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CounterPunch There was a time in history when travel diaries were the way people in London, Paris, Berlin, and Amsterdam found out about the countries they had yoked to their imperial ambitions. India, Sumatra, and rural Donegal-the places that funneled raw materials and gold into the great imperial centers-came alive in journals and long letters to leading newspapers. Most the diarists focused on the exotic, but not a few accurately predicted that no matter how many dragoons were sent to terrorize the Irish countryside, insurrectionary groups like the “Whiteboys” would appear in their wake to burn down a landlord’s house. Or divined that all the “khaki boys” in the British Army would never quell the fierce Pushtin tribesmen of the Northern Frontier.

Benjamin Dangl, the author of “The Price of Fire: Resource Wars and Social Movements in Bolivia,” is a sort of 21st century version of these 18th and 19th century commentators who distained the colonial comforts of Dublin or Delhi to head off into the outback. He rides buses into Bolivia’s altiplano, chews coca leaves in a Potosi park, and gulps his coffee as a cloud of tear gas descends on him in Buenos Aires. His five-year odyssey took him though Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, Uruguay, and Argentina, all the while recording what might be called the death of the Monroe Doctrine.

While the book is subtitled “resource wars and social movements in Bolivia,” Dangl covers most the countries that make up the Andes crescent. His thesis is that Bolivia’s “water war” of 2000 sparked similar uprisings in neighboring countries over the control of resources and resistance to the neo-liberal “Washington Consensus,” whose model of open markets and punishing austerity has plunged the southern hemisphere into economic chaos and bone-grinding poverty.

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Filed under: Main on March 31st, 2007