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Tom Perreault
Department of Geography, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, USA;
taperrea@maxwell.syr.edu
Introduction
Viewed from a distance, Bolivia’s Huanuni Valley appears a bucolic place. The valley is
home to numerous Quechua-speaking indigenous campesino1 communities, whose
residents labor to grow quinoa, potatoes, fava beans and other Andean crops. Their
small farms and mud-brick homes dot the valley floor, and their llamas, sheep
and cattle graze in the surrounding fields. The valley is watered by the Huanuni
River, which flows northwest from its headwaters in the Cordillera de los Frailes
toward shallow and saline Lake Uru Uru. But in spite of appearances, the history
of this valley has been far from tranquil. Indeed, the landscape bears witness to
successive waves of conquest and subjugation: the Incas, who dominated the Uru
Chipaya and Aymara peoples of the region, ruled the valley for less than a century
before themselves being supplanted by the Spanish in the early 1500s. The Spanish
were in turn defeated 300 years later in Bolı́var’s revolution, making way for the
establishment of Republican-era haciendas, or agricultural estates, controlled by
a handful of criollo (white) elites. The parents and grandparents of the valley’s
contemporary residents were pongos, or bonded indigenous agricultural laborers,
liberated from peonage in 1945 and granted land by the agrarian reform of 1953
that dissolved the haciendas and the system of racialized serfdom it entailed.
The 1952 Social Revolution, which divided hacienda lands among pongo
communities, also led to the intensification of mining activity in the hills above
the valley. No sooner were the indigenous campesino communities granted rights
to land and water through the agrarian reform than the benefits of those newfound
rights began to be stripped away through an inexorable process of environmental
deterioration. Mining activity and associated contamination in the valley have waxed
and waned since the early twentieth century, but have intensified markedly during
the past decade, with an increase in the price of tin and the reactivation in 2006
of the state mining company, COMIBOL. Before broadening out in the Huanuni
Valley, the river passes below and provides water for the state-owned Huanuni
tin mine. Upriver from the mine, the river’s waters are clean enough to irrigate
crops, but below the mine it flows gunmetal gray, choked with sediment from the
mine’s processing plant, and laden with heavy metals, chemical pollutants, sewage
and solid waste. During the rainy season (October through February), the swollen
river deposits toxic silt on riverbank fields, rendering them infertile and forcing
residents uphill, away from the water’s edge. Wells have been contaminated and
animals sickened. Residents suffer a variety of health problems, including respiratory
ailments exacerbated by sediments borne aloft by August winds. Faced with the
loss of land and water and the difficulty of raising crops and livestock, residents
leave their communities in search of work in Bolivia’s major cities, or in neighboring
Argentina or Brazil.
Hydrosocial relations in the Huanuni Valley have been profoundly shaped by
mining. The effects of the river’s flow both embody and reproduce highly unequal
and historically sedimented relations of power and social exclusion. In Marxian
terms, the residents of the Huanuni Valley are steadily being separated from their
means of production and social reproduction. The process underway, though
different in character from the enclosures, enslavement and bondage to public debt
described by Marx in his discussion of the “so-called primitive accumulation”, is just
as surely a forceful alienation of labor from the land, and with it the proletarianization
of indigenous smallholders. Harvey’s (2003) effort to update Marx’s formulation
is by now well known. In this conceptualization, the forms of dispossession that
mark primitive accumulation are not merely the “original sin of capitalism” as Marx
infers, but rather an ongoing process, necessary to accumulation and undertaken
as a strategy in response to recurrent crises of overaccumulation. Accumulation
by dispossession is, for Harvey, the predominant mode of accumulation under
neoliberal capitalism. But whereas the dispossession of collective rights and access
to water has most commonly been equated with processes of privatization or
marketization (eg Swyngedouw 2005), water’s dispossession can take other forms,
including contamination, which remove it from the public sphere and effectively
enclose it. I argue below for an expanded understanding of primitive accumulation,
that accounts for the contingent role of nature in shaping pathways of accumulation
and dispossession (Sneddon 2007), as well as the ways dispossession shapes patterns
of, and opportunities for, social reproduction (Roberts 2008).
