Dispossession by Accumulation? Mining, Water and The Nature of Enclosure On The Bolivian Altiplano

Dispossession by Accumulation?
Mining, Water and the Nature of

Enclosure on the Bolivian Altiplano
Tom Perreault
Department of Geography, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, USA;
taperrea@maxwell.syr.edu
Abstract: This paper examines processes of primitive accumulation and livelihood

dispossession on the Bolivian Altiplano. Through empirical examination of the social
and environmental effects of mining waste, the paper demonstrates that indigenous
campesino community members are experiencing livelihood dispossession by way of three
interrelated forms of accumulation: accumulation of toxic sediments on agricultural fields;
accumulation of water and water rights by mining firms; and accumulation of territory
by mining operations. In the case under examination, full proletarianization is not taking
place, and processes of dispossession are not a “fix” for an overaccumulation crisis. The
paper argues for greater attention to the contingent role of nature’s materiality in processes
of dispossession and accumulation.
Keywords: accumulation by dispossession, primitive accumulation, Bolivia, mining,

water, livelihoods
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
Antipode Vol. 45 No. 5 2013 ISSN 0066-4812, pp 1050–1069 doi: 10.1111/anti.12005

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Dispossession by Accumulation? 1051
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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1052 Antipode
by dispossession in examining the ways in which rural peoples are dispossessed

of their livelihoods through three separate processes of accumulation. These are
accumulation of toxic sediments in formerly fertile floodplains; accumulation of
water and water rights through intensive withdrawals for mining activity; and
accumulation of land as the spatial “footprint” of mining activity grows over time.2
By using the formulation “dispossession by accumulation” I do not intend to draw
parallels where none exist: obviously Marx’s concern for the accumulation of capital
is distinctly different from the accumulation of sediments, water rights or land. My
point, rather, is to draw attention to the contingent and circuitous relationships
between the concentration of sediment, water rights and land, and the processes
of state-led capitalist accumulation by which indigenous campesino peoples are
dispossessed of those assets (cf Sneddon 2007). In other words, I am concerned to
examine how the materiality of specific forms of nature—water and sediment—
shapes processes of dispossession through their accumulation. In the following
section I review the concepts of primitive accumulation and hydrosocial relations,
and consider their utility in understanding processes of dispossession in the Huanuni
Valley. I then examine processes of livelihood dispossession by way of accumulation
of toxic sediments, water rights, and territory in the valley. The paper ends with a re-
consideration of primitive accumulation and the dispossession of rural livelihoods in
the context of mine-related environmental degradation in contemporary Bolivia.
Parsing Accumulation, Primitive and Otherwise

Proletarianization is making a comeback. As both a fundamental, phenomenological
element of capital accumulation, and an object of scholarly inquiry, processes
of peasant immiseration, commodification, rural expulsion, privatization of the
commons, land grabbing and the “new enclosures” have undergone something
of a revival during the past decade (Levien 2012). The best-known recent
treatment of these processes is undoubtedly Harvey’s discussion of “accumulation
by dispossession”, an effort to update and expand Marx’s notion of “primitive
accumulation” (Harvey 2003; for critiques, see Ashman and Callinicos 2006; Hall
2012). In his diffuse and wide-ranging discussion, Harvey argues that processes of
proletarianization and dispossession, far from being one-time, originary events as
Marx suggests, are ongoing, structurally necessary features of capitalism. Moreover,
Harvey argues, this broad category of processes is particularly characteristic of
neoliberal capitalism and in fact is “the dominant form of accumulation” under
neoliberalism (eclipsing accumulation through expanded reproduction; Harvey
2003:153).3 Unlike Marx’s discussion of primitive accumulation, Harvey’s intention
is not to probe the origins of capitalism, but rather to explain how capital overcomes
recurrent crises of overaccumulation that are characteristic of (though not exclusive
to) neoliberalism (Hall 2012). By privatizing, commodifying, or devaluing assets held
or enjoyed by others (whether by the state, peasant or indigenous communities,
or the public in general), new opportunities are created for investment and
accumulation.
But as Harvey himself acknowledges, such insights are hardly new. Rosa
Luxemburg (1968) recognized a century ago that capitalism requires something

