Thea Riofrancos

I’m Thea Riofrancos. I’m a professor of political science at Providence College and a member of the Climate and Community Project. My research has focused on resource extraction, the energy transition, left strategies, and public policy. A lot of it emerged from a long engagement in Latin America, but I’m increasingly doing more transnational work as well. At various moments, it’s been intertwined with the Green New Deal and other just transition advocacy in the US.

Thea Riofrancos

Sure. There’s a long history of conflict and protest around resource extraction in Ecuador—strikes by oil workers, frontline communities protesting the environmental and social impacts of extraction. It’s a very vibrant field of contention. I want to back up a little and say that this contention has a long history we could trace to colonialism and various starting points, but it really heated up during the neoliberal period of the 1990s and early 2000s. Ecuadorians were being hit with a variety of challenges: neoliberal austerity, a debt crisis, a financial crisis. Amid all of this, there was also an attempt to deregulate resource sectors, inviting foreign companies into previously untouched parts of the Amazon where there had not been oil extraction before—the southern Amazon, for example. Increasingly, indigenous communities in those parts of the country employed quite militant tactics, using their bodies and other instruments to actually prevent oil companies from entering their territory. At the same time, through those actions, they were developing what we might call a more holistic analysis of extractivism and of capitalism in its contemporary form.

We can fast-forward to the government of Rafael Correa, which came to power during what’s called the pink tide—a pivotal moment in recent Latin American history where a series of left-wing governments came to power almost like dominoes. That started with Hugo Chávez in 1999 and continued with Evo Morales, Lula, Kirchner in Argentina, the president of Uruguay. It was actually quite inspiring, and formative for me personally—the first time I saw, as a young adult, the real possibility of the left taking state power. Not just a protest movement in the streets, but entering the halls of government. It was a huge pivot away from the neoliberal hegemony of the ’90s and early 2000s.

But that introduces a bunch of challenges and paradoxes. It’s one thing to arrive at state power, which is an enormous feat in a very unequal society where neoliberalism is deeply embedded in institutions. To get to power is an enormous accomplishment—but that’s kind of when the difficulty begins. You have to govern a society that’s tremendously unequal, shaped and constrained by neoliberalism, with economic sectors deeply embedded in the world economy. That gives you limited control over how quickly you can transform them. At the same time, you have very understandable demands from society to make good on ambitious campaign promises—to pay off the so-called social debt of neoliberalism, to reinvest in societies that have been divested from during decades of austerity.

What makes some of those tasks more doable but also introduces additional trade-offs is that at the same time the pink tide came to power, there was a global commodity boom—roughly 2000 to 2014—in which a broad array of primary materials had historically high prices and historically high demand. A lot of that came from China, which was undergoing rapid industrialization. Basically, everything a country like Ecuador exports had suddenly very high prices; at the same time a left-wing government was being more assertive with global capital, forcing contracts to be renegotiated, taxing companies more, and increasing royalties. Ecuador is what we might call a petro-state—fiscally dependent on oil extraction and exports since the early 1970s. Correa wanted to expand that extractive portfolio by also opening up the mining industry. So Correa lands in power, there’s a lot of social demand for social spending, and he has the fortune of coming to power during an economic boom that allows him to make good on a lot of promises—investing in social services, improving public infrastructure, and dramatically improving human development indices across poverty, malnutrition, sanitation, health-care access. It’s a very rosy story in certain ways, including politically, because it buttressed his popularity. Latin Americans are very used to politicians betraying them, and one of the things different about the pink tide governing during an economic boom is that they actually did what they said they were going to do.

Now I’ll answer your question more directly. What does this mean for extractivism, and for the indigenous and campesino communities on the front lines of that extraction? Their protest and militancy had already begun in the decades prior—they were primed. As extractive sectors expanded and Correa brought in new oil and mining investment, clashes were inevitable. And that is exactly what happened. Some of the very constituencies that were politically important to Correa’s rise—working-class, indigenous, small-farmer, peasant communities—began to rise up and contest his attempts to expand extraction, even though he was rhetorically using that extraction to fund social development. They said: Social development should not come at the cost of environmental degradation or the violation of indigenous sovereignty.

