Disaster Extractivism: Latin America’s Extractive Shock Therapy in the Age of COVID-19

Abstract

Latin America faces a twin crisis. The spread of COVID-19 has become a health catastrophe and sent regional economies into recession, while governments’ increasing reliance on extractive development as a health and economic “cure” has compounded existing socio-environmental conflicts across the continent. An emergent “extractive savior” discourse aligns with political economic interests that have instrumentalized the pandemic to propel a new strain of disaster capitalism—disaster extractivism. Any socio-environmentally just response to COVID-19 must eschew the extractivist logic that underlies the pandemic and mainstream responses to it. América Latina enfrenta una doble crisis. La propagación de COVID-19 se ha convertido en una catástrofe sanitaria y ha llevado a las economías regionales a la recesión, mientras que la creciente dependencia de los gobiernos del desarrollo extractivo como una "cura" sanitaria y económica ha agravado los conflictos socioambientales existentes en todo el continente. Un discurso emergente de "salvación extractiva" se alinea con los intereses económicos políticos que han instrumentalizado la pandemia para impulsar una nueva cepa del capitalismo desastroso: el extractivismo desastroso. Cualquier respuesta socioambientalmente justa al COVID-19 debe evitar la lógica extractivista que subyace a la pandemia y las respuestas generales a esta.

Extractivism and the engendering of disasters: disaster risk creation in the era of the Anthropocene

“…However, in various Latin American countries, governments used the state of emergency to redefine mining, oil and gas extraction as "essential" activities to ensure their continued DPM 33,3 functioning. In Chile protestors denounced mining as a super-spreader activity, with the environmental organisation Movimiento Socio-Ambiental Valle del Huasco noting: "Large-scale mining first kills us with pollution, now it kills us by COVID" (cited in Artiga-Purcell et al, 2023).…”

“…Paula (2021) suggests the answer may lie with the prevailing extractivist logic that has seen a doubling of resource extraction in the last 25 years (McNeish and Shapiro, 2021, p. 4). Extractive logic underpins social dislocation and ecological destruction, and the intensification of extractive practice creates the conditions that facilitate the spread of zoonotic disease (Artiga-Purcell et al ., 2023).…”