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.

Since 2019, two interlocking forces have swept across Latin America sowing conflict and crisis. COVID-19 has ravaged the continent, pummeled local economies, and driven communities to shelter in place. In response to the resulting health catastrophe and economic recession, Latin American governments of various political leanings have turned to socio-ecologically degrading extractive development as the solution. Under the banner of a “state of emergency,” countries across the political spectrum have deemed mining, oil, and gas extraction “essential” activities and community resistance a “security threat.” Just as the pandemic exacerbates preexisting inequities, the extractive solution in these countries inflames ongoing socio-environmental conflict (Earthworks et al., 2020). In this paper we trace the political economic and discursive relations that have propelled deepening extractivism during the COVID-19 pandemic in Chile, Ecuador, and Honduras.

Naomi Klein’s (2007) work on “disaster capitalism” illustrates how powerful political economic interests instrumentalized moments of crisis from natural disasters to manufactured coups to impose neoliberal policies and crush dissent through “shock therapies.” We argue that the current COVID-19 pandemic has presented extractive corporate elites and Latin American governments with the perfect crisis to consolidate and deepen extractive development. In short, this new strain of neoliberal disaster capitalism has taken on the distinctive form of disaster extractivism. Empirical examples from Honduras, Ecuador, and Chile illustrate that this trend transcends geography and party politics. In each case, the private sector revitalized corporate social responsibility and shared-values discourses that present extractive development as the “savior” in the face of the health and economic catastrophe. Though in distinct ways, each government has transformed this discourse into policy by reregulating natural-resource governance in favor of extractive interests while suspending already fragile spaces of democracy, dialogue, and dissent. During the first months of the pandemic, state–private-sector alliances capitalized on stay-at-home orders that hindered antiextractive social mobilization and created more favorable conditions for expanding extractive activities.

These empirical findings provoke the question: is it possible or desirable to literally dig our way out of this economic and health crisis? Deploying political ecological understandings of natural disasters problematizes extractive solutions to the pandemic by extending the disaster extractivism analytic beyond postdisaster reactionary politics (Robbins, 2012). Viewing the pandemic as a socio-natural disaster imbued with political economic and discursive politics upsets framings of COVID-19 as a purely natural and external threat to our “normal,” “healthy” and heavily extractive social, political, and economic systems. Quite the opposite, the COVID-19 pandemic emerged from the extractive logic that underpins rampant land-use change, lightning-fast global commodity chains, social dislocation, and ecological destruction—precisely the conditions that put humans in contact with and facilitate the spread of zoonotic disease (Gandy, 2021; Serafini, 2021; Sultana, 2021). Consequently, disaster extractivism takes on a double meaning in this analysis, describing the entrenchment of extractivism that both follows and facilitates disaster. This insight echoes Latin American environmental justice movements’ increasing insistence that the pandemic cannot be solved by the extractivist logic upon which the pre-COVID-19 status quo was founded. Rather than a return to extractive normalcy, they advocate transitions to more just, sustainable, and necessarily postextractive politics.

Disaster Extractivism and Shock Therapy

The dynamic spread of neoliberal capitalism since the 1980s has marked a policy and ideological shift in Latin American governance and a rebalancing of power in favor of corporate elites (Harvey, 2005). Despite neoliberalism’s multiple manifestations across political regimes and variegated deployment across uneven geographies (Brenner, Peck, and Theodore, 2010), a common trend propelled its rapid proliferation. In her book The Shock Doctrine, Klein (2007: 8) describes this trend as governments’ use of “moments of collective trauma [following disaster] to engage in radical social and economic engineering.” In the case of orthodox neoliberalization, this involves “orchestrated raids on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events, combined with the treatment of disasters as exciting market opportunities” (6). Klein calls this phenomenon “disaster capitalism.”

Klein describes the strategic instrumentalization of social, economic, and natural catastrophes via methodically applied social and economic “shocks.” Inspired by Milton Friedman, economic “shock therapy” quickly imposes policy changes in favor of free-market deregulation, privatization, and austerity reregulation. Citing examples from across the globe, Klein notes that such swift and unilateral economic restructuring often requires authoritarian enforcement via militarized execution of legal reforms and extralegal repression. Anathema to collective interests and the democratic process, neoliberal economic shocks beget accompanying social shocks to quell dissent. Disaster followed by overlapping shock therapies enables governments “to pull off what [they] could only have dreamed of before [the crisis]” (Klein, 2007: 16). Through complicit governments, disaster capitalism allows corporate elites to impose their interests, policy agendas, and worldviews on a population disoriented by trauma.

