The Uncertainties of Groundwater and Its Extraction in the Salar De Atacama, Northern Chile

]RUNNING HEADS:

VERSO: SALLY BABIDGE

RECTO: SUSTAINING IGNORANCE[

]t1[Sustaining ignorance: the uncertainties of groundwater and its extraction in the Salar de Atacama, northern Chile

]t2[SALLY BABIDGE

]t3[University of Queensland

]abs[The extraction of groundwater and the regulation of its use in many parts of the world have been found to present a particular kind of problem. A contest involving mining companies, an ‘impacted’ community, and the state arising from groundwater and its extraction in the Salar de Atacama, northern Chile, provides a stark example. What marks the case are the many uncertainties about underground water and the quantities extracted.

This article argues that uncertainty characterizes conditions of ‘late industrialism’ and that corporate practice that sustains ignorance is a form of powerful agency that in turn maintains the conditions for potentially harmful extractive activity. Critically engaging with the proposition that water may act in the relational process of unknowing contributes to the analysis of how corporate practice may sustain ignorance. This also suggests that alternative political responses to uncertainty are possible.

This is the author manuscript accepted for publication and has undergone full peer review but has not been through the copyediting, typesetting, pagination and proofreading process, which may lead to differences between this version and the Version of Record. Please cite this article as doi: 10.1111/1467-9655.12965.

]p[In 2016, the Chilean Chamber of Deputies commenced a year-long investigation into the environmental state of salt pans and glaciers, during which they received many submissions about the Salar de Atacama, northern Chile (Cámera de Diputados 2017). This area is characterized by significant surface water scarcity. It is ‘located in the most arid desert in the world’ (Ortiza et al. 2014), and annually ‘receives less than 20 mm’ of rain (Kampf, Tyler,

Ortiz, Muñoz & Adkins 2005). The Salar de Atacama (or Atacama ‘salt pan’) is within the indigenous territory of Atacameño (or Likan Antai) peoples. In the late 1960s, North

American scientists reported that they had found ‘large quantities of ground water in the

*Salar de Atacama+ basin’ (Dingman 1967: 2). Since the Pinochet regime’s early enforcement of privatization measures to promote economic growth in the 1980s, the Chilean government has granted rights to individuals and to companies to extract groundwater in perpetuity. Today, the volume of total extraction rights in the Salar de Atacama basin amounts to thousands of litres per second (Babidge & Bolados 2018). Two copper mining companies – Minera Escondida (MEL, operated by BHP Billiton) and Zaldívar (CMZ, majority owned by Antofagasta Minerals) – own the majority of subterranean water extraction rights, and the bulk of their wells are in the southern surrounds of the Salar. Where there is water in and around the Salar, it flows underground from snowmelt in the Andean cordillera to aquifers, small lagoons, and springs. Atacameño peoples capture and channel springs in the foothills of the Andean cordillera on the east side of the Salar into irrigation systems that feed agricultural and pastoral oases. Their demands for greater regulation of subterranean water extraction within their territories have been increasingly vociferous, and distrust of mining company claims is widespread. As one man said to me: ‘The [mining

companies] know that when they take water from here [motioning to the mountains] they will dry out there [motioning to the Salar]. And they know it perfectly well! But they don’t say it . . .’ (interview with don Geraldo, Peine, 5 November 2011).1

]p1[The extraction of groundwater and the regulation of its use in many parts of the world have been found to present a particular kind of problem. The exploitation of underground water has been shown to exacerbate previously existing social inequalities

(e.g. Budds 2013; Hoogesteger & Wester 2015; Oyarzún & Oyarzún 2011), and while providing short-term benefits for extractors, the delimitation, measurement, and control of aquifers is also expensive and complex (see, e.g., Blomquist 1992; Shah 2009; Theesfeld

2010). What marks the case I discuss here is that uncertainties about the extent of underground water, the exact quantities of water extracted and the associated effects, and how the basin replenishes itself characterize currents of dispute among members of the community and representatives of the state as well as industry actors. Recent important research has conceptualized the ‘hydro-social’ as a nexus of social and natural relationships in which power, agency, and contestation are prominent (Boelens, Hoogesteger,

Swyngedouw & Wester 2016; Linton & Budds 2014; Swyngedouw 2009). The present article shows how, in the Salar de Atacama, the socio-natural relationships in contestation are particularly marked by uncertainty and unknowns in relation to underground water. I argue that water’s activity has political effects in contests among human actors over use and access to water and associated ecological things, especially given the way that the unknowns relating to water arise in corporate, state, and indigenous practices.

Furthermore, the political dynamics encompassing water and water’s activity (as well as

being about water) contribute to the ways in which ignorance regarding the environment and impact may be sustained.

]p1[As I explain below, ‘lateness’ and the agency of the powerful are key to the conditions of unknowing in the case of the Salar de Atacama. I describe how these conditions are contingent on water’s material enigma, which is an active factor in relations of ignorance. I then trace the ways in which indigenous people, the state, and mining corporations each deal with the unknowns of underground water in the context of extraction, and how the deficiencies of state regulatory activity intersect with companies’ environmental ignorance practices. I show that this dynamic enables ongoing extraction of groundwater despite significant ecological uncertainties. Finally, I propose that uncertainty produced through these material and political dynamics might instead be responded to with alternate projects.

]ha[An anthropology of extraction and ‘lateness’

]p[The analysis of water, community, and political and industrial life that I detail here has been formed during ethnographic fieldwork based in Peine, a small town of about 400 people in the Antofagasta region (Region II), Chile.2 That research has focused on the effects of the extraction industry on sociopolitical and ecological life in the southern Salar de

Atacama. Peine is one of a handful of Atacameño towns situated in the foothills of the

Andean cordillera on the east of the Salar, which are recognized by the Chilean state as

Indigenous Communities. The Indigenous Community of Peine claims territory that ‘hosts’

fields of water extraction wells and plants owned by a number of mining operations and thus engages in relations with each that range from legal contracts, which provide community development funding, to informal ‘good neighbour’ arrangements. In addition to the copper miners MEL and CMZ, two lithium extractors, Albermarle (a North American company) and SQM (formerly Soquimich, a predominantly Chilean venture), have water concessions for freshwater (and also extract litres of brine) on and around the Salar and within claimed indigenous territory. Three additional lithium mining ventures are seeking environmental approval to begin work on the Salar. It is predominantly MEL’s activities, and the Peine community’s responses to MEL as an extractor of water and a powerful corporate social relations machine, that I discuss in this article. MEL has had the rights to extract many more litres of water than other mining companies and also a long-standing formal agreement with Peine for ‘development benefits’3 and social and environmental impact reporting.4 As I outline below, neither MEL’s extraction in Peine’s claimed indigenous territory, nor the formal agreement between MEL and Peine, represent a fixed position or stable relation.

