Governance,Participation,and Hegemony: Governing Cananea and the Sonora River Region

Abstract

Building upon critical debates on network governance in policy making and complementary debates on corporate social responsibility in Mexican mining, a study of the municipality of Cananea and the Sonora River region of Mexico indicates that the (mis)management of information and implementation of participatory mechanisms produced administrative domination in the relationships between government authorities and the mining corporation. Gramscian understandings of hegemony have limitations when dealing with decentered relations beyond state actors. Therefore, Foucauldian concepts of governmentality are useful to complement understandings of power relations in governance arrangements.

A partir de los debates críticos sobre la gobernanza de redes en la formulación de políticas y debates complementarios sobre la responsabilidad social corporativa en la minería mexicana, un estudio en torno al municipio de Cananea y la región del río Sonora, en territorio mexicano, argumenta que el (mal) manejo de la información y la implementación de mecanismos participativos produjeron dominación administrativa en las relaciones entre las autoridades gubernamentales y la corporación minera. Las interpretaciones gramscianas de la hegemonía se topan con limitantes cuando se trata de relaciones descentradas que van más allá de los actores estatales. Por lo tanto, los conceptos foucaultianos de la gubernamentalidad son útiles para complementar la comprensión de las relaciones de poder en los acuerdos de gobernanza.

Keywords

Mining Mexico Corporate social responsibility Consensual coercion

For centuries, Mexico has been known for its mining industry. However, since the new millennium, mining and its technologies have achieved unprecedented records. Sariego (2016: 27) argues that the amount of gold extracted between 2000 and 2016 was double that extracted between 1521 and 1830, while silver extraction was 60 percent greater in the same period. In 2013 a series of reforms intensified natural-resource extraction in Mexico. Although these reforms pertain mostly to the energy sector (oil, hydrocarbons, and renewable energy), minor reforms to mining regulation were carried out to streamline the issuing of concessions and to prolong contracts with corporations for up to 50 years. These new changes are commonly known as “the expansion of the mining frontier.”

The extraction of resources has been accompanied by conflict. Many debates in the Latin American context (Bebbington et al., 2008; Svampa, 2018; Veltmeyer and Petras, 2014) have centered on the political economy of resources and communities’ struggle to defend lifestyles threatened by the expansion of the industry. Less attention has been focused on policy making and on the role of government actors in forging spaces of participation to reduce conflict when institutional capacity and regulatory landscapes are limited (Bebbington, Fash, and Logan, 2019; Coelho and Favareto, 2008; Zaremberg and Torres Wong, 2018). The focus on participatory mechanisms is relevant because a generation ago it was considered key for democratizing Mexico. In particular, local governance arrangements, alongside decentralization, were considered potential ways to consolidate democracy (Grindle, 2007; Meza, 2018).

Building upon critical approaches to network governance in policy making and complementary debates on corporate social responsibility in Mexican mining, this article argues that the (mis)management of information and implementation of participatory mechanisms has produced administrative domination in the relationships between government authorities and the mining corporation. This domination has been achieved by a threefold strategy: (1) the corporation’s distancing from policy responsibility, (2) legitimacy through control, and (3) the concealment of coercive tactics. The argument is based on a Gramscian understanding of hegemony in the governance of place, but this approach has limitations in dealing with decentered relations that go beyond the state. Therefore, the Foucauldian concept of governmentality is used to complement understandings of power relations in governing arrangements. Using Gramsci’s hegemony and Foucault’s governmentality, it is possible to unravel the everyday practices of state and nonstate actors while reframing the analysis of historicity and scale.

The data for the article were collected from the municipality of Cananea and the Sonora River region.¹ These areas have been impacted by a well-established mining industry responding to global market forces such as commodity exports and their financialization and to transnational discourses of sustainable mining—a conjunctural space in which labor, environmental, and cultural-identity conflicts converge. According to Tetreault (2019), the confluence of these types of conflicts is key to understanding resistance to mining in Mexico and Latin America, and I will add that it is also key to understanding local governance. Fieldwork was carried out between August and November 2018; data collection included observations of everyday living over a three-week period and 39 in-depth interviews.² These were complemented by a documentary review that included policy reports, mining union bulletins, local newspaper articles, and the reports of human rights nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Thematic analysis involved the coding of the interview transcripts, fieldwork diaries, and documents in terms of practices and concepts related to governance, participation, and corporate social responsibility, all of which fed into a broader analysis of coercion-consensus dialectics under Gramscian hegemony.

