Populist Moments and Extractivist States in Venezuela and Ecuador: The People’s Oil? 3030709620, 9783030709624

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Populist Moments and Extractivist States in Venezuela and Ecuador The People’s Oil? Teresa Kramarz Donald Kingsbury

Populist Moments and Extractivist States in Venezuela and Ecuador

Teresa Kramarz · Donald Kingsbury

Populist Moments and Extractivist States in Venezuela and Ecuador The People’s Oil?

Teresa Kramarz University of Toronto Toronto, ON, Canada

Donald Kingsbury University of Toronto Toronto, ON, Canada

ISBN 978-3-030-70962-4 ISBN 978-3-030-70963-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70963-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © John Rawsterne/patternhead.com This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

This book is dedicated to our families and our students

Acknowledgments

This book is part of a collaboration that has (so far) spanned five years and three continents. In 2016 we started preparing for field work in the Amazon to investigate the politics of oil extraction in Latin America. The following year, we traveled to Ecuador’s oil frontier to investigate a failure. Like many others outside of Ecuador we were fascinated by the Yasuní-ITT Initiative to leave oil in the earth, both for the possibility of supply-side decarbonization and for the way it would have upended conventional wisdom on development in resource-rich settings. In traveling to the country four years after the termination of the initiative, we wanted to better understand why and how it failed, and what lessons it might offer for global environmental politics and future environmental actions in Ecuador. This work on what we came to describe as the “afterlives” of the Yasuní Initiative would not have been possible without the assistance of an outstanding team of student researchers. Many thanks to Emily Evans, Gita Goolsarran, Olivia Hazleton, Kyle Jacques, Denise Lee, Daniel Sanchez-Casillas, Hannah dos Santos, Jillian Sprenger, Ben Windeler, and Stephanie Xu. Thanks also to Steve Parra Ávila and Cadhla Gray, who joined the team upon our return to Toronto. You were all key to the success of our collective efforts. Despite Delta Airlines’s best attempts to scuttle the trip before it even began, fieldwork was conducted thanks to funding from the University of Toronto’s Dean’s International Initiatives Fund. We would like to thank the latter for the support and avoid the former at all costs in

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

the next stages of our work together. Also at the University of Toronto, many thanks are in order to Barbara Murck, Kevin Rowley, and Berenice Villagómez for all of their insights and assistance throughout the process. Our work in Ecuador was greatly facilitated by Diego Quiroga at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito, to whom we extend our warmest thanks. Alejandro Rendón Ayerbe was everything: a fixer, a travel companion, and an interlocutor—his mental and administrative agility was of immeasurable value to our work and to this book. We were fortunate to be able to count on excellent research assistance from Sharon Lam, Danielle Pal, Sara Urbina, Alex Erickson, and Carmen Bezner-Kerr, who spent more hours helping prepare and finalize this work than they likely realize. Teresa would like to thank colleagues, collaborators, and friends Mariana Valls from Ecojure, Jorge Daniel Taillant of Centro de Derechos Humanos y Ambiente, Jose Maria Musmeci of Fundación Patagonia Natural, Pascual Kramarz, and Marcelo Sticco for many fruitful exchanges and valuable insights on oil and gas extraction. I also thank Sarah Witol, Director of International Programs at Woodsworth College in the University of Toronto, for supporting my efforts to combine research projects with teaching through fieldwork in Latin America. Travelling and working with Don to conduct the research that is now part of this book was truly exciting. I am grateful to have in him an academic partner whose energy, commitment, and intellectual curiosity generate so many questions and research projects that we are eager to tackle together. I am—as always—most grateful for the dinner conversations, patience during my absences and enduring encouragement of Tess, Tiago, Maite, and John. You are the light and oxygen I live for. Don would like to thank Victor Rivas, Francisco Vielma, and Gustav Cedarlöf for too many conversations to count about the petropolitics of Venezuela. Thanks also to my students and colleagues from so many years ago at the Escuela Venezolana de Planificación for the insights, interventions, and challenges that started me thinking about extractivism and politics in Latin America. I would also like to thank my co-author and friend Teresa. Your commitment to engaged teaching and learning have been examples I hope to replicate, and the openness and energy you bring to collaboration make this sort of work worthwhile. Academic life can be isolating

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and exhausting; a laugh and a mate make it easier. I’m looking forward to our next adventures. Closer to home, love and gratitude to Theresa Enright for her patience, brilliance, and support, and to Cormac and Lucinda Joy for making me want to leave the world in better shape than I found it.

Introduction

In November 2017 as we sped through the Amazon in Ecuador’s Napo Province, passing flare stacks from oil wells, we paused for a moment to mark the end of any notion of a “pristine” nature. The jungle was developed and developing, as it always has, if in radically different ways. The oil flowing through pipelines alongside the highway also paved the roads on which we travelled, renovated the airport in Quito where we arrived, and as occasional billboards reminded, transformed the country’s human and physical infrastructures. The peoples we passed were, as ever, negotiating new livelihoods with the landscape and the global forces that continue to shape it: their own needs and those of fellow citizens, the designs of the Ecuadorian state, the appetites of global markets, and the transnational corporations constantly in search of new extractive frontiers. We came to appreciate the Amazon we encountered as less a wilderness than a complex series of relationships—a state–society–nature dynamic dominated by the prerogatives of extraction and development. We were on a “toxic tour”—a tactic adopted by activists throughout the region to raise awareness and solidarity in the aftermath of the environmental consequences of extraction—when we stopped at a home near the site of an oil spill (Pezzullo, 2003; Depoe et al., 2004; Pezzullo, 2009). Though the spill had occurred two decades earlier, the small creek running through the property of a local family still betrayed the shimmer of oil rising to the surface. The company’s “clean up” once the oil stopped

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INTRODUCTION

flowing, we were told, amounted to patching the faulty pipe and covering pools of toxic crude with a layer of dirt. Chickens and dogs drank from the polluted water nearby as we observed a disagreement between an environmental campaigner and the campesina on whose land we were standing. The woman insisted that she needed to have results now. No one was cleaning up the oil in her yard. She wanted action and compensation. In response, the campaigner (and our toxic tour guide) outlined a process that included preparing an official complaint to petition officials, attending meetings, and working with his NGO. The process required considerable time and uncertain results, a calculation that left the campesina noticeably unsatisfied and the campaigner pessimistic. As we drove away from the spill site, we noticed stairs occasionally straddling the roadside pipelines. Our guide pointed them out to us, explaining that behind the wall of pipes lay someone’s farm. He continued, “when campesinos complain to the oil company that the pipes cut them off from the road they build them those little staircases.” Life on the Amazon’s oil frontier was a series of forced negotiations and adaptations as peoples, landscapes, and livelihoods interacted with the realities of extraction. Later that month we were being scuttled through the Ecuadorian National Assembly in Quito by an aid to Carlos Viteri Gualinga, a Sarayaku Kichwa member of former president Rafael Correa’s AlianzaPAIS. Our meeting with Viteri had been rescheduled multiple times. The usually busy day of an elected official was complicated by upheavals in the ruling party in the few months since the election of Correa’s handpicked successor, Lenín Moreno. Moreno served as Correa’s Vice President from 2007 to 2013 and campaigned on a continuity platform. Even though Correa announced that family obligations required him to relocate to Brussels upon conclusion of his term—his wife is Belgian—he promised on the campaign trail that the reforms of the Alianza-PAIS’s Revolución Ciudadana (Citizen’s Revolution) would continue under Moreno’s mandate. Correa is widely considered to be the latest in Ecuador’s history of populist leaders (de la Torre & Ortiz Lemos, 2016; Eisenstadt & Jones West, 2019; Moreano & Donoso, 2006). He founded the Alianza-PAIS as an electoral vehicle for his presidential campaign in 2006 amid economic turmoil, escalating social tensions, and the collapse of established parties and leadership. When he left office in 2017, Correa enjoyed among the

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highest approval ratings in Latin America, and Moreno was expected to continue his predecessor’s policies of maximized extraction, social spending for the urban poor, and independence from global economic and geopolitical designs from the North Atlantic. Upon assuming the presidency, however, Moreno changed track. In short order he initiated dialogues with business elites and signalled a rapprochement with the media, sectors that had been vilified by his predecessor. In a move seen by correistas (supporters of Rafael Correa) as the start of a purge, Moreno arrested his own vice president—another holdover from the previous administration—under charges of corruption. Shortly before our arrival in Quito, Moreno announced a binding constitutional consultation and referendum to be held the following year. Measures in the referendum would, among other things, bar any official found guilty of corruption from running for office, reimpose the term limits Correa had lifted shortly before leaving for Europe, rescind a progressive capital gains tax, and impose new limits on mining and oil extraction in the Amazon1 . The measures all passed by significant margins. By mid-2018 Moreno’s turnaround was completed as he welcomed US Vice President Mike Pence to Quito and made overtures to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which encouraged his government to maintain its commitment to extractivism and significantly shrink the welfare state that had been constructed over the past decade. Even though the Alianza-PAIS remained the majority party in the National Assembly, it was internally divided among the remnants of correismo and those aligned with Moreno, who increasingly stood shoulder to shoulder with the resurgent regional right and the Trump administration in the US on questions of regime change in Venezuela, extractive industries, and climate change. It was against this background of transition and mounting tensions in 2017 that we wanted to ask the member of the National Assembly, Carlos Viteri, about Sumak Kawsay. The Kichwa concept, conventionally translated into Spanish as Buen Vivir, or “Good Living,” first came to the attention of many in the global north with Ecuador’s adoption of a

1 This last measure was met with profound ambivalence by environmentalists in Ecuador. While the potential protections for indigenous peoples living “in voluntary isolation” was of unquestionable importance, many saw the measure as effectively constitutionalizing the mandate to drill for oil in other parts of the Amazon. See Chapter 5.

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INTRODUCTION

new constitution in 2008.2 Viteri, an anthropologist by training and a visible indigenous presence in a nation-state with a much longer history of racist exclusion than pluricultural process, claimed to be a key architect of Sumak Kawsay’s transition from cosmovision to public policy. The 2008 constitution and subsequent national development plans are framed in terms of Sumak Kawsay, which has been taken to emphasize harmonious human-nature coexistence, the rights of nature, and an egalitarian mandate to provide for the good of the many. We were far from the first to note that Correa’s “progressive extractivism” seemed at odds with the conservationist spirit of Sumak Kawsay (Acosta, 2016; Radcliffe, 2012), and wanted an insider’s view of how the triangle of needs and contradictions formed by development, conservation, and extraction was reconciled by someone who could, arguably, change its shape. Early twenty-first-century extractivist regimes—for example, those identified with the government of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Correa in Ecuador, or Evo Morales in Bolivia—were characterized by states’ continued involvement in and deepening dependence on petroleum, natural gas, and mining industries. Unlike previous extractivisms, twenty-first-century“progressive” extractivisms added an ostensibly populist element to the export-based model of development. Revenues from hydrocarbon exports (increasingly, to China) were more evenly distributed than had been previously. Citizens received tangible benefits as human development indices improved and inequality declined through social programmes and investment in infrastructure. Nature, in the form of commodity exports, was explicitly tied to improving the lives of citizens—enlisted as part of a movement for the future of the nation that was often pitted as a battle against predatory foreign powers and parasitic domestic elites. However, with the collapse of the commodity boom of this century’s first decade, this so-called “Pink Tide” of left of centre presidencies ebbed. In its wake, extractive regimes have been delinked from the progressive social agenda to which they were briefly tied. There is of course no such thing as sustainable extractivism. The expansion of the social welfare state was a response to the catastrophic aftermaths of late twentieth-century structural adjustment. However, this progressive extractivism incorporated citizens and the political projects of 2 Correa won his first campaign for president in 2007 promising, if elected, to convene

a constituent assembly to rewrite the constitution. Ecuador had 20 constitutions between 1830 and 2008.

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chavismo in Venezuela and correismo in Ecuador into what Murat Arsel has described as the “extractive imperative,” in which the exploitation of natural resources is linked to national development. Tied to official and collective aspirations for a better tomorrow, extraction thus accrues a sense of legitimacy as well as an overbearing influence on wide swaths of policymaking and citizen–state interactions (Arsel et al., 2016: 878). As extraction accrues more and more primary importance, other aspects of state–society–nature relations like democratic accountability, indigenous resurgence, or environmental stewardship are subordinated to maximizing commodity exports. Returning to our interview, for his part Viteri saw no necessary contradiction. Emphasizing the human needs of Amazonian peoples as concerns for development, he insisted that while developmentalism via resource extraction and Sumak Kawsay might not be “complementary” they could, “under conditions,” practice, “a manner of coexistence.” These ostensible “conditions”—better regulation, better technology, better distribution of resource rents—are long-standing promises of the extractivist state. They are enticing, but as promises they have gone unfulfilled. Or, as Jaime Vargas—president of the Confederación de Nacionalidades Indígenas del Ecuador (Confederation of Indigenous Nations of Ecuador, CONAIE) summed up to us in another interview, the government’s adoption of Sumak Kawsay was always a trap. The development on offer from extraction always means underdevelopment for peoples living in extractive zones, he said (Vargas, 2017). This book is animated by these contradictions, and by extractivist states and the populist moments that punctuate them. Since the twentiethcentury Latin American states have by and large followed a formula linking development and modernization with maximizing the extraction and export of natural resources. They have had little by way of choice. The realities of geopolitics and economics since the colonial era have relegated much of Latin America to the status of “nature exporters” within global supply chains (Coronil, 1997). Latin American states are sources of raw materials—natural as well as human capital—and markets for finished goods (UNCTAD, 2019; Ocampo, 2017; Cardoso, 1972). These political and economic conditions shape state–society–nature relations in Latin America in ways that have limited the opportunities for local stakeholders to pursue accountability and deprioritized environmental sustainability across civilian, military, neoliberal, and populist regimes. Extractivist states are durable and adaptable. Populist moments may interrupt or revise

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them, but rarely have they been able to alter the fundamental workings of extractivism in the Américas.

References Acosta, A. (2016). Post-Extractivismo: Entre el Discuro y la Praxis: Algunas Reflexiones Gruesas para la Acción. Ciencia Política, 11(21), 287–332. Arsel, M., Hogenboom, B. & Pellegrini, L. (2016). The extractive imperative and the boom in environmental conflicts at the end of the progressive cycle in Latin America. The Extractive Industries and Society, 3(4), 880–887. Cardoso, H. F. (1972). Dependent capitalist development in Latin America. New Left Review, 74, 83. Coronil, F. (1997). The magical state: Nature, money, and modernity in Venezuela. University of Chicago Press. De la Torre, C., & Ortiz Lemos, A. (2016). Populist polarization and the slow death of democracy in Ecuador. Democratization, 23(2), 221–241. Depoe, S. J., Delicaath, J. & Aepli Elsenbeer, M. (2004). Communication and public participation in environmental decision making. SUNY Press. Eisenstadt, T. & West, K. J. (2019). Who speaks for nature? Indigenous movements, public opinion, and the petro state in Ecuador. Oxford University Press. Moreano, H., & Donoso, C. (2006). Populismo y Neopopulismo en Ecuador. Revista Opera, 6(6), 117–140. Ocampo, J. A. (2017). Commodity-led development in Latin America. International Development Policy, 9(9), 51–76. Pezzullo, P. (2003). Touring “Cancer Alley,” Louisiana: Performances of community and memory for environmental justice. Text and Performance Quarterly, 23(3), 226–252. Pezzullo, P. (2009). “This is the only tour that sells”: Tourism, disaster, and national identity in New Orleans. Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change, 7 (2), 99–114. Radcliffe, S. (2012). Development for a Postneoliberal Era? Sumak Kawsay, living well, and the limits to decolonization in Ecuador. Geoforum, 43, 240–249. United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. (2019). Commodity dependence: A twenty-year perspective. United Nations. Vargas, J. (2017). Interview by T. Kramarz, D. Kingsbury, and K. Jacques. Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE) personal interview. Quito, Ecuador, November 8.

Contents

1

The People’s Oil? Outline of the Book References

1 8 10

2

The Limits of Populism as Causal Explanation Til Populism Do Us Part: Populisms’ Threat to Liberal Democracy Neopopulist Interludes Critical and Radical Democracy Approaches Populism and Nature Conclusion: Populism and the Extractivist State in Latin America References

13

3

The Self-Reinforcing Effects of the Extractive State The Curse of the Extractive State Democratic Accountability Gaps Feedback Effects Conclusion References

33 36 40 44 46 47

4

“The Devil’s Excrement”: Venezuela as the Prototypical Extractive State Sowing the Oil

51 52

14 19 21 24 27 27

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CONTENTS

State–Society–Nature Dynamics and Twentieth-Century Dictatorships Extractivism After Dictatorship Collapse as Transition: Toward Post-neoliberal “Progressive” Extractivism Progressive Extractivism and the Bolivarian PetroState Populist Moments and Democracy in Venezuela Conclusion References 5

6

The Citizen’s Revolution and the Failure of an Alternative Environmental Moment in Ecuador The Promise of an Alternative Model The Yasuní-ITT Initiative Endogenous and Exogenous Influences to Leave Oil Underground Populism and the Feedback Effects of the Extractive State Populist Moments and Democratic Ecology in Ecuador Conclusion References Extractive States and Prospects for Environmental Action Proximities, Distances, and Lessons Theoretical Implications Policy Implications References

Index

53 57 60 62 67 68 70 75 75 78 81 86 91 92 94 99 102 108 110 112 115

Abbreviations

AD AMO APRA CONAIE COPEI DFID IMF IPCC NGO OPEC PbR PSUV URD

Acción Democrática (Venezuela) Arco Minero del Orinoco (Orinoro Mining Arc) Alianza Popular Revolucionara de America (Peru) Confederation of Indigenous Nations of Ecuador Committee of Independent Political and electoral Parties (Venezuela) Department for International Development (United Kingdom) International Monetary Fund Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Non-governmental organization The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries Payment by Results United Socialist Party of Venezuela Radical Republican Union (Venezuela).

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List of Figures

Fig. 1.1

Fig. 3.1 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2

Fig. 5.3

Fuel exports* (Percent of merchandise exports) for Venezuela, RB; Ecuador; Mexico; Argentina and Colombia, 1970–2015 (Note *Fuel exports include mineral fuels, lubricants, and related materials. When there is missing data for some years and locations, known values in this graph have been connected by a dotted line. Source World Bank staff estimates through the WITS platform from the Comtrade database maintained by the United Nations Statistics Division [2019]) The feedback effects of the extractivist state 2011–2013 Opinion polls on approval of the Yasuní-ITT Project (Source CEDATOS, Opinion Poll 2011–2013) 2013 opinion poll of the President’s decision to close the Yasuni-ITT Initiative and start oil exploitation in Yasuni (Source CEDATOS, Opinon Poll 2011–2013. El Telegrafo. 2014. “El 56% del país apoya explotar Yasuni.” Available at http://tinyurl.com/y9mbxo5w) Presidential approval ratings 2007–2017 (Source CEDATOS, Estudio “Opinion” August 2017)

4 45 85

86 87

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CHAPTER 1

The People’s Oil?

Abstract This chapter introduces the key interventions of the book. We argue that extractivist states engender democratic accountability deficits due to the requirements of trade and aspirations toward development. They establish state–society–nature dynamics that restrict participation and exact a heavy toll on the environment. Populist political sequences respond to these exclusionary and unequal dynamics. Although populism is often portrayed as a driver of poor environmental governance, we identify it instead as an intervening variable at best—one that emerges as a response to the democratic accountability deficits that characterize extractive states. However, once in power, populists often intensify rather than reverse the technocracy, verticalism, and exclusion of extractive states in order to increase and more widely distribute resource rents. As a result, extractivism gains a powerful, popular, and legitimating mandate despite its negative social, environmental, and economic consequences. By examining the experience of Venezuela and Ecuador, this book identifies the constraints and opportunities for environmental action as peoples and states attempt to balance state–society–nature relations imposed by extractive modes of development. Keywords Populism · Extractivism · Accountability deficits · Venezuela · Ecuador

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 T. Kramarz and D. Kingsbury, Populist Moments and Extractivist States in Venezuela and Ecuador, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70963-1_1

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T. KRAMARZ AND D. KINGSBURY

Populist Moments and Extractivist States in Venezuela and Ecuador is primarily concerned with two phenomena long associated with Latin America: extractive models of political economy and populist politics. The former has levied a heavy toll on the peoples and landscapes of the region—subjecting economies to the whims of commodity markets, displacing populations, and disrupting ecosystems. While we are skeptical of the latter’s explanatory merits—especially as a causal trigger for extractivism—populism has become an unavoidable conceptual presence in the study of Latin America. More to the point, populism often serves as a shorthand dismissal of the sort of contentious politics we see as rooted in a refusal to accept the exclusions, violences, and lack of accountability of the extractive state form. Our aim is thus to analyze the impact of extractivist states and moments or movements deemed “populist” on opportunities for environmental action in Latin America. By environmental action, we refer to the multiple forms of political claims and collective action that include a spectrum of engagements, from petitioning legislators and legal proceedings to protests and direct action. It is a means toward the end of securing more sustainable and inclusive landscapes and livelihoods. Although populism is often portrayed as a driver of poor environmental governance (Eisenstadt & Jones West, 2019; Lockwood, 2018; Matsen et al., 2016; Middeldorp & Le Billon, 2019; Tsfaros, 2007), we identify it instead as an intervening variable at best—one that emerges as a response to the democratic accountability deficits that characterize extractive states. So-called populist governments in twenty-first-century Latin America have responded to this accountability deficit through interventions on specific local economic, social, and political crises. However, once in power, populists often intensify rather than reverse the technocracy, verticalism, and exclusion of extractive states in order to increase and more widely distribute resource rents. As a result, extractivism gains a powerful, popular, and legitimating mandate despite its negative social, environmental, and economic consequences. By examining the experience of Venezuela and Ecuador, this book identifies the constraints and opportunities for environmental action as peoples and states attempt to balance state–society–nature relations imposed by extractive modes of development. Extractivism has become an increasingly important theme in work on contemporary Latin American politics. In Thea Riofrancos’s (2017) genealogy of the term’s deployment by anti-mining activists in Ecuador, extractivism has become a grand narrative of resistance, resulting “in

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THE PEOPLE’S OIL?

3

what Latour refers to as an ‘acceleration’ of analysis. Mimicking the ever-expanding frontier of oil and mineral exploitation that it seeks to describe, extractivismo links phenomena across vast expanses of time and space” (295). Extractivism encapsulates more than the processes by which raw materials are removed from the earth and shipped abroad. As explained by Riofrancos, extractivism identifies a stance critical of the state–society–nature dynamics of previous modes of development and political economy. Pushing beyond the radical resource nationalisms of Chávez in Venezuela and Correa in Ecuador—in which the constituted power of the state controls extraction and distributes rents across the population—extractivism as a discourse is critical of the long-dominant and cross-ideological developmentalist common sense that unites state sovereignty, the exploitation of natural resources, and the advancement of the population. Building on these ways in which activists articulate extractivism as a discursive analysis and mobilizing demand, we identify it as an ideological complex, encompassing the biomechanical operations and infrastructural emplacements entailed in resource extraction with the political, economic, cultural, subjective, and ecological relations necessary for its naturalization and reproduction. We thus refer to extractivist states as state–society–nature configurations in which resource extraction is the cornerstone of a developmentalist economic model (Savino, 2016). For Eduardo Gudynas (2015), extractivist societies are characterized by “a type of extraction of natural resources in great quantities or intensity, destined for export as unprocessed or minimally processed primary products” (13). PetroStates like Venezuela and Ecuador rely overwhelmingly on revenues from oil and face significant fiscal, political, and social consequences as a direct result (Auty, 1993, 1997; Cori & Monni, 2014; Humphreys et al., 2007; Karl, 1997; Khanna, 2017; Lahiri-Dutt, 2006; Murshed & Serino, 2011; Ross, 2013; Siakwah, 2017; Van de Ploeg, 2011). Table 1.1 and Fig. 1.1 show the overall reliance of the Latin American region on oil exports and the critical reliance of Venezuela and Ecuador on oil as a percentage of their total exports of goods. While we recognize the significant and pernicious impacts the oil industry has had on peoples and landscapes in Latin America in general and on Venezuela and Ecuador in particular, and while we are indeed primarily focused on matters linked directly to the extraction and export of petroleum, in this book we nonetheless prefer extractive state as an explanatory concept. Extractive states are institutional and infrastructural

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T. KRAMARZ AND D. KINGSBURY

Table 1.1 Latin American countries rank among the 50 most commoditydependent countries in the world, 2013–2017 Rank

Country

Total

Agriculture (%)

Minerals (%)

Energy (%)

13 21

Bolivia Ecuador

95.4 93.6

17.8 45.9

31.4 3.2

46.2 44.3

27

Venezuela

92.7

0.7

1.7

90.2

34

Paraguay

90.7

69.9

1.3

19.5

39

Peru

88.8

20.5

58.8

9.5

49

Chile

86.3

30.0

55.4

0.9

Most exported products

Share

Natural gas Crude petroleum Crude petroleum Oil seeds/fruit Copper ores Copper

42.7 42.0 73.6 26.4 21.5 27.2

Source United Nations Conference on Trade & Development. (2019). Commodity Dependence: A Twenty-Year Perspective. Geneva: United Nations Fuel imports (% of merchandise imports) - Venezuela, RB, Ecuador, Mexico, ArgenƟna, Colombia 30

25

20

15

10

5

0 1989

1990

1991

1992

1993

1994

1995

1996

1997

1998

1999

Ecuador

2000

2001

Mexico

2002

2003

2004

ArgenƟna

2005

2006

Colombia

2007

2008

2009

2010

2011

2012

2013

2014

2015

2016

2017

2018

2019

Venezuela, RB

Fig. 1.1 Fuel exports* (Percent of merchandise exports) for Venezuela, RB; Ecuador; Mexico; Argentina and Colombia, 1970–2015 (Note *Fuel exports include mineral fuels, lubricants, and related materials. When there is missing data for some years and locations, known values in this graph have been connected by a dotted line. Source World Bank staff estimates through the WITS platform from the Comtrade database maintained by the United Nations Statistics Division [2019])

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THE PEOPLE’S OIL?

