'No a la contaMINAción'. Counter-insurgency in the Tia Maria copper mining project (Peru)

The aim of this paper is to analyse the top-down political reactions of a mining company (Southern Copper Peru) and the Peruvian government to popular opposition to a copper mining project in the Tambo agricultural valley (Peru). Residents organised a popular consultation, large-scale demonstrations, road blockades and general strikes and faced violent repression. It examines the political ecology of counterinsurgency, which studies the techniques of socio-ecological warfare employed to control human and natural resources, and relates it to the discourse of social warfare. The first section lays the theoretical groundwork for discussing the coercion and "social warfare component" present in natural resource extraction. This leads to an overview of the relationship between Peruvian security forces and extractive industries, followed by a brief chronology of the Tía María conflict. The next two sections provide a political ecology analysis of various 'hard' and 'soft' counterinsurgency techniques employed by the Peruvian state and Southern in an attempt to pacify unrest and social acceptance of the project. The final section discusses the counterinsurgency approach employed by the government, and recognises how current institutional arrangements and commercial imperatives are designed to override popular socio-ecological concerns. Using the discourse of social warfare, the article argues that the state apparatus and politics serve as an instrument of social pacification and ecological exploitation, despite widespread ecological and climate concerns.