The politics of bachaqueo

Abstract

Añú indigenous people living in the La Guajira borderland work by purchasing subsidized gasoline from local service stations in Venezuela and reselling it with high markups in Colombia-an extralegal trade called bachaqueo. Gasoline black markets, despite unleashing new forms of criminalization and violence, are an attempt to reclaim oil in ways that open novel possibilities for channeling indigenous rights, aspirations, and political claims. By extending the routes of distribution beyond their expected end point in gasoline consumers, bachaqueros (smugglers, traders) disrupt top-down planning and partially redress the failures of Venezuelan petropolitics in delivering its promise of social justice and wealth redistribution for indigenous people. [oil, extractivism, smuggling, indigeneity,

A poetics of living rebellion: Sociocultural anthropology in 2021

“…The disruption of dominance and subjugation as the primary lens through which to understand the relationship between Indigenous communities and extractive industries is clear in the “resurgence of indigenous struggles over land and resources, struggles that range all the way from refusals to pragmatic alignments with extractive actors” (Schwartz 2021, 506). In the specific relations of power between the Venezuelan state, Indigenous Anú, and oil extraction, the partial participation of Anú in the black market of small‐scale, cross‐border smuggling of oil, or bachaqueo , highlights how Anú peoples reorient the terms of Indigenous rights by asserting claims to “intervene in the circuits of distribution of oil, capturing the economic value embedded in this resource” and “exercising autonomy under normative conditions imposed by states” (517).…”