In their recent introduction to the LAG Blog series on extractivism and the green energy transition, Tobias Franz and Angus McNelly draw attention to the possibility of a new commodity supercycle in Latin America related to supposedly green technologies. They caution against undue optimism regarding the developmental potentials of such a boom for the countries in which these resources are located, given the “mixed results” of the last commodity supercycle. As they rightly point out, while this cycle raised growth rates across the region between 2002 and 2013, it also intensified socio-environmental conflicts and ecological destruction on extractive frontiers.
This tension between aggregate-level development successes and localized instances of resource-based conflict has structured much of the critical debate on the legacy of neo-extractivist regimes in countries like Ecuador and Bolivia. Such debates tend to generate a dichotomous picture of the state as a rational orchestrator of development on one hand and a colonizing agent of repression on the other. In doing so, they “underestimate the massive degree of uncertainty, bluff and ignorance on which such gargantuan enterprises as the ship of state rest” (Taussig 1997: 144).
This blog post draws this underlying chaos to the surface, through a sketch of some of the key themes of my recently published book, Reality of Dreams: Post-Neoliberal Utopias in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Based on extensive field research conducted between 2014 and 2017, the book explores a series of extraordinarily ambitious infrastructural megaprojects financed by a bonanza of petrodollars, through which the putatively post-neoliberal regime of Rafael Correa sought to break with the nation’s ecologically catastrophic dependence on Amazonian oil reserves. It focuses on three such projects: “Manta-Manaus,” the “Millennium Cities,” and “Ikiam.” Here I briefly summarise the distance between the vision of each project and its outcome on the ground.
The Manta-Manaus multimodal transport corridor aimed to compete with the Panama Canal by opening an interoceanic corridor from the Pacific Coast of Ecuador to the industrial city of Manaus in the Brazilian Amazon, and on to the Atlantic Coast of Brazil. Over US$1 billion was invested by the Correa administration in the highways, ports and airports included in the Ecuadorian section of the corridor. But the road over the Andes ran into a maze of canyons and had to be abandoned; the River Napo along which the fluvial section of the route would run was found to be too shallow for commercially viable vessels; and the new airports were virtually unused. The outcome was a total absence of international trade moving along the corridor. Meanwhile, the port on the Napo at which containers were to be shifted from road to river was repurposed by the oil industry, as the closest port to a controversial new oil block that Correa had opened in the Yasuni National Park.
The Millennium Cities were a planned network of two hundred new towns to be constructed throughout the Ecuadorian Amazon, in which the Indigenous inhabitants of the region would be resettled, and where they would finally benefit from the hydrocarbons extracted from beneath their territories. In a microcosm of the critical dichotomy between the celebration of the progressive potentials of the developmental state on one hand and the condemnation of extractivist violence and dispossession on the other, Correa and his opponents on the anti-extractivist left clashed over the project. Correa insisted he was bringing modernity to impoverished and marginalized citizens, while his critics accused him of launching a colonial project for the seizure of Indigenous territories and the erasure of Indigenous cultures. These opposing discourses paradoxically collaborated in the projection of a vision of an omnipotent and totalizing state. But the first two Millennium Cities turned out to be mere mirages of modernity: schools without teachers, clinics without doctors, roads without cars—which were being rapidly abandoned by their inhabitants and consumed by the jungle, and in which the state was dramatically failing to pursue its supposedly “civilizing” project. Following the dramatic collapse of the oil boom in 2014, these initial Cities continued their decline, and only one more of the two hundred that had been planned was actually constructed.
Ikiam was envisioned as a state-of-the-art biotechnology university on the edge of an extensive Amazonian biosphere reserve, in which scientists would research the flora and fauna of the jungle, unlocking its economic potential, and catalysing a green transition from an economy based on oil extraction to one based on knowledge and biodiversity. The planning for the university began in 2012, with its inauguration scheduled for 2014. A team of international scientists was assembled for the planning phase, and insisted that the timeframe was completely unrealistic. But in the words of one of the architects of Ikiam (speaking in English), the response from Correa’s team was “There is no time! Build the fucking thing now!” Both were proved right: it was completely unrealistic, and there was no time. By the time the main campus was inaugurated in October 2014, the oil price has begun its precipitous descent. The budget was repeatedly slashed as a result. Laboratories and entire campuses remained unbuilt, and scientists began appropriating Indigenous knowledge in the absence of facilities in which to conduct their own research. Meanwhile budgetary shortfalls were being desperately compensated by an aggressive and increasingly privatized expansion of the primary commodity frontier. Needless to say, Correa’s dream of a knowledge economy did not come to fruition.
Reality of Dreams includes detailed ethnographic explorations of these megaprojects, demonstrating that in each case “a utopian dream was transformed into a satirical self-parody, a progressive vision was inverted into a circular journey to nowhere, and a grand ambition was swept away by forces beyond its control” (Wilson 2021: 198). There is no room to discuss my theorization of this process here. The purpose of this post – aside from encouraging you to read my book! – is simply to draw attention to the phantasmatic and absurd dimensions of state power that are often occluded by leftist debates over the benefits and perils of extractivist development, be it in the context of the last commodity supercycle or the next. This absurdity need not be a cause for despondency. Instead, it could be taken as an indication that the political situation is more open than it appears. This openness has been further demonstrated by a series of explosive uprisings launched in the Ecuadorian Amazon against state and capital, which are also detailed in my book, and which directly staged the utopian ideal of collective abundance and egalitarian freedom. In such moments we can perhaps glimpse the prefiguration of radical futures that transcend the developmental fantasies of the extractivist state.
References
Taussig, Michael (1997) The Magic of the State New York: Routledge.
Wilson, Japhy (2021) Reality of Dreams: Post-Neoliberal Utopias in the Ecuadorian Amazon New Haven: Yale University Press.