]p1[Extraction companies here (as elsewhere) maintain that their activities are

‘sustainable’, meaning in this case that company studies claim that sufficient volumes of water remain in the environment to endure ongoing extraction with minimal impact. While a public register of water concessions is available on-line, the Chilean private property regime and market for water means that concessions have not been independently monitored by the government authority (Bauer 2004; Budds 2013). Public protest regarding the potential environmental crisis brought on by industrial water extraction has been

building over the past ten years, and the lack of government oversight of water exploitation by mining companies has been central. Anxieties among Indigenous Community members and the broader public about the nature of mining ‘sustainability’ plays out in an environment that Fortun (2012; 2014) refers to as ‘late industrialism’, the contemporary condition in which the spectre of environmental harm and ecological crisis prevails and preventing damage seems overwhelmingly complex.

]p1[Temporalizing environmental, industrial, and cultural experience as ‘late’ – see also Giddens’s ‘late modern’ (1991) and Povinelli’s ‘late liberal/capitalist’ (2011) – indicates maturity, fragmentation, and a density of interrelated factors without signalling a radical break from previous systems. In the past two decades, extractive capitalism has radically expanded its reach into remote places, while developing impact reporting and mechanisms that make claims for its managed effects on the world. Strong currents of uncertainty abound regarding these claims and how to know and address the effects of extractive activity on humans and environments. The resulting contradiction and complexity are part of what I refer to as ‘lateness’. An example of late capitalist complexity, dominant in my research, is the Chilean Water Code (1981), a central plank of the Pinochet regime’s

‘neoliberal miracle’ which enabled unconstrained water extraction by copper mining corporations in the desert north and gave corporations great capital incentive (Bauer 2004).

However, in re-evaluations of Chile’s water (and neoliberal) regime, extensive ecological damage and significant social inequalities have been traced to the effects of the Water

Code’s ‘free market’ (Bauer 2013; Camacho 2012; Oyarzún & Oyarzún 2011). In 2011-12, consultants from the World Bank recommended that the Chilean government reconfigure

their water regime since it had resulted in ‘mishandling’ of the national allocation of resources (World Bank 2013), and IMF economists published a recent ‘rethink’ of their market-based water reforms, once central to global finance strategies, making Chile’s Water

Code a special case (Ostry, Loungani & Furceri 2016). The neoliberal system in Chile has thus seen recent but incomplete changes. Greater state regulation of resource use has been developed in conjunction with the introduction of environmental protection legislation and legal recognition of indigenous rights at the same time that the extractive basis for the national economy has been encouraged (see Gudynas 2012). Such apparently contradictory conditions are characteristic of ‘lateness’ and are exemplified by changes in engagements between MEL and the Peine Indigenous Community that relate specifically to water extraction and its impacts. Below I provide some background to MEL and Peine’s relationship regarding MEL’s water extraction. A range of unknowns are articulated by community members that arise in their relationship with MEL and the associated legal and regulatory context. Government regulation regarding environmental protection and recognition of indigenous rights to consultation have introduced practical complexities but have not addressed community uncertainty about protection of water sources.

]hb[Local uncertainties and local ecologies

]p[Peine Indigenous Community members talk in a number of ways about currently unknown risks of industrial water extraction to their lives. Based on their experience of mining’s effects, some people are emphatic about the potential for both benefits and harm

from new and more expansive mining activity, and harm is sometimes explained in terms of how the earth and water respond to disturbance. While I worked for my hosts in Peine during their agricultural planting season, accompanied people as they irrigated, weeded gardens, walked through fields to reach corrals and feed small herds of animals, or sat with them in community meetings (or meetings with mining company representatives), they commented on how local water sources and landscapes are the same as or different than before mining began in their territory. Many say that the quality and yield of crops have decreased along with a decrease in the number of animals and people the crops are able to sustain. Nonetheless, while continuing to work agricultural lands and keep small herds, every household receives economic gains from the mining industry. People work in the mines on the Salar all year round as wage or contract labour and run industry-dependent small businesses or work in hospitality and other services. Money earned enables people to send children to school in regional centres and towns, pays local or migrant day labourers to work in fields or casual workers in small businesses, purchases consumer goods and foodstuffs from supermarkets in the city and local stores, and fuels motor vehicles and electricity in their homes.

]p1[In discussing extraction of water by the mining industry, Atacameño community members have emphasized ancestral relations with waters and watered territory, citing not only generations of knowledge, care, and use, but also their relations with water as a being that is responsive to people.5 For example, in conversations over cups of tea, doña Inés (in her late fifties) often mused over changes in customary and ritual practice and environmental change that she sees as having come at the same time as increasing

modernization and industrialization. She reflected that the drought since the 1970s may be associated with ‘not doing the right things’. The ‘right things’ referred partly to her sense of a decline in ritual reciprocity (such as the convido and ‘pago6’) as well as to taboos, for example, against human ingress to the Salar during summer months. Observations such as those of doña Inés cast environmental change as being possibly affected by changing

Atacameño practice associated with being (partly) incorporated into the mining economy. In this perspective, the ‘individualism’ (individualismo) of mining life has fragmented social unity7 and may have affected the environment as well. Doña Inés and others also say that the ‘dust’ (polvo) from the mines on the Salar that is carried to their fields on prevailing winds, or the water extraction from mining activity that people say must be drying up the

Salar and the aquifers (napas) that nourish it, are to blame for negative changes in their worlds. The things that humans do and how they may relate to change in the world are many and complex. A sense of the complexity of relations at play has been compounded along with industrial activity in Peine’s territory, people’s involvement with the extractive economy, and, as a key element of late industrialism, a constant stream of information produced about it by extraction companies.

