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Bolivia Processes of Change

Zed Books Ltd

LAND, CAMPESINOS AND INDÍGENAS

On 21 March 2011, twenty-one years to the day since the groundbreaking 1990 march by indigenous peoples of the eastern lowlands, a new march set out from Trinidad, the capital of the Beni, towards La Paz, 600 kilometres away. The VIII march, organized by the Confederación de Pueblos Indígenas de Bolivia (Cidob), was a protest march against government plans to construct a road through the Territorio Indígena y Parque Nacional Isiboro Sécure (TIPNIS). Like its forerunner, the VIII march was to have important ramifications, both nationally and internationally. It became a show of force of some sectors of Bolivia's indigenous peoples – highland as well as lowland – against a government policy that appeared to ignore indigenous demands and violate a constitutional commitment to organize prior consultations where indigenous lands or people are affected.

The TIPNIS – it is better known by its acronym – is a triangular piece of land of over a million hectares in the centre of Bolivia. Shaped like the head of a cat, it straddles the still-undefined border between the departments of Cochabamba to the south and Beni to the north. The area was declared a national park in 1965. In 2009, the Mojeño-Ignaciano, the Yuracaré and Chimán ethnic groups, which occupy the greater part of the area, were awarded title for their lands of the Territorio Indígena Originario Campesino (TIOC). The local indigenous population totalled some 12,000 people, mainly dependent on the forest and its natural produce. Carved out of the south of the national park is an area known as the Polígono 7, settled since the 1970s. It is now inhabited by up to 30,000 Aymara and Quechua-speaking migrants from the highlands, devoted largely to subsistence agriculture and a few cash crops like cocoa, bananas, citrus fruits and (significantly) coca. Polígono 7 abuts the Chapare district of Cochabamba, and the settlers form part of the Federación del Trópico, one of the six federations of coca growers of that region, of which Evo Morales is president.

Until fairly recently, the majority of Bolivians had probably never heard of the TIPNIS; it became a household name after the Morales government – without prior consultation (and indeed prior to the ratification of the new constitution) – signed a contract with a Brazilian construction firm to build a road through the centre of the reserve. This was the central section of a road project that would link Villa Tunari to the south (joining up with the Santa Cruz–Cochabamba trunk road) to San Ignacio de Moxos in the north (joining up with the dirt road from La Paz to Trinidad). Though several different routes had been mapped out, all crossed the TIPNIS. Alternative routes were either hobbled by the hilly terrain to the west or by marshy land to the east.

Part of the Amazon rainforest, the TIPNIS is an extraordinarily bio-diverse region, vulnerable to the sort of depredation that the rainforest has suffered elsewhere, particularly in Brazil. Most of its indigenous inhabitants live in settled communities, sixty-seven in total. However, some still live a nomadic lifestyle as hunter-gatherers. As well as land and timber, the TIPNIS area also includes probable hydrocarbon deposits, part of a belt stretching along the whole eastern flank of the Andes. Some prospection work has been carried out. The construction of a road through the TIPNIS would certainly lead to extensive deforestation, just as has been the case in Brazil. A study published by the PIEB (Programa de Investigaciones Estratégicas de Bolivia) suggests that over a period of twenty-five years, as much as 65 per cent of the present forest cover could be lost, not least because of the high market prices for hardwoods from the rainforest.

The road-building scheme quickly developed into conflict between those supporting it and those not. Arguments in favour included the positive impact a road would have on developing the country's road infrastructure, providing an important link between Cochabamba and the Beni. It was also seen as facilitating social development (education, health posts, etc.) in an area of extreme poverty where such services are largely absent. The road would also reduce the traditional economic dependence of the Beni on Santa Cruz. Those opposing the project pointed to the damaging consequences it would have for the environment, its negative impact on indigenous communities, and the spur it would provide to the northwards march of the cocaleros into new territory. Critics also pointed to the benefits that would accrue to Brazil, not to Bolivia, by providing a road link from Rondonia to the Pacific. The issue also raised questions of implementation of prior consultation, respect for indigenous lands and self-determination, key issues for indigenous people of the lowlands.

Attempts to broker an agreement for the project foundered on the lack of common ground: either a road is built or it is not. The issue soon became highly politicized, with the Cidob adding a number of other demands to its original opposition to the road, reflecting the interests of other ethnic groups who form part of the confederation. Internationally, the project swiftly became a cause célèbre, casting doubt on the indigenous and environmental credentials of the Morales administration. Destruction of the rainforest hardly squared with the official discourse of protecting the Pachamama (Mother Earth) and standing up for the interests of indigenous peoples. On the other hand, the government – with its close links to the cocaleros – was loath to have its agenda dictated to by a small minority of the population living in the reserve. The VIII march thus set off from Trinidad with neither side willing to back down and the government apparently committed to the road going ahead.

