Oil Politics and Urbanization in the Northern Ecuadorian Amazon
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THE MILLENNIUM CITY: OIL POLITICS AND URBANIZATION IN THE NORTHERN ECUADORIAN AMAZON Angus Lyall A dissertation submitted to the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Geography. Chapel Hill 2020 Approved by: Gabriela Valdivia Elizabeth Havice Christian Lentz Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld John Pickles © 2020 Angus Lyall ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT Angus Lyall: The Millennium City: Oil Politics and Urbanization in the Northern Ecuadorian Amazon (Under the direction of Gabriela Valdivia) Oil production in the northern Ecuadorian Amazon has facilitated the urbanization of some of the world’s most biodiverse rainforests. New highways into the jungle, snaking pipelines, and population centers have followed in the wake of oil explorations and drilling over the last fifty years. Oil companies and the state have also sought indigenous consent to oil production in their territories in exchange for infrastructures, such as roads, electrification, and, in a few cases, urban-like settlements. Researchers, environmentalists, and engaged citizens have denounced urban development in indigenous territories as an unsustainable imposition of Western culture on otherwise isolated, unwilling or unwitting communities. However, such narratives overlook the social legacies of prior waves of colonial capitalism in the northern Amazon. Histories of racism and racial capitalism are often erased by ahistorical representations of the Amazon as a timeless, uniform space of pre-Hispanic cultures, effectively obscuring the violence that produced modern Amazonía. In this dissertation, I detail the history of an indigenous community of subsistence farmers, fisher-people, and hunters that recently negotiated with the state oil company to receive an urban-like settlement in the rainforest. I describe their newfound hardships in a place at the far margins of market society, where they lack food, money, and maintenance, and I document nostalgia for farm life. Yet, by the same token, I describe their collective struggles to sustain this so-called “Millennium City,” rather than abandon it. For generations, racism has been a motor iii driving these families to pursue integration into market relations, Western education, and urban spaces, as strategies to mitigate the physical and symbolic violence of dominant, white society. Today, negotiations over oil production between indigenous communities, the state, and companies in the northern Amazon unfold on an uneven social terrain shaped by centuries of oppression. This dissertation draws on multiple periods of fieldwork over six years that included interviews, video ethnography, and focus groups in the Cuyabeno Wildlife Reserve, as well as archival research in the Amazon and Andes. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am deeply grateful to the residents of Playas del Cuyabeno for sharing their stories with me. In particular, I am indebted to Marco Noteno, Olimpo Casanova, Anderson Tapuy, Bercelino Noteno, Rocío Chávez, Edwin Noteno, Rommel Chávez, Andrea Jipa, Roney Noteno, Edgar Noteno, Yessica Noteno, Rosa Noteno, Líder Jaramillo, ‘Don Plúas,’ Carlos Plúas, Jesús Grefa, Humberto Yumbo, and Karen Chávez. I am grateful for all that they have taught me, as well as their hospitality, kindness, and friendship. Similarly, I am indebted to Felipe and Randi Borman of the Zábalo community for their enriching conversations and support. I thank the communities of San Pedro, Taikwa, Zancudococha, Zábalo, Puerto Bolívar, Pañacocha, and Tablada de Sánchez for participating in this research. The institutional support of the National Archives of Ecuador; the Tena Governorship; the Ecuadorian Ministry of the Environment; the Aurelio Espinosa Pólit Library; and the vicariates of Aguarico and Sucumbíos was crucial for carrying out the archival portion of this research. I am particularly grateful to María Eugenia Tamaríz and Teodoro Bustamente for sharing their vast knowledge of the historical archives of the northern Amazon and to Álvaro Gundín of the Museo Arqueológico y Centro Cultural de Orellana [Archaeological Museum and Cultural Center of Orellana] for his guidance and his personal commitment to organizing and sustaining the Capuchin archives. I would like to thank my professors and mentors at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill, FLACSO-Ecuador, and Columbia University. First and foremost, I am thankful for the tireless guidance, incisive insights, and friendship of my advisor at UNC, Gaby v Valdivia. Gaby’s generosity and enthusiasm for teaching and advising are unmatched. Likewise, I am grateful to Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld, Elizabeth Havice, Christian Lentz, Alvaro Reyes, Altha Cravey, and Florence Babb for mentoring me beyond the classroom through conversations, shared writing and research projects, and independent studies. Coursework with John Pickles, Banu Gökariksel, and Scott Kirsch were also very formative for how I think and write as a