija department’s road-building company SEDECA signed an agreement
with an oil company, PETROSUR, for the lease of a workers’ camp in TCO Itika Guasu. The APG IG
denounced the agreement, claiming they should have been consulted; SEDECA then won a departmental
court case against the TCO’s President for jeopardizing their “rights of association”. In 2008, following an
appeal by the APG IG, the case went to the Plurinational Constitutional Tribunal. In fact, the Constitutional
Sentence (25th October, 2010) resulting from this case not only sets an important precedent for future
negotiations over extractive industry development in the TCO, by affirming the APG IG’s right to prior
consultation on any development activities in “their territory”, but also, referencing numerous national and
international norms, orders the Bolivian state (via INRA) to complete the titling of the TCO in favor of
Guaraní claimants (Equipo Nizkor, 2010).

8
land struggle, the TCO has been associated with a struggle for autonomy, or becoming
iyambae (free, without an owner). Grounded in the struggle to break relations of
dependency and exploitation with local patrones, autonomy was associated with moving
freely through territory and recovering cultural practices that enabled ancestors to “live
well”. The Morales government has seen the emergence of new tropes for imagining
indigenous autonomy, including the creation of autonomously-governed indigenous
territories (based on TCOs) within a “plurinational state”.7
Without necessarily abandoning the above tropes, in the wake of the 2010
Friendship Agreement, APG IG leaders began to talk about the Itika Guasu Investment
Fund as a route to, and a symbol of, indigenous autonomy. This was illustrated by the
APG IG’s President’s description of the Fund as “part of our long-term funding strategy,
which will permit us to carry forward our own development [and which] guarantees our
real autonomy and that of our children”. While the politicized context of this speech has
been noted, informal discussions with APG IG leaders pointed to the deeper resonance of
this vision. One day in late 2011, Román visited me in my small room in Entre Ríos,
where we were able to talk out of earshot of other APG IG leaders and técnicos. As usual,
he’d come armed with piles of papers, relating to the APG IG’s numerous ongoing
conflicts with private and state actors.
After a familiar discussion on the disappointments of the MAS government, the
conversation turned to the controversial hydrocarbon projects underway in Aguarague, a
national park in Guaraní ancestral territory which is the Chaco’s primary aquifer and has
since 2009 been co-administered by a regional Guaraní council and the state parks
agency SERNAP. Román was scathing about this co-management arrangement, insisting:
“Aguarague doesn’t belong to the Guaraníes; it’s private property of the state...the state
has converted itself into another patrón. If it pays you then that’s not called autonomy”.
When I asked: “What is autonomy?” he replied: “Autonomy is knowing how to look after
your things”. He went on to talk about the ongoing process for establishing formal
indigenous autonomy (under the 2009 Autonomies Law) in the Guaraní municipality of
Charagua Norte, which he also dismissed as “not real autonomy” owing to the presence
of non-indigenous campesinos in local government. When I asked again: “What is real
autonomy?” he referred to the agreement with Repsol, emphasizing: “We negotiated on
our own with the company; now we’re managing the money on our own; we made our
development plan for the next 20 years on our own”. The fact that the money was from a
transnational oil company, negotiated with the help of foreign lawyers, was unimportant
– for Román “on our own” meant independently of karai-controlled regional institutions
and the MAS government, both of which had sought to contain the Guaraní quest for
territory and autonomy. Yet, “on our own” also had a deeper significance; it framed the
agreement as another step in the Guaraníes’ struggle to break relations of dependency
with their former patrones; as he went on:

Before you had to work for the patrón, he would pay you in coca; if the women wanted to wash
the clothes then first they had to grind maize; you had to work a whole month just to get some
sugar for your mate, but now you are working on your own, you’re doing things yourself.

7On the hopes and realities of indigenous autonomies under the MAS, see Cameron, 2013; Garcés, 2011,
Albó and Romero 2009.

