Tracing the Political Life of Kimsacocha: Conflicts over Water and Mining in Ecuador’s Southern Andes

Indigeneity, the State, and Social Movements

“Indigeneity” can refer to “a process; a series of encounters; a structure of power; a set of relations; [and] a matter of becoming” (de la Cadena and Starn, 2007: 11). It has been invoked by groups to make claims to citizenship, rights, and social inclusion based on the constitutional recognition of the collective rights of indigenous people (Sieder, 2002; Van Cott, 2000). Indigeneity also intersects with an internationally recognized language of rights (Warren and Jackson, 2002) even as it enhances divisions among leaders and the grassroots communities they claim to represent (Canessa, 2006; Shah, 2010). Indigeneity is imbricated with a new form of governmentality in which the neoliberal state and international financial institutions have incorporated some of the demands of indigenous people without fully coming to terms with their petitions for collective resource rights, particularly in cases where such demands will “violate the integrity of the productive regime” (Hale, 2005: 18). Conflicts over resources deepened in the 2000s, and indigeneity emerged as a discourse through which class-based popular demands for meaningful social change were articulated and ultimately set the stage for the election of post-neoliberal governments in the region (Postero, 2007a).

Post-neoliberal governments in Ecuador and Bolivia—where the Law of Mother Earth and Integral Development for Living Well was approved in 2012—have integrated Andean cosmologies into their governing frameworks, and the latest round of multicultural reforms is said to have laid the groundwork for a decolonial political and economic project (Radcliffe, 2012). In anthropology the ontological turn has drawn attention to the “multiplicity of forms of existence in concrete practices” (Holbraad, Pedersen, and Viveiros de Castro, 2014) and the ways in which “arrangements [of existents] . . . maintain their apparent unity and reproduce this apparent unity over time” (Povinelli, 2014). In Ecuador, state recognition of Pachamama rights was initially interpreted as a challenge to the Eurocentric or modern constitutional framework. As an “earth-being” in the public sphere, the Pachamama reorganizes the hegemonic arrangements of human and nonhuman entities (de la Cadena, 2010). Arturo Escobar (2010: 39) describes the recognition of Pachamama rights as an “epistemic-political event that disrupts the modern political space because it occurs outside such space, as a challenge to liberalism, capitalism, and the State.” The presence of “earth-beings” in Ecuadorian and Bolivian legal frameworks questions Cartesian models of progress and development based on the separation of humans from nature and serves as a springboard for a radical rethinking of development (Gudynas, 2011).

Recent scholarship in Ecuador shows the limits of Andean cosmologies as a state practice. Sarah Radcliffe (2012) argues that state implementation of sumak kawsay as a transformative discourse is seriously limited because state documents neither create the foundations for a truly intercultural society nor contemplate the redistribution of land and other resources for indigenous communities. Carmen Martínez Novo (2014: 108) reaches a similar conclusion, arguing that the Correa regime “is appropriating indigenous symbols and demands, but is not recognizing indigenous people as actors” and instead constructs them as “obedient subjects” who must toe the government line to receive any material benefits. She observes a reversal of the gains made under neoliberal multicultural reforms. Erin Fitz-Henry (2012: 266) shows that Pachamama rights have been deployed in largely symbolic ways compatible with market-oriented conservation practices while simultaneously justifying “further expropriations of Indigenous, poor, and Afro-Ecuadorian communities.”

