Biopolitics and hydropower of drinking water in Latin America: Conceptual resources to understand hydrohegemony in Latin America

Abstract

Talking about the biopolitics of water and hydropower relations in Latin America implies understanding the basic dynamics of power relations and the practices of the region in the area of ??water, its processes of securitization in national security agendas and their areas, safety in production, industrialization, mining, food and common use.

A basic description of the processes in which water biopolitics becomes an agenda item in the sense that it unravels the processes by which neoliberalism develops an agenda contrary to common values ??and contrary to community processes that define identities. cultural aspects of the areas where water sources exist, carrying out infrastructure processes that displace and brutalize populations and the environment with intervention processes that do not meet the expectations of the inhabitants of those areas and cities, but rather exhausted for the purposes of privatization and resource negotiation.

In this way, addressing these aspects within a biopolitical significance, a description of the processes of governance and governance of water in Latin America, its description as a strategic resource in Latin America, and then observing at the regional level the structure of hydropower and hydrohegemony in the international relations of Latin America and North America.

From which a critical view is given and that defines the water thematization processes as a topic that implies the need to re-evaluate the processes by which the understanding of knowledge-power relations in the context of the processes of hydrohegemony are key to revealing the processes of access to water as a matter of justice, as a matter of human rights, as a matter of access and identity with which we can understand its basic dynamics in Latin America.

On the other hand, point out the complexity of the identity, justice and social mobilization processes within which the deterioration of community relations is verified by infrastructure modernization projects and problems with extractivism as part of the environmental and social conflict in the fight for justice on the issue of water and as part of a counterhegmony nationally and internationally.

Counter-hegemony is consistent with thinking in defense of identities and water justice and, of course, regionally, it implies that the processes of modernization and extractivism are evidenced from versions of the theme that imply an extinction modality, from changes in the environment as processes of extinction, as a process of change and urbanization of the areas that maintain a natural landscape, extinction in that sense, as extinction of the forms of life of the communities near those water sources, as extinction of harmonious habitability with the environment environment, as extinction of the natural resource itself.

Of course, these impacts on the environment entail raising awareness of the processes of technological readjustment and the modalities of intervention to obtain or manage the natural resource, and with this we assume that it is a matter of turning to develop premises for these processes and those of commercialization. that conform to environmental premises, but also assume that these changes are taken as a source of business in novel schemes for such purposes.

It is a general turn and a turn that opts towards the adjustment and conventionalization processes that, according to its own promoters, promotes the care of the environment and with it, morally, a link can be understood that accumulates these forecasts about the consequences of the impact of real human intervention and exploitation of water resources. From there we have that it is a label of a new version of capitalism that describes itself as ecological and sustainable, a “green capitalism”.

The impacts of hydrohegmonic interactions that thematize a turn towards "green capitalism" in Latin America and the impacts that processes yield on issues that are part of the structure of inequality, which shows us landscapes and their relations with necropolitics in terms of forced migration, environmental deterioration, population expulsion, drug trafficking, metal trafficking, energy trafficking, and the extraction of strategic natural resources that cause problems such as infanticide, juvenicide, human trafficking, etc.

It is this structure of inequality and this form of structure of the economic since the beginning of modernity, which defines the processes where a panorama currently yields in terms that also opt for the necropolitical, where the question is that environmental impacts yield scenarios that pour their processes on topics that have to do with organized crime and migration.

The impacts may be greater or less depending on the ability of the communities to organize in anticipation of these environmental impacts, but they add to the number of poverty and inequality that are mid-term managers of the processes that prevail in the blood businesses, given that the processes of struggle for the referents of knowledge-power imply the development of the processes that within these logics of profit imply a human image within their forecasts.

And that is why it is the profit with the body and with the crime organizations that this process makes us above all a wake-up call in the action of agents outside the law within the processes of containment of social activism in the defense of water and of the territory and as merchants where economic profit is enabled as an outlet for the deterioration of capacities given the impacts on the ability to carry out the tasks of community life and the economic and social impoverishment of modernizing impacts in the areas near the sources of the hídric resource.

Finally, these variables associated with inequality involving criminal organizations that, together with the actions of groups related to extractive processes, generate a climate of violence against populations that are in the midst of strategic resources such as water or mining. They are the object of territorial disputes and that they promote cycles of violence for social fighters and for the inhabitants of the vicinity of water sources and of the communities that are in the midst of the conflict of these groups and in which the process of privatization or clandestine exploitation.

These suppose an order of things that are explained in ways within which the processes of national security and the processes of militarization of security zones condition the social action of the communities to the observation not only of the deterioration of living and environmental conditions. , but of the agency within a low intensity war between the criminal groups and the state bodies, plus the private security of the private entities and that supposes a logic to describe and that is within reach of the analyzes of a necropolitics of the subject that adds to the determining factors of water management, administration and regulation.