Visions of development

The TIPNIS dispute was to have lasting resonance in Bolivian politics, both for the immediate issues it raised and for the way it highlighted different visions of development. As we saw in the Introduction, various social movements, representing different sectors of the population, came together in 2003 around the October Agenda and, concretely, around the electoral campaign of the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) in 2005. The so-called Pacto de Unidad, agreed in 2004, brought together campesinos and indigenous peoples around a programmatic agreement: basically the rewriting of the constitution. The Pacto de Unidad included those who saw themselves as 'fundamental' to the establishment of the MAS as their 'political instrument', and those who saw themselves more loosely as 'allies'. The 'fundamentales' included the peasant confederation (CSUTCB); the women's arm of the CSUTCB, the Confederación Bartolina Sisa (CNMCIOB-BS); and the confederation of colonizadores, which has renamed itself the Confederación de Comunidades Interculturales (CSCIB). They also, of course, included the coca farmers' federations of both the Yungas and the Chapare, both closely related to the Interculturales. The 'aliados' consisted basically of the two indigenous confederations, the Cidob (representing lowland indigenous peoples) and Conamaq (Consejo Nacional de Ayllus y Markas del Qullasuyu, representing highland indigenous peoples organized in ayllus).

What united these various different sectors was the possibility of engineering a new deal of legal and constitutional rights for the large proportion of the Bolivian rural population that had always found itself excluded from the political class. In practice, 62 per cent of the population of Bolivia self-identified as 'belonging to some originario or indigenous peoples' in the 2001 census, making it a more 'indigenous' country than any other in Latin America. Despite the difficulty of defining 'indigenousness' in very precise terms, there had always been a large overlap between ethnicity and class in the country; the peasantry and working class were largely of indigenous extraction. The term 'campesino' tended to be used to describe the socio-economic status of rural communities, while the term 'indigenous' tended to refer to historic and cultural identities. Indeed, as Xavier Albó, an anthropologist, put it to us, in the Andean area as a whole, rural populations are referred to as 'indigenous campesinos' or, alternatively, as 'campesino indígenas'. Still, between indigenous movements as such and those of the peasantry, there were (and are) important defining characteristics, relating to economic activity, but particularly to the ownership of land.

The 1953 agrarian reform was premised on the idea of individual landownership, with the division of hacienda lands among their former workers. Although peasant communities might embrace some communal landownership and decision-making might be collective, more productive land tended to be individually farmed and its produce individually marketed. This tradition permeated those who, as a result of land shortages in the Altiplano, migrated to the areas of colonization – both formal and informal – in other parts of the country, but particularly in the tropics of La Paz, Cochabamba and Santa Cruz. Individual landownership was not, however, the practice of indigenous groups in the eastern lowlands, whose traditions were often nomadic and not circumscribed by notions of landownership. In the Altiplano, too, despite the agrarian reform and its effects, age-old communitarian traditions of landownership persisted in the form of the ayllu, albeit often with individual possession and use of land. As we shall see in Chapter 2, the resurgence of indigenous consciousness in the highlands since the 1980s has led to attempts to reconstitute individually held land as collectively held, at least in those parts where such a tradition existed. The 1953 agrarian reform had, basically, sought to address landholding in the Altiplano and the inter-Andean valleys, where haciendas had predominated. The reform did not contemplate land distribution issues in lowland Bolivia, where traditionally land had been held in large units and where, in the 1960s, new forms of cash-crop agriculture emerged on large privately owned estates. The 1996 agrarian law, known as the INRA Law after the institution charged with carrying it out (the Instituto Nacional de Reforma Agraria), sought to address some of the inequities that had emerged in the meantime, particularly with regard to the rights of lowland indigenous communities. It introduced the concept of the Tierras Comunitarias de Orígen (TCO), based upon notions of collective ownership and territorial control. These two conceptions of landholding – individual and collective, peasant and 'indigenous' – have increasingly, as we shall see, proved uneasy bedfellows.

