Hydrocarbons, popular protest and national imaginaries: Ecuador and Bolivia in comparative context

Geoforum 41 (2010) 689–699

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Hydrocarbons, popular protest and national imaginaries: Ecuador and Bolivia in comparative context Tom Perreault a,*, Gabriela Valdivia b a b

Department of Geography, Syracuse University, 144 Eggers Hall, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY 13244-1020, USA Department of Geography, University of North Carolina, Saunders Hall, Campus Box 3220, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3220, USA

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Article history: Received 25 May 2009 Received in revised form 19 February 2010

Keywords: Hydrocarbons Ecuador Bolivia Resource conflict Oil Natural gas

a b s t r a c t This paper examines contemporary struggles over hydrocarbon governance in Ecuador and Bolivia. Our comparative analysis illustrates the ways that petro-capitalism, nationalist ideologies, popular movements and place conjoin in the governance of oil and natural gas. In the case of Ecuador, state employees drew on their labor relations and political training to oppose the government’s efforts to privatize the state oil company. In Bolivia, urban popular movements opposed the privatization of the hydrocarbons industry and its domination by foreign firms. In both cases, hydrocarbons struggles involved the production of imaginative geographies of the nation and it hydrocarbon resources, which in turn drew on historical memories of nationhood. Whereas neoliberal political and economic restructuring sought to reorganize national hydrocarbons companies, redraw concessions, and draft new resource extraction laws, hydrocarbon movements aimed to counter these processes by re-centering hydrocarbon governance within a populist vision of the nation-state. In contrast to analyses of resource conflict in the environmental security and resource curse literatures, the cases of Ecuador and Bolivia demonstrate that such struggles cannot be reduced to models of opportunity structure, war profiteering, or resource scarcity (or abundance). Rather, these cases show that political economy and cultural politics are inseparable in the context of resource conflicts, which involve struggles over the meanings of development, citizenship and the nation itself. Ó 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction Petro-politics are back in the headlines. Nearly two decades of US imperial adventures in Iraq, increasing investment in African oil producing states (and the associated creation of a US military command for Africa, AFRICOM), renewed US tensions with Russia, and a newfound alliance between Russia and Venezuela are illustrative of the events that have thrust hydrocarbon-producing states and the specter of ‘resource nationalism’ into the spotlight (see, for instance, Guriev et al., 2008; Stanislaw, 2009). Struggles in the global South over the development of oil and natural gas, and the distribution of the rents they produce, entail complex articulations of citizenship, territory and the nation. Perhaps the best known and most intractable of these conflicts is the ongoing struggle in Nigeria’s Ogoniland region, in the Niger Delta (Watts, 2004), where armed groups have laid siege to Shell’s facilities and workers, and widespread protests occasionally disrupt oil exports and affect global prices. Struggles over hydrocarbons in Ecuador and Bolivia – the focus of this paper – while not as violent or * Corresponding author. Tel.: +1 315 443 9467; fax: +1 315 443 4227. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (T. Perreault), valdivia@email. unc.edu (G. Valdivia). 0016-7185/$ - see front matter Ó 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2010.04.004

far-reaching as that in Ogoniland, nevertheless share some of its characteristics. These cases all involve conflicts between transnational oil and gas firms, social movements and their supporters, and state institutions over hydrocarbon production and the rents it produces. Such struggles underscore the emergence of and interactions between multiple actors seeking to define the terms of hydrocarbon governance. Moreover, as in Nigeria, hydrocarbon conflicts in Ecuador and Bolivia concern not only capitalist relations of production and the appropriation of surplus value, but also the production of ‘‘imaginative geographies” – the representing and practicing – of hydrocarbon nationhood and citizen-communities (c.f. Gregory, 2004; Said, 1978). By probing the contours of hydrocarbons-related conflicts in Ecuador and Bolivia, we hope to illuminate the ways that natural resources figure into constructions of the nation, both official and popular. Hydrocarbons politics in Ecuador and Bolivia would appear to hold much in common: both countries are small and impoverished, with Andean capitals (Quito and La Paz, respectively) that oversee hydrocarbons producing zones in the eastern lowlands. Both countries have politically influential indigenous and labor movements and currently have left-leaning presidents determined to use hydrocarbons resources for national development. Both countries have histories of involvement by foreign (particularly US-based)

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oil companies and relatively weak national hydrocarbons firms. These firms (Petroecuador and Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales Bolivianos, YPFB, respectively) are charged with coordinating hydrocarbons development but lack the technical capacity necessary to carry out exploration and extraction on their own (in contrast, for instance, to Venezuela’s Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. [PDVSA], Mexico’s PEMEX or Brazil’s Petrobras). This situation has fostered a structural dependence on foreign firms and historically tense relations that have fueled resentment toward what is commonly perceived as foreign domination of the hydrocarbons sector. In other ways, however, resource struggles in Ecuador and Bolivia are quite distinct. In Ecuador, Amazonian indigenous peoples, campesinos and, as discussed below, employees of Petroecuador – all groups directly affected by oil development – have strongly opposed foreign involvement in oil development and argued for greater state control over hydrocarbon resources. In Bolivia, protests by those directly affected by gas extraction (e.g., Guaraní indigenous peoples) have played a relatively minor role in national debates. Instead, hydrocarbons politics in Bolivia have mostly involved contentious (and at times violent) struggles between those calling for greater state control of hydrocarbons resources and the revenues they produce, and those calling for regional autonomy and greater local control of oil and gas rents. Thus, although resource struggles in Ecuador and Bolivia share much with one another, and with other such struggles the world over, a closer look at the dynamics of resource conflicts reveals that the particular histories of nation and place shape their emergence and expression. In this paper we examine the dynamics of contemporary resource struggles in Ecuador and Bolivia vis-à-vis the relationships and conjunctures that have shaped the hydrocarbon industry in these nations. We argue that the ways that imagined hydrocarbon communities articulate state institutions of hydrocarbons governance with citizenship and national belonging have profound implications on the dynamics of resource struggles. We begin by examining debates surrounding resource conflict and the role of natural resources in sustaining ideological conceptions of the nation. We then continue with a discussion of recent protests over oil and gas in Ecuador and Bolivia, respectively, followed by a consideration of resources and nationalism in the Andes. 2. Resource conflict and national imaginaries Questions of resource conflict, the central focus of this paper, have been addressed from a range of disciplinary backgrounds. One particularly influential school of thought, the environmental security perspective, holds that resource scarcity is a primary driver of conflict. Popularized in the 1990s by journalist Robert Kaplan (1994) and given academic legitimacy by the work of political scientist Thomas Homer-Dixon (1999; see also Homer-Dixon and Blitt, 1998), this view has been sharply criticized for its deterministic explanations of resource conflict and its causal linking of ‘scarcity,’ violence, migration, and national security (Peluso and Watts, 2001). The environmental security perspective has proven resurgent, however, and has found its most recent expression in debates surrounding global climate change and its potential political ramifications. Indeed, in the USA, the view that climate change should be seen as a security issue seems to be taken for granted by journalists (Broder, 2009), policy analysts (Busby, 2007), and the US military (Pumphrey, 2008). That the CIA has opened a Center on Climate Change and National Security is further evidence that this perspective has re-emerged with force.1 1

See www.cia.gov/news-information/press-releases-statements/center-on-climate-change-and-national-security.html (accessed 22 December, 2009).

