3. Water storage reservoirs in Mataquita: clashing measurements and meanings

Ursula Balderson

Introduction

Water-infrastructure developments in Andean Peru have great symbolic and practical importance, particularly in ‘territories of abandonment’ where state presence is limited and water may be scarce (Rasmussen, 2016b, 2016c; Harvey and Knox, 2015). Like other types of infrastructure, water infrastructures can ‘emerge out of and store within them forms of desire and fantasy and can take on fetish-like aspects that sometimes can be wholly autonomous from their technical function’ (Larkin, 2013). Despite this, water infrastructures are generally presented as apolitical and technocratic, a characterisation which obscures the intense wrangling and negotiation processes that can accompany even small-scale localised interventions. In the case I discuss below, the desire for water infrastructures was intertwined with issues of citizenship, legitimacy, and respect and therefore inherently political.

The data for this chapter is drawn from observations of a ‘working group’1 formed to resolve a low-level mining conflict taking place between the mining company Barrick Gold2 and the village of Mataquita in the Ancash region of Peru. The conflict revolved around the village’s inadequate access to drinking water as a result of damage caused to water resources during mining activities. Although the mining company initially dismissed the complaint brought by the community as illegitimate, after substantial pressure a working group overseen by state representatives was formed. The outcomes of the process included a hydrological study outlining the extent of the water deficit in the village (the Diagnóstico), a document detailing engineering designs for a series small water storage reservoirs which were posited as a means of resolving the crisis (the Expediente Técnico) and the reservoirs themselves.

In my discussion, I seek to illustrate the complex relationship that communities can have with promised infrastructure developments and the ways in which they try to mould the form that these interventions take. I show how infrastructural developments are never politically neutral and how their affective nature allowed the community to challenge the abstract depoliticised rationalities that legitimate them.

Hybridity and hydrosocial territories

Infrastructures have been viewed as ‘socio-technical assemblages through which it is possible to tease out the arrangements of people and things and ideas and materials that make up larger technological systems’ (Harvey and Knox, 2015, p. 5). Infrastructures generate political effects and structure social relations. Work on assemblages shifts the focus from what things are to what they do (Deleuze, 1990, p. 218 in Fox, 2015, p. 305). The concept of ‘hybridity’ and the interrelation of natural/physical and social worlds which underpin concepts such as ‘socio-technical assemblage’ and ‘hydrosocial territory’ emerged from the influential work of Bruno Latour (Latour, 2004). The term ‘hydrosocial territory’ is used to indicate the hybrid relationship between nature, society, and technology which facilitates or constrains access to water resources (Zwarteveen and Boelens, 2014; Boelens et al., 2016). Hydrosocial territories have been conceptualised as ‘the contested imaginary and socioenvironmental materialization of a spatially bound multi-scalar network in which humans, water flows, ecological relations, hydraulic infrastructure, financial means, legal and administrative arrangements and cultural institutions and practices are interactively defined, aligned and mobilized through epistemological belief systems, political hierarchies and naturalizing discourses’ (Boelens et al., 2016, p. 2). Hydrosocial territories are therefore both plural and multidimensional. In the example I discuss below, they included physical infrastructures, legislation such as the Peruvian Water Resources Law, discursive understandings of adequate water access, epistemological assumptions about what constitutes valid knowledge of the hydrosphere, the technical documents which underpinned the design of the water-storage reservoirs, local and global conceptualisations of water rights and the institutions and actors who were engaged in the process of resolving water conflicts.3

Hydrosocial territories make visible the political decisions which underpin water-infrastructure construction. The disproportionate ability of powerful actors to influence the production of norms and knowledges which serve their own agendas means water infrastructure is not rolled out evenly across countries but tends to prioritise the needs of already affluent communities (Anand, 2011; Zwarteveen and Boelens, 2014; Loftus, 2009). Latour’s approach to knowledge emphasises its political nature and the futility of trying to enforce the fact/value distinction. Although sometimes considered a social constructivist, Latour is uncomfortable with work that leaves the study of nature to the scientists and works only with our perceptions of it (Harding, 2008). Rather than denying the possibility of facts or truth, he indicates that the how, where, and why a ‘fact’ was created ought not to be regarded as irrelevant to the fact itself (Latour, 2004). Knowledge inevitably serves some agendas better than others and the ability to produce facts that bolster one’s own agenda is a socially contingent process. Facts also rely on concepts such as ‘sufficiency’, ‘normality’, and ‘legality’ which inevitably have a political dimension. Throughout the conflict, values, ideologies and affective relations could be observed impinging on the ‘facts’ that supposedly underpinned the solution to the water crisis that was being performed. By excavating the power relations underpinning access to water the issue of water justice becomes pertinent. Demands for water justice combine demands for more just socio-economic distribution of water and far more or better cultural-political recognition such as the acknowledgement of local pre-existing norms and value systems (Zwarteveen and Boelens, 2014).