]p1[The bulk of MEL’s water extraction occurs within an area referred in regulatory terms as Monturaqui-Negrillar-Tilopozo (MNT) (see Fig. 1). The company and the Chilean

Water Authority (DGA, Dirección General de Aguas) delineate the MNT area a ‘sub-basin’ of the southern Salar. MNT is thus formed by waters running from snowmelt in the mountains near Monturaqui, into subterranean channels through the Negrillar canyon (part of which is shown in the snaking vegetation on the surface in Fig. 2), and ending in the far southern end

of the Salar at Tilopozo, an area that incorporates an aquifer, salty pasture, and surface freshwater pools (see Fig. 3). Tilopozo is registered as part of the Peine Indigenous

Community’s territory (under the Indigenous Law 19.253, 1993) and the aquifer is listed as

‘protected’ by the DGA.8 Until the 1970s, people from Peine herded mules, sheep, goats, and llamas between the high pastures and springs in the mountains in summer and the lowland pastures in winter, including along paths in the ‘MNT basin’ (see Kalazich 2013;

Núñez 2011). Monturaqui was also a settlement at the railhead for the line to Argentina where people from Peine lived and worked from around the 1930s until the early 1980s.

The freshwater and meadow in Tilopozo have long sustained Peine’s herds in winter. As a consequence of demands from the community and according to ‘social responsibility’ policies of the company, MEL and Peine negotiated a legal agreement (the first in 1997, renewed in 2007) that sets out the company’s environmental reporting requirements, especially focused on Tilopozo.

]INSERT FIGURES 1-3 NEAR HERE[

]p1[There have been no spectacular impacts on Peine’s domestic or agricultural water supply due to over-exploitation as there have been elsewhere in the north.

Nonetheless, community members express a lack of trust in MEL’s claims about managing the impact specifically on Tilopozo and broader indigenous territory. This relates to people’s knowledge of earlier disasters in the region as well as the previous effects of MEL’s extraction in another Salar in Peine’s territory, the Salar de Punta Negra. MEL has water extraction rights (a total of 1,406 litres per second from forty-eight wells, most registered in

1990 and 1992) in Punta Negra. Since 2000, MEL has had a programme of pumping water

back into that Salar in an attempt to mitigate the negative impacts of its extraction (MEL

2006), but much damage has been done. Moreover, MEL’s potential impact on the waters of the Salar de Atacama has also generated community resistance. In 2007, MEL’s operating company, BHP Billiton, submitted to the Antofagasta office of the National Environment

Commission9 a water extraction project for approval titled Suministro de Agua Pampa

Colorada (Pampa Colorada). This project proposed to extract over 1,000 litres per second from an area of high-altitude wetlands in the cordillera above Peine and other inhabited places of the southeastern Salar, and claimed that the impact would be mitigated by scientifically modelled ‘recharge’ of the area. Unconvinced by this claim, partly given their opinion that MEL’s similar activities in Salar de Punta Negra were ineffective, Atacameño peoples from around the Salar launched a campaign of resistance. Subsequently, regional government officers and elected officials did not approve the project.

]p1[The events of ‘Pampa Colorada’ were conveyed repeatedly to me by people in

Peine during discussions about the effects of mining on their lives. These events and MEL’s extraction effects on the Salar de Punta Negra inform the way people talk about the ongoing risk of extraction. In discussing such matters further with don Geraldo (a local leader who has been involved in meetings with MEL, as he says, ‘from the beginning’), I commented that while we know water flows down, and appears in some places on the surface, when it is underground it can be a little mysterious. He rejected my suggestion, telling the following story to illustrate his point:

]ex/[When I was young, we went to the cordillera with our animals, to that part

called ‘Leoncito’ . . . The mountains in that area are very high and the snow is a long,

long way away. Far below is a pool of water. But when there is no snow, the water

dries out! [laughs] So there you have a test! I did a study! . . . It looked just like a

spring had appeared. But when the snow melted, little by little the water dried out.

Listo! *Right!+. Where did the water go? It wasn’t running upwards; it went below . . .

So, it makes one think about the currents of water. The fact is, they run down and

they come from above [laughs+. Sure, it’s just about seeing the way things are

(interview, 5 November 2011).]/ex[

]p[Don Geraldo’s insistence on the basic principle of downward flow combined with the implicit story about the cyclical appearance and disappearance of water was aimed at demystifying what is there, but cannot always be seen. Thus, Geraldo dismisses technological arguments about what water might do if managed by extractors, denying that any other factor may be at play except the obvious association between extraction and impact: if they extract from above, they will dry out what is below. It is as an absolute fact, one that cannot be subject to mitigation. In the Pampa Colorada case, the community reacted to potential extraction of water through resistance, and the government authority acted decisively not to approve water extraction where certain material properties (its location above, its downward flow) connected water to people’s lives. While the groundwater in the Tilopozo area is situated below everyday Atacameño community life, making arguments about its effect on human lives less available, the concerns and questions about potential flow, effect, and absence remain.

]p1[In 2009, Chile became a signatory to the International Labour Organization’s

Convention 169 (C169), one aspect of which obliges signatory states to ensure that indigenous peoples are consulted about any potential impacts on their recognized territories. Changes to national regulation of ‘development activity’ associated with C169 indicate that from 2019 onwards both MEL and CMZ will have to seek Indigenous

Community consent before they are able to extend the life of their water extraction concessions in Peine’s broader claimed territory. In early 2017, MEL lodged an

Environmental Impact Study (EIS) with the Environment Evaluation Service of the Chilean government (SEA), seeking to extend its licence to extract from Monturaqui. As part of its

EIS, MEL offered a range of conciliatory goods, services, and activities to Peine and other

Indigenous Communities around the Salar, and announced plans to stop extracting water from the Salar de Punta Negra. Members of the Peine community have so far expressed resistance to further water extraction licences, arguing that extraction will compromise the ways in which they go about life around the Salar in the future.

