In the last few years, a great deal has been published on the causes of the Latin American mining boom that began in the 1990s. This literature includes analyses of the wave of mining conflicts that has affected indigenous communities, peasants, and small towns in almost all countries of the region (Bebbington and Bury Reference Bebbington and Bury2013; De Castro et al. Reference De Castro, Hogenboom and Baud2016). The essays that make up Política Minera y sociedad civil en América Latina (Mining Policy and Civil Society in Latin America) contribute to this debate by examining the effects of socioenvironmental mobilization on mining laws at the federal level. Why do antimining coalitions manage to influence mining policy in some countries and not in others? This constitutes the principal question that the various authors seek to answer, based on the cases of Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador, Argentina, Peru, Chile, and Uruguay.
Studying these countries individually, the authors analyze neoliberal reforms to mining legislation made in the 1990s that led Latin America to capture nearly one-third of global mining investment; they examine the different conflicts resulting from the development of megamining; and they look at the varying results achieved by antimining coalitions in their attempts to influence the sector’s regulating laws. In the introduction, Paúl Cisneros signals the need to look beyond the heretofore dominant theoretical frameworks of political ecology, geography, or political economy to study the issue in the Latin American context. He proposes a reading based on an “advocacy coalition framework” to shed light on the interactions between socioenvironmental mobilization and the public policies of mining sector regulation, an approach described in detail in his chapter on Ecuador.
Mexico receives the most foreign direct investment (FDI) for mining among Latin American countries and is ranked fourth worldwide, after Canada, the United States, and Australia. Its constitution decrees that the country’s natural resources belong to the federal state, constituting the most centralized regulation model among the federal nations in the region. Darcy Tetrault analyzes the transformation that has taken place in the mining industry, which was controlled by the state and by Mexican capital at the beginning of the 1980s. In the early part of that decade, the debt crisis forced the government of Miguel de la Madrid to initiate a deregulation of the mining industry, which successive governments would deepen. This led to the formation of Mexican oligopolistic mining capital, as well as the foreignization of the sector, particularly as a result of Canadian capital investment in gold and silver extraction.
The level of socioterritorial conflict is low in Mexico but is characterized by a high degree of human rights violations of indigenous and peasant organization leaders who oppose extractive projects. Tetrault reports 31 conflicts up to 2014 in relation to the 800 mining projects controlled by transnational companies, mostly Canadian-owned. Socioterritorial protest had an impact on a handful of cases at the local level (paralyzing projects or achieving better economic compensation). Future research should include a more systematic analysis of why conflict did not occur around the greater part of mining projects in this country. The emergence of national networks, since 2008, to denounce various socioenvironmental consequences of mining development and other types of extractive projects managed to give visibility to the issue, but without achieving significant legislative changes to environmental regulation of mining.
In Guatemala, the development of extractive and other energy projects affects more than 70 indigenous communities, in a context where the rates of social protest criminalization and human rights abuses are the highest, not only among Central American countries but in all of Latin America. Simona Violetta Yagenova points out that although in 1996 the Guatemalan state ratified ILO Convention 169, stipulating the right of consultation with populations affected by a given extractive project, institutional mechanisms for compliance are lacking. Between 2004 and 2011, 11 different bills were submitted to the legislature with a view to reforming the neoliberal mining code, but without success. Since then, protest from indigenous organizations has been radicalized; they seek, in addition to better environmental regulation in the mining sector, recognition and respect from the state for their different worldviews and territorial conceptions.
In Argentina, the decision of whether to advance in natural resource exploitation is a provincial responsibility. For that reason, the subnational level is central to any understanding of the socioenvironmental conflicts that affect 10 out of 23 provinces. Nine provinces have approved laws prohibiting metal mining, and in 7, these are currently in effect. Lucas Christel investigates, from a comparative perspective, the cases of the provinces of Córdoba and Mendoza, where such laws have been passed, and of Catamarca and San Juan, where various mining projects are in operation. He advances the hypothesis that greater degrees of political plurality within a political system and greater degrees of development and diversification in the economic matrix foster favorable opportunities for social resistance to have an impact on provincial mining legislation.
