¿La minería para el buen vivir? Large-scale Mining, Citizenship, and Development in Correa’s Ecuador

AuthorConsuelo Fernández-Salvador,Karolien van Teijlingen
Date01 May 2021
DOI10.1177/0094582X211008146
Published date01 May 2021
Subject MatterArticles
https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X211008146
LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 238, Vol. 48 No. 3, May 2021, 245–261
DOI: 10.1177/0094582X211008146
© 2021 Latin American Perspectives
245
¿La minería para el buen vivir?
Large-scale Mining, Citizenship, and Development in
Correa’s Ecuador
by
Karolien van Teijlingen and Consuelo Fernández-Salvador
Through a persuasive discourse on well-being and citizen “participation,” Ecuador
Estratégico, a government agency tasked with implementing buen vivir (good living) in
regions of resource extraction, plays a pivotal role in justifying and legitimizing resource
extraction locally. An examination of the practices and discourses of this state institution
and of the responses of community members and the ways they negotiate citizenship in the
context of mining-based development calls into question the mobilization of buen vivir to
govern local populations and push for a controversial mining project. These political strat-
egies were key for the onset of large-scale mining under former president Correa, the effects
of which may endure for decades.
A través de un discurso persuasivo sobre el bienestar y la “participación” ciudadana,
Ecuador Estratégico, un organismo gubernamental encargado de implementar el “buen
vivir” en las regiones sujetas a extracción de recursos, desempeña un papel fundamental
en la justificación y legitimación de dicha extracción a nivel local. Un análisis de las prác-
ticas y discursos de esta institución estatal, las respuestas de los miembros de la comuni-
dad y las formas en que negocian la ciudadanía en el contexto de un desarrollo basado en
la minería pone en entredicho el uso del buen vivir como herramienta para gobernar a las
poblaciones locales e impulsar un polémico proyecto minero. Estas estrategias políticas
jugaron un papel clave para el inicio de la minería a gran escala bajo el ex-presidente
Correa; sus efectos han de perdurar durante décadas.
Keywords: Buen vivir, Mining, Citizenship, Critical development studies, Ecuador
In 2008, the adoption of buen vivir (good living) as the guiding principle of
Ecuador’s new constitution was heralded as a major milestone in the search for
alternative development paths. Shortly thereafter, however, the ostensibly pro-
gressive government of Rafael Correa announced the intensification of oil
extraction and aggressively initiated the development of Ecuador’s previously
nonexistent large-scale mining industry.1 Contrary to the approach of preced-
ing neoliberal governments, his support for extractive industries was couched
in a resource-nationalist discourse that sought to restore these industries as
symbols of national progress. He claimed that the expansion of these industries
Karolien van Teijlingen is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Radboud University Nijmegen,
The Netherlands. Consuelo Fernández-Salvador has a Ph.D. in development studies from the
International Institute for Social Studies of the Erasmus University, Rotterdam, and is an assistant
professor at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Ecuador.
1008146LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X211008146Latin American Perspectivesvan Teijlingen and Fernández-Salvador / Mining, Citizenship, and Development in Correa’s Ecuador
research-article2021
246 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES
was crucial for the transition to buen vivir and the implementation of social
programs aimed at reducing poverty (Lu, Valdivia, and Silva, 2017). The inten-
sification of extraction has been widely criticized by academics and social
movement actors as a continuation of neoliberal and postcolonial practices that
undermine rather than foster the transformative potential of buen vivir (Holst,
2016; Walsh, 2010). This article contributes to this critical debate by scrutinizing
the attempts of the Correa government to implement buen vivir in the context
of the conflict-ridden expansion of large-scale mining.
To do so, we use the Chinese-owned Mirador copper mine as a case study.
The Mirador project became emblematic of the controversy around buen vivir
and resource extraction as the country’s first large-scale mining project and as
important for the implementation of Correa’s new extractive policies. Since
2006, the project has been targeted by protests, and there have been violent con-
frontations between local pro- and antimining groups (Avcı and Fernández-
Salvador, 2016). After the government and the Chinese-state-owned company
Ecuacorriente S.A. (a subsidiary of CRCC-Tongguan) signed a contract for the
exploitation of the mine in 2012, protests intensified in response to the displace-
ment of peasants, the contamination of nearby rivers, and the murder, which has
remained unsolved, of an indigenous leader opposing the mine (van Teijlingen
etal., 2017). Yet the Mirador mine has been not only a spearhead project for
antimining groups but also a showcase for the government’s “different” mining
policies. After several decades of neoliberal reforms in the extractive sector,
President Correa advocated the nationalization of resources to increase national
budgets and expand social programs (Hogenboom, 2012: 144). This did not nec-
essarily mean a “complete takeover of private enterprises by the state,” as Arsel
and Avila (2011: 9) point out. Instead it involved a stronger presence of the state
in the negotiation and operation of contracts, the tightening of environmental
regulations, and the redistribution of mining revenues in pursuit of buen vivir.
In this scenario, the role of Ecuador Estratégico (EE) was crucial. This govern-
ment agency was founded in 2011 with the aim of channeling the revenues of
extractive projects to the local communities most impacted by them.
Focusing on the work of EE, we aim to discuss the discourses and practices
of the Ecuadorian government to promote buen vivir in relation to large-scale
mining. Although buen vivir was initially conceptualized as a “rupture” with
conventional development thinking (Escobar, 2010; Thomson, 2011; Walsh,
2010), we use the case of EE and its practices around Mirador to question this.
Yet, contrary to studies that emphasize the destructive and oppressive power
of development in twenty-first-century Ecuador (see Holst, 2016), our contri-
bution lies in examining ethnographically the more productive forces of EE’s
practices. We concentrate on the citizen-subjects and territorial transformations
EE seeks to produce in the name of buen vivir and the tensions that arise from
this rather than on what it forecloses.
The article is structured as follows: After a brief description of the local con-
text following this introduction, the next two sections present our theoretical
framework and describe the political changes and controversies on a national
level, respectively. The following section focuses on our data on the discourses
of the government on extraction-based buen vivir and the responses and sub-
jectivities they generated among people from local communities. We show that

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