BOLIVIA:
Natural Gas Dispute Sees Awakening of the Guaraní
Franz Chávez
LA PAZ, May 11 (IPS) - Guaraní Indians staged a peaceful five-day protest in which they surrounded the grounds of the oil transnationals Repsol-YPF and Maxxus, which operate in Bolivia's largest natural gas field.
The indigenous activists are calling for recognition of their territorial rights and the nationalisation of the fossil fuel industry, and they reject the secessionist threats in the country's eastern region.
Dozens of Guaraní, who live in the southern departments of Tarija and Chuquisaca, and in the southeastern Santa Cruz, led a silent mobilisation last week, an event that was far from the mass media spotlight.
With marches, roadblocks on the highway that connects the region to the Argentine border, and a human chain around the Margarita natural gas field, the seemingly forgotten indigenous community began its second battle in defence of its lands since the defeat of Kuruyuki, on Jan. 28, 1892, when the army massacred more than 2,000 Guaraní.
"It is the most important effort since (the Guaraní) tried to recover their lands that were seized by big landowners and which ended with a massacre," writer and expert in indigenous groups from eastern Bolivia, David Acebey, told IPS.
The Indians blocked the transport of food and supplies last Monday through Friday to the oil companies' installations - a resistance without confrontation or violence.
The protest was brought to an end when the government pledged to set aside for the Guaraní two percent of the royalties that the state receives from the exploitation of fossil fuels, and will go towards community development.
But the Guaraní maintain their demand to nationalise the natural gas fields, which foreign companies have been granted concessions to exploit since 1997.
"The Guaraní peoples, with their 24 captaincies in the entire territory covering Tarija, Chuquisaca and Santa Cruz, declare their mobilisation... until the repeal of fossil fuel Law 1689. If no response is obtained, we reserve the right to adopt the measures we believe appropriate until our petitions are heard," says the manifesto of the Assembly of Guaraní Peoples, of Apr. 27.
The Guaraní are a small ethnic minority in this country of 8.7 million people, where more than half the population is Quechua or Aymara. In the 2001 census, 78,359 people identified themselves as members of the Guaraní community.
A warrior tribe, the Guaraní people - whose ancestral lands extended over parts of what are know Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay - repelled Spanish troops in colonial times.
During the wars for independence from the Spanish Crown, the Guaraní were able to consolidate their territories in the new republic of Bolivia, but the Europeans who had settled in the country isolated them, relegating the Indians to less fertile lands and, in many cases, subjected them to servitude bordering on slavery.
Today, a Spanish-Argentine company (Repsol-YPF) and two U.S.-based firms (Maxxus and Union Texas) are digging exploration wells in the Margarita oil fields, in O'Connor province of Tarija department.
The oil fields hold an estimated 13.4 trillion of the 53 trillion cubic feet of Bolivia's natural gas, the third largest reserves of South America, after Venezuela and Brazil. Furthermore, the area holds 303 million barrels of petroleum.
The natural gas field, set between the mighty Pilcomayo River and the sierra took on importance when the Pacific LNG consortium, made up of Spanish and British firms, showed an interest in exporting liquid natural gas to markets in Mexico and the United States, transporting it via Chilean ports.
But a popular uprising of Aymara and impoverished communities in the Bolivian west last October forced then-president Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada (2002-2003) to halt those plans and to resign as national leader.
The Guaraní protest, backed by small settlement farmers, rural workers and the landless peasant movement, united as the "Bloc of the East", is their first in defence of the fossil fuels in the region.
The movement questions the actions of the civic committees of Santa Cruz and Tarija, which the protesters accuse of promoting the interests of the big oil companies and the major landowners.
The committees are non-governmental groups formed by community members ostensibly to promote regional, economic and cultural interests.
These groups are in favour of exporting the natural gas as a means to generate development of Bolivia's eastern region, and have openly expressed interest in seeking political and economic autonomy for the regions to break away from what they see as the centralism of the existing government system.
Their proposal clashes with the aims of the indigenous movement in the Bolivian west, where the Aymara culture is predominant.
After the failure of the plan for exporting natural gas to North American markets, the civic committees of the south and east threatened to form a new republic, which they proposed calling "Media Luna" (Half Moon).
The natural gas region, in the municipality of Villamontes, enjoys a high ranking on Bolivia's national index for human development elaborated by the United Nations Development Programme and the Bolivian government.
But the standard of living in the port of Margarita, neighbouring the gas fields, is quite low.
To receive basic health services, residents have to travel more than 30 km. During the first half of the year, their income comes from fishing for the 'sábalo', which they sell for around seven cents on the dollar per kilo to the oil exportation companies' labourers and technicians, IPS found.
The rest of the year, the local population is dedicated to raising goats and to subsistence farming. Overall, their nutrition is deficient.
Santa Cruz author Germán Arauz, now a resident of La Paz, told IPS that the indigenous movement is a reaction to the Tarija civic committee, which he believes wants to repeat the experience of the leaders of Santa Cruz, who built a local oligarchy fuelled by the royalties coming from the oil fields.
Expert on indigenous issues Acebey says the Guaraní mobilisation is not connected to the Aymara protests in the west, also characterised by their radical opposition to natural gas exports, although the two indigenous cultures share the ideals of defending natural resources and land to be run by community organisations.
The Assembly of Guaraní Peoples emerged in 1992, encouraged by non-governmental groups seeking to create free communities in the areas that the 1953 agrarian reform had not reached.
(END/2004)
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