The settler roots of Plurinational Bolivia: state-sponsored indigenous colonization on Bolivia’s Amazonian ‘frontier’

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article analyzes a land conflict in Latin America through the lens of settler colonial studies. I focus on an area of the Bolivian Amazon known as the Alto Beni, where a government-sponsored colonization project settled indigenous colonists from the Bolivian highlands in territories occupied by the Mosetén people. This project has led to conflicts over land that continue to this day. I argue that this project continues to reflect the settler colonial logics of the development professionals who designed it, particularly their ideas about the role of Bolivia’s Amazonian ‘frontier’ in the production of a national identity. This involves the circulation of ideologies that cast the settler frontier as a key step on the path toward modernization, both for settlers (who are to be incorporated as citizens of a modernizing Bolivia) and for Mosetenes (who are to be eliminated in order to make room for this process). I conclude by challenging the stark distinction that scholars of settler colonialism make between settler colonialism (particularly as it depends on Anglocentric ideologies of racial classification) and other experiences of colonial oppression (particularly those which involve the circulation of ideas and the production of knowledge).