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Labor Environmentalism in Colombia and Latin America

Aviva Chomsky and Steve Striffler

Colombia’s coal mines offer a microcosm of events and ideas sweeping Latin America in the twenty-first century. Foreign multinationals ravage the environment to extract resources consumed in the global north. Indigenous and Afro-descended peasants inhabiting valuable regions claim special status as caretakers of fragile natural environments. Radical unions elaborate an anti-imperialist, environmental critique of the companies that they see as looting their countries. These forces contribute to a twenty-first century socialism that links indigenous and environmental rights, attacks the privileges of multinationals and the global north, and commits to redistribution and a vision of development that transcends economic growth.

In the summer of 2009, a young Appalachian activist we’ll call Sara, just hired to work on the Sierra Club’s “Beyond Coal” campaign, met with Jairo Quiroz, the president of Colombia’s largest coal mining union.1 Jairo described the workers’ struggles in one of the world’s largest open-pit coal mines, stretch- ing over thirty miles near Colombia’s northern coast. Labor’s issues, as he conceptualized them, were intimately tied to empire and environment. Coal dust and other toxic materials, as well as the extraordinarily heavy machinery involved in the operation, caused work-related injuries and illnesses. The foreign corporations that owned the mine exported its profits while looting and destroying Colombian land. Afro-Colombian and indigenous farming commu- nities were being displaced. The region was one of Colombia’s poorest, and the company’s cozy relationship with the Colombian government allowed it to pay low taxes and royalties, few of which made it back to the region. Right-wing paramilitaries, which also enjoyed virtual impunity from the U.S.-supported Colombian government of President Álvaro Uribe, threatened union organizers and were responsible for the deaths of thousands, including three mining union officials from the next department over.

Sara was surprised to hear a mining union leader so critical of the industry. In her experience with unions in Appalachia, the United Mine Workers (UMWA) had been a relentless promoter of the mountaintop removal coal mining that environmental activists protest. “So you agree that coal is just inherently dirty, and we have to stop mining it?” Sara asked him. The union leader stopped short. When he finally responded, he took the analysis of empire

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WorkingUSA: The Journal of Labor and Society · 1089-7011 · Volume 17 · December 2014 · pp. 491–508 © 2014 Immanuel Ness and Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

and environment to an even deeper level. “You are asking the wrong person,” he replied slowly. “We don’t use coal here in Colombia. We export 100 percent of the coal that we mine. We’re mining it for you!”

Before Sara could protest that her organization was working to stop the burning of coal in the U.S., he continued. “And if you think that you’re going to find some kind of alternative energy that doesn’t rely on mining, think again. Where do you think the materials for the solar panels come from? For the wind turbines? For the batteries, storage, and transmission infrastructure? And do you really think that those sources can produce enough electricity for you in the United States to keep using more than anyone else in the world?”2

The above exchange reflects different understandings of not only the place of coal in the modern world, but of the global economy and of the concept economic development itself. Sara, after listening to a discussion of the Colom- bian coal industry that explores the intersection of economy, labor, empire, and environment, quickly returned to her comfort zone, an understanding of the environment that ignores precisely what is central to Jairo’s analysis. By side- lining the economic and imperial aspects of environmental problems, Sara’s environmentalism starts and ends in a seemingly radical place—Abolish Coal!— that comes from a completely different political, economic, and cultural context from Jairo’s.

This disjuncture of worldviews shares certain elements with that identified decades ago by Ramachandra Guha, who criticized first world “deep ecology” for its isolated notion of nature that ignored the human and social context. By privileging the preservation of nature or “wilderness” untouched by humans, deep ecologists followed a long American tradition, but one quite at odds with the ways that rural and subsistence peoples interacted with, used, and sustained long-term reliance on the natural world.3

The clash between first world environmentalism and third world labor expressed in Jairo’s conversation with Sara likewise reveals fundamental differ- ences, though not precisely the same ones analyzed by Guha. Like Guha’s deep ecologists, Sara seeks to purify and decontextualize the object of her environ- mentalist attention. Her stance seems radical in its absolutism, but is in many ways conservative in her acceptance of a larger social and global order, and her lack of concern for its social implications.

Jairo’s retort shares something of the utilitarian view of nature that Guha describes as inherent to traditional rural peoples. Colombia’s resources, he believes, should be used in ways that will bring more well-being and justice— including environmental justice—to Colombians rather than being looted rapa- ciously to feed global inequality. Jairo critiques the imperial and extractivist model that connects Colombia to the U.S., and the overconsumption of resources the model allows in the global north. He incorporates labor’s tradi- tional emphasis on the corporate exploitation of workers but also suggests an environmental critique that links global inequality and U.S. consumption with social and environmental destruction in his country. In this stance, Jairo joins a much larger anti-extractivist, nationalist, and pro-food security left that in Latin

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America has challenged mainstream economic thought and the international order, and brought environmental issues into the public sphere in unprec- edented ways.

