Disaster and Development: The 1968 Río Grande Flood and the Future of Bolivia’s Frontier Colonization

• In Event: Local Histories of Development

Abstract

In early 1968, after more than a week of unrelenting rain, the Rio Grande, a short distance to the east of Bolivia's frontier city of Santa Cruz, leapt its banks. It had long held a reputation as an “unruly” or “capricious” river given the seasonal volatility that regularly transformed it from a series of muddy channels to a raging expanse stretching over a kilometer. The 1968 disaster reconfirmed this assessment, yet in contrast to earlier floods, where surging waters had inundated unsettled bushland, the rivers’ flood plain was now home to thousands of national and foreign colonists that had arrived through government-sponsored colonization programs over the preceding decade. Some took to the rooves of their improvised palm-thatched homes where they were plucked by helicopter or boat. Thousands flooded into the service town of Montero.
Like other Latin American disasters ranging from recurring droughts in northeastern Brazil to devastating earthquakes in Central America, the ’68 flood offers a window on socio-political dynamics. Local responses to the presence of hitherto unknown rural flood victims in urban spaces revealed the increasing racialized polarization, between highlanders and lowlanders, that would become a central conflict in Bolivia’s frontier expansion. The Bolivian state’s populist initial response, and its subsequent abdication of responsibility for settlers, presaged the turn to forms of “semi-directed” colonization in the following decades. Though the ’68 disaster seemed to confirm that new lands settlement was environmentally questionable, it would ultimately serve as the impetus for new rounds of development along Bolivia’s tropical frontier.

Author

• Ben Nobbs-Thiessen