781347

research-article2018
LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X18781347Latin American PerspectivesMarston and Kennemore / Rethinking Extractivism From Bolivia

Extraction, Revolution, Plurinationalism

Rethinking Extractivism from Bolivia
by
Andrea Marston and Amy Kennemore

With the ratification of its new constitution in 2009, Bolivia was transformed into a
“plurinational state” associated with ecologically oriented values, yet resource extraction
has expanded ever since. Fieldwork conducted in communities in highland Bolivia shows
how resource extraction sustains and is sustained by “revolutionary narratives” in which
the state—led by President Evo Morales—is configured as the protagonist of the plurina-
tional era. Examination of the challenges presented by Bolivia’s indigenous communities
and mining cooperatives to this revolutionary narrative during the 2014 adoption of new
mining legislation suggests that shifting critical focus away from revolutionary change
toward what David Scott calls the “politics of the present” might be a more fruitful way to
think about the relationship between resource extraction and Bolivia’s plurinationalism.

Al ratificar su nueva constitución en 2009, Bolivia se transformó en un “estado pluri-

nacional” asociado con valores ecológicos; sin embargo, la extracción de recursos se ha
expandido desde entonces. Investigaciones llevado a cabo en comunidades de las tierras
altas de Bolivia muestran cómo la extracción de recursos sostiene y se sustenta en las
“narrativas revolucionarias” en las que el estado, encabezado por el presidente Evo
Morales, se configura como el protagonista de la era plurinacional. Examinar como las
comunidades indígenas y las cooperativas mineras de Bolivia cuestionaron esta narrativa
revolucionaria durante la adopción de la nueva legislación minera en 2014 sugiere que
virar el enfoque crítico desde el cambio revolucionario hacia lo que David Scott llama la
“política del presente” podría ser una forma más fructífera pensar en la relación entre la
extracción de recursos y el plurinacionalismo boliviano.

Keywords: Resource extraction, Mining, Plurinationalism, Bolivia, Neoextractivism

Many analyses of contemporary Bolivian politics have addressed a para-

dox: despite the fact that the country’s first self-identifying indigenous presi-
dent, Evo Morales, rose to power with promises of ecologically inflected
development, resource extraction has increased since his inauguration in 2006
(Gudynas, 2009; Massuh, 2012; Postero, 2013). As have most of Latin America’s
“new left” governments, Morales’s party, the Movimiento al Socialismo
(Movement toward Socialism—MAS), has taken advantage of periods of

Andrea Marston is a Ph.D. candidate in geography at the University of California, Berkeley. Her
research explores subterranean politics through work with tin-mining cooperatives in Bolivia.
Amy Kennemore is a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at the University of California, San Diego.
She researches legal pluralism and rights activism in the Bolivian highlands.

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 225, Vol. 46 No. 2, March 2019, 141–160
DOI: 10.1177/0094582X18781347
© 2018 Latin American Perspectives

141
142   LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

booming commodity prices to fund infrastructural projects, social grants, and

even the 2013 launch of the nation’s first satellite.1 As is often the case with
resource-driven development, however, dispossession and environmental
devastation have increased in tandem with extraction (Bebbington and
Bebbington, 2010; Perreault, 2013). In this way, Bolivia is emblematic of what
Eduardo Gudynas (2009) calls “neoextractivism,” whereby the state’s
increased involvement in allocating resource wealth legitimizes not only the
state but also the extractive industries themselves.
Neoextractivism in Bolivia must also be understood in light of the country’s
long history of contentious politics around natural resources. Ever since the
Spanish conquistadores struck silver in Potosí in 1545, resource extraction has
been the base of Bolivia’s economy (Brown, 2012). Since then it has been gener-
ating extreme socioeconomic disparity while also shaping a potent narrative of
“resource nationalism,” the widespread belief that resource wealth should be
used to benefit the nation (Young, 2017: 1; see also Kohl and Farthing, 2012;
Pellegrini, 2016). Between 2000 and 2005, waves of social protest against neo-
liberal economic reforms deepened such sentiments across various sectors of
Bolivian society (Gutiérrez Aguilar, 2008; Perreault, 2006). In 2005 Morales
campaigned on a “revolutionary” platform that promised to reverse neoliberal-
ism and take control of Bolivia’s natural resources (Farthing and Kohl, 2014;
Webber, 2011).
Yet the Morales government’s so-called process of change is not only driven
by resource nationalism but also framed as a historical project of “decoloniz-
ing” state and society, ending centuries of racism and marginalization of
Bolivia’s indigenous and peasant population (Gustafson, 2009; Postero, 2017).
Along these lines, indigenous and collective rights have made notable advances
in Bolivia, and indigenous concepts of sustainable living such as vivir bien (liv-
ing well) have served as a foundation for public policy on a range of issues
(PND, 2006).2 In 2009, Bolivians ratified a new constitution that “re-founded”
Bolivia as a “plurinational” state, incorporating indigenous values into the
very heart of the nation and establishing a participatory framework representa-
tive of the diverse legal, social, economic, and political systems that make up
its constituency (Bautista, 2010; Tapia, 2010). While resource nationalism calls
for natural resources to be used for the good of the nation, plurinationalism
raises the questions who should make decisions on behalf of the nation, who
should bear the burdens of those decisions, and whether the “nation” should
even be the imagined social body within which communities, regions, and
indigenous territories are articulated (Rivera Cusicanqui, 2014).
In practice, nationalist demands for natural resource extraction have often
taken precedence over indigenous and environmental concerns, leading to con-
flict between the Morales government and some indigenous and environmen-
tal activists (Fabricant and Postero, 2015; Laing, 2012; McNeish, 2013). A great
deal of the dissatisfaction these activists have with the MAS government can
be interpreted as a tension embedded within the plurinational project: on the
one hand, there is a drive for nationalist, state-led development, which legiti-
mates and is legitimated by natural resource extraction, while on the other
hand there is a push for environmental protections and indigenous autonomies
(Tockman and Cameron, 2014; Zimmerer, 2015). This tension, however, does
 Marston and Kennemore / Rethinking Extractivism From Bolivia  143

