Neoextractivism and Class Formation: Lessons from the Orinoco Mining Arc Project in Venezuela

The Socioeconomic Context and the Balance of Forces in the Emergence of the Amo

By 2015 economic contraction in Venezuela was being translated into a significant deterioration of living standards for the popular and working classes ¹ both through the debilitation of real wages in a context of high inflation and through the relative decrease in government social expenditure (Sutherland, 2016). The international price of Venezuelan oil had dropped from a peak of US$110.15 per barrel in 2012 to US$40.73 in 2015 (EIA, 2016), while this export still constituted 97 percent of the foreign currency earnings essential for public expenditure. There was stagnation or contraction in other productive sectors, showing the economic limitations of both the private sector and publicly led development projects such as those based on cooperatives, social production companies, or communal councils. The government nevertheless continued meeting the (substantial) payments of its contracted foreign debt, and overall its capacity to maintain social expenditure was significantly reduced. Unprecedented signs of dissent became noticeable within the upper and lower ranks of Chavismo. ²

This was the scenario for a shift in the political arena: the opposition bloc obtained a solid victory in the 2015 parliamentary elections, held in December. The Bolivarian bloc had experienced a national-level electoral drawback only once in the previous 17 years: the referendum for constitutional reform in 2007. ³ On that occasion, however, the opposition’s victory did not translate into effective institutional powers, and the Bolivarian government, thanks to its continuing dominance of the executive and legislative branches, advanced some of the proposals contained in the defeated constitutional reform project, pitched as socialist. Those reforms were electorally backed and facilitated by subsequent victories in the regional elections of 2008 and 2012 and in the parliamentary elections of 2010. From 2008 on there were indications of the growing capacity of the opposition bloc when it presented organized electoral coalitions, ⁴ but the Bolivarian bloc maintained solid control of the legislature and most governorships (20 out of 23 in 2012), key to articulating national policy.

The electoral results of 2015 had quite different implications. Political polarization had up to that point been channeled by a combination of electoral competition and extrainstitutional collective action articulated by factions of both blocs, ⁵ but from then on it involved a frontal institutional clash between the executive and the legislature that could interfere with governance. The opposition bloc obtained a strong qualified majority (112 of 167 parliamentary seats) that granted it nonnegotiable legislative powers and, in the medium term, the possibility of nominating key figures in other public bodies (such as the judicial and the electoral). Technically this offered a way of weakening the executive in preparation for future elections, but a gradualist approach was not shared by everyone in the opposition leadership, part of which was interpreting the victory as a sign of the terminal debilitation of the Bolivarian bloc. In recognition of this latter opposition current, the president of the newly installed Assembly, Henry Ramos Allup, remarked in his inaugural speech that the executive’s mandate “could be terminated before [its statutory] chronological time for any of the causes that the constitution stipulates” and in fact presented such termination as a commitment that the new Assembly would try to fulfill in six months (El Mundo, 2015).

The Assembly actively pursued that goal through different avenues. On the one hand, it systematically tried to block key proposals of the executive. In January 2016 it blocked the decree of an economic emergency that Maduro had issued in pursuit of executive leeway in tackling acute aspects of the national economic crisis, ⁶ and in June it rejected the presidential decree creating the AMO (Asamblea Nacional, 2016), a government plan for revitalizing the public treasury and redistributive policy in the short-to-medium term. In parallel, opposition members of the Assembly actively supported the activation of a recall referendum against Maduro, exerting pressure on the National Electoral Council to have it held before the end of 2016. ⁷ In October the process leading to the recall referendum was suspended when that council supported the (intriguingly synchronized) call of several regional judiciary courts where denunciations of irregularities in the collection of signatures that had activated the referendum effort were being processed. An electoral measurement of the balance of forces in the country was thereby postponed, since the council also opted for the suspension of regional elections (initially due for late 2016 and eventually set for December 2017)—the official announcement of the date being made in May 2017. This gave the government extra time to attempt to recover political support, which eventually proved crucial for its options. ⁸