]p1[While those active in political negotiations for Peine see some promise in changes that have come with C169, especially a recognition of the indigenous relationship with water and territory, aspects of the consultation process introduce new uncertainties, pressures, and complexities, including the limited and as yet undefined recognition of indigenous territories and waters, and how community members might respond to company-produced technical studies of underground water which argue that high levels of groundwater extraction will be sustainable.

]p1[In an attempt to comprehend such systemic complexity in mining contexts, the

‘agency of the powerful’ (Gilberthorpe & Rajak 2017) is now as much in focus as the ethnographic detail about responses to mining from the ‘impacted’ community and workers

(S. Kirsch 2014; Li 2015; Rajak 2011; Welker 2014; cf. Nash 1979, Taussig 1980). Studies of mining processes, mined substances, and associated technical practice have also deepened comprehension of actors and effects across mining contexts (Barry 2013; Richardson &

Weszkalnys 2014). The extent of MEL’s and other mining companies’ extraction of groundwater and the associated effects are difficult to grasp. Below I argue that this is partly the result of how mining companies sustain ignorance about water and the impacts of extraction as a form of agency of the powerful that maintains the conditions for extractive activity. However, I first show how sustaining ignorance is contingent on what groundwater does. I then set out the argument for groundwater’s active part in this ecological contest and demonstrate how it intersects with state and corporate practice.

]ha[Groundwater’s political capacity and the agency of powerful capital interests

]p[Groundwater’s political effects may include, for example, the ways in which flows and the appearance of water in the Salar de Atacama partly describe the territorial parameters of cultural groups, which in turn affect which mining company must engage with which indigenous group. Exploring the presence and activity of water as it creates relations in human politics has become an important focus in recent geographies of the ‘hydro-social’ in which space is constituted through water-society relations, cycles, and networks (Boelens et

al. 2016; Linton & Budds 2014; Swyngedouw 2009). However, other factors (and nature) may also be active in relations that are less constitutive or causal. Bennett proposes that political ecology might be rooted in an ‘ontological field without any unequivocal demarcations between human, animal, vegetable, or mineral’ (2010: 117). In such a field, she posits materialities as ‘forces and flows’ that ‘are or can become lively, affective, and signaling’ (2010: 117). For Bennett and others (see also Coole & Frost 2011; Strang 2014),

‘natural’ things (e.g. groundwater) are less environmental objects than actants (see Latour

2005) in a set of contingent relations.10 Thus, in various ways the liveliness of nature is being incorporated into political ecology analyses. That ‘nature’ (water) may be ontologically diverse (there are many waters, rather than water simply being valued differently in cultural terms) is the proposition of a political project in anthropology developing around the consideration of multiple natures in Latin American ecological contests (neatly reviewed in relation to water by Bonelli et al. 2016, but see, e.g., Blaser 2009; de la Cadena 2015). The political contest involving indigenous people, extraction companies, the state, and the waters of the southern end of the Salar de Atacama lends itselfto thinking through what sustains their relations in these terms. However, rather than a broad consideration of ontological relations, this article considers one specific way in which underground water may be understood to have active relations with the state and extractive companies in a political contest. If materiality is political, it has been argued, we should consider the specific ways in which things afford (have the capacity, or potential, to affect) responses of many kinds by humans and other things (Abrahamsson, Bertoni, Mol & Ibáñez 2015). My argument is that groundwater has the material capacity to effect an enigma (or produce

unknowns), and it is this – being partially unseen, actively unseeable – that allows for the political responses I narrate here. In a late industrial contest over water extraction, specific relations are significant. It is in these terms that I show how the material capacity of underground water is related to regulatory and extractive processes of unknowing.

]hb[Groundwater: an enigma

]p[Subterranean water has a material curiousness that, as others have shown (de Rijke,

Munro & de Lourdes 2016), may be considered a broad characteristic of underground things. Hydrological studies of the nature of the water in the Salar de Atacama define the material problematic of this little-known environmental object. The basin is ‘endorheic’, that is, a hydrological system considered ‘closed’. ‘Recharge’ in the basin occurs from scant rainfall and snowmelt largely flowing underground from the Andean mountain range (the cordillera) to form a pool in the expanse of the Salar. Rather than ‘discharging’ to rivers or an ocean, the water evaporates. The greatest quantities of water in the Salar are concentrated in aquifers, although there is a river on the northern edge of the basin and within the saltpan are a number of salt lagoons and occasional small freshwater pools such as those at Tilopozo. In hydrological research, the ‘recharge and discharge’ of different groundwater systems that feed springs and aquifers in and around the Salar are referred to as not well understood (Kampf et al. 2005; Messerli et al. 1997; Tejeda, Cienfuegos, Muñoz

& Durán 2003), and quantities of water that flow to salt and fresh lagoons on the Salar’s surface are described as largely unknown (Vásquez, Ortiz, Suárez & Muñoz 2013).

Hydrologist John Houston concludes that evaporation is a process which is ‘elusive and

poorly quantified’ (2006: 402), especially in the Salar de Atacama, and while he makes a detailed attempt to address this lack, he concludes that ‘important gaps’ in scientific knowledge of the area remain. An analysis of these descriptions of the physical properties of underground-ness and evaporation within the Salar’s hydrological system begin to demonstrate the ways in which groundwater has the characteristic of an enigma. Below, through an exploration of the DGA’s regulatory activities in relation to the Salar, I illustrate how the enigma of water’s material capacities is related to the structures and reproduction of ignorance.

]hb[Regulatory ignorance

]p[Corporate and government reports about underground water describe many kinds of knowledge about the environment, but a striking feature is that they appear to manage forms of ignorance (the authority’s and company’s own, as well as others’) about key aspects of the environment and extraction’s impact. Here, ignorance refers less to a state, such as an absence of knowledge, than to the ways in which it is produced by ‘specific practices with effects that are distinct from the effects of the lack of knowledge to which the ignorance in question corresponds’ (Mair, Casey & Kelly 2012: 3). The effects of ignorance in this sense are unknowing in the midst of voluminous information production. Deliberative and strategic ignorance, as well as passively allowing unknowing to flourish, are productive and powerful forms of agency (T.G. Kirsch & Dilley 2015; McGoey 2012; Proctor 2008).

