ABSTRACT
The main concern and central focus of this chapter is on the new territorial management strategies used by the mining companies in Chile to defeat community-based resistance. Regarded as a classic case of a country heavily dependent for its development on mining, and one of the largest producers of strategic minerals and industrial metals (copper) in the world, Chile is also the site of some of the most virulent forces of resistance, which has resulted in a longstanding relation of conflict between the companies in the mining sector and the Indigenous communities. The dominant management strategy to date has taken the form of corporate self-regulation or Corporate Social Responsibility, a strategy premised on the ability of the mining companies to obtain a ‘social license’—to obtain the support and approval of the communities on the extractive frontier, and their ‘informed consent’. However, the author and his associates in a research project have traced out the evolution of diverse strategies pursued by the mining companies in order to overcome and defeat community resistance. The chapter documents one of the most important cases of the strategic response mounted by mining companies to the resistance of the communities impacted by their operations.
