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International Journal of Heritage Studies
ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjhs20
The industrial heritage of two sacrifice zones and
the geopolitics of memory in Northern Chile. The
cases of Gatico and Ollagüe
Damir Galaz-Mandakovic & Francisco Rivera
To cite this article: Damir Galaz-Mandakovic & Francisco Rivera (2023): The industrial heritage
of two sacrifice zones and the geopolitics of memory in Northern Chile. The cases of Gatico
and Ollagüe, International Journal of Heritage Studies, DOI: 10.1080/13527258.2023.2181379
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2023.2181379
Published online: 23 Feb 2023.
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The industrial heritage of two sacrice zones and the geopolitics
of memory in Northern Chile. The cases of Gatico and Ollagüe
Damir Galaz-Mandakovic
a
and Francisco Rivera
b,c
a
Dirección de Investigación, Postgrado y Transferencia Tecnológica, Universidad de Tarapacá, Arica, Chile;
b
The
Archaeology Centre, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada;
c
Instituto de Investigaciones Arqueológicas y Museo,
Universidad Católica del Norte, San Pedro de Atacama, Chile
ABSTRACT
The Antofagasta region, now part of northern Chile, belonged to Bolivia
until the so-called War of the Pacic (1879–1883). Since the end of the
nineteenth century, with the irruption of foreign and national capitals, the
area witnessed intense industrialisation and mining expansion. Industrial
mining modied local communities’ livelihoods, social practices, land-
scapes, and ecologies. Gatico (coast) and Ollagüe (highlands) were two
mining centres that agglutinated a signicant migrant workforce to pro-
duce copper and sulphur, respectively. Now dismantled, both peripheric
extractive spaces form an ‘industrial topology’ structured outside the
national margins. Abandoned industrial infrastructures and the chemical
debris of mining activities recongure the current geopolitics of memory
among local communities. Tensions and dissonances emerge from the
touristic and economic ‘museumication’ of these sacrice zones and
their industrial ruins.
ARTICLE HISTORY
Received 11 December 2022
Accepted 13 February 2023
KEYWORDS
Industrial heritage; mining
history; capitalism; sacrifice
zones; Atacama desert
Introduction
In July 2009, ‘100% Patrimonio’, a Tocopilla cultural group, arrived at the ruins of the old mining
centre of Gatico, 50 kilometres south of Tocopilla, a port in the Antofagasta region in northern
Chile. In this abandoned industrial town, the group installed a massive sign on the only still-
standing building on the site. It said: ‘100% Heritage’ (100% Patrimonio; Figure 1). This cultural
intervention was not funded by the state or promoted by a company. Still, it was organised by
citizens who wanted to protect a decaying building as they saw it as a cultural symbol of the region.
The purpose of the intervention was to disseminate the importance of the site and thus promote its
upkeep and prevent its destruction through what we recognise as a spontaneous ‘heritagisation’
process (Dicks 2003, 140) or even as what James Clifford would call ‘museumification’ (Clifford
1997), a commodified space of culture.
The historical values of the ruin and the ecological particularities of the Gatico area were
previously evident to the Chilean state in the 1980s when it was declared part of a typical and
protected zone’. Decree No. 75 of 12 January 1981, stated:
In the II Region, the area of Cobija, between Gatico and Punta Guasilla, constitutes an archaeological site of
extraordinary scientific value. In addition to many historical sources, ecological characteristics, etc., make it of
great interest to study the socio-cultural development of coastal societies and their biological and cultural
adaptation through the ages
1
(cited in Galaz-Mandakovic2020; Figure 2).
CONTACT Francisco Rivera f.riveraamaro@utoronto.ca The Archaeology Centre, University of Toronto, 19 Ursula Franklin
Street, Toronto, Ontario, M5S 2S2, Canada
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HERITAGE STUDIES
https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2023.2181379
© Damir Galaz-Mandakovic and Francisco Rivera
Figure 1. Administration House in Gatico with the sign’ 100% Patrimonio’ (Photo: Damir Galaz-Mandakovic).
Figure 2. Industrial remains in Gatico with the sign’ 100% Patrimonio’ (Photo: Damir Galaz-Mandakovic, 2009).
2D. GALAZ-MANDAKOVIC AND F. RIVERA
Ten years later and 400 kilometres east of Gatico, a group of scholars from a regional university
arrived at Ollagüe, a Quechua community located on the border with Bolivia. Following its
corporate social responsibility mandate, they delivered a documentary film to the local community
from a heritage project funded by the mining company El Abra.
2
The project stated that it had
brought together ‘the history, memories, and livelihoods that make up the historical heritage of
Ollagüe at the height of the sulphur boom’. In addition, it sought to ‘value the cultural and
patrimonial legacy of the municipality’. The final purpose was ‘to make our municipality known
at the tourism level’.
3
Gatico and Ollagüe are similar communities
4
in northern Chile’s periphery of the Atacama
Desert. They are deindustrialised places (High, MacKinnon, and Perchard 2017), evoking a deep
historical and poetic memory of absence and nostalgia. The remains of industrial materials were the
focus of both heritage projects’ interventions, with the recent twentieth-century past being their
primary concern. Both projects are positioned in a way that considers industrial ruins and objects to
be safeguarded from decay, oblivion, and erasure (Mah 2012). Nevertheless, both projects are
different. On the one hand, the ‘heritagisation’ of Gatico’s industrial ruins was carried out by
local citizens with strong emotional attachment to the site (on emotional value, see Smith 2021). On
the other hand, Ollagüe’s mainly academic heritage project was carried out through the expertise of
its executors and financed by a mining company, which perhaps limited the degree of engagement
with troublesome subjects, such as ethnic and labour conflicts and mining pollution.