Groundwater’s enigma is connected to the structures and practices of ignorance extant in

late industrial capitalism, and a study of the Chilean DGA’s attempts to develop strategies for water regulation begins to reveal these dynamics.

]p1[In 2010, the DGA published a diagnostic report of the Salar de Atacama basin that included calculations of its average hydrological ‘balance’ for the years 1970-2008. This

‘balance’ is a calculation of how much water enters and leaves the basin using rainfall data, available estimates of subterranean and surface flows, and evaporation and evapotranspiration data (the transference of water from plants to the atmosphere) (DGA

2010).11 As in other studies, the DGA found that the range of variables needed for a calculation of the total ‘balance’ for the Salar made such a calculation subject to ‘great indeterminacy’ and ‘uncertainty’ (2010: 96). Nevertheless, the report provided both a model, that is, an estimation tool for calculating the ‘balance’, and a figure for water available which was a total for the Salar of 5.6 cubic metres per second (2010: 126). The

DGA recommended that its model might in future consider industrial extraction quantities, which largely occur in areas of the Salar identified in the report as the ‘most sensitive’. The southern end of the Salar at Tilopozo has been consistently singled out as the area at once most ecologically sensitive and subject to the highest volume of extraction.

]p1[In December 2012, the DGA hosted a public meeting in San Pedro de Atacama to discuss with the Salar’s communities the government agency’s diagnostic reporting of the water in the basin.12 Atacameño community leaders from localities around the Salar as well as non-indigenous locals, business owners, journalists, and researchers such as myself attended the meeting. The presenter of the DGA’s report noted a range of problems in representing and regulating the basin (cuenca) as a whole. These included the DGA’s

network of environmental monitoring apparatuses (redes de vigilancia), composed of a range of different instruments and data points, including those owned by mining companies, which together do not make a coherent set. Additionally, problems with the weather were said to be responsible for missing data and discontinuous registers. The presenter concluded that the DGA has ‘general problems with *data+ reliability’ (DGA 2012).

In June 2016, submissions to the national Comisión Investigadora Glaciares y Salares

(Investigative Committee into Glaciers and Saltpans: Cámera de Diputados 2017) revealed that the DGA had in fact long diagnosed the Salar as over-allocated (sobre otorgada), meaning that according to its calculations, there were more concessions for extraction granted than water entering the basin.13 According to one submission, the DGA reported in

2004 that 'zone 4' of the Salar – the southeastern area impacted by extractions from the

Monturaqui-Negrillar-Tilopozo area – had a recharge rate of 880 litres per second (l/s, or .88 cubic metres per second) and 2,466 l/s of granted water rights, meaning that 1,586 l/s were being extracted that could not be supported by ‘natural recharge’. An earlier report contains similar figures, and the water authority’s conclusion was that ‘the effective flow of granted

*extraction+ rights exceeds the renewable resource in this zone’ (DGA 1999: 9). Despite such findings, the DGA public register revealed that further concessions in the year 2000 and again in 2001 were granted to MEL by the water authority in areas on the southern

‘sensitive’ zone of the Salar’s basin. In the same proceedings of the Cámera de Diputados

(2017), the DGA representative from Antofagasta underlined his desire for better regulatory modelling. He is reported as saying,

]ex/[The DGA works with these aquifers and how they are used according to its

economic capacities. Hence there are [water extraction] rights in this sector and they

are growing, but it *the basin+ needs an ‘SDT’ *water availability model+ to determine

the state of the aquifer, how it is behaving, and how it is recharging. We must know

the availability [of water] and for this we must have an SDT, which is not unique and

will be variable (2017: 96, see also 88).]/ex[

]p[Such statements by the DGA representative indicate regulators’ desires to improve their estimations (or models) of how much water is in the basin’s system in order to better regulate and allocate water extraction rights. In an interview, the regional director of the

DGA explained that the Salar’s remoteness from its offices in the regional capital of

Antofagasta, its large size, location underground in a harsh landscape, and problems with their environmental models have prevented the DGA from regulating water or knowing the true environmental impact of its extraction (interview, Antofagasta, 2015).

]p1[The DGA’s uncertainties about environmental modelling and insistence on greater regulation can be understood at least partially in terms of the enigma of underground water. Being mostly hidden, but flirting with appearance, this underground water affords human awareness of the dynamics of water’s unknowns. The unknowns are to an extent known, described, and explained, but seem unable to be effectively controlled in the interests of regulatory activity. The DGA’s attempts at regulation have been hampered by a range of structural factors, including its lack of oversight of mining company extractors

and quantities of extraction.14 Given competing interests, unknowns then become crucial to the inequities of water access, management, and impacts of extraction.

]p1[Studies of risk management practices of governments and corporations in late industrialist conditions have revealed how ‘judgement *about harm may be] emphatically if not aggressively suspended’ (Fortun 2014: 319). For example, Rayner identifies a number of environmental regulatory strategies that produce ignorance, including by ‘displacing’

‘uncomfortable knowledge’ through substituting a model for an environmental object or activity, thereby managing change through representation, prediction, and simulation

(2012: 120-2). Such analyses seem parallel to Proctor’s proposition in another context that ignorance be investigated as embedded in structures of inequality, rather than be regarded solely as deliberative inattention. He writes, ‘[I]t is not hard to imagine an “overdetermined” mix of deliberate and inadvertent neglect, though the boundary between these two is not always clear’ (2008: 8).

]p1[I turn now to examine in more detail how unknowns may be sustained in the interests of ongoing extraction.