9
To emphasize the point further, he compared the Fund – the interest from which would
fund APG IG projects – to “a donkey that you fatten and breed every year”, concluding:
“that is autonomy”.
Imagined in such terms, the Investment Fund had transformed gas – a non-
renewable resource whose extraction requires little direct Guaraní participation – into a
sustainable source of subsistence to be owned, nurtured and exploited by the Guaraní.
This discourse placed recent APG IG success in negotiating with extra-territorial actors
over extraction on a continuum with early struggles to gain independence from local
patrones. However, whereas the latter struggle has been grounded in the quest for
material control of territory – something to be achieved through state-sanctioned land
rights – this new notion of autonomy rests less on land control than on the APG IG’s
ability to capture gas rents.
Fabio took a similar view, insisting that indigenous autonomy was neither as a
distant dream, nor the reward for completing a lengthy state-led administrative process,
but rather something that has already been achieved: “We’re already autonomous!
Because not we’re not maintaining ourselves here with [help from] other local
institutions, we’re not dependent on NGOs, on the [regional government] anymore – all
those things”. As for Roman, Fabio’s version of autonomy was about transcending
clientelistic relations with the state and non-indigenous institutions – something the
Investment Fund seemed to make possible.
My first introduction to this discourse came almost a year earlier in January 2011,
when, having recently returned to Bolivia for PhD fieldwork, I unexpectedly encountered
my friend Santiago in an elite café in central Tarija. Previously one of a small number of
APG IG-funded university students studying Human Rights in the regional capital,
Santiago informed me that he had now graduated and been recruited by the APG IG
leadership. Following the update on his personal progress, I asked him about the state of
affairs in Itika. Santiago’s face lit up as he told me: “Finally the moment has come when
we will being to realize all our dreams”. It took me a few seconds to realize he was
talking about the recent agreement with Repsol. His enthusiasm was genuine – he
referred to aspirations to expand health services, build new schools, and recruit medical
professionals to work in the TCO. Perhaps more striking was the sense of pride with
which he spoke of the agreement. He claimed that the APG IG had learned from mistakes
of the past and “done everything right this time”. The sum of money negotiated would
make the state’s development programs seem like mere crumbs in comparison, he
beamed. More importantly, the APG IG would be able to administer the money itself,
according to its own development priorities and without state interference.
Like other leaders, Santiago expressed great pride that the APG IG had negotiated
the agreement without the involvement or knowledge of the state; indeed, he gleefully
imagined the surprise and anger of leading government officials when they learned that
“un pueblo
 chiquito” (a little tiny people) had managed to strike such a beneficial deal
with a transnational company behind their backs. In reflecting on the achievement that
this represented, Santiago used an interesting analogy. He compared the Guaraní People
to a baby that was learning to walk – at first stumbling around uncertainly but now
gradually finding a surer footing. This notion of the Guaraní organization growing up and
achieving full personhood in the context of a hydrocarbon conflict provides a powerful
illustration of hydrocarbon citizenship, wherein recognition and autonomy – once framed

10
in relation to the state and local patrones – are now understood in relation to the
governance of gas.
This discourse continued to reign among the APG IG leadership over subsequent
years. At the APG IG’s 2014 anniversary celebrations – a reportedly lavish event
featuring a local rock band – the leadership formally declared Itika Guasu an
“autonomous” territory. The poster advertising the event (Figure 2) provides insight into
this evolving vision of gas-funded TCO-based indigenous development. At the center of
the poster, against a backdrop of the Pilcomayo River (from which TCO Itika Guasu
takes its name) is the widely-recognized outline of the TCO. Yet, rather than bearing the
official title “Communal Land of Origin”, the outline bears the inscription “Communal
Territory of Origin” - an explicit critique of the TCO titling’s offer of “land and not
territory”, and a bold assertion of the political nature of the APG IG’s territorial project.
This assertion of territorial sovereignty is echoed by the strapline above, which declares
the APG IG “owner [propietario] of TCO Itika Guasu” – an assertion that simultaneously
reproduces a discourse of property and challenges the state’s authority to arbitrate
property rights. Below the map outline, five photographs depict the forms of development
envisaged from the Itika Guasu Investment Fund: the acquisition of tractors for maize
cultivation and the creation of TCO-wide, technologically advanced medical services.
Inscribed on these images are the words “Towards the Land Without Evil and Indigenous
Autonomy” – a slogan that links a pre-colonial Guaraní territorial project8 to a
contemporary vision of gas-funded indigenous development.

