Bolivian Native Politics and Mining Corporations

• In Event: Extractivist Economies, Ethnographies of Plunder

Abstract

The current government of Bolivia has stated that extractivism is the economic basis for achieving national development and social progress. At the same time, President Evo Morales regularly performs ceremonies to pachamama in international meetings and even advocates for the recognition of pachamama rights with the support of the Vice President Alvaro Garcia Linera. One way to understand such a contradiction is to view his performance as concealing his government’s real disconnection from indigenous people´s conceptualization of their world which is menaced by mining corporations, particularly in Northern Potosi. In this paper, I examine anti-mining sentiment in the case of villagers in Mallku-Quta who struggle to defend the mountain and lake Mallku-Quta. For them, Mallku-Quta exists as a single person with whom they share food and treats to guarantee the reproduction of their life in their own terms. That is, particular places exist as social beings and they are part of the world that villagers have constituted as such. This conceptualization of the world is revealed through Quechua social and linguistic practices. By analyzing snapshots of a video-documentary that illustrates the fight of villagers of Mallku-Quta against mining projects in their territory, I shed light on how Bolivian native politics question the plunder that Morales has certified as good for the nation.

Author

• Margarita Huayhua, University of Texas