We argue that both heritage initiatives emerged to make the communities’ mining history visible
but have done so without delving into the violent roots of mining capitalism in the Atacama Desert.
De Souza Santos and Iamamoto (2019) showed how the absence of an ‘articulated memory’ of the
negative impacts of mining during Bolivia and Brazil’s colonial periods inevitably affects local
identities in the present. This is even more evident in the case of recent mining projects developed
during the twentieth century, for which exists a plethora of materials: ruins, objects, archives,
photographs, and testimonies.
5
However, few heritage projects conducted in Gatico and Ollagüe
have focused on the history of mining production, the causes of decay and disappearance of the
sites, the resulting migration of the population, or the substantial environmental and social impacts
of such industrial activities. Instead, heritage projects have depended on the absence of political
consideration and sought tourism development to solve the political and economic issues of
marginalisation and poverty, which we argue are, in turn, structured by the same violent extractive
capitalist framework. We highlight the significant tensions and dissonances in the modes of the
relationship created between the past extractive activities of these two ‘sacrifice zones’ (Holifield
and Dany 2017) and recent memories of their industry, understood as ‘difficult’ heritage
(Macdonald 2009, 2015) in the context of new economic alternatives for local communities through
tourism.
In northern Chile, heritage preservation processes are not understood or applied without the
intent of tourism promotion. Tourism has become a cultural policy prospect that selects or discards
historical content that may be uncomfortable or politically incorrect. We argue that in Gatico and
Ollagüe, the hegemony of the neoliberal imprint of profit is integral to the commodification of the
local mining culture. As Michael Shanks and Christopher Tilley pointed out, in the heritage
industry, the past is produced and managed just like any other commodity (Shanks and Tilley
1987). In these two underdeveloped mining regions, industrial heritage becomes a device for an
opportunity to be inserted into new tourist markets. The risk lies with the emergence of ‘historical
fiction’ to encourage the arrival of tourists that invigorate local economies. In this sense, we ask
ourselves: Can we speak of heritage without linking it to tourism? Is it perhaps the economy that
defines, selects, or categorises the aesthetics of heritage tourism? Are the narratives constructed
about mining history in a consumer tourism context sincere?
Industrial heritage thus offers the material and historical depth to understand the impact that
mining expansion has imposed on the region, enabling a rethink of the social and political
relationship that local communities have with these material vestiges (Bergeron 2006; Daumas
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HERITAGE STUDIES 3
2006). Based on the cases of Gatico and Ollagüe, two mining centres in the Atacama Desert, we will
evaluate the implications of mining – industrial capitalism, its territorial impacts, and the primary
signifiers of the heritage process applied in these communities after both ceased production.
Mining war and the roots of extractive capitalism in the Atacama desert
The origins of copper and sulphur mining in the former Bolivian territory of Antofagasta and the
Atacama Desert, now under Chilean sovereignty, developed due to Bolivia’s policy concerning the
remoteness of mines from its administrative centres (La Paz and Sucre). This situation led to
conceiving the Atacama Desert as a peripheral area distinguished by the liberal spirit of extractivism
(Cajías 1975). This political context stimulated investment among mining companies, increasing
the region’s population during the period before the War of the Pacific
6
and effectively during the
so-called ‘Chileanization’
7
process through the migration of workers.
On 9 May 1877, a destructive earthquake and tsunami devastated the Bolivian ports of Tocopilla,
Cobija, Mejillones, and Antofagasta, causing severe material and economic damage as significant
population loss. In addition, a year after this catastrophe, a harsh drought struck the Bolivian
highlands region and its population, significantly impacting national productivity. All these events
contributed to the imposition of 10 cents per quintal nitrate tax on the Anglo-Chilean Nitrates and
Railway Company of Antofagasta (known locally as the Compañía de Salitres y Ferrocarril de
Antofagasta, or the CSFA), a Chilean company which owned mining investments in the region.
The levy represented a small proportion of the company’s profits but was intended to support
reconstruction programs following natural disasters (Galaz-Mandakovic and Owen 2015).
Nevertheless, the CSFA, considering that Bolivia had violated the bilateral treaty of 1874, raised
several claims against the tax. Faced with the Bolivian order for the CSFA’s infrastructure and
facilities to be confiscated and auctioned for non-payment of the tax, the Chilean government
intervened by sending army troops to invade the port of Antofagasta on 14 February 1879, and by
expelling the Bolivian state representatives. Although Bolivia did not technically declare war, it was
engaged in the military conflict by attempting to contain the advance of the Chilean troops
occupying the Atacama Desert. The military conflict was initiated simply as an argument between
a private company and a state and not, at first, a conflict between the two nations. Amid the
territorial occupation and violence solely due to private economic interests, the current region of
Antofagasta came under de facto Chilean sovereignty with the military occupation of its main city,
Antofagasta, on 14 February 1879. This occupation resulted in the Chilean invasion of Tocopilla on
March 22 and Calama on March 23. The de facto occupation moved to a de jure occupation with
the creation of a department on 2 May 1879, and then with the establishment of the province of
Antofagasta on 13 July 1888. As the region came under the rule of the Chilean flag, foreign mining
investors set the stage for a novel type of occupation.