Through ethnographic research, this paper extends critical studies of the multicultural reforms as they unfold in the context of mining conflicts. I examine Andean cosmologies as a form of knowledge practice that simultaneously strengthens—even as it challenges—post-neoliberal state formation. Mining conflicts expanded and intensified under neoliberal and post-neoliberal regimes (Bebbington, 2009). Corporate knowledge practices are well documented in the literature on mining (Himely, 2014; Kirsch, 2014; Li, 2009), but less is understood about the kinds of knowledge systems that activists mobilize and their effects (Osterweil, 2013). Andean knowledge systems are celebrated as the basis for a kind of oppositional politics that connects human and nonhuman entities in life projects that challenge extractive industry (Blaser, 2010; Escobar, 2008). In this paper, I conceptualize Andean cosmologies as part of a “language of contention” in which the state establishes the terms in which people express their collective demands (Roseberry, 1994). On the one hand, Andean cosmologies enabled farmers to expand their political coalition into an ethnically plural movement in defense of life and symbolically transform the Kimsacocha watershed into the Pachamama, whose rights were protected by the constitution. Thus antimining activism here was based on global discourses of indigeneity that ironed out complexities and internal differences regarding “local” views of nature for the creation of an antimining movement rooted in environmental politics (see critiques from McNeish, 2013; Ramos, 2012). At the same time, when farmers’ demands for Pachamama rights were acknowledged by the state, Andean cosmologies became the discursive basis through which the state promoted watershed conservation along with mineral extraction. In effect, Andean cosmologies are part of state governing frameworks that shape both the terrain of political opposition and the future of sustainable mineral extraction in Ecuador even as farmers oppose such development projects.

This paper is organized as follows. First, I show that multinational and state actors have defined the highland landscape as a lucrative mineral deposit with the potential to finance social welfare programs. Second, I show how farmers mobilized the metaphor “water is life” as a way to expand their allies and redefine the Kimsacocha watershed as the embodiment of the Pachamama. Third, I show how the state redeployed the language of the Pachamama in ways that fundamentally undermined the claims of the coalition. Research for this essay was carried out over the course of nearly 30 months of sustained ethnographic research between January 2008 and May 2010. I conducted participant observation with antimining activists, attended community meetings and workshops, rallies, and marches, conducted interviews with farmers, priests, and urban activists, and collected additional data through the Internet, newspaper resources, and nongovernmental organizations involved in the protest movement.

Quimsacocha as a Mining Project

Quimsacocha was originally the name of a multinational mining project and not the name attributed to the highland watersheds by the dairy farmers themselves. The Toronto-based IAMGOLD Corporation named its project Quimsacocha shortly after securing 12,000 hectares of mineral concessions in a highland wetlands area that coincides with a nationally protected forest. The toponym “Quimsacocha” is Quechua for “three lakes.” IAMGOLD secured its concessions on the heels of the passage of a neoliberal mining law in 2001 that opened protected areas to prospecting and extraction and introduced an environmental framework for the nascent mining sector. Companies were required to prepare an environmental impact assessment for exploratory work, and state environmental monitoring agencies were established.

Opposition to the Quimsacocha project began shortly after the company made its environmental impact assessment available. Partly to fulfill its obligations under the law and partly as a form of corporate social responsibility, IAMGOLD invited communal water board leaders to a meeting where consultants explained that high-valued mineral deposits overlapped with community watersheds. IAMGOLD identified approximately 3.3 million ounces of gold and additional deposits of silver, copper, and molybdenum in the effluents of the Irquis River from which several communal systems draw water. A citizens’ group made up of irrigation users was the first to organize peasants in the rural parishes of Victoria del Portete and Tarqui, located just outside of Cuenca, Ecuador’s third-largest city. The movement gained momentum in 2006 and 2007 with the formation of the National Coordinating Committee in Defense of Life and Sovereignty and the participation of the Victoria-Tarqui communal water board—the largest drinking-water board in the two parishes. Communal water boards are influential in community politics, often representing their members in second- and third-tier organizations. Many farmers supported the movement out of fear that IAMGOLD’s project would adversely affect water quality and quantity.

