On June 5, two months of gathering indigenous protest across the Peruvian Amazon culminated in one of the country’s most tragic moments in many a year.1 Several thousand indigenous and non-indigenous people had assembled in the Amazonas town of Bagua, blocking the highway and demanding the derogation of executive decrees on which they had not been consulted and that they felt threatened their future access to land, and therefore their livelihoods, in the territories they have long occupied.2 Also gathered were police forces, sent in by the central government to re-open the highway. In a still unclear sequence of events, shooting began.

By the end of the day, and though numbers are still disputed, five Awajún-Wampís indigenous people and five mestizo townspeople were confirmed dead, along with 23 policemen, 11 of whom were killed in retaliation by indigenous people as they were guarding a pumping station of the North Peruvian Oil Pipeline. One hundred and sixty-nine indigenous and mestizo civilians and 31 police were confirmed injured. A report issued in July by the national Ombudsman’s office found that all the indigenous people involved in the conflict had been accounted for in the villages its representatives had visited and that no formal complaints of missing persons had been received. Indigenous leaders, however, said that many more remote villages had not been visited and that reliable figures on the missing or killed would not be available unless an independent commission were created to investigate the events.

While the roots of this confrontation run deep, the ticker on the time bomb was set more recently. On October 28, 2007, Peru’s president, Alan García, published “El síndrome del perro del hortelano” (The Dog in the Manger Syndrome), the first in a series of newspaper articles in which he laid out his interpretation of Peru’s ills and his vision of how to cure them. The problem, he argued, was that Peru’s immense natural resource endowments are not legally titled, and therefore cannot be traded, do not attract investment, and do not generate employment. The result: continuing poverty. This situation persists, he maintained, because of the “law of the dog in the manger, which says if I can’t do it, nobody can do it”—a position argued by “the old anti-capitalist Communists of the 19th century, who disguised themselves as the protectionists of the 20th century and then changed T-shirts again in the 21st century to be environmentalists.”

García bemoaned that “there are millions of hectares for timber extraction that lie idle, millions more that communities and associations have not, and will never, cultivate, in addition to hundreds of mineral deposits that cannot be worked.” Oil development was being hampered because those who questioned the expansion of extractive industry had “created the image of the ‘non-contact’ jungle native.” The solution, according to García, is to formalize property rights, offer up large swaths of land for sale, and attract large-scale investment and modern technology.3 By June 2008, García had passed 99 decrees to act on this manifesto, easing processes that would effectively break up community land and territory. The people in Bagua were protesting some of these very decrees.

As various commentators have argued, what lies behind García’s decrees (as well as parallel initiatives in the coastal valleys) is, in the words of anthropologist Richard Chase Smith, “a clear project of state reform oriented towards the concentration of land and natural resources in private hands.”4 Meanwhile, Chase Smith notes, the government has failed to respond to any of the land-titling requests made by about 3,800 communities, some of which date back a decade and a half.

Notwithstanding the neoliberal credentials of García’s manifesto, its full significance lay elsewhere. “[T]he first resource is the Amazonia. It has 63 million hectares [almost 156 million acres] and abundant rain,” the president wrote, reiterating a long-standing vision of the Amazon as empty and awaiting development. His declaration, brimming with high-modernist sentiments, charted a route to a future mapped by faith in the infallibility of property rights, technology, and the potential of large-scale capital to transform Peru for the better.5 Environmentalism, in this view, is not simply the product of a misguided, unreconstructed left—it is naive and mistaken.

Furthermore, García portrayed Peru’s countryside as a space to be once again colonized in order to extract, and profit from, the natural resources embedded in the fields and forests thought of as occupied, if at all, by technologically backward indigenous and mestizo small-scale farmers and nomads who are, quite simply, in the way. Just hours before the violence erupted in Bagua, García practically accused the protesters of holding the country hostage, making an insidious distinction between “natives” and “Peruvians” in a statement to the press:

“Enough is enough. These peoples are not monarchy, they are not first-class citizens. Who are 400,000 natives to tell 28 million Peruvians that you have no right to come here? This is a grave error, and whoever thinks this way wants to lead us to irrationality and a retrograde primitivism.”6

Yet García’s statements are only the most brazen expression of a continent-wide push to open up frontiers for extracting hydrocarbons, mining, producing biofuels, harvesting timber, and investing in agroindustry. The widening geographical and economic scope of these five sectors should be understood as linked to the Initiative for Integration of Regional Infrastructure of South America (IIRSA), a project agreed to in 2000 at a presidential summit in Brasília, under which a network of inter-oceanic roads, ports, waterways, hydroelectric plants, pipelines, and other major pieces of infrastructure are being built in order to integrate (but also open up) the continent.