In this paper, I seek to understand the complex relationship between the accumu-
lation of toxic sediments and the dispossessionary effects of capital accumulation. I
take up these themes through an examination of mine-related water contamination
in Bolivia’s Huanuni River Valley, and its implications for social reproduction in
14 indigenous campesino communities downstream from the Huanuni mine.
In particular, the paper semantically inverts Harvey’s formulation of accumulation
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outside itself to assure ongoing accumulation, and her insights regarding the extra-
economic characteristics of accumulation have been widely influential. Indeed,
the relationship between capitalism and pre- or extra-capitalist relations lay
at the heart of much dependency theory and world systems thinking (Amin
1974). If, as Harvey argues, there is something distinctive about accumulation
under neoliberal capitalism, it is also the case that processes of dispossession,
enclosure, commodification and proletarianization have long been a sine qua non
of accumulation under capitalism more generally (Perelman 2000).
Indeed, as Hall (2012) points out, all conceptions of primitive accumulation
involve some theorization of capitalism’s “inside” and “outside”, with an
understanding that non-capitalist social relations and conditions of production are
functional to capitalism inasmuch as they permit capital to externalize the costs
of production (for instance, as ecological fixes via pollution and other forms of
environmental degradation), and offload costs of reproducing the workforce (see
Bakker 2009; Glassman 2006; Roberts 2008). A similar understanding is present in
de Janvry’s (1981) twin notions of sectoral disarticulation and functional dualism,
whereby an export-oriented, capitalist sector co-exists with an internally oriented
subsistence sector. In de Janvry’s conceptualization, the immiserated subsistence
sector (ie the peasant economy in his case and mine) is disarticulated from, and
subsidizes through its cheap labor and social reproduction, the export-oriented
industrial sector. In this way, the subsistence sector, only partially incorporated into
capitalist relations, is functional to the accumulation of capital. As I argue below,
such is the case in the Huanuni Valley, where the cheap, semi-subsistence, migratory
labor force partially underwrites mining and urban capital.
This recognition points to the various means by which dispossession, accumu-
lation, and proletarianization can occur. While not tying primitive accumulation
to specific crises of overaccumulation (as Harvey does with accumulation by
dispossession), Marx nevertheless recognizes that primitive accumulation is an
ongoing process with diverse geographies and histories (Perelman 2000). In his
analysis of the concept, De Angelis (2001:11) is unequivocal on this point, arguing
that Marx’s conception of primitive accumulation assumes many forms, and is
not limited to direct land enclosures. Elsewhere, De Angelis (2004:68, emphasis
in original) makes two related points:
In short, primitive accumulation is, as Marx (1967:714) notes, “nothing else than
the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production” as
a precondition for capital accumulation. On this point there is little disagreement.
However, the strategic element of primitive accumulation—noted by De Angelis,
and an underlying supposition in Harvey’s discussion—merits reconsideration.
Certainly there is little doubt that the expulsion of the peasantry from enclosed sheep
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runs or the privatization and patenting of seed varieties represent specific strategies
for accumulating capital. But it is also true, as Li (2009) notes, that the process of
proletarianization implies two distinct phases: dispossession of the laborer, and her
or his absorption into the labor force, moments that may be widely separated in
time and space. Marx himself implicitly recognized as much in his discussion of the
“bloody legislation against the expropriated” that targeted beggars, robbers, and
vagabonds over the course of several centuries (Marx 1967). Dispossession often
takes time and may bear no relation to employment prospects for the dispossessed.
The Huanuni Valley is one such place, where capital makes use of land and natural
resources, but has little use for the labor of local residents.
Insofar as Harvey (2003) places his emphasis on processes of enclosure as opposed
to proletarianization, his reformulation of Marx proves a useful analytic for examining
the dispossession of rights to land, water and other natural resources. And as
Glassman (2006) and Levien (2012) have pointed out, it is precisely the extra-
economic character of accumulation by dispossession that lends the concept its
analytical heft, by distinguishing these processes from accumulation by expanded
reproduction. As such, I argue for close examination of the extra-economic means
through which dispossession occurs, and in particular, the ways that nature is
enrolled in these processes. Such an approach recognizes that any project of
enclosure is necessarily and simultaneously an environmental project (Sneddon
2007), an analytical doorway Harvey opened but did not pass through himself.
