Government Rationality and Risk Production: Case Study from River Communities in Peru

1. View of the river

The first element explains why living on the water is risky for one group and not for another. According to the government, public servants, and development experts, the flooding hazard constitutes the main problem, which presents the need for a risk assessment policy. This group aligns their understanding of risk according to the principles of developmental programs (Defert 1991) to effectively control environments, natural resources, and populations (Goldman 2001). According to these principles, the natural fluctuations of the river and the rain are variables that present an obstacle to the government’s ability to give Beleninos development and the “greater good.” For instance, public servants say that Belen is uninhabitable because the flooding prevents building concrete structures and installing drains and lighting. In their view, resettlement is easier as a risk reduction strategy.

Additionally, the government cites a study conducted by the Navy explaining that the Amazon River will inevitably flood Belen and destroy its communities. The following two interview excerpts summarize public servant discourse on how living on the river is unsafe for populations. Roberto and Margot work for different institutions related to the project. Both of them represent one of the main arguments supporting the resettlement project:

Roberto: “You cannot live there [Belen], modifying the house every time it is flooded. You cannot live like that. It is inhumane. You cannot improve your house there because you cannot build concrete structures, because of the water. Structures cannot resist [the water]. Some people have electricity there, but then there are fires; nothing can be built there.”

Margot: “The law has technical support, a report from the Ministry of War [Navy], which indicates that the Amazon River will recover its previous course. That means that the entire lowland area of Belen is not only going to flood, but that it will be covered by the waters of the Amazon River, and it will no longer be just a flood; it would be something permanent.”

These testimonies are compelling because they are from the same public servants that previously supported the Belen Sostenible project, which was based on the construction of typical wooden houses on the river and appreciated the Belenino cultural and economic perspective. Roberto and Margot use their approximations of development to reject the possibility of living on the river and to turn the idea of the river fluctuations as a resource into a risk that needs to be managed.

On the other hand, for Beleninos, the river constitutes a resource for their survival. For them, the river has a different meaning. The changes in the river level are part of their everyday reality, their community and family habits, their shared knowledge of living with and on the river, and their history from the beginning of the development of Belen. For them, the government’s concept of flooding misinterprets the natural river fluctuations. The government’s approach to the river, and water in general, it is not just a different understanding of risk and economic means; to Beleninos, not having the resources of Belen available threatens their survival as well as their culture and social and economic development. Marta and Eduardo have lived in Belen their whole lives and have learned to live with river fluctuations. To them, living on the river does not constitute a risk:

Marta: “They enacted a law based on a study conducted by the Navy of Peru that says that this area will disappear; we have another report that says the contrary. Every year, there is flooding, but that is natural; that does not mean that we are in danger or at risk. The government should improve the life quality of the population here, instead of wanting to get us out.”

Eduardo: “Because of the huaycos [mudslides/landslides], that’s why they have started talking about flooding. Here we have the creciente and vaciante. Here there is no risk; the only thing we have to do is be careful.”

Marta and Eduardo do not trust the Navy’s technical report. They know that river fluctuations are difficult to predict and are not flooding. They think that the government’s ideas of the river and their thoughts on the river’s behavior are those of westerners, which explains why they see risk and nature differently than they do as locals. However, both views are not exclusive but overlapping, making this conflict more nuanced as can be seen in the testimonies of Pablo:

Pablo: “I get it, Belen Sostenible was not sustainable, but it doesn’t mean that it is not possible. It was a political opportunity to think about “new cities.” The technical part of the project was very idealistic because the maintenance is too expensive. It is similar to the Varillalito project, it is not ok; it is not even finished… Ollanta [Peru’s past president] promised something to the Beleninos that he couldn’t accomplish. But again, it is not true that you can’t build houses on the water. There are many cities—look at Venice—that is why people call Belen ‘the Peruvian Venice.’”

Pablo is an example of an actor with different understandings of risk that help legitimize the resettlement (Apter, 1997). Their testimonies are evidence of the complexity of the discourses around the justifications of the resettlement project. However, they still justify the government’s ignorance of the essential features of the local culture’s social order (Pierce 2006: 897). This view is in line with a way of thinking about development and governmental intervention (Li 1999, 2014) as further presented in the following dimension.

