Territories in conflict. An identification of water conflicts in the provinces of Formosa and Chaco, Argentina, since the year 2000 (in Spanish)

This article presents preliminary advances of the research project “Water inequalities. Territories with water conflict in the provinces of the Argentinean Northeast (NEA) since the year 2000”, currently under development. It aims to identify the conflicts that are generated by water inequalities in the provinces of Formosa and Chaco, Argentina. The main objective is to identify and characterize the different types of conflicts related to problems affecting water for human consumption, which produce water-related vulnerabilities among the unprotected sectors of the population, for example owing to floods or water shortages. In this first stage the conflicts were identified, and the most relevant cases were analyzed and mapped. Through case study analysis, we developed a tipology of conflicts, a cartography, and an identification of the logics and regularities of those processes that increase inequality in socially disadvantaged populations in both provinces.

This article has been published as part of Volume 4, Number 4 of the WATERLAT-GOBACIT Working Papers (http://waterlat.org/publications/working-papers-series/).

This is the first issue developed by members of the WATERLAT-GOBACIT Network’s Thematic Area 10, Water and Violence (http://waterlat.org/thematic-areas/ta10/). It is based on papers first presented at the session “Water and violence: scenarios and manifestations in Latin America”, during the Network’s VIII International Meeting, that took place in San Jose, Costa Rica, on 3-7 April 2017 (http://waterlat.org/meetings/public-meetings/waterlat-gobacit-ix-2018/). The papers are the result of ongoing research covering cases from Argentina, Colombia, Guatemala and Mexico, which exemplify the wide range of forms of violence being exercised against local communities, mainly related to the rapid expansion of extractivist activities including large-scale open cast mining, building of large dams for hydroelectricity or the territorial spread of hydrocarbon production through new technological developments, among other. The papers provide supporting evidence for the increasing claims made in the relevant literature showing that violence is too often the result of a connivance between governments, extractivist industries and organized criminal gangs, which account for the considerable number of people being tortured, disappeared or even murdered in Latin America for defending their territories, natural resources, and living conditions. The authors also address successful cases of community resistance against the violent expropriation of their territories and living conditions, which are imposed on them by aggressive neoliberal reforms that are highly undemocratic and regressive in socio-economic and political terms.