The Two Fires of ANCAP

Abstract

This chapter examines debates surrounding lead contamination and the Uruguayan state petroleum enterprise ANCAP. Through ANCAP, the politics of contamination (political ecology) became embroiled with the politics of privatization (political economy), bringing together concerns over the health of citizen bodies and the health of the state. In these overlapping debates, the ANCAP directorship and the state oil-workers union, FANCAP, presented contrasting visions regarding the role and character of both the public enterprise and the modern state in neoliberal times. The chapter traces the roots of organized labor’s militant and radical history of defending the “means of state production,” including its heroic resistance against the dictatorship. It examines the union’s double bind in denouncing the enterprise’s role in contamination through leaded-gasoline production while defending it from privatization.