In what follows I argue for greater attention to the contingent role played by
nature’s materiality in processes of dispossession—what I refer to as “dispossession
by accumulation”—less a critique than a critical extension of Harvey’s ideas. These
processes are particularly visible in the valley’s historically sedimented hydrosocial
relations, discussed below.
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increased economic and political opportunity, and the specter of expanded resource
extraction and associated pollution on their lands.
This dilemma speaks to the quandary of the “new extractivism” (Bebbington
2009; Gudynas 2009), in which governments throughout the Andean region, and
across the political spectrum, are increasingly relying on extractive industries to
generate rents. To be sure, resource extraction has been a mainstay of Latin American
economies since the colonial period. But the recent increase in global commodity
prices, combined with technological advances that permit extraction in places and
at scales not previously seen, have increased pressure on governments to allow
foreign investment in mining, gas and oil extraction (Gudynas 2009). Moreover, to
one degree or another, Andean governments are using mining and hydrocarbons
rents to fund social welfare programs which, depending on one’s perspective,
represent either a new social contract or a Faustian bargain (Bebbington et al
2008). Among Left and Left-leaning governments, including Venezuela, Ecuador,
Bolivia, and Argentina, many of these policies have been implemented under the
guise of “post-neoliberal” politics (Bebbington and Humphreys Bebbington 2010).
Wishful prefixes notwithstanding, these governments have had only partial success
in shedding their neoliberal trappings, owing both to the path-dependent nature
of state economic and social policies (Kaup 2010) and the enduring structural
dependency of resource-based economies (Kohl and Farthing 2012).
In Bolivia, Evo Morales and his Movement to Socialism party have established
subsidies for the poor, the elderly, and young children, paid for with rents from gas
development and (to a lesser extent) mining. It has also reasserted state control over
key extractive sectors, including the reactivation of the state mining firm COMIBOL.
These moves, combined with high commodity prices internationally, have served
to increase the government’s fiscal dependence on extractive industries. But the
state remains similarly dependent on foreign investment and technology to develop
its hydrocarbons and mineral reserves, exacerbating the longstanding inequities in
costs and benefits associated with these activities, and limiting the state’s ability
to translate extraction into more equitable and durable forms of development
(Gudynas 2009; Laing 2012). These effects are particularly visible in the context
of mining and dispossession in the Huanuni Valley, examined below.
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Figure 1: Huanuni River valley (cartography by Joe Stoll, Syracuse University Cartographic
Lab)
all cases exceeding levels permissible under Bolivian law. Similar results were found
in a study of the Huanuni River by Montoya et al (2010), who reported low pH (3.5)
and excessive concentrations of cadmium, lead, iron and zinc.
Following a turbulent history that has seen nationalization (during the Social
Revolution of 1952), closure (during the first wave of neoliberal reforms in 1985),
and privatization (when the government finally found an investor in the late
1990s), mining activity at Huanuni has increased substantially during the past
decade. In 2002, COMIBOL reassumed control of the mine after the collapse of
a short-lived arrangement with the British firm Allied Deals (López et al 2010).
COMIBOL continued to operate with a reduced workforce, in conjunction with
mining cooperatives that excavated sections of the mine. In 2006, a confrontation
between COMIBOL and cooperativista miners left 17 dead and led the state to absorb
the cooperatives, increasing the COMIBOL workforce from roughly 700 workers to
over 4500 (Howard and Dangl 2006). The enlarged workforce both permitted and
necessitated an increase in production, from 400 tons of ore extracted daily in
2006, to over 1000 tons per day in 2010, a move facilitated by rising tin prices
internationally (López et al 2010; MMM 2009).
