Chuquicamata: Necropolitics and Autopoiesis of a Mining City

The Atacama Desert in Chile is marked as a colonial and imperial ‘empty’ space, conquered, occupied, plundered, and polluted for centuries. Zooming in on the mining town of Chuquicamata, Constanza Mendoza’s contribution to the “Kin City” text series relates the history and politics of Chuquicamata to her own family, connecting times, spaces, and urban ecologies that have been too long separated, offering a condensed narrative of the history of settler colonialism in the Atacama Desert.

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I was born in the mining town of Chuquicamata, the year the socialist president Salvador Allende nationalized the mining industry. Chuquicamata is the largest open-pit copper mine in the world. The city was a ‘Company Town’ that provided productive functions, housing, and other facilities aimed at achieving efficient production in the exploration of raw materials. At the same time, it created a social group that was excluded from other activities and forms of urban expression not provided by the company.

The large-scale industrial exploitation of Chuquicamata was initiated by the Guggenheim brothers in 1911, with significant investments to create railroads, a power plant, and a port funded through a bond issue in New York. In the middle of the driest desert in the world, it was necessary to create living conditions for the miners and their families, as well as special accommodations for the North American managers and their families.

By 1918, American interests accounted for 87 percent of Chile’s copper output. When the Guggenheims sold Chuquicamata to the Anaconda Corporation (another U.S. investment company) in 1923, they had dominated and transformed not only the Chilean copper industry but also the emergence of U.S.-based multinational mining companies, shaping a new global economy.

The city of Chuquicamata reached a population of 25,000 in the 1970s. In 2003, it began to be dismantled, and by 2007, its 10,000 inhabitants were relocated to Calama, the nearest city. The main reason given by the company to justify the displacement of the entire city was health issues.

The world’s largest open-pit mine contains 20% of the world’s copper reserves. Its mining and industrial processes produce dust and water pollution containing arsenic, leading to massive cases of cancer and serious respiratory diseases in nearby communities and affecting local ecosystems and drinking water sources.

Necropolitcs

Chuquicamata was designed as a sacrifice zone, reflecting the broader enterprise of Euro-American culture, which instrumentalizes and exploits lands and peoples for its own development. While the concept of a ‘sacrifice zone’ has significant relevance for environmental justice – particularly developed by indigenous movements since the 1970s, especially among Native Americans regarding uranium and nuclear issues – I draw on the concept of necropolitics proposed by Professor Achille Mbembe. Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics describes the structural system of colonialism that subjugates life to the power of death.

For my purpose, necropolitics better defines the roots of structural colonial occupation as the sovereign right to kill. Mbembe defines colonial occupation as “a matter of seizing, demarcating, and asserting control over a physical geographical space – of writing on the ground a new set of social and spatial relations.”

In 1971, the Chilean government under President Salvador Allende nationalized the copper industry, including Chuquicamata, as part of a broader agenda to redistribute wealth and promote social equity. The nationalization process involved a complex assessment of the value of the assets held by American companies. The Chilean government agreed to compensate the companies, with estimates suggesting that compensation for the nationalization of Kennecott and Anaconda amounted to about $800 million.

During the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile, which lasted from 1973 to 1990, severe human rights violations occurred. Approximately 3,200 Chileans were killed as a result of state violence, around 38,000 individuals were tortured, and more than 1,000 were forcibly disappeared, with the fates of many remaining unknown. The legacy of these human rights violations continues to affect Chilean society, with ongoing efforts for justice, reparations, and recognition of the victims.

Mbembe recognizes that contemporary state-sponsored death cannot be fully explained by Michel Foucault’s theories of biopower and biopolitics. He argues that “under the conditions of necropower, the boundaries between resistance and suicide, sacrifice and salvation, martyrdom and freedom are blurred.”

Autopoiesis

In his essay “Necropolitics” (2003), Mbembe critically analyzes “the normative theories of democracy as general norms made up of free and equal men and women.” In his words: “These men and women are posited as full subjects capable of self-understanding, self-consciousness, and self-representation. Therefore, sovereignty is defined as a twofold process of self-institution and self-limitation. The exercise of sovereignty, in turn, consists in society’s capacity for self-creation through recourse to institutions inspired by specific social and imaginary meanings.”