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:
First, primitive accumulation is the ex-novo production of the separation between

producers and means of production. Second, this implies that enclosures define a
strategic terrain among social forces. The actual playing out of these strategies in given
forms depends, of course, on the historical, geographical, cultural and social context
. . . [E]nclosures are the basis, the presupposition, and the necessary precondition for
accumulation of capital to occur.
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

1054 Antipode
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.
Hydrosocial Relations and the Primitive Accumulation of Water

Much has been written in recent years about the so-called hydrosocial cycle: “a
complex network of pipes, water law, meters, quality standards, garden hoses,
consumers, leaking taps, as well as rainfall, evaporation, and runoff” (Bakker
2002:774; see also Budds 2008; Swyngedouw 1999). In this sense, water is a
“socio-nature”, both medium and outcome of social struggle and the complex re-
orderings of nature–society relations (Swyngedouw 2004:25). A signal contribution
of this work has been to demonstrate the ways that water flow, quality, and
quantity, as well as access and rights to water, both reflect and reproduce relations
of social power. This sense is captured in the concept of “waterscape”, defined
by Budds and Hinojosa (2012:124) as “the ways in which flows of water, power
and capital converge to produce” uneven socio-natural relations . . . “in which
social power is embedded in, and shaped by, both water’s material flows and its
symbolic meanings” (see also Perreault, Wraight and Perreault 2012). But while
recognition of water’s circulation through the hydrosocial cycle has proven both
productive and provocative, not everything associated with water circulates in
the same way. Water itself—H 2 O—circulates, while other elements of hydrosocial
systems tend to accumulate, among them water-borne sediments, bio-toxins, water

rights, and forms of water-related knowledge. Thus, in a manner analogous, though

not equivalent, to the capitalist processes examined by Marx, accumulation (of
sediments, toxins, water rights, etc) presupposes circulation (of water itself).
This is more than mere wordplay. Nature’s materiality plays a crucial but under-
theorized role in processes of primitive accumulation. It bears asking, then, what
difference nature makes to processes of accumulation, and moreover, how the
materiality of specific forms of nature (water, sediment, minerals, biotoxins, etc)
shape processes of dispossession. As Sneddon (2007:186) argued, “processes of
accumulation always necessarily involve transformations of nature. These proceed
in diverse ways, and understanding the specific biophysical relationships that are
sustained or disrupted via such transformations is prerequisite for understanding
the conflicts that so often follow on the heels of environmental change.” Examining
processes of contamination, sedimentation, and bioaccumulation, as well as water
and land grabbing associated with mining activity illuminates the contingent nature
of dispossession in the Huanuni Valley and beyond. Such efforts are useful inasmuch
as they shed light on the manner in which primitive accumulation not only entails
the privatization of the means of production, but, as McCarthy (2004:337) points
out in the case of international trade agreements, the enclosure of the ecological
conditions of production as well: “Simply put, among the ‘property rights’ being
constructed [through trade agreements] is the right of some firms to pollute, the
right to cause ecological harm and create environmental hazards for people in
a given area.” Such is the case in the Huanuni Valley and other locations where
mining dominates the local economy, and where non-extractive livelihoods and the
lives dependent on them are subordinated to the demands of accumulation in the
mining sector. It is to these processes that the paper now turns.
Geographies of Mining, Water, and Livelihood on the

