Bolivia in the Age of Gas.

• Author: Sierra, Luis

Gustafson, Bret. Bolivia in the Age of Gas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020.

Bolivia in the Age of Gas examines fossil fuel capitalism in twenty-first-century Bolivia. Sociocultural anthropologist Bret Gustafson analyzes how the fossil fuel industry centered in North America and Western Europe, has historically shaped, bent, and twisted the mechanism of the Bolivian state. Bolivia in the Age of Gas demonstrates how Standard Oil and the United States in the 1930s stood to benefit from the Chaco War, 1932-35, between Bolivia and Paraguay. American political and economic interests dovetailed nicely with any conflict between the two nations and would result in favorable terms for American firms to extract and commercialize fossil fuels for consumption in the Global North and among Bolivia's wealthier, more industrial neighbors. Gustafson explores the growth of what he calls the "gaseous state" from a historical perspective, placing the latest developments in gas extraction in the longue duree economic framework of oil and mineral extraction. Bolivia in the Age of Gas details how, just like silver, tin, and copper mining and oil extraction, natural gas extraction also generates state violence and repression, coercive labor regimes, limited economic and social gains for most of the population, and a subjugation of local, regional, and national political sovereignty to the interests of national and transnational capital flows.

In this context, Gustafson traces how the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS; Movement toward Socialism) political party envisioned a political program that slowly but surely transformed from a radical revision of the relations of the state to the people--the proceso de cambio (process of change)--toward a reactionary state that made tactical alliances with lowland elites, largely ignoring the structural economic problems that maintained Bolivia's vastly unequal society. Like other Bolivian historical reform movements, the MAS project stalled out and faced severe backlash. In the Bolivian lowlands, regionalism and autonomy became metonymic political discourses that embodied the racialized notions of the traditional political class within Bolivia. The autonomist movement of the eastern Bolivian lowland provinces employed political violence to shape their demands on the state and seek greater autonomy from the national government to retain control of the gas rents. Andean migrants to the eastern lowlands were seen as...