Sharing a family resemblance with the environmental security literature is work on the so-called ‘resource curse.’ Focusing on resource abundance, as opposed to scarcity, the resource curse thesis describes the paradoxical situation whereby countries with large natural resource endowments, and whose economies are heavily dependent on income from resource production and export, tend to experience slow economic growth and frequent armed conflict (Ross, 1999; Sachs and Warner, 2001). Political scientists examining these processes have focused on the frequency of armed conflict – primarily civil wars – among resource-producing states (see, inter alia, Fearon, 2005; Klare, 2001; Ross, 2004, 2006). In a comprehensive review of this literature, Ross (1999) identifies cognitive, societal, and state-centered explanations for the resource curse. Building on this work, Dunning (2005) examined resource dependence, economic performance and political conditions in Botswana, Suharto’s Indonesia and Mobutu’s Zaire, concluding that the causes and outcomes of the so-called resource curse in each country are contingent and contextual: national politics, past histories of resource development, and world commodity markets all influence resource dependence, political conflict and economic outcomes. But even with all the nuance Dunning can muster, this explanatory framework – rooted in statistical analysis of such variables as resource endowments, GNP, and war casualties – fails adequately to account for the complexities of most resource conflicts. A more geographical view is provided by considering the political ecologies of resource conflict. For instance, LeBillon (2001, p. 562) characterizes resource extraction activities as an ‘‘exclusionary form of globalization” in which ‘‘[v]iolence is expressed in the subjugation of the rights of people to determine the use of their environment and the brutal patterns of resource extraction and predation.” As LeBillon observes, neither the resource scarcity thesis championed by Homer-Dixon nor the curse of resource abundance espoused by Ross and Dunning, consider the socially constructed nature of natural resources themselves, and thus fail to account for the social relations of production and consumption, as well as the geographical imaginaries that give resources their commodity form and social meaning (Harvey, 1974). In analyzing different types of resource conflict, LeBillon (2001) constructs a typology of resources along four axes: those that are spatially diffuse (forests, fisheries) vs. those that are spatially concentrated (diamonds, oil wells); and those that are proximate to population centers vs. those that are distant. This is a richer account of resource conflicts, which considers some of the material variation in resources themselves, as well as society’s relationship to them (see also LeBillon, 2008). Such models nevertheless fall short of fully explaining the dynamics and character of resource conflict, which imbricate not only the spatiality of resources and populations, but also the particular histories and geographies of resource governance, and the broader political economies that connect resource producing zones with centers of resource processing and consumption (Selby, 2005a, b). Moreover, to the extent that resource conflicts entail the assertion of political claims and concomitant moral economies, attention must be paid to the ideological dimensions that inhere within them. As Turner (2004, p. 866) notes, It is only through a full and critical engagement with both the materiality which underlies all social life and the moral claims that implicate natural resource use that the etiology of resource-related conflict can be better understood. Struggles over resources are often only superficially so – they in fact reflect not only broader tensions (with ethical dimensions) between social groups but also tensions within these groups. In this view, resource conflicts in the global South are not only the result of uneven development between states, but are often characterized by exclusionary geographies of wealth and poverty

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within those states. As such, analysis of resource conflict must be attentive to the political economies that structure resource access, as well as the processes by which meanings and social identities are produced within the crucible of resource politics (Moore, 2000). In this paper, we take as axiomatic two points regarding resource struggles. First, that the analysis of resource struggles necessitates a historical perspective that joins political economy and cultural politics to take into account the material and symbolic elements that shape their emergence. Second, resource struggles are never only (or even primarily) about resources. Rather, conflicts over resources such as oil and gas become focal points for broader struggles involving the terms of citizenship, the nation, rights and identity (Watts, 2001). It is from this perspective that we analyze resource conflicts in Ecuador and Bolivia. 2.1. Hydrocarbons and nation-building in contemporary Ecuador and Bolivia2 In his analysis of petro-violence in the Niger Delta, Watts (2004) points out that subterranean resources such as hydrocarbons articulate with the territoriality of the nation-state, raising crucial questions about how ‘local’ and ‘national’ communities and claims are constituted and contested vis-à-vis hydrocarbons development. Similar articulations of resources, nation, and citizen-communities are observed in contemporary Ecuador and Bolivia, where hydrocarbons played a fundamental role in projects of nation-building during the 20th century. With increasing inter-connection of national economies and global markets during the last 30 years of neoliberal policies, struggles over hydrocarbon governance have intensified. Both Bolivia and Ecuador entered global markets and adopted neoliberal reforms in the 1980s, albeit in different forms and magnitudes (Demmers et al., 2001; Malloy and Gamarra, 1988; Yashar, 2005). In Ecuador, neoliberal policies have followed a piece-meal fashion, reducing public spending while generously favoring private investment in productive sectors such as the hydrocarbon industry. In Bolivia, austerity measures were fully implemented in 1985, turning the country into a poster-child for structural adjustment. Populist redistribution was abandoned and the country’s mining and hydrocarbon sectors were opened to private investment through the decentralization of the state mining (Corporación Minera de Bolivia, COMIBOL) and petroleum (YPFB) corporations. In both countries, neoliberal policies marked a presumed break from state-led populist capitalism and entailed a double movement that promoted the withdrawal of state power from certain sectors (namely, public institutions governing public services) while simultaneously reinforcing state intervention in others (e.g., administering austerity plans and new taxes). These changes in the governing structure and national political economy fueled criticisms from various sectors of society that drew on alternative imaginations of state-citizen relations in matters of hydrocarbon governance. This paper interrogates these alternative imaginings of resources, population and the state in Ecuador and Bolivia, and in particular, examines the ways that subterranean nature – oil and natural gas – has come to figure centrally in the ideological 2 This research is based on 5 months of field research by Valdivia in Ecuador (2001– 2003 and 2007–2009) and 4 months of field research in Bolivia by Perreault (2006– 2009). The Ecuadorian case study draws on participant observation in petroleumrelated marches and meetings in public areas in Quito; 11 key informant interviews with current and former union representatives (group and individual interviews in both formal interview settings and during marches); and media and archival research. Bolivian fieldwork consisted of key informant interviews in La Paz and Cochabamba with activists, scholars and state officials, as well as participant observation in conferences, meetings and public events, including demonstrations and street protests. All interview translations are by the authors. Both authors have research experience in both countries, and contributed to the analysis of both case studies.

