The politics of bachaqueo

Abstract

ABSTRACTAñú 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, Añú, La Guajira, Venezuela]