Mining Water: Rivers, Water Rights, and the Development of Anaconda Copper’s Chuquicamata Mine in Chile

This paper explores the central importance of water extraction to the development of one of the world’s largest copper mines in Chile by the North American Guggenheim and Anaconda Copper companies. It argues that extraction of the scarce water flowing in rivers from the Andes through the arid Atacama Desert was essential to the ecologically disruptive practice of an industrial-scale mine. It traces how the Guggenheim conglomerate, partnering with the British commercial house Duncan Fox, acquired multiple water rights that proved vital to the industrial concentrating process. The paper makes three related points. First, it traces the chains composing what historian Richard White referred to as an “organic machine,” linking the copper wire that knit together the industrializing economies of the North Atlantic world with the energy and water flowing through the Andean rivers. The extractivism and environmental destruction of “minescapes,” in historian Thomas Andrews’ words, was insperable from the destruction of rivers’ “waterscapes.” Second, it focuses on metrology, the standardization to building both extractive and industrial economies. Reducing the complex ecologies of rivers to standardized units of power and current, measurements of flow rates, undergirded the legal process through which mining companies established claims to rivers water and transformed use rights to a water commons (a bien nacional de uso público) into property rights. Establishing de facto, if not de jure, property rights to water, required metrology and shaped the Chilean state’s determination to delegate management and ownership of water to private, often transnational, mining companies. Third, the paper argues, that this process during the first decades of the twentieth century, laid the foundation for the later privatization of water rights during the Pinochet dictatorship’s radical free-market restructuring.