중남미

Politicizing water in mining conflicts: Discourses and resistances in Chile and Argentina. The last two decades have seen a proliferation of socioenvironmental conflicts in relation to the expansion of mining activity in Latin America. In this context water stands out as a central axis and common denominator. The existing academic literature documents the impacts on water generated by mining activity, the social movements that have arisen in response to such impacts, and the responses of the State to the conflicts that have emerged in relation to water resources. What has received less attention is the discursive construction of the water issue by the actors mobilized in its defence; our objective is to contribute to strengthening the research agenda in this dimension. We address this issue through a comparative study between cases from Chile and Argentina. There we find a variety of discourses related to water: scarcity, contamination, the vulnerability of glaciers, and water as a referent for territory. We aim to identify the ‘political productivity’ of these discourses: their role in the conceptualization of water by political actors, in the strategies of social movements for the defence of water, in the evolution of debates about the use and protection of the resource, and in the formation of public policy to regulate the relationship between water and mining activity