Testimonies I gathered from dairy farmers expressed a sense of betrayal when they found Correa supporting IAMGOLD’s Quimsacocha project. Farmers recall that during his campaign for the presidency he had promised to safeguard water supplies. In 2007, shortly after a 5,000-person-strong protest had rocked the southern highlands, the president and the minister of energy and mines, Alberto Acosta, engaged communal water board leaders in a dialogue about the fate of IAMGOLD’s concessions. At the request of the authorities, water board leaders presented evidence that IAMGOLD had violated three different bodies of law to secure its concessions. Expecting that the government would therefore withdraw the concessions, farmers were surprised when it required IAMGOLD to set aside only a small part of its concession for conservation and ultimately left the project intact (see Moore and Velásquez, 2013). In December of 2007 Correa told the press, “We wanted to avoid this at first, but if there are $100 billion [in minerals in the ground], then we will have to permit open-pit mining” (Soto, 2007). He said that the profits could be used to finance social development projects for Ecuadorians and put an end to poverty (El Comercio, December 3, 2007). Only a month after the new constitution was ratified in 2008, the Correa administration announced a new mining law that would promote and regulate mineral extraction. The law increased government control over extraction and guaranteed the state a majority of the profits from mining activities. Activists estimated that, including additional taxes in royalty payments and special and corporate taxes levied against companies such as IAMGOLD, the law would result in at least 75 percent profit sharing (Zorrilla, 2008). Farmers in Victoria del Portete scrambled to oppose the law, which allowed the expropriation of lands and watersheds slated for mineral extraction without community consent. While they staged marches, road blockades, and even a hunger strike, they were unable to stop or meaningfully change it. First, they were unable to develop a nationwide coalition against it. In several organizational meetings I attended in late 2008, social and environmental groups remained divided over the political timing and the scope and framing of the demands. The Confederación de Nacionalidades Indígenas del Ecuador (Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador—CONAIE) did not mobilize its base communities until late January 2009, after the law had been passed. Secondly, Correa succeeded in discursively tying the country’s future to industrial mining. An editorial in a Cuenca newspaper titled “Absurd Savagery” called for the “authorities to use an iron fist against the abuse and prepotency of the [antimining] protesters, who should be more concerned with producing more for the economic benefit of the country” (El Mercurio, January 10, 2009).

The Water Law

On August 26, 2009, Correa sent the National Assembly a draft of a new water bill that was framed as a way to recover sovereignty and increase social equity. The preface identified the status quo as “unequal access and distribution, distortion in the management of irrigation water, and lack of participation of water users.” To address these problems, the proposed law declared water a public good and a human right, guaranteed a minimum amount of water to every Ecuadorian citizen, prohibited the privatization of water (the hallmark of neoliberal governance), and strengthened public institutions in anticipation of their better management and protection of water resources.

A heterogeneous group of dairy farmers quickly emerged as a vociferous critic of the proposal for opening up highland watersheds to mineral extraction. Carlos Pérez Guartambel, a lawyer and president of the Tarqui-Victoria communal drinking-water system and the Unión de Sistemas Comunitarios de Agua del Azuay (Union of Community Water Systems of Azuay— UNAGUA), became a spokesperson for the group. It produced a pamphlet for distribution to farmers in consciousness-raising workshops and water board meetings pointing out that the law contained “authorizations for the economic use of water for mining activities” and that, although it prohibited mining in headwaters, there was an exception for mining that was declared “of national interest.” IAMGOLD’s Quimsacocha project was repeatedly identified in the press as one of the four largest and most advanced mining projects under consideration. Members of communal water systems feared that the state would use the exception to turn their watershed into a gold mine. Carlos Pérez Guartambel urged water users to defend Kimsacocha as a “space of life” and, as such, a no-mining zone.

Pérez Guartambel formed an alliance with the highland indigenous organization ECUARUNARI and with the CONAIE. While many of ECUARUNARI’s member communities and organizations were not directly affected by mining, they were affected by the monopolization of water resources by private companies. The proposed water law prohibited privatization of water sources, but it did not require the state to review its water concessions to private firms, essentially leaving water in the hands of the large agro-businesses, bottled-water companies, and cut-flower producers that dominated it in the central and northern highlands. Leaving inequalities over water access in the highlands virtually intact would render Correa’s socialist framing of the law a hollow promise. The UNAGUA, the CONAIE, and ECUARUNARI agreed that water law reform was desperately needed, but they did not view their own political and economic interests as compatible with Correa’s vision of a centralized state.