Hydrocarbons and mining in particular have recently seen significant hikes in capital investment. They have also triggered the most contentious arguments between the state, the private sector, and social movements over the territorial, environmental, and human implications of their expansion. The result for those who live near extractive enterprises has been tension and conflict.

“Under siege” may sound too strong, but in large parts of the continent, peoples and environments are increasingly being pressured from all sides. In the words of anthropologist Federica Barclay, who has spent a lifetime working on the Peruvian Amazon: “Everywhere there is increasing unrest. I have seen it in various places throughout the past two years. People are overwhelmed.”7

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Much of Latin American economic and social history could be read as a long engagement with extraction. At times the emphasis has been on escaping the limits of the extractive economy—an important theme in the region’s import-substitution industrialization policies that lasted from mid-century through to the 1980s. At other times, denouncing extraction has mattered most, as in Eduardo Galeano’s classic Open Veins of Latin America and a long list of social protests that have challenged the relations of exploitation and dispossession that underlie the extractive economy.8 Yet today, many governments of all political hues seem primarily concerned to make the very most of extraction.

Believing that with their different mixes of policies and politics they can escape the “resource curse”—i.e., the underperformance and pathologies said to accompany economic-development models that depend heavily on natural resources—governments as distinct as García’s in Peru and that of Evo Morales in Bolivia share an approach to extraction that can only be described as optimistic. Of course, the potential economic gains are very high, and more than one government in the region is financing its social policy with income from mining and hydrocarbons. But, as the recent violence in the Peruvian Amazon suggests, the human and political costs of such a development strategy can also be significant. Such costs, which rarely adorn the pages of environmental-impact statements, however important these may be, are the costs that come from rewriting the region’s political ecology.

To begin with, the extractive frontier is an aggressive one in all senses, not least the geographical. In Peru, some 64 hydrocarbon blocks (areas in which companies acquire the rights to explore for, and ultimately exploit, oil and gas) cover more than 70% of the country’s Amazonian territory. Eleven blocks overlay protected areas, 17 overlap reserves for indigenous peoples in voluntary isolation, and 58 overlap lands titled to indigenous peoples.9 In Ecuador about two thirds of the Amazon is zoned for hydrocarbon expansion. Meanwhile in Bolivia, although the area so far contracted is less, 55% of national territory is considered to be of potential hydrocarbon interest. Indeed, under the current Morales administration, hydrocarbon operations have significantly expanded in the country’s northern Amazon basin, generating consternation among indigenous groups and tensions between them and the government.

Figure 1 (below), drawn from a recent and influential inventory of hydrocarbon concessions and contracts in the western Amazon, shows the sheer physical extent of this process. Meanwhile, new hydrocarbon concessions have been carved out of the Central American isthmus, for example, in Mosquitia and the Pacific coast. Thus, García’s manifesto must be seen as part of a far larger set of policies and political commitments that have allowed this geographical transformation to occur. Likewise, Bagua has to be seen as part of a wider set of consequences and responses to this expansion—some of which have already occurred, many of which are yet to come, even as García and other presidents in the region argue that such protests are part of an international conspiracy rather than legitimate expressions of citizen concern.10

The image is similar for mining. At the beginning of the 1990s, Latin America received about 12% of global investment in mining; today the share is around one third.11 Some estimate that more than half of Peru’s peasant communities are affected by mining concessions, while up until mid-2008 the geography of mining concessions in Ecuador suggested something similar.12 Investment and exploration have likewise grown in Argentina, with a 740% increase in foreign investment since 2003.13 The conflicts and socio-environmental preoccupations around the Marlin mine in Guatemala described in the interview with activist Gregoria Crisanta Pérez are part of this wider whole.