But the National Assembly also pursued other nonelectoral options for ousting Maduro. Its president formally supported the investigation of Maduro’s alleged foreign (Colombian) origins, aiming to invalidate his presidential appointment (Últimas Noticias, 2016). Later in 2016, members attempted to initiate a “political trial” of the head of government reminiscent of the so-called parliamentary coups that have removed leftist presidents from their offices in the recent past (e.g., in Honduras in 2009, Paraguay in 2012, and Brazil in 2015). Lacking constitutional grounds, that option failed too, but as soon as a new president of the Assembly took charge in January 2017 it was reactivated with a parliamentary resolution declaring that Maduro had “abandoned his post” (Reuters, 2017). None of these efforts bore fruit, and furthermore the Assembly was made institutionally impotent in September 2016 after the Constitutional Branch of the Supreme Court declared its acts null for its not having fulfilled the request for formal removal of three deputies whose election had been marred by illegality (Tribunal Supremo de Justicia, 2016). Against this backdrop, by early 2017 the Assembly reflected the limited institutional power of the opposition bloc, ⁹ which additionally exhibited noticeable dissent among its leaders and lacked the capacity to mobilize the popular discontent with the country’s economic situation. ¹⁰ Even the sizable wave of antigovernment street protests initiated in April 2017 conspicuously lacked mass support from the popular classes. ¹¹

On the other side of the political divide, the Bolivarian government’s prospects were bleak. It had suffered an unprecedented electoral defeat and faced an antagonistic legislature amidst a severe economic contraction. However, in addition to the frail cohesion of the opposition leadership and the limited institutional powers of the bloc they represented, two factors facilitated the government’s survival and what by early 2017 seemed to be a political recovery (at least short-term). ¹² First, in the 2015 elections more than 40 percent of Venezuelans voted for Bolivarian candidates (over 5.6 million voters) despite the country’s already very difficult economic circumstances, which were particularly acute for the popular classes. This was evidence that a substantial proportion of Venezuelans still supported the Bolivarian project and did not consider the opposition bloc to represent a viable political alternative for government. Second, the executive is constitutionally strong in Venezuela, and, expectedly, the judiciary has resolved institutional confrontations with the legislature in the executive’s favor.

All these factors established the basis for the government’s political decisions throughout 2016, which were primarily aimed at securing sources of revenue that could reactivate key redistributive policies and facilitate economic recovery. The presidential decree announcing the AMO in February was revealing in this respect, but it was only part of a larger policy orientation through which the government has pursued the expansion and diversification of its (extractive) commercial deals. In November 2016 President Maduro received the secretary general of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting States (OPEC), HE Mohammad Sanusi Barkindo, in Caracas, showing open support for the reactivation of the “Algiers Accord” and for setting limits to oil production, with which OPEC members expected to stimulate an increase in the price of oil in international markets (OPEC, 2016). In January 2017 the Venezuelan government announced that in fulfillment of its part of the agreement it would start cutting 95,000 barrels from the country’s daily production. However, by November it was simultaneously positioning itself in several scenarios partly undermining this commitment. PDVSA secured funding (US$2.2 billion) to stimulate oil production through an agreement with Chinese CNPC, setting a target increase of 277,000 barrels a day in the short term (Xinhua.net, 2016). Additional contracts were signed in this period between PDVSA and Russian ROSFNET, for instance, seeking to boost gas exploitation, and, also in November 2016, Venezuela was readmitted to the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme (El Universal, 2016a), which was pivotal to facilitating the entry of diamonds into international markets. This had become a government target as soon as the AMO was launched, and it served as reassurance for international corporations investing in the AMO (which included companies with capital from China, the United States, Russia, Canada, and Switzerland, among other countries).

As a whole, this reveals a multilateral pragmatic approach to the pursuit of credit and international trade deals partly consonant with the foreign policy orientation that has characterized the Bolivarian governments, which from the outset included a degree of pragmatism while asserting independence, advocating a pluripolar geopolitical order, and actively supporting alternative socioeconomic orders through supranational integration (Angosto-Ferrández, 2014; Muhr, 2012; Raby, 2011). Significantly in this respect, Álvaro García Linera, vice president of Bolivia and an organic intellectual of the Latin American left, has highlighted the diversification of trade and credit relations as one of the achievements of progressive continental governments over the past decade, remarking that it has been pivotal to consolidating a degree of sovereign autonomy (García Linera, 2015: 75). And according to the Centro Estratégico Latinoamericano de Geopolítica (Latin American Strategic Center of Geopolitics—CELAG), a think tank in the orbit of the leftist governments of the region, pragmatic diversification of trade deals and sources of credit has been characteristic, in a global geopolitical scenario of insecurity, of Latin American governments of any political inclination (Serrano Mancilla, 2016).

