This chapter examines the dynamics of Indigenous political mobilization in Bolivia, Chile, and Ecuador, analyzing how Indigenous discontent has evolved from demands for the recognition of collective rights to struggles over their implementation. Alberti presents a framework that distinguishes between “from above” factors—state responses, institutional settings, and extractivist policies—and “from below” factors, such as organizational cohesion, location in extraction zones, and group size. In Bolivia and Ecuador, robust collective rights were granted in new constitutions during leftist governments, but state reliance on natural resources led to partial implementation and renewed confrontations. Chile, in contrast, remains a case of neoliberal multiculturalism, offering limited recognition and prompting persistent confrontational mobilization. The chapter traces divergent repertoires—from institutional participation to violent protest—shaped by the degree of institutional openness and governmental responsiveness. The study also explores organized non-Indigenous opposition, often aligned with economic elites.

Chapter 5 of The Coup Trap in Latin America examines the political systems of Bolivia, Ecuador, and Paraguay, the three most unstable of the region. The model anticipates 89 percent of the years of instability in these systems. It presents qualitative evidence that false positive predictions tell us something important: that conditions can be ripe for a military coup for decades at a time. What I call an atmosphere of crisis – that conflicts between pro- and anti-government supporters are severe enough so that it is increasingly certain that the president’s survival is uncertain – can, in other words, persist for decades. To explain when assaults on the executive take place requires analyzing micro-political factors, which the statistical model cannot easily grasp. This chapter also begins to explain what makes T such a powerful predictor of instability; it turns out to be a proxy for factional strife, which, among other things, disseminates the practical knowledge necessary to organize and execute a military coup d’état.

This chapter presents case studies of Indigenous peace agreements in the Andes region. It begins with an introduction that highlights the significance of understanding legal geography and its relevance to Indigenous peoples. It then explores the legal frameworks that protect Indigenous rights, focusing on international instruments such as declarations and conventions. It then examines specific agreements in the Andes that enact these legal frameworks, with a spotlight on the National Agreement for Development and Peace in La Araucanía, 2018, in Chile, and the Agreement Between the Bolivian Government and the Confederation of Indigenous peoples from the East, Chaco, and Amazonia in 2010. These case studies showcase the intersection of legal, social, and political dynamics in promoting Indigenous rights and fostering peace. By analysing the legal geographies of these agreements, the chapter contributes to a deeper understanding of the complex challenges and opportunities Indigenous communities face in achieving sustainable development and peace in the Andes region.

A framing case study discusses child workers in Bolivia. Then the chapter provides an overview of international human rights law. The chapter first discusses the historical origins of the human rights movement and the multilateral and regional human rights systems. Then it outlines major physical integrity rights, including laws that prohibit genocide, ethnic cleansing, torture, and human trafficking. It next turns to major civil and political rights, including the right to free expression, assembly, and association, various religious protections, and criminal justice rights. Finally, it examines major economic, social, and cultural rights, including rules about labor, economic and social assistance, cultural rights, and the rights of marginalized groups, like women, children, and the disabled.

The movement of tin frontiers across the globe both shapes and tells the tale of key vectors of capitalist imperialism across the world-system: expropriation, industrialization, decolonization. This chapter takes as its organizing principle the idea of the ‘mystery’ of the commodity and the ‘curse’ of tin. The literary and cinematic narratives examined reveal the capacity of tin texts to shape understandings of the socio-economic, gendered and racial inequalities in both peripheral and core territories. Whether in realist or irrealist representation, the mystery of the commodity of tin is frequently mobilized as plot hook, organising metaphor or structural principle. Whether in the tales of the tío or the memoirs of Cornish miners, in the realist films of Bolivia’s Ukamau group or Hammer’s schlock-visions of extraction in the British South West, we find instructive accounts of land expropriation, leeching of natural resources, ecologies of exhaustion and the broken bodies of the global working class.

