Coppered Lives: The Chilean sacrifice zone of Quintero Bay

Abstract

In September 1964, when Las Ventanas copper smelter was opened in Quintero Bay it was welcomed as a key piece in the Chilean development strategy. Just over fifty years later, Quintero Bay hosts the largest industrial complex in Chile and has become the site of a chronic environmental disaster, with recurrent pollution crises and industrial accidents that pose massive risks to its human and nonhuman residents. Through historical and ethnographic analysis, involving the use of archival documents, government proceedings, media publications, interviews and participant observation, this thesis investigates Quintero Bay’s process of copper-led industrialisation and its transformation into a sacrifice zone. The thesis explores some of the Chilean government’s environmental regulatory responses, the everyday life of Quintero Bay residents and the emergence of practices of political contestation. The thesis argues that the expectations placed on copper in terms of development, the characteristics and pressures of international copper trade and the adoption of neoclassical calculation regimes have contributed to the emergence and autonomisation of copper’s existential needs. That autonomisation has led to the adoption of a logic of sacrifice that privileges the existential needs of copper over the protection of Quintero Bay’s population and environment. The spatial consequences of that regime has been the production and expansion of a sacrifice zone in Quintero Bay. This study contributes to the understanding of the extended dynamics involved in the production sacrifice zones as spaces of the Anthropocene, illuminating some of the processes of stabilisation, protection and contestation taking place within these spatial formations.