At any rate, the country-specific consequences of these geopolitical currents are always shaped by the balance of class forces that a national government articulates. In this respect, the AMO provides grounds to analyze the current balance of forces in Venezuela and reveals two central questions: first, the Bolivarian post-neoliberal approach to national development, which currently relies on extractivism, retains substantial support in the current conjuncture; second, it is rooted in the international cycles of capital accumulation and therefore the prospects for the socialist reform advocated by sectors of Chavismo are limited. This plan for development involves a flexibilization of the conditions for international capital—displacement of organized labor and collectively oriented forms of property ownership in the management of production. In the conjuncture of electoral defeat and a crisis of access to food and other consumer goods, the government has strengthened its calls for productive cooperation with sectors of national and international capital and enabled other corporate sectors such as the military to occupy positions of economic advantage.

The Amo: Current Conditions for “Sowing the Minerals”

The creation in February 2016 of the AMO national strategic development zone (República Bolivariana, 2016) aimed to stimulate the exploitation of minerals within a vast area covering some 12 percent of the national territory (111,843 square kilometers) and containing an estimated 4.5 percent of the population. From the outset, the government linked this mining development plan to commitments to maintaining social investment and promoting the diversification and increase of national production. When in August 2016 the government formalized agreements with international corporations for investment in the area (for US$4.5 million, initially), Maduro addressed criticisms of the project, remarking that 60 percent of the income generated through the new extractive ventures would be dedicated to sustaining programs in “health, education, housing, and transport” (Telesur, 2016a) and that this commitment would be legally sanctioned in a subsequent presidential decree. The record of Bolivarian governments in social services expenditure is strong, and expenditure was maintained at relatively high levels amidst the strong economic contraction of the past three years. Against this background, it was expected that this new commitment could be fulfilled.

In parallel, the government highlighted that the AMO was part of the plan to “break with rentierism” (Telesur, 2016b), as Maduro underscored when announcing the approval of special funds for investment in the project. Indeed, in the debates that the AMO has sparked in Venezuela, government representatives have consistently presented this plan as another opportunity to diversify and increase national productivity—a move reminiscent of “sowing the oil,” the term coined by the Venezuelan intellectual and politician Arturo Uslar Pietri in 1936 (and recurrent in Venezuelan political debate ever since) advocating the use of oil-derived income to stimulate a diversification of economic production. In this sense, the AMO indirectly confirms the limitations of the economic transformations pursued by Bolivarian governments, which, as have others before them, identified “sowing the oil” as a driving objective. In the case of the Bolivarian governments, the recovery of public control over the oil industry was explicitly associated with overcoming the rentier-state model, ¹³ but despite the various policy frames that have been implemented the foundations of the national economy remain extractivist.

Units of endogenous development, social production companies, cooperatives, communal councils, and communes have at different stages over the past 17 years been pointed to as avenues toward the diversification and increase of production and, from 2005 on, toward socialist transformation. Given the scale of the financial, logistic, and organizational resources mobilized under these politico-economic frames, they cannot be underestimated as experiments in self-organization and learning among the popular classes, which are generally excluded from the planning and implementation of productive ventures. Until 2012, public revenue derived from high international oil prices made such experiments compatible with substantial improvement of social development indicators in the country. However, given the failure to increase and diversify production in any significant way, the results of those schemes divide observers between those who think that more emphasis could have been placed on large-scale production and industrialization from the outset (Purcell, 2013) and those who see the Venezuelan case as confirming that attempts at transforming property ownership through centralized planning and state programs are prone to generate a decrease in production (Przeworski, 1991). Both hypotheses, however, need to be tested against the fact that, despite the promotion of “social economy” structures and the nationalization of key industries, the share contributed by the public sector to the GDP has decreased since the commencement of Bolivarian governments in 1999 (Álvarez, 2009: 251–258), which destabilizes arguments that the politically reduced size of the private sector is the key cause of productive stagnation.

At any rate, the overarching impact of all those government projects in economic terms confirms what has been suggested for the social production companies in particular (Purcell, 2013): they facilitated the circulation of rent in an expanded way (compared with previous configurations of Venezuelan rentier capitalism), and arguably this contributed to stimulating internal demand at an aggregate level, economically strengthening the commercial bourgeoisie that dominates the sector of import and distribution of commodities. This strengthening was further stimulated by the overvaluation of the bolívar, a key mechanism of appropriation of rent in Venezuela prior to and during the Chavista governments (Dachevsky and Kornblihtt, 2017). This overvaluation was consolidated despite several nominal devaluations of the national currency since 2010 and increased the purchasing power of the import sector that had access to the official exchange rate set by the government. This monetary arrangement not only contributed to limiting the options of export-oriented sectors but also benefited foreign capital based in the country, which saw its capacity to remit profits greatly augmented by the possibility of remitting earnings in overvalued bolivars (86–88).