As with hydrocarbons, what matters about these mining concession geographies is not only their size but also the degree to which they overlap with other geographies. For example, they overlap with community and territorial claims, as well as with water resources. Many of the more promising mining concessions are located in headwaters. More generally, the granting of concessions and the strategic management of water resources seem to be two processes that, in many countries, move along parallel tracks. As a result, in Peru, between a quarter and two thirds of many of the country’s main watersheds are covered by concessions. The three watersheds that supply greater metropolitan Lima, a chronically water-constrained metropolis of more than 8 million people, have 41%, 40%, and 30% of their area overlapped by mining concessions, respectively.14

This is a problem because modern mining requires large quantities of water for separating minerals from rock, a process that also often involves the use of toxic substances like cyanide. At the same time, by breaking up ground rock into far smaller parts, it increases the speed of naturally occurring chemical reactions that release toxic substances that can then be carried downstream in what is called acid mine drainage. The mining industry repeatedly insists that current technologies allow them to safely manage these hazardous materials and waste products, and thus protect water quality. It also insists that mining’s water usage pales in comparison to that of agriculture, meaning that impacts on water quantity will not be great either.

Many people, however, remain unconvinced by these arguments, and concerns about water figure prominently in protests around mining. Indeed, while the issues of land and territory are of primary concern to peasant and indigenous populations, water also mobilizes urban populations, significantly broadening the base of social protest around mining—while also complicating the challenge of building alliances within the broader socio-environmental movement.

The extractive frontier is expanding in countries whose governments reflect a range of political options: Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Chile, Nicaragua, and so on. At the same time, Latin America as a whole is an increasingly important source of foreign direct investment in extractive industries. This is most clearly the case for Brazil, home to both a hydrocarbons and a mining giant (Petrobras and Vale, respectively), but is also the case for Venezuela, whose state hydrocarbon company, PDVSA, entered into partnership with the Bolivian state company, YPFB, to create a new joint venture called Petroandina in 2007.

This raises the question: How far does the ideological position of a government affect how relationships between extraction, environment, land, and territorial rights are handled? While approaches to the ownership of extractive industry clearly vary (witness recent efforts of Bolivia and Ecuador to increase the role and power of state-owned extractive enterprise), approaches to the environmental and social implications of extraction may be rather less different. Bolivia’s and Ecuador’s governments seem just as likely as Peru’s to tell activists and indigenous groups to get out of the way of national priorities, just as likely to allow extractive industry into fragile and protected ecologies, and just as determined to convince indigenous peoples that extractive industry is good for them too, without fulfilling their right to free, prior, and informed consultation (much less full consent).

As in Peru, hydrocarbon concessions in Bolivia overlap with protected areas and indigenous territories. In the departments of La Paz, Beni, and Cochabamba, significant parts of the Madidi and Isiboro Securé National Parks and of the Pilon-Lajas Biosphere Reserve are covered by hydrocarbon contracts. In the Gran Chaco of Tarija, most of the Aguaragüe National Park—co-managed by the Consejo de Capitanes Guaraníes de Tarija, who also deem it Guaraní territory—has been affected by contracts given to Petrobras and Petroandina that allow for exploratory seismic testing and drilling, while the Chinese company Eastern Petrogas is set to operate in the park’s buffer zone. Plans to increase gas production have intensified since the Morales administration took power, and the emphasis is clearly on expanding such operations, even though government ministries have made overtures to the Guaraní, talking of remediating environmental damage caused by earlier periods of state-led oil extraction.

The Morales government’s rationale for this expansion is that these resources belong to the nation and are needed to finance national social policy and cash-transfer programs for the poor, as well as broader public investment. In criticizing opposition to hydrocarbon expansion, Morales said in July:

“What, then, is Bolivia going to live off if some NGOs say ‘Amazonia without oil’? They are saying, in other words, that the Bolivian people ought not have money, that there should be neither IDH [a direct tax on hydrocarbons used to fund government investments] nor royalties, and also that there should be no Juancito Pinto, Renta Dignidad nor Juana Azurduy [cash-transfer and social programs].”15

As Morales’s sharp comments illustrate, gas is emerging as a source of tension and conflict between the government and different groups in Bolivian society. While the debates around the question of regional autonomy in 2007–8 reflected a (real) argument between Morales’s party, the MAS, and regionalists in the eastern Media Luna zone over the control and distribution of resource rents, equally significant arguments are emerging between the MAS government and lowland indigenous movement organizations. Many of these organizations do not categorically oppose extractive industry in Bolivia, but they are increasingly dismayed that their territorial concerns have been placed on the back burner while the government promotes extraction in precisely the areas where they have territorial claims.