Indigenous hydrocarbon citizenship beyond Itika Guasu

The APG IG is not alone in seeking to gain access to a share of gas rents as a means to
implement their visions for indigenous territorial governance. In December 2011, the
Concejo de Capitanes Guaraníes de Tarija (Council of Guaraní Captains of Tarija,
CCGT) – who have longstanding political rivalries with the APG IG – proposed the
creation of a Departmental Indigenous Fund consisting of 15% of Tarija’s Direct
Hydrocarbon Tax to fund the implementation of Territorial Management Plans in TCOs.
This proposal replicates at a departmental level – and seeks to provide an indigenous-
controlled alternative to – a controversial state-managed national Indigenous Fund, which
receives a fixed share of national Direct Hydrocarbon Tax. At a national level, too, the
governance of hydrocarbons is coming to play an increasingly important, if little-
acknowledged, role in indigenous visions of autonomy. An interview I conducted with in
early 2012 with the APG’s national Autonomies Officer in Camiri was illustrative. An
educated and articulate leader, he talked excitedly about a proposal for the creation of a
national Guaraní oil company to conduct extraction within Guaraní territories, which, he
argued, could provide the “economic base” for an autonomous “Guaraní nation”. He
elaborated the proposal with reference to the experience of Canadian First Nations, with
whom the APG had been in contact, suggesting that:

8 The “land without evil” (Guaraní: ivi maraei or kandire; Spanish: tierra sin mal) refers to the myth
of a primordial land of material abundance free from suffering, the search for which is thought to
have motivated past Guaraní migrations.

11
 At least in Itika, you could invest those I don’t know how many millions that you’ve received in
damages, in compensation, in an oil company that you manage. Where you’re the owners, the
shareholders, that when the oil company is going to drill in your territory, you provide them
services instead of them contracting...the services of other companies.

However, criticizing the APG IG’s isolationist stance, he emphasized that Guaraní
involvement in extractive process should function to benefit the Guaraní at a national
level: “The beneficiaries are going to be the Guaraní Nation…we too want to do it – that
is part of autonomy”. As this reveals, the reframing of indigenous autonomy in relation to
gas rents has the potential to create new tensions within indigenous movements, as well
as between indigenous movements and the “plurinational” state, and within indigenous
territories (discussed below).
These visions of gas-rents funded indigenous autonomy must be placed in a
context in which indigenous peoples have, under the 2009 Constitution and Autonomies
Law, seen their demands for formal indigenous autonomy “domesticated” (Garcés, 2011)
into a form of “autonomy without resources” (Cameron, 2013), which remains
unachievable in many territories. They must also placed in a national context in which
political actors at a variety of scales are increasingly framing gas rents control as a basis
for their territorial projects and sovereignty claims.9 Such subnational projects replicate –
as well as challenge – the MAS government’s political project, wherein state control of
Bolivia’s gas wealth is framed as the basis for popular sovereignty and decolonizing
development (Perreault and Valdivia, 2010).
Yet, as I have argued, indigenous experiments in “hydrocarbon citizenship” must
also be understood in the context of the failure of TCO titling, with its multicultural
politics of recognition, to satisfy historically-grounded demands for “recovering
territory”. This was made explicit by the National Guaraní Autonomies Officer, who
situated his proposal for a national Guaraní oil company in the context of broader
Guaraní efforts to recover a political vision of indigenous territory, which had
underpinned indigenous territorial demands but been lost in the TCO titling process:

I think it’s the result of constant reflection...about the fact that, even if we managed to title our
land, it turns out that what we’ve titled is insufficient – even though the initial demand was for our
ancestral territory...There once existed a territory of the Chiriguano, the Guaraní Nation, you see.
This territory was the reference point for our demand to the Bolivian State, the titling process and
the process of consolidating Land-Territory. So now the change [in our vision of territory] is
substantial in the sense that we’re transitioning from a way of thinking based on agrarian [rights
and development], and now we’re thinking of Land-Territory on the level of political practice
(ejercicio político). And it’s there that we talk about autonomy. Indigenous autonomy now
imagined not just for [agrarian] production – territory just for production – but to practice what we
consider to be our vision, our own political project. So there is that substantial change...that is, we
don’t just want the consolidation of territory in agrarian terms but for the exercise of power.