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manifestations of a comportment toward the environment as raw material, as means to a developmentalist end, and the organization of state–society relations to facilitate that end. This often results in the criminalization of those who reject sacrifices considered necessary for economic growth, a logic that characterizes Venezuela and Ecuador before and after their populist moments, and in mega mining as much as in the oil sector. For this reason we also prefer to focus on the state–society–nature dynamics created by extractivism as a structuring logic over that of a specific industry’s attributes and harms in order to avoid what Michael Watts (2004), writing about oil conflicts in the Niger Delta, has referred to as the “commodity determinism” of much work on PetroStates (53). Oil does not “shape” politics in Venezuela and Ecuador. It is rather part of the ideological and material ground on which policymaking and citizen contestation, development agendas and environmental action, and the norms of accountability and representation are formed. The extractive state as a form is in this regard a historically specific institutional organization, but also and perhaps primarily a common sense that frames politics from the mundane and quotidian to the commanding heights of the global economy. Extractivist states promote a development paradigm that can be “defined as a pattern of accumulation based on the over-exploitation of (often non-renewable) natural resources as well as the expansion of the [productive] frontier over territories considered as ‘unproductive’ in the past” (Svampa, 2013: 34). This triggers several displacements, including undermining other economic activities, threatening the livelihoods of rural and indigenous populations, excluding those most affected from decision-making processes, weakening environmental protections, and, in turn, increasing harms inflicted on ecosystems. Extractive states do not exist in isolation. As administrative and political bodies, extractive states are nodes in transnational networks that include nation-states, but which also include social movements, local stakeholders, national and international non-governmental organizations, transnational governing bodies, and multinational corporations. As Siakwah (2017) has argued, research on the resource curse has largely neglected this nested nature of the PetroState within broader economic and political networks. This bias toward methodological nationalism in the literature, as she defines it, has constrained the explanatory power of traditional analysis. Our emphasis on extractive states by contrast begins from the recognition that the network that produces PetroStates is uneven. It may

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be populated by actors and stakeholders of various forms and capacities, but it is inextricably shaped by the norms, institutions, and power relations of carbon capitalism. This is a framework, as defined by Di Muzio, that highlights how “modern civilization and the social reproduction of capitalism are bound inextricably with fossil fuel consumption,” with unequally distributed effects around the globe (Brevini & Murdock, 2017; Di Muzio, 2015: 3; Malm, 2016). For example, in moments of market expansion, the Venezuelan state and the national oil company, PDVSA, see their position enhanced in relation to the multinational oil and energy companies that want to access Venezuela’s subsoil. The state’s bargaining power with external actors may be enhanced, but opportunities for citizens directly affected by the immediate impacts of increased production are also curtailed, as expanding revenues incentivize everyone not immediately experiencing “negative externalities” to prioritize the performance of the oil industry. When extractive states privilege business partnerships, they shift their focus of accountability to the needs of producers and consumers, and away from the electorate on matters of procedural or substantive goals of representation (Kramarz & Park, 2016). Reflecting this, extractive states are marked by a high degree of opacity in dealings with foreign governments and firms vis-à-vis the citizenry, an opacity that can bleed into other aspects of the citizen–state interactions. Democracy gets in the way of deals. Furthermore, the costs of extraction are disproportionately experienced by those people and places least able to shape the rules that affect their lives and landscapes. These vulnerable communities can become “zones of sacrifice,” places where people and environments have implicitly or explicitly become expendable in service to broader economic projects.1 Beyond the immediate impacts of extractivism on the environment, zones of sacrifice can be understood as spaces in which core principles of liberal democracy such as the ability to shape the rules that affect one’s lives are considerably diminished. The extractivist social contract is thus less Hobbesian or Lockean—whereby citizens forfeit ostensibly “natural” rights in exchange for safety and the grounds for prosperity—than

1 The term zones of sacrifice was a designation originally used by United States government officials to identify communities that had been contaminated by uranium mining and processing during the Cold War. Lerner (2010) argued that these low-income and minority communities were relegated to necessary collateral damage in the struggle against communism—necessary sacrifices at the altar of national security.

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a colonial one guaranteeing the outward flow of natural resources. As a result, demands for accountable government go unmet, and authoritarian responses to dissent produce feedback loops of deepening exclusionary politics and social backlashes. The direction of these reactions is highly unpredictable. For example, the collapse of the representative system in Venezuela in the 1980s and 1990s heightened popular enthusiasm for more direct forms of democracy and a more equitable distribution of oil rents under Hugo Chávez’s Bolivarian Revolution. The demands for the reform of political systems that relegate whole populations to permanent zones of sacrifice (Lerner, 2010) also resulted in pioneering environmental policies from governments of the New Left in South America. Ecuador and Bolivia emerged as defenders of nature, granting nature inalienable rights and legal personhood (Martin & Sholz, 2014; Marx, 2010). On the extreme opposite end of the spectrum, the Workers’ Party of Brazil’s inability to overcome endemic corruption, poverty, and vulnerability to highly volatile export markets increased cynicism toward existing parties and opened the door for far-right reaction in that country. After a crackdown on nationwide protests against a number of overlapping issues—austerity measures after the collapse of the boom, the costly spectacles of the 2014 World Cup Finals and the 2016 Summer Olympic Games, faltering social services in education and health care, and controversial megadam projects in the Amazon—Dilma Rousseff was ousted in a constitutional coup that deepened austerity and accelerated the opening of the Amazon for agribusiness and mining (Declercq, 2016; Vicino & Fahlberg, 2017). By 2018, frustrations with the Workers’ Party and with establishment center-right parties that ousted her (as well as no small amount of judicial interference) facilitated the election of the far-right candidate, Jair Bolsonaro, who has not only been an outspoken climate skeptic, but opened up the Amazon to further deforestation, undermined indigenous land claims, and weakened other environmental and social protections (Bratman, 2019). In sum, the extractivist state—its colonial orientation, opacity in statecitizen relations, lack of accountability, and heavy-handed response to dissent that cannot be bought off with windfall revenues—opens space for anti-systemic movements, many of which have been labeled populist. Analyses that focus on the populist moment rather than the enduring extractivist relations that make them possible thus put undue focus on symptoms over causes, missing in large part the legitimate grievances that

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give rise to social mobilizations. More than just an analytical misstep, however, this misunderstanding of the relation between populism and extractivism lets the former off of the proverbial hook, allowing for the perpetuation of a dynamic that harms democracy, people, and the environment.

Outline of the Book The People’s Oil unfolds over the course of twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury histories of Venezuela and Ecuador. Following an outline of the main propositions of the book, Chapter 2 develops a genealogy of Latin American populist regimes and their alternating variations, then critically evaluates the explanatory merits of populism as a concept in the formation and evolution of extractive states in Latin America. In Chapter 3, we consider key propositions from three distinct literatures on populism, the resource curse, and democratic accountability to advance an alternative framework. We find that populisms’ acritical explanation of voting behavior, the resource curse’s predominant focus on domestic institutional weaknesses, and democratic theory’s primary concern with proper institutional design are insufficient on their own to understand the constraints and opportunities for environmental action under conditions of extractivism. We develop a framework that proposes feedback effects between extractive logics of action, accountability deficits, and populism to better capture the complex dynamics at play. The goal is to facilitate further research on prospects for becoming unstuck from this locked-in cycle. Chapters 4 and 5 are case studies in Venezuela—for many, the prototypical PetroState—and Ecuador—whose transformation into a PetroState came decades later, but built on previous extractive political cultures associated with agribusiness. These illustrate the degree to which extractive states are oriented by a colonial and export-oriented logic. This logic regulates state–society relationships and circumscribes avenues for local stakeholders to hold public officials and extractive industries to account for environmental and human impacts. The result is what we identify as the Extractive State in Venezuela and Ecuador: the complex of institutions, social relations, and political “common sense” that prioritizes extraction over more immediately democratic concerns. These dynamics can be observed across populist as well as more liberal

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democracies, military and civilian regimes, and across nearly 150 years of political development and geopolitical change. While the Venezuela chapter analyzes the effects of coexistence with oil throughout its long history as a large producer, the chapter on Ecuador offers an in-depth analysis of a specific opening for environmental action that was for some time celebrated internationally as a governance innovation—the Yasuní-ITT Initiative. Ecuador offered hope in a post-Kyoto era where traditional multilateralism was failing, but a hope that was ultimately extinguished by the enduring structures of the Ecuadorean extractive state. We do not introduce these as traditional case studies in a book, where authors aim to validate a thesis with cases selected based on their representativeness or variance on a dependent variable. As such, the mode of presentation in each chapter differs, with our study of Venezuela focused on the formation and transformation of petroleum extractivism over the course of a century. Our discussion of Ecuador is on the other hand more recent in scope, and centered on a specific attempt to exit an extractivist trajectory in order to more fully appreciate the constraints to environmental action imposed by the state–society–nature dynamic of extractive states. These chapters are thus meant to provide a sociological vantage point that traces historically contingent relationships between domestic and international economies, policies, and politics in zones of sacrifice. The concluding chapter compares Venezuela and Ecuador, highlights convergences, divergences, and lessons from the cases in order to assess the theoretical implications of our argument, the policy ramifications, and opportunities for environmental action within the structural constraints of extractivist states in Latin America and beyond. Our hope in this short book on extractive states, populist politics, and opportunities for environmental action in Latin America is to outline a state–society– nature relation that has endured for centuries. This relation shapes landscapes—like the Amazonian highway where we said goodbye to any naïve notion of a pure or pristine environment—entangling local peoples and places in thoroughly transnationalized networks of power and nature. In assessing the persistence of extractive modes of rule and their impact on participation and accountability, we highlight ways in which extractivism persists despite the widespread recognition of its associated perils and false promises. Rather than a driver of extractivism, populist politics are responses to this political, economic, and ecological formation,

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responses that have to this point failed to escape the self-reinforcing logics and structures of the extractive state form.

References Auty, R. M. (1993). Sustaining development in mineral economies: The resource curse thesis. Routledge. Auty, R. M. (1997). Natural resource endowment, the state and development strategy. Journal of International Development: The Journal of the Development Studies Association, 9(4), 651–663. Bratman, E. (2019). The burning quest to revive a nationalist vision in Brazil’s Amazon. NACLA. https://nacla.org/news/2019/12/05/brazilamazon-fires-bolsonaro. Accessed December 29, 2020. Brevini, B., & Murdock, G. (2017). Carbon capitalism and communication: Confronting climate crisis. Springer. Cori, A., & Monni, S. (2014). The resource curse hypothesis: Evidence from Ecuador (SEEDS Working Paper Series, 28). Declercq, M. (2016, April 17). The day of men. NACLA. https://nacla.org/ news/2016/05/12/april-17-2016-day-men. Accessed October 30, 2019. Di Muzio, T. (2015). Carbon capitalism. Energy, social reproduction and world order. Rowman & Littlefield International. Eisenstadt, T., & Jones West, K. (2019). Who speaks for nature? Indigenous movements, public opinion, and the petro state in Ecuador. Oxford University Press. Gudynas, E. (2015). Extractivismos: ecología, economía y política de un modo de entender el desarrollo y la naturaleza. Centro de Documentación e Información Bolívia. Humphreys, M., Sachs, J. D., Stiglitz, J. E., & Soros, G. (2007). Escaping the resource curse. Columbia University Press. Karl, T. L. (1997). The paradox of plenty: Oil booms and petro-states. University of California Press. Khanna, A. A. (2017). Revisiting the oil curse: Does ownership matter? World Development, 99, 214–229. Kramarz, T., & Park, S. (2016). Accountability in global environmental governance: A meaningful tool for action? Global Environmental Politics, 16(2), 1–21. Lahiri-Dutt, K. (2006). ‘May God give us chaos, so that we can plunder’: A critique of ‘resource curse’ and conflict theories. Development, 49(3), 14–21. Lerner, S. (2010). Sacrifice zones: The front lines of toxic chemical exposure in the United States. MIT Press. Lockwood, M. (2018). Right-wing populism and the climate change agenda: Exploring the linkages. Environmental Politics, 27 (4), 712–732.

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Malm, A. (2016). Fossil capital: The rise of steam power and the roots of global warming. Verso Books. Martin, P. L., & Scholz, I. (2014). Policy debate: Ecuador’s Yasuní-ITT initiative: What can we learn from its failure? International Development Policy, 5(2). Marx, E. (2010). The fight for Yasuni. Science, 330(6008), 1170–1171. Matsen, E., Natvik, G. J., & Torvik, R. (2016). Petro populism. Journal of Development Economics, 118, 1–12. Middeldorp, N., & Le Billon, P. (2019). Deadly environmental governance: Authoritarianism, eco-populism, and the repression of environmental land defenders. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 109(2), 324– 337. Murshed, S. M., & Serino, L. A. (2011). The pattern of specialization and economic growth: The resource curse hypothesis revisited. Structural Change and Economic Dynamics, 22(2), 151–161. Riofrancos, T. (2017). Extractivismo unearthed: A genealogy of a radical discourse. Cultural Studies, 31(2–3), 277–306. Ross, M. (2013). The oil curse: How petroleum wealth shapes the development of nations. Princeton University Press. Savino, L. (2016). Landscapes of contrast: The neo-extractivist state and indigenous peoples in “post-neoliberal” Argentina. The Extractive Industries and Society, 3(2), 404–415. Siakwah, P. (2017). Political economy of the resource curse in Africa revisited: The curse as a product and a function of globalised hydrocarbon assemblage. Development and Society, 46(1), 83–112. Svampa, M. (2013). Resource extractivism and alternatives: Latin American perspectives on development. In M. Lang & D. Mokrani (Eds.), Beyond development: Alternative visions from Latin America (pp. 117–143). Quito: Fundación Rosa Luxembourg. Tsfaros, N. E. (2007). Big oil and big talk: Resource populism in international politics. SAIS Review, 27 (1), 147–157. United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. (2019). Commodity dependence: A twenty-year perspective. Geneva: United Nations. Van de Ploeg, F. (2011). Natural resources: Curse or blessing? Journal of Economic Literature, 49(2), 366–420. Vicino, T., & Fahlberg, A. (2017). The politics of contested urban space: The 2013 protest movement of Brazil. Journal of Urban Affairs, 39(7), 1001– 1016. Watts, M. (2004). Resource curse? Governmentality, oil and power in the Niger Delta Nigeria. Geopolitics, 9(1), 50–80. World Bank. (2019). World Development Indicators: The World Bank. http:// wdi.worldbank.org/table/3.14.

CHAPTER 2

The Limits of Populism as Causal Explanation

Abstract This chapter introduces Latin American populism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In the first section we examine economic, political, and critical approaches to populism’s relationship with liberal democracy, a common concern throughout the literature on the topic. These approaches, we argue, explicitly or implicitly carry a teleological and ultimately Eurocentric bias of “democratization” that understands populism as a pathological condition of underdeveloped peoples and places. Among other problematic attributes, these accounts miss the interdependencies between populism and extractivist state formations. Extractivist states, we argue, better explain the sort of democratic accountability gaps that engender populist reactions. In the second section, we explore in greater detail how ostensibly populist sequences relate to political and ecological accountability. The chapter concludes with a call for rethinking populism along several dimensions and as nested within the broader context of extractivism. Keywords Democracy · Classical populism · Neopopulism · Radical populism

In what follows, we offer a genealogy of Latin American populism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In the first section we examine © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 T. Kramarz and D. Kingsbury, Populist Moments and Extractivist States in Venezuela and Ecuador, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70963-1_2

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economic, political, and critical approaches to populism’s relationship with liberal democracy, a common concern throughout the literature on the topic. These approaches, we argue, explicitly or implicitly carry a teleological and ultimately Eurocentric bias of “democratization” that understands populism as a pathological condition of underdeveloped peoples and places. Among other problematic attributes, these accounts miss the interdependencies between populism and extractivist state formations, which we argue better explain the sort of democratic accountability gaps that engender populist reactions. In the second section, we explore in greater detail how ostensibly populist sequences relate to political and ecological accountability. The chapter concludes with a call for rethinking populism along several dimensions and as nested within the broader context of extractivism. Against the teleological orientation of democratization studies that characterizes democratic consolidation as a series of stages that end in Robert Dahl’s (1978) concept of polyarchy, we argue instead that the role of extractive states as suppliers of the raw materials required for a global, carbon-based economy means that populism is not a mere obstacle on the universal path of institutional consolidation. Populism in Latin America has rather been a consequence of the extractive state—a state form that is itself part and product of a transnationalized network of power and nature. The consequences for environmental action and substantive democratization thus remain robust and resistant to change, despite the regime fluctuations in Latin America as studied in the following chapters.

Til Populism Do Us Part: Populisms’ Threat to Liberal Democracy Prior to the boom of the populism research program in academia and coverage in the media since the 2016 election of Donald Trump in the United States, social science discourses about populism were most often generated in the global north about politics in the global south. Latin America was in many ways ground zero for this phenomenon, and Juan Domingo Perón of Argentina is often posed as the prototype

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of the populist leader in the twentieth century.1 Variations have multiplied since the death of Peronismo’s founder in 1973. A key attribute of populism that crosses cases, after all, is the centrality and hyperpersonalism of the leader. Populisms are less about ideology than mobilizations around particular individuals, and the highly personalistic governments of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and Rafael Correa in Ecuador are seen as twenty-first-century instances of this long Latin American tradition. Populism has been used to characterize diametrically opposed worldviews like national development and neoliberalization, suggesting that some sort of enduring underlying logic or structure has remained intact, particularly in the cases of Venezuela and Ecuador. As a conceptual tool, furthermore, populism has described phenomena that are either antithetical to or dangerous for liberal democracy. Populism is thus either a degraded form of a liberal democracy gone wrong or a symptom of a political culture incapable of advancing along the path of liberalization, an analysis that we find says more about the normative and critical

1 There were of course predecessors. Aníbal Quijano (1998) traces the historical origins of the term populism to the nineteenth century Populist party in the United States, a predominantly agrarian organization and movement that fought fluctuations in crop prices, and the Russian narodniki of the nineteenth century. In the US, ‘populism’ was conceptually elaborated as early as 1894 by Thorstein Veblen (1894) to describe the politics of “an intellectually undisciplined populace” susceptible to demagogic manipulation (459). The narodniki, a peasant movement of the 1860s and 1870s that briefly drew the loyalties of a young Leon Trotsky, responded to Russia’s tortured transition from feudal society to more fully consolidated capitalist logics of ownership and production. Knowledgeable of and known to socialist and anarchist thought of the day, the narodniki conceived of the peasantry as a truly revolutionary class, capable of propelling Russia to socialism without passing through the ‘stages’ of economic and political development (Quijano 1998: 174–176). These nineteenth century populisms illustrate two important ways in which the term has always been loaded with normative meaning, long before its incorporation into conceptual and theoretical arsenals of contemporary social sciences. In Veblen’s case, populism betrays a fear of the unwashed masses, ‘the people’— a rather common preoccupation of his age. Just one year later (and first translated into English in 1896), Gustave Le Bon’s (2002) highly influential The Crowd was published in Paris, a study that articulated the growing anxieties and preoccupations of emerging ‘mass psychology.’ Le Bon’s basic thesis, that when combined in a mass, individuals (no matter how critical, learned, or dispassionate they may be in isolation) de-evolve from civilization to barbarism, is also seen in Veblen’s concern of the two-sided deterioration of the US polity expressed in his entry on populism. This aspect—fear or distrust of the (often newly enfranchised or mobilized) masses, without the mediating, mitigating, and disciplining power of established institutions—informs most subsequent and contemporary theorizations of populism in Latin American politics.

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investments of scholars studying populism than the actual substance of the phenomena in question. Classical populism was, in Gino Germani’s (1973) words, an “ideology of industrialization” that operates through the creation of a “nationalpopular” by authoritarian, ideologically hybrid, and nationalistic movements. These movements, he argues, arise whenever the demographic need for integration exceeds the capacity of existing social, political, and economic institutions (29–30). In the face of institutional and elite intransigence, charismatic political entrepreneurs forge coalitions of the people (pueblo) defined more by their affective investment in the leader and their hatred for the old order (la oligarqía) than by any program or ideology. In Torcuato DiTella’s (1965) analysis, while these coalitions may indeed build upon legitimate grievances, they also and perhaps primarily allow new elites to attain economic and political power with the help of the “disposable” masses through their shared “passionate hatred of the status quo” (50). Populism is in this light a symptom of antagonism and transition. Economic development in the early twentieth century saw a shift in the export-driven economies of Latin America, initiating and accelerating a process of social change that produced both a new class of elites excluded from the exercise of power by traditional oligarchs and an excess of displaced, increasingly urbanized, and under-employed (or under-satisfied) masses —both of whom held aspirations of upward socioeconomic mobility. Depending on the country in question the era of classical populism in Latin America largely took place in the mid-twentieth century. In addition to the prototypical case of Peronismo in Argentina (particularly during Perón’s first term in office, 1946–1955), examples include Lázaro Cárdenas in Mexico (1934–1940), Getulio Vargas in Brazil (particularly his second term, 1951–1954), Victor Paz Estenssoro in Bolivia (1952–1956 and 1960–1964), and the Alianza Popular Revolucionara de America (APRA) of Victor Haya de la Torre in Peru (founded in 1924, though never in the presidency until the election of Alan García in 1985). In each of these “classical” cases, as Michael Conniff (1999) notes, “populism was an expansive style of election campaigning by colorful and engaging politicians who could draw masses of new voters into their movements and hold their loyalty indefinitely, even after their deaths. They inspired nationalism and cultural pride…and they promised to give them a better life as well. Populists campaigned mostly in the big cities, where tens of millions of people gained the franchise and exercised it

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at the ballot box. The vast majority of voters belonged to the working classes, which gave some of the populists a decidedly pro-labor image. Yet populists also attracted middle-class voters, who applauded the social and economic programs these leaders championed and who also obtained jobs and benefits from them” (4). Classical populism was above all else a political phenomenon tied to cross-class election coalitions headed by charismatic leaders. These leaders “exhibited such diverse traits as great intellect, empathy for the downtrodden, charity, clairvoyance, strength of character, moral rectitude, stamina and combativeness, the power to build, or saintliness” (Conniff, 1999: 5). Outstanding personalities combined with the deteriorating legitimacy of traditional elites, as “the church, oligarchical families, political parties, established newspapers, or business elites” (ibid.) were increasingly identified with the backward and unequal past. This parochial old guard proved an easy target for enterprising populists who filled their actions with a spirit of common purpose and development. As Conniff continues, “populists preached that the state should be strengthened in order to fulfill a great national identity” (ibid.), thus resonating with structuralist development theories of the day. In practice, the opportunities afforded by a derided elite combined with structural changes to the economy and demography of a country, and the popular mandate for a strengthened state to pursue a more inclusive development for the nation or pueblo lent themselves to autocratic tendencies. Populists “promoted democracy even though they did not always behave in democratic ways…exhibit[ing] autocratic tendencies and abus[ing] their powers” (Conniff, 1999: 7). The intense personalism of classical populist regimes meant the mobilizations around a leader’s candidacy were often uninstitutionalized. As a result, traditional clientelism was displaced—or in some cases, augmented—by the “psychic rewards and security provided by the leader” in return for service to the cause (16). However, the key cross-case attribute of populism is that there is no key cross-case attribute of populism. Definitions varied across countries. In the case of peronismo in Argentina, they varied across the life, career, and death of Juan Perón from left-leaning developmentalism to right-leaning authoritarian nationalism. Personalism, opacity, centralization of power, verticalism, corruption, and state-directed development—key attributes of classical populism in the literature, meant different things in different places.

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Rather than focusing on reforms carried out in the era of Classical Populism—policies associated with Import Substitution Industrialization, investment in infrastructure and human capital, and the formation of pro-poor welfare states—populist regimes are described in the literature as less-than-democratic subspecies of democracy. They mark an authoritarian and illiberal slide within the boundaries of electoral politics, one in which power is concentrated in an executive that works zealously to undermine the opposition, the media, and any institutional check on their unfettered power (Castañeda, 2006; de la Torre, 2013; de la Torre & Ortiz, 2016; Weyland, 2013). It unsettles the mechanisms of horizontal accountability—the checks and balances internal to the liberal democratic state—necessary for the functioning of an effectively consolidated democracy (O’Donnell, 1994; Levitsky & Loxton, 2013). The style of the charismatic leader with a direct, usually uninstitutionalized, connection to the pueblo facilitates this expansion in executive power. Generations of elite rule fueled mass distrust and animosity toward politics as usual, granting the populist leader a high degree of popular legitimacy at the expense of conventional legality. It is this latter constellation of attributes that worries liberal observers, and why many commentators saw the Chávez and Correa governments as the return of familiar populist excesses (Castañeda, 2006; Corrales & Penfold, 2015; de la Torre, 2010). We address these concerns in subsequent sections and chapters, but at this point it is important to highlight that by prioritizing politics over economics in their analyses, these theories of populism identify it as an authoritarian tendency lurking along the edges of liberal orders: a threat from within democracy itself. Our criticism is that this concern with populism both naturalizes and valorizes technocratic and polyarchic (that is to say, exclusionary and unequal) rule—exclusionary modes of rule that are also characteristics of the extractivist state form in Venezuela and Ecuador that both extend beyond discrete populist sequences and inspire the sort of mobilizations that make liberal critics of classical populism so nervous. The question of why populists’ calls for wide-sweeping change resonate with so many sectors of their societies—even if they are ultimately disingenuous—are rarely given full consideration or appreciated.

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Neopopulist Interludes The prioritization of political style over economic and social policy lent itself to the conceptualization of neopopulism in the 1990s. Divorced from classical populism’s emphasis on state-led development and pro-poor policies, neopopulism was meant to identify the paradoxical emergence of charismatic politicians who ran for office on strong anti-elite and anti-status quo platforms while enacting neoliberal structural adjustment. Like their classical predecessors, neopopulists ruled in a highly verticalist fashion with little respect for or willingness to abide by established institutional checks on their power. However, unlike classical populists, these new figures used their wide-ranging powers to execute neoliberal structural adjustment: reforms that privatized state industries, dismantled welfare programs, lowered workplace and wage protections while weakening tariff barriers that favored national industries, unilaterally opening national markets to competition from abroad. These reforms disproportionately harmed the poorest and most marginalized while redistributing social wealth upward, domestically and internationally. Arguably the clearest expression of this new populism was Alberto Fujimori of Peru’s autogolpe (self-coup) of 1992. Facing gridlock as he pursued neoliberal economic reforms alongside a brutal counterinsurgency against the Maoist Sendero Luminosoguerrillas, Fujimori used the military to dissolve the legislative and judiciary branches of government. The new constitution of 1992 “effectively establish[ed] a semiauthoritarian state” while constitutionalizing harsh structural adjustment programs (Bury, 2005: 222). Among other reforms, the resulting constitution privatized significant portions of the Peruvian economy, including the mining sector. These privatizations combined with reforms surrounding Foreign Direct Investment, new bilateral trade agreements, and the pacification of significant mineral-rich territories lead to the “transnationalization” of the mining sector and an outsized role of extraction in the national economy.2 By 2005 at least 10% of national territory was covered by subsurface mineral claims (Bury, 2005: 225). Neopopulism in the case of Fujimorismo, particularly in the de-nationalization of Peruvian territory, was exactly the opposite of classical populism. It was

2 For more discussion of neopopulism in Latin America, see: Weyland (1996, 2003), Knight (1998), and Ellner (2002).

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authoritarian and personalistic, but highly internationalized and lacking in any sort of social welfare core. Neopopulists often used bait-and-switch tactics to enact neoliberal reforms despite explicit campaign promises to the contrary (Weyland, 1996: 4). In Venezuela, for example, Carlos Andrés Pérez announced his gran viraje (great turnaround) after campaigning on an explicitly antineoliberal and anti-International Monetary Fund platform in the 1988 presidential elections. During his campaign, Pérez pledged a return to the petroleum-financed and state-lead developmentalism of his first term in office (1974–1979), when turbulence in the Middle East was a boon for Venezuelan oil exports. The 1980s were much less kind to Venezuela, however, and after almost a decade of piecemeal but nonetheless painful economic reforms, voters were primed for an anti-neoliberal candidate. Andrés Pérez won handily with that platform, but shortly after taking office he signed structural adjustment packages demanded by the IMF into law, triggering the implosion of Venezuela’s socioeconomic order and no small loss of lives in the ensuing conflicts, austerity, and crackdowns.3 Similar dynamics have been at play in early twenty-first-century Ecuador. Lucio Gutierrez capitalized on a wave of indigenous-led anti-austerity protests to win the presidency in 2003. Gutierrez emphasized his role in the military in triggering the downfall of his notoriously corrupt and pro-market successor, Abdalá Bucaram. In the 2003 elections, Gutierrez signaled his reform agenda by, among other things, forging an electoral alliance with the pan-indigenista movement Pachakutik. However, upon taking office Gutierrez made clear he had no intention of reversing the privatizations, dollarization, or austerity measures that had roiled Ecuador throughout the preceding decade (de la Torre, 2013; Moreano & Donoso, 2006; Weyland, 2003). By the twenty-first century, neopopulism’s moment, in which charismatic leaders fostered personalistic ties with largely unorganized and impoverished masses while pursuing neoliberal structural adjustment (Barr, 2003; Weyland, 1996), seemed to have passed. In response to the social crises triggered by neoliberalization throughout the 1980s and 1990s—the growth of inequality, precarity, and impoverishment coupled with the foreclosure of effective democratic participation, access to health care and education, and the reasonable expectation for upward 3 For more on Carlos Andrés Pérez and neoliberalization in Venezuela, see the following chapter.

