Este artículo analiza variaciones significativas entre dos conflictos en torno a la minería en Chile con respecto al grado, la escala y los resultados de las contiendas: los conflictos en Chañaral, donde la empresa estatal Codelco opera, y en el valle del Huasco (Pascua Lama), donde una empresa privada transnacional está a cargo. En el primer caso la oposición contra la minería es baja y aislada, y el Estado no responde a las demandas locales. En contraste, el proyecto Pascua Lama motivó protestas a gran escala, obtuvo apoyo nacional e internacional y logró que el Estado actuara en beneficio de las demandas locales. Tres factores explican estas diferencias: primero, el contexto económico local, es decir, la dependencia que un determinado lugar tiene de la industria minera afecta el grado de movilización; segundo, la presencia de la empresa pública reduce tanto la disposición general de oponerse a la actividad minera como las oportunidades de multiplicar las escalas del conflicto. Además, el Estado tiende a proteger a las empresas públicas que proporcionan ingresos fiscales importantes. Por último, el origen de la empresa (nacional-transnacional) influye en la escala, así como en los resultados, de los conflictos mineros.

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Introduction: the global gold chain as a hybrid regimeGold mining in Peru has a long tradition and grew significantly during the latest global commodity boom in the 2000s. About one third of the gold mined in Peru is artisanal and produced on a small scale by individ ual miners or small companies washing the mineral out of superficial sediments (referred to in the literature as Artisanal Small-Scale Gold Min ing, henceforth ASGM). The bulk of ASGM production takes place in the Amazon basin, in the department of Madre de Dios, located in the Peruvian south.The Peruvian state currently classifies small-scale gold mining in Madre de Dios into three types (Wieland 2020): formal or legal gold mining 2 , which refers to mining activities that comply with the legal provisions es tablished by the state; illegal gold mining, which refers to mining activities in places where mining is officially forbidden (in so-called "no-go zones"); and informal gold mining carried out by miners who operate without the required legal permits in places where mining is not forbidden. Many miners who have been working for decades in areas closed off for mining are only recently invoking what they consider their consuetudinary right to mine and see themselves as informal and not illegal miners. In some cases, the Peruvian government has accepted this claim.This complex scenario, which includes the coexistence of different cat egories of gold mining in one and the same region, is the result of different policy responses to the sector that have varied over time: small-scale gold mining in Peru was not regulated by the state for most of the time since extraction started in the 19th century, hence it was neither legal nor illegal. Only recently, in 2012, Peruvian governments started to require miners to formalise their activities and to prohibit gold production in several 1.

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