The election of indigenous president Evo Morales in 2005, following a wave of social protests, placed Bolivia at the forefront of debates over indigenous rights, extractivism and the quest for ‘post-neoliberal’ development. Derrick Hindery's new book, From Enron to Evo, makes an important new contribution to these debates. Focusing on oil giants Enron and Shell's Cuiabá gas pipeline in Bolivia's Chaco region, Hindery traces one indigenous group's struggle for self-determination in the context of an expanding extractives frontier. Through a combination of dogged detective work at the international level and deep ethnographic work in Bolivia with both indigenous groups and state officials, the book illuminates the inner workings of transnational resource exploitation and financing, as well as the extractive industry's local effects on indigenous populations. Crucially, by focusing on the evolution of a single resource conflict that has spanned from the neoliberal 1990s to the present, Hindery provides a compelling ethnographic account of the continuities and tensions arising from Bolivia's current ‘post-neoliberal’ development model, at a moment when these are becoming increasingly visible and contested at a national level.
Hindery's central argument – that neoliberal governance subordinated indigenous rights to transnational capitalist interests – is hardly a novel one. Yet, whereas many previous critiques of neoliberalism have rested on vague accusations of complicity between transnational corporations and the state, this book offers us a rare ‘nuts and bolts’ account of the concrete processes through which such collusions played out. Based on extensive documentary analysis, Hindery reveals how projects created by international financial institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund to manage the social and environmental impacts of extraction were doomed to failure from the outset owing to conflicts of interest that made it impossible for the state to regulate transnational corporations. Furthermore, he demonstrates that – contrary to the ‘free market’ discourse of the era – without multilateral funding the Cuiabá project would have been financially unviable. Thus, despite a rhetoric of sustainable development, multilateral donors were key actors in backing extractive industry projects in Bolivia – projects that paid only minimal lip service to social and environmental concerns.
A key argument of the book is that it is necessary to look beyond individual projects or case studies to evaluate the overall effects of extractive development. By demonstrating the ‘synergistic effects’ of particular projects – which often depend on and pave the way for others – Hindery sheds light on the emergence of an entire ‘extractive complex’, which produces chain reactions at multiple scales. In doing so, he enables us to conceive of extractive industry development as a reterritorialising process with a vast spatial reach. Again, this flies in the face of the rhetoric accompanying this development. As Hindery details, when advocating such projects, transnational corporations and the state (both in the neoliberal period and in the current Morales period) paint each project as self-contained, safe, and with limited effects on the local environment and the livelihoods of the communities nearby. In revealing the fallacy of this discourse, the book has important implications for wider debates on the governance of extraction.
Yet, this book is not only about the tenacity of neoliberal governance; it is also about the creative ways in which indigenous peoples respond to such processes in defence of their historically grounded claims to territorial sovereignty and self-determination. While making clear the costs of extractivist development for the Chiquitanos, Hindery avoids depicting them as mere victims. Instead, he provides a detailed account of their multi-scalar strategies, their shifting coalitions, their political debates – and the pragmatic choices they make in light of the enormously powerful forces facing them. He characterises their approach as ‘flexible pragmatism’. A key example is a compensation plan agreed to on the basis that the oil companies would provide financial, legal and technical support to secure legal land titles for communities (a pattern echoed in numerous other indigenous territories). Through detailed examples such as this, Hindery reveals how indigenous peoples manage to exercise agency within the double-edged spaces of an extractivist development model – something we have both sought to illuminate in our work.
Perhaps this book will be most cited for its challenge to the MAS government's self-image as a pro-indigenous, post-neoliberal and decolonising state. Much recent scholarship on Bolivia has taken as a starting point the idea that the 2005 election of Evo Morales represents a fundamental rupture in the country's development trajectory. More than any other recent academic book, Hindery's account calls this assumption into question. Following the Cuiabá case (along with several other important cases like the Desaguadero oil spill, the Madidi Park project, and the scandal about the TIPNIS highway), Hindery demonstrates in ethnographic detail how the current ‘indigenous-led’ state replicates a centuries-long relation with extractivism that spans from the colonial period, through the neoliberal period, to the present. While these dynamics are being widely debated in Bolivia and in Bolivianist scholarship, Hindery's book offers specific evidence of how they play out in practice in territories of extraction. The message that emerges is an important, albeit depressing, one: even in Bolivia, the place lauded across the world for its empowerment of indigenous rights, the forces and practices of global capitalism continue to demand the sacrifice of indigenous people's lands and resources. In revealing these sacrifices, this book demonstrates the importance of ethnographic work in Bolivia's under-researched indigenous frontier regions for understanding the dynamics of the current ‘process of change’.
From Enron to Evo will be widely read in the Latin American indigenous studies world, as well as by political ecologists and scholars of the Latin American Left. Hindery's clear and accessible writing style makes the book a valuable resource for students of geography, anthropology, Latin American studies and related disciplines. The book will also be widely read in Latin America, where a Spanish-language version has already been published to critical acclaim. In short, by bringing Hindery's committed empirical work to bear on debates on neoliberalism, extractivism and indigenous development, this book illuminates the complex challenges faced by Latin American societies struggling for more just, equitable and decolonising forms of development.