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construction of the nation.3 In Latin America, this conjoining of nation and nature is captured in the Spanish term la Patria. Glossed as ‘fatherland,’4 la Patria is comprised of two bodies: the body politic, which consists of government and citizens, and the natural body, which consists of nature and territory that form the lifeblood of the economy (Coronil, 1997). In countries with economically productive hydrocarbon and mineral sectors, la Patria often conjures subterranean natural resources (oil, gas and minerals) as patrimonio nacional, the inheritance of the nation and its citizens, which is imbued with historical significance and purpose through its ability to promote national growth and modernization (c.f. Martz, 1987). Since mid-decade, left-leaning governments in Ecuador and Bolivia have embarked on ambitious projects of national reimagining through hydrocarbon governance. This has entailed the writing of new constitutions and the enactment of explicitly anti-neoliberal economic policies that increase the role and oversight of the national government in hydrocarbon matters. In both countries, hydrocarbon development and the rents it generates figure centrally in government plans, both as a source of income to finance social programs and as a focal point of ideological constructions of citizenship and the nation. These efforts have translated into an assertive policy of re-negotiating contracts with international oil and gas firms (in Bolivia, under the guise of ‘nationalization’) and the economic and political fortification of the national hydrocarbons companies (Petroecuador and YPFB, respectively). As Radcliffe and Westwood (1996) remind us, however, nationalisms come in both ‘official’ and ‘popular’ varieties, both of which are constitutive of the imagined community that is the nation (see also Anderson, 1983; Hobsbawm, 1992). In the following sections, we build on this insight to examine how claims to citizenship and nation gain meaning vis-à-vis hydrocarbons conflicts in Ecuador and Bolivia. In both countries, indigenous organizations, labor unions, regional elites, local governments, and an array of social movements on the right and left have contributed to the production and reconfiguration of geographical imaginaries of hydrocarbon nationalisms, often in ways that blur boundaries between official and popular views of what constitutes the nation. Social conflict and political protest in both countries occasionally erupt into spasms of violence and revolve around control of national patrimony, oil and gas blocs, the distribution of rents derived from state resources, and the negative social and environmental effects stemming from hydrocarbon development. We ground our analysis in two particular hydrocarbon-related movements. First, we consider unionized Ecuadorian oil workers and their demands for greater state control over what they view as national patrimony. We then move onto a discussion of historical memory and contemporary conflicts over state control of natural gas development and the rents it produces in Bolivia. 3. The making of the Ecuadorian petro-nation The commercial exploitation of petroleum has shaped visions of the boundaries, potentialities, and character of the Ecuadorian nation-state. By 1970 – three years after the discovery of the first significant oilfield – some thirty concessions comprising nearly ten 3 We take the ‘nation’ as a multiform, unstable, contested, and processual concept. There is an enormous body of literature on the nation and nationalism, within and beyond geography. For comprehensive treatments of these concepts see, inter alia, Anderson (1983), Gellner (2008), and Hobsbawm (1992). 4 But, as Sawyer (2002) notes, ‘la Patria’ is a feminine noun, making its gender connotations ambiguous. As such, this feminization makes the fatherland something to be protected and defended from potential violations by outsiders: ‘‘La Patria is the cherished possession of the pater, el padre – the prize of his patrimony. La patria is the gendered trophy of the ruler that ensures national identity and its faithful reproduction” (Sawyer, 2002, pp. 162–163).

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million hectares were granted throughout the Ecuadorian Amazon, attracting heavy investment from multiple hydrocarbon exploration and production companies (Fontaine, 2003). In 1972, the SOTE (Sistema de Oleoducto de Transporte Ecuatoriano), a 503-km long pipeline, began transporting petroleum from the Amazon rainforest (near sea level), over an Andean pass exceeding 4000 m in elevation, and down to the Pacific coast for export and refining.5 Today, this re-mapping and integration of Ecuador’s territory through petroleum activities generates 40% of all export earnings and one third of all tax revenues (EIA, 2007). This petroleum economy also has engendered powerful mobilizations against social injustices associated with petroleum extraction, production, and profit generation, such as land appropriation, detrimental health effects, loss of traditional knowledges, and the marginalization of indigenous peoples (cf. Acosta, 2000; Fontaine, 2003; Little, 1992; Kimmerling, 1992; Sawyer, 2002). Here we focus exclusively on the mobilization of national petroleum workers. Consideration of the petroleum workers’ movement is important because, first, they are one of the most vocal groups opposing the neoliberalization of the national petroleum industry, second, unionized workers were one of the first social groups to articulate petroleum as national patrimony, and third, they represent a unique position: they are state representatives (working for the state oil company) that are publicly critical of state practices.6 The following sections explore how petroleum production and views on state sovereignty shape the Ecuadorian petro-nation, as envisioned by petroleum workers. 3.1. Seeding the hydrocarbon nation Multiple processes have shaped the conjoining of nation and hydrocarbons in Ecuador. Soon after a territorial dispute broke into war between Perú and Ecuador in 1941, the two countries were coaxed to amicably resolve the issue through a ‘peace protocol,’ the Protocolo de Paz, Amistad, y Límites, in which Ecuador essentially consented to abandon claims to large Amazonian territories in favor of regional peace. The ratification of the Protocol resulted in profound resentment among nationalists in Ecuador, who referred to it as a moment that injured the nation’s spirit (Luna, 2007). These conditions fostered a nationalism based on the memory of territories unjustly lost, symbolized by the national motto that still graces the presidential stationary: ‘‘El Ecuador ha sido, es y será país amazónico” (‘‘Ecuador is and always will be an Amazonian country”) (c.f. Sawyer, 2004). Some also claim that behind the conflict was a dispute between oil companies seeking easier access to Amazonian resources (Fontaine, 2003), thus feeding a ‘‘collective trauma” and resentment towards the vendepatrias (those who sell the nation for profit) that favor foreign petroleum exploitation (Diario Los Andes, 2007). This confluence of geopolitical conflict, territorial disputes, and foreign investment shaped ensuing decades of petroleum governance in Ecuador. As the national petroleum industry developed in the 1970s, nationalist sectors saw entreguismo (giving away the country’s interests) and not patriotismo (love for one’s country) in the contract terms and practices of concessionary leasing that dominated at the time. Anxiety over the ‘proper’ (i.e., nationallyoriented) governance of the nascent petroleum industry led to the overthrow of the elected government in 1972 by a revolutionary, nationalist military junta (Martz, 1987). The new military gov5 Refining was initially conducted in the Santa Elena Peninsula and managed by joint-venture and foreign oil companies such as Anglo Ecuadorian Oilfields and Gulf. 6 A number of Native Amazonian groups and national indigenous leaders also articulate this perspective today. Nonetheless, their claims have been framed, historically, in terms of the governance of indigenous territories vis-à-vis petroleum exploitation. More recently, some leaders of CONAIE, the national level indigenous organization in Ecuador, have also voiced concerns over petroleum as concerns over national patrimony.

ernment nationalized all subsurface resources as patrimony of the state and created the first national institutions and laws through which to govern natural resources. The goal was to define a consciousness of national sovereignty based on the governance of petroleum. As a result, contractual terms with petroleum companies were reviewed; the allocation of large concessions to private companies ended; the Ecuadorian Petroleum State Corporation (CEPE, re-organized as Petroecuador in 1989) was created to manage petroleum affairs; and a small labor force was trained in technologies of petroleum extraction and refinement to serve the nascent petroleum industry in Ecuador. By 1977, the first national refinery, Refinería Estatal Esmeraldas, started operating, with an original processing capacity of 55,500 barrels per day. As in other Latin American petro-states, the Ecuadorian government used petroleum revenues to modernize the nation. State-led programs channeled these revenues into well-being and progress (through urbanization, health, and educational programs) and transformed the state into the apparatus that not only generated modernity but also took care of its population (c.f. Montúfar, 1990).7 The central government provided subsidies for the general population, kept taxes low, and financed credit for industrial investors. Petroleum-backed credit policies favored agro-exports and import-substitution schemes (Conaghan et al., 1990); investment in commercial real estate, manufacturing, and services (Carrière, 2001); and rapid urbanization (Swyngedouw, 2004). Domestic petroleum products were heavily subsidized and their increasing consumption generated a broad feeling of economic progress, particularly among urban residents (Gerlach, 2003). 3.2. Petro-subjects and the birth of petro-nationalism ‘‘Workers have to protect the interests of the nation.” (Henry Llanes, former petroleum union leader, quoted in El Comercio February 25, 2009) The project of nation-building was present not only in the physical structures that formed the new national petroleum industry but also in the minds of its employees (Valdivia, 2008). According to one of the first operators of the Refinería Estatal Esmeraldas, employees were immersed in a nationalist wave of lifting up CEPE, la empresa (the firm), where they had ‘‘experienced the presence of capital and foreign experts” (Interview June 13, 2008).8 CEPE and the refinery in Esmeraldas became sites where workers acquired a ‘sense of politics’ from the association of nation-building projects and the prosperity that petro-capital had generated around the country. It is in these sites of production – where labor and petroleum mixed to generate the petro-dollars that financed national wealth – that a consciousness of petroleum-citizenship also emerged. For petroleum workers, CEPE not only was the institution that symbolized sovereignty over petroleum but also the mechanism through which the nation-state was reproduced. In 1979, with the return to democracy, the first petroleum workers’ union formed in Esmeraldas, the Sindicato de Operadores de la Refinería de Esmeraldas (SORE), which became the epicenter of petroleum worker politics. According to Marcelo Román, one of the first leaders of the SORE, We had an incomparable militancy. We were 140 communist militants in the refinery out of 600 workers. . . we were there 7 The benefits of petroleum, however, were not evenly distributed throughout the country. In the Amazonian provinces where petroleum is extracted, petroleum did not provide the benefits expected by local populations. 8 To protect the identity of those that publicly challenge state petroleum policies and in accordance with IRB regulations on the protection of research subjects such as workers, activists quoted here remain anonymous (unless they have published their accounts under their own names).

