Domination and sabotage: Oil,indigenous anarchism,and eco-territorial defense in Amazonia

Abstract

Both domination and sabotage are ubiquitous in Amazonia as part of dialectical formations of the state, oil companies, and territorial and ecological defense movements. This article examines one stream of political response to state-capitalist domination in the West Amazonian forests of Yasuní: direct-action movements that bring together Indigenous and anarchist politics through expression of sabotage. Grounded in Indigenous and anarchist theories, ethnographic research, and a novel spatial history of oil infrastructure sabotage, I consider how a century-long history of resistance has changed from armed confrontation to more non-violent social movement struggles that at times includes sabotage of logging and oil operations. I find that over the last three decades there were more than fifteen sabotage actions as part of territorial and ecological defense in the Ecuador's Amazonian oil fields. Saboteurs damaged machines and infrastructures within landscapes of toxicity and violence where politicians and activists face assassination, imprisonment, and other forms of state repression. I find in these direct-actions of disruption of capitalist infrastructure a negative power, or potenza, of dismantling existing structures of domination that create space for alternative life-worlds. As the manifestation of this power of refusal, sabotage represents one element in an improvisational mix of repertoires of struggle that may, despite intense repression, be more effective in challenging the infrastructural foundations of contemporary state-capitalist power than the protagonists of this domination typically acknowledge. I consider how sabotage in this stream of struggle is an expression of the defense of human and other-than-human life that ameliorates divisions between territorial and environmental defense. In doing, these politics overturn dominate conceptions of violence, revealing sabotage here to be a disarming of both infrastructures of oil exploitation and state and corporate domination.