The first section of the article describes a series of recent historical events that help to contextualize local governance in Cananea and the Sonora River region. The second section discusses the significance of a Gramscian approach in analyzing mining in these regions and the complementarities with Foucault’s governmentality. The next section explains how the concepts of network governance are articulated with those of corporate social responsibility as a way of achieving administrative domination in mining towns. With empirical data, the fourth and fifth sections unpack the practices of administrative domination that culminate in the threefold strategy. Finally, conclusions underlining the policy relevance of the framework developed are presented.

Framing Cananea and the Sonora River Region

Cananea is a town in northwestern Sonora, Mexico, 60 kilometers from Arizona in the United States. In 2015 it had a population of 35,892 (INEGI, 2015). It has been a copper mining town since colonial times. It is the seat of the Grupo México Corporation’s Buenavista del Cobre mine, the biggest mine in the country and the fourth-largest copper mine in the world. Cananea is renowned for its labor struggles, the most relevant being the 1906 insurrection of mining workers against precarious wages and long working hours and the 2007 strike led by Branch 65 of the Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores Mineros, Metalúrgicos, Siderúrgicos y Similares de la República Mexicana (National Union of Mining, Metallurgic, Steel, and Similar Workers of the Mexican Republic—SNTMMSSRM). The latter strike resulted from neoliberal economic policies that promoted the privatization of state-owned enterprises and changes in labor contracts and working conditions that undermined many of the benefits that the union had previously enjoyed. It was prompted by an accident in which 65 workers died in the Pasta de Conchos Mine in Coahuila, also owned by Grupo México, since workers in the Buenavista del Cobre mine experienced similar precarious working conditions.

The 2007 strike was significant in that it had contributed to shaping both power relationships in Cananea and contemporary national labor and development policies (see Sariego, 2013). Nearly 650 workers (Soy Cobre, 2018) and their families are still affected by the strike, since they cannot be redeployed in the regional mining sector. The lack of formal and well-paid jobs has jeopardized these families’ access to the home ownership that was comfortably afforded them in the early 1980s. Reduced public health provision, access to potable water, and household waste collection are residents’ everyday concerns. These services have been neglected by the local authorities as they struggle to build the capacity to absorb responsibilities that were those of the mine when it was a state-owned enterprise (Sariego, 2013).

The 2007 strike has permeated people’s memories regardless of their background and social class, but whereas for other residents the strike ended in 2010, when the mine reopened and subcontracted labor through its network of suppliers, for the workers who are still members of Branch 65 it has meant 12 years of endurance and solidarity. The effects of the strike are surprisingly present in the town’s urban space. It started with violent protests along the main street, Benito Juárez, which in its heyday was full of life, with local shops, the town’s hospital, and a local school and, most important, mining trucks going in and out of the mine’s main entrance. Nowadays this part of town, known as Cananea Vieja, is a ghost town, with empty streets and derelict buildings. Efforts to gentrify it have been limited despite many buildings’ preserving Cananea’s early-1900s architectural style. The premises owned by Branch 65 (funerary premises, auditorium, and others), also located in this quarter, are run-down. Over the past decade, shops have moved northward around the main plaza and along the highway heading toward the U.S.-Mexican border.

The long labor struggle overlapped with a 2014 mining spill resulting from the negligent maintenance of one of the pipelines leading to the mine’s tailings dam. Although the spill did not impact Cananea physically, it impacted the local and regional governance of the Sonora River. The accident leaked 40 million liters of acidulant copper into the 400-kilometer-long Sonora River, which flows from the mountains of Sonora to the valley of Hermosillo, the state’s capital city. The volume and toxicity of the spill caused it to be categorized by the Minister of the Environment as “the worst mining accident in Mexican history.” Monitoring reports³ indicate that in the first few months the environmental damage impacted the water quality of the river, which provides water to a population of some 22,000 inhabitants of the seven municipalities along the river and to one of the two reservoirs serving Hermosillo. Acidulant copper and other heavy metals affected the crops and livestock of peasants and ranchers farming near the river. The accident was followed by a regional recession. Although the Federal Attorney for Environment Protection (interview, Environmental Auditing officer, 035, Mexico City) and the state-level government Ministry of Economy (interview, Direction of Mining officer, 034, Hermosillo) confirmed that the water was not contaminated, health problems continue to be reported by academic investigations and human rights NGOs (PODER, 2018). These reports reveal the uncertainty of the environment in which people live.