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mobility (Escobar, 2010)—prompted some scholars to signal alarm bells at the ostensible return of classical populism (see, most characteristically, Castañeda, 2006; Levitsky & Loxton, 2013). Like many of their predecessors, the literature on neopopulism and post-neoliberal populism we discuss below extends familiar liberal criticisms of populism as bumps along the linear path of democratization. They miss the degree to which, first, backlashes to elite rule can and should be understood as rational responses to a dysfunctional order, and second, that populist sequences may not be abnormal or pathological but endemic to any politics based on or invested in conceptions of liberalism characterized by inequality and exclusion. It is to this consideration that we now turn.

Critical and Radical Democracy Approaches A final group of conceptual approaches to populism also acknowledge its fraught relationship with—and antagonism to—liberal democracy. However, whereas the classical and neopopulist approaches raised concerns with populism’s attack on democracy or its retarding effects on democratic consolidation, this group of theories see in populism the inevitable consequence of liberalism’s shortcomings. Rather than a threat to democracy, outbursts of populism are here understood as moments of democratic possibility—raw potential that can either reinvigorate stagnant liberal orders and incorporate the previously excluded into the body politic, or less creative moments of destruction that highlight the ever present but hidden dangers of prevailing social orders. In Margaret Canovan’s (1999) estimation, populism occupies the gap between “redemptive” understandings of democracy based on popular sovereignty and direct participation with the “practical,” bureaucratic, and representative mechanisms of the modern state (see also Panizza & Miorelli, 2009). Here, populism gives expression to the rejection of what Enrique Dussel (2006) has described as the entropy-prone nature of states and institutions. With time, forms of constituted and consolidated power come to see themselves as the source of their own strength, their own legality, and legitimacy, regardless of their delivery of livelihoods or the participation of the pueblo. Liberal Democracies’ prioritization of procedural over substantive equality, sober and cautious debate over radical reform, and representative over participatory democracy all render it particularly prone to this sort of entropy.

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In this light, populism’s threat to liberal democracy is a good thing. Rather than a marking of democratic underdevelopment, populism is here recognized as the expression of discontent feeding into renewed civic engagement. It is an upsurge of participation, sometimes conventional and electoral, sometimes less so, that could (potentially, but never inevitably) give new life to the sorts of stagnant institutions and civic apathy that characterize much of life under late carbon capitalism. For Benjamin Arditi (2007), “populism is not the ‘other’ of democracy, but rather a shadow that follows it continually” (82). It occupies an “internal periphery,” or “a hazy territory that indicates the outermost limit of an inside and the beginning of an outside of a system, a grey area where the distinction between inside and outside is an effect of polemic” (87). In this sense, populism is democracy’s constant companion. It is internal to the machinations of representative politics, but in its appeal to the direct rule of the people threatens (or promises) a rupture, beyond proceduralism toward a more authentic and horizontal political practice. Critical and radical democratic readings of populism either implicitly or explicitly oppose teleological understandings of democratic consolidation. They are, rather, spatial or dialectical. Democracy and populism coexist, entangle, and engender one another. Ernesto Laclau (2005) has perhaps gone farthest and most comprehensively in this line of thinking. Laclau sees the concerns of liberal commentators that populism is a capricious, unstable, and dangerous possibility and practice as symptomatic of a fear of democracy. Laclau contends that the dismissal and denigration of populism, having been confined to “the unthinkable” by responsible policymakers and their advisors, is part of a general strategy of separating the “normal from the pathological” that works to disqualify progressive movements (19). Against this, Laclau develops an understanding of populism as a discursive phenomenon and a relational practice that is absolutely central to the formation of shared public identities (13). He identifies populism at work with the logic of hegemony, which, as he argued with Chantal Mouffe (1985) in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, offers a nonessentialist form of transformative politics. As Jon BeasleyMurray (2010) concludes, for Laclau, “populism is hegemony is politics” (47). Populism, then, is not merely a symptom or variant of democracy, much less a threat to it; populism is the royal road to developing a collective and oppositional politics in the era of “globalized capitalism” (Laclau, 2005: 250).

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For Laclau, populism offers a mode of engagement that bridges independence and interdependence. Productive and transformative processes underlie the spectacle, bombast, and mass mobilization that draw the most attention in populist moments. Unlike liberal critics, Lalcau emphasizes the construction and role of the people over the personality traits of a leader. In the course of mobilization isolated social identities—what Laclau calls “demands”—form in opposition to an established power when the content of their identity or request cannot be absorbed and assimilated into the prevailing order. These “demands” are explicitly political in the sense that they cannot be reduced to the economic mode of production or class; they are democratic in the sense that one cannot be subordinated to another by any criteria other than personal preference. Individual frustrations scale up to demands, antagonism and, potentially, regime change when distinct demands interact with one another through their mutual identification with a third, unifying signifier. It is by choosing to identify with this mediating “empty signifier”—the populist leader, the nation or people, or often, both—that discrete political entities form larger publics (93). Laclau describes this process as the transition from democratic demands to “the people” (71)—the sine qua non of all politics, and the necessary first step for any egalitarian or democratic project (225). These critical approaches to populism—as a rejuvenating force within contemporary politics, liberal democracy’s internal periphery, or the hegemonic formation of popular identities and radical democratic praxis— avoid the pathologizing conclusions reached by liberal critics of classical and neopopulist approaches. They are not, however, without their limits. Considering populism as the vitalistic force pushing democracy through the ossifying effects of liberal institutionalism fails to escape the cyclical consequences of modern republican politics. The power struggles that define the political take the form of a serialized drama. Demands become interchangeable. Social mobilization, if successful, results in an institutionalization that eventually, inevitably, reproduces new experiences of alienation and marginalization. These new grievances in turn trigger new demands, new mobilizations, and new institutions—we remain in a circle. Laclau goes so far as to make a virtue of necessity of fragmentation and representation, effectively remaking modern liberalism under the guise of radical democracy (Kingsbury, 2015, 2016). Critical approaches to populism do well to demystify populist moments but go too far in the opposite direction. Rendering populism as normal

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risks overlooking or downplaying the seriousness of the negative attributes with which it is rightly or wrongly associated. The directly democratic potentials of populism place well deserved emphasis on the people over the leader. However, they also naturalize—or ignore—a form of the state that has proven time and again prone to the sorts of democratic accountability deficits that open the door for numerous environmental (and other) abuses. This is especially the case, as we shall argue, for extractive states in Latin America like Venezuela and Ecuador. Critical and radical democratic approaches to populism refute teleological understandings of democratic consolidation, but miss the enduring state forms underlying liberal or illiberal democratic politics. Rather than the universal, linear, and progressive path of political development toward some sort of Dahlian polyarchy, these readings see politics as cyclical and dialectical: populism and democracy are entangled. Populisms expose the exclusionary realities of elite rule parading as democracy. However, against the more optimistic renderings offered by Laclau and Canovan, we hasten to add that this exposure is by no means guaranteed to open toward more egalitarian or ecologically sound horizons. This has been the case in Latin America perhaps more than anywhere else in recent history.

Populism and Nature Populism makes environmentalists nervous. So-called populists of the right and far right—Donald Trump in the United States or Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, for example—dismiss climate science as lies, fake news, or international conspiracies to block their respective nations’ progress. Against a growing consensus on the need to transition the global economy into greener energy sources and practices, these populists have increased— and campaigned on increasing—carbon emissions through extraction and deforestation in the name of economic progress. The political and economic nationalism of Trump and Bolsonaro is steeped in an outdated understanding of industry and development, and the fantastical return to a prior state of politics, nature, and people (Kojola, 2018). Beyond nostalgia, it also claims to resist global scientific and cultural elites attempting to influence a nation’s ability to control its own policymaking agendas. These figures adapt the classical “us versus them” or “people versus elites” discursive frame of populism and deploy it against the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Hollywood campaigns against (for example) deforestation and the coal

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industry (Forchtner & Kølvraa, 2015; Mann & Wainwright, 2018). Sovereignty, nationalism, and development are thus identified with extraction and pitted against the murky forces of globalization (Brown, 2014; Lockwood, 2018; Malm, 2016). As the climate crisis deepens, political entrepreneurs of the right are also deploying ecological rationales for xenophobic policies. Often framed in a sort of “blood and soil” discourse common to European populisms of the far right, these expressions of a nascent, full-blown “eco-fascism” pit a people against an anti-people on the grounds of the non-renewability of finite space and resources within the nation’s borders (see Ashford, 2019; Sayare & De La Baume, 2010; Wilson, 2019; Zimmerman, 2004). Exclusionary environmental populism need not be as virulently antiimmigrant as Europe’s new right has deployed it. For example, Paul and Anne Ehrlich’s (1971) notorious neo-Malthusian Population Bomb was prompted by a suggestion from the then president of the Sierra Club, one of the largest conservation NGOs in the United States. The authors’ preferred original title, Population, Resources, and Environment explicitly tied exclusionary policies to environmental protection (Ehrlich, 1971; Ehrlich & Ehrlich, 2009). Populisms of the left also ring alarm bells for environmentalists. Oil revenues, for example, offer enhanced opportunities for leaders to attract and maintain support, without asking much in turn from supporters. Populist leaders are thus incentivized to maximize extraction, as it provides a comparatively cost-effective means to securing the coalitions required for re-election (Brienen, 2017; De la Torre, 2013; Lyall & Valdivia, 2019; Matsen et al., 2016; Mazzuca, 2013; Saguin, 2019). The authoritarian tendencies within populist politics are particularly exposed in response to opposition to extraction. Here, opposition to extraction is opposition to development and a threat to the security and future of the nation (Acosta, 2016: 303). In the case of Correa’s Ecuador, for example, organizations such as Yasunidos, Acción Ecológica (Ecological Action), and the Pachamama Foundation that opposed drilling for oil in the Amazon or the expansion of megamining projects in the Andes were persecuted under anti-terror laws, castigated in state media, and attacked as elitists out of touch with the needs of the pueblo—the country’s poor majority (Becker, 2013). Studies of populisms of the right and left tend to agree that the electoral short-termism of populist leaders can lead to negative impacts on policies that require foregoing immediate revenues in favor of longer-term

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environmental sustainability (Eisenstadt & West, 2019; Kenney-Lazar, 2019). While the motivations differ, populists need to increase revenues to deliver tangible benefits to their core constituencies, and the sums generated by oil and other extractives are often simply too great to ignore. This can lead to confrontations with transnational corporations (Berrios et al., 2011; Philip, 1982; Tsfaros, 2007) or to mixed enterprises that, despite the nationalist rhetoric of leaders, deepen a country’s entanglement in global networks of capital and natural resources (Terán Mantovani, 2014). In all cases, and even in those where nationalism frames politics as the battle between el pueblo and predatory foreign capital, the biggest threat to the nation, development, and the people are those who would stand in the way of extraction—often with violent consequences (Antias, 2018; Middeldorp & Le Billion, 2019). The ostensibly populist regimes in early twenty-first-century Latin America brought macroeconomic, structural, and megaproject developmentalist perspectives back into vogue (Gudynas, 2010, 2015; Svampa, 2015). This developmentalist orientation, writes María García-Guadilla (2009) in respect to Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela, is “incompatible” with notions of sustainability (206), “deepening…a model in which the environment is totally subordinated and the protagonistic participation of communities and social movements is rejected” (211). From this perspective, then, what is referred to as populism in Venezuela deepens existing dynamics and breathes new life into a state–society–nature dynamic in which the state, identified with the executive branch, dominates and exploits society and nature. Both right and left variants of populism in the twenty-first century can be seen as reactions to the neoliberalization of the global economy that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. By capitalizing on widespread anxieties and dislocations that only grew with the global financial crisis of 2008, recent populist phenomena can once again be seen as a politics of transition, and increasingly, of crisis. The climate crisis is thus also a major factor in driving this ostensibly populist moment, displacing populations and heightening concerns about livelihoods across geographical and economic space. So too are other environmental challenges, of which populism is once again less a cause than a symptom. Right-wing populisms see climate change as an opportunity to further advance nationalistic and xenophobic agendas. Left-wing populisms ignore it or displace responsibility in order to pursue higher degrees of social development.

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Both, however, are intent on capturing the extractivist state as a necessary precondition for any political project they pursue.

Conclusion: Populism and the Extractivist State in Latin America In this chapter, we have argued that it is a category error to classify the states that preceded classical, neoliberal, or early twenty-first-century populist sequences as either liberal or liberalizing. This is the case regardless of how populism is understood—either as threatening degradation to or internal element of liberal democracy. While there were certainly elements of liberalism at play in the populist dynamics we have assessed here, these were neither primary nor enduring. It would rather be more accurate to understand the contexts from which Latin American populisms emerge in terms of extractive state forms. The prerogatives of the extractivist state span populist and non-populist regimes of the right, left, and center. Having critically engaged with the main conceptualizations of populism presented in the literature, and populism’s relationship to current environmental crises, we continue in the next chapter to contextualize populism as a moment that emerges against the backdrop of a unique triad in extractive states. We propose an analytical lens that integrates the logic of action of extractivist state formations, the democratic accountability deficits they bring with them, and the enabling conditions this creates for populisms to emerge. We posit that, in the absence of functioning democratic and welfare institutions, figures like Chávez in Venezuela and Correa in Ecuador emerge as attractive alternatives to business as usual—and rationally so. However, the environmental and social costs of extraction persist. The ecological toll of megamines and carbon capitalism is not reduced when the rents captured by regimes are more equitably distributed among their populations. Nor, as we explore in subsequent chapters, are “progressive” extractivist states ultimately more accountable than their predecessors. The feedback loop of extraction, accountability deficits, and so-called populist reactions—persists.

References Acosta, A. (2016). Post-Extractivismo: Entre el Discuro y la Praxis: Algunas Reflexiones Gruesas para la Acción. Ciencia Política, 11(21), 287–332.

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Antias, P. (2018). Limits to decolonization: Indigeneity, territory, and hydrocarbon politics in the Bolivian Chaco. Cornell University Press. Arditi, B. (2007). Politics on the edges of liberalism: Difference, Populism, revolution, agitation. Edinburgh University Press. Ashford, J. (2019, October 3). What is eco-fascism? The Week UK. https://www. theweek.co.uk/103616/what-is-eco-fascism. Accessed 18 December 2020. Barr, R. (2003). The persistence of neopopulism in Peru: From Fujimori to Toledo. Third World Quarterly, 24(6), 1161–1178. Beasley-Murray, J. (2010). Posthegemony: Political theory and Latin America. University of Minnesota Press. Becker, M. (2013). The stormy relations between Rafael Correa and social movements in Ecuador. Latin American Perspectives, 40(3), 43–62. Berrios, R., Marak, A., & Morgenstern, S. (2011). Explaining hydrocarbon nationalization in Latin America: Economics and political ideology. Review of International Political Economy, 18(5), 673–697. Brienen, M. (2017). A populism of indignities: Bolivian populism under Evo Morales. The Brown Journal of World Affairs, 23, 77–92. Brown, M. B. (2014). Climate science, populism, and the democracy of rejection. In D. A. Crow & M. T. Boykoff (Eds.), Culture, politics and climate change (pp. 129–145). Routledge. Bury, J. (2005). Mining mountains: Neoliberalism, land tenure, livelihoods, and the new Peruvian mining industry in Cajamarca. Environment and Planning A, 37, 221–239. Canovan, M. (1999). Trust the people! Populism and the two faces of democracy. Political Studies, 47 (1), 2–16. Castañeda, J. (2006). Latin America’s left turn. Foreign Affairs, 85(3), 28–43. Conniff, M. (1999). Populism in Latin America. University of Alabama Press. Corrales, J., & Penfold, M. (2015). Dragon in the tropics: Venezuela and the legacy of Hugo Chávez. Brookings Institution. Dahl, R. A. (1978). Polyarchy: Participation and opposition. Yale University Press. De la Torre, C. (2010). Populist seduction in Latin America. Ohio State University Press. De la Torre, C. (2013). Latin America’s authoritarian drift: Technocratic populism in Ecuador. Journal of Democracy, 24(3), 33–46. De la Torre, C., & Ortiz Lemos, A. (2016). Populist polarization and the slow death of democracy in Ecuador. Democratization, 23(2), 221–241. DiTella, T. S. (1965). Populismo y reforma en América Latina. Desarrollo Económico, 6, 391–425. Dussel, E. (2006). 20 tesis de política. Siglo XXI. Ehrlich, P. (1971). The population bomb. Ballentine Books. Ehrlich, P., & Ehrlich, A. (2009). The population bomb: Revisited. The Electronic Journal of Sustainable Development, 1(3), 5–13.

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Eisenstadt, T., & West, J. K. (2019). Who speaks for nature? Indigenous movements, public opinion, and the petro state in Ecuador. Oxford University Press. Ellner, S. (2002). The tenuous credtials of Latin American democracy in the age of neoliberalism. Rethinking Marxism, 14(3), 76–93. Escobar, A. (2010). Latin America at a crossroads: Alternative modernizations, post-liberalism, or post-development. Cultural Studies, 24(1), 1–65. Forchtner, B., & Kølvraa, C. (2015). The nature of nationalism: Populist radical right parties on countryside and climate. Nature and Culture, 10(2), 199– 224. García-Guadilla, M. P. (2009). Ecosocialismo del siglo XXI y modelo de desarrollo bolivariano: los mitos de la sustentabilidad ambiental y de la democracia participativa en venezuela. Revista Venezolana de Economía y Ciencias Sociales, 15(1), 187–223. Germani, G. (1973). Populismo y contradicciones de clase en Latinoamérica. SA Mexico. Gudynas, E. (2010). The new extractivism of the 21st century: Ten urgent theses about extractivism in relation to current South American progressivism. Americas Program Report. https://www.americas.org/6615/. Gudynas, E. (2015). Extractivismos: ecología, economía y política de un modo de entender el desarrollo y la naturaleza. Centro de Documentación e Información Bolívia. Kenney-Lazar, M. (2019). Neoliberalizing authoritarian environmental governance in (post)socialist Laos. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 109(2), 338–348. Kingsbury, D. V. (2015). Populism as post-politics: Ernesto Laclau, hegemony, and the limits of democracy. Radical Philosophy Review, 19, 569–591. Kingsbury, D. V. (2016). Oil’s colonial residues: Geopolitics, identity, and resistance in Venezuela. Bulletin of Latin American Research, 35(4), 423–436. Knight, A. (1998). Populism and neopopulism in Latin America, especially Mexico. Journal of Latin American Studies, 40(2), 223–248. Kojola, E. (2018). Bringing back the mines and a way of life: Populism and the politics of extraction. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 109(2), 371–381. Laclau, E. (2005). On populist reason. Verso. Laclau, E., & Mouffe, C. (1985). Hegemony and socialist strategy: Towards a radical democratic politics. Verso Trade. Le Bon, G. (2002 [1896]). The crowd: A study of the popular mind. Dover. Levitsky, S., & Loxton, J. (2013). Populism and competitive authoritarianism in the Andes. Democratization, 20(1), 107–136. Lockwood, M. (2018). Right-wing populism and the climate change agenda: Exploring the linkages. Environmental Politics, 27 (4), 712–732.

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Lyall, A., & Valdivia, G. (2019). The speculative petro-state: Volatile oil prices and resource populism in Ecuador. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 109(2), 349–360. Malm, A. (2016). Fossil capital: The rise of steam power and the roots of global warming. Verso Books. Mann, G., & Wainright, J. (2018). Climate Leviathan: A political theory of our planetary future. Verso. Matsen, E., Natvik, G. J., & Torvik, R. (2016). Petro populism. Journal of Development Economics, 118, 1–12. Mazzuca, S. L. (2013). Lessons from Latin America: The rise of rentier populism. Journal of Democracy, 24(2), 108–122. Middeldorp, N., & Le Billon, P. (2019). Deadly environmental governance: Authoritarianism, eco-populism, and the repression of environmental land defenders. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 109(2), 324– 337. Moreano, H., & Donoso, C. (2006). Populismo y Neopopulismo en Ecuador. Revista Opera, 6(6), 117–140. O’Donnell, G. (1994). The state, democratization, and some conceptual problems (a Latin American view with glances at some post-communist countries). In W. C. Smith, C. H. Acuña, & E. A. Gamarra (Eds.), Latin American political economy in the age of neoliberal reform. Theoretical and comparative perspectives for the 1990s (pp. 157–180). North-South Center Press. Panizza, F., & Miorelli, R. (2009). Populism and democracy in Latin America. Ethics & International Affairs, 23(1), 39–46. Philip, G. (1982). Oil and politics in Latin America: Nationalist movements and state companies (Vol. 40). Cambridge University Press. Quijano, A. (1998). La Economía Popular y Sus Caminos En América Latina. Mosca Azul Editores. Saguin, K. (2019). Return the lake to the people: Populist political rhetoric and the fate of a resource frontier in the Philippines. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 109(2), 434–442. Sayare, S., & De La Baume, M. (2010, December 16). In France, civil unions gain favor over marriage. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2010/ 12/16/world/europe/16france.html. Svampa, M. (2015). Commodities consensus: Neoextractivism and enclosure of the commons in Latin America. South Atlantic Quarterly, 114(1), 65–82. Terán Mantovani, E. (2014). El Fantasma de la Gran Venezuela: Un Estudio del mito y los dilemas del petro-Estado en la Revolución Bolivariana. Centro de Estudios Latinoamericanos Rómulo Gallegos. Tsfaros, N. E. (2007). Big oil and big talk: Resource populism in international politics. SAIS Review, 27 (1), 147–157.

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Veblen, T. B. (1894). The Army of the Commonweal. Journal of Political Economy, 2(3), 456–461. Weyland, K. (1996). Neopopulism and neoliberalism in Latin America: Unexpected affinities. Studies in Comparative International Development, 31(3), 3–31. Weyland, K. (2003). Neopopulism and neoliberalism in Latin America: How much affinity? Third World Quarterly, 24, 1095–1115. Weyland, K. (2013). Latin America’s authoritarian drift: The threat from the populist Left. Journal of Democracy, 24(3), 18–32. Wilson, J. (2019, March 19). Eco-fascism is undergoing a revival in the fetid culture of the extreme right. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/ world/commentisfree/2019/mar/20/eco-fascism-is-undergoing-a-revival-inthe-fetid-culture-of-the-extreme-right. Zimmerman, M. E. (2004). Ecofascism: An enduring temptation. Environmental Philosophy: From Animal Rights to Radical Ecology, 4, 1–30.

CHAPTER 3

The Self-Reinforcing Effects of the Extractive State

Abstract This chapter examines the constraints placed on political and environmental action by extractive states. Building on our critical assessment of populism in Chapter 2, we acknowledge populism is a backlash to social inequality that has been justified by sedimented layers of political exclusion. However, in a departure from the critical explanations of populism, we develop an analytical framework that highlights the powerful limits that the extractive state imposes on opportunities to breathe new life into stagnant political institutions and support sustained environmental action. Keywords Extractive state · Petrostate · Populism · Democratic accountability

On February 16, 2016, shortly after Venezuelan crude bottomed out at $25 per barrel, and with the enhanced power of a declared economic state of emergency he promised to “forcefully apply,” Nicolás Maduro announced the “14 motors of the productive economy” that “overcome all of the … economic mechanisms of the old petroleum rentism that have made our economy non-functioning and dependent” (MonitorProDaVinci, 2016). One of the most controversial aspects of the 14 motors has been the plan to develop the Arco Minero del Orinoco (Orinoco © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 T. Kramarz and D. Kingsbury, Populist Moments and Extractivist States in Venezuela and Ecuador, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70963-1_3

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Mining Arc, AMO)—a mining megaproject located in the Venezuelan Amazon, comprised of roughly 111,000 square kilometers, or 12% of the national territory. Later that month, Maduro announced that a number of international consortiums—including a multibillion-dollar contract with the Canadian firm Gold Reserve—would build mixed companies with the government and the military to initiate exploration for and exploitation of gold, coltan, and other minerals. As Venezuelan sociologist Edgardo Lander (2016) pointed out at the time, the negotiations and planning surrounding the AMO had been conducted with such secrecy vis-à-vis the Venezuelan public that concerned citizens had to look for information abroad to learn any details of the deal. For its part, Gold Reserve triumphed. In addition to the cash settlement closing its previous cases against the government, the company was also promised that Venezuela will “establish a special customs framework for the mixed company and other tax and economic benefits” (BusinessWire, 2016). By late 2017 the AMO increasingly resembled an all but completed tragedy in the proper sense: the unhappy conclusion was accompanied by a sense of inevitability. In the same session that the Asamblea Nacional Constituyente—the body convened by Maduro in order to bypass the opposition-controlled National Assembly earlier that year—heard and unanimously approved a proposal by the president on the opening of the AMO, they also approved a law rewriting the conditions under which foreign firms can invest in Venezuela—all under the call to develop a “post-rentista” economy (El Universal, 2017). In other words, despite Maduro’s promise that 60% of all profits from mining activities, which the government assured relied on “ecologically sound” methods, would be returned to Venezuelans “in the form of social investments” (TeleSur, 2016), the framework of the deal looked disturbingly familiar. Negotiations were conducted behind closed doors. Foreign companies charged with the technical work reaped the profits, even before mining begun. The public was expected to remain outside the process as officials determined the scale, scope, and distribution of costs and benefits. Protests challenging the impacts on the environment and on indigenous peoples were smeared by the government as supporting the opposition and criminalized. Executive decree 2,248, issued in early 2016, declared the AMO a “strategic development zone,” which bars any “particularistic interest”—including indigenous peoples, unions, impacted communities, or any other group of concerned citizens—from protesting or otherwise interfering with mining activities now identified with the “general interest

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of the nation” (quoted in Rosales Nieves, 2017: 132). Violent tensions in the AMO and surrounding areas continued to escalate as indigenous peoples, various branches of the state and military, and local and transnational irregular miners competed for control over these new extractive frontiers. The development of the AMO failed to provide a viable exit trajectory from what Maduro himself referred to as a “non-functioning” rentier state. Indeed, the proposed development of the Arco Minero is little more than an extension of Venezuela’s entrenched extractivist past. The mixed enterprises that will carry out the bulk of extraction are less cooperative ventures than leases. Foreign firms will provide and retain ownership of equipment and expertise while extracting, exporting, and processing the minerals of the AMO in exchange for a fee paid to the central government, thus displacing or overshadowing local stakeholders. The government (Bolivarian or otherwise), is in turn expected to provide the legal framework, stability, and if necessary, repressive force to guarantee the smooth flow of operations. By late 2018, Maduro had signed agreements with over 135 international firms for the exploitation of the AMO. The controversies surrounding the AMO illustrate neatly the selfreinforcing effects of the extractive state. Maduro’s plan was explicit: Venezuela hoped to use resource extraction as a means to escape the negative political, social, economic, and environmental effects of extractivism. It is a contradictory logic that has more to do with the enduring structures of a state that has always functioned as a tool for the outward flow of raw materials and wealth than with any meaningful hope for development. As we discuss in the next chapter, this material and ideological attribute of the uneven global economy is one to which Venezuelan regimes since the early twentieth century have adapted. Venezuelan extractivism, like extractivism elsewhere, cannot be explained by the whims of particular leaders—be they populists, liberals, or authoritarians. Populists—to the extent such a term is useful for making sense of politics—might shift the priorities of the extractivist state, but extraction persists. In this chapter, we argue in line with the critical approaches on populism described earlier, that populism is a backlash to social inequality that has been justified by sedimented layers of political exclusion. As we have seen in the North Atlantic throughout the early twenty first century, failure or refusal to acknowledge the root causes of discontent—dispossession—only serves to intensify the reaction. This has also been the case in

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Latin America since the twentieth century. However, in a departure from the critical explanations of populism, we develop an analytical framework that highlights the powerful limits that the extractive state imposes on opportunities to breathe new life into stagnant political institutions and support sustained environmental action. We now outline the framework for analysis, starting with the influence of the extractive state form, and then its significance in the extractivism–accountability–populism nexus.

