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Mechanised Pits and Artisanal Tunnels: The Incongruences and Complementarities of Mining Investment in the Peruvian Andes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 October 2022

Kieran Gilfoy Open the ORCID record for Kieran Gilfoy [Opens in a new window]
Kieran Gilfoy*
Affiliation:
Department of International Development, University of Oxford
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*Corresponding author. Email: kieranjgilfoy@gmail.com
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Abstract

Conflict has become a central concept to understanding the recent expansion of mining across the Andes. Yet, while contestation can emerge and has done so, the continued extraction of minerals requires scholars to attend to how mining projects maintain viability. This article moves beyond analyses of conflict to elucidate the role of compromise in achieving temporary states of homeostasis. Using ethnographic data collected at the Las Bambas copper mine in the highlands of southern Peru, I explore the agential navigation of communities affected by mining and the projects they develop in pursuit of ‘a better life’. The article elucidates the challenges that industrial production presents for professional employment, the limitations of boomtown hustling (informal economic activity) for aspiring individuals, and the rise of artisanal mining as a project of social mobility. Ultimately, the acceptance of such ‘illegal’ mining by corporate proprietors demonstrates the complementary nature that informal and formal extraction play in allaying the momentum of conflict.

Spanish abstract

Spanish abstract

El conflicto se ha vuelto un concepto central para entender la expansión reciente de la minería a lo largo de los Andes. Ahora bien, mientras que puede surgir oposición a la misma y de hecho sucede, la extracción continua de minerales requiere que los académicos atiendan a cómo es que los proyectos mineros mantienen su viabilidad. Este artículo va más allá de los análisis del conflicto para dilucidar el papel de los arreglos para alcanzar situaciones temporales de homeostasis. Utilizando datos etnográficos recolectados en la mina de cobre de Las Bambas en el altiplano del sur del Perú, exploro la agencia de las comunidades afectadas por la minería y los proyectos que desarrollaron en búsqueda de ‘una vida mejor'. El artículo dilucida los retos que la producción industrial representa al empleo profesional, las limitaciones del hustling (actividad económica informal) para individuos con deseos de mejorar su situación, y el aumento de la minería artesanal como proyecto de movilidad social. Ultimadamente, la aceptación de esta minería ‘ilegal’ por los propietarios corporativos demuestra la naturaleza complementaria que la extracción formal e informal juega en reducir la conflictividad social.

Portuguese abstract

Portuguese abstract

O conflito tornou-se um conceito central para entender a recente expansão da mineração nos Andes. No entanto, embora a contestação possa surgir e o fez, a extração contínua de minerais exige que os estudiosos observem como os projetos de mineração mantêm a viabilidade. Este artigo vai além das análises de conflito para elucidar o papel do compromisso na obtenção de estados temporários de homeostase. Usando dados etnográficos coletados na mina de cobre Las Bambas, nas terras altas do sul do Peru, exploro a navegação de agentes de comunidades afetadas pela mineração e os projetos que desenvolvem em busca de ‘uma vida melhor'. O artigo elucida os desafios que a produção industrial apresenta para o emprego profissional, as limitações do hustling (atividade econômica informal) para indivíduos que desejam melhorar sua situação e a ascensão da mineração artesanal como projeto de mobilidade social. Em última análise, a aceitação de tal mineração ‘ilegal’ por proprietários corporativos demonstra a natureza complementar que a extração informal e formal desempenha para aliviar o ímpeto do conflito.

Keywords

AndesPeruminingdevelopmentinformalityAndesPerúmineríadesarrolloinformalidadAndesPerumineraçãodesenvolvimentoinformalidade
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Latin American Studies , Volume 54 , Issue 4 , November 2022 , pp. 679 - 703
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

1 Throughout this article, pseudonyms have been used for all communities and individuals.

2 Comunidades campesinas are incorporated collective peasant communities within Peru found predominantly in the highlands. The terms ‘comunidad’ and ‘community’ are used interchangeably.

