TIPNIS

By Emily Achtenberg - Upside Down World, June 29, 2015

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

On May 20, Bolivian President Evo Morales issued Supreme Decree 2366, opening up Bolivia’s national parks—which are protected under the Constitution as ecological reserves—to oil and gas extraction. Just two weeks later, Morales proclaimed that his on-again, off-again plan to build a highway through the TIPNIS national park and indigenous territory in the Bolivian Amazon will finally be realized.

The coincidence of these announcements was not lost on TIPNIS road opponents, who have long suspected that the advancement of oil and gas interests is a major impetus behind the road. Within the TIPNIS, four areas covering 30% of the park’s territory are subject to long-standing hydrocarbons concessions. The Securé block is virtually adjacent to the proposed road.

In fact, 11 of Bolivia’s 22 national park reserves are overlapped by existing gas and oil concessions to transnationals like Brazil’s Petrobras, Spain’s Repsol, and France’s Total.  Since the “nationalization” of hydrocarbons in 2006, these companies have operated through joint ventures with YPFB, the state energy company.

Like the TIPNIS, many of these reserves are collectively titled to indigenous groups who have inhabited them for centuries, relying on their ancestral lands for subsistence.  In some cases, hydrocarbons concessions cover 70-90% of the park’s territory. These parks could become virtually extinct once the contracts are operational.

While the land area conceded to gas and oil companies in Bolivia has vastly expanded under Morales—up from 7.2 million acres in 2007 to 59.3 million in 2012—activity in the national parks has been largely paralyzed due to the lack of a coherent regulatory framework for extraction—until now. Under the new Supreme Decree, permits for hydrocarbons extraction can be granted under existing or new contracts, as long as the company promises to mitigate any adverse environmental impacts, and contributes 1% of its investment towards poverty reduction and economic development in the affected area.

Critics say these measures won’t begin to compensate for the true costs of hydrocarbons exploitation, especially since the environmental and parks agencies responsible for administering them are strongly biased towards extraction. According to Jorge Campanini of the non-profit research organization CEDIB, Supreme Decree 2366 will be a "terminal sentence” for protected areas already under assault from illegal mining, deforestation, and land invasions by coca-growers.

Morales’s twin announcements highlight a central challenge and contradiction for the  MAS (Movement Towards Socialism) government, which has relied heavily on oil and gas extraction to finance its successful redistributive programs. This strategy has increasingly put Morales at odds with indigenous, environmental, and other civil society organizations who argue that extractivism destroys nature and communities, perpetuates dependence on transnationals, and obscures the need to develop a sustainable economic model for the future.

In contrast, the MAS government defends its extractivist and developmentalist policies as a necessary means to alleviate poverty in the present, and to create the resources for a post-extractive economy that will transition towards “communitarian socialism.”  Political scientist George Gray Molina has noted that the Bolivian government’s effective take of hydrocarbons taxes and royalties, at 72%, is among the highest in Latin America.[1]

These contrasting visions crystallized in 2011-12 around the TIPNIS controversy, the most divisive conflict of Morales’s nine-year tenure. The protracted dispute ruptured the alliance of indigenous, campesino, and urban social movements that originally brought Morales to power in 2005.