Water is Life

The metaphor of water as life framed popular marches in opposition to the proposed water law and helped create a cohesive protest narrative that brought the diverse members of the coalition together under an alternative understanding of water. On September 11, 2009, two weeks before the National Assembly was scheduled to debate the law, as many as 6,000 protesters flooded Cuenca’s central park to stop the law. Many held placards that read “El agua no se vende, se defiende” (Water is not to be sold but defended). A microphone amplified voices of dissent from Correa’s efforts to centralize water resources. One indigenous woman who addressed the crowd well articulated the metaphor of water as life: “The state wants to be the owner of water. Water should be communitarian because it is life. Indigenous people and campesinos give life. We women have the use and rights to water because water is the blood of our life. Water flows through our veins; without water, there is no life. Without [agricultural] production, there is no life.” She drew on gendered imagery to conceptualize the right to water as a complex web of interdependence that makes life possible. By comparing water to blood she materialized the interdependence of indigenous people and peasants with water and also of city dwellers with peasants and indigenous people, suggesting that water was a central force in sustaining agrarian and urban life. She argued that water should be managed by groups rather than individual, state, or private interests.

Metaphors, as understood by Lakoff and Johnson (1980: 4), reflect cultural values that “structure how we perceive, how we think, and what we do.” By suggesting that water was a living and life-producing entity, farmers argued that mining threatened the right of humans and nonhumans to exist. “Water is life” helped coalition leaders articulate a complex set of political and economic demands in Andean terms. Most immediately, the coalition demanded that the National Assembly shelve the water law pending further consultation with peasant and indigenous organizations. It demanded that a revised draft law include the establishment of a plurinational water council to be made up of elected officials and representatives of indigenous, Afro-descendant, and peasant organizations to decide national water policy, community management of local watersheds and rivers, autonomy for communal water boards, and the prohibition of mining in critical water zones. It argued that the inclusion of voices from indigenous and popular movements would democratize water policy in the country, leading to a more equitable distribution of water and greater support for small and mid-scale agricultural activity.

The coalition’s long-term demand was that the government move away from extractive industries as the main form of development and draw upon Andean values to promote sustainable development. In a letter written to the National Assembly in March 2010, the water board leaders and the CONAIE declared their unity. Pérez Guartambel read the letter aloud during a rally, stating that they aimed to “construct an economically and socially sustainable development model based on the principles of the ayni, of reciprocity . . . to guarantee respect between brothers and sisters and, above all, nature.” He continued: “We propose a commitment to struggle against the capitalist, extractivist neoliberal model.” Ultimately, they “demand[ed] that all laws passed by the National Assembly recognize the rights of nature and water” (field recording, March 3, 2010).

Discursive links between water and life are not new in the Andean region. Scholars have pointed out that in the Andes water is imbued with life-giving powers and that pre-Hispanic societies traced their origins to sacred mountain lakes, springs, rivers, and other bodies of water (Gelles, 2000). When faced with the privatization of municipal water systems, leaders of the well-publicized Bolivian water war turned “water is life” into a protest slogan. Farmers’ claims to water were based on customary law (usos y costumbres), and reciprocity and collective governance of water were “primordial” Andean values (Albro, 2005) that challenged its commodification. The language of indigeneity as it is mobilized for political uses in Bolivia and Ecuador is akin to what Nancy Postero (2007b: 4) calls “Andean utopias”—a historically situated discourse of indigeneity in which actors strategically deploy “elements of traditional narratives and myths . . . to produce consensus about the kinds and forms of change that are appropriate and possible.” Because strategic mobilization of Andean cosmologies can be used to “articulate projects for social justice beyond exclusive notions of ethnic identity” (de la Cadena and Starn, 2007: 11), the issue is not so much about affirming an indigenous cultural identity as about articulating a political position against the commodification of water and the democratization of water policy.