not manifest itself as a straightforward opposition between distinct social

groups. Rather, those who oppose the socioenvironmental costs of extractivism
may also be forced to navigate its potential economic benefits, as Postero (2017)
has recently suggested from the perspective of the lowland Guarani (see also
Anthias, 2018). Both reproducing the legitimacy of resource extraction and cre-
atively defying existing power structures, such complicated local stances
demand a fresh exploration of neoextractivism on the ground.
This article takes up this task by exploring the relationship between neoex-
tractivism and plurinationalism through what we call “revolutionary narra-
tives,” ways of describing the plurinational state as a radical challenge to
colonial, neocolonial, and capitalist oppression. Our attention to revolutionary
narratives draws inspiration from David Scott’s (2004) argument that the style
in which history is narrated—as romance or as tragedy—shapes the “politics of
the present”: conceptions of the present that open up different potential futures.
We argue that the Morales government’s narrative of revolutionary transforma-
tion shapes not only the terms of debate around resource extraction, including
questions about who participates and who benefits, but also local actors’ expec-
tations of and attachments to both extraction and the plurinational state.
We explore the relationship between the Morales government’s revolutionary
narrative and grounded narratives of extraction by focusing on two social
groups that are positioned very differently in relation to resource extraction and
the government’s project of decolonization: mining cooperatives and indige-
nous organizations. Mining cooperatives are groups of small-scale miners who
hold significant political power in Bolivia but are often seen as antagonistic to
the plurinational project in the sense that they operate individually, resist taxa-
tion, and oppose and environmental and labor regulations. In contrast, indige-
nous organizations tend to represent local claims to autonomy, prior consultation,
and environmental protection in the face of extractive industries. In this sense,
indigenous organizations are often seen as hostile toward natural resource
extraction and, more recently, development policies promoted by the Morales
government. We examine these two sectors’ engagements with Bolivia’s new
Mining Law, passed in May 2014, which establishes how social organizations
can legally engage with mining in the plurinational era.
Focusing on the new mining legislation, we draw on Scott (2004) to ask: How
are revolutionary historical narratives harnessed to resource extraction in
plurinational Bolivia? How do these narratives shape understandings of “pos-
sible futures” and thus render the experiences and proposals of other actors
irrelevant? And what work do historical narratives do in legitimating extrac-
tion-as-usual—in justifying its continuation and in policing the borders of who
participates? To address these questions, we conducted interviews and partici-
pated in events, meetings, and everyday activities in communities in the high-
land departments of La Paz, Oruro, and northern Potosí over the course of 24
months starting in July 2014.
In the first half of the article, we show how romantic revolutionary narra-
tives have been used in Bolivia to legitimate state-led natural resource extrac-
tion by framing it as necessary to the construction of the plurinational state. In
the second we examine the corresponding narratives offered by mining coop-
eratives and indigenous organizations in relation to the Mining Law, showing
144   LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

how they are always constrained by yet also offer alternatives to the narratives
of state-led extractivism. We conclude by suggesting that the narratives circu-
lating within mining cooperatives and indigenous organizations might be con-
sidered “tragic”—although by “tragic” we do not mean utterly devastating or
beyond hope. Rather, we borrow again from Scott to suggest that tragic narra-
tives direct attention toward the “politics of the present” necessary to negotiate
justice in the paradoxical everyday world.

Revolutionary Narratives, Resource Extraction, And

The Plurinational State

How are revolutionary historical narratives both supportive of and sup-

ported by resource extraction in Bolivia? Our understanding of historical nar-
ration draws on Scott’s Conscripts of Modernity, which examines a shift in
narrative form between the two editions of C. L. R. James’s The Black Jacobins
(1963 [1938]). Scott argues that the political contexts in which James was writ-
ing shaped his historical narratives of the Haitian Revolution. At stake in the
1930s was an assertion of revolutionary nationalism in the face of colonial rule,
so James told the story of the Haitian Revolution with a romantic narrative in
which good strives to overcome evil, suffering is framed as temporary and
justified by future outcomes, and change is driven by heroic individuals. By the
early 1960s it was apparent that national revolutions could not cure all the ills
of colonialism, and James added several chapters to the second edition of the
book that turned its narrative arc into a tragedy. Scott (2004: 131) argues that
revolutionary narratives are “out of joint” with the contemporary constraints
of postcolonial politics and uses James’s work as an urgent call to think beyond
the imperatives of these narratives.
Scott’s argument guides our reflections because revolutionary narratives cir-
culate continuously in Bolivian political spheres, where they are used to both
consolidate power and incite political action. Indeed, revolution has been a
defining feature of Bolivian history: after winning political independence from
Spain in 1825, the country experienced two “revolutions” in the past century,
the National Revolution of 1952 and the consolidation in 2009 of the plurina-
tional state, which is often framed as a “democratic cultural revolution”
(Nicolas and Quisbert, 2014; Postero, 2017). The National Revolution of 1952
was led by unionized workers and indigenous peasants and resulted in the
nationalization of the tin mines, land reform, and universal voting rights
(Dunkerley, 1984). The party that took power, the Movimiento Nacionalista
Revolucionario (Revolutionary Nationalist Movement— MNR), constructed a
historical narrative that claimed indigenous heritage and anticolonial struggle
as part of a national past (Rivera Cusicanqui, 2003; Sanjinés, 2004).
While the Morales government has shifted this frame by reasserting indige-
neity as a national present, Nicolas and Quisbert (2014) show that the two revo-
lutionary narratives have much in common. The ruins of Tiwanaku, which
were partly excavated by the MNR to illustrate Bolivia’s glorious precolonial
past (Nicolas and Quisbert, 2014: 19), have also been an important site of ritual
performance for Morales (Postero, 2017). Both administrations have also made
 Marston and Kennemore / Rethinking Extractivism From Bolivia  145