Unsurprisingly, the disaster was identified as an opportunity for Branch 65 to seek allies from the communities affected. A short-lived alliance was made with environmental mobilizations in Hermosillo organized as the Frente de Defensa Río Sonora (Sonora River Defense Front—FDRS). The Branch 65–FDRS alliance was seen in street protests and sit-ins that took place in Cananea immediately after the spill, particularly outside Los Patos, the main well supplying the mine (SNTMMSSRM, 2015). The initiation of a “movement against Grupo México” was mentioned in speeches on environmental, labor, and human rights abuses. Sit-ins outside Los Patos lasted three months, until the federal police removed the protesters. Repression was not reported in the news, but in fieldwork conversations I was told that Branch 65 members were armed with sticks and knives in case confrontation with authorities turned violent and committed acts of vandalism against Grupo México’s property. This type of disobedience discouraged some residents of the lowlands, who were not used to confronting state authorities through (armed) struggle and party politics.

The appetite for mobilization of residents who did not want to join Branch 65 was the result of relationships with the Project on Organizing, Development, Education, and Research (PODER), an international NGO aiming to improve corporate transparency and responsibility from a human rights perspective. PODER offered an alternative that materialized in a long-term socio-legal strategy against Grupo México and the government authorities who had turned a blind eye to the negligence by and irregularities of the mine. Since 2014 PODER has worked closely with the affected communities to pursue 15 constitutional injunctions (amparos), some of which have reached the National Supreme Court of Justice, against Grupo México and a wide range of government authorities (from the environmental, health, and agrarian ministries and their regulators to municipal councils). In two of these claims the ruling favored the communities—the first in 2015, recognizing that wells were contaminated and requiring Grupo México to provide water treatment as part of its remedial plan, and the second in 2018, establishing that all business corporations with a direct impact on the environment had to consult local communities, indigenous or not, about their infrastructure plans.⁴ In informing, training, and mentoring communities on how to prepare and submit legal claims, PODER encouraged residents to organize in comités de Cuenca Río Sonora (Sonora River Basin committees), creating a subregional front that has gradually excluded Cananea and its historical labor movement (interviews, PODER officers, 009 and 038, Hermosillo and Mexico City).

Cananea residents, especially former mining workers, are aware of small environmental accidents at the mine in the past, but their small scale and the capacity of the mine to neutralize their effects had kept them from reaching the national news. Madrigal’s (2019) historical ethnography underlines that the residents of Cananea have become habituated to the negative externalities of mining that they experience daily, to the extent that they have begun to normalize pollution. Informal chats with residents revealed that they considered the yellow-blueish coloring of the local stream pretty and something to highlight to visitors. Residents do not deny the contamination generated by mining but instead show resignation combined with self-deprecating humor.

The Concept of Hegemony and Its Limitations for Studying Mining Governance

Gramsci’s concept of hegemony has been applied to unpack Mexico’s capitalist power relations on international, national, and regional scales (Hesketh, 2017; Morton, 2013; Rubin, 1997). It is a dialectic concept built upon coercion and consensus and the multiple forms they take in maintaining dominant groups’ interests. Because capitalism is prone to crisis and contradiction, dominant groups cannot consistently deliver on their promises to subaltern groups, and therefore hegemony is continuously being challenged. Negotiations lead to policies and programs that require the acceptance of state and civil society institutions by the popular sectors, but when negotiations fail, force tends to be used to maintain the dominant classes’ hegemony (Davies, 2012).

Power relations in Cananea have been studied with a Gramscian approach (Harner, 2001) because it has been a cradle of labor-rights struggles and because it represents the blurring of the economic and political interests materialized in mining that has helped nurture the country’s twenty-first-century commodities boom and its association with the discourse of modernization (Sariego, 2016). Through consensual strategies, attempts have been made to persuade the population of Cananea to accept mining as the only option for development. By focusing on Cananea and the Sonora River region, this article contributes to Morton’s (2013) call for a focus on space and multiscalar relationships in attempting to understand the uneven geographical development of state power and its operation.

However, a Gramscian approach is not enough to understand Cananea’s governance. The decenteredness of power, in particular that of mining companies in modern enclave towns, is also important to consider (Smart, 2020). This decenteredness is increasingly captured in the policies of corporate social responsibility, a concept that has been useful in identifying business’s exercise of power alongside the state (Hilson, 2012).

Ekers and Loftus (2013: 18) are among those who argue that a Gramscian approach requires that we define concepts in relation to historically and geographically situated practices, which may require the use of other intellectual traditions. These writers’ (2008) argument on the complementarity of Gramsci’s hegemony and Foucault’s governmentality is useful for understanding the decenteredness of power in governing arrangements. I am interested in the consensual arm of hegemony, which focuses not on sanctions but on tactics, especially policies and programs, for creating deeper attachment to a way of thinking and acting. Foucault’s work describes the diffusion of power through a body of social relations, in particular relations materialized in administrative “practices that aim to control everyday life” (Ekers and Loftus, 2008: 706).