This position differs from mainstream U.S. environmentalist thought, and also from most of the U.S. labor movement, which generally assumes that continued economic growth is necessary and central to the modern world and essential for improving the lives of working people. At least since the mid- twentieth century, U.S. labor has largely focused on redistributing the fruits of capitalism more equitably. It assumes that economic growth—making the pie bigger—is the path toward improving the lives of workers.4 As unionized employment has contracted since the late twentieth century with the collapse of the manufacturing sector, political and legal attacks against unions in general and the public sector in particular, unions like the UMWA have understandably emphasized job preservation and creation. While dissident movements for envi- ronmental justice and blue-green alliances have emerged, they have not yet brought about major paradigm shifts in either the environmental or the labor movement in the U.S.

The positions articulated by Jairo and Sara offer convenient bookmarks for exploring a range of arguments and debates related to labor, environment, extractivism, and empire. We will look at several organizations and actors related to the extractivist sector—in particular, Colombia’s coal mines—to try to untangle how they understand their goals for social change, and confront the question of the global economy.

In Colombia, as elsewhere in the Americas, only a tiny sector of the working class is unionized. To study labor in Latin America, we must necessarily include rural workers, workers in the informal sector, and subsistence peasants who may engage in different ways with the wage labor system. While unions like Jairo’s play an important role in Colombia’s politics and political culture, the large nonunionized sector of workers is also significant in the struggle for twenty- first-century alternatives.

Latin America: Environmentalisms of the Poor

Jairo’s expression of anti-imperialism draws on a long history dating back to indigenous resistance to Spanish colonial rule. Intellectuals and activists like Bartolomé de las Casas and Guamán Poma de Ayala framed those histories as celebrations of indigenous innocence, collective values, heroic resistance, and cultural alternatives. Both resistance and its celebration were revived in compli- cated ways in eighteenth and nineteenth-century rebellions and independence wars. They resurfaced in Marxist-infused revolutionary and indigenist move- ments that spanned the twentieth century (and their Caribbean counterpart, négritude), in structuralist and dependency-based economic critiques, and in what has come to be known as twenty-first century socialism.

The noxious impact of imperial rapaciousness on Latin America’s natural environment was implicit in much anti-imperial thought.5 In his 1971 classic

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Open veins of Latin America: Five centuries of the pillage of a continent, Eduardo Galeano described the imperial legacy explicitly in terms of environmental economics. “Potosí, Zacatecas, and Ouro Preto became desolate warrens of deep, empty tunnels from which the precious metals had been taken; ruin was the fate of Chile’s nitrate pampas and of Amazonia’s rubber forests,” he wrote. “Northeast Brazil’s sugar and Argentina’s quebracho belts, and communities around oil-rich Lake Maracaibo, have become painfully aware of the mortality of wealth which nature bestows and imperialism appropriates.”6 Economic growth for the core rested on the environmental destruction of the periphery, he argued, decades before the discipline of ecological economics took its name, and histo- rians like Kenneth Pomeranz and Richard Tucker explored how colonial dis- placement of environmental destruction shaped the modern world economy.7

Rural peoples in Latin America articulated and acted upon their own analy- ses of the extractivist, export economy. For Latin America’s majority peasant population, integration into the global economy generally meant the loss of the lands that sustained subsistence economies, forcible incorporation into a labor force, or at the very least, increased tax and tribute demands on their productive economies. Force remained necessary into the twentieth century because the new workers failed to appreciate the rationale for accumulation and still retained access to their subsistence alternatives. As a nineteenth German coffee planter in Guatemala phrased it, “the natives are too lazy to work . . . The Indians won’t work more than just enough to fill their basic needs, and these are very few. The only way to make [an Indian] work is to advance him money, then he can be forced to work. Very often, they run off, but they are caught and punished very severely.”8 The ubiquity of imperial complaints about the “laziness” of those they saw as their rightful laborers in the lands they conquered attest to the resistance they encountered to their project of “progress” based on export- oriented economic development.9

Rural workers’ reluctance to join the export economy was rooted in part in what James Scott called a “moral economy of the peasant” or “subsistence ethic” based on “patterns of reciprocity, forced generosity, communal land, and work- sharing.”10 Subsistence society offered both ideological and material challenges to capitalism. As Eric Wolf concluded in his study of twentieth-century revolu- tions, “it is not so much the growth of an industrial proletariat as such which produces revolutionary activity, as the development of an industrial work force still closely geared to life in the villages. Thus it is the very attempt of the middle and free peasant to remain traditional which makes him revolutionary.”11

Joan Martínez-Alier has pointed out that Scott’s moral economy of the peasant went hand in hand with an environmental sensibility—an “environmen- talism of the poor” that valued security and long-term sustainability over short- term increases in accumulation or consumption. Peasants’ survival depended upon stewardship of their lands. This set of ideas was central to survival in the agrarian world and contributed to revolutionary challenges to export-oriented capitalism in Latin America from the Mexican Revolution through today’s Zapatistas in Mexico and the Landless Workers Movement in Brazil. These

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ideas have also nourished and interacted with nationalist and Marxist left-wing critiques of Latin America’s place in the global economy.

While some of Latin America’s rural peoples have challenged the very notion of economic development, most of the organized left historically has shared with the mainstream a vision of development rooted in economic growth.12 For the left though, economic development, and in particular natural resources, should be under the control of a progressive state rather than foreign multinationals. The benefits from those resources could then stay in the region and be redistributed to meet social needs rather than lining the coffers of private interests and multinational corporations.

