This analysis aims to chronicle the courageous endeavors of social movements striving for progressive transformation in Bolivia, while simultaneously offering a sharp critique of fossil fuel-driven capitalism.
It delves into the intricate and often problematic relationship, both historically and in the contemporary era, between leftist ideologies and the allure of fossil fuel nationalism. Many events unfolding in Bolivia defy easy categorization by conventional terms such as neoliberalism, populism, socialism, or even indigeneity.
To characterize Bolivia, for a period, as a "gaseous state" or, as many Bolivians themselves describe it, "gasified" (gasificado) or "gaseous" (gasífero) is largely metaphorical, a concept explored in depth here.
Yet, this idea also acknowledges the somewhat deterministic power wielded by economies heavily reliant on fossil fuels. The imperative to extract natural gas, as a material process, generated both direct and indirect consequences. These were intimately tied to the creation of surplus in the form of rents, various acts of violence, and other types of excess.
Furthermore, this dynamic profoundly reshaped legal frameworks, geopolitical calculations, and the very potential for political change, as Mitchell observed. This study examines these multifaceted implications through three interconnected lenses: time, space, and excess.
From a temporal perspective, the gas economy exerted pressure, particularly on former president Evo Morales but also on social movements, to subsume long histories of struggle and visions of future political possibilities into the contractual temporalities and temptations offered by fossil capital.
Spatially, the decolonizing struggles of indigenous peoples and their efforts to reimagine a new political order were similarly "gasified." This meant that fossil capital exerted a kind of transterritorial sovereignty, favoring specific territorial projects, such as those of regionalist factions, and a particular expression of nationalism.
In doing so, it often marginalized or absorbed more radical political aspirations, like those for indigenous autonomy.
Regarding excess, with more utopian political visions sidelined, Bolivian politics frequently devolved into disputes over percentages—the trickle-down of rents that, while bringing some material benefits, did so in geographically and socially uneven ways.
These benefits, paradoxically, often generated new forms of violence, also experienced differentially by people and nature. These three overarching themes—time, space, and excess—form the structural backbone of this book and will be revisited throughout its chapters.
The geological origins and historical entanglement of Bolivia's gas wealth
Hundreds of millions of years ago, the landmass now recognized as South America was fused with what is now Africa.
Approximately 300 million years ago, these continents separated, and a vast sea flooded the newly formed rift. Over subsequent millions of years, organic matter accumulated on the seabed, gradually becoming buried and compressed by layers of sediment. Through further millions of years, this organic material slowly "cooked" into oil, and with additional heat and pressure, transformed into natural gas.
Concurrently, the ancient waters receded. This oil and gas accumulated deep underground, beneath the present-day edges of the Atlantic Ocean, offshore Brazil and West Africa, and extending further inland.
In Bolivia, the unique geological formation of the Andean fold-and-thrust belt brought these subterranean riches within reach of the surface.
This process is akin to a blanket bunched up at the foot of a bed, creating geological "wrinkles" that brought the distant past into the present. Oil and gas prospectors in Bolivia speak with enthusiasm about the Huamanpampa and the Devonian, names given to these deep geological strata where significant reserves are found.
This ancient geological history laid the groundwork for the political and ecological challenges faced today. While geology set the stage, as Almaraz noted, it was not until the advent of fossil capital in the early twentieth century that Bolivia became ensnared in the paradox of possessing abundant gas and the associated noxious, violent politics it inevitably brought.
The majority of Bolivia's substantial gas reserves are located in the rugged terrain between the Andes and the Chaco region, as indicated on map I.
A significant portion of this geologically "disheveled blanket" comprises the ancestral lands of the indigenous Guarani people, who now coexist with Bolivian neighbors of diverse origins. The presence of gas here was, and is, extensive. German, British, Chilean, Bolivian, and US prospectors first sought oil in this region in the early twentieth century, a history detailed within these pages.
Fast forward several decades, and it became clear that gas, rather than oil, was the most abundant resource. Many key gas fields, including Margarita, Itau, and San Antonio, are situated within Guarani territory.
The significance of the Chaco and its connection to national identity
To those residing elsewhere, this region is often perceived as a remote backwater.
Along with the rest of eastern and southeastern Bolivia, it was long treated as a peripheral frontier by an Andes-centric state historically heavily dependent on mining. For many Bolivians, the mere mention of the word "Chaco" evokes memories of the Chaco War and its association with oil.
Thus, the Chaco occupies a central place in the national imaginary, even if narratives from the perspective of its inhabitants are seldom told. It is frequently envisioned as a space somewhat detached from the "true" Bolivian nation, as Delgado-Peña observed. In other respects, as a landscape scarred by war and marked by decaying monuments from earlier boom-and-bust cycles, the Chaco is also often described as a place of relics and ruin, much like its depictions on the Argentine side, as noted by Gordillo.
Patty Heyda's map helps illustrate this geographic context.
When Evo Morales nationalized gas resources in 2006, it was a sound economic decision for a low-income country like Bolivia. However, this act was not as radical as many within the nationalist left had desired.
While the country did revitalize its state-operated oil and gas company, Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales Bolivianos (YPFB), foreign firms largely remained the dominant players. Despite the powerful rhetoric of indigeneity, decolonization, socialism, and anti-imperialism, Bolivia in the age of gas largely operated within a framework of fossil fuel capitalism.
The key difference was a significantly expanded government role in redistributing the considerable wealth generated.
As gas operations intensified, the volume of gas exported from the Chaco hinterlands surged. Daily, millions of cubic meters of gas are extracted from the earth, processed to separate liquids, and then pumped into thirty-inch underground pipelines.
These pipelines function like vital arteries, with one network stretching over two thousand kilometers north and east, towards Brazil. Petrobras, the Brazilian company engaged in gas extraction in Bolivia, effectively controls a cheap energy production apparatus for Brazil.
