Darcy Tetreault

Free-Market Mining in Mexico

This paper examines the impact of neoliberal reforms on Mexico’s mining sector, with a focus on the social and environmental conflicts that have emerged since the 1990s. It distinguishes between two types of conflict: labor conflicts, which stem from intensified labor exploitation in the realm of expanded reproduction; and eco-territorial conflicts around accumulation by dispossession. It argues that free-market mining in Mexico has led to Mexican oligopoly control, Canadian imperialism and narco-mining.

An Introduction to Social Environmental Conflicts and Alternatives in Mexico

Tetreault, McCulligh, and Lucio provide a panoramic description of social environmental conflicts in Mexico and the alternatives that are being constructed from below in rural areas. They argue that, for the study of social environmental conflicts, Mexico represents both an “extreme” case and an anomaly in the Latin American context. A theoretical model is presented to explain the multiplication of social environmental conflicts in the neoliberal era, taking as a point of departure Marx’s model of “original accumulation”. In connection with this model, the authors point to the policies and agencies that promote projects that imply the commodification and privatization of natural resources in Mexico. In this way, an argument is made that, in the context of a regulatory framework subordinated to the imperative of creating favorable conditions to attract and retain private and foreign investment, the imposition of mega-development projects, maquiladora industrialization, and natural resource exploitation have generated objective conditions of environmental crisis and injustice in multiple and diverse local settings throughout Mexico, even though not all give rise to open environmental conflicts.

Taking Stock of Contestation and Alternatives to Neoliberal Capitalism in Mexico

Tetreault, McCulligh, and Lucio present a comparative and global analysis of the studies brought together in this edited collection. They seek to distill the political and theoretical implications of their findings as regards to the structural causes of increasing social environmental conflicts in Mexico, the conformation of resistance movements and the construction of alternatives from below. The chapter briefly considers struggles and alternatives in urban areas, and it closes with some general reflections on the country’s current political situation.

Political Class Formation in Opposition to the Zapotillo Dam

Tetreault and Gomez Fuentes analyze the struggle against the Zapotillo Dam in the Highlands of Jalisco. They seek to explain the formation of a collective agency of resistance in a local and regional context characterized by Catholic conservatism, high levels of migration to the USA, and highly concentrated private ownership of land and water resources. After contextualizing the Zapotillo Dam project in a brief review of historical and contemporary dam-building policies and trends in Mexico, and after critically analyzing the logic behind this particular project, the authors center their investigation on the formation of organized resistance in Temacapulin, the largest of the three towns threatened by flooding. Regional culture, leadership types, and state mediation are examined in order to explain the formation and evolution of popular organized resistance and networking, which has so far prevented the Dam from being completed and filled.

Water in Zacatecas: A Crisis Without Conflict

Tetreault analyzes water issues in and around the Metropolitan Area of Zacatecas and Guadalupe, located in the arid central region of the state of Zacatecas. The case is presented as one of “no conflict” vis-a-vis objective conditions of environmental crisis and injustice. The analysis begins with a brief historical review of the genesis and evolution of water supply and contamination problems, from the city’s founding as a mining enclave in the mid-sixteenth century until the present, with emphasis on the transition from the period of state-led development and import substituting industrialization to the current neoliberal era. Mexico’s water policies and water management practices in Zacatecas are examined in an effort to explain the driving forces behind a deepening water crisis on the local level. This is sketched out in three dimensions: the overexploitation of aquifers, the contamination of surface and underground water sources, and an unjust distribution that privileges the private sector and delivers water with dangerously high concentrations of heavy metals to the urban population. The study reveals that there is little public awareness of these problems.