Irrigation that the Market Does Not Want to See: History of the Water Dispossession in the Communities of Lasana and Chiu-Chiu (Atacama Desert, Chile)

The Chilean Water Code is known as a radical example of a free market model for resource management. As part of the implementation of this model in the Atacama Desert, in 1983 the military dictatorship began to privatize surface water rights in the Atacama communities of Lasana and Chiu-Chiu. The objective of this action was to decollectivize water under a system that facilitated the transfer of rights between the agricultural sector to the mining and sanitary sectors. In light of a political ecology framework, in this article, I address questions of how the dictatorship privatized water rights in Lasana and Chiu-Chiu to produce a water market, and how, through this action, it reconfigured the water landscape of these communities. In doing so, I use in-depth interviews, archival analysis, and satellite images. Results show that the dictatorship used coercion, ignored traditional irrigation, and deliberately lied to local peasants, and as a result, privatized less water than they used to use. This action generated a surplus which was centrally transferred to the extractive industries.