Suzana Sawyer's Crude Chronicles

...A recent UN report found that 60 percent of Latin Americans believe development is more important than democracy...

...These critics point to a changing atmosphere in the hemisphere...

...Lately, the mainstream North American press has carried warnings of an antidemocratic backlash in the region, as populist movements from Bolivia to Peru reject "democratic" systems to promote what is portrayed as violent mob rule...

...In response, as Sawyer writes, "Indian leaders repeatedly appealed to history to rewrite the law and challenge injustice...

...Members DISSENT / Summer 2005 n 123 BOOKS of the press fingered their notebooks and played with their cameras...

...Or, as Sawyer writes, "The politics of petroleum—the power matrixes that configured the daily operations of oil—intimately influenced the social, cultural, economic, as well as environmental reality in which people lived their lives...

...It does not cover a recent wave of important oil developments in Ecuador, including a tense confrontation between the government and the defiant indigenous community of Sarayacu (itself in Pastaza province) over repeated efforts to lease drilling rights on their land to foreign oil companies...

...The latter remain the supposed patrimony of the Ecuadoran people, held in trust by the national government, which has leased thousands of acres to foreign oil companies, leaving local residents bearing most of the appalling costs to human health and environment...

...Bowing to pressure from foreign and domestic critics, the government has recently begun to enforce some of its own environmental legislation...

...Foreign oil companies have changed their practices since the bad old days of Texaco, so that, ironically, it is Petroecuador, once the crown jewel of Ecuador's economy but now grossly underfunded and technologically backward, that is responsible for most of the spills and accidents these days...

...126 n DISSENT / Summer 2005...

...The backlash against anyone perceived as threatening la patria, the mythologized nation-state, has led to ugly racialist rhetoric...

...Almost forty years of the modern petroleum era have brought little change to the lives of many Ecuadorans, who remain mired in extreme poverty...

...It pleads implicitly for a recasting of democracy as socioeconomic, not just political—calling for more substantive changes to inherited, encrusted systems of power and privilege, rather than endless tinkering with the surface trappings of candidates and elections...

...Pachakutik was forced out of the government seven months later, its departure prompted by anger at Gutierrez's adherence to neoliberal policies and his refusal to follow through on an ambitious reform agenda...

...But with flashbulbs popping and OCP officials looking on, the president could not make the wheel turn...

...But Ecuador has remained wedded to an economic model that has sought to repay foreign debt without tackling poverty and marginalization...

...It is hard to imagine a better metaphor for the Ecuadoran model of oil development than this bifurcation between soil and subsoil, with the state directly undercutting its citizens' very foundations of prosperity...

...Yet commentators such as the Washington Post's Jackson Diehl continue to promote a facile dichotomy between "authoritarian populism" and "democratic Latin governments...

...The state enshrined juridical notions of equality before the law, but did little to end extreme economic stratification or ensure broad political participation...

...Since the first wells were drilled in the 1960s, Ecuador has been a microcosm of what dependency theorists once termed "core-periphery relations...

...These groups sought an "alternate vision of the political" (in Sawyer's words) that re-conceives the state as a diverse collection of culturally distinct nations, rather than a melting-pot-style amalgamation...

...His recent master's degree research at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies focused on oil issues in Ecuador...

...This insistence on the "mosaic" quality of Ecuador implied a related acknowledgment that—contrary to the official myth of equality (all citizens are the same)—Ecuadorans had long been divided according to race and class...

...124 n DISSENT / Summer 2005 As they became better organized and more politically sophisticated, indigenous groups began to propose a different understanding of democracy itself: one that replaces the abstract rhetoric of liberal equality with a plurinational vision of diversity...

...Crude Chronicles is, however, an account of events that took place during the 1980s and 1990s...

...While successive governments have pursued privatization and cuts in domestic social programs, indigenous groups have made common cause with trade unions, farmers, and others skeptical of neoliberal orthodoxy...

...CRUDE CHRONICLES: INDIGENOUS POLITICS, MULTINATIONAL OIL, AND NEOLIBERALISM IN ECUADOR by Suzana Sawyer Duke University Press, 2004 294 pp $21.95 N AUGUST 21, 2003, the president of Ecuador, Lucio Gutierrez, drove with his retinue to a small windswept hilltop in the Andes, not far from the capital city of Quito...

...Built in the face of great domestic and international controversy, the OCP represented the latest chapter in the almost forty-year history of Ecuador's tethering its economy to petroleum...

...DISSENT / Summer 2005 n 125 BOOKS As Sawyer points out, reducing the petroleum issue to a narrow concern with better technology exemplifies what the anthropologist James Ferguson has called "an anti-politics machine," stripping it of complexity and controversy...

...Petroleum flows out of the country's east, leaving a great deal of misery in its wake...

...Symbolically—and this was also crucial—they wanted a transformation of the political system to reflect the reality of difference and to acknowledge a historical record of injustice...

...It was precisely the failure of the neoliberal model, with its emphasis on oil exports, to raise living standards and reduce poverty that fueled the emergence of Ecuador's modern indigenous movement...

...In fact, Ecuador and other Latin American countries have witnessed a struggle for the emergence of a "Third Way"—a pluralistic populism that emphasizes the urgent need to better represent minority interests and vulnerable people within the political process...

...But this diagnosis also rests on a woefully narrow understanding of democracy...

...And now, though the first oil would not gurgle its way westward for several months, the politicians, oil barons, and other VIPs were ready to celebrate...

...In Ecuador, possessing the title to land gives surface rights, not subsoil rights...

...The old order had failed, and so indigenous groups (one-quarter of Ecuador's population) sought not to secede from the state, but to transform the state itself...