Figure 1.  Billboard in the city of Oruro featuring Túpac Katari next to Evo Morales. (Photo
Andrea Marston, August 1, 2014)

strategic use of the figure of Túpac Katari, an eighteenth-century Aymara leader

who laid siege to the city of La Paz for nearly six months before he was cap-
tured and quartered by colonial officials in 1781. Although Katari’s life and
death have been central to various Bolivian social movements since at least the
mid-twentieth century (Serra Iamamoto, 2015), there has recently emerged a
“personality cult” in which Katari appears virtually reincarnated in Morales
(Nicolas and Quisbert, 2014: 173). In public performance, Morales portrays
himself as the main protagonist of a twenty-first-century pachakuti who will
bring about the necessary revolutionary transformations to “decolonize” state
and society (Postero, 2017). Indeed, Katari’s image has been circulated along-
side Evo Morales’s in election campaigns and the promotion of large-scale pub-
lic works. In the billboard shown in Figure 1, the top left corner advertises the
Túpac Katari satellite, and the text to the right of Morales reads “The future is
the presence of our past. Your star.” The “star” presumably refers both to the
satellite (an apparent astral star) and to the shared figure of Túpac/Evo (the
“star” or protagonist of Bolivian history).3
This revolutionary narrative not only employs imagery but also is material-
ized by reinvested resource rents. The satellite launched by the MAS govern-
ment in 2013 was named Túpac Katari and was claimed capable of uniting
Bolivia’s citizenry in a more efficient cell phone network. During the 2014 pres-
idential campaign, when Morales won his third term with 61.36 percent of the
vote (TSE, 2014), billboards stating “Con Evo Vamos Bien” (“With Evo We’re
Doing Well)” were accompanied by billboards announcing the reinvestment of
hydrocarbons taxes in a range of development plans, among them Mi Teleférico,
the gondola transportation system that links large swaths of La Paz and the
neighboring migrant city of El Alto, the Juancito Pinto and Juana Azurduy
programs for students and pregnant and lactating mothers, and new soccer
146   LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

Figure 2. A new soccer field in the tin-mining town of Llallagua and, behind it, the massive
tailing piles from mining that began in the early twentieth century. (Photo Andrea Marston,
July 29, 2013)

fields in nearly every corner of the country (see Figure 2). These uses of resource
rent have harnessed significant popular support for the Morales government,
allowing it to build the symbolic infrastructure of the MAS’s “process of
change” that also justifies state-led resource extraction as key to constructing
the plurinational state. It was common for us to hear references by members of
local indigenous and mining organizations to “hermano” or “compañero” Evo in
relation to new projects, demonstrating the sense of pride and belonging these
words generated in a range of plurinational subjects.
But Morales’s revolutionary narrative also seeks to silence opposition and
debate around resource extraction. Over the past 12 years, critics of Morales’s
“process of change” have emerged from both “traditional” opposition sectors
such as lowland elites4 and organizations within the MAS’s support base, and
much of this opposition has centered around resource extraction. In 2011 mem-
bers of the lowland Confederación de Pueblos Indígenas de Bolivia (Confederation
of Indigenous Peoples of Bolivia— CIDOB) marched to protest the construction
of a highway through the Territorio Indígena Parque Nacional Isiboro Sécure
(Isiboro Sécure Indigenous Territory and National Park—TIPNIS), a legally titled
indigenous territory and national park bordering the departments of Beni and
Cochabamba (Fabricant and Postero, 2015; Laing, 2012). While consolidating
Bolivia’s national territory, this highway will also facilitate the extraction of natu-
ral gas that has been identified within the park (McNeish, 2013). Vice President
García Linera’s book Geopolitics of the Amazon (2012) justified the construction of
this highway by arguing that Bolivia’s asymmetrical position in the global econ-
omy dictates the expansion of resource extraction as necessary in the short term
for a transition beyond capitalism in the long term. This implies a great deal of
 Marston and Kennemore / Rethinking Extractivism From Bolivia  147

suffering (for a few) in the present in exchange for future happiness (for all
Bolivians). The way García Linera connects past, present, and future rests on a
notion of redemption in which harm done in the present is justified as necessary
for a future horizon of justice (Meister, 2011; Povinelli, 2011).
Such revolutionary narratives generate expectations among government
officials, civil society, and political analysts alike about how different social
groups should relate to resource extraction and the plurinational state, corral-
ling actors into a spectrum of political stances according to their socioeconomic
affiliations. In the following section we consider how such narratives shape
expectations that cooperative miners will support resource extraction but object
to the redistributive aspects of plurinationalism and that indigenous organiza-
tions will celebrate plurinationalism while questioning the socio-environmen-
tal impacts of resource extraction. In this sense, both groups are figured as
alternately aligned with and antagonistic to the plurinational state. This oppo-
sition is reinforced by Morales himself, who commonly labels opposition
groups “right-wing” and thus enemies of the plurinational state even when
they are organizations that once constituted his support base. But the ways in
which mining cooperatives and indigenous organizations engaged with the
2014 Mining Law reveal deep ambivalences toward resource extraction, the
state, and even revolutionary political desire.