Drawing on an ongoing conflict over hydrocarbon development in a protected area in Southern Bolivia, this chapter explores resource frontiers as key sites of juristocratic reckoning, where international and national discourses of rights are simultaneously invoked and undermined by violent processes of accumulation by dispossession. A leading example of transformative constitutionalism, Bolivia’s 2009 Constitution defined the country as a “Plurinational State” and recognized an array of new rights for Indigenous, originary, and peasant peoples, including in relation to territory and the environment. Yet state dependence on natural gas extraction has produced a widening gap between legal discourse and practice. This chapter asks: What new forms of politics emerge as communities at extractive frontiers reckon with the possibilities and limits of law and rights to confront ongoing processes of environmental dispossession? The arrival of oil companies in the Tariquía Reserve catalyzed a wave of human rights education in remote rural communities, yet a series of failed constitutional challenges have exposed the limits of law and rights as instruments to counter state-led extraction. Rather than turning away from rights, the chapter argues that community activists in Tariquía see themselves as custodians of the 2009 Constitution against the state. Their embodied praxis of territorial defense points to a form of juristocratic politics from below, in which the state’s monopoly on political and legal authority is called into question.

This chapter considers how, with animals recognised as a part of nature, legally enshrined ‘rights of nature’ could provide a basis for animals’ legal subjecthood. The chapter centres on the case of Estrellita, an Ecuadorean woolly monkey who was declared to be a subject of rights under Ecuador’s constitutionally enshrined rights of ‘pachamama’ or ‘Mother Earth’. Yet, while Estrellita’s case highlights the potential for rights of nature to serve as a source of animals’ legal subjectivity, the chapter stresses caution. First, several rights-of-nature provisions have arguably co-opted Indigenous ideas, and served to justify continued resource extraction under the guise of living in balance with nature. Second, rights-of-nature provisions maintain the ontological human/all-other-nature divide that exists in current legal systems. Finally, the rights of nature may operate as a kind of ‘eco-coverture’ by encapsulating the interests of individual animals within the sphere of nature’s interests, thereby limiting the potential scope of animals’ legal protection. The chapter concludes that we can do better than grounding animals’ legal subjecthood in the rights of nature.

Chapter 8 examines the failed struggle for democracy in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Paraguay during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In contrast to the other South American countries, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Paraguay made relatively little progress in professionalizing their armies in the early twentieth century and were not able to establish a monopoly on violence. As a result, the opposition, especially in Paraguay and Ecuador, continued to seek power via armed revolt, which undermined constitutional rule and encouraged state repression. The weakness of parties in Bolivia and Ecuador also enabled presidents to manipulate elections, resist democratic reforms, and run roughshod over the opposition.

The legal systems of countries as dissimilar as Ecuador, Bolivia, New Zealand, the United States, and Uganda have recognized nature as a subject of rights. This chapter contributes to the description, analysis, and comparison of the global discursive patterns that convey and underpin the rights of nature from the perspectives of comparative law and global legal pluralism. The first part of the chapter examines three types of discourse related to rights of nature: the prototypical models, discourses that reproduce the paradigmatic models, and discourses that resist the rights of nature. The second part analyzes rights of nature from two perspectives that are central to contemporary comparative law: the political economy of legal knowledge and explanatory theories of legal change. Rights of nature challenge conventional notions of which countries create and exchange legal knowledge. They have been articulated by historically weak or marginalized countries or peoples, and they have been incorporated in national legal systems through heterodox processes of South–South and South–North exchange.

Far from representing the abandonment of civilian government by conservative, pro-military forces in Washington, DC, Bolivia’s 1964 coup d’état occurred over strident objections from the United States. In describing this surprising story of local Cold War golpismo (coup waging) in Latin America, this chapter analyzes the overlapping trajectory of three key groups of actors: the deterioration of the ancien régime of middle-class nationalists (los golpeados), the widespread involvement of liberal developmentalist US officials (los gringos), and the multivalent ideologies and strategies of civilian and military plotters (los golpistas) who brought down twentieth-century Bolivia’s most powerful leader. The case study reveals a superpower’s inability to micromanage political development on the periphery, and it highlights the underappreciated intimacy between civil society and military officers in the social phenomenon known as Latin American golpismo.

This chapter explores how taxes shape the meaning of other payments and money flows in highland Bolivia. The concept ‘ecology of payments’ is introduced to describe the world of payments amongst the so-called informally employed in the city of Cochabamba. It explores how, for instance, receipts for commercial licence taxes and property taxes paid provide people with the right to make other kinds of payments, such as fees to local neighbourhood associations and unions. An ‘ecology of payments’ pays attention to the multiple links and dependencies between payments and the way they transform each other. This approach encourages a focus on the local impact of taxes paid, as opposed to the effect of taxes on long-term state–society relations. To ascertain the role of taxes within this ecology, the chapter also aims to understand how the concept of formality informs the power and character of different payments.