This is, I think, a real dilemma—and I use that word advisedly, because it’s not a simple either-or. The dilemma is actually structural. It’s not just about who’s in power and the specific choices they make. It’s about the fact that in the peripheries of the world economy, the choices around which sectors are available to fund much-needed social spending are limited in the near term, due to legacies of colonialism and neoliberalism. Transformation can change that, but when you arrive at power, those structures are what they are. The elites associated with those sectors remain powerful—just saying “We’re going to shut down X industry” might provoke an elite backlash or even a coup. Latin America has a long history of coups. So on the one hand, it makes total sense that a government would use these lucrative sectors to pay off the social debt. On the other hand, these sectors are deeply environmentally harmful, have a history of violating indigenous rights and of outright violence—Latin America is the place where the most land and water defenders are systematically killed for peacefully trying to protect their access to clean land and water. And they’re also economically unsustainable: not only because we’re potentially moving into a post-oil world, but just because of the boom-and-bust nature of commodity markets. What goes up also comes down.

All of this erupted during Correa’s time in power and resulted in a very fundamental divide on the left—dividing people who in a prior moment had been comrades, sometimes in the same movements or formed by similar political ideologies. Now they were at loggerheads: Those in government pursuing public policy entered into fundamental disagreement with frontline communities defending their land and water. You get, in a way, two different versions of leftism. One is about resource nationalism—using those resources to fund fundamental social services. Another says we need to transition away from this quickly and achieve a post-extractive economy. What’s somewhat tragic is that those two positions became so polarized that it subsequently weakened the left. We’re now seeing a return to left militancy in Ecuador, a return to social movement organizing, which is encouraging. But there were moments that looked very politically weak for the left because of this fundamental division.

Thea Riofrancos

There’s a lot in there. There are limitations on the tactical level, on the level of political program or coalition, but there are also constraints that are somewhat external to the movement—not the doing of the movement but external constraints that still need to be taken very seriously.

Maybe I’ll start by talking about some of the achievements of this movement, which will put into context what it can achieve and what it can’t achieve on its own as a more frontline-focused coalition. What is actually impressive about anti-extractive activism is that it emerges at the sites of either ongoing or planned extraction—in those often peripheral and rural territories where mining or oil extraction or agribusiness or hydroelectric development is occurring. It’s happening in those landscapes, in those territories, by communities whose livelihoods, cultures, and in some cases spiritual and religious practices are deeply tied to place. The place where extraction might occur is a threat not just to biodiversity or air quality, but existentially to the culture and cultural integrity of these people. That existential threat is met by pretty militant tactics—not violence in many cases, but using their bodies, in some cases risking their lives, because they can expect based on experience that police or security forces may repress them. What they’re trying to do is slow down plans to extract so that they can more democratically participate in fundamental decision-making. The message is: Hold on—we have not been consulted, we have not given our consent, and we might have other ideas for how this territory is used that include us and our livelihoods.

And it’s actually impressive—these are classic David and Goliath situations. Multinational companies, often protected by state security forces, against communities that are racially and class marginalized, often territorially isolated. And even given that extreme asymmetry, these communities have been able not only to slow down but in some cases force the cancellation of projects, scaring off investors, forcing capital flight, compelling governments to intervene with protective policies. That’s a real victory, and in a moment when the left is sometimes uncertain about how to actually win, these are examples of achievement that we should take seriously.

On the other hand, and almost by the same token, the spatial focus at the frontlines of extraction—in these rural peripheries—creates certain coalitional and spatial constraints. Can you transform the whole national, let alone global, economy from those spaces without dense coalitions with the urban and peri-urban working class? And not just the working class as traditionally understood, but the precarious people laboring in informal economies, living sometimes in slum-like conditions on the edges of cities. These are often the first to receive the social services being funded by oil and mining revenues, and they benefit from them considerably because they were previously so underserved. What would it look like, to put it more positively, to have a territorially diverse coalition that includes people marginalized at the frontlines of extraction in rural areas—who may be indigenous, maybe campesino—alongside the urban, working, and precarious economic classes? Their shared interest is a society in which all of us flourish, one that is more equal and in which elites—whether domestic, regional, or global—are not profiting from exploiting our labor or extracting our resources. There is actually a shared basis for that coalition, and we can see it in certain moments where these coalitions have existed. They’re not just a good idea—they’ve happened at pivotal moments. But they can be hard coalitions to sustain, which is all the more reason to think intentionally about what would help them flourish.