An industrial topology amid a capitalist periphery
The jurisdictional incorporation of this portion of the Atacama Desert under Chilean sovereignty
was an aggressive political move, albeit with a capitalist substratum among specific economic
interests. After the war, the Chilean state did not consolidate a substantial presence, social
commitment, or sovereignty enforcement. Its incorporation of Atacama meant amending the
map and installing a different flag; however, it featured some military presence, a few teachers,
a lonely postman, and low-ranked officials indifferent to ‘the nation’. In that sense, the state did not
promote the colonisation of these new areas. However, foreign mining capital brought about the
conditions necessary for cities and towns to be developed and populated, organising the new
geopolitics of the territory. The Atacama Desert became a peripheral region for Chile, distant
from major political decisions in its capital, Santiago. The capitalist enterprises provided the means
to develop settlements and territorial colonisation. In this context, two mining centres emerged and
4D. GALAZ-MANDAKOVIC AND F. RIVERA
stood out for their machinery and scale of production (Table 1): Gatico on the Atacama coast
(Figure 3) and Ollagüe in the highlands on the border with Bolivia (Figure 4).
These two cases show that extractive activities were deepened in the territory usurped from
Bolivia and placed under Chilean jurisdiction. Foreign and Chilean capital strengthened the mining
process’s liberality, which increasingly had more influence and control than the state. As a result,
a rentier Chilean state took shape, which had gone to war but was left far removed from its territory.
It was merely satisfied by collecting taxes from foreign mining companies that monopolised the sale
of mineral resources. As a result, an asymmetrical relationship emerged where the state became
a recipient of levies and export duties solely; as Cavieres (1998, 18) pointed out, ‘the State was
content with collecting taxes that meant neither effort nor investment’.
Territorial expansion was thus possible thanks to the conjunction of two original factors of
wealth: military force and labour force. In this sense, mining capitalism, aided by an external
partner – the state’s power – acquired an expansive force that allowed it to extend control devices.
As a partner subordinate to commercial enterprises, the state only needed to be a guarantor of the
political, legal, and social conditions conducive to the development of mining capitalism. The
armed wing of the Treasury was a device that could be used to intervene in any anomaly affecting
private interests. Thus, workers experienced cruel massacres and bloody mistreatment in the desert
mining region. This situation led to several strikes repressed by the police and military, resulting in
thousands of deaths (González Miranda 2007; Artaza, González, and Jiles 2009). In addition, the
working conditions were poor, especially in areas at high altitudes, where Bolivian migrants had to
support the development of sulphur and borax mining through their labour forces’ physiological
disposition (Galaz-Mandakovic and Rivera 2020).
The state retreated from advancing technology development and improving or planning new
urban, administrative, and public facilities. This way, a delegation of power emerged; by passing on
its influence, the Chilean government de facto delegated its sovereignty. Politicians, military, and
mining enterprises strengthened their networks through social and economic interests, subordinat-
ing ‘national’ interests. This relegation derived from a hegemony of foreign capitalists, who
increasingly controlled the region by developing new settlements, constructing transport
Figure 3. Gatico’s industrial facilities in 1909 (top) and 1916 (bottom) (Photo: Author’s archives).
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HERITAGE STUDIES 5
infrastructure, monopolising supplies, and establishing extractive mining activities with headquar-
ters outside Chile (e.g. New York, London, Hamburg). In some cases, private enterprises executed
public works to benefit the wider region, such as the supply of drinking water, ports, telegraphs,
telephones, and roads. However, these interventions also meant that indigenous peoples were
dispossessed of their territories and lost natural resources, primarily through the industrial use of
water that would pollute and overexploit their rivers and the sea (see, e.g. Prieto, Salazar, and Jesús
Valenzuela 2019).
In 1880, Chile had to administer the regions incorporated by military force. However, the
government faced a dilemma: Should it carry out a statist policy, as Peru had planned, or should
it hand over territory to the commercial enterprises? Following González Miranda and Leiva
Gómez (2016, 17), ‘to apply a high export tax and let this industry develop according to the
behaviour of the businessmen’, a decision that ‘would resolve the dilemma would have real
consequences’. The government eventually resolved the problem by taking the latter option, initially
planned for saltpetre and extended to the extraction of copper and sulphur. The situation was raised
by Eduardo Cavieres when he pointed out that throughout the nineteenth century, the Chilean state
had not clearly distinguished between what it sought to be politically and what it resolved
economically. The historian pointed out that ‘from 1860 onwards, the liberal triumph also deter-
mined liberalism in economic matters’ (Cavieres 1998, 14).
Two environmental sacrice zones
The Gatico and Ollagüe mining centres were connected to global capitalism. Both locations are
‘entangled’ (Hodder 2012) on a web of social relations mediated by materials, each following
different trajectories and temporal rhythms, with varying degrees of impact on forming their
industrial social space. They are a distinct, historically situated network of places, objects, technol-
ogies, capital, and human and non-human agents. In addition to managing the modes of habit-
ability and controlling the population, the mining industry needed to consume natural resources
and burn fossil fuels (oil, coal, and coke). In Gatico, pyrometallurgical methods used in ore
processing polluted the air by emitting sulphur dioxide and carbon dioxide, impacting the envir-
onment due to the accumulation of greenhouse gases and acidification. In addition, air and soil
contamination from heavy metals (e.g. sulphur, mercury, nickel, vanadium, cadmium, and lead)
still lingers from the abandoned mining facilities (Galaz-Mandakovic 2020).