Bolivian Altiplano
Mining has long been a defining feature of Bolivian political economy and national
identity. The silver mines of Potosı́ were once the richest in the Spanish empire,
while in the early twentieth century, the mines of Oruro made Bolivia a leading
exporter of tin, and tin baron Simón Patiño one of the world’s wealthiest men
(Nash 1993). Today, although its national importance has largely been eclipsed by
natural gas, mining is still the major economic activity in Potosı́ and Oruro, and
mining rents help finance President Evo Morales’ social policies (Gudynas 2009;
Kohl and Farthing 2012). But whereas the Bolivian state has long depended on
resource extraction, these activities have done little to foster local or regional
development. Indeed, Potosı́ and Oruro are today among the poorest regions in
the country. As Bolivia’s first president of indigenous ethnicity, Evo Morales has
promised to improve economic conditions and political voice for the country’s
indigenous and campesino majority, even as he remains committed to developing
the country’s mineral resources, many (if not most) of which are under or adjacent to
indigenous communities. As a result, many indigenous campesino peoples in Bolivia
find themselves caught in the contradiction between the government’s promises of

1056 Antipode
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.
Mining, Water and Livelihoods in the Huanuni River Valley 4

The Huanuni River drains into Lake Uru Uru, a northern extension of the ecologically
fragile Lake Poopó endorheic (closed basin) watershed on Bolivia’s central Altiplano
(see Figure 1). Huanuni is one of two remaining mines currently operated by the
state firm COMIBOL (Corporación Minera de Bolivia, Bolivian Mining Corporation),
and may be the region’s single largest source of contamination from heavy metals,
chemicals, and acid runoff. In its nearly 100 years of operation, it has never had
an adequate retention facility for containing mining waste, and instead dumps
untreated water and waste material directly into the Huanuni River, which flows
through more than a dozen indigenous campesino communities on its way to Lake
Uru Uru. A study by Quintanilla and Garcı́a (2009) identified heavy metals such as
lead, arsenic, cadmium, iron and zinc in rivers throughout the Poopó watershed—in

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

1058 Antipode
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.
Dispossession by Accumulation in the Huanuni River

Valley
Accumulation of Toxic Sediments on Farmland and Floodplains
Precipitation and stream flow are highly seasonal in the Bolivian Andes. The large
majority of precipitation and associated flood events occur during the summer

Table 1: Contamination in Huanuni River sediments (in mg/L, except pH)
Author’s data (2011) Montoya et al Class B

(range, min–max) (2010) standard
pH 2.7−2.8 3.5 6−9

Cadmium (Cd) 1.03−1.09 2.06 0.005
Copper (Cu) 1.33−1.34 − 1.0
Zinc (Zn) 43.14−45.28 74.94 0.2
Iron (Fe) − 283.77 ≤ 0.3
Sulfates (SO 4 ) 468.3−553.8 − ≤400
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

1060 Antipode
including salinization of wells, recurrent drought, and an overall lack of investment

in irrigation and other agricultural infrastructure. But there can be little doubt
that contamination from river-borne sediments deposited on agricultural lands is
a major contributor to the community’s problems. As one man in Allkumarka told
me, “Before, when I was a kid, production was good, with potato, fava beans,
quinoa; now production isn’t like it was before. Now they don’t grow.” Moreover,
virtually all respondents interviewed in the community reported that when they were
children (ie during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s) their families commonly fished in
Lake Uru Uru and collected duck eggs and hunted birds and other animals on
the lake’s marshy shoreline. Respondents noted that these practices contributed
significantly to household diet (and, importantly, protein consumption). Today
these activities are no longer possible owing to the combined effects of pollution and
drought.
In sum, the sediment load from the Santa Elena and Machacamarca processing
plants, as well as activity in the mining centers of Japo, Morococala and Santa Fe
in the upper reaches of the Huanuni watershed, deposits upwards of 1200 tons of
sediment daily into the Huanuni River. These sediments, tainted with heavy metals
and other contaminants, accumulate on riverbanks and floodplains during the rainy
season, rendering those lands infertile.
Accumulation of Water and Water Rights