Throughout Latin America, the COVID-19 pandemic has provided just this sort of opportunity for a new round and variant of shock therapy. However, drawing on critical analyses of Latin American extractivism, we identify a new wrinkle in the old formula. The variegated neoliberalisms deployed across the continent increasingly coalesce around a distinctively extractivist politics. The policy changes implemented during the pandemic have deepened states’ commitment to a particular strain of disaster capitalism, what we term “disaster extractivism.”

This transition aligns with recent scholarship on Latin American extractive development (Petras and Veltmeyer, 2016; 2020; Robinson, 2010). The Pink Tide swept in progressive governments that challenged neoliberalism’s hegemonic sway in the region but not extractivism (Farthing and Fabricant, 2018; 2019; Silva, 2016). “Neo-extractivism” describes self-proclaimed “post-neoliberal” governments’ entrenched commitment to “redistributive” extractive development (Bebbington, 2009; Gudynas, 2009). Breaking from neoliberal orthodoxy, the neo-extractive model most often linked to Ecuador, Bolivia, and Venezuela redirects natural-resource revenues from corporate coffers and transnational shareholders to social welfare programs (Chiasson-LeBel, 2016a; Veltmeyer and Petras, 2014). In contrast, authorized left (izquierda permitida) —a reference to the indio permitido, the multicultural set of neoliberal policies in the 1990s that adopted a language of cultural recognition of indigenous movements in a way that made sure that they would “not challenge neoliberal economic policies” — models like Chile’s offer heterodox alternatives that “[sustain] the veneer of a progressive discourse” (Leiva, 2013: 300) but “[signal] deep continuities with neoliberal capitalism and [adapt] easily to U.S. imperialism” (Webber and Carr, 2013: 5), with new coalitions of transnational extractive elites, state managers, and progressive intellectuals co-creating the conditions for expanding the frontiers of extractivism (Leiva, 2019; Li, 2018).

The practical and ideological differences between these models, the extent to which each diverges from or repackages neoliberal doctrine, and their relevance since the “return of the Right” (Frens-String and Velasco, 2016) provoke contentious debate (Chiasson-LeBel and Larraburre, 2019; Mirowski, Plehwe, and Slobodian, 2020; Pickup, 2019). Rather than address these discussions, we highlight their unifying assertion: amidst Latin America’s political upheaval, extractivism remains hegemonic, cutting across geography, party politics, development ideologies, and private and public sector interests (Artiga-Purcell, 2022b). Maristella Svampa (2019: 24; 2021) insightfully describes this era as a “passage from the Washington Consensus, associated with financial valuation and structural adjustment, to the Commodities Consensus, based on the large-scale export of primary goods, economic growth, and the expansion of consumption.” The countries analyzed here span the political spectrum, including Ecuador’s neo-extractivist regime (Vela-Almeida, 2018), Chile’s authorized left governance (Leiva, 2013), and Honduras’s poster-child neoliberal model (Bebbington, Fash, and Rogan, 2019). Although the recent return to the right in Ecuador (Cuvi, 2021) and complex progressive victories and defeats in Honduras and Chile during the pandemic (Arsenault, 2021; Nicas, 2022; Rioja, 2021) blur such clear-cut distinctions, the present analysis highlights these countries’ remarkable convergences.

The extractive shock therapy analytic helps illustrate how disaster extractivism manifests itself across these countries during the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet two theoretical clarifications shaping our analysis are in order. First, neoliberal shock therapy often implies the imposition of a new politics and ideology on the “blank slate” wiped clean by disaster (Klein, 2007). However, extractivism is centuries old in Latin America (Galeano, 1973). Thus, “extractive shock therapy” refers not to a novel philosophy or politics but to a set of new policies that instrumentalize the pandemic and the economic crisis that followed to perpetuate and expand existing commitments to extractivism. Like extractivism itself, resistance to extractive projects that exploit exhaustible resources and deplete ecosystems predates the pandemic (Bebbington and Bury, 2013). The current set of disaster extractive shock therapies builds on existing authoritarian enforcement and repression of these movements.

Second, the extractive shock therapy analytic shifts our gaze from the random consequences of supposedly natural disasters to the manufacture and instrumentalization of crises. We extend this insight through a political ecological examination of the interlocking political economies, discourses, and environmental processes that shape and frame socio-natural disasters (Artiga-Purcell, 2022a; Watts, 1983). Attending to the socio-natural origins of disaster makes it clear that the will to extract did not follow but largely produced the COVID-19 pandemic (Sultana, 2021). Beyond an outcome of pandemic politics, entrenched extractivism constituted and facilitated the COVID-19 disaster.