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from the beginning, when the refinery was just a few pipes. There was a confluence of politics there. It wasn’t only about wages, it was a fight, a political vision. . . From Esmeraldas, we were able to unionize the rest. (Interview, June 13, 2008) By 1982, however, a drop in global petroleum prices and revenues marked the beginning of structural change in the hydrocarbon sector. The Ecuadorian government began to implement measures that favored foreign and private involvement in productive sectors to alleviate the developing economic crisis. Modernization acquired a new meaning under this model: austerity programs, the retreat of the state from social programs, foreign investment, and a greater role for the market in the governance of petroleum (Fontaine, 2003; Montúfar, 1990). The national petroleum industry was targeted as a site in need of reform in this process of structural change. In 1989, CEPE was re-organized into Petroecuador, a conglomerate of affiliated but independent enterprises with distinct roles in exploration, production of derivatives, and domestic commercialization (Brogan, 1984). This restructuring, portrayed as an effort to eliminate inefficiency and encourage foreign investment (Montúfar, 2000), was seen by petroleum workers as an attempt to minimize the power of the labor movement that had developed within the company. This transformation of the meaning and mechanisms of modernization in Ecuador set in motion a call-to-arms to ‘defend the people’s resources’ among unionized petroleum workers.9 Below, we outline two such moments of resource defense: protests against the privatization of the SOTE and mobilizations against the privatization of Petroecuador oilfields. In both instances, petroleum workers successfully postponed privatization. Crucially, their view is not that petroleum exploitation should be stopped, but that the central government has assumed an erroneous position by privileging private enterprise over the Ecuadorian population. Specifically, petroleum workers see structural adjustment measures as limiting the role of the state in the management of petroleum, and have charged national governments with treason for selling out to capitalist forces. 3.3. Workers against privatization Throughout the 1990s, the Ecuadorian government continued to push for the privatization of the main pipeline, SOTE, to increase foreign investment, rates of extraction, and revenues (Corbo, 1992). According to union leaders, this was a defining moment for the petroleum labor movement; it honed petroleum workers’ political consciousness and pushed them to engage in more pronounced expressions of civil unrest in order to articulate their opposition to the privatization of the national industry (Interview, November 24, 2007). While privatization certainly translated into greater livelihood risk, protests against the privatization of the company and oilfields focused mostly on its effects on state sovereignty. One of the most significant of these moments of syndicate opposition began to take shape in 1992, when then President Sixto Durán Ballén initiated a process of apertura petrolera (opening the oil industry to private investors) that granted third party actors generous investment incentives (such as billing the Ecuadorian state for their labor and infrastructure while retaining control over these), reduced import taxes, and provided state subsidies to exploit hydrocarbon resources while reducing state oversight in these matters. In the view of the labor movement, the apertura petrolera reduced the capabilities and responsibilities of the state 9 These mobilizations were often met with repressive tactics by central governments (particularly, the León Febres Cordero and Lucio Gutiérrez administrations), which articulated a discourse of anti-patriotism against those that opposed their economic policies.

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in matters of national importance and weakened its role as an effective sovereign. In 1995, in one of the best-known mobilizations that exemplify petroleum workers’ imaginaries of the petro-nation, members of FETRAPEC chained themselves to a replica of a pipeline staged in Quito’s busiest gas station to protest the privatization of the SOTE and question the economic strategies proposed by then Minister of Energy, Galo Abril. The strike, known as the encadenados del oleoducto (people chained to the pipeline), lasted nearly two weeks and received significant media coverage, partly because it coincided with a profound electricity crisis that spurred popular support for petroleum workers and spread doubts about Abril’s performance as energy tsar (Durán and Nieto, 1995).10 Photographs and editorials in leading newspapers across the nation (El Comercio, La Hora, Hoy, Expreso, El Telégrafo, and El Universo) documented the plight of petroleum workers against the corruption that enveloped the privatization of the SOTE, the ‘lifeline’ of the nation. Moreover, protesters announced their determination to follow up with a shutdown of petroleum activities, a hunger strike, and even severing their limbs if government authorities did not take care of the rampant corruption that plagued the hydrocarbon sector (Diario La Hora, 1995, quoted in Narváez Quiñónez et al. (1996, p. 170)).11 According to a former president of FETRAPEC, present at the front line of this protest, petroleum workers specifically objected to proposals to expand the pipeline’s capacity through private investment, qualifying the process as being stuck in a ‘‘neoliberal mentality” that shifted focus away from the energy needs of the national population to the welfare of private enterprises (Interview June 13, 2008). The protest was largely successful, not only because of the significant media coverage and popular support that workers received – the Bishop of the Amazonian province of Sucumbíos gave his blessing to the encadenamiento pointing out that ‘‘God is not neoliberal” – but also because later assessments found the improvement-throughprivatization plans lacking (Narváez Quiñónez et al. (1996, p. 175)). The government of Lucio Gutiérrez (2003–05) marked a second important moment for the articulation of nation and petroleum among unionized petroleum workers. FETRAPEC had initially supported Gutiérrez, and had initiated a dialog with him to determine the best course of action for the national industry. A few months after his election in 2003, however, Gutierrez signed an accord of compromise with the IMF that included the privatization of some of Petroecuador’s oilfields. He also gave his Ministry of Energy, Carlos Arboleda, the task of accelerating privatization of the four most productive oil fields. Union leaders characterized this move as a betrayal that favored transnational companies over Ecuadorians (Villavicencio, 2006). In response, FETRAPEC leaders initiated a ‘prolonged demonstration’ that led to a tightening of gasoline supplies.12 Petroleum workers were not alone in their protests against Gutierrez’s policies. Their mobilization was joined by multiple sectors of civil society – indigenous peoples, educators, students, unions and guilds, and middle-class households – who objected to the state-citizen relations advanced by Gutierrez. Petroleum workers protested alongside (and, at times, in collaboration with) these various groups.13

10 Abril was dubbed ‘Lord of Darkness’ because of the recurring blackouts caused by the electricity crisis in 1995. 11 The publication by Narváez et al. is a union sponsored effort that tracks how the printed media depicted the events of 1995. It contains photocopies of articles from various major Ecuadorian newspapers that describe and interpret the actions of petroleum union members. The publication also contains essays by former union leaders. 12 Petroecuador workers cannot legally enter a strike, thus, they refer to their public acts of protest as ‘prolonged demonstrations’ or ‘extended assemblies.’ 13 In some instances, FETRAPEC opened up its official locale to house meetings that brought together indigenous representatives, worker’s unions, and other activists. In this sense, FETRAPEC leadership procured some of the initial spaces for civil society conversations across class and ethnic differences in the 1990s.

