Environmental justice and the politics of scale in latin american social movements against gold miningthe cases of pascua-lama in chile and marlin in guatemala

Résumé

The gold mining frontier is advancing in Latin America and many communities are complaining against it. Gold is now mainly extracted by open-pit and cyanide leaching implying great environmental impacts. Besides, Latin American mining regulations attract foreign mining investment with little national and local economic benefits. In this context, gold (and metal) mining is becoming a recurrent protest theme in the region. In this thesis, I firstly approach, through a statistical review, the ultimate cause of gold mining controversy: the demand of gold and the geographical allocation of gold mining. I conclude that gold has its own dynamics that to some extent move away from the schema of mining concentration in economically impoverished countries and commodity consumption in the North. However, gold mining reproduces unjust distribution patterns (mainly at other scales of analysis). The bulk of the research consists of two case studies on socio-environmental conflicts around gold mining: the Pascua-Lama project in Chile and the Marlin mine in Guatemala. The fieldwork was based on a participant research strategy. Through political ecology and social movement theory approaches, I analysed the agency of the anti-mining movements (strategies, discourses, participants) and the key contextual features explaining the outcomes of these conflicts. The results are presented as a collection of articles published or under revision in international journals. One of the articles is a comparison with the Esquel case in Argentina (with Mariana Walter) and the concluding chapter carries out a further comparison (also with Tambogrande, Peru). In these comparisons, the success of anti-mining movements appears as strongly influenced by the cohesiveness in local mobilisation, the size of the project and the lobbying capacity of the mining company, the working stage of the project when protests start, and the economic relevance of mining in the country, among others. The thesis concludes that the anti-mining movements under study are not just local environmental movements, but glocal or multi-scalar ones that combine environmental, social and cultural demands. The multi-scalar character of the movements influences how they frame their claims at each political scale. However, a common defence of the local and communitarian scales for decision-making has been identified in their discourses, which should be understood as a struggling effort to achieve recognition, participation and distributional justice. Although anti-mining movements emerge from environmental grievances, historically embedded perceptions of injustice explain their complex claims (influenced by class, gender, ethnic discriminations experienced by communities affected by mining). Thus, the articulation of environmental concerns with social justice demands is resulting in the emergence of an environmental justice discourse in mining conflicts. The environmental justice framework is fostering promising alliances in Latin America, which present new alternatives (or limitations) to the extractivist development fostered by governments of different tendencies, transnational mining companies and the growth of the world economy.