Paper short abstract:

This paper contextualizes socioenvironmental conflicts due to welfare and mining interventions of the Venezuelan Amazon region in a historical shift from a no-to-infrastructure, environmentalist and sustainable development governmentality to an agenda of neo-extractivism and bio-political control.

Paper long abstract:

This paper contextualizes socioenvironmental conflicts due to welfare and mining interventions of the Venezuelan Amazon in a historical shift from a no-to-infrastructure, sustainable development governmentality to neo-extractivism and bio-political control. Opposition to road construction, together with environmentalist, locally-based development in-tune with scientific research, configured in the 80s-to-early-90s an alliance between policy-makers, the indigenous movement, NGOs and scientists, crystalized in several Amazonian national parks and biosphere reserves. The Caldera administration froze this in the mid 90´s, abandoning sustainability policies and constructing a huge military airstrip in the center of Amazonas state. Notwithstanding its pro-indigenist policies, the Bolivarian regime continued this tendency. While operating an expansion of State welfare through health attention and redistributive programs, after fifteen years it had all but dissolved the region´s environmental protection. New health attention programs reached further into the upper Orinoco hinterlands with military helicopters, dotting remotes communities with helipads, health posts and radios. Concomitantly, indigenous leadership was co-opted into state bureaucracy, land demarcation stalled, and wildcat mining benefitted from military complicity. This is topped by an effort to counteract the oil price plunge with a Chinese-funded gold and rare-earths mining macro-project. As the neo-extractivist agenda amalgamates indigenous and further opposition, the fight against road construction that coalesced resistance in the 90´s becomes a memory of a bygone era. Embracing biopolitical control rather than infrastructure, current developmentalism relies on space-time compression, facilitated by military flights and control of waterways, warping together socialist discourse, State capitalism and global markets in the thrust of extractive governmentality.