Anita Carrasco

Dorm Room Number: 505-9954284/Extension No. 4284

My name is Anita Carrasco, I was born in 1977 in Santiago-Chile and was raised in a mining town in northern chile. I am currently a last year PhD student at the School of Anthropology at The University of Arizona. I am writing my dissertation titled: One World, Many Ethics. The Politics of Mining and Indigenous Peoples in Atacama. In the context of my research interests, the concept of sustainable development has attracted my attention in my effort to understand how mining corporations around the world are making claims of sustainability in the way they conduct business. It is hard to believe claims that hold that it is possible to extract non-renewal natural resources and at the same time be sustainable with the environment and communities nearby mining sites. If we revise the concept of sustainability, it was first introduced to the public in 1987 by the Brundland Report titled Our Common Future. Here, sustainability was defined as “the ability to meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations…to meet their own needs.” If critical, the first question that should arise from this broad and vague definition is who defines what those ‘needs’ are? In my research, I have been studying the relations between the national copper corporation of Chile (CODELCO) and Atacameño indigenous peoples in northern Chile. Atacameño men and women have been subject to the impacts of mining throughout the course of the 20th century and still are today. My research investigates: (1) how a mining economy has impacted the lives and families of Atacameños in the city of Calama and the rural villages of Cupo, Turi and Toconce. Specifically, it will compare and contrast ethical systems that shape views of justice and the environment in the world: indigenous peoples’ views, mining corporations’ views, and the state, and (2) how the different underlying ethical systems are determining the outcomes of corporation-community relations in the Atacama region and how they influence political decisions that regulate these relationships. For Atacameños, ideas of citizenship, identity, and forced migrations are deeply politicized due to the historical presence of mineral and water extraction in the Atacama Desert. The War of the Pacific against Peru and Bolivia (1879) led to a Chilean annexation of the territory that inaugurated a process of exploitation for Nitrate by English firms until the early 1900s, and Copper by American firms (Anaconda) from the beginning of the 20th century until 1970. This was the year when the socialist government of Salvador Allende nationalized the copper industry (Sanhueza and Gundermann 2007). While Atacameños’s opposition to mining is mainly focused on a critique of the excessive ‘greed’ of corporations, specially their voracious consumption of water in the region, the Chilean government has promoted the development of large-scale resource extraction projects as a priority for the country. This has displaced the interests of minorities and has ignored the historical impacts that mining has had on Atacameños in the region such as the deterioration of agricultural and herding activities. Consequently, the political resentment in particular among urban Atacameños, has caused social bitterness and dislike among the different interests groups. Indigenous narratives challenge official versions of mining-community relations in the region, particularly government claims of sustainability, and versions of territoriality and water represented by the Chilean state, the National Copper Corporation (CODELCO) and other private mining firms working in the region. In my research, Atacameño narratives are viewed as accounts of local understandings of historical relationships with mining corporations that expose complex internal divisions among Atacameños absent from official narratives that serve to support the state, corporations, and their political and economic agendas. My research will provide new insights on the role of ethics in the shaping of mining-community relations. In particular, it looks at how political decisions that regulate them are being legitimized through the co-optation of the discourse of sustainable development. This co-optation of sustainability allows the state and corporations to move current problems of environmental and social impacts to an unspecified time of future generations. This move distracts attention from the contemporary transformations that the peoples of today are going through. These transformations are making people’s livelihoods and cultures unsustainable in the contexts of those who have the power to define the “needs’ of present and future generations.