In recent months, Morales and the Central de Pueblos Indígenas del Norte de La Paz exchanged harsh words when the latter requested a consultation process on Petroandina’s proposed exploratory operations (FOBOMADE, the national environment and development forum, has also called for this right of consultation to be respected). Similarly, when the Asamblea de Pueblos Guaraní of Itika Guasu (whose lands are home to a massive gas field operated by a consortium led by the Spanish company Repsol YPF) wrote to the government complaining about its failure to address its concerns, the response from the Morales administration was less than supportive.

Meanwhile, in Aguaragüe, Quintín Valeroso of the Asamblea Pueblo Guaraní Yaku Igua, based in Yacuiba, complained in May that the government had not recognized the APG Yaku Igua as the relevant indigenous organization for carrying out consultation processes. “There has been no consultation for any of these projects with indigenous people,” he said, adding: “We demand the government carry out the consultation process. We deserve respect.”16 Increasing tensions between the Guaraní and MAS, above all around extraction, have sparked discussions within the national Asamblea de Pueblos Guaraní reconsidering its political options prior to the elections in December—calling into question any automatic allegiance to MAS and Morales.17

These expressions of concern are not only localized. In April, Adolfo Chávez, the executive secretary of the Confederation of Indigenous Peoples of Bolivia (CIDOB), a lowland indigenous organization headquartered in Santa Cruz, commented: “Now we have to talk about why it is that the permission of indigenous peoples is not being requested for hydrocarbons exploration in the Tierras Comunitarias de Origen.”18

In July, Bolivia’s principal national indigenous organizations met in La Paz for the First National Meeting of the Natural Resource Secretaries of Indigenous Campesino Organizations. Among the declarations of the meeting were that extractive activities in indigenous-campesino territories “violate our collective rights as recognized in the Political Constitution of the State (CPE), Laws and International Treaties,” and that this occurs because the ministries of hydrocarbons and mining do not allow for the “implementation of a process of prior, free, informed and obligatory consultation and participation.”

“We condemn the actions of the Ministry of Hydrocarbons in its visits to Moseten and Lecos communities,” the delegates resolved in yet stronger language, referring to the government’s overtures to gain local support for YPFB-Petroandina’s Lliquimuni oil-exploration project.19 Morales appears to interpret such issues as the effect of NGO manipulation: “Unfortunately some NGOs use some union leaders in order to oppose and obstruct the environmental licenses required to increase the number of wells and pump more oil.”20

Meanwhile, in Ecuador, environmentalists and the indigenous movement have likewise found themselves increasingly on the receiving end of harsh words and occasional police force, even though they had supported the electoral campaign of President Rafael Correa, as well as his campaign for constitutional change. Since passing in April 2008 a Constituent Decree on mining (the so-called Mining Law), which the environmental movement initially welcomed for the increased and stringent controls it would place on large-scale mining, the government has worked closely with the industry (in this case dominated by Canadian companies) in the process of drawing up new legislation to replace the mandate.

Socio-environmental movement organizations felt largely excluded from this process—which culminated in a new mining law (passed in January) that they feel favors transnational companies and large-scale projects (see “Correa vs. Social Movements”). Meanwhile, Correa’s public position has shifted, and he increasingly lauds the benefits of socially responsible, large-scale mining, emphasizing that the revenues generated can be used for social development.21 At the same time, his attacks on environmentalists have become sharper; he has referred to them variously as “extortionists,” “terrorists,” “infantile leftists and romantic ecologists.”22 Echoing Morales’s association of extraction with national need, Correa has vowed that mining critics will not “impede the exploitation of the resources that the country needs.”

“It’s absurd to be sitting on top of hundreds of thousands of millions of dollars, and to say no to mining because of romanticisms, stories, obsessions, or who knows what,” he said in October 2008.23

Yet movement organizations’ dissent does not necessarily mean that they oppose all forms of extractive industry. In many instances their primary concerns are about how the expansion of mining and hydrocarbon activities is occurring—about the problems of rights, transparency, citizenship, environmental governance, and development raised in the process of expansion. By casting such dissent as forms of “terrorism,” “extortion,” or “neocolonialism,” which are inherently “anti-mining” and “anti-oil,” these presidents evade having to answer questions about their own arguably authoritarian political styles, at least on the question of extraction.