With assistance from Chevron and despite fierce opposition, Argentina harbors ambitions of achieving gas independence through hydraulic fracturing in the coming years, along with all the associated environmental toxicity. This development may also reduce Argentina's demand for Bolivian gas.
Nevertheless, for many decades leading up to and during the age of gas, Argentina frequently vied with Brazil, and by extension with the United States, for access to Bolivian gas. Consequently, to a lesser extent, Bolivia has also served as an energy colony for Argentina.
Expanding public access to gas was paramount for maintaining popular support for gas extraction.
To this end, YPFB installed new gas lines in thousands upon thousands of humble urban households. One of the most common political rituals in recent years involved the president or vice president ceremoniously opening a gas valve in a kitchen, as the beneficiary—invariably a woman representing the grateful housewife—looked on.
Evo Morales, or his vice president, Álvaro García Linera, would celebrate these moments as milestones of domestic progress and modernity, and as the triumphant outcome of a prolonged revolutionary struggle against imperialism. All of this gas flowing out of the country generates millions of dollars daily in royalties, rents, and taxes.
Unlike any period in its recent history, Bolivia consistently led Latin America in measures of economic growth, fiscal stability, and foreign reserves during this time.
A substantial portion also flowed into the coffers of the gas companies. In Bolivia, through a complex web of funds, legal stipulations, metrics, and political calculations, percentages of this new government wealth were redistributed in multiple forms. Some funds went directly to departmental and municipal governments.
Other percentages were allocated to the military, universities, and the national oil and gas company, YPFB. Still other portions supported a rural development fund. Finally, some funds were utilized by the national treasury for public works expenditures. Regions where the gas is primarily found—Santa Cruz, Tarija, and more recently Chuquisaca—received disproportionately more money than other areas.
In some instances, such as Tarija, departmental governments received so much funding that they struggled to spend, let alone embezzle, all of it.
Empire and the critical lens on US foreign policy
Culturally, this study aims to capture the rich Bolivian lexicon of anti-imperialism, replete with potent terms like "lackey" (lacayo) and "country sell-out" (vendepatria).
An anthropologist must take these meanings seriously, recognizing that they can reflect genuine combative militancy but are often also merely discursive flourishes. Moreover, written from a North American perspective and considering that many readers are also in the US, a significant subtext of this book is a critique of US foreign policy.
This policy has been shaped by a long history of fossil fuel-driven expansionism, intervention, and militarism, as analyzed by Mitchell and Huber. To this end, the term "empire" is used as many Bolivians use it, referring specifically to the United States and its sustained efforts to influence the trajectory of Bolivian politics and economics.
Empire, in this context, denotes a specific territorial configuration where the US seeks to exert influence over the course of state policy.
This is not to suggest that US imperialism is an omnipotent force; indeed, US interventions, frequently carried out with the cooperation of willing Bolivian collaborators, have failed as often as they have succeeded, as Lehman has shown. The ascent of Evo Morales is a testament to the power of popular resistance.
Furthermore, his fall in the November 2019 coup was not solely the result of US imperialism. Even so, within much of the academic and policy world, which is often dominated by material interests and forms of knowledge production that serve imperial urges, the reality of empire is frequently denied, and its invocation often met with derision.
This denial is most explicit among the hawkish hardliners of the US Republican Party, but Democrats have not lagged far behind. When former ambassador Miguel Otero visited Tarija for the unveiling of a new gas line in 2010, he made the trip with then-secretary of labor Hilda Solis, underscoring the intertwining of US economic interests and political influence.
The sustained efforts to destabilize the governments of Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela are inextricably linked to oil, as Tinker-Salas and Schiller have documented.
US foreign policy toward Mexico, including its promotion of the privatization of Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex), was similarly centered on US fossil capital interests, as Breglia and Menchaca have argued. US support for violent dictatorships in Bolivia during the 1970s was entirely connected to oil and gas.
US efforts to undermine Evo Morales, both electorally and through political subterfuge, are also connected to—if not wholly determined by—the politics of gas. This connection is not only due to concerns about climate change but profoundly rooted in the ways that fossil fuel political economies are central to the reproduction of patriarchal and racial capitalism and the militarization of social life.
Fossil fuel economies generate multiform toxicities that are arrayed against human bodies as well as ecological systems.
What becomes clear is that the material reality of fossil fuels, while not singularly determinant, plays a decisive role in ensnaring societies in a world that is socially, politically, and ecologically toxic. In infrastructural, political, and economic terms, we are all held captive by a fossil empire that shapes, in its own ways, the formation of modern politics and modern political subjects.
By the same token, though with differing measures of responsibility for the damage inflicted, Bolivian gas consumers and car drivers in the US—and indeed everywhere—are subjects of this fossil empire. This dynamic predisposes rulers to open their borders, alter their laws, and repress their citizens, whether in the gas-rich lands of Bolivia or the Oceti Sakowin territory of North Dakota.
Alternatively, rulers may attempt to persuade us that fossil fuel dependence is beneficial and just, by asserting that we are amidst a revolutionary process (in Bolivia) or enjoying the freedom that molecules of gas bring (in the US). Ultimately, we are asked to acquiesce so that capital can expand through the monetization of fossil fuels.
In a very real sense, we are all caught in this trap.
Anthropologies of energy and the Bolivian context
The field of energy anthropology has also experienced a recent surge in interest. In earlier generations, scholars pursued broad theories regarding the relationship between energy and social and cultural evolution, as seen in works by Leslie White.
Yet, most anthropologists tended to take energy for granted, at best, or turned their attention to other theoretical paradigms. This argument largely holds true today. With some notable exceptions, the poststructural turn and the rise of neoliberalism kept anthropologists preoccupied with other areas of inquiry.
Only in recent years, amidst escalating awareness of global warming and the intensification of the latest cycle of endless oil wars in the Middle East, has new and diverse work in this field truly taken off. Broadly speaking, anthropologists are once again interested in the intricate connections between social, cultural, and political-economic processes and energy, understood in a comprehensive sense.