Alternative Narratives: Mining Cooperatives’ And

Indigenous Organizations’ Engagements
With The Mining Law

By January 2011, the Bolivian government was drafting new mining legisla-
tion with the stated objective of “establishing a structure for the sustainable use
and exploitation of mineral resources . . . oriented toward the vivir bien [living
well] of all Bolivians” (Anteproyecto de la Nueva Ley Minera, 2011: Art. 1). The
proposed law’s objectives were informed by the aims of Bolivia’s National
Development Plan, which was intended to guide a “democratic cultural revo-
lution,” to “fully dismantle colonialism and neoliberalism,” and to “construct
a multinational and communitarian State that will empower its burgeoning
social movements and indigenous peoples” (PND, 2006: Presentación). The
Mining Law (No. 535) thus merged natural resource extraction with a revolu-
tionary narrative of radical structural transformation. However, as it grew
closer to passage it became clear to many members of mining cooperatives and
indigenous organizations that it would create new exclusions for them both.
For many indigenous organizations and their advocates, a central concern was
how the law might limit other constitutional rights, particularly the rights to prior
consultation and traditional territories. In July 2013 leaders from the highland
national indigenous organization Consejo Nacional de Ayllus y Markas del
Qullasuyu (National Council of Ayllus and Markas of Qullasuyu—CONAMAQ)
held a national mining summit in Achocalla, outside the capital La Paz, to analyze
and debate the new law. In addition to identifying contradictions in existing laws
that recognize indigenous peoples’ right to prior consultation, the rights of
Pachamama (Mother Earth), and the human right to water, participants raised
148   LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

concerns over the exclusion of “communitarian” as a legally recognized form of

mining. Although they did not explicitly define “communitarian mining,” several
participants described it as cohering with indigenous usos y costumbres (habits and
customs) such as rotating access rights and collective upkeep responsibilities. The
exclusion of communitarian mining from the law was the result of contradictions
within the constitution itself, which recognizes communitarian economies (CPE,
2009: Art. 306, II) but restricts legal mining actors to the “state mining industry,
private mining industry, and cooperative societies” (Art. 369). With the constitu-
tional backing of Article 369, the Morales government justified the fact that coop-
eratives, private industry, and the state company Corporación Minera de Bolivia
(Mining Corporation of Bolivia—COMIBOL) would be the only entities directly
involved in the writing and revision of the new mining law, despite outcry from
some indigenous federations and irrigators’ unions, among others (Pedro Mariobo
Moreno, interview, La Paz, July 14, 2014).
For mining cooperatives, the most contentious aspect of the law was a
change in Article 151 on mining cooperative contracts. In the bill submitted to
the Chamber of Deputies, this article stated that mining cooperatives would be
allowed to form partnerships with private companies, but the deputies found
this article unconstitutional and reversed it (Paredes, 2014). In response, on
March 31, 2014, the president of the Federación Nacional de Cooperativas
Mineras (National Federation of Mining Cooperatives—FENCOMIN),
Alejandro Santos, called upon all of the nation’s cooperative members—esti-
mates of whom are currently around 120,000 (Mamani, 2018)—to arm them-
selves with dynamite and shut down major transportation arteries. By the time
the protests were lifted nearly a week later, two miners were dead and at least
60 people had been injured in confrontations with police (Paredes, 2014).
After several days of direct dialogue with the country’s president, it looked
as if the cooperatives had lost the battle: Law No. 535, passed on May 28, 2014,
prohibits mining cooperatives from forming partnerships with private compa-
nies. As many observers noted, however, mining cooperatives won a great deal
more than they lost in this fight. They maintained their low tax rate and were
allowed to form “mixed companies” with private entities as long as they
involved COMIBOL (CEDIB, 2014; see also CEDLA, 2014). Following these
events, the Bolivian media were flooded with articles about the threat posed by
mining cooperatives to national values and coffers. When it was “discovered”
that 42 mining cooperatives had already signed contracts with private compa-
nies (Imaña, 2014), cooperative members were framed disparagingly as “sav-
age capitalists” willing to sacrifice nature, nation, and even their own bodies to
try their luck in the mines (Rada, 2014). In our conversations with indigenous
leaders, unionized workers, and middle-class professionals, we found that
mining cooperatives were commonly considered a barrier to the kind of social-
ist and communitarian politics that were envisioned for the plurinational state.

Mining Cooperatives: Tragic Figures Of The

Revolutionary State

To understand why mining cooperatives were so adamantly opposed to

state involvement and why public reaction to their struggle was so negative,
 Marston and Kennemore / Rethinking Extractivism From Bolivia  149