Through this political ecological lens, we analyze how the COVID-19 disaster emerged from an extractive logic and provided the political and discursive space for public-private sector alliances to enforce policy changes that situated extractivism at the heart of national development strategies. Below we first consider the twin health and economic “savior” discourses fueling this new wave of extractive shock therapy. Then we examine the political implementation, long-term socio-ecological ramifications, and finally alternative framings of disaster extractivism.

The Extractive Savior Discourse and Health Care

Extractive shock therapy revolves around a discourse in which companies present themselves as saviors confronting interlocking health and economic crises. They promise to provide the technologies and infrastructures to help cure the sick. They also propose to generate wealth, redistribute profits to the victims during the crisis, and reactivate national economies once the pandemic is over. Such rhetoric reboots the long-contested "sustainable” and “responsible” mining discourses of corporate campaigns seeking to clean up the image of an environmentally and socially devastating industry (Bridge, 2004; Himley, 2010). Obscuring decades of local conflict, dispossession, and ecological contamination, transnational mining firms now present themselves as promoters of "health and well-being" and "community resilience" amidst the pandemic (Barrick Gold, 2020; Newmont, 2020; Prescott et al., 2020).

During the worst parts of the health crisis, many Latin American states faced problems in obtaining the resources to support their populations, including medical equipment for health personnel (ECLAC, 2020). In this state of emergency, extractive companies multiplied medical equipment and food donations to establish themselves as front-line aid and polish their corporate images. For example, the Canadian mining giant Barrick Gold delivered a field hospital worth more than US$12 million to the Chilean state during the pandemic (CPC, 2020; MapuExpress, 2020). In Ecuador, while the state lacked medical resources in its hospitals to ensure the protection of health workers, the extractive companies Lundin Gold and EcuaCorriente promoted donations of medical supplies and food (EcuaCorriente, 2020; Lundin, 2020). Similarly, the mining company Inversiones Los Pinares donated food to families surrounding its iron oxide mine in Tocoa, Honduras (Hondudiario Redacción, 2020). Although the capacity to give away such sums of money seems impressive, the amounts at stake (a few million dollars) are relatively small for companies whose market capitalization is valued in billions (more than US$2 billion for LundinGold and more than US$44 billion for Barrick Gold in 2021) (Trading Economics, 2022).

These corporate donations can have beneficial impacts. During a pandemic, vulnerable populations’ timely access to food, services, and treatments can mean the difference between life and death. However, a more critical analysis of these “contributions,” generally grouped under the slogan of “corporate social responsibility,” reveals contradictions and inefficiencies that often deepen the systemic inequalities that provoke corporate takeover of public responsibilities in the first place (Sadler and Lloyd, 2009). Such corporate philanthropy masks the fact that these same companies pay reduced taxes and operation costs because of socio-environmental deregulation. In Chile, mining companies escaped their guarantee deposits, originally intended to cover the costs of their mine closure plans. Such measures have allowed mining transnationals to recover at least US$3 billion in savings (Portal Minero, 2020). The Honduran case poses similar contradictions. In October 2020, the Honduran National Congress legislated reforms of the mining law that exempted mining for stone aggregates from sales tax and reduced the payment of the special mining tax by 50 percent (Legislative Decree 135-2020, Art. 2). While the previous reform of the law, in 2013, had increased mining royalties from 1 percent to a still-paltry 2.5 percent, up to 40 percent of mining royalties fund the Honduran police, military, and military police (Bebbington, Fash, and Rogan, 2019). Such militarization remains central to maintaining the social “order” necessary for deepening extractive activity (Frank, 2018). That mining corporations pay with one hand while raiding national coffers, environments, and social liberties with the other exemplifies a highly selective willingness to contribute to the common good. Rather than pay higher taxes, the privatized corporate social responsibility model maximizes corporate control over profits and enables public image campaigns often enacted to counteract local community opposition to extractive operations (Cisneros and Christel, 2014).