What you see historically in Latin America is that this kind of rural-urban, cross-working-class coalition takes root most powerfully in moments where there is a very clear shared enemy—when there is a neoliberal government in power that is both degrading the environment and cutting wages and social services. Everyone can agree that’s a problem. And not only does it become a negative coalition against something—it also becomes a way for people across territorial, class, and ethnic differences to talk about what kind of future they want instead. Some really interesting ideas have come out of that. In the mid-1990s, in the thick of neoliberal hegemony in Ecuador, the national indigenous movement called for what they described as a planned, ecological, communitarian economy—eco-socialism, in other words. They were thinking: We need planning, a community-based economy that benefits the people. It needs to be planned—we can’t just leave it to market forces—but it also needs to be ecological, taking into account planetary limits and biological and ecophysical processes. That’s a very broad vision that includes working-class demands and does not pit class against ethnicity. And there’s no reason per se that this kind of intentional coalition-building, this thinking through how to combine ecology and socialism, can’t happen in a moment when you’re closer to governing or even in power.

Just to end on a positive note: We’ve seen a bunch of left-wing governments come to power again in Latin America recently—some call it a second pink tide. And without overstating it, I do think there has been a learning process. Lula in Brazil and Boric in Chile have learned that they need to take ecology seriously, take environmental stewardship seriously, think about frontline and indigenous communities, and put forth policies that tie these things together more than divide them. Correa’s response, by contrast, was to double down on polarization—calling environmentalists “infantile environmentalists.” Not very constructive. The attitude from the left halls of state power today seems more constructive, more attentive to the climate crisis, the energy transition, and biodiversity. And I think there’s been some learning from the recognition that these dividing lines of extraction are not lines we should divide ourselves over—we should think through what a more sustainable regional economy actually looks like.

One last piece I’ll put on the table: I ultimately think that the position countries like Ecuador find themselves in is not solvable at the level of Ecuador. There are limitations to frontline or locally affected community politics, yes. But there are also limitations to national politics. There are constraints that come at the regional and global level. When policymakers and movements don’t attempt to intervene at those higher scales, and when powerful global elites don’t redistribute resources to the Global South, these trade-offs feel much more zero-sum because the choices are so much more limited. One thing the global left needs to think about is what would loosen some of these trade-offs for Global South governments. Those solutions can’t only come from better policies at the government level or better strategies at the movement level. They have to come from changes to the architecture of the global system itself.

Thea Riofrancos

I want to jump in for a quick second, because the former vice president of Bolivia, Álvaro García Linera—a well-known leftist intellectual—wrote a whole book on what he called something like neocolonialism in the Amazon, and he did not mean foreign corporations. He meant exactly what you’re describing. He had a very strong line on this, which Correa was inspired by and would reference. Correa shared the belief that when you have transnational environmental groups—or even transnational indigenous networks in the Amazon supporting directly affected communities—that is yet another example of undermining state sovereignty through imperial mechanisms. He even had a convoluted theory that this somehow benefited the extractive industry by weakening the state. I couldn’t quite follow the logic, but regardless, he shared that framing.

And I should mention Petro and Francia Márquez—perhaps even more than Petro, as his vice president. She’s a historic environmental activist, an Afro-Colombian woman, the first Afro-Colombian woman to hold that level of political office in Colombia. She has been fighting mines her whole life. So Petro and Francia together bring a very ecologically minded leftism—Francia wants to make sure Afro and indigenous communities in Colombia are protected from a rapacious mining industry, and on the international stage, Petro has been building a coalition of Global South states to move beyond fossil fuels. And Lula in his current term is far more invested in the Amazon than in his first—sending environmental police to enforce the dismantling of illegal gold mining operations and giving land back to indigenous people directly. Without putting too much hope in individual heroes, I think they are wisening up to the fact that the first pink tide foundered partly on the coalitional level, and on the economic level by tying things so tightly to volatile commodity markets. There has to be some other way. And I especially appreciate Lula calling on the Global North: You all need to invest in the Amazon too. This is the lungs of the world. It’s not just about us, and it’s not just about indigenous communities—it’s about climate mitigation as well.