While the reactivation of the Huanuni mine may be a boon to miners, COMIBOL
and the state treasury, increased production has meant increased pollution for the
indigenous campesino communities downstream from the mine. Ore extracted
from the mine is processed in one of two concentrating plants: the Santa Elena
plant, adjacent to the mine, has a capacity of 1200 tons per day, and handles
the bulk of the ore. A smaller proportion is trucked daily to the Machacamarca
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plant, with a capacity of 200 tons per day, located roughly 15 km downriver (López
et al 2010). The Santa Elena plant has never had an adequate containment reservoir
to retain processed and highly contaminated sediment. Instead, these sediments,
which contain heavy metals and chemicals used in processing ore, are discharged
directly into the Huanuni River. Some of this sediment is trucked to a location below
the town of Huanuni and deposited on the river’s banks, to be worked by relaveros5
who channel it into pools where the sediments are mixed with sulfuric acid and
hydrocarbons such as kerosene or spent motor oil (among other chemicals) in order
to settle out any mineral that remains in the sediments after processing (Moeller
2002). No measures are taken for environmental protection (or the health and
safety of the workers), and these chemicals are washed directly into the river. In
contrast to the Santa Elena processing plant, the Machacamarca plant does have a
containment reservoir, which is currently near capacity. A small group of relaveros
works the processed sediments that for years have accumulated below the reservoir.
Water seeping from the containment reservoir and the relavero operations makes
its way downstream and into the Huanuni River, less than a kilometer away.
The environmental impacts of Huanuni’s mining operations are severe. Analysis
of water and soil samples taken at three sites in the Huanuni River and one site
in the Santa Fe River (just upstream from its confluence with the Huanuni) found
extremely low pH values, and elevated levels of cadmium, copper, zinc and sulfates
(SO 4 ). Similar results were reported for the Huanuni River by Montoya et al (2010).
Discharge from the Santa Elena processing plant has increased the river’s sediment
load, and led to an increase in braiding and erosion of the river’s banks (Zamora
et al 2010). Solid waste and sewage from the town of Huanuni, at the base of the
mine, are deposited directly into the river, and affect water quality for communities
downstream.6 As a result, the river below Huanuni is polluted in the extreme. It
supports no plant or animal life, and suffers from low pH and dissolved oxygen,
and high levels of heavy metal contamination. The water can no longer be used
for irrigation, let alone consumption, and residents must be watchful to make
sure their sheep, cattle and llamas do not wander down to the river for a drink.
The accumulation of contaminants in water and soil, together with the spatial
expansion of the mine and its impacts, conspire to dispossess indigenous campesino
communities of their lands, water and livelihoods. These processes highlight the
relationship between dispossession and the biophysical characteristics of particular
forms of nature—in this case water, sediment, and biotoxins (cf Sneddon 2007).
Similarly, they point to the role that primitive accumulation plays in shaping the
geographies of social reproduction (and vice versa; Roberts 2008). Below, I detail
three ways in which this process, which I refer to as “dispossession by accumulation”,
is occurring.
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Data from water samples taken by author, 1 June 2011. Analysis conducted by Spectrolab chemical
analysis laboratory, Universidad Técnica de Oruro. “Class B standard” refers to Bolivian government
standard for water suitable for agricultural and household uses, but not for human consumption.
months, between September and March, with April–August typically seeing little or
no rainfall (PPO 1996). The river’s high sediment load, a result of discharge from the
Santa Elena processing plant, contributes to a broadened floodplain and sandbars
in the river. In addition to collecting plastic debris that floats downstream from the
town of Huanuni, the river’s banks, sandbars and floodplain collect sediments with
elevated heavy metals content. Analysis of sediments from the river’s edge indicates
elevated levels of cadmium, copper, mercury and zinc (see Table 1). During the dry
season, these desiccated sediments are carried aloft by windstorms.
