Coloniality and Mining Extractivism

Depoliticization of the regional landscape and environmental devastation in Latin American continent

Abstract

The displacement of ancestral indigenous people has been a constant practice on the part of transnational companies installed in mining enclaves operating in the Latin American continent. This situation has caused a discontinuity in the well-being of these communities, their relationship with the environment, their millenary culture and their subsistence cultures. National states, whether progressive or conservative, understand that the abundance of natural resources has favored the consolidation of an extractive export model that has emerged as the only alternative to the continent's development. The transformation of the regional and urban landscape of most territories that have adopted mining extractivism, the Chilean experience specifically, offers us a representative model of exploratory study in this sense. Aiming to provide a better understanding of the research problem centered on the environmental devastation caused by mining activity, essentially about the management of water resources and the restrictions imposed on their consumption by native people, it is recorded that the latter has reached levels critical to the reproduction of their subsistence culture. The theoretical research axes that underlie this reflection privilege the coloniality of the territory with the aim of characterizing the depoliticization of the regional landscape devastated by the mining activity. The article ends by signaling a reflection on other theoretical questions based on critical latin american eco-politics and points towards the preservation of the integral value of life, through the decolonization of the State.