The documentary film Habilito: Debt for Life provides a case study of the conflicts and tensions
that arise at the point of contact between highland migrants and Mosetenes, members of an
indigenous community in the Bolivian Amazon. It focuses particularly on a system of debt
peonage known locally as ‘habilito’. This system is used throughout the Bolivian lowlands, and
much of the rest of the Amazon basin, to secure labor in remote areas. Timber merchants
advance market goods to Mosetenes at inflated prices, in exchange for tropical hardwood
timber. When it comes time to settle accounts, the indebted person often finds that the wood
he has cut does not meet his debt obligation, and he has to borrow more money to return to
the forest to continue logging. This permanent cycle of debt permits actors from outside these
indigenous communities to maintain control over the extraction of wood and provides them
with a free source of labor in the exploitation of timber resources. This system is practiced
especially in remote areas where systems of patronage predominate, and where colonists with
a market-based economic logic come into contact with Amazonian indigenous peoples who,
historically, have not employed an economic logic of saving or hoarding.