Capitalism, state construction and water modernization in the Atacama Desert, north of Chile (XIX century).

International audienceFor the last two decades, conflicts created by the access, use, ownership and meaning of water has become an important issue for the Chilean geography. Researches developed from Political Ecology perspective have constrained their analysis to the neoliberal period (post 1973). The present paper follows the research perspectives of Worster (1985), Linton (2010) and Swyngedouw (2015), who propose a geo-historical understanding of the problem. Preliminary results suggest that the insertion of a part of the Atacama Desert (present Chilean region of Tarapacá) into the world capitalist circuits of goods and the modernization of these territories (both in the 19th century) triggered profound sociocultural and geographical changes, reconfiguring the understanding and relations of these populations with water. In this way, different processes, discursive (scientific, political and legal) and material (investments and technology), transformed these "desert and unproductive" lands into a world scale mining territory, changing, at the same time, water into resource. Finally, we proposed that a direct consequence of water modernization in this region was conflict. In this sense, we will analyse the first modern water conflict (1888), where the Chilean State expropriates (for productive purposes) the water of the indigenous community of the Quisma Valley (Tarapacá region), pushing these people to land-expulsion and poverty