The project of “sowing the minerals” through the AMO seeks to increase and diversify production while recovering growth and improvement in social development indexes. However, the prospects for economic transformation generated by this new development plan are constrained by the political conditions of its launching. The AMO appears in a scenario in which the balance of forces for developing production is disadvantageous for the socialist-oriented factions within the government and its supporting bloc. Previous efforts by Bolivarian governments at “sowing the oil” were to a significant degree channeled through schemes in which the state transferred resources to locally organized productive units, placing emphasis on developing collectively oriented forms of property and social relations that could gradually overcome capitalist structures. At present, the AMO partly displaces those attempts and provides more leeway to international and national capital and corporations as drivers of new productive ventures. On the one hand, some of the enterprises in the AMO zone will be undertaken under agreements between the state and small and medium-sized Venezuelan mining cooperatives. Miners’ associations have publicly supported this proposal, ¹⁴ but the ultimate extent of participation of these small and medium-sized producers in AMO enterprises remains to be seen. On the other hand, economic contraction combined with electoral weakening and the unprecedented prospect of losing institutional power in the short term seem to have conditioned an acceleration of the shift from promoting small productive units and cooperative forms toward closer collaboration with large private producers and direct state participation—as has happened in areas of production such as agriculture (Enríquez and Newman, 2016). In the AMO public-private mining ventures, the Venezuelan state will retain 55 percent of the shares and the profits, but this comes along with advantageous conditions for investing corporations.

In political terms, the AMO recentralizes economic planning around the executive, which created the plan through a decree and exerts direct control over its operative development—a factor that helps to explain why sectors of the opposition-led National Assembly have been critical of the plan. The AMO’s founding decree stipulates that the president appoints the members of its management council and its development zone coordinator, an operative manager (Articles 5 and 6). In economic terms, the decree also sanctions a flexibilization of terms for incoming investment capital, identifiable in provisions such as the acceleration and simplification of the process of public contracting (Article 16) or in the special taxing regime to be applied to private and public companies involved in the mining ventures (Article 21). The labor regime to be expected in the industrial mining enterprises points toward conventional capitalist management models and a tightening of control over labor. Significantly, Article 25 makes explicit that the interests of labor unions are included among the “particular interests” that will not be tolerated as interferences with production processes. There is also a crucial role for the military in the development of these productive activities, in two respects: security and participation in maintenance and the provision of services. In this latter regard, just before the launch of the AMO in February 2016 a presidential decree sanctioned the creation of the Compañía Anónima Militar de Industrias Mineras, Petrolíferas y de Gas (Military Corporation for the Mining, Oil, and Gas Industries), organically linked to the Ministry of Defense. In the absence of solid evidence about the success of military intervention in the management of nationalized companies, these prerogatives could be read as appeasement of the armed forces in times of political instability; as have other sectors of society living off salaries, members of the armed forces have seen their living standards deteriorate. In Venezuela, the military has historically received comparatively high budgets and special social safety nets in periods of economic growth (Trinkunas, 2002), and such treatment was considered part of the civic-military agreements during the so-called Fourth Republic. The maintenance of a degree of privilege seems to remain rooted in sectors of the armed forces. ¹⁵

This general picture confirms several political-economic facts: the continuation of extractivism as the core of the national economy, a flexibilization of conditions for capital investment, control by the executive over national economic planning, and an expansion of military participation in the management of extractive industries. In tandem with the as-yet unconfirmed extent of participation of small Venezuelan mining cooperatives and the potential environmental impact associated with the plan (which will be significant despite the insistence on “ecological mining” that the government advocates), ¹⁶ the AMO generates various sources of tension within factions of the Bolivarian bloc, and outside the bloc it has been nominally rejected by sectors of the opposition, including National Assembly members. Though these tensions have found expression in a range of forms, including court appeals, small localized protests, and considerable public debate, opposition to the project has not reached mass proportions. On the contrary, there is evidence of significant support for the AMO project. With regard to the opposition to this project, compared with the collective action deployed on the occasion of comparable government-supported development projects such as the one affecting the Yasuní National Park in Ecuador (Lalander, 2016) or the Isiboro Sécure National Park and Indigenous Territory in Bolivia (McNeish, 2013), the AMO case appears to be singular. To shed some light on this apparent singularity, I will next discuss additional factors of the political economy of mining, including its link with the (fragmented) demands and struggles of indigenous peoples in Venezuela.