Background to the dispute

The Pierina mine is located in Ancash, a central northern region in Peru, and run by Barrick Gold, a Canadian multinational gold mining company, and the second largest gold mining company in the world. When Barrick Gold acquired the Pierina concession and the company which had been carrying out the exploration work in 1996 the hopes of the local populations living nearby were high.4 As this area has a long history of mining activity and it has often complemented incomes from subsistence agriculture or small-scale farming (Assadourian et al., 1980; Deustua, 1994) there was little organised resistance to the arrival of the mine. State investment in agriculture had been declining since the 1980s (Gonzales de Olarte, 1996; Yashar, 2005, p. 236) and low levels of water availability meant that agricultural productivity in the Jangas region where the mine would be located was lower than in other nearby districts which had greater access to water resources. The settlements in the area around Mataquita, the village where I conducted most of my fieldwork, are a mixture of villages, hamlets, and small-scale campesino communities. Quechua is the first language spoken in most of the villages and although Spanish is also spoken men tend to be far more proficient in it than women. Local people generally describe themselves as campesinos and there has been limited resurgence in indigenous identification and organisation around issues affecting this group in this part of Peru (see de la Cadena, 2000; Oliart, 2008; Scarritt, 2011; Yashar, 2005 for more detailed discussion of these topics).

When Barrick Gold arrived, it was hoped that the company’s Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programme would improve access to further education and training and that agricultural productivity would be improved via the installation of reigo tecnificado (sprinkler systems). Over 20 years later, although there has been some progress, most feel that Barrick Gold’s promises have not been fulfilled. Although the initial reception to the mine was relatively positive, as soon as the local employment boosting construction phase ended, local relationships went quite quickly downhill. Between 2002 and 2005 the company was involved in a tax avoidance scandal which led to the loss of US$141 million in taxes from the Peruvian Treasury, although the tax authorities pursued Barrick Gold through the courts they eventually lost the case. Soon after that, low-level water conflicts began to develop around the mine. These conflicts periodically flare up into more serious episodes of violence. For example, in 2012 one protester was killed and four were injured during protests about water scarcities in Mareniyoc, a neighbouring village to Mataquita. Despite similar complaints, coalition building between affected actors has remained limited (Himley, 2013; de Echave et al., 2009; Gamu and Dauvergne, 2018; Balderson, forthcoming). Not only has the mine failed to fulfil expectations of development, many of the communities around the mine feel their situation is now even more precarious as water availability has reduced since the mine’s arrival as a representative of the Junta Administradora de Servicios de Saneamiento (JASS) (Mataquita Water and Sanitation Committee) explained to me:

In the Environmental Impact Assessment Barrick planned to bring water from the Cordillera to use in their operations but they never brought it. As an agreement or a commitment Barrick said they would bring water and share it with the communities. But what has happened is the opposite. When they began their operations they began extracting subterranean water. This is now affecting the surface water and many streams have dried up. (Representative of JASS)5

The Cordillera Negra where the mine and village are located has always been short of water. After significant pressure from the local government, the mine funded a water transfer scheme from across the other side of the valley where glaciers provide relatively abundant water. However, when this was eventually built in 2015, it did not benefit the communities which have been most affected by the mine’s activities as pumping water to their altitude was not considered economically feasible. Barrick Gold did not view this situation as problematic as their overall contribution to water availability in the region was positive: ‘We have brought 150 litres and we have taken away 20 litres.6 Mathematically it is this’, a community relations representative told me during an interview.

Water supply in Mataquita was delivered by a series of ‘water capturation points’, built where springs emerged and constructed throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. Until the initiation of mining exploration activities in 1996, an important contributor was the Uliyacu stream whose water was shared between the villages of Mataquita and Mareniyoc, a village slightly higher up the catchment. Unfortunately, during mining exploration work, the flow rate of that stream dramatically diminished and there was no longer enough water for the villagers to share and so from 1996 onwards the Uliyacu stream was only used by Mareniyoc. Initially, there was sufficient water for both villages from other sources, however, as the population increased, other water sources decreased, and flushing toilets became more common, water regularly began to run out in Mataquita. In 2013, fed up with the intermittent drinking-water connection, the community wrote to the local water authority to lodge a formal complaint (denuncia) against the mining company. The aim of this denuncia was to convince the company to provide water to replace that which had been lost as a result of mining activities. In the next sections, I discuss events that emanated from and underpinned this denuncia in order to illustrate some of the social and political dimensions of the resulting infrastructure project.