In sum, the García, Morales, and Correa governments each approach the domestic political ecology of extraction in a remarkably similar way. Put simply: These resources belong to the nation, not to local or indigenous populations. They will be developed, consultation will be a managed process, and dissent will not be brooked.

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Yet dissent shows no sign of going away. The big question, then, is what will it achieve? What seems certain is that the conflicts around extractive industry have placed the relationships between economic development, environmental quality, territory, and human rights on the public agenda in new and powerful ways. Indeed, in the figure of Father Marco Arana, conflicts over mining in Peru have produced a potential presidential candidate for the 2011 elections, one whose platform draws heavily on his long history of work on environmental justice and mining.

This increased visibility of socio-environmental issues increases the possibility that various Latin American societies will begin a more inclusive debate on the relationships between the environment, economy, plurinationality, and social democracy (with or without extractive industry). Such a debate must address how well these countries are served by the mixture of large-scale infrastructure, private investment, export-oriented primary production, and modern technology that characterizes the elite-led development model embodied in initiatives like IIRSA.

Furthermore, this new debate must consider in practical, and not merely discursive, terms what other models of development might feasibly better serve Latin American societies—bearing in mind the fiscal constraints that limit governments’ room for maneuver, regardless of how relatively progressive their platforms may be.

The need for such debate is not trivial. IIRSA has been a massive initiative agreed to by presidents and international financial institutions with scarcely any public or parliamentary debate at all. With just a few exceptions (such as the Bank Information Center), social movements, NGOs, academics, and others became aware of it only very late in the day, in much the same way as the expansion of oil, gas, and mining concessions has crept up behind them. It was only in 2008 that the Andean Coordinator of Indigenous Organizations (CAOI), together with the Bolivian NGO CEADESC, presented a strategy for reorganizing IIRSA, eight years after it was launched.

Yet it remains unclear whether the sum of all this dissent constitutes an articulated socio-environmental movement, since one encounters a range of positions on the relationships between environment, rights, and development. We can divide these positions into five general currents: Some are motivated by (1) conservationist environmentalism and are concerned primarily about the impacts of extraction on biodiversity and environmental quality. Others express concerns that trace roots to (2) deep ecology, concerns that are also conservationist in intent, but are based on different reasons (a belief in the rights of the environment) and are wont to employ more radical political strategies (e.g., direct action).

Moving away from these more conservationist currents, other environmentalisms in the region draw their energy from commitments that are more social in character. Environmental justice (3), with its roots in human rights and social justice thought, emphasizes inequalities in how different social groups are exposed to environmental costs, risks, and benefits, and insists that there is a set of inalienable human and other rights that should be guaranteed prior to any development strategy based on exploiting natural resources. This position is related to, though differs from what the economist Joan Martínez Alier calls the environmentalism of the poor (4), in which the emphasis is on sustaining environments that in turn sustain lives and livelihoods.24

A final environmentalist current is concerned primarily with increased state access to and control over natural resources and the benefit streams they produce. This resource-nationalist environmentalism (5) critiques the foreign and private control of natural resources rather than extraction per se, and under certain circumstances (e.g., nationalized control over extractive industry) can accept that certain rights are infringed and some livelihoods threatened if the nation as a whole benefits. Finally, within these same mobilizations, there are also currents of thought that are not environmentalist at all, but rather emphasize the need for much more progressive redistribution of the benefits generated by extraction.

We have, then, a tangle of currents that coexist within socio-environmental protests, and they can and do pull movements in different directions. The tensions between the first two, more conservation-minded environmentalisms and latter three, more socially concerned positions are clear. Perhaps more thorny are the tensions that exist among the latter three, all of which might be associated with a broad “left” position in the region; while none is intrinsically opposed to extraction on environmental grounds, each allows for quite different trade-offs among environment, rights, and development, as well as between the local and the national. Arguably the fifth current, resource nationalism, is the most clearly expressed among the broad social bases of Correa’s Alianza País and Morales’s MAS. Conversely, indigenous and human rights movements tend to express positions that are far closer to the ideas that underlie environmental justice and the environmentalism of the poor.