Farmers in this case turned to Andean cosmologies as a “political discourse for what needs to be reclaimed, reinvented, and reimagined” (Fabricant, 2012: 4) in the Citizens’ Revolution. They and their allies strategically deployed alternative notions of nature as a way to stop the commodification of their water supplies and advance a struggle for collective rights recognized in international and national legislation but not implemented by the Correa regime. In 2007 farmers in Victoria del Portete and Tarqui filed a petition for recognition of the collective rights to consultation guaranteed under the 1998 constitution and International Labor Organization Convention 169 without success. In 2008 the National Constituent Assembly issued the Mining Mandate, in which mining concessions granted without community consultation were to revert to the state, but the Correa administration never implemented this part of the mandate; instead it temporarily halted IAMGOLD activities until the new mining law had been passed in 2009. When the farmers were unable to develop an effective language of opposition to mining that attracted broad support, they turned to Andean cosmologies to defend their watersheds. Framing water struggles in terms of Andean values such as water as a living entity and reciprocity is part of what Perreault (2008: 846–847) calls the “cultural politics of livelihood,” in which meaning and materiality meet to reconfigure power relations and democratize water governance.

The coalition initiated and shaped public debate over the legitimacy of Correa’s proposed water law. In response to the demonstrations, the National Assembly members revised the proposed legislation to recognize the rights of various collectivities including rights to water. A revised draft law passed in November 2009 defined the Pachamama as a rights-bearing entity whose waters were life-sustaining. It recognized the rights of Pachamama as the source of life, whose waters had the right to be conserved, holistically managed, and repaired if contaminated (República del Ecuador, n.d.). It added a new chapter on the collective rights of communities and nationalities to manage, conserve, protect, be consulted, and participate in decisions regarding water use according to their own worldviews and to maintain, strengthen, and recover their spiritual, cultural, and ancestral knowledge and practices with regard to water. Moreover, it adopted the CONAIE’s proposal of the creation of a plurinational water council to formulate and carry out national water policy. Article 73, which had authorized companies to use water for mining, was replaced with Article 104, “No water will be authorized for use in the exploitation of mining within 2,500 feet of ecosystems associated with hydrological cycles that influence water sources.” Article 74, problematic because it allowed for mining in headwaters if declared of national interest, was replaced by Article 105, “Authorization for . . . mining exploitation will not be granted within the areas of influence of water sources.”

Pérez Guartambel considered these significant advances but not enough: “We need to be two steps ahead, not just one” (interview, November 14, 2009). In late November 2009 he convened an UNAGUA meeting where he shared his skepticism about the law, pointing out that Article 105 did not declare the highlands free of mining. The dispute over language and framing was important, he said. Declaring Kimsacocha a no-mining zone was not guaranteed. “We have to protect everything, the entire highlands, not just part of it.” Whereas the law assumed that mining was an industry whose impacts could be managed and contained, he viewed Kimsacocha as a system that could be affected whether mining occurred in water sources or 2,500 meters away. The UNAGUA rejected the new draft law for proposing piecemeal conservation as a way of appeasing critics of mining.

Kimsacocha: From a Mining Project to the Pachamama

The UNAGUA pursued a two-pronged strategy: deepening political coordination with the CONAIE and ECUARUNARI and mobilizing a diverse local coalition. In December of 2009, the indigenous movement—with the support of the UNAGUA—engaged in high-level dialogues with the Correa administration. Meanwhile, the UNAGUA and its regional allies used the slogan “Water Is Life”’ as a way to transform Quimsacocha from a mining project into the Pachamama and thus to protect the watershed from mining. Catholic priests played a crucial role in this reframing.

On December 12, 2009, dairy farmers, journalists, environmentalists, and international supporters gathered around Father Samuel, who was about to begin an outdoor mass at Kimsacocha. Women filled plastic bottles with lake water and placed them in a circle for blessing. Father Samuel’s homily drew from the Beatitudes and invoked the group as an ethical community defending life itself,

Jesus says, “Blessed are the poor,” because you the poor value this space, this place as a sacred place, as the temple of God. A rich man comes here and looks around and thinks, “There is a great opportunity to make money.” In contrast, when a poor man comes to this place, he says “God is here.” Instead of making calculations, he says, “We have to defend this, because this is the source of life, of living water and free water that we all want.”