Lands along the river were once considered the most desirable, both for
agriculture and for residence, as evidenced by the fact that the ruins of most
hacienda houses in the valley are located adjacent to the Huanuni River, or one of
its two major tributaries, the Cebada Mayu River or Santa Fe River. Hacienda owners
claimed the best lands and building sites for themselves, leaving less desirable plots
for their pongo laborers. But those houses closest to the river are now surrounded by
infertile and abandoned lands. During household interviews, community members
whose lands and houses are situated adjacent to the river complained of declining
crop yields and soils contaminated by the river and windborne silts. The river’s
extreme pollution has rendered it unsuitable for irrigation, and numerous canals are
left dry and abandoned. Many riverside residents have left their homes altogether
and moved uphill, away from the river’s edge, in search of more fertile land and
cleaner water. As one resident of the community of Quimsa Mayu noted, only half
joking, “There are two types of land here: land that is contaminated, and land that
is going to be contaminated” (anonymized interview, 6 April 2011).
Downriver, in the community of Allkumarka, the river’s floodplain is at its
broadest, and the flood and sedimentation problem at its most acute. Here,
where seasonal floods deposit their sediment load, it has been estimated that
contaminated mining sediments are over a meter deep (Montoya et al 2010).
Allkumarka is the only community in the valley located downstream from the
Machacamarca concentrating plant. As a result, it receives a greater load of sediment
and contamination than other communities. The floodplain in this area is vast
and barren, and the native grasses are stunted and appear burnt. Agricultural
production has declined dramatically in the past generation, a result of many factors
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Number %
Based on interviewee responses to household survey, and not direct observation (n = 105).
indicated that they do not have sufficient water to meet their daily needs (see
Table 2). Over 40% of households surveyed reported having to haul water for
daily use on a regular basis. Most (though by no means all) of these households
are in the community of Allkumarka, where there is widespread and acute water
scarcity. In other communities, households without access to potable water tend to
be those adjacent to the river’s edge, where groundwater and agricultural lands are
contaminated by the river. Over 40% of households surveyed reported having to
carry water from another location—usually a distant well or neighboring town—a
particularly onerous task that most often falls to women, as men more commonly
labor outside the home.
Not surprisingly, water scarcity has translated into extremely low rates of water
consumption, with an average per capita consumption among the 14 communities
surveyed of just 10.3 liters per day compared with the World Health Organization
(WHO) minimum standard of 20 liters per person per day, and recommended
consumption of 50 liters per day (Howard and Bartram 2003; see Table 3). Of
the 105 households asked these questions, only eight reported consuming above
the WHO minimum standard, and no households reported consuming the WHO
recommended standard. In other words, the large majority of households and
individuals surveyed experience a consumption deficit, which in most cases amounts
to roughly half the minimum standard set by the WHO. Water availability and
consumption vary greatly between communities, and between families within
communities, with the lowest overall rates found in Allkumarka. Thus, as Roberts
(2008) notes, primitive accumulation has not only driven proletarianization, but has
also shaped the geographies of social reproduction in profound and permanent
ways, with distinctly gendered effects.
There are many reasons for low rates of water availability and consumption in the
valley, including recurring drought and a general lack of water system infrastructure.
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But for the seven communities I surveyed with land adjacent to the river itself (of a
total of 14 communities surveyed), it is clear that mining contamination has severely
limited water availability. In household interviews, older respondents reported not
only that the Huanuni River formerly supported irrigation, but also that it contained
fish and that when they or their parents were young, the river was suitable for
drinking. Today, the river provides none of these benefits, and to the extent that it
contaminates agricultural land and is not safe to drink, represents a very real threat
to the health and livelihoods of community members. Of the households surveyed,
74% reported having at least one animal sickened from consuming surface water,
and 47% reported having at least one animal die from water consumption. Thus,
through discharges of processed sediments, chemical contaminants, and acidic
runoff, and its regular, constant and large-scale surface and sub-surface withdrawals,
mining activity has usurped much of the water and water rights formerly enjoyed
by downstream indigenous campesino communities.
This fact is perhaps most readily apparent in the community of Toraquilla Pampa,
from which water for the Machacamarca concentrating plant is extracted. Fresh
water flows in an open canal from a well near the old hacienda house to the
plant, several kilometers downstream. Nearby agricultural fields lack irrigation,
however, as community members have no right to the spring’s water, and the
river—contaminated by the mine upstream—is no longer usable. Thus, water and
water rights have been accumulated by mining operations, even as the historical
customary rights and water use practices of communities have been steadily
eroded.