2. Notions of development

The government and Beleninos also have different notions of development. On the one hand, the government sees Belen as an undeveloped, polluted, and dangerous place without access to potable water and drains. The waste in the water includes garbage from households, fecal matter, and syringes from the medical center. The government is also concerned about the domestic violence, robberies, and drug selling that occurs within the neighborhoods. All Beleninos agree with this element of the government’s perspective; however, they argue that the government should be responsible for what they call “undeveloped.” From their perspective, some of the features of their surroundings are indeed risky, such as the ones related to quality of life in regard to public health. However, the focus of the government’s justification for the resettlement project is the Beleninos’ inability to live on the river. The government approaches nature and the river with governmental rationality, as an effort to secure “the right manner of disposing things to optimize the health and wealth of populations at large (Foucault 1991a, 95). This manner is based on an idea of development that does not include fishing, the market, farming, social networks, and rainfall as resources (Li 2014, Hacking 1986). On the contrary, Beleninos have a different perspective of nature, the river, and how they interact with them (Li 2014); for them, nature can be appropriated for human use as “natural resources” (Scott 1998). Beleninos have a different historical perception and evaluation, and consider living in Belen a resource for their development (Hacking 1986).

The following testimonies of Ricardo and Gilda, public servants that support the resettlement project, summarize institutionalized ideas about the dirtiness of Belen and how they perceive Beleninos’ lives:

Ricardo: “When the river is higher, you see one child washing his teeth in the morning while another one is going to the bathroom, everything with the same water...It is a different mentality from what we live here [in the city of Iquitos]. They see it as normal...To improve the quality of life, we have to boost values.”

Gilda: “Belen is like a giant market; you can find everything. They sell you everything: drugs, sex, children…there [in Belen], people think that hitting women is normal, that stealing is normal, children tell you that their father is a thief, as if it was normal, or that their mother is a prostitute...acting in that way, they will not better themselves.”

These testimonies expose important social problems that need to be fixed by the government. However, they are not directly related to the resettlement project or the space, but to the efficiency. The Beleninos recognize and share the government’s view of Belen as dirty to some degree while at the same time blaming them for putting the drains in their space. They claim that the state should have more involvement regarding garbage collection and provide more police officers. From their perspective, there is a lack of municipality participation in the district, a place that has many resources for social and economic development. In their minds, Belen is a place in which nobody starves. There are always resources to survive: the river, the chacra [farm], the market, and social networks. Belen’s inhabitants form strong bonds.

Mirla came to Belen from the chacra when she was a teenager. While she recognizes some of the government’s perspectives about the river and Belen, living in Belen helped her to cope with the dangers and uncertainties of life. Her daily routine of selling coal and sugar cane liquor allowed her to raise her three daughters and two sons. Her observation comes from a comparison between her life before and after living in the river community. Living in Belen brought her more security. Indeed, from her perspective, it enhanced her economic and social development, as explained in the following quote.

Mirla: “The people of Belen buy and sell in the market and from their homes, it’s their way of living. You go fishing early, and you’re going to the market to sell, and with that, you have money to eat and help your family. For example, I have my sugar cane, with that, I prepare liquor and sell it from my home and sometimes in the market. To me, Belen gave me opportunities that I did not have when I was little…Here, my family and I think that all those who have come here have been able to improve. Here, you can ask anyone! Here, we will not live in wealth, but we continue to survive and even improve.”

As in the first element, the government’s and Beleninos’ notions of development are mostly based on disparate cultural origins, although there are some intermediate points of view. Essential features of Belenino river communities are incomprehensible to some because they have different systems of meaning provided by their respective cultures (Mitchell 2009; Babb 2001; Ferguson 1994). While Beleninos recognize that Belen has several problems that need improvement, the government’s institutionalized perspective of development has allowed it to determine standards of normality that question the traditional life context described in Mirla’s testimony.