The Curse of the Extractive State The literature on extractivism and its impact on the political and economic life of a state has a long research trail. In The Wealth of Nations Adam Smith warned: Of all those expensive and uncertain projects, however, which bring bankruptcy upon the greater part of the people who engage in them, there is none perhaps more ruinous than the search after new silver and gold mines. It is perhaps the most disadvantageous lottery in the world, or the one in which the gain of those who draw the prizes bears the least proportion to the loss of those who draw the blanks….They are the projects, therefore, to which of all others a prudent law-giver, who desired to increase the capital of his nation, would least choose to give any extraordinary encouragement. (Smith, 1776: 230)

Smith’s cautionary note on the dangers of pursuing mining projects based on the experience of the “natives” and the Spanish crown following Columbus’ first travels to America can be extended to Latin America’s experience with oil extraction in the twentieth century. In the Paradox of Plenty, Terry Lynn Karl illustrates how Venezuela’s agricultural sector was gutted by the oil industry and the massive influxes of foreign capital and goods that accompanied it. High reserves of foreign currency made imports—from luxury items to daily staples—cheaper than locally produced goods. “Faced with a loss of employment in their villages,” she writes, “rural laborers headed toward the lucrative jobs in the oil fields or employment in an urban public works program. With the stagnation of agriculture and the pull of petroleum forcing peasants off the land, Venezuela experienced the fastest rate of urbanization in Latin America” (82).

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Unlike the dynamics in early twentieth-century Argentina, or earlier, in Northern Europe, urbanization in Venezuela was not triggered by industrialization. Instead, emerging geographical and class dynamics formed what Karl describes as an “inverted pyramid” in which “the generation and rapid circulation of petrodollars, the result of rent rather than real productive activities, meant that a largely nonproductive urban middle class preceded and outnumbered a slowing growing working class” (83). Cities grew and GDP expanded, but neither did so as a result of an organic growth in the economic activities of the population. Growth rather followed extractivist principles: consumption ruled over production, the workforce remained largely precarious and un-proletarianized, and concerns of ecological, economic, or social sustainability were by and large ignored by a government unfettered by any robust fiscal or electoral constraints. There is an extensive literature on the effects of the so-called resourcecurse (Auty, 1993, 1997; Crivelli & Gupta, 2014; Di John, 2011; Gelb, 1988; Lahiri-Dutt, 2006; Ross, 2013; Rosser, 2006; Stevens & Deitsche, 2007; Van de Ploeg, 2011; Watts, 2012; Weszkalnys, 2011).1 The central thesis of the curse is that resource-rich nations, particularly those endowed with oil, tend to suffer more political and economic maladies than their resource-deficient neighbors. However, an empirical regularity describes a correlation between variables. Devising explanatory mechanisms that might account for this observation has lagged behind. The literature has been broadly divided among those who identify endogenous versus exogenous factors at work. The majority of scholars have focused on endogenous factors such as corruption, rent-seeking, failure to diversify industrial sectors, and weak domestic institutions. For example, in a review of the economic literature, van de Ploeg (2011) finds that countries that fail to convert their resource curse into a blessing are afflicted by induced exchange rate appreciation, rent grabbing leading to conflict, and a difficulty in transforming resource funds into growth in other economic sectors. Murshed and Serino (2011) support the claim that state failures to diversify and add value to exports (e.g. processing of crude oil) play a key role in weak economic growth. Auty (1997) focuses on the effects of land distribution patterns on rent-seeking and 1 One of the earliest cross-country analyses that pointed to the negative relationship between oil abundance and economic growth in developing countries included Venezuela and Ecuador among the case studies (Gelb, 1988).

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the development of the curse. Khanna (2017) centers her argument of the causal mechanisms behind the curse squarely on weak institutions. She argues that resource-rich countries “adopt state ownership and control if the institutions are strong, if the institutions are weak, transfer ownership to foreign oil companies” (214). Edging away from a singular focus on endogenous conditions, Edwards (2017) argues that the bureaucratic capacity of state institutions along with dependence on foreign debt are the most important factors determining the impact of resource extraction on a state’s development pathway. Although the thesis is that countries rich in natural resources are also among those with the lowest rates of economic growth (Humphreys et al., 2007) some scholars have cautioned against a corresponding commodity determinism (Watts, 2004). High levels of natural resource wealth are often a necessary but not sufficient condition to predict poverty, as the case of Norway illustrates (de Ploeg, 2011; van Cori & Monni, 2014). There are structural conditions that enable the resource curse to take hold in countries like Venezuela and Ecuador. Soros (2007) claims that among all the conditions that enable oil producing countries to be trapped by the so-called resource curse, one of the least discussed and most important are political conditions. He focuses on the agency problems that come with the political configuration of the modern state. In order to exploit an oil field, international companies must obtain concessions from local rulers, but these are only agents, rather than the principals of the resources. “The rulers get their rewards from the companies not from the people whose interests they are supposed to safeguard” (Soros, 2007: 12). The owners of the oil companies instead are faithfully represented by their agents who use bribes or any other pressure necessary to obtain the concessions. Soros refers to this as asymmetric agency problems, which is a political issue of representation. The way in which Soros presents the asymmetry, however, supposes that the central problem lies with the corruptible state representatives of oil producing countries, ignoring that the problem of corruption also exists because oil companies operate in an international business climate of impunity which allows them to offer those bribes in the first place. Scholars like Lahiri-Dutt (2006) have argued that the way in which the resource curse has traditionally been analyzed eschews a more in-depth and systemic understanding of broader endogenous factors that shape particular contexts in which resource industries operate. For example, elite ownership and management of national resources affects the kinds

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of political and economic outcomes that most resource scholars identify—only much further down the causal chain of events. Additionally, domestic legal frameworks tend to protect and perpetuate the control of natural resources in the hands of elites which excludes access and influence by and for the vast majority of the population. Although Lahiri-Dutt focuses on the mining sector, her claim that the literature is missing a more holistic and integrated analysis of the social and political conditions surrounding extractivism in developing countries resonates with our analysis here. The extension of Venezuela into mining in the case of the AMO, and Ecuador’s similar pivot to megamining in the Andes in the face of its own limited petroleum reserves, suggests a need for an analytical treatment of PetroStates that is both more nuanced and more attuned to the persistent and globalizing effects of extractivism more generally. Siakwah (2017) casts a broader net to examine the interplay between endogenous and exogenous factors that shapes the context in which PetroStates operates. The absence of more studies in this vein, she argues, speaks to the bias toward methodological nationalism that affects the resource curse literature. This bias steers scholars to focus on the weaknesses or strengths that states manifest as the main culprits behind natural resource impacts. She refers us instead to the broader enabling environment that gives rise and fuels the resource curse in Africa, her area of study. Her argument employs the concept of globalized assemblages to highlight the “interactions within and among resource rich and exporting economies, transnational companies, national and local politics, technologies and globalised structures and actors as a new entry point to challenge and problematize the existing framing of the curse. It posits that the dimensions of the curse and manifest across space is conditioned and a function of globalised assemblages” (85). This analytical approach steers the conversation away from deterministic accounts of the recourse curse, shifting our attention toward historically contingent relationships between structures and actors. The preceding also suggests a need to get beyond the methodological nationalism of resource curse theories of extraction or populism and democracy as singular explanations for environmental action. The extractivist state emerges as the product of globalized assemblages. PetroStates, as we refer to the cases of Venezuela and Ecuador, in turn engender political institutions that are outwardly focused and preoccupied with their responsiveness to international oil markets, domestic hierarchies of influence conditioned by proximity to the oil industry, and reduced capacity

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to respond to domestic demands. In the next section, we focus on the impact that these global relationships have on democratic accountability at the domestic level.

Democratic Accountability Gaps We refer to the accountability of government institutions as one of the three key dimensions of our analytical framework because it articulates the relationship between extractive states and the emergence of populism. Accountability “refers to the obligation that authoritative actors have to provide justification for their actions, and the right of those affected to evaluate and sanction those actions” (Kramarz & Park, 2016: 4). We argue that the formal mechanisms of accountability that exist in liberal democracies, between the state and society and within the state apparatus itself, are either broken or nonexistent in the case of extractive states, and populist leaders exploit these cleavages for their own political projects and individual prospects. The promise of liberal democracies is governance by the people and for the people. Liberalism pledges to construct governing arrangements and political institutions that hold citizens’ interests as the compass guiding all government action (Brennan & Hamlin, 1994). One of the main mechanisms that states use to safeguard this goal is the separation of powers between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government. This doctrine creates accountability mechanisms through checks and balances within and between the branches to ensure that each is responsive to the polity and each other in fulfilling their remit. The literature on democratic accountability differentiates these mechanisms as vertical and horizontal types of accountability. Whereas liberal democracies premise these dynamics on a foundational social contract between citizens and governments, the operational logic of the extractive state is fundamentally different—even if it considers itself democratic. Fundamentally colonial in nature, extractive states guarantee the outward flow of resources and promise some degree of returns for a population left uninvolved in the transactions. Therefore, the organizing priorities of vertical and horizontal accountability in extractive states are in practice structurally different than in liberal democracies. It is the often uneasy coexistence of liberal discourses that promise one thing, and extractivist practices that deliver another, that render states vulnerable to populist reactions.

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Theoretically, vertical accountability mechanisms guide the relationship between the government and the electorate. They generate controls that the polity can exercise over governments to ensure elected representatives adhere to their mandates. The polity can punish or reward those who are accountable by voting with their ballot to sanction their elected leaders in the three branches. Horizontal accountability refers to the checks and balances that government branches place on each other to protect polities against monopolies of power, ensure adherence to laws, jurisdictions, and remits. The sanctioning mechanisms of horizontal accountability include oversight between state branches and agencies backed by the threat of legal action, including impeachment, on those who fail to serve the public good (Kramarz & Park, 2016; O’Donnell, 1998). However, O’Donnell (1998) argued that Latin American countries, like other democracies in transition, traditionally suffer from horizontal accountability deficits. In other words, the three branches of government do not adequately exercise checks and balances on each other. In such cases, the head of the executive branch often takes on patriarchal and larger than life roles, claiming to be the voice and champion of the people, and often seeks to establish a direct connection between he and the people. The legislative bodies and the courts are unable or unwilling to curtail executive overreach, which enable the head of state to claim an outsized position of authority in the political life of the country. The head of state presents himself (and it is still usually himself ) as the most democratic representative of the will of the people and forges a dyadic association between the electorate and himself. O’Donnell referred to this as the crisis of “delegative democracies,” a phenomenon that describes the accountability gaps generated by the traditional strongman dynamics of Latin America’s presidentialist politics. Presidentialist politics in Latin America are often characterized by a paternalistic relationship between the executive and society. For example, Wiarda (1981) argued that the distinctive features of the Iberic-Latin political tradition merit creating distinct measurable indicators of democracy for the region based on, among other expectations, that “strong, personalistic executive leadership, caudillo or Bonapartist rule is not only permissible but expected” (41). In the case of extractive states, the criteria for judging the head of state is based less on adherence to democratic procedure than to the results they deliver in terms of promises met, economic performance, or their embodiment of the general will—and often all three.

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This is not a prima facie absurd proposition. People are willing to bet on political figures that promise direct and unmediated forms of accountability and results because the experience of the average citizen of Venezuela and Ecuador is that many government agencies on the whole do not work for them. While resource curse accounts place too much weight on the power of specific commodities, and are limited by their methodological nationalism, they nonetheless correctly highlight many of the lived realities and institutional dynamics of extractive states. The effects of the transnational state–society–nature complex of late carbon capitalism—the lack of institutional transparency, the corruption, and the primary focus on satisfying the demands of global markets—cannot be denied (Biresselioglu et al., 2019; Caviedes & Fontaine, 2011; Di John, 2011; Larsen, 2006; Papyrakis, 2017; Wilson & Van Alstine, 2014). These practices and dynamics are often grafted onto already established elitist and racialized political cultures, reinforcing a generalized sentiment that state agencies, courts, and parliaments lack either the capacity or will to deliver on the needs and demands of the public. The state in extractivism’s state–society–nature dynamic is thus distanced, radically, from society and predatory in its relation to nature. No wonder then that modes of engaging the state on questions of environmental—or, for that matter, any other importance—trend toward the disruptive. These disruptions, triggered by long-standing gaps in accountability and effective participation, take myriad forms, from support for iconoclastic outsider candidates like Chávez or Correa to direct action. As one Amazonian anti-oil activist put it to us in 2017, the only way to get authorities’ attention is through deploying an escalating series of tactics— from protests to blockades and even to kidnappings—that hit the state in the only place it pays attention: the oil. While actions such as kidnapping oil workers or sabotaging drilling equipment are spectacular and require an intense degree of organization and commitment on the part of participants, they nonetheless continue to exist within a political universe that naturalizes and practices vertical over horizontal modes of accountability in terms of state–society–nature dynamics. We compliment this vertical-horizontal approach to understanding authority and accountability by asking for what, exactly, are authorities held to account? This refers us to the input versus output distinctions of accountability. Input accountability points to the means or processes used in governing and output accountability to the outcomes or ends achieved through appropriate governance—essentially a means-ends distinction.

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Input accountability emphasizes access to information, transparency, representation of stakeholders, and meaningful participation. Output accountability is concerned with responsibility for outcomes, resources used, and impact of government actions (Scharpf, 1999; Schmidt, 2013). There is a tendency in both policy and scholarly debates to focus on the results-based dimension of output accountability. It is also, in the best-case scenarios, the approach to accountability offered by extractive states. Political leaders are typically judged for delivering on very specific results—not for enabling broad participatory processes. When leaders promise to deliver economic benefits to traditionally excluded sectors of the population, they are not forcefully pressed to account for processes if they achieve those ends. This is not a problem circumscribed to governments in Latin America. International organizations like the World Bank, and bilateral development agencies like the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) have also increasingly relied on results-based aid models. For example, the framework of Payment by Results (PbR) provides foreign aid based on the delivery of concrete outputs such as a piece of infrastructure. As the UK Secretary of State for International Development claimed, this is a growing approach “We are pioneers of ‘Results Based Aid’… we are determined to take this approach further” (GOV.UK, 2014). Here too, results take precedence over processes. Input accountability remains a secondary or neglected dimension of political practice. Furthermore, as Kramarz and Park (2016: 4) argue, “rule makers and takers need to agree on the particular nature of the problem, its cause-effect linkages, and who is affected, in order to design accountability means that will meet desired ends.” In the context of democracies in transition—where mechanisms of horizontal accountability between government branches are weak or absent—foregoing social demands for input accountability further emboldens populist leaders to rely on a discourse of results as a way of justifying their means. In Venezuela, for example, the formation of the consejos comunales (communal councils—see Chapter 4) sought to horizontalize decisionmaking on a nationwide scale. However, rather than supplant the power of the executive branch—the logic of revolutionary “dual power” under which they were inaugurated—as Venezuela’s crises deepened since 2015 they were all too often limited in scope to their immediate surroundings, allowing the executive branch to further enhance its position. In Ecuador (see Chapter 5), the design of an initiative by environmentally minded elites based in the capital city excluded from decision-making those

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indigenous stakeholders whose lives in sacrifice zones would be most affected by the success or failure of the Yasuní-ITT Initiative. In either case, people are spoken for rather than with—while the potential results may ultimately be benign, they nonetheless remain paternalistic expressions of the extractive state’s failure to deliver input accountability. In the next section, we pull together the three conceptual claims borrowed from the literatures on populism, extractivism, and democratic accountability we have discussed above to complete our theoretical framework that situates the central role of extractive states.

Feedback Effects The conditions that characterize extractive states, as examined above, have feedback effects. Figure 3.1 illustrates the relationship between extractive logics of action which orient national institutions to respond to outward markets; the malformation of political institutions that become unresponsive to internal political claims; and the emergence of populist politics as a reaction to accountability failures from various branches of government. In line with critical approaches in the populism literature, our analytical framework challenges the teleological orientation of democratization studies that characterizes democratic consolidation as a series of stages that will ultimately fulfill the conditions of Robert Dahl’s concept of polyarchy. The role of extractive states as suppliers of the raw materials required for the global carbon-based economy means that populism is more than a mere obstacle stymying a progression through the ranks of democracy toward full institutional consolidation. However, in a departure from critical approaches that identify populism as a necessary rebirthing force of democracy, we argue that the effect of extractivist state formations both precede and promote populist governments—extinguishing opportunities for democratic renewal. The negative effects of extractive states on sustained environmental action remain robust and resistant to change, despite regime fluctuations in Latin America. The feedback effects of extractivism have an established empirical history in Latin America. Political institutions follow a supplier logic rather than one of public service. Accountability is thus a matter of fulfilling obligations to foreign demand or specific corporations that have contracted with the state for delivery of natural resources. The result is what we describe as a persistent democratic accountability gap—one that corrodes the liberal democratic relationship between the government

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Extractivist state: outward focused to oil markets

Democractic accountability gaps: unresponsive to domestic constituencies Rise of populist sequences: some populists redistribute oil rents, others privatize gains

Fig. 3.1 The feedback effects of the extractivist state

and its citizens. In the best of circumstances, legitimacy is based on the delivery of discreet products or results—economic growth, infrastructure modernization, enhanced quality of life—but even these are often only enjoyed by a small segment of the population. In either case, popular participation is forestalled in the name of progress, however defined. These conditions engender “populist” responses. In the following chapters, we will deploy this framework to examine the cases of Venezuela and Ecuador, and map the challenges that arise from the feedback effects of extraction, accountability deficits, and populism to outline limits and possibilities for locally driven responses to climate change and its unequally distributed consequences. As we discuss in the introduction, these are not simply two cases deployed to prove an explanatory thesis. They are rather two historically contingent examples of

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extractive states embedded in global assemblages—networks of resources, institutions, and stakeholders that constrain opportunities for sustained environmental action.

Conclusion In the previous chapter we outlined a genealogy of populism from classical interpretations to critical ones. We engaged with the critical literature on populism as a launching pad to criticize the way in which populism has become an increasingly ubiquitous and meaningless description of antisystemic politics. In this chapter, we have developed a more nuanced analytical treatment of populism as a phenomenon nested within a broader and transnationalized political and economic system. We emphasized the impact of endogenous and exogenous factors in creating and regulating the extractive state as it attempts to balance being responsive to both, domestic demands and international commodity markets. Given the deepening dependence of governments like those in Venezuela and Ecuador on oil exports, representative goals are overtaken by supplier logics of action. This shapes political institutions into opaque, technocratic, vertical, and exclusionary organizations that are outwardly focused toward international market signals. In a system of diminished representation, people can turn to other branches of government like their legislatures or judiciary to compel the government to address their demands. However, such mechanisms of horizontal accountability between state branches function very poorly in extractive states. Therefore, populist leaders present themselves as the only hope for a direct, personal relationship between the government and the people that bypasses an otherwise unresponsive political system. However, the populist formula maintains similar verticalist and exclusionary dispositions—dispositions that are amplified in cases where the populist depends on the extractive state in order to meet their mandate. Paternalist leaders claim to speak for the people rather than with them, which further erodes input accountability mechanisms and continues to make democratic prospects more elusive. Popular legitimacy is grafted on to a familiar extractive core, reinscribing the autoreferential prerogative to extract as the reason of state, thus starting the cycle anew. In the following chapters, we examine the specificities of the Venezuelan and Ecuadorian extractive states. There are important differences that mark these cases, and they have much to learn from each

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other. However, in both cases as with other early twenty-first-century post-neoliberal regimes in Latin America, analysts have been quick to characterize successes and failures alike as the consequences of populist irresponsibility, opportunism, or bad faith. We find this populist hypothesis that locates an almost god-like agency to the executive branch to be overly simplistic and misleading. Instead of blaming the populist leader and the willingly duped masses for disruptively anti-systemic and environmentally unsustainable policies, we instead identify the feedback effects of extractive states at work.

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Rosales Nieves, A. (2017). Stringent, open and hybrid state treatment of foreign investment: Three eras of the oil industry in Venezuela and Ecuador (Ph.D. diss.). University of Waterloo, UWSpace. Ross, M. (2013). The oil curse: How petroleum wealth shapes the development of nations. Princeton University Press. Rosser, A. (2006). Escaping the resource curse. New Political Economy, 11(4), 557–570. Scharpf, F. W. (1999). Governing in Europe: Effective and democratic? Oxford University Press. Schmidt, V. A. (2013). Democracy and legitimacy in the European Union revisited: Input, output and ‘throughput’. Political Studies, 61(1), 2–22. Siakwah, P. (2017). Political economy of the resource curse in Africa revisited: The curse as a product and a function of globalised hydrocarbon assemblage. Development and Society, 46(1), 83–112. Smith, A. (1776). The wealth of nations. Soros, G. (2007). Foreward. In M. Humphreys, J. D. Sachs, & J. E. Stiglitz (Eds.), Escaping the resource curse. Columbia University Press. Stevens, P., & Deitsche, E. (2007). Resource curse: An analysis of causes, experiences and possible ways forward. Energy Policy, 36, 56–65. TeleSur. (2016, August 26). Lo que debe saber del Arco Minero Orinoco en Venezuela. http://www.telesurtv.net/telesuragenda/Arco-Minero-del-Ori noco-en-Venezuela-20160826-0056.html. Van de Ploeg, F. (2011). Natural resources: Curse or blessing? Journal of Economic Literature, 49(2), 366–420. Watts, M. J. (2004). Resource curse? Governmentality, oil and power in the Niger Delta, Nigeria. Geopolitics, 9(1), 50–80. Watts, M. J. (2012). A tale of two gulfs: Life, death, and dispossession along two oil frontiers. American Quarterly, 64(3), 437–467. Weszkalnys, G. (2011). Cursed resources, or articulations of economic theory in the Gulf of Guinea. Economy and Society, 40(3), 345. Wiarda, H. J. (1981). Corporatism and national development in Latin America. Routledge. Wilson, E., & Van Alstine, J. (2014). Localising transparency: Exploring EITI’s contribution to sustainable development. International Institute for Environment and Development.

CHAPTER 4

“The Devil’s Excrement”: Venezuela as the Prototypical Extractive State

Abstract This chapter traces the history of the extractive state in Venezuela from its origins in the early twentieth to early twenty-first centuries. From the dictatorships of the early years into the semidemocratic puntofijo years, political elites pursued a development strategy based in a modernizing, technocratic, and exclusionary worldview, one that is distrustful of a citizenry deemed too unrefined for the needs of state and industry. During these years, Venezuelan extractivism’s influence expanded significantly. However, the social peace the extractivist state purchased could not survive the changing political and economic terrain of globalization. The resulting implosion and nearly 20 years of austerity created the conditions that made Hugo Chávez’s ascent and the Bolivarian Revolution possible. The final substantive section of this chapter explores the “progressive extractivism” of the Chávez years. In this, the continuities of the Bolivarian era with its extractivist predecessors are perhaps as striking as the social changes it enacted, and the catastrophic way in which it imploded. Keywords Progressive extractivism · Venezuelan dictatorship · Bolivarian PetroState · Hugo Chavez

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 T. Kramarz and D. Kingsbury, Populist Moments and Extractivist States in Venezuela and Ecuador, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70963-1_4

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Sowing the Oil In 1936, the statesman and public intellectual Arturo Uslar Pietri famously warned that Venezuela’s dependence on extractive industries would produce “an unproductive and idle country, an immense parasite on petroleum, swimming in a momentary and corrupting abundance, doomed to an imminent and inevitable catastrophe.” The only solution was an ecological one: Venezuela needed to counteract what he considered the destructive economy of extraction, that “sacrifices the future to the present” with massive investment into modern, scientific, and industrialized agriculture: to sembrar el petróleo, “sow the oil” (Pietri, 1936). Four decades later, in the 1970s, Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo, one of the founding figures of OPEC, concluded Uslar’s challenge had not been met. The “Venezuela Effect” entailed an “inundation” of capital during oil booms that could not be productively absorbed, resulting in an accumulation of political, social, economic, ecological, and physical ills (42). Venezuela was, he lamented, drowning in the devil’s excrement. The story of the Venezuelan PetroState is in many ways a tragic one, though its tragedy is not determined by its chief export alone. Governments across the years and across the political spectrum have failed to escape Uslar Pietri and Pérez Alfonzo’s dire conclusions. The mid-twentieth-century dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez proposed to use oil money and foreign debt under the auspices of his Nuevo Ideal Nacional (New National Ideal) to physically transform Venezuela into a modern nation through investments in infrastructure. During the oil boom of the 1970s, Carlos Andrés Pérez promised to produce La Gran Venezuela (Venezuela the Great) via public investment in “big push” industrialization. Finally, Hugo Chávez, in his Plan de la Patria of 2007–2013, and again as a presidential candidate in 2012, pledged the Bolivarian Revolution would establish Venezuela as a potencia energética mundial (Global Energy Superpower) and fund his “socialism for the twenty first century” (Terán-Mantovani, 2014: 163). Each of these projects followed a strikingly similar pattern of state-led oil-based development—a pattern also seen in Nicolás Maduro’s more recent plans to exploit the AMO discussed in the previous chapter—highlighting the persistent patterns of the extractive state’s state–society–nature dynamic. This chapter traces the history of the extractive state in Venezuela. The first section examines its origins during the dictatorships of Juan Vicente Gómez (1908–1935) and Marcos Pérez Jiménez (1948–1958). During

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the first half of the twentieth century these dictators followed a development strategy based on a modernizing, technocratic, and exclusionary worldview, one that is distrustful of a citizenry deemed too unrefined for the needs of state and industry. This worldview, and the exclusions it entailed, continued during civilian rule in the puntofijo era, which is explored in the second section. During the puntofijo years Venezuelan extractivism’s fields of influence expanded significantly. Despite the liberal democracy it adverstised, the puntofijo era was highly unequal, deeply exclusionary, and profoundly corrupt. In the third section we discuss the puntofijo system’s failure to navigate the changing political and economic terrain of globalization. The resulting implosion and nearly 20 years of austerity created the conditions that made Hugo Chávez’ ascent and the Bolivarian Revolution possible. The fourth and final substantive section of this chapter explores the “progressive extractivism’ of” the Chávez years. In this, the continuities of the Bolivarian era with its extractivist predecessors are perhaps as striking as the social changes it enacted, and the brilliance with which it collapsed.

