Subterranean Struggles: New Dynamics of Mining, Oil, and Gas in Latin America

6. Territorial Transformations in El Pangui, Ecuador: Understanding How Mining Conflict Affects Territorial Dynamics, Social Mobilization, and Daily Life

CHAPTER 6 Territorial Transformations in El Pangui, Ecuador: Understanding How Mining Conflict Affects Territorial Dynamics, Social Mobilization, and Daily Life XimEnA s. WArnAArs Introduction The lush green mountain range of the Cordillera del Cóndor lies in the very southeast of Ecuador. With its valleys and steep cliffs covered by the dense cloud forest air, the Cordillera has become host to mines of various forms and guises. In the 1990s, these mountains were covered in landmines placed by the military during the war with Peru. Today, in these same mountains, transnational companies seek to develop mines in order to extract gold and copper on both sides of the border. The arrival in the early 2000s of largescale mining projects owned by the Canadian companies Corriente Resources and Kinross-Aurelian has triggered resistance among local populations. Social and armed political conflicts are once again becoming part of everyday life for people living along the Cordillera.1 In this chapter I seek to understand the ongoing social transformations in the parish of El Pangui in Zamora Chinchipe province that are, I argue, a result of increased mining conflict and social mobilization. I examine the effects of these mining projects on preexisting territorial dynamics and the influence of these territorial dynamics on the ways in which mining investments are contested. I am particularly interested in those less-visible dimensions of environmental struggle that are embedded in the routines of daily life, as well as in the ways in which the memory and history of territorialization and settlement influence social movement organizing. I suggest that at the heart of territorial dynamics one finds differing understandings of, and meanings apportioned to, nature–society relationships that over time have contributed to a layering of conflicts in the Cordillera del Cóndor. 150 Warnaars The editors of this volume call for a deeper engagement with the subsoil because of its immense power in and significance for societal and territorial transformations. In this chapter I reiterate that call by presenting a case study2 in which the presence of subsoil mineral deposits has set in motion a range of transformations. The case is particularly interesting from the perspective of a political ecology of the subsoil because the minerals in question have not yet crossed the earthly boundary in any material sense, to interact with human practice or the global economy. Symbolically, however, they have long since crossed this boundary and, in the process, have triggered profound societal transformations. Following a brief conceptual discussion, I introduce the region of southeast Ecuador and my methodological approach to studying mining conflicts. On that basis, I then analyze the ways in which conflicts over extraction, territorial change, and everyday life have become mutually constitutive in and around El Pangui, discussing implications for political ecologies of social movement activity around the subsoil. Literature Review Studies of struggles over natural resources have drawn attention to a range of issues: the causes of these social conflicts and the socioenvironmental impacts of extractive industry (Geddicks 1993; Ballard and Banks 2003, 19; Bury 2004); the ways in which people seek environmental justice (Tsing 2000; Perreault 2006; Bebbington 2007b); the relationships among extractive industry , environment, livelihoods, and institutional change (Bebbington and Bury 2009); and the bearing of indigeneity and identity politics on extraction (Ali 2003; Sawyer 2004; Kirsch 2006). While the argument of this chapter is located in these traditions, my particular concern is to push their boundaries forward. In particular, I seek to show (1) the ways in which struggles and social movements around mining are themselves artifacts of prior and ongoing processes of territorialization as much as they are shapers of territory, (2) the importance of memory, popular ontologies, and everyday practices in determining how mining and territorial dynamics affect each other, and (3) that territory—its identity, its control, its physiognomy, its meaning—is constituted at the interface of the territorializing projects of mining companies and local populations. In the following three subsections, I explore some of the ideas that underlie this analysis, relating them to other currents of thought within the broad fields of political ecology and social movement studies. Territorial Transformations in El Pangui, Ecuador 151 Environmental Struggles and Struggles Over Meaning Political ecologists understand that conflicts involving the environment are as much about meaning as they are about land and resources (Peet and Watts 2004). Here, values and beliefs can shape people’s identities and mobilize actions, such that cultural meanings...