By drawing on these broader examples, my intention is not to idealize the shifting

territorial visions of the APG IG leadership, but rather to situate these more firmly in
relation to the legacies of neoliberal multiculturalism and the emergent dynamics of
“hydrocarbon citizenship”. Such visions of indigenous autonomy are both historically

9See Gustafson, 2011; Gustafson and Fabricant, 2011; Bebbington and Humphreys Bebbington, 2010.
Both provincial and departmental autonomy movements in Tarija have claimed control of gas rents as the
basis for elite-led (and profoundly racist and conservative) political projects.

12
grounded and contemporary; shaped by long historical memories of radicalized
dispossession and by the processes with which indigenous peoples today find themselves
entangled. Yet, they are also fraught with ambivalence and contestation. I now return to
Itika Guasu to reflect on some of the tensions and political challenges that the APG IG
leadership’s vision of territory has given rise to.

Territorial tensions

If APG IG leaders believe they have achieved autonomy through their agreement with
Repsol, then it is important to ask: autonomy for whom? Negotiations leading up to the
agreement were accompanied by a distancing of the APG IG leadership and Guaraní
communities in Itika Guasu. An important sign of this was the leadership’s assumption in
2009 of special “decision-making powers”, which led to an effective end to communal,
zonal, and regional assemblies. Having attended seven multi-day assemblies in Itika
Guasu in 2008-9, and missed many more, I was struck by the dramatic nature of this
decline in popular participation. Guaraní community members were particularly critical
of the fact that the APG IG leadership’s annual evaluation – when communities have the
chance to replace ineffective leaders – had also not taken place since 2009. As one
community leader explained, this led to diminishing communication and coordination
between different levels of the APG IG leadership:

There’s no coordination with the communal leaders, the zonal leaders...they continue with the
negotiation with the companies, they continue fighting. But we....we’re just here...they never come
down to...to the countryside, and that’s what bothers us...the Directorio is sitting there, and it
doesn’t remember us.

This lack of communication and accountability fuelled rumors of corruption and fiscal
mismanagement by the APG IG leadership following the agreement. This was heightened
by the introduction of unregulated “salaries” (financed by the Investment Fund) to APG
IG leaders in 2009 – a development that followed the sudden dismissal of the
organization’s respected accountant. Critics of the leadership – which included local
NGOs and other Guaraní capitanías, as well as many community members – claimed they
had used the Investment Fund to purchase expensive vehicles, private properties within
the TCO, and lavish houses in nearby towns. Such tensions also played out within
communities, where APG IG members – which included the father of my host family in
Tarairí – had begun to receive salaries, which were often spent on luxury consumer goods
inaccessible to their neighbors and relatives.
While some community members remained hopeful about the prospects for new
projects funded by the Itika Guasu Investment Fund – and certainly wanted to ensure they
got their fair share of any such projects – many were skeptical about whether these funds
would ever arrive to communities. As Pedro from Tarairí put it:

Money is tempting. If one sees money, the first thing one thinks is to keep it. But now, if the
compañeros who are in the head, the leadership [of the APG IG] really think about the rest of their
brothers who are suffering, [they could say] “they’re suffering so let’s do this”. But, on the other
hand, if they think of themselves, they’re going to keep everything and the brothers [in the
communities] will end up with nothing.