Yet the peasant question continues to challenge Latin America’s political classes. Twentieth-century experiments in state-sponsored industrializ- ation revealed that modern industry could not provide sufficient employ- ment for refugees from the rural economy. Like in the area around Colombia’s mines, economic development in the twentieth century has often displaced peasants from their traditional, subsistence labor, without offering them an alternative of decent employment and access to the benefits of modernization.

In much of today’s Latin America, the peasant challenge comes from eth- nically identified indigenous peoples who have positioned themselves as guard- ians of the environment.13 Indigenous peoples looked to real and invented histories to elaborate an alternative path that challenges the economic assump- tions underlying both capitalist and socialist models of development.

Near the Cerrejón mine where Jairo works, Wayuu indigenous leader Oscar Woliyu, from the Provincial Resguardo (reservation) articulated the conflict between modern mining and his community’s notion of work and relationship to the land:

We exist as an indigenous community, but overrun by the multinational that is now present in our territory. We know that for us the land is the mother earth, it is unacceptable that they destroy the face of our mother earth, because for us, the Wayuu, the territory is very sacred . . . Now we Wayuu can no longer hunt, because the police come and won’t let us enter. We used to feed ourselves with fish, but that doesn’t exist any more because the Ranchería River is contami- nated. There was a lot of fish here, but now there are hardly any fish. And they blast every day at 12 noon, and everything shakes, and now our chickens can’t even lay because of that, they don’t produce like they used to produce.14

“Cerrejón doesn’t let us onto its property to hunt,” confirmed Jairo Epiayu, the elected authority of the Wayuu village of Tamaquito. “We used to sustain ourselves by hunting, by planting, but now Cerrejón has bought all of the land around our village and this has been a problem for us. . . . If we go onto Company property to hunt a rabbit to feed our children the mine immediately sends their security after us and takes us to their base.”15 For both spokespeople, it was the land that provided work and sustenance, and when the mine took their lands, their ability to work and sustain their families vanished.

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These statements reflect literal reflections of experience, long histories of cultural relationships to the land and resistance against colonialism, and late twentieth-century forms of global indigeneity. Afro-descended communities in Colombia experienced a similar process. A community leader from the displaced village of Tabaco explained the loss of its traditional culture and the need to recover it:

Our cultural development was united, in brotherhood, because we were one family. We fished, we hunted, we took care of the natural world. What for us was a basic necessity, the land, was seen by the company, and by the state, as a great opportunity. We didn’t abuse the land, we took care of our territory. For many years, there were few incursions in our land because outsiders feared us, the idea of the bárbaros hoscos [wild barbarians, an epithet applied to those living outside of state control], this also gave us the chance to survive for all that time. But it was a defense that we lost, because later we came to believe more in “civilization”—that is, they tricked us. It’s a trick that anybody would fall for, when they had so many professionals and we were just a bunch of illiterates.16

International interest in indigenous rights, environmentalism, and sustain- able development helped to frame Latin America’s late twentieth-century move- ments and in some cases, to depoliticize them.17 But indigenous peoples also engaged with Latin America’s Marxist-influenced labor movements and twenty- first-century socialists.18 Together they have articulated an alternative— conceptualized as buen vivir or “living well”—that fundamentally challenges large-scale resource extraction, the abuse of the natural world, economic growth, and export-oriented models of development. Buen vivir also critiques the unequal global order that drains Latin America’s resources to provide for overconsumption in the north. While explicitly based on indigenous concep- tions of nature, the buen vivir project resonated widely and has been taken up by the left as a whole, from labor militants like Jairo to political leaders such as Rafael Correa, Evo Morales, and Hugo Chavez, if at times in contradictory ways.

Economic Development, Peasants, and Workers

During Latin America’s colonial period and most of the nineteenth century, economic development meant export-oriented development. Areas of intensive economic development, like the Andean silver and mercury mines or Brazil’s sugar plantations, were areas where peasant subsistence agriculture was demol- ished, and excruciatingly exploitative systems of forced labor replaced it. The lands that had sustained farming and foraging for centuries were poisoned, along with the bodies of many of the residents and workers.19

Historian E. Bradford Burns coined the phrase the poverty of progress to describe Latin America’s economic development in the nineteenth century. Export economies boomed, but their impact on local populations was mostly negative. Subsistence economies were undermined, and those displaced were forced into labor for the mostly foreign-owned enterprises. The more remote

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areas, like northern Colombia, where independent subsistence economies flour- ished, became zones of escape for refugees from the export economy. Indeed, many of today’s inhabitants of La Guajira are descendants of these refugees, either self-freed slave rebels or independent indigenous peoples who fought off Spanish colonial and Colombian national attempts to incorporate them well into the twentieth century.20