Scholars have meticulously traced linkages between nation and state formation and oil, as explored by Coronil and Apter, and the profound effects of violence, terror, and resistance on the ground, documented by Reyna; Behrends, Reyna, and Schlee.
Studies within the science, technology, and society (STS) field have also redirected our attention to the pivotal role of experts in envisioning new energy futures, for example, by scholarship from J. Mitchell. Considerations of political power, the sociotechnical impacts of energy infrastructures, and cultural meaning all resonate deeply with the narrative presented here.
Beyond simply pursuing an anthropology of energy narrowly focused on gas or its infrastructures, this work offers a historical ethnography of the Bolivian state, specifically as it has been shaped by the politics of gas and, to a lesser extent, oil.
This approach draws inspiration from political anthropologists who are interested in how states become tangible realities through their effects and affects, an approach recently re-energized in Latin America by Krupa and Nugent.
Other significant scholarship has examined conflicts between corporations and peoples, and the various forms of resistance to fossil fuels. Elana Shever, for instance, traces the intricate contours of oil and neoliberalism in her study of oil labor and reform in Argentina.
Lesley Gill provides a historical analysis of an oil town in Colombia, illustrating how oil, labor, and revolutionary politics created a volatile environment that the state and paramilitary forces addressed through years of systematic violence. And David McDermott Hughes offers a powerful critique of the immorality of gas in Trinidad.
This study also draws inspiration from critical scholars outside anthropology whose work has examined the intersections between state power, fossil fuel infrastructures, and the dynamics of capital, territoriality, violence, and hegemony, among others, including Mitchell; Huber; Malm; Valdivia; and Zalik.
As with political anthropology, though with a greater emphasis on spatiality, this body of work is concerned with how fossil fuels intersect with statecraft, power, culture, and rule, and how people in distinct social positions seek to transform, resist, or promote the imperatives of fossil capital as these intertwine with ongoing political and historical processes.
If these efforts were to be condensed, the aim is to pursue a critical historical and ethnographic account, adopting a spatially attuned sociotechnical and materialist approach to gas.
This necessitates an ethnographic sensitivity to meaning and its material effects, alongside an empirical acknowledgment of the harder geopolitical and economic materialities that fossil capital and its infrastructures invariably entail.
Bolivia's "pink tide": hopes, contradictions, and critical voices
A series of recent studies on Bolivia constitutes another set of crucial interlocutors.
For a period, Bolivia was held up as a quintessential example of the broader leftward shift in Latin America, often termed the "Pink Tide." Roughly from 2006 to 2014, as the MAS (Movement for Socialism) government fended off right-wing and US-backed destabilization efforts, a number of writers, including myself, wrote optimistically about the progressive transformation underway.
However, as state-led development increasingly clashed with indigenous rights, corruption proliferated, violence against women intensified, and judicial institutions came under political pressure, disillusionment with Morales and the MAS grew. The stark realities of natural gas dependence and the imperative to consolidate and centralize power began to expose their inherent contradictions with declared decolonial and socialist ideals.
At various junctures, even from the outset, committed revolutionaries began to distance themselves from the MAS.
Andrés Solíz Rada, one of the last nationalist leaders of Sergio Almaraz's generation, was ousted for demanding that Morales challenge Brazil. Another veteran anti-imperialist, Enrique Mariaca Bilbao, introduced in chapter 4, departed after the government thwarted his attempts to audit gas contracts with foreign companies.
Raúl Prada, an early theoretician of plurinationalism, left after the watering down of the constitution. Alejandro Almaraz, Sergio Almaraz's son and a key figure in chapter 6, was an early MAS militant who was forced out for being too committed to indigenous rights. The fact that all these prominent leftist figures were men is itself part of the problem, as various radical feminists, to whom this book returns at several points, were less inclined to board the androcentric train of fossil fuel power in the first place.
Many of these individuals are among the most vocal critics of the MAS government today.
Similarly, external observers have adopted a more critical stance. Nancy Postero (2017), focusing on the discourse of decolonization, suggests that much of what passes for decolonization is mere performance, a perspective echoed by Anthias.
This also extends to the nationalists of the left who produced profound political and historical critiques of Bolivian subordination to foreign economic and political interests. This work engages with these figures in a distinct manner, rereading them as historical voices that illuminate heroic resistance to fascism, racism, and authoritarianism, and expose the dilemmas and limitations inherent in oil- and gas-centric socialist thought.
Inspiration was drawn from their fearless use of biting prose against oligarchs and dictators, a capability that clearly surpasses my own but has profoundly influenced much of what is written here. Facing off against military dictators—Marcelo Quiroga Santa Cruz, among many others, would ultimately pay with his life—these writers instilled fear in the powerful due to their unwavering commitment to documented truth.
This includes an exploration into the Chaco War and the roles of American guns, oilmen, and bankers.
It also involves a series of parallel histories of struggle, from Che Guevara to the often-overlooked urban revolutionaries of the Comisión Nestor Paz Zamora (CNPZ), and notes on various heroes and villains who played pivotal historical roles. Some of these digressions are integrated into the main text; others are relegated to the notes.
Readers are encouraged to delve into these digressions and read the notes alongside the main text. Through this accumulation of interconnections, the aim is to allow readers to perceive and grasp the intersections that contribute to a cumulative political understanding, which hopefully will prove useful for confronting the fossil empire of today.
The patriarchal terms of the conversation are evident in the fact that much of the discourse surrounding popular and socialist nationalism, not to mention the patriarchy of the conservative right, was and remains dominated by men.
This constitutes a key analytical point. A critical challenge lies in articulating incisive thinking about the lines of violence and inequality tied to race and sexuality with their profound political and economic anchors in systems like the "gaseous state." As a remedy, however incomplete, this work also ventures into the "underside of extractivism," as conceptualized by Gómez-Barris, to expose the gendered and racialized toxicities and violences inherent in the gas industry.