Thea Riofrancos

For the past few years, I’ve been working on lithium battery and electric vehicle supply chains—specifically the mining end, the extractive beginning of those supply chains. I’m focused on lithium, but there’s a whole periodic table of minerals involved in producing solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles, large-scale energy storage, and so on. Which is to say: Climate technologies don’t represent an escape from extraction. They themselves involve forms of extraction, and that’s a thorny dilemma. The main demand of the global climate justice movement is “keep it in the ground,” which pertains to oil, gas, and coal. But there are other things coming out of the ground to enable renewable energy systems. And we know that mining generates significant local environmental impact and emissions in its operations. So what is to be done?

One set of answers involves better governance—and when I say governance, I always include social movements and labor unions, not just public policy. Better democratic governance in the places where these sectors are rooted: Ensure indigenous right to consent, protect clean water and biodiversity wherever mines are planned or operating. A lot of my research has been in northern Chile, which supplies a quarter of the world’s lithium. So we can think about what would lift up communities, ecosystems, and progressive priorities in the places where extraction takes place.

But as I’ve been suggesting, I think it’s limiting to restrict our analysis and our proposed solutions to those places. Thinking of it as a problem for “faraway, exotic places” that can clean up their act while the Global North continues business as usual—that’s not sufficient. The main reason is that what drives extraction in the first place, and the most harmful forms of extraction—those intense boom moments, those gold rushes and lithium rushes where new investment floods in before good governance is in place—those moments of really intense demand are driven by the other side of the supply chain. It is consumer goods, it is capitalist production processes that need the raw materials. So it cannot just be that we tell frontline communities and the peripheries of the global system to fix their problems. It’s also about how the Global North consumes, and about what levels of extraction are required to keep capitalism profitable.

To make that more specific: The main thing driving lithium demand—no pun intended—is individual passenger electric vehicles. The way the energy transition is currently being conceptualized, as it pertains to transportation, is that we replace every individual internal combustion engine vehicle with an electric vehicle. We change nothing else. We just electrify the status quo. And not only that, we assume economic growth—more and more vehicles over time. That is deeply concerning when you look at the projected increases in demand not just for lithium but for cobalt, nickel, graphite, copper, and all the rest, and then think about the implications for frontlines around the world—including in the US, where more mining is being planned.

What we’ve found in some collaborative research is that there is a different way to get to zero emissions—a way that actually has many additional benefits. What brings me to this idea is the desire to reduce mining, to reduce the harm of extraction. And it turns out that if we get people out of individual cars and into buses, bikes, commuter rail—or if we stop building everything so sprawled out, if we allow more density and affordability in cities so people can live near where they work—if we stop producing and therefore consuming these enormous vehicles, including enormous electric vehicles with huge material volumes, we can actually significantly reduce how much lithium and everything else is required. And that’s not only more just—it’s also faster. The slowest way to get to zero emissions is to trade out every single car for a different car. If you just get people into a bus, even a regular bus, the carbon footprint drops dramatically and it happens faster. We have transit systems in many metropolitan regions. They need more investment, but they exist. And the benefits beyond emissions are enormous: People are less stressed, streets are safer, and in the US, highways and car-centric infrastructure are major forces of racial and class segregation.

What this shows is that the interests of working-class communities who need reliable mobility are not actually opposed to the interests of indigenous communities anywhere in the world. What makes them appear so opposed is a very unequal, privatized, individualized form of consumption that prioritizes every individual having a Tesla. That model creates enormous harm, and also working-class people can’t participate in it, because it’s too expensive. What people actually say they want—especially in urban areas—is more reliable transit, the ability to live near where they work. They’re not asking for an electric Hummer.

