Journal
MOUNTAIN RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT
Volume 35, Issue 3, Pages 220-229Publisher
MOUNTAIN RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT
DOI: 10.1659/MRD-JOURNAL-D-14-00033.1
Keywords
Atacama; Atacameno people; Chile; neoliberalism; high-altitude wetlands; Andes
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Funding
- Interamerican Foundation (Grassroots and Development Fellowship)
- Interdisciplinary Center for Indigenous and Intercultural Studies (CONICYT FONDAP) [15110006]
- Concurso Nacional de Insercion en la Academia, Convocatoria (CONICYT) [79140014]
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The Chilean water model has been described as a textbook example of a free-market water system. This article contributes to the critiques of this model by showing the effect of its implementation in the Atacameno community of Chiu-Chiu, located in the Atacama Desert in the south-central Andes. In this community, the privatization of water rights ignored local water management practices that had produced a high-altitude wetland (known as a vega). This led to the inhabitants' dispossession of crucial water rights and to wetland degradation. This process belies statements that the Chilean model relies on an unregulated market and instead highlights the state's role in marginalizing local irrigation practices by reducing the water consumption of the indigenous population while keeping the copper mining industry (the main source of Chilean income) and related growing urban populations supplied with water.
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