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Marches, banners, political murals, editorials and announcements in the radio and printed media were used to illustrate, literally and figuratively, what workers labeled a ‘‘marriage of convenience” that bonded Gutierrez and the IMF, a union sealed by selling the nation’s patrimony to the highest bidder (Valdivia, 2008). The message of the petroleum union remained the same throughout this second moment of mobilization: members of FETRAPEC protesting in the streets of downtown Quito saw the need for ‘‘unmasking the false nationalist discourse on petroleum that current governments articulate. . . [and] the right time to confront the model. . . and make its falseness visible to all” (Interview, August 30, 2003). Arboleda opted to use force to stop the strike, retaliating with image defamation campaigns (targeting what he qualified as the ‘‘padded” and ‘‘privileged” unions) that aired constantly on the media outlets to weaken and decapitate the worker’s movement (Langa, 2003). Union leaders were accused of failing to fulfill their obligations as public servants and being anti-patriotic and terrorists. Arboleda also used ‘incentives:’ According to a former leader of the FETRAPEC (now a consultant for the union), numerous unionized employees were offered generous retirement offers, himself included, to reduce opposition to restructuring projects (Interview, June 12, 2008). The acceptance of many of these ‘incentives’ was eventually publicly decried in the media; a strategy that weakened the nationalist position of the union in the eyes of the larger public. By the time Gutierrez was ousted in 2005, the intense defamation campaign had exhausted the union leadership and led to internal questioning within the ranks of the worker movement. With the election of President Rafael Correa in 2005 and the establishment of a Constituent Assembly that is inclusive of leftist and nationalist sectors of society, the role of oppositional petroleum worker politics was further diminished. Yet, FETRAPEC’s leadership continues to caution against current petroleum policies. Since 2007, they have publicly criticized Correa’s plan to cede Petroecuador oil operations to foreign companies and the ratification of a new Mining Law, which they see as the continuation of the ‘‘old neoliberal project of privatization,” ill-informed, and in collusion with the ‘‘petroleum mafias” of Petroecuador and the Ministry of Mines and Petroleum that do not have the nation’s interests at heart (Frente Social por la Nacionalización del Petróleo (FSNP) et al., 2008).14 As the current leader of FETRAPEC suggests, the claims that gave rise to a labor movement to protect the nation’s petroleum industry in the 1970s, continue to be relevant today (Cano, 2008). Petroleum continues to be the medium of articulation of nation, sovereignty, and citizenship, as expressed by petroleum workers in an open letter published on April 7, 2008 by the FSNP: [the petroleum labor movement is looking for the] implementation of a true, sovereign, petroleum policy: one that starts the nationalization of petroleum and ends the entreguismo and allows the country to restore the rational and sustainable management of its natural resources so that the revenues derived – from the commercialization of crude and the sale of its derivatives – are destined to meet the basic needs of all the population as well as restore the productive apparatus of the nation, and they don’t go exclusively to benefiting the transnational companies, which, over many years, have over-exploited and destroyed our natural wealth (FSNP, 2008). If petroleum workers have been at the forefront of efforts to reconfigure the relations between hydrocarbons and the Ecuadorian nation, in Bolivia similar struggles have been taken up by an ar14 Whether directly related or not (different sides will argue different motives), union leaders that openly criticized Correa’s resource policies in 2008 have been laid off or accused of exhibiting ‘‘questionable” behavior.

ray of social movement coalitions in both the Andean highlands and (from a radically different political position) in the eastern lowlands. These processes are outlined, below. 4. Hydrocarbon protest in Bolivia: Collective memory and popular nationalisms In Bolivia, recent political mobilization and conflict over hydrocarbons have been animated by collective imaginaries of the country’s historical identity as a resource-producing state. Popular constructions of Bolivia as a mining country (‘‘país minero”) – a reflection of the country’s long-standing dependence on silver and later tin exports – have largely given way to its re-construction as a petro-state and the commonly held belief that the country’s political and economic aspirations lie in its potential to produce hydrocarbons, and particularly natural gas. Popular imaginaries of natural gas and its role in the national story are in this way rooted in nationalist understandings of Bolivian resources as the fulcrum on which turn the country’s relations with the global economy. As Bolivian labor leader and activist Óscar Olivera has written, ‘‘The transfer of wealth to private and foreign hands is the fate that has befallen the collective national patrimony. . . Bolivia’s possession of natural gas and petroleum, because of their world-wide use, is what most strongly ties the national economy to world trade and foreign investment” (2004: 154). But gas must be seen as a component of broader debates about the nation, and is bound up with discussions of regional autonomy, land reform, development models and the nature of the state itself. Recent discourse and political practice in Bolivia have splintered into opposing ideological positions. On the one hand, the government of Evo Morales and his supporters promote a nationalist vision, in which the state controls production and sale of hydrocarbons, according to a highly redistributive model of state-led development. On the other hand, economic and political elites based in the lowland departments of Santa Cruz and Tarija (with the support of elites elsewhere) promote a regionalist, ‘‘autonomist” vision of national development, in which governments of the various departments are empowered to establish their own terms of investment and trade, and may retain a greater share of hydrocarbons rents (Gustafson, forthcoming; Eaton, 2007). In what follows, we discuss the history of hydrocarbons governance in Bolivia, and then recount two watershed events: the 2003 ‘gas war,’ and Evo Morales’ 2006 ‘nationalization’ of hydrocarbons. Although these events were transitory, illusory (they were neither a ‘war’ nor a true ‘nationalization’), and too complex to be fully examined here (but see Perreault, 2006, 2008), we argue that they were defining moments in the articulation of hydrocarbons resources and the nation. 4.1. A brief history of hydrocarbons development in Bolivia The first sustained efforts at hydrocarbons exploration in Bolivia were made by Standard Oil Company of New Jersey (now ExxonMobil), which in 1921 acquired from the government all concessions for oil exploration within Bolivian territory, as well as agreements permitting it a range of refining, transportation, and marketing functions (Orgáz García, 2002). This arrangement remained in place until 1936 when, following Bolivia’s disastrous and humiliating loss to Paraguay in what became known as the Chaco War, the government broke its contract with Standard, allowing the company exploration rights only. The calamity of the Chaco War gave rise to a new, and newly national, hydrocarbons policy: oil and natural gas – the patrimonio nacional – would be exploited by a national firm for the benefit of the Bolivian state and people. The government gave the newly created state petroleum company, YPFB, responsibility for production, transport,

