Neoextractivism and Indigenous Water Ritual in Salar de Atacama, Chile

• Author: Paola Bolados,Sally Babidge
• Date: 01 September 2018
• DOI: 10.1177/0094582X18782673
• Published date: 01 September 2018
• Subject Matter: Articles

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 222, Vol. 45 No. 5, September 2018, 170–185

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X18782673

© 2018 Latin American Perspectives

170

Neoextractivism and Indigenous Water Ritual

in Salar de Atacama, Chile

by

Sally Babidge and Paola Bolados

Latin American governments are neoextractivist: they promote exploitation of natural

resources as central to economic development while acting to mitigate some of the excesses

of extractive activity. In the space left open by the neoliberal state in the Salar de Atacama

in northern Chile, the mining industry creates its own regulatory mechanisms and pro-

vides infrastructure and “improvement” projects to indigenous communities. While these

projects gain a degree of consent to water extraction and the value of water for develop-

ment, indigenous people also resist the neoextractivist project. The contradictions of

extractivism-as-development are evident in everyday life and articulated in ritual and

cultural practice. We take the example of a ritual and work event, the limpia de canales

(canal cleaning), to narrate something of local responses to neoextractivist conditions.

Los gobiernos latinoamericanos son neoextractivistas: promueven la explotación de los

recursos naturales como elemento central del desarrollo económico y al mismo tiempo

actúan para mitigar algunos de los excesos de la actividad extractiva. En el espacio aban-

donado por el estado neoliberal en el Salar de Atacama en el norte de Chile, la industria

minera crea sus propios mecanismos regulatorios y proporciona infraestructura y proyec-

tos de “mejora” a las comunidades indígenas. Si bien estos proyectos obtienen un grado

de consentimiento para la extracción de agua y el valor del agua para el desarrollo, los

pueblos indígenas también se resisten al proyecto neoextractivista. Las contradicciones del

extractivismo como desarrollo son evidentes en la vida cotidiana y se articulan en la prác-

tica ritual y cultural. Tomamos el ejemplo de un evento ritual y laboral, la limpia de

canales, para narrar algo de las respuestas locales a las condiciones neoextractivistas.

Keywords: Neoextractivism, Mining, Water, Atacameño peoples

Mining provides approximately 12 percent of Chile’s gross domestic prod-

uct, almost all from copper, and more than half the copper mined in Chile

comes from the Antofagasta region (Comisión Chilena de Cobre, 2016: 19, 65,

99). The demand for water increased dramatically in the mining region of

Sally Babidge is an anthropologist and senior lecturer at the University of Queensland. Paola

Bolados is an anthropologist in the Social Work School at the Universidad de Valparaiso. They

thank the community members from Camar and Peine who permitted them to undertake research

with and in their communities and those they interviewed elsewhere in the region. They also

thank Matthew Harris, who made the map. The research was made possible by the support of the

School of Social Science and the Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities of the University

of Queensland, the Universidad de Valparaiso, an Australian Research Council Grant

(DP#1094069), and a grant from the Chilean Fondo Nacional de Desarrollo Científico y Tecnológico

(#8120062).

782673LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X18782673Latin American PerspectivesBabidge and Bolados / Neoextractivism And Water Ritual In Chile

research-article2018

Babidge and Bolados / NEOEXTRACTIVISM AND WATER RITUAL IN CHILE 171

Antofagasta during the 1990s, when the boom in copper began. By 2015 a com-

bination of industrial, political, and ecological factors had led to broad-based

declarations from local and indigenous communities, environmental nongov-

ernmental organizations, authorities in the Chilean government, and even min-

ing companies of the need to preserve aquifers and scarce surface waters in the

region. A publicly recognized “water crisis” had become apparent, but signifi-

cant inequalities in access to water and large-scale extraction for mining con-

tinued.

Chile’s contemporary political economy is neoextractivist; it has many char-

acteristics of the historically developmentalist states of Latin America that have

relied on unrelenting exploitation of nature in the name of national economic

benefits. Gudynas (2012) sets out the contradictions in neoextractivism,

whereby progressive governments incorporate regulatory mechanisms that

purport to compensate peoples and environments for the excesses of extraction

while seeking to sustain extraction-led economic gains.1 Most significant to the

contradictory conditions of neoextractivism for this paper is that resource

extraction often occurs on indigenous lands and benefits least those who expe-

rience its negative impacts. As Bebbington etal. (2008: 9) argue, Chile is “one

of the banner countries [in Latin America] for the ‘mining leads to develop-

ment’ argument.” However, mining-associated water extraction and the policy

landscape in Chile have enabled extraction and consumption of water by

national and global interests with few effective regulatory mechanisms to mit-

igate their environmental and social impacts (see also Bauer, 2004; Budds, 2010;

Oyarzún and Oyarzún, 2011). The resulting inequalities in access to water and

contests over environmental and social impacts involving indigenous peoples,

other local communities, and the mining industry characterize political and

economic relations in the North (e.g., Carrasco, 2016; Castro-Lucic, 2002; Prieto,

2015). In this paper we demonstrate that neoextractivism in Chile relies on

industry-led development programs that play a direct and indirect “compensa-

tory” role, especially in the absence of effective state regulation. We begin by

describing water demands for resource extraction and changes in state regula-

tion of environmental and social impacts since the 1990s. Our account of extrac-

tion and its contemporary political economic dynamics around the Salar de

Atacama shows how water and compensation for water extraction both sustain

and threaten extractivism-as-development.

Indigenous people respond to the conditions of neoextractivism in a variety

of ways. An annual communal work and ritual activity relating to water prac-

ticed in two Atacameño (indigenous) communities reveals much about the

dynamics of these responses.2 In Camar and Peine the work and ritual under-

taken during the cleaning of the irrigation ditches enact key elements of

Atacameño customary practice that are partly state-recognized. The state

legally recognizes some indigenous territory and associated water rights,

though recognition is subject to other property regimes (see Yáñez and Molina,

2011). And while rights to land and water are important, Andean irrigation

practices also articulate a relation to earth and water through the ritual engage-

ment with a productive and responsive landscape (Boelens and Gelles, 2005; Li,

2015). While state laws partly recognize rights to land and water, they only

partly recognize the way these rights are exercised by indigenous people