Concerted challenges to this form of desarrollo hacia afuera (outward- oriented development) began with the Mexican Revolution of 1910. By the post-World War II era, the idea that the state must take a leading role in economic development, promoting domestic industrialization and supplanting the position of foreign multinationals, had become widespread. Extractive industry workers like Mexico’s and Colombia’s oil workers fought for the nationalization of their industries, so that their products and their profits could be used for national development. Implicit, and sometimes explicit, in the movements for nationalization was outrage against the environmental destruc- tion the companies wrought in their quest for profits.21

The expropriations and state-sponsored industrialization of the twentieth century aimed at catching up with the model of modernization achieved by the industrialized countries, by using a different, Third World, path. Except in Mexico, subsistence agriculture was generally assumed to be a vestige of Latin America’s backwardness, which would disappear with the spread of industry. The environmental costs of industrial production were of little import. Of more immediate concern was the growing awareness that the new import-substitution industries could not meet the demand for employment of the rural exodus that sought economic security in the arms of governments that finally seemed to aim at actually providing services for at least their urban constituencies. With eco- nomic development under the control of the state, the argument that foreign environmental concerns were merely a ruse to prevent Latin American eco- nomic development gained credence.22 But as the global environmental crisis grew more acute at the end of the twentieth century, and coincided with the retreat of the state, encroachments of neoliberalism, and the rise of indigenous movements, spaces opened for more radical alternative environmental critiques of Latin America’s economic path.

Sintracarbón

The unionist cited in the opening anecdote, Jairo Quiroz, has held leadership positions including the presidency (from 2008–2010 and again from 2013–2015) in Sintracarbón, the union that has represented workers in Cerrejón, one of the world’s largest open-pit coal mines, since 1984. It is proudly an industrial (Congress of Industrial Organizations-style) union, representing 3,000 workers in different job categories in the mine, as well as struggling to organize the some 7,000 workers who are tercerizados or subcontracted. Tercerización is one of the strategies that has proliferated in neoliberal Colombia as employers have sought

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to minimize their legal responsibilities to their workforce, and contributes to the low rate of unionization in Colombia—currently under 5 percent.23

When international activists (including the authors) first began working with indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities affected by Cerrejón, Sintracarbón was not engaged with them. Though we had no contacts in the organization, we decided to formally invite it to participate in a conference we organized to publicize the situation of the affected communities. The union’s president didn’t reply to our invitation, but he showed up at the conference and listened to community representatives describe the impact of the mine on their lives and their villages. After the conference he approached us.

Contract negotiations would begin in November, he told us, and he pro- posed that we work together. He wanted to educate the membership about the situation in the communities: would we come back and take a delegation of union leaders to visit the communities? And he wanted to develop international solidarity for the union during the negotiation process. He proposed linking the two projects by including a demand about the rights of the communities in the union’s collective bargaining proposal, and asking us to put together an inter- national network to support the union.

The most dramatic aspect of the delegation was simply bringing the union members into the communities. “I didn’t know that anything like this existed in my country!” exclaimed one union leader with awe. Yet they were only a few kilometers away from the mine where he worked. Down long rugged dirt roads, the villages consisted of clusters of mud and thatch houses where poverty, illiteracy, and unemployment reigned. Before the mine arrived they had been poor, but had access to clean water, clean air, land to farm and graze their cattle, and day labor on local ranches. The small urban center of Tabaco had provided institutional presence like a school, a church, and a post office. The mine’s impact on the communities seemed to exemplify the way leftist nationalists saw imperialism more generally: it took resources, destroyed self-sufficiency, and left poverty and underdevelopment in its wake.

Union members were impressed with the level of political consciousness and organization in the villages. Their struggle resembled other conflicts between indigenous peoples and mining enterprises throughout Latin America. An alli- ance with the communities also fit within the union’s vision of its place in Colombia’s and the region’s social movements. The organization’s mission statement pronounced it a “classist” union that “represents and defends the rights and interests of coal industry workers and communities. We strengthen the unity, solidarity, capacity for struggle, with political, cultural, socioeconomic, and environmental participation to permanently better their quality of life.”24

Rather than understanding its goal as protecting workers’ rights to their jobs against community organizations hostile to mining—as has happened in the U.S.—the union saw the communities’ plight as the embodiment of the global order brought by empire, extractivism, and neoliberalism.

During the past decade, the union at the mine has taken a radical stance for the social and environmental rights of the communities in the region.

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It protested the “cruel uprooting and violent displacement” of the community of Tabaco in 2001, and asked the national government to intervene to prevent another community expropriation in 2013.25 The union explicitly addressed the communities’ cultural and economic ties to the land:

Cerrejón has obtained a resolution from the Ministry of Mines that authorizes the expropriation and expulsion of eight Roche families from their lands. It now intends to begin a process of displacement of the ancestral inhabitants who are seeking a negotiation that acknowledges their rights and respects their property. . . . You are aware of the pressures against workers and communities by those whose only goal is their private gain . . . These communities risk the quality of life that they have woven through their culture and social networks in their lands that they are now forced to abandon.26

“The case of the communities affected by Cerrejón can’t be separated from our history,” a former union president explained in an interview:

The army and police are dispossessing the true owners of the land, the true owners of the resources. They don’t take into account the rights of the com- munities, of their ancestors, of their grandfathers and great-grandfathers. In the case of the indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities, they have a vision of the land that is not only socio-political but also religious. The place where their ancestors are buried is a sacred place. This is very important to their beliefs. It’s not just a question of buying a plot of land and removing the people . . . It’s the roots that a family or a person has in that land, in that community. The animals they hunt, the fish they catch. The flora, the fauna. The whole socio-political context of the friendships, the environment in which their culture developed. That has a value, and it can’t just be compensated with money. Money can’t pay for this. That’s why we believe the rights of the communities must be taken into account, must be respected.27

When the union called a strike in late 2012, it listed as its priority demands that the mine address “occupational health and risks, the dignity of its workers, equity for subcontracted workers, protection of the environment of La Guajira and respect for the communities in the region.” In particular, the union demanded that the company abandon its proposal to divert the Ranchería River in order to access coal deposits underneath it, and that “its social responsibility programs live up to their name, especially with respect to the communities that are displaced by the mine and lose their source of income and their customs.”28

Sintracarbón has also become a key player within a coalition to stop the mine’s proposed expansion, an expansion that would reroute the region’s major river. Such a position, which runs counter to some unions’ narrow interests of job creation and security, is virtually unimaginable within the U.S. context. “How can you, a union, oppose the expansion of the mine that provides your jobs?” one U.S. delegate asked then-union president Igor Díaz in the summer of 2013. “We are not against the mine’s expansion!” the union leader qualified. “We are against the diversion of the river. The river is water. Water is life. Without life, there are no jobs.”29

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Article 141 of the Collective Bargaining Agreement signed on March 13, 2013, obliges the company to address both the communal rights and the labor rights of the surrounding communities. The company must “facilitate support and empowerment for the communities that are resettled . . . provide land in commodatum to members of these communities who wish to use it to improve their incomes and their quality of life.” The mine “will give priority to agricultural projects proposed by collectives formed by members of the community, such as cooperatives, elected village councils [Juntas de Acción Comunal], and others. . . . Cerrejón will support the necessary training for the formation of these collective associations and also for the development and strengthening of the knowledge and technical skills necessary for each project.”30

When questioned about what future they seek for the coal mining regions, Colombian unionists frequently say that they want the mines nationalized, and operated for the benefit of local populations. “We need some kind of a balance,” a union leader informed yet another anti-coal activist in an event in Boston in 2011. “In my country we have a 12% unemployment rate and a 40% poverty rate. We need jobs and economic development. But we also need to take into account the needs of the planet, and of the future.” In this stance, Colombia’s unions are joining the twenty-first century socialists who swept Latin America at the end of the twentieth century and have tried to elaborate an alternative economic development model.

U.S. visitors have also questioned the union’s participation in RECLAME, the Colombian Network on Large-Scale Transnational Mines (Red Colombiana Frente a la Gran Minería Trasnacional). The organization’s name is often translated into English as “Colombian Network Against Large-Scale Transna- tional Mining,” but the union points out that the wording is important. “How can a mining union oppose mining?” I asked Jairo in a meeting with another Witness for Peace delegation in 2011. “We’re not against mining,” he insisted. “The name of the organization is ‘Frente a la Gran Minería Trasnacional.’ We are not against mining—we are confronting mining. And we are against transna- tional mining. We are against the multinationals that are looting our territory. We think the mines should be nationalized, and should be operated in the interests of the people.”31

Union and other activists often offer the phrase, “minería sí, pero no así”: mining, yes, but not like this. In its current incarnation, mining seems to symbolize all that is unjust and unsustainable about the current global order. Foreign corporations answer to their shareholders, and have little long-term commitment to the people or the land in which they operate. Lax regulation allows them to pollute and exploit with impunity, and both the profits and the product are enjoyed abroad.

Sintracarbón’s radical stance responds to a long history of imperialist resource extraction that sees the benefits of mining leave the region, and of a sense of connection with peasant—today primarily indigenous and Afro- Colombian—movements profoundly identified with the land. Union activists

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combine a Marxist critique of imperialism and capitalism with an environmen- talism of the poor that has blossomed into a new, contradictory, twenty-first- century socialism in Latin America.

Twenty-First-Century Socialism and Buen Vivir

The era of neoliberal expansion of the late twentieth century is the most recent stage of a long imperial history that has progressively undermined rural and indigenous peoples’ hold on the land in Latin America. The rapid rise of nontraditional export crops and the frantic race for fossil fuels and minerals gave capital added incentive to extend its territorial reach. Both right and left-wing developmentalist governments pursued exports at all costs, jumping on to a “mining locomotive” that brought new forms of empire—especially Chinese— into Latin America, and into some of the last redoubts of autonomous indig- enous community. At this point, force is no longer necessary to create new labor markets. Since the early twentieth century, the impersonal forces of land loss, on the one hand, and the lures of the consumer economy, on the other, have progressively created a vast global surplus of labor.