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refining and commercialization of oil and natural gas. The first nationalization of Bolivian hydrocarbons occurred in 1937 when Standard was accused of illegally transporting petroleum to Argentina, and the company’s assets were expropriated and transferred to YPFB (Wu, 1994). YPFB has since come to represent (and be represented as) the embodiment of the state and national patrimony, and ensuing shifts in governance may be seen as an oscillation between YPFB (state) and private foreign capital. Following the 1952 Social Revolution, the government faced intense international political pressure, food shortages and the threat of US sanctions. The Eisenhower administration sought to prevent the leftward drift of Bolivia’s Movimiento Nacional Revolucionario (MNR) government, and in the nine year period from 1953 to 1961 Bolivia received more US aid per capita than any other country in the world (Rabe, 1988; see also Healy, 2001). This largesse came with a cost, however. Eisenhower made it clear to Bolivian president Víctor Paz Estenssoro that continued US assistance would be contingent upon Bolivia’s granting concessions to US oil firms. Such conditions were met by the 1956 hydrocarbons law, which was effectively written by lawyers from the US-based firm Davenport and Schuster, and which strongly favored foreign investment in Bolivian hydrocarbons development, while limiting the possibilities for national involvement (Hindery, 2003). With the implementation of the so-called Davenport Code, Gulf Oil entered Bolivia in 1956 and before long became the dominant actor in the hydrocarbons sector, controlling some 90% of Bolivian oil and gas reserves. Conditions changed yet again in 1969 when the military government of Alfredo Ovando Candia repealed the Davenport Code, expropriated the assets of Gulf Oil and expelled the company. This, then, was the second nationalization of Bolivian hydrocarbons, and a clear attempt by the state to regain control of its most important source of export income (Orgáz García, 2002). This policy was short lived, however. In 1970 a coup d’etat brought to power Colonel Hugo Banzer Suárez, who quickly set out to reverse Ovando’s hydrocarbons policy. In March 1972, Banzer promulgated a new General Hydrocarbons Law, which permitted foreign investment and allowed for joint operations between foreign firms and YPFB. Eighteen foreign firms were promptly granted 30-year concessions (Orgáz García, 2002), and Gulf Oil was promised indemnification for its 1969 expulsion, the payment of which strained YPFB’s ability to produce profitably, slowed oil exports, and threw the company into debt (Hindery, 2003). Neoliberal reforms were first introduced to Bolivia in the mid1980s, amid profound economic and political crisis (Conaghan et al., 1990; Perreault, 2005). In 1985, when Víctor Paz Estenssoro was re-elected for the fourth and final time, he quickly implemented his New Economic Policy, a package of orthodox structural adjustments focused on austerity measures, the reduction of trade barriers, and the privatization of state industries (Kohl and Farthing, 2006). The most far-reaching neoliberal reforms to affect the hydrocarbons sector were to come in the 1990s, however, with the election of Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada. In 1996, the government of Sánchez de Lozada set forth its ‘energy triangle’ policy, consisting of (a) a new hydrocarbons law; (b) capitalization of the state hydrocarbons firm YPFB; and (c) construction of a natural gas pipeline to Brazil. Together, these measures were intended to increase state revenues by facilitating private investment in Bolivian hydrocarbons and opening up new markets in Brazil. The new hydrocarbons law sought to promote foreign investment by restructuring the tax code and implementing a new concession system; facilitating the import, export and internal marketing of hydrocarbons; and allowing foreign parties to distribute, transport, refine, and industrialize oil and gas (Hindery, 2003). Liberalization of the hydrocarbons sector was encouraged by the US government and the Inter-American Development Bank, and was explicitly pro-

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moted by the World Bank through specific sectoral loans, ‘institution building’ programs (and associated loans), and direct lobbying of members of Bolivia’s Congress to pass enabling legislation (Hindery, 2004). 4.2. Hydrocarbon nationalism In October 2003, Bolivia was convulsed by violent and widespread protests that quickly came to be known as the guerra del gas, or gas war. The eponymous issue of the protest was the government’s plan to export liquefied natural gas to the United States through a Chilean port. Under the rules established by the revised hydrocarbons law of 1996 the financial benefits of gas export were to accrue overwhelmingly to the transnational firms involved in the venture, while the state would receive relatively little in the way of gas rents. The law lowered the rate of royalties that exporting firms would pay the state, and established conditions of shared risk, in which royalties were to be paid to the state only in cases of profitability, in contrast to the previous requirement of payment for any oil or gas extracted, regardless of market conditions (Hylton and Thompson, 2004). That the re-organization of Bolivia’s hydrocarbons sector strongly favored private (mostly foreign) capital, while disadvantaging the state was not lost on Bolivian nationalists, intellectuals or activists on the political left (Kohl and Farthing, 2006). Indeed, the breaking up of YPFB – referred to by some as its ‘Tupacamaruzación’15 in reference to its administrative dismemberment into ‘upstream’ (exploration and extraction) and ‘downstream’ (processing and retailing) components – signaled the weakening of state control over oil and gas production, and was considered a particular indignity by many nationalists and leftists (Orgáz García, 2002). Plans to allow foreign interests to export liquefied natural gas (LNG) via Chile, Bolivia’s historic rival (to which Bolivia lost its coastal territory in the 1879–83 War of the Pacific), were similarly viewed as an intolerable affront. The protests that were to fuse into the gas war were initiated by Aymara campesinos led by Felipe Quispe, who had until then shown little concern for the gas issue (Centellas, 2007). The turning point came in mid-September 2003, when a government mission to ‘rescue’ hundreds of foreign and Bolivian travelers stranded by road blockades sparked protests in the Aymara town of Warisata and resulted in six deaths (including that of a eight year old girl). The widespread public outrage that culminated in the violence of the gas war resulted from the perception that the state was willing to sacrifice national interests (campesino lives) for foreign interests (tourist comfort).16 As an early center of Aymara social and political mobilization (including literacy and bilingual educational programs as early as the 1920s), Warisata holds a unique place in Aymara historical memory. Its role as a focal point of resistance to Bolivia’s racist, neocolonial state informed both the response of local residents to the presence of the police and military convoy, and the larger processes of political uprising for which it served as a catalyst (García Linera, 2004). Diverse and spatially dispersed protests were quickly galvanized in their opposition to Sánchez de Lozada, and his efforts to export natural gas rapidly assumed symbolic power as the focus of resistance (Espinoza and Guzmán, 2003; Guzmán, 2003). The killings in Warisata unified and radicalized protesters throughout the Altiplano, who reinforced the road blockades and declared strikes, both in rural areas and in the neighboring cities of El Alto and La Paz (Espinoza, 2003). For those in the streets contesting 15 This is a macabre reference by Andean nationalists to Túpac Amaru, the last Inca leader, who led a rebellion against the Spanish invaders in the 16th century, and who was eventually executed and drawn and quartered. The use of historical memory of Andean resistance to foreign domination is as obvious as it is evocative. 16 Thanks to one of the anonymous reviewers for this insight.

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the government’s plans to export gas, the protests were not only a struggle over natural resources, but over national resources as well. Protesters denounced the way that structural inequalities, which have marked Bolivian society throughout its history, were being reproduced by plans to allow foreign firms to export what was widely viewed as patrimonio nacional (Perreault, 2006). Mounting pressure from protesters, the military, the Church, and various sectors of civil society led Sánchez de Lozada to resign his office and flee to Miami (Cortés Hurtado, 2003). His vice president, Carlos Mesa, assumed the presidency but in June 2005 was similarly forced to resign his office amid widespread opposition and debilitating protests, opening the way for new elections in December of that year. Evo Morales Ayma, leader of the powerful coca growers union and a former diputado (national deputy), was elected president as head of the Movement to Socialism (MAS). With 54% of the vote – nearly twice the total of his center-right rival – Morales became the first president of indigenous heritage in Bolivian history.17