This perspective highlights the vital contributions of indigenous movements. These movements are finding renewed resonance in the age of gas, converging with anarchist, queer, anti-racist, feminist, and ecological currents that are waging a slow but powerful insurgency.
Writer-activists such as Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Raúl Prada, and the anarcho-feminist María Galindo, though not always explicitly discussing gas, have established a powerful language of critique from the "underside"—a critique that employs parody, satire, and acerbic humor, some of which this work attempts to recuperate (recuperar).
Between the heroes of the old left and new figures of desacato (disobedience), Bolivia offers significant inspiration in a world where capitalism, weaponry, and oil have led to rightward, neofascist political shifts and the intensification of war and human and ecological crises globally.
The world has much to learn from Bolivia. To fully comprehend how this story unfolds, one must examine the state both from its center, including the iconic figures of its leaders, and from its peripheries, as Krupa and Nugent suggest. A significant portion of this book explores state policies and actors, including Evo Morales and others.
Just as the Chaco is perceived as a periphery within Bolivia, Bolivia itself is frequently viewed as a periphery on the edge of global capital.
Yet, both are central to understanding how global circuits of fossil capital and empire actually operate. For instance, how might societies escape the pervasive tentacles of fossil fuel capitalism amidst deep relationships of dependency, inequality, and ecological crisis?
This book hopes to offer a reading that interprets how the politics of gas were experienced on the ground, or across many grounds, from the fascists of Santa Cruz to the anarcho-feminists of La Paz and to my Guarani friends in the Chaco, all of whom were mobilized to shape the direction of change.
Deconstructing the gaseous state: time, space, and excess
The book's structure is chronologically organized around three interwoven dimensions of the "gaseous state": time, space, and excess.
Resources possess a distinct temporality; that is to say, when transformed through the deployment of capital and human labor, commodities like gas acquire social and cultural meanings imbued with multiple and often contradictory senses of time. As Mandana Limbert (2010, 11) argues for Oman, entanglement and dependence on the fossil fuel industry generate multiple and overlapping temporal and political sensibilities.
These range from the contractual time linking industry and state to the time of historical memory, both of which animate political struggles and aspirations. These temporalities are not standardized, despite the shared form of oil and gas extraction worldwide, but rather collide with local and national histories and unique cultural ways of imagining the political.
The primary purpose of part 1 is to establish a foundation for critically examining the historical and contemporary linkages between finance capital, militarism, war, and fossil fuels.
It highlights the particular role of the US in aiding the expansion of military infrastructures in direct relation to oil and gas infrastructures, and the masculine excess produced by fossil fuel economies. All of these dynamics coexist with the dispossession of native peoples and the exercise of multiple forms of violence against feminized bodies and nature.
The endeavor is to demonstrate how contemporary political struggles are animated by discourses on oil and gas that selectively bring the past into the present, while simultaneously collapsing past political struggles and present political imaginaries into a form of consent to ongoing gas activity.
Against the backdrop of these multiple temporalities, this analysis focuses on how the temporality of political struggle, primarily that of social movements as expressed in the recent cycle of resistance (2000-2005), was absorbed by the temporality of gas as a commodity circulating within global fossil capital.
Historians have argued that Bolivians, particularly in the Andes, possess deep reserves of revolutionary memory and constantly replenished revolutionary horizons that, at certain moments, become central to mass mobilization, as shown by Hylton and Thompson; Gutiérrez; and Dangl.
The crucial point is that gas, mediated through the pivotal figure and voice of Evo Morales, effectively "froze" these imaginaries in the present with the idea that a revolution of sorts had already triumphed. The collapse of historical time and memory into the temporality of gas extraction and sale had a numbing effect on Bolivian politics, contributing to feverish struggles over rents and the broader gas assemblage, and ultimately dislocating and distorting other political projects and visions.
The second section of the book considers the interconnected themes of space and territory, drawing on the work of Watts, Labban, and Zalik.
When states open their borders to foreign extractive capital, the state inevitably cedes some measure of sovereignty and access in exchange for the ability to monetize nature (gas) and generate some return in the form of rents to "landed capital"—that is, the state acting as a landlord.
Simultaneously, conflicts both between and within these scales and spaces intensify, as spatial integration with global fossil capital often generates internal spatial fragmentation, as Labban highlights. Chapter 4 examines the conflict-ridden period of the Gas War of 2003 and its aftermath, arguing that despite the popular uprising, the configuration of fossil capital and local power imbalances established a legal and infrastructural "carbon lock-in" for the export of gas.
Chapter 5 addresses the reemergence of regionalism in Santa Cruz, offering a critical account of how anti-Andean racism, cultural appropriation, and the objectification of women articulated with a political claim for regional autonomy. These dynamics would manifest again in the November 2019 coup.
Chapter 6 investigates conflicts related to Guarani demands for territory during a crucial period in the early years of the MAS government. In each instance, territorial orders are contested through a combination of legal and extralegal maneuvers, frequently shaped by violent clashes.
Part 3 explores the "gaseous state" as a series of interlocking struggles over different forms of excess—excess violence, excess labor, and excess money.
The gaseous state produced phenomena that exceed our capacity to reduce them to familiar analytical terms but which nonetheless invade, disrupt, and inflect the political and economic dynamics of territory and capital discussed in the first two parts of the book.
In chapter 7, it is argued that excess violence—the creation of dead bodies and the political work they perform—was and remains central to the struggle over hegemony. The final two chapters examine the circulation of gaseous excess through struggles over compensation and labor (chapter 8) and battles over what Morales allegedly did with all the excess money (chapter 9).
In all cases—violence, labor, money—there exists a profound political and moral ambiguity about these excesses. This ambiguity is part of the distorting impact on politics that suggested to some the success of the MAS government, and to others the decadence of what was once a process of revolutionary potential.