In a second part of the chapter, Christel explains the 2010 enactment, at the federal level, of the Glaciers Law, for the preservation of glaciers and the periglacial environment, which bans mining and hydrocarbon exploration and exploitation in glacial zones. This law constitutes an innovation in environmental regulation of mining, produced by strong mobilization of different segments of civil society, not from the standpoint of prohibition, as at the subnational level, but from the position of glacier protection.
Cisneros studies the evolution of influence exerted by the Ecuadorian antimining coalition on mining regulation policies between 2007 and 2014. The advocacy coalition framework analysis is a theoretical perspective that would be very useful for illuminating other Latin American cases. Cisneros observes that because of divisions among the environmental and indigenous organizations, the antimining coalition failed to establish a unified discourse regarding the best form of regulation over the mining sector. The Rafael Correa government put into action various strategies to depoliticize the demands of the antimining coalition and initiated reforms to the neoliberal mining model of the 1990s that granted greater regulatory control to the state, using mining revenue to finance social programs in health and education. In this context, the antimining coalition shifted strategies from its focus on the mining agenda to construct its demand, instead, around water protection and the need to enact a water resources law, which was finally approved in 2014.
In his chapter on Peru, Gerardo Damonte underscores the importance of the mining industry to the Peruvian economy. The share of exports increased from 20 percent in the 1990s to more than 60 percent in 2010, concentrated in large mining projects for gold, silver, copper, and zinc extraction, operated by a small number of transnational corporations. The Peruvian industry is characterized by a model of corporate self-regulation, which was put in place with the neoliberal reforms of the mining sector in the 1990s and is still in effect. The regulatory capacity of the state is very limited and has only aggravated socioenvironmental conflict in relation to mining project development in the country.
In the last two decades, despite some emblematic cases of resistance that effectively halted mining projects, the various protests that have taken place at local or regional levels have been more notable for their dispersion. They have failed to articulate a position on the national scale or to form a unified social movement that could engender changes in the mining sector. The National Confederation of Communities Affected by Mining (CONACAMI) mobilizes a discourse based on indigenismo that fails to integrate the different local protests.
Chile’s mining industry also occupies a prominent place in its national economy, representing more than half of invested capital; the country is the largest copper producer in the world. There are more than a hundred socioterritorial conflicts in relation to different kinds of extractive projects, among them mining and dams (Delamaza et al. Reference Delamaza, Maillet and Neira2017). Jonathan Barton, Cecilia Campero, and Sebastián Baeza assert that Chilean civil society has exerted an influence on modifying neoliberal mining policy. In 2009, Chile ratified ILO Convention 169 and enacted a law protecting water as a public good, replacing the Water Code of 1981, which considered it a commodity. In 2016, a Glaciers Protection Law was approved, but was criticized by environmental organizations, which considered the law permissive with respect to the binational Pascua-Lama project (Chile-Argentina), operated by the largest gold-mining company in the world, Barrick Gold.
Uruguay cannot be said to have a mining sector of importance, and in relation to other countries in the region, it enjoys a greater economic and institutional stability, which assists in resolving conflicts. Lylieth F. Varela Fagúndez and Eduardo Gudynas examine the single mining conflict that took place in 2012 in relation to citizen objection to an iron extraction development, as well as to the mining law that framed and defined that development. The company finally abandoned the project because of the decline in the international price of iron.
In the conclusion of the volume, Paúl Cisneros puts forward a form of typology for the “patterns of activism” to explain the dynamics among the various political scales (local, subnational, regional, national, and transnational) and the influence of the socioenvironmental protest cycle on mining and environmental legislation in each of the countries discussed in the chapters.
In summary, the volume constitutes a stimulating first approach to explaining the sociopolitical mechanisms that exert different degrees of influence by civil society on the regulation of mining and environmental policy in Latin America. We can make two main criticisms. First, throughout the chapters, the phrase civil society is used synonymously with antimining mobilization, without clarifying, in certain cases, the important roles of other actors in civil society (political parties, companies, unions, NGOs, etc.). Furthermore, the frameworks of analysis utilized in the different studies to answer the primary question posed by the volume are disparate, which prevents extensive comparison of the cases. Future research is still required, and hoped for, on this particular subject.
