Arıcan, Alize. “Bret Gustafson, ‘Bolivia in the Age of Gas.’” New Books in Latin American Studies, May 3, 2021. Mp3, 52:03.
Evo Morales, Bolivia’s first Indigenous president, won reelection three times on a leftist platform championing Indigenous rights, anti-imperialism, and Bolivian control over the country’s natural gas reserves. In Bolivia in the Age of Gas (Duke UP, 2020), Bret Gustafson explores how the struggle over natural gas has reshaped Bolivia, along with the rise, and ultimate fall, of the country’s first Indigenous-led government. Rethinking current events against the backdrop of a longer history of oil and gas politics and military intervention, Gustafson shows how natural gas wealth brought a measure of economic independence and redistribution, yet also reproduced political and economic relationships that contradicted popular and Indigenous aspirations for radical change. Though grounded in the unique complexities of Bolivia, the volume argues that fossil-fuel political economies worldwide are central to the reproduction of militarism and racial capitalism and suggests that progressive change demands moving beyond fossil-fuel dependence and the social and ecological ills that come with it.
(Source: New Books Network)
In this episode of New Books in Latin American Studies, Alize Arıcan interviews Bret Gustafson, author of Bolivia in the Age of Gas.
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