Sacrifice Zones in Chile: Contestations and Possible Reconfigurations of the Neoliberal Development Model Mariela Miranda van Iersel, Chile

Sacrifice Zones in Chile: Contestations and Possible Reconfigurations of the Neoliberal Development Model

By Mariela Miranda van Iersel, Chile

Introduction

“Every new building blocks sunlight from someone, but no one would take this as a reason to halt construction” informs one news article from July 1957 upon the installation of the first smelter and refinery of copper at the commune of Puchuncaví, Chile (as cited in Villasana López et al., 2020, p. 343). This public statement reveals a logic of sacrifice in the name of ‘progress,’ and it was followed by the installation of fourteen other highly contaminating industries in the area. Several quantitative papers have achieved consistent results about the negative effects that exposure to these installations has on health (Cortés et al., 2019, p. 103). Unsurprisingly, years of pollution resulted in a socioenvironmental crisis that reached its definite explosion in 2018, when over 1,500 individuals suffered intoxications due to a saturation of pollutants present at the air level, soil, and coastlines (Céspedes and Rueda, 2019, p. 27). Problematically, Puchuncaví is only one of the six ‘sacrifice zones’ in Chile. The term sacrifice zone has been applied worldwide to describe urban areas with exposure to extreme concentrations of environmental pollution caused by industrial activities – making it dangerous to even breathe or drink clean water at these locations (Lerner, 2010, pp. 3-4). In Chile, the notion of sacrifice zones gained popularity in 2015 after the mayors of five municipalities (Tocopilla, Huasco, Quintero, Coronel, and Puchuncaví) joined forces to demand a governmental response to the socio-environmental crisis experienced by their districts (Castán Broto and Sanzana Calvett, 2020, p. 280). This achieved the recognition by the Chilean administration that their municipalities are sacrifice zones – representing a symbolic victory against the extractive dynamics of neoliberal development (Castán Broto and Sanzana Calvett, 2020, p. 282). Indeed, sacrifice zones in Chile have served as a long-standing strategy for the strengthening of neoliberal economic development, which anticipates that extractions will pave the way to socioeconomic progress (Arsel, Hogenboom and Pellegrini, 2016, p. 880). Ultimately, the conflict lies in that “communities and entire local ecosystems have been [increasingly] sacrificed in the name of ‘economic growth’ or ‘national prosperity’” (Valenzuela-Fuentes, Alarcón-Barrueto and Torres-Salinas, 2021, p. 2). Sacrifice zones for extraction are legalised and maintained by the Chilean government despite the evidence that states their detrimental consequence to welfare and health. As top-down national policies and approaches to sacrifice zones have failed to resolve social injustices (Castán Broto and Sanzana Calvett, 2020, p. 282), the aim of this essay is to understand the views and practices of individual agents who have organised themselves to resist and question the extractivist model of development. How many buildings should be built to cover sunlight from how many human beings? For this purpose, this paper will: (1) present contextual information about the legacies of dictatorship that have enabled sacrifice zones in Chile; (2) explain the environmental injustice that has incentivized bottom-up action, and (3) discuss the social movement that has resisted sacrifice zones and the possibility of buen vivir (living well) as an alternative development perspective.

Contextual factors enabling sacrifice zones

While the extraction of natural resources for exportation dates back to a dark colonial history in Latin America, it continues to be central to development policies and economic growth today (Arsel, Hogenboom and Pellegrini, 2016, pp. 880-881). Its contemporary relevance and promotion are related to the installation of a hegemonic neoliberal ideology.

The ideals of neoliberalism were provided by academics who theorised alternatives to the Keynesian-Fordism that dominated postwar economies (Bateman, 2006, p. 272; Harvey, 2005, p. 20). Chile became the neoliberal ‘guinea pig,’ as the neoliberal theories that had gained international popularity were tested and implemented to full extent during the dictatorial regime of Augusto Pinochet that lasted from 1973 until 1990 (Spira, 2012, p. 134; Liverman and Vilas, 2006, p. 328). Liverman and Vilas (2006) define neoliberalism as the “political philosophy or worldview of free markets and less government” (p. 329). In contrast to the earlier period of classical liberalism, neoliberalism does not assume that conduct takes an entrepreneurial form automatically. Instead, neoliberal regimes develop systemic and institutional practices for enacting this vision (Read, 2009, p. 28). In terms of the environment, neoliberal reforms led to the privatisation and commodification of resources such as water, forests, fisheries, copper, and energy production; the deregulation of environmental management; and trade and investment openness (Liverman and Vilas, 2006, p. 328). Alongside economic reforms, environmental legislation has also been influenced. Article 19 of the Constitution by Pinochet of 1980 states that all people have “the right to live in an environment free of contamination” and “it is the duty of the State to ensure that this right is not violated and that the environment is protected” (as cited in Villasana López et al., 2020, p. 359). However, the same section explains exceptions to this statement, such as to ensure “the right to develop any economic activity/freedom of enterprise” (as cited in Villasana López et al., 2020, p. 359). Consequently, the legislation provides ample space for interpretation that allows for institutionalised environmental violence and the incentive “to side directly with business and ‘development’ interests” (Carruthers, 2001, p. 349).

Ultimately, the neoliberal institutional developments and the legislative changes that took place during the dictatorship in Chile have enabled the expansion of extractive activities and the creation of sacrifice zones, where the interests of private companies are valued over the environment and the health of citizens. This neoliberal development model not only transformed institutions and legislation, but it also extended to the organisation of subjects into new categorizations - where social injustice assigns some as ‘credit-worthy’ and others as ‘credit-less’ (Demmers, 206, p. 70).