I propose a link between this normative idea of a democratic society based on its capacity for self-creation and the scientific concept of autopoiesis. Autopoiesis emphasizes self-organization and self-maintenance as essential characteristics of living systems.

The term autopoiesis was proposed in 1974 by Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela in their book “Autopoiesis: La organización de lo vivo”. The original title of this book was “Máquinas y Seres Vivos” / “Machines and Living Beings,” in which they defined life as the self-sustaining chemistry of living cells.

Autopoiesis was made possible in large part by the interdisciplinary ferment of postwar cybernetics. Interestingly, the introduction to the first edition of the book was written by Stafford Beer, who, commissioned by Allende, applied cybernetics to a national communications system intended for the entire social economy of Chile – the famous Cybersyn Project – and Maturana and Varela built on cybernetics with their notion of autopoiesis in organisms.

In the 50 years since its publication, the theory of autopoiesis has not been widely adopted in the natural sciences to define life, but it has significantly influenced the philosophy of technology, particularly in discussions about artificial intelligence.

The influence of autopoiesis theory in cybernetics and managerial systems corresponds to decades of accelerating neoliberalism, characterized by an explosion of the financial market and consumer goods that require exorbitant amounts of mineral resources.

Two sides of the same system

Today, the demand for minerals far exceeds their availability. The EU is highly dependent on external supplies of these materials: out of a list of 45 elements in world reserves, only two are found in an EU country (40% of strontium reserves are in Spain, and only 10% of selenium reserves are in Belgium). The rest is imported from third countries.

I propose these two concepts – necropolitics and autopoiesis – as two sides of the same system in relation to the historical context of Chuquicamata, the impact of extractive imperialism.

Necropolitics defines the historical and contemporary situation in the global South as territories from which life can be extracted for the benefit of the global North. On the other side, if life is self-generating, as autopoiesis claims, it denies the interdependence of all living things with their environment.

Ultimately, my argument is that the theory of autopoiesis has provided so-called democratic nations and corporations with a scientific and political justification for colonial occupation, genocide, and ecocide, legitimizing the mass deaths of human and non-human beings as sacrifices for a distinctly white minority in the global North.

Note from the author: I wrote this text to honor all the indigenous peoples and those who have been killed fighting for their right to exist and defend their land, fighting against colonial industries. The text was the basis for a performance lecture I presented at ZK/U on October 17 as part of the grand opening of the Berliner Gazette’s “Kin City” festival. It is a short extract from a larger work entitled “Mining The Self” – a performance in two acts that excavates the impacts of colonialism, imperialism, and dictatorship on the history of Chile, my family, and myself through a multi-scalar approach. I delve into the engineered and sanitized rhetoric that shapes the physical environment and conceals the colonial dispossession of populations in local sacrifice zones, from Tierra del Fuego to the Atacama Desert, where land and people are discarded for larger geopolitical and economic projects. “Mining The Self” attempts to embody a counter-transparent self that remains a relational and collective mode of resistance, despite the constant threat of being co-opted and silenced. The first act, “I Wish No One An Identity,” is a counter-narrative on colonial identity. Through the excavation of a personal discourse related to the systemic violence of European settlers that persists today, I trace my maternal family’s origins in Poland and Italy, highlighting their complicity in the dispossession and genocide of the Selk’nam indigenous people of Tierra del Fuego. The second act, entitled “Purity Is Not An Option,” continues the excavation of identity based on nation-state fictions, rejecting the myth of purity – whether in the engineering of landscapes or in social categories – as principles of exclusion. It highlights the collective trauma associated with the colonial mining industry before Salvador Allende’s presidency, during its nationalization process, and under Pinochet’s dictatorship, induced by Richard Nixon and U.S. corporate interests. “Mining The Self” critiques today’s hypercolonization and its inherent dynamics to control and cleanse both land and people.