Subsoil Politics: Extraction, Nationalism, and Protest in Bolivia and Peru

• DOI: 10.1177/0094582X18774319
• Author: Andrea Marston
• Published date: 01 September 2018
• Date: 01 September 2018
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 222, Vol. 45 No. 5, September 2018, 229–231

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X18774319

© 2018 Latin American Perspectives

229

Book Review

Subsoil Politics

Extraction, Nationalism, and Protest in Bolivia and Peru

by

Andrea Marston

Kevin A. Young Blood of the Earth: Resource Nationalism, Revolution, and Empire in Bolivia.

Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017.

Moisés Arce Resource Extraction and Protest in Peru. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh

Press, 2014.

Across much of Latin America, the past two decades have been characterized by a

sharp increase in protests centered around natural resources, especially water, land,

minerals, and hydrocarbons. The outcomes of these protests in Bolivia and Peru are

frequently contrasted despite their shared border and interconnected indigenous com-

munities. Bolivia, after electing its first indigenous president, Evo Morales, in 2005, has

(theoretically) strengthened local territorial rights and affirmed a commitment to pro-

tecting Pachamama (Mother Earth), while Peru’s economic future has become increas-

ingly yoked to the huge mining projects of foreign companies.

Yet the distinction between these two contexts becomes murkier the closer one looks:

resource extraction has increased on Morales’s watch, and, as the political scientist

Moisés Arce emphasizes, “fragmented” protests in Peru have had a significant impact

on regional and national mining policies. In other words, these countries share both

resource-dependent economies and a rich politics of dissent. Arce’s Resource Extraction

and Protest in Peru and the historian Kevin A. Young’s Blood of the Earth: Resource

Nationalism, Revolution, and Empire in Bolivia are both efforts to explain the political

formations that have emerged in conjunction with Latin America’s “new” extractive

boom.

In his timely and engaging book, Young argues that Bolivia’s national imaginary

has been shaped in relation to natural resources, particularly tin and gas, since the

early twentieth century. Resource nationalism—the belief that the country’s natural

resources should benefit the nation—continues to be a centripetal force in Bolivian

politics. The majority of Young’s book explores the years immediately before and after

Bolivia’s national revolution of 1952, when a variety of political pathways were under

discussion by both middle-class elites and union leaders in multiple sectors. While

most scholars have underscored the determining role of U.S. Cold War policies in

pushing postrevolutionary Bolivia rightward, Young draws on union publications and

resolutions to emphasize the discussions that were taking place on the ground in

Bolivia. He reads these proclamations alongside recently declassified documents of the

U.S. government that, he argues, reveal that the United States was less concerned with

a Soviet- or even Cuban-style revolution than with Bolivia’s resource nationalism and

Andrea Marston is a Ph.D. candidate in geography at the University of California, Berkeley.

774319LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X18774319Latin American PerspectivesMarston / BOOK REVIEW

book-review2018