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5 Amongst the explosion of academic interest that has mirrored the rise of mining investment in the region, scholars have homed in on particular elements of conflict produced by mining investment: land tenure, environmental degradation, water rights, gender, livelihood transformation, rent-seeking etc. See Arellano-Yanguas, Javier, ‘Aggravating the Resource Curse: Decentralisation, Mining and Conflict in Peru’, The Journal of Development Studies, 47: 4 (2011), pp. 617–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bury, Jeffrey, ‘Livelihoods, Mining and Peasant Protests in the Peruvian Andes’, Journal of Latin American Geography, 1: 1 (2002), pp. 1–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bebbington, Anthony and Williams, Mark, ‘Water and Mining Conflicts in Peru’, Mountain Research and Development, 28: 3 (2008), pp. 190–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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11 Cf. Hugo Romero Toledo, Angélica Videla and Felipe Gutiérrez, ‘Explorando conflictos entre comunidades indígenas y la industria minera en Chile: Las transformaciones socioambientales de la región de Tarapacá y el caso de Lagunillas’, Estudios atacameños, 55 (2016), pp. 231–50.

12 ‘Hustling’, here, encapsulates a savvy and creative means of making ends meet, or, in the words of Nanna Jordt Jørgensen, of ‘[surviving] … through improvisation … making the most of any available opportunities for gaining a bit of income': ‘Hustling for Rights: Political Engagements with Sand in Northern Kenya’, in Elina Oinas et al. (eds.), What Politics? Youth and Political Engagement in Africa (Leiden: Brill, 2018), p. 143.

13 Appel, Hannah, ‘Offshore Work: Oil, Modularity, and the How of Capitalism in Equatorial Guinea’, American Ethnologist, 39: 4 (2012), pp. 692–709CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 MMG, Las Bambas Sustainability Report, Lima, 2017 (http://online.fliphtml5.com/zexo/xmbe/#p=1; last accessed 10 July 2022); CooperAcción, Caso Las Bambas: Informe Especial 2015, Lima, 2015 (https://cooperaccion.org.pe/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/2015-10-Las-Bambas-informe-OCM.pdf, last accessed 9 July 2022); ProInversión, Las Bambas: Un modelo de desarrollo sostenible (Lima: Agencia de Promoción de la Inversión Privada, 2005).

15 The word describes members of a comunidad campesina in Peru. However, its regional use extends beyond this formal definition, encompassing locals of the province regardless of their ‘official status’. Throughout the article, the latter more general use is employed.

16 For interesting insights into the nuances of women's lived experience on the margins of extraction, see Boudewijn, Inge A. M., ‘Negotiating Belonging and Place: An Exploration of Mestiza Women's Everyday Resistance in Cajamarca, Peru’, Human Geography, 13: 1 (2020), pp. 40–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jenkins, Katy, ‘Unearthing Women's Anti-Mining Activism in the Andes: Pachamama and the “Mad Old Women”’, Antipode, 47: 2 (2015), pp. 442–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For more global comparisons see Behzadi, Negar Elodie, ‘Women Miners’ Exclusion and Muslim Masculinities in Tajikistan: A Feminist Political Ecology of Honor and Shame’, Geoforum, 100 (2019), pp. 144–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Within mining regions in Peru, zones of ‘affectedness’ are determined by the technical assessments carried out as part of an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) prior to exploitation. Communities are identified in reference to both mineral deposits and points of environmental concern (water sources in particular). In the case of the Las Bambas project, 18 communities were officially recognised as being ‘affected’ by the mine (Golder Associates, ‘Estudio de Impacto Ambiental Proyecto Minero Las Bambas: Resumen Ejecutivo’, prepared for Xstrata Tintaya S.A., Arequipa, 2010, pp. 15–26). However, the local politics of ‘affectedness’ is subject to broader debates by communities and individuals who are not incorporated under the official designation.

18 One of the few ethnographic studies carried out in Cotabambas investigated the history and culture of local cattle theft, giving the region a certain outsized reputation as a lawless frontier of Peru. See Ricardo Valderrama and Carmen Escalante, Nosotros los humanos: Testimonio de los quechuas del siglo XX (Cuzco: Centro de Estudios Regionales Andinos/Bartolomé de las Casas, 1992).