One of the fundamental contradictions between the agricultural and mining
economies lies in their dependence on water. Both are water-intensive activities,
and therefore highly sensitive to water availability and, particularly in semi-arid
regions like the Bolivian Altiplano, both also rely on regular water withdrawals from
surface and subsurface sources. But whereas campesino agricultural practices rely
on rainfall and (in a minority of cases) small-scale irrigation systems, and therefore
consume relatively little water, mining operations on the Altiplano require massive
water withdrawals. The Huanuni mine consumes over 28 million liters of water
per day, second in Bolivia only to Potosı́’s massive open-pit San Cristóbal mine,
which consumes an estimated 46 million liters per day (Moran 2010). Moreover,
unlike campesino agriculture, which uses relatively few chemical inputs, mining
operations are frequently responsible for acute water contamination. Discharges
of sediment from processing plants, acid runoff from mines and tailings piles,
and the release of highly contaminating substances (including mercury, sulfuric
acid, and petro-chemicals) all contribute to severe water contamination (López
et al 2010; Montoya et al 2010; Zamora et al 2010). In contrast to the highly
seasonal water demands of agriculture in response to cropping cycles, the demand
for water in mining is constant. Thus, both surface withdrawals from rivers or springs,
and subsurface withdrawals from wells, can negatively affect water availability for
downstream users. This effect is particularly acute in the Huanuni River Valley, given
that the Huanuni River itself is no longer suitable for irrigation, and the region
has experienced repeated and prolonged drought during the past 30 years (PPO
1996). The valley is marked by (socially produced) water scarcity, and nearly 36%
of households surveyed reported having no source of freshwater, while over 64%

Table 2: Household access to water
Number %
Have household well 99 78.6

Have well with potable water 59 46.8
Regularly carry water from other location 52 41.2
Do not have drinking water in household 45 35.7
Do not have sufficient water in household 81 64.3
Human illness from drinking water 71 56.4
Animal illness or death from drinking water 85 73.9
Data from household survey (n = 115).
Table 3: Daily household and per capita water consumption (liters)
Water consumption per family (average) 35.8

Water consumption per person (average) 10.3
Per capita consumption deficit below WHO minimum of 20 liters/person/day 9.7
Per capita consumption deficit below WHO recommendation of 50 liters/person/day 39.7
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.

1062 Antipode
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.
Accumulation of Land and Territorial Expansion of Mining

By its very nature, mining radically transforms landscapes. All forms of mining
necessarily entail the production of large quantities of waste material, brought up
from the depths of the earth and—owing to their mass and the fact that ores
are almost always processed in situ—deposited in close proximity to the mine site
(Bridge 2004). Large slag heaps extend the spatial footprint of mining operations, at
times covering potentially cultivable fields, springs, or streams. The massive tailings
piles of the Japo and Santa Fe mines, in the upper reaches of the Huanuni watershed,
cover large portions of those towns, while those within Oruro’s city limits dwarf
the surrounding houses. But the “footprint” of mining is not limited to the spatial
extent of slag heaps, containment reservoirs, buildings and other operations. Rather,
the territorial expansion of mining is also advanced through the accumulation of
mine concessions and the spread of pollution. Throughout the Andean countries,
mining concessions have increased dramatically in recent years, in both number
and size (Bebbington 2009). While mining in Bolivia has not expanded as rapidly
or as broadly as in Peru or Colombia, several large mining operations have been
planned or initiated in recent years. With its increased production since 2006, the
Huanuni mine has expanded operations, both vertically (expanding mine shafts
below ground to exploit new tin deposits) and horizontally (opening up new
mines in adjacent areas). The construction of new facilities, including the temporary
containment reservoir, and the opening of a new mine across the valley, have

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.
Understanding “Dispossession by Accumulation”

How do we make sense of the social impacts of acute mine-related water
contamination in the Huanuni River Valley? There can be little doubt that processes
of livelihood dispossession are occurring. Indigenous campesinos in the valley
have seen crop yields decline, animals sickened, wells contaminated, and lands
despoiled. To be sure, both the proximate and underlying causes for these problems
are complex and multiform, and include long-term environmental change (eg
drought and salinization of soils) as well as water pollution from sources other than
mining (eg sewage and solid waste from the town of Huanuni). But the intensive
discharge of sediment, chemical pollutants, and acid drainage from the Huanuni
mine (and to a lesser extent, mining activity and tailings at Morococala, Santa
Fe and Japo), remains the largest sources of water pollution in the valley. These