Demands for water as demands for citizenship

When the community sent their letter to the local water authority demanding that Barrick Gold intervene to replace the water that had disappeared as a result of mining activities they framed their intervention in terms of their rights as Peruvian citizens:

as human beings and citizens of PERU we have the right to water because it guarantees our life and as such will allow that our Nation has peace and tranquillity as long as citizens such as us will be able to continue our activities without the threat of an uncertain future.

The letter goes on to request that the state:

enforce the Mining Company Barrick with the duty to provide us with drinking water and water for our agricultural activities because the Uliyacu stream has disappeared since exploration and exploitation of mining activities were initiated.7

In the letter, they drew on the Water Resources Law8 to suggest the loss of water meant their human right to water was not being respected. In Mataquita, the enmeshing of concerns about water and citizenship reveals the extent to which water availability is used as an indicator of social wellbeing and is inseparable from people’s expectations of development, recognition, and respect from the state. Since the early 2000s, water has become an extremely salient political topic in Peru, and it has been central to many of the nation’s mining conflicts (Defensoría del Pueblo, 2015). Perhaps the most emblematic of all has been the conflict with the Yanacocha Mining Company, which has a history of intense conflicts running back as far as the early 2000s. In 2011, the conflict re-intensified when the company announced plans to extend mining activities and construct a large open-pit copper-gold mine (Li, 2015; Triscritti, 2013; Sosa and Zwarteveen, 2016). This new project would be located in the headwaters of three provinces reliant on agriculture and would involve draining three lagoons and their replacement by artificial reservoirs. Previous experience of high-level conflict relating to the Yanacocha mine means that activist networks are much stronger in this part of Peru than in the Ancash region (de Echave, 2009; Tanaka, 2005). In February 2012, around 1,000 campesinos and representatives of groups defending water rights marched from the threatened lagoons to Lima 800 km away. A manifesto produced by the organising committee stated, ‘The Peruvian state’s current legislation does not recognize that potable water and sanitation are a human right; a right that is essential for all other human rights, since without water there is no life.’9 The Mataquitans registered their grievance against Barrick Gold shortly after the 2012 Water March and echoes of this strategy can be seen in their approach to the conflict. This tendency towards using the language of rights in water conflicts relates to neoliberal ideas about citizenship and what constitutes a recognisable and legitimate concern for campesino communities, constraining the type of grievances that can be aired as I discuss in more detail below (Hale, 2007).

The importance of citizenship in claims for water was particularly evident during a protest event I observed in Mataquita in September 2015. As the water had been disconnected for nearly a week, in an attempt to convince Barrick Gold to arrange water deliveries to the village by lorry the community partially blocked the road to the mine.10 During this protest the villagers raised a Peruvian flag in the middle of the road (see Figure 3.1). Their desire for water and water infrastructure was intimately connected to their desire to feel valued Peruvian citizens rather than abandoned and neglected by their state. As Baviskar notes: ‘[a]ppreciating the inseparability of the material and symbolic dimensions of the conflict helps us understand that the political economy of a natural resource is meaningful only through the wider networks of cultural politics through which it is embedded’ (Baviskar, 2003, p. 5051).

Anand (2011, 2017) has used the term hydraulic citizenship to refer to the way that belonging is enabled through articulations between politics and technology as residents of Mumbai attempt to access reliable water from the urban distribution system. Similarly, Paerregaard et al. (2016) propose water citizenship to describe how actors understand the right to use and access water and the distribution of responsibilities relating to governance. If citizenship is to be conceptualised as ‘an imperfect, unstable set of processes and practices always in the making rather than a singular status being negotiated’ (Paerregaard et al., 2016, p. 200) then the quote from the letter above implies a transactional relationship with the state in which the community’s compliance to the norms expected of them rests upon the state, and by proxy, the ability of the mining company to deliver a sufficiency of this critical resource. The quote echoes Anand’s discussion of the iterative, cyclical process of citizenship formation whereby social histories, political technologies, and material semiotic infrastructures all contribute to people’s quest to secure reliable water access (Anand, 2017) as well as Lemanski’s claim that ‘citizenship is embodied in infrastructure for both citizens and the state’ (Lemanski, 2020, p. 1).

Figure 3.1 The Peruvian flag was raised emphasising the link between issue of water access and citizenship. Photo by the author.