In summary, the age of gas was a time of both hope and paradox, marked by progressive change but simultaneously deformed by an increasingly grotesque form of politics, the latter intensified by right-wing tactics that would coalesce in the November 2019 coup, discussed in the postscript.
With the right-wing resurgence, the struggle will undoubtedly persist.
Methodology and the global warming critique
This book is the culmination of hybrid methodological strategies and writing efforts that emerged from particular historical moments.
These are reconstructed through interviews, ethnographic observation, and documentation from digital and print media sources. The aim is to document and reflect on these events to understand what they reveal about the underlying dynamics of fossil fuel capitalism and the specificities of the "gaseous state." It is important to note that this work does not attempt to be an ethnography of the gas industry itself, whether focusing on the corporations, the workers, the infrastructure, the gas molecules, or the intricate and largely inaccessible political negotiations that shape the industry's operations at the national level.
For such insights, the reader will need to consult other sources. In this book, the intention is to offer critical understandings of Bolivia as a "gaseous state." Hughes, rightly in my view, demands that we acknowledge the existential dilemma facing humanity and recognize that burning fossil fuels is fundamentally immoral.
We are trapped and dependent, which is precisely why resistance is imperative. As I write, my lights and computer are powered by a coal-burning utility in St. Louis, one that wields corrupt and disproportionate influence over an obedient legislature. We resist in ways that might seem negligible in Bolivia—they block highways and topple governments; we tweet and sign petitions.
Certainly, there is concern about global warming in Bolivia, but it is coupled with a rightful recognition that the majority of carbon dioxide emissions and global warming have been caused by the US and the over-consuming Global North.
As you sit in your parked car, idling and spewing exhaust, remember where the real problem lies. Therefore, it is not the purpose of this work to criticize Bolivians for embracing natural gas. This is not to absolve Bolivian political leaders or fossil fuels, which are indeed the targets of much critical reflection herein.
Rather, it is an attempt to let Bolivians articulate their own story. My hope is also to emphasize that moral critique must be accompanied by radical structural change, which inherently necessitates mass collective action. As Maristella Svampa writes, the left of the future, if it is to exist, will have to be an ecological left—united in its critique of racism, patriarchy, capitalism, and militarism—all of which are intimately linked to the fossil fuel industry as we currently understand it.
This book aims to contribute meaningfully to that vital conversation.
Indigenous peoples and the early history of oil in Bolivia
In what is now Bolivia, the lands were the ancestral territories of the Guarani, with parts of the southern edges home to the Weenhayek and Toba peoples.
By the late 19th century, the Guarani had been largely subjugated through a combination of violence, forced labor, and missionization. The Toba were decimated and pushed into Argentina. The Weenhayek continue to live along the Pilcomayo River, south of Villamontes, as documented by Gustafson and Langer.
With no territorial recognition for the indigenous peoples who survived settler colonialism, the Bolivian state asserted its authority by the early 20th century, though its borders with Paraguay remained contentious. On the ground, power was fiercely contested among landlords, soldiers, and the Church, all vying for control over Guarani bodies, land, and labor.
As explored in subsequent chapters, the Guarani in particular have been, and remain, central actors in the gas lands, despite being rendered largely invisible in most nationalist and popular histories of oil and gas.
Further south, the mountain range known as Aguaragüe descends into the flatlands of the Chaco.
The Guarani cultivated corn in fertile valleys and hunted in the rugged hills, and had long been aware of oil and gas seeps along streambeds. The Guarani referred to oil as "itane," meaning "stinky rock," and utilized it for lamps and medicinal salves. Gas seeps in creek beds were marked with toponyms like "ivo," literally meaning "bubbly water." This indigenous knowledge was later adopted by Spanish and Bolivian occupiers.
In the early colonial period, Spaniards sought oil as an alternative fuel source for Andean mineral processing, given the scarcity of wood, llama dung, and yareta, a moss-like plant. However, these early efforts yielded little success due to the formidable challenge of transport.
By the late 19th century, the quest for kerosene, then produced in Argentina, reignited interest in oil. Local knowledge about oil was beginning to globalize. The advent of automobiles and the subsequent demand for gasoline would follow swiftly thereafter. As Sergio Almaraz aptly wrote, where there is oil, or gas, capital will not be far behind.
With considerable intrigue, German, Chilean, British, Bolivian, and American capitalists began dispatching exploratory expeditions to the rugged region.
In both exploration and production, many Guarani were put to work performing manual labor. An infrastructure of roads, outposts, work camps, and trading posts emerged, transforming the landscape and overlaying settler colonialism with a new apparatus of domination: the oil industry, as Cote describes.
By 1924, Standard Oil was extracting oil from its operations in Fortín Campero, near the Argentine border. The company even constructed a clandestine pipeline across the Bermejo River to illegally export oil to Argentina, a point revisited later in this chapter. Standard Oil eventually built a refinery there on a parcel of Guarani land that had been sold to it by the Vannuccis, an Italian settler family.
In the ensuing decades, Bolivians from across the country flocked to Camiri to work for the oil industry or to provide goods and services for those who did. Camiri, situated atop significant oil reserves, became known as the "Oil Capital of Bolivia." Alongside the expansion of cattle ranching and corn production, oil development pushed the Guarani further to the margins.
Camiri became a crucial crossroads of Bolivia, connecting Santa Cruz to the north, Sucre and points beyond to the west, and the vast, arid Chaco, extending into Paraguay and Argentina in the south. Unlike the mining centers and the state power structure centered in La Paz, Camiri and the Chaco were simultaneously peripheral and central to Bolivian politics and the Bolivian political imaginary, especially concerning fossil fuels.
The Chaco War revisited: oil, empire, and contested narratives
When I and my colleague, Ubaldo Padilla, began compiling oral histories from retired oil workers in Camiri, it quickly became evident that discussions about oil, gas, and labor, both past and present, contained little mention of the Guarani people.
