Unearthing Conflict: Corporate Mining, Activism, and Expertise in Peru by Fabian Li (review)

All over the world, local community opposition and conflicts over energy and corporate extractive projects are on the rise. Protests arise from concerns about environmental degradation and cultural invasion or a sense that the economic benefits are not adequately distributed to local communities. From the debate over the environmental impacts of hydraulic fracturing in the United States to violent protests such as that in Bagua in Peru in 2001, local opposition has had major impacts, sometimes halting or delaying projects in the hydrocarbon, mining and renewable energy sectors in the Americas. These clashes present a great dilemma for governments that must ensure the supply of energy and natural resources for domestic consumption and that rely on tax revenues from the exports of such industries.

Latin America is among the regions where such conflicts are most widespread. The regions’ economies are particularly reliant on commodity exports. According to the World Bank between 1990 and 1997, investment in mining exportations grew by 90 percent at the global level, by 400 percent in Latin America and by 2,000 percent in Peru. In the early twenty-first century high prices of metals continued to drive the expansion of mining frontiers into areas formerly used for agriculture and farming, affecting more than half of Peru’s 6,000 campesino communities. This has led to a spike in conflicts over natural resources, some of which have turned violent. Local communities’ grievances are mostly tied to demands for greater economic benefits, environmental protection, or land rights. Governments lack clear processes, adequate resources, and the political ability to prevent or defuse such conflicts, leaving companies with too much responsibility for direct mediation.

As Fabiana Li shows in her timely and stimulating Unearthing Conflict, nowhere have these issues been more intensely engaged than in Peru. Popular protests have proliferated in many parts of the country in recent years, from Cajamarca and Piura in the north, to the smelter town of La Oroya in the Central highlands, to the southern departments of Cuzco and Arequipa. Li is a native of Oroya where the Cerro de Pasco copper smelter created a pollution and environmental disaster over a century ago. After studying in the United States, she returned to Peru to research her dissertation on the mining conflicts that have been roiling the country since 1990. Her case study centres on gold production at the Yanacocha mine in Cajamarca, South America’s largest gold mine, and the nearby proposed Conga mine where residents and the company became embroiled in an intense conflict over plans to develop yet another gold mine.

Li shows how the current protests differ from miners’ strikes of the past over higher wages, better working conditions and more equitable distribution of mining revenues. While environmental issues sometimes accompanied these demands culminating in calls for nationalization, today’s key concerns are about pollution, biodiversity, and water scarcity.

To answer why this change has occurred Li examines “the changing technologies and practices of mineral extraction, the deployment of expert and non-expert knowledge in disputes over nature, and emergent forms of political activism that has accompanied mining activity in Peru” (3). She shows how the politics of protest has changed as well, to the point that pro and anti-mining forces cannot easily be defined in traditional, mostly ideological terms. Rather both sides comprise now a diverse group of actors, not just mine workers against the mining companies, but rather peasants, unions, students, environmentalists, urban professionals, church groups, and ngos. Equally significant, demonstrations have occurred in support of mining companies, not just against them. Li’s study reveals the shifting alliances among these various actors and the sometimes ambiguous and contradictory relationships between communities and mining companies.

Li’s main contribution to analyzing this new state of affairs in mining is her application of the anthropological concept of “equivalence” by which she means the methods with which to quantify and...