The insustainability of contemporary mining in Zacatecas, Mexico. Conflict Study

Abstract

The objective of the research is to study contemporary mining in the state of Zacatecas based on social, economic and environmental unsustainability; through the systematization and analysis of labor and eco-territorial conflicts. We start from the fact that the mining conflicts identified in Zacatecas express the unsustainability of the mining that prevails in the entity, since they arise due to the contradictions of the logic of capitalist production that supports contemporary mining, tending to the exploitation workers and the intensive appropriation of nature under neoliberal logics. We find that social unsustainability manifest itself in an increasing labor overexploitation for working hours of 12 hours a day for a period of 14 consecutive days, in the intensification of territorial dispossession in the form of extrahections. In economic terms, it manifests itself in the fact that Zacatecas concentrates and specializes in the mineral extraction stage, which are exported to other economies where they are processed and transformed into finished goods; therefore the benefit for the local spaces where the extraction is carried out is minimal. In environmental terms, the form of extraction prevents the ecological balance that must prevail in the territory.