UC Riverside UC Riverside Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title The Smell of Petroleum: Health, Insecurity, and Citizenship in "Revolutionary" Ecuador Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3bb1p5rx Author Welcome, Nicholas Scott Publication Date 2013 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE The Smell of Petroleum: Health, Insecurity, and Citizenship in “Revolutionary” Ecuador A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology by Nicholas Scott Welcome June 2013 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Juliet McMullin, Chairperson Dr. Christina Schwenkel Dr. Thomas Patterson Copyright by Nicholas Scott Welcome 2013 The Dissertation of Nicholas Scott Welcome is approved: _____________________________________________ _____________________________________________ _____________________________________________ Committee Chairperson University of California, Riverside ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am extremely grateful to the many members of the Esmeraldeño and Ecuadorian community who helped me realize my field research. Their humor, directness, and good will made this dissertation project possible. I give special thanks to Mercedes Vargas, Pablo Minda, Sonia Valencia, and Ritter Ramirez who opened their own homes to me. Their stimulating conversation, understanding of their own community, and enthusiastic support helped orient and ground me in the field, even in the moments when Esmeraldas became surreal. I also wish to give special thanks to Susan Poats from the Grupo Randi Randi and X. Andrade from FLACSO Ecuador for opening their institutions to me. Both were instrumental in making the transition to field go as seamless as possible and each has become a vital member of my Ecuadorian family. I am also grateful to Emily Walmsley, Jean Muteba Rahier, and Mauricio Espinel for providing me with contacts in Esmeraldas and insights about the community as this project progressed. In California my gratitude goes foremost to my dissertation committee chair, Juliet McMullin. Her patience, encouragement, and support have consistently pushed me to become a better scholar. Her intellectual guidance and creative approach to anthropology have fundamentally shaped how I think about the world and my discipline. I also have the upmost gratitude for Christina Schwenkel and Thomas Patterson for supporting me through the larger dissertation process. My ongoing and stimulating conversations with them have pushed my research in new and incredibly fruitful directions. At UCR I need to give a special thanks to my post-graduate colleagues in the anthropology department. I give a big thank you to Jelena Radovic Fanta, Lisa Garibaldi, iv Sarah Grant, Dan Leonard, Jenny Banh, Silvia Ventura Luna, Jennifer Chmilar, Melissa King, Jay Dubois, and John Gust. I offer special thanks to Taylor Nelms and Eudelio Martinez who have been invaluable as sounding boards for ideas, which shaped the direction my dissertation has taken. I would like to thank FLACSO Ecuador for offering me an academic affiliation as a visiting scholar that allowed me to conduct research to the fullest extent possible. I am extremely grateful to the UCR Graduate Division GRMP Program, The UC One Health Institute, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for providing generous research funding that allowed me to spend almost twenty-one months in Ecuador. A special thanks is also due to the UC Office of the President, UC Humanities Research Initiative, and the UCR Center for Ideas and Society for providing dissertation year funding and work space that made the process of writing go much more smoothly. I also have debt of gratitude to the many people that have commented on early versions of my dissertation chapters. The insights of Paul Ryer, Karen Brodkin, Nancy Postero, Geoffrey Bowker, Li Zhang, and Amber Wutich have been indispensible in refining my work. Finally, I thank my parents Maxine and Frank Welcome. Their love and support through a decade of post-graduate work has given me the strength to push through and complete this project. v ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION The Smell of Petroleum: Health, Insecurity, and Citizenship in “Revolutionary” Ecuador by Nicholas Scott Welcome Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Program in Anthropology University of California, Riverside, June 2013 Dr. Juliet McMullin, Chairperson This project explores how the environmental and health impacts of energy production challenge emergent discourses of citizenship in Ecuador. I follow the relationship between Ecuador’s national petroleum refinery and the city of Esmeraldas, a largely afro-descendant and historically marginalized community, as the nation negotiated