State–Society–Nature Dynamics and Twentieth-Century Dictatorships Between political independence from Spain in 1823 and the early twentieth century, Venezuela’s sovereignty was disrupted by civil wars, foreign debt, and the actions of regional strongmen. The central state did not practice uncontested control over the territory, resources, or peoples within Venezuela’s borders until the twentieth century with the industrialized exploitation and export of oil. Using resources and ties with foreign capital and governments afforded by the burgeoning industry as powerful amplifiers, the government of Juan Vicente Gómez (1908–1935) built modern Venezuela on the back of extraction, changing from a dispersed and agrarian economy to a rentier and developmentalist one within a few short years.1

1 Gómez’s absolute control over the oil industry was facilitated by the country’s first

mining law, promulgated by his predecessor, Cipriano Castro, in 1904. The code established the president’s capacity to negotiate, grant, and administer mineral concessions without the need for congressional input or approval—a measure which both streamlined the concession process and greatly enhanced the power of the executive branch (Lieuwen, 2016: 23).

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Venezuela began issuing petroleum concessions in 1907. Between 1907 and 1912 Royal Dutch Shell acquired seven of these concessions through local intermediaries, and on this basis became Venezuela’s largest single producer until nationalization in 1976 (Mommer, 2010: 76). By 1928, Venezuela already ranked second—after the United States—in world petroleum exports (Mommer, 2010: 87). The Great Depression and subsequent Second World War weakened the previously prominent cacao and coffee sectors in Venezuela while also increasing demand for Venezuelan oil (Mommer, 2010: 87–88). These patterns continued until mid-century, as oil dominated the Venezuelan economy and, increasingly, defined national policy and identity (Mommer, 2010: 110; Tinker Salas, 2009: 77). From 1920 until the mid-1960s, Venezuela boasted one of the fastest growing economies in Latin America, and rates of growth in the manufacturing sector were also among the region’s most rapid until the 1970s (Di John, 2009: 3). Accountability in this era was firmly limited to results or outputs—and the dictatorships’ primary constituencies were the companies with whom they contracted. Ordinary Venezuelans were either the passive beneficiaries of extraction or obstacles in the way of its maximization. Of course, maximizing extraction did not come without risks or “negative externalities,” but these were deemed acceptable by the dictators and planners of the time. The industry was initially centered in the Lake Maracaibo basin in the West of the country, which was essentially deemed a “zone of sacrifice” in service to the modernizing designs of the central state. A striking example occurred with the “Los Barrosos 2” well blow out in the La Rosa area of the Bolívar Coastal Field in November of 1922. The spill, which would eventually amount to nearly one million barrels in volume—as Elvin Delgado (2012) contextualizes, “four times more than [the] vessel Exxon Valdez discharged in Alaska on March 24, 1989, and three more than [the] vessel Prestige released in Spain on November 13, 2002” (55)—marked the second major such event in recent memory. In the face of the massive human and ecological toll of the disaster—crops destroyed, ecosystems irreparably altered, populations displaced—the Gómez government moved not to put protections in place for peoples and landscapes affected by Venezuela’s emerging main industry, but to consolidate its control over it and maximize its share of future revenues (Coronil, 1997).

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From the death of Gómez in 1935 to the mid-century dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez (1948–1958) the primary concern of governments centered on containing largely disconnected elite and popular demands for more political participation or better working and living standards. The intellectual and policy response to this preoccupation took the form of Venezuelan positivist thought. Since the late nineteenth century, positivist intellectuals justified authoritarian rule in Venezuela by arguing that the existing “effective constitution” of Venezuelans— determined by history, geography, climate, and race—was incompatible with the “written constitution” of liberal democracy (Urbaneja, 2013: 8; Vallenilla Lanz, 1980: 369). The “social and political forms of every pueblo” writes Laureano Vallenilla Lanz in his touchstone 1925 book, Cesarismo Democrático (Democratic Cesarism), is necessarily determined by its character and its past (129). Environment, histories of immigration, experiences with public and political life, and the mix of racial identities all contributed to the contemporary reality of peoples. In Venezuela’s case, the positivists concluded, these factors resulted in a “society in formation”—an incomplete populace in need of training, direction, and development (Vallenilla Lanz, 1991: 207). Positivism in Venezuela feared not only the instability it saw as anathema to scientific planning and organization, but what it considered to be its political synonyms: mass democracy, anarchy, and communism (Caballero, 2003: 36; Vallenilla Lanz, 1991: 205). As a result of these anxieties, the positivists developed a strong defense of exclusionary political orders based on their achievements. Economic growth, European immigration, sanitation, roads, modern housing, and other public works all, they insisted, proved better suited to ensuring Venezuela’s progress and modernization than any other political order (Almandoz, 2001: 89). The organization of state, society, and nature relations of the positivists provided the intellectual scaffolding for the extractivist state that would outlive the age of Venezuela’s dictatorships. Nature was to be conquered and transformed into modernity, both through the extraction and export of oil and in the construction booms petroleum rents fueled. Many times, this pursuit took the shape of spatio-ecological, metaphorical, and actual warfare, as in the case of the Pérez Jiménez dictatorship’s guerra contra el rancho (the battle against the shanties) that sought to subdue and rationalize the capital city’s expanding network of informal settlements, or in the brief guerrilla and counterinsurgency of the early democratic era (Velasco, 2015).

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In these ambitions, the positivists and the generations of planners and policymakers they informed were fueled by Venezuela’s growing oil industry. The years following World War II brought an increased demand for Venezuelan oil, and real GDP growth in Venezuela was the highest in Latin America during this era. The government in turn enjoyed tremendous material capacities: “in the period between 1950 and 1957, ordinary oil revenue grew an average of 11.6 percent and government income an average of 13.9 percent annually, while the total value of oil exports increased 250 percent and treasury reserves 400 percent” (Coronil, 1997: 187). During this time, the regime also moved quickly to marginalize or manage any potential threat to its hold on the state. After a strike among oil workers aimed at overthrowing the military government was quashed in 1950 (Ellner, 2003: 161), the government increasingly imported skilled labor from Southern Europe while encouraging its partners in the industry like Royal Dutch Shell to offshore refining and other value-adding processes to Curaçao. As a result, workers on Venezuelan soil were captive, segregated, and loyal to the regime while any potential chokepoints in the extraction and export of oil were situated far away from any restive locals (Coronil, 1997: 184). The dictators and positivists understood accountability in terms of results, and they did not trust the population to judge the means to achieve those results for themselves. The democracies that followed shared many of these misgivings. Venezuela’s first attempts at democracy, in the brief 1945–1948 trienio of Acción Democrática (Democratic Action, AD) and then later under the auspices of the puntofijo pact (1958–1992), systems were organized much less around participation and accountability than attempts to dislodge the encrusted oligarchy that had monopolized the benefits of the oil economy since the Gómez years (Mommer, 2010: 106). For Coronil (1997), this integration of popular and elite interests around a reformist center came to characterize hegemonic political projects in Venezuela. If populism sustains the fantasy of national unity through the identification of people and nation, in Venezuela the expectation that collective well-being would be achieved through oil-financed national transformation turned this fantasy into an illusion of collective harmony. But from the outset, the construction of this illusion of harmony was premised on reformist control over the oil industry and the forceful exclusion of radical demands made by both elite and popular sectors. (127)

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Democratization was thus less a matter of democracy than a new arrangement in the control and distribution of oil rents. However, whereas populist fantasies are premised on a unified people-nation facing off against internal or externalized “enemies,” in Venezuela this fictive social harmony was instead based on a collective belief in oil’s ability to propel national progress and the directing leadership of the state. Oil had become both the means and ends of the state, all other concerns were either peripheral or antithetical. Even farther from their concern was anything resembling what twentyfirst-century observers might describe as ecological conservation or sustainable development. Environmental action, for twentieth-century planners in Venezuela, entailed the conquering and transformation of the natural world into the physical manifestations of modernity: ordered, monumental, and concrete (Blackmore, 2017). The dictatorships rather worked to consolidate the state’s control over the population and the national territory’s natural riches; so too did the civilian governments that followed. In political ecological terms, the Venezuelan extractive state embodied Simón Bolívar’s defiant response to the earthquake that leveled much of Caracas in 1812: Si la naturaleza se opone, lucharemos contra ella y haremos nos obedezca (if nature opposes us we will fight against her and make her obey us). There is in sum, a long-standing pattern of top-down and exclusionary state–society–nature relations in Venezuela that predate the formation of modern extractivism that informs dictatorial and liberal democratic regimes alike.

Extractivism After Dictatorship After the fall of Pérez Jiménez, civilian elites quickly moved to consolidate their control over the Venezuelan state (Coronil, 1997: 212). At the center of this push were two parties, Acción Democrática (Democratic Action, AD) and the Comité de Organizaciones Politícas Electorales Independientes (Committee of Independent Political and Electoral Parties, COPEI). Respectively of the center-left and centerright, the primary interest advanced by both parties was to prevent any future return of military rule while maintaining and augmenting Venezuela’s position in the global petroleum economy. The resulting Pacto de Puntofijo—initially between AD, COPEI, and the Unión Radical Republicana Democrática (Radical Republican Union, URD)—established the rules of post-dictatorship democracy in Venezuela.

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Characterized by Fernando Coronil (1997) as a “pact to make pacts,” the ensuing system organized Venezuelan governance for the following three decades in order to maximize oil rents while minimizing social or political unrest (229). The pacted system divided civil society and organized labor into de facto spheres of influence between AD and COPEI while formally and informally excluding any political competitors, and especially the Communist Party (Ellner, 2009). It was a quintessentially Cold War arrangement of anti-Communist developmentalism. It was also famously celebrated as “exceptional” in Latin America at the time (Ellner & Tinker Salas, 2007) for its ability to maintain a formal liberal democratic political system even as it faced a guerrilla insurgency (which formally ended with amnesty in 1968) (Gott, 2008: 89–198; Velasco, 2015: 87–110), multiple attempted coups (Miller, 2016: 84–86), and the social disquiet and unrest that accompanied breakneck and informal urbanization (Velasco, 2015). The stability of the puntofijo system was perhaps exceptional, but it did not necessarily entail social peace. Oil maintained this “exceptional” stability. However, in its early years the puntofijo pact was tenuous at best. Rómulo Betancourt, leader of AD and first president after the transition, ruled by martial law for nearly the entirety of his term. The promise to include minority parties in ruling cabinets faltered due to political calculations, the internal fragmentation of the parties themselves, and the emergence of a radical left challenge to the hegemonization of puntofijismo (Neuhouser, 1992: 124). Government expenditures, furthermore, were limited by the debts incurred during the dictatorship and the need to spend to guarantee the military’s loyalties. It was not until the boom of the 1970s that socio-political order was consolidated under puntofijo. As Kevin Neuhouser (1992) observes, The post-1973 dominance of AD/COPEI was based on the combination of vastly increased oil revenues and increased state access to those revenues. Between 1958 and 1969, the average real price per barrel of Venezuelan oil dropped from US$2.48 to US$1.81. In the inter-election period of 1969-1973, however, the price of oil increased 105 percent; government income from oil increased 105.4 percent; and total government increased 85.4 percent. Although the biggest portion of these increases came in 1973, there were significant increases in the preceding years. From 1973 to 1974, the increase was even greater -- government income from oil jumped 226 percent and total government income grew by 165.1 percent. Since 1973, AD and COPEI have used these state oil revenues to address the short-term material interests of both capitalists and workers. (125–126)

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Oil allowed administrations of both centrist parties to balance consumption and accumulation demands, building a top-down state–society– nature model based on class compromise funded by oil revenues. This class compromise began to erode when the regional economic crisis triggered by Mexico’s debt default exacerbated problems within the Venezuelan economy. Edgardo Lander (1996) notes that by the time of Venezuela’s “Black Friday” in February 1983, in which the administration of Luis Herrera Campins devalued the Bolívar and instituted a complex exchange rate system, “the accumulation model based on the distribution of oil revenue had become exhausted, making substantial changes in the direction of the country’s economy unavoidable” (50). However, rather than politically adjusting to a new reality, successive administrations in Venezuela augmented their reliance on oil monies with foreign aid in order to maintain corrupt distribution schemes. These political factors, Jonathan Di John (2009) argues, offer a better explanation for Venezuela’s economic collapse than the commodity determinism that runs through most Dutch disease explanations. Dutch disease or resource curse models posit a causal link between resource booms, an expansion in the service and construction sectors, and the decline or collapse of domestic manufacturing and agriculture (40). For Di John, this conclusion stands up neither to the historical record in Venezuela nor to comparative analysis; manufacturing’s share of the non-oil economy remained constant or grew slightly from 1973 to 1998, a period spanning massive oil booms as well as the prolonged economic crisis (42). The decline of the economy of the 1980s and 1990s cannot be explained by Venezuela’s ostensible overreliance on oil, but rather on the policies enacted during this era which first triggered and were then determined by a massive foreign debt crisis. The puntofijo system, with its centralized arrangement of “rent deployment and management” was effectively decoupled from economic criteria, obeying instead the political requirements of maintaining populist coalitions and patron–client networks (231). By the end of the first Carlos Andrés Pérez presidency (1974–1979) the puntofijo system produced what Di John refers to as a “capital flight cum debt crisis” that resulted from four factors First, the Pérez administration attempted to undertake an ambitious development plan of big-push, natural resource-based industrialization through decree, not consultation. This upset factions within AD and COPEI.

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Second, the executive branch of the government realized that the financing needed to fulfill the plan would outrun oil revenues during its own administration, and thus encouraged state managers to undertake a major foreign borrowing program …Third, the isolated manner in which the mega projects were initiated meant that the main goal was to initiate foreign borrowing, which was the main way to avoid political battles over appropriating state oil revenues domestically … Fourth, Venezuelan borrowing by both state managers and private business conglomerates was not closely monitored. (233)

The political requirements of maintaining the puntofijo system and the ambitions of development, coupled with particular policy decisions and, later, a changing global economic climate caused the collapse of the Venezuelan economy in the 1980s and 1990s. The tailspin worsened throughout the 1980s as real-cash payments on external debts were prioritized and new loans were taken on by the government to maintain the expensive commitments of previous years. However, with the economy in a general state of stagnation, local projects in which to invest these loans were increasingly scarce and lax regulations meant foreign exchange distributed to the private sector was almost immediately invested abroad. Successive Venezuelan governments borrowed themselves into insolvency in order to distribute stimulus funds that were then depatriated (on this phenomenon see Coronil, 1997; Lander, 2016; Mommer, 1996). Oil itself is in other words not a singularly explanatory factor, necessary and sufficient, for explaining Venezuela’s fates, at least not in the economistic sense proposed by Dutch disease and the resource curse models.

Collapse as Transition: Toward Post-neoliberal “Progressive” Extractivism Puntofijo’s struggles with debt and reform throughout the 1980s were intensified by late and then post-Cold War geopolitics. With the neoliberalization of the global economy, often referred to misleadingly as “globalization,” states attempted (or were forced) to reposition themselves within a new division of power, development, nature, and labor. The 1980s and 1990s were profoundly difficult, an era described by Emiliano Teran-Mantovani (2015) as the “chaotification of Venezuela’s sociopolitical and economic order” (117). Hamstrung by a collapsing elitist and exclusionary political order and dependent on the sale of

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petroleum—the prices of which had entered a twenty-year decline— Venezuela was ill-prepared to navigate this new reality. Endogenous and exogenous pressures, in other words, made for a difficult and prolonged end to the puntofijo order’s organization of state, society, and nature in the Venezuelan extractive state. The specific way in which the puntofijo system collapsed set the stage for Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution in 1999 (Ciccariello-Maher, 2013; Terán-Mantovani, 2014: 145). Specifically, three “shocks”—1983s Black Friday, the Caracazo uprising and massacres of 1989, and Chávez’s attempted coup in 1992—disenchanted a “society mystified by petroleum” (148), and temporarily shattered the extractive state’s command over the state–society–nature relationship. Black Friday shattered the “Quixotic image of ‘progress’ the PetroState had attempted to recreate” (143), while the Caracazo amounted to nothing less than the rearticulation of the “pueblo” from passive participant in the designs of the developmentalist state to an active, antagonistic, and extra-institutional force (148). Finally, Chávez’s attempted coup in 1992 reactivated the military—subordinated to civilian rule since 1958—as a recognized actor in Venezuelan political life identified with the struggles of the oppressed (148). Puntofijo was not simply a political pact between two parties. It was an organization of social and natural life, an exclusionary but nominally democratic iteration of “the constitutive trilogy of politics in Venezuela: petroleum-State-pueblo” (Terán-Mantovani, 2015: 112), in which the extractivist state played a key role in the pursuit of development. The ensuing neoliberalization of the Venezuelan economy was carried out both as structural adjustment in response to crushing debt and as a creolization of globalization’s new common sense. Development policy in Venezuela was increasingly dictated by technocrats like the so-called “IESA Boys” who preached the gospel of privatization and foreign direct investment, even in the oil sector.2 Accountability remained a matter of results, and citizen participation was further curtailed by precarity.

2 Named for the Instituo de Estudios Superiores de Administración, a business school

Caracas and in analogy to the ‘Chicago Boys’ of Chile during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. IESA members like Ricardo Hausmann and Moises Naím were appointed ministers during the 1990s and advocated for privatization of key national industries (including extractives like oil, steel, and mining, as well as telecommunications), and the deregulation of the financial sector (Terán-Mantovani, 2014, 147).

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As in other cases in Latin America, the results of neoliberalization in Venezuela were “ambiguous at best” (Escobar, 2010: 2). Venezuelans arguably felt harder done by structural adjustment than others, as they followed decades of the oil-induced confidence that la Gran Venezuela was on the horizon. The 1990s were years of generalized downward mobility and deteriorating services. They were also years of social and spatial fragmentation as crime rates and the fear of crime spawned a generalized securitization of daily life and new modes of class and racial segregation. These dynamics were in turn dialectically entangled with a distrust of public institutions, the police, and the political class that had been deepening since the Caracazo (Sanjuán, 2002: 88; Zubillaga, 2013: 111). The traditional political class discredited itself by the turn of the century, but already so too had the proposed neoliberal remedy to Venezuela’s woes. In two decades, Venezuela exchanged its status as the richest country in Latin America to the one with the highest rates of per capita debt. According to CORDIPLAN,3 by 1999 Venezuela had reached a poverty rate of 80%, extreme poverty rate of 39%, and malnutrition rate among children of 37%. Unemployment reached 15%, with over half of the workforce employed in the informal sector (cited in TeránMantovani, 2014: 152). Such a complete collapse of social, political, and economic conditions opened the door for radical outsiders like Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution. Chávez promised to build a civic– military alliance, one that placed the constituent power of the poor front and center in the construction of a new republic.

Progressive Extractivism and the Bolivarian PetroState The implosion of puntofijismo did not end extractivism in Venezuela. Questions of development and resource policy were, rather, partially renationalized as the state renegotiated the contractual terms and direction of trade in the oil industry, attempting to make up for ground lost during the apertura petrolera of the 1990s. The constitution of 1999, written by a nationwide Constituent Assembly after Chávez won the presidency in

3 Ministry of Coordination and Planning during the second, non-puntofijo administration of Rafael Caldera (1994–1999).

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1998, states clearly that the management of natural resources, including hydrocarbons, is the sole responsibility of the state. While the state can issue concessions for extraction, they are limited-term affairs. Articles 302 and 303 highlight the strategic character of extractive industries, and stipulate that the state is to retain full ownership of PDVSA, which is here construed as a vehicle to “assimilate, create, and innovate nonrenewable natural resources in order to generate employment and economic growth, and to create wealth and welfare for the people [pueblo].” In other words, this constitution once again identifies extraction with development. However, the 1999 Constitution is clear on environmental protections. In Chapter 10, “On Environmental Rights” (Articles 127–129), these rights are articulated as both immediate and long term in nature, encompassing individual and collective rights and responsibilities, “it is the right and responsibility of each generation to protect and maintain the environment for the present and future world. Each person has the individual and collective right to enjoy a safe, sound and ecologically balanced life” (Article 127). Article 128 is seemingly the most squarely opposed to extractivism as a mode of politics and development: “The state will develop a land management strategy in line with ecological, geographical, population, social, cultural, economic, and political realities in accord with the premises of sustainable development, which include information, consultation, and citizen participation.” How, precisely, the constitution intended to balance competing demands to ensure sustainability within the otherwise extractive framework of Venezuelan political economy is less clear than the resolution of this perennial contradiction in favor of the oil economy’s continuity. The most significant change in these terms that came with the 1999 Bolivarian Constitution had less to do with altering Venezuela’s development model than with a shift in the scope and direction of oil rent distribution. In economic terms, it was less a revolution than the democratization of consumption. The social crises produced by structural adjustment in the 1990s had fomented a popular consensus around the need for the (radically reconfigured) state to control the oil industry, and in turn take charge of development, as reflected in the constitution—but as we have argued, this state-led approach was not unfamiliar. The constitution and the early Bolivarian years did however break with extractivist state–society–nature dynamics in the profusion of direct participation and “protagonism” in the process of Venezuelan political life (Kingsbury, 2016).

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Neighborhood-level organizations that had formed in response to austerity and structural adjustments like the Mesas Técnicas de Agua4 and the Comités de Tierras Urbanas5 took on new form and responsibility as state-sanctioned bodies. For example, the círculos bolivarianos (Bolivarian Circles neighborhood associations) gave way to the consejos comunales (Communal Councils—neighborhood associations of 200 families with legislative and budgetary power)6 and misiones bolivarianas .7 While many have dismissed and denounced Chávez as a familiar populist (e.g., Castañeda, 2006; Corrales & Penfold, 2015; Hawkins, 2006), the first years of the Bolivarian Revolution saw attempts to respond to the democratic accountability gaps of the previously “consolidated democracy” in Venezuela with more inclusive and participatory democratic arrangements for the organization of collective life and public goods. Many of these reforms broke with conventions of representative liberal democracy, and for a time, departures from proceduralism pushed toward more direct participation in governance and emphasized equity as well as equality. This opening toward a post-liberal state–society–nature dynamic began to close by 2007, and has arguably closed definitively in favor of a malfunctioning extractive state with the economic, social, and ecological collapses that accompanied it and have intensified in the Maduro years (Kingsbury, 2018; Spronk & Weber, 2011). Political and social horizontalism ended at extraction, as oil remained classified in a strategic sector of the national economy. It was defined as central to both sovereignty and development and hence isolated by the force of law from any potential disruptions associated with collectivization and workplace democracy. Oil sector unions remained tightly linked with 4 These were water working groups worked to guarantee access to potable water and

sanitation services in underserved urban settlements. 5 These were urban land committees organized to defend and normalize informal settlements. 6 These communal councils are the basic unit of the “communal state” proposed by Chávez as the realization of “Socialism for the 21st century.” Understood as a radical decentralization, communal councils are meant to pull power away from the government through local self-organization. 7 Bolivarian Missions were the centrepiece of the government’s social mandate whereby oil monies are invested in education, food security, health care, housing, environmental sustainability, and many other targets. Missions were meant to operate under the principle of cogestión, whereby active organized communities cooperate with state authorities rather than follow orders or passively receive benefits.

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the government (Ellner, 2009), especially after the consolidation of state control over the petroleum industry after the management of PDVSA, the state oil company, participated in the failed 2002 coup against Chávez and the 2002–2003 lockout, or golpe petrolero (oil coup), that crippled the Venezuelan economy. Space for union and worker autonomy was further constrained with the general political consolidation attempted by the formation of the Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (United Socialist Party of Venezuela—PSUV) in 2007 (Spronk & Weber, 2011). Throughout Chávez’s time in office, the relationship between state and worker militancy was often ambivalent. While a number of collective enterprises worked toward egalitarian workplaces and communities, the networks of communal production faced significant practical and political obstacles in scaling-up their efforts (Azzellini, 2016). In the face of agitation from below in strategic sectors like oil and aluminum, the government prioritized nationalization over collectivization, limiting autonomy and monopolizing decision-making powers in the hands of government appointees and agencies. In sum, despite moves to reorient the national economy according to socialist priorities during the Chávez years, extractive sectors remained organized in a centralized, top-down, and technocratic fashion (Chiasson-Lebel, 2016). A brief post-neoliberal opening or reconfiguration quickly took the form of what Thea Riofrancos (2017), writing about Ecuador in the same moment, refers to in terms of a “radical resource radicalism” that responded to the previous twenty years of neoliberalization. Radical Resource Radicalism facilitated activist coalitions around demands for “the expulsion of foreign oil companies, the nationalization of oil, and the channeling of oil reserves to meet social needs” (8). In Venezuela this took the form of a consensus between movements of the urban and rural poor with state actors on the need to utilize nature—petroleum and other mineral resources—to address poverty, inequality, and precarity. The ecological costs of this consensus are significant. The early twentyfirst-century boom in commodity prices made the heavier, dirtier, and harder to access fossil fuels in the Orinoco delta oil belt in the east of the country economically viable. With Orinoco oil online Venezuela’s accessible reserves ranked highest in the world, and Chávez significantly increased exploitation in this region, which had been known for a century, but was only systematically explored by PDVSA during the later puntofijo years (Talwani, 2002). In the best-case scenarios, the impact on landscapes and ecosystems by the new infrastructures required for extraction

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alone will be significant (Baynard, 2011). In less optimal and more likely scenarios this new resource frontier may follow the pattern of extraction in the original heart of Venezuela’s oil industry, the Lake Maracaibo basin in the west, where the Ministry of the Environment admits to an estimated 15 significant oil spills or leaks per month, nearly 1,800 between 2000 and 2015 (Gudynas, 2015: 131). In this way Venezuela, perhaps the original PetroState, is also the original progressive extractivist state. Whereas conventional or conservative extractivism seeks legitimation through the promise of economic growth and subsequent trickle-down effects, in progressive extractivism the state mediates in extractive industries, linking them to specific anti-poverty projects (Gudynas, 2015: 123). The resulting social mandate for extraction emphasizes national sovereignty and development, sharing the commonsensical assumption that draws a causal link between economic expansion and social welfare found in the modernization and development theories of the twentieth century. In the best-case, gains during periods of progressive extractivism championed by populists like Chávez amounted to a more generalized distribution of oil rents in response to the economic and social catastrophes of the preceding decade rather than the fundamental restructuring of the state– society–nature dynamic. This democratization of consumption, however, is neither economically nor ecologically sustainable. The boom-bust cycles endemic to global capitalism are all the more acutely felt in resourcebased economies of the global south. Chávez (and after him, Maduro) was perhaps even more vocal in their criticism and concern surrounding rentier capitalism than their predecessors, and yet they intensified the state and population’s dependency on extraction. Why? Explanations based in the irresponsibility of populist largesse ignore the very real constraints and demands faced by Venezuela at the turn of the twenty-first century (and indeed, two decades later). Extraction was not only an exogenously imposed constraint on Venezuela’s economy and not merely a method for political entrepreneurs to buy votes and loyalty. It was a ready-made and entrenched policy solution to a pressing social need. The corruption and mismanagement of previous years shifted among characters, but did not disappear. The post-2014 collapse of both the extractive model and the Bolivarian process in Venezuela illustrates that these conditions have actually worsened.