The tensions are real, and I don’t want to wish them away with perfect policies. It’s true that in the near term, the energy transition does involve new forms of extraction. But there are approaches—at the movement-strategy level and the public-policy level—that can show there isn’t necessarily such a misalignment between the two ends of the supply chain. The misalignment is exacerbated by a very extractive mode of energy transition that benefits a particular set of interests. Start from the extractive perspective, ask what materials all of this requires and what impacts that has—and you end up with a different frame entirely.

Thea Riofrancos

It’s a great question, and it returns to some themes we’ve already touched on. There’s an increasingly live conversation across the Global North and Global South about what wonks call industrial policy. Industrial policy has a very long history in Latin America—it was called dependency theory and developmentalism in the 1960s and ’70s—but the thinking was the same: How do we intentionally change the structures of our economy toward some goal? That goal could be better economic well-being, or rapid industrialization, depending on context. Industrial policy is not a new idea, but it’s back in fashion. Across various sides of global divides and across the political spectrum—somewhat confusingly—politicians and policymakers are saying that free markets have not done what we wanted them to do. Whether it’s the pandemic and the supply-chain crises, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the energy transition, or the climate crisis, governments are increasingly thinking they need to take a more active role in steering the direction of their economies.

But that doesn’t necessarily address global inequality. In a way, what you’re describing is the Global North triggering an energy transition within their own polities while the supply chains remain global—procuring materials from around the world, which in some cases means intensified extraction to produce clean technologies consumed in the Global North. The justification is that getting to zero emissions in these sectors benefits everybody. Okay. But in the meanwhile, people are living with intensified extraction and not getting access to the technologies themselves. When you electrify transportation, you reduce pollution, which is a huge killer in the Global South. It’s not fair or just that the Global North is the main place where these technologies are produced and consumed while everyone else serves as an extractive frontier.

So what are the options? What Global South governments are doing—in Indonesia, Brazil, and around the world—is also rethinking industrial policy, taking up again the idea that neoliberalism and free markets have their severe limits when confronting these crises. To varying degrees of success, Global South governments are saying: We want some control over these supply chains, especially because some of them start in our countries. We are the source of the original minerals going into all of these products, but we don’t capture the value-added. One of the things that makes supply chains so unjust is that the places where raw materials come from are not the places where the final products are consumed. There’s quite a bit of academic research showing extreme inequality in who ultimately benefits from those minerals—it’s not the people living next to the mine.

So another way to think about supply chain justice is to ask: What policies in the Global South could bring some of those supply chains within Global South countries, or better yet, within regions? Could there be some regional coordination so that there’s a supply chain for an electric bus within Latin America, so you don’t have to import it from abroad? It feels somewhat less unjust when the lithium is at least being used for something you yourself get to participate in and consume. And there are some successes and interesting innovative attempts happening right now—in Chile, in Indonesia, which has banned the export of raw nickel to retain more value-added production domestically. In Chile, there are similar goals around lithium. I even heard someone in the environmental ministry in Chile say on the record that they should use trade policy to only export their lithium to be used for public transit. So there’s trade policy, industrial policy—but for this to be successful, transnational coordination is important. When you’re an individual Global South country in this very asymmetric context, the main risk of becoming more assertive with your public policies is capital flight. You lose the investment. Sometimes you have leverage—we have the resources you need to be here—but some of these resources exist in many places in the world, which can create a race to the bottom. What prevents that race is when countries coordinate and say: We’re going to have similar policies, similar standards, similar tax rates on mining companies, so that if the company goes somewhere else, they’ll face the same conditions.

That’s been difficult, but there are historical moments we can look to. OPEC, when it was created in the 1960s and ’70s, actually had genuine anticolonial bona fides—the goal was for all oil-exporting nations to get together and set common standards so that multinational companies couldn’t play them off against one another. There were attempts to do the same with copper and other raw materials. I think we need to bring some of those ideas back. And this isn’t my genius; this is what people are already talking about in the Global South: coordination and industrial policy that benefits Global South people, rather than just exporting everything and having resource drain, energy drain, and land drain to serve markets elsewhere in the world.