Father Samuel’s invocation of a mineral-rich watershed as a sacred place rather than a commodity, as a place that invites contemplation rather than calculation, articulated a politics of life as the linchpin of an antiextractivist movement. Water as a living, sacred entity brought together the farmers and the progressive wing of the Catholic Church. Father Samuel practiced what he called “eco-liberation theology,” which he described as a “reflection of [Catholic] teachings about the entire planet” (interview, March 15, 2010). He was the coordinator of the social pastoral office of the Cuenca diocese and worked with poor communities for structural transformation. He organized popular education workshops in the Freire tradition in which he distributed some of his writings on water conflicts. In one of his unpublished essays he attributed social inequality and ecological problems to capitalist resource extraction. He found a solution to such problems in the convergence of Catholic and Andean traditions, whereby “water is considered sacred” (interview, December 12, 2009). The emphasis on Andean or indigenous values as a solution to modern problems is part of a longer tradition of liberation theology in Ecuador. In the 1960s, Salesian priests promoted intercultural theology, holding that indigenous people “naturally” held anticapitalist values that needed to be developed and molded (Martínez, 2013).

Priests have played an active role in shaping the language and practices of Andean worldviews in Ecuador. It was Father Lucio, a Salesian priest, who first suggested turning Quimsacocha into a sanctuary. “I told Carlos, ‘We need to build a beautiful sanctuary here. . . . If we build one they won’t mine here’” (interview, Cuenca, July 24, 2013). After the December 12 mass led by Father Samuel, the farmers built an outdoor sanctuary. A group of men poured concrete into the shape of a chakana—an Andean cross—in anticipation of the arrival of the newly minted Virgin of the Waters of Kimsacocha. Dairy farmers and their allies appropriated the name of IAMGOLD’s mining project and “indigenized” its spelling by replacing the Q with a K. (According to early records of antimining activism in the region, activists once referred to the watershed as Sombrederas.) Some months later the group held another lakeside mass to bless the stone statue representing the Virgin of the Waters of Kimsacocha. Activists increasingly linked Kimsacocha with the Pachamama in political speeches, rallies, and everyday talk. Don Ismael is representative of the transformation. In a conversation about mining he told me, “Kimsacocha is the Mother Earth. Just like the veins that we have in our body, so does the Pachamama. Instead of blood, her [veins] are filled with water. Kimsacocha is her body” (interview, July 30, 2013).

The movement in defense of life made important political gains. First, the coalition made Kimsacocha matter to an urban audience that had generally dismissed peasant concerns during the public debates over the mining law. Journalists attended the lakeside performances and the community trips to Kimsacocha, and favorable media coverage increased. El Tiempo, Cuenca’s second-most-important regional newspaper, dedicated a full-page article with seven pictures to Kimsacocha. The article began “Preservation. It is impossible not to be filled with admiration before one of the most sublime scenes of Azuay nature” (El Tiempo, November 29, 2009). The article echoed the idea of Kimsacocha as a site of “life”: “The presence of small trout that feed on the algae . . . on the edge of lake is life in its purest state.” At the same time that the nation was discussing the water law, a serious drought was affecting water supplies and causing massive energy shortages. Urban audiences viewed the preservation of Kimsacocha as a solution to climate change and the security of a future water supply. The language of “life” brought together unlikely actors whose political agendas were not always in line with each other. Eco-politics is often founded on the premise that “native peoples’ views of nature . . . are consistent with Western conservation principles,” although such principles are often at odds with demands for community resource autonomy (Conklin and Graham, 1995: 695).

Secondly, the coalition won an ambivalent victory. After a heated national debate over the water law that included publicly aired debates between movement leaders and state officials, radio commercials, and fiery street protests, the National Assembly shelved the water law debate on the basis of a lack of consultation over the law. The government had successfully mobilized the argument that the Constitution of 2008 required non-binding prelegislative consultation with the communities affected by the law. In a communication circulated by e-mail on May 17, 2010, Marlon Santi, then CONAIE president, celebrated the decision as a victory: “In spite of a media campaign full of lies . . . gifts, projects, and intense disinformation from the Correa government, we have won this battle.”