For Foucault, according to Ekers and Loftus, daily discipline is not only centered on the state but also dispersed in practices and knowledge promoted and embodied by nonstate actors such as schools, prisons, and hospitals. State and nonstate actors constitute a network of relations that contribute to the basis of modern forms of rule. For Ekers and Loftus (2008: 704) this interpretation “might be seen to have antecedents in Gramsci’s work on the integral state.” The dispersion of governmental relations is key to an understanding of network governance, in which the distinction between state, civil society, and the business sector in policy making is blurred. The state has become a network made up of governmental and societal actors in which there is no sovereign actor to steer or regulate them (Rhodes, 1996; Kooiman, 2003). Corporate social responsibility’s elements of citizen and community participation are central to my argument. Davies (2012: 2688) argues that network governance is a broad-church term with “common reference points across social sciences,” but what is important in these debates is the “cultivation of networks between public authorities and other actors” to reduce transaction costs between state, markets, and societies through (albeit highly questionable) relations of trust and collaboration that at times require hidden coercive tactics.

These networks require management and coordination that are flexible and information-rich (Davies, 2012: 2689). Davies argues that network governance can be understood as a form of Gramsci’s “integral state” pursuing hegemony. With Foucault to help him, Davies brings Gramscian abstract theorizations down to the local scale (Davies, 2014). In doing so, he recognizes that a Foucauldian approach has limitations on two important fronts, both of which are relevant to my argument: the inadequate theorization of the relationship between the coercive and noncoercive exercise of power and the lack of attention to scale—in particular, how power is configured in cities or municipalities (2014: 3219) and on national and international scales. In bringing together all these debates, this article aims to underline the importance of Foucault’s governmentality without forgetting Gramsci’s insights when studying local hegemony and its relationship with that of other spatial scales.

Corporate Social Responsibility Policy as a Mechanism for Unpacking Mining Governance

Corporate social responsibility policy in mining has increasingly involved the term “sustainable mining,” which challenges the mining sector to rethink regional and local development (Antonelli, 2009). At its best, the term promotes an integrative approach, coupling the extraction of resources with respect for human rights and community or citizen participation. Environmental sustainability is pursued through management practices that allow the use of renewable natural resources to produce goods indispensable for human subsistence while including long-term mitigation and compensation schemes for communities impacted negatively by extraction (Antonelli, 2009; Smart, 2020). At its worst, the use of the term can become a greenwashing tactic that accompanies other means for deflecting government regulation while showcasing businesses’ moral commitments to well-being (Shamir, 2010; Vogel, 2010). The latter provides a common language for cogovernance by state, enterprises, and communities in local policy making for sustainable development but often subordinates social considerations to commercial ones. Shamir (2005) argues that corporate social responsibility models commonly consist of community and educational training programs that swap “a rhetoric of political empowerment for a rhetoric of socioeconomic empowerment by educating and equipping people with skills and organizational tools” for coping with unemployment, displacement, and self-provision (Taylor, quoted in Shamir, 2005: 107). Although commitments to sustainable mining are voluntary, rewards for attaining them have become important. Good corporate responsibility policies do not guarantee more valuable stock shares for shareholders and investors but instead provide risk management tools that enhance marketing and public, employee, and investor relations (Vogel, 2010: 77), especially since these shareholders are increasingly sympathetic to the United Nations’ sustainable development goals.

Davies (2012: 2693) argues that because network governance may also be characterized by distrust it is important to attend to the coercive side of consensus that it entails. A coercion-consensus dialectics is commonly found in the administrative domination of the state bureaucracy and, I will argue, the bureaucracy of the corporation. Davies contends that the perpetrators of administrative domination obscure injustices by promoting participation and collaboration among the state, businesses, and communities. Administrative domination is especially relevant to local governance in mining corporations because these corporations have had a strong influence on the management of local space and citizen participation in periods of labor, environmental, and identity conflict.