Instead, the historical narrative was invariably framed through the lens of the Chaco War, which Bolivia fought with Paraguay between 1932 and 1935. For virtually all Bolivians, it was a war over oil that remains central to the national imaginary. Like historical wrinkles in time, stories about the war and the struggle against Standard Oil in the 1930s were seamlessly woven into narratives about the struggle against Gulf Oil in the 1960s.
Although the history of the Chaco War is well-trodden ground, understanding the "age of gas" and the ways of speaking and thinking about the meaning of time, memory, and fossil fuels necessitates revisiting the war here once more.
Thinking historically, spatially, and relationally allows for an understanding of how these "fossil fuel assemblages," as Watts describes, transcend national borders and exert forms of transterritorial sovereignty.
As such, the narrative requires making visible the intricate connections between the Chaco region and the US government, Standard Oil, and banks, capitalists, and arms dealers from the US, Britain, and other nations. Crisólogo Miranda, an old oil worker, recounted, "my father was a lawyer.
His name was Miguel Miranda Ramos. He died in the war of the Chaco, in the last retreat at Picuiba. In the midst of combat my father died in defense of the oil. They were merchants, they came here to make their lives around commerce." He added, "and my dad went to war very young." In dying for oil, or for the nation (patria), these deaths transformed the defense of oil into a sacrosanct idiom of the Bolivian nation.
As intensely felt as oil and the Chaco, the issue of Chile and access to the sea continues to vex Bolivians today and would also come to shape gas pipeline politics over a century later. In 1903, Bolivia also ceded territory after losing a war with Brazil, this time over rubber.
Bolivian president Daniel Salamanca believed that territorial conquest in the Chaco would lead to economic diversification, particularly through oil.
Standard Oil was operating in the Bolivian Chaco but lacked a viable means to export oil. Yet, Argentina, then more aligned with British capital and interests in Paraguay, and aiming to defend its own nascent national oil company, refused to permit Standard to export Bolivian oil through its ports.
The Bolivian generals hoped to assert control over the disputed territory of the Chaco and seize Fuerte Olimpo, a port on the Paraguay River. With a pipeline to this port, Bolivia hoped to find a way to transport its oil out to the Atlantic, as Cote explains. Although Argentina and Paraguay played a role in stoking long-standing border tensions, in 1932, Bolivian generals made the initial moves that precipitated the war.
World War I had increased demand for Bolivian tin, but the Great Depression had caused its collapse. Bolivia repatriated most of its tin wealth and was burdened by debt, primarily to US and British banks. Unemployment was rampant. Alongside ongoing indigenous resistance, this period saw new forms of struggle as militant workers, students, and intellectuals, inspired by Marxism and anarchist thought, began to challenge the mining-backed oligarchs, as detailed by Lora; Lehm and Rivera Cusicanqui.
The populace was in a state of social upheaval, and the struggle was intense. Marxists and anarchists were staunch opponents of the war, which they rightly perceived as merely serving the interests of foreign capital and the bourgeoisie. In response, the military regime repressed, jailed, and exiled many young labor leaders, severely weakening the organized union movement.
After three years of mutual slaughter, the Bolivians suffered a series of key defeats and withdrew to the line of settlements between Camiri and Villamontes.
By late 1934, Paraguayan troops were threatening to capture both cities and the vital oil fields. It was at this dire moment that the old oil worker, Crisólogo Miranda, then just a toddler, lost his father, Miguel. Yet, as any Bolivian will recount, in that desperate hour, their troops mounted a heroic defense of Villamontes.
One can revisit this through photographs, mounted machine guns, and dioramas in the small Chaco War museum in Villamontes. It juts up south of Camiri. As the stories unfold, the defense of the oil—alongside the mythos of the heroes of the Chaco—persists today almost as if the war were yesterday.
These sentiments are intensely felt. I once suggested to a colleague, an urbane intellectual with leftist and ecological sensibilities, that the Chaco War was an aggressive war seeking a port, not a defensive one. This provoked a strong, indignant reaction. The simplified version was that it was a proxy war between two rival imperial powers: the US and Britain.
Standard Oil, backed by US dollar capitalists, was pressing Bolivia to capture territory from Royal Dutch Shell in Paraguay, which was backed by British pound sterling capitalists.
These two countries, companies, and currencies were then vying for control over oil regions globally, a struggle that was, in fact, being waged across the world's oil lands through competition and sometimes collusion between US and British oil interests, as Mitchell and Arrighi have observed.
Cultural residues of this history endure in the Chaco. Given the once dominant role of British capital in the rubber industry to the north, the tin industry of the Andes, and the lumber and cattle regions of Argentina, Bolivians in the Chaco still recount folk tales about discovering hidden treasure chests holding libras esterlinas (sterling pounds).
In contrast, stories told about contemporary oil and gas wealth and corruption usually speak of tables covered with dólares (dollars).
Eduardo Galeano captured the essence of this conflict in his poem "el Chaco." The poem laments how the "Paraguayan fights his war, and the Bolivian wastes away in the jungle, with his machine gun." He writes, "before them arrived Standard Oil with its lawyers and its boots with its checks and its rifles with its governments and its prisoners Its obese emperors live in New York, they are soft and smiling assassins, who buy silk, nylon, cigars, petty tyrants and dictators.
They buy countries, towns, seas, police, deputies, distant regions where the poor guard their corn like misers guard gold: Standard Oil wakes them, uniforms them, designates which is the enemy brother, and the Paraguayan wages his War and the Bolivian perishes with his machine gun in the jungle." Galeano pointed to the fact that postwar negotiations were even overseen by Spruille Braden, an American diplomat and capitalist investor, who himself had oil concessions in Bolivia in the 1920s and later sold them to Standard Oil.
Indeed, it was in these early years of oil and empire that the US government and its burgeoning military apparatus became increasingly indistinguishable from the interests of private oil companies, as, in many ways, they continue to be today.