Santi could not have predicted what was to come. Four years later, in the context of increased state repression of activism and the persecution of antimining leaders, the National Assembly passed a water bill that maintained the proposal of a plurinational water council but did not grant autonomous collective management of water to indigenous or rural communities. It granted communities the collective right to participate in the use, management, and conservation of water that flowed through their lands and territories, not their watershed. It allowed the national water authority to grant water concessions for mining projects when they had priority in the national development plan. The 2013–2017 National Plan for Good Living lists Quimsacocha (now referred to as “Larga Loma”) as a strategic project. Provisions in the law pertaining to water used in mining emphasize the protection of water sources, including the regulation of mining activities that affect water quality and quantity and the return of treated water to the original channel without affecting water for domestic use.

Conclusion

This paper has examined the ways in which farmers in highland Ecuador and the state have appropriated, mobilized, and resignified Andean epistemologies in the context of growing conflicts over mineral extraction and water rights legislation. Changes to resource use regimes became flashpoints of contention in which the direction of Ecuador’s Citizens’ Revolution was hotly disputed by variously positioned “left”-leaning groups: those that favored a nationalist development strategy based on the extraction of nonrenewable resources and those that rejected that strategy. These tensions were stoked by constitutional recognition of the Pachamama as a subject of rights and the simultaneous promotion of progressive extractivism as a way of challenging the hegemony of neoliberal rule.

Constitutional frameworks for legislating Andean cosmologies became the discursive terrain through which farmers pursued their claims, with contradictory outcomes. Farmers drew upon ontological differences recognized in the constitution to suggest that mineral extraction violated a form of collective rights that included humans’ and nonhuman entities’ right to life. As a global political discourse, Andean epistemologies are based on essentialized constructions of indigeneity that underscore harmonious human-environment interactions, reciprocity, and democratic equality. These constructions were critical in building political coalitions. The malleability of indigeneity enabled farmers to ground their struggles for water and life in claims to disputed territories as sacred embodiments of the Pachamama. The staging and performance of spiritual rituals that venerated the Kimsacocha watershed as a sacred entity were intended to create “zones of exception” (Ong, 2007)—places where the incursion of commodity-driven logics was ethically limited and an alternative notion of governance recognizing water as a living system that included (rather than excluded) people prevailed. The coalition succeeded in framing national debates over Correa’s proposed water law, challenging his plans to deepen and expand extractive industries across the Andes and the lowland Amazon, and materialized an ethnically diverse movement for the defense of life powered by the participation of the country’s most important indigenous organizations.

The state responded by incorporating the farmers’ demands into a new draft of the water law that promoted a degree of environmental conservation. Communal water board leaders rejected a revised draft that recognized watersheds as the Pachamama and prohibited mineral extraction 2,500 meters from headwaters, arguing that the state should protect all, not just part, of the Pachamama. This raised the possibility that the language of the Pachamama might become just another way for the state to promote “sustainable” mining. Previous research has shown that the Correa administration has promoted “sustainable mining” initiatives through piecemeal conservation practices (Moore and Velásquez, 2013). In fact, water monitoring studies, native plant reforestation, support for community agrarian practices, and environmental conservation funded by IAMGOLD shaped those “sustainable” practices. The final draft of the law approved four years after massive mobilizations maintained a focus on environmental sustainability and extraction while limiting the rights of groups to manage integrated water systems. Critics of “sustainable mining” consider the term an oxymoron and assert that corporations manage critiques of their practices through “idioms of ethics, health, and environmentalism and corporate responsibility” that “conceal the contradictions of capitalism” (Kirsch, 2010). In adopting the language of environmentalism as central to progressive mining projects, the post-neoliberal state promotes a form of market-oriented sustainability that is similar to a neoliberal or green environmentalism but with social redistribution as a crucial difference. While limited in terms of state reforms, Andean cosmologies helped transform their local antimining movement into a national movement for the defense of life.