Indigenous Peoples, Mining, and the Political Ecology of Leftist Governments in Latin America

Mining is not new in several parts of the area covered by the AMO, including some environmentally protected areas. This has implications for an understanding of the dynamics of support and opposition that the project generates. One of the areas that has attracted attention for the potential negative impact of mining is the Upper Caurain Bolívar, an indigenous (mainly Yekuana and Sanema) territory. This area, like other environmentally sensitive regions in the country, has for decades been subjected to a variety of often overlapping regimes of protection, but its recognition as an indigenous territory in the framework of the 1999 Constitution has failed to materialize. Kuyujani, the main Yekuana and Sanema civic organization, submitted in 2006 the first full application requesting land titling in the name of entire indigenous “peoples” (not just “communities”), and after evaluation by the regional and national demarcation commissions the application was rejected (Angosto-Ferrández, 2010: 109). Interested parties alleged that this was because of a decision by the president, and Arturo Rodríguez, then-president of Kuyujani, remarked that the final argument against their proposal was summarized with the formula “large area, few people. . . . That’d be like creating a state within the state” (110). This decision was consistent with the political approach of Bolivarian governments to implementing this aspect of indigenous rights, which is a model of weak territorialization in which indigenous lands are demarcated and recognized through (indigenous) communal councils and communes that do not correspond in legal status and territorial autonomy to what the 1999 Constitution (Chapter 8, Title 3) envisaged as recognized indigenous “lands” and “habitats.” With this model the government has sought to make compatible a degree of distinctive indigenous (weak) legal territorialization, the promotion of productivity in communities, and the state’s ultimate control over the ownership and exploitation of natural resources (Angosto-Ferrández, 2017). While the implementation of this model differs drastically from the spirit of the model outlined in the constitution, the creation of communal councils has been actively pursued and generally well received in thousands of indigenous communities, which have shown strong support for the opening of avenues to gain access to state resources and pursue projects of socioeconomic development (Angosto-Ferrández, 2017; Caballero, Bernal, and Carrera, 2015). This fact has not forestalled criticism by members of indigenous communities in different parts of the country with regard to procedural or political questions, but none of the latter appear to be insoluble problems.

In the Upper Caura there has been a steady increase in mining for over a decade. Evidence of expanding mining has been denounced by a variety of actors since 2002, but in 2006 the situation was aggravated by a so-called bulla (gold rush) that attracted large numbers of native and foreign miners from areas where mining was being subjected to stronger surveillance (such as the Paragua region). Some reports had it that Yekuana men had sparked the bulla on the Yuriani River (Zerpa, 2010), but at any rate part of the local and regional indigenous population increased its engagement in mining, stimulated as were other participants by the dramatically increasing price of gold in those years (which trebled between 2005 and 2010).

Neither the environmental legislation nor a succession of attempts at regulating and limiting mining over the past 15 years has been able to stop extraction in the region. Two governmental plans seemed particularly promising: the mining reconversion plan of 2007, which promoted a diversification of productive alternatives for miners with state support for credits and professional training, and the Caura Plan, established in 2010, which aimed to halt the rapidly increasing environmental degradation caused by mining and specifically threatening the Caura Basin. The results of these plans have been meager, but not even the indigenous population of the Upper Caura attributes all responsibility to the government. The attraction of mining has long been a stimulus for some indigenous people and even entire communities in these areas, which offer few alternative sources of income. As in other Venezuelan regions (such as sectors of the Gran Sabana, in southern Bolívar), where part of the indigenous population has embraced this productive venture (Angosto-Ferrández, 2015: 220–229), an ecological factor helps to explain the phenomenon: the extraction of minerals is not capital-intensive (in relative terms), and this facilitates direct participation and productive control for the indigenous population. This type of mining is different, for instance, from capital-intensive coal mining, which from the outset is identified as endangering the reproduction of local communities while denying them any possibility of direct productive control. In the case of the Upper Caura, mining was for a time undertaken by sectors of the local indigenous population as an occasional activity to earn cash for special purchases (for instance, a boat engine) and initially had less environmental impact: it was reportedly viable by techniques such as digging holes in the banks of streams in which gold nuggets would accumulate. Subsequently, mining became more labor-intensive and environmentally impacting but still not too capital-intensive: it required “cuts” in the forest that affected relatively small areas and the use of pressure motor pumps to dig the soils. In any case, these processes always involved the use of mercury and highly polluting chemical components for processing the minerals, and there are reports of (unpublished) studies indicating that the presence of mercury in the bodies of the some of the local population is far beyond the limits considered safe by the World Health Organization (Red Ara, 2013).