In the case of Gatico, the accumulation of coal ash continues to pollute, cause contamination of
the mountain slopes and sea, and damaged surface layers. Tons of sand added as flux from mining
Figure 4. Aerial ropeways transporting sulphur from the Ollagüe volcano in 1935 (Photo: Robert Gerstmann, Museo Histórico
Nacional de Santiago, FB-8024, used with permission).
6D. GALAZ-MANDAKOVIC AND F. RIVERA
Table 1. Information and a comparative table of Gatico and Ollagüe mining centres.
Gatico Ollagüe
Location (coordinates) 22°30’06.0’S
70°14’20.6’W
21°13’23.6’S
68°15’05.4’W
Location and ecological area Coastal Mountain Range, Pacific Coast Andean Highlands
Current geopolitical
circumscription
Antofagasta Region, Province of
Tocopilla, Municipality of Tocopilla
Antofagasta Region, El Loa Province, Municipality of
Ollagüe
Main ore deposit − Mina Toldo
− Mina Carolina de Michilla
− Aucanquilcha volcano
− Ollagüe/Santa Rosa volcano
− Olca volcano
Operating period 1905–1940 1913–1993
Resources exploited − Blister Copper − Sulphur
− Borax
Destination of resources United States
Australia
Great Britain
Chile
Latin America
Great Britain
Mining type Pyrometallurgy Open pit
Main companies/Consortium − Compañía Minería de Gatico
− Gibbs and Sons
− Sociedad Azufrera Borlando Ltda.
− Sociedad Industrial Azufrera Minera (S.I.A.M.
Carrasco)
− Borax Consolidated, Ltd
Company’s origin − England
− Chile
− Chile
− United States
− England
Technical system − Gravitation plant
− Flotation plant
− Refineries
− Fixed and rotary retorts
− Fixed and rotary autoclaves
Scale Medium mining Medium mining
Auxiliary installations − Aerial ropeways
− Foundry
− Coal-fired thermoelectric
− Railway
− Aerial ropeways
− Refineries
Average workforce 2.000 workers 300 workers
Labour risks − Highly hazardous work in the mine
and smelter.
− High accident rate due to burns and
dynamite explosions.
− Work at high altitude: risk of hypoxia, hypothermia,
and storm hazards.
Uniqueness and
hazardousness of the
environment
−Earthquakes (1868, 1877, 1922
y 1928)
− Tsunamis
(1868, 1877 y 1922)
− Floods
(1912, 1928, 1940).
− Snowstorms, fires, low temperatures, volcanic
eruption risks.
Population Census 1907: 2.672 inhabitants.
Census 1920: 7.648 inhabitants.
Census 1930: 1.044 inhabitants.
Census 1940: 449 inhabitants.
Census 1907: 175 inhabitants.
Census 1920: 125 inhabitants.
Census 1930: 455 inhabitants.
Census 1940: 1514 inhabitants.
Ethnic predominance − Chango
− Rural dwellers in central and
southern Chile
− Quechua
− Rural inhabitants of the Bolivian highlands
Nearest urban centre Tocopilla (Chile) Calama (Chile)
Uyuni (Bolivia)
Road articulation modes − National and international shipping
companies.
− Antofagasta to Bolivia Railroad (FCAB).
− Local transportation companies (trucks).
Main closure factor or causes − The economic crisis of 1921
− The financial crisis of 1929–1932
− Flood of 1940
− Neoliberal project under Pinochet’s military
dictatorship.
− The oil crisis of 1973.
− The public debt crisis of 1982.
Community impacts − Work stoppage
− Unemployment
− Famine
− Urban decay
− Depopulation
− Work stoppage
− Camps closures
− Unemployment
− Depopulation
(Continued)
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HERITAGE STUDIES 7
activities, with tailings and slag from copper leaching scattered along the coast, has caused
a significant health impact on the population. In the case of Ollagüe, located in a high-altitude
desert with an annual rainfall of 125 mm per year (Risacher, Alonso, and Salazar 2003), water
resources are scarce. Nevertheless, sulphur and borax mining required abundant water sources, and
the industrial facilities, which included retorts and autoclaves, operated with intermittent systems of
vaporisation and condensation (Encina 1965; Rivera 2020). The mines overexploited the water and
did not adequately and sustainably manage the aquifers. It changed the local landscape and forced
populations away from their traditional agropastoral lands. In addition, miners suffered health
problems and occupational hazards associated with high-altitude work, including hypoxia and
silicosis. In Gatico and Ollagüe, a form of ‘chemical regime of living’ (Murphy 2008, 697) thus
emerged. The sites became dense, fuliginous spaces that harmed human and non-human inhabi-
tants. In addition to the chemical residues, the ruined and fragmented materialities of the industrial
sites constitute an archive that must be assessed, examined, and reinterpreted (Mah 2012). They
provide a history of a complex interweaving of corporealities, materials, and memories. Nature and
people were transformed into something new, a device or functional component that needed to be
‘capitalistically managed’ (Fischer-Kowalski and Haberl 2000; Foster 2004).
