The necroeconomy of electricity generation for mining. The community impact of the use of petcoke in Tocopilla (Chile, 2000-2015)

Abstract

From a historiographic methodology and an anthropoloical hermeneutic, this article describes and analyzes a process derived from large-scale copper mining and the generation of electrical energy. necessary to develop it, in the first five years of the 21st century. This production regime, within the framework of commercial competitiveness, led to a necroeconomy through the introduction of petcoke ,as fuel in thermoelectric plants, This fuel structured a strong socio environmental precariousness and forged the production of a territorial and community subsidiarity. In other words, the Tocopilla population had to breathe, endure, and suffer the environmental and bodily effects of productive decisions, which were protected by subsumed state agents and by weakness in environmental regulation. To speak of necroeconomics is to make one of the adverse functions of capitalism and its subordinate agents in politics visible, which produces a superfluous population, no longer necessary to “exploit” but rather manage — one way of getting these population surpluses is exposing them to all kinds of dangers and risks. In this way, vulnerability and death are hierarchized and disposability is built in some social groups through slow violence or dense outbreaks on "subsets" of humanity classified at a lower level. Thus, the subjects of rights, become subjects of waste, and also subjects of death; in other words, people who, due to foreign and suddenly invisible economic factors, ceased to be part of the social world and were excluded from the norms that ensure vital protection.