Evo Morales and the Amazon
The struggle over whether corporations should control energy reserves in the Amazon is set to move from Peru to Bolivia.
The indigenous struggle in the Peruvian Amazon made international headlines last month after clashes between indigenous protesters and police left 25 police and more than 50 indigenous people dead. For months, indigenous communities had been demonstrating against the incursion of transnational petroleum corporations given contracts by Peruvian President Alan Garcia without consultation with--let alone approval from--local indigenous communities.
In Bolivia, Amazonian indigenous people are also confronting transnational petroleum companies that have been given licenses to begin operations by the government of Bolivian President Evo Morales. The difference, however, is that Morales, the country's first indigenous president, counts on the support of much of the country's indigenous population.
Morales faces strong opposition to the move from labor, peasant and indigenous organizations, including the National Council of Ayllus and Markas of Qullasuyu, the United Sindical Conferation of Campesino Workers of Bolivia, the Sindical Confederation of Indigenous Women Peasants "Bartolina Sisa," the Indigenous Confederation of Bolivia, the Landless Movement of Bolivia and the Afro-Bolivian People.
These organizations met in Bolivia's capital of La Paz in early July to demand an end to petroleum and mining exploration in their territory. Among the demands in the groups' statement were "the approval of transparent politics and social control over YPFB (the state-owned gas company) and COMIBOL (the state-owned mining corporation) and a political relationship with indigenous communities based on the proposals of their organizations."
Morales accused non-governmental organizations of "manipulating" and "confusing" indigenous leaders. But the social movements themselves initiated the opposition and are determined to fight. Here, we publish a translation from Spanish of a statement by , president of the Bolivian Forum on the Environment and Development, released two days before the La Paz meeting.
THE COMPANY Geokinetics, an octopus of the oil and gas industry headquartered in Houston, Texas, has already begun seismic work for gas exploration in the South Amazon of Bolivia, affecting the territory and the communities of the indigenous groups Mosetén and Leco-Larecaja. The development plans will also affect the Chimán, Quechua-Tacana, Tacana, Ese Eja, Toromona y Leco-Apolo indigenous groups, as well as campesino camps in the area and shore populations, such as those in Rurrenabaque and San Buenaventura.
This was verified in the area by several commissions of which various indigenous communities are part. The first phase of exploration has already begun: large work camps and open penetration roads have been detected in Palos Blancos in the department (state) of La Paz and close to the community of Pukara in the department of Beni, and helicopter trips and detonations are daily and incessant.
The most dramatic part is the exploratory work that is wreaking irreversible environmental destruction of rivers, forests, and animal and plant life, all of which the indigenous communities depend on for their livelihoods and the survival of their culture.
This evident aggression against all of the rights of indigenous peoples of the South Amazon of Bolivia is being carried out by a petroleum company whose origin is unknown to the indigenous organizations and the Bolivian people generally. The aggression is born from absolute disrespect for the rights of prior consultation and consent of the indigenous people, who were not even informed about the scope and risks that the oil and gas activity would bring.
This disrespect for the human rights of these peoples, including efforts to bribe leaders of some organizations and communities, worsens their subjugation. And this is occurring in spite of the fact that Evo Morales declared that the transnationals would not buy off leaders as they did in the past (La Razón, October 29, 2008).
It is for these reasons that we issue this denunciation on a national and international level--to stop all of the abuses already noted for which there exists proof that cannot be hidden that should be condemned in the most forceful manner possible, appealing to the solidarity and mobilization of all sectors that struggle for una Amazonía para la Vida (an Amazon for Life).
THE MOST incredible aspect of all of this is that the aggression against the Amazon's indigenous peoples is happening under the watch of the first president of the pluri-national state of Bolivia, compañero Evo Morales.
For this reason, we ask for and demand an explanation for the presence of this Yankee petroleum company in an area the area that constitutes the port of entry to the rest of the Amazon, and of which control and ownership is a strategic objective of the North Americans--a fact already denounced on numerous occasions, including by the very Bolivian government headed by Evo Morales.
We do not understand how the North American presence can be accepted when events in Baguá, Peru have demonstrated that this presence only brings death and genocide for our indigenous brothers and sisters. The same interests that Geokinetics (also operating in Peru) represents in Bolivia are those that have driven the massacre in Baguá. Do we have to end up with the same extreme violation of human rights to get the Yankee petroleum company to leave the region?
Nor can we keep quiet about the fact that functionaries of the Bolivian Ministry of Hydrocarbons have threatened indigenous leaders with militarizing the zone if opposition to gas exploration arises.
