Bolivia in the Age of Gas by Bret Gustafson (review)

Bret gustafson has been working on Indigenous movements in Bolivia since the 1990s focusing on questions of land and language rights in the Chaco region of lowland Bolivia. This book is a testament to decades of friendship, comradery, and commitment to the Guarani people and grew out of ongoing research collaborations. Perhaps this book surfaced out of Gustafson’s own excitement for the rise of a political party like MAS (Movement toward Socialism), a political party that promised to nationalize resource industries and redistribute wealth to Indigenous and poor people. Gustafson watched from afar as the MAS party came to power in 2006 out of series of popular mobilizations, from the “Water Wars” in Cochabamba in the early 2000s to the “Gas Wars” in 2003 in El Alto. Movement cries for nationalization of gas, radical land redistribution and a new constitution shaped his first year in office; yet very quickly Morales scaled back on some of his more radical proposals due to opposition from agrarian elites in Eastern Bolivia. Perhaps gas was one of them which went from nationalization (to a form of semi-nationalization, or what Gustafson calls nationalization-lite). While the government did not expropriate or expel the big foreign companies, instead they worked as “partners”. For example, the government bought back significant parts of the hydrocarbon infrastructure—filling stations, pipelines, and distributors—or at least reclaimed them while working alongside private investors. Furthermore, the expansion of the gas industry in Guarani territory has not brought the “development dreams” Indigenous peoples hoped for but rather brought new geopolitical, cultural, environmental, and territorial conflicts.¹

Gustafson’s Bolivia in the Age of Gas examines the historical and contemporary cultural politics of Bolivia’s complex and often troubled relationship with natural gas. Bolivia’s fossil fuel resources – and the quest to extract and export them from this land-locked country – have entangled Bolivia in complicated international relationships, most notably with the United States. These conflicts date back more than a century when Standard Oil bullied Bolivia amid nationalist fever in the early 1920s. In the neoliberal era, as transnational corporations expropriated natural resources, Bolivians increasingly called for sovereignty in the form of national and territorial control over resource wealth. The popular challenge to neoliberal privatization peaked with the “Gas War” in the early 2000s, but fossil fuel resources have continued to be at the heart of Bolivia’s ever unfinished and conflictive project of nation-state formation and perhaps in the future there will need to be a clean break.

Gustafson’s book is organized into three parts: time, space, and excess. The first section presents the longue durée of oil and gas extraction; the second hones in on questions tied to national, regional, and indigenous territorialities; and the third addresses “the gaseous state’s interlocking struggles over different forms of excess—excess violence, excess work, and excess money” (p. 21). In the tradition of the great Bolivian sociologist and philosopher, René Zavaleta Mercado, Gustafson draws distinctions and makes connections between the past and present and juxtaposes historical events to deploy them in new ways. He brings a humanistic lens to the study of fossil fuel economies by unpacking the everyday toxicities tied to this industry, from the misogynistic and patriarchal relationships in the gas-rich Chaco region to the incessant machista humor and gossip that fills the oil camps. Beyond confronting climactic crisis, he aims to reveal how fossil economies reproduce the patriarchal, hetero-normative, racialized regimes which leave layers of “toxicit(ies) arrayed both against our own bodies and those of the natural world” (p. 13). Gustafson’s sharp analysis also seeks to “help North American readers understand the problem of ‘fossil capital’ and fossil fuel dependency in the U.S. as well as in Bolivia.” (p. 13). Perhaps, our own addictions to consumption and excess in the North (and in more industrialized...