Herbert Klein argues that while Standard Oil operated corruptly, and its contractual breaches provided reasonable justification for nationalization, Standard was not to blame for the war itself.
More recently, Stephen Cote points out that territory was sought by both sides, with at least some notion that oil was one of various resources at stake. Bolivia certainly sought an outlet to the Atlantic, and did so in part because it hoped to export oil. Yet for Cote, Standard was not the primary protagonist.
Standard was simply doing what oil companies did everywhere: sitting on its concessions to hold them until a global oil oversupply evened out. Cote argues that Bolivian elites harbored their own territorial ambitions and did not simply react to the machinations of Standard Oil.
The fact that during the peace negotiations the Bolivians continued to demand a navigable port on the Paraguay River seems to confirm this reading, as Rout also noted. Formally at least, Standard Oil and the US government declared themselves neutral. Had it been a proxy war, the logic suggests, Standard would have at least done more to help Bolivia win it, as Leslie Rout Jr.
pointed out. With little explicit evidence to show that Standard had a direct hand in instigating the war, one might conclude that Standard, the US, and Wall Street were innocent.
Yet, if we know anything about the oil industry, it is its propensity for untruth.
As with contemporary attempts to suggest that the endless wars in the Middle East are not about oil, the effort to absolve Standard from responsibility for the Chaco War is politically and intellectually naïve. To absolve oil is to ignore the realities of fossil fuel capitalism and the militarist nationalism it engenders, in both the US and Bolivia, and to obfuscate the ways that war and oil entice us to embrace a politics of death while deceptively labeling it sacrifice.
The Bolivian oligarchs, Standard Oil, and the US financiers were inextricably entangled by oil, guns, and debt, and were virtually inseparable. This draws on historical work and my own investigations into the links between the banks and Standard Oil. Much has been written about human suffering in the war.
Soldiers faced death not only from battle, but also from tropical diseases and lack of water, as Zulawski describes. On the Bolivian side, a predominantly white oligarchic caste was sending mostly darker-skinned soldiers to kill and die. Officers enjoyed significantly better living conditions, food, and access to medical care.
Foot soldiers on the front lines were treated much like they were on the haciendas and in the mines, as less than citizens, something disposable. As the anarchist leader cited above stated, they were workers, despised by the elites. The Bolivian revolutionary thinker René Zavaleta excoriated this oligarchic, anti-national state, the incompetence of the military, and the racist disregard the elite showed for workers and indigenous peoples alike.
For Zavaleta, the racism of the ruling caste was starkly expressed in the hubris with which soldiers were sent to die in the Chaco.
For the oligarchs, these were neither heroes nor sacrificial victims; they were mere cannon fodder. There was, of course, intense critique of the war even while it was being fought. This counter-impulse is often obscured in contemporary nationalist remembrances of the Chaco War as a heroic defense of oil.
This impulse was to resist the war altogether, through the Bolivian anarchist spirit of desacato (disobedience and dissent). A recently published memoir of the war written by Trifonio Delgado Gonzales offers an illustrative glimpse, starting with its title, carne de cañon: ¡ahora arde, kollitas! (cannon fodder: now burn, little kollas!).
Bettman via Getty Images. At the outset of the war, in 1932, Delgado Gonzales entered the trenches. He was in his twenties. By train, truck, and forced march, he and thousands of others were transported from the high Andean mining and agricultural centers to the unforgiving battlefields of the Chaco.
Already steeped in the experience of labor struggle in the mines, and no stranger to the linkages between tin, oil, and empire, Delgado Gonzales was both a foot soldier and a radical intellectual. Though many anarchists and radical thinkers had gone into exile to avoid military service, Delgado Gonzales, due to circumstances beyond his control, found himself on the front lines.
Yet Delgado Gonzales was no naive purveyor of cheap patriotism (patriotismo), a derogatory term for uncritical nationalist sentiment. The Chaco War was a senseless counterrevolutionary bloodletting that articulated racial capitalism, the power of the oil and arms industries, and the pathologies of military men and financiers.
Against the remembrance of war heroes defending oil, and thus justifying the sacrifice, Delgado Gonzales once again viewed the deaths as senseless.
He wrote, "we continued advancing, with difficulty, taking hand by hand a few miserable stretches of this sterile and treacherous land; and as we advanced we left in our path, made brothers by death, pilas [paraguayans] and bolis [bolivians] laid out with their face to the sun, amid puddles of blood and in the most grotesque poses: some clenching their rifle, others face down, some huddled around their possessions as if they were trying to dodge death.
All of these cadavers appeared to protest silently and sinisterly against the remote instigators of this cruel massacre." Bolivia ultimately lost much of the Chaco but retained its oil fields. Paraguayans definitively shifted the border westward. After World War I, the United States, flush with capital, briefly became a creditor nation; much of this wealth stemmed from oil exports for the war itself.
The US had been spared the widespread devastation of war. American finance capital was a rapidly ascending power. Banks—most virtually indistinguishable from the oil industry itself—and the US government hoped to lend money to expand consumption of US goods and extend US political influence through debt.
This "dollar diplomacy," both before and after World War I, aimed at countering the influence of the British pound sterling in favor of the dollar, while also gaining access to natural resources needed by the burgeoning oil-military-capital assemblage.
Bolivia, rich in tin, oil, and other minerals, was one of several countries targeted.
Dollar diplomacy, debt, and the grip of fossil capital
This initiative involved the sale of Bolivian bonds by American banks to buyers in the United States. The banks, after taking a significant cut, would provide the money to Bolivia for future repayment.
Invariably, these agreements stipulated that Bolivia use some of the borrowed funds to contract goods and services from US firms. In 1922, a bond issue was designated to hire an American firm to construct the Yungas railway. In 1923, money was allocated to hire Ulen Corporation to build a sewer system in Cochabamba and La Paz.