How these differences are negotiated is critical. In some cases, negotiation has occurred through co-optation and corruption—movement leaders take favors of some sort and tone down their positions in return. Indeed, any commitment to these movements should not obscure a recognition that such corruption is serious and has affected how, for instance, the gas fields of Peru’s Camisea and Bolivia’s Chaco have developed. In other cases, negotiation is conducted through compensation—a similar mechanism to the first, except that benefits are transferred to a broader group than just the movement leadership. These mechanisms help neither to consolidate democracy nor to bring about institutions that could allow any sustained resolution of political difference surrounding the relationships between extraction, environment, and rights. In yet other cases, of which Bagua is an extreme example, “negotiation” occurs through violent conflict.

Ironically, one country where there has been some institutional innovation appears to be Peru—the least likely candidate on the face of things. The state has begun to take faltering steps toward stronger environmental regulation, while some regional governments and NGOs have begun to experiment with ecologically based land-use planning, and, following the tragedy in Bagua and other conflicts, conditions may now be in place for a more systematic debate on the rights of local populations to free prior and informed consent regarding economic activities on their lands and territories and for the passing of legislation to protect these rights. Indeed, the Bagua incident took place just as the Ombudsman’s office was pushing for such a debate.

Four factors seem to have made these inklings of “progress” possible. The first has been conflict itself, which has been sufficiently sustained to force government and industry to respond. While some responses have involved the use of force and ridicule, others have been more constructive. Indeed, all the evidence suggests that without popular mobilization and conflict, the rules of the game governing relationships between development and environment do not change, least of all when extractive industry is in question. Second, the mobilizations around García’s decrees of June 2008 appear to have contributed to a deepened sense of shared Amazonian and indigenous identities and rights, as well as to greater awareness among the non-indigenous population that these issues cannot be ignored. Third, a strong, independent, and professional government Ombudsman’s office (La Defensoría del Pueblo) has played a vital role in converting loosely stated and sometimes inchoate positions expressed during protest into concrete positions on how government policy and practice should change. To play this role, however, the Ombudsman must be autonomous of the executive and utterly committed to the constitution: Co-opted Ombudsman’s offices do not help. And fourth, there must be civil society organizations that can support both the Ombudsman and socio-environmental movements in elaborating strategies and proposals.

In the end, whether such steps toward institutional change progress far will depend considerably on the geopolitical relationships in which the extractive economy is embedded. In Peru, the position that the United States takes on whether the decrees being protested in Bagua really were necessary to satisfy the government’s free trade agreement with the United States will matter. Even if the Peruvian government’s motivations are simply to facilitate extractive investment, it has used the free trade agreement to assert the need for some of these decrees (interestingly, a prestigious consultancy in Peru, Apoyo, issued a report in June suggesting that the decrees could be repealed without threatening the trade agreement).25 Elsewhere the geopolitical weight of the United States is declining, as extraction becomes an increasingly important element of relationships with China, Russia, Brazil, India, Venezuela, and Canada. If, and how far, these governments worry about the environmental and social consequences of extraction will go a long way in determining the scope of progressive change.

The human cost of the Bagua incident was, of course, immense. Many hope, however, that the lives lost and rights violated will force the Peruvian government and industry to accept the need for legal and policy changes that give greater guarantees to human rights, self-determination, and environmental quality in territories where extractive industry takes place. If this is the final effect of Bagua, the question is whether the same sort of change can be secured elsewhere in the region—without any more Baguas.

Anthony Bebbington teaches in the School of Environment and Development at the University of Manchester, U.K., and is a research associate with the Centro Peruano de Estudios Sociales, Lima. He is the author of Minería, movimientos sociales y respuestas campesinas: una ecología política de la transformación territorial (Lima: IEP/CEPES, 2007).

1. This essay draws on research conducted during a fellowship on territories, conflict, and development funded by the U.K.’s Economic and Social Research Council (www.sed.manchester.ac.uk/research/andes). It owes a great debt to a long-standing collaboration with Denise Humphreys Bebbington and to the comments of María Luisa Burneo, Guido Cortéz, Fernando Eguren, Jennifer Moore, Francisco Rhon, Cynthia Sanborn, and Martin Scurrah.

