NACLA Report on the Americas

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Fossil Fuels and Toxic Landscapes

Nicole Fabricant, Bret Gustafson & Laura Weiss

To cite this article: Nicole Fabricant, Bret Gustafson & Laura Weiss (2017) Fossil
Fuels and Toxic Landscapes, NACLA Report on the Americas, 49:4, 385-386, DOI:
10.1080/10714839.2017.1409003

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10714839.2017.1409003

Published online: 13 Dec 2017.

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Download by: [181.60.195.223] Date: 25 December 2017, At: 18:43


NICOLE FABRICANT, BRET GUSTAFSON, AND LAURA WEISS
Fossil Fuels and Toxic Landscapes
A
year after President Trump’s inauguration, our
worst climate policy nightmares have become a
reality. Fossil fuel interests have hijacked every
part of the new administration—the State Department,
Department of the Interior, the Environmental Protection
Agency, the Department of Energy, and the National
Economic Council—and the list continues. The inten-
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sity of global-warming fueled devastation increases daily
as over a century of fossil-fueled war and violence against
labor and nature rages on. Latin America is familiar with
this kind of violence.
As hurricanes rip through the Caribbean and tear
into Central America, it would seem common sense to
acknowledge the ills of fossil fuel dependence and mo-
bilize for radical transformation. Yet Latin America and
the Caribbean have long been subjected to the oil-dom-
inated foreign policy and military interests of the United
States. And, as we have seen in Mexico, Cuba, Venezuela,
and Bolivia, even resistance to this imperialist project has
long depended on oil in its increasingly deep and dan-
gerous iterations.
Today, the progressive turn of the early 2000s is slid-
ing backward toward a more familiar politics dictated by
capital and the hyper-militarized right, one long commit-
ted to monetizing any and all subsoil resources for the
sake of accumulation, planet be damned. Extractivism
has become a familiar debate in the past decade, which
we engaged in the spring 2013 issue of the NACLA
Report. But the particularities of fossil fuels—and the
ambiguities and contradictions they raise for political
projects and visions on both right and left—begs closer
examination. Might activists and thinkers on the left find
a way to envision political projects that transcend a long-
standing dependence on the idea of oil nationalism and
oil sovereignty? Facing the retrenchment of the right as
they deploy tools old and new—from TV media to mili-
tarized police—to deepen and expand the extraction of
oil and gas, how are affected communities responding?
These are the dilemmas we explore in this issue.
Oil and gas expansion, and resistance to its effects—
from physical displacement to destroyed landscapes
to livelihoods subjected to poisoned air and water—
NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS, 2017, VOL. 49, NO. 4, 385-386, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10714839.2017.1409003
NACLA_49-4.indd 385
EDITORS’ NOTE
continue to characterize the region. Lorena Riffo’s piece
on fracking in Argentina takes us close to the ground.
Today, Argentines are grappling with the legacies of
Indigenous genocide and the seductive lure of oil sov-
ereignty and right-wing nationalism to confront the new
scourge of fracking, implemented in the name of solving
the country’s energy crisis.
From Brazil, Alexandre Araujo Costa makes a bold
challenge to the left: “Yes, the oil is ours, and we should
keep it in the ground!” This is perhaps a quixotic dream
but nonetheless a concrete point of struggle, increasingly
linking peoples across the Americas. Bryan Parras brings
the point home to Houston, Texas in his interview ex-
ploring the racialized dimensions of the chemical indus-
trial complex. In the wake of another devastating storm,
beleaguered communities of Mexican-Americans yet
again confront the seemingly unassailable power of the
oil industry and the painful realities of living and dying
in toxic landscapes. As these areas become increasingly
toxic due to worsening climate disasters and environ-
mental racism, heightened displacement and emigra-
tion will certainly follow, as Todd Miller explores in his
book Storming the Wall, excerpted in this issue. Rather
than seek out more sustainable policy, governments have
instead turned to increasing border securitization and
technology to fight threats of growing immigration due
to environmental disaster.
Central to the lack of alternative or more sustainable
policies are the ways that the hydrocarbons industry in
the Americas have attempted to control—or “lock in”—
fossil fuel dependency. Bret Gustafson’s piece considers
the Caribbean’s deep dependence on oil for electricity
production, and its ties to a longer history of U.S. mili-
tarism, like the invasion of Grenada, and imperialism in
the region. This history matters when thinking about
the Caribbean today, from Puerto Rico’s brittle, debt-
riddled oil-dependent grid to Grenada’s tug-of-war with
an oil-burning electric utility, to new efforts to turn the
Caribbean into a region fueled by fracked natural gas.
Another set of questions arises around the contra-