Indigenous political structures and organizations of the Upper Caura have been incapable of generating consensus regarding positions on mining, and a division between individuals and groups in favor of and against mining persists (Silva Monterrey, 2016: 241). This situation found expression during the local meetings that took place after the AMO was launched. One of the Yekuana capitanes (community leaders), Cayetano Pérez, lamented that “we [Yekuana people] are getting too used to this [mining]; the Yekuana merchants should be stopped, too” and that “if we [indígenas] practice mining we are violating ourselves” (Vitti, 2016a, my translation). He also advocated that the indigenous people in the area who owned mining machinery should be stopped.

Representatives of the government also held meetings with members of indigenous communities within the AMO zone. In April 2016 Jorge Arreaza, vice president for social development, conducted meetings in Los Pijiguaos (Cedeño, Bolívar), for decades an important center of extraction of bauxite surrounded by indigenous communities, where Bauxilum (part of the Venezuelan Corporation of Guayana) has a base. The declared objective of the government was to incorporate communities in the area into the AMO’s productive projects, presented as a source of employment and of revenue that would be partly invested in developing local services and infrastructure. In many of these communities there has been significant support for Bolivarian governments. In fact, two of the municipal units most affected by the AMO plan, Cedeño and Sucre, which have a relatively large percentage of the indigenous population of Bolívar, have been and remain outstanding electoral strongholds of Chavismo. Even in the National Assembly elections of 2015, Chavista candidates obtained a strong victory in these constituencies, with a nearly 10 percent lead over opposition candidates in Cedeño and 13 percent in Sucre. In the 2013 presidential elections, Maduro overcame Capriles by a difference of 24 percent of the valid votes, far above the national average (which was barely a 2 percent difference in favor of Maduro). In 2012 more than 70 percent of voters had supported Chávez in the presidential elections in the two municipal constituencies. ¹⁷

Thus when in August 2016 Arreaza announced that 181 indigenous communities would be incorporated into activities related to the AMO project (AVN, 2016a), there was reason to assume that the assertion that substantial sectors of those communities supported the core of the project was not just government rhetoric. These communities have witnessed mining (often illegal) taking place in the area for decades, with no return for them and often under violent conditions. ¹⁸ In turn, the support for Bolivarian governments in the area demonstrates interest in maintaining a degree of socioeconomic development, which at least until recently these governments facilitated through their redistributive policies.

These factors bring nuances to the analysis of support for and opposition to the AMO and destabilize arguments based on preconceptions about the social groups that are taking sides over it. The project brings to the surface political elements overlooked by mechanical analyses of contemporary class formation and struggle in Venezuela—for instance, those based on assumptions about the position of the indigenous population considered as a homogeneous class fraction within the national formation. As a matter of fact, the indigenous population at the national level is divided by significant economic cleavages (in addition to cultural and political ones) and at the regional level is increasingly structured by internal class differentiation. This fragmentation is objectively identifiable not only by the differences in the material conditions of different indigenous communities and people and in the streams of collective action through which they express their opinions about government policy. Important sectors of the indigenous population have supported and continue to support Bolivarian policy both electorally through the PSUV and allied indigenous organizations and through various forms of activism that link them with the Ministry of Indigenous Peoples (Angosto-Ferrández, 2015: 178–183). Many of the members of this state-supporting indigenous movement come from sectors of the urban indigenous population (two-thirds of the total, according to the 2011 census) that, like other sectors of the popular classes, have been direct beneficiaries of the improvement in social development indicators that the government facilitated for over a decade. Further examination of the material conditions of the indigenous population in the zone where the AMO is expected to develop will shed more light on the politics of support and opposition that it has sparked in the region.