However, the way citizens engage with infrastructures is uneven: in Mataquita they protested in favour of water infrastructure whilst in Cajamarca they protested against it. In both cases, their arguments were buttressed by rights-based framing tactics. After significant community pressure (explored in more detail below) the company agreed to build water-storage reservoirs to help address the drinking-water crisis in the village. These structures would capture water that fell as rain during the rainy season and distribute it during the dry season when supplies were often scarce. Although some concerns were expressed about the suitability of potentially stagnant water for drinking and cooking, the commensurability of the replacement water source was not extensively debated in meetings. This is unlike the Conga conflict discussed above in which the rejection of the reservoirs and thus the conflict itself hinged on the incommensurability of lagoon versus reservoir sourced water. In Mataquita, it was not that the water sources were regarded as equal, but rather their need for some form of water-infrastructure intervention and a weak bargaining position meant the rejection of what was being offered by the mine was not an option. Instead, unease around the equivalence of the intervention mainly focused on whether the water-storage reservoirs would deliver sufficient water for their needs to be adequately met.

As ethnographic research by Dayot in this volume makes clear, responsibility for infrastructure provision in contexts where extractive companies are active is complex and tends to shift between local actors depending on changes to the political economy of extraction. This uncertainty around responsibility is exploited by both the company, local state actors, and prospective politicians (Dayot, 2022). When the Mataquita conflict took place, although the Water Resources Law recognised the right to water, it was not considered to be a constitutional right. In October 2016 however, amendments were made to the constitution and universal access to drinking water has now been included and will be guaranteed by the prioritisation of human consumption over other uses.11 The decision to construct water capture infrastructure in Mataquita is indicative of a moment when water access has crept up the political agenda such that demands that try to activate the human right to water, even before constitutional formalisation, were acted upon. Yet demands for more water are still narrowly interpreted as demands for drinking-water provision rather than fuller conceptualisations which recognise the role that water plays more broadly in allowing human flourishing to take place (Jepson et al., 2017). Below I explore this issue more fully through a consideration of the role that documentation played in determining the response to the water crisis.

Documents and the epistemological underpinnings of infrastructure design

When the community initiated their complaint to Barrick Gold, it was partly because two actas12 had recently been rediscovered in the community archives in which the company appeared to admit responsibility for causing damage to the Uliyacu stream in 1996. The rediscovery of these actas was crucial because previous interactions13 with the company had taught the community that without the proper documentation convincing them to accept responsibility for damages was impossible. On one occasion when complaints about the disappearance of streams used for agriculture were raised in a meeting, the community relations representative reminded them, ‘It is necessary to demonstrate with legal documents [that water resources have been affected]. It is easy [just] to say they have been impacted.’ This emphasis on the necessity of formal studies as a means of knowing scarcity disadvantages local communities who struggle to access this type of information (Shah et al., 2019; Li, 2015). The necessity of having legal documents in order to make a claim for water loss conscribed the community’s ability to successfully claim for the loss of other streams which had been gradually disappearing since the initiation of mining activities.

As such, in their letter to the mining company the community focused on damages caused to the Uliyacu stream, rather than their perception that water availability was reducing more generally. At first, the company refused to recognise the legitimacy of their complaint.14 The community’s use of the Uliyacu stream had previously occurred under an informal sharing agreement with the neighbouring village of Mareniyoc, thus, as a formal permit had never been obtained for the water’s use, Barrick Gold stated15 that they had no right to claim for its subsequent reduction in flow. Such informal agreements are a common feature of water allocation configurations across the country (Gelles, 2000; Boelens, 2009). However, Peru’s legal system does not recognise the plurality of ways that water is shared and used, despite the ubiquity of this type of arrangement in highland communities (Boelens, 2008). ‘Local water rights, organisational norms and operational rules in the Andean region are not only dynamic, extremely diverse, puzzlingly intertwined and even mutually contradictory; often they also stand in clear contradiction to national legislation’ (Boelens, 2009, p. 310; Cremers et al., 2005).

When Barrick Gold continued to refuse to recognise the legitimacy of their claim despite the existence of the acta, the Mataquitans pointed to the existence of physical infrastructures (pipes, a storage tank and hydraulic brake systems) buried in the ground, and which had previously been used to distribute the water from the Uliyacu stream. These orientations are typical of peasant frameworks for understanding water rights, which rarely rest on the acquisition of specific state permits. Instead, legitimate mechanisms for the right to make a claim include socio-territorial rights, historic rights (i.e. the use of water over a given historical period) and hydraulic property creation (Boelens, 2009; Boelens and Vos, 2014). In Mataquita, the historic use of the water and the materiality of the previously existing infrastructure was regarded as ‘overwhelming proof’16 of water rights.