The international bidding war for COVID-19 medical supplies further burdens “developing” nations disproportionately (Peel et al., 2020). This creates opportunities for multinationals from the Global North that manage to gain access to essential medical supplies to fill the void of state incapacity. One study praising corporate social responsibility during COVID-19 argues, “The contribution of mining companies in supporting workers and communities in these countries is critical, especially where local government capacity may be overwhelmed” (Prescott et al., 2020). While the study cites the need to address “structural inequalities,” the authors ignore the mining industry’s role in undermining states’ ability to adequately respond to national health needs even as they claim to be meeting those needs. In Ecuador, mining multinationals that won tax reductions on extraordinary earnings in 2013 (El Comercio, 2012; Spurrier, 2013), bombastically celebrated their donation of syringes worth US$1.7 million to the state in 2021 (CME, 2021). At its core, the corporate social responsibility model reveals and perpetuates an imbalance of power between political economic interests within and across states.

What little benefits extractivist corporations provide through medical philanthropy may be overshadowed by their contribution to the ongoing spread of contagion. A report produced during the peak of the pandemic by various nongovernmental organizations found that extractive corporations “have become key vectors for the spread of the virus and are putting communities, rural and urban populations, and their workforces at great risk” (Earthworks et al., 2020: 4). The report identifies mining projects in Brazil, Canada, Mexico, and Panama with infected workers. The lack of contact tracing in most countries makes uncovering direct causal links difficult. Yet the limited precaution and information speaks to the overall disregard for public health in the face of potential profits.

Chile remains the exception in documenting the links between mining and COVID-19. By mid-July of 2020, the state-owned Codelco company recorded 3,215 cases with nine fatalities (Reuters, 2020b). In that same month, Chile’s Ministry of Health reported that three major municipalities in Chile’s mining regions, Antofagasta, Calama, and Rancagua, claimed the highest number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in the entire country, only behind the capital city of Santiago (Elorrieta et al., 2020). On July 1, Antofagasta’s Department of Health estimated that 43 percent of active COVID-19 cases in the region originated in the mining sector (Valencia, 2020). Such reports fuel local protests denouncing mining as a super-spreader activity. In a prepared statement, the environmental organization Movimiento Socio-Ambiental Valle del Huasco concluded: “Large-scale mining first kills us with pollution, now it kills us by COVID” (Movimiento Socioambiental Valle del Huasco, 2020).

Unpacking the “us” in the above statement reveals further discriminatory power imbalances that cut across gender, race, indigeneity, and other intersectional identities. A United Nations study documents that within Latin America, COVID-19 disproportionately impacts indigenous peoples and people of African descent “owing to worse socioeconomic conditions compared to the rest of the population, limited access to social protection, and high levels of discrimination in the labour market” (United Nations, 2020: 15). In 2020, Ecuador’s Confederación de Nacionalidades Indigenas del Ecuador (Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador—CONAIE) denounced “the state’s abandonment of indigenous communities to face the health emergency caused by the pandemic” (CONAIE, 2020b; Velez, 2020). Women’s and girls’ “wider presence on the front lines of the crisis” as domestic and care workers also exposes them disproportionately to contagion and to domestic violence and femicide (United Nations, 2020: 14). The extractive savior discourse proves especially ironic in that extractive activities notoriously negatively impact these same groups disproportionately (Deonandan and Bell, 2019; Lahiri-Dutt, 2015; Morales, 2019). The disease and the extractive “cure” perpetuate and deepen intersecting gendered, racial, and ethnic oppressions.

Extractivism as Economic Savior

The extractive savior discourse responding to the health crisis articulates seamlessly with narratives presenting extractive development as the solution to pandemic-induced economic catastrophe. States emphasized the dual imperatives of blocking the virus spread through shelter-in-place mandates while avoiding complete economic shutdown. The extractive sector supposedly solves both issues through its indispensable contributions to health care and economic growth.

Latin American governments highlight the revenue stream from the extractive sector as an essential source of foreign exchange to pay the accumulating public debts acquired to finance responses to the pandemic crisis (Prescott et al., 2020). In an interview, Ecuador’s minister of energy and nonrenewable resources, René Ortiz, explained that, for his dollarized country, “There are only three ways for us to secure the flow of dollars we need: exports, foreign direct investment and debt. We’ve clearly exhausted our capacity to take on debt. . . . So that means we have to focus on exports and FDI—and mining generates both” (Ortiz, 2020). Similarly, the Chilean minister of mining, Baldo Prokurica, recounted the mining industry’s key financial role in fighting COVID-19 in an op-ed titled “Mining: A Great Ally to Chile in the Face of Coronavirus” (Prokurica, 2020). Chile’s government has invested millions of dollars in helping miners get back to work.