Garibay’s (2019) discussion of “negative reciprocity” is helpful for applying Davies’s consensual coercion to mining governance. He defines the term as the intention to take everything while giving little or nothing in return. While simulating positive transactions, under a model of domination corporations obtain labor, goods, and territory at very low cost. Garibay argues that the main strategy of the Mexican business sector in implementing sustainable mining is the deployment of community development programs under a policy of corporate social responsibility. Enterprises identify the needs and aspirations of the community through participatory mechanisms to produce community development plans that may include mitigation and relocation of displaced groups as a result of mining expansion. However, Garibay continues, while the enterprise is following the discourse of participation, consultation, and perhaps deliberation with community groups in achieving an agreement that “favors” the community’s well-being, through the networks built into the mining sector it is lobbying state actors across multiple tiers of government to promote favorable legal conditions, subsidies to facilitate investment and obtain incentives, licenses, and permits, streamlining of administrative processes for appropriating land and resources (such as water), the capture of state and community institutions through bribery and other informal arrangements, and deactivation (aided by state policing and militarization) of any opposition to mining. In other words, participation is used to help implement the territorial expansion and risk management to which contemporary mining activities are exposed, but the (mis)management of information and of participatory mechanisms ensures an administrative and (limited) regulatory environment in which businesses can thrive. It is in this mismanagement of information and participatory arrangements by state and business actors at the local level that administrative domination is identified and coercion concealed as consensus is enacted.

Administrative Domination: A Confluence of State and Business Practices

The 2007 strike and the 2014 spill undoubtedly prompted change in the policies and strategies carried out by Grupo México, and at a microlevel they were concessions that had to be made in exchange for hegemony. In 2009–2010 the corporation created a Community Development Directorate in its mining branch, and this directorate has developed a humane approach in the building of relationships with communities directly impacted by mining while pursuing “good neighborliness” through practices of corporate social responsibility. It has invested in “good corporate citizen” activities (Shamir, 2005) through community events, donations to local charities and community organizations, and summer schools, but it has also created ways of influencing local policy making through participation embedded in the sustainable-mining discourse. It has created its own brand, called Casa Grande, and the program of activities it has lined up over the years has played a vital role in regaining some of the trust lost through earlier repression and economic stress. A series of economic, political, social, and environmental assessments of Cananea, carried out by a team of sociologists/anthropologists in 2009, served as the basis for a program of activities through which Casa Grande could contribute to the development of community activism and social cohesion. In the early stages of the program, infrastructure projects with regard to building improvements were also financed, but since the introduction of the mining tax in 2014 these activities have focused on social development projects.

The program stresses the importance of community skills, particularly leadership. Casa Grande considers itself a source of local leaders who have the vision to promote ideas for Cananea’s sustainable-mining development. The leadership program includes principles of citizen participation such as inclusion, transparency, and accountability and is monitored by an 8–10-person Communitarian Committee initially appointed by Grupo México and subsequently by a network of community members. Members have professional backgrounds (schoolteachers, doctors, etc.) and are well-known residents and community activists. They lack immediate past relationships with mine workers of the lower ranks. Casa Grande staff members have designed processes in which transparency and accountability are exercised by this committee through, for example, annual and regular meetings in which the directorate’s budget reports and business plans are presented, discussed, and monitored. However, whether this transparency and accountability extend to the rest of the public is debatable (interviews, Communitarian Committee members, 020 and 023, Cananea).

After four years of restoring trust, the spill disaster called Grupo México’s sustainability agenda into serious question. The corporation has an environmental directorate that deals directly with these issues. However, sustainable mining is supposed to build links between environmental and social and participatory matters, and these links are limited to close communication among the directors and joint corporate social responsibility annual reports. Casa Grande began to organize immediately after the spill, bringing over extra staff from other parts of the country and providing drinking water to the victims. Over a three-month period, it surveyed the impact of the spill on many localities down the river, provided initial compensation to households directly affected, and coordinated the collection of information with academics, volunteer groups, and government authorities to provide a baseline for the federal authorities’ remedial plan (interviews, Grupo México officers, 005 and 010, Hermosillo).

By the end of 2014, the federal government had taken over the management of the remedial plan. Under the Ministry of the Environment and Natural Resources, a private trust called the Fideicomiso Río Sonora (Sonora River Trust) was created to administer the 2 million pesos of Grupo México’s remedial package. The mismanagement of the funds and ineffectiveness in distributing resources of the government authorities at individual and community levels has been reported by NGOs (Fundar, 2018; Lamberti, 2018). Grupo México had no direct responsibility in the management and operation of the remedial plan, but the municipal authorities that partnered with state and federal agencies did. Among the administrative deficiencies underlined by these reports are problems with getting complete, timely, and open information, corruption in the distribution of compensation, underspending of the 2 million pesos, and lack of management capacity to operate the water treatment plants and health services. Surprisingly, despite the fact that the lack of information, transparency, and accountability were the main problems raised in criticisms of the mismanagement of the Trust, I saw no sign of Casa Grande’s influencing how participation could have made its operations more transparent and accountable.

