Eco-territorial feminisms and re-existences against neo-extractivism in Bolivia

Throughout Latin America, women’s leadership and protagonism seem to characterise the contemporary wave of territorial resistance to extractivist projects and their multiple dispossessions. This article examines eco-territorial feminist resistance, and experiences of re-existence, as alternatives to extractivism in contemporary Bolivia, where the twenty-year rule of the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) government, characterised by neo-extractivist policies, has recently come to an end. Through the cases of the Amazonian Tacana Indigenous peoples and peasants in the Tariquía protected area of southern Bolivia, we analyse women’s intensified efforts to strengthen territorial defense and re-existence, thereby providing a perspective on the plurality and ambivalences of perpetuating lived alternatives to extractivism. We argue that for many in these communities, the alternative to extractivism does not represent anything radically new or different, but rather protection and caring for existing ways of living and producing. Instead of perceiving the territories as either dispossessed objects of natural resource exploitation or romanticised sites of Indigenous struggles, we perceive them as transformative, complex, and disputed fields where community, territorial defense, feminism, and ecology meet to put a halt to the environmental and climate emergencies.