According to Boyden (1992), the population’s socioeconomic metabolism and colonisation
processes vary according to the prevailing mode of production. Thus, both are inseparable from
the linkage with the type of ‘exosomatic instruments’ the author calls’ technometabolisms’. In other
words, the mining intervention and the use of the environment are understood by its community
effects through inflows, internal flows and outflows (Boyden 1992). Five typical phenomena
configure this process: 1) appropriation, 2) transformation, 3) circulation, 4) consumption,
and 5) excretion (Toledo 2013). Thus, not only are the modes of production of interest but so are
the modes of access and the asymmetric use of natural resources, which were privatised and
established a ‘territorial sacrificial character’ (Klein 2015; Emmelhainz 2016; Frascella 2016;
Holifield and Dany 2017). This notion refers to irrational and unregulated environmental exploita-
tion directly affecting the population’s health. As a result, they did not benefit economically from
mining activities but only faced their complex negative consequences (pollution, occupational
diseases). In this context, the local population can also be considered part of the production process
as a form of ‘biocapitalism’ in two mining centres steadily transformed into a ‘wasteland’ (Voyles
2015). Biocapitalism thus operated in social and cultural spaces considered available and sacrificial,
a distinctive consequence of a colonial economic relationship.
Mining decline, dismantling, and depopulation
By 1932, and already in economic decline, Gatico was finally hit by the Great Depression, which
effectively brought about its end (Figure 5). Gatico’s decline was also a consequence of the legal
action of Carlos Ibáñez’s government, which proclaimed the end of the municipality through
Supreme Decree No. 8583 on 30 December 1927. There were two reasons for this: Besides
administrative reorganisation dictated by Ibáñez, it was primarily due to the rapid demographic
Table 1. (Continued).
Gatico Ollagüe
Main archaeological remains − Administration House
− Mine tailings
− Camp ruins
− Water ponds
− Smelter walls
− Remains of reverberatory furnaces
− Wharf and port platform bases
− Mining camps of Amincha, Buenaventura, Santa
Cecilia, Puquios, Yuma, Polán, Santa Rosa.
− Administration House of Buenaventura.
− Ruins of the Ollagüe-Collahuasi railroad branch.
8D. GALAZ-MANDAKOVIC AND F. RIVERA
decline of the mining town and, thus, a lack of tax revenues. In short, the town’s deteriorating
wealth significantly influenced its subsequent abandonment and decay. In addition, its fate reflected
the ups and downs of the global market, which inscribed its origins and determined its expunction.
Ollagüe’s sulphur industry continued into the 1980s. However, the economic policies of Augusto
Pinochet’s dictatorship led to considerable changes to its production structure. State reforms were
based on an orthodox version of Chicago school neoliberalism (Stigler 1992). These reforms
included extensive trade privatisation and the financial liberalisation of most state enterprises,
except for CODELCO, the largest copper mining company and the largest sulphur buyer from
Ollagüe companies. The reforms, as well as the economic policy as a whole, included the liberal-
isation of capital through the elimination of price controls, substantial fiscal adjustment, a sustained
increase in interest rates, and much more permissive legislation concerning large extractive projects
without taking into account minor and medium mining concerns (Santarcángelo, Schteingart, and
Porta 2018). As a result, amid an unfavourable environment for Ollagüe’s industry, its mining
companies, such as Sociedad Industrial Azufrera Minera (SIAM Carrasco) and Sociedad Azufrera
Borlando Ltda., contracted due to a lengthy domestic market depression and trade liberalisation.
The ruins of the sulphur mine’s work and living areas are thus the result of the neoliberal economic
policies put into practice in Chile under Pinochet’s dictatorship (Figures 6 and 7). In Ollagüe, this
Figure 5. The ruins of Gatico on the coast of northern Chile (Photo: Galaz-Mandakovic 2019).
Figure 6. Abandoned transport trolley in the industrial sector of Buenaventura, a sulphur camp in the Ollagüe area (Photo:
Francisco Rivera).
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HERITAGE STUDIES 9
period is remembered with sadness among former miners and inhabitants of the town, who
highlight the closure and abandonment of its mining camps. As one former railway worker recalls:
As I told you earlier, there was life in Ollagüe when people worked at the [industrial] plant here. There were
a lot of people. There was a lot of movement. Later, when the plant was moved, there was nothing. The fun was
over, the soccer was over, everything was over. (. . .) And as I told you before, there was a bakery, there was
a bookstore, there was. . . well, there were people (. . .). But after the plant went to Amincha, Ollagüe was
finished and died. Now there is nothing. You can see here there is nothing. Ollagüe is dead
(Interview J.C., Ollagüe, 2017).
The camps and industrial vestiges in Gatico and Ollagüe have witnessed Chile’s political and
economic crises. Their origins date back to the violence of war, and their abandonment and decay
are intertwined with the context of post-war capitalism. Tim Edensor pointed out that ‘the
production of spaces of ruination and dereliction are an inevitable result of capitalist development
and the relentless search for profit’ (Edensor 2005, 4). The relationship of these remains with the
recent past of the region’s capitalist expansion has also profoundly affected the current perception
of the industrial ruins among the local populations (Mah 2012). In Ollagüe, for example, interviews
were conducted with its current inhabitants, who offered testimonies of dismantling the buildings
and industrial facilities of the abandoned camps that populate the Ollagüe landscape.
The company that worked here was Buenaventura Limitada [. . .]. And it seems to me that there are still
autoclaves in the factory in Buenaventura. It seems [they are] in good condition because the other time
I looked around there, I was looking for some pipes I needed. I thought I could find some there and went to
‘luquiar’ [look around]. Well, there were still some materials because the owner of that sulphur factory was
Borlando & Compañía, the owner of the San Pedro mining company. But then he leased it and left, and his
sons did nothing. And there it is now, all dismantled. [. . .] Abandoned. When it closed, the camp had a roof,
the school, the houses, everything had ceilings, but now it is a mess. People have taken out the calaminas
[metal sheets]. They have removed the doors, the windows, everything (Interview V.A., Ollagüe, 2017).