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expanded the mine’s territorial footprint. Moreover, its impact extends downriver in
a plume, broadening out in the floodplains in Toraquilla Pampa and Allkumarka. The
mine’s impact is spatially encroaching on community lands downstream through
the widening of the floodplain as a result of the river’s high sediment load, and
the associated erosion of the river banks and adjacent agricultural fields. The forced
abandonment of fields and homes adjacent to the river has exacerbated this process,
as has the loss of water for irrigation, which has resulted in reduced production
and has led some residents to abandon their agricultural fields. Ironically, efforts by
COMIBOL’s Huanuni Mining Company to mitigate its environmental effects have led
to further conflict with local communities. Containment reservoirs are both spatially
extensive and risky: in 1996, a rupture in the dyke at the Porco Mine in Potosı́
released some 235,000 tons of toxic slurry containing arsenic, cyanide, lead and
zinc, severely contaminating the Pilcomayo River (Garcı́a-Guinea and Harffy 1998).
It is no surprise, then, that Huanuni’s proposal to construct a large containment
reservoir in a community adjacent to the mine has so far been blocked by residents’
concern about environmental risks and their unwillingness to sell the necessary
land.
In sum, mining is inherently spatially extensive, and its territorial expansion only
increases over time. Moreover, mining produces a long-term impact on landscapes
and waterways, with those effects lasting decades or centuries. Acid runoff from
uncapped tailings and open mineshafts will continue to affect nearby waterways
long after a mine has ceased operation. The sediment load and contamination
from the Huanuni mine has created acute water pollution problems, which have
affected downstream areas by contaminating riverbanks and floodplains, with
negative effects for agricultural fields adjacent to the river’s edge. Thus, mining’s
ongoing accumulation of territory is accomplished at the expense of downstream
indigenous campesino communities. As in the case of the Indian waste streams
examined by Gidwani and Reddy (2011), the Huanuni Valley is marked by
divergent socio-natures: one, more highly valued (in both the political economic
and normative senses of that word), which produces toxic waste, and the other,
less valued and more easily abandoned, relegated to live and die with the mine’s
excrement.
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various class fractions limit the potential for broad-based popular mobilization to
halt or remediate mining waste.
Conclusion
How, then, may we characterize processes of dispossession and accumulation
underway in the Huanuni Valley? Individuals and families, as part of closed,
corporate communities, retain land and production in their home communities
as an important source of income and sustenance. In the case of Bolivia, with its
anemic industrial sector, exports are overwhelmingly primary commodities: natural
gas, minerals, soy, timber, and coca leaf. In spite of recent calls for industrializing
resources in order to add value, strengthen manufacturing, and spur domestic
consumption, there has thus far been little progress in this direction. Indeed,
under Morales, Bolivia has grown more, not less dependent on the export of raw
materials (Bebbington 2009; Gudynas 2009; Kohl and Farthing 2012). By producing
their own food and providing for their own housing, and thus maintaining a
cheap and readily available labor force, the campesino sector is functional (in
de Janvry’s 1981 sense of “functional dualism”) to the mining sector. Contrary
to the commonly held (and in Oruro, politically convenient) belief that mining
underwrites all other economic activities in Oruro, it is in fact indigenous campesino
labor that subsidizes the extractive economy, as well as Bolivia’s broader capitalist
economy more generally (Nash 1993). And similar to the e-waste workers discussed
by Gidwani and Reddy (2011), Bolivian mining is subsidized by the lands, livelihoods,
and bodies of the indigenous campesino peoples who bear its environmental
costs.
Indigenous campesino communities, while only partially integrated into the
mining economy, have nevertheless been subject not only to its boom and
bust economic cycles, but also to the vast amounts of contamination that have
accumulated during the centuries since the region’s first mines were opened.