Despite the spread of consumer culture and the commodification of leisure, and despite a virtually hegemonic global commitment to the idea of economic growth as a solution to poverty and inequality, capitalism’s ability to absorb the planet’s labor force has increasingly declined since the mid-twentieth century. Since then, labor surplus rather than scarcity has come to characterize the global economy, and displaced rural populations have become superfluous, disposable peoples rather than forced or enticed laborers. The indigenous and Afro- descended populations of the peripheries of Colombia, as well as many others in the process of displacement by twenty-first-century megaprojects in Latin America, fall into this latter category. Guha termed them “ecological refugees”: peoples who have been displaced from subsistence, but for whom contemporary society seems to offer no alternative.

A useful analogy may be drawn between the peasants who depend on the sustainability of their land for their long-term survival, and the Third World intellectuals, politicians, and activists, including labor activists, who view the environmental sustainability of their country as a matter of urgent concern. Unlike in the U.S., where most of the population can maintain a blissful igno- rance of the environmental costs of their standard of living, many Latin Ameri- cans are painfully aware that they are paying those costs. Foreign multinationals may be willing to deforest, mine, poison, and otherwise render nonproductive Latin American lands, but those who live there—whether peasants who depend directly on the land, or urbanites competing for the too-small number of decent jobs—are well aware that they will be left to pick up the pieces when the resources run out. There will be no new colonies left for them to outsource their environmental destruction to when their countries have been turned to wastelands.

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The current century is seeing a new coalescence of forces: peasant and indigenous movements in Latin America, Latin American leftist labor move- ments, environmentalists, and twenty-first-century socialists. Several decades of painful structural adjustment and neoliberal policies along with the rise of global environmentalism and ethnic politics opened opportunities for indigenous peoples in terms of access to international resources, organizations, and publics, and helped create a climate that has fostered deeper challenges to traditional models of development.

Indigenous and peasant movements play an important role in the coalitions of the twenty-first-century socialists who swept Latin America at the end of the twentieth century and have tried to elaborate an alternative economic develop- ment model. Elected socialist leaders, in particular Bolivia’s Evo Morales, whose background is precisely in indigenous leftist movements, and Ecuador’s Rafael Correa, have committed to the concept of buen vivir, understood as a direct challenge to neoliberalism and incorporated in their new constitutions (in Ecuador in 2008, in Bolivia in 2009).

Ecuador’s National Plan for Buen Vivir describes the concept this way:

Buen Vivir is part of a long process by Latin America’s social movements in recent decades, to seek a way of life that answers back to the neoliberal eco- nomic model . . .

Buen Vivir is a project for change, a work in progress emerging from these social movements, to strengthen the need for a broader vision that transcends the narrow quantitative boundaries of economicism. It seeks to create a new economic model whose goal is not the material, mechanistic, and interminable accumulation of goods, but rather an inclusive economic model. The model incorporates the processes of accumulation and redistribution to those actors who have historically been excluded from the logic of the capitalist market. It also includes forms of production and reproduction that are based on principles not informed by the logic of the market.

Likewise, Buen Vivir is based on a reinterpretation of the relationship between the natural world and humans. It seeks to shift away from the current anthrocentrism to biopluralism (Acosta, 2009). Human activity and use of natural resources must be adapted to the natural generation (regeneration) of these resources.32

Its proponents argue that Buen Vivir offers a radical alternative concept of economic development.33 It critiques the “economicism” at the heart of neoliberal capitalism and the unequal world order that sustains it. It seeks a post-extractivist and postcapitalist economy, and insists that redistribution must be central to a global economy characterized by extremes of over and under- consumption, and a flow of resources from the have-nots to the haves.

It is perhaps not surprising that the Andes, for centuries a center of the labor and environmental abuses inherent to colonial mining, has given birth to the first state-level challenges to the very core of industrial society, the idea that economic growth can create a rising tide that will lift all ships.

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The new ecologically informed anti-imperialism is more easily articulated than implemented. Like other Latin American attempts to redress domestic and global inequalities, it confronts a world market still governed by the very logic it pretends to overturn. In most of South America, the new leftist governments have followed a policy that critics have termed “neo-extractivism,” continuing to rely on and even expand extractive industries, while using the profits to fund the expansion of social programs. They reverse neoliberal policies by increasing regulation, state participation, and redistribution, but their challenge to the extractive model remains more at the level of rhetoric than of reality.34 They have little leverage within the global economic system and few allies in the north to support their vision of global redistribution or de-growth in the overdevel- oped countries.

Thus, today’s leftist governments in Latin America espouse an anti- imperialist, environmentally sustainable economic model that recognizes indigenous rights while at that same time promoting redistributive and poverty- reduction programs that rely on the old model of exporting natural resources— especially fossil fuels and agro-fuels—to the global north. Despite a rhetorical commitment to challenging growth, consumption, and environmental destruc- tion, they privilege the redistribution of wealth, often funded by state-controlled natural resource extraction and export. Not surprisingly, this contradiction has produced its share of conflict between the new leftist governments, whose social-political projects are partially dependent on natural resource extraction, and indigenous peoples, whose territories often lie on top of those valuable resources.35

Historically, nationalized industries have proven just as capable of environ- mental devastation as those run by foreign enterprises. State-operated enter- prises are often more responsive to urban consumers than they are to the rural populations more likely to be the victims of extractive industries. This problem is compounded when the rural populations are Indigenous, Afro-descended, and poor, as they are in Colombia and elsewhere in Latin America. Colombia’s Cerrejón mine was initially half owned by the Colombian state, and showed no greater interest in the needs of the local or national population then than it does now. In Ecuador, Bolivia, and Venezuela, indigenous organizations have contin- ued to feel marginalized by the agro-industrial and extractive projects sponsored by leftist governments.