it is important to understand their history. Mining cooperatives are embodied

evidence of cyclical collapses within the mining sector and the shortcomings
of past attempts to establish a national economy based on resource extraction.
They emerged from a long lineage of unruly surplus laborers, most notably
k’ajchas, groups of underemployed miners and peasants who stole metal ore
as part of a livelihood strategy starting in the seventeenth century (Abercrombie,
1996; Barragán, 2015), and jukus, ore thieves whose numbers exploded follow-
ing the initiation of the “Triangular Plan” in 1961 (Kohl, Farthing, and Muruchi,
2011: 36).5 The Triangular Plan was designed to “rehabilitate” the flagging
COMIBOL while loosening the grip of Bolivia’s communist and Trotskyist
mining union leaders through massive worker layoffs (Burke, 1987; Field,
2014; Young, 2017). Unemployed miners turned to jukeo, and the Bolivian gov-
ernment created mining cooperatives to manage the rampant theft (Gall, 1974).
Cooperative miners established FENCOMIN as their umbrella organization in
1968, but the organization did not become a serious political force until after
1985, when more than 20,000 COMIBOL miners were laid off following the
collapse of the tin market and the introduction of neoliberal austerity policies
(Kohl and Farthing, 2006). As thousands of angry miners swelled FENCOMIN’s
ranks, the organization absorbed the unions’ political combativeness, if not
their ideology.
Mining cooperatives have been a key support base for Morales since he came
to power in 2006. During this time, they have also multiplied in response to
booming metal prices and favorable government policies such as the creation
of a credit agency, constitutional recognition as “not-for-profit” entities sub-
jected to reduced taxation, and loosened restrictions in fiscal reserve areas
(Francescone and Díaz, 2013; Poveda Ávila, 2014). Between 2006 and 2017, the
number of registered mining cooperatives increased from 911 to 1816, with
total membership increasing from 50,000 to 120,000 (Mamani, 2018).
Despite their name, mining “cooperatives” are notoriously uncooperative in
structure: although concessions are collectively held, they are subdivided into
parajes (areas) that are divided up among individual members, and profits from
these areas are not redistributed. Moreover, in many cooperatives members
contract nonmembers to work on their behalf (Michard, 2008). Over the past
decade, some mining cooperatives have started to develop partnerships with
private companies. The most notorious case of such a partnership is the San
Bartolomé silver mine, which unites the American company Coeur d’Alène
and seven mining cooperatives in the department of Potosí (Francescone, 2014).
For Bolivia’s traditional leftists, who are generally steeped in unionism, mining
cooperatives represent an obstacle to nationalizing the mining sector or increas-
ing state tax revenue. As Filemón Escobar, who was a prominent union and
political leader in the tin mines in the 1970s and 1980s, wrote, “In the almost 10
years of Evo’s government, the cooperatives . . . have become destroyers of the
mining industry [and] have turned themselves into the ‘new oligarchy’ of the
country’s western region” (Escobar, 2014: 19–20). Here we see the mining coop-
eratives figured as antagonists of the plurinational project and revolutionary
forms of resource extraction—a simplistic interpretation of their attachments to
both the state and natural resources.
Since 2011 mining cooperatives have suffered from falling mineral prices,
and they have sought aid from the Morales government and investment from
150   LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

private mining companies to offset their financial losses. For example, in the
tin-mining town of Llallagua, Potosí, mining cooperatives came close to sign-
ing contracts with two companies, one Chinese and one Brazilian, which prom-
ised to help the exploit the century-old slag heaps that reportedly contain 18
million tons of low-grade tin (Erbol, June 22, 2016). The Morales government
had granted half of these slag heaps to regional cooperatives in 2012 but had
not provided them the technical or financial support necessary for exploitation.
Roberto Rojas,6 a member of the directorate of the regional mining cooperative
federation of Northern Potosí, explained in an interview (Llallagua, February
6, 2016) that Llallagua’s cooperative miners were seeking private investment to
overcome these technological hurdles. This was why the new mining law’s
restrictions around private-cooperative partnerships had hit them so hard. “No
private company wants to make a partnership that involves COMIBOL, it’s too
weak!” Rojas said bitterly. “And [private-cooperative partnerships] should be
allowed, since the constitution claims to recognize plural, mixed economies.
But with the new mining law, we are all screwed.” Rojas went on to say that the
state had never been a reliable ally of miners. He pointed to the National
Revolution of 1952, arguing that the postrevolutionary government had cele-
brated (unionized) miners as revolutionary heroes but had betrayed them with
the Triangular Plan. After referencing this historical treachery, he continued:
“You have seen how we suffer as miners. Right now, we look to the state for
support, but we do not trust it. See what has happened? Even compañero Evo
has betrayed us with this new mining law. Now we must depend on the state
even more because we cannot make partnerships with private companies.”
Even though these are cooperative miners, the ambivalent relationship of
dependence on the state is akin to that described by June Nash (1979) in her
study of unionized tin miners. She argued that miners were doubly depen-
dent—both on COMIBOL because of their position as workers and on the
global North because of Bolivia’s structural position in the world economy—
and that this sense of dependency was in continuous tension with their fight
against exploitation. Without COMIBOL as an intermediary, cooperative min-
ers struggle directly with the government, hoping to garner material support
such as mining equipment, cars, and new work areas, but never fully trusting
their potential benefactor. For example, Alejandro Choque, president of a min-
ing cooperative in Llallagua (interview, Llallagua, June 13, 2016), casts the state
as a villain that showed its true colors with the passage of the mining law:

The new mining law is—how do I say this?—it’s mostly aimed at supporting
the state mining industry. There are some things in there that helped coopera-
tives, but mostly it favors the state. It puts more power in the hands of the
comunarios [indigenous people], but in the end it’s the state that profits because
the state manipulates them. The state is a plunderer.

Choque went on to describe mining cooperatives in Llallagua as the hijos

mendigos (beggar children) of the Morales government, while the workers of
the nearby state-owned tin mine Huanuni were the hijos mimados (spoiled chil-
dren). In 2016 Huanuni received US$36 million in government assistance to
stay afloat despite falling mineral prices (Correo del Sur, June 25, 2016). By con-
trast, Choque argued, the cooperative sector operates independently and does
 Marston and Kennemore / Rethinking Extractivism From Bolivia  151

not contribute to the national debt. More important, it “provides jobs directly
and indirectly”—an oft-repeated refrain of cooperative miners—for anyone
who needs money rather than restricting benefits to a salaried core. This narra-
tive shifts the terms of debate around extractivism by challenging assumptions
about who should participate and who should benefit.
Cooperatives are often accused of supporting any political party that prom-
ises them immediate material gain. Unlike the unionized miners discussed by
Nash (1979), cooperative miners are not interested in creating a workers’ state.
Rather, they are looking for immediate solutions to their daily struggles.
Ideological commitment involves a future-oriented perspective, and Choque
and others privilege the availability of jobs in the present over abstract prom-
ises of social change in the future. Rather than seeing this position as naturally
adversary to plurinationalism, we must ask what type of conceptual reframing
it facilitates. After the 1952 National Revolution, Bolivian tin miners were rep-
resented as the revolutionary heroes of national modernization narratives.
Mining cooperatives, in contrast, can be understood as tragic figures in the
sense that their very existence points to the limits of the post-1952 revolution-
ary state. Speaking from this position, mining cooperatives are less interested
in plurinational narratives that frame resource extraction as the economic
engine of revolutionary change, of which they are distrustful. Instead, they
defy ideologically pure readings of political action offered by certain strains of
both the traditional and the indigenous left, insisting that life continues on the
margins and despite the contradictions of the plurinational present.

