Local Action Against Gold Mining in the Bolivian Amazon: Human-Nature Relations as a Foundation for Resistance to Colonial Continuities

Abstract

Throughout history, gold extraction was one activity generating major profits for the colonial powers in Bolivia. Today, colonial continuities in Bolivia remain and are reflected in the entanglement between the ecosystem and the social and economic fabric, that (re)produce exclusion, polarization, and systemic power asymmetries. In this paper, we focus on a protected area in the northern Bolivian Amazon, the Manuripi National Amazonian Wildlife Reserve, which can be considered a ‘commodity frontier’. The majority of the reserve’s population depends on collecting Brazil nuts. However, increasing small-scale gold mining and projected industrial gold mining on land, although ecologically and socially dangerous, developed into a viable economic alternative over the past years. We identify this development as the expansion of the ‘commodity frontier’ which generates new dynamics of violence against people and nature building on systemic power asymmetries and reproducing colonial relations and dependencies across scales. In this paper, we aim to better understand how postcolonial hierarchies manifest in contemporary dynamics of gold mining in the northern Bolivian Amazon and investigate how local populations encounter these dynamics with intrinsic mechanisms of cooperation. To address this question, we apply a political ecology perspective and draw on extensive qualitative field research. Our preliminary findings suggest that local human-nature relations give reason to cooperative dynamics that resist colonial continuities of exploitation. Nevertheless, power imbalances between communities, economic, and state actors constantly interfere. Additionally, understanding how and under which conditions local communities collaborate might be valuable to transform power asymmetries within global forest climate mitigation schemes.