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Populist Moments and Democracy in Venezuela As we have illustrated throughout this chapter, it would be a category error to characterize the puntofijo system as a robust liberal democracy. The era was distinctive in its stability, but it was wrought from the outset by challenges to the state–society–nature order it imposed. The “class compromise” of years fattened by oil revenues proved brittle even before the bloodbath of the caracazo, and inequality remained a constant problem even if absolute poverty was less pronounced than in some of Venezuela’s neighbors. Even taking a minimalist definition of democracy as reducible to regularly scheduled and reasonably free and fair elections leaves doubts, as the punitive two-party stranglehold on the state limited the scope of choice and change within the system. Nonetheless, the Bolivarian Revolution has been characterized as a threat to democracy, as a “competitive authoritarian” order, and as a human rights violating regime from the very beginning (Corrales, 2015; Mainwaring, 2012). This sort of analysis emphasizes the combative relationship between Chávez, chavistas, and the opposition. It has also always been quick to conclude that the crushing electoral victories by the government, especially in its early years, were the result of illegitimate action rather than the combination of sincere support among voters and miscalculations on the part of the Washington-backed opposition. On the eve of Chávez’s last election in 2012, key elements of the opposition seemed to acknowledge that overreliance on this analysis had harmed them in the polls and in the streets, and started adapting their strategies accordingly (Gil Yepes, 2012). However, collapsing oil prices, political polarization, and foreign sanctions that followed Chávez’s death in March 2013 have resulted in a very different dynamic. The extractive state founded on the oil industry no longer functions in Venezuela due to chronic internal mismanagement, corruption, and stubbornly low prices (Monaldi, 2018). The government of Nicolás Maduro has ordered wave after wave of crackdowns against opponents—against the traditional elitist opposition as well as erstwhile allies on the left (Buxton, 2016). By 2019 his government had ceded significant power to the military, including in the ability to contract with foreign firms in resource extraction in the AMO. The opposition, meanwhile, remains more interested in spectacles aimed at its foreign backers than in expanding their traditional base in Venezuela, all in the context of a humanitarian collapse that by 2019 resulted in over 4 million people

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fleeing the country (UNHCR, 2019). Neither Maduro nor the opposition seems particularly concerned with democracy or accountability, and neither camp has expressed any sincere or coherent interest in breaking with Venezuela’s extractivist ordering of state, society, and nature. Quite the contrary, government and opposition alike see oil and mining as key to whatever economic recovery may be possible after the resolution of the seemingly eternal political impasses that have defined the twenty-first century, as seen in the battle between Nicolás Maduro and self-declared president Juan Guaidó over control of PDVSA’s foreign assets (Feely, 2019). The post-Chávez years in Venezuela should thus be seen less as an extension of the populist moment of the early twenty-first century and rather as a lack of political solution to the collapse of an extractivist state. Did the populist moment of the Chávez years produce this collapse? Or, was it inevitable that petropolitics in Venezuela would disintegrate? The boom and bust of commodities exporting economies has left its mark on Venezuela before, and the arc for oil producers would seem to be irreversibly downward given the global climate crisis and mounting calls for a decarbonizing energy transition. Rather than conclude with many mainstream observers that Chávez or Maduro—or Guaidó or any other representative of the opposition, for that matter—was good or bad for democracy in Venezuela, we insist instead that the extractivist state itself poses significant challenges to democratic performance. Attempts to reinterpret democracy along more direct and participatory lines in the early days of the Bolivarian Revolution that came with the communal councils and Bolivarian Missions were democratic accountability openings in an otherwise closed extractivist system. Their contributions to Venezuelan democracy, however, should not and can neither be attributed nor reduced to a president.

Conclusion The modern Venezuelan state formed alongside the oil industry in the early twentieth century. Elitist, exclusionary, and oligarchic political cultures of the preceding agrarian era were in many ways well suited to the requirements of doing business with the foreign majors that dominated the industry at the time. During the mid-century dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez oil revenues were dedicated to the physical modernization of Venezuela—a developmentalist variation on a pattern established in previous decades in which the natural world was raw material to be

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transformed according to expert designs and in which the population is relegated to the role of passive recipient of government planning. Postdictatorship governments of the puntofijo era shared this developmentalist worldview. Extraction of oil was to be maximized in order to pursue “big push industrialization” that by and large only succeeded in weakening the government’s position vis-a-vis its many creditors. The scale of the endeavor, the nature of business in global markets (even after nationalization in 1976), and the corruption that has always accompanied elite and party politics in Venezuela all contributed to deepening accountability deficits in Venezuela’s “exceptional” liberal democracy. While developmentalist oil may have been able to finance a degree of class compromise during boom years, it by no means guaranteed social peace, let alone participatory politics or democratic accountability. The increasing tensions of this arrangement did not survive the 1980s and 1990s, especially after the Latin American debt crisis arrived on Venezuela’s “Black Friday” in February 1983. By this point, Venezuela’s debt was the largest in the region, and as oil prices began a two-decade decline, the fragility of the extractivist economy was exposed. By February 1989, when IMF-imposed shock therapy was announced, their system could not survive. Venezuelans took to the streets to protest political exclusion, economic inequality, and neoliberal austerity. Scores were murdered in the state reprisals of the caracazo. The development plan of the extractivist puntofijo order was irreparably broken. The political vacuum and accompanying economic and social collapse of the ensuing decade did not, however, mark the end of the extractivist state in Venezuela. Poverty and precarity triggered calls for a reinvigorated welfare state, and a boom in oil prices provided the means for building one. After 1999, Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution thus not only resurrected the extractivist model in Venezuela, they intensified it, enlisted, and encouraged popular support for an industry that had proven itself economically, politically, and environmentally unstable many times over in Venezuela’s now century long history as an extractivist state. However, rather than conclude that Venezuela is nothing more than an example of twenty-first-century “petro-populism” (e.g., Castañeda, 2006), the historically rooted analyses in this chapter illustrated that the continuities of extractive models across historical moments and regime types require a different explanation. The participatory energies of the first years of the Bolivarian experiment in Venezuela were rejections of puntofijo’s exclusionary order—responses to the accountability gaps of

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the extractive state. However, the democratic moment faced significant challenges—more than it could cope with at the time of this writing. The exclusionary, opaque, and verticalist practices of extractive states are less the consequence of overbearing individual political personalities— populists—than requirements placed on local political systems wholly integrated into global supply chains. Their volatility, again, has less to do with individual caprice—the instability or irrationality of the populist— than with the vulnerability hard wired into global commodities markets and the pressing needs of populations. The anti-establishment positions and increased social spending of Chávez and other ostensible populists are rational given the highly constrained set of options they and their supporters face. This reality does make progressive extractivism of the early twenty-first century sustainable. It has proven quite the contrary for the political projects on which they are based, the people they are meant to benefit, and for the natures exploited by extractivist states as they pursue development.

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Corrales, J., & Penfold, M. (2015). Dragon in the tropics: Venezuela and the legacy of Hugo Chávez. Brookings Institution. Delgado, E. (2012). Spaces of socio-ecological distress: Fossil fuels, solar salt, and fishing communities in Lake Maracaibo, Venezuela (PhD Dissertation). Syracuse University. Di John, J. (2009). From windfall to curse? Oil and industrialization in Venezuela, 1920 to the present. Penn State Press. Ellner, S. (2003). The contrasting variants of the populism of Hugo Chávez and Alberto Fujimori. Journal of Latin American Studies, 35(1), 139–162. Ellner, S. (2009). Rethinking Venezuelan politics: Class, conflict, and the Chávez phenomenon. Lynne Reinner. Ellner, S., & Tinker Salas, M. (2007). The Venezuelan exceptionalism thesis: Separating myth from reality. In S. Ellner & M. T. Salas (Eds.), Venezuela: Hugo Chávez and the decline of an ‘exceptional democracy’ (pp. 3–15). Rowman and Littlefield. Escobar, A. (2010). Latin America at a crossroads: Alternative modernizations, post-liberalism, or post-development. Cultural Studies, 24(1), 1–65. Feely, J. (2019, July 18). Juan Guaidó asks US Judge to End Maduro Bid to Appoint PDVSA Board. Bloomberg. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/ articles/2019-07-18/guaido-asks-u-s-judge-to-end-maduro-bid-to-appointpdvsa-board. Gil Yepes, A. J. (2012). Como Ganar o Perder las Elecciones Presidenciales de 2012 en Venezuela. Editorial Libros Marcados. Gott, R. (2008). Guerrilla movements in Latin America. Seagull Books. Gudynas, E. (2015). Extractivismos: ecología, economía y política de un modo de entender el desarrollo y la naturaleza. Centro de Documentación e Información Bolívia. Hawkins, K. (2006). Dependent civil society: The círculos bolivarianos in Venezuela. Latin American Research Review, 41(1), 102–132. Kingsbury, D. V. (2016). Oil’s colonial residues: Geopolitics, identity, and resistance in Venezuela. Bulletin of Latin American Research, 35(4), 423–436. Kingsbury, D. V. (2018). Only the people can save the people: Constituent power, revolution, and counterrevolution in Venezuela. Suny Press. Lander, E. (1996). The impact of neoliberal adjustment in Venezuela, 1989– 1993. Latin American Perspectives, 23(3), 50–73. Lander, E. (2016). The implosion of Venezuela’s rentier state. New Politics Papers, 14. Transnational Institute, Amsterdam. https://www.tni.org/files/pub lication-downloads/lander-venezuela-english-1.pdf. Accessed 18 December 2020. Lieuwen, E. (2016). Petróleo en Venezuela: Una Historia. Ediciones El Perro y la Rana.

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Vallenilla Lanz, L. (1991). Cesarismo Democrático y Otros Textos. Biblioteca Ayacucho. Velasco, A. (2015). Barrio rising: Urban popular politics and the making of modern Venezuela. University of California Press. Zubillaga, V. (2013). Menos desigualdad, más violencia: la paradoja de Caracas. Nueva Sociedad, 243, 104–118.

CHAPTER 5

The Citizen’s Revolution and the Failure of an Alternative Environmental Moment in Ecuador

Abstract This chapter investigates the Yasuní-ITT Initiative in Ecuador as a puzzle for populist and commodity-determined accounts of Latin American politics and development. We begin with a deceptively simple question: why would Ecuador choose to incur economic costs to contribute to biodiversity and climate change benefits? The case of Yasuní represents a hard case because we are confronted with a poor country that depends on oil as its main export, has converted to a dollar-based economy, and requires currency that can only be acquired through exports, yet launches a global initiative to forego exploiting a large oil reserve if only partially compensated by the international donor community. Even in its failure, we argue, Yasuní demands a rethinking of accepted political rationalities in Ecuador and perhaps beyond. Keywords Yasuni-ITT Initiative · Rafael Correa · Sumak Kawsay · Citizen’s Revolution · Populism

The Promise of an Alternative Model For most of the twentieth-century Ecuador depended on the export of agricultural commodities. This agricultural extractivism was accompanied by a succession of military coups, constitutional crises, and racialized © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 T. Kramarz and D. Kingsbury, Populist Moments and Extractivist States in Venezuela and Ecuador, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70963-1_5

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politics. The highly exclusionary nature of Ecuador’s politics toward its sizeable indigenous and African descendant populations inspired the formation of robust social movements such as CONAIE (the Confederation of Indigenous Nations of Ecuador, for its initials in Spanish) which would by the 1990s form powerful blocs against racial rule, the extractivist model, and economic structural adjustment that triggered the downfall of three presidents. In the early 1970s, the discovery of oil in the east of the country exacerbated but did not replace these economic, political, and ecological patterns. The oil boom brought the military government at the time windfall revenues, but the power of foreign capital over policymaking and significant portions of national territory intensified as oil took on an increasingly dominant role in Ecuadorean political economy. By 2010 oil comprised 51% of this OPEC member’s exports (Larrea, 2010). Oil rents were massive but unevenly distributed. What is more, the ecological toll of extraction—as seen for example in Texaco’s spills, cover ups, and retreat in Lago Agrio—galvanized resistance to the extractivist model even as social crises, inequality, and poverty intensified. The result in Ecuador has been a highly ambivalent relationship with the now consolidated PetroState and with emergent extractive industries, such as mining, in general. It is against this backdrop that the government of Ecuador made international headlines in 2007 when it proposed to forego significant national income from hydrocarbon concessions in favor of mitigating climate change and protecting biodiversity. Newly elected President Rafael Correa presented a plan to the United Nations General Assembly that would indefinitely ban oil exploitation in the Yasun´i National Park in the Ecuadorian Amazon in exchange for partial financial compensation from the international community. However, five years after its announcement, the international community failed to pledge the required compensation. Correa announced his administration was withdrawing its offer, and drilling in the Yasun´i National Park recommenced. Many blamed the president as the singular source of the initiative’s demise, concluding that populists like Correa make for poor partners in environmental governance (Arsel & Avila Angel, 2012; Becker, 2013; Conaghan, 2016). However, the failure of the Yasun´i-ITT Initiative—so named for the focus on the Ishpingo, Tambococha, and Tiputini blocks of the Yasuní National Reserve—and its aftermath eludes simple explanation. There can be no question that Correismo shaped much of Ecuadorian politics since Rafael Correa’s first election in 2007. However, as a conceptual tool to decipher

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the genesis of the initiative, populism obscures more than it illuminates. Most significantly, the populist thesis ignores the enduring structures of the extractive state. More so than a specific regime, the malformation of political institutions, and accountability gaps between state, society, and nature that characterize the extractive state in Latin America provides compelling reasons and justifications for the initiative’s rise and fall, and for the “Plan B” of oil extraction that always haunted the proposal and began immediately after its withdrawal in 2013. In this chapter, we investigate the Yasuní-Initiative in Ecuador because it poses a puzzle to a pure populist-driven explanation as well as one that relies exclusively on the commodity determinism of the resource curse thesis we outlined in previous chapters. Why would Ecuador choose to incur economic costs to contribute to biodiversity and climate change benefits? The case of Yasuni represents a hard case because we are confronted with of a poor country that depends on oil as its main export, has converted to a dollar-based economy, and requires currency that can only be acquired through exports, yet launches a global initiative to forego exploiting a large oil reserve if only partially compensated by the international donor community. The extractive state thwarts the functioning of democratic institutions, undermines accountability relationships, and produces populist moments that pit development needs against environmental protections. However, the Yasuní-Initiative demonstrates that the outcomes of populist regimes are indeterminate. The initiative was part of a broader effort by the government and social movements to give nature legal personhood. Yet by some accounts Correa was never fully committed and always planned to exploit the oil reserves in the national park. By many other accounts, the lack of international confidence in Correa was a critical component of the initiative’s ultimate demise. Since this chapter focuses on understanding the impetus for local action, the reconstruction of the case relies on archival research and 61 semi structured interviews conducted in October and November 2017 after Correa had left office. The interviews were timed to take place right before Ecuadoreans were preparing to vote on a binding referendum (in February 2018) which included a question on the Yasuni National Park, and partial protection of the area from extensive oil extraction activities.

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The Yasuní-ITT Initiative Although Correa was internationally identified with the Yasuní-ITT Initiative, the proposal to leave Yasuní oil in the ground originated within Ecuadorian civil society years before Correa’s electoral victory in 2007. The first efforts to save Yasuní emerged in 1986 when the government marked the first oil blocks in the National Park for exploration, which Bebbington (2011) has described as a sign that the Ecuadorean government prioritized hydrocarbon interests over environmental concerns. In this, Yasuní became the latest landscape to be reorganized according to the resource nationalist and developmentalist principles that organized state–society–nature relations in Ecuador since the 1970s (Rosales Nieves, 2017). NGOs started organizing around the defense of the park and of indigenous groups who, living in sacrifice zones, were disproportionately affected by the advance of the oil frontier further into the Amazon. Members of the NGOs Acción Ecologica, Oilwatch, and Pachamama, along with intellectual leaders such as Alberto Acosta (who later became Minister of Mines and Energy), initiated NGO forums and organized marches demanding a moratorium on oil drilling in the Amazon (Pellegrini et al., 2014). In 1997 this group of civil society organizations proposed a moratorium by developing alternative sources of revenue through a compensatory financial mechanism (Boedt & Martinez, 2008; Rival, 2009). This proposal was called “Option One” and it later became Yasuní-ITT. Rival (2009: 13) recounts the widespread participation of environmental NGOs within and beyond Ecuador involved in the formulation and socialization of the original Option One: “The idea had been widely circulated and discussed within the environmentalist movement in Latin America, Europe and Nigeria, and had led to the publication, among others, of Acción Ecólogica’s 2000 book El Ecuador Post Petróleo.” From the beginning, then, the campaign not to extract oil from the Yasuní park mirrored the internationalized nature of the oil industry itself. In 2007, President Rafael Correa presented Yasuní-ITT as a bold new proposal at the United Nations General Assembly. His government would enact a moratorium on the exploitation of petroleum in the Yasuní-ITT reserve if the international community committed to compensate Ecuador for half of what the developing country would have earned if it exploited one of its largest oil reserves. At the time, the IMF’s recommendation to Ecuador was “to exploit all of its oil reserves to depletion within a

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30-year period” (Batker et al., 2007: 15). The Yasuní fields were estimated to contain nearly one billion barrels of oil worth $7–8 billion dollars. However, as Martin and Scholz have pointed out, “from the very beginning of the plan and following its announcement in 2007, President Correa reminded the world that he had a backup plan, a Plan B – to drill for oil if contributions were not received” (Martin & Scholz, 2014: para. 7). What is more, the proposal to forego exploitation in the Ishpingo, Tambococha, and Tiputini blocs said little to nothing about Ecuador’s continued drilling elsewhere in the Amazon, nor did it blunt the rapid expansion of megamines elsewhere in the national territory. Following his announcement, President Correa created a YasuníITT Administrative and Leadership Council whose role was to design the specific components of the compensatory financial mechanism and raise the required pledges from the international community. The President of the Council was Roque Sevilla, a former mayor of Quito, wealthy businessman, and a pioneer of the conservationist movement in Ecuador. This proposal generated much public attention internationally, as well as domestically. Roque Sevilla (2017) recalls: The basic idea was that developed countries should pay their share of having contaminated since the first industrial revolution the air as if they were the only owners of the air although it is common property. So they should now begin to pay for their overuse of something that is common property. It was not an easy instrument (the compensation proposal) and not easy to convince the countries (international donors) to do something.

Sevilla also highlighted the counterintuitive nature of the proposal. While promoting the initiative, many international donors and audiences were initially incredulous of the inherent logic it represented. The World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank and IMF surprisingly supported the idea though many of those classical economists thought this would be impossible to achieve because it goes against all economic laws. There is one principle: if you are sitting on a gold mine you better exploit it. If you don’t use the resources that you have, you are stupid. This is very very important and more so if you are in a poor country. If you are poor and you have oil underground and you don’t exploit it, then you are stupid. It goes against the principle of using in the best way possible scarce resources in favor of the people.

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The Yasuní-ITT Council promoted the initiative throughout Europe. Alberto Acosta, Minister of Energy and Mining at the time, a former member of one of the leading Conservation NGOs (Acción Ecológica), and one of the key architects of the proposal approached the German government, who became the first foreign state to support the initiative, pledging e50 million per year over a 13-year period (Larrea, 2017; Sevilla, 2017). In an unusual show of bipartisanship, the German Bundestag voted unanimously in 2009 to support the Yasuní-ITT Initiative (Martin, 2011). The Germans imposed two conditions of their support. The first was that an international organization establish and administer a multi-donor trust fund to receive donor resources dedicated to sustainable development projects in Ecuador in exchange for oil left underground. The second condition was that the Council secure the support of at least one more country. The trust fund was set up with the United Nations Development Program and six additional countries committed financial resources to the initiative: Germany, Spain, France, Sweden, Belgium, and Italy. The Fund contained a guarantee for contributors in case the Government of Ecuador reversed its decision to forego exploitation of the ITT block in Yasuní. The money raised would be invested in financing sustainable development projects, including conservation of protected areas, research in science and technology to improve energy efficiency, and develop sources of renewable energy (Larrea, 2012, 2017; Sevilla, 2017). In 2009, the launch of the trust fund and agreement with the first donors was to be announced in the Copenhagen Conference of the Parties, but at the last minute Correa decided not to attend. According to some interviewees, that same week Correa was holding conversations with oil executives on plans to move ahead with the exploitation on Yasuní (Larrea, 2017). The Guardian later also reported leaked documents that cast doubts on Correa’s commitment to the initiative throughout the period of negotiations with donors (Hill, 2014). “This was the beginning of the end,” said Carlos Larrea, the initiative’s chief technical advisor and economist who was also a member of the Yasuní-ITT Council. In a full about-face, President Correa then denounced the agreement with the Germans and said on the radio that they should stick their money in their ears.

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We are sick and tired of being treated like a colony. Like inferiors. In the Yasuní ITT initiative the principal contributor is the Ecuadorian people. The easiest thing for us to do is to exploit that oil and receive US$ 6 billion [….] You know what sirs? Go tell people what to do in your own home, change your donations into coins and stick them in your ears because we are not going to receive orders from anyone, that money belongs to the Ecuadorian people. I gave the order not to sign that trust fund full of shameful conditions […] They are the donors and we are the poor, inept, corrupt and inefficient ones. So they say the money goes into a trust fund and they decide in what to invest it. If that’s how it is, keep your money and we start exploiting Yasuní in June. (El Universo, 2010)

The entire Yasuní-ITT Council resigned in protest and a new Council was created by President Correa. This next group was headed by the politician and former presidential candidate, Ivonne Baki. However, the initiative was not able to recover from its earlier setbacks. Five years after its launch, Yasuní-ITT had received pledges for around 10% of its original $3.6 billion dollar goal, and only $13 million was actually collected from donors (Sovacool & Scarpaci, 2016).

Endogenous and Exogenous Influences to Leave Oil Underground A full analysis of the ultimate demise of the initiative is beyond the limits of this chapter. Our focus is rather on understanding how a history of extractivism influenced Ecuador’s cost–benefit analysis regarding gains, potential health and environmental losses, and the role populism played in enabling this project. The fact that a poor country like Ecuador went against mainstream economic expectations and supported a plan to forego oil revenue is counterintuitive, as Roque Sevilla noted. Why did Ecuadorean society embrace such a radical overhaul of the state–society– nature dynamics? Attempts at costing out the two options, oil exploitation versus environmental conservation, shows that the former translates into fewer gains.1 However, the gains from oil exploitation are measured in dollars 1 There have been wide disparities in the literature on this calculation due to the difficulty of future pricing of a volatile international commodity. Valuation of ecosystem services also relies on non-monetary calculations since many of nature’s goods and services are not accounted for in economic transactions.

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while valuing the gains from conservation relies largely on intrinsic values of respect for nature, ecosystem services to indigenous people, and services to the global environment (Batker et al., 2007; Rusetska & Grabs, 2013). Furthermore, it is worth noting that much of the attention in this conservation valuation of the Yasuní-ITT Initiative was on the provision of global biodiversity and climate mitigation services (Batker et al., 2007). For all these reasons, support for the initiative across Ecuadorian society is puzzling. The resource curse literature suggests that the absence of strong, democratic institutions will block sustainable development in resourcerich states. These are the crucial endogenous factors that allow the curse to take hold and prevent natural resources from becoming a blessing (Ahmadov & Guliyev, 2016). However, the case of Yasuní suggests a more complex picture. One of the important sources of influence for leaving oil underground was a domestic idea that nature had to be preserved. Domestic sustainability norms merged with international sustainable development ones forming a kind of globalized assemblage of material and ideational forces, as we discussed in Chapter 3. To disentangle these various interactions, we investigate the specific dynamics that emerged between national and international actors. Many accounts of Yasuní-ITT describe the role that global sustainability norms were playing in the background, and suggest that socialization of international environmental standards influenced Ecuadoreans to support the initiative. However, as Martin (2011) argued, in this case it was Ecuadoreans who were acting as norm entrepreneurs. Rather than abiding by an international norm of sustainable development, they were seeking to make a domestic norm of protection fit within an international conception of sustainability. Martin claims that a counter-boomerang effect of norm socialization was at work. Southern NGOs like Acción Ecológica, where the idea of the moratorium was first conceived, took on the task of socializing key players from the international community and obtaining their support for the initiative. In academic circles, there was much praise for the proposal, noting the relevance of morally driven governance (Rival, 2010). Many expressed hope, in normative terms, that initiatives like Yasuní-ITT may represent a post-oil paradigm, potentially even recasting nature itself as an actor in policy debates (Acosta, 2010, 2013). There was also much written on the environmental dimension of the 2008 Constitution, and the integration of the concept of Sumak Kawsay or Buen Vivir as the

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new development paradigm (Acosta 2013; Dávalos, 2008; Guardiola & Garcia-Quero, 2014). However, beyond the initial normative appeal of Sumak Kawsay, there has been limited theoretical research on how this may lead a developing country to make costly choices to cooperate with the global environmental agenda in the first place.2 Sumak Kawsay is a Kichwa concept that refers to living life in fullness, and in harmony between human and nonhuman actors (Cubillo-Guevara & Hidalgo-Capitán, 2014). As the President of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE) explains, it is a concept that prioritizes the qualitative dimensions of a life of abundance, including peace, harmony and the absence of need (Vargas, 2017). Sumak Kawsay and the rights of nature frame and permeate the 2008 Constitution (Arsel, 2012), the preamble of which states: “With a profound commitment to the present and future, we hereby decide to build a new form of citizen coexistence, in diversity and harmony, to reach the goals of Buen Vivir, and Sumak Kawsay.” This indicates that in 2007, when President Correa announced the Yasuní-ITT Initiative, a domestic norm of sustainability was emerging which influenced the decision of a broad base of Ecuadorians to support such a proposal. The concept of Buen Vivir mapped well on to the international norm of sustainable development, and the negotiating team of the Yasuní-ITT Initiative was able to connect these complementary domestic and international frames to make their case to international donors. The initiative was continuously painted as a domestic innovation that was a means to the same end of sustainable development, a defining norm of global governance. The initiative was also identified as a potential alternative to the failing Kyoto approach to secure sustainable development. The Yasuní Council framed it as a “Kyoto to Quito” proposal. As Yolanda Kakabadse, a former member of the Administrative and Leadership Council for the Initiative, explained, Ecuador “is proposing a post-Kyoto framework, which means not modifying Kyoto, but rather entering a pilot process with a different instrument – certificates for avoided emissions” (quoted in Martin, 2011: 22). With Yasuní, in other words, Ecuador was not only upending the conventional wisdom that links extraction with development, it also aimed

2 An exception is Martin (2011).

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to reverse the normal North–South flow of governance norms and power relations. However, the concept of Buen Vivir was not as untainted in practice as originally imagined and described by scholars. Throughout his presidency, Correa was able to fashion it to his interests (Bebbington, 2009; Romano & Estefanía, 2015). As we discussed in the introduction of this book, some of the original proponents, like Congressman Carlos Viteri, said that although extractivism in Yasuní is not complementary with the concept of Sumak Kawsay, it can coexist with that vision of harmony between human and nonhuman actors (Viteri 2017). This shows the enormous gap in translation from the original Kichwa conception to national implementation in Ecuador. It also shows that in the case of Ecuador norm socialization did not take hold. Attempts to justify the government’s oil policy resulted in the recasting of the concept of Buen Vivir, rather than adjusting policy to maintain consistency between the two.3 From the perspective of indigenous people, the concept of Sumak Kawsay was badly conceived by the government from the beginning. It was another tool, like the Yasuní-ITT Initiative, designed and imposed from the top-down, and without the consultation of those most directly impacted by its uptake or implementation. Opposed to this state-led directive, as the president of CONAIE insisted in an interview “we have to have development with identity” (Vargas, 2017). Rather than a reconfiguration of established state–society–nature dynamics along more democratic lines, Vargas contends that the Yasuní-ITT Initiative merely rebranded existing inequalities and exclusions, pasting a Kichwa concept onto a developmentalist core without bothering to consult the peoples and landscapes most impacted by extractivism in Ecuador. From this perspective the initiative can also be understood as a political project that manipulated background ideas about the value of nature. Opinion polls also cast doubt on the explanatory strength of Buen Vivir as a defining factor in Ecuadorians’ support of Yasuní-ITT. A first poll shows steady growth in approval for the initiative and conservation of the reserve. In 2011, 59% of the population approved. By 2013,

3 This stands in contrast with the expectations of spiral models of norm socialization. In such cases, individual actors’ decision to adhere to normative behavior might initially arise from purely strategic, and material calculations however justifications based on standards of appropriate behavior begins to trap actors into compliance with such behavior (Rieth & Zimmer, 2004).