While, at first glance, this might appear to be heritage destruction practices, what we see instead is
that the removal of materials from these sites is a form of appropriation of local heritage that
challenges the authorised and vertical orientation of the heritage discourse (Smith 2006; Rivera,
Lorca, and González 2018). The salvaged equipment and materials of the abandoned sites are reused
to build or repair houses in the town of Ollagüe. This dismantling, recycling, and reuse is part of the
‘living process’ of the sites’ transformation, which refers to a differentiation between matter and
form. As Tim Edensor pointed out:
Figure 7. Remains of the sulphur processing furnace in Polán, a sulphur mining site in the Ollagüe area (Photo: Francisco Rivera,
2017).
10 D. GALAZ-MANDAKOVIC AND F. RIVERA
Ruins do not take one shape but are manifold in form, fashioned by the era in which they were constructed,
their architectural style and their industrial function, and also partly depending upon the strategies mobilised
by firms towards them after abandonment’ (Edensor 2005, 4).
The ruins are thus re-signified through an intervention that changes the form of the materials
(wood, metals) that remained through their reuse in other ways: ‘The ruins of Buenaventura are in
my backyard’ is a common trope from Ollagüe’s inhabitants. They participate in another social and
material ‘meshwork’ (Ingold 2015). The ruins in Gatico and Ollagüe, thus, exceed their original
purpose, enriching their cultural biographies (Kopytoff 1986). However, they are not immutable
and static but mould a ‘fluid space’ (Ingold 2009) defined by a constant becoming of rubble, ruins,
spare parts, and heritage.
The heritage of mining capitalism in the desert
With their sacrificial environments, the material vestiges of Gatico and Ollagüe industrial spaces
should not be understood as passive elements of mining and capitalist expansion in the region. They
are not only materialities used to document the historical circuits of capitalist production and
consumption. On the contrary, they participate, even today, in its expression and anchoring. In this
sense, it is necessary to pay attention to the preservation discourses generated by initiatives
regarding the temporality of the sites and the objects, which can be based simply on identifying
origins and provenances to establish their heritage value. As Stephen Silliman pointed out, the
acculturation model has traditionally assumed a linear direction, a static temporality, in which the
‘dominant colonisers’ culture would have transformed the local society’s passive receptacle
(Silliman 2010). By characterising practices and material culture solely in terms of their origins,
whether indigenous or foreign, we thus risk neglecting the construction mechanisms of local
identities within the framework of social practices associated with industrial materialities. Giving
life to industrial heritage requires understanding local uses and meanings (Silliman 2009). We argue
that the tangible heritage of industrialisation should detach itself from its single focus on prove-
nance as, for example, the origin of artefact production, machinery, and technological equipment.
Instead, it should focus on its multitemporal uses and, therefore, on the cultural meanings inscribed
on it by ‘interpreters’, that is, the local practices of the mining camps’ inhabitants. Thus, its focus
would be centred on the complex forms of representation of their local meanings, leading to
contesting the authority discourse of heritage expertise (Clifford 1988; Smith 2006; Smith and
Waterton 2009). As a result, the mining camps’ industrial materialities become a mechanism for
creating practices and subjectivities insofar as it creates distinct and differentiated positions in the
past and present social space (Bourdieu 1979).
The shift from origin to local meaning also triggers memories and feelings among the current
inhabitants: Feelings have a narrative structure, wrote Han (2018), a story design shaped by
ambivalence between presence and absence. Following Margaret Wetherell’s concept of ‘affective
practice’, Laurajane Smith has shown the distinctive roles of affect, emotion, and feeling in the
intertwined relation between emotion, discourse, and practice to understand the cultural process
and performative nature of heritage-making (Smith 2021). Indeed, the ‘100% Patrimonio’ group’s
performative act in Gatico was an affective practice reflecting this emotional fabric that puts the past
and the present in tension. It was also associated with a dense process of highly developed
subjectivity in an economic neoliberalism scenario (Alemán 2022).
In addition to enabling us to understand the insertion of Gatico and Ollagüe into capitalist
markets, these industrial spaces and their materialities act as active agents of appropriation and
transformation in the present under new socioeconomic frameworks (tourism, identity vindica-
tions). Industrial heritage raises two critical issues. On the one hand, material culture reveals the
installation and development of modern industries and, by extension, capital, as indices of cultural
change. On the other hand, it awakens the creation of cultural and social heritage or group identity.
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HERITAGE STUDIES 11
Is mining capital, therefore, part of this cultural heritage? In his study of a post-contact Australian
site occupied by indigenous groups, Harrison (2002) has shown how metal objects are perceived
and identified as ‘indigenous’ and not ‘Western’ for local communities. The metal artefacts,
modified or not, are thus an integral part of their cultural history, affirming their cultural continuity
in their ancestral territory (Harrison 2002). Also, in Gatico and Ollagüe, the industrial social space
is where significant experiences have taken place, and industrial materialities and their meanings
continue to be contested and negotiated. The architectural ruins and artefacts arising from the
insertion of these spaces with the capitalist world indicate the cultural change brought about by the
expansion of mining capital and the reason for the historical presence of both communities.