Conamaq: critical adversaries of

the neoextractivist state?

While the history of CONAMAQ is radically different from that of the min-
ing cooperatives, their emergence can be similarly understood in relation to the
limits of the post-1952 revolutionary state. Following the revolution, citizen-
ship was formally extended to Bolivia’s indigenous population but through a
corporatist structure in which access to the state was predicated on their status
as peasant laborers rather than a recognition of ethnic or cultural diversity
(Albó, 2002; Dunkerley, 1984; Postero, 2007; Rivera Cusicanqui, 1987). By the
late 1960s, indigenous intellectuals in the highlands were beginning to question
the integration policies of both the 1952 state and the subsequent military gov-
ernment. Their political activism coalesced into the Katarista movement,
named after Túpac Katari, which expanded as urban-based Aymara intellectu-
als called for a revitalization of Aymara culture, language, and sociopolitical
organization to challenge the persistence of ethnic and racial marginalization
among the majority of the population (Hurtado, 1986; Rivera Cusicanqui,
1987). Leaders relied on the organizational and ideological structure of labor
federations to extend their political reach and in 1979 formed what was his-
torically one of Bolivia’s most influential organizations, the Confederación
Sindical Única de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia (Unified Federation of
Peasant Workers of Bolivia—CSUTCB) (Albó, 2002; Yashar, 2005). Yet by the
late 1980s, neoliberal economic restructuring had significantly weakened the
152   LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

Central Obrera Boliviana (Bolivia’s Workers’ Central—COB), leading to a “de-

unionization” of state-society relations and provoking some members to seek
alternative channels of political mobilization (Powęska, 2013: 150).
CONAMAQ emerged as a challenge to the Westernized union structure of
the CSUTCB, emphasizing an explicit project of “reconstituting” the ayllu, a
collective form of indigenous sociopolitical and territorial organization histor-
ically prominent in the highland region, as its central form of governance
(THOA, 1995). Officially formed in 1997, the organization was largely com-
posed of Quechua- and Aymara-speaking communities in the rural highland
departments of La Paz and Oruro, which had maintained their traditional
organizational structures through the colonial and republican periods (Rivera
Cusicanqui, 1987). Yet the resurgence of ayllu-based governance was also facil-
itated by a particular juncture in the 1990s characterized by ethnic revitaliza-
tion projects and neoliberal multicultural reforms, often supported by domestic
activist networks and international NGO development funding (Alvizuri, 2009:
190; Postero, 2007; Powęska, 2013: 186). By the 2000s CONAMAQ was one of
Bolivia’s most influential national-level indigenous organizations, along with
the lowland indigenous federation CIDOB. The two federations also formed
part of the unity pact that brought together Bolivia’s main social organizations
to participate in the constituent assembly that drafted the state’s new plurina-
tional framework from 2006 to 2008 (Postero, 2017; Schavelzon, 2013). However,
only a few months after Morales’s inauguration in 2006, CONAMAQ publicly
declared him an “enemy of the indigenous movement” for limiting its partici-
pation in the constituent assembly and gradually hardened its stance toward
the government’s extractivist development model (Burman, 2014). In 2011, fol-
lowing the TIPNIS conflict, CONAMAQ officially withdrew from the unity
pact and formed an alliance with CIDOB in direct opposition to the Morales
government (Los Tiempos, May 26, 2011).
In this context, the national mining summit in Achocalla can be understood
as part of the schism that had long been growing between CONAMAQ and
Morales’s government. During the two-day meeting, participants not only ana-
lyzed contradictions in the proposed law but also reflected on its implications
for indigenous self-determination. They discussed how other legislation, such
as Law No. 367, which was passed in 2013 to control mine seizures and could
be used to subject antimining activists to criminal prosecution, might put a
damper on protest and undermine indigenous peoples’ ability to demand con-
trol over their lands. The year before, CONAMAQ had been involved in a pub-
lic campaign denouncing the prosecution of one of its former leaders, Cancio
Rojas, following a conflict between communities in the highland region of
Mallku Khota and the Canadian mining company South American Silver (see
Los Tiempos, May 26, 2012), and participants at the mining summit were con-
cerned that Law No. 367 would enable more such prosecutions. In the last sec-
tion we analyzed how the MAS government frames opposition to resource
extraction as antagonistic to the plurinational state; here we see how this fram-
ing manifests itself in legislation and discourages antimining protest.
However, discussions at the summit also challenged the assumption that
indigenous peoples should be protesting against mining. As one participant
noted, “Brothers and sisters, with much respect for all of the proposals
 Marston and Kennemore / Rethinking Extractivism From Bolivia  153

discussed here today, I want to say that one has to remember that it is our
brothers, our fathers, cousins, sons who work in the mines. What will hap-
pen to them if we demand that the [mining] companies in our communities
leave?” After acknowledging the embeddedness of mining in indigenous
communities, this commentator went on to observe that substantive oppo-
sition to the Morales government would also imply running the risk of
being cut off from much-needed financial support.
Tata Mallku Félix Becerra, then leader of CONAMAQ, suggested that, rather
than being a threat to indigenous autonomy, mining might enable economic
independence from the state:

Why are we poor? In our territory, what weaknesses do we have? We have

government, but have we been able to manage our resources? No! This is my
concern about Túpac Katari. . . . [He] fought for the defense of territory, for our
resources. That’s why the Spanish quartered him. . . . How long are we willing
to suffer? I don’t want to suffer anymore; I want to be part of the resources we
have.

