Motley territories in a plurinational state: forest fires in the Bolivian Chiquitanía

ABSTRACT In August and September 2019, wildfires destroyed over 3 million hectares of forest in the Bolivian Chiquitanía. They were caused by slash-and-burn land clearance techniques used to prepare land for agriculture. In this article, we examine how the forest fires constitute a way of making territory, paying particular attention to how underlying relations of power have historically shaped territories in the region. We trace the actors and social relations of power that have historically developed in the region from the 17th century to today, putting an emphasis on the necessity to expand the temporal lens through which we analyse struggles over territory in Latin America. The Chiquitanía region is an illustrative case study, as it reflects Bolivia’s highly diverse society, revealing multiple, simultaneously existing territorialised social relations, which we conceptually grasp as motley territories. We define motley territories as diverse territorialised social relations that were established in different epochs but continue to coexist in often unarticulated ways. We argue that the state-sanctioned appropriation of slash-and-burn practices by landowners is a mechanism to integrate more land into the agricultural frontier while rendering other forms of inhabiting those motley territories more difficult.