Pachamama Politics

Campesino Water Defenders and the Anti-Mining Movement in Andean Ecuador

Teresa A. Velásquez

• Publisher: University of Arizona Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9780816556557
  9780816544738
• eBook ISBN:
  9780816545315
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Global Politics
• Index: Social Sciences

Ecuador became the first country in the world to grant the Pachamama, or Mother Earth, constitutional rights in 2008. This landmark achievement represented a shift to incorporate Indigenous philosophies of Sumak Kawsay or Buen Vivir (to live well) as a framework for social and political change. The extraordinary move coincided with the rise of neoextractivism, where the self-described socialist President Rafael Correa contended that Buen Vivir could be achieved through controversial mining projects on Indigenous and campesino territories, including their watersheds.

Pachamama Politics provides a rich ethnographic account of the tensions that follow from neoextractivism in the southern Ecuadorian Andes, where campesinos mobilized to defend their community-managed watershed from a proposed gold mine. Positioned as an activist-scholar, Teresa A. Velásquez takes the reader inside the movement—alongside marches, road blockades, and river and high-altitude wetlands—to expose the rifts between social movements and the "pink tide" government. When the promise of social change turns to state criminalization of water defenders, Velásquez argues that the contradictions of neoextractivism created the political conditions for campesinos to reconsider their relationship to indigeneity.

The book takes an intersectional approach to the study of anti-mining struggles and explains how campesino communities and their allies identified with and redeployed Indigenous cosmologies to defend their water as a life-sustaining entity. Pachamama Politics shows why progressive change requires a shift away from the extractive model of national development to a plurinational defense of community water systems and Indigenous peoples and their autonomy.
 

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• List of Acronyms, Abbreviations, and Organizations
• List of Frequently Featured People
• Introduction
• 1. Testing the Waters: The Rise of Anti-Mining Activism
• 2. Criminalizing the Defensoras: Building the Neoextractive State
• 3. “Water Is Life”: From Quimsacocha to the Pachamama
• 4. Indigenous and Campesino Struggles for a Plurinational State
• 5. Decolonizing Identities: Reconsidering Race, Gender, and Mestizaje
• 6. Defending Lo Nuestro: Fighting for Water Autonomy
• Conclusion
• Timeline of the Proposed Quimsacocha / Loma Larga Mineral Project, Legal Reforms, and Related Political Events
• Glossary of Terms
• Notes
• References
• Index
• About the Author