a national structural transition that would test the promise of a “revolutionary” future, new substantive citizenship rights, and new imaginaries of state care. The petroleum industry represents a critical planning struggle for Esmeraldas; originally built outside of the city the refinery complex is now surrounded by shantytowns that are continuously exposed to contaminated air and water. While the city was promised a golden age of development, their three decades long experience with the oil industry has left them with a population explosion, mass unemployment, decaying infrastructure, and a public health crisis. However, in 2006 residents were hopeful for a fundamental change as a newly elected government promised to embed social justice and well being into the national conceptualization of citizenship. This “Citizen’s Revolution,” vi pledged to redistribute Ecuador’s energy resources to improve quality of life and the quality of citizenship for all Ecuadorians. However, this project illustrates that while the new political regime intends to promote wellbeing through energy production, corporate logics continue to shape the biopolitical processes of making environmental contamination and its health effects in/visible, even as Esmeraldeños employ novel conceptualizations of citizenship and spectacular protests to push for a livable environment. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………..iv Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………vi Table of Contents………………………………………………………………………viii List of Figures……………………………………………………………...…………....ix Introduction: Leaky Spaces: The Sacred and Profane of the Ecuadorian Oil Industry…1 Chapter 1: Time Bombs: Disaster and Decay in an Industrial Miasma……………….. 37 Chapter 2: Carnivalesque Democracy: Political Malaise and the Engineering of Affect…………………………………………………………………………...……….81 Chapter 3: Bleeding Out: Life, Labor, and Spectacular Citizenship…………………...135 Chapter 4: Adjusting Accounts: Impunity and Free-Floating Insecurity………………167 Chapter 5: The Smell of Petroleum: Indexing Pollution and the Particularities of Health..........................................................................................................................213 Chapter 6: The Revolution is in Neutral: Potholes and State Imaginaries of Care…….250 Conclusion: Imprinting the Revolution: Citizenship, Care, and Well Being………......297 Works Cited……………………………………………………………………….……313 viii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. Petroleros Bleeding Out, Esmeraldas, EC……………………………………136 Figure 2. Protest Caricature of President Rafael Correa Delgado, Esmeraldas, EC…....163 Figure 3. The Social Limpieza Flyer, Esmeraldas, EC………………………………....168 Figure 4. The Pothole and the Sign, Esmeraldas, EC....………………………………. 253 Figure 5. The Streets of Esmeraldas Post-Storm, Esmeraldas, EC....…………………. 280 Figure 6. “Without Light, Without Water, The Revolution is Now for Everyone” Esmeraldas, EC…………………………………………………………………………286 Figure 7. “The Citizens Revolution is in Neutral,” Quito, EC…………………………296 Figure 8. “Inside of this Circle You Are Safe,” Quito, EC………..……………...…….301 Figure 9. Zombie Propaganda, Esmeraldas, EC……………………………….……….303 Figure 10. Refinery Mural, Esmeraldas, EC………………………………………..…..310 ix Introduction Leaky Spaces: The Sacred and Profane of the Ecuadorian Oil Industry We’re All Contaminated… Early one morning in October 2009 I crossed the city of Esmeraldas on my way to interview a career employee of PetroEcuador, Ecuador’s national petroleum company. The path from the city center to the Villas de CEPE, the gated community that houses workers of Ecuador’s largest petroleum refinery, is a study in contrasts. As you traverse the urban milieu, you move through crowded, chaotic streets of densely packed apartment buildings in the city Center, to sprawling autoconstructed shantytowns of low lying homes in the Southern Barrios, before finally arriving at a fortified oasis of calm near the edge of the municipality. Through the trip, the presence of the State Refinery of Esmeraldas looms on the horizon, expelling a stream of smoke and flame from its principal chimney. On humid days, the particulate matter, gases, and ash produced by the refining process interact with the landscape and climate, generating an unmistakable haze that envelops the marginalized barrios surrounding the oil complex. For locals, this industrial miasma fundamentally shapes their experience of the city and the state, as contamination indexes the ill health, disasters, and social conflict created by the presence of the industrial complex. Nonetheless as you cross the bridge at the barrio La Propecia, the urban area undergoes a transition; pollution recedes to the background and honking and exhaust 1 spewing taxis, cars,