19 Gustafsson, Maria-Therese, Private Politics and Peasant Mobilization: Mining in Peru (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; cf. Rasmussen, Mattias Borg, ‘Tactics of the Governed: Figures of Abandonment in Andean Peru’, Journal of Latin American Studies, 49: 2 (2017), pp. 327–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 See Berg, Ulla D., Mobile Selves: Race, Migration, and Belonging in Peru and the U.S. (New York: New York University Press, 2015)Google Scholar; Anahy Gajardo, ‘Performing the “India Permitida”: The Counter-Gift of Indigenous Women Targeted by a Corporate Social Responsibility Programme (Chile)’, Bulletin of Latin American Research, 40: 2 (2021), pp. 172–87; Leinaweaver, Jessaca B., ‘Improving Oneself: Young People Getting Ahead in the Peruvian Andes’, Latin American Perspectives, 35: 4 (2008), pp. 60–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Paerregaard, Karsten, Linking Separate Worlds: Urban Migrants and Rural Lives in Peru (Oxford: Berg, 1997)Google Scholar.

21 Van Vleet, Krista E., Hierarchies of Care: Girls, Motherhood, and Inequality in Peru (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2019)Google Scholar.

22 The historical significance of this should not be underestimated. While migratory movements of people in Peru is nothing new, traditionally the greatest flows of Peruvians have been those to the urban margins from rural villages. See Eric Hirsch, ‘Investment's Rituals: “Grassroots” Extractivism and the Making of an Indigenous Gold Mine in the Peruvian Andes’, Geoforum, 82 (2017), pp. 259–67; Peter Lloyd, The ‘Young Towns’ of Lima: Aspects of Urbanization in Peru (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).

23 Though the Anglo-Swiss multinational Xstrata won the initial bid for the Las Bambas concession in 2010 and carried out the early social work in the region, the project was sold to MMG in 2014.

24 Gustafsson, Private Politics, p. 145.

25 Ferguson, James, Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999)Google Scholar.

26 Gisa Weszkalnys, ‘A Doubtful Hope: Resource Affect in a Future Oil Economy’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 22: S1 (2016), pp. 127–46.

27 Kieran Gilfoy, ‘Toxic Endurance and Social Becoming: Environmentalism in the Shadows of Andean Extraction’, The Extractive Industries and Society (2021): https://doi.org/10.1016/j.exis.2021.100930.

28 Challhuahuacho, once a small back-water municipal town of adobe houses, became an energetic boomtown of services and speculation owing to its proximity to the Las Bambas concession.

29 Óscar had a partner and child who had remained in the barrio of Villa El Salvador on the outskirts of Lima.

30 CooperAcción, Caso Las Bambas, p. 3.

31 See, for example, García, María Elena, Making Indigenous Citizens: Identities, Education, and Multicultural Development in Peru (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gelles, Paul H., Water and Power in Highland Peru: The Cultural Politics of Irrigation and Development (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

32 Gelles, Water and Power, p. 45.

33 Cf. Himley, Matthew, ‘Regularizing Extraction in Andean Peru: Mining and Social Mobilization in an Age of Corporate Social Responsibility’, Antipode, 45: 2 (2013), pp. 394–416CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 MMG, Las Bambas Sustainability Report, p. 49.

35 Li, Unearthing Conflict, p. 19.

36 Dore, Elizabeth, ‘Environment and Society: Long-Term Trends in Latin American Mining’, Environment and History, 6: 1 (2000), pp. 1–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37 See Himley, ‘Regularizing Extraction’; Stuart Kirsch, Mining Capitalism: The Relationship between Corporations and their Critics (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2014); Arboleda, Martín, Planetary Mine: Territories of Extraction under Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 2020)Google Scholar.

38 See Himley, ‘Regularizing Extraction’. For a historical overview see Brown, Kendall W., A History of Mining in Latin America: From the Colonial Era to the Present (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2012)Google Scholar and Dore, Elizabeth, The Peruvian Mining Industry: Growth, Stagnation, and Crisis (London: Routledge, 1988)Google Scholar.

39 See Crabtree, John, ‘Funding Local Government: Use (and Abuse) of Peru's Canon System’, Bulletin of Latin American Research, 33: 4 (2014), pp. 452–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40 For further reading on rise of ‘surplus populations’ in contemporary capitalism, see Kathleen M. Millar, Reclaiming the Discarded: Life and Labor on Rio's Garbage Dump (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018); James Ferguson, Give a Man a Fish: Reflections on the New Politics of Distribution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015); Tania Murray Li, ‘After Development: Surplus Population and the Politics of Entitlement’, Development and Change, 48: 6 (2017), pp. 1247–61.