However, the extractive sector hardly represents an economic solution to spur development even in nonpandemic times. The economic problems related to expanding extractivism have spurred an entire literature that describes the “resource curse” (Auty, 1994), the “curse of abundance” (Acosta, 2009), and the “paradoxes of plenty” (Karl, 1997) or speaks of extractivism as a “disease” (Brahmbhatt, Canuto, and Vostroknutova, 2010). This literature warns that the extractive sector tends to produce long-term negative economic effects that outweigh any short-term benefits. Other critiques highlight weak government and social institutions rather than an inevitable resource curse as the primary factors explaining extractivism’s checkered development history (Watts, 2004). States’ deregulation reduced corporate transparency, and inadequate popular participation in mining governance during the pandemic created just the sort of weak institutional environment that fosters a resource curse rather than a boon (Bebbington and Bury, 2009; Cori and Monni, 2015).

Even more critical scholarship problematizes narratives of extractivism as either good or bad national development (Perreault and Valdivia, 2010). Claims by both neoliberal and post-neoliberal regimes of a singular “national interest” conveniently erase extractive development’s uneven impacts across class, race, gender, ethnicity, and livelihood (Arsel, Hogenboom, and Pellegrini, 2016; Chiasson-LeBel, 2016b). Therefore, we cannot speak of Chile’s “extractive development miracle” as a function of the gross domestic product without noting the country’s extreme economic inequality (Babidge and Bolados, 2018; COHA, 2011; Laing, Sherwood, and Cambero, 2019; OECD, 2019), the hollowing out of its already limited system of political representation, or the enormous costs represented by the pillage and plunder of ecosystems (Chile Sustentable, 2003). Similarly, Ecuador’s strides toward extractivism-funded economic equality simultaneously and disproportionately dispossess and oppress indigenous populations surrounding the Amazonian oil fields (Lu, Valdivia, and Silva, 2017). The Yasuni-ITT initiative championed by the post-neoliberal Ecuadorian government promised to protect the environment and indigenous populations of the Yasuni-ITT region by leaving oil underground but was abandoned when the financial needs of the central state superseded all ethical concerns (Le Quang, 2015; Sovacool and Scarpacci, 2016).

In sum, extractive development does not always improve national development. Its disaggregated impacts on local populations benefit some at the expense of others. Nevertheless, extractive corporations have capitalized on the pandemic to polish their image and bolster their claims to fostering social well-being and economic development. This discursive maneuver simultaneously justifies disaster extractivism and the private sector’s role in it. To better understand how this dubious corporate discourse turned into disaster relief policy throughout Latin America, we must interrogate how resource governance has changed during COVID-19.

The Public-Private Extractive Alliance

Like the transformation of neoliberal ideology into policy during the 1980s, the manifestation of extractive savior discourse in pandemic policies proliferated through economic and social shock therapies. Economic shocks reregulate environmental policy, redirect financial flows, and limit regulatory oversight in favor of extractive interests. These overnight changes in priorities and institutional settings to extractive policy during the pandemic threaten long-term and potentially irreversible impacts that will shape lives and environments for generations. The inevitable public resistance to these extractive policies has faced the social shocks of shelter-in-place mandates that hinder social mobilization and further propel disaster extractivism. Drawing on examples from our case studies, we examine how governments of all political leanings adopted and enforced extractivism as development policy. We illustrate how this seemingly neutral politics hides and naturalizes an unquestioned alliance between the state and extractive interests.

Liberal thought presents the state as a neutral actor and an impartial arbiter vis-à-vis various interest groups (Heywood, 2004). However, throughout Latin America overlapping extractive interests between public and private sectors blur such neat distinctions (Pickup, 2019). Corporate and state portrayals of extractivism align around narratives that equate private resource development with the common good. The fiduciary goal of extractive companies to prioritize the interests of their shareholders, mostly located in the Global North, disappears from this discourse. This seemingly apolitical state–private-sector alliance hides the latent power relations that infuse supposedly rational extractive politics (Bridge, 2004). Furthermore, this discourse effectively isolates communities in their struggles against extractivism and undermines the legitimacy of their rejection of extractive companies’ incursions into their territories. In an ironic reversal, proextractive narratives portray dissenting communities as irrationally defending their particular private interests at the expense of national progress (Bebbington, 2009). As the abundant literature on extractive conflicts points out, this normalization of extractive development as inherently good development policy is itself politics at work (Bebbington and Bury, 2013).