13
Shortly before I left Bolivia in February 2012, Celestino – a longstanding and well-
respected Itikeño leader who emerged as an early and vocal critic of the APG IG
leadership – informed me, off the record, that some communities in Itika Guasu were
beginning to organize their own assemblies to discuss the “state of the organization”.
Management of the Investment Fund was not the only source of concern for
community members in 2011-12. Concerns about the environmental and cultural impacts
of hydrocarbon development were also widespread. The 2010 Friendship Agreement
coincided with a new wave of hydrocarbon development in the Margarita-Huacaya gas
field. In 2012, Repsol pledged to invest a staggering 327.4 million US dollars in the gas
field’s development over a five year period (Energy Press, 27 February, 2012). This
development includes the expansion of the gas processing plant, the construction of a
variety of new access roads and gas pipelines, and the drilling of several new gas wells.
This new wave of expansion was already underway by the time I left Itika Guasu in early
2012 and was producing visible impacts. During a one-month consultancy on
hydrocarbon regulation in the Margarita gas field in October 2011 (Anthias 2012),10 I
counted more than 30 hydrocarbons companies working in the TCO, and was informed
that the registered number of gas workers in the TCO totaled 1,500. While APG IG
leaders claimed the Friendship Agreement (which remained secret) made provisions for
APG IG participation in socio-environmental monitoring, they admitted they lacked the
technical expertise to assess or control the environmental impacts of extraction. As one
leader speculated:

The worry doesn’t end here, it’s going to continue and it’s necessary to study it a bit more. What
could happen in Zone 1? What could happen in Zone 2 in five years? What could happen in ten
years in Zone 3? What would happen if the oil ran out? What would happen if it didn’t rain? What
impact will the oil companies have, what damage will they do? What development are we going to
lose? What development could we gain, now or later, or will it cause lasting damage? What
difficulties will the organization come to have? Will it be empty land? Will it be land you can
sow? It’s very complicated thinking about all these things.

Such anxieties were reiterated by community members – including through the widely-
held theory that hydrocarbons development is the cause of the deteriorating drought
conditions in the TCO. Community members also noted that a financial settlement with a
transnational oil company did not resolve their pressing problems of land access. Indeed,
some criticized their leadership for becoming so embroiled in hydrocarbon negotiations
that they had neglected the historic struggle for land rights. According to Celestino, who
participated in INRA’s 2000 fieldwork as a Guaraní land promoter, when it came to the
land issue, the APG IG had “thrown everything on the floor”. Other community members
merely observed that, while their leadership remained engaged in opaque negotiations
with hydrocarbon companies,11 they continued to struggle to subsist on small fragments
of increasingly arid land.
While these concerns all contributed towards growing discontent among

10 This consultancy was part of the Rural Territorial Dynamics Program of the Chilean NGO RIMISP and
was supervised by Geographer Tony Bebbington.
11 While Repsol has continued to operate outside of the 2009 “mixed” contracts, a range of synergistic

developments have involved state-owned companies and regional elites, who have come into conflict with
the APG IG over prior consultation and compensation payments. Particularly heated in 2011-12 was a
conflict over the expansion of the Gasoducto Margarita Tarija (Margarita-Tarija Gas Pipeline, GMT).

14
communities of Itika Guasu following the 2010 Friendship Agreement, it was another
issue that finally precipitated the overthrow of the APG IG leadership in 2014. Besides
doubting whether the promised APG IG projects would ever materialize, community
members in Itika Guasu increasingly felt that they were losing out on possible state and
NGO development projects in the TCO, owing to the APG IG’s acrimonious relations
with local institutions and their insistence on prior consultation by any entity – state or
private – operating within the TCO. Such concerns have provided the basis for a new
iteration of “hydrocarbon citizenship” in TCO Itika Guasu – one that remains wedded to
extractive industry development but now frames itself as in alignment with, rather than
against, a national project of extractives-based development.