4.3. Nationalist imaginaries and historical memory On May 1, 2006, just four months into his presidency, Morales held a press conference at the San Alberto natural gas field in the southern department of Tarija. Surrounded by soldiers and journalists from the national and international press, and with a banner behind him declaring ‘Nacionalizado: Propiedad de Bolivianos’ (‘Nationalized: Property of Bolivians’), he announced Presidential Decree 28,701, known as the ‘Heroes of the Chaco’ decree. As he read his declaration, the military simultaneously occupied 56 natural gas installations throughout the country. As Webber (2006) notes, such military theatrics served both practical and symbolic purposes. On the one hand, the armed forces sought to prevent documents being removed from the offices of hydrocarbons firms. Thorough audits would have to be conducted to assess company activities and profits in order to re-negotiate contracts. On the other hand, the presence of the military signaled armed forces support for Morales and the nationalization plan, sending a message to opposition activists that a coup was out of the question. Moreover, military presence was a reminder of nationalizations under past military regimes. As with these earlier, short-lived hydrocarbons nationalizations, Morales’ declaration may be read as a repudiation of foreign domination and a signal that the government intends to use the nation’s natural resources for the benefit of Bolivian people. The decree also draws explicitly on collective historical memories and spatial imaginaries. The name ‘Heroes of the Chaco’ is a reference to the disastrous War of the Chaco (1932–35), which Bolivia lost to Paraguay, and in which the majority of Bolivia’s 57,000 casualties were Andean indigenous (Aymara and Quechua) conscripts. Though the causes for the war likely had more to do with internal Bolivian politics and gross miscalculations by Bolivia’s corrupt and inept political elite (Klein, 1992), the war has been retrospectively framed as a gallant defense of the country’s oil (and more recently, gas) fields. Thus, the label ‘Heroes of the Chaco’ resonates both with Andean indigenous historical memory, which views the war in terms of Aymara and Quechua sacrifices for the nation, and with nationalist conceptions of sovereignty, rooted in national and cultural patrimony (Orgáz García, 2002). Article 1 of the decree thus declares, ‘‘The state reclaims the property, the possession and the total and absolute control of these resources.” In this reading, the Heroes of the Chaco decree is not a seizing of property but the recovery of national patrimony lost (or given away) by unpatriotic leaders (c.f. Laurie et al., 2002). 17 Morales was re-elected on 6 December 2009, this time with 63% of the popular vote.

For Bolivian nationalists, natural gas has assumed the pride of place once held by tin, and before that by nitrates and silver. There is no doubting the economic importance of natural gas (and, to a lesser extent, petroleum) for Bolivia: hydrocarbons represent Bolivia’s single largest source of income, with revenues increasing from $188 million in 2001 to over $1.5 billion in 2007 (Ministerio de Hidrocarburos y Energía, 2006, cited in Gustafson, forthcoming). But Morales’ Heroes of the Chaco decree draws symbolic force from historical memory of domination by foreign and domestic elites, indigenous sacrifice, and the discursive framing of natural gas as patrimonio nacional. The policies of Morales and his MAS government have been animated by the political discourses and popular nationalist visions of those who struggled for years against white elite domination and neoliberal policies (Albro, 2006a, b). Crucially, however, these popular nationalisms are not the only forms of political imaginaries at play in contemporary Bolivia. Political and economic elites in the lowland commercial hub of Santa Cruz, together with their allies throughout the lowland media luna (half moon) departments and some cities of the Andean west, provide a powerful, if stark, alternative vision (Gustafson, 2008). Similarly rooted in accounts of natural resource exploitation, reflecting the region’s economic dependence on its vast cattle ranches, soy plantations, and oil and gas fields, cruceño aspirations to regional autonomy represent a direct challenge to the popular nationalisms that find purchase in the Andean west (Gustafson, 2006; Eaton, 2007). In the ongoing ideological, regional, ethnic, and class-based struggles in which Bolivia is currently embroiled, hydrocarbons and the rents they generate will continue to play a central role, both materially and symbolically. 5. Hydrocarbons governance and the nation When we talk about recovering our national patrimony, the central questions remain: Who or what is the ‘nation’? What would it mean to recover the control and management of hydrocarbon resources ‘for the nation’? Who decides the meaning, and who authorizes the voice, of the ‘nation’ that will take charge of the reappropriation of natural wealth? (Olivera, 2004, p. 155) Decisions over the best ways of exploiting and commoditizing hydrocarbon resources in the global South have been historically handled by national governments and/or transnational capital, contributing to an erasure of the specific geographies and histories of resource producing regions. By contrast, the cases of hydrocarbon-related mobilization discussed here point to the existence of powerful resource conflicts emerging from the encounters between the flow of ideas, capital and practices of fossil fuel capitalism and the specificities of place. Both the petroleum labor movement in Ecuador and the various left social movements in Bolivia strongly oppose the effects of neoliberal policies on the grounds that projects of privatization and a narrow focus on profit in the hydrocarbon sector are detrimental to the well-being of national populations. Their actions (protests, strikes, blockades, occupations) have aimed to de-stabilize hegemonic practices and meanings associated with existing hydrocarbon economies and highlight the power asymmetries reproduced through the neoliberalization of resource governance (c.f. Emel and Huber, 2008; Ferguson, 2006; Harvey, 2006). The position of the hydrocarbon movements described here is not solely one of resistance; Tsing’s (2005) concept of ‘‘friction” – the awkward, unequal, unstable, and creative qualities resulting from the contingent encounters of capitalist relations and the specific geographies and histories of place – is particularly apt for describing the dynamics of hydrocarbon struggles in Ecuador and Bolivia. The metaphor of friction alludes not only to how specific

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configurations of capital, nature, and national identity keep certain power relations in motion, but also to how these can be disrupted through alternative imaginative geographies of state-society relations. As the cases of Ecuador and Bolivia suggest, alternative imaginaries of ‘proper’ hydrocarbon governance articulate contests over the material aspects of hydrocarbon production (e.g., extraction, distribution of rents) with struggles over the meanings of development, citizenship, and the nation (e.g., the objectives of national policy). By imbuing citizenship with the responsibility to question the governance of hydrocarbon resources, social movements in Ecuador and Bolivia have drawn on and performed ‘‘political communities” (Anderson, 1983) of petro-citizenship that are invested in a continued exploitation of hydrocarbons, albeit in the context of alternative hydrocarbon nations. Thus, the goal of opposing hegemonic practices of hydrocarbon governance is not to stop production or to abolish state structures, but rather to intervene in the terms and intentions of such governance.18 Although the dynamics of hydrocarbon conflict in Ecuador and Bolivia superficially resemble one another, they also reflect distinct geographies of properly ‘re-making’ the nation. In the Ecuadorian case, opposition to hydrocarbon privatization is strongest at the sites of petroleum transformation – refineries and the national petroleum company. In contrast to Bolivia’s YPFB, whose union was severely weakened when the company was broken up in the 1990s (Haarstad, 2009), FETRAPEC’s militancy prevented the privatization of Petroecuador. Although the firm was re-structured, workers retained their jobs and were able to re-organize to defend the firm against further attempts at neoliberalization. While labor organizing initially centered on concerns over wages and workplace, later mobilizations had stronger links to the construction of a petro-nation, colored by perceptions of Petroecuador as the motor of national modernity. For example, petroleum union leaders refer to the production of a ‘‘national political consciousness” and of an obligation to oversee the most appropriate mechanisms and institutions through which to govern hydrocarbon rents. In their view, their close proximity to the natural resource allows them to have a clearer understanding of the internal politics of petroleum governance. In large part, their efforts were successful, and built momentum within the movement and reinforced their anti-privatization position. Their spectacles of civic concern have aimed to make public the ‘hidden politics’ of capitalist practices and the interests of those considered unpatriotic. Thus, their efforts to disrupt the changes taking place at the sites and institutions of petroleum transformation – through strikes, ‘prolonged assemblies,’ militancy, newspaper ads, and organized protests in areas where public, petroleum, and state meet (e.g., gas stations) – territorialize petroleum as a site of struggle over the collective identity and interests of the nation and its citizens. In the case of Bolivia, the ‘nationalization’ of gas fields in 2006 by the government of Evo Morales was also geographically situated, discursively linking the specific locales of production and transformation (e.g., the physical occupation of gas installations by the military) to a political project of national sovereignty that ‘rescues’ state leadership in matters of the sovereign nation’s territory. Similarly, the ‘recovery’ of national patrimony through nationalization and its reference to the Heroes of the Chaco was largely a public display of efforts to return sovereign control over hydrocarbons to the recently elected indigenous-campesino government. As Tsing (2000) argues, these sorts of culturally specific and geographically situated economies of representation are constitutive of the reproduction of alternative collective imaginaries of the nation vis-à-vis its population and the global community. 18 The desire on the part of these and similar movements for continued hydrocarbons exploitation (albeit under state, rather than private, control), will no doubt complicate attempts by international actors to reach consensus on efforts needed to slow global climate change.