With this question Becerra shifted the narrative framing for debates the fol-
lowing day, which centered on the viability of community-controlled mining
as an economic alternative for ayllus rich in mineral resources. In this model,
indigenous communities would be the sole administrators of mining and ore
processing and, through ayllu-based structures, would reinvest profits in other
community-led productive industries. Participants’ responses to Becerra’s pro-
posal highlighted a series of concerns, particularly over the potential for min-
ing to heighten local conflict within indigenous communities. They also
grappled with how community-controlled mining would fit within Bolivia’s
plurinational framework. They were concerned not only with the lack of con-
stitutional recognition of communitarian mining but also with how they might
openly advocate for mining while also claiming rights to protection from the
negative impacts of resource extraction.
Becerra, however, pushed participants to think beyond such double binds.
In response to their concerns, he stated:

They [public commentators] will tell you, “If you form a cooperative, you will
lose your identity, your habits and customs. . . . But as indigenous peoples
exploiting their own resources, they [indigenous miners] are the owners, they
follow the rules of their leaders. And each of them has beer, food, money. . . .
They have sufficient resources. This is the path to self-determination.

He would later explain that the inspiration for communitarian mining came
from a small community in the department of La Paz that owned the legal
rights to mine as a cooperative but did so “respecting the usos y costumbres”
(interview, La Paz, June 15, 2016). For him, this example offered a concrete pro-
posal that could respond to one of the most significant barriers to the strength-
ening of indigenous governance— the lack of economic resources.
Of course, implementing communitarian mining in Bolivia would be a dif-
ficult task, especially considering the range of dilemmas raised by the mining
summit’s participants and the barriers of the new Mining Law. In his own
assessment of the task at hand, Becerra emphasized the “permanent hard
154   LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

work” that would be required to analyze and implement proposals to mitigate

the tensions around the environmental and sociopolitical impacts of resource
extraction. As his interventions in the summit suggest, this might also imply
moving away from the narratives that have traditionally animated the indige-
nous movement in Bolivia to consider a plurality of expectations and concerns
around resource extraction.

Conclusion

In this article we have taken up David Scott’s (2004) call to rethink the value
of revolutionary narratives in the (post)colonial present by exploring the ways
resource extraction both supports and is supported by revolutionary narratives
in plurinational Bolivia. As Kohl and Farthing (2012) have detailed, the MAS
government has faced a major challenge as it has attempted to implement its
revolutionary aspirations in the years since Morales’s initial election: how to
provide promised material support to Bolivia’s citizens without relying on
resource extraction. To manage the tensions of this position, the Morales gov-
ernment has articulated a revolutionary narrative of plurinationalism that jus-
tifies state-led resource extraction while playing down the experiences,
expressions, and proposals of other groups already navigating the everyday
dilemmas that extraction entails. We have discussed how engagements with
the 2014 Mining Law (No. 535) by mining cooperatives and CONAMAQ incited
alternative narratives that strained against the state’s revolutionary line even
as they were disciplined by it. While cooperative miners demanded the right to
continue mining independently from the state and in collaboration with pri-
vate companies, CONAMAQ attempted to theorize a form of mining that
would support indigenous political and economic autonomy. These groups
articulated alternative narratives of resource extraction that leaned away from
the Morales government and state-led mining, but neither group was able to
fully implement its vision.
More recently, three major events have marked a distinctively tragic shift in
historical readings of Bolivia’s plurinational revolution. Just as C. L. R. James
added chapters to The Black Jacobins to shift the narrative arc, we discuss these
events to show how tragically complicated the Bolivian panorama has become.
First, in 2014, a division emerged within CONAMAQ, with one group of
leaders opposing the MAS and another group remaining loyal to Morales. The
latter group, which some anti-MAS activists now refer to as “CONA-MAS,”
staged a violent takeover of the organization’s headquarters. The former group,
the “organic” CONAMAQ that still claims to represent indigenous highland-
ers, now lacks formal recognition and has been largely cut off from government
funding. CONAMAQ also lost public support following a 2015 corruption
scandal surrounding the Fondo de Desarrollo para los Pueblos Indigenas
Originarios y Comunidades Campesinas (Fund for the Development of
Indigenous Originaries and Campesino Communities—FONDIOC), estab-
lished in 2005 to channel a percentage of hydrocarbons taxes to indigenous and
peasant organizations’ development projects (see Ayo, 2016). Several leaders
from these organizations have since been imprisoned with charges of misusing
 Marston and Kennemore / Rethinking Extractivism From Bolivia  155

FONDIOC money, including CONAMAQ’s Félix Becerra in December 2015.