In 1926 and 1927, bonds were issued both to repay prior debts and to expand railway infrastructure, also involving US construction. In 1928 and 1930, further bonds were issued to repay the now-mounting debts and finance new infrastructure projects. Much of this lending was predicated on the speculation that future oil discoveries would finance repayment.
However, default was also implicitly built into these agreements as a political tool. Across Latin America, the mechanism was strikingly similar. The banks skimmed off lucrative fees. If the bonds defaulted, as virtually all of them did, the intermediary banks and the government were conveniently absolved of responsibility.
This was the context of finance capitalism and debt that set the stage for the Chaco War. The intricate connections between the bonds, the US government, and Standard Oil were most evident in the 1922 loan.
The St. Louis Union Trust Co. was one of the many banks involved in the loan.
Yet at the heart of the loan was the Equitable Trust Co., a bank intricately connected to the Rockefeller empire and Standard Oil. As Malm (2016) argues, this bank-oil fusion was "fossil capital incarnate"; both oil and debt served as mechanisms of capital accumulation, as did war.
War itself was a primary means of expenditure, consuming both capital and oil, and necessitating more debt and more consumption. Three significant points emerge from this analysis. First, the distinction between capital and oil was blurred, if it existed at all. Second, the oil industry was deeply intertwined with the arms industry and the US government, creating a powerful, self-perpetuating nexus.
Third, the bribes, the payments, and the loan itself were strategically used to encourage Bolivian oligarchs to incur debt and to reward Standard Oil with a generous concession, thereby granting the oil-capital assemblage significant power over Bolivia.
The bond issue contract, with terms particularly onerous for Bolivia, was signed in May 1922.
In a clear quid pro quo, the contract with Standard Oil, with terms equally onerous for Bolivia, was signed in July 1922, as documented by Zapata Zegada. The oil contract granted Standard concession rights for fifty-five years, a remarkably low royalty to the state (11 percent), and no surface rental fees until production commenced, as Cote noted.
The Bolivian government consciously disregarded its own Petroleum Law, which had imposed a moratorium on new concessions. The deep imbrication of the banks, the oil company, and the Bolivian government was unequivocally clear. The Bolivian state was largely, if not entirely, brought under the influence of US fossil capital through the legal mechanism of debt finance.
In an earlier draft of the deal, even taxes on future petroleum exports were to be subject to collection by the American bankers. Had this clause remained, it would have meant that any revenues generated by Standard Oil activities above and beyond their profits and share of rents would also be funneled back to the Rockefeller-controlled banks themselves as payment on the bonds.
Fierce public outcry ultimately led to the removal of this egregious clause in the final version.
Nevertheless, the agreement still represented a significant surrender of sovereignty. To ensure the collection of all available money to service the bond repayment, the bond issue established a permanent fiscal commission tasked with overseeing tax and customs revenue collection.
Crucially, two of the three members of this commission would be named by the North American bankers. Consider how this mechanism operated through a specific example. Pompilio Guerrero, a Bolivian customs agent, discovered a clandestine pipeline used by Standard Oil to illegally export oil to Argentina.
This was a clear breach of contract, as Standard had repeatedly claimed it had not yet discovered oil and thus any exports would be subject to tax and royalty payments. Guerrero reported this to his superior, who promptly fired him. It turned out that his boss, the national director of the Bolivian Customs Agency, was one William Magowan, a US citizen and former employee of Standard Oil.
Magowan had been given the job as one of the conditions imposed by the loan, a mechanism through which the oil banks could extract repayment on the debt and Standard Oil could evade the law. Guerrero was later vindicated, but Standard Oil wielded so much power within the government that this breach of contract was not addressed until after the Chaco War.
In nationalist lore today, Pompilio Guerrero is remembered as another hero, as Zapata Zegada recounts. The state also ceded control of oil exploration. As it was in the 1990s, when deeply indebted and interpenetrated by World Bank and IMF functionaries defining policy, the Bolivian state in the 1920s was a hybrid entity.
The 1922 loan propped up the Bautista Saavedra government, which possessed no genuine political or economic base outside a small oligarchic elite and its dependence on mineral export taxes.
The Standard Oil concession was achieved through the enticement of a bond issue that all parties knew Bolivia could not repay. In 1927, the principal items on the Bolivian budget were debt payment (25 million bolivianos, approximately 50 percent of total government income) and the department of war (11 million bolivianos, approximately 21 percent).
By 1929, on the eve of the Great Depression, Bolivia was spending 37 percent of its revenue on servicing debt and 20 percent on its military, as Marsh documents. But the underlying assumption was that in case of default or the nationalization of Standard Oil assets, the US government would intervene to defend Standard Oil and US capital.
Yet, just as oil capital operated transnationally, so too did the radical ideas that sought to resist it. A digression is worthwhile here. Margaret Alexander Marsh is another long-forgotten hero. She meticulously studied the US loans to Bolivia based on several months of fieldwork in La Paz between 1925 and 1926.
Marsh went on to teach sociology and anthropology at Smith College, as Curti noted. This bond-based oil imperialism affected many countries in Latin America and elsewhere in the world. In virtually all cases, the countries were in no condition to repay.
Princeton economist Edwin Kemmerer led an advising mission to Bolivia in 1927. His report led to a redesign of the Bolivian banking system to make it more amenable to US capital interests. A significant portion of the Dillon Read loans of 1926 and 1927 went toward the payment of debt to Vickers, the British manufacturer of machine guns later used in the Chaco War.
Kemmerer's analysis was accurate: the Dillon Read bonds were in default by 1930. But that was precisely the goal. Default triggered mechanisms that further deepened the control of the US banks and increased dependence on future dollar debt. These mechanisms were criticized by Americans who linked their critiques of Wall Street and the arms industry, which they blamed for pushing the US into the carnage of World War I.
Exposes of the arms industry, such as merchants of death, written by libertarian scholars, were interconnected with critiques like that of Marsh, as Engelbrecht and Hanighen illustrate.