]ha[MEL’s ‘Monturaqui-Negrillar-Tilopozo PAT’

]p[Models of the environment are products of contingent ecological relations or human responses to what nature affords (Bennett 2010). My analysis of the models within company environmental reporting to the state and community on the impact (actual or anticipated) of their extractive activity is a consideration of this material relation and an exploration of how ecological dynamics may become political tools. The ‘PAT’ (Plan de

Alerta Temprana, Early Warning Plan) contains models by which MEL represents the process and effects of its extraction in the Salar. A recently available annual sustainability report shows that about 50 per cent of MEL’s water for mineral processing at the copper mine comes from extraction of groundwater in Monturaqui (MEL 2015: 56) at the head of the

Monturaqui-Negrillar-Tilopozo (MNT) sector and where they have been extracting water since 1995 (MEL 2006: 123).15 According to the PAT, and as outlined above, the impact zone of MEL’s (and others’) water extraction overlaps with Peine’s recognized territory and a

DGA-protected aquifer at Tilopozo. An analysis of the PAT as a model of underground water reveals some ways in which groundwater has the capacity to be materially unknown and to represent the unknown as manageable through assertions of technical competence.

]p1[Between 2010 and 2012, and in compliance with the company-community agreement, representatives from MEL used the PAT to present environmental impact data to the Indigenous Community of Peine at community meetings. The company had presented the reports to community previously, but for these three consecutive years MEL’s social performance manager made a special effort to assure that the reports were ‘consultative’ and ‘transparent’ (interview, 28 December 2012). In the full community meetings I observed in 2011 and 2012, company speakers focused their reports on calculations showing adherence to the limits of acceptable environmental change established in the PAT. These limits were no more than 1,800 l/s extracted from the sector, a 25 centimetre limit to decrease in the level of water, and a 6 per cent maximum drop in flow of water to the

Tilopozo aquifer. In conversations I had with MEL representatives about their activities in

2011, they expressed a desire to improve their knowledge of the conditions of underground

water. When I asked about these matters in 2012, the community relations manager appeared apprehensive, saying: ‘*The+ extraction of water in this location is perhaps not that principally of Escondida or BHP alone . . . So we don’t really know what the true impact is and whether this will, in the end, cause damage to us’ (interview, 28 December 2012). In

2013, a new social performance manager told me that because some community members did not accept the validity of their reports, he planned to hold workshops that would focus on increasing community understanding of the science of environmental impact (pers. comm., 11 December 2013). In 2017, these workshops had still not eventuated.

]p1[In 2015, I asked a MEL geohydrologist to explain the water and impact modelling they undertook, and she responded:

]ex/[The Salar, any Salar, is a system of discharge and the water discharges through

evaporation. It [the groundwater] may have a connection with another sector, but

by preference, the water is going to want to go that way (el agua se va a querer ir

por alli). Because water, I always say that water is super-intelligent, it will always

want to go for the easiest way and the easiest way is to discharge through the Salar

. . . If here we have some clay, for example, the water will arrive there and say, I

cannot pass, I’ll have to go this [other] way (va a llegar aquí y decir, no puedo pasar,

tengo que irme por acá). So, for us it is really important to know the geological

formations. Because we know – well, we infer, obviously, we can’t say with scientific

certainty – we infer (inferimos) . . . which way the water is going to go, and in this

way we build our model. We try to explain this also to communities sometimes, but

sometimes they do not believe us very much [laughs]. But that’s how it is (Pero así

es) (interview, 26 November 2015).]/ex[

]p[The geohydrologist’s personification and simplification of scientific modelling for the benefit of explaining the model to community members (and interviewing anthropologists) appears to contradict official company assertions that the MNT PAT is a model that protects

MEL’s conditions of ‘sustainability’.16 The PAT models impact through basin recharge

(subterranean flows measured at multiple monitoring points) and discharge (evaporation) and MEL’s rates of extraction. As I have illustrated above, all three calculations are inexact.

Indeed, a DGA report notes that,

]ex/[of the three indicative conditions in the PAT . . . it is possible to indicate that the

first of these is considered ambiguous, given that the 25 cm level has no established

reference point . . . and does not indicate which monitoring wells were used to verify

[change] . . . or the period of time that determines the threshold (DGA 2014:

250).]/ex[

]p[Moreover, each relies on studies produced almost solely by MEL’s (and CMZ’s) scientists, studies which themselves have been critiqued for partiality. For example, according to the

DGA’s analysis, some monitoring wells indicate that the levels of the PAT are ‘closer to the established threshold’ than the company reports (DGA 2014: 217). Furthermore, the DGA

insisted that while there are inconsistencies in the data, contrary to company claims there appears to have been a steady decrease in water levels at Tilopozo, and one of the early warning signs of impact, a 6 per cent reduction in flow to the aquifer identified in the PAT, may be reached in four to five years (2014: 251-5). According to company scientists, if a significant impact on Tilopozo is registered, it will occur a ‘long time in the future’

(interview, 6 November 2015). This is quite a different conclusion to the four to five years the DGA predicts. Monturaqui is about 60 kilometres ‘upstream’ from Tilopozo, and these conflicting representations reveal that the underground relation between the two may be well established, but that the details of the connection are subject to a range of unknowns.

Nonetheless, MEL continues to assert the ‘sustainablity’ of its extractive activity. According to the geohydrologist from MEL, Monturaqui ‘has behaved much better’ than predicted, but

Negrillar and Tilopozo were ‘not as good as we had thought in the beginning’.16 Since 2013,

MEL has been developing a desalination plant on the coast near Antofagasta and has reported that it will reduce the volume of freshwater extracted from underground.

Nonetheless, early in 2017 its EIS sought an eleven-year extension of its licence to extract water from Monturaqui.

]p1[MEL’s reporting might be understood to reflect company hydrologists’ broader modelling practices. While scientists do not expect water to be a stable object, modelling as a corporate and regulatory product tends to seek an equilibrium (Babidge 2015; Li 2015).

Thus, assertions of low-level impact in the PAT should be understood as conditioned by the techniques that the company scientists and managers rely on and which only approximate the nature and extent of the body of water. The model of the PAT seeks to define and

encapsulate risk, which, as McGoey argues, represents ‘commodified uncertainty . . . a calculation of one’s exposure to contingency . . . itself contingent on its own inability to predict all contingencies’ (2012: 8). The effect is a turning away from the capacity for underground water to have an effective relation with the human. The company’s official assertions about certainty and sustainability are a promulgation of ignorance about such effects, both in reports to the community and in those to the government authority.

