Geopolitics of the Amazon - Part II: Capitalist subsumption of the Amazon indigenous economy

[Bolivia Rising]

From part II - Capitalist subsumption of the Amazon indigenous economy

.......An intense class struggle has begun to unfold [in the Amazon], and little by little it is reconfiguring the new regional power relationships. The presence of a state detached from the land-holding classes, expressed in social rights and with the function of redistributing the expanding common resources, has dealt a mortal blow to the hacendado-patrimonial structure in the Amazon, triggering an intense struggle for reconfiguration of territorial power in the region. To a certain extent it can be said that since 2006, with theGovernment of social movements and President Evo Morales, a kind of democratic revolution has occurred from “below,” based on the initiatives of the campesinos, indigenous peoples and popular urban sectors, and from “above,” from the state, that is now helping to unfetter and deploy the vital energy of the peoples and popular social classes in a region characterized until quite recently as being the most conservative in the country, dominated by a regime of despotic hacendado power.

As in any revolutionary process, the state not only condenses the new correlation of political and economic forces of the emerging society, of the successful social struggles, but in addition becomes a material and institutional subject that helps to promote new social mobilizations that transform the structures of domination still present in certain regions and spheres of the society. The present role of the Government of social movements in the Amazon, Chiquitanía and Chaco, in which previously there existed modes of hereditary domination based on ownership of the land, is precisely that: to help clear the road for the local popular and indigenous forces to deploy their emancipatory capacities in opposition to the prevailing regional powers.

This rising revolution in the regional power relations in the Amazon, Chiquitanía and the Chaco, has unleashed a violent and aggressive counter-revolutionary reaction. In the case of Chiquitanía and the Chaco, landlords like Anderson or Monasterios participated directly in the attempted coup d’état of September 2008, when they tried to create a parallel government in the four lowlands departments: Pando, Beni (both of them in the Amazon), Santa Cruz and Tarija. And in fact these same actors, in complicity with outside powers that do not want to lose extraterritorial power in the Amazon, are the ones that were behind the recent TIPNIS marches...... read full entry here http://boliviarising.blogspot.com.au/2012/12/alvaro-garcia-linera-geopolitics-of_13.html