Reclaiming the Lake Citizenship and Environment-As-Common-Property in Highland Peru

Reclaiming the lake Citizenship and environment-as-common-property in highland Peru Mattias Borg Rasmussen Abstract: Since the early 1990s Peru has experienced an expansion in mining activities and an expansion in what the Peruvian ombudsman defi nes as socio- environmental confl icts. Th is article examines the dynamics through which an environmental issue is transformed into a matter of citizenship and social belonging during a weeklong uprising in defense of Lake Conococha. Highlighting the collective actions and personal narratives from participants in the region-wide blockade, the article therefore seeks to understand how dispossessions of environmental resources perceived as common property are cast in terms of individual rights that move well beyond the site of confl ict. It is th erefore argued that the actions to reclaim Lake Conococha were not only a battle for natural resources and clean water, but more fundamentally an attempt to repossess a citizenship that may be constitutionally secured but all too oft en fails to be a lived reality in the high Andes of Peru. Keywords: citizenship, environmental struggles, mining, Peru, property Defending what? has gotten to its feet!” he had yelled to me, trying to make his voice heard through the noise of “Who would not defend his rights?” the old man shouting, whistles, and the intensity of a large asked. crowd in movement. “¡Ya basta!” he ended our We were sitting in his cobbler’s store in the conversation. small highland town of Recuay in the northern “Enough is enough!” Th e protests of the high- Peruvian Andes. Old shoes were stacked on the land region Ancash that culminated in eight days shelves on the wall, its blue paint cracking, and of paro, or blockade, in December 2010 were peeking out from behind the curtain that hid his directed against a proposed mining exploration bed I could see his old watchdog, Bobby. A week in the headwaters of the Santa River, near the prior to our meeting, I had tried to call this shores of a lake known as Conococha. Orga- man, Don Lucas. Th e roads were then blocked nized by the Conococha Defense Front created by angry peasants, and I was unable to reach the in response to the mine, peasants from the co- town that was the site of my fi eldwork. “Recuay munidades campesinas Cátac and San Miguel Focaal—Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 74 (2016): 13–27 © Stichting Focaal and Berghahn Books doi:10.3167/fcl.2016.740102 14 | Mattias Borg Rasmussen de Utcuyacu blocked the Parco Bridge with the headwaters of the rivers Santa, Pativilca, and wooden poles and rocks, thus preventing the Fortaleza. Th is article takes as its starting point transport of people and goods to and from the the question posed by Don Lucas and examines regional capital of Huaraz. Other groups did the the dynamics through which an environmental same on the bridges Bedoya and Ucushchaca, issue is transformed into a matter of citizenship and later Velasco. What was initially meant to and social belonging. Having direct impacts on be a twenty-four-hour preventive blockade to water, land, and territory, mining raises questions call attention to the lack of transparency regard- about the management and property regimes of ing the mining concession exploded with the these resources and how they are negotiated (or death of Muñante, a young peasant leader from violated) in the process. It thus concerns con- Utcuyacu. Th e authorities claimed that the cause verging and colliding regimes of spatial control must have been bullets fi red from the protest- that are enacted in the context of mining. Here ers, while the organizers of the blockade insisted I stress the discrepancies between the state pol- that the bullets had been fi red by the police. icies of concessions in which the Ministry of Four days of blockade culminated in two days of Energy and Mines acts as the legal proprietor violent encounters in the city center of Huaraz, of the underground, and the territoriality and led by an alliance of student and peasant orga- moral economy of water of the rural popula- nizations. Large amounts of teargas were used. tions. I argue that the struggle between, on the Th e protesters shattered the windows of all state one hand, the state and the mining company and fi nancial institutions, thus attacking the and, on the other, the participants (fi rst peas- physical sites of what in their interpretation was ants and later other regional residents) in the an unholy alliance between state and capital. region-wide strike against the exploration and Th e blockade was called to an end aft er a week resource extraction around Lake Conococha when the mining company decided to withdraw manifested itself partly as a discussion about from the site, and the Peruvian Ministry of En- citizenship. Having asserted its right to control ergy and Mines annulled