Class Formation, Land Ownership, and Corruption around Mining

Mining, along with other market-oriented economic activities in indigenous territories whose inhabitants are in a structural position of “market involvement,” contributes to a rapid reshaping of regional class formation. Here I use “market involvement” to distinguish the position of certain communities that are not “market-dependent” (i.e., lacking any possibility of obtaining and/or producing subsistence goods outside the market [Wood, 2002; cf. Byres, 2006]). Communities in a “market involvement” position become incorporated into markets intermittently and to some extent voluntarily because their members produce substantial amounts of what they consume. Social differentiation for economic reasons is accelerating in some of the Upper Caura indigenous communities ¹⁹ (which at least until recently fell within the “market involvement” category). In some indigenous communities there are people who own the machinery needed for extraction and organize mining teams, often hiring the labor of other indigenous people from their own or other communities. This includes labor for mining enterprises or services that they involve such as transporting cargo and equipment to and from the mining sites. For instance, the Sanema people, who have come to occupy the niche of transporting cargo (on their backs), have different fees for criollo (nonindigenous) and Yekuana miners, charging the latter 20 percent less (Vitti, 2016b). Owners of mining equipment and merchants, for example, hold distinctive economic positions in communities and contribute to and require rearrangements of indigenous property regimes and therefore of social relations. The new market-oriented activities, based on commodity production or the provision of services, involve new forms of (privatized) property ownership. In my own fieldwork in the Venezuelan Gran Sabana, where I have worked at intervals for over a decade, I have registered significant transformations in the Pemon property regime resulting from the increased engagement of the local population in tourist activities (Angosto-Ferrández, 2016), with tourist camps stimulating land enclosure and the emergence of previously inconceivable permanent claims of private ownership over parts of the territory.

The case of mining of course presents singularities regarding land ownership, however, because of the mobile character of small-scale illegal mining and because its extractive operations are not backed by legal titles to or concessions over land. In these cases extractive teams abandon devastated locations once the mineral is exhausted. There is nevertheless evidence of active defense of land (and extractive) rights among the traditional owners of these indigenous territories. On the one hand, for the indigenous population the risk of dispossession and displacement has been a historical constant associated with the colonial history of the continent and the subsequent expansion of the capitalist frontier. In parts of Venezuela such as the Upper Caura this process was attenuated because of the particular conditions of the country’s political economy, which with the early advent of the oil industry (in the 1920s) gradually reduced pressure on parts of the territory not linked to extractivism of that kind. With the increase in illegal mining and now with the AMO, dispossession becomes again a very proximate threat, but in this case it is qualified by the fact that the opposition may be not opposition to mining but in part a demand for the maintenance of extractive rights.

Illustrating this point are episodes of protest that some analysts nevertheless automatically interpret as resistance to extractivism. Some such protests, which have taken place in the Upper Caura and in other mining areas of Bolivar such as the Gran Sabana, have been directly targeted at sectors of the military linked to corruption and extortion of (illegal) mineral rent. These members of the military are accused of systematically extracting illegal “taxes” from the mining population, including the indigenous population, whether directly (as specific amounts of gold) or indirectly (as amounts of money claimed from people purchasing gasoline, which is regulated in the area through quotas, or bringing in commercial goods). Kuyujani and other people and organizations have denounced the conversion of military control points established along the river (Javillal, Pie de Salto, and Las Pavas [now closed]) into centers of extortion. An incident in 2015, sparked by the burning of an indigenous house under construction near one of those points by military alleging that it was illegal, revealed a form of protest that has also taken place in other areas. Members of Yekuana communities hijacked a military commander, Gianfranco Giordani Leal, and nine soldiers, accusing them of extortion and interfering with access to supplies and fuel and more generally of abuse of power and facilitating the arrival of more miners (El Universal, 2016b). Comparable episodes of protest have taken place in mining sectors of the Gran Sabana in the past six years (Angosto-Ferrández, 2015: 225–229), with members of the National Guard being detained and disarmed by local Pemon people who accused them of extortion and interference in their (indigenous) mining ventures. This pattern of belligerent protest thus combines denunciation of corruption with a demand for respect for territorial and extractive rights.

