El Agua Vale Mas Que El Oro: Mining and Protest in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru

What are the determinants of collective mobilization against mining in Latin America? Mining activities in Latin America have increased dramatically over the last decades, causing increased social resistance over the past years. Resistance against mining forms part of the wave of protest against neoliberalism in Latin America since the 1980s, which occurred concomitant to the political mobilization of indigenous groups. Yet, such ethno-environmental protest has varied over space and time. Our theoretical contribution is threefold. First, we argue that the de-facto inclusion of representatives of ethnic groups affected by mining activities in regional decision-making organs decreases the likelihood of disruptive mobilization by mitigating collective grievances. Second, the existence of de-jure ethnic group rights, such as the requirement for communal consultation, also decreases collective grievances and, thus, the occurrence of disruptive mobilization against mining. Third, with respect to social movements’ political opportunity structures, we examine the explanatory power of two competing hypotheses. On the one hand, ethnic as well as left-wing populist parties that establish links with indigenous groups should channel grievances into institutionalized politics, rather than the protest arena. On the other hand, parties closely related to social movements are often used as vehicles for large-scale social mobilization. Empirically, we introduce new geo-coded data on mining sites and anti-mining protests in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru from 2002 to 2013. We combine these data with existing information on ethnic groups’ political inclusion from the Ethnic Power Relations (EPR) dataset and new data on indigenous and regionalist parties’ participation in subnational institutions to examine the institutional roots of ethno-environmental protest against mining in Latin America.