As the Mataquitans only had an acta linking water disappearance to mining activities for one stream, the only part of their claim that might be considered legitimate related to drinking-water scarcity rather than the more generalised water crisis that was affecting the village. As a response to a much more generalised water crisis, the construction of the reservoirs made both the state and the mine complicit in the enactment of a political ideology which was willing to concede the necessity of drinking-water provision for highland communities but did not recognise the interconnected nature of natural and social systems, and the role that water plays in allowing a flourishing life to take place (Jepson et al., 2017). As such, the reservoirs are indicative of a political ideology that prioritises large-scale extractive projects to the detriment of smaller-scale productive activities which are more likely to contribute a sustainable income to households in the area. A point echoed by Guarneros-Meza and Torres-Wong in this volume whose case study illustrates how infrastructural decision-making in the presence of mining activity is often not always made in the best interests of local populations.

Despite the formation of a working group overseen by the state, the mining company continued to claim that the denuncia lodged by the community was a spurious complaint that aimed to secure undeserved compensation and that the community already had sufficient water to meet their daily living needs. In 2015, the working group addressed this difference in opinion via the production of a document called the Diagnóstico de Agua para Uso Poblacional de Mataquita Distrito de Jangas, Huaraz, Ancash (henceforth referred to as the Diagnóstico) which was a hydrological study that aimed to determine the water balance in the village. This report used hydrological and meteorological data to quantify expected stream flows and then combined this information with current and future population water-use needs to determine how much water was needed in comparison to how much water was available. The study indicated that although the water balance was positive across the year, there was a deficit between June and December especially during August, September, and October. This document served to ‘scientifically verify’ the scarcity which the community were reporting and its results placed Barrick Gold under increased pressure to respond to their complaint. As a result, they agreed to fund the production of an engineering document known as the Expediente Técnico, which arrived nearly a year later and outlined how the scarcity in the village could be addressed. The water deficit figures in the Diagnóstico directly informed the follow-up document, which proposed addressing the scarcity via the construction of water-storage reservoirs that would collect water during the rainy season for distribution later in the year. The study noted that there was a small but significant water deficit in the present but as the population increased this would increase in the future. It outlined volumetric designs for the reservoirs as well as recommending that existing water distribution infrastructures were renovated to reduce water losses.

Although it is common practice to treat documents such as the Expediente Técnico as purely technical endeavours, they are nevertheless constrained and moulded by specific regulatory guidance, normative expectations, and epistemological assumptions. The Expediente Técnico makes clear that any infrastructure development must consider the needs of not just the current population but the projected population over a period of 20 years.17 Therefore, the designs presented in the Expediente Técnico were supposed to meet the needs of the projected population of Mataquita, which is expected to increase from 681 to 919 people by 2035. This apparently necessitated the construction of five water-storage reservoirs in total: three of 870 and two of 355 cubic metres capacity. This seemingly mundane government recommendation became ‘a site of opportunity’ (Pinker and Harvey, 2015, p. 16) as it allowed the community to potentially gain access to water in excess of their current supposed requirements.

As the Expediente Técnico itself stated ‘Due to the location being found within the influence of the mine the project will be financed by the Civil Association NeoAndina’18 (2M Group/Asociation Civil Neo Andina, 2016, p. 1) the community had expected that water infrastructures would be built according to the designs presented in the document. However, during subsequent working-group meetings the mining company representatives denied they had ever committed themselves to building water infrastructures for the village. Instead, representatives began to claim that only one of the five reservoirs included in the Expediente Técnico needed to be built. As the community had begun to feel that significant water-infrastructure development was within their grasp, there was great disappointment and moral outrage when they realised that again the company was backtracking on its commitments despite their apparent formal codification into documents. In the words of the president of the Water and Sanitation Committee:

[A]ll this has been worked [out] in an engineering manner, it hasn’t been done without thought [así por así], no? They have submitted to the laws and in agreement with the laws (…) it has been designed in agreement with the work of engineers, Mr [Ling19] cannot avoid this. Why did they commit themselves on principle to make an Expediente in agreement with the Diagnóstico that [Manual Martínez] did? Because why not just say, you know what, the mine has the intention of only making a reservoir of so much, so let’s make this Expediente just for this?’ (President of JASS)