This state–private-sector strategy is not new, but it has gained strength during the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, in Chile, the crisis has renewed the long-standing alliance between state and private extractive interests (Leiva, 2019). Barrick Gold told Chile’s El Mercurio that it was in constant contact with the government to advance its projects (Vegara, 2020). Meanwhile, President Sebastian Piñera promised millions to the extractive industry, purportedly to save the Chilean economy from the pandemic (Ministry of Mining, 2020).

Beyond direct financing, governments facilitate continued extractive operations through reregulatory measures. The Honduran Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment streamlined a virtual portal to minimize paperwork and facilitate extractive projects in the midst of the pandemic (Reacción Criterio, 2020). Moreover, the 2020 reforms to the mining law mentioned previously aimed “to promote investment and development of the mining of stone aggregates and as a state measure aimed at promoting the export of the aforementioned resources” (Legislative Decree 135-2020, Art. 2). While debates over the law predate the pandemic, Honduran environmental activists conclude that the Congress “carr[ied] out these reforms taking advantage of this COVID-19 crisis”—an eerie echo of the 1998 proindustry mining law passed just after the devastating Hurricane Mitch (Radio Progreso, 2020).

These measures build on existing policies that favor increased extractivism (Gordon and Webber, 2016). Since 2018, President Juan Orlando Hernandes’s regime has kept decisions regarding environmental permits secret, demonstrating a clear prioritization of protecting state relationships with mining companies over defending its diminishing legitimacy in the eyes of the public (Frank, 2018). This burgeoning alliance between the Honduran state, national elites, and transnational mining corporations has reached new heights during the pandemic as the government has doubled down on its proextractive policy.

In Ecuador, lawmakers designated mining companies as “strategic” activities allowed to continue production during the pandemic (Bnamericas, 2020; Reuters, 2020a). While some corporations initially reduced their operations voluntarily, they quickly resumed activities (Lundin, 2020). Lundin Gold–Aurelian Ecuador, operator of the Fruta del Norte mine, produced its first gold ingot during the pandemic (Lundin, 2020). Minister René Ortiz succinctly outlined the state’s strategy thus: “Even during the depths of the crisis we never lost sight of our primary goal. We are turning Ecuador into a major exporter of copper, gold, and silver” (Ortiz, 2020). In the early months of the pandemic, the minister promised to “exploit all possible natural resources” by attracting increased private investment in the oil sector (Orozco, 2020; TeleSur, 2020).

In July 2021, Ecuador’s president adopted Decree 95, which privatized important parts of the oil-related activities and renegotiated the service contracts of multinational oil corporations as participation contracts, all to attract foreign investment and double oil production over the next four years (Vásconez and Orozco, 2021). These reforms align with the previous 2020 mining law reform that distributed concessions to private firms without request for public bids (Pacheco, 2020). Both reforms capitalized on the pandemic-induced economic crisis and the extractive savior discourse.

Across our cases, affected communities, environmentalists, and organizations of various political leanings have denounced and resisted the social and environmental impacts of extractivism. However, in the classic pattern of shock therapy, social shocks dissuade resistance to economic shocks (Klein, 2007). Throughout Latin America, extractive interests have capitalized on strictly enforced shelter-in-place laws, curfews, and other limits on freedom of assembly that hinder antimining social mobilization (Earthworks et al., 2020). In Chile, the initial shelter-in-place laws inhibited antimining protests in the Huasco Valley. Costanza San Juan, an activist, politician, and member of the Huasco Assembly, said in a webinar at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 2020, “There is no more modesty [from extractive companies] precisely because we are locked up in the house and we cannot go out to protest.” Similarly in Ecuador, CONAIE suffered the chilling effect of the pandemic when it called on its members to protest from their homes against deepening neoliberalization during the pandemic (CONAIE, 2020a). CONAIE also denounced extractive companies’ failure to respect the curfew and sanitary restrictions (Velez, 2020).

In Honduras, quarantine laws and entrenched impunity for human rights violations have left environmental activists vulnerable to threats and physical attacks. A letter to the Honduran government signed by an international consortium of civil society organizations notes, “While [environmental] defenders’ and social leaders’ movements are restricted as they respect the social isolation orders, armed groups continue to illegally mobilize to harass and attack defenders” (COPA, 2020). The letter emphasizes transgressions against land-rights activists protesting extractive palm oil agriculture in the Bajo Aguán region.

