Sexual violence and extraction: Interrogating mining executive discourses of corporate social responsibility, violence, and impunity

Abstract

Gender-based and sexual violence permeates resource extraction. This violence operates in many forms and spheres, both public and private. Focusing on a case of overt, public violence, we ask, what is productive about gender-based and sexual violence for mining corporations? In the context of commitments to social responsibility and the gender impacts of mining, what can explain corporate engagement with acts of extreme violence that publicly undermine these commitments? We respond by exploring the case of the 2007 attack on Maya Q’eqchi’ women near the Fénix nickel mine in Guatemala. Following an attack allegedly involving gang rape by public-private armed forces, eleven survivors mobilized to demand justice in the landmark Caal v. Hudbay legal case in Canada. Our analysis offers a reading of the internal communications of mining executives and their affiliates, which were released through the case. Bringing these data in conversation with critical theories of race, gender and extraction, we argue that the mining company benefitted not only from the gendered suppression and discipline of resistance, but also from the reinforcement of a racialized view of Guatemala as violent—a stereotype that allows Canadian corporate executives to continue to project their goodness, regardless of the substance of their actions.