In the quote above, the speaker tries to appeal to the indisputable materiality of the figures in the Expediente Técnico and the ‘authority’ of the law to challenge the refusal of the mine to acknowledge both the neediness of the community and the legitimacy of their expectations. Using a legal frame to address perceived miscarriages of justice has a strong historical precedent in highland regions (de la Cadena, 2015; Salomon and Nino Murcia, 2011; Wilson, 2013). The legitimacy of concepts such as law and science are derived from their association with objectivity and neutrality. Their apparent strength is that they are designed to be a non-political tool in conflict resolution (Sosa and Zwarteveen, 2016). The villagers expected, as citizens of Peru, that the legal framework which had insisted that their claim could not be considered fully valid due to the lack of a formal permit for water use in this instance would work in their favour. They expected that their willingness to negotiate with the mining company, their prioritisation of technical and scientific knowledge would make them ‘rational’ subjects and respected citizens (Li, 2015). In her analysis of the way that documents are operationalised by Turkish Cypriots, Navaro-Yashin writes about how their ability to produce particular effects means they can ‘discharge affective energies’ and ‘be perceived or experienced as affectively charged phenomenon ... within specific webs of social relations’ (2007, p. 81). In Mataquita, the hope that documents would allow them to hold the mining company to account is part of what electrified the conflict and working-group negotiations (Balderson, 2022). Further, in rural Peruvian communities documents are seen as very powerful: ‘[t]he written word [is] mightier than the spoken one; its leverage in legal disputes (local ones included) [is] undeniable, and it [can] only be countered with another written word’ (de la Cadena, 2015, p. 15; see also Allen, 1988, p. 67).

As the mine continued to insist that the community already had sufficient water, community members brought forth emotional accounts of their lived experience of water scarcity.

I am there daily, I live there (…) and your study doesn’t convince us, and why? Because we live on this side, as I have said we have tried to collect water from the roofs, for what? In order to survive. (Unknown speaker at a working group meeting)

Or in the words of another:

[H]ave you at least checked that there is sufficient water in the lower part? At least have you lived [there] for a couple of days? Of course, it is there at some moments, [but] there are moments when it disappears. (Unknown speaker at a working group meeting)

The speakers are challenging the figures in the documents by presenting their own epistemology of ‘seeing is believing’, which is a situated and embodied approach to understanding scarcity (Phillimore, 1998). Li has also highlighted the weight given to experiential knowledge by campesino communities (Li, 2015). In the quotes above knowledge is accessible, and knowledge of a situation can be acquired by the straightforward process of visiting the neighbourhood in question. As such, it became clear that the appeal to the legal force of the figures contained in the Expediente Técnico was not so much a genuine commitment to the authority of science but was instead related to their faith in what documents do. In Mataquita, codification of the community’s needs in engineering documents according to the formal state-sponsored protocol created the expectation that the solution to the water crisis enacted would be the same as those laid out in writing. Again, we can see immaterial aspects of the hydrosocial territory shaping both processes of contestation and the response to the water crisis in the village via the embedded but conflicting norms about what constitutes valid knowledge of water availability.

Water infrastructures as the materialisation of social value

The Pierina project is an example of nueva minería, a type of mining that promises negligible environmental impact, local development, and fair treatment of local communities. However, as I indicated earlier, many feel that Barrick Gold has not lived up to its slogan of ‘Responsible Mining’. One woman reported how she had gone from village to village in the 1990s, evangelising on the part of the mine, trying to make sure that the project went ahead. ‘At the moment they enter [the zone] they offer everything, but up until now they have completed nothing’, she told me angrily 20 years later. The frustration that the mine had not fulfilled expectations was palpable. It was a grievance they knew carried little political weight, but which was deeply felt, nonetheless. In this context, the promise of tangible water-infrastructure investments had meaning that went beyond their use value as structures able to ameliorate the impending water crisis. The water-storage reservoirs were viewed as a way of forcing the company to fulfil its moral obligations to the community who were resentful of the dismissive attitude shown during nearly 20 years of operations (Balderson, 2022). The community wanted as much water-storage as possible capacity to be built partly to alleviate the water crisis but also as the material presence of reservoirs in the village served as visible indicators of the community’s social worth.

The logic of Barrick Gold was that building more than one reservoir would give the community water in excess of their requirements. In a meeting a community relations representative commented:

It is unnecessary to construct for 20 years, the current deficit that Mataquita has could be satisfied with one infrastructure, with one part of the infrastructure investment which is proposed here (…) Why? Because to construct it all in one effort is unnecessary; it is going to deteriorate, you are not going to use it. It is unnecessary. (Community relations representative: Barrick Gold)

Velho and Ureta (2019) have explored the fragility of infrastructure and its innate propensity to decay. They note how in the neoliberal era rather than being the materialisation of state power as was previously the case, infrastructures often turn out to be manifestations of incapacity, corruption, and state failure. The ubiquity of infrastructural disrepair and decay is being exploited here by the Barrick Gold representative who uses this essential characteristic to undermine the case for infrastructural investment in the village. This is distinct from its implications in other contexts where the continuous experience of unreliability can result in a stabilised and embedded momentum in terms of the way that people interact with that system and find ways to adapt to and mitigate for its failures (Furlong, 2014).