The evidence suggests a regional trend in which governments of all political stripes transform the extractive savior discourse into concrete policy. In line with the shock doctrine playbook, the entrenchment of extractivism requires a double shock therapy that reregulates natural-resource governance and blocks dissent. This double boon to extractive interests secures their hold on existing projects and enables their expansion into new territories. This state–private-sector alliance has instrumentalized the crisis to promote political ends that could not otherwise be achieved at the same scale and pace, marking a new wave of disaster extractivism in Latin America. The alliance helps explain why extractive production continues even as other economic activity grinds to a halt.

Toward an Antiextractivist Logic

The contradictions and uneven power relations that permeate extractive savior discourses and politics problematize arguments that extractivism necessarily provides a way out of the COVID-19 disaster and its related economic crisis. Yet a more fundamental and pernicious assumption propels and ultimately undermines the disaster extractivism ideology: the false belief that the crisis is external to our society, economy, and politics. Beyond our critique of disaster extractivism as reactionary postpandemic politics, we now interrogate the extractivist logic from which the pandemic emerged. We draw on scholarship and activism on political ecologies of natural disasters and postextractivism to reframe the origin story of the COVID-19 crisis. Framing the pandemic as a socio-natural disaster facilitated through expanding extractivism turns the extractive savior narrative on its head. It also broadens the disaster extractivism analytic by emphasizing extractivism as cause and effect of disaster.

The belief that extractivism, like a vaccine, can inoculate societies and economies against an external viral threat presumes a natural crisis foreign to the dominant organization of social and environmental life. Just as an exogenous virus contaminates its corporal host, the pandemic is said to attack our normally healthy social, political, and economic systems. All that is needed to cure the patient—body or society—is to extricate the malady. However, the extensive political ecology literature on hazards notes that there is no such thing as a purely “natural” disaster (Watts, 1983). Like famines, hurricanes, and wildfires, pandemics are hybrid creations, emanating from socio-natural forces. The circuits of global capital, geopolitics, hegemonic ideologies valuing individual liberty, preexisting inequality, environmental racism, and the incubation, contagion, and lethality of COVID-19, among others, all shape the scale and uneven impacts of the current pandemic (Ieven and Overwijk, 2020; Mostafanezhad, 2020; Spinney, 2020). This socio-natural reframing of the pandemic refutes notions of COVID-19 as a natural aberration or an external threat (Latour, 2020). Rather than a return to normalcy via extractivism—or some other cure—a political ecological lens demands an inquiry into the “healthy,” “normal” conditions from which the pandemic sprang.

Beyond the physical and socioeconomic conditions that turned the virus into a pandemic (Bergandi, 2020), growing movements and scholarship throughout Latin America denounce an underlying extractivist logic. This logic is a way of thinking, being, and relating with the world that might be summarized as the drive to “[remove] as much material as possible for as much profit as possible” (Willow, 2019: 2). This extractivist logic spurs the ever-expanding frontier of extractive activities—from mines to clear-cut forests—that puts humans in contact with more novel zoonotic diseases (Lyons, Esposito, and Johnson, 2021). It facilitates virus spread through global networks and infrastructures built with raw materials to transport raw materials and maximize the accumulation of capital (Tsiotas and Tselios, 2022). It manifests itself in the disenfranchisement of communities—through land-grabbing, water pollution, and livelihood loss—that become more susceptible to sickness (Rodrigues and Lowan-Trudeau, 2021). In sum, “the COVID-19 pandemic can be understood in terms of extractivist violence because it is the result of a changing relationship between humans and their environment . . . increasingly based on violence and destruction” (Serafini, 2021: 104). Extractive activities are not the sole cause of the pandemic, but the extractivist logic remains instrumental to its socio-natural development.

Transnational antimining movements increasingly pair resistance to particular projects with critique of the systemic extractivist ideology, ontology, and “one-world world” worldview (De la Cadena and Blaser, 2018; Escobar, 2020; Law, 2015). Today, calls for buen vivir (good living) alternatives to development, postextractivism, and decolonialism permeate Latin American social movements, community organizing, and counterhegemonic politics (Artaraz, Calestani, and Trueba, 2021; Escobar, 2018; 2020; Lang and Mokrani, 2011; León, 2010; Mignolo and Walsh, 2018; Williford, 2018). For our purposes here, the nuanced differences between these thought and livelihood projects are less relevant than their unifying message: extractivism cannot provide an escape from the present crisis, understood as both the COVID-19 pandemic and the broader civilizational crisis driving socio-ecological destruction. Nor can a return to normalcy break out from the extractivist logic upon which that status quo is founded.

