Where Rivers Meet the Sea: The Political Ecology of Water

8. Convergent Protest from the Provinces: Hydroelectricity Gold Mining = Water Predation

8 Convergent Protest from the Provinces Hydroelectricity + Gold Mining = Water Predation Contesting the Complicit State: Destruction as Development T he language of development provides a cloak of legitimacy that protects the perpetrators of environmental crimes committed in the context of megaengineering projects (Svampa and Antonelli 2009). From the point of view of neighborhood activists engaged in the struggle to assert alternatives, a criminogenic impulse is part and parcel of eco-blind megaengineering projects and of the state that coproduces them. The projects are ir/regular and il/legal water-dependent machines that global outlaws (Nordstrom 2007) use to bypass national sovereignty and human rights; the global outlaws negotiate inside and outside legitimate institutions and businesses. To resist the illusion of development, to recognize the harms, and to call into account those who perpetrate such harms requires the convergence of organized, expressive, dedicated, and diverse people—that is, a social movement across multiple scales that includes, among other kinds of practices, staging street actions in cities. Through their intersecting journeys, activist groups expand the scale and relevance of cities as spaces for environmental politics, at the same time tearing holes in the illusionists ’ imperial cloaks. Coordinators of events bring public attention to particular crises through tactical improvisations that vary timing, intensity, participation, and style. This chapter analyzes activist perspectives and cultural repertoires in a series of encounters and demonstrations in Buenos Aires. The events show how struggles against environmental injustice in the provinces mediate local and global fields of power in the capital city. 152 / Buenos Aires, Argentina A serendipitous convergent event inspires the analysis. In it, Andean mountain activists and a porteño women’s performance group arrive to contest the open-pit mining operations of Barrick Gold. The Paraná River people displaced by the hydroelectric dam Yacyretá, who earlier today protested outside the Supreme Court nearby, join them. The convergence of neighborhood activists from far-flung provinces takes the form of a mass-mediated rally in central Buenos Aires, a few blocks from the iconic Obelisk, at the house of the allegedly traitorous provincial governor of San Juan, José Luis Gioja. When activists bring together hydroelectricity and gold mining as coincident modes of environmental destruction, watershed destruction emerges as a unifying theme. The account of this and other selected events follows fieldwork chronology. In Flux in Moon Land: River People Displaced by the Yacyretá Hydroelectric Dam Yacyretá1 represents hope, life, and it declares the dream as real as the splendor that gushes from the waters of the Paraná River. A project born with the century, later overcoming delays and difficulties, has transformed into a tangible reality and a milestone for the people of America who have understood that progress and development is conquered with the integration of resources and the purity of their courage. —Binational Entity of Yacyretá (EBY)2 Wednesday, May 23, Café in the Madres de Plaza de Mayo University, Congress Plaza Argeo Ameztoy, a photographer and activist whom we met on World Water Day, has just returned from his journey to the Paraguayan side of the hydroelectric dam Yacyretá, where he conversed with and photographed people identifying themselves as Mbyā Guaraní.3 They once lived on the islands in the river and were moved without adequate reparations. I summarize his introduction to this complicated and evolving situation. Topography-Driven History Open and flat topography distinguishes Yacyretá from other hydroelectric dams. Instead of the usual drop in elevation that enhances the generation of hydroelectricity, Yacyretá is an extraordinarily long, seventy-kilometer wall across the Paraná River, an engineering feat that required flooding a 110,000-hectare expanse crossing the Argentina-Paraguay border. The first assessment of the huge river’s hydroelectric potential was done in the 1920s, another proposal was made in the 1950s, and then in 1973 the deal was signed that led to the formation of the public corporation that owns Convergent Protest from the Provinces / 153 and administers the project: Binational Entity of Yacyretá (EBY, Entidad Binacional Yacyretá). Now, thirty-four years later, EBY has not yet but still hopes to meet its original energy-production goal. This requires raising the water level behind the wall another meter, causing an additional 50,000 hectares of flooding, for a total of 160,000 hectares submerged. Disparities Argentina, with the assistance of World Bank and Inter-American Devel­ opment Bank loans, bore 80 percent of the cost. Much money was stolen, construction proceeded...