ABSTRACT
This essay explores the ongoing policing practices, legal proceedings, institutional arrangements, and social conditions that affect the mining industry in Ecuador. Despite rhetoric premised on social rights, Ecuador’s post-neoliberal governing model is firmly rooted in resource extraction, and the government still relies on policing and criminalization of dissent. I argue that criminalization governs resource access and control, concentrating power in the hands of the so-called progressive, post-neoliberal state. The analysis provided here draws on an institutional ethnography that brings together data from semi-structured interviews with community members in Intag, Ecuador, academics in Quito as well as extensive participant observation of ongoing, everyday efforts to resist state practices.