The recent Southern Ecosocial Pact signed by thousands of activists, community leaders, and scholars across Latin America explicitly seeks to avoid a return to such normality. The initiative denounces the “powerful groups both old and new [that] are taking advantage of the emergency to make sure that ‘the return to normality’ or ‘the new normal’ does not deprive them of their privileges” (Pacto Ecosocial del Sur, 2020). Instead, it calls for a “radical socio-ecological transition” founded upon “post-extractivist economies and societies” (Pacto Ecosocial del Sur, 2020). Such a transition will require more than a vaccine or any one innovative technological fix. Echoing Boaventura de Sousa Santos, we might situate COVID-19 within our particular historical moment as a “transitional time in which we face modern problems for which there are no modern solutions” (2014: 44). Extractivist politics and ideology are central, not external, to the pandemic and to the capitalist modernity that engendered it. Ironically, the promise of extractivism to facilitate a return to “normalcy” threatens to do just that—entrench the pre-COVID-19 extractivist status quo and ensure future extractive disasters. Transitions to a more just and sustainable world require postextractivist logics that acknowledge and foster the diversity of human and extrahuman natures as the foundation for healing our world.

Conclusion

The COVID-19 pandemic has facilitated a deepened commitment to extractive development across Latin America. Examples from Honduras, Ecuador, and Chile show that this new round of disaster capitalism transcends neoliberal, postneoliberal, and authorized left governance regimes and is best described as disaster extractivism. This paper deploys the extractive shock therapy analytic to trace the discursive and political economic forces that justify and impel disaster extractivism during the COVID-19 pandemic. Examination of dominant extractive narratives shows how interlocking development discourses present extractive companies as saviors in the face of the twin health and economic crisis. Corporate donations to health and social welfare programs breathe new life into economic and corporate social responsibility discourses that justify extractivism. Moreover, states deem extractive development essential to avoiding the looming recession as economies and nonessential businesses shut down. Both discourses naturalize private-sector takeover of public institutional responsibilities, obscure the systematic weakening of state institutional capacity, and overlook the uneven social, economic, and ecological impacts of extractivism.

To better understand how these discourses are manifested in policy, we analyzed changes in state governance of extractive activities during the pandemic. We found that state–private- sector alliances instrumentalized the pandemic to foster extractive interests through reregulation of resource governance and obstruction of social movements. Each of the states examined wielded its legislative power to grant extractive corporations free rein to continue and expand their operations with less regulatory oversight, operational transparency, and opportunity for public scrutiny. Meanwhile, public and private extractive interests capitalized on the pandemic to promote extractivism and hinder public dissent—a classic display of social and economic shock therapy.

Finally, drawing on political ecology scholarship on natural disasters and postextractivist social movements helped problematize the extractivist logic that underlies disaster extractivism. Tracing the pandemic’s socio-natural origins undermines the hegemonic framing of the COVID-19 as an external threat to the social and economic status quo—a core assumption of proposals for an extractive solution. Moving beyond critique of postpandemic natural-resource policy and discourse, we reframed the COVID-19 crisis as a symptom of the socio-ecological conditions driven by an extractivist logic. Viewing extractivism as constitutive of the COVID-19 disaster rather than its cure suggests that we cannot dig our way out of the present crisis. More extractivism threatens to produce more of the same—extractive disasters. A more just and sustainable solution to the COVID-19 crisis must seek alternatives to extractive shock therapy that escape the ideological cage of disaster extractivism.

Biography

James Alejandro Artiga-Purcell is an assistant professor of communication studies at San José State University. Thomas Chiasson-LeBel is a visiting professor at FLACSO-Ecuador and the author of several articles on Latin American elites, extractivism, and post-neoliberal governments. Fernando Ignacio Leiva is a professor of Latin American and Latino studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the author of The Left Hand of Capital: Neoliberalism and the Left in Chile (2021). Alejandra Watanabe-Farro is a climate and environmental justice activist and Ph.D. student in Latin American and Latino studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The trends identified in this article emerged from a webinar of the Research Cluster on the Critical Cultural Political Economy of Extractivism at the University of California, Santa Cruz, titled “Las nuevas estrategias del extractivismo: La acción del estado y la defensa socio-territorial en tiempos del coronavirus.” Panelists included Constanza San Juan, from the Asamblea por el Agua del Guasco Alto in Chile, Pedro Landa from the Equipo de Reflexión, Investigación y Comunicación in Honduras, and Blanca Chancoso from the Confederación de Nacionales Indígenas del Ecuador. The Research Center on the Americas of the University of California, Santa Cruz, provided support for the event.