Managing Brines for Future Generations

In August 1980, the Chilean press fi nally announced what had been gestating for over five years: The Sociedad Chilena del Litio (SCL) now existed as a joint venture between the US com pany Foote Mineral and the state agency CORFO.Newspapers applauded SCL and the strange conditions that made it pos si ble, namely, a new law that reserved lithium for strategic state uses (DL 2886)-to safeguard "the national interest," according to a national newspaper.The northern edition of this paper, El Mercurio, added: "With the start of lithium extraction, the desert again delivers its riches as it did with nitrates, which created welfare and wealth we all still remember."1 Nitrates, they reminded readers, had been managed by "foreign cap i tal ists," and the shuttering of nitrate mines had created a "mass of unemployed people who still haunt northern cities."While they celebrated the investment that SCL represented, they criticized the inequitable distribution of profits: The state copper com pany Codelco contributed to a " great national fund without delivering much to the region whose soils are being exploited."Mining memories were being reinvented for a new era, this one marked by a repressive and increasingly market-oriented military government.A century of political life had convinced many in Chile of the virtues of state control of mining.Only through state control could Chile ensure that prices, productivity, and investments remained high, rather than be subordinated to global corporate strategies, which sought mono poly power.State guidance could break with extractivism-whereby foreign powers accumulate wealth by appropriating nature in faraway countries, like Chile-to produce some kind of dependent development, wherein a degree of industrialization adds value to the products of nature but development remains conditional to growth elsewhere.2 Copper presented a classic case of dependent development: Chile extracted and refined copper thanks to US capital investments 5 Managing Brines for Future Generations