]ha[Conclusions: responding to enigma

]p[The state, the mining companies, and Indigenous Communities all have a stake in the political contest over subterranean water in the Salar de Atacama, and all are subject to its enigma. Water’s potential to flow, exist, and disappear makes plain a sense of its capacity to give and deny sustenance and life. However, while calling to the fore a relationship among human actors in terms of what water can do, the privileging of what Bennett (2010) calls the vitality of things may be dangerously unspecific (Abrahamsson et al. 2015). A prominent criticism of an object-orientated ontology is that a focus on how some thing may have political capacity obscures the structural elements of late industrialism, which in turn may allow powerful agents to shift ongoing negative effects of material relations to some humans and environments more than others (Fortun 2014: 314-15). I have sought instead to show how one material capacity of underground water – to be unknown, an enigma – affords responses to the management of unknowns that in turn maintain levels of extraction and their impacts. Moreover, appeals to those unknowns have delayed regulatory action

and sustained extractive activity. I propose that there are alternative responses to the politics of uncertainty.

]p1[The excesses of privatization, such as those of a ‘water market’, have been publicly debated in Chile, but through the decades since industrial water extraction for mining use began in the 1980s, a kind of ‘attritional catastrophe’ (Nixon 2011: 7) is thought to have occurred. The 2016 national investigation into Chile’s salt pans and glaciers revealed broad scholarly, community, and government fears about the condition of the natural environment, its protection, and the regulation of extraction (Cámera de Diputados 2017:

248). The ways in which the enigmatic capacities of the waters of the Salar are related to their extraction add to the complexities of responding to ‘impact’. However, rather than state recognition of indigenous rights taking into consideration indigenous relations to water and knowledge of its properties (however active and uncertain), recognition has been converted into corporate environmental and social ‘responsibility’ reporting, and, while the

DGA has recently implemented stronger regulatory conditions, there is a state commitment to ongoing industrial extraction. The contradictory forces that see the recognition of indigenous rights and the need to protect environments entwined with ongoing extractive capitalism are part of the complex conditions of lateness since corporate acts to recognize rights to consultation with indigenous groups and regulating impact through environmental modelling are put to work for arguments regarding social and environmental sustainability of extraction.

]p1[The relationships between corporations and communities that are produced by the geospatial (territorial) capacities of water, and shared but unequal uncertainty about it,

have produced inaction in response to broad concerns about water depletion. The water’s material elusiveness and corporate-scientific slipperiness have raised questions for government regulators about levels of water exploitation but prevented them from defining a regulated object. In setting out his taxonomy of ignorance, Smithson distinguishes between the state of ignorance (an error) and the act of ignoring (a declaration of irrelevance), identifying the latter as a negative process resulting in exclusion of something

‘from reality’. In contrast, a positive approach to ignorance is to ‘revise the framework of reality itself to make a place for the anomalous material’ (Smithson 1989: 6). I suggest instead that an acknowledgement of water’s enigmatic capacities, the unknowns and uncertainties that inhere in human relations with underground water, might provide an argument for protection of water resources.

]p1[One of the prominent logics of considering the political activity of things is the proposition that the relation between human actors and things affords a partial connection

– a contingency rather than causation – with political implications. Don Geraldo’s simplification of water’s material properties (downward flow), and his inference that where extraction occurs an impact must be present and extraction should be stopped, negates

MEL’s assertions that an impact may be mitigated through modelling and adherence to self- prescribed limits. Such an argument about downward flow was implicit yet effective when

Atacameño communities resisted potential new extraction in the case of ‘Pampa Colorada’, where the physical relation of source, flow, and the essential relation of the waters of the mountains and the lives of people in villages below was ‘obvious’. Tilopozo’s political relation to human life is less apparent. Its waters include unseen aquifers, potentially fed by

waters originating in Monturaqui, that connect in myriad ways to small surface pools and the damp pastures around them, evaporating through these surface appearances but also lying still beneath. In the case of Tilopozo, the place is registered in the name of the community and listed as ‘protected’ by the DGA, but not permanently occupied by contemporary community members. Members of the community have nonetheless insisted on its significance, partly through community participatory monitoring or ‘vigilance’ of corporate environmental studies in the area, and partly by increasing their use of the area.

Such activities emphasize a political and ethical relation between water and community and a response to underground water that insists, above all else, on recognition of this relationship.

]p1[Extracting water from the Salar de Atacama and surrounding hyper-arid areas has been undertaken for many years by a range of mining operations without reporting the result to the public or to impacted communities. Shifts towards environmental regulation, the reporting and indigenous rights recognition, and the demands of local populations may yet prevent an ‘attritional catastrophe’ in the Salar de Atacama, despite such movements having scant recourse to company reports that detail their own studies of environmental

‘sustainability’. I have proposed here that taking account of underground water’s material characteristic of enigma would mean emphasizing the fact that company technical practices

(modelling, managing, reporting) reveal many ecological unknowns and potentially harmful effects. Responding to unknowns by stopping or radically slowing extraction would be a direct contrast to current company and regulatory responses. My sense is that the value in including material agency as politics, in this case a specific capacity of water’s enigma that

intersects with the agency of the powerful to sustain ignorance about the impacts of extraction, may help turn our attention to the multiple and unequal ways in which lives and environments are being disregarded.

]hx[NOTES

]nt[I acknowledge and am grateful to leaders and community members from Peine who authorized my research in their community and extended their hospitality. I also thank the employees of MEL and Rockwood and the DGA who consented to my requests for interviews. The research was supported by the School of Social Science and the Institute of

Advanced Studies in the Humanities of the University of Queensland, and by an Australian

Research Council Grant (ARC DP#1094069). It was completed during my time as a Visiting

Scholar at the Centre for Intercultural and Indigenous Research (CIIR), Chile (CONICYT/

FONDAP/15110006). Many colleagues provided critical comments over the years of this article’s development. Thanks to the Anthropology Department at Sydney University, who invited me to give the article in their seminar series and who were generous in their critique. The article greatly benefited from anonymous reviewers’ suggestions. I take responsibility for any remaining deficiencies.

