Megaminery, water and territory: processes of un-re-territorialization due to concession of important water resources in zones of the parish of El Chical, Carchi province, Ecuador

Abstract

This article is an effort to define and characterize “important hydrologic zones” affected by mining concessions in the territory defined as mestizo, part of the parish El Chical in Carchi province in northwestern Ecuador. Facing a wave of concessions for industrial mining, many debates and uncertainties from the local populations that inhabit these territories, now defined as miners from the central state, have emerged. As these new concessions enter in a conflict for land use, it generates deterritorialization of local habitants, since their way of living and the natural resources to maintain them are threatened by state politics. Besides this, the materialization of this politics, including the presence of transnational mining companies, have already influenced changes in local relationships. This document is the first part of a wider investigation, whose objective is to analyze factors of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, from different actors perspectives, related to water, its use and conservation as a contestation to the imposition of mining territories, in El Chical parish. The document makes a characterization of the problematic between water and mining, and then analyzes from the critical geography perspective the processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, to finally make and overlap between mining concessions and important hydrologic zones in the study area.