Moving Pictures

The chapter draws from an impressive corpus of visual and written materials that sought to define the March to the East in human and environmental terms. This includes the work of filmmaker Jorge Ruiz, who traveled throughout the Bolivian lowlands documenting colonization for the state and its U.S. sponsors. Ruiz played with the visual distinction between the arid highlands of Bolivia and the tropical lowlands. His camera followed the lives of fictional characters whose migrations through unfamiliar landscapes would overcome profound regional differences and unify a fractured national body. Shown in cinemas across the country, Ruiz’s films helped the state consolidate an enduring frontier imaginary that the future of the country lay in the east. Residents of Santa Cruz responded to such films in conflicting ways. Lowland elites eagerly embraced new highways and railways that would link them to the rest of the nation. Yet they harbored a deep fear of the Andean indigenous bodies that would accompany these new forms of mobility. Ruiz and his images also circulated far beyond Bolivia. His success at transplanting his aesthetic repertoire highlights the flow, pervasiveness, and flexibility of midcentury development ideology and the role of film as a powerful vehicle for representing change.

Past and Present in the Bolivian Lowlands

This conclusion draws on contemporary examples from Santa Cruz to explore the visibility and invisibility of internal and transnational migration. The very scale of the March to the East continually obscures its origins as new agro-industrial operation and its role in accelerating development. In highlighting these realities, the conclusion points to decades-long continuities in lowland policy that are shared by diverse political regimes.

An introductory framework for ‘Habilito: Debt for Life’

The documentary film Habilito: Debt for Life provides a case study of the conflicts and tensions that arise at the point of contact between highland migrants and Mosetenes, members of an indigenous community in the Bolivian Amazon. It focuses particularly on a system of debt peonage known locally as ‘habilito’. This system is used throughout the Bolivian lowlands, and much of the rest of the Amazon basin, to secure labor in remote areas. Timber merchants advance market goods to Mosetenes at inflated prices, in exchange for tropical hardwood timber. When it comes time to settle accounts, the indebted person often finds that the wood he has cut does not meet his debt obligation, and he has to borrow more money to return to the forest to continue logging. This permanent cycle of debt permits actors from outside these indigenous communities to maintain control over the extraction of wood and provides them with a free source of labor in the exploitation of timber resources. This system is practiced especially in remote areas where systems of patronage predominate, and where colonists with a market-based economic logic come into contact with Amazonian indigenous peoples who, historically, have not employed an economic logic of saving or hoarding.

Indigenous Peoples’ Land Rights in the Bolivian Lowlands

Land destitution and expropriations disproportionally affect indigenous peoples’ ancestral lands in the Bolivian lowlands, namely Guaraní communities. Due to recent extractive projects in the lowlands land rights are seriously infringed. The close relationship with indigenous peoples’ lands and its significance for survival generates vulnerabilities. This concerns indigenous communities and individual community members in particular. This article analyses inequality dimensions in indigenous communities in the context of prior consultation mechanisms regarding natural resource extraction. Inequalities among indigenous community members in consultation processes are an unobserved phenomenon which requires further research. In this case, inequalities particularly emerge in forms of gender- and age-related factors. This stems from uneven impact on such groups by state and corporate conduct. Therefore, the role of vulnerable members in indigenous communities concerning land destitution is explored in a case-study and recommendations for mitigating inequalities in indigenous communities in resource disputes are developed.