1064 Antipode
processes of livelihood dispossession, however, do not neatly conform to Harvey’s

definition of accumulation by dispossession. For Harvey (2003), dispossession (of
livelihood, the commons or collective wealth) provides investment opportunities
for overaccumulated capital, and is, in this sense, a crucial means by which
capital realizes accumulation under neoliberalism. Far from epiphenomenal, then,
dispossession is a necessary outcome, and strategic means toward, certain forms of
accumulation.
Conditions in the Huanuni Valley, however, do not easily map onto this schema.
To the extent that dumping mine waste directly in the river permits COMIBOL
to externalize some of its production costs, this practice serves as an “ecological
fix” in the sense of Bakker (2009; cf Castree 2007)—a form of enclosure that De
Angelis (2004:77, 78) identifies as the “unintended by-product of accumulation”
that promotes “the bankruptcy of communities of independent producers, from
indigenous peoples to farmers”. But in contrast to the cases discussed by Harvey
(2003), there is no ready investment capital to take advantage of land and resources
“freed up” through this process. In part, this is a result of land tenure relations
and mining capital in this part of Bolivia. Since the collapse of COMIBOL’s joint
venture with Allied Deals in 2002, the Huanuni mine has been (once again)
controlled solely by the Bolivian state, an arrangement that was only strengthened
and expanded with the re-activation of COMIBOL and the expansion of Huanuni’s
mining operations in 2006. Thus, while private, mostly transnational mining firms
account for the large majority of mining extraction in Bolivia (both in terms of the
volume of ore excavated and the value of mineral exports; Espinoza Morales 2010;
Ribera Arismendi 2010), the Huanuni mine remains firmly under the control of a
reinvigorated COMIBOL. As such, there are no ready investors seeking a fix for their
overaccumulated capital.
Moreover, and perhaps more to the point, the marginal character of the resources
dispossessed—primarily agricultural lands and waters—discourages investment and
appropriation. The central Altiplano is high, cold and arid, and even in the absence
of pollution, agricultural production is limited by the region’s severe climatic
constraints. In the Huanuni Valley these conditions are exacerbated by extreme
levels of soil and water contamination, coupled with recurring drought and a
long-term process of salinization (PPO 1996). Finally, the collective character of
landholdings similarly militates against full dispossession. Following the dissolution
of the hacienda system during the 1953 agrarian reform, pongo laborers were
collectively granted the land and water of the haciendas to which they had
been tied. Under the conditions of this arrangement, membership in the newly
formed corporate communities was strictly limited to the original pongos and their
families, who are prohibited from selling land to individuals or organizations outside
the community. As such, there is no market for land in the Huanuni Valley. So
while indigenous campesino livelihoods are undergoing an inexorable process of
dispossession, and contra the arguments made by Li (2010), this does not involve
the “freeing up” of land and water for new forms of investment.
What is clearly occurring is a broader separation of labor from the means of
production and social reproduction, through processes not unlike those described
by Marx in his discussion of primitive accumulation. Although this process does

not respond to a crisis of overaccumulation, it does have the effect of dispossessing