Nationalist sentiment serves leftist purposes when used against foreign mul- tinationals, and to ensure that Latin American governments rather than foreign capital retain the right to exploit the region’s natural resources. That same nationalist sentiment, though, can be turned against foreign environmentalists, or anyone, including indigenous peoples, who advocates limits on economic development as generally understood. Some argue that to preserve large swaths of nature and leave natural resources in the ground means that large portions of the population will remain impoverished and lack access to basic health care, clean water, and electricity. “I don’t want any gringo asking us to let an Amazon resident die of hunger under a tree,” Brazil’s president Luiz Inácio da Silva

Chomsky and Striffler: Labor Environmentalism 503

(Lula) said. “We want to preserve, but they will have to pay the price for this preservation because we never destroyed our forest like they mowed theirs down a century ago.”36 Rich countries should acknowledge the real cause of climate change: their own consumption. “We need a different campaign, not only to protect plants and animals . . . to get rich countries to reduce gas emissions.”37

Adds Ecuador’s Correa, “Those who say we should not exploit our resources would jeopardize the programs we are advancing to put Ecuador among the first rank Latin American nations. They would return us to the status of a poor nation without a future.”38

Foreign environmentalists can also create ecological refugees and appear to be just another example of the north using the south for its own purposes. Only now, in addition to denigrating subsistence work in favor of an export economy, northerners claim that subsistence work threatens fragile environments. “In Europe everyone has opinions about the Amazon, and there are people who think the Amazon is a zoo where you have to pay to enter,” said Marco Aurelio Garcia, Lula’s top foreign policy adviser. “They don’t know there are 30 million who work there.”39

Still, Latin American political leaders are publicly voicing a position that is anti-imperialist and redistributive in nature, holds up the rights and values of rural and indigenous peoples, and questions the capitalist logic of growth, consumption, and environmental destruction. Such a position is practically unheard of in the global north.40 It reflects the power of indigenous movements and their success in fusing indigenous rights and an environmentalism of the poor onto traditional left politics, as well as the ways that indigenous claims to land and nature can be superimposed upon national claims.

The role of radical unions like Sintracarbón in this process has been crucial. Workers labor in a foreign-owned, energy extractive export sector, and they have been schooled in Marxism and dependency theory. They experience the envi- ronmental ravages of coal mining in their own bodies, and in their land, water, and air. The depredations faced by the indigenous and Afro-Colombian com- munities seem to mirror those faced by the country as a whole: loss of land, loss of livelihood, joblessness, and a global economy that demands their resources and gives environmental degradation in return.

The twenty-first-century socialists are heirs to generations of structuralist, nationalist, populist, and Marxist thinking in Latin America that have argued for state control of resources and nationally oriented economic development. Pow- erful energy-sector unions like Mexico’s and Colombia’s oil workers in the mid-century played pivotal roles in these movements, given the centrality of energy to the entire modern project of economic development.

Although today’s leftist governments have not (yet) extricated themselves from neo-extractivism, they are certainly giving voice to an alternative vision of nation and development that departs radically from the premises of capitalism and the market. The vision honors traditional peasant values, giving them an indigenous inflection. It draws multiple connections between the workings of the global economy and its local manifestations.

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Jairo Quiroz elaborated recently on the analysis he made at the beginning of this article. “The United States contains 6% of the world’s total population, but it consumes 25% of the energy that the world produces,” he noted. “The U.S. demand for energy has set off a global search for alternative renewable sources of energy, so that the U.S. population can continue to maintain its lifestyle.” After reiterating the environmental costs of so-called “renewable” sources of energy—including the mining that will continue to be necessary to construct processing, transmission, and storage facilities— he concluded that:

Given the global demand for continued massive energy consumption, despite all of the environmental impacts that it causes, continued use of non-renewable sources is inevitable. We should be focusing our discussion on whether there can be a responsible way to carry out mining—like business environmental responsibility—to mitigate its environmental effects on workers’ and commu- nities’ health, the ecosystem, and the water sources.41

Aviva Chomsky is Professor of History and Coordinator of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Salem State University in Massachusetts. Her books include Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal (2014), A History of the Cuban Revolution (2011), Linked Labor Histories: New England, Colombia, and the Making of a Global Working Class (2008), They Take Our Jobs! And Twenty Other Myths about Immigration (2007; U.S. Spanish edition 2011, Cuban edition 2013), and West Indian Workers and the United Fruit Company in Costa Rica, 1870–1940 (1996). She has also coedited several anthologies including The People Behind Colombian Coal: Mining, Multinationals and Human Rights/Bajo el manto del carbón: Pueblos y multinacionales en las minas del Cerrejón, Colombia (2007), The Cuba Reader: History, Culture, Politics (2003), and Identity and Struggle at the Margins of the Nation-State: The Laboring Peoples of Central America and the Hispanic Caribbean (1998). Address correspondence to: Aviva Chomsky, Professor of History and Coordinator of Latin American Studies, Salem State University, 352 Lafayette St., Salem, MA 01970. E-mail: [email protected].