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approval had grown to 76%. However, a second poll in 2013—after President Rafael Correa declared that the international community had not pledged the required contributions to support the Yasuní-ITT Initiative and conserve the reserve—shows that the majority of the population moved its support to exploiting the oil in Yasuní (Figs. 5.1 and 5.2). Whereas most people supported the initiative, they also supported drilling if the international community did not pay. Therefore, the idea of living in balance with nature embedded in the paradigm of Buen Vivir and in the new Ecuadorian constitution may signal an initial norm shift on the importance of environmental protection in Ecuadorean society. However, the polls above show that, on its own, the concept of Buen Vivir did not sustain support for the initiative in the absence of international financial support. A domestic norm of conservation does not provide a sufficient explanation to the question of why Ecuadorians agreed to forego part of their oil wealth for the benefit of the global environment. Do you APPROVE or DISAPROVE the proposal by the Ecuadorian government to the international community to contribute $3.6 billion to protect the reserve Yasuni ITT and not exploit the oil that will produce $7.2 billion?

76 64 59

23 18

21 15

16 8

DEC.11

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Not in support

MAY.13 No opinion/Would not respond

Fig. 5.1 2011–2013 Opinion polls on approval of the Yasuní-ITT Project (Source CEDATOS, Opinion Poll 2011–2013)

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Do you approve or disapprove the decision taken by the President of the Republic?

12% 36%

56%

In support Not in support No opinion/Would not respond

Fig. 5.2 2013 opinion poll of the President’s decision to close the YasuniITT Initiative and start oil exploitation in Yasuni (Source CEDATOS, Opinon Poll 2011–2013. El Telegrafo. 2014. “El 56% del país apoya explotar Yasuni.” Available at http://tinyurl.com/y9mbxo5w)

Populism and the Feedback Effects of the Extractive State It is important to consider the sway of the President’s support. In 2013, when 56% of the population approved of the President’s decision to exploit Yasuní, a similar number was polling in support of President Correa’s presidency in general. The poll below shows a 62% approval rating for the President. This is the phenomenon of “Correismo”—an element of populism that predicts, regardless of the policy, a significant portion of the population will support Correa’s proposals. As pollsters like Nancy Cordova, Vice President of the polling firm CEDATOS, put it, this represents a voto duro (solid vote) on which Correa could always rely. Correa appealed to a dyadic social contract between himself and “the people”—one that circumvented government agencies which people distrusted and were carrying on different proposals that were not aligned in a common pursuit of a coherent environmental conservation program. Yasuni represented a proposal from President Correa to the Ecuadorean people that would change the relationship between the extractive state and nature. The rest of the government could carry out business as usual but Yasuni-ITT epitomized the kind of vertical accountability relationship between the strong, personalistic figure of Correa and the electorate.

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For example, David Romo (2017), Co-Director of the Tiputini Research station in Yasuni National Park, recounted in an interview how the Minister of the Environment was in the Copenhagen Conference of the Parties in 2009, promoting the program Socio Bosque that duplicated many of the goals of the Yasuni-ITT Initiative which was being presented in another room of the same conference by the Yasuni Council. According to the former President of the Yasuni Council and former mayor of Quito, Roque Sevilla, this was not perceived as significant competition because the Council had been tasked by Correa with raising billions of dollars from the international community (Sevilla, 2017). Correa’s own environment minister could run in parallel with a competing proposal and members of the Yasuni Commission discounted that this represented no real threat to their own work. This highlights the lure of populism in extractive states—it is less an opportunity for democratic renewal and more one for direct and vertical accountability between the leader and his people (Fig. 5.3). The proposition, from the critical and radical democracy school discussed in earlier chapters, that populism represents a moment of democratic possibility, an opportunity to forge a new state–society–nature relationship led by Rafael Correa provides a compelling account of Do you approve or disapprove of the way the President of the Republic is handling his job to date?

90 80 70

68

63

60

66

62 51

55

50

50 40 30

31 25

36

20 10

51

44

7

6

7

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2008

2009

2011

3

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75.3

73.6

17.1

19

20.9

5.9

5.7

5.5

Aug, 2017

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Oct, 2017

47 46

42 9

77

40

35

42

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76.5 70.3

23

7

7

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5

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IT, 2017

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11

20.4 9.3

0 2013

Approves

Disapproves

May, 2017

Jun, 2017

No answer

Fig. 5.3 Presidential approval ratings 2007–2017 (Source CEDATOS, Estudio “Opinion” August 2017)

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Ecuadorean society support for the Yasuní-ITT initiative. However, this populist explanation on its own also falls short of describing the full picture. If populism explains both support for Yasuní-ITT when Correa first proposed it, and support for oil exploitation when Correa gave it up, then oil operations in Yasuní would not remain an open question and “an outstanding debt” as described by Cordova (2017) after Correa left office. Evidence that Yasuní remains an open question can be found in the continued campaigns to stop extraction in the area, and in the political referendum of February 2018 that reduced the area of extraction and increased the where groups of indigenous people live in voluntary isolation (Información Ecuador, 2017). With Correa’s presidency ending in 2017, the populist thesis that suggests support for conservation action in Yasuní depended on his figure alone should have moved to the sidelines of the political agenda. This was not the case. To understand Ecuadoreans’ support for the Yasuní-ITT Initiative, it is imperative to account for the role of the state–society–nature complex in a rentier state. In addition to the factors described above, there was a strategic calculation on the part of civil society to champion an alternative to oil exploitation because of its experience with this oil. Historical patterns of exclusion and inequality in Ecuador foretold the polity that any future economic benefits from oil concessions would disproportionately benefit a few national elites, international oil, and oil service companies.4 To illustrate civil society’s understanding of this accumulation of wealth, a member of the network of NGOs collective called “Yasunidos” described a proposal that the network presented to President Correa when he decided to close the Yasuní-ITT Initiative (Pichilingue, 2017). The plan would increase taxation to the largest 110 companies in Ecuador, who at the time enjoyed the most competitive tax rates in Latin America. This additional income would guarantee the government more resources than exploiting Yasuní (Centro de Derechos Economicos y Sociales, 2013). Yasunidos called this “Plan C,” named after the President’s own Plan B to exploit Yasuní, the backup option he frequently alluded to since the launch of the initiative. Correa refused to consider Plan C.

4 For example, for fiscal year 2018, the Ministry of Hydrocarbons said that 96.7% of oil has already been pre sold to Asian oil companies, leaving the state with only 3.6 million barrels for sale this year (El Universo, 2017).

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An economic summary of the distribution of wealth following Ecuador’s oil boom since the 1970s confirms that the public’s experience with economic exclusion is well founded. As Martin (2011: 24) describes: A 37-year run of petroleum extraction has left the country among the poorest in South America with poverty rates of 45 percent until 2001, which then declined by 20 percent by 2006. However, poverty in the Amazon where oil is abundant is at extreme levels—66.8 percent, compared to its neighboring Highland provinces at 43.6 percent and the Coastal provinces at 52.4 percent. Furthermore, cancer rates in oil producing areas of the Amazon are 31 percent, whereas the national average is 12.3 percent.

The extractive state in Ecuador has historically circumscribed the possible configurations of the state–society–nature relationship, disproportionately harming the most marginalized peoples and landscapes. Cori and Monni (2014) evaluated structural conditions engendered by dependence on oil as a primary economic sector and argued that despite the state’s alternative development project, based on the principle of Sumak Kawsay, the most recalcitrant features of the extractivist development model remained firmly in place during the Correa presidency. In this context, it is easier to understand the widespread support for the Yasuní-ITT proposal. The crisis in representation, described earlier by Soros (2007) as a problem of asymmetrical agency within a rentier state, helps explain why, by the time the Yasuní-ITT Initiative was launched, Ecuadoreans had come to recognize that their oil wealth did not pay high dividends in human development. Furthermore, the history of oil production and environmental disasters in the Amazon forged an important point of reference in the collective memory on the cost of oil. One of Ecuador’s first experiences with oil proved to be devastating for indigenous people, nature, and development. In 1967, Texaco began exploitation of its concession around Lago Agrio in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Texaco was later acquired by Chevron, but it remained the sole operator in the Lago Agrio area until the 1990s. Ecuador lacked environmental regulations and scientific know-how to properly oversee the Texaco-Chevron operations. The Ecuadorian people now involved in a suit against Chevron describe how regular oil spills— that by the end of the company’s operations amounted to 12 billion gallons spilled in what were supposed to be “untouchable zones”—were

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never cleaned up. They describe improper management of open pits, and dumping of contaminated water that left a legacy of cancer, poverty, and environmental devastation (Langewiesche, 2007). Our visit in 2017 to areas in the Amazon contaminated by Petroecuador, the national oil company that took over Chevron’s operations, showed the long-term effects on vulnerable communities that lack information on how to access their legal rights, or time and the financial means to retain a lawyer to present legal claims on their behalf or pursue other channels of accountability. Some colonos (long time settlers) found their experience living close to oil fields as well as their knowledge of the Texaco suit gave them sufficient reasons to support the initiative and forego whatever limited economic opportunities oil may create in their communities. The head of a local community organization said: “If there are 1 or 100 wells in my community there are no more or less jobs to be had” (Zambrano, 2017). From this vantage point, it is clear that strategic and material calculations by Ecuadorean society regarding the true cost of oil were at play in their support of Yasuní-ITT. This is a calculation based on their experience of unequal distribution of benefits from the extractivist state and the improbability that environmental and health damages resulting from oil extraction would be redressed through state agencies. Among the political elites who did not support the initiative were former oil executives in government positions who vied for Correa’s ear. According to some interviewees these actors helped to ultimately derail the Yasuní-ITT Initiative and supplant it with their own proposal to continue extraction. This included, for example, a former President of Texaco who was part of the Correa administration. One interviewee described the closed-door meetings between Correa and the main state oil company, PetroAmazonas, the day before Correa decided not to attend the launch of the Yasuní-ITT trust fund in Copenhagen (Larrea, 2017). PetroAmazonas allegedly was presenting Correa with the extraction plan that is currently in progress in Yasuní. An interview with the Yasunidos network affirms these competing interests. Leaving the oil underground represented a direct cost to the oil industry, those who privately benefited from oil contracts, and the extractivist state itself (Pichilingue, 2017).

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Populist Moments and Democratic Ecology in Ecuador To an extent, it matters little whether Correa proposed the Yasuní-ITT Initiative in good or bad faith. The opening which allowed for such a counterintuitive and yet widely popular approach to development and extraction was not of his making, and the energies that propel environmental action in Ecuador both predate him and persist now that he has left office. In a dynamic similar to what we outlined in the previous chapter on Venezuela, democratic action cannot be reduced to a president—attempts to do so are simply category errors. Correa was always more of a technocrat than democrat, and his progressive credentials had more to do with the distribution of oil rents than with reinvigorating democracy in Ecuador. Indeed, as Thea Riofrancos (2020) illustrates, a key guiding principle of his entire administration was to re-establish state power after what they perceived as the inefficiency and irrationality of neoliberalization (138). From this perspective democracy—and especially direct democracy—was understood to be a potentially dangerous distraction from the regulatory and developmentalist functioning of the state (131). Despite the language of democracy and the rhetoric of a citizen’s revolution that framed his time as president, Correa worked above all else to restore a hierarchically ordered state– society–nature complex typical of extractivist modes of development. He should be understood as one actor among many in the context of a populist moment, and not the most democratic one at that. The boom in commodity prices corresponded with the criminalization of anti-mining and anti-drilling activism in Ecuador. The government used formal legal measures such as closing or attempting to close NGOs like Acción Ecológica and the Pachamama Foundation to sideline dissent. Correa was also infamous for using his bully pulpit to characterize opponents to megamining and oil exploration as selfish “semi-delinquents” as in the case of Shuar land defenders (Birss, 2017). From this position of power, Correa and his administration also worked to reframe discourses like Sumak Kawsay/Buen Vivir they had previously utilized as their agenda shifted. Writing about the Mirador megamining project, Teijlingen and Hogenboom (2017) argue that Buen Vivir was used by Correa not as a criticism of developmentalism based in indigeneity. It was rather akin to a branding exercise: “by employing a development discourse that is framed very different from the neoliberal

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discourses from the past, the Correa administration highlights the novelties while obscuring the continuities within its development strategy” (406). Indeed, by highlighting aspects of Sumak Kawsay that emphasize collective over individual interests, Buen Vivir became a powerful discursive tool affixing moral emphasis on the government’s criminalization of anti-mining organizing. In this light, protests were not only against the law, they were affronts to the common good. What is so distinct about the Correa years in terms of democratic and environmental action in Ecuador is the way in which it responded to the dissonance of the neoliberal era by increasing it, only to resolve it in favor of a rejuvenated extractivism. The legitimate opening in the state–society– nature dynamic caused by structural adjustment allowed indigenous, and environmental movements to advance demands beyond protests and into concrete proposals to reimagine political rights, economic development, and environmental conservation. The Yasuní-ITT Initiative should thus be understood as an instance of democratic ecology that occurred during a populist moment in Ecuador. As democratic ecology, the initiative was the result of decades of struggles against drilling for oil in the Amazon and an instance where demands for alternatives to development directed the actions of the state. As we have argued, however, the institutions, subjects, and worldviews of the extractivist state proved more resilient than these challenges. This does not mean that democratic ecology in Ecuador is finished. Following Sheldon Wolin (2004) we would instead suggest that just as democracy only is when it is “fugitive,” or “an ephemeral phenomenon rather than a settled system” (602), so too are moments of democratic ecology experienced as moments of collective action rather than as settled structures of governance and regulation.

Conclusion The Yasuní-ITT Initiative was born out of civil society after decades of destructive social and environmental experiences with oil extraction in the Amazon. The initiative was novel because it represented an opportunity for democratic renewal—an opportunity to reshape state–society–nature relationships in an extractive state. If successful, Yasuni-ITT would have circumvented the continued accountability failures of the Ecuadorean state by creating a new social contract rooted in environmental protection. The moratorium proposed to interrupt the extractive imperative that

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had worn-out public goods and produced many social and environmental harms. However, the proposal was itself a product of a society shaped by the vertical structure of the extractive state. It was developed by intellectuals and environmental organizations based in the capital city of Quito. It was not an initiative that emerged from indigenous people living in affected areas of the Amazon. As the President of CONAIE explained, Yasuní-ITT remains to them an idea of development without identity (Vargas, 2017). When Yasuní-ITT is characterized in the literature as a bottom-up proposal, it is important to distinguish which “bottom” it represents, since the ethnicities it would affect were not part of a consultation (Sevilla, 2017). In this sense, the initiative itself replicated patterns of exclusion that are hallmarks of the extractive state, an illustration of how Buen Vivir was transmogrified into the familiar, verticalist, and developmentalist state–society–nature dynamic of Ecuador’s past (Caria & Domínguez, 2015). Yasuní was developed by intellectual and environmental elites and successfully marketed to politically disenfranchised sectors of the population. The partial moratorium on oil extraction in the Amazon was a desirable result for most of the Ecuadorean population. Despite its poor record of input accountability, it promised a result that was widely supported. This was the output accountability feature which the initiative could have delivered. However, it would not have redressed the intractable input accountability deficits historically experienced by indigenous people in sacrifice zones whose right to participate and decide on the future of their lands in the Amazon remained forever beyond their grasp. The compelling feature of the initiative that unified domestic constituencies was the chance to stave off an extractivist imperative that produced maldevelopment—a distinguishing feature of PetroStates. Our analysis on the feedback effects of the extractive state highlights the impact of exclusion and inequality on generating accountability gaps that gives rise to populist leaders who are sometimes pro environmentalists in their orientation—even if only for a time and to further their own political gains. This was an important dimension of the domestic support of the initiative, as confirmed through interviews. After four decades of living with oil, Ecuadoreans shared a broad understanding that oil would not produce tangible development benefits. For many, the decision to forgo exploiting this oil, in the name of conservation of biodiversity and avoided carbon emissions to mitigate

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climate change, did not emerge from a primary concern with environmental impacts. However, the environmental awareness that was lacking at the beginning of the initiative did grow throughout the five years of negotiations with international donors. Ecuadoreans, particularly young people, became much more environmentally conscious, in large part because of the massive and sustained government campaigns on the value of the Amazon as a biodiversity hotspot during the length of the initiative (Pichilingue, 2017). Just as the resource curse takes hold in extractive states thanks to an interplay of interactions between endogenous and exogenous structures and actors, which have been described as globalized assemblages, Yasuni-ITT demonstrated that similar assemblages could be created for environmental action. The initiative leveraged a significant level of consensus between international and domestic actors on the value of the proposal, and its potential to protect the atmosphere and biodiversity. Domestic constituencies supported an alternative to the traditional state-society-nature relationship of the extractive state which historically generated profoundly unequal development opportunities and this made the proposal economically rational to a broad base of domestic actors. It was a combination of these ideational and material conditions, local and international interactions, that created and sustained the opportunity of the Yasuní-ITT experiment for as long as it did.

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Sevilla, R. (2017, November 9). Interview by T. Kramarz and D. Kingsbury Personal Interview. Quito, Ecuador. Soros, G. (2007). Foreward. In M. Humphreys, J. D. Sachs, & J. E. Stiglitz (Eds.), Escaping the resource curse. Columbia University Press. Sovacool, B. K., & Scarpaci, J. (2016). Energy justice and the contested petroleum politics of stranded assets: Policy insights from the Yasuní-ITT Initiative in Ecuador. Energy Policy, 95, 158–171. Teijlingen, K., & Hogenboom, B. (2017). Debating alternative development at the mining frontier: Buen Vivir and the conflict around El Mirador mine in Ecuador. Journal of Developing Societies, 32(4), 382–420. Vargas, J. (2017, November 8). Interview by T. Kramarz, D. Kingsbury, and K. Jacques. Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE) Personal Interview. Quito, Ecuador. Viteri, C. (2017, November 9). Interview by T. Kramarz and D. Kingsbury. Asamblea Nacional de Ecuador. Personal Interview. Quito, Ecuador. Wolin, S. (2004). Politics and vision. Princeton University Press. Zambrano, D. (2017, November 6). Interview by T. Kramarz, D. Kingsbury, Red Angel Shingre Personal Interview. Quito, Ecuador.

CHAPTER 6

Extractive States and Prospects for Environmental Action

Abstract This conclusion most explicitly draws out the comparative lessons to be learned in the cases of Ecuador and Venezuela. Extractive states rather than the actions of charismatic leaders are key to understanding social, political, and environmental dynamics in both countries. Populism is a symptom or response to extractivism, not the other way around. We summarize our argument that democratic and accountability deficits associated with populist moments in the Americas predate the Chávez and Correa administrations and persist after the end of their terms. If anything, in their early moments both presidents embodied hopes, long percolating among largely dispersed and local movements in their respective countries, of a mode of state–society–nature relations other than the verticalism, exclusion, and extractivism that defined political culture across democratic and authoritarian regime types alike in both countries. Endogenous and exogenous factors ultimately deflated these hopes in both cases, lessons which enhance our understanding of populist moments and extractivist states in the Americas and beyond. Keywords Extractivist logics · State–society–nature relationship · Exclusions

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 T. Kramarz and D. Kingsbury, Populist Moments and Extractivist States in Venezuela and Ecuador, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70963-1_6

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On October 1, 2019 Lenín Moreno announced a series of decrees intended to shore up Ecuador’s faltering economy. In order to secure $4.2 billion dollars in stabilization loans from the International Monetary Fund, Moreno signed into law changes to the country’s financial, labor, and social policies (Silva, 2019). The most controversial element of the paquetazo, as it was immediately denounced, was the elimination of subsidies for transport and heating fuels, a move that triggered increased transit and shipping costs that most drastically impacted the poor. The response was immediate, and massive. Demonstrations choked the capital, Quito, as police fired tear gas on protesters demanding Moreno reverse what were widely considered the undemocratic imposition of austerity on a population already struggling to adapt to diminished economic prospects. The government was either caught unaware by the scale of the uprisings or simply overwhelmed. By October 8, Moreno announced the security situation had deteriorated to such an extent that he was moving the seat of government from Quito in the Andes to Guayaquil, nearly 400 km away on the Pacific coast. On October 10, CONAIE announced that two of its members had been killed by state forces during a protest in the capital. At a public mass held that night, members of the press observed the largest indigenous confederation in the Americas oblige ten police officers to carry to the altar the coffins containing the protesters killed during the crackdown. CONAIE then transferred custody of the police to representatives of the United Nations, calling for justice, dialogue, and the reversal of Moreno’s economic decrees (El Comercio, 2019). In a speech during the events, CONAIE’s president, Jaime Vargas, denounced the government and asked the military to withdraw their support for the government. Responsibility for any bloodshed during the protests, he insisted, rested solely with the Moreno administration. Signaling CONAIE’s willingness to radicalize their tactics, he concluded by threatening that if their demands were not met, they would “return to the Amazon and shut down the oil wells” (El Comercio, 2019). As we conclude the writing of this book, the situation in Ecuador continues to unfold, and is now significantly worse by the COVID19 pandemic that has devastated the poorest sectors of the population. However, the events of early October 2019 call for a few observations in light of the dynamics of extractivism, accountability, and populism in contemporary Latin America. First, Moreno’s decrees are symptomatic of the kinds of sequences engendered by top-down governments, with

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persistent input accountability failures. Populations are regularly excluded from the decision-making processes, and policy is often established via decree rather than debate and consensus building. Ecuador, as we illustrated in chapter five, was top-heavy in favor of the executive branch long before Correa’s ostensibly populist reconfiguration of state and society, and particularly resistant to any potential interference in policymaking or the economics of development and extraction. It remains so after the country’s “populist moment” of Correismo and its “Citizen’s Revolution.” Second, the nature and publicity of CONAIE’s actions on October 10 can be read as performances that highlight the sorts of accountability gaps we have outlined in this book while at the same time enacting alternatives within the means available to them. By detaining the police officers, CONAIE illustrated the limits of the Ecuadorean state’s sovereignty. By forcing the soldiers to carry their dead, CONAIE orchestrated an act of public blaming and shaming, compelling the officers to accept responsibility. By handing the now publicly declared guilty police to representatives of the UN, CONAIE forcefully demonstrated their lack of faith in police oversight and justice in Ecuador and found a surrogate in the international community. Finally, the threat of disrupting oil production in the Amazon acknowledges the existential reality of the extractive state in Ecuador. CONAIE had no clear accountability channels to seek redress in response to Moreno’s austerity measures, and so it took to the streets. The President’s decrees did not come about after consultation with citizens or stakeholders, and continued a pattern of reversing the previous decade’s social welfare commitments. Roadblocks and caravans to the capital, furthermore, are part of an established repertoire of action in Ecuador, having been used in the previous anti-austerity protests that toppled three presidents in the 1990s and early 2000s. Vargas’s threat to take the fight to the oil wells, on the other hand, took aim at the very existence of Ecuador as an extractive state. What do these events say, directly, to the prospects for environmental action in Latin America? In this book we have examined populism as a response to the democratic accountability deficits that characterize extractive states, and the consequences on environmental sustainability and human development. We analyzed the emergence of populism in Latin America to reclaim the rents of natural resource extraction for the people,

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and the surge in civil society movements that contest the continued environmental and human violence of the so-called “progressive extractivism” paradigm of the early twenty-first century. We argue that these movements face a new set of political and social challenges as they work to build more inclusive and just post-extractive pathways for development. While the populist governments of Chávez in Venezuela and Correa in Ecuador promised a more equitable distribution of resource rents, the political logic of the extractive state continued the longer standing circumscription of participation and curtailed accountability. Reforms were often carried out in the name of local stakeholders, but rarely with or by them, and almost never in cases that threatened the activities of extractive industries. Similarly, the mandate of national development and ever-present crises arising from local and global economies provided easy alibis for authorities and elites looking to avoid accountability for environmental degradation and corruption.

Proximities, Distances, and Lessons In this short book, we argued that it is the logic of extractive states, rather than the actions of charismatic leaders, that is key to understanding social, political, and environmental dynamics in both Venezuela and Ecuador. Populism is a symptom or response to extractivism, not the other way around. As we have illustrated, the sorts of democratic and accountability deficits associated with populist moments in the Americas predate the Chávez and Correa administrations. They have also, as we have seen, persisted after the ostensible populist break these charismatic figures represented. If anything, in their early moments both presidents embodied hopes, long percolating among largely dispersed and local movements in their respective countries, of a mode of state–society– nature relations other than the verticalism, exclusion, and opacity that defined political culture across democratic and authoritarian regime types alike in both countries. Endogenous and exogenous factors ultimately deflated these hopes in both cases, lessons which enhance our understanding of populist moments and extractivist states in the Americas and beyond. The PetroState defined Venezuelan political economy since the early twentieth century. Indeed, the history of the Venezuelan state itself is that of oil extraction, as the post-independence years of the nineteenth

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century were marked by the difficulties of reconstructing and consolidating the authority of Caracas over the totality of the national territory. Oil’s discovery and exploitation during the reign of Juan Vicente Gómez (1908–1935) was a key determinant of state formation and of what would be the enduring relationship between the state, population, and natural resources in Venezuela. Venezuela has thus always been a PetroState, and the patterns of exclusionary developmentalism established under dictatorship persisted well into the ostensibly democratic Puntofijo era between 1958 and 1992 (Blackmore, 2017; Coronil, 1997; Kingsbury, 2018). Ecuador relied on agricultural exports for most of its history prior to the discovery of oil in the Amazon during the military dictatorship of the 1970s. Whereas the Venezuelan state was rather fragmented prior to the growth of the oil industry, in Ecuador political power had long been a matter of contestation between highland and coastal elites in the context of coffee and then banana booms. Oil revenues provided the development minded military junta with revenues to carry out civic and social reforms that were derailed due to turbulence in other sectors of the national and global economies. Once recognized, however, oil’s role in the economic life of Ecuador would only grow—from 3% of GDP in 1973 to 18% by the time of Correa’s election in 2007 (World Bank, 2011). In the intervening years, civilian and military administrations, often with terms shortened by popular unrest and economic crises, all relied increasingly on the promise of immediately accessible and lucrative oil rents to pursue their policy objectives. In both countries, these consolidated extractivist states were disrupted and reorganized by the economic crises of the late twentieth century in Latin America collectively known as the “lost decades.” In Venezuela, low oil prices, exploding debt, and a political class too brittle to adapt to popular discontent when the class compromise of the Puntofijo system ran out of money for the poor resulted in a decade of political and social violence that began with the caracazo massacre of over 3,000 antiausterity protesters in February 1989. By the time the last president of the Puntofijo system, Carlos Andrés Pérez, was impeached for corruption in 1992, traditional elites, their parties, and the ordering of state, society, and nature they championed imploded. The stage was set for an outsider like Chávez—who, despite leading a failed coup attempt in 1992 as a junior officer, had little by way of organic or sustained relationship with the movements against neoliberalization in Venezuela—to take advantage of a radically open political landscape.

