INDIGENOUS LIFE PROJECTS and EXTRACTIVISM Ethnographies from South America Edited by CECILIE VINDAL ØDEGAARD and JUAN JAVIER RIVERA ANDÍA

INDIGENOUS LIFE PROJECTS AND EXTRACTIVISM Ethnographies from South America Edited by CECILIE VINDAL ØDEGAARD and JUAN JAVIER RIVERA ANDÍA APPROACHES TO SOCIAL INEQUALITY AND DIFFERENCE Approaches to Social Inequality and Difference Series Editors Edvard Hviding University of Bergen Bergen, Norway Synnøve Bendixsen University of Bergen Bergen, Norway The book series contributes a wealth of new perspectives aiming to denaturalize ongoing social, economic and cultural trends such as the processes of ‘crimigration’ and racialization, fast-growing social-economic inequalities, depoliticization or technologization of policy, and simultaneously a politicization of difference. By treating naturalization simultaneously as a phenomenon in the world, and as a rudimentary analytical concept for further development and theoretical diversification, we identify a shared point of departure for all volumes in this series, in a search to analyze how difference is produced, governed and reconfigured in a rapidly changing world. By theorizing rich, globally comparative ethnographic materials on how racial/cultural/civilization differences are currently specified and naturalized, the series will throw new light on crucial links between differences, whether biologized and culturalized, and various forms of ‘social inequality’ that are produced in contemporary global social and political formations. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14775 Cecilie Vindal Ødegaard Juan Javier Rivera Andía Editors Indigenous Life Projects and Extractivism Ethnographies from South America Editors Cecilie Vindal Ødegaard Juan Javier Rivera Andía University of Bergen Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona Bergen, Norway Barcelona, Spain Approaches to Social Inequality and Difference ISBN 978-3-319-93434-1 ISBN 978-3-319-93435-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93435-8 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018954928 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019. This book is an open access publication. Supported by the University of Bergen. 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Cover Photo © P_We / GettyImages This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland PREFACE Extractivism is a good way to summarise the last five hundred years in South America. When Indigenous people discovered Spanish explorers on their coasts in the late fifteenth century, the strangers had arrived in search of precious metals and spices. Mercantilist policies at the time sought to increase wealth and power through trade and the accumulation of gold and silver. Proselytism accompanied the extraction of natural resources and, as Europeans moved into the continent, they employed religion and force to coerce Indigenous labour. Native people became the workers who first panned for gold in the Caribbean and then mined silver in northern New Spain (Mexico) and at Potosí, a high plateau in what is today Bolivia. Native labour made extractivism possible throughout the Colonial Period and, with millions of African slaves, facilitated Europeans’ appropriation of raw materials. The extraction of resources, forced labour, and European colonisation created the South America we know today. Independence and the creation of nation-states in the nineteenth century was an opportunity for people in South America to take ownership of their own resources. The Americanos, those upper-class Europeans born in the Americas who employed nativism to procure support for their wars to gain freedom from Europe, were at first unable to extract minerals because the devastating wars for political freedom had filled in mines, destroyed ports, and damaged the infrastructure. Once the elite overcame decades of political struggle and began to turn a profit, they faced addi- tional obstacles. The high cost of mass production, along with the legacy of 300 years of exchanging raw materials for manufactured goods, challenged an industrial take-off. Border conflicts, Indigenous insurrections, v vi PREFACE and political disarray among the elite further inhibited industrial advances. In sum, the nineteenth century perpetuated the extractivist legacy and challenged South American attempts to forge new economic models for their young nations. Native people again played an important role as the labour force that made extractivism during the Neocolonial Period of the late nineteenth century so lucrative for the elites who sold their raw materials, as well as for the foreigners who purchased them. The chapters in this book show that by the turn of the twenty-first century, extractivism had shifted to minerals, petroleum, and water. One century earlier, companies instead extracted raw materials, fruits, and plants. Indigenous people tapped rubber latex in Amazonia and harvested yerba mate tea in Eastern Paraguay. They mined copper in Chile and harvested coffee in Colombia. Native workers harvested cotton in northeastern Brazil, collected cochineal snail shells for dying textiles, and guano along northern Pacific coasts of South America. As in the Colonial Period, Indigenous workers extracted the raw materials that changed the lives of millions of people in the developed world and enriched the elite in South American nations. States and companies during this period mobilised Native people for extractive labour. To extend coffee, Guatemala divided communal Native lands into individual lots and sold the surplus in 1877, forcing villages to send the number of workers that planters requested for 60–90 days of the year.1 Labourers migrated to the coffee fincas in the lowlands to clean the groves and harvest the beans. Conditions were often violent: managers called Native workers chuchos (dogs) and beat them with fists, whips, machete flats, attacked them with dogs, and held them in stocks orfinca jails to force their work. Labour recruiters stole from the workers, kid- napped wives and children, and burnt their houses to force compliance. Planters employed indebted peonage and, by the 1920s, most of the men in the Native villages owed substantial debts to estate owners.2 As a result, highland Indigenous people lost the ability to subsist on their own crops and became permanent workers on lowland coffee plantations where they had to buy food. The demand for Amazonian rubber grew during these years and, by 1907, Peruvian entrepreneur Julio Arana was employing brutal measures to force the Huitoto people in Peru’s eastern forests to harvest caucho (rubber latex). The company used torture and terror to extract 4000 tonnes of caucho by 1910 at the cost of 30,000 Native deaths.3 Surrounding Manaus on the middle Amazon River, where Henry Ford was extracting PREFACE vii caucho and where rubber barons built the famous opera house, rubber tapping led to the untold misery of thousands of Native people. A similar example took place in Eastern Paraguay, where the Paraguayan Industrial Company employed debt peonage to force the Guaraní to harvest yerba mate under dismal conditions.4 These labour arrangements became com- mon in South America, yet labourers who made such extraction possible largely did not enjoy the benefits of the profits. Native people during these decades faced liberal administrations’ intent on displacing them in favour of extractive industries while still using their labour. Politicians wanted land, resources, and labour to extract export crops such as coffee, rubber, bananas, and henequen (Agave fourcroydes Lem.). In areas of larger Indigenous populations and histories of racial mixture, liberal rulers divided Native communal territories, took their lands for agriculture, and created pools of landless workers to serve national labour needs. Technological changes also altered Indigenous lives. Transportation and communication systems, developed rapidly during the Neocolonial Period to facilitate extractivism, enabled broader interrelations between

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