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Both the Ecuadorian and Bolivian cases suggest that hydrocarbons and their governance shape meanings of the spaces and times of the nation-state. Hydrocarbon struggles have materialized not only in control over the technologies of transport, transformation, and extraction – i.e., the sites from which to defend the interests of the national community – but also in attempts to intervene in the relationships through which ‘‘the oil complex” operates (Watts, 2004). Indeed, it is the specific configuration of petroleum firms, state, and community that the petroleum labor movement and indigenous/popular mobilizations are seeking to de-stabilize, in an effort to produce or re-institute imaginaries of the nation that reduce the power of foreign and ‘unpatriotic’ interests in favor of national, sovereign communities. In sharp contrast to the deterministic, reductive logic of the environmental security and resource curse literatures, the cases of Ecuador and Bolivia demonstrate that hydrocarbon production is contested on both material and ideological terrains. Such conflicts cannot be reduced to simplistic models of opportunity structure, war profiteering, or resource scarcity (or its obverse, resource abundance). Rather, to understand hydrocarbon conflicts and their outcomes we must be attentive to their spatialities, the role of situated memories of territory and nation, and to the political economies that structure resource access. As we have argued here, resource struggles are never only about resources. As the cases of Ecuador and Bolivia suggest, political economy and cultural politics are inseparable in resource conflicts, as contests over the distribution of rents and the objectives of national economic policy are infused with struggles over the meanings of development, citizenship and the nation itself. 6. Conclusion Through a comparative analysis of Ecuador and Bolivia, we have sought to illustrate the articulations of petro-capitalism, nationalist ideologies and cultural politics in struggles over hydrocarbon governance. We have focused on the dynamics of resource conflicts, the spaces and practices through which contestation of hydrocarbon governance is conveyed to the larger public of the nation, and the ways in which the histories of nations and populations shape the moral geographies of hydrocarbon-related social movements. We have also highlighted the conjunctures of mobilization (specific policies, political-economic measures, and encounters between global capital, state, and population) that have influenced the material forms and social meanings of nation and citizenship conjured by hydrocarbon movements in Ecuador and Bolivia. As the cases suggest, these movements seek to restore state sovereignty over petroleum by reclassifying capitalist spaces of hydrocarbon production – refineries, concessions, pipelines – into spaces of nation-making. This re-making of the nation occurs through a redefinition of the relationship between state, population, territory and resource (Radcliffe and Westwood, 1996). For example, while neoliberal political and economic restructuring sought to re-organize national companies, redraw concessions and export routes, and draft new resource extraction laws to facilitate the extraction of natural capital and encourage the concentration of financial capital outside the spaces of the nation, hydrocarbon movements aimed to counter these processes by recentering hydrocarbon governance in the nation-state. Similarly, the restructuring of CEPE and dismemberment of YPFB also fueled protests because they were seen as reducing the responsibilities and capabilities of the state in key socio-economic sectors. In Ecuador, the conflict originated within the national company, as state employees drew on their labor relations and political training to oppose privatization. In Bolivia, opposition was led by popular mobilizations seeking to put a stop to two decades of neoliberal policies that had not improved the living conditions of the majority

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of Bolivians. In both cases, intervention in the status quo of hydrocarbon governance turned into a territorial struggle that relied on the ideological unification of nation and resource to fulfill the promise of a sovereign that cares about the interests of citizens. These struggles to defend the authority of the state over hydrocarbon matters are not meant to be a return to previous modes of sovereign power, however. Rather, the collective imaginaries of the nation invoked by hydrocarbon movements seek to carve out a space for state authority that it is more closely aligned with what they see as the interests of the population. In other words, these social movements are positioned neither outside nor inside the state or civil society, but traverse these social fields, opening new spaces and understandings of the nation and citizenship (c.f. Hart, 2002). Yet, while ‘re-making the nation,’ involves the possibility of imagining new capital-state-population relations, the cases described here also point out the crucial role of identity politics in how such transformations take root. In both the Ecuadorian and Bolivian cases, specific concepts, categories, and systems of representation are appropriated and deployed in order to form a national consciousness in relation to hydrocarbons governance. The politics of nation-making in these two cases converge in establishing a ‘force’ against the idea of neoliberalized hydrocarbons governance, not in the historical trajectories or complex identities of each of the social movements described, nor in the possible outcomes of their imaginaries of ‘the nation.’ Moreover, their positions blur the boundaries between state, capital, and population, albeit in different ways: state employees represent themselves as members of civil society to protest the practices of hydrocarbon governance in one case, civil society operates through the state to make claims over such governance in the other. What, then, are the implications of popular protest for what is widely seen as the neoliberal restructuring of the hydrocarbon sector? It must be recognized that neoliberalism is never only an economic project, but is, in a fundamental sense, a utopian ideological project concerned with social order, ever in process and never finalized (Harvey, 2005). Hydrocarbon movements aim to disrupt the normative vision put forward by the advocates of neoliberalism and replace it with an alternative (and equally utopian) vision of social order and socio-natural relations. Our aim is not to read these movements and their strategies as yet another case of the local resisting global structures. Rather, we see them as illustrating, first, the political and social content of what is understood as neoliberal restructuring, and second, the ways that the frictions of hydrocarbon-generated capital shape its governance. In Ecuador and Bolivia, neoliberal policies that re-structured the terms of hydrocarbon governance were opposed on nationalist grounds. In both cases, social struggles over oil and gas focused not on economic policy per se, but on how such policies give meaning to citizenship, development and the nation. Protest movements in Ecuador and Bolivia exposed the limits of the neoliberal project; but if there are limits to neoliberalism, so too are there limits to populist politics and utopian nationalisms. Ideas about the nation and citizenship may, in this sense, be considered an example of what Hall (1986) refers to as a ‘‘politics without guarantees.” As such, their connection to struggles over natural resources are not fixed and may follow various trajectories based on competing constructions of national governance. In both Ecuador and Bolivia, ongoing structural dependence on oil and gas rents necessitates expanded hydrocarbon production, which in turn requires continued foreign involvement in the hydrocarbon sector (Kohl and Farthing, 2009). The contradiction between utopian nationalisms, on the one hand, and structural dependence on international capital and foreign hydrocarbons firms, on the other, will surely continue to generate frictions well into the future. How these frictions play out is a history yet to be written.

Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank Scott Prudham and the three anonymous reviewers for their criticism and guidance. We are grateful to Suzana Sawyer, Terence Gomez and the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) program in Identities, Conflict and Cohesion, and to Chaly Crespo and Ida Peñaranda of the Centro de Estudios Superiores Universitarios (CESU) in Cochabamba for funding and support with the Bolivia portion of this study. Thanks also to the University of Minnesota, the MacArthur Interdisciplinary Program on Global Change, Sustainability, and Justice, and the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill for supporting the research conducted in Ecuador. In Ecuador, special thanks to Marcela Benavides, Marcelo Román, and FETRAPEC for their insightful contributions and contagious passion for change.

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