The desire for development

While the presence of development actors in the TCO was not new in 2011-12, times
were changing. Since 2006, the MAS government’s “post-neoliberal” regime of
hydrocarbon governance has led to an unprecedented influx of gas rents into
departmental and municipal, as well as central state, coffers. While much of Tarija
Department’s hefty share remained either unspent or channeled into urban-based projects
– such as a series of competing musical fountains romantically named aguas danzantes
(dancing waters) – sustained peasant mobilizations have helped channel more of this
investment into rural development projects, which have eventually – if unevenly – come
within reach of indigenous communities. PROSOL, a rural development program based
on direct cash transfers and funded by Tarija Department’s Indirect Hydrocarbons Tax
(IDH) is one example. During my six-month stay in Tarairí community, I was frequently
called upon to transcribe letters to municipal or departmental authorities, the few literate
(male) community members being absent from the community for wage labor. Requests
included new furniture and supplies for the school, and cooking equipment to prepare
school meals. From PROSOL, the community had received barbed wire and was awaiting
some sheep (check). It was not only hydrocarbon rents, but also changing racial attitudes
that made this possible. Now in his sixties, the community’s mburuvicha Fausto
described how: “Before, a Guaraní didn’t enter the office, not even of the municipality, it
was pure karaireta [karai people], pure karaireta. Now one can go and [say]: “I’m a
mburuvicha” [and] those in the office [say]: “Enter!”. It’s nothing like [in the past]”.
While many community members and leaders were keen to exploit such
opportunities to improve their lives, the APG IG leadership – at loggerheads with local
state institutions over its demands for consultation and compensation on extractives
projects – was aggressively asserting its power to veto or oversee any such initiatives. In
part, this was due to the leadership’s perception – not entirely misplaced – that elite-
dominated regional institutions and the MAS were actively seeking to displace them and
their territorial project. Most community members, distrustful of their evermore-distant
leadership, simply wanted to improve their living conditions and be included in
“development”. When I returned to Itika Guasu in July 2014 after a two-year absence,
communities’ demands for participation in a range of gas rents-funded state development
projects had emerged as the central theme of a growing movement in opposition to the
APG IG leadership.
When I visited Tarairí, I found the community (all part of one extended family)
divided between support for the “old” APG IG leadership – increasingly embattled but

15
still clinging onto power – and a rival leadership faction, supported by the MAS
government, regional institutions, and NGOs, as well as many community members. My
first visit, after my host family (which supported the old leadership) was to the
mburuvicha Fausto’s household. His daughter Mariana welcomed me in with the usual
offer of mate, and we sat on rickety wooden stalls sipping the sugary herbal brew. In the
past, it was usually me who instigated any discussion of local politics with the
community’s women, and responses were often cynically detached, if not wholly
disinterested. I was surprised then by the passion and spontaneity with which Mariana
offered me her lengthy analysis of the leadership struggle. She was damning in her
critique of the APG IG’s current President. Some of her criticisms were familiar: “[He]
works in the office and we don’t have anything, we continue as poor people”, “We just
want to see evidence of the accounts”, “[He] says that he’s going to lock up in jail anyone
who doesn’t support him”. Yet, her primary concern was that the APG IG’s demands for
consultation were jeopardizing the arrival of state and NGO development projects:

[The APG IG President] says consultation, [and that’s why] government projects don’t come; he
doesn’t want projects with the government, or with CERDET...[he] asks for a load of paper -
consultation - but if the community wants [the project] he shouldn’t have to say consultation. [The
APG IG President] wouldn’t have brought [electric] lights. We have to say “Yes, we want
projects” if someone comes from the municipality, from the [central] government.

She viewed the rival APG IG leadership as the solution, describing how its leader,
Tarabuko, was “looking for computers”, had “personnel in Entre Rios supporting him”
and was “getting projects for the community”. “Tarabuko can accept projects now”, she
emphasized, “he doesn’t ask for consultation - he speaks more Guarani, he’s come here,
to talk to Dad” (Fausto). In contrast, “Never says consultation, consultation, first you
have to do a consultation”. She gave the example of the Plan de Empleo – a vote-winning
departmentally-managed gas rents-funded public employment scheme that usually
focused on road improvements – complaining that the current APG IG President “didn’t
want it to come” but “the community needs money to buy things, needs money and he
blocks it, says they have to come to the office – that’s why we’re not working in the Plan
de Empleo”. She also referred to the fact that the departmental electrification project
currently underway – half of Tarairí’s houses had been connected to the grid at the time
of my visit – had arrived four months late, owing to the APG IG’s demand for prior
consultation. She concluded:

The departmental government supports us with electric light and water tanks; from the municipal
government we got the ecotourism [project], we have chicken coups from CERDET, and what
have we got from the APG? Well, nothing!