In this context, rather than building five storage reservoirs according to the engineering solution proposed in the documents, instead the company offered one reservoir of 870 cubic metres for the upper part of the village and another daily regulation reservoir of 30 cubic metres for a neighbourhood situated at a lower location. The representative present claimed that as according to the figures in the documents as the population had not yet reached 919 inhabitants this would be sufficient to meet the community’s needs in the present. This squabble over access to a few extra hundred litres of water also needs to be contextualised in relation to other less visible infrastructure interventions such as the deep-well pumps built on the mining company’s property which allow the company to extract 120 litres a second of water from the water table below the mine as referenced in the quote at the start of this chapter. Again, the terrain of conflict as a hydrosocial territory is useful here; the idea of an excess of water reflects a particular social imaginary which was at odds with the way in which the community experienced daily life in the village in which there was always an insufficiency of water. For the community, the decision about what size to construct reservoirs was not an abstract concept related to the number of litres deemed a sufficient allocation per person per day, but rather it was linked to lay normativity and the understanding that they ought to have access to sufficient water for necessary daily living activities. The president of JASS commented:

look we have lost time waiting for the 3,300 cubic meters, (…) it is something illogical gentlemen. (…) we have always been present, we can make [them] respect our rights.

Framing their disappointments in terms of the mining company’s failure to respect their rights brings the relationship between infrastructure development and practices of citizenship back into focus again. Rasmussen has discussed how ‘by claiming specific rights that highland protestors believe are granted by the constitution, they attempt to re-possess a citizenship that may be constitutionally secured but which all too frequently fails to be a lived reality in the high Andes of Peru’ (Rasmussen, 2016a, p. 15). Their claim for ‘rights’ is a claim for visibility and recognition which they felt could be enacted by the construction of water-storage reservoirs in the village. However, the desire for tangible forms of social recognition is often viewed as an attempt to gain undeserved personal or community advancement by mining companies, the state, and in popular discourse.

In Peru since the 1980s, multiculturalism has been integrated into the neoliberal model of citizenship operating there. This has both progressive and regressive qualities in that it enables the cultural rights of indigenous populations to be given greater symbolic recognition whilst simultaneously denying the possibility of meaningful improvements, political representation, or economic opportunities (Hale, 2007; de la Cadena, 2015). Within this model of citizenship, certain types of indigenous activism are permitted in the political space whilst others are excluded, for example, demands for language rights are acceptable, but demands that interfere with global capital accumulation, such as full-scale opposition to megaminería projects, are far more problematic. Charles Hale and Rosamel Millaman have used the term indio permitido to describe the acceptable practices of multicultural citizenship that are admitted by the neoliberal state (Hale, 2007). This model of citizenship creates two types of indigenous subject:

The ‘Indio permitido’ has passed the test of modernity, substituted ‘protest’ with ‘proposal’ and learned to be authentic and fully conversant with the dominant milieu. Its Other is unruly, vindictive and conflict prone. These latter traits trouble elites who have pledged allegiance to cultural equality, seeding fears about what empowerment of these Other Indians would portend. (Hale, 2007, p. 5)

As noted above, throughout the conflict it seemed that the Mataquitans were trying to position themselves as ‘modern’ actors. Their appeal to the power of law and science is an attempt to distance themselves from the disruptive protesters active at other conflict sites around the country. Despite this, their focus on implicitly economic issues such as access to water and sustainable livelihoods were considered ‘unruly’, and their demands and ways of doing business did not quite fit within the boundaries of what was considered acceptable by the mining company and the state. Their intentions of obtaining concessions that went beyond the symbolic realm contributed to the construction of their demands as issues of ‘[personal] interest’, and therefore invalid claims on the resources of Barrick Gold. In the words of one mining company representative:

They are trying to extract an economic advantage from a situation of scarcity in a village like Mataquita (…) Tell me this is not miserly? Or tell me this is not manipulative? It is manipulative, pure manipulation in order to extract material benefits. Obviously, it is manipulation.

The economic implications of said scarcity seem to be lost on the speaker. This tendency to question the moral worth of the community was consistent across various interactions I both initiated and observed. It is a delegitimation strategy that has been observed in numerous social conflicts in the region (Boelens, 2015).