3. Belenino identity

From the government’s perspective, Belen is not just a dirty place, but a space with filthy practices and deviant culture which makes it undeveloped. These opinions have built meanings surrounding the identity of Beleninos that support the government risk construction arguments justifying the resettlement project. Public servants see Beleninos aiming to preserve and benefit from immoral practices such as robbery, drug dealing, alcohol sales, human trafficking, and informal businesses (Li 1999). In addition, these employees question the Beleninos’ worldview because by living around and with the river, they willingly accept the risk of diseases from water pollution and subpar standards of living. In their words, Beleninos live a “vicious lifecycle” that needs to be regulated (Li 1999) for the sake of development (Defert 1991). In some public servants’ words, refusing the resettlement project and voluntarily putting themselves at risk reflects Beleninos’ ignorance of how a person should live and their failure to recognize how their lives would be improved by living on solid ground and letting the government transform populations (Ferguson 1994, Li 1999) for the ‘greater good’ (Cernea 2000). These perceptions are captured in a conversation with a public servant from Iquitos directly related to the project. The following conversation with Clara illustrates some of the arguments used by many public servants to support the resettlement project and to delegitimize the Beleninos’ local culture.

Interviewer: Tell me about your job, what do you do for the project? Can you walk me through it?

Clara: Well I do home visits to see if the people of Belen want to sign up to go to Varillalito. Then there are also informative workshops on the project, such as on the proper use of water; they do not know how to use water...Belen, from my perspective, has sectors that are a bit bleak. It scares me because people are drinking; there are also drugs. I have the sense that people in Belen live in their world, in their comfort zone. For a person who has never been in Belen, it would be shocking. You see the children, while one is brushing his teeth, the other is doing his business [in the same water], and for the mother, this is normal, or you see children not going to school. It’s a mentality and a world different from what we see, but for them, it is normal. We seek to improve the quality of life in general. You have to give them values, security, respect for themselves, love, solidarity, the need to study...People of Belen are a bit conformist; they do not see beyond.

Clara is a psychologist that organizes the workshops. In these workshops, she talks about the benefits of living in Varillalito as well as the ‘vicious lifecycle’ of Beleninos that live on the river. She creates an atmosphere that separates the qualified Beleninos from the unqualified ones, and promises to teach Beleninos that decide to resettle how to properly behave, general grooming practices, and healthy social and personal relationships, as a way to re-school them (Collins & Mayer 2010) and create new subjectivities (Li 1999). By marking the undeveloped and risky identities, she uses the workshops to ‘deposit’ mental and physical schemes of perception, appreciation, and action (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 2005, Bourdieu, 2000), thereby breaking down old forms of living and enabling new ones to come into being (Scott 1995, 193).

On the one hand, Beleninos acknowledge cases of urban and interpersonal violence as well as sexual abuse. No interviewee justifies these problems. They, indeed, suggest that they require government attention. For instance, they call for greater police presence, garbage collection, and the restriction of medical waste disposal. On the other hand, they do justify practices reflecting their relationship with nature, their identity, and their traditions. For them, as in their notions of development, many of the problems in Belen need to be solved through collective efforts. However, the existence of problems does not invalidate their local know-how, traditions, and how they live with nature that, in Varillalito, are canceled in the absence of the river, farm, and market. The following testimonies of Magda and José summarize the Belenino perspective about their way of life in Belen. Both were born in Belen and identify themselves as Beleninos:

Magda: “I know that there are robbers here, bars, bad things, but as in every place. At least we don´t die here out of poverty. The government wants to relocate us where there is no development, nothing to survive. Here are our customs, our culture, our work. The majority of people work in markets, ports, rivers, and others work in farms in nearby areas.”

José: “We know how we live; we know how to live...Enacting a law against a population in a habitable place?…how is Belen uninhabitable? So I’m an animal? I am a Belenino. I was born here; my father and my mother raised me here.”

