In 2006, Evo Morales was famously elected the first self-identified indigenous president of Bolivia. Under Morales, the decolonization of politics, economics, society, and culture was the central project motivating state and social transformation. Morales promised to extend human rights and dignity to every Bolivian citizen as part of his “plurinational” state, which formed the cornerstone of his New Left political ideology and the rewritten 2009 constitution. In 2011, Morales mandated an annual “Day of Decolonization” celebrating indigenous nations and commemorating his administration’s extension of rights to Bolivia’s long-neglected indigenous citizens.

According to Penelope Anthias, the president of Bolivia’s Guaraní indigenous community Itika Guasu claimed, also in 2011, that the Guaraní had finally achieved “fully legal recognition” (p. 5) of their property rights over their native community territory (Tierra Comunitaria de Origen; TCO). However, this “fully legal recognition” was not provided by Morales and the Bolivian state. Instead, after a decade of failed attempts to gain legal titles for their TCO from the Bolivian government, Itika Guasu had circumvented the state to directly negotiate and sign an agreement with the Spanish oil company Repsol. In exchange for access to Itika Guasu’s section of the hydrocarbon-rich subsoil of Bolivia’s arid Chaco region, Repsol acknowledged the Guaraní’s property rights and promised them an investment fund totaling $14.8 million, “the interest from which was to be managed independently by the Guaraní organization” (p. 5).

There is tremendous irony in this juxtaposition of Morales’s decolonization efforts and Itika Guasu’s view that they achieved “fully legal” recognition of their lands only through an agreement with a Spanish oil company. But this juxtaposition also captures the desperate situation in which many of Latin America’s contemporary indigenous communities find themselves. On the one hand, indigenous nationalities have been afforded more legal recognition than ever as democratization, multiculturalism, and New Left governments swept across the region. On the other hand, the persistence of neoliberal doctrine, the global demand for hydrocarbon resources, and states’ pursuit of development mean that indigenous groups have continued to be neglected and manipulated in favor of neocolonial extractive interests. At its core, Limits to Decolonization provides a richly detailed case study of how this tension has evolved in a remote Guaraní community in the Bolivian lowlands Chaco region. But Anthias’s much larger contribution—and one that she could have spent more time developing—is how this case illustrates the overarching conflict between human rights, extractivism, and territorial control that shapes contemporary politics across Latin America.

Anthias, a geographer, uses rich historical and ethnographic research to trace “the evolution of the Guaraní territorial claim in Itika Guasu from its insurgent origins, through its production in cartography and law, to its growing enmeshment in hydrocarbon politics” (p. 15). A real strength is Anthias’s account of the historic context for the Guaraní’s land claims. In chapter 1, Anthias describes the gradual and devastating colonial process centered around cattle and oil production that stripped the Guaraní of their communal lands in the Chaco. The detailed yet straightforward narrative that Anthias constructs will assist even those with minimal knowledge of colonial history in understanding the deeply entrenched racial hierarchies that structure Latin American politics and society. In chapters 2 and 3, Anthias illustrates how the colonial legacy of racialized power inequalities effectively silenced indigenous territorial knowledge in both the mapping and titling processes of TCOs conducted by the Bolivian state. In doing so, Anthias delves into the complicated landscape of rural politics in the Andean region, with its patrones (landowners) and campesinos (peasants), settlers of indigenous and non-indigenous origins, and the many ways that these groups do and do not overlap. Political practices that are unfortunately all too common in many of Latin America’s rural areas—including violence, bribery, and clientelism—proved instrumental in obstructing indigenous representation in the Chaco. Anthias documents these and other fascinating political dynamics that developed around granting legal land titles, including efforts by some small-scale mestizo farmers to “pass” as Guaraní in order to ensure continued access to land in TCOs (p. 104).

Anthias’s work also touches on key debates on indigenous politics, multiculturalism, and sustainability as highlighted in the literature. Recent scholarship on Latin America’s indigenous movements recognizes the paradox inherent in state-coordinated extractivist development: extending public services funded by hydrocarbon rents to poor constituencies often comes at the cost of encroaching on resource-rich indigenous lands. By examining this tension at the community level, Anthias emphasizes indigenous agency in the struggle for both cultural rights and economic development. She convincingly argues that Itika Guasu’s agreement with the Spanish oil company Repsol “marked a turning point” for the Guaraní and “provided the basis for a new vision of territory and autonomy” in the indigenous community’s centuries-long struggle for rights and recognition (p. 5). Anthias defends indigenous groups’ decisions to participate in extractive projects, highlighting a new form of “hydrocarbon citizenship” that provides an alternate forum for territorial recognition and sovereignty for communities that have long been subject to racial exclusion and dispossession (p. 246).

Yet this view is not without controversy, even among the Guaraní who stood much to gain from their “Agreement of Friendship” with Repsol. As Anthias documents in chapter 6, Itika Guasu’s entry into the hydrocarbon business did little to rejuvenate the Guaraní’s collective territorial project; instead it resulted in “political fragmentation, the erosion of indigenous governance structures, and the harnessing of political authority to external interests” (p. 206). The community became torn apart as movement leadership was divided between those supported by the oil company—and who were receiving salaries as a result—and those allied with Morales and the state. Though the Limits to Decolonization offers a clear critique of Morales’s so-called post-neoliberal government, it could easily have been equally critical of the global dominance of the hydrocarbon industry and the global North’s relentless consumption that demands ever-increasing oil and gas production. It is difficult to argue that the variety of neocolonialism grounded in extractivism as experienced by Itika Guasu provides any sort of real solution for indigenous groups seeking genuine sovereignty and autonomy.

Indeed, Anthias only briefly recognizes another grave paradox confronting many of Latin America’s contemporary indigenous movements; namely, the long-term environmental risks for communities posed by extractivist development (pp. 219–25). As one of Anthias’s participants put it, “There are some people who know, who feel, feel that they’re damaging their TCO, that the oil companies damage the environment” (p. 221). Anthias’s account of Itika Guasu ends by recognizing her ambivalence with respect to the sustainability—politically, economically, and environmentally—of projects like the “Agreement of Friendship” with Repsol. Future research may further explore the quality of indigenous autonomy that, as a participant in Anthias’s book describes, is “based on money” and leads only to more extractivism (p. 244). Nevertheless, Anthias’s contribution has inspired a constructive and realistic framework for analyzing indigenous rights movements in the era of extractivism, one that not only appropriately contextualizes indigenous claims to territory but also places indigenous agency at the forefront of their search for autonomy.