...Recent mobilizations in Ecuador against efforts at trade liberalization, such as the Free Trade Area of the Americas and the Andean-U.S...

...Last year, it even allowed a landmark trial to go ahead that involves charges of severe ecological and health problems related to the American oil giant Texaco's operations in the Oriente during the 1960s and 1970s...

...Sawyer shows how Ecuador's indigenous groups have sought to bring their distinct views of land, natural resources, and development into the political arena...

...Along with its push for a new politics of plurality, this movement advocated greater economic democracy and a different relationship with oil and the royalties from its production...

...Oil has been a viable fuel for development only in those few countries with the political will to demand concrete results...

...As Michael Shifter argued recently in Foreign Affairs, the "heightened expectations and demands— entirely legitimate and long overdue" of indigenous groups across Latin America "carry profound democratizing potential" if they are actually heard...

...Additionally, in January 2003, Ecuador reached a political milestone with the first direct participation of an indigenous political party in the governing coalition...

...There are parallel cases across Latin America...

...Like many Latin American countries, Ecuador emerged into modernity as a democracy in word more than deed...

...yet they represented a major advance in the struggle for an indigenous political voice that she describes...

...On a practical political plane, they wanted greater recognition of minority rights and more direct representation in the political process...

...Most of the wells in the Oriente (as the Ecuadoran Amazon is known) were built by foreign oil companies, who received preferential deals ensuring them the lion's share of royalties and a myriad of tax breaks, incentives, and write-offs...

...This does not imply a return to the authoritarianism of the caudillos, but it does question the imagined veneer of national unity behind which "democratic Latin governments" have operated...

...Venezuela, for instance, has undertaken an ambitious experiment in funding social programs through a recent flood of oil profits...

...Led by the dynamic Organization of Indigenous Peoples of Pastaza (OPIP), many of these communities have been organizing for decades to stop the advance of the petroleum frontier from its traditional base in the northeastern Oriente, near Colombia...

...Influential groups like CONAIE (the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador) have proposed, for instance, that a specific percentage of oil revenues go directly to fund indigenous programs...

...Suzana Sawyer, an anthropologist at the University of California-Davis, has worked for many years among the indigenous communities of Pastaza, a province in the southern Oriente...

...Similarly, in 2003, the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa launched a scathing attack on Latin American indigenous groups who, he believes, talk the talk but do not walk the walk of democracy...

...SAWYER WRITES compellingly, though with an unfortunate surfeit of academic jargon...

...LIKE THE ECUADORAN indigenous groups Sawyer describes, millions of marginalized people throughout the hemisphere are seeking a broader definition of democracy...

...The book recounts a series of meetings, demonstrations, and negotiations with rich anecdotal detail...

...Indeed, the current bubble of global oil prices obscures a painful truth: 80 percent of the population subsists near the poverty line, and the World Bank recently pointed out that the country's poverty rate actually increased by 6.5 percent during the 1990s...

...the wealth from its sale accretes in Quito and along the southern coast, near Guayaquil...

...The reawakening of populism in Latin America is a direct response to continued poverty, inequalBOOKS ity, and social exclusion there...

...Free Trade Agreement being currently negotiated with Washington, have brought together a diverse medley of interests that includes the major indigenous confederations...

...Here is where oil, as the country's most privileged commodity, assumes particular significance...

...In the meantime, if another model of oil development is possible, it still hovers, phantomlike, out of Ecuador's reach...

...He was there to inaugurate the new $1.5 billion Heavy Crude Pipeline, or OCP (Oleoducto de Crudos Pesados), which would be the second oil pipeline to stretch from east to west across this small, poverty-plagued country...

...Tracing OPIP's ongoing struggle to prevent the national government from leasing thousands of acres of rain forest to foreign oil companies, Sawyer sees a larger parable about development and democracy...

...Though they are clearly concerned with the direct environmental consequences of oil production, indigenous groups have promoted a broader understanding of oil issues as economic, social, and political, inexorably linked to the distribution of power and resources in Ecuador...

...After several embarrassing minutes, the wheel turned, the flashbulbs flashed—the next era of Ecuadoran oil development was dawning...

...That party, Pachakutik, had played a key role in the accession of Gutierrez, a former army colonel, to the presidency...

...Indigenous people, who make up one-quarter of the population, suffered and continue to suffer from all kinds of exclusion...

...In their minds, the liberal logic of abstract universals could not so easily be reconciled with the histories of discrimination that made Ecuador's racially stratified social landscape...

...Thus, a dependent relationship also emerged between the Ecuadoran state and global capital...

...As this review went to press, Lucio Gutierrez became the third Ecuadoran president in a decade to be ousted from power...

...Whether this will happen, and whether Palacio will attempt substantive political reforms, remains to be seen...

...JONATHAN COOK is a program officer at the World Wildlife Fund in Washington, D.C...

...Of course, the decision by the Gutierrez government to complete the OCP and license a new round of oil exploration in the Amazon underlined how far indigenous Ecuadorans have to go to receive more benefits from oil...

...His replacement, Alfredo Palacio, the former vice president, promised to begin redirecting additional oil revenues toward social programs...

...Though the state set up its own oil company, Petroecuador, and sought to channel some of the royalties from foreign companies toward health, education, and infrastructure programs, much was siphoned off through corruption, unfavorable contracts, and foreign debt payments...

...Sawyer does not address these developments...

...Outfitted for the occasion in an engineer's hardhat, Gutiérrez strode forward to turn a large crank that would symbolically open the floodgates to a new wave of Ecuadoran oil wealth...

...But these improvements in the process of exploring for and extracting oil are deceptive...

...But "the demand for a plurinational state," writes Sawyer, "unsettled and continues to unsettle elite foundational fictions of the nation in Ecuador...