Within Bolivia, relations of social exclusion have been reproduced through the
institutional configurations involved in mineral extraction and the control and use
of water resources. These social relations, like the flows of water, minerals and
toxins that shape them, bear the imprint of historically sedimented and deeply
asymmetrical relations of power (Swyngedouw 2004). In the case of mine-related
water contamination in Bolivia, livelihood dispossession has in large part been driven
by various forms of accumulation: accumulation of toxic sediments in farmland
and floodplains; accumulation of water and water rights (and the usurpation of
customary rights through water pollution); and accumulation of territory as the
spatial “footprint” of mining grows over time. Thus, in a manner analogous to
the workings of capital, the movement of water and mining waste through the
hydrosocial cycle involves both circulation and accumulation. The dispossession of
indigenous campesino livelihoods through the accumulation of toxic sediments,
water rights, and land illustrates the circuitous and contingent role that nature’s
materiality plays in primitive accumulation (cf Sneddon 2007). These processes
in turn demonstrate the ways that the power geometries that have long shaped
hydrosocial relations in the Huanuni Valley continue to be reproduced, even as the
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Acknowledgements
My thanks to Joe Stoll for his cartography skills, and Vinay Gidwani and the four anonymous
reviewers whose comments helped improve this paper. I am grateful for the support of CEPA
and CORIDUP in Oruro, and especially for the kind assistance of Don Román Mamani. The
research on which this paper is based was supported by a Fulbright Hays Faculty Fellowship,
the Maxwell School, and the Department of Geography of Syracuse University. The usual
disclaimers apply.
Endnotes
1
The term campesino, glossed in English as “peasant”, denotes smallholder agriculturalists.
In Bolivia’s Andean valleys and Altiplano, campesinos are overwhelmingly Quechua- and
Aymara-speaking indigenous (or originario) peoples. Following usage common in Bolivia,
in this paper I use the two terms together to signal that residents in the Huanuni valley
are indigenous in their ethnicity, and campesino in their occupational and class identities.
Residents of the valley commonly refer to themselves as “campesino originario”. I adopt
the term “indigenous”, as opposed to the Spanish “originario”, owing to its more common
usage in academic literature. For more on Bolivian indigeneity, see Perreault and Green
(forthcoming).
2
A fourth form of accumulation that merits recognition and demands analysis is the
accumulation of heavy metals and other toxins in the bodies of people and their animals.
Such analysis would require epidemiological analysis that I was unable to conduct, and for
which reliable data from Bolivia do not exist.
3
In this paper, I take neoliberalism to be a political economic project aimed at liberalizing
and globalizing trade and investment; minimizing state-imposed barriers to trade, investment,
and production (while retaining its role in facilitating accumulation); imposing fiscal discipline
on states; and limiting the rights and power of labor (see Perreault and Martin 2005). As
Harvey (2007) notes, neoliberalism is, above all, a project aimed at restoring the power
of the capitalist class. In a pattern common in Latin America, neoliberal policies were first
implemented in Bolivia in the 1980s and 1990s, and have since been rolled back (though not
erased) by the government of Evo Morales.
4
Unless otherwise indicated, information presented in this section is based on 8 months
of field research in Bolivia between 2009 and 2011, including a 6-month period during
2011. Fieldwork included survey-interviews of 125 households in 14 indigenous campesino
communities affected by mining contamination. I conducted all survey interviews personally
in Spanish (or in a few instances in Quechua, with the help of a local research assistant).
Fieldwork also involved 36 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with officials from state
agencies and mining firms, community leaders, researchers and activists; chemical analysis
of water and soil samples taken from the Huanuni River and its tributary, the Santa Fe
River (samples were analyzed at the Spectrolab chemical analysis laboratory of the Technical
University of Oruro); and participant observation at an array of community meetings, public
forums, mine inspections and other events. All indigenous campesino community names are
pseudonyms.
5
“Relaveros” work sediments (“relaves”) to extract the estimated 15% of mineral that
remains after being processed in the concentrating plants.
6
The town of Huanuni has no facilities for either wastewater treatment or solid waste disposal.
Sewage pipes in the town, as well as buildings along the river’s banks, simply discharge directly
into the river. Solid waste is similarly dumped into the river.
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