Media and Resistance: Mapping the Fluidity of Mining Production in Chile

• In Event: Narrating Extractivism in Bolivia, Chile, and Peru

Abstract

The emergence of Neoliberalism in the 1970s as a political technology in Chile (Tironi & Barandiarán, 2014) was accompanied by a transformation in the media industry at a global and local scale. The transnationalization of media ownership was not only a symptom of the economic theories and practices enacted in the continent during the 1970s and 1980s, but also reflected the appropriation of the practices of media production. Today, the production of transnational capital exceeds their engagement in extraction, toward companies that extend their operations to other realms, like the management of media. Thus from a space of physical intervention they start to conquer a space of symbolical representation. Through the analysis of national and local community media examples, this essay will explore an ongoing socio-environmental conflict discussing how narratives of extractivism are pursued by the mining industry in Chile and how local communities produce narratives of resistances, having a symbolic and material impact on the local communities as well as in the rest of the country. This paper incorporates archival research and ethnographic fieldwork in the Choapa Valley, Chile, to discuss the fluidity and sophistication of the mining system and how institutions or dissident archives have a critical role in the local territories.

Author

• Karla Palma Millanao, Universidad de Chile