Revealing the water owners: infrastructures, hydro-social controversies, and water appropriation in the Copiapo Valley (in Spanish)

After reviewing some relevant elements of the trajectory and conjuncture of extractive activities in Chile, derived from the institutional architecture for the commodification and privatization of water articulated around the 1981 Water Code and the 1980 Political Constitution, the paper describes the communicational, political and socioenvironmental controversy developed in the Copiapo Valley, Atacama Region. The article looks at the communicational deployment made by sectors of the social groups that own the water market linked to agriculture, who have sought to position their own interests around their Lautaro 2.0 Project. The paper identifies the actors involved as well as the contestation strategies from civil society sectors, showing how the institutional frameworks that guarantee the water property system emerge as one of the nodal elements in the discursive networks that subvert and reveal the interests of the property-owning sectors.