Despite its partial delivery, the Trust was discontinued in 2017, and Casa Grande decided to invest resources in Cananea and the Sonora River region by funding the consultancy services of academics to help municipalities develop comprehensive development plans. Resources became available for this by the federal government’s creation of a mining tax colloquially known as the Fondo Minero (Mining Fund). Up until 2019, the fund reinvested the tax paid by mining companies in the states and municipalities where minerals were extracted, 80 percent of it being directed to infrastructure. Sonora was the biggest beneficiary of this tax, given its mining productivity, and Cananea was the municipality that received the most in 2017–2018.⁵ The first municipal administration to benefit was the Herrera administration (2015–2018), which began by investing in roads. By 2017, 40 percent of Cananea’s Mining Fund budget was allocated to participatory budgeting.

Participatory budgeting has become the World Bank’s answer to local governments’ need to reduce patronage and corruption, and since the early 2000s it has been part of the organization’s understanding of “good governance” (Goldfrank, 2012). The 13 projects voted for by citizens prioritized basic infrastructure such as street paving, piped water and sewerage connections, and street lighting. The number of infrastructure projects was more than double that of the previous two administrations combined. Interviews with residents (025 and 027, Cananea) and municipal authorities (senior politician, 011, and finance officer, 013, Cananea) suggested that this exercise created a space for renewed trust in the municipal administration when citizen consultations materialized in the construction of needed public works.

Although Casa Grande had no direct role in the design, management, and allocation of resources derived from participatory budgeting, during the first three years of the Mining Fund, the head of the Community Development Directorate was the representative of the mining sector on the regional committee at the state-level government that ensured that the resources were used as the municipal authorities intended. The directorate’s role on this regional committee can be interpreted as a tactical step by Grupo México to understand the way the tax influenced municipal governance decisions on infrastructure. Grupo México benefited from the infrastructural precarity across different scales—neighborhood, municipality, and region—that complemented the broader national discourse on extractive industries as engines of modernization.

Mining companies have had a strong presence in the identity formation of place (Harner, 2001), but Casa Grande has had an advantage in pursuing local hegemony in the past decade as a result of the labor and environmental crises. Harner argues that Gramscian hegemony has been achieved in Cananea through a continuous quest for an equilibrium in which “the meaning of place for the majority of residents matches the ideological beliefs of the class in power [Grupo México and politicians]” (676). Casa Grande has contributed to the achievement of hegemony through the promotion of citizen participation in various dimensions, from the Communitarian Committee and the projects it has sponsored through its corporate citizen activities to its support for participatory budgeting.

However, the participatory spaces that Casa Grande has created lack the emancipatory value of democratic participation because the skills acquired in them are subject to a market rationale. Observations of the summer activities offered to young people and the assessment of community projects receiving Casa Grande’s financial and in-kind support revealed that whereas emancipatory training would have included awareness of human rights, exercises to build collective identity and social cohesion among rival groups, and efforts to identify the community’s concerns with regard to water quality, Casa Grande promoted individual leadership through exercises that nurtured aspirational and self-esteem activities and commitment to others. This approach was a way of developing countertactics against what Shamir (2005) calls the “unwarranted political pressures” exercised by combative groups such as the SNTMMSSRM and PODER.

Discussion

Administrative domination is the product of a strategy carried out jointly by Grupo México and various state actors that involves distancing from responsibility for policy, legitimacy control, and concealed coercion.

Distancing from Responsibility for Policy

Both in NGO reports and during my interviews, questions arose about Grupo México’s fulfillment of the compensation for disaster victims required by the Trust and the limited negotiations held with the SNTMMSSRM in the aftermath of the strike (interview, union member, 015, Cananea). The corporation generally stepped back and left the state actors responsible for negotiating the terms and delivery of the compensation agreed upon, depending on its relationships with various state authorities to negotiate terms that were convenient to its mining division. At the federal level these authorities were the Ministry of the Environment and Natural Resources, the Ministries of Labor and Social Welfare, Agriculture and Rural Development, the Interior, and Agrarian, Territorial, and Urban Development, and the federal police, at the state level the governor and the Ministry of Economy, and at the municipal level the mayors. It used these relationships to shield itself from direct contact with the affected citizen groups. Ironically, this practice undermined the citizen participation element of its sustainable-mining discourse.