What is being behind all of this? Public announcements until now have stated that the company given the concessions to the gas reserves of the jungle were YFPB-Petroandina SAM, a Bolivian-Venezuelan mixed enterprise.
We now denounce this subcontract with a North American company that is not only injurious to national sovereignty, but also violates and mocks the spirit of the hydrocarbons nationalization process that the Bolivian people fought for on the streets of El Alto and La Paz in the "Gas War" against neoliberalism, when more than 60 people were killed in October 2003.
Is this the nationalization that our compatriots died for?
Why is property being given to a project that is also of doubtful technical viability, when it is known that YPFB explored the same region 20 years ago and failed to find any significant deposits?
Why isn't priority given to more urgent issues in the realm of hydrocarbons, such as extraction of hydrocarbon liquids that have already been exported, for which we lose hundreds of millions of dollars, or for the demand to comply with the 47 contracts with the transnationals that continue to operate in national territory?
Why this overwhelming obstinacy and stubbornness toward people and rights of entry to the Amazon?
Conscious of the irreparable environmental damage that is beginning, we also cannot believe the siren songs of the Yankee company, Petroandina, and Ministry of Hibrocarburos functionaries when they talk about mitigating the damage. It was revealed a few days ago that the president of YPFB, Carlos Villegas, pardoned the transnational Transredes' debt to the state and indigenous communities in La Paz and Oruro from the biggest ecological disaster of its history, a petroleum spill caused by the rupture of one of the company's pipelines in 2000.
WE DO not understand how compañero Evo--who knows about the aggression and the massacres carried out by the North American presence in the Chapare [coco-growing] region, which he confronted as a union leader over the course of 20 years in the defense of the coca leaf--can now support the presence of Geokinetics in the Amazon. Will we too have to confront the gringos, as he and the six federations of the Cochabamba Tropics took on the DEA [Drug Enforcement Agency]?
At the same time, we do not understand how the government that has done the most to challenge the incessant North American interference in Bolivia's internal affairs can permit this Yankee presence on Bolivian soil.
How should we understand the fact that the same North Americans who have been denounced by national authorities for conspiring to overthrow and assassinate Evo; were behind the massacre in Porvenir, Pando, where dozens of campesinos died [in September of last year]; and initiated the Civic-Prefectural coup attempt against the government in an attempt to divide Bolivia have now initiated a process of irreversible destruction of the natural resources of the southern Amazon?
This denunciation clearly contradicts the unquestionable work that Evo Morales is doing on an international level to defend indigenous rights. He is held up and respected as a champion of these rights, as was demonstrated when Bolivia became the first country in the world to raise the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of the United Nations to the level of law--or when, at the proposal of Evo himself, the UN approved the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth.
For this same Mother Earth that is already being victimized, contaminated and destroyed, and for the rights of the indigenous peoples who are being trampled on, subjugated and disowned, we implore our compañero president, in the name of the sacred defense of the earth and life in the Amazon, to order the immediate suspension of all gas exploration in indigenous territory and expel Geokinetics in order to prevent destruction, new affronts to human rights and violence.
We do not want another Baguá, not at the hands of the gas companies nor as a result of the imposition of a new developmentalist vision of indiscriminate exploitation of natural resources.
We want sacred rights, national laws and international agreements, as well as the thinking of our government represented by the slogan "to live well"--meaning to live in harmony with nature, as we have always lived, and as our brother Evo proclaims in intentional forums--to be respected.
We want the efforts of the indigenous people and peasants of the Amazon to be revered. This is to preserve not only life and nature in the Amazon, but also the viable economic alternatives that they propel--such as ecological production of chestnuts and cacao and ecotourism that demonstrate that sustainable use of biodiversity is the alternative to the model of accumulation based in the extraction of non-renewable natural resources that has tied Bolivia to poverty since the founding of the Republic.
In this sense, we propose an ideological debate and conscious reflection, and accept the challenge posed by compañero Evo Morales himself in the last consultative meeting of the Indigenous Confederation of Bolivia to debate these issues and all those related to the present and future of the Amazon in an open, frank and fraternal manner...
We believe that these truths need to be heard, that the actions of the functionaries of the Ministry of Hydrocarbons violate the rights of indigenous peoples and should be punished, and that it is necessary to end the North American presence in the Amazon, especially when it means environmental destruction, social division, cultural degradation and subjection to the dictates of politics that do not respond to the true needs of the people.
Translation by Sarah Hines.