geographer. Coursework and conversations with Ara Wilson at Duke University shaped how I approach social theory. I am grateful to Beatriz Muniz, Shelley Clarke, and Joanna Shuett at the Institute for the Study of the Americas for their support. A host of journal editors and workshop organizers helped to move my analysis along for this dissertation, particularly James McCarthy, Sarah Radcliffe, Andrea Nightingale, Pablo Bose, Mattias Borg Rasmussen, Kenneth Bo Nielsen, Rune Bolding Bennike, Christian Lund, Kristen Drybread, and Donna Goldstein. I could not have seen what I saw in the field or conducted the type of ethnographic-historical research that informs this dissertation without the teachings of my friends and mentors at FLACSO-Ecuador, particularly Cristina Cielo, Ivette Vallejo, Lisset Coba, Gioconda Herrera, Fernando García, Andrés Guerrero, Blanca Muratorio, Carmen Martínez, Valeria Coronel, Eduardo Kingman, Luciano Martínez, and Carlos de la Torre. At Columbia, I am grateful to Carl Wennerlind for teaching me how to do historical research and for mentoring me to this day. I am forever indebted to Chad Gifford, Sam Connell, Ana Lucía González, and the rest of the Pambamarca Archaeology Program crew for sparking an enduring interest in Andean anthropology and history. I want to acknowledge other friends who shaped my thinking and helped me through this process, particularly Tamara Matheson, Justin Orlosky, Andrea Wood, Rob Jones, Steven Horton, Francesa Sorbara, and other residents of “the Bog” in Carrboro; Patricia Sarzosa and vi Poema Carrión; Misha Gómez and the Gómez family; Mike Cepek, Matt Ford, and Jeremy Rayner; Mike Bento and Nancy Burneo; and members of the Colectivo de geografía crítica del Ecuador [Critical Geography Collective of Ecuador], including Sofia Zaragocin, Manu Bayón, Melissa Moreno, Karo van Teijlingen, Nadia Romero, and Gabi Ruales. At UNC, Benjamin Rubin, Rachael Cotterman, Chris Neubert, Maia Call, Cory Keeler, Fredy Grefa, Francisco Laso, Mike Hawkins, Helena Cárdenas, K.D. Brown, Tim Stallman, Jim Kuras, Pavithra Vasudevan, Sertanya Reddy, Eloisa Berman-Arévalo, Dayuma Alban, Willie Wright, Adam Bledsoe, Mike Dimpfl, Molly Green, and Eric Thomas all shaped both my experience and my thinking. Thank you to Barbara Taylor, Nell Phillips, and Dan Warfield in the geography office for all of your help through crises big and small. And thank you, Javier Rodríguez, for your help and your patience. Finally, I want to thank my family. My brothers, Kip and Duff, and my parents, Carol and Alec, have always encouraged my academic pursuits and my travels. This dissertation is the product of decades of your support. I started this research in 2014 alongside my partner, Nancy Carrión. Much of the analysis in these pages are the product of conversations Nancy and I have had for the last six years. I only endured graduate school with her care and support. And I finished this project with a new member of our family in tow. Thank you, Emma Lucía, for hugging me, playing with me, and keeping my priorities straight over the last three years. vii PREFACE: A WORLD DIVIDED IN TWO In 2009, I was in a town meeting in a rural Andean parish when several indigenous men stood up to denounce me as an “imperialist.” I was working for North American archaeologists at the time, as their logistics guy. And I had requested the meeting to offer work to locals in exchange for access to new dig sites on their farms. At the opening of the meeting, I was rebuked for not deferring to local leadership to call the meeting to order; by the end of the night, I had been accused of stealing Incan gold on behalf of the U.S. government. I was successful at negotiating access to new sites, but our staff was later chased off of several sites by farmers waving axes and shovels at them. It seemed that I had struck deals that were no longer tolerable once white people began digging up their lands. Worse still, the archaeologists had been storing artifacts in the estate of a local elite family that had once owned the parish and held the indigenous population in indebted servitude until the 1970s. That history lingers. Although I was already in my third year in Ecuador, I still struggled to understand social context. When I had first arrived, at the age of twenty-two, my plan was to spend a summer learning Spanish and then travel on to Brazil, Haiti, maybe Lebanon. But I landed a job guiding mountain bike tours. I knew little about bikes – even less about the country, but my Dutch boss joked that whatever tourists asked me, I was free to make things up. I spent my days rolling down the sides of glacier-topped volcanos, among patchwork Andean hills, and through cloud forests. It was an altogether different world for a young man from Cape Cod. viii It was an exciting time for the country as well. A bright young socialist economist named Rafael Correa was running for president against the billionaire banana tycoon, Alvaro Noboa. Correa promised to defend socioeconomic justice, rebuild institutions, and end the ‘long neoliberal night’ – ten turbulent years in which the country cycled through seven presidents.