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The situation in Ecuador was in many ways similar. Repeated corruption scandals in the 1980s and 1990s compounded the challenges of a faltering export economy, mismanagement and growth of external debt, and the dollarization of the economy that accompanied neoliberlization and structural adjustment. Unlike Venezuela, however, a strong, nationwide indigenous movement articulated with environmentalists and the urban poor to shut down the country in multiple protest actions that intensified the perennial instability of the Andean nation. Correa’s lack of connection to these movements—he was an economics professor at the prestigious and private Universidad San Francisco de Quito at the time—rendered him perhaps even more of an outsider than Chávez in Venezuela. Like his contemporary, Correa used this outsider status to his advantage, capitalizing on the anti-establishment momentum of a decade of crises and mobilizations to propose a radical rupture. In both cases these ruptures took the form of constituent assemblies—in Venezuela in 1999 and Ecuador in 2008—and both are striking in their attempts to revise the sociopolitical and ecological contracts of existing extractivist states in each country. Venezuela’s new constitution was more consistently resource nationalist in character and tone than Ecuador’s, emphasizing the role of the state in administering the petroleum industry in the interest of the people and barring privatization. It broke with established political cultures by prioritizing direct over representative democracy, and constitutional measures like recall referenda were followed by hybrid state-civil society formations like the Communal Councils and Bolivarian Missions. The ability of councils and missions to engage people in the betterment of their own lives was predicated on the sale of oil—that much was familiar. However, the distribution of resource rents enhanced by a global boom in commodity prices was to be controlled locally, collectively, and horizontally—a far cry from the elitism and technocracy of the past. This break with the established machinations of democracy in Venezuela pushed toward more inclusive and transformative horizons until the collapse of commodity prices in 2014, though the crises of the Bolivarian Republic can be traced at least as far back as the controversies surrounding the formation of the PSUV in 2008 and Chávez’s prolonged battle with and eventual death to cancer (Buxton, 2016; Spronk & Weber, 2011).

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Ecuador’s constitution was also bullish on sovereignty, oil, and development. However, it included several countervailing elements—indigenous concepts like Sumak Kawsay, or granting citizen rights and protections to nature, for example—that implicitly or explicitly contradicted the path of extractive-led development favored by Correa. The result was a dissonance that settled in favor of the extractivist state by the time of the Yasuní-ITT Initiative’s failure. In a similar fashion, the civic revival of Correa’s promised “citizen’s revolution,” as he styled his movement, was more often than not a rather circumscribed affair. Especially in policy matters pertaining to extraction, Ecuadorians were meant to benefit from sound policy but not to participate in its making. Any criticism of drilling or megamining was considered by the president and his allies as opposition not only to government initiatives, but to the progress of Ecuador itself. Both Venezuela and Ecuador, then, share the similar historical experiences in ruptures with previously consolidated extractivist state orders on the eve of a decade’s worth of economic expansion and a rapid increase in commodity prices. In contrast with the “commodity determinism” of the resource curse literature, we have argued that both Chávez in Venezuela and Correa in Ecuador aggressively pursued policies that not only prioritized resource extraction over domestic economic diversification (even while paying lip service to the latter), both also did so as part of a geopolitical strategy that prioritized Latin American regional integration, South-South development, and independence from the United States— all of which resulted in closer ties to China. This geopolitical logic also left both countries vulnerable to China. The consequences of overreliance on Chinese demand were borne out in 2013, when a shift in domestic development plans in China triggered economic crises in Venezuela and Ecuador. In neither case has the coda to the populist moment ameliorated the social, political, and ecological crises of the extractivist state. Nor have the subsequent governments of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela or Lenín Moreno in Ecuador attempted to pursue post-extractivist paths. Quite the contrary, both have reversed their predecessors’ social and economic policies, imposing austerity measures and privatizations, initiating new transnationalized extractivist projects in megamining and ordering crackdowns on the resulting social reactions. Whereas alternatives to extractivist orders presented by populist moments in Venezuela and Ecuador emerged in the context of social mobilization, democratic engagement, and the

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decay of consolidated orders, the return to the extractivist status quo ante has been accomplished by force. Three lessons from the comparison of populist moments and extractivist states in Venezuela and Ecuador can be drawn before moving on to the broader theoretical and policy implications of this book. First, we have discussed the resilience of extractivist state formations, the state–society–nature dynamics they put in place, and the loud and quiet violences they entail. Extractivisms are so resilient because they are always global and entangled with hopes of development. As we stated in the introduction, and as numerous others have pointed out in different cases and idioms (Gudynas, 2015; Riofrancos, 2017; Svampa, 2019) extractivist states do not exist in isolation; they are rather nodes in transnationalized and uneven networks of power and nature. They are part of a global assemblage of actors and appetites. Extreme illustrations of this can be seen in the transition from the Correa to Moreno administrations in Ecuador. Throughout his administration, Correa signed multiple contracts with China for infrastructure development and human development funds payable in future oil exports (Casey & Krauss, 2018). Even if Moreno, or any other subsequent president wanted to pursue a post-petroleum economic policy, their hands would be significantly tied. Venezuela has run into similar difficulties in restarting its economy in the context of a sorely mismanaged petroleum sector, the aforementioned fall in prices for oil, and a crippling sanctions regime imposed by the United States (Sachs & Weisbrot, 2019). The Maduro administration’s turn to the exploitation of the AMO highlights the persistence of extractivist strategies for generating revenue in Venezuela. It also illustrates a recognition on Maduro’s part that what trading partners want from a country like Venezuela is relative ease of extracting minerals as opposed to, for example, opening factories and creating new supply chains (and potential competitors in value-added spaces). Breaking with extractivism cannot be accomplished within the borders of a single country. A second lesson has to do not only with the resilience of extractivist states as structural realities, but of the subjects they engender. Like most other forms of political identification, the subjects of extractive states are creations of habit (Beasley-Murray, 2010). Habits can be—and often are—broken, but elements do not disappear. They remain available for recomposition.

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More than charisma or chutzpah, Chávez and Correa’s promise of a break with political exclusion, social inequality, and economic maldevelopment mobilized electoral majorities. Constituent assemblies in both countries put a fresh start on the horizon in terms of direct democratic participation in Venezuela or alternatives to carbon-intensive development in Ecuador. Infrastructures and habits of extractivism also remained tempting elements of the political terrain, made more likely given the late carbon capitalist conditions the Bolivarian and the Citizen Revolution were required to navigate. As Venezuelan and Ecuadorean extractivist states responded to the crises of the early 2000s, politics became increasingly vertical in practice and technocratic in execution, and zones of sacrifice were demanded from populations still reeling from the previous decades’ experience with structural adjustment and political violence. If Chávez or Correa were “bad for democracy”—condemnations often leveled by mainstream commentators and political scientists—the ways in which they were had more to do with their continuation with rather than break from extractivism. Finally, as a concept, populism is stretched. As we explored in Chapter two, populism has been deployed to explain state-led industrialization and development. It has been used to identify processes of social inclusion and democratization. It has been defined by the Manichean rhetoric often deployed by political entrepreneurs. It has been associated with the bait-and-switch of neoliberals in the 1990s. Beyond Latin America, we might also add the extreme xenophobia, climate change denial, and protectionism of Donald Trump in the United States, Brexit in Europe, and the return of far-right parties in the post-Soviet sphere. The list could go on. Part of this proliferation of populisms is the way in which populism is almost always theorized against a normative backdrop of liberal democratic norms and practices—either as an idealized prior state or as the guiding principles of good governance. Though some treatments of populism have tempered such ubiquity by recognizing populism as a symptom of mass politics, an experience on the “edge” of liberalism (Arditi, 2007), its apparent ability to describe everything undermines its ability to accurately apprehend anything. What is more, neither Venezuela nor Ecuador could honestly or accurately be described as “liberal” or open democracies prior to the ruptures of the early twenty-first century. They could, however, be described as extractivist, a designation that better explains the rationalities and machinations of state–society–nature

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dynamics in those countries than essentializing theories of politics. Extractivism also better explains phenomena usually associated with populism in Venezuela and Ecuador. It better predicts the semi-cyclical occurrence of decomposing political orders, accountability failures, and anti-systemic mobilizations without falling into either the commodity determinism of resource curse theories or the cults of personality that are fixtures of populist theories. In Venezuela and Ecuador, extractivist states trigger responses. These populist moments ultimately settled back into extractivist modes of organizing politics, society, and nature. Democratic accountability gaps, rising inequality, and the decision to consign some people and landscapes to zones of sacrifice for economic growth and development are all aspects of the extractivist state. Populist moments are ruptures in which the internal political organization of extractivist states, often in response to exogenous shocks, have been sufficiently disrupted so that alternative modes of political engagement and visions of development seem possible. However, the needs of the populations in question are confronted with unceasing pressures from transnational and local firms, aid groups, experts, and elites across the political spectrum to provide strong pressure to resume and even intensify extractive activities. States are thus pressured to return to their role as businesses, which, by definition, are neither democracies nor capable of placing any value—from inclusion to sustainability—over shareholder profit. Our analysis here shows that while this cycle was not inevitable, it was always likely.

Theoretical Implications In the absence of a democratically accountable state, and the recalcitrance of the extractivist development model, environmental action is more likely to emerge from non-state institutions of civil society or the market. While both of these types of non-state actors have made important inroads in terms of climate action on the global scale, by assuming a growing number of functions previously held by public actors, this rise in the privatization of democratic accountability also points toward narrower logics of action that can easily be overtaken by persistent extractive states, populist or otherwise. One of the effects of the receding state in global governance is the growth of what Koenig-Archibugui and Macdonald (2013) have

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called “proxy accountability.” As more non-state governance arrangements develop to fill the vacuum left by the state, and produce or sustain the kinds of public goods that were previously the domain of public officials, new configurations of actors become authoritative and accountable. These might emerge in the form of hybrid governance arrangements like public–private partnerships, or they may be wholly private such as a corporation that voluntarily adheres to production standards to obtain a certification seal for its products (Kramarz, 2020; Kramarz & Park, 2016). We refer to this phenomenon—the new private character of formerly public functions—as the privatization of accountability to highlight the shifting logics of action. Whereas the purpose of public accountability mechanisms is to faithfully represent the will of the people, private actors’ core purposes range from producing economic value in the case of market actors to propagating specific moral frames in the case of civil society organizations (Kramarz & Park, 2016). Privatizing accountability means that the scope of answerability is redrawn around new purposes that might or might not involve governance for or by the people. Extractive states produce situations in which the privatization of accountability can emerge as a last available option, particularly in terms of environmental action. However, the privatization of accountability is an ambivalent concept. When practiced by local stakeholders, or even by nationwide confederations like CONAIE it may be seen as an empowering, transformational recourse to structural injustices. It is direct action, and it challenges the ossified exclusions and corrupting opacity of extractivism, if only for an exceptional moment. Therefore, the privatization of accountability can also be seen as an instance of so-called populist mobilization. Corrupt, and otherwise unresponsive states fostered under the extractive imperative, allowed individual political entrepreneurs like Chávez or Correa to accrue significant symbolic and material power, willfully given by populations fed up with the status quo ante. This belief in the leader and movement is, however and paradoxically, often expressed in the same breath as distrust for the extractivist state apparatus over which they preside. We saw this in the opinion polls simultaneously supporting drilling in Yasuní and leaving the oil in the ground, or in the popular Venezuelan affirmation that “Chávez is good, but he’s surrounded by scorpions.” Pinning all hopes on a single person delivered real benefits to the poor majorities as Venezuela and Ecuador used oil rents to

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expand welfare states. It also unfortunately left the fundamental architecture of the extractive state in those countries untouched—or perhaps even enhanced, as a social mandate for extraction now occupies the popular imagination. Less positive, however, are privatizations that of accountability see corporations and foreign NGOs take on the role of states. Privatized security forces, self-serving corporate social responsibility campaigns, the “revolving door” between industry and the government agencies meant to regulate the extractive sector, all make the pursuit of accountability on the part of citizens even more difficult. Furthermore, the assumption of welfare and other services by private entities shifts the tenor and substance of the accountability dynamic from one of civic responsibility toward one of client or customer service.

Policy Implications The picture we paint is bleak. The incredible durability of the state– society–nature relationships in Latin America’s extractivist states result in self-replicating political cycles of exclusion, mobilization, and extraction. Despite growing calls for the decarbonization of the global economy, the power dynamics of carbon capitalism and the persistence of human development needs in Latin America do not suggest any significant revision of these patterns in the near future. However, if the accountability gaps of the extractivist state presented in this book seem structurally predetermined, and the consequences for environmental action so dire, we have also located here potential avenues for change. The early years of the Bolivarian Revolution (especially 2002–2008) witnessed a profusion of experimentation in direct, participatory, democracy. The misiones bolivarianas and other attempts to shape the economic and social realities of Venezuela would not have been possible without the early twenty-first century’s record high oil prices. As a result, the drive to maximize oil production characteristic of the extractivist approach to development renewed its popular mandate and continued to occupy a prominent place in the national imaginary (Plaza Azuaje, 2018). At the same time political power was reconceived in practice as constituent power—as a creative and collective endeavor in which popular sovereignty stubbornly refused to transfer itself to populist leaders or bureaucratic state apparatuses (Ciccariello-Maher, 2013; Kingsbury, 2018).

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Communal Councils, worker-controlled enterprises, and the constitutional right to referendum all point to a leveling of accountability mechanisms, a form of politics that is more immediate and inclusive than the representative organs of liberal democracy. However, they have not proven immune to capture by the extractive state, and their effectiveness has been significantly hampered by Venezuela’s deepening economic and political crises since 2015 (Buxton, 2016). They nonetheless suggest and continue to occupy a prominent position in collective ethical and political history, a manner of organizing the state–society–nature relationship beyond the exclusionary logics of the extractive state in Venezuela. A similar lesson can be drawn from the failed Yasuní-ITT Initiative. Correa’s 2013 withdrawal of the proposal to leave the oil under the soil was the result of a confluence of conditions. Among these, there was bad faith from his administration as well as from his European Union counterparts. Anxieties were no doubt on the rise as oil prices continued to fall after the 2008 financial crisis, pushing Ecuador to export as much oil as soon as possible. The needs of both the Ecuadorean people and Correa’s own political brand needed cash in hand. China was (and remains) an energy-poor superpower poised to exploit inroads to Latin America. All of these factors, however, are conjunctural. They are by no means inevitable. At its core, the Yasuní-ITT Initiative rested on a simple premise: the North needed to trust the South. However, the colonial legacy loomed large. Donors are generally suspicious of populist leaders like Correa and doubt they have the practical and technical capacity to pursue development and conservation. This is a poor foundation for the kinds of collective and global environmental actions we increasingly need. If there is to be any hope of navigating the troubled waters of the climate crisis we have already entered, coordination between states will require more trust. It is striking that, given all the structural elements in place, the YasuníITT proposal would have emerged at all in a poor extractive state headed by a populist leader. The initiative remains popular in Ecuador and beyond. It points toward a politics of collaboration, and a refusal of the worldview that ties extraction to development. It also proposes a reversal of the colonial conditions of late carbon capitalism and the extractivist logic. Rather than a state apparatus that subordinates the needs of its population in the service of external markets, the initiative would have

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seen Ecuador partner with the global north to enhance the lives and livelihoods of the poor while protecting the Amazon, its mega biodiversity, and carbon sinks for the benefit of the entire world. Against the self-replicating cycles of extractivism and the uneven implications of the privatization of accountability, this book identifies these as some of the lessons that we can draw from Venezuela and Ecuador. Much more analysis of governance experiments that attempt to overcome extractivist logics of action constitutes an important research task for developing more equitable and effective environmental action at both local and global levels. However, even at this stage it is clear that the initiatives must come from below. The exclusionary and top-down state– society–nature dynamics of extractivist states cannot be replaced by more impositions from on high. Extending these familiar patterns only promises to deepen the democratic and ecological crises of the present.

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Koenig-Archibugi, M., & Macdonald, K. (2013). Accountability-by-proxy in transnational non-state governance. Governance, 26(3), 499–522. Kramarz, T. (2020). Forgotten values: The World Bank and environmental partnerships. MIT Press. Kramarz, T., & Park, S. (2016). Accountability in global environmental governance: A meaningful tool for action? Global Environmental Politics, 16(2), 1–21. Plaza Azuaje, P. (2018). Culture as renewable oil: How territory, bureaucratic power, and culture coalesce in the Venezuelan Petrostate. Routledge. Riofrancos, T. (2017). Extractivismo unearthed: A genealogy of a radical discourse. Cultural Studies, 31(2–3), 277–306. Sachs, J., & Weisbrot, M. (2019). Economic sanctions as collective punishment: The case of Venezuela. Center for Economic Policy Research. https://cepr.net/ report/economic-sanctions-as-collective-punishment-the-case-of-venezuela/. Accessed 15 November 2020. Silva, M. V. (2019, October 1). Lenín Moreno Anuncia 6 Medidas Económicas y 13 Propuestas De Reforma. El Comercio. https://www.elcomercio.com/act ualidad/lenin-moreno-medidas-economicas-ecuador.html. Spronk, S., & Weber, J. (2011). The Bolivarian process in Venezuela: A left forum. Historical Materialism, 19(1), 233–270. Svampa, M. (2019). Neo-extractivism in Latin America: Socio-environmental conflicts, the territorial turn, and new political narratives. Cambridge University Press. World Bank. (2011). Oil rents, % GDP. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/ NY.GDP.PETR.RT.ZS?locations=EC-VE. Accessed 15 November 2020.

Index

A Acción Democrática (Democratic Action, Venezuela) (AD), 56–59 Acción Ecológica (Ecuador), 25, 80, 82, 91

Arco Minero del Orinoco (Orinoco Mining Arc) (AMO), 34, 35, 39, 52, 67, 106 Arditi, Benjamin, 22, 107 Argentina, 14, 16, 17, 37

Accountability accountability deficits, 2, 8, 24, 27, 41, 45, 69, 93, 101, 102 accountability, privatization of, 109, 112 democratic accountability gaps, 14, 40, 44, 108 environmental accountability, xv, 24, 77, 92, 102 horizontal and vertical mechanisms of, 18, 40–43, 46 input/output, 42–44, 46, 93, 101

B Beasley Murray, Jon, 22 Betancourt, Romúlo, 58 Bolivarian Missions (Venezuela), 64, 68, 104 Bolivarian Revolution, 7, 26, 52, 53, 61, 62, 64, 67–69, 110 Bolívar, Simón, 54, 57, 59 Bolivia, 4, 7, 16 Bolsonaro, Jair, 7, 24 Bucaram, Abdalá, 20 Buen Vivir. See Sumak Kawsay

privatization of accountability, 109, 112 Acosta, Alberto, xiv, 25, 78, 80, 82, 83 Alianza-PAIS (Ecuador), xii, xiii

C Canovan, Maragret, 21, 24 Cárdenas, Lázaro, 16

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 T. Kramarz and D. Kingsbury, Populist Moments and Extractivist States in Venezuela and Ecuador, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70963-1

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INDEX

Chávez, Hugo, xiv, 3, 7, 15, 18, 26, 42, 52, 53, 61, 62, 64–70, 102–105, 107, 109 attempted coup, 1992, 61 chavismo/chavistas, xv, 67 president, 68, 103 Chevron, 89, 90 Ciccariello-Maher, George, 61, 110 Citizen’s revolution, xii, 91, 101, 105 Comité de Organizaciones Políticas Electorales Independientes (Committee of Independent Electoral Political Organizations, COPEI, Venezuela), 57–59 Commodity, xiv, xv, 2, 4, 42, 46, 65, 68, 70, 75, 81, 91, 104, 105 Commodity determinism, 5, 38, 59, 77, 105, 108 Communal Councils (Venezuela), 43, 64, 68, 104, 111 Confederación de Nacionalidades Indígenas del Ecuador–Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), xv, 76, 83, 84, 93, 100, 101, 109 Consejos comunales . See Communal Councils (Venezuela) Constituent assembly, xiv, 62, 104, 107 1999 Venezuela, 62 2007 Ecuador, xiv Constitutional referendum of 2018 (Ecuador), xiii, 75, 111 Coronil, Fernando, 54, 56–58, 60, 103 Correa, Rafael, xii–xiv, 3, 15, 18, 25, 27, 42, 76–81, 83–92, 101–107, 109, 111 correismo/correistas, 86 voto duro, 86 Correismo, xiii, xv, 86, 101

Corruption, xiii, 7, 17, 37, 38, 42, 66, 67, 69, 102–104

D Dahl, Robert, 14, 44 Democracy, 6–8, 17, 18, 21–24, 39, 41, 43, 44, 55–57, 64, 67, 68, 87, 91, 92, 104, 107, 108, 110 liberal democracy, 6, 15, 21–23, 40, 55, 64, 67 Democratic ecology, 92 Development, xi, xiv, xv, 2, 3, 5, 9, 15–17, 19, 24–26, 34, 35, 38, 43, 52, 53, 55, 59–64, 66, 69, 70, 77, 80, 83, 84, 89, 91–94, 101–103, 105–108, 110, 111 developmentalism, xv, 17, 91, 103 developmentalist, 3, 26, 69, 91, 93 sustainable development, 57, 63, 80, 82, 83 Discursive, 3, 22, 24, 92 DiTella, Torcuato, 16 Dussel, Enrique, 21

E Elites, xiii, xiv, 16–18, 21, 24, 38, 39, 43, 55–57, 69, 88, 90, 93, 102, 103, 108 Environmental action, 2, 5, 8, 9, 14, 36, 39, 44, 46, 57, 91, 92, 94, 101, 108–112 Exclusion, xiv, 2, 21, 35, 53, 56, 69, 84, 88, 89, 93, 102, 107, 109, 110 Extractivism extractive imperative, xv, 109 extractive state, 2, 5, 8–10, 35, 36, 42, 44, 57, 102 extractivist social contract, 6 progressive, xiv, 53, 66, 70, 102

INDEX

F Foreign direct investment, 19, 61 Fujimori, Alberto, 19

G Garcia, Alán, 83 Germani, Gino, 16 Gómez, Juan Vicente, 52–56, 103 Guaidó, Juan, 68 Gudynas, Eduardo, 3, 26, 66, 106 Gutierrez, Lucio, 20

I IESA Boys (Venezuela), 61 Import Substitution Industrialization, 18 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 24 International Monetary Fund (IMF), xiii, 20, 69, 78, 79, 100

J Jiménez, Marcos Pérez, 52, 55, 57, 68

117

M Maduro, Nicolás, 33–35, 52, 64, 66–68, 105, 106 Martin, Pamela, 7, 79, 80, 82, 83, 89 Mining, xiii, xiv, 2, 6, 7, 19, 34, 36, 39, 53, 61, 68, 76, 80, 91, 92, 105 Misiones Bolivarianas. See Bolivarian Missions (Venezuela) Morales, Evo (Bolivia), xiv Moreno, Lenín, xii, xiii, 100, 101, 105, 106

N Narodniki, 15 Nationalism, 3, 5, 16, 17, 24–26, 39, 42 Neoextractivism. See Extractivism (progressive) Neoliberalism/neoliberalization, xv, 15, 19–21, 26, 27, 60–62, 65, 69, 91, 92, 103, 107

O O’Donnell, Guillermo, 18, 41 Oil industry, 3, 6, 36, 39, 53, 56, 62, 63, 66–68, 78, 90, 103 Opacity, 6, 7, 17, 102, 109

K Karl, Terry Lynn, 3, 36, 37

L Laclau, Ernesto, 22–24 Lago Agrio (Ecuador), 76, 89 Lanz, Laureano Vallenilla, 55 Larrea, Carlos, 76, 80, 90 Logic of action, 27 Lula, Luiz Inacio ‘Lula’ da Silva (Brazil), 7

P Pachakutik, 20 Pachamama Foundation, 25, 91 Paz Estenssoro, Victor, 16 Pérez, Carlos Andrés, 20, 52, 59, 103 Perón, Juan Domingo, 14, 16, 17 Personalism, 17 Peru, 4, 16, 19 Petroleos de Venezuela, SA (PDVSA), 6, 63, 65, 68

118

INDEX

PetroState, 3, 5, 8, 39, 52, 61, 66, 76, 93, 102, 103 Pink Tide. See Extractivism (progressive) Political claims, 2, 44 Polyarchy, 14, 24, 44 Populism as personalism, 17 as rhetoric, 26, 107 classical, 16–19, 21, 23, 24, 27, 46 “critical and radical”, 22, 24, 87 critical and radical democracy approaches, 21 neopopulism, 19–21 populist, 2, 8, 14, 15, 18, 23–27, 35, 44, 77, 88, 102 Positivism, 55 Presidentialism, 41 Pueblo, 16–18, 21, 25, 26, 55, 61, 63 Puntofijo, 53, 56–61, 65, 67, 69, 103

R Rentier, 35, 53, 66, 88, 89 Resource curse, 5, 8, 37–39, 42, 59, 60, 77, 82, 94, 105, 108 Riofrancos, Thea, 2, 3, 65, 91, 106 Royal Dutch Shell, 54, 56

S Sevilla, Roque, 79–81, 87, 93 Sovereignty, 3, 21, 25, 53, 64, 66, 101, 105, 110 State-society-nature, xi, xv, 2, 3, 5, 9, 26, 42, 52, 57, 59, 61, 63, 64, 66, 67, 78, 81, 84, 87–89, 91–94, 102, 106, 107, 110–112 Sumak Kawsay, xiv, xv, 82–84, 89, 91, 92, 105

T Technocracy, 2, 104 Teran-Mantovani, Emiliano, 60 Texaco, 76, 89, 90 de la Torre, Victor Haya, 16, 18, 20, 25 Toxic tour, xi, xii Trump, Donald, xiii, 14, 24, 107 Twenty-first century socialism, xiv, 2, 13, 15, 20, 26, 27, 35, 52, 57, 65, 66, 68–70, 102, 110. See also Bolivarian Revolution V Vargas, Jaime, xv, 16, 83, 84, 93, 100, 101 Verticalism, 2, 17, 102 Violence, 2, 102, 103, 106, 107 Viteri, Carlos, xii–xv, 84 W Welfare institutions, 18, 19, 27 programs, 19 social, xiv, 20, 66, 101 state, xiii, xiv, 18, 19, 69, 110 Workers’ Party (Brazil). See Luiz Inacio ‘Lula’ da Silva Y Yasunidos (Ecuador), 25, 88, 90 Yasuní-ITT initiative, 9, 78, 84, 105, 111 Z Zone(s) of sacrifice, 6, 7, 9, 54, 107, 108