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Article Excerpt
This examination of the work of three organizations in the northeastern Ecuadoran Amazon, FEINCE, OISE, and FOISE, explores how they engage and produce representations of indigeneity in relation to an on-going lawsuit against Chevron Texaco. Each of these organizations has used distinct network associations and performances based on their particular histories in relation to petroleum in order to mediate cultural, political, and economic possibilities for their constituencies. As these organizations mobilize support for local causes through specific network connections, they produce and articulate distinct meanings of indigeneity, with distinct consequences for the future of their constituencies. I argue that an analysis of how collective indigenous identity, localities, and social networks shape and are shaped by representative organizations can help productively explore the social relations through which knowledge about Ecuadoran Amazon peoples and places is produced. KEYWORDS: indigeneity, transnational networks, indigenous organizations, petroleum, Amazon-Ecuador.
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On June 7, 1992, the contract of Texaco Petroleum Company in Ecuador--a subsidiary of the former Texaco, now part of Chevron Corp.--reached its end, marking the beginning of momentous change in the history of petroleum production in Ecuador. When petroleum was discovered in the northern Amazon in 1967, it was on Texaco Petroleum's concessions. The company undertook significant investments in the development of its concessions and petroleum infrastructure, which under contract were handed over to the Ecuadoran company, Petroecuador, in 1992.
A little over a year after Texaco's departure, on November 3, 1993, a coalition of indigenous leaders and other residents from the Ecuadoran Amazon, sponsored by environmentalist and human-rights supporters, filed a billion-dollar, class-action lawsuit against Texaco in US federal court. The plaintiffs accused the company of knowingly conducting negligent environmental practices (such as dumping highly toxic water and crude petroleum into the surrounding ecosystem), wrecking traditional ways of life, and increasing health risks for local peoples. (1) It was not until 2002, however, that the US court of appeals finally ruled that the trial be conducted in Lago Agrio (Sucumbios province), Ecuador, and that the Ecuadoran judicial system's decision would be legally binding on the Texaco parent corporation in the United States. Inspections of oil wells and surrounding environments continue today, and reports on these findings are circulated via online sources for wider access. (2) A final decision is expected in 2007.
This is one of the first legal cases to address human-rights violations by international petroleum firms in a low-income country, and has the potential to set precedent for similar disputes around the world. During the first stages of what has been dubbed "the Amazonian trial of the century," representatives of the plaintiffs rallied outside the Lago Agrio courthouse, wearing "traditional red face paint and feathered headdresses" and stating their opposition to "big oil" environmental practices. (3) Through their role in the US-based lawsuit, networking with law offices in New York, and directly challenging Texaco within and outside of Ecuador, plaintiffs of distinct Amazonian nationalities collectively complicated notions of locally bounded subjects in relation to the national government and transnational petroleum companies. As poignant images of indigenous residents are circulated and translated around the world, a specific understanding of Amazonian struggles and desires is also produced through this high-profile lawsuit: local peoples, marginalized by capitalist enterprises and environmental irresponsibility, who are seeking to maintain an environmentalist ethic for cultural survival.
An analysis of the participation of indigenous organizations in the Texaco lawsuit, however, suggests that indigeneity, articulated for transgressing political, social, and cultural boundaries, can have distinct (and at times ambiguous) meanings, performances, and outcomes. (4) In this article, I examine the ways in which three indigenous organizations in the northern Amazonian province of Sucumbios, FEINCE, OISE, and FOISE, have articulated indigenous identities through their participation in the trial against Texaco. (5) FEINCE represents five Cofan communities (approximately 800 people), OISE represents three Secoya communities (close to 400 people), and FOISE represents fifty-six Quichua communities that range in sizes from ten to more than one hundred families. (6) Although often seen as "local" agents, these organizations are not limited to only locally based social relations. Their network associations, the discursive and material aspects of their production and their role in producing knowledge about Amazonian peoples and their claims are central to the connection between local livelihoods, development interventions, and transnational processes. (7)
The Networks of Indigenous Articulation
I draw on the analytical contributions of Actor-Network Theory (ANT) to better understand the ways in which FEINCE, OISE, and FOISE shape knowledge about Amazonian peoples and their struggles in relation to petroleum. By focusing on the networks in which actors are enmeshed, ANT explores the conditions and interactions through which different forms of social order are produced. ANT also looks at how these are configured so that actors gain responsibility for their collective actions. (8) ANT is critical of conceptions of reality that assume a hierarchy of differentially sized and bounded governable spaces and actors, where some actors operate at "global" scales and hence are more politically influential than actors that remain at "local" ones. (9) Instead, it argues, interpreting the world as nested global, national, and local scales is a powerful and dominant representational trope emerging within network associations to frame our understanding of political agency. (10) For example, spatial hierarchy metaphors are integral to the "rules of interaction" of FEINCE, OISE, and FOISE, shaping how they draw associations to translate "local" issues into "transnational" ones.
Indigenous leaders often explain that their networking practices are a way of securing help from those "with international influence" both to enact change locally and to circumvent corrupt practices of the state. Interpreting social processes as situated within a "spatial scaffold" of governance levels allows the possibility to visualize the ways in which "local" actors can transcend the political boundaries of scale to mobilize a response from actors at "larger" scales of influence. (11) This visualization of political opportunity for social action draws on imaginaries of actor mobility, or "scale jumping," (12) where affiliating with actors in other places (and their financial and political resources) empowers those "below."