While the details remain unclear, some analysts have speculated that his arrest
represents political persecution of indigenous leaders who have openly criti-
cized the Morales government (see Gómez Vela, 2017).
Second, conflicts between the Morales government and mining cooperatives
have become increasingly confrontational. In August 2016, disagreements sur-
faced in response to government proposals to modify the 2013 Law of
Cooperatives (Law No. 356) to allow unionization within cooperatives.
Although opposition to this modification was led by a subset of mining coop-
erative leaders, their protests quickly snowballed into a series of demands that
demonstrated just how dissatisfied cooperative miners have become across the
board (El Deber, August 13, 2016). The miners’ protest took a dark turn on
August 25 when, in response to the deaths of three cooperative miners from
police gunfire, a group of cooperative miners murdered the deputy minister of
internal affairs, Rodolfo Illanes, who had been taken hostage as he attempted
to establish dialogue between the cooperative sector and the government.
Fifty-nine cooperative miners were immediately imprisoned (Peñaranda Pinto,
2016), and on September 1 the government issued five decrees that broke the
cooperative-MAS alliance, declaring Illanes a national “hero” in defense of
Bolivia’s natural resources (Cambio, August 26, 2016).
Third, on February 21 2016, a majority of Bolivians voted no in a referendum
to change the constitutional term limits of the presidency, which would have
allowed Morales to run for a fourth term in 2019 (BBC Mundo, February 24,
2016). However, in December 2017 the Plurinational Constitutional Tribunal
ruled that Morales could run again indefinitely, reversing the referendum deci-
sion (BBC Mundo, November 27, 2017). This decision underscores the fact that,
despite growing clashes between civil society organizations and the MAS gov-
ernment,7 a viable alternative to the current administration has yet to emerge.
Who could replace Evo?
Paralleling Scott’s concern in Conscripts of Modernity, we suggest that the
revolutionary narratives around plurinationalism that justify state-led resource
extraction are “out of joint” with the world they are describing and normatively
aim to construct (Scott, 2004: 2). Scott argues for the value of tragic narratives
by describing how, in the second edition of The Black Jacobins the Haitian revo-
lutionary Toussaint L’Ouverture is caught between the need to demand free-
dom from colonial oppression and the inability to give voice to that freedom
outside of colonial categories. By showing Toussaint L’Ouverture’s impossible
double bind, James revealed him to be a “conscript” rather than a “volunteer”
of modernity. Scott reads James’s shift to the tragic as “nothing less than a
provocation” to take seriously the different stakes, dilemmas, and aspirations
of the present that influence the way postcolonial scholars draw from the past
to shape future imaginaries (30).
Indeed, the endurance of resource extraction in Bolivia has been inseparable
from revolutionary narratives, as subsoil resources have motivated political
struggle and financed postrevolutionary states in both 1952 and 2009 (Kohl and
Farthing, 2012: 225). We look to the tragic because, like Toussaint L’Ouverture,
groups like FENCOMIN and CONAMAQ are caught in complicated political
double binds. The primary commitment of cooperative miners and their peones,
156   LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

laboring underground and frequently dying before they are old enough to
receive their pensions, is to secure their daily earnings. The potential for eco-
nomic redistribution of the “communitarian mining” pursued by indigenous
people is likely counterbalanced by the impact of mining on indigenous land,
water, and bodies. The aspirations of both of these groups are tragic in that they
are caught between their immediate needs and long-term sustainability. They
neither wholeheartedly embrace nor reject mining; rather, their engagements
with the Mining Law illustrate how they take “both, and” positions when con-
fronting the challenges of extractivism. Moving away from revolution as the
sole measure of political transformation, they reject the imperative to choose
between economic development and socioenvironmental rights. Taking their
demands seriously implies dwelling in the ambivalence of the present and
remaining alert to everyday political negotiations. The state revolutionary nar-
rative of plurinationalism is only one of many, and the multiplicity of narra-
tives contains more than one possible future.

Notes

1. A 2014 “Country Report” published by the International Monetary Fund applauded the
MAS government’s “prudent fiscal policy,” as Bolivia was one of the few countries in Latin
America to maintain economic growth during the economic crisis of 2008 (IMF, 2014: 4). The
report noted an overall growth rate of 6.6 percent by September of 2013, which had increased from
5.2 percent in the previous year, nearly reaching the country’s highest growth rate in over 30 years
(14). While Bolivia still ranks low on the UN’s Human Development Index, the rate of extreme
poverty has been reduced from 38.2 percent in 2005 to 21.6 percent in 2012, largely through cash
transfer programs that have also partially contributed to a near tripling of per capita income and
overall improvement in health indicators (77).
2. Though the role of notions such as vivir bien in shaping the actual content and application of
such policies has hardly been evident in practice (see Dingemans, 2016).
3. The slogan on this sign is also referencing an Aymara understanding of time in which the
past is imagined as in front because it has already been experienced, while the future is unknown
and therefore behind. “This suggests that returning to a known past is a means of moving for-
ward, which in Aymara is expressed through the concept of nayrapacha—literally ‘eyes in time/
space’” (Farthing and Kohl, 2013).
4. During Morales’s first term, lowland elites sought to thwart efforts to radically transform
Bolivia’s economic and political model, a tendency that was especially evident during the drafting
and passage of the 2009 Constitution (see Postero, 2014; Schavelzon, 2013). Over the past decade,
however, their resistance has waned as the MAS has made economic pacts with the traditional
agricultural elite in the region, as evidenced by the result of the 2014 presidential election (TSE,
2014).
5. Financed by the governments of the United States and West Germany in collaboration with
the Inter-American Development Bank, the Triangular Plan (1961–1970) was designed to support
COMIBOL with financial and technical assistance amounting to US$62 million (Burke, 1987). The
plan came with strings, however, most notable of which was a requirement that Bolivia imple-
ment a “state of emergency” in the mining sector and lay off 20 percent of the mine labor force
(Field, 2014: 21). It was one of the first projects carried out under the U.S.-led Alliance for Progress
and was intended to reduce the possibility of a Cuban-style revolution in Bolivia, but it was also
aligned with policies already under consideration by top MNR officials who wished to curtail the
power of the miners’ unions (Young, 2017: 76).
6. Pseudonyms are used for interviewees without significant public profiles.
7. The most recent clash with the Morales government was in response to a new penal code
that was approved in December 2017. Protests across the country ultimately lead Morales to call
for its repeal (La Razón, January 21, 2018; for a discussion of specific sectors’ demands regarding
the code, see Página Siete, January 10, 2018).
 Marston and Kennemore / Rethinking Extractivism From Bolivia  157

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