However, the interweaving of discourses about the past reflects the contradicting and juxtaposed
views about the value and representation of industrial materiality. It is what Tunbridge and
Ashworth (1996) identified as a ‘dissonant heritage’, in which the past is far from a static and one-
dimensional terrain of interpretation.
Vitality and the sacrality of absence
Industrial material culture is quickly ‘re-discovered’ and ‘re-valued’, usually for commercial pur-
poses. This situation gives rise to re-reading the mining environment, the industrial social space,
and architectural remains to promote new cultural markets and tourism projects. Following Llorenç
Prats, this situation leads to the ‘sacralisation of cultural externality’ and an understanding of
‘valorisation’ as ‘synonymous with activation or heritage action’ (Prats 2005, 19). The latter depends
fundamentally on political power. These processes of material sacredness of specific heritage spaces
increase when they coincide with the search for the ‘exotic’, the ‘pristine’, or the ‘autochthonous’.
The museumification of the industrial facilities and mining camps are thus simultaneously inserted
into a sweetened, romanticised, and exotic narrative about the recent past (Galaz-Mandakovic
2019).
In Gatico and Ollagüe, the buildings acquire value by exposing a moment in the ‘evolution’ of
mining or what we could also understand as material residues of the ‘domestication’ of the desert
(Vilches et al. 2013), the result of the explosion of extractive projects. However, paraphrasing
Carroll (1983), the mining centres in Atacama acquired a ‘cadaveric dimension’ by producing
a formal and reified material identity. This form of museumification would be the inevitable result
‘of any preservation initiative, insofar as a preservation means removing something from obsoles-
cence, deterioration, disappearance, and death’. (Menard 2017, 51). The mining centres, ‘without
productive life’, now acquire vitality. They go from productive life to patrimonial vitality, an
expression of the affect and effect generated by buildings no longer in use or have fallen into ruin
(Edensor 2005; Smith 2021), into death. However, at the same time, they are in a ‘museumified’ or
a post-mortem state. Historical narratives are thus anchored to materialities and technologies that
become a fetish, an accumulation, and an archive.
The ‘heritagisation’ of mining and industrial objects is perhaps a political problem generated by
seeing some disappeared peoples as part of the irruption of modernity. Thus, such material’ scars’
(Storm 2014, 2022; Rivera 2018) in the landscape and material remains of mining and industrial
history become agents mediating a fetishised relationship with ambiguous objects representing and
embodying an absence (Pohl 2021): ‘Fetishism exalts a degraded object to an eminent value’ (Freud
1990 [1927], 149). Heritagisation thus produces commodified goods independent of their origin,
which acquire a ‘phantasmagoric reality’ (Agamben 1995, 72). This situation is all a cultural process
framed in a neoliberal context where absence is conceived as a new object, a new merchandise for
cultural consumption. Each mining ruin is the product of a trace, of the memory that consumes the
same entity that acquires historicity, which, as the French psychoanalyst Gérard Wajcman stated, ‘is
the object that has become a historical sponge, an accumulator of memory’ (Wajcman 2001, 14).
For the author, the ‘century invented absence as an object (. . .) against it we beat ourselves in every
corner’. (Wajcman 2001, 224). Absence is thus the condition of heritage possibility that enters the
12 D. GALAZ-MANDAKOVIC AND F. RIVERA
visual marketing of cultural consumption. In Atacama, industrial heritage bears what Andreas
Huyssen called ‘an anamnestic dimension, a kind of memory value’ (Huyssen 1995, 33). In other
words, derelict industrial buildings and facilities became a form of reaction and a critique of the
culture of consumption, planned obsolescence, and amnesia. That is why we should not minimise,
hide, or silence the ‘difficult heritage’ (Macdonald 2009, 2015), the historical geopolitical problem of
war violence and settler colonialism in its territorial alienation from Bolivia and the Indigenous
communities.
Conclusion: assessing sacricial and domesticated mining spaces
Mining capitalism in the Atacama Desert, in Gatico and Ollagüe, conveyed a condition of
‘subalterity’ of the territory within the framework of capitalist relations that articulated
different suppliers of raw materials with centres of consumption in the global north.
However, this relationship of subalterity between productive spaces also constituted the
condition of a colony within the Atacama territory itself. That is to say, the companies
exploiting mineral resources in an area that supposedly possessed Chilean national sovereignty
developed practices typical of a colonial system; the mining entrepreneurs developed more
power and influence than the Chilean state itself had. The desert became foreign. A sacrificial
mining region thus emerged to witness asymmetries in the distribution of benefits, the
depletion of resources, and the almost null community development at the local and regional
levels. The aim was to reproduce foreign wealth, with savage ways of obtaining it, meaning the
strengthening of capital over, or to the detriment of, indigenous groups. Marcelo Segall had
already pointed out in 1953 that the history of Chile was the history of metal merchandise or,
as he stated: ‘the history of its capitalist development’ (Segall 1953, 36). Extractive capitalism
worked in local populations with the promise of overcoming poverty, achieving welfare,
promoting wage labour, and a supposed concern for the environment. But, as we have
shown, the perspective of time forces us to reconsider and question such utopias.
Networks of economic exchange, production, and communication embedded in the economies
of the capitalist world have shaped modern industrial extractive activities (Cano Sanchiz 2018).
Donald Hardesty examined the important meanings associated with the current process of ‘gloca-
lisation’, the interaction between the global and the local. He stated, ‘Archaeologists also need to
explore how global knowledge and commodities are locally interpreted or transformed into new
meanings’ (Hardesty 2003, 82). As we have seen in the cases of Gatico and Ollagüe, local commu-
nities have socially signified the mining cultural landscape. The historical scale, intensity, and
extension of each site have characteristics that are of particular interest to current heritage projects.
