On Tuesday, September 25 the Latin American Studies department at Grand Valley State University hosted a mini-symposium entitled "Society, Globalization, and Natural Resources in Latin America: New Perspectives and Experiences from Mesoamerican Reef countries and South America." The forum featured two speakers, one who is a journalist with a recent book on social movements in Bolivia and the other a researcher with the Nature Conservancy who addressed the impact of tourism on the environment and economies on the Atlantic coast of meso-America.
Ben Dangl author of The Price of Fire: Resource Wars and Social Movements in Bolivia spoke first. He said that the main conflicts in the past 6 years have taken place in the capital of La Paz. Bolivia has tremendous mineral wealth - tin, copper, and iron ore, resources that foreign investors want. Dangl said that a great deal of the current conflict stems from the 1952 revolution that was brought about in part by the mining unions, which fought to get the mines nationalized. In the mid 1980s the power of the miner's union was broken up and many of those former miners went to the Chapare region of Bolivia, where most of the coca is grown. During the 1980s and 1990s the US war on drugs targeted that region with a coca eradication campaign. This contributed to greater poverty in the Chapare region, which eventually led to an organized resistance movement.
One of the main organizers that Dangl met in Bolivia was Leonilda Zurita who is a coca grower and part of the coca growers union. Coca growers in Bolivia are known as cocaleras. Zurita is now in the Bolivian Senate. Evo Morales, the current President of Bolivia, is also from the Chapare region as well. Dangle said that Morales used the power that the coca leaf has in the country by holding them up when he spoke publicly during his campaign for president.
The author then addresses what is now known as the water war in Cochabamba. In 1999, Bechtel was given a contract to privatize the water in Cochabamba. Water rates went up as high as 200%, even rain water collected was privatized. People organized against this, demanding that the water go back into public hands and that it would be affordable for everyone. Both rural and urban movements worked on this campaign to kick Bechtel out. Dangl said that this struggle is exemplary of what is happening all around the world with resource wars, but it also influenced the gas war struggle in Bolivia that was soon to come.
Bolivia has the second largest natural gas reserves in Latin America. In 2003 a movement began to nationalize the natural gas so that the money could be used for roads, schools, and other public services. A counter proposal was put forth to export the natural gas to the US. People began to protest. People would sometimes block roads with small gas tanks to protest the policy. In El Alto, people pushed train cars off the tracks to prevent the gas from being transported and sometimes the roads would also be blocked to get the politician's attention in order to demand that the gas be nationalized. People eventually kicked out the President Sanchez de Lozada and got the gas nationalized. Dangl said that de Lozada now resides in the US, although there is an effort to bring him back to Bolivia and try him for crimes.
Evo Morales was then elected in 2005 with a campaign to legalize coca production, to nationalize many resources and to have a constitutional convention. Some of his campaign promises have come to fruition, where funds generated from gas sales have been used for education and health care programs. Morales is also the president of the coca growers union, which many see as a conflict of interest. Part of his plan is to allow every family to grow coca on plots of land about half the size of a football field. The constitutional assembly has been resisted by other political parties and has been the biggest challenge faced by Morales to date.
The last point that Dangl made dealt with the Bolivian hip-hop movement that has played a big role in the popular movements. He showed a rap video that focuses on workers and indigenous rights. The hip-hop movement is also trying to bring ancient indigenous leaders into public consciousness, leaders who fought against the Spanish conquest (www.upsideDownWorld.org).
The second speaker was Matt McPherson, an anthropologist that has worked in the Caribbean and Central America. He has worked with the Nature Conservancy in MesoAmerica. McPherson said the area he did research in has the largest coral reef system in the Western Hemisphere. There are roughly 60 marine and coastal protected areas. Since 1997 the Presidents of the four countries (Mexico, Guate, Belize, Honduras) have pledged to protect this area. These reefs provide habitat to numerous life forms, such as whale sharks, turtles, and conch. Reefs not only protects the biological diversity, but the ethnic diversity as well - Mayan, Garifuna, Creole and Miskito. Tourism, McPherson says, has drastically changed population numbers in the reef/coastal areas. Poverty levels though, are bigger in agricultural areas, less so in tourist areas.
The scenario he laid out was this - when reefs die, fish and fishing industry die, then beaches erode, tourism moves in, and local economies are devastated. Climate change has also caused the bleaching of reefs, which can contribute to their destruction. Another issue is watershed contamination. But the area he spoke about most was how coastal and infrastructure development have contributed to the contamination. Over-fishing is another negative factor, even though fishing isn't a huge contributor to the local economies in terms of total income generators. Tourism is another contributor to reef destruction. In Quintana Roo, with the large beaches and huge resorts are much more problematic than the smaller bed and breakfast like establishments in places like Belize which have very different beaches. McPherson provided some numbers in major tourism areas. In some communities 90% of the population is tied to tourism. Cruise ship visitors have increased tremendously. Tourism impact has many negatives that include anchoring, the trampling reefs, sewage, pollution, and extreme local dependency on International markets.
McPherson then addressed what he referred to as sustainable tourism. He says there has been an attempt to get fishers more involved in tourism activities. In Punta Allen, Mexico example they have won awards for its sustainability. They rely on lobster and have created lobster fishers in blocks where each person manages very a very specific area. They also now have tourism cooperatives that involve people who are part of fishing cooperatives. He said there is the issue of over capacity. When are too many tourists for any given area? The speaker also looked at a few communities in Belize. There has been a decline in the fishing economy in some of those communities and tourism has had a negative impact.
The difference between the information shared by both speakers seemed to be that the struggle for economic justice in Bolivia was much more of a grassroots effort to challenge neo-liberal economic policies. With the second speaker there seemed to be a sense that communities were trying to integrate themselves into these policies that promoted tourism. Integration into the tourism industry was confirmed by a website--www.cancun.info--that the second speaker provided that promotes "sustainable tourism."