Environmental (in)justice

Environmental justice studies emerged as a body of interdisciplinary literature that documented the unequal impacts of the social and ecological costs of capitalist production on different social classes and racial/ethnic groups (Mohai, Pellow and Roberts, 2009, p. 406). Several studies have concluded that the burdens of environmental pollution do not affect us all equally, as some communities carry the burden of sacrifice zones while others enjoy their benefits (Holifield, Chakraborty and Walker, 2017, p. 1). This differentiated positioning forms the central problem of environmental injustice, which when applied to the difference principle of John Rawls, “the issue is not of inequality per se but that of justified inequalities from the standpoint of the worst-off” (Baxi, 2016, p. 18). However, there is more at stake than distributive justice, as there is also a need for fair and equal participation and recognition of those groups that are marginalised, disadvantaged, and less powerful in the conversation about how to solve and act against environmental burdens (Baxi, 2016, p. 18; Fraser, 1998, p. 5). According to Faber (2017), the disparities to experiencing the negative externalities of resource extraction stem from these power imbalances – where people are situated in different positionalities depending on class, gender, race, ethnicity, citizenship, and more (p. 62). Ultimately, the “various social positions or ‘identities’ held in these power structures intersect to create different social ‘axes’ of advantage and disadvantage” in regard to environmental justice (Faber, 2017, p. 62). Those that are the most disempowered tend to receive the most environmental disadvantages, as they possess fewer resources to defend themselves against environmental injustice (Mohai, Pellow and Roberts, 2009, p. 414). Thus, the most cost-effective practices for extractive industries are those that offer the least political resistance. In Chile, this constitutes those territories

inhabited by lower-class identities who – immersed in poverty and lack of opportunities – end up engulfed in polluted sacrifice zones (Benavides, 2020, p. 10).

Resistance and alternatives to the extractivist development model

The economic and political structures that enable the discrimination of the least empowered for the benefit of capital accumulation have not remained unchallenged by the Chilean population. Heilinger (2020) proposes that injustices must be addressed from bottom-up approaches, where joint commitments and actions by individual agents can generate impact and change (p. 16). Given the disparities in environmental burdens, local governments, organisations, and environmental grassroot movements have previously organised to raise awareness about the commodification of natural commons and the multiple injustices experienced by communities living in sacrifice zones (Schaeffer and Smits, 2015, p. 147). However, the social movement of October 2019 was capable of creating a possibility for political transformation and a radically different development model. Millions of Chileans took over the streets to express their discontent with the neoliberal logic that was installed during the dictatorship of Pinochet and institutionalised in the Constitution of 1980. Not only were they demanding environmental justice, but they were also appealing to their right to health and education, dignified jobs, gender equality, respect for indigenous peoples, and an overall escape from the market logic that shaped their lives (Villasana López et al., 2020, p. 355). The recognition of the local injustices of sacrifice zones as connected to the larger injustices of neoliberalism and the recruitment of other affected identities allowed for the initial success of this movement. This social movement that encompasses all axes of domination resulted in the construction of a new Chilean Constitution which would overcome the model inherited from the dictatorship that prioritises capital accumulation over health and welfare. Thus, the movement was successful in challenging the neoliberal hegemonic order and opening possibilities for society to transform and produce itself in an alternative manner (Pleyers, 2020, p. 9). However, this initial outcome towards a radically different development model supported by a new Constitution was recently rejected by the Chilean population. Given the current context of unknowns and possible phases of transformation, it is important to have narratives about other ways of life readily available (Pleyers, 2020, p. 10). Socio-environmental movements are devising new alternatives that challenge the current development hegemony that enables sacrifice zones (Arsel, Hogenboom and Pellegrini, 2016, p. 882). Examples of alternative narratives are the degrowth perspective, the Indian ecological swaraj, and the Latin American approach of buen vivir. The concept of buen vivir is an alternative development model that recuperates the approaches of ancestral indigenous communities (García, 2016, p. 114). However, Villasana López et al. (2020) explain: “Far away from yearning for the past, embracing buen vivir entails reimagining and recreating the present by collectively learning from knowledges, experiences, epistemologies, and cosmologies that have been historically marginalised by modern capitalist development in Latin America” (p. 16). Consequently, buen vivir is an ongoing proposal that encompasses a diversity of worldviews that converge in their belief to go beyond the current understanding of progress and their ethic that values a harmonious relationship between nature, humans, and non-humans (Villasana López et al., 2020, p. 12). Thus, buen vivir moves away from an understanding of nature as a commodity that can be used as a resource for economic gains and humans as an additional material incorporated into the chain of production. Instead, buen vivir fosters collaborative and sustainable projects at the local level where ecotourism, subsistence fishing, and urban agroecological practices flourish.

Conclusion

This essay initially explained how the neoliberal legacies of the dictatorship in Chile have enabled the creation and maintenance of sacrifice zones that are detrimental to the environment and the welfare of citizens. Later, it presented how this hegemonic model of development has affected individual subjects who live under environmental injustice. Finally, it discussed the bottom-up resistance by social movements that grew impatient due to inaction by the State and joined forces with other movements to battle neoliberalism and move towards alternative understandings of development such as buen vivir. Ultimately, while many individual agents have become disenchanted from the neoliberal state that enables sacrifice zones and environmental injustice, and have resisted through social movements, this struggle cannot be reduced to Chile or to the periphery: it is universal and global (Heilinger, 2020, p. 5). Our contemporary world is characterised by connections and interactions, such that a new ideology in Chile cannot escape the effects of the hegemonic neoliberal ideology worldwide that sustains the lavish lives of some individuals to the detriment of the health of others and our planet as a whole.

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