Mariana’s concerns were echoed by other community members. The community’s nurse,
Pedro, even claimed that the father of my former host family, a member of the APG IG
leadership, was demanding consultation from public doctors arriving in the community.
Pedro also complained that the APG IG was demanding consultation from Health
Ministry doctors, and expressed his concern that this would jeopardize his ability to
manage the community’s health needs. He noted that the APG IG’s promises of Repsol-
funded projects for health, education and employment had so far failed to materialize.
Fausto, who had joined the conversation, mentioned a forthcoming meeting he had

16
scheduled with the departmental government to discuss a Plan de Empleo and a second
communal potrero, making clear that – the continuing presence of the old APG IG
notwithstanding – a new set of relationships and political alliances are already starting to
take effect in communities of Itika Guasu.

Shifting alignments of sovereignty

The leadership battle continued in my absence, with the old APG IG leadership – still in
control of the Investment Fund – living in an isolated, siege-like state in one building at
the edge of Entre Ríos, while Tarabuko’s rival leadership ran their operations from a
separate building, holding frequent meetings with members of the municipal, provincial
and departmental government, and making visits to communities in state-funded vehicles.
On November 6th, 2014, this stalemate came to an end when representatives from Repsol
YPF signed an “Act of Coordination and Relations” with Tarabuko, marking the final
demise of the previous APG IG leadership. The agreement was made official by Justino
Zambrana, the Guaraní member of Tarija’s Departmental Assembly, who has risen to
power through alliances with both MAS and right-wing parties. In his address, reported
in a local newspaper article, Zambrana described the agreement as “a triumph for the
people” and clarified that management of the Investment Fund had passed to the new
leadership. Zambrana is quoted as stating that: “With respect to the administration of
economic resources, [under the old leadership] one didn’t know how much was spent
each day or month.... that’s why we’ve agreed with Repsol that, from now on, it will be a
joint task”. The article continues:

He also recognized that it isn’t possible that one can make this kind of agreement in an isolated
manner outside of the national norm, for which reason he proposed some modifications in the
original document, because, as he said, supervision [fiscalización] of the administration of the
APG IG is necessary and, in this, the state could be “an overseer [veedor]. On this last point, he
said that control of the management of resources would also pass under the gaze of the oil
company, because given that it was the oil company that gave the money, it’s necessary that it
knows what it's being spent on and how they are doing it.

The article cites a passage from the agreement, which states that: “an obligatory meeting
will take place every six months...as well as a trimestral meeting in TCO Itika Guasu that
will be undertaken in zonal meetings, on the request of the leadership of the APG IG”.
As such, while extraction continues apace, and the Investment Fund remains in
tact, the old APG IG leadership’s dream of gas-funded autonomous territorial
development, undertaken without supervision of state entities, lies in tatters. On the other
hand, communities’ demands for the return of zonal assemblies, and oversight of their
leadership’s management of the Fund, appear to have been answered. So too have their
demands for state development projects in the TCO, which Tarabuko’s leadership was
busily negotiating in the months before its recognition by Repsol. The speed and efficacy
with which this new pro-government alliance of sovereign entities with deliver
development to Guaraní communities once the political struggle for Itika Guasu has
subsided remains to be seen. So too do the new forms of citizenship, subject-formation,
or inter-ethnic relations that could emerge from this new participatory, state-supervised
regime of governing the Investment Fund. The future of the TCO titling process is also an
open question. But one thing seems clear: the overthrow of the APG IG does not signal

17
the end of hydrocarbon citizenship in TCO Itika Guasu. The struggle for territory remains
inextricably tied to the governance of extraction.