the rights granted. I and extract resources throughout the Peruvian was then trying to make sense of the dynam- territory, and the mandate to promote and de- ics of the protest and the involvement of the fi ne economic development, the Peruvian state people that I had been working with who were links notions of “proper development” to no- living 60 kilometers downstream from Conoco- tions of “proper citizens”: proper citizens are cha Lake. Don Lucas’s question to me on that those who endorse proper development. How- day is intriguing, for all its apparent simplicity. ever, the protesters claim that their citizenship is What kind of rights was it necessary to defend? embedded in particular territories and environ- How are these rights constitutive of citizenship? ments, and, consequently, damage to their envi- What are the dynamics of deprivation and dis- ronment constitutes an attack on their rights as possession that make a mining exploration not citizens. At the root of the disagreement regard- only a matter of environmental sustainability but ing the mining activities are, therefore, diff erent also an issue of rights and citizenship? In other notions of citizenship and rights. words, how does a transformation from envi- Th is article has four parts. First, I explore ronmental matters into a question of citizenship how the new geographies of mining (Bury et al. occur? And what is being repossessed as the 2013) are strategically created through forms of peasants of Recuay and elsewhere take to the state presence and absence. I focus particularly streets in defense of their water and life? on the convergence and collision between min- Th e confl ict that erupted in confrontations ing policies, environmental property regimes, between the peasants and the police across An- and citizenship formation. Second, I examine cash in December 2010 was born out of a pro- the relationship between mining and techniques posed mining exploration around Conococha in of spatial control, highlighting how forms of Reclaiming the lake | 15 collective property intersect with eff orts of land Andean veins acquisition and local-level political dynamics. Th ird, I turn to the question of the ownership Th e basic equation I set out to explore is this: ac- of Lake Conococha in particular, and of the en- cording to Don Lucas, the (alleged) disposses- vironment in general. And last, I examine the sion of the lake prompted people to defend their new idioms of rights and wrongs that emerge in rights. Th ese rights, connected to a direct chal- the encounters between state and citizens in the lenge to the perceived environmental property context of mining. In the conclusion I argue that regimes with the attendant threat of pollution the actions to reclaim Lake Conococha were not of the commons, were the sparks that ignited only a battle for natural resources and clean wa- broader claims to citizenship. Th e exploration ter; more fundamentally, by claiming specifi c of the underground near Lake Conococha was rights that the highland protesters believe are seen as a violation of rights: a violation with fu- granted by the constitution, they attempt to re- ture ramifi cations. I understand here “rights” as possess a citizenship that may be constitution- a recognition of a claim, and therefore as a socio- ally secured but all too oft en fails to be a lived political rather than a legal category. Rights and reality in the high Andes of Peru. property are closely related insofar as they both Th is article is based on interviews, newspa- refer back to political institutions with the abil- per articles, offi cial documents, radio broad- ity to sanction claims. Rights recognized by the casts, and observations related to the events that state are particularly salient in this regard, but evolved around Conococha during my fi eldwork they are not the only rights people can acquire in Ancash in 2010–2011. I was working in the through claims. Since rights understood both communities adjacent to Cátac on questions of as citizenship and as property rights depend on water management, local politics, and environ- mutual recognition, any question of rights also mental change. Aft er the confl ict withered (tem- implies a question of authority. Consequently, a porarily, as it is still classifi ed as dormant by the protest against government violation of rights Defensoría del Pueblo, the ombudsman dealing is simultaneously an acknowledgment of the with human rights issues), I began exploring how rights-granting institution (e.g., the state) and and why people in the Recuay area had gotten a challenge of the policies and practices of the involved in the confrontations. I conducted a concrete government institution that carries series of interviews both with my own interloc- them out (e.g., granting rights to explore the utors, who had been active in blockading the underground).

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