Indigenous rights and fracking in Patagonia : an ecofeminist perspective

Abstract

The number of conflicts between natural resource extraction and local populations, particularly indigenous peoples, in South America is the highest in the world. One such case happens in Patagonia, in Argentina’s Vaca Muerta, where state-sponsored fracking development dispossesses the local Mapuche indigenous people of their land and rights. The Argentine state rationalizes oil extraction with its desire for economic growth and energy sovereignty. However, the uneven effects imposed on the Mapuche and the state’s dismissal of their right and way of life suggests an underlying neocolonial perspective driving the development. In this thesis, I therefore explore the state’s framings of the extractive industry, nature, and the Mapuche that rationalize the fracking development. I do this by applying the critical lens of socialist ecofeminism to a desk study analyzing secondary data. This reveals how the state holds a gendered and dualistic worldview that deems nature and indigenous peoples as inferior, feminine, and passive to be subordinated to the masculine extractive industry and state. The case of the Mapuche and fracking in Vaca Muerta thus illustrates how such dualistic worldviews need to be deconstructed for alternative developments and an inclusive future to flourish.