41 June Nash's We Eat the Mines and the Mines Eat us: Dependency and Exploitation in Bolivian Tin Mines (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979) and Michael T. Taussig's The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1980) are primarily concerned with the ‘devilish’ consequences of a labour force folded into global capitalism. Contemporary extraction turns the riddle on its head, pushing locals aside from production activities. The new ‘devil’ must be found in the margins of exploitation.

42 Ferguson, James, ‘Declarations of Dependence: Labour, Personhood, and Welfare in Southern Africa’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 19: 2 (2013), pp. 223–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

43 Fuerabamba was a comunidad campesina that sat directly upon the first prominent deposits which Xstrata and then MMG intended to exploit, and thus was relocated. As part of the negotiations on the relocation agreement, Fuerabamba stipulated preferential contracts for service provision with the mine owners.

44 I borrow the term from Henrik Vigh, who conceptualises navigation as the movement through social worlds, across waves of obstacles, ‘negotiating the many more to come on one's way along an envisioned course’. See Vigh, Henrik, Navigating Terrains of War: Youth and Soldiering in Guinea-Bissau (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2006), p. 54Google Scholar.

45 See José Nun et al., ‘Marginalidad en América Latina’, Centro de Investigaciones Sociales, Instituto Torcuato di Tella, Buenos Aires, 1968; Janice E. Perlman, The Myth of Marginality: Urban Poverty and Politics in Rio de Janeiro (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976); for brief overview see Kristine Kilanski and Javier Auyero, ‘Introduction’, in Javier Auyero et al. (eds.), Violence at the Urban Margins (New York: University of Oxford Press, 2015), pp. 1–17.

46 Appel, Hannah C., ‘Walls and White Elephants: Oil Extraction, Responsibility, and Infrastructural Violence in Equatorial Guinea’, Ethnography, 13: 4 (2012), pp. 439–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

47 Ferguson, James, Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), pp. 194–210Google Scholar.

48 Himley, ‘Regularizing Extraction’, p. 399.

49 The continued exploitation of colonial and republican mines by local populations is neither new nor unique within Latin America. See Marston, Andrea, ‘Of Flesh and Ore: Material Histories and Embodied Geologies’, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 111: 7 (2021), pp. 2078–95Google Scholar.

50 Ccochasayhuas was one of the few large-scale mining operations which existed in eastern Apurímac during the twentieth century.

51 Behzadi, ‘Women Miners’ Exclusion’; Hilson, Gavin and Osei, Lydia, ‘Tackling Youth Unemployment in Sub-Saharan Africa: Is There a Role for Artisanal and Small-Scale Mining?’, Futures, 62 (2014), pp. 83–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Marston, Andrea and Kennemore, Amy, ‘Extraction, Revolution, Plurinationalism: Rethinking Extractivism from Bolivia’, Latin American Perspectives, 46: 2 (2019), pp. 141–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

52 Perforistas, when it comes to small-scale or artisanal mining, are generally in charge of explosives and ‘reading’ the walls of a mine shaft.

53 Peru, like most neoliberal countries in Latin America, establishes a legal distinction between surface and subsoil rights enshrined in the Ley General de Minería (General Mining Law) of 4 June 1992, decree no. 014-92-EM (https://www2.congreso.gob.pe/sicr/cendocbib/con3_uibd.nsf/89E200B65DCF6DE9052578C30077AC47/$FILE/DS_014-92-EM.pdf, last accessed 14 June 2022). While the comuneros of Ccancayllo were the proprietors of the land they walked upon, the copper below belonged to the corporate concession holder (MMG).

54 Beginning in late 2016, then President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski began legal proceedings to formalise small-scale mining throughout the country. By 2017 the formalisation process had begun to permeate not only national media but the cantinas of Challhuahuacho as well.

55 According to a number of friends and acquaintances throughout the region, this tacit agreement was dependent upon a corporate stipulation that no heavy equipment (e.g. excavators, backhoes, etc.) be used in the communities’ artisanal mines.

56 Appel, ‘Offshore Work’.

57 Ibid., p. 693.