What emerges in these indigenous territories when market-oriented activities are introduced is a reconfiguration of class formation. There are indigenous groups that defend their land rights and legitimately oppose dispossession but in this period of globalized capitalism are moving in the direction of a kind of rentier class. The different actors involved in mining, which rests on a commodification of Nature, confirm from an unexpected angle what Fernando Coronil (1997: 32) identified as characteristic of societies in which Nature becomes the main source of revenue: the capture of rent is transformed into an organizing principle for social life. A rentier class always appears in competition (for the appropriation of surplus value) with capital, for which landowners as a class—a class that extracts a type of profit that Marx (1974: 814–831) conceptualized as “rent”—constitute an obstacle. And in some indigenous areas where mining is taking place there are indications that local efforts at protecting territorial rights under conditions in which Nature has been actively incorporated into the cycles of capital have the parallel effect of helping to constitute a rentier class. But this emerging rentier class is in competition not only with capital but also with corporate sectors of the state apparatus, in this case the military, which through corrupt tactics positions itself in a scenario of competition to appropriate extraction-related income. At the same time, mining becomes a focus of class differentiation within indigenous groups despite the often-presumed internal homogeneity of their conditions. Class differentiation emerges between people who participate in that activity and those who do not and, among the former, between people occupying different positions in the production process (e.g., owners of equipment vs. miners vs. cargo carriers).

These factors should also be taken into account in an analysis of the AMO project and the dynamics of support and opposition that it generates, for they help to explain why, despite the variety of conflictive elements that it involves, the mobilization generated against it has not achieved mass proportions in the region—the small foci of activism against it being concentrated elsewhere in the country, particularly in the capital.

Conclusion

It is a truism that one of the main characteristics of Latin American leftist governments in power has been a recovery of control over natural resource extraction in order to undertake redistributive policy and enhance the enfranchisement of marginalized actors (Rosales, 2013). Some have called this neoextractivism, differentiating it from previous models but highlighting that the continuing incorporation into globalized capitalism of these Latin American countries reproduces problems of uneven development, displacement of local communities, and environmental degradation, all of which gives rise to mobilizations against neoextractivist governments (Gudynas, 2012: 133). While some of these points hold, there is still a lack of understanding of the reasons some of these governments continue to receive support beyond the suggestion that tolerance of neoextractivism is a continuation of a traditional self-understanding among Latin Americans as owners of enormous ecological riches that need to be exploited. In this paper I have attempted to provide grounding for an understanding of this support in Venezuela for a new large-scale extractivist project and the limited reach of mobilization against that project.

The notion of ownership of natural resources that people were alleged to have in Latin America was always in practice countered by people’s experience of the very unequal distribution of its benefits. And one key factor underpinning the support received by Bolivarian governments, even in their continued extractive ventures, is that the bloc that maintains that support has always had socioeconomic development as an amalgamating demand. Bolivarian governments have responded to this demand for over a decade with a recovery of control over national resources in a way that, at least for a period, substantially improved the socioeconomic conditions and political standing of the popular and working classes (in relative terms, of course, since a rentier bourgeoisie remained economically dominant). They have also responded to that demand by creating schemes through which small producers could participate in development plans, which in turn now helps to explain why associations of mining cooperativists also support the project.

At present, the AMO project reveals a flexibilization of conditions for international capital investing in the country and a questionable repositioning of corporatist sectors of the state apparatus such as the military, but for many Venezuelans it nevertheless promises to recover lost ground in welfare and reactivate socioeconomic development. And this pragmatic government alliance with international capital and the private sector and appeasement of the military cannot be interpreted in isolation from the institutional scenario of frontal confrontation between public powers that I have outlined above. The opposition bloc in Venezuela had before 2015 a track record of refusal to recognize the legitimacy of the government, but with control over the National Assembly that tendency gave way to a new scenario in which the intention of blocking governance and ousting Maduro through nonelectoral mechanisms was made institutionally explicit.

At the same time, the environmental impact of the AMO project cannot be overemphasized, but, as I have shown, important damage has already been done and neither the government nor the local population has had the capacity to stop it. In the indigenous territories directly affected by mining there has been increased participation of the local population in (illegal) mining activities over the past decade, demonstrating that, in the current scenario of globalized capitalism, localized expressions of its logics are all-pervasive. Against this background, and in a country where the capture of rent derived from extraction has been consolidated as an organizing principle of society, what the AMO project demonstrates is that at critical conjunctures different social groups maneuver to occupy positions of advantage. In this maneuvering, capital holders and strong corporatist groups tend to be able to exert their power directly, while the majority of the popular and working classes come to rely on the government as a mediator, for the latter is the only institutionalized power that can contribute to consolidating and defending their interests. This also sheds some light on the reasons the Bolivarian government in Venezuela still receives significant support even though the AMO has been launched with significant concessions to capital.