dictions of leftist political projects dependent on oil
(or gas). How revolutionary are state-based projects
385
© 2017 North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA)
12/7/17 7:33 AM
 that rely on revenue from the extraction of oil? Miguel
Tinker Salas examines how Venezuela’s focus on oil pro-
duction has blinded it to persistent and worsening eco-
logical disasters, while Gabriela Valdivia takes up the
limitations of the Pink Tide by analyzing the human
and ecological costs of oil-fueled public investment in
Ecuador. The same could be said of Morales’ Bolivia. A
short piece on offshore oil in Cuba draws attention to
similar dilemmas pairing hopes of economic and po-
litical sovereignty with fears of yet another disaster in
the Gulf of Mexico. Can a revolution run on oil or gas?
The question is relevant too when discussing other ex-
tractive industries, such as Condor Gold’s operations in
Nicaragua, as Sandra Cuffe writes.
These articles also analyze how toxic fossil fuel land-
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scapes shape everyday life for the poor in Latin America.
Donna DeCesare and Javier Auyero’s essay takes us in-
side several cases illustrating how a “toxic status quo”
works in practice, from Argentina to Peru to Ecuador.
The essay—echoing Parras’ description of Houston,
Texas—traces the cumulative impacts of contamination
or the “slow violence” of toxicity upon physical bodies,
health, and well-being. But the idea that the state will
respond if someone patiently waits is another form of
slow violence. In their case studies, the authors illustrate
the health consequences of lead and heavy chemicals af-
fecting families across the region. DeCesare’s photo essay
expands on toxicity in its portrayal of pollution from a
lead smelter in Abra Pampa, Argentina, and its ongo-
ing impacts, which are linked to cognitive disabilities in
some 90% of those tested for lead poisioning.
While Costa, Parras, and Riffo each imagine alterna-
tive worlds and describe emergent social movements,
Alexander Dunlap address some of the contradictions
linked to capitalist approaches to renewable energy,
namely wind projects in southern Mexico. In Oaxaca,
the defense of wind has devolved, in some cases, into
the use of counterinsurgency tactics against struggling
communities.
So what are the alternatives to large-scale capitalist
development? A conversation with Landless Workers
Movement (MST) activists in Brazil suggests that per-
haps community-run, community-controlled wind
turbines could be a solution to transnational consoli-
dation of “green energy” industry. But a lack of re-
sources has limited the impacts of movements towards
independence within the MST settlements.
From Houston to Neuquén, and from Oaxaca to
Puerto Rico, we need a deeper understanding of the
386 NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS | VOL. 49, NO. 4
NACLA_49-4.indd 386
linkages between racialized inequalities and fossil-fuel
created toxic landscapes as we imagine more radical
approaches to resisting the deepening militarization of
fossil capital. The emerging articulation of ideas sug-
gests democratic and socialized energy—the renewable
kind—under the control of people, not of big capital.
As for fossil fuels, perhaps the answer might be in ex-
erting democratic power to keep the fossil fuels in the
ground while remaking energy and the grid for a differ-
ent kind of future.
B
eyond the Report, our Around the Region articles
engage with equally important and at times
interrelated questions of disaster, recovery,
politics, and peace. In the wake of two devastating
earthquakes in Oaxaca and Mexico City, Deborah Poole
and Gerardo Renique examine how the state has looked
to profit off of relief while activists on the ground have
demanded alternatives. Jonathan Treat’s photo essay
also looks at the impacts of the Oaxaca earthquakes.
Kevin Edmonds examines how Haiti, still recovering
from the destruction of its 2010 earthquake, will move
forward amid President Trump’s termination of the
Temporary Protected Status for Haitian immigrants
in the United States as UN “peacekeeping” forces
transition from the country. A piece by Marco Castillo
and Kregg Hetherington provides an update on the
political situation in Paraguay. Finally, as Robert A.
Karl writes, Colombia has faced unintended challenges
to its burgeoning new political order under the peace
accords—some of which have come from unexpected
places: Colombia’s own justice system.
Don’t miss our feature essay by Jonathan DeVore,
which analyzes the scandals plaguing the Odebrecht
Corporation and the organization’s mid-century land-
grabbing roots in Bahía, Brazil, which displaced set-
tlers and set the stage for decades of disposession in the
countryside and beyond.
Our Arts and Reviews section includes two poems by
Craig Santos Perez on the links between militarization
and economic devastation in the U.S. territory of Guam.
Plus, we review two books—Jennifer Lambe’s Madhouse:
Psychiatry and Politics in Cuban History, and the edited
volume Comics and Memory in Latin America. Finally,
Elizabeth Oglesby looks into the legacy of corruption,
genocide, and injustice in Guatemala as explored in the
new documentary, “500 Years: Life in Resistance.”
12/7/17 7:33 AM