Steve Striffler is the Doris Zemurray Stone Chair in Latin American Studies and Professor of Anthropology at the University of New Orleans. He works broadly on Latin America, labor, and immigration. His first book, In the Shadows of State and Capital (Duke University Press, 2002), explored peasant-worker struggles in Ecuador’s banana belt. His second, Chicken: The Dangerous Trans- formation of America’s Favorite Food (Yale University Press, 2005), traces the industrialization of the chicken and the large-scale migration of Latin Americans into the U.S. South. He has also edited, with Thomas Adams, Working in the Big Easy: The History and Politics of Labor in New Orleans (UL Press, 2014). Address correspondence to Professor Steve Striffler, University of New Orleans, 2000 Lakeshore Drive, Latin American Studies, Milneburg Hall #273, New Orleans, LA. 70148. E-mail: [email protected].

Chomsky and Striffler: Labor Environmentalism 505

Notes

1. The Sierra Club campaign aims to eliminate the use of coal in the U.S. See http://content.sierraclub.org/ coal/about-the-campaign.

2. Witness for Peace delegation meeting with Sintracarbón President Jairo Quiroz, Barrancas, La Guajira, Colombia, 2009. Author’s notes from the meeting.

3. Guha 1989. See also Dowie 2009; Jacoby 2001. Subsequent studies by Karl Jacoby, Chad Montrie, and others studied how urban nature-lovers clashed with rural peoples.

4. As summarized by Bergquist 1986, “labor gave ground on the issue of control in the workplace in exchange for a major share of productivity gains. Capital thus eliminated the principal immediate obstacle to economic expansion in the postwar era. It tamed powerful, disruptive organized labor movements that threatened to undermine the process of capitalist accumulation. In effect, capital turned organized labor into a partner” (5). This explanation is widely accepted in U.S. labor history but rarely examined in its imperial and environmental aspects.

5. See, for example, the mid-century novels of Miguel Ángel Asturias and José María Arguedas, among many others, for environmental or proto-environmental critiques of imperialism.

6. Galeano 1973/1977, 2–3.

7. On ecological economics see Martínez-Alier 1987/1991. See also Pomeranz 2001 and Tucker 2000.

8. Friedrich Endler, cited in Wilkinson 2004, 35, 38.

9. Larson writes that “Creole authorities manufactured images of lazy, antimarket Indians and Africans content to live in poverty and sloth,” (Larson 2004, 80–81). See also Alatas 1977 and Sheffield 2004 for just a few of innumerable examples.

10. Scott 1977, 2–3.

11. Wolf 1969, 292.

12. See Escobar 1995, Gow 2008.

13. Hale 2004 and 2006, and Ulloa 2010.

14. Oscar Woliyu, taped interview, November 2006.

15. Jairo Epiayu, taped interview, November 2006.

16. José Julio Pérez, taped interview, March 2006.

17. Hale 2004, 2006.

18. See Becker 2008 for a discussion of the historical relationship between ethnically based rural indigenous movements and urban leftists, and how engagement with outside sectors has long been important in shaping indigenous activism. Grueso, Rosero and Escobar 1998, and Asher 2009 describe the process in Colombia’s Pacific region.

19. Robins 2011.

20. See Chomsky 2007.

21. See Santiago 2006, chaps. 5–7; Chomsky 2008, 228–31.

22. See Díaz-Briquets and Pérez López 2000.

23. Ríos Navarro 2005; United States Department of State 2010.

24. Sintracarbón n.d.

25. “Expropiación” is the legal term that basically refers to a legally authorized, forced eviction.

26. Jairo Quiroz Delgado, president of the Junta Directiva Nacional, to Sandra Morelli, Contralora General, August 12, 2013.

27. Jaime Delúquez, November 2006 recording, La Guajira.

28. Sintracarbón 2013.

29. Witness for Peace delegation, summer 2013.

30. Carbones del Cerrejón, Limited 2013. When the union first demanded that its contract incorporate language defending the rights of the communities in 2006, the mine refused resolutely. The language

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currently incorporated first appeared in the 2009–2010 Convention, although it still does not fulfill everything that the union has asked for.

31. Chomsky 2014.

32. Gobierno Nacional de la República del Ecuador 2014, “El buen vivir en la Constitución del Ecuador,” http://plan.senplades.gob.ec/3.3-el-buen-vivir-en-la-constitucion-del-ecuador.

33. Acosta 2012.

34. See Webber 2010. Others have described this stance as adhering to the “commodity consensus” that reigns across the political spectrum. See Renique 2013, 13.

35. See Hindery 2013.

36. Associated Press 2009.

37. http://news.mongabay.com/2007/0206-brazil.html#iSHPHd0vPztTAdS7.99.

38. From Correa’s weekly broadcast, April 2013. Cited in Chimienti and Matthes 2013.

39. Associated Press 2009.

40. See Smith 2014.

41. Personal communication, January 19, 2014.

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