La Amazonía minada: Minería a gran escala y conflictos en el sur del Ecuador ed. by Karolien van Teijlingen, Esben Leifsen, Consuelo Fernández-Salvador, and Luis Sánchez Vásquez

Abstract

lic policy programs by delving deep into the petro-state’s least-affluent communities. This unique perspective presents an investigative avenue for future scholars to examine how the complexity of political change can occur against the backdrop of a country replete with yet paralyzed by the possibilities of black gold. Trey Murphy Department of Geography University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Karolien van Teijlingen, Esben Leifsen, Consuelo Fernández-Salvador, Luis Sánchez Vásquez, eds. La Amazonía minada: Minería a gran escala y conflictos en el sur del Ecuador Quito: Universidad San Francisco de Quito/Ediciones Abya-Yala, 2017. 404 pp. Maps, photographs, references. $22.00 (ISBN: 978–9–942–09472–8). Current global mining news and reports paint a clear picture of Ecuador as a mining country and “the world’s hottest new exploration destination” (Miningnews. net, 2018). This idea of Ecuador as a “mining country” is relatively recent. While geologic exploration of mineral deposits goes back to the late 1800s, sustained interest in international mining agreements did not take off until the mid-to-late 1990s, and high-value mineral mining activities accounted for less than 1% of its real gross domestic product (GDP) until 2004 (Wacaster, 2016). In contrast , since the 1970s, the sale of oil derivatives has accounted for about one third of Ecuador’s total value of exports, thoroughly “petrolizing” (Karl, 1997) the country’s politicsandeconomicsfordecades .However,the volatile super cycle of primary commodities prices throughout the 2000s, together with Ecuador’s mature oilfields, have made oil dependencerisky .“Ecuador,miningcountry”is part of a “post-oil,” governmental strategy to diversify Ecuador’s export revenue sources. A new Mining Law was approved in 2009 to incentivize foreign capital investment, and the old Natural Resources Ministry was broken down and reconstituted into a series of new resource governance entities, including a Ministry of Mining. To further solidify its miningreputation,in2017,Ecuadorbecamea sponsorofthe85thworldconventiononnew projects and explorations, PDAC, one of the most important mining events in the world. La Amazonía Minada is an empirically -drivensocialscienceanthologythattraces how the turn to large-scale mining in Ecuador has been experienced in the Amazonian provinces of Azuay and Zamora Chinchipe, known to host world-class copper and gold deposits. Its Ecuadorian, North American, and European-based contributors examine local responses to the Mirador project, Ecuador ’s first large-scale mining project, visa -vis political alternatives to Latin America’s “doublecrisisofneoliberalismandmodernity” (Escobar, 2010, p. 2). In Ecuador, these political alternatives included a new constitution in 2008 --remarkable for its recognition of human rights and the rights of nature and redefining the country as plurinational and intercultural-- and the state-led project of 24 Journal of Latin American Geography citizen wellbeing referred to as Buen Vivir, consideredarupturefromdominant conceptions of development. La Amazonía Minada pays attention to questions of structural inequality, plurality, and counter-hegemonic mobilization. The book is divided into four parts. Part I tracks how historical imaginaries of the Amazon as a national resource inform the current mining moment. As the authors point out, Ecuador might be a newcomer to large-scale mining ,butnottoextractiveindustries.Fromthe exportofbananasandcacaotooil,Ecuador’s nation-building is tied to the political economy of extraction—and mining is bent on reproducing some of the same pitfalls associatedwiththismodel .Part IItracks how largescale mining unfolds within a “paisaje imbricado ” (p. 117)— a plural, contentious space of already existing differences and inequalities , and where diverse territorialities collide. Fernandez-Salvador (Chapter 5), focuses on the case of the Shuar, and argues that while a sense of ancestral territoriality vis-à-vis the nation-state informs indigenous opposition to mining, political heterogeneity within the collective can deepen divisions and “individualize ” (p. 144) political positions and actions . Continuing the analysis of local experiences , Yépez and van Teijlingen (Chapter 6) describe how the struggles of women against the expansion of large-scale mining are also struggles over social reproduction, and how the insertion of mining in local economies and ecologies means that women live “el proceso de la mineria” differently (p. 203). Part III focuses on the articulation of knowledge production and the devaluation oflocallife,arguingthatbehindthepromises of progressive politics, state-managed “strategic projects” (Leifsen and Beham Hogan, Chapter 6) and “corporate science...