The daily interaction with industrial spaces and objects in the public environment allows us to
discuss how these vestiges assume a social role in constructing individual and collective memory
(Huyssen 2016) (Figure 8). Industrial heritage enables a rethinking of local communities’ social and
political relationships, simultaneously with its fetishised ruins (Pohl 2021) or its material ‘rubble’
(Gordillo 2014). It thus offers the material and historical depth to assess the impacts that mining
expansion has imposed on this northern region of Chile.
Gatico and Ollagüe left distinctive mining and cultural landscapes and social spaces that
constituted a significant material expression of the capitalist expansion and occupation of new
extractive regions: As fetishised ruins, they become the ‘auratic remainder of loss’ (Pohl 2021).
Moreover, they are the ruins of the industrial forms acquired for the ‘domestication of the desert’
(Vilches et al. 2013). Thus, desert domestication synthesises a historical process formerly carried
out by extracting value by exploiting natural resources. Currently, it persists through extracting
value from a revised commodified notion of cultural heritage.
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HERITAGE STUDIES 13
Notes
1. Quotes in languages other than English have been translated by the authors.
2. Corporate social responsibility, or socially responsible investment, is defined as the active and voluntary
contribution to social, economic, and environmental improvement by companies, generally with the aim of
improving their competitive situation and adding value (Solano 2008). There is no doubt that companies seek
to improve their image through clientelism, assistance, a kind of self-interested gift, in order to co-opt those
affected by the production processes (see, for example, the case of Rio Tinto in Cochrane 2017).
3. El Abra, ‘Comunidad de Ollagüe recibió documental e investigación del azufre gracias al fondo patrimonial de
El Abra’, December 23, 2019. Retrieved from: https://www.elabra.cl/comunidad-de-ollague-recibio-
documental-e-investigacion-del-azufre-gracias-a-fondo-patrimonial-de-el-abra.
4. Community is a difficult concept. We agree with Smith and Waterton that ‘the term has become ambiguous
and ambivalent, and can therefore be difficult to use in any meaningful way’ (Smith and Waterton 2009, 23–
24). Consequently, we understand community not as an abstract, homogeneous, and solely geographically
localised group. On the contrary, it is a politically charged notion that implies groups’ negotiations and
contestations of often dissonant political and social interests (Smith and Waterton 2009).
5. In Ollagüe, fifteen interviews were conducted between 2015 and 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic broke out.
Fieldwork resumed in 2022 and is ongoing. It consists of new archaeological surveys of agropastoral and industrial
sites, of archival documentation and interviews. Interviews are primarily conducted among former workers and
inhabitants of industrial sites living today in Ollagüe and neighbouring Chilean and Bolivian localities (Calama,
Antofagasta, Uyuni, San Cristóbal). In the case of Gatico and Tocopilla, ethnographic work coincided with the
performative act carried out by the 100% Heritage Group on February 1, 2009. In these localities’ abandoned
industrial facilities, we conducted unstructured interviews with the leaders and participants of the Group.
6. The so-called War of the Pacific or Saltpeter War (1879–1883) was a military conflict between Chile, Peru, and
Bolivia, resulting in the annexation by the Chilean state of large portions of territory: the Arica y Parinacota
and Tarapacá regions, formerly part of Peru, and the Antofagasta region, formerly part of Bolivia.
7. ‘Chilenisation’ was a politically driven device that sought to homogenise and culturally integrate the Atacama
territory (cultural, symbolic, military) by rendering the Bolivian presence invisible (Galaz-Mandakovic and
Rivera 2020).
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Tiziana Gallo, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful insights.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Figure 8. A visit to the ruins of the Administration House in Buenaventura, a sulphur camp in the Ollagüe area (Photo: María
Angelica Ovalle, used with permission).
14 D. GALAZ-MANDAKOVIC AND F. RIVERA
Funding
This work was supported by the Fondo Nacional de Desarrollo Científico y Tecnológico (FONDECYT, ANID Chile)
[grant number 11180932 and 11220113] and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Notes on contributors
Damir Galaz-Mandakovic is a historian and received his PhD in Anthropology at the Universidad Católica del Norte
(Chile) and his PhD in History at the Université Rennes 2 (France). His research focuses on the social history of
mining and modernity in the Atacama Desert (Chile) and southwestern Bolivia. He recently published ‘Movimientos,
tensiones y luces. Historias tocopillanas’ (Ediciones Bahia Algodonales, Tocopilla, 2019) and ‘Memorias de la ciudad
de Gatico. Minería y Sociedad. 1832-1940’ (Pampa Negra Ediciones, Antofagasta, 2020).
Francisco Rivera is a historical archaeologist and received his PhD in Anthropology at the University of Montreal
(Canada). His research interests are the anthropology of mining, industrial heritage, the archaeology of the
contemporary past, and the historical archaeology of capitalism in the Atacama Desert (Chile) and Quebec’s
Lower North Shore (Canada). He is the director of the Alto Cielo Archaeological Project, and he recently co-
edited the book ‘El perfume del diablo: azufre, memoria y materialidades en el Alto Cielo (Ollagüe, s. XX)’ (RIL
Editores, Santiago, 2020).
ORCID
Damir Galaz-Mandakovic http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0312-6672
Francisco Rivera http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4938-7392
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