The Indigenous Right to Self-Determination in Extractivist Economies
Marcela Torres-Wong, Cambridge University Press, £17

THE resounding vote by Ecuadorians to stop the development of all new oil wells in the Amazonian Yasuni national park is an emphatic signal that indigenous people have steered the global debate on extractivism to a historic juncture.

The binding referendum decision permanently prohibits oil drilling in the Ishpingo-Tambococha-Tiputini (ITT) oil project and is a major blow to the fossil fuel industry led by Ecuador’s own state oil company, Petroecuador.

The move has fuelled hysterical warnings by mainstream economists that it will further harm this cash-strapped South American country, with the praetorian guard of global capitalism, the credit ratings agencies, already penalising Quito.

But this development has lasting ramifications far beyond the successful moratoria on mining achieved elsewhere, representing an important new strategy for indigenous rights activists who have long pointed to the ruinous consequences of petroleum operations.

Above all, it exposes the practical limitations of a raft of laws throughout Latin America and international norms that ostensibly champion indigenous rights to self-determination, and also a key developmental dilemma confronting progressive governments in the global South.

As Marcela Torres-Wong points out, despite legal frameworks introduced in many countries throughout the region to empower indigenous groups, in practice many communities do not enjoy the rights intended and remain vulnerable and disempowered.

That is because extractivism holds potent developmental promise, promoted by both left and right-wing governments at the expense of the environment on which indigenous communities depend, yet in many cases offering them potential benefits hitherto denied.

As the author writes: “Many studies document that land dispossession, the aggressive exploitation of natural resources, discrimination, and criminalisation of indigenous protest are all intrinsic to extractivist economies... Conversely, Latin American governments argue that extractive resources are the most easily available resources that can be used to improve the lives of indigenous and non-indigenous citizens.”

It’s a classic liberal dilemma demonstrating how capitalism has prevailed, since at least 1989 when the International Labour Organisation (ILO) spearheaded a convention on indigenous rights, in spite of the emergence of a sophisticated legal matrix to “protect” its victims.  

Indeed, many scholars began to suspect that the official policies of multiculturalism by which these rights were extended in Latin America were merely functional smokescreens for neoliberalism. 

Ecuador is important when considering the huge political quandaries this has posed the left. 

It was the country’s former president Rafael Correa who, in trying to defend extractivism in 2012, asked two challenging questions: “Where does the Communist Manifesto say no to mining? What socialist theory said no to mining?”

These are complex question without simple answers, but most Marxists would consider large-scale extractive enclaves as anathema to equitable development and the product of dependent economies forced to opt for the easy solutions of commodity exchange in global markets.   

What is without doubt is that extractivist policies have not gone uncontested: violation of their lands provoked widespread indigenous mobilisation in the 1990s and 2000s, and has generated intense attention, and also division, among scholars.

Torres-Wong uses this context to ask a key question: how can indigenous people in extractive economies effectively exercise extant rights to self-determination?

The author considers what self-determination means in both theory and practice and examines a range of factors to explain varying interactions between indigenous people and states.

She explores a number of cases in Bolivia, Peru and Mexico where self-determination has had differing outcomes for rural communities in which indigenous leaders either embrace anti-extractivist goals, or pursue self-determination through extractive resources.

Her conclusions are not earth-shattering in the way that a bulldozer is in a pristine forest: much will depend on the degree to which affected communities are able to use favourable legal frameworks to their advantage, together with their access to non-extractive resources. 

However, Torres-Wong also identifies the fundamental importance of culture in holding communities together against assimilationist laws and industries, and in demonstrating indigenous interdependence with, and stewardship of, the natural environment.