The TIPNIS dispute – and many others in recent times which have received far less publicity – involved conflicts over the nature of landholding. For indigenous groups, particularly those of the lowlands, the TCO was a very significant conquest, providing legal guarantees for a traditional way of life which had not been recognized by the 1953 agrarian legislation. The formation of the Cidob in 1982, first by ethnic groups from Santa Cruz and then subsequently from other lowland departments such as Beni, Pando and parts of Tarija, aimed to secure such guarantees. In essence it is a loose alliance, rather than a very formal structure. Among its original promoters were the Chiquitanos, one of the more numerous of the peoples of eastern Santa Cruz, whose lands had come under attack from the expansion of cash-crop agriculture. Other founder members included the Guarayos, Guaraníes and the Ayoreos. The Cidob gave rise to a number of smaller regional organizations dedicated to preserving indigenous rights in general, but land rights in particular. In some instances, such as among the Guaraní in southern Santa Cruz, indigenous groups were even prepared to buy the land they needed.

For most indigenous groups territory has much more than just an economic meaning. It represents the guarantee of cultural and even spiritual survival. This was made very clear to us in the interviews we conducted with the Suyu Jatun Killaka Asanajaqi (Jakisa) in southern Oruro, a highland indigenous people who have sought to reassert their ethnic identity through the reconstitution of ayllus. For them, this is the reconquest of an identity suppressed since colonial times. According to Antonio Maraza, who presided over a meeting we attended, 'it's about decolonization and restoring ourselves as we used to be'. The introduction of the TCO therefore has a political dimension which implies a degree of decision-taking and self-determination, self-government (autonomía), the preservation of resources, and respect for traditional modes and customs (usos y costumbres) – not least regarding judicial matters. Collective ownership of land does not, however, imply collective forms of production; rather it means that land cannot be bought and sold as if it were a commodity. One of the criticisms frequently levelled at the peasant approach to landholding is that it is essentially 'mercantilist' in that its main objective is, through trade, to make money, even if at the expense of the rest of the community and the environment. José Bailaba, one of the founders of the Organización Indígena Chiquitana (OICh) in the eastern part of Santa Cruz, puts it thus: 'They have a different vision of things. For them there is no land that is respected as a reserve [...] their view is that looking after nature is a waste of time, a distraction from the business of making money.'

Indigenous organizations in the eastern lowlands were among those that pushed most consistently for the need to include such rights, based on land, in a new constitution. The 1990 march from Trinidad to La Paz proved highly influential, not least in paving the way to the 1996 Ley INRA. 'Before the march, no one took any notice of us,' says Bailaba; with it 'we emerged on the political stage'. Subsequent marches – these became a hallmark of indigenous mobilization – paved the way towards constitutional change. The III march in 2000 aimed to bring changes in the administration of the INRA Law, while the IV march in 2002 highlighted the need for a Constituent Assembly to change the constitution and thereby legally guarantee self-government and self-determination within indigenous territories. For Bailaba, the formation of the Pacto de Unidad had the sole purpose of passing the constitution. 'For us, it never had more permanence than that,' he says.

Campesino organizations take a rather different view, although there has been a good deal of overlap between peasant and indigenous demands in the past, and there are areas of Bolivia – Pando is a good example (see Chapter 8) – where indigenous and peasant organizations have worked harmoniously together, engaged in similar activities and usually in the face of a common enemy such as the latifundista or (in Pando) the barraquero. However, the problem of pressure on the land, both in the Altiplano and the valleys, has led to increasing hardship over the years as minifundios subdivide from one generation to the next into what are sometimes called 'surcofundios', a single furrow of crops. Lorenzo Soliz, the national director of CIPCA, a rural development NGO with programmes in both the Altiplano and the lowlands, points out that with plots of 1–2 hectares, peasant families in the highlands are simply unable to support themselves. 'Is it surprising that they are demanding land?' he asks. The overflow of peasant populations into the tropics has often been at the expense of indigenous lands. This is the prime cause, for example, of the growing pressure on the land in the Chapare and in the Polígono 7, as well as in some of the areas to the north of Santa Cruz city, which were originally settled by colonizadores in the 1960s and 1970s. For Juan de Dios Fernández, the director of planning at INRA, it is also a problem of the scale of TCO awards to indigenous peoples, the relatively low numbers of people living in them, and the poor management of the land provided. 'They are unable to control the uses to which it is put,' he says, citing how some sell off or rent parts of TCOs to timber extraction companies. Lorenzo Soliz agrees: 'the challenge is how to manage this land', he says. Some Interculturales go as far as to say that the TCO/TIOC are the new latifundios.

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Excerpted from Bolivia Processes of Change by John Crabtree, Ann Chaplin. Copyright © 2013 John Crabtree and Ann Chaplin. Excerpted by permission of Zed Books Ltd.
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