Conclusion

The last several decades have seen a proliferation of processes for mapping and titling
indigenous territorial claims. Such efforts are often underpinned by discourses that frame
indigenous-titled territories as a means of protecting indigenous peoples’ culturally
distinct life-worlds from destruction by outside forces. Arturo Escobar writes of
indigenous and Afro-descendant land claims in Colombia’s Pacific Coast as “territories
of difference” in which “people engage in the defense of place from the perspective of
the economic, ecological, and cultural difference that their landscapes, cultures, and
economies embody in relation to those of more dominant sectors of society” (2008: 6).
Yet, as critics of “neoliberal multiculturalism” point out (Hale, 2002, 2005), forms of
cultural recognition often fail to transform the broader economic and political power
relations that structure indigenous lives. Indigenous mapping and TCO land titling in the
Bolivian Chaco provides a powerful illustration of these limits. Not only did the
imaginary of indigenous territories as bounded spaces of cultural difference obscure the
existence of competing land claims within these (post)colonial spaces, but legal-
cartographic recognition failed to prevent their transformation by a new wave of
extractive industry development. Such development continues apace under the Morales
government, routinely overriding indigenous territorial claims, and making
“plurinationalism” appear a mere repackaging of a multicultural politics of recognition.
Yet, rather than simply detailing the limited capacity of indigenous land titling to
transform entrenched colonial and emergent capitalist geographies, this paper has
examined how indigenous peoples have responded to these double-edged processes.
Specifically, I have argued that TCOs in the Chaco are being reframed and redeployed as
a territorial basis for indigenous engagements in “hydrocarbons citizenship”, an emergent
regime in which hydrocarbons provide the material and symbolic basis for a variety of
competing territorial projects. As I have shown, these new framings are fraught with
ambivalence and displace territory from the lived practices, livelihoods struggles, and
political agency of indigenous community members. Yet, they also represent a bold
attempt to recapture the political content of “territory” and its deep-rooted association
with indigenous autonomy – a dimension that was evacuated from the state-led process of
TCO titling, and has been newly domesticated by the extractivist and clientelistic politics
of the MAS government.
In his account of the violent and deeply divisive processes of ethnic claims-
making witnessed in the Niger Delta, Michael Watts writes that: “Communities use oil
wealth to activate community claims on what is seen popularly as unimaginable wealth –
black gold. The governable space of Nigeria is, as a consequence, reterritorialized
through ethnic claims-making” (2003: 25). While indigenous territorial projects in
Bolivia predate the recent hydrocarbon boom, their growing imbrication in the broader
spatializing dynamics of hydrocarbon development (Gustafson, 2011) has uncertain
implications for broader governmental processes in Bolivia. This is particularly the case
given that, as I have shown, such projects may either challenge or align with the state’s
own claims for resource sovereignty. Of course, Guaraní territorial claims cannot be

18
reduced to a strategic bid for participation in a national hydrocarbon economy. Rather,
shifting visions of territory in the Chaco reveal the dynamic nature of indigenous
territorial projects, and their capacity to exceed the terms of cultural recognition that
framed their inscription in state cartography and law. Such projects form part of a broader
struggle over citizenship in the Bolivian lowlands, where the legacies of multiculturalism,
the unfulfilled promise of plurinationalism, and the dynamics of extractivist development
are intersecting in new and unpredictable ways.
Even if indigenous land titling failed to create the “territories of difference” some
activists envisaged, then we should not underestimate its transformative power. In his
recent book Red Skin, White Masks, Dene scholar Glen Sean Coulthard observes that “the
field of recognition politics can modify the subject positions of Indigenous peoples and
communities over time”. In the case of indigenous land claims in Canada, this shift
involved a result is “a reorientation of the meaning of self-determination…[from a]
struggle informed by the land as a system of reciprocal relations and obligations….to a
struggle that is now increasingly for land, understood as a material resource to be
exploited in the capital accumulation process” (2014:78). In the Bolivian Chaco, the
translation of territory as property – that is, as a bounded space of indigenous ownership,
defined by recognition by other property owners – has been a fundamental starting point
for Guaraní bids for participation in hydrocarbon citizenship. This suggests that the
lasting importance of neoliberalism’s “territorial turn” may rest not in its legal-
cartographic outcomes, but rather in the diverse “post-multicultural” indigenous projects
that are emerging in its wake.

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