2. See Gerardo Rénique, “Against the Law of the Jungle: Peru’s Amazonian Uprising,” NACLA Report on the Americas 42, no. 1 (January/February 2009): 5–8; see also Rénique, “Blood at the Blockade: Peru’s Indigenous Uprising,” June 8, 2009, nacla.org/node/5879.

3. Alan García Pérez, “El síndrome del perro del hortelano,” El Comercio (Lima), October 28, 2007, and “Receta para acabar con el perro del hortelano,” El Comercio, November 25, 2007.

4. Richard Chase Smith, “Bagua: La Verdadera Amenaza,” Poder (Lima, July 2009): 48–53; “¿Quién decide sobre recursos naturales?” La Revista Agraria (Lima), no. 108 (June 2009).

5. Such ideas are discussed in James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (Yale University Press, 1998).

6. “Presidente Alan García advierte a nativos: ‘Ya está bueno de protestas,’ ” Peru.com, June 5, 2009.

7. Federica Barclay, “Un reclamo justo,” Ideele (Lima), no. 193 (June 2009), www.revistaideele.com/node/468?page=0,3.

8. As discussed in David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford University Press, Blackwell, 2003).

9. Matt Finer, Clinton N. Jenkins, Stuart L. Pimm, Brian Keane, and Carl Ross, “Oil and Gas Projects in the Western Amazon: Threats to Wilderness, Biodiversity, and Indigenous Peoples,” PLoS ONE 3, no. 8 (2008), available at plosone.org.

10. See Alan García Pérez, “A la fe de la inmensa mayoría,” Expreso (Lima), June 29, 2009; for Evo Morales’s statement to the same effect, see Agencía Boliviana de Información, “Morales denuncia estrategias para evitar exploración de hidrocarburos en Bolivia,” July 10, 2009.

11. José de Echave C., “Mining in Peru: Between the Transformation of Conflicts and the Programmatic Challenge,” paper presented at a seminar of the Programme on Territories, Conflicts and Development, University of Manchester, United Kingdom, October 22, 2007, www.sed.manchester.ac.uk/research/andes/seminars.

12. José de Echave C., “Los retos actuales del movimiento social vinculado a la lucha por los derechos de las comunidades frente a las industrias extractivas: el caso peruano,” paper presented at the conference “Rethinking Extractive Industry,” York University, Toronto, March 5–7, 2009.

13. “La nota que los lectores de Los Andes en San Juan no pudieron leer,” Los Andes On Line (losandes.com.ar), June 14, 2009.

14. Data from Anthony Bebbington and Jeffrey Bury, “Confronting the Institutional Challenge for Mining and Sustainability in Peru,” forthcoming, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

15. “Morales denuncia estrategias para evitar exploración de hidrocarburos en Bolivia,” Agencía Boliviana de Información, July 10, 2009.

16. Interview with Valerosa, Radio ABC (Tarija), conducted during a visit to Campo Sanandita, Gran Chaco, Tarija, Bolivia, May 12–14, 2009.

17. I draw on the field research of Denise Humphreys Bebbington here.

18. “CIDOB quiere dar permisos a las petroleras,” La Razón (La Paz), April 30, 2009.

19. Pablo Cingolani, “Organizaciones indigenas y campesinas repudian las acciones del Ministerio de Hidrocarburos contra Mosetenes y Lecos,” BolPress.com, July 12, 2009.

20. “Morales denuncia estrategias.”

21. “Correa pone de ejemplo a Canadá para defender beneficios de minería,” El Comercio (Quito), February 21, 2009.

22. Rafael Correa, Cadena Radial, December 2, 2007, available at redamazon.wordpress.com/2007/12/05/ecuadorian-president-call-ecologists-terrorists.

23. Ibid., and Cadena Radial, October 11, 2008.

24. Joan Martínez-Alier, El ecologismo de los pobres: conflictos ambientales y lenguajes de valoración (Barcelona: Icaria, 2002).

25. Apoyo Consultoria, “Cambios en legislación sobre tierras en la Amazonía no pondrán en riesgo el TLC Perú-EEUU en el corto plazo,” Informe s@e (Lima), June 16, 2009.

Anthony Bebbington