While Beleninos relate their socialization to their history and identity without justifying their social problems, public servants utilize negative descriptions of Beleninos to reinforce the aims of their resettlement project. The government does not consider the Belenino identity as an actual identity but as a way to demonstrate the risk of their way of life (O’Malley 1996). Therefore, their ‘spoiled’ identity supports the legitimization of the resettlement project. Some public servants have decided to ignore the essential features of the local culture’s social orders and to undermine the ability of the Beleninos and others (Mathews 2008) to envision the state as an entity with legitimate actors (Pierce 2006: 897) that ‘knows better’ with regard to development and risk. Under this rationale, the resettlement project operates as an effective risk reduction strategy.

5. Conclusions

In this paper, I found that the overlapping of perspectives unveils risk as politically, socially, and reflexively constructed. However, not all approximations of risk are valued equally. Public servants generally consider living on solid ground as a resource for development. For them, resettlement in Varillalito is the right way to optimize development. Living on the river constitutes a risk because it is difficult to effectively control the environment and to regulate how Beleninos live their lives (Goldman 2001, Li 1999). This approximation of development, however, embodies an inherent paradox in the context of development. By using the logic of the “greater good,” it rationalizes and justifies a forced/manipulated resettlement (Cernea 2000) that bears little relation to Beleninos’ local culture.

As protests increased, new arguments emerged positioning Beleninos as a population with a ‘spoiled identity’ requiring protection. This new persuasive element defending the legitimacy of the project further shaped public servants’ concept of risk, view of the river, and notions of development and the Belenino identity. First, the natural fluctuations of the river and the rain are variables that present an obstacle to the government’s ability to provide development. In their view, resettlement is easier as a risk reduction strategy. Second, the government sees Belen as an undeveloped, polluted, and dangerous place without access to potable water and drains. Thus, the government approaches nature and the river as things that hinder proper development. Finally, the right manner of development also includes not being a Belenino. For some public servants, Beleninos are the object of intervention, living a “vicious lifecycle” that needs to be regulated (Li 1999) for the sake of development (Defert 1991).

Resettlement as a risk reduction strategy is confusing to them for two reasons. First, the Belen Sostenible project featured development ideas that supported the local and cultural context of Beleninos (Jha 2009). Then suddenly, when the government realized that the project was not sustainable, it changed its narrative and view of Belen by creating a sense of risk that considers the whole space undeveloped (Ferguson 1994; Li 1999) and in need of governmental intervention. This abrupt change demonstrates that the construction of risk is part of a power structure that does not equally consider meanings of risk that do not come from ‘experts.’ This also explains why some Beleninos changed their thoughts about living in Belen and decided to be resettle in Varillalito arguing that the government “should know better” (Mathews 2008; Scott 1998) while others continue to defend their view of the river, notions of development, sense of Belenino identity, and belief in local know-how. In their view, the Amazon environment has organized their conception of space and taught them to live with river fluctuations rather than seeing them as a risk. Beleninos’ notions of development include living on the river and using their surroundings as a resource for their development and survival.

This analysis of risk has implications for risk construction and development theories as well as studies of disasters and resettlement. First, it illustrates the importance of risk as a concept that is constructed reflexively, in constant conversation with people’s minds and cultures, and manifests as social constructs with real effects in terms of perceptions and social activity based on systems of meaning provided by culture (Slovic 2010; Kahan & Slovic 2006; Petryna 2002; Douglas & Wildavsky 1983). However, it also underscores the variable of power that gives or takes away the legitimacy of how risk is constructed. Thus, risk is embedded in regular processes that structure people’s thinking (Heimer 2001), is politically constructed, and therefore legitimized by a group of privileged actors, in this case, the government positioned as experts. This approach to risk explains why after the failure of the Belen Sostenible project, the government’s changing ideas about the river and manner of communicating with Beleninos were accepted by the majority of public servants as a government technique, and even some Beleninos, who believed in the legitimacy of the government’s new discourse about the risk of living on the river. Second, this analysis reveals that the concept of risk is inherently related to development. Thus, it is possible to understand development as a risk reduction strategy, which in this case, came in the form of power aimed at regulating people’s lives (Li 1999). I believe that many developmental programs are genuinely guided by an equity compass (Cernea 2000). However, in this case study, the resettlement project, as a developmental policy, was a political opportunity to cover up a failed project. This resulted in the disruption of the Beleninos’ local culture and identity construction.