indigenous campesinos of their agrarian livelihoods. This is evident in the widespread
outmigration of community residents, particularly among the young, to major urban
centers. Indeed, of the 125 households surveyed, 108 (86.4%) have had at least
one household member leave the community in search of work, and 87 (69%)
receive some form of off-farm income. This is not complete proletarianization,
however, since residents tend to retain land in their communities and cultivate it for
sustenance and income. Thus, small-scale semi-subsistence agricultural production
continues to be a crucially important activity for extended families in the Huanuni
Valley, whose diverse livelihood strategies frequently involve petty commerce or
construction in Oruro or La Paz, or work in sweatshops or as domestic laborers in
Buenos Aires or São Paulo. Many families also participate in the mining economy,
particularly in those communities closest to Huanuni. Some 60% of those surveyed
reported having at least one family member—typically a father, husband or son—
working in the mining sector, although a substantially lower percentage (43%)
reported receiving income from this labor. Mining remains one option among
many for community members engaging in waged labor, but fewer than half of
those leaving the community for work in the mines contribute to their families’
household income. To be sure, mining alone does not drive outmigration. Residents
leave, temporarily or permanently, for many reasons, including educational and
employment opportunities, marriage, and the desire to live in an urban setting.
But conventional wisdom among Oruro’s elites and urban residents—that mining
underwrites all other economic activity in the region (an assertion I heard repeatedly
during interviews and informal conversations)—does not appear to hold true in the
communities closest to, and most negatively affected by, mining.
In interviews, community members repeatedly denounced the Huanuni Mining
Company, along with the state’s inability or unwillingness to implement an effective
cleanup. Overall, however, community members have shown little inclination to
engage in widespread or sustained protest. Activists from the city of Oruro have
held numerous community-based meetings, and have had a measure of success in
pressuring the government to take action. But in a country where street protest is
an accepted and nearly ubiquitous feature of political life, the muted reaction of
community residents appears anomalous. Reasons for this are complex, and likely
have to do with the historical inter-dependence of Oruro’s mining and agricultural
economies. Even in the absence of pollution, agriculture on the Altiplano is minimally
productive, and indigenous campesinos have long supplemented their incomes with
waged work in the mines or in urban centers. Additionally, mining contamination
accumulates gradually. In contrast to an oil pipeline rupture that contaminated
the nearby Desaguadero River in 2000 and which sparked popular protest and
government action (Montoya et al 2002), the effects of mining activity have
built up over decades or centuries. Community protest has also been dampened
by direct and indirect pressure from the region’s powerful labor organizations:
the mining cooperatives union (FEDECOMIN), and the departmental campesino
confederation (FSUTCO), both of which strongly support Oruro’s mining economy,
and vehemently oppose any measures that might threaten the continued operation
of the region’s mines. As such, the seemingly incompatible interests of Oruro’s

1066 Antipode
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

contradictions inherent to the “post-neoliberal” Bolivian economy are brought ever

more sharply into focus
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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Dispossession by Accumulation? Mining, Water and The Nature of Enclosure On The Bolivian Altiplano

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Dispossession by Accumulation?

Mining, Water and the Nature of

Abstract: This paper examines processes of primitive accumulation and livelihood

Keywords: accumulation by dispossession, primitive accumulation, Bolivia, mining,

Antipode Vol. 45 No. 5 2013 ISSN 0066-4812, pp 1050–1069 doi: 10.1111/anti.12005

by dispossession in examining the ways in which rural peoples are dispossessed

Parsing Accumulation, Primitive and Otherwise

First, primitive accumulation is the ex-novo production of the separation between

Hydrosocial Relations and the Primitive Accumulation of Water

rights, and forms of water-related knowledge. Thus, in a manner analogous, though

Geographies of Mining, Water, and Livelihood on the

Mining, Water and Livelihoods in the Huanuni River Valley 4

Dispossession by Accumulation in the Huanuni River

Table 1: Contamination in Huanuni River sediments (in mg/L, except pH)

Author’s data (2011) Montoya et al Class B

pH 2.7−2.8 3.5 6−9

including salinization of wells, recurrent drought, and an overall lack of investment

Accumulation of Water and Water Rights

Table 2: Household access to water

Have household well 99 78.6

Data from household survey (n = 115).

Table 3: Daily household and per capita water consumption (liters)

Water consumption per family (average) 35.8

Accumulation of Land and Territorial Expansion of Mining

Understanding “Dispossession by Accumulation”

processes of livelihood dispossession, however, do not neatly conform to Harvey’s

not respond to a crisis of overaccumulation, it does have the effect of dispossessing

contradictions inherent to the “post-neoliberal” Bolivian economy are brought ever

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