Warming and Dispossession: Climate Change, Road Building, and Forced Labor in Bolivia’s Cordillera Real, 1880–1920

• In Event: Making Latin American Landscapes in the ?-ocene

Abstract

In the late 1800s, liberal elites from Mexico and Central America to the Andes led aggressive campaigns to break up Indigenous communities and dispossess them of land, water, and other resources. While scholars have explored the economic, social, and political dimensions of liberal land policies, the environmental and climatic dimensions of this history have received less attention. Considering the climate is important because these dispossession campaigns occurred in the decades after the end of the Little Ice Age as the climate was gradually warming, causing glaciers in mountainous areas like Bolivia’s Cordillera Real to recede. This paper considers the role that a warming climate played in Liberal state building, economic development, and land policies in Bolivia’s Cordillera Real at the turn of the twentieth century. It argues that a warming climate helped facilitate dispossession of Indigenous land, labor, and knowledge by making previously inaccessible mountainous areas accessible to paceño elites intent on expanding mining, rubber extraction, export-oriented agriculture, and hydroelectric operations. Building roads to connect the Altiplano and the new capital city of La Paz west of the Cordillera Real with the range’s eastern slopes was key to these efforts. To pay for and create a labor force for road building, Congress established a system called prestación vial that taxed men who could afford to pay and drafted those who could not. Like the colonial corvée labor system it replaced, prestación vial was highly racialized and gendered, especially in the Department of La Paz where creole and mestizo men generally paid the tax while Indian men built and maintained roads. The roads that Aymara men built in the Cordillera Real facilitated the entry of explorers, mining companies, military expeditions, hydroelectric companies, water utilities, and other operations. Forced Indigenous labor thus subsidized commerce and facilitated settlement and extraction in Indian lands.

Author

• Sarah T Hines, University of Oklahoma