1 All names used in this work are pseudonyms.

2 Initial research permission was negotiated with leaders and the assembly of members of the Peine Indigenous Community in 2010 and annual or biannual fieldwork totalling more

than fourteen months has followed; the longest period was four and a half months, the shortest three weeks.

3 MEL has contributed funding to local projects in potable water, a sports stadium, local schooling and health infrastructure, and much else. The benefits, effects, and impacts of corporate-led community development are a subject of fierce national, global, and local debate, and of significant academic interest, but are not addressed here.

4 BHP Billiton is the operating company for copper extraction at the Escondida mine. Over the years of my research, representatives of the company whom I have met and who interact with the community have been employed directly by BHP Billiton, or by Minera

Escondida Limitada or through a consultant. I intentionally conflate the operational complexities here as ‘MEL’ for ease of reference.

5 In this article, I think about one aspect of the material capacities of groundwater in relation to this political contest, rather than broader ontological questions. Such questions include what, for example, de la Cadena (2015) calls Andean ecologies, in which water is water, but

‘not only’. What may be at play in Atacameño ecologies might profit from questions along these lines, but cannot be incorporated within the confines of this article. See Li (2015) for in-depth work on this topic in extractive political contests in Peru, and Bonelli, Bueno de

Mesquita & Roca (2016) for an exploration of ‘many natures’ and political projects in Latin

America.

6 The convido and pago are public rituals in which relations with water and earth as responsive things are sought and maintained. For Göbel (2008: 222), Andean pastoralists in

Huancar, Argentina (within Atacameño ancestral trading and pastoral routes), are ‘actively

engaged’ in responding to environmental uncertainty through practices that instantiate the connections between human bodies, the bodies of their herds, and beings of the earth (e.g. the pachamama) whose hunger, desires, or sadness may create dangerous situations. As doña Inés signalled, life changes, but ethnographic records of earlier times (Mostny 1954) have contemporary echoes.

7 A common refrain is ‘antes éramos mas unidos’: ‘we were more united before’.

8 The Water Code makes a legal distinction between land owned and waters associated with that land. Implications of this have been explored by others (e.g. Budds 2013). Amendments to Chile’s Water Code in 2005 necessitated government audits of extractive activity and made new extraction of subterranean water in the northern desert regions of the country subject to special authorization from the DGA. The Chilean state has not recognized the full territorial claims of communities around the Salar and, as per the Water Code, there is no provision for the recognition and protection of subterranean water.

9 Comisión Nacional de Medio Ambiente, CONAMA

10 Latour’s term ‘actant’ is glossed by Bennett as ‘that which has efficacy, can do things, has sufficient coherence to make a difference, produce effects, alter the course of events’

(2010: viii).

11 ‘The cuenca’ (basin) of the Salar de Atacama as a putative object overlaps with the cartographic boundaries of the sub-region (comuna) of San Pedro de Atacama, in the province of El Loa, in the region of Antofagasta, representing as much a bureaucratic regime as an environmental feature (see Orlove & Caton 2010: 407).

12 San Pedro de Atacama (town) is located on the northern end of the Salar, the seat of local government for the Salar’s communities and a tourist centre. Water management for San

Pedro and its associated ayllus (agricultural settlements) is a critical issue for the region, but it is not possible to address this here (see Bolados 2014).

13 In the video recording of one session, available on-line

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4zDluBL3uM, accessed 15 November 2018), a submission was made by Jorge Vergara from the Fundación Desierto Atacama (a not-for- profit research foundation), who worked in 2014 as an environment and heritage project manager with the Peine Indigenous Community. A lawyer and anthropologist, Alonso Barros

(associated with the same Fundación), who also previously worked for the community and was the first in this area to publish widely on the significant inequalities of water extraction, gave a parallel presentation to the Committee (see Barros 2008; Cámera de Diputados

2017).

14 On 22 June 2018, the DGA resolved that the southern Salar (incorporating Tilopozo) was a

‘zone of prohibition’, meaning that it would grant no new water extractions rights

(Resolution no. 13: http:// www.leychile.cl/N?i=1121804&f=2018-08-16&p=, accessed 19

November 2018). While prohibition has been welcomed, Chilean law allows extraction at current rates to continue, given water rights may only be expropriated by the state from private owners under extraordinary conditions.

15 CMZ extracts at around 1000 l/s from the same sector (DGA 2014: 184). Rockwood

Lithium (Albermarle), and SQM also extract freshwater and brine. These activities are

significant to the overwhelming uncertainty regarding potential effects of extraction in the region.

16 In making this observation, I do not seek to resolve the contradiction, or expect the science to necessarily resolve the enigma of underground water.

17 Full quote:

]exn/[Pero a través del tiempo, nos dimos cuenta de que la cantidad de agua que

tenía era mucho más de que nosotros pensábamos. Que se iba . . . que se ha

comportaba mucho mejor, particularmente Monturaqui, ¿ok? Negrillar y Tilopozo sí

. . . nosotros también sabíamos que eran buenos, quizás no tan bueno como

pensábamos en el inicio, pero nosotros estamos trayéndolo de Monturaqui . . .

(interview, 26 November 2015).]/exn[

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]bio[Sally Babidge is a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Queensland. She writes about the extraction industry and indigenous peoples in northern Chile and is the author of Aboriginal family and the state: the conditions of history (Ashgate, 2010), based on research in Australia.

]add[School of Social Science, The University of Queensland, St Lucia Qld 4072, Australia. [email protected]

Figure 1. Map of region and places mentioned in text. (Map: Sally Babidge and Matthew Harris.)

Figure 2. A path of underground water close to the surface (sustaining vegetation) through the ‘Negrillar’ section of the Monturaqui-Negrillar-Tilopozo sector. (Photo by the author, December 2013.)

Figure 3. A freshwater pool and surrounding pasture at Tilopozo on the south end of the Salar. (Photo by the author, September 2011.)