Eventually, the working group managed to thrash out a deal on the size of the reservoirs and the compromise solution of one reservoir of 870 cubic metres and another of 100 (rather than the 30 originally offered by Barrick Gold) metres cubed was agreed. This small concession was extracted as a close examination of the technical documents by interested parties revealed that the figure of 30 metres cubed did not fit the calculated needs of the community even in the present. Thus, the potency of formally codified scientific figures remained largely intact, even if interpretation of their implications was more politically fraught than had initially appeared.

In 2017, these reservoirs were built and when I returned to the site in 2018 the community seemed relatively satisfied with the outcome of the conflict. During my period away, two villagers contacted me separately via Facebook to share pictures as the construction of the reservoirs progressed. The community was allowed to form a microempresa and a few people were then contracted to build the reservoirs under the supervision of a more technically qualified foreman. In these photos, they looked pleased and proud that the mining company had finally been convinced to offer tangible investment to the community. The water-storage reservoirs also improve their standing locally, something they felt was neglected, and from a practical point of view improves water access at the site (Balderson, 2022). By my 2018 visit, the paint was already looking flaky but for the previous two years there had been a much more reliable drinking-water connection. Water for agriculture remained in very short supply.

Discussion and conclusion

This case study reveals a number of insights pertinent to understanding the social and political life of water-infrastructure projects in this part of Peru. Analysis of the politics and ideological assumptions behind the wrangling process which led to the construction of the Mataquitan water-storage reservoirs has shown how important features of the hydrosocial territory around the community and the mine influenced the type of infrastructure intervention received at the site. First, the value accorded documentation – both terms of water permits which formalise access to specific water sources and scientifically accredited studies that legitimise experiences of scarcity – reduced the ability of the community to contest water scarcities which go beyond inadequate access to drinking water. Complex layers of mutually contradictory understandings of water rights, imaginaries of community behaviours, and historic infrastructures form part of the hydrosocial territory which shaped the type of water access intervention – i.e. the type of infrastructure – the community would go on to receive.

My discussion has highlighted how water can operate as a socio-technical assemblage: the documents created by the engineers conjured water into being for the community, the hydrological study made their experience of scarcity ‘real’, and so made an intervention to improve access (and thus ‘produce’ water) also a reality (Zwarteveen and Boelens, 2014). As Harvey and Knox point out, ‘infrastructures do not simply reference or represent political ideology but actively participate in often unexpected ways, in the processes by which political relations are articulated and enacted’ (Harvey and Knox, 2012). Thus, the construction of reservoirs which do not facilitate an increase in local productive (agricultural) capacities is a means of ensuring that current political relations remain unchallenged. Limited access to irrigation water reduces the likelihood that the Mataquitan campesinos will have sufficient economic security to participate fully in the political life of the country and be able to challenge the marginalisation of rural indigenous groups across the country.

Long (2001) has used the term ‘knowledge interface’ to conceptualise the discontinuities between lifeworlds and ways of knowing. For him ‘interface entails an acute awareness of the ways in which different possibly conflicting forms of knowledge intersect and interact’. It highlights how ‘different social constructions of “reality” developed by various parties’ have important social implications (Long, 2001, p. 191). In the case discussed above, during working-group meetings experiential knowledge crunched up uncomfortably against the apparently scientific figures in the Diagnóstico and Expediente Técnico. Whilst the community were not necessarily willing to recognise the legitimacy of scientific representations of reality what was recognised was the immutability of knowledge codified into formal documents and the power of modernist discourses such as law and science.

The imbrication between these frameworks and infrastructure projects both constrains and opens up possible resistance strategies in marginalised communities. On one hand, the totalising nature of these narratives squeezes the possibility that their lived experience of water scarcity will be taken seriously by powerful actors such as the mining company and the state. However, the tendency for citizenship ‘to be mediated through infrastructure’ (Goodwin, 2018, p. 13) creates space for communities to make redistributive claims in language that is acceptable to the state. Thus, as well as creating liberal subjects via the imposition of these logics as Alderman and Goodwin suggest in the introduction, contestations around infrastructures also offer previously ‘unruly’ citizens a means through which to perform their identities as modern rational citizens who understand the value (and power) which science and law have to shape their water reality. The construction of water infrastructure in Mataquita was riven with tensions. Although the infrastructure was longed for and viewed as a tangible indicator of the community’s social worth, the specificities of the design were contested. The end result was somehow a physical expression of their hopes and disappointments. Anand (2011) has posited ‘pressure’ as a useful analytic for understanding how settlers claim water in Mumbai and certainly the Mataquitans had to apply significant pressure to secure water infrastructure for the village in the face of an obdurate attitude from the mining company. However, in doing this they worked creatively with the discursive flow in which law and science were sacrosanct and the state was increasingly sensitised to the link between suffering and access to water.

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