The monster has landed: Shifting land tenure regimes and the political ecology of a Chilean mining ‘wasteland’

Abstract

This article examines the emergence and expansion of El Torito, a large-scale tailings dam in El Melón, Chile. I present the dam as an outcome of multiple historical land tenure regimes, including the rural proto capitalist “hacienda”, the twentieth century agrarian reform, and the current liberalisation of land markets. The political ecology literature on wastelands (including mining waste sites) has extensively explored the historical features that lead to the production of such territories, including land control and appropriation. However, I argue that this scholarship has not paid sufficient attention to the ways in which multiple, successive, and radically different land tenure regimes overlap over time, collectively shaping the production of wastelands. Furthermore, I claim that each land tenure regime involves a particular valuation of the territory, and that their intersection explains the availability of land for waste disposal. To support this argument, the article discusses the concepts of ‘wastelanding’, ‘valuation’ and ‘territorial emptying’. The thematic analysis of the conducted interviews and the review of secondary sources suggest that most of the features described in the literature on the production of wastelands are present in my case. However, my findings contribute to expand the literature: Firstly, the production of wastelands is not necessarily characterised by the imposition of one valuation of the land over other, subaltern, or fundamentally different valuations. Secondly, the production of wastelands can be shaped simultaneously by processes of territorial emptying and repopulation, manufacturing multiple and contradictory valuations of the territory.