This tactic created a distant and “closed” image of Grupo México that has helped it to prolong judicial procedures that relieved it of its social responsibility. For example, in the amparo (144/2015) originally submitted by PODER, it was held responsible for violating human rights as a result of the damage caused by the spill, but the state-level judicial authorities denied this claim. PODER considered this resolution biased in that it gave Grupo México more time to prepare a countersuit (PODER, 2018). It can be argued that Grupo México has treated the authorities like a janitor charged with the “undesirable” work of dealing with organized citizens. It is the authorities who (albeit often ineffectively) deal with citizens’ demands, and it is they who are accused of corruption. Meanwhile, Grupo México is exonerated of any wrongdoing and contemptuous of the government for its inability to put its house in order—for example, in withdrawing financial support for the Trust in response to shortcomings in the construction and operation of the epidemiological clinic for treating victims affected by the spill (UN, 2017: 10).

The creation of Casa Grande in combination with the implementation of corporate social responsibility policy has helped to remedy some of the faults of Grupo México’s distant and closed stance. Casa Grande aims to bring the corporation closer to the community through a program of activities that can be interpreted as opportunities for self-development and self-management in a context of withdrawal of public and social services. As structural reforms have become consolidated in the country, Casa Grande has filled the void. These activities can be read as a strategy for training Cananea’s inhabitants to manage their own needs rather than demanding free basic services as they did when the mine was state-owned. Equally, however, these practices may help the community to cope with government agencies’ negligence regarding service provision. Locally, these agencies have been perceived as corrupt and, until participatory budgeting was implemented, unaccountable to citizens. In this sense, Grupo México is helping to create a participatory culture in the governance of Cananea while ensuring that no direct responsibility for the decisions made during its implementation is charged to it.

Legitimacy through Urban Space and Service Provision Control

Alongside the municipal government, Casa Grande has helped to prepare Cananea’s application for the status of pueblo mágico (magic town, in a program of national recognition of towns known for their beauty and distinctive customs) and to diversify Cananea’s economy beyond mining through the support of wine production initiatives. Environmental projects have also been used to build a positive image, among them the leisure park and shopping center Plaza Tamosura and the co-maintenance of a federal wildlife reserve. These quasi-private spaces are thought to compensate for the closure of public spaces such as the Ojo de Agua, a natural reserve bought by Buenavista del Cobre to supply water to its mining activities. Another example is Casa Grande’s promotion of trade in the agricultural produce of the Sonora River, whose lowlands were affected by the spill (interview, Casa Grande officer, 036, Mexico City). These activities are complemented by projects in which Grupo México’s logo is seen on billboards and street furniture announcing that it is involved in the construction of roads and highways and street maintenance in the municipalities along the river, which do not benefit from the Mining Fund. Through these types of activities, Casa Grande wants to show residents that the corporation cares.

At the same time, Casa Grande has shown no interest in tackling a number of issues that are relevant for a significant part of the population. It has not invested in reviving spaces in Cananea Vieja, which some residents claim built their identity, nor has it conducted independent, rigorous, and open surveys of residents’ concerns and perceptions regarding the scarcity and the quality of water and health services that might influence local policies for addressing the management of natural resources transparently. Anyone who visits Cananea and the river municipalities for a few weeks will realize that the architecture of the historic center and water scarcity are two of the population’s main concerns.

Casa Grande staff members (interviews, 005 and 036, Hermosillo and Mexico City) claim that the program of activities they have been developing since 2009 in Cananea and since 2017 along the Sonora River is a response to the socioeconomic diagnoses carried out by the corporation, which in theory include the populations’ needs, concerns, and demands. Unfortunately, these reports are not publicly available. One inevitably wonders why the program of activities has not more openly addressed these aspects that are relevant for the majority of the population. A possible answer may be that by addressing these issues Casa Grande would contribute to reducing Grupo México’s legitimacy. One of the town’s historians told me that Grupo México was not “really interested” in reviving the historic center because doing so would mean “surrender to residents-workers who associate their identity with living and feeling” the city.

Concealed Coercion

Casa Grande has helped to conceal, but only to a limited extent, the corporation’s coercive arm. In the 2007 strike, union workers and families confronted militarized police protecting the mine’s premises. Repression (beating and tear gas) was used to control and disrupt street protests. After the violent conflict, Buenavista del Cobre built barricades and iron gates at all the entrances to the site, and these entrances are closely guarded by private security and sometimes militarized police. The wells in rural districts are all fenced, with Los Patos the most secure. One of the roads connecting Cananea to the municipalities to the south has armed guards who ask the names and check the license plates of all drivers. I was warned to be discreet about taking pictures, since I could be questioned and, if I were with a local resident, that person’s name could be added to Grupo México’s blacklist.

Participants mentioned a list of workers who had been actively involved in the 2007 protests and related activities carried out over time, and these workers were barred from working in Buenavista del Cobre and other mines owned by Grupo México, including secondary or tertiary firms to which the mine outsourced operations. On some occasions, extended-family members were also affected by the blacklist. For example, the niece of a former worker who wanted practical training in mining engineering as part of her local college studies was denied access to the mine and had to travel to Chihuahua for that training. Meanwhile, on the mining site I was told during informal conversations and by Branch 65 interviewees (021 and 022, Cananea) with colleagues working on the site that shifts were now 12 hours (up from 8 hours in 2007) and workers were discouraged from gathering in groups and required to leave their personal belongings, including smart phones, at the gate to avoid the spread of rumors about labor rights violations through social media.

The 2014 disaster has left resentment among the people affected, who interpret as abandonment the corporation’s absenteeism over the three years in which the Trust was implementing the remedial program. The misinformation and mismanagement of the Trust was interpreted by some residents as a clear indication of the way Grupo México and the authorities “beat, step on, and forget you.” Resentment is accompanied by uncertainty about using tap water despite official announcements that the water is not contaminated. As a result, residents along the Sonora River now buy 20-liter plastic containers of purified water, and this new cost adds to the list of injustices that Grupo México and the government’s structural policies have inflicted upon Cananea’s residents since the mine’s privatization.

The coercive tactics of Grupo México have been accompanied by federal intervention in repressing the 2007 strike and the road blockages in 2018 and more broadly by surveillance. The latter is coupled with a wider national program of drug-trafficking control, especially on the U.S.-Mexico border. Mafia-like disciplinary tactics are also reported; residents said that they were threatened by the local mafia after they complained to Buenavista del Cobre about its breach of the water contract signed with the agrarian assembly (interview, assembly member, 024, Cananea). These coercive tactics not only categorize resistance as conflict and manipulate participation but also create fear.

Conclusions

Grupo México’s threefold strategy—distancing from responsibility for policy, legitimacy through control, and concealed coercion—for achieving administrative domination involves a wide range of state actors and a directorate for implementing corporate social responsibility policies and government programs and projects. It functions through a series of contradictions: mismanaging information while creating spaces of citizen participation, distancing from political responsibility while opening spaces of reapproachment through Casa Grande’s activities, promoting the city’s beauty but neglecting its historic buildings, closing public spaces while opening quasi-private parks. These contradictions contribute to concealing the repressive coercion by which domination is maintained. Hegemony is always contested, and the threefold strategy has responded to the pressures exerted by union and grassroots resistance to the violation of labor and environmental rights.

By unpacking administrative domination, I have shown the usefulness of a Foucauldian approach to the everyday exercise of power diffusion through a body of social relations built by Grupo México, various state actors, and local civil society/citizen groups. Focusing on network governance, I have employed the concept of hegemony at the local level to understand the coercive and noncoercive exercise of power, and this has required building links to Gramscian foci on historicity, spatial scale, and the coercion-consensus dialectics in which hegemony has been embedded in Mexican mining.

I have also stressed that, as the mining industry expands and intensifies, so does its influence on local policy making, especially where regulatory environments are limited. Beyond the cases discussed here, there are several mining towns in Mexico that may reveal similar trends in governance, among them Necozari and La Colorada in Sonora, Sombrerete in Zacatecas, and Cerro de San Pedro in San Luis Potosí. Beyond Mexico, there are several emblematic cases in Latin America (see Rodríguez López, 2016). I have emphasized shortcomings of network governance that merit further research, especially distrust and limited accountability at the local level, and pointed out that corporate social responsibility policies may divert attention from the shortfalls of administrative domination—mismanagement of information and unempowering participation—that contribute to the development of a sclerotic state. Ironically, Casa Grande’s adoption of participatory mechanisms highlights the precarious role of the municipal government and underlines its weakness with regard to Mexico’s democratization. Three decades ago, municipal authorities were considered the engines of democratic and participative innovation, but with the expansion of extractive industry this role seems to have passed to the corporation. If academics and practitioners continue to overlook this shift, the empowering principles inherent in the concept of local participatory democracy will soon be forgotten.

Footnotes

Notes

Valeria Guarneros-Meza is a reader in politics and public policy in the Department of Politics, People, and Place at De Montfort University, UK. She is grateful to Gisela Zaremberg and Lourdes Gallardo, who contributed to rich discussions during the data collection for this article, and to the three reviewers, who provided very helpful comments for improving the argument. The work was funded by the British Academy (grant reference AF160219, “Conversing with Goliath? Participation, Mobilisation and Repression in Neoextractivist and Environmental Conflicts in Mexico”).

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