ANT also seeks to reconceptualize notions of agency and subject production. In ANT, "agency" is a collective social and technical process, the product of negotiations between all kinds of actors with seemingly autonomous (but actually mutually interdependent and determined) capacities. (13) Hence, a subject is never an isolated individual; subjects and networks are constituted by the relationality among animate and nonanimate actors, not by the actors themselves. (14) The process of translation, which includes "all the negotiations, intrigues, calculations, acts of persuasion and violence, thanks to which an actor or force takes, or causes to be conferred on itself, authority to speak or act on behalf of another actor or force" (15) is central to understanding the ways in which FEINCE, OISE, and FOISE participate in the production of indigenous subjects.
The goal of organizations such as FEINCE, OISE, and FOISE is to achieve control over local living spaces by establishing connections between local desires for life improvement and the moral, financial, or political interests of actors beyond "the local." (16) The ways in which these organizations translate indigenous peoples' struggles are conditioned by the flow, contingency, and emergent properties of their relationships with indigenous advocates, constituencies, and nonhuman actors (such as petroleum). Relationships within networks are not always "horizontal," however. (17) Power asymmetries that constrain associations can materialize through economic inequality, access to information, language proficiency, or political inexperience. These asymmetries shape the kinds of scale "transgressions" that occur, the capacity of actors to mobilize other actors on their behalf, and the circulation of specific representations of "the local" among network participants. Constituencies also affect the practices of their representative organizations, pressuring them to establish (or break) associations, and providing political legitimacy that allows leaders to enforce or seek agreements with nonlocal actors.
The articulations of indigeneity engaged by FEINCE, OISE, and FOISE, therefore, are imbued with meaning through the practices of network-building, where organizations are persuaded, coerced, or directed to define indigenous needs and desires in particular ways and by distinct actors, in order to reach resources that will help transform local material conditions.
Drawing on conversations, interviews, focus groups and archival research conducted in Sucumbios between 2002 and 2003, I trace the different ways FEINCE, OISE, and FOISE have articulated indigeneity through specific negotiations, persuasions, and contestations surrounding the Texaco trial. (18) I conceptualize indigeneity not as "truths" about a people's authentic practices and beliefs that are then "taken up" by representative organizations, but as practices and relationships of identification and recognition of difference that are produced, inhabited, and contested through networks of social interaction. (19) Defining who is "indigenous" and what constitutes "authentic" indigenous needs and desires (or not) is shaped by network relationality, the connections among humans (with specific desires and goals) and nonhumans that intersect in time and space to generate a particular view of "the social." The Texaco trial, therefore, does not necessarily disclose or emphasize a preexisting identity, but it certainly helped shape and circulate representations that have become widely prevalent and accepted as strategically powerful ways of achieving a political response among indigenous and nonindigenous actors alike.
The analysis of how FEINCE, OISE, and FOISE articulate indigeneity in relation to petroleum and Texaco is significant for understanding not only the role they perform in shaping the future of their constituencies but also the ways in which livelihood--as a relationship linking everyday life, environment, and actors, locally and beyond--is intricately connected to questions of identity, modernity, and transnational connections.
Petroleum, Development, and the Nation-State in the Ecuadoran Amazon
Petroleum, agricultural development, and nation-building policies have conditioned the cultural transformation of the Ecuadoran Amazon as well as the production of Amazonian indigenous organizations. A series of populist governments in the 1960s and 1970s pushed for the modernization of Ecuador, and petroleum was perceived as the commodity through which this goal could be achieved. (20) While the quest for petroleum had profound effects throughout the entire Amazon region, the discovery of rich and viable deposits in Sucumbios in 1967 brought the northern provinces squarely into national interest. By 1970, the Ecuadoran government had granted numerous concessions throughout the region, attracting multiple companies that invested in exploration and production. (21) Since 1972, oil has accounted for an average of 45 percent of the total national export revenue. (22) Income from this Amazon export has financed national infrastructure, increased the internal flow of capital, and increased Ecuador's international profile.
Securing potential deposits of this rich natural resource from the threat of neighboring countries became a priority for the Ecuadoran state, and agrarian reform proved to be a timely strategy to achieve this goal. (23) Agrarian reform laws in the 1960s and 1970s sought to economically and politically integrate the Amazon into the logic of the nation-state. Under agrarian reform, the Ecuadoran Amazon was conceived as tierras baldias (unoccupied lands) in need of settlement and development, despite knowledge of the existence of indigenous populations using those lands. (24) Reform encouraged highland farmers to migrate to the Amazon. This was done in order both to alleviate the extensive land tenure crisis existing in the highlands and to increase the presence of Ecuadoran citizens in the Amazon region. (25) As a result, nearly one-third of the Ecuadoran Amazon--more than 38,000 square kilometers--was titled for settlement by outsiders. (26) In many cases, agrarian reform practices backed the expropriation of lands used by indigenous peoples in the name of greater economic production and integration into the modern Ecuadoran nation. In other cases, indigenous communities, in order to protect resource use and property rights, chose to participate in the logic of economic integration through agrarian reform. (27)
Using the roads built by the Texaco-Gulf consortium to connect the Amazon to the rest of Ecuador, agricultural colonists settled into the